Happy Saturday!
I write to you from Appleton, Wis., where I’m recovering energy and sanity after a few days crisscrossing the eastern part of the state for election coverage. The day is dark, and the garden gnomes have their umbrellas up. Let us talk literature, you and me.
F. Scott Fitzgerald occasionally receives unwarranted criticism, perhaps because we were all forced to read The Great Gatsby in high school. But even if you begrudge him his unwitting part in an unpleasant ninth-grade experience, I think he remains worth a look, especially his short story “Winter Dreams,” which toys with many of the themes of Gatsby but puts them to the reader more succinctly. Published in December of 1922, the story has a squelching introduction that so perfectly captures autumn in the northern Midwest, an event I observe here from my study over the slumbering form of feline-in-residence, Minerva.
“Winter Dreams” is a story about women, the (un)makers of men since the Fall. What I most appreciate about “Dreams” is its treatment of women as daughters of Eve, fully flesh with eternal spirits. Instead of being inherently good or evil — the madonna and witch archetypes — Fitzgerald allows for the full spectrum of womanhood’s goodness and evils to be displayed. The modern conversation often treats women as world-beating prop glass — indomitable vessels that must also be tirelessly protected by removing scrutiny and logic (e.g., believe all women) from their actions and words. To pretend this is demeaning to women and incongruous with reality, stultifying exchange and allowing the incorrigible to bully the polite.
Since first grade, I’ve maintained a crush on willful, opinionated women, ultimately marrying one. My standard was one I would only consciously realize many years later. It was a high but simple standard: She had to be more intelligent and quicker-witted than me. If she could make my brain fizzle, I was hers. Thankfully, these girls, when I was a boy, and women, when a man, never took advantage. But there is a darkness in the fairer sex that Fitzgerald knew and agonizingly sculpted for his reader. Additionally, Fitz captures the dunderheadedness of young men around alluring and malicious women in passages as bang-on as any I’ve read.
An early excerpt:
The little girl who had done this was eleven–beautifully ugly as little girls are apt to be who are destined after a few years to be inexpressibly lovely and bring no end of misery to a great number of men. The spark, however, was perceptible. There was a general ungodliness in the way her lips twisted, down at the corners when she smiled, and in the–Heaven help us!–in the almost passionate quality of her eyes. Vitality is born early in such women. It was utterly in evidence now, shining through her thin frame in a sort of glow.
She had come eagerly out on to the course at nine o’clock with a white linen nurse and five small new golf-clubs in a white canvas bag which the nurse was carrying. When Dexter first saw her she was standing by the caddy house, rather ill at ease and trying to conceal the fact by engaging her nurse in an obviously unnatural conversation graced by startling and irrelevant grimaces from herself.
“Well, it’s certainly a nice day, Hilda,” Dexter heard her say. She drew down the corners of her mouth, smiled, and glanced furtively around, her eyes in transit falling for an instant on Dexter.
Then to the nurse: “Well, I guess there aren’t very many people out here this morning, are there?”
The smile again–radiant, blatantly artificial–convincing.
“I don’t know what we’re supposed to do now,” said the nurse, looking nowhere in particular.
“Oh, that’s all right. I’ll fix it up.
Dexter stood perfectly still, his mouth slightly ajar. He knew that if he moved forward a step his stare would be in her line of vision–if he moved backward he would lose his full view of her face. For a moment he had not realized how young she was. Now he remembered having seen her several times the year before in bloomers.
Suddenly, involuntarily, he laughed, a short abrupt laugh– then, startled by himself, he turned and began to walk quickly away.
“Boy!”
Dexter stopped.
You can read the rest here.
The story reminds me of one of the most soulful recordings I’ve ever heard: Charles Bradley bleeding Black Sabbath’s “Changes.”
May yours be a particularly lovely weekend.