Fitzgerald's Tender

Those who came to The Forge early last night were fortunate enough to be treated by a representative of Grand Rapid's Perrin Brewery.  Several of us sampled a pint of their Blackberry IPA or Perrin Black Ale.  This writer had a Blackberry IPA and while it was a bit too fruity for my simple tastes the price was right.  Haywood was the rep and a nice guy.

We repaired to the back bar for the discussion of F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender Is The Night.  Ed promises to send notes about his choice, so I'll let him speak for himself.  The general discussion was on track for most of the meet.  While several themes were bantered about, the "money doesn't buy happiness" thread occupied much time.

We further observed that Fitzgerald gave us some real gems.  In appealing to the more prurient nature consider this example, "She crossed and recrossed her knees frequently in the manner of tall restless virgins." Who amongst us struggles with that image?  How about, "The orange light through the drawn blind, the sarcophagus of her figure on the bed, the spot of face, the voice searching the vacuity of her illness and finding only remote abstractions."  Can you see Fitzgerald pondering Zelda's schizophrenic behaviors while in treatment and manifesting that helpless feeling he must have had at not being able to care for her?

These and other examples of Fitzgerald's work show him to be one of the best at his craft.

This writer is drawn to the the era that occupies most of Fitzgerald's stories.  Between the two great wars, ex-pats in Europe, especially Paris, produced remarkable works.  The characters there had to have been powerful cohorts.  From Wikipedia The "Lost Generation" was the generation that came of age during World War I. The term was popularized by Ernest Hemingway, who used it as one of two contrasting epigraphs for his novel, The Sun Also Rises. In that volume Hemingway credits the phrase to Gertrude Stein, who was then his mentor and patron. This generation included artists and writers who came of age during the war such as F. Scott Fitzgerald,^[1] T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Sherwood Anderson, John Dos Passos, John Steinbeck, William Faulkner, Djuna Barnes, Glenway Wescott, Waldo Peirce, Isadora Duncan, Abraham Walkowitz, Ezra Pound, Alan Seeger, Henry Miller, Aldous Huxley, Malcolm Cowley, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Erich Maria Remarque and the composers Sergei Prokofiev, Paul Hindemith, George Gershwin, and Aaron Copland.

Has there been another such era?

I'll ponder a bit and maybe add some more.  

...meanwhile, Later in 2016...

It's been a couple of hectic months, Gentle Reader, and two titles were discussed by your intrepid heroes, The Great Apes.  In July Flashman and The Mountain of Light was excoriated by yours truly. My goodness, where to begin?  The Flashman series is offered as an everyman British Forrest Gump who places himself at the end of Imperial Britain's tentacles around the globe.  Flashy, yes Flashy as he is affectionately called solves problems and beds conquests.  Great guy, huh?  Early James Bond? Sherlock Holmes?  This iteration of Flashman was copy written in 1990.  MacDonald does his best to imitate adventure writers of the mid-nineteenth century.  I found the structure to be problematic and troublesome.  The cover of my edition features a Washington Post review with Very laugh-out loud funny in quotes.  Flee at that recommendation.  Don't misunderstand, there are a few humorous turns of the phrase.  In the first 100 or so pages, more than 110 characters are introduced.  ONE-HUNDRED TEN.  I counted them.  Probably says a lot about me.  Few of these characters are more than a passing reference.  Why include them Mr. MacDonald?  Are you trying to flex some literary muscle?  Impress us with your historical acumen? Bad form, my friend, bad form.  The Mountain of Light takes us to the North-West Frontier of the Indian Subcontinent in an effort to get readers to appreciate why the brightest gem in the Crown is a ruby of uncommon clarity and size. OK.  Before this my hat was off to the Punjabis for their excellent ale.  One of MacDonald's paragraphs is 180 words long, three semi-colons, 10 commas filled with vernacular.  Oh, and he gives us 56 historical notes and numerable footnotes.  Not for the faint of heart. If you thought the Master and Commander series is your standard bearer, this one is for you.

In August we had a hearty discussion of Elie Wiesel's Night.  He died this year and if you have never read Night, you should.  Much passion, a heavy almost existential discussion explored Wiesel's view of God, religion and how a supreme being could stand by while 7 million humans were exterminated during the Holocaust and other atrocities.  Man's Inhumanity To Man.  A common literary theme. Sigh.