Jonathan Bate's 'Bright Star, Green Light'

Many English teachers are likely to teach both John Keats and F. Scott Fitzgerald, and so a ‘parallel lives’ biography by one of the most distinguished Shakespearean scholars, Jonathan Bate, is a very attractive prospect. Bright Star, Green Light: the beautiful and damned lives of John Keats and F. Scott Fitzgerald is a skilfully constructed account of the lives and writings of these two men, both of whom died too young. To use Keats’s word from ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, it is a kind of literary ‘brede’, a braid of the two intertwined stories.

As he writes at the start,

I have sought to bring [Keats and Fitzgerald] back to life in the Plutarchan style: in parallel and by means of a highly selective series of anecdotes, moments and scenes that seem to me to come to their essence and to reveal the wellsprings of their art.

He certainly achieves this. For anyone not familiar with the biographies, Bate is an excellent guide through the key events of the lives, and as a literary scholar he demonstrates how their works came to birth out of this stream of living, and especially how Keats influenced Fitzgerald; this was of course not possible the other way around, but the equivalent for the Romantic poet was Shakespeare, and the line between the three is fascinating. 

There are certainly uncanny parallels between the two, summarised on page 3 (the wars just before their establishment as authors, the financial crises later in their lives, their attempts to supplement their work by writing for the stage/screen, their love lives, their tragic early deaths, the way their literary tastes were both borne back ceaselessly into the past), and so

Here is a reading of Keats through the eyes of Fitzgerald and a Keatzian [Fitzgerald’s spelling] reading of Fitzgerald.

There is a lot of material to cover, but Bate does so with a light and nimble touch, moving fluently between the lives and the works of the two men. There was so much drama in both lives: Keats’s loss of his brother Tom, his desperately sad voyage to Rome and death, Fitzgerald’s tragic wife Zelda, his relationship with the extraordinary Sheilah Graham. The incidental detail is terrific: Fitzgerald’s father Edward launched a business called ‘American Rattan & Willow Works’, and we cannot but help think of the famous moment in Chapter 8 of Gatsby when Nick Carraway imagines the beginning of Daisy and Jay’s young relationship (a moment repurposed from his 1922 story ‘Winter Dreams’):

Her porch was bright with the bought luxury of star-shine; the wicker of the settee squeaked fashionably as she turned toward him and he kissed her curious and lovely mouth. She had caught a cold, and it made her voice huskier and more charming than ever, and Gatsby was overwhelmingly aware of the youth and mystery that wealth imprisons and preserves, of the freshness of many clothes, and of Daisy, gleaming like silver, safe and proud above the hot struggles of the poor.

And how about the story of Fitzgerald’s of brief raunchy affair with Rosalinde Fuller:

They met in the Plaza Hotel and almost immediately jumped into a closed hansom cab, which drove them around Central Park as they discovered each other’s bodies, every bit in the manner of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and her lover.’ 79

(The Plaza being the site of the dramatic heat-stunned confrontation between Gatsby and Tom Buchanan).

But best of all for teachers in the book is Bate’s exposition of the writings of both authors, extending beyond Gatsby for Fitzgerald (including Tender is the Night, a title taken from ‘Ode to a Nightingale’), and the major poems of Keats, particularly the Odes, centring on ‘Nightingale’ and ‘Grecian Urn’. On those poems, just to say that the longer I teach Keats the more ‘To Autumn’ seems to me his ultimate achievement, a perfectly-poised masterpiece.

Jonathan Bate ends with the words below, so I will too. And then, after that, listen to the recording of Fitzgerald reciting ‘Nightingale’ on visit to a store on Hollywood Boulevard with Sheilah Graham (there are omissions, and trivial errors): two voices we continue to ‘hear this passing night’.

Two hundred years after Joseph Severn witnessed his friend’s death in the room beside the Spanish Steps, old comforts about health – personal in the wake of pandemic, social in an age of inequality, and that of the natural world in an era of unprecedented ecological change – are threatening to ‘pass into nothingness’. Under the shadow cast by global damnation, the loveliness of Keats’s poems and Fitzgerald’s novels increases. Their beautiful works will not endure for ever, but in dark times they can at least bring moments of joy.