Nostalgic Sensibilities: Romantic Music in Selected Works Of
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
NOSTALGIC SENSIBILITIES: ROMANTIC MUSIC IN SELECTED WORKS OF WILLA CATHER, ERNEST HEMINGWAY, AND F. SCOTT FITZGERALD by NICOLE JOSEPHINE CAMASTRA (Under the Direction of James Nagel) ABSTRACT Although the Modernists lauded progressive attitudes toward the arts, Ezra Pound’s injunction to “make it new” did not necessarily proscribe the old, familiarity with which provided the best way to achieve his example. A strong interest in the nostalgic past characterized American literature of the era, especially the fiction of Willa Cather, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Memorializing experience meant idealizing it to a degree, and Romantic music in particular helped express impressions of the individual and collective past with which the period and these writers were so preoccupied. Stemming from the Impressionism that precipitated the early twentieth-century aesthetic, a focus on sensory experience defined the capstones of the new literary era to which Cather, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald belonged. The trademark styles of all three authors therefore urge the suggestion to listen to their writing in addition to reading it. Doing so means reevaluating the tendency to align Modern authors and their fiction with twentieth-century music, especially jazz. Ubiquitous as it was, it could not offer an adequate paradigm for certain structural and thematic concerns. Romantic music did, and as an older aesthetic, it also provided an idiom commensurate with the nostalgic tone of particular works of fiction. Antonín Dvořák’s Symphony No. 9, From the New World, inspired the theme of My Ántonia (1918). The variations genre, especially Johannes Brahms’s Variations on a Theme by Haydn, and the castrati tradition relate to the form and content in two of Hemingway’s short stories from Winner Take Nothing (1933), “Homage to Switzerland” and “God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen.” Finally, Franz Schubert’s Heine Lieder seem to have galvanized Fitzgerald’s development of Dick Diver, the protagonist in Tender is the Night (1934). Using a musical hermeneutic for these works depends on reading them as inherently nostalgic for an artistic impulse that was subsumed by a more progressive, avant-garde one. Ultimately, inspiration rests in suggestion, not duplication, and the way in which an author crafts musical influence becomes its own kind of performance. INDEX WORDS: Modernism, Fiction, America, Music, Nostalgia, Willa Cather, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, My Ántonia, Winner Take Nothing, “God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen,” “Homage to Switzerland,” Tender is the Night NOSTALGIC SENSIBILITIES: ROMANTIC MUSIC IN SELECTED WORKS OF WILLA CATHER, ERNEST HEMINGWAY, AND F. SCOTT FITZGERALD by NICOLE JOSEPHINE CAMASTRA B.A., State University of New York at New Paltz, 1997 M.A., State University of New York at New Paltz, 2005 A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The University of Georgia in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY ATHENS, GEORGIA 2012 © 2012 Nicole Josephine Camastra All Rights Reserved NOSTALGIC SENSIBILITIES: ROMANTIC MUSIC IN SELECTED WORKS OF WILLA CATHER, ERNEST HEMINGWAY, AND F. SCOTT FITZGERALD by NICOLE JOSEPHINE CAMASTRA Major Professor: James Nagel Committee: Douglas Anderson Hubert McAlexander Electronic Version Approved: Maureen Grasso Dean of the Graduate School The University of Georgia May 2012 iv DEDICATION For Ivan v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am very grateful to James Nagel for his invaluable help and guidance not only with this project but with several of my endeavors over the course of my doctoral degree. My thanks also go to Douglas Anderson and Hubert McAlexander for their unique support and encouragement and for serving on my committee. All three have shown me how to become a better writer, reader, and thinker in more ways than I can count. My work on Hemingway’s “God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen” was helped in particular by John Sanford, who graciously offered me unpublished material on his uncle Ernest Hemingway, and Susan Beegel at the Hemingway Review, who supplied great editorial advice. My broader research on Hemingway in this project is indebted to conversations with Valerie Hemingway and to Robert Trogdon, who provided me with information from the Hemingway Letters Project. Additionally, the John F. Kennedy and Jimmy Carter Libraries have been instrumental in my archival work with Hemingway’s manuscripts, as was the Rare Books and Special Collections Library at Princeton University for my research on F. Scott Fitzgerald. I greatly appreciate funding from the Ernest Hemingway Foundation and Society, The University of Georgia Graduate School Dean’s Award, Dissertation Completion vi Fellowship, and other support from the Graduate School, and The University of Georgia English Department. This project also flourished from frequent conversations with David Haas. His breadth of knowledge in the field of musicology helped me to articulate some of my deepest intuitions about music and literature and also reminded me of why I love music in the first place. Additionally, I would like to recognize some of my music professors from SUNY New Paltz. Mary Jane Corry, Harry Jensen, and Susan Seligman all helped this project in one way or another through their valuable tutelage. The English department at New Paltz granted similar guidance since it provided me with some of the best training for being a critical thinker and member of an academic community. I would especially like to acknowledge the love and support of Sparrow and H. R. Stoneback. Their faith in me provided the impetus for my graduate studies and sustains me still. Special thanks go to the friends who supported me in numerous ways during the writing of this project. My family has also provided constant encouragement, including my siblings, Danielle and Jeff, my mother and stepfather, Linda and Don Drott, and especially my father, Joseph. More than any other, my husband, Ivan, deserves my utmost gratitude for his patience, faith, and love. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS................................................v CHAPTER 1 Introduction: A Hidden Muse .............................1 2 “A Homesick Heart”: Antonín Dvořák’s Symphony No. 9, From the New World, and Willa Cather’s My Ántonia....63 3 The Distant Past: Musical Content and Form in Ernest Hemingway’s “God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen” and “Homage to Switzerland”.............................144 4 Swan Song: Franz Schubert’s Heine Lieder and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night....................227 5 Conclusion: Transposing Memory ........................314 BIBLIOGRAPHY..................................................349 1 CHAPTER 1 Introduction: A Hidden Muse Although the Modernists lauded progressive attitudes toward the arts, Ezra Pound’s injunction to “make it new” did not necessarily proscribe the old, familiarity with which provided the best way to achieve his example. A strong interest in the nostalgic past characterized American literature of the era, especially the fiction of Willa Cather, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. All three mostly employed Pound’s dictum by using vintage sources in unique ways, and one influence was Romantic music. Antonín Dvořák’s Symphony No. 9, From the New World, inspired the theme of My Ántonia (1918). The variations genre, particularly Johannes Brahms’s Variations on a Theme by Haydn, and the castrati tradition relate to the form and content in two of Hemingway’s short stories from Winner Take Nothing (1933), “Homage to Switzerland” and “God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen.” Finally, Franz Schubert’s Heine Lieder seem to have galvanized Fitzgerald’s development of Dick Diver, the protagonist in Tender is the Night (1934). 2 All three authors were familiar with these composers. Ernest Hemingway’s audio collection at the Finca Vigía, his home in Cuba, contains an immense selection with well-worn album covers. Willa Cather’s journalistic reviews of symphonic and operatic performances, written over several years, fill volumes. F. Scott Fitzgerald's personal library and that of his lover, Sheilah Graham, contain several books on the topic and on a major poetic muse for Schubert’s late Lieder, Heinrich Heine. Using a musical hermeneutic for these works depends on reading them as inherently nostalgic for an artistic impulse that was subsumed by a more progressive, avant-garde one.1 The term Modernism applies to a transnational movement and commonly refers to the historical period between World Wars I and II, but that timeline can be extended as far back as the 1890s. Beginning around the turn of the century, the trends in literature and music departed sharply from convention. Innovative applications to tonality and narrative perspective, for example, were favored over more traditional approaches. The iconoclastic concern with form also represented a break from the past. Established boundaries began to disappear, giving way to broader, unfettered expression. Similarly, stream of consciousness and unreliable narration became increasingly more common in fiction, demonstrating the idea that an objective reality was difficult to grasp and understand. Antipathy toward 3 nineteenth-century sentimentality also provided a cornerstone of the new ideal. Resulting partly from the example of French Symbolism but mostly from Impressionism, the new aesthetic in the United States favored selection rather than saturation, implication instead of documentation. Chronologically, American Modernism follows Realism and Naturalism.