Speed Dating Events

Fitzgerald first created this situation in This Side Of Paradise, a book to fall in love by, if ever there was one. As Rosalind and Amory fall in love . . .

. . . they were together constantly, for lunch, for dinner, and nearly every evening — always in a sort of breathless hush, as if they feared that any minute the spell would break and drop them out of this paradise of rose and flame. But the spell became a trance, seemed to increase from day to day; they began to talk of marrying in July — in June. All life was transmitted into terms of their love, all experience, all desires, all ambitions were nullified: ‘She’s life and hope and happiness, my whole world now.’

But they have no money to marry on, and in the ensuing tension, they break apart. Despite her cry ‘Lover! Lover! I can’t do with you, and I can’t imagine life without you’, Rosalind ends it — she can’t bear to drift down from the heights where they have been so passionately happy. Yet even as she sends him away, she knows that she has lost something for ever, something irreplaceable.

Fitzgerald returned to this theme even more powerfully in his masterpiece, The Great Gatsby. Gatsby and Daisy fall deeply, lyrically in love, and pledge themselves to each other in physical and emotional passion. But then he is sent overseas as a soldier, and Daisy cannot withstand the pressures of life on her own:

All night the saxophone wailed the hopeless comment of the ‘Beale Street Blues’ while a hundred pairs of gold and silver slippers shuffled in the shining dust. At the grey tea hour there were always rooms that throbbed incessantly with this low, sweet fever, while fresh faces drifted here and there like rose petals blown by the sad horns around the floor.

So Daisy begins to dance to ‘the sadness and suggestiveness of life in new tunes’. Gatsby, like so many American heroes, is a man out of nowhere. He has no money and no position. Daisy is locked into her world of riches, assurance and privilege like a maiden in a castle to which Gatsby cannot find the key. His bid to hold her fails, and he never recovers from this loss:

. . . he found himself committed to the following of a grail . . . She vanished into her rich house, into her rich, full life, leaving Gatsby — nothing. He felt married to her, that was all . . . He stretched out his hand desperately as if to snatch a wisp of air, to save a fragment of the spot that she had made lovely for him. But it was all going by too fast now for his blurred eyes and he knew that he had lost that part of it, the freshest and the best, for ever.

Haunted by the belief that ‘rich girls don’t marry poor boys, Jay Gatsby‘, as Daisy mockingly whispers in his imagination, Gatsby devotes the rest of his life to becoming what Daisy might want. Only death can free him from this quest.

As the Hemingway story showed, death is the last great enemy of love’s promise, and it is one that even the strongest cannot defeat. Ian Fleming’s James Bond finds as 007 that he is always closer to danger and destruction than other men. But when, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, he encounters the beautiful Teresa, he has other things on his mind:

Bond suddenly thought, Hell! I’ll never find another girl like this one. She’s got everything I’ve looked for in a woman. She’s beautiful, in bed and out. She’s adventurous, brave, resourceful. She’s exciting always. She seems to love me. She‘d let me go on with my life. She’s a lone girl, not cluttered up with friends, relations, belongings. Above all, she needs me. It’ll be someone for me to look after. I’m fed up with all these untidy, casual affairs that leave me with a bad conscience. I wouldn’t mind having children. I’ve got no social background into which she would or wouldn’t fit. We’re two of a pair, really. Why not make it for always?

Bond found his voice saying those words that he had never said in his life before, never expected to say.

`Tracy. I love you. Will you marry me?’

The whirlwind romance is followed by an equally whirlwind marriage. At last the two lovers can be alone together; ‘we’ve got all the time in the world‘, says Bond contentedly. But as they drive away to start their honeymoon, a bullet from an unseen enemy destroys his hopes for ever:

Bond turned towards Tracy. She was lying forward with her face buried in the ruins of the steering wheel. Her pink handkerchief had come off and the bell of golden hair hung down and hid her face. Bond put his arm round her shoulders, across which the dark patches had begun to flower.

He pressed her against him. He looked up at the young patrolman and smiled his reassurance.

it’s all right,’ he said in a clear voice as if explaining something to a child. ‘It’s quite all right. She’s having a rest. We’ll be going on soon. There’s no hurry. You see —’ Bond’s head sank down against hers and he whispered into her hair — ‘you see, we’ve got all the time in the world.’

Anyone who has ever lost someone they love knows that it takes all the time in the world to come to terms with it. For Time is a slow doctor, and he works without anaesthetic, as Stevie Smith says in her Novel On Yellow Paper:

And this causes a great deal of sadness and wildness and despair. And you turn this way and that way, and there is nothing, there is nothing to be done at all, for all the wildness and tears and despair. You have lost. Suddenly

you have lost everything, and the hours are long, and only a thousand hours will help at all to heal.

Well, you have the time. When you have lost everything) else, it’s all you do have. The reality of high risks take’ and dangers averted by successful lovers is nowhere mor clearly demonstrated than in the sadness and desolation o those who lose.

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