No, my friends, one of the great discoveries of 2012 was the 80-year-old writing of The Lost Generation. More specifically, of F. Scott Fitzgerald.
"Great discovery" may be an exaggeration.
"Great discovery" may also be limited to the confines of my 'finally got round to reading' list. Because I am in no way belittling the contribution of Gangnam Style to the progress of humankind. If anything can remind us that we're all, deep down, human and partial to a cheesy song and dance, then I'm all for it.
Back to Mr Fitzgerald.
The Great Gatsby is one of those books you feel you should have read, and that you're sure everyone else has read, and you're a literary heathen for not having religiously consumed all the so-called classics ever penned and published. You know that it has something to do with America, and the American experience, and what it is to be American. You may even know that it was set during the Jazz Age. If you're incredibly lucky, you'll have the considered smugness that allows you to elaborate that the Jazz Age refers to a cultural shift in the 1920s where youth began to rebel against the Victorian morals of their parents and a generation that could allow the Great War to take place, where women began (in theory) to claim a greater role in society, where jazz got into people's blood and had them drinking highballs until the small hours of the morning.
What you may not know (I certainly didn't until I read the introduction to The Great Gatsby) is that Fitzgerald's first novel was actually This Side of Paradise (1920), followed by The Beautiful and the Damned (1922), and only then did the seminal The Great Gatsby (1925) launch itself on the world..
What struck me about the three novels, when read chronologically, was the development in not only Fitzgerald's writing style, but also the tone of messaging and story. And, upon chatting with a friend last year and reflecting on the difficulties of life in your twenties, it struck me that the experience you go through in your twenties is mirrored in this trio of books, and in the wider story of the Roaring Twenties.
Without talking too much about the plots of the three novels, This Side of Paradise is heavy with self-indulgent writing. It smacks of the arrogance of youth tempered with the foetal self-doubt caused by discovering what the real world is and what our place within it can and must be. It's full of self-discovery, the infallibility and rigidity of our principles in our early-twenties, and the determination to live by those principles. Fitzgerald is experimental in his writing style, with little thought given to the enjoyment of the reader. And this, to an extent, is how we are in our early-twenties. We have our beliefs of how the world will be, and as we leave university with our degrees (if that's the path we've chosen to take), we expect the world to fall at our feet in reverence of our glory, intelligence, and youth.
But as you move to The Beautiful and the Damned and then finally The Great Gatsby, you are struck by the change in tone, the increasing absence of trills in Fitzgerald's language. Some of the arrogance of the earlier novel begins to fracture. The couple that feature in The Beautiful and the Damned, heavily modelled on Fitzgerald's high-profile life with Zelda, serve as the perfect illustration of the awakening of youth to the vagaries of life. That it can be a bore, that money has to be earned and budgeted, that endless parties can and inevitably do take their toll.
The Great Gatsby, with its starker, more matter-of-fact style, then brings you to the final realisation of your twenties, as you edge towards your fourth decade. That the assuredness of your early twenties has undoubtedly taken a hit. That there are sometimes personas we find ourselves adopting to achieve our goals, personas that don't fit with our image of ourselves. Then comes the realisation that sometimes those goals are not clear-cut, or perhaps no longer as desirable as they may have once been. That we look to our peers and wonder how they've achieved such dizzying success, whilst beneath that success is very likely a parallel set of questions and concerns. Is this what I want to be doing? Is this how I thought I'd be living my life? Is this what life consists of?
Having listened to and had conversations with friends of a similar age, this creeping realisation that hits in your twenties isn't unique. Having spoken to people in their thirties, forties, fifties, the questions don't seem get easier or answered. Rather, they seem to be swapped for a different set of conundrums, an ever-increasing palate of principles and experiences and complexities from which we need to draw in order to assemble a way of living that reconciles all we've learnt.
But that initial break within our Jazz Age decade can be brutal.
And it is here that the subject of this blog creeps in at the backdoor. We can so easily forget what it is that we enjoy, who it is that we are at our core, what it is to see the world through another's eyes, to be consumed by the day-to-day practicalities of our own lives.
Today I read two pieces that reminded me of the importance of developing our own 'Art of Living', our own awareness of the way we live our lives, the indulgences we allow ourselves; that the simplicity of youth can be combined with our increasingly complex experience as adults, and that the way we understand and empathise with others is a choice that we make.
One was a post from Open Culture, which was on a new university degree that looks at how the doodling and art and drawing more commonly associated with children can support our learning as adults. Another was the text of a commencement speech in 2005 by the late David Foster Wallace. In it, he reminds us of the ease that we can slip into our default setting of experiencing life with us at the centre of it, rather than making a choice to perceive how things may be from another viewpoint.
In our twenties, we seem to experience the trauma of realising that life does not flow as you wish it to. But we also have the joy of working out what it is that we enjoy within this bigger picture, and what it is we can draw from others and give back in return. To emerge from our Jazz Age with what we've learned but without leaving behind who we are.
Has/is your experience of your twenties (been) vastly different? Does this mirror that F. Scott Fitzgerald held up through his novels ring true for you? Are your thirties, forties, fifties, and so on any easier? Or does leaving the Jazz Age inevitably lead to a Great Depression, World War, a brief sexual revolution, and then increasing economic uncertainty...
What struck me about the three novels, when read chronologically, was the development in not only Fitzgerald's writing style, but also the tone of messaging and story. And, upon chatting with a friend last year and reflecting on the difficulties of life in your twenties, it struck me that the experience you go through in your twenties is mirrored in this trio of books, and in the wider story of the Roaring Twenties.
Without talking too much about the plots of the three novels, This Side of Paradise is heavy with self-indulgent writing. It smacks of the arrogance of youth tempered with the foetal self-doubt caused by discovering what the real world is and what our place within it can and must be. It's full of self-discovery, the infallibility and rigidity of our principles in our early-twenties, and the determination to live by those principles. Fitzgerald is experimental in his writing style, with little thought given to the enjoyment of the reader. And this, to an extent, is how we are in our early-twenties. We have our beliefs of how the world will be, and as we leave university with our degrees (if that's the path we've chosen to take), we expect the world to fall at our feet in reverence of our glory, intelligence, and youth.
But as you move to The Beautiful and the Damned and then finally The Great Gatsby, you are struck by the change in tone, the increasing absence of trills in Fitzgerald's language. Some of the arrogance of the earlier novel begins to fracture. The couple that feature in The Beautiful and the Damned, heavily modelled on Fitzgerald's high-profile life with Zelda, serve as the perfect illustration of the awakening of youth to the vagaries of life. That it can be a bore, that money has to be earned and budgeted, that endless parties can and inevitably do take their toll.
The Great Gatsby, with its starker, more matter-of-fact style, then brings you to the final realisation of your twenties, as you edge towards your fourth decade. That the assuredness of your early twenties has undoubtedly taken a hit. That there are sometimes personas we find ourselves adopting to achieve our goals, personas that don't fit with our image of ourselves. Then comes the realisation that sometimes those goals are not clear-cut, or perhaps no longer as desirable as they may have once been. That we look to our peers and wonder how they've achieved such dizzying success, whilst beneath that success is very likely a parallel set of questions and concerns. Is this what I want to be doing? Is this how I thought I'd be living my life? Is this what life consists of?
Having listened to and had conversations with friends of a similar age, this creeping realisation that hits in your twenties isn't unique. Having spoken to people in their thirties, forties, fifties, the questions don't seem get easier or answered. Rather, they seem to be swapped for a different set of conundrums, an ever-increasing palate of principles and experiences and complexities from which we need to draw in order to assemble a way of living that reconciles all we've learnt.
But that initial break within our Jazz Age decade can be brutal.
And it is here that the subject of this blog creeps in at the backdoor. We can so easily forget what it is that we enjoy, who it is that we are at our core, what it is to see the world through another's eyes, to be consumed by the day-to-day practicalities of our own lives.
Today I read two pieces that reminded me of the importance of developing our own 'Art of Living', our own awareness of the way we live our lives, the indulgences we allow ourselves; that the simplicity of youth can be combined with our increasingly complex experience as adults, and that the way we understand and empathise with others is a choice that we make.
One was a post from Open Culture, which was on a new university degree that looks at how the doodling and art and drawing more commonly associated with children can support our learning as adults. Another was the text of a commencement speech in 2005 by the late David Foster Wallace. In it, he reminds us of the ease that we can slip into our default setting of experiencing life with us at the centre of it, rather than making a choice to perceive how things may be from another viewpoint.
In our twenties, we seem to experience the trauma of realising that life does not flow as you wish it to. But we also have the joy of working out what it is that we enjoy within this bigger picture, and what it is we can draw from others and give back in return. To emerge from our Jazz Age with what we've learned but without leaving behind who we are.
Has/is your experience of your twenties (been) vastly different? Does this mirror that F. Scott Fitzgerald held up through his novels ring true for you? Are your thirties, forties, fifties, and so on any easier? Or does leaving the Jazz Age inevitably lead to a Great Depression, World War, a brief sexual revolution, and then increasing economic uncertainty...
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