Babylon Revisited And Other Stories – F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1960 ★★★★½

Going Long on Selling Short

Can one make the same basic point without becoming shrill or droning?

The answer is yes, if one is F. Scott Fitzgerald and the subject the hollowness of wealth. The best-known collection of Fitzgerald’s short fiction, Babylon Revisited And Other Stories, amazes and engages while beating its one-eyed message like a tom-tom.

The ten stories that make up this collection originally appeared in magazines between 1920-1937. From the first, “The Ice Palace,” to the last, “The Long Way Out,” these varied tales of lost youth and romantic disappointment are all filtered through the prism of wealth and privilege.

Fitzgerald wrote about wealth in a way that made it his exclusive territory. “Let me tell you about the very rich,” he explains in “The Rich Boy,” included in this collection. “They are different from you and me.”

Different doesn’t mean better or happier. The rich people that populate much of this collection may live splendid lives, but they are always on the verge of falling apart.

In “The Rich Boy,” Anson Hunter won’t settle for anything less than love on his own terms – and winds up with no love at all.

In “Crazy Sunday,” Miles Calman is a powerful Hollywood director who can’t handle being married to one of the world’s most desired women.

In “Babylon Revisited,” Charlie Wales has gotten his life back together, but remains haunted by the shadow of his dead wife, especially when he goes back to a familiar city to reclaim his daughter.

F. Scott Fitzgerald with his wife, Zelda. While his novels wallowed in obscurity, his 164 published short stories allowed him to live comfortably for much of his lifetime. Image from http://www.startribune.com/legend-of-f-scott-fitzgerald-lives-on/206645331/.

A danger in picking up Babylon Revisited And Other Stories is to focus on the title story and ignore the rest. The title story is one of the great all-time short stories, but rather unique here both in approach and tone. It came out in 1931, during the Great Depression, whereas all but two of the other tales in this book were produced in the 1920s, the so-called “Jazz Age” when Fitzgerald was at his commercial and creative apogee.

The difference is stark in some ways. Not that the older stories aren’t sad, but in “Babylon Revisited” there is a resigned quality to the melancholy that makes it feel more earned:

“I heard that you lost a lot in the crash.”

“I did,” and he added grimly, “but I lost everything I wanted in the boom.”

“Selling short.”

“Something like that.”

Another big difference is the economy with which Fitzgerald writes. The earlier stories in this collection are often-sprawling in their scope, mini-novellas like “May Day” and “The Diamond As Big As The Ritz” injected with “the something extra” which Fitzgerald rightly prided himself on being able to produce, however disconnected from the story:

It is youth’s felicity as well as its insufficiency that it can never live in the present, but must always be measuring up the day against its own radiantly imagined future – flowers and gold, girls and stars, they are only prefigurations and prophecies of that incomparable, unattainable young dream. [“The Diamond As Big As The Ritz”]

Many of these stories feature unattainable women, inspired perhaps by Ginevra King, whom Fitzgerald pursued for years. One such story is "Winter Dreams": She said “maybe some day,” she said “kiss me,” she said “I’d like to marry you,” she said “I love you” – she said – nothing. Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ginevra_King. 

By the time you get to “Babylon Revisited,” Fitzgerald’s style seems less round, more direct. It’s as if a bit of his famously terse rival Ernest Hemingway has found its way into the narrative.

In it, we follow Charlie Wales around Paris as he visits old haunts and reflects on the mental distance he has traveled since he was younger and carefree. The prose is elliptical, spare. A critical meeting with his wife’s clutchy sister and her husband, who have guardianship of the daughter Charlie wants back, is played out in short bursts of dialogue. “She had built up all her fear of life into one wall and faced it toward him,” Fitzgerald writes about the sister-in-law, a curt portrait that captures all you need to know about her nature.

"Babylon Revisited" as it first appeared in a February 1931 issue of The Saturday Evening Post. Image from https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2013/05/great-gatsby-fitzgerald/.

Is Charlie Wales the same character as “Brick” Wales, a principal antagonist in “The Freshest Boy,” published just three years before? “The Freshest Boy” is perhaps the happiest of the stories in this collection, but even it carries a melancholy tinge.

Our title character here is Basil Lee, who appears in several Fitzgerald stories about boyhood. Here Basil must live down a poor start he has made at a new boarding school, a place which Fitzgerald paints marvelously, “muggy with the odor of stale caramels that is so peculiar to boys’ schools.”

Told he needs to get wise to himself, Basil does just that after witnessing a quiet argument between a celebrated Yale athlete and a showgirl who is breaking off their romance:

He did not understand all he had heard, but from his clandestine glimpse into the privacy of these two, with all the world that his short experience could conceive of at their feet, he had gathered that life for everybody was a struggle, sometimes magnificent from a distance, but always difficult and surprisingly simple and a little sad.

Yet this story closes on a happy note unusual to this collection.

More common are downer endings, with “May Day” offering the most dramatic example. This sprawling tale of Manhattan after the Great War plays like a novel, with several story threads interwoven to depict a city teetering on the edge of madness before ending on a bang.

"The wealthy, happy sun glittered in transient gold through the thick windows of the smart shops..." Fifth Avenue as depicted by Fitzgerald in "May Day" and painted above by Childe Hassam in 1919. Image from https://www.clevelandart.org/art/1952.539.

“May Day” impresses in the main but more so in the margins. We observe a swanky party from several perspectives while a man home from the war impresses on his beloved his complete disintegration.

For him, it’s a world-ending encounter; for her, a disappointment:

Love is fragile – she was thinking – but perhaps the pieces are saved, the things that hovered on lips, that might have been said. The new love words, the tendernesses learned, are treasured up for the next lover.

For all its heaviness, “May Day” has a radiance about it, a night of raucous partying and a glimpse of radiant dawn poking through blue windows at Columbus Circle, which pulls you in.

Was Fitzgerald a socialist? “May Day” introduces us to a socialist character who seems to have a clear head while everyone around him is drunk and/or arrogant with money. In other stories here, people are defined, for better or usually worse, by their finances.

The most extreme example of this is the fable “The Diamond As Big As The Ritz,” the title of which turns out not to be hyperbole. The Washington clan lives on the world’s biggest diamond, bedrock of a secret fortress whose security they would do anything to protect.

For diversion, the children invite friends from boarding school like the story’s narrator, not bothered by the fact these friends will have to be killed later to protect the diamond from outsiders. “We can’t let such an inevitable thing as death stand in the way of enjoying life while we have it,” one of the daughters blithely explains.

“The Diamond As Big As The Ritz” goes on too long and isn’t that funny, perhaps because Fitzgerald wasn’t trying to be. The oppressiveness of wealth is summed up in “Ritz’s” climax where the Washington patriarch tries to bribe God, failing because perhaps there is no One there to hear him.

In "Crazy Sunday," Fitzgerald sets a story in Hollywood: "Behind, for all of them, lay sets and sequences, the long waits under the crane that swung the microphone...the clash and strain of many personalities fighting for their lives." Image from https://themouselets.com/history-of-mgm-studios-hollywood-studios.

An emptiness to life is a central theme in many stories. “Absolution” depicts a son of immigrants who is forced to go to Confession by his narrow-minded father only to watch the priest suffer a nervous breakdown. “When a lot of people get together in the best places things go glimmering,” the priest repeats.

Such glimmering can be deceptive, going by other stories here.

Not everything in Babylon Revisited And Other Stories is downbeat. “The Ice Palace” aims mostly for amusement in its depiction of a displaced Southern belle somewhere up North, while “The Freshest Boy” is a coming-of-age comedy. But most of the stories here are classics in a decidedly more tragic vein, even when there is humor.

In “Winter Dreams,” protagonist Dexter Green’s pursuit of wealth is tied up in his obsession for a rich girl who can’t take him seriously:

“You see, if I’d thought of him as poor – well, I’ve been mad about loads of poor men, and fully intended to marry them all. But in this case, I hadn’t thought of him that way, and my interest in him wasn’t strong enough to survive the shock.”

Though published 20 years after Fitzgerald’s death; Babylon Revisited And Other Stories is better known than any of the four short-story collections he saw to print, and as well-known as any of his novels bar one or two. Its stories are taken from different points in his career, yet they coalesce around a similar idea: the lure and deception of wealth and the attendant loss of focus of those who covet it. The result is a feeling of thematic completeness, ten unique takes on the human experience worth reading from cover to cover.