Living Well is the Best Revenge

For the first time all semester we have read a text that approaches individuals with a feeling of sincerity and honesty. Tompkins engaging prose allowed me to see and feel the Murphy’s. As a Cole Porter fan, I knew a little bit about their lives. And I knew from reading the introduction to Tender is the Night that they were the models for the Divers. In contrast to the other memoir/biography texts we have read this felt real—there were real people with real issues doing real, albeit somewhat insane, things. The voices were authentic rather than persona.

Even in these short excerpts one gets a feel for who Ernest Hemingway was, and what ate at Scott Fitzgerald. For the first time I got a picture of what life was like in France in the twenties. I got a feel for the passions of the individuals—how life really was in France—without the complication of ego. While The Sun Also Rises is filled with shallow empty characters and Tender is the Night seems to be taking that tack (I have only read the first hundred pages or so), this text explores real people, with real emotions and issues; people about whom one wants to care. They drink, they party, some are profoundly irresponsible, but they also feel—this is a quality that has been lacking in all that we have read.

Each text has been from the outside looking in, they have bordered, at least for me, on voyeurism. Although there are moments in The Sun Also Rises where one catches glimpses of how Jake feels (and one could certainly expand that to how Hemingway felt) there isn’t enough to build on and make him a solid individual. Here, Fitzgerald is seen clearly through Tompkins lens and although he is obnoxious, one sees another side of him; a frightened insecure side. For me, seeing that others saw, felt, and perceived these writers (Hemingway and Fitzgerald) as sensitive, personable individuals adds depth to the shallowness I have always read into their texts. This will allow me to approach texts by these authors with a greater understanding of who they were, and what they were trying to say. It seems a pity that we are only reading excepts as I feel it has been the most enlightening about Americans in Paris in the 1920s.