Bright Star, Green Light by Jonathan Bate

Bright Star, Green Light: The Beautiful Works and Damned Lives of John Keats and F. Scott Fitzgerald
By Jonathan Bate
Yale University Press, 2021

There isn’t quite enough about John Keats in great Shakespearean scholar Jonathan Bate’s new book to make a whole John Keats biography, and there isn’t quite enough about F. Scott Fitzgerald to make a whole Fitzgerald biography - hence Bright Star, Green Light: The Beautiful Works and Damned Lives of John Keats and F. Scott Fitzgerald. “Without assuming the reader’s prior knowledge of the work of either author - beyond, perhaps, The Great Gatsby or the odes of Keats,” Bate writes, “the book accordingly seeks to offer lovers of Keats a brief life of F. Scott Fitzgerald, lovers of Fitzgerald a brief life of John Keats, and, at the same time, an account of the two writers’ shared commitment to words that evoke and create beauty.”

A shared commitment to beautiful words is a mighty flimsy ligament to link two such disparate literary figures, and Bate clearly knows it. He hauls on-stage the most hoary of models as a kind of justification: Plutarch’s Lives, in which the great writer gives readers a Greek life and a Roman life and then links the two. But Bate can invoke Plutarch until the cows come home - it won’t make any more parallels between Keats and Fitzgerald than the paltry few that already exist.

They were both handsome. They were both fatally addicted to alcohol and tobacco. They were both more meticulously anxious about their tawdry financial success than either they or their posthumous fans were comfortable admitting. They both dealt with more than their fair share of homoerotic impulses. They both had a tendency to hum to themselves when they were nervous. 

These are trivial resemblences, and Bate knows it. He himself mentions that the literary reputations of both men dipped precipitously after their deaths, and it’s intriguing to think that both Keats and Fitzgerald might have died thinking they were failures. But although Bate can sometimes get oddly evangelical (“Keats’ name was not written on water,” he tells us. “It lives whenever his poems are read”), he is putting most of his emphasis on the ephemeral: that commitment to beautiful words bit. “Why should we continue to read Keats and Fitzgerald now?” he asks, having performed the necessary 21st century scolding of Keats’s sexism and Fitzgerald racism. “Because they lived by language and because they wrote well. Because the leading ‘parallel’ is that they crafted words and impressions of beauty in a world of mortality.” 

Some of this is fairly fluffy, of course - what sets beauty and mortality in implied opposition, for instance? Has there ever been anything beautiful that wasn’t also mortal? But the key to a book like Bright Star, Green Light is ultimately far simpler even than two young men loving beautiful words: it’s that Jonathan Bate is eminently worth reading no matter what organizational gimmick crosses his mind. There isn’t much to be gleaned from comparing John Keats and F. Scott Fitzgerald. But reading a book of Jonathan Bate musing on both of them? Rich pickings there.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The American Conservative. He writes regularly for The National, The Vineyard Gazette, and The Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.