Exile and the City F. Scott Fitzgerald's “The Lost Decade”

Abstract

The connections, many of them biographical, between F. Scott Fitzgerald and New York City have become so well established in critical studies of his work in recent decades that they barely require repeating. Whether as the location of his marriage to Zelda Sayre in April 1920; or as the backdrop to many of the intrigues that fill The Great Gatsby; or as the principal city of Fitzgerald's delineations of the Jazz Age; or as “the magnificent façade of the homeland” (217) which greets Dick Diver's return from Europe for his father's funeral in Tender Is the Night, New York recurs as a central and defining coordinate within Fitzgerald's work and his life. Despite this, and the critical focus garnered by some of his other New York short stories such as “May Day” (1920) or “The Rich Boy” (1926), it is intriguing that one of his last fictional engagements with the city remains peculiarly under-considered in discussions of his work. “The Lost Decade,” written in July 1939 and published in Esquire in December of that year, twelve months before Fitzgerald's death from a heart attack in Hollywood, is a brief fictional episode both absorbing and yet unnerving in its portrayals of this most iconic American city. At the heart of its unsettling appeal stands an architect, Louis Trimble, who has returned to New York after an apparent ten-year sojourn away from its precincts. As a tale specifically about New York, it resonates with Fitzgerald's oft-cited “My Lost City” essay from 1932, a double-edged account of the glamour and downfall of New York before and after the Wall Street Crash, which remained unpublished until after Fitzgerald's death (Curnutt 86). While the two pieces share similar attributes, whether in terms of their specific metropolitan setting and subject matter, or the mutual “lost” at the center of their titles, they produce divergent effects in their mapping of New York and in their understanding of the self's relation to the city's modern evolution. Beyond fruitful comparisons with Fitzgerald's other work, re-reading “The Lost Decade” is germane, as this essay will demonstrate, to other New York texts and contexts, from the early nineteenth century to the start of the twenty first.Before examining the story in detail, it is important to note that, across Fitzgerald's work, New York is not represented as a singular entity. Indeed, even within the brief span of “The Lost Decade” Fitzgerald creates alternative New Yorks that differ from each other both temporally and metaphorically: one is the remembered city of the 1920s, another the city as encountered on Trimble's return in the late 1930s, both of which are filtered through Fitzgerald's own oscillating assessments of New York past and New York present shaped in part by his residence in Hollywood in the final period of his career. As an example of New York fiction, “The Lost Decade” unsurprisingly invokes other writing from or about New York, and not just by Fitzgerald. An updated variation on Washington Irving's “Rip Van Winkle” (1819), Fitzgerald's story plots the reappearance of the potentially anachronistic Trimble onto the streets of New York City, specifically the midtown area of Manhattan, in the late 1930s. Yet, despite its echoes of the earlier tale's storyline of absence and return and the pivotal role played by alcohol in the protagonist's disappearance, Trimble's is not actually a return at all: it transpires that he has never been away, physically, from the city. Where Irving's Van Winkle journeys to the Catskills, imbibes a liquor offered to him there by a mysterious stranger, and consequently sleeps for twenty years, Trimble emerges from a decade-long drinking spree that has ensured the New York that he helped design remains unknown to him. Trimble's disconnection due to his drinking is marked by a failed capacity to remember the facts and details of places for which he was, as architect, intimately responsible. For Irving's eponymous character, the disconnect he experiences is explained by his two-decade disappearance in the Catskills, a period encompassing the Revolutionary War and the first years of American independence; he returns to a world in which his wife has died, George III's image outside the village tavern has been replaced by that of another George (Washington), and the former subjects of the British crown are citizens of a newly independent and politicized republic.By invoking Irving's earlier tale, however fleetingly, Fitzgerald once more layers motifs of pre- and post-revolutionary identity into one of his fictions, a theme most explicitly signaled in The Great Gatsby—whether it is “the Marie-Antoinette music-rooms and Restoration salons” (98) of Gatsby's mansion, the “scenes of ladies swinging in the gardens of Versailles” (35) upholstering Myrtle's over-large furniture of her uptown apartment funded by Tom, or the fact that the events of the novel straddle the Fourth of July celebrations, The Great Gatsby is laced with the narrative coordinates of revolution and subversion. Van Winkle's status as a potential subverter of the American revolutionary cause is coded in his obsolete adherence to a previous era's political and social order. As a living anachronism Van Winkle embodies a forgotten, almost mythical, time despite initially appearing to offer a latent anarchic threat to the new American order. Fitzgerald's characterization of Louis Trimble sidesteps any deployment of him as either a marker of temporal difference or as a radical element within society. The revolutions of “The Lost Decade,” if any such upheavals exist within its eleven hundred words, are not based in the marked differences between time periods or generations. They are detailed in the narrative's focused present tense arrangement that simply relates a straightforward walk around the recently completed architecture of a redesigned Fifth Avenue during which the preconceptions of one man, Orrison Brown, are overthrown by the elementary actions of another, Louis Trimble, the cipher of both story and city.What Fitzgerald develops in “The Lost Decade” is a compelling mix of uncertain memory and fiction, fact and history, place and architecture, enclosed within a deceptively unassuming story describing a brief stroll along Fifth Avenue. Indeed, given Trimble's vocation as an architect, it is unsurprising that the buildings of New York, in particular those on or adjoining Fifth Avenue, form at the very least a backdrop to the story's events. Midtown Manhattan is central to the narrative trajectory: Trimble's return to the city fulfills a number of objectives, its pretext his seeing buildings that he has not consciously appreciated before this point in time. In addition to this motive, “The Lost Decade” concentrates on the minute physical textures and interactions of what it means to be alive set against the urban environment of New York's architecture: “He felt suddenly of the texture of his own coat and then he reached out and pressed his thumb against the granite of the building by his side” (Short Stories 750). The story closes with this comparison of, and need for, contact, for feeling real, concrete objects and acknowledging the substance of the things that form the living, public city environment. Coming to terms once again with the real, what it means to be a citizen of this particular city in the wake of personal trauma, is integral to Trimble's quest and to the effect that he has on the story's other character, the journalist Orrison Brown, who is here left silenced and needing to re-establish contact with the materiality of city life on an almost molecular level.Biographical readings that position Trimble as a veiled self-portrait of Fitzgerald possibly offer some useful ways of approaching “The Lost Decade.” Louis Trimble's relocation of himself within New York City after a decade of alcohol misuse can readily be interpreted as an aspect of Fitzgerald's own disappearance from the city that, as he highlighted in “My Lost City,” had previously held “all the iridescence of the beginning of the world” (Wilson 25). Trimble's absence from a New York that, in part, he himself had helped to create mirrors Fitzgerald's own exile from the city which had adopted him “as the arch type of what New York wanted” (Wilson 26). Trimble's lost decade is the direct result of his drinking and being “every-which-way drunk” (Short Stories 749), a theme as well as a lifestyle that Fitzgerald knew only too well himself. Both Trimble and Fitzgerald learn that New York is a place that “had limits” (Wilson 32); for Trimble it is a city that he needs to “see” again (Short Stories 749), though by the time of this story's publication Fitzgerald would have made his last visit to New York. Sight and vision, perception and alternative perspectives are live issues central to “The Lost Decade” just as they are the structuring elements of its predecessor essay “My Lost City.” Trimble's exile in “The Lost Decade” could stand as a commentary on Fitzgerald's own exile in Hollywood at the end of his life, looking back east to a New York City evolving in his absence while simultaneously remembering the city as it was being developed at the close of the 1920s. For today's readers, this issue of vision is doubled on closer examination: Fitzgerald offers both a nostalgic look back at the late 1920s when the architectural projects of the boom period were being conceived while at the same time providing an historical eye on the consequences of that era of excess.Despite its brevity, “The Lost Decade,” which remained uncollected until the 1951 Cowley edition of Fitzgerald's stories, charts a number of interconnected narratives. Trimble's former alcohol dependence, his role in the creation of part of the New York cityscape, and the belief that the decade he has lost (from the Wall Street Crash forward) was a good one to miss, all jostle for attention on a first reading. Further examination reveals the core of the story, Trimble's intimate need to reconnect, not just with the physical spaces, but also with the people of New York. Added to these questions is the revelation of what can be viewed as Fitzgerald's West Coast perspective on his own lost city intercut with the rememberance of his former life there, and the larger question of America before and after the Depression strikes, figured in the citizens of its principal city attempting to recover from their own personal collapses.To characterize Fitzgerald's associations with New York in the last years of his life as those of a man in exile from the city may at first glance appear to be too strong a claim. However, if exile in this case refers to displacement, the phenomenon of being out of place, of being dislocated, then “The Lost Decade” can be understood as a narrative of displacement, created by an author who had by this stage relocated to Hollywood. Such equivalence is further supported by the readymade fact that Fitzgerald and his character share biographical similarities (connected through alcohol misuse), but to understand “The Lost Decade” primarily via this issue would do the story an injustice and is, in any case, something of a red herring. Unlike his seventeen Pat Hobby stories (1940–41) or “Babylon Revisited” (1931), another before-and-after-alcohol narrative that seeks some form of recovery and reconnection, drinking is not the central concern of “The Lost Decade.” In these other possible companion tales Fitzgerald concentrates on the effects of alcohol, whether comic or deleterious, on the lives of Pat Hobby and Charlie Wales, respectively. While appearing of initial significance, these alcohol stories become as irrelevant to an understanding—contextual, comparative, or otherwise—of “The Lost Decade” as alcohol is to the brief episode that the story narrates. It is not the issue of drinking or repentance for past abuses that occupies either Trimble's or Fitzgerald's time or their attentions in “The Lost Decade”; rather it is New York itself and the attempt to grasp once more the fundamental concepts that constitute its enigmatic status that dominates this narrative. For this reason, “My Lost City” offers a more immediate and ultimately more relevant comparison to “The Lost Decade” as Fitzgerald returns in both to consider the pull that New York had exercised on both his life and his work.While “The Lost Decade” omits Trimble's former drinking exploits—“there was nothing about him that suggested or ever had suggested drink” (Short Stories 750)—it concentrates its attentions elsewhere to register an alternative New York to the one presented in “My Lost City.” No longer the fallen edifice of former glories, New York is mapped as a tangible city that can be relied upon to bolster Trimble's reorientation of himself within society. Seeing and experiencing the city, understanding how its citizens move individually and collectively within its urban geography, are the catalysts for Trimble's adaptation back into city life. The story's focus falls on the fundamental coordinates of one's being alive within New York: Trimble's departing figure at the story's close reinforces the narrative's acknowledgement of the physical, human geometrics of existence in the urban environment, requiring his interlocutor Orrison Brown to begin again to plot his own physical relationships with the spaces he inhabits. With one eye on Fitzgerald's biography, it must be remembered that, no matter how identified with New York he may have been on account of The Great Gatsby, his other New York fictions, or his synonymity with the Jazz Age, he was always an outsider in this city; as much a midwesterner as Nick Carraway or James Gatz, Fitzgerald's life in New York was one lived in exile from his roots, as would those parts of his life lived in Europe or Montgomery or Baltimore or California.Exile, originating in his being displaced from his own Minnesota background and upbringing, was a permanent state of existence for Fitzgerald and is a strong undercurrent in his writing. Whether in terms of the expatriation of the Divers in Tender Is the Night, all of the westerners who inhabit East Egg and West Egg in the “riotous” (10) summer of 1922 in The Great Gatsby, or here, in “The Lost Decade,” where he provides the issue of exile with an inverse application via a city dweller, indeed a maker of the city, who has been displaced within its physical spaces for more than a decade, the question of exile is an implicit coordinate of his work. Writing back to and about the city that informed so much of his illustrious work from the 1920s, this 1939 fictional encounter with New York revokes Fitzgerald's own by then displaced status as an exile from New York. It creates a reinvention of the city that reimagines it building by building and body by body. Trimble's rebirth after his lost decade engenders a reconception of the city that simultaneously defamiliarizes urban life for Orrison Brown, requiring him to see and touch the buildings beside him, to feel the texture of his own clothing, to comprehend—as he had never done so before—the basic components of contemporary city life. Trimble's apparent seeing of New York and New Yorkers for the first time similarly renders the city and its citizens anew for Brown, requiring that he too return to first principles and establish once again first contact with the homeland.Brown's primary role as guide to the returning Trimble is overthrown by the latter's wholly disarming behavior. Mistakenly, Brown ponders whether his companion “could have possibly spent the thirties in a prison or an insane asylum” as he tries to answer his own question to Trimble: “You've been out of civilization?” (Short Stories 748). The conundrum Trimble represents to Brown is complicated further by how the architect moves within the city and what he lists as the things that he wishes to see and do. Whereas Brown had assumed that his role for the afternoon was as a temporary tour guide around parts of Manhattan to someone reacquainting themselves with the city after a possible period of incarceration, what transpires in the story dismisses any such notions. Trimble returns to see the realized city having known only the original blueprint impressions of its buildings on paper. Neither criminal nor mentally unsound, he is part-author of the city that Brown claims to know but only dubiously understands. Unlike Brown's occupational familiarity with New York, Trimble's reengagement with his city exhibits central aspects of the flâneur's relation with modern urban space: he is a man of the city who also can stand apart from it as an urban spectator.That said, Trimble's concern with the city does not emanate from a position of knowledge, as detailed by Walter Benjamin's conceptualization of the flâneur, but from the motivation to discover anew facts about the city of which he was unaware although for which he was, as architect of some of the city's new buildings, partially responsible. Benjamin's theory of the flâneur, developed between 1927 and 1940 (the year of his death, three months before Fitzgerald's) in his unfinished Passagenwerk (Arcades Project), corresponds at points with Trimble's characterization: “To the flâneur, his city is—even if, like Baudelaire, he happened to be born there—no longer native ground. It represents for him a theatrical display, an arena” (Benjamin 347). Yet, unlike Benjamin's walker of the city streets, Trimble is not interested in the commodified urban experience, nor does he seek to disappear or become lost in the city. Indeed, it is a counter impulse that drives him: to locate himself in the city of which he currently has no knowledge and acquaint himself with the lives of its citizens. Moreover, it is the material mechanics of the city and not its materialist economics that intrigue him. Among the few observations that Brown is able to make about Trimble “was his countryman's obedience to the traffic lights” and that “ Trimble's face tightened at the roar of traffic” (Short Stories 748): Trimble, more sabotaged by traffic than its saboteur (Benjamin 42), does not register New York in terms of either its commercial or commuter potential. His “ predilection for walking on the side next to the shops and not the street” (Short Stories 748) reveals an instinct for self-preservation; it also aligns his character with what is substantial and permanent in the cityscape, rather than with what is transient, the latter an aspect of New York more familiar to Brown as a journalist. Trimble's bearing in the story moves the focus elsewhere: breaking down the complexities of the city; understanding something as simple as which building stands beside which other one; questioning how communities are formed; or how individual humans function in routine, everyday, urban circumstances. These are the component parts of Trimble's quest—not trade and not traffic, neither consumer nor commuter, but as spectator and interpreter of the basic facts of city life.Revealing that Trimble has not been wholly absent from New York over the course of this lost decade is significant: he admits that he has been around but that he has absolutely no recall of the ten-year intervening period. To redress this issue, he walks Manhattan's streets, as if for the first time, to see and experience its buildings and people, and to familiarize himself with the elementary mechanics of motion within the geometrics of place. His exile has been more metaphysical than physical, a metaphorical exile rather than an actual one. It has rendered the city and its citizens as unknown to him instead of rendering Trimble as unknown to them: “as they left the restaurant the same waiter looked at Trimble rather puzzled as if he almost knew him” (Short Stories 749). Knowledge and identity are uncertain things; this becomes the object of Trimble's expedition in the story, to make sense once again of the urban world around him. This accords with a dominant strain within Fitzgerald's writing after the hedonistic glories of the Jazz Age had dissolved into trace memories, plotted most clearly in “The Crack-Up” essays published in Esquire in 1936. The 1930s was a period during which Fitzgerald used his writing to reflect upon the excesses of the previous decade; significant portions of his fiction, as well as the essays he produced in the ten years before his death, identify the dark side of the boom era while simultaneously registering the consequences of either personal or social dissipation. The symbiosis between personal and national depression was manifested in Fitzgerald's writing just as it had charted his own successes during the 1920s; as Bruccoli notes, “he seemed to personify both the excesses of the Boom and the anguish of the Depression” (477). Whether in “My Lost City” in particular or essays such as “Echoes of the Jazz Age” (1931) or “Early Success” (1937) more generally, or “Babylon Revisited” or Tender Is the Night, or the Pat Hobby stories, or even the unfinished novel The Last Tycoon, Fitzgerald was producing alternative commentaries on the 1920s narratives of American success with which he had been singularly identified.Concurrent with his writing of “The Lost Decade,” The Last Tycoon was the main fictional project that Fitzgerald had set himself to complete while he was in Hollywood. That novel's descriptions of Wylie White's drinking parallel the alcohol dependent flipside of Louis Trimble's character, the side that “The Lost Decade” insistently withholds from view. Echoes of Trimble's loss of, or exile from, identity are evident in Wylie's awareness of his own predicament: “I spoke to half a dozen people but they didn't answer. That continued for an hour, two hours—then I got up from where I was sitting and ran out at a dog trot like a crazy man. I didn't feel I had any rightful identity until I got back to the hotel and the clerk handed me a letter addressed to me in my name” (15). However, where “The Lost Decade” differs is that, instead of dwelling on themes such as alcohol dependence, exile, and loss and maximizing their negative potential, it repositions them within an alternate, and ultimately optimistic, worldview.It bears within its narrative trajectory some of the inflections of Tender Is the Night, though not in terms of the twinned biographies of Diver and Trimble that, as with Wylie's, are riven by alcohol misuse. That said, with Diver's disappearance into the smalltown geography of upstate New York, Tender closes where arguably “The Lost Decade” opens five years later: where one Fitzgerald character dissolves into the undifferentiated upstate landscapes north of the metropolis, a second emerges onto the specified streets of Manhattan's midtown to relocate himself as a solid citizen in a contemporary urban world. In this regard “The Lost Decade” can be placed alongside Tender as another instance of Fitzgerald's theoretically based fiction, acknowledged in a letter to John Peale Bishop, dated 7 April 1934, in which Fitzgerald refers to Tender as a “philosophical, now called psychological” novel (Letters 383). “The Lost Decade” is a philosophical rather than a romantic or dramatic tale. Where Tender develops an interest in psychoanalysis and, in part, registers the impact World War I had on its generation, this late story produces an algorithmical reconception of the city by one of its architects that matches Dick Diver's “hovering between the centripetal and centrifugal” forces that gather at the outset of his relationship with Nicole Warren (156). In Tender, the complex impulses and drives of the human mind that shade the non-chronological arrangement of episodes dealing with infidelity, incest, the Great War, and expatriation in Europe and that pivot in the destructive relationships of the Divers provided Fitzgerald with one method of constructing fiction in the aftermath of breakdown, but this was not his only mode of response in the 1930s. As “The Lost Decade” makes clear, positive reconceptions of the self within the modern world are also made available to offset the darker fictional and autobiographical expressions of Fitzgerald's world during this decade.While multiple ways of reading “The Lost Decade” are clearly possible, what is certain is a central ineffability; it is a quite odd, and ultimately haunting, story. Its title intimates temporal loss indicating that the narrative which follows will be centered in lost time or will be a discussion in part of the decade that has been lost. Yet, within its short span, lost time is something that is recorded only briefly in passing, and then as a beneficial thing: “Some people would consider themselves lucky to've missed the last decade” (Short Stories 747). Unlike Irving's Van Winkle, Louis Trimble is not an anachronistic emblem of a different era. The story appears, in one reading, to grant the architect Louis Trimble a level of foresight for having exiled himself from society for “almost twelve years” through his drinking (747). Described by Bruccoli, in his head note to the story, as the “most remarkable of Fitzgerald's late elliptical sketches” (Short Stories 747), as it unfolds it becomes clear that temporal loss is a secondary issue when compared to spatial loss, to dislocation, to a severing of contact with place, with specific locations that themselves are specific to New York City. Time and its attendant changes during the decade that has been lost are absent features of the narrative. Furthermore, “The Lost Decade” moves to offer a counter-narrative, one dedicated to the slow retrieval of contact with the people and the places of the present, not of the past. It could be argued that “The Lost Decade” is a take on the recovery narrative, though not primarily in terms of addiction and alcohol dependence; the recovery undertaken occurs at a much more baseline level as Trimble seeks to fit together again the physical world of New York with the biological architecture of its peoples' lives.With its emphasis on place and on the textures of material things in the city, it becomes clear why Fitzgerald chose an architect to be the central figure in the story. Placing Trimble in the guise of a writer would have been too close, obviously, to Fitzgerald for anything other than biographical readings to dominate analyses of it. Moreover, presenting Trimble as an author would have provided too easy an opposition to Orrison as a hack journalist to the possible detriment of the story, obscuring its structural interest in the real world and in how the calculus of identity is calibrated by the places in which people live and move. Indeed, it is the writer Orrison who is forced to reconsider his relation to the city at the story's close. Trimble, unlike Van Winkle in Irving's tale of returned exile, is no storyteller of former times: he recounts nothing of his previous decade because he has no recall of that period, nor does he have any reason to do so; similarly, he does not impart any information about life before his lost decade. Yet, the effect that he has on Orrison Brown is life changing, producing a shift in his understanding of the city, and decisively impacting how he now relates to his contemporary world, whether as a journalist or as an individual human being.In terms of the particular city in question, alongside its symbolic status within the global psyche, New York has long been home to multiple races, creeds, and nationalities, “a permanent exhibit of the phenomenon of one world” (White 47). As noted earlier, reflecting back on the city after World War I, Fitzgerald recalled how “New York had all the iridescence of the beginning of the world” (Wilson 25). For the generation emerging out of the Great War, New York represented a new genesis and the architectural redesign of Manhattan, “ compelled to expand skyward,” the epitome of modern possibilities (White 30). The festival of celebration that greeted the troops showed that America was “the greatest nation” and New York the nation's greatest city (Wilson 25). Across his work, New York for Fitzgerald is a space of possibility, of romance, of intrigue; a place where, crossing the Queensboro Bridge, “[a]nything can happen,” “[e]ven Gatsby … without any particular wonder” (75). The boom of the 1920s multiplied the city's pluralities and potentialities; an “[i]ncalculable city” (Wilson 26) Fitzgerald recalls elsewhere in “My Lost City,” a city offering singularly personal peaks and troughs, glittering successes and devastating depressions. For Fitzgerald, it is the barometer both of the nation's escapades during the Jazz Age and its collapse after the Wall Street Crash.The affinity between New York's biography as viewed by Fitzgerald and his own is unmistakeable, a paired and analogous interplay with relevance to “The Lost Decade.” Trimble is the man identified with New York City, Orrison Brown having been introduced in the story's opening paragraph as coming to the city from a previous position as the editor of “the Dartmouth Jack-O- Lantern” (Short Stories 747), the student newspaper of the Jack-O-Lantern Humor Society of Dartmouth College in New Hampshire.1 Brown's callowness is arguably his main feature, an individual who lives in New York but has no real knowledge of it, whereas Trimble represents a particular and first hand relation with an urban environment that he helped conceive. Where Brown begins their sightseeing mission hypothetically as the guide, this role quickly transfers to Trimble, architect and cipher of the city's meaning, Fitzgerald's surrogate self taking in one last New York adventure.Fitzgerald's lost New York in “My Lost City” remains for him a conflicted place that is recalled with a mixture of disappointment and disillusion. Reflecting on how he was inevitably caught up in the city's own “ Bacchic diversions” (Wilson 29), his regret is mostly pointed in