EILEEN BATTERSBYponders John Keats and F Scott Fitzgerald
DESPITE THE BITTER winds, torrential rain and struggling sunlight characteristic of an Irish summer, there remains the faint chance of an October afternoon that can lift the heart. Never underestimate the fleeting glories of the current sunrises and dazzling sunsets, without hope runs the stigma of national defeat. Take heart; the apples are ripening on the trees. “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness/ Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun,” wrote the English Romantic poet John Keats in his famous ode To Autumn in 1820, a year before his death at 25 from the tuberculosis that also killed his mother and brother Tom.
Keats was born in London on Halloween 1795, the first of four children in the family of a prosperous coachman. The young Keats was confident and handsome, unperturbed at standing only five foot tall. Initially apprenticed to a surgeon, Keats then entered Guy’s Hospital in 1815 as a medical student. He was already writing poetry. In common with all of his major contemporaries, he was inhibited by the enduring presence of Milton and was closely drawn to Wordsworth. Keats was by nature an intellectual and his prose, most particularly his extraordinary letters, reveal that he not only learned from Hazlitt, he matched him.
The poetry developed later. Yet by the autumn of 1818 Keats the poet had indeed matured and within a year had written almost all of his finest works. About that same time he experienced the first symptoms of his fatal disease while nursing his dying brother. Keats then conceded that his love for Fanny Brawne would also be doomed. In her honour he wrote The Eve of St Agnes in early January 1819 and by that spring had completed La Belle Dame sans Merci. The great odes would follow including Ode on a Grecian Urn, Ode on Melancholy and one of the most beloved of Romantic texts, Ode to a Nightingale.
Keats appeals to all readers. He inspired deep emotions in F Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940), himself a tragic romantic and revered as the author of The Great Gatsby (1925), which expresses more eloquently than any other novel, the loss of innocence and the death of the American Dream while highlighting the subtle vulnerability of mid-western idealism when faced with eastern cynicism.
Yet Fitzgerald, for all the perverse perfection of The Great Gatsby, Baz Luhrmann’s film version is to be released next year, wrote another powerful, moving, painfully autobiographical and frequently overlooked novel Tender is the Night (1934). It tells the story of an American psychiatrist, Dick Diver, and his schizophrenic wife, Nicole, clearly modelled on Fitzgerald’s wife, Zelda Sayre. His life with Sayre seemed to chart the rise and squalid fall of the Jazz Age. Fitzgerald for all his gifts and wit – he was very funny – was an alcoholic. Tender is the Night was published at the height of the Depression and many Americans had little sympathy rich expatriates idling on the Riviera. Taking his title from the fourth stanza of Ode to a Nightingale, in Tender is the Night, Fitzgerald, who died of a heart attack while failing to produce Hollywood screenplays, acknowledged Keats with a lingering pathos.
