As Jonathan Bate observes, the American critic Edmund Wilson “never allowed his friendship to dull his critical intelligence”. He had been close to F Scott Fitzgerald as a student, but, writing in 1924 about Fitzgerald’s first novel, This Side of Paradise, he was unforgiving towards what he saw as its central weaknesses – a lack of energy and coherence, which he attributed to the intertwining malign influences of Compton Mackenzie and John Keats. Mackenzie, whose stock as a novelist was still high in the 1920s, had himself attributed features of his florid literary style to Keats’s example; but Fitzgerald had certainly gone direct to the source as well.
Bate chronicles with admirable thoroughness the consistent enthusiasm for Keats that appears not only in Fitzgerald’s correspondence (and in the literary reading list that he drew up for his lover Sheilah Graham in 1939) but, most famously, in the title of his second most celebrated novel, Tender is the Night (1934), which is taken from “Ode to a Nightingale”. Keats’s sonnet “Bright Star!” furnished a kind of subtext for more than one of Fitzgerald’s fictions, and Bate’s title neatly associates it with the “green light” on the headland in The Great Gatsby (1925), which signifies to Jay Gatsby both the nearness and the distance of his beloved Daisy.
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