Sunday Short: Babylon Revisited by F. Scott Fitzgerald

The degree to which F. Scott Fitzgerald's writing taps into his personal life still staggers me. Tender is the Night is one of my favourite novels of all time and it's portrayal of Dick and Nicole Diver and the demise of them romantically and individually virtually mirrors that of Fitzgerald and his wife, Zelda. Babylon Revisited has a lot in common with Tender is the Night, and plays with a lot of the same themes, namely of what happens to the life of the party when everyone's gone home. The short is a tender piece about a father's battle to get his daughter back following a stint in a sanitarium, a drinking problem and the death of his troubled wife. Plus it's written with Fitzgerald usual flare for the sublime which makes it worthy of the read anyway.

As they rolled on to the Left Bank and he felt its sudden provincialism, he thought, “I spoiled this city for myself. I didn’t realize it, but the days came along one after another, and then two years were gone, and everything was gone, and I was gone.”

You can read Babylon Revisited here.