Starlight, Starbright

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s devotion to John Keats is widely known and well-recorded. The influence of the English poet on the American novelist has been explored in various articles and essays, as well as being a discussion point in Fitzgerald biographies. That said, Jonathan Bate’s decision to look at the life and works of these two literary lions alongside each other may, on first glance, seem strange. The century that separates England’s Regency era from the American Jazz Age is as vast, deep, and turbulent as the Atlantic Ocean itself. However, in the opening chapter of his book, Bate explains his approach, stating he has left cradle-to-grave biographies to others and is instead drawing for inspiration from Plutarch’s two-thousand-year-old The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, first translated into English by Sir Thomas North in ten volumes beginning in 1579, a series that heavily influenced the plays of William Shakespeare. Plutarch chose two key figures, one from each ancient culture—as one example, Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar—and looked at their lives simultaneously. With “a particular emphasis on anecdote and incidents that were revelatory of their character,” Plutarch could offer a “‘parallel’ between the pair” (5). The result of this approach to Keats and Fitzgerald is an enjoyable and insightful book that explores both the lives and the times of these two artists. For Fitzgerald devotees, it provides insight into the life of Keats for those aware of his influence on the novelist but unfamiliar with his personal chronology. It also offers an excellent, concise biography of Fitzgerald, which is to be expected from one of the leading literary biographers of the day.

The parallels that Bate identifies are numerous: both Keats and Fitzgerald were writing in the aftermath of war; they lived through a period of new freedoms that came to an abrupt halt by means of a financial crash (although Keats had been dead four years before the stock market panic of 1825 that the author references); they experienced unrequited and unconsummated love and used this theme in their work repeatedly; they attempted alternative and more lucrative arenas for their writing (Keats on the London stage and Fitzgerald in Hollywood); both men died prematurely, although Keats’s life was nearly twenty years shorter than Fitzgerald’s. These factors are, of course, of interest, but they can be seen as coincidental rather than particularly significant to their literary development.

However, one parallel that Bate does identify that is of great importance is their attitude not only to their writing but to the reading that influenced it. Bate makes the point that both men were borne back ceaselessly into the past when it came to their literary passions. Keats was preoccupied with medieval romance, John Milton, and William Shakespeare (126–32). Fitzgerald’s love of Keats saw him return to the poet for inspiration and solace throughout his life. Bate develops this point further still in his assertion that Keats’s imagination was “fired to life by Shakespeare, but he failed when he tried to write pseudo-Shakespearean blank verse. 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” (3), Bate identifies a similar transformation in the relationship between inspiration and creation in the career of Fitzgerald. Fired by Keats, his imagination succeeded when he stepped away from writing pseudo-Keatsian lyric poetry and infused the spirit of his favorite poet into the lyrical novel (3).

For obvious reasons, Bate identifies the work in which Keats’s spirit is most clearly infused in Fitzgerald as The Great Gatsby. This influence has been noted by a number of scholars but also by Fitzgerald himself. In a 1938 letter to his daughter Scottie, one quoted in this study, Fitzgerald guiltily admits the extent to which he was indebted to Keats (212; Life in Letters...