Not a Yes Or No Question

A few weeks ago, in Australia, my husband met a woman who told him Ypres was her favourite place in the whole world. I've just come back from my second visit to the city, and I'd have to say I find her passion puzzling. Which is not to say it isn't a lovely place. It is. I suppose it's all a question of psychology, and Ypres, while I like it very much, doesn't somehow quite match my own psychology. Possibly that says more about me than about Ypres. Who knows, it might be a very strange place indeed that really sang to me.

Anyway, as I said, this was the second time I'd ever been to Ypres and, wandering about the town, it seemed to me that the place had become a bit more commercial - I'm sure there wasn't an Apple shop three doors down from the Menin Gate last time I was there, or a boutique belting out Lulu hits in the hope of tempting me to dash in and stock up on miniskirts, let alone a place flogging chocolate Tommies helmets, (with filling), surely the most misguided of marketing ideas ever.

While waiting for the 8 p.m Last Post ceremony at the Menin Gate, I rested for a while on a bench in the town's main square. Soon I found myself sharing it with one of those men who clutch cans of beer, (or something stronger), at all times and are accompanied everywhere by that special kind of mongrel dog that only drug dealers have, the ones that come as puppies ready-equipped with a piece of string for a lead.

Surrounded, as one inevitably is in a town as drenched in World War One as Ypres - (if indeed any other town is in its league in that respect) - by images of the nobility of male sacrifice, I found it hard not to notice how much my new companion's demeanour deviated from that earlier generation's approach to the world. I didn't have long to observe the detail of the differences, however. Having been accosted by a tribal crony, whose grunted conversation seemed to indicate he wanted something urgently, the can-carrying stranger left me, together with his furry friend, (both the canine and the human variety, in fact).

Watching the trio stumbling off across the cobbles, my initial thought was that we'd lost something. What I couldn't decide was whether that might not actually be a good thing. If called upon, there was absolutely no chance whatsoever that a modern fellow like my erstwhile neighbour would even think about stepping up to the plate in the defence of Queen and country. For the slaughter on the Western Front to happen again, the vast mass of the male population would have to possess a strong sense of duty and an unquestioning respect for authority. Despite the emotional appeal of such qualities, could it actually be a sign of progress that many people nowadays regard such things with scorn?

I find it hard to entertain that possibility. It makes the terrible losses in the First World War appear even more poignant. Was the eager rush to enter the military - on both sides - futile and stupid? Were all the lives sacrificed, all the acts of bravery and mateship we have been taught to admire, merely misguided? If so, what is it that so many of us find so admirable and stirring about the conflict? What gives a poem like Anthem for Doomed Youth such a melancholy beauty? Or, perhaps more precisely, what is that makes melancholy so beautiful to us, when it goes hand in hand with what we see as nobility? Is our admiration for self-sacrifice healthy or is it in fact a kind of death cult?

I can't answer any of these questions. I can only say that I am awed by the Menin Gate and the seemingly endless war graves that remind us of those terrible, muddy, pointless days when, as F Scott Fitzgerald put it so chillingly, 'an empire walked very slowly backward a few inches a day, leaving the dead like a million bloody rugs'. These places remind us of men at their maddest, I suppose, but also at their best in some terrible way.

I can't explain my feelings when I go to places like Ypres. I don't want anything like the First World War to ever happen again and yet I'm horribly moved that people once gave up their lives and petty day-to-day interests to go to serve what they thought was a bigger cause - despite the fact that with the benefit of hindsight it was possibly just a really silly one. I'm strangely touched by the memorials, great ugly things many of them, their heaviness and sheer size some kind of attempt to make sense of the pointless vastness of what had been done and how much was lost:

  This monument to the XLIX West Riding Division stands behind a Commonwealth War Grave near Ypres, which includes a memorial to John McCrae, the Canadian doctor who wrote the beautiful poem that begins, 'In Flanders field the poppies blow',

Possibly my favourite place in Ypres - or anywhere I've been on the Western Front so far is St George's Chapel, which I'll try to write about and show pictures of in the next post I do. For now, here are some images of Langemark, a German graveyard near Ypres in which 44,061 Germans lie, some 7,000 of them unidentified. I heard Neil MacGregor, Director of the British Museum (I think) on Radio Three the other day, quoting a German historian on the German approach to history. He said that for them history is what must never be allowed to happen again. The Germans, according to this writer (Michael Stormer, possibly?) use history to remind themselves of what went wrong. That was certainly the sombre impression one got from Langemark

Another One Bites the Dust

I find this story sad (while simultaneously being puzzled by the use of the word 'cadence' in the context). It also sets me wondering about where exactly that 'large, proud rose-coloured hotel' that is the opening image of the first Tender is the Night used to stand, if it had an origin in reality, rather than merely in Fitzgerald's imagination. The picture he paints in that opening scene is wonderfully uncrowded and civilised:

'On the pleasant shore of the French Riviera, about half-way between Marseilles and the Italian border, stands a large, proud, rose-coloured hotel. Deferential palms cool its flushed facade, and before it stretches a short dazzling beach ... when this story begins only the cupolas of a dozen old villas rotted like water-lilies among the massed pines between Gausse's Hotel des Etrangers and Cannes, five miles away.

The hotel and its bright tan prayer rug of a beach were one. In the early morning the distant image of Cannes, the pink and cream of old fortifications, the purple Alps that bonded Italy, were cast across the water and lay quavering in the ripples and rings sent up by sea-plants through the clear shallows. Before eight a man came down to the beach in a blue bathrobe and with much preliminary application to his person of the chilly water, and much grunting and loud breathing, floundered a minute in the sea. When he had gone, beach and bay were quiet for an hour. Merchantmen crawled westward on the horizon; bus boys shouted in the hotel court; the dew dried upon the pines.'

Is there anywhere as quiet and untouched left on the French Riviera? I fear it's all been overrun or swept away.

Stop Press: (No, not swept away, I discover, just put out of reach. Apparently, the model for Fitzgerald's hotel is almost certainly the Grand Hotel du Cap d'Antibes, and the prices, if you look, are breathtaking. In the summer the most basic room starts at 700 Euros per night - a bit beyond the reach I suspect, of present day McKiscos and other such ordinary mortals.)

Battered Penguins V -Tender is the Night

Tender is the Night, by F Scott Fitzgerald, is set mainly in the South of France, Paris and Switzerland, between about 1919 and 1930. It tells the story of Dick Diver and the group of rich Americans he lives amongst in those post- (or, as it turned out, between-) war years. The title is taken from Keats's Ode to a Nightingale and the book is dedicated to the author's Antibes-dwelling friends, Gerald and Sara Murphy, whose picture you can see here.

Unusually, the novel has two published versions. The first - and the first I was ever exposed to -  opens in the summer of 1925 in the South of France. A young American film actress called Rosemary meets Dick and his wife Nicole. The couple have a house somewhere on the French Riviera. They spend their days on the 'bright tan prayer rug of a beach' beneath their house, surrounded by their friends. The account of what happens as Rosemary gets to know the Divers takes up the first part of the novel.  In the second part, we are taken back to a time before Dick and Nicole were married and we discover what lies behind certain puzzling incidents we have witnessed in the opening section.

The second version - which is that contained in the battered Penguin I have just read - reverts to a chronological framework, beginning at the actual beginning of the story - that is, with the second part of the original - and then proceeding to what was, in the original, the first part of the book, where we meet Rosemary and watch events unfold in the South of France. This second version is apparently the result of a revision made by Fitzgerald following the book's initial publication. He was disappointed by its reception and decided the lack of enthusiasm with which it was met might be due to the disordered arrangement of the episodes of the plot. 

 

I am not clear which is the currently accepted or authorised form of the novel, and I am not quite sure which I think is better. In the original version, the book's opening is almost cinematically visual. We are plunged into a bright, exciting world and, together with Rosemary, we are dazzled by the characters we meet. We see them only from the outside, getting to know them in the same way that we might if we encountered them in real life. We form impressions, as we do when we meet strangers, based on their behaviour. We are charmed by the personalities they choose to display to the social world. Only then are we allowed to find out what lies behind the brittle but glittering facade that they have shown us.

The later, chronologically ordered version dispenses with the mystery the original managed to build around the Divers. It does not give the reader the chance to be seduced by the versions of themselves the Divers permit others to see. Instead of presenting a wide, sparkling panorama, peopled with colourful players, Fitzgerald focuses immediately on Dick Diver. Rather than offering the temporary illusion that Dick leads an enchanted life, right from the very first paragraph it is made clear that Diver's fate is unlikely to be a happy one. 'Years later, Fitzgerald explains, "it seemed to him that even in this sanctuary he did not escape lightly". A note of melancholy is sounded from the opening page.

Perhaps in this respect the revised version is truer to the spirit of the novel than the original. After all, despite the at times fevered gaiety displayed by the characters, melancholy pervades Tender is the Night, whichever version you choose to read. It is partly the usual Fitzgerald melancholy, which derives from the mismatch between life and his characters' dream of how life should be, but it is also the melancholy of the post-war world - 'the broken universe of the war's ending', a place where even apparently beautiful things, like Nicole herself, are actually dreadfully damaged. It is the world that is left after, as Dick puts it during a visit to the Western Front, an 'empire walked very slowly backward a few inches a day, leaving the dead like a million bloody rugs'. 

 

Besides melancholy, of course, the two versions share many other equally powerful elements. In both, the reader encounters an acutely observed chronicle of a relationship, which captures 'the vast irrationality' of infatuation and the poignance of being loved more than you love in return - 'It made him sad when she brought out her accomplishments for his approval' - and which recounts with great acuity the way that the tide of emotion between Nicole and Dick shifts and changes.

In both versions, the reader discovers a striking portrait of a talented man who uses "somewhat conscious good manners", even though "often he despised them because they were not a protest against how unpleasant selfishness was, but against how unpleasant it looked" and who is trapped by his own charm - his "power of arousing a fascinating and uncritical love"; a man who, despite thinking "that he wanted to be good, he wanted to be kind, he wanted to be brave and wise", is defeated by his addiction to pleasing others, (an addiction in which always "some element of loneliness [is] involved - so easy to be loved – so hard to love").

In both versions, Fitzgerald uses Rosemary - who, in her role as film star, is described as "cutting a new cardboard paper doll to pass before its[the public's] empty harlot's mind"  and who, even when she is walking across a Western Front battlefield, feels she is "in a thrilling dream" - to represent the shallow, bright unreality of the new world of film. In both, he displays a sharp eye for snobbery, describing, for instance, how one character, "made a quick examination of [a man] and, failing to find any of the hallmarks she respected, the subtler virtues or courtesies by which the privileged classes recognised one another, treated him thereafter with her second manner", and presenting another's reaction to an acquaintance's death as entirely focused on his club membership – "It wasn’t the Racquet Club he crawled to – it was the Harvard Club. I’m sure he didn’t belong to the Racquet".

In both, he displays great perception about character - "Her emotions had the truest existence in the telling of them" - and about the gulf that exists between us all - '"ou never knew exactly how much space you occupied in people’s lives." In both, his writing is so vivid that some passages read like eye-witness reports from the dawn of modernity - here, for example, is what I would lay bets must be one of the first descriptions in literature of motor-vehicle-induced smog: "In the square as they came out, a suspended mass of gasoline exhaust cooked slowly in the July sun. It was a terrible thing - unlike pure heat, it held no promise of rural escape, but suggested only roads choked with the same foul asthma."

In both, there are one or two slightly squirmy sub-Lawrence moments and in both, I'm sorry to say, there are incidences of homophobia and racism ( and this last is not confined to skin colour; indeed Fitzgerald seems to have reserved his greatest loathing for the English, about whom he has Dick Diver make many observations, of which my favourite is this: "he had long ago concluded that certain classes of English people lived upon a concentrated essence of the anti-social" [I should add that, although Australians only appear once in the novel, they do not appear in a flattering light either]).

Most importantly though, in both versions the reader will find a moving and beautiful novel, tracing the path through life of a man full of promise whose failure may result from his exemption from war service (he was deemed "too valuable, too much of a capital investment to be shot off in a gun"), or from his decision to marry someone with "too much money ... Dick can't beat that",or from his overwhelming desire "to be loved", or from the tension between being "dignified in his fine clothes, with their fine accessories", and the fact that "he was yet swayed and driven as an animal", or simply from his fondness for drink. In addition, as he did in The Great Gatsby (which I regard as a lesser work, because a) it is more schematic and less ambiguous and b) it has, like Brideshead Revisited, a static and, to my mind, annoyingly directing point of view and voice, that of an elegiac narrator), Fitzgerald not only displays his talent for exceptionally poignant final lines but also litters every page of the path to that final line with a wealth of wonderful minor details, including the glorious information that an incidental character is "a manufacturer of dolls' voices from Newark".