The Great Gatsby and Trimalchio Author(s): Paul L. MacKendrick Source: The Classical Journal, Vol. 45, No. 7 (Apr., 1950), pp. 307-314 Published by: The Classical Association of the Middle West and South, Inc. (CAMWS) Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3293195 Accessed: 25-02-2019 15:41 UTC
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Authors of a literature of protest Portrayers of a crumbling age-Petronius and Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby and Trimalchio
Paul L. MacKendrick
T HE NEWS THAT SCOTT FITZGERALD at further into the misty side streets of litera- first intended to give the title Trimalchio ture: Huysmans, Walter Pater, Theophile to his novel The Great Gatsby, but was dis- Gautier, and the racier sections of Rabelais, suaded on the ground that the name would Boccaccio, Petronius, and Suetonius." be too hard for the public to spell and pro- Classicists will probably be disappointed, nounce, will be treated by classicists with and others neither sad nor glad, that the delv- their customary stoicism. To aficionados of ing resulted in no deadly parallels. There is Scott Fitzgerald it will not be news. For they not even direct evidence that Fitzgerald read will remember that because of Daisy's dis- Petronius in Latin; at least the Satyricon was satisfaction with one of Gatsby's fabulous not included in the syllabus of the two parties "the lights in his house failed to go on courses in Latin that Fitzgerald took at Prince- one Saturday night-and, as obscurely as it ton. And he wrote in an undated letter, had begun, his career as Trimalchio was over." "One time in sophomore year at Princeton, And they will recall that in This Side of Dean West got up and rolled out the great Paradise Amory Blaine, who is to Fitzgerald lines of Horace: as Eugene Gant to Thomas Wolfe, "delved 'Integer vitae, scelerisque purus Non eget Mauris iaculis neque arcu'- 4(Paul L. MacKendrick, member of the Department of Classics at the University of Wisconsin, now in Italy -And I knew in my heart that I had missed on a Fulbright Fellowship, is one of those rarer scholars something by being a poor Latin scholar, like who see the ancient and modern world within one view. a blessed evening with a lovely girl. It was a His article here, beyond its general interest, will be im. great human experience I had rejected mensely useful for those college teachers who interpret the ancient authors to the student of modern literatures. through laziness, through having sown no Professor MacKendrick is editor of the comprehensive painful seed." two-volume anthology of classical authors in new trans- But shakiness in Latin had not barred lations now under preparation by the University of Wis- Amory Blaine from reading the Satyricon consin Press. The direction of this volume has been because it was racy, and it did not keep the closely related to Professor MacKendrick's experiences in the Integrated Liberal Studies Program at Wisconsin mature Fitzgerald from seeing in Trimalchio the symbol of a sick society. So the method
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(detailed reporting of decor and incident), the after all, his wife is an ex-chorus girl, and in aim (social satire), and the experience (pro- her house everything is done to music. A uni- gressive disillusion) of Petronius and Fitz- formed trumpeter plays a fanfare as the guests gerald are so similar that the parallel between enter the dining hall; a piccolo whispers pri- the nouveau riche excesses of Long Island vate music in the master's ear as he is carried under Harding and of Capua-or was init his sedan chair; the slaves sing in chorus as Puteoli?-under Nero turns out to be strik- they solicitously pare the guests' hangnails; ing, and that between the authors more Trimalchio is piped in to dinner, and him- striking still. To cast light, through the in- self grinds out in a most hideous voice a hit vestigation of these more subtle parallels, tune from a musical comedy. Music of popu- upon the social, intellectual, and political at- lar airs accompanies acrobats as they climb titudes common to both authors, and to ladders, hop through burning hoops, and suggest a new approach to Petronius through pick up wine-jars with their teeth. The cook the understanding of Fitzgerald, is the pur- sings in an extremely ugly quavering voice as pose of this paper. he serves the snails. After an outburst of
I maudlin weeping Trimalchio sings in his bath, and finally the party ends as it began, THE ESSENTIAL DIFFERENCE between Gatsby with trumpeters, this time rehearsing a and Trimalchio, so far as the fragmentary funeral march so loud that the watch bursts state of the Satyricon permits us to judge, is in, thinking Trimalchio's thirty,room house that Gatsby has a sentimental motive for his is on fire. magnificence, Trimalchio none, beyond that of any Midas or Morgan or Maecenas. This Decor is of course another way of saying that Fitzgerald sympathizes with his hero and IN BOTH HOUSES the objects of conspicuous despises "what preyed on Gatsby, what foul consumption and conspicuous waste display a dust floated in the wake of his dreams"; taste in keeping with the music. Gatsby's Petronius despises the whole society that has house was a factual imitation of some Hotel made Trimalchio and most of his hangers-on. de Ville in Normandy, built in period style With these important reservations, Fitzgerald by a brewer who went into a decline because describes the "vast, vulgar, and meretricious the tenants of the neighboring cottages re- beauty "of West Egg-the music, the objets fused to have their roofs thatched with straw. d'art, the people-in terms which Petronius ("Americans, while willing, even eager, to be would understand. serfs, have always been obstinate about being First of all, the music, part of the many- peasantry.") Trimalchio would have ap- colored, many,keyed commotion of Gatsby's proved, though Daisy did not, of Gatsby's life. A whole pitful of oboes and trombones two motor boats, his Rolls-Royce, his station- and saxophones and viols and cornets and pic- wagon, his own circus,wagon of a car ("a rich colos, and low and high drums, playing Vladi- cream color, bright with nickel, swollen here mir Tostoff's Jazz History of the World, bury- and there in its monstrous length with tri- ing its rhythms obligingly for an exhibitionist umphant hat boxes and supper boxes and dancer, supplying the accompaniment to a tool boxes, and terraced with a labyrinth of famous tenor who sings in Italian, and a wind,shields that mirrored a dozen suns"). notorious contralto who sings in jazz. A tall, Besides, there were his eight servants red,haired young lady from a famous chorus (seventy were born on Trimalchio's estates in weeps as she sings, and is invited to sing the a single day), his hydroplane, his library, tri- notes which her mascara has made on her umphantly and thoroughly stocked with real face. books. ("Knew when to stop, too-didn't This musical background is even more cut the pages.") Gatsby's shirts have painfully obvious at Trimalchio's party- "stripes and scrolls and plaids in coral and
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apple-green and lavender and faint orange, in grim catalogue, full of Fitzgerald's ob- with monograms of Indian blue," and he session with the rawness, the Weltschmerz, wears suits of caramel color, or luminous pink, the sudden deaths, and the neuroses of the or white flannel, with a silver shirt and gold 'twenties: "Doctor Webster Civet, who was tie. drowned last summer up in Maine .. . Edgar Trimalchio's house, like its master, ex Beaver, whose hair, they say, turned cotton- nihilo crevit. It used to be a mere kiosk, now white one winter afternoon for no good rea- it's a regular temple: four dining rooms, son at all... Snell was there three days be- twenty bed-rooms, two marble (veneer) fore he went to the penitentiary, so drunk colonnades, an upstairs wine-cellar, master out on the gravel drive that the Ulysses bedroom, the viper's boudoir (Trimalchio so Swett's automobile ran over his right hand. refers to his wife, the ex-chorus girl), a fine ... G. Earl Muldoon, brother to that Mul- nook for the porter, and plenty of guest bed- doon who afterward strangled his wife... rooms. When the lamps multiply before the young Quinns, divorced now, and Henry Trimalchio's guests' eyes, the illumination is L. Palmetto, who killed himself by jumping rather inward than outward, but these same in front of a subway train in Times Square lamps burn costly ointment, which is also . . .young Brewer, who had his nose shot off used in the wine and as a foot-bath. Tri- in the war. . . Miss Claudia Hip, with a malchio has a passion for silver. Trimalchio's man reputed to be her chauffeur." All these wines are older than Napoleon brandy ("I people-the world and his mistress-came put on some second-rate stuff yesterday, and to Gatsby's house in the summer. there was a much more distinguished guest- list"); he is saving several magnums, carefully Women sealed with gypsum, to decorate his enormous mausoleum. He despises learning no more As A FOIL TO THESE, Fitzgerald presents"the than Gatsby; he has three libraries, one Greek staid nobility of the countryside": rich, con- and one Latin. (The discrepancy is in the man- fused, simple-minded Tom Buchanan, the ex- uscripts, and it should stand.) His porter Yale end, who had reached such an acute wears green with a cerise belt, his wife cerise limited excellence at twenty-one that every- with a high yellow waist-band, and he him- thing afterward savored of anti-climax. He self plays tennis in a russet tunic and dress nibbles at the edge of stale ideas, believes in pumps. race supremacy, and-when he is not with his mistress-in family life and family institu- People tions. "By God, I may be old-fashioned in my ideas, but women run around too much THESE NABOBS, ancient and modern, have these days to suit me." He is capable of in- in common not only their music and their stant transition from libertine to prig. Gats- objets d'art, but their parasites, the types that by's five years' devotion to Daisy he dis- prey upon them. At Gatsby's the guests con- misses as a "presumptuous little flirtation." duct themselves according to the rules of be- It is his wife, Daisy, excitingly desirable, the havior associated with an amusement park, silver idol, the "nice" girl (the quotation and the reader is better acquainted with them marks are Fitzgerald's), safe and proud above than is the host, who says simply, "I keep it the hot struggles of the poor, in her artificial [his house] always full of interesting people world, redolent of orchids, and pleasant, night and day. People who do interesting cheerful snobbery, for whose sake Gatsby has things. Celebrated people." It is a precious reared the preposterous Petronian structure lot. They sneer bitterly at Gatsby on the whose simplicity she fails to understand. courage of Gatsby's liquor, and by accepting She says, with "basic insincerity," that she his hospitality become authorities on his past. has been everywhere and seen everything and There are the names of that menagerie listed done everything. Like Augustus' daughter
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Julia she has contracted a marnage de having con- paid a high price for living too long venance, and is therefore looking for romantic with a single dream. The Gatzes of this world possibilities totally absent from her world.can never long possess the Daisy Fays: the When she has killed her husband's mistress distance from the clam flats of Lake Superior in an auto accident, she allows her to lover ripe mystery, the gay and radiant activities Gatsby to take the blame and to be murdered of Daisy's father's house in Louisville, is too for it, while she and her husband, greathaving to be bridged even by the colossal ac- smashed up things and creatures carelessly, cidents of a war and a postwar. Ex nihilo nil retreat back into their money or their fit; vast but Fitzgerald makes it clear that Lucre- carelessness, or whatever it is that keeps tius' them truism applies to Daisy as well as to together, and let other people clean upGatsby. the mess they have made. What of the menagerie that surrounds But of course the major interest of Trimalchio? both Their names are all Greek: novels centres in the development Hermeros,of the Dama, Seleucus, Phileros the bar- main characters. The fine sympathy rister, with Ganymede, Echion the rag man, which Nick Carraway, Fitzgerald's intellec- Niceros, Plocamus, Habinnas the contractor; tual alter ego, describes Gatsby is a foil they for are all parvenus; yesterday a garret, to- the subtle scorn with which he strips day Daisy a mansion. Like Gatsby and his gangster and her kind down to their basic insincerity. and caf6 society friends, they are in but not of We see how James Gatz of North Dakota the societyin- in which they live. They differ es- vented just the sort of Jay Gatsby sentially that a from Gatsby's guests in that they seventeen-year old boy would be likely all to know in- their host, and admire him. With his vent, set him in a dream universe of ineffable estates so large he has never seen his bound- gaudiness, such as one could concoct by aries, skim- his slaves so numerous he does not ming through a dozen magazines, andknow re- one in ten by name, his accounts so mained faithful to that conception to the complicated end; they are always six months in how as a young officer by the colossal accidentarrears, his fortune so vast he cannot invest it, of the first world war, with no comfortable he represents all their little dreams magnified family behind him, he fell in love with to Daisy, infinity. But they, like Gatsby and the foul and was committed to the following of dusta grail. that floated in the wake of his dreams, When she, wanting her life shaped by are some filled with a maudlin mal de siecle. Their force-of love, of money, of unquestioned satisfactions are material, subject to the de- practicality-that was close at hand, married stroying touch of death, or bankruptcy, or Tom Buchanan while Gatsby was overseas, the sneers of the dilettanti. he devoted his whole corrupt life to Trimalchio's the is the rare dinner party where realizing of his uncorruptible dream-drifted the food has less savor than the conversation. cooly out of nowhere and bought a palace Dama on drinks double bumpers, and goes Long Island Sound, in order to have the straight kind from bed to banquet. Seleucus of friends whose lack had lost him Daisy. mourns It a friend who has fasted to death: had been a world complete in itself, second"It was just the other day that he called me to nothing because it had no consciousness by name: of I can see myself talking to him being so, until he looked at it again through now. We walk about," he sighs, "like blown- Daisy's eyes, and saw her "appalled by up this bladders; we are less than flies . . . no unprecedented 'place' that Broadway had more be- than bubbles.... It was the doctors gotten upon a Long Island fishing village, did him by in, or rather bad luck, for a doctor is its raw vigor that chafed under the oldno more eu- than a consolation of the mind.... phemisms and by the too obtrusive fate He hadthat a fine wake-he had freed a number herded its inhabitants along a short-cut of fromslaves-even if his wife's were crocodile nothing to nothing." She was appalled tears."by it, Phileros the barrister adds significant so again he stood breathless and betrayed, detail, full of all the solid bourgeois values:
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"He started from scratch and made his pile, tion, and respect. "I thank God," he says, by being willing to pick up a farthing from "for a my practical education: it has made me dunghill with his teeth. So he grew like what a I am today." Encolpius and Ascyltus, honeycomb, and left a clear hundred thou- whose adventures give the Satyricon its pre- sand, and all in hard cash. But his slaves eaves, carious unity, are a pair in whose comparison dropped, and did him in. It never pays to Fitzgerald'sbe inks are white. They have a bet- too trusting, especially if you're a business ter education than prospects, and better pros- man." The undertaker Proculus-"the de- pects than morals. Encolpius, particularly, centest man in the party," Petronius calls the intellectual, is given to Proustain self- him-cannot call his hair his own; like flagellation and introspection. "I care nothing Gatsby, he has found that when "the for possessions," he says, "unless the cormmon company's pot goes off the boil, and things heard is jealous of them." After Trimalchio's start slipping, your friends desert you." He banquet he takes a room in an out-of-the-way used to dine like a king: pigs in blankets, place right on the beach and haunts himself petits fours, pheasant, more wine spilled with the thought that he is deserted, de- under the table than many a man has in his spised, a cheat, a murderer, a beggar, and an cellar, but when bankruptcy strikes him he exile. Like Fitzgerald, Encolpius is sensitive does not lose his panache. "For sale," he ad' because he has never seen military action; he vertises, "superfluous goods." lies about his captain and his regiment until And it is not only the rich whom the shoe he is exposed because his shoes are out of uni- pinches. Ganymede speaks for the common form. He does not share the bourgeois view of man, who suffers, while to upper-class jaws the blessings of education. "College," he says, it's always Christmas. Nowadays, the poli- "makes complete fools of our young men, be- ticians are in league with the bakers to keep cause they see and hear nothing of ordinary dear bread bad and scarce. It gets worse, he life there." Uprooted, unadjusted, unhappy sighs, by the minute. This town is growing in love, ill-at-ease in the social, intellectual, backward, like the calf's tail. and political climate of a world he never Echion the rag man doesn't think it's so made, he is, and he knows he is, a member of bad. "Things are good in spots, as the farmer neither the first nor the last of the "lost said when he lost the piebald pig." There are generations," one of the "sad young men," always panis et circenses. The intelligentsia blood brother to Jake in The Sun Also Rises, may scoff, but the poor have their pleasures. to Amory Blaine, Nich Carraway, and Dick Their sons learn Greek and the times-table, Diver, to Eugene Gant and George Webber, can get to be barbers, or auctioneers, or at to Stephen Daedalus and perhaps even to least lawyers. Look at Phileros, for instance. Studs Lonigan. Only yesterday he used to carry round his The tale of Trimalchio's motiveless extrav- wares for sale on his back, and today he dares agance begins and ends with a trumpet-call talk back in court to the best of them. "Yes, which is a memento mori. "I am bursting with culture is a gold-mine, and a good practical happiness," he says between sobs. "I was education never dies." Who are the literati once just what you are," he tells his guests, to sneer at these bourgeois values? Hermeros "but by my own merits I have come to this." bought his freedom, he owes no one a sou, "This" is a drunken quarrel with his wife be- he has his bit of land and his bit of money- fore a houseful of tipsy guests. The road to "I feed twenty bellies and a dog," he says "this" is marked by subservience, adultery, proudly-his credit is better than riches; he losses at sea, and the pawning of his wife's has made the grade. "I never learned geometry jewels, and the attainment of his goal is cele- and criticism and nonsense and nursery brated by a rehearsal of his funeral, with rhymes, but I can read large print and figure himself in the role of corpse. "So the world in pounds, shillings, and ounces." He has turns like a mill," he says in the midst of his learned the value of property, circumspec- ostentation, "and always brings some evil to
This content downloaded from 141.222.55.179 on Mon, 25 Feb 2019 15:41:07 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 312 PAUL L. MAcKENDRICK pass." When in 1922, the dramatic dateguished of a literary figure as Mr. Westbrook The Great Gatsby, T. S. Eliot published Pegler The had this to say of Fitzgerald's choice of Waste Land, he aptly chose a quotation characters, from in a tasteful piece composed at the Trimalchio as its motto. When the time boys of the author's death: "[It] recalls memo- asked the Sibyl, "iSWuXXa, rl 0EXecs;" she ries an-of a queer bunch of undisciplined and swered, "'AlroOavelv OeXw." Gatsby and self-indulgent the brats who were determined not Buchanans, too, live on the edge of a toWaste pull their weight in the boat and wanted Land, the symbolic desert of ashes that the worldlies to drop everything and sit down between West Egg and New York. Is it and not bawl with them. A kick in the pants and perhaps more than a mere cliche when a clout Tri- over the scalp were more like their malchio's limping elegiacs bewail the unpre-needing." dictability of Fortune and prescribe wine In dealingas with these gentry, the patience opiate? With unconscious irony he ofquotes Job, though more difficult to exercise than verses about pearls, emeralds, rubies, the andacidity of a Housman, is perhaps more fine linen, and how little they compensate efficacious the in the long run. For we have come cuckolded husband. His gods are Gain, to Luck, see that the artist is the product of his age and Profit, and they have given him just and thathis own experience, and we know that and nothing more. He has composed his neither own Petronius' nor Fitzgerald's age or ex- epitaph: "He started from a shoestring, perience was calculated precisely to convince left thirty million, and never went to them col- that God was in his Heaven or that all lege." He believes in werewolves, witches, was right with the world. and astrologers. A cock-crow makes him nervous, and he lives in deadly fear of in- formers. It is all as sinister as a Charles Ad- Merely Clever dams cartoon. He cannot imagine a poor man,FOR GATSBY IS FITZGERALD, and the novel is even as a hypothetical case. He is a Mana condition of contrary to fact in past time. Property, and as such he shares the unhappi- Gatsby's story might have been Fitzgerald's if ness, as he exceeds the bad taste, of Soames This Side of Paradise had not made the Forsyte, of Babbitt, and of Fitzgerald's author "very enough money to marry Zelda Sayre. rich, who are different from you and In me."that novel Mrs. Connage says to her ("Yes," said Hemingway, "they have daughter more Rosalind, "I have your best in- money.") terests at heart when I tell you not to take a step you'll spend your days regretting.... II You'd be dependent absolutely on a dreamer, IN VIEW OF THEIR unsparing and detailed a nice, well-born boy, but a dreamer-merely analysis of the ills of their society, it is not clever." So Rosalind "presses the ring softly surprising that Petronius and Fitzgerald are into Amory's hand" and makes him "sick of a in equally bad odor with the mandarins of system where the richest man gets the most literary criticism. Says an English classicist of beautiful girl if he wants her, where the artist this century, "If we can suppose the author without an income has to sell his talents to a of this work [the Satyricon] to have been button manufacturer." To turn from the animated by any other motive than the desire fictional to the real situation, Fitzgerald him- to amuse himself, it might be that of convinc- self wrote, in The Crack-Up, "It was one of ing himself that the world in general was as those tragic loves doomed for lack of money, bad as he was himself." Says an American, and one day the girl closed it out on the basis writing in 1929, "It is unfortunate . . .that of common sense. During a long summer of writers whom we regard as realists should despair I wrote a novel instead of letters, so have felt themselves compelled to deal with it came out all right, but it came out all right the lower strata of society and with the un- for a different person. The man with the pleasant aspects of existence." So distin- jingle of money in his pocket who married the
This content downloaded from 141.222.55.179 on Mon, 25 Feb 2019 15:41:07 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms THE GREAT GATSBY AND TRIMALCHIO 3I3 girl a year later would always cherish gross an inequality in the distribution of wealth, abiding distrust, an animosity, toward and the the rebels were aware of it. A century leisure class--not the conviction of a revolu- before the probable date of the Satyricon, tionist but the smouldering hatred Lucretius of a was analyzing the neurotic restless- peasant. In the years since then I have nessnever of the leisure class; Sallust, later, ascribes been able to stop wondering where the my conspiracy of Catiline in part to the loath- friends' money came from, nor to stop ingthink- felt by the ordinary man for his own con- ing that at one time a sort of droit de seigneur dition. By the time Livy was writing his might have been exercised to give onefamous of preface, in the Golden Age of them my girl." Augustus, the auri sacra fames had reached, There might be some grounds for suspect- he says, such a pitch that Rome could endure ing here the influence of Edmund Wilson, neither her vices nor their remedies. Horace whom Fitzgerald referred to as for twenty in Odes and Satires show how the millionaire's years his intellectual conscience, and fears who and forebodings, like Trimalchio's, probably figures as Tom d'Invilliers in clamber This up the same way as the millionaire Side of Paradise. But the savage dissection himself. of Rome has grown more corrupt Tom and Daisy Buchanan in Gatsby, and generation of by generation, and Horace sees no Nicole Diver and her family in Tender prospectis the of the precedent's being reversed. Night, are surely Fitzgerald's own. PoorWhen and rich are equally restless. One poor John Dos Passos ranked Gatsby with man War changes his garret, his bed, his bath, his and Peace and The Red and the Black, barber; we he hires a boat, and is as sick as the may be sure that it was not Fitzgerald's rich man in his three-banked yacht. Persius sympathy with the upper classes shares that with Petronius a contempt for the sort prompted the choice. It was no mere playboy of education which has helped to make this chronicler of a jazz age, nor even an "Orestes sick society what it is; Juvenal joins our au- at the Ritz," who wrote of Nicole thorDiver: in an attack on legacy-hunting. Petro, "For her sake trains began their run at nius Chi- says of Croton, but he means Rome: "In cago and traversed the round belly thatof the city men are either the prey of legacy- continent to California; chicle factories hunting or are legacy-hunters themselves. fumed and link-belts grew link by link ... Noin one brings up children; that would factories; men mixed toothpaste in vats mean and no dinner or theatre invitations. So the drew mouthwash out of copper hogsheads; town is a Waste Land [like Fitzgerald's girls canned tomatoes quickly in August desert or of ashes in Gatsby], like a plague- worked rudely at the Five-and-Tens stricken on plain, where there is nothing but Christmas Eve; half-breed Indians toiled carcasses on to be devoured, and crows to devour Brazilian coffee plantations and dreamers them." were muscled out of patent rights in new tractors." Such was the society in which Petronius Fitzgerald had risen above the "illusions lived of aand wrote. "There are only the pursued, nation, the lies of generations of frontier the pursuing, the busy and the tired." Yet mothers who had to croon falsely that though there Trimalchio, Encolpius and the rest were no wolves outside the cabin door." are the living embodiments of the vices and And what of Petronius? Fitzgerald's theworld attitudes dealt with by the Roman sati- had seemed to go to pieces overnight; rists as abstractions, to most classical scholars Petronius' had been crumbling for Petronius' two motive for writing remains a hundred years: first in the blood-bath of mystery. civil But the Cena Trimalchionis is an war, then in spendthrift hedonism and account ex- of a parvenu banquet written for the travagant prodigality. When all due allow- entertainment of the court in the same sense ance is made for the rhetorical exaggera- as Gulliver's Travels is a tale for children, tion which colors nearly all Latin literature, The Rape of the Lock the story of a hair cut, there remains a hard core of fact: there and was Moby a Dick about a whale. If we apply to
This content downloaded from 141.222.55.179 on Mon, 25 Feb 2019 15:41:07 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 314 PAUL L. MAcKENDRICK
Petronius the method we have used with Both authors see clearly the political corrup- Scott Fitzgerald, it becomes at once apparent tion of their age. Oscar Wilde, who supplied that the ancient no more than the modern a motto to This Side of Paradise, and under author is a mere retailer of chroniques scan- the name Sebastian Melmoth is suspected of daleuses. Both contribute to the literature of having translated the Satyricon, may stand as protest evoked from sensitive spirits in every a symbol. For Petronius is not the first, nor age in which ethics fails to control enonomics. Fitzgerald the last, to be called monstrous by Petronius has been called a jaded voluptuary, the critics for describing their age as they see yet he cares passionately about the decline ofit: socially, intellectually, politically corrupt. education and the arts; he has been termed aPerhaps not until authors and critics alike cynical patrician, yet he can put into the cease confusing what should be with what is, mouth of Ganymede a complaint of the plight will what should be finally be brought to pass. of the poor, caught between the upper and Until then, we beat on, boats against the cur- the nether millstone, which is unique in rent, borne back ceaselessly into the past. Latin literature; he passes for a half-amused contemplator of low-life, yet his saeva in- dignatio toward legacy-hunting is as biting as NEW CAMWS OFFICERS Juvenal's. Difficile est saturam non scribere. His colossally ignorant and ostentatious AT THE FORTY-SIXTH annual meeting of the Trimalchio, confused and unhappy in the Classical Association of the Middle West midst of his luxury, is described with the and South held early in April in Cleveland, same repugnance which Fitzgerald lavishes Professor Clarence A. Forbes of the Ohio upon Tom Buchanan. Even as a literary critic State University was elected president of the Petronius is not above the battle: when he re- association for I95o-SI, succeeding Miss writes Lucan's Pharsalia, it is to change the Mary V. Braginton of Rockford College. bias from the conservative Pompey to the The I95I meeting, it was announced, will liberal Caesar. be held in Memphis, Tennessee, March 29, It has been brought against Petronius as a30, 31. sort of acusation that none of his characters First Vice-President for I950o-5 will be shows affection, conscience, honor, or good- Miss Esther Weightman of Madison, Wis- ness of heart. Well, the emperor's affection consin. was not conspicuous when he had his mother Professor William C. Korfmacher was re- murdered; the prime minister Seneca's con, appointed Secretary-Treasurer to serve science did not prevent him from amassing through I95o-5I. a fortune of three hundred million during four To serve as Editor-in-Chief and Business years of "standing wellwith truth and yet not Manager of THE CLASSICAL JOURNAL, Pro- ill with Nero"; Otho's honor did not stand fessor Clyde Murley of Northwestern Uni- in the way of his acting as pander between versity was appointed to succeed Norman J. his wife and his sovereign; and Christian DeWitt of the University of Minnesota, who goodness of heart was rewarded by the cross resigned after five years of service. and the arena. A distinctive feature of the meeting was It is perhaps not surprising that these qual- the reading of "Ovationes" in Latin at the ities are absent from the fiction, as they are banquet session, as tributes to four members absent from the life, of the age of the Harding of the Association. Among those so honored scandals, Teapot Dome, Fatty Arbuckle, and were President-Emeritus Winfred G. Leutner the Ku Klux Klan. Petronius' bourgeoisie, of Western Reserve University, Professor- like Fitzgerald's, is neurotic, confused, dis- Emeritus Clarence P. Bill, also of Western satisfied; his intellectuals, like Fitzgerald's, are Reserve University, and Dr. E. B. de Sauze, frustrated by their ability to diagnose the ail- who recently retired as Director of Foreign Lan- ment without being able to effect a cure. guage Study in the Cleveland public schools.
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