I don’t wanna grow up
The Fabulous F. Scott Fitzgerald
Over the past couple of years I’ve started to become very excited by literature and I can pinpoint this new found passion to first reading Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground.
Before that I would read a novel by some great writer, and although I might find it engrossing, enjoying and appreciating it on different levels, I was never gripped or enflamed by the writing – not in the same way as I might be about a great piece of music. Which meant that I would still feel some kind of distance to the work and rarely an immediate sense of connection, so that literature never really lived for me. Until that is, I read Notes and, it seems cliched to say, but yes, my mind really was awakened to the possibilities, the extremes of consciousness and the different kinds of truths and contradictions that a truly great writer could communicate through the form of the novel or short story. But Dostoevsky was an alchemist, some kind of great seer, and he was fearless about putting grotesque, ugly things in his books and challenging the reader without — and this for me is one of his great achievements — falling into a kind of dauntingly relentless grimness. Most of all, through his fearlessness he got at the truth about human relationships and about just how fucked up we are, and that’s why we still revere him today. So, I never thought I’d be lucky enough to find another writer with whom I felt such an affinity, whose courage and spirit I was so in awe of.
But I have. A few weeks ago I picked up Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald. I was expecting to be impressed by the writing — I knew by reputation that he was a superb prose stylist – and I was and am blown away utterly by the poetry and the sparkle of his sentences; but more about that later. However I didn’t think I would find a writer with such an insight into the human soul, who was like Dostoevsky a master psychologist in addition to being master at his craft – and I certainly didn’t think I’d find this in a writer whose subject matter was exclusively the dazzling lives of wealthy Americans.
More Youtube Music
Two live versions of Baby We’ll Be Fine by the National, my favourite song from my new favourite band:
Dostoevsky’s Devils*
WARNING: I give away important plot details in what follows.
‘What constituted the turbulence of our time and what transition it was we were passing through I don’t know, nor I think does anyone, unless it were some of those visitors of ours. Yet the most worthless fellows suddenly gained predominant influence, began loudly criticising everything is sacred, though till then they had not dared to open their mouths, while the leading people, who had till then so satisfactorily kept the upper hand, began listening to them and holding their peace; some even simpered approval in the most shameless way.’
