Sometimes Money Can Destroy You Faster Than Poverty

Reflections on my favorite short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Like most Americans, I read The Great Gatsby in high school and, as a restless kid growing up in foster care, it deeply resonated with me. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 classic captured the promise at the heart of the American dream: That your origins don’t have to define your future, that no matter who you are or where you started, you can make something of yourself. I understood Jay Gatsby’s desire for self-improvement and self-reinvention, his yearning to transform himself into something grander, to outrun his past and become something more. Something better.

I was born into poverty and grew up in foster homes in Los Angeles and the rural town of Red Bluff, California. I fled as soon as I could at the age of 17, enlisting in the military right after high school, then attending Yale on the GI Bill. I saw education, professional success, and wealth as tickets out—not just from poverty, but from every difficulty. I believed, like many Americans do, that you can self-improve your way into happiness, that enough success or enough money can solve anything.

But there are dangers to wholeheartedly believing this very American ideal, and Fitzgerald examines them magnificently.

By reinventing himself as a wealthy, charismatic millionaire, Jay Gatsby—born James Gatz, a poor young man from North Dakota—becomes false, and unreal. He is both disconnected from his own past, and haunted by it. In The Wire, a narcotics trafficker-turned-prison-inmate named D’Angelo Barksdale explains Fitzgerald’s message:

“He’s saying that the past is always with us. Where we come from, what we go through, how we go through it—all that shit matters….It’s like, you can change up. You can say you somebody new. You can give yourself a whole new story. But what came first is who you really are, and what happened before is what really happened.”

But if Fitzgerald used The Great Gatsby to illustrate how money doesn’t make you happy, a few years later he went further. In his poignant short story “Babylon Revisited,” published in 1930, he explores how money can actually make you unhappy.

The protagonist is Charlie Wales, a formerly wealthy American expatriate who returns to Paris after the stock market crash of 1929. Like Jay Gatsby, he was a reckless partier during the Jazz Age; unlike him, Charlie lives long enough to reform. He cuts back on his drinking, returns to steady work, and decides to take responsibility for his life again. If only it were that easy.

Charlie’s goal in the story is to regain custody of his young daughter, Honoria—who, since the death of her mother, Helen, has been living in Paris with her mother’s sister, Marion. The details of Helen’s death are left ambiguous, but readers can infer that it may have been a result of the reckless lifestyle she led with Charlie. Marion certainly blames him for her sister’s death.

Charlie visits Marion’s home repeatedly, attempting to demonstrate his stability, and his sobriety. But despite these sincere efforts to prove he has changed, Charlie’s past comes back to haunt him when two of his former drinking companions, intoxicated and disruptive, unexpectedly show up at Marion’s home. This confirms Marion’s suspicions about her brother-in-law’s inability to reform himself, and she refuses to grant him custody of Honoria.

At the end of the story, Charlie is alone.

His readers often observe that there were two F. Scott Fitzgeralds. There’s the participant—the man who threw himself into the freedom and prosperity of the 1920s, reveling in excess. But then there’s the observer—the moralist—standing a few steps back, analyzing the ethical dilemmas that arose from those unique circumstances. In our more reflective moments, we are all a little like him, simultaneously living our lives while standing back and judging our own fortune, caught between indulgence and self-reproach.

Fitzgerald sneaks some troubling questions into “Babylon Revisited.” First: Do people ever truly want to change or do they just feel compelled to, due to external circumstances?

Charlie, in an attempt to get his daughter back, commits to being a better man than he was in the 1920s. But if Charlie is in Paris solely for Honoria, why does he keep revisiting the places where he once threw money around? Because he misses it. He even admits as much, reminiscing, “But it was nice while it lasted,” he says to Marion. “We were a sort of royalty, almost infallible, with a sort of magic around us.”

Perhaps what he regrets isn’t the hedonism itself, but that it’s over—that the time has finally come to pay the price for his actions. If he could, would he again embrace the debauched irresponsibility he enjoyed in the Jazz Age? Fitzgerald doesn’t say it, but probably.

Which brings us to the second troubling question: Can prosperity be just as catastrophic as poverty?

The most important exchange in “Babylon Revisited” is Charlie’s reply to a bartender named Paul:

“I heard that you lost a lot in the crash.”

“I did,” and he added grimly, “but I lost everything I wanted in the boom.”

Charlie recognizes that while he suffered financial losses in 1929, the real damage was done during the Roaring Twenties; it was when he was making the most money that he lost what truly mattered to him. His exchange with the bartender is a reversal of the idea that money solves problems. Fitzgerald suggests that when people believe fortune is on their side, they can overreach and thereby bring about their own downfall.

That’s what Charlie never fully understands—his self-destruction wasn’t incidental to his wealth; it was enabled by it. Money allowed him to indulge the worst part of his character. His is a cautionary tale: Prosperity, unchecked, can lead not to happiness, but destruction.

As someone who grew up poor and had only ever seen one side of hardship, this insight hit me like a bolt of lightning. As a teenager, I noticed something strange about myself and many of the other young males I grew up around. So often, our worst moments didn’t happen when we were broke, but right after payday—when a sudden influx of cash allowed us to indulge in alcohol or drugs. Then the hangover would come, along with fleeting moments of clarity and regret. It’s a cycle I explore in my memoir.

Recognizing the dangers of wealth, as articulated by Fitzgerald, taught me to be cautious of sudden windfalls of good fortune, to respect the dangers of excess, and to understand that self-discipline and restraint matter most precisely when it feels least necessary. It’s a constant reminder that character isn’t tested only by poverty and hardship, but equally—and perhaps even more dangerously—by success.

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This article was originally published at The Free Press under the title “Things Worth Remembering: Money Can Ruin Your Life.”