Bright Star, Green Light: The Beautiful Works and Damned Lives of John Keats and F. Scott Fitzgerald
JONATHAN BATE
(WILLIAM COLLINS, 416 PP, £25)
Tablet bookshop price £22.50 • tel 020 7799 4064

On the face of it, the lives of Keats and Scott Fitzgerald could hardly have been more different. Fitzgerald enjoyed early success, became the toast of American high society, embarked on a glamorous but disastrous marriage, and died – almost burnt out and all but forgotten – in middle age. Keats was derided for his humble origins by Britain’s literary establishment, was frustrated in his one great love affair, and was only properly recognised after his early death at 25.
But Fitzgerald made his reverence for the poet clear when he borrowed the title of his most substantial novel, Tender Is the Night, from Ode to a Nightingale. And in this book marking the bicentenary of Keats’ death, Jonathan Bate sets out to show not only that Fitzgerald owed Keats a deep artistic debt, but that their lives contained “uncanny” similarities.

His chosen approach, he tells us, is Plutarchian – focusing on key moments rather than offering a cradle-to-grave narrative. In this he undersells himself, because what he actually gives us is a pair of splendidly vivid portraits with as much detail as anyone could reasonably ask for. He explains, for example, how Catholicism gave Fitzgerald social respectability in his native Minnesota, but meant that he never truly belonged in the Wasp circles he frequented on the East Coast. Intriguingly, the seeds of Jay Gatsby’s character can be found in Absolution, a short story about a boy going to confession; as for Gatsby’s great love, Daisy Buchanan, Bate identifies her convincingly with Fitzgerald’s teenage sweetheart Ginevra King, who came from a rich family and married into a richer one.