Bright Star, Green Light
eBook - ePub

Bright Star, Green Light

The Beautiful and Damned Lives of John Keats and F. Scott Fitzgerald

Jonathan Bate

Share book
  1. English
  2. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  3. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

Bright Star, Green Light

The Beautiful and Damned Lives of John Keats and F. Scott Fitzgerald

Jonathan Bate

Book details
Book preview
Table of contents
Citations

About This Book

A dazzling biography of two interwoven, tragic lives: John Keats and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

‘For awhile after you quit Keats,’ Fitzgerald once wrote, ‘All other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming.’

John Keats died two hundred years ago, in February 1821. F. Scott Fitzgerald defined a decade that began one hundred years ago, the Jazz Age.

In this biography, prizewinning author Jonathan Bate recreates these two shining, tragic lives in parallel. Not only was Fitzgerald profoundly influenced by Keats, titling Tender is the Night and other works from the poet’s lines, but the two lived with echoing fates: both died young, loved to drink, were plagued by tuberculosis, were haunted by their first love, and wrote into a new decade of release, experimentation and decadence.

Luminous and vital, this biography goes through the looking glass to meet afresh two of the greatest and best-known Romantic writers in their twinned centuries.

Frequently asked questions

How do I cancel my subscription?
Simply head over to the account section in settings and click on “Cancel Subscription” - it’s as simple as that. After you cancel, your membership will stay active for the remainder of the time you’ve paid for. Learn more here.
Can/how do I download books?
At the moment all of our mobile-responsive ePub books are available to download via the app. Most of our PDFs are also available to download and we're working on making the final remaining ones downloadable now. Learn more here.
What is the difference between the pricing plans?
Both plans give you full access to the library and all of Perlego’s features. The only differences are the price and subscription period: With the annual plan you’ll save around 30% compared to 12 months on the monthly plan.
What is Perlego?
We are an online textbook subscription service, where you can get access to an entire online library for less than the price of a single book per month. With over 1 million books across 1000+ topics, we’ve got you covered! Learn more here.
Do you support text-to-speech?
Look out for the read-aloud symbol on your next book to see if you can listen to it. The read-aloud tool reads text aloud for you, highlighting the text as it is being read. You can pause it, speed it up and slow it down. Learn more here.
Is Bright Star, Green Light an online PDF/ePUB?
Yes, you can access Bright Star, Green Light by Jonathan Bate in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Literature & Literary Biographies. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Information

Year
2021
ISBN
9780008424985

1

THE PARALLEL

A little before Christmas 1818, John Keats wrote from the village of Hampstead, just outside London, to his brother and sister-in-law George and Georgiana. They were 4,000 miles away in the log cabin of the ornithologist John James Audubon in Henderson, Kentucky. They had a wild turkey nesting on the roof, a household of children and a boisterous pet swan called Trumpeter to keep them company. Keats was alone with his grief, writing with the news about their other brother that they had been dreading for months: ‘The last days of poor Tom were of the most distressing nature.’ Tuberculosis had taken him.
Keats comforted himself with the thought that he had ‘scarce a doubt of immortality of some nature of other’. ‘Of other’ was a slip of the pen for ‘or other’, but perhaps a telling one in that Keats conceived of immortality as a connection to others rather than something to do with God and heaven. ‘That will be one of the grandeurs of immortality,’ he continued, ‘there will be no space and consequently the only commerce between spirits will be by their intelligence of each other.’ The immortals ‘will completely understand each other – while we in this world merely comprehend each other in different degrees’. Mutual comprehension, he suggests, is the measure of love and friendship. He did not feel so very distant from George and Georgiana, despite their emigration to America, because he could remember every detail of their manner of thinking and feeling, the shaping of their joys and sorrows, their ways of walking, standing, sauntering, sitting down, laughing and joking.
In order to demonstrate their connection, he proposed that he should read a passage of Shakespeare every Sunday morning at ten o’clock and that they should do so at the same time. Shakespeare would bring them ‘as near each other as blind bodies can be in the same room’. This experiment in quasi-telepathy via shared simultaneous reading would, presumably, have been stymied by the difference in time zone, of which Keats was not aware. But that would not have mattered. Whether the time difference is six hours, as it was for the Keats siblings, or 200 years, as divided Keats from Shakespeare and divides us from Keats, the act of reading creates a community across time. Keats described the great writers of the past as ‘the mighty dead’. Their ‘charactered language’, he said, ‘show like the hieroglyphics of beauty’; his ambition was to join them in what he called ‘an immortal freemasonry’. The endurance of great art was the only immortality of which he was certain.
George and Georgiana had eight children, including a son named John Keats, who became a civil engineer in Missouri. He lived until 1917. A report in a Minnesota newspaper had once predicted that ‘the name of Keats will probably die with him’. But by 1917 the name of Keats was truly among the immortals. It lived through those who read and loved his work, such as a Princeton student from St Paul, Minnesota, who that very year was immersing himself in poetry, beginning his first novel, and yearning for a green light from the girl of his dreams.
*
Biographers and critics have noted that John Keats was F. Scott Fitzgerald’s favourite author. Academic essays have been written about particular passages in his novels where the relationship becomes apparent. But the full extent of the influence, its pervasiveness across Fitzgerald’s career, the sense that he saw himself as the prose Keats, remains underappreciated.
The parallels between their lives are uncanny. Each of them established themselves as authors in the aftermath of a long and devastating war. Each lived in a time of freedom and experimentation that came to an abrupt end with a financial crisis: the stock-market panic of 1825 and the Wall Street crash of 1929. Each sought to supplement the work that was their vocation – poetry in Keats’s case, prose fiction in Fitzgerald’s – by trying to make money in the more lucrative arena of the performing arts: Keats writing for the London stage, Fitzgerald for the Hollywood screen.
Keats’s last years were shadowed by his unconsummated love for Fanny Brawne, for whom he wrote his most famous sonnet, ‘Bright Star’. Fitzgerald’s writing was shadowed by his unconsummated love for Ginevra King, who inspired the character of Daisy Fay in The Great Gatsby. In their literary taste, both were borne back ceaselessly into the past: Keats to the romance of the Middle Ages and to the English poetry that he loved (Milton, Shakespeare); Fitzgerald, to Keats.
Keats’s imagination was fired to life by Shakespeare, but he failed when he tried to write pseudo-Shakespearean blank-verse drama. He succeeded, triumphantly, when he took the spirit of Shakespeare and infused it into a different form, that of lyric poetry – the ode, above all. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s imagination was fired to life by Keats, but he failed when he tried to write pseudo-Keatzian lyric poetry. He succeeded, triumphantly, when he took the spirit of Keats and infused it into a different form, that of the lyrical novel – The Great Gatsby, above all.
They were both cursed by tuberculosis. Fitzgerald was further damned by chronic alcoholism. Had Keats lived longer, he might have taken a less sanguine view of the pleasures of intoxication than that expressed in one of his incomparable letters:
whenever I can have Claret I must drink it. –’tis the only palate affair that I am at all sensual in. Would it not be a good Speck to send you some vine roots – could it be done? I’ll enquire – If you could make some wine like Claret to drink on summer evenings in an arbour! For really ’tis so fine – it fills the mouth one’s mouth with a gushing freshness – then goes down cool and feverless – then you do not feel it quarrelling with your liver.
‘O for a beaker full of the warm south … That I might drink, and leave the world unseen’, he would write a few months later, in the poem that gave Fitzgerald the title Tender is the Night.
Keats is the epitome of the Romantic poet; Fitzgerald the epitome of the Romantic novelist.
*
The notion of ‘parallel lives’ has a long history. Many of the foundations for the art of biography were laid 2,000 years ago by Plutarch in the book that Shakespeare read in an English translation entitled The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans Compared. Plutarch thought that biography was the most interesting part of history because it offered immense riches of narrative and character: ‘stories are fit for every place, reach to all persons, serve for all times, teach the living, revive the dead, so far excelling all other books’. His technique was to pair up figures from Greece and Rome – for example, the soldiers Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, the political orators Demosthenes and Cicero. He told the stories of their lives, with a particular emphasis on anecdotes and incidents that were revelatory of their character, and then he offered a ‘parallel’ between the pair.
This book is a revival of the experiment of paralleling two similar but different geniuses: one of them English, a poet, and of the early nineteenth century; the other, American, a novelist, and of the early twentieth. The lives of Keats and Scott Fitzgerald were short, but many biographies of them have been very long. Instead of replicating the detailed ‘cradle to grave’ narratives of their admirable biographers, I have sought to bring them back to life in the Plutarchan style: in parallel and by means of a highly selective series of anecdotes, moments and scenes that seem to me to come to their essence and to reveal the wellsprings of their art. My theme is the gestation of Keats’s mature poems and the making of Fitzgerald’s novels. Readers should go elsewhere if they are in search of a day-by-day account of Keats through his letters or an enumeration of Fitzgerald’s every short story and drunken escapade.
Without assuming the reader’s prior knowledge of the work of either author – beyond, perhaps, The Great Gatsby or the odes of Keats – the book accordingly seeks to offer lovers of Keats a brief life of F. Scott Fitzgerald, lovers of Fitzgerald a brief life of John Keats, and, at the same time, an account of the two writers’ shared commitment to words that evoke and create beauty. To put it another way, here is a reading of Keats through the eyes of Fitzgerald and a Keatzian[1] reading of Fitzgerald.

2

‘GREEN FELICITY’

Scott Fitzgerald learned about the life of John Keats from a 600-page biography bound in dark green board with gold debossed type on the front: ‘JOHN KEATS – SIDNEY COLVIN’. Published in New York by Charles Scribner’s Sons in 1917 to mark the centenary of Keats’s first volume of poetry, its full title was John Keats: His Life and Poetry, His Friends, Critics and After-Fame. The author was a distinguished figure in English cultural life. He had been Slade Professor of Fine Art at Cambridge University and a close friend of the renowned Robert Louis Stevenson prior to the latter’s premature death. He had then become Keeper of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum.
Colvin explained in his preface that his was the first book to give a full and connected account of Keats’s life and poetry. Thirty years earlier, he had written the slender volume on the poet for a series of popular biographies called English Men of Letters, but now, too old for war service, he had ‘found solace and occupation’ through the ‘soul-shaking years’ of 1914 to 1917 in researching and writing the first comprehensive biography, based on a full examination of published and unpublished sources. By bringing together the reminiscences of Keats’s friends, the evidence of reviews and press coverage, and above all the poet’s own extraordinarily self-revelatory letters, Colvin was able to recreate both the everyday and the inner life of his subject with a fullness and authority rarely accorded to the literary biographer. There have been many excellent biographies of Keats since Colvin’s, rich in psychological, literary critical and historical contextual insight, but surprisingly few new facts have been added to his narrative. He can be our guide, as he was Fitzgerald’s.
*
Images missing
Keats’s poems and letters, and Colvin’s biography: the editions owned by Scott Fitzgerald
author’s collection
Thomas Keats or Keates came out of the west. His family belonged to Devon or Cornwall, the counties in the far south-west of England, bordering on the Atlantic Ocean. As American westerners a century later would go east to New York to seek their fortune, so he headed for London. Being a countryman, he knew horses. By the time he was twenty, he had become head ostler in a livery stable providing horses for hire at an inn called the Swan and Hoop overlooking Moorfields, in the east of the city. In October 1794, he married Frances, the lively and impulsive nineteen-year-old daughter of his employer, John Jennings.
Their first son, John Keats, was born a year later. The notion of him being cradled in a stable like some latter-day Jesus would fuel the romantic idea of his humble genius, though in reality his place of birth is not known for certain (and records differ as to whether he was born on 29 or 31 October 1795). When he was three, the family moved from their rooms above the inn to a house just off the busy City Road. By then, Johnny had a brother, George. Another boy, Thomas, followed a year later and three years after that, they moved back to the Swan and Hoop. Jennings had decided to retire, and Thomas Keats took over as manager. Horses could now be purchased from ‘Keates’s Livery Stable’. The following summer, in June 1803, Frances Keats gave birth to her only daughter, Fanny.
Colvin recorded two anecdotes about the young John Keats. According to an old lady who was a neighbour when they were living near the City Road, when he first learned to speak, ‘instead of answering sensibly, he had a trick of making a rime to the last word people said and then laughing’. He was also said to be fiercely devoted to his mother. Once, when she was ill and the doctor had ordered rest, he stood guard at the door with an old sword and refused to let anybody in. The artist Benjamin Robert Haydon, who would play a major part in Keats’s story and who loved to embroider a tale, heightened the force of the anecdote:
He was when an infant a most violent and ungovernable child. At five years of age or thereabouts, he once got hold of a naked sword and shutting the door swore nobody should go out. His mother wanted to do so, but he threatened her so furiously she began to cry, and was obliged to wait till somebody through the window saw her position and came to the rescue.
Keats would one day write that ‘A Man’s life of any worth is a continual allegory – and very few eyes can see the Mystery of his life – a life like the scriptures, figurative.’ True poets such as Shakespeare, he continued, live lives of allegory upon which their works are a commentary. By the same account, the literary biographer infers the writer’s character from their works and finds incidents in the life that allegorize it. Thus Keats the born rhymester, the child with an innate sense of humour, the boy of strong passion.
In April 1804, when Keats was eight years old, his father was riding home late at night when his horse stumbled and he was thrown. He cracked his head on the ground. A watchman found him at one o’clock in the morning and he was dead soon after dawn. Just two months later, Frances Keats remarried and her new husband was installed as manager of the Swan and Hoop. Her father, old Mr Jennings, died the following spring, leaving substantial legacies to his family. But the terms of the will were unclear and Frances, who felt herself excluded, challenged it in the Court of Chancery. The action failed, but it delayed the possibility of an inheritance for the Keats children. Around the time of the court judgment, her second marriage broke up and for a time she disappeared from the family, perhaps into alcoholism.
John, George, Tom and Fanny were now effectively orphans. They clung closely to each other. Henceforth, his siblings would be among the most important people in Keats’s life. They moved in with their grandmother, Mr Jennings’ widow, who lived in Edmonton, a village a few miles to the north of London, close to another village, Enfield, where John and George had been enrolled at a small but excellent school.
Clarke’s Academy offered a formidable education in the ‘dissenting’ tradition. In contrast to the ancient ‘public’ boarding schools for gentlemen, where the curriculum was confined almost entirely to the Greek and Latin classics, John Clarke offered more varied fare: Latin remained a staple part of the daily diet, but there was also French translation, English history, mathematics, science (mechanics, optics, even astronomy), botany and gardening – pupils were given little plots for growing and tending plants. This was a practical education, preparing lower-middle-class boys for working lives in trade, but there was also a message that they should take pride in the hard-won English traditions of liberty, freedom of thought and religion, and a mixed political constitution. Those who had fought and written in the middle of the seventeenth century against the old regime of monarchical absolutism were ...

Table of contents