F. Scott Fitzgerald and addiction

F. Scott Fitzgerald's Babylon Revisited, one of his best and most famous stories (included in 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories as one of 3 representing the 1930s) is in part about the wreck of his own life - a family essentially destroyed by alcoholism and mental illness, exacerbated by the reckless and profligate life of American ex-pats in Europe after the First World War - as it is a portrait of a generation in turmoil. It's hard in some ways to feel much sympathy for his central character, Charlie Wales, who made a fortune on the market in the 20s and lived in Paris where the dollar was incredibly strong against the flank and instead of doing anything with his life just drank and flirted and cheated on his wife and eventually broke apart the marriage when he locked her out of the apartment on a snowy night, leaving her to nearly catch pneumonia - and there's a hint that his mistreatment may even have caused her early death, attributed to "heart trouble." The story concerns Charlie's return to Paris after some years - he's now a successful businessman in Prague - in hope of reclaiming his young daughter, who has been living w/ her aunt (her mother's sister and now he legal guardian) and uncle. Charlie has to persuade them that he's reformed - he's not terribly convincing; his argument that he takes one drink a day so as not to make the craving for alcohol too big a deal, seems a recipe for disaster, so to speak. His plan to reclaim his daughter goes off the rails when two of his drinking partners from the old days show up at his in-laws house, disgusting his sister-in-law and shaming Charlie. Fitzgerald makes the woman (Nancy) the heavy and her husband (Lincoln) another one of feckless male nice guys. Nancy may be bitter and unsympathetic, but she's probably in the right - it would be very difficult to give up her guardianship and let the young girl go with a man so tenuously sober. Fitzgerald in my view never quite succeeds in building sympathy for Charlie's case, and that may not even be his aim - he makes it pretty clear that the life Charlie et al. led in Paris in the heyday was, in FSF's term, "dissipated" - vanishing into nothing, and Charlie seems to close to the verge. In this sense, we shouldn't confuse Charlie w/ FSF himself - FSF fought the same battle against addiction and illness but despite all his troubles he did make something of his life to say the least - writing one of the great novels of the century and several stories (like this one) and secondary novels that have defined an era, a time, and a place.