PUBLIC APOLOGY: I am sorry I forced you to look at Quasimodo constantly for the last week and a half.
My eye is better (my cough is not). I turned in my final thesis on Tuesday, so you can only imagine the kind of things I’ve been doing for the past thirteen days. It’s not the past days I’m concerned about so much as those to come. I don’t even know what to do with three free hours right now, let alone the rest of my life.
In order to fill up some of those new hours, I picked up a book at the library yesterday. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night. I picked it up because of the following quotation from an essay by David Hare “…on factual theatre.”
In a famous letter to the novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway expressed reservations about his friend’s great masterpiece Tender is the Night. Scott, Hemingway said, had taken elements of his own relationship with his wife Zelda, he had added in events which had befallen their mutual friends, Gerald and Sara Murphy, and then he had laid on top of this factual mélange a third layer, this time of pure invention. This was, Hemingway said, no way to write, because the reader was distracted by the question of what was real and what was not. In his reply, Fitzgerald pointed out that this was, actually, one of the means by which writers of fiction had always operated. Elizabethan dramatists, including Shakespeare, had regarded it as normal artfully to mix facts about people who had really existed with what these same people inspired in the author’s imagination. Hemingway had the perfect right to doubt Scott’s success with what he called ‘composite characters.’ What he had no right to do was question the method itself.
Hare goes on to discuss documentary theatre as a form, based on his own experiences:
Never for a moment has it occurred to me that such works, using verbatim dialogue, organized, arranged and orchestrated with proper thematic care should involve less labour, skill, or creative imagination than those dreamt up in the privacy of a study.
I bet you assumed I only thought about chicken wings, ice cream, and arts and crafts! Au contraire, mon frère! I wrote that whole damn thesis about documentary theatre, and although I have never wanted to think less about it, I am choosing to read Tender is the Night because of it. I didn’t actually include any part of David Hare’s essay in my thesis, but I found it fascinating. Even in my post-thesis mayhem, I am extending my study. CREEPY, right? Definitely didn’t think I’d be into that, but then I think about how much I like to think and learn, so why should I stop?
As I dive into this book (slowly… I dozed off after 5 pages yesterday), I look forward to being transported into another world. I look forward to immersing myself in that world and swimming around in it, but then getting out of it and thinking about the structure Fitzgerald created, and the amount to which it bothers or intrigues me that the characters are composites or the events are dreamed up. In short, I’m reading for the excitement of reading, but I’m also going to have a little book club with myself about my reading.
Maybe that’s just a way to fill up the time, but I feel pretty good about it.
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Work Cited:
Hare, David. “…on factual theatre,” Resource Material. Talking to Terrorists.
By Robin Soans. London: Oberon Books Ltd., 2005. 111-113.
Hemingway’s strike at Fitzgerald had little to do with Fitz’s writing. The two started as friends–and Fitz actually introduced Hemingway to Maxwell Perkins, which got Hemingway published with Scribner’s–but later Hemingway (probably jealous of Fitz’s success) openly made fun of Fitz’s in dozens of interviews and stories, including “The Snows of Kil.” The rift was petty, not a portrayal of either’s writing talent. Also, Fitz ripped off Zelda’s novel _Save Me the Waltz_(1932) for _Tender is the Night_(1934). More pettiness, but this time in a marriage.