Nostalgia, Paternity and Honor in Fitzgerald's Babylon Revisited

In his article "Fitzgerald's 'Babylon Revisited,' Cecil Eby rightly points out the story's use of double entendre during Charlie's conversation with Paul. Paul assumes that Charlie's loss during the last few years was only monetary because he does not know of Charlie's personal misfortunes. Eby writes, "Although he now has a good job in Prague and his material well-being has returned, [Charlie] is unable to recover what he had once lost" (Eby 177). What Eby fails to mention, however, is what Charlie has truly lost. His wife and daughter no longer exist in his life thanks to his drunken ways, but it is not them, the human beings, he misses. He misses what they represent: an era where he reveled in wealth, power, and honor. The protagonist therefore chooses to reclaim his daughter from his sister-in-law, Marion, not because he loves and misses her but because society and nostalgia demand it. Charlie mistakenly believes that by regaining daughter, he can capture and preserve a relic of a past he currently only possesses drunken memories.

During his conversation with Paul, the manager of the Ritz Hotel bar, Charlie alludes to losing more than money by stating his real defeat occurred during the boom years, not the 1929 stock market crash. The following conversation takes place between Charlie and Paul:

"I heard that you lost a lot in the crash." [Paul]

"I did," and he [Charles] added grimly, "but I lost everything I wanted in the boom."

"Selling short."

"Something like that." (Fitzgerald 426)

Eby writes that Charlie agrees he lost a lot of money in the crash, but "thinking of his spiritual deterioration during the flush years before the economic debacle, he adds that his losses were greater in the boom years" (Eby 176). Charlie spent the boom years drinking, partying, and living a high life beyond the imagination of his frugal, bourgeois sister-in-law and family. Charlie realizes that he lost his wife and child as a result of his drinking, but more so rationally than emotionally. The true emotional tie remains with the loss of free-spirited days, where he "stole the butcher's tricycle," "tried to call on the president [while wearing] the old derby rim and wire cane," back when Lorraine, his mistress, still struck him as "very attractive" (Fitzgerald 423.)

During that carefree, decadent period, Honoria still lived with him but he was often so drunk that it is doubtful he spent much quality father-daughter time with her, let alone remembered it, fondly or otherwise. The point is that Honoria symbolizes a happy time for Charlie. Her symbolism of the past is precisely the reason why Charlie feels so anxious about Honoria growing up ("But if we wait much longer I'll lose Honoria's childhood" (Fitzgerald 420)). Honoria is not, after all, a stationary artifact. She is a breathing, growing little girl. Even at the tender age of nine, she is no longer the same girl as she was at age six when she first parted from Charlie. As she grows up, Honoria will remind Charlie less of the past, thereby distancing him more from his beloved boom days.

Honoria also appears to represent Charlie's 'honor,' or dignity personified-something that plummeted with the stock market. The narrator says, for instance, that there was a time when Charlie felt that he "owned" (Fitzgerald 412) the Ritz Hotel bar, connoting a sense of power and personal prestige. Now, though, "...the stillness in the Ritz bar was strange and portentous. It was not an American bar any more-he felt polite in it" (Fitzgerald 412). In an additional tribute to bygone days, Charlie tells Marion, "'We were a sort of royalty [then], almost infallible, with a sort of magic around us'" (Fitzgerald 414). After 1929, of course, his glory has subsided.

Charlie recognizes that he can regain some of that glory and respect, particularly from his wife's family, if he succeeds in taking Honoria back and taking proper care of her. In his book Fool for Love: F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Donaldson writes:

"...[liquor-induced] amnesia does not last. No matter how he squandered time and money in order not to remember, Charlie Wales cannot forget what his drinking has caused: 'his child taken from his control, his wife escaped to a grave in Vermont.' He has apparently solved his drinking problem, but Wales is not permitted to recover his daughter Honoria-not until he has paid a still longer and more bitter penance for the wild days and nights of the boom in Paris" (Donaldson 174).

Yet Charlie does not appear fully penitent and therefore fully invested in reclaiming his daughter. The man makes a hotel bar his first stop in Paris, when he knows that his sister-in-law will refuse him his daughter until he commits to sobriety. Marion even says, "'I should think you'd have enough of bars,'" (Fitzgerald 414) after Charlie accidentally blurts out that he had visited the bar before coming to his in-law's home. Again, he seems more so attached to the idea of taking her back as a souvenir of the boom while masking it as a sincere, paternal act. The societal expectation is that a parent should provide for his daughter, not just in terms of food and shelter but also emotional presence.

Instead of heading directly to the bar, an eager father might have gone to a book or toy store first to buy a small gift for his daughter. Presenting his daughter with a gift would have expressed his affection for her. Perhaps he would have gone to the governess agency first to hire someone to look after Honoraria once he reclaimed her. Such an act would have proven to his sister-in-law that he was mature and responsible enough to plan for a future with his daughter. Either one of these moves likely would have impressed his sister-in-law to some extent. The fact that he has not seen the girl for ten whole months (Fitzgerald 412) also indicates that he is not entirely serious about being a father to her. A distance of 640 miles should be nothing to a rich, earnest father if it means seeing his darling daughter again. But because Charlie does not take a more serious approach reinforces the fact that Charlie believes he can salvage that past glory, not necessarily because he misses having the young human being herself.

Charlie recognizes his mistakes in hindsight, now that his excitement and wealth have dried-during the boom years, he was too concerned with fun to consider the repercussions of his "all play" lifestyle-but he does not make significant steps toward his goal of becoming sober and getting his daughter back. Years later, he is still grieving. In John Schiff book Ashes to Ashes: Morning and Social Difference in F. Scott Fitzgerald's Fiction, he writes the following:

"... Charlie's attitude toward his daughter reveals his wish, fueled by both guilt and nostalgia, to deny his wife's absence in envisioning Honoria as his dead wife-one of many signs in the story indicative of the pastness of the present, the difficulty of working through the process of mourning" (Schiff 52).

In denying his wife's absence, Charlie denies that an era he loves has ended; such denial also prevents him from fully accepting the problems his alcoholism caused. Ultimately, his grief is hindering him. In order to be happy, Charlie must recognize that the past is unobtainable and all that remains for him is the present and the future. What Charlie does not seem to realize, however, is that he cannot ever fully return to the past, even if he manages to reclaim his daughter.

Losing money may not concern a successful businessman, but losing the lifestyle it afforded apparently does in Charlie's case. After the death of his wife and loss of his daughter, Charlie may recognize and regret his wrongs, but he has not yet fully repented and learned from his errors. He still fixates upon his past free-spiritedness and hopes that by recovering Honoraria, he can salvage part of his bygone lifestyle. Charlie, therefore, is not fully committed to fatherhood but rather committed to irrational nostalgia and rescuing his honor.

Bibliography

Donaldson, Scott. Fool for Love: F. Scott Fitzgerald. New York: Congdon & Weed, 1983.

Eby, Cecil D. "Fitzgerald's Babylon Revisited." Explicator (Spring '95, Vol. 53, Issue 3.) Washington, D.C.: Heldref Publications, 1995.

Fitzgerald, F. Scott. "Babylon Revisited." Charters, Ann. The Story and Its Writer: An Introduction to Short Fiction. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2007.

Schiff, John. Ashes to Ashes: Morning and Social Difference in F. Scott Fitzgerald's Fiction. Selinsgrove: Susquehanna University Press, 2001.