12/28/2023 0 Comments Stella glow chapter 6![]() Rudolph Miller in “Absolution” suffers a “furious” attack of shame when he has no money for the church collection box, since Jeanne Brady, in the pew behind him, might notice. “The theme comes up again and again,” he said, “because I lived it.” He’d grown up “a poor boy in a rich town a poor boy in a rich boy’s school a poor boy in a rich man’s club at Princeton”-above all, a poor boy in love with a rich girl. “We have two or three great and moving experiences in our lives,” he observed, and on the basis of these experiences “we tell our two or three stories-each time in a new disguise-maybe ten times, maybe a hundred, as long as people will listen.” One of thetwo or three stories Fitzgerald told was about the struggle of the poor young man to win the hand of the rich girl. Most authors continually repeat themselves, Fitzgerald knew. “Everything is either love or money, “ Fitzgerald remarked. What else is there to write about?” Austen had observed. In this respect, the three writers shared an unlikely forerunner in Jane Austen. ![]() Both of them, he wrote Van Wyck Brooks in 1925, “have to have love as a main concern since our interest lies outside the economic struggle or the life of violence, as conditioned to some extent by our lives from 16-21.” What he did not add was that James and himself and Dreiser too were all interested in romantic love as it was complicated and compromised by a given social and financial context. Fitzgerald recognized the kinship with James. This was ground that Henry James, master of awareness and nuance, had already staked out. Theodore Dreiser in his stumbling genius had-especially in An American Tragedy-ventured onto the ground Fitzgerald was to explore more thoroughly. Among his rare antecedents, two very different writers stand out. It was not a subject close to the mainstream of American literature. ![]() Love providedFitzgerald with the emotional crises of his life and the raw material of his fiction.
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