A great line from Fitzgerald

We read This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald for book club this month. I don't even think I wrote about it on here. The book made almost no impression on me except I was annoyed. When your chosen metier is the tragic ennui of rich white people, your writing had better be pitch perfect or your readers are likely to react with, "Tell it to your polo pony, Captain Abercrombie."

So I went back and read "Winter Dreams" recently, his most famous short story which I had read in high school and remembered almost nothing about. It's available online here. Fitzgerald wrote it in 1922, which means about three years after Paradise was written and two years after it was published. He had already markedly improved. It was good to go back and read this. Paradise was so lackluster that it made me wonder if I overestimated Gatsby.

Fitzgerald, other than hewing close to the autobiographical well for materials, liked to write about the death of the spirit. I think that's nicely encapsulated here in the final line of Winter Dreams when Dexter learns 5 years later that Judy Jones is married to a man who drinks and treats her poorly and has lost the looks that made her so singular:

For the first time in years the tears were streaming down his face. But they were for himself now. He did not care about mouth and eyes and moving hands. He wanted to care, and he could not care. For he had gone away and he could never go back any more. The gates were closed, the sun was gone down, and there was no beauty but the gray beauty of steel that withstands all time. Even the grief he could have borne was left behind in the country of illusion, of youth, of the richness of life, where his winter dreams had flourished.

"Long ago," he said, "long ago, there was something in me, but now that thing is gone. Now that thing is gone, that thing is gone. I cannot cry. I cannot care. That thing will come back no more."