Reception
When the title story appeared in Fitzgerald's final collection, 1935's Taps at Reveille, The New York Times wrote, "'Babylon Revisited,' which seems oddly linked in spirit to Mr. Fitzgerald's latest novel, 'Tender is the Night,' is probably the most mature and substantial story in the book. A rueful, though incompleted, farewell to the Jazz Age, its setting is Paris and its tone one of anguish for past follies." In a January 2011 essay to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Penguin's Modern Classics series, University of East Anglia's Sarah Churchwell wrote,
"Babylon Revisited" is at once timeless and startlingly modern in its evocation of a single father struggling with alcoholism and trying to care for his daughter, and coming to terms with the costs of extravagance...Nine years after the publication, less than a year before he would die at 44, Fitzgerald wrote his daughter Scottie a letter about the story: "You have earned some money for me this week because I sold 'Babylon Revisited,' in which you are a character, to the pictures (the sum received wasn’t worthy of the magnificent story—neither of you nor of me—however, I am accepting it)." Like, Fitzgerald learnt the hard way that loss is remorseless, absolute; what has been wasted is irrecoverable. But as "Babylon Revisited" also shows, even out of the wreckage some things can be salvaged, if not everything: what Fitzgerald retrieved he bequeathed to us, the hard-won lessons of his life transformed into heartbreaking art.
Churchwell called the story—as of 2011—"a perfect tale for the times we live in".
Read more about this topic: Babylon Revisited And Other Stories
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