Borne Back Ceaselessly into the Past: Fitzgerald, Gatsby and WWI
theworldwar.org
theworldwar.org
“See that little stream — we could walk to it in two minutes. It took the British a month to walk to it — a whole empire walking very slowly, dying in front and pushing forward behind. And another empire walked very slowly backward a few inches a day, leaving the dead like a million bloody rugs. No Europeans will ever do that again in this generation.”
“Why, they’ve only just quit over in Turkey,” said Abe. “And in Morocco —”
“That’s different. This western-front business couldn’t be done again, not for a long time. The young men think they could do it but they couldn’t. They could fight the first Marne again but not this. This took religion and years of plenty and tremendous sureties and the exact relation that existed between the classes. The Russians and Italians weren’t any good on this front. You had to have a whole-souled sentimental equipment going back further than you could remember. You had to remember Christmas, and postcards of the Crown Prince and his fiancée, and little cafés in Valence and beer gardens in Unter den Linden and weddings at the mairie, and going to the Derby, and your grandfather’s whiskers.”
“General Grant invented this kind of battle at Petersburg in sixty- five.”
“No, he didn’t — he just invented mass butchery. This kind of battle was invented by Lewis Carroll and Jules Verne and whoever wrote Undine, and country deacons bowling and marraines in Marseilles and girls seduced in the back lanes of Wurtemburg and Westphalia. Why, this was a love battle — there was a century of middle-class love spent here. This was the last love battle.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night
It is fair to say that the losses of WW I induced caution in the British, and left a huge demographic hole in France.
It wiped the best and the brightest, from a small population. Russia sent serfs into the grinder.
[Added, less flippant] An army requires officers, and it is fair to guess that the Russian army had a reasonable complement of intellectually capable officers. The standard of education may not have been up to that of the western Allies or the Central Powers, but I suspect that the Russians weren't that bad. One would not know how many of the 191x class of the Russian universities were killed off, for the revolution largely remade those universities, and presumably had no interest in publicizing the works of the men who served the old regime.
The museum that published this is quite good, though sadly a bit out of the way for many on this site (Kansas City). It's easily reachable with public transit if you're ever there and staying near downtown.
I felt the same way about Jane Austen for a long time. It was a parody of manners, for a period I knew nothing about. I finally saw some really great filmed versions and I understood what the author was saying, and now I adore reading her work.
Maybe Gatsby will click for me some day. I reread it every decade or so, just to see if it happened. It hasn't yet.
What about Nick is unpleasant?
I think I'm supposed to identify with the way he gawps at the opulence and the experience of being around the ultra-wealthy. His feelings are mixed, and I think I'm supposed to share that -- on one hand wanting to live that way myself, on the other hand being horrified by how vapid and idle it all is. But I get a lot of the latter and very little of the former, so I get a rather negative view about Nick as well.
I will say, I rather enjoyed “The Chosen and the Beautiful”, a magic-tinted retelling of the story from the point of view of Jordan Baker. I find her a rather interesting character.