Babylon Revisited And Other Stories (1996) - Plot & Excerpts
“Babylon Revisited”: A Portrait of the Vulnerable ManF. Scott Fitzgerald has a great talent to portray the inner world of human beings. He explores the subconscious elements of the human mind in his story, and the reader can contemplate how one can be strong and vulnerable at the same time. In “Babylon Revisited,” Fitzgerald creates a tragic character, Charlie Wales, who wrestles with his subconscious weakness albeit having fortitude and diligence. The reader’s impression of Charlie as an accountable man diminishes soon after he faces his contradictions; Charlie’s ambivalent behaviors reveal his vulnerability, and the maturity he pursues remains incomplete.In “Babylon Revisited,” Charlie Wales returns to Paris from Prague, where he is once again financially successful after an economic crisis with the hope of regaining his child, Honoria. Honoria is being cared for by Marion and Lincoln Peters, who are the sister and brother-in-law of Charlie’s wife, Helen. Marion does not trust Charlie because of his dissipated past and believes he is responsible to her sister’s death. However, she gradually changes her mind due to Charlie’s modesty and sincere attitude. Nevertheless, Charlie accidentally becomes involved with some of his old friends, and despite his accountable manner, Marion again doubts Charlie’s transformation. This incident destroys his opportunity to reclaim his daughter, and he leaves without what he wants, promising himself better days to come. The general interpretation of this story can be summarized by Ray B. West, that Charlie is “doomed because he still carries the burden of his early irresponsibility, even in the years of maturity and knowledge” (qtd. in Harrison). However, the reader confronts the fact that there are too many contradictions in Charlie’s comportments and becomes skeptical whether he is really reformed.Fitzgerald devotes a good deal of space to describe Charlie’s mind in-depth. Charlie “was not really disappointed to find Paris was so empty,” (Fitzgerald 44) and he proudly turns down the offer of another glass of alcohol and flaunts his moderate drinking to the bartender: “‘No, no more,’ Charlie said, ‘I’m going slow these days.’ ... ‘I’ll stick to it all right,’ Charlie assured him. ‘I’ve stuck to it for over a year and a half now’” (Fitzgerald 44). Even after Charlie is frustrated because Marion postpones her decision to surrender custody of his daughter, Honoria, Charlie knows “if ever there was an appropriate time to go on a bender, it is now” (Twitchell). This is the time he is able to blame the despair he feels due to the failure of getting back his daughter, but Charlie decides to stop drinking. He seems satisfied with his soberness and proves his capability to resist temptation. Charlie keeps attempting to corroborate how he has been transformed and to show his dislike of the old life: “It would be silly for me to deny that about three years ago I was acting badly — but all that’s over. As I told you, I haven’t had more than a drink a day for over a year, and I take that drink deliberately, so that the idea of alcohol won’t get too big in my imagination. You see the idea?” (Fitzgerald 54). Seymour L. Gross points out “throughout the story [Fitzgerald] ironically stresses the splendid achievement of Charlie’s reform. His sensitivity, poised intelligence, and quiet power over himself should be enough to get his daughter back,” and contends that Charlie indeed reforms from the past. But how can Twitchell and Gross be so sure that Charlie fully transforms to a new man if Charlie shows contradictions in his behaviors at the same time he conveys sincere attitudes? The contradiction can be found from the beginning: “Two familiar names from the long list of a year and a half ago. Charlie scribbled an address in his notebook and tore out the page. ‘If you see Mr. Schaeffer, give him this,’ he said. ‘It’s my brother-in-law’s address. I haven’t settled on a hotel yet’” (Fitzgerald 43). In this dialogue, Charlie’s inquiring old friends seem to be motivated by mere nostalgia, not by morbid curiosity for the past. However, when he actually faces his old friends, Duncan Schaeffer and Lorraine Quarrels, he depicts them as “sudden ghosts out of the past” (Fitzgerald 51) and recalls this as “somehow, an unwelcome encounter” (Fitzgerald 52), as if he does not remember his inquiry at the Ritz bar. Later, he protests to Lincoln Peters that he knows nothing about how they could find him out when his old friends abruptly appear in Peters’s apartment with rowdy behavior: “I didn’t tell them to come here. They wormed your name out of somebody” (Fitzgerald 62). However, the readers notice that Charlie is the one who is responsible for leaving his brother-in-law’s address at the Ritz bar, and Duncan Schaeffer and Lorraine Quarrels’ appearance at the Peters’s apartment would never happen without it (Harrison). Charlie’s surprise and outrage toward his old friends seems genuine, but this series of event proves his old, dissipated life somehow still appeals to him unconsciously if he is really unable to recall what he has done. One can find his consciousness declines to pervade into revel of his early years at the scene of encounter with his friend, Duncan: “‘What’s your address?’ said Duncan skeptically. He hesitated, unwilling to give the name of his hotel. ‘I’m not settled yet. I’d better call you. We’re going to see the vaudeville at the Empire’” (Fitzgerald 52). James B. Twitchell asserts that “this refusal is an act of conscious volition,” and he declines the argument that Charlie Wales is still drawn into his formal life. However, Charlie is actually reluctant to cut off the relationship with his old friends. Instead of firmly making it clear to Duncan that he is now a changed man — as he did to the bartender — he merely rejects Duncan’s demand of giving him his address, which is pointless since Duncan finds it out anyway at the Ritz bar and repeats that he will contact him later. Charlie’s conscious volition only vaguely represents his desire to be reformed, but he is unable to confirm that he surely overcomes his past. He is rather strongly affected by his subconsciousness, an attraction towards the past. It causes a distress due to disconformity between his consciousness and subconsciousness.Charlie maintains that he no longer finds his former haunts alluring, but he “bought a strapontin for the Casino and watched Josephine Baker go through her chocolate arabesques” (Fitzgerald 48), and he “stopped with the sense of familiarity; it was Bricktop’s, where he had parted with so many hours and so much money. A few doors farther on he found another ancient rendezvous and incautiously put his head inside” (Fitzgerald 49). He is consciously aware that “[he] lost everything [he] wanted in the boom” (Fitzgerald 63), yet he simultaneously misses the old times: “‘but it was nice while it lasted,’ Charlie said. ‘We were a sort of royalty, almost infallible, with a sort of magic around us’” (Fitzgerald 48). On the surface, Charlie disdains his old, empty life but he actually enjoys it behind the scenes. Readers can clearly see how this incongruity conflicts in his mind, and he gradually becomes no longer reliable. He also “felt Lorraine’s passionate, provocative attraction” (Fitzgerald 51) for a moment he encounters Lorraine, although Charlie soon reminds that Lorraine is lethal as alcohol. Twitchell insists that “Charlie’s reaction is not at all ambivalent” when he encounter Lorraine, however, the readers only can perceive a faint show of resistance from Charlie’s stance: “he emphatically did not want to see her, and he was glad Alix had not given away his hotel address” (Fitzgerald 60). This action discloses us another cognitive dissonance of Charlie. He never gives Alix, the assistant bartender at Ritz bar, his hotel address but the Peters’s and he surprisingly does not remember it. He can simply deduce that Lorraine and Duncan possibly do burst into the Peters’s apartment since he leaves an address for Duncan and Lorraine with Duncan when he first meets her, but Charlie stops thinking and denies his subconsciousness with sugarcoating of oblivion. No matter how many times Charlie strives to settle himself, he reels at the debauched past and reflects the old times of wine and roses without realizing it.Readers can observe another contradiction of Charlie as being a father. Charlie tries his best to keep his composure and thoroughly choose his words to the Peters in order to get a custody of Honoria. Moreover, as other devoted fathers do, “Charlie was more and more absorbed by the desire of putting a little of himself into her before she crystallized utterly” (Fitzgerald 52). Now he gives the impression of being a patient, tolerant, and kind father to the readers. However, the reader would wonder how long has Charlie really been a good father? While he persuades Marion to surrender custody of Honoria for him, Charlie excuses himself: “when I consented to the guardianship, I was flat on my back in a sanitarium and the market had cleaned me out. I knew I’d acted badly, and I thought if it would bring any peace to Helen, I’d agree to anything.” The readers are cognizant of Charlie’s self-justification in this part. It already has been a year and a half since he left Paris after his wife’s death, and he leaves his daughter alone in Paris all these times. Instead of taking care of his daughter, Charlie “exiles himself to a dream world free of past responsibilities — Prague — where he creates the fresh image of himself as a successful businessman” (Toor). Charlie relives that “they don’t know about [him] down there” (Fitzgerald 44), and he is pleased he can wear a mask of different identity. But of course, he is unable to hold the image forever as long as he wants his daughter back. When Honoria asks him if they can live together, “his heart leaped” (Fitzgerald 53). From his deep heart, Charlie feels he does not deserve to take his daughter.Aside from being a good father, Charlie has other problems as well. “His distorted view of the real world leads him into delusion and jealousy” (Toor). When Charlie considers what he can do after taking Honoria from Peters, he “wondered if he couldn’t do something to get Lincoln out of his rut at the bank” (Fitzgerald 60). Charlie obviously denigrates the financial status of his brother-in-law, as he calls it a “rut,” and the Peters also know that there is a huge economic gap between Charlie and themselves. In despite of the Peters’s envy towards Charlie’s wealth, Lincoln’s “rut” actually indicates a warm and comfortable American homelife that Charlie desperately wants, where “the children felt very safe and important; the mother and father were serious, watchful” (Fitzgerald 60). Charlie thinks he can help the Peters in charity, but in point of fact, Charlie envies the Peters’s peaceful home life, which he almost grasped once. Charlie’s longing for hearth and home is expressed as his dream of Helen: “Going over it again brought Helen nearer, and in the white, soft light that steals upon half sleep near morning he found himself talking to her again. She said that he was perfectly right about Honoria and that she wanted Honoria to be with him. She said she was glad he was being good and doing better. ... But she was in a swing in a white dress, and swinging faster and faster all the time, so that at the end he could not hear clearly all that she said” (Fitzgerald 58). Charlie knows his wife was unhappy about many things when she was still alive, but he refuses to face up to the reality and builds up his ideal home in his mere dream where his wife fully supports him.The tragedy Charlie confronts stems from his ambivalence. The more Fitzgerald emphasize Charlie’s sincerity, the more suspicions arouses to its integrity. Although his ambivalence evokes sympathy to readers, Charlie is responsible to both his burden of his formal dissipated life and his current weakness which he does not aware of himself. Charlie “wants only the honorable part of the past, that he would like to disengage himself from the rest of it, that, as he tells Marion, he has radically changed ... [He] still wants both worlds” (Male). The life Charlie wants for him and Honoria will never come until he banishes the lingering affection for the old times. He leaves from Paris, but he believes that “he would come back some day; they couldn’t make him pay forever” (Fitzgerald 64). Readers will notice now that he is trapped into self-recrimination because he justifies himself with ignoring his ambivalence. “Babylon Revisited” is a story about the human mind’s ability to delude itself into thinking that what it does is based on reason — the ultimate vulnerability. Charlie will return in six months, or even later, until he utterly squares himself; and then the evaluation for Charlie Wales will be made again.
In Fitzgerald’s Babylon Revisited, women are erratic and emotional perpetual children who are incomplete without the guidance and oversight of men. At the outset, Charlie treads lightly around his sister-in-law Marion so as not to arouse undue emotion from her: “He greeted Marion with his voice pitched carefully.” With Lincoln (Marion’s husband), Charlie “clasped hands in a friendly way” sans the need to monitor his approach. There is some indication of the social influence of gender roles during the lunch between Charlie and his daughter, in particular the mock conversation. “I see you have a child madame. . . married or single,” Charlie says to his daughter. “Yes, I’ve been married, but I’m not now. My husband is dead,” she says, playing along. The story is far too short to draw rash generalizations about how Charlie will, should be eventually take Honoria home, condition her toward those roles, but, the assumption of women’s role as child-bearers and wives is hinted toward in this exchange. The interaction with Charlie’s old “friends” Duncan and Lorraine shows further evidence of how women must be monitored by men; indeed, how their language is as unfiltered as a child’s and how their interests are equally pedestrian. “Charlie, I believe you’re sober,” she said judicially. “I honestly believe he’s sober, Dunc. Pinch him and see if he’s sober. . . That’s what I want to do,” Lorraine said. “I want to see some clowns and acrobats and jugglers. That’s what we’ll do, Dunc.” During the conversation with Marion and Lincoln about taking Honoria, Charlie provides a logical explanation as to why he wants custody of his daughter. He attempts to make amends and prove how he has changed and how his drinking and bad behavior is now under control. Marion, however, is not convinced, she, as Charlie seems to suspect of all women, lives in the past and is rule by emotion.He explains why he takes one drink a day to which Marion responds that she does not understand. Lincoln, on the other hand, tells Charlie “I get you.” After Charlie makes his custody case, Lincoln responds begins speaking and is interrupted by Marion who, still, is fixated upon Charlie’s past and his drinking. Finally, she brings up an incident that, apparently, involves her sister (Charlie’s former wife) and some semi-abusive/negligent behavior by Charlie. Lincoln, naturally, ‘saves’ his wife from her emotions and declares “We’re getting off the subject. . . “ to which he reframes Charlie’s argument and proceeds to make logical plans on how to accomplish the goal. These are just a few examples of how women are portrayed as unduly emotional and childlike. A later exchange between Charlie, Lorraine, and Duncan solidify the unruliness of women and how without strong guidance and oversight they might run amuck. In fact, that same exchange causes Marion to change her mind about allowing Honoria to go with Charlie: a single incident to which Lincoln is unable to convince his wife to relent. To some degree, Marion’s suspicion seems warranted, especially given Charlie’s past behavior and her undeniable grief associated with the death of her sister. What is most interesting is how the story might be told from a female perspective. In Fitzgerald’s version, as in most of his writing, the perspective is male and there is little to no exploration of the female interior monologue, only looks, stares, interruptions, erratic behavior, and emotional outbursts. Often, in reading Fitzgerald, I wonder how many of his female characters are based upon his wife, Zelda. Indeed, there seems little variation in character between the women in Babylon and Gatsby and Winter Dreams. That said, Babylon was an enjoyable read. Winter Dreams, however, smacked of and unfinished and underdeveloped outline of what would ultimately become Gatsby. . . at times, in reading Fitzgerald, I’m inclined to think that he was a one trick pony. Perhaps he peaked too soon and then never bothered to developed, especially since he knew he could make a rather lavish living for a writer in even today’s society (granted he always lived far beyond his means) by rewriting the same story over and over and over again.Fitzgerald, F. Scott. “Babylon Revisited.” Rpt. In The Norton Anthology of American Literature. 8th Ed. Nina Baym & Robert S. Levine. New York: Norton, 2012. 675-89. Print.
What do You think about Babylon Revisited And Other Stories (1996)?
I was just not impressed with this story. Charlie Wales enters the picture as a man of reform; he doesn't engage in wild, crazy parties like he used to. He has limited himself to one drink a day, and, although his daughter Honoria stays with his in-laws, they love each other, and Charlie wants her to live with him permanently. He broaches the subject with Lincoln and Marion Peters, his ex-wife's sister and she gives excuse after excuse to convey that she doesn't like him, blames him for her sister's death, and doesn't think he is capable of taking care of his daughter. When that doesn't work, because she realizes she's only bringing up examples that don't have any significance in the present, she becomes nervous, agitated, and can't handle the situation anymore. While Charlie may have been a little half-hearted in his attempt, Marion didn't face the situation like an adult, she kept running away. The Peters' had two children, were less financially secure than Charlie, yet she would not let him have his daughter. It was just lackluster.
—Athena
I have to say, I was a tad disappointed in this. After rekindling my love for Fitzgerald last week, I was really looking forward to reading short stories. It seemed like the perfect thing! I loved The Great Gatsby and I love short stories- what could go wrong? Unfortunately none of these had the impact that Gatsby had. I think the characters in Fitzgerald's stories are too subtle for a short story. In short fiction, you have to get in, establish a character, and get their story told in only about 20 pages. The characters in these tales were flat, and the themes started to feel very similar in the end- which, I get it, most authors have a few main agendas they work towards, but every story was, "person is rich, person becomes disillusioned with society/money." Some of the earlier works felt pretentious, though I did enjoy the later ones more. Babylon Revisited was definitely the strongest, though I also enjoyed whatever the last one was called (I don't have the book on me anymore and I am forgetful), which was obviously influenced by his wife's mental deterioration. Overall, if you love Gatsby, don't expect to be wowed by these. Not a total waste of time, but there's other stuff to be read.
—Stefanie
THE ICE PALACE - a young woman from the south is engaged to a man named Mr. Bellamy from the north...MAY DAY - 1919 A young man's tale of woe as told to a friend he has tracked down at the Biltmore Hotel culminates in a request for money. What follows could well be expected. DIAMOND AS BIG AS THE RITZ - a young man is exagerating his family wealth, only to find out the diamond is really as "big as a mountain" ...* WINTER DREAMS - The young golf caddy learns that in reaching the heights of society was not as fullfilling as the climb itself!* ABSOLUTION - The young man could be Gatsby.THE RICH BOY - the famous saying: "Let me tell you they are the very rich. They are differnt from you and me."THE FRESHEST BOY - A young man, indulged by his mother, suffers at school until a wonderful thing happens during basketball. BABYLON REVISITED - Based on a true incident in the life of the author, his step daughter Scottie & his wife, Zelda's sister, Rosalind, who after Zelda was committed to a sanitarium tried to adopt Scottie. This short story contains a clever variety of literary themes and symbolisms.CRAZY SUNDAY - A young man up and coming in Hollywood receives a very important dinner invitation and then after showing off tries to mend the bridges he thinks he has burned. Very pleasing little short story...THE LONG WAY OUT - Based on his wife's struggle with split-personality.* Also in his collection of short stories published in 1926 entitled "All the Sad Young Men",
—Suzlizjohnson
