Recommended Reading for Black Tuesday – “Babylon Revisited” by F. Scott Fitzgerald

What’s Black Tuesday again?  It is October 29, 1929, the attributed day of the stock market crash (it actually occurred over four days); 16 million shares were traded as the market pummeled downward.  It wasn’t until November, 1954 that Dow achieved its pre-crash levels or until 1968 were that many shares traded on a single day.  We’ve been hearing more and more about the crash in the last year as our own economy brings it alive as no history book ever could.  Recently, for a Literary Affairs lunch, I read the short story “Babylon Revisited,”  a tale that provides a fuller view of the cost of the crash than any charts or bank statements.  The story describes post-crash Paris with flash backs to the Roaring Twenties era, a gut-wrenching difference.

What struck me is the pervading sadness throughout the story.  The main character, Charlie, grew rich during the Roaring Twenties, led the high life, then lost his money and his family.  His wife died, a victim of heedless living.  His daughter is living with his sister-in-law in Paris because he was an unfit father.  He is working in Prague successfully restoring his finances.  The story opens with Charlie visiting the infamous bar at the Ritz, but it is monument to the past as Charlie and the bartender list the tragedies that befall the former regulars.  But not only Paris has changed due to the financial collapse, Charlie returns sober and with limited funds. 

He remembered thousand-franc notes given to an orchestra for playing a single number, hundred-franc notes tossed to a doorman for calling a cab. 

But it hadn’t been for nothing.

It had been given, even the most wildly squandered sum, as an offering to destiny that he might not remember the things most worth remembering, the things that now he would always remember–his child taken from his control, his wife escaped to a grave in Vermont.

Charlie is in Paris to gain custody of Honoria, his daughter, from his sister-in-law, Marion, who can barely stand to be in the same room with him.  She resents how he and her sister lived (Fitzgerald gives snippets through out the story) , and how her sister died.  Fitzgerald creates emotional tension that builds as the reader wonders if Charlie will restrict his drinking and will Honoria return to Prague with her father.  At moments, it’s hopeful that the family will be reunited, but the tone of regret and sorrow never eases, signaling a different ending. 

Names are significant in the story: “Babylon” is a place of exile and anguish for the ancient Israelis, and while at one time Paris was an adult amusement park for Charlie, it is no longer.  Marion is married to Lincoln, names reminiscent of American hard-working ideals, and they have worked for middling salaries while Charlie lived excessively off profits he did nothing to gain.  In fact, Marion reminded me a bit of Mary Lincoln, another woman who was resentful, emotionally unstable, and mentally ill.  It goes without saying that Honoria is aptly named.

“Babylon Revisited” mirrors Fitzgerald’s life at the time.  In 1931, when it was published in the Saturday Evening Post, his wild days in Paris with his wife, Zelda, were over.  She was committed to a sanatorium due to her mental illness and their daughter was living with a nanny in Paris.  Fitzgerald shuttled back and forth between the two of them, and wrote to earn a living.  Hemingway observed in A Moveable Feast during the midst of the 20s that after The Great Gatsby “Scott did not write anything any more that was good until after he knew that [Zelda] was insane.”  He may  have been right, because in the midst of such hardship, Fitzgerald wrote this beautiful story that shows a heady life and its terrible, tragic cost.