The quote contained in the title comes from the British writer Ben Macintyre: “I wish I’d written The Great Gatsby. Doesn’t everyone?”1 Such a desire always escaped me, but after digesting the comment by Macintyre, yes, indeed, more or less any decent writer (and even the indecent ones) would have loved to have written such a novel of substance. As that is what I feel when I read again – for the fifth or sixth time? - The Great Gatsby, published in 1925, that most American of novels, and by that very citizenship also that most universal of novels of the 20th century. Substance, as becoming to one of those literary creations in which not a single paragraph appears superfluous—perhaps not even a single line—like The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway, or some short-stories by Anton Chekhov.
Yet at first sight one would not expect that much “substance” from a sort of just about a medium-length novel (188 pages in a Penguin paperback edition), which seems to discourse (very fluidly and elegantly) through the pompous vanity, soulless monumentality and nouveau rich luxury of the Jazz Age – a term, apparently, also coined by Scott Fitzgerald. By the time of his death, Scott Fitzgerald was acknowledged as a commendable writer, but his work was pigeonholed to an epoch “when gin was the national drink and sex the national obsession”2, the incarnation of “Jazz Age decadence”. No hope, it seemed then, of his work ever transcending the limits of a colourful yet perhaps one-sided portrait of the “roaring Twenties”, done by someone whom not a few critics dismissed as a “failed alcoholic”.
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (*1896-†1940) would die too young, thus not experiencing himself the rank and the prestige his opus magnum would reach as from the early 1940s, when The Great Gatsby was distributed free amongst the hundreds of thousands of American soldiers fighting the Second World War, and also by the Red Cross to American prisoners in German and Japanese camps. By the end of the 1960s The Great Gatsby was already hailed as a “masterpiece” of American literature, a sacrosanct statue to be monumentally enhanced and transported into the rest of the world by the film-versions, in particular the 1974 movie with Robert Redford.
Gatsby, the elegant, self-made man of somewhat obscure origins, copiously decorated in the First Wold War, enigmatically pursuing an old-dream, would become a “standard, immediately recognizable coin” in any country, in any language of the world. Few writers can boast of their literary figures having achieved such a status.
There is, however, a huge, poisonous trap lurking around, concerning the evaluation of the intrinsic literary merit of the novel by Scott Fitzgerald: That of being dazzled by the film-versions, in particular those of 1974 and 2013 (previous ones in 1926 and 1949), hence unable to “read” the text without biased-spectacles, to let the “text” speak for itself. It is worth submerging oneself in the circa two-hundred pages, and this contribution is an invitation to that effect. More so, as few would disagree with the statement that the last two film-versions do not quite render the innermost of the characters, exhuming a certain emptiness and cliché-loaded feelings, because of the phenomenon called “over-production”. Meaning, above all, that we are swamped by monumental, yet also false-glittering and extravagant settings, getting drowned somehow in a sea of silk, champagne, roses, silver and gold.
It is worth then to keep at least one eye off the screen. Because what we have in our hands is an extremely well-conceived and tightly accomplished novel, rooted in substance yet discoursing like an amiable, moon-lighted river, where the apparent simplicity and nonchalance of the descriptions hide the deeper cogitations taking place underneath the surface. At time the latter will come afloat, like soundless thunderbolts, illuminating the “unsaid”, and warning us of much deeper, dire undercurrents.
My first copy of the novel was bought in London in 1977 (included in a volume of “Selected Works”), but it disappeared under not very lustre conditions in 1987. About four years ago, an acquaintance in Berlin lent me another copy, which I read and commented copiously. I gave it back to him, not before scanning the pages with my notations, as I feared I might not see it again. Indeed, that copy ended up somewhere in Poland. A translation into German was at hand, which I checked against the English original, curious to see how some “Americanisms” were translated – the job was well done, yet, as in any other language, the aroma of the American text had faded away considerably. Emulating his compassion vis-à-vis this humble scribbler in the case of Charlotte Brontë’s “Jane Eyre”, “Saint-John” took again pity of my fate, and deposited a new copy, Penguin edition, on a pew outside one of his churches. To compound the gift, it had been glossed and underlined with relevant meticulousness, both in English and in German. No doubt a lady, almost sure the same who ploughed with sapience through every single line of Charlotte’s novel.
The novel is propelled by a first-person “narrator”, Nick Carraway, a Chicago man who comes to New York to tempt fortune, magisterially interpreted by Sam Waterston in the 1974 film version, perhaps the only truly soul-caring and soul-exhaling acting performance in the whole movie. He does have a “heart” (Gatsby also, but his is hidden for the rest of the world and clouded inwards), and at the end of the novel, we will learn that Nick’s heart is the one who survived as the less contaminated, having escaped lethal intoxication by
“…what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams...”3
To a large extent, “Nick Carraway” is the alter ego of Scott Fitzgerald, and would dare to qualify himself as:
“Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known.4”
Gatsby is also “honest”, at least concerning his innermost feeling, yet he is too rich, too powerful and is perceived as a threat by many. At such level of exposure, one cannot afford to let the others see what lays “deep down there”. And thus he died the way he did.
The sort of first thirty pages invite us to tread “… on the sunny side of the street...” where glamorous insouciance, a new dress everyday and millions of dollars seem to fall from heaven, unasked for. Albeit there are already at least tenuous hints concerning the “other side of the street”, and to the yet-to-be-deciphered darkness lurking around, under the surface of the “shine”.
The “… shadowy side of the street...” (“bounded on one side by a foul river”) begins to be distinctly delineated at the beginning of chapter 2, which introduces us to the “valley of ashes”, “about half way between West Egg and New York”. In the first fifteen lines of the first paragraph, the words “ash” and “grey”, and related (“obscure”, “bleak”, “dusty” et cetera) are repeated sort of sixteen (16) times. Has Scott Fitzgerald “overdone” it here a little bit? We do not seem to get that impression, as the “Leitmotiv” is encrusted in different nouns. It works rather as a deliberate counterpoint to the preceding remonstrance of dilapidated affluence, much more so as a timely analgesic to the even greater outburst of ever-lasting partying and fastidious (not in the text, but perhaps in the film-versions) display of different types of waterfalls pouring money and unstylish luxury.
Is this “valley of ashes” a premature graveyard? A sort of a purgatory, a training-camp for those who would never walk on the “sunny side” of the street, overlooked by “the eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic”.
It is the valley where the “clandestine mistress” of Tom Buchanan lives, “Mrs. Wilson” and where her husband struggles to make some money by selling petrol and repairing cars. Yet that same valley will, at the end of the novel become the setting for a tragic accident (is it really an accident?) which will transform every erotic and romantic dream into a fast-disappearing fume, mingling for eternity with the other “greyness”.
Placed after the first chapter, the “valley of ashes” is a subdued premonitory warning to the subconsciousness of the readers, injecting avant l’heure a sedative which will help digest the abrupt fall into the abyss. The future minefield is already unveiled in the “clandestine rendezvous” in a New York flat, where scenery and human landscape seemed to anticipate both The Threepenny Opera (Bertolt Brecht, Kurt Weil, 1928), and Breakfast at Tiffany’s (Truman Capote, 1958), with a greater excess of alcohol and lasciviousness, at least in the 1974 film-version.
It is worthwhile just to stop for a while, forget the images, and enjoy the magic of a writer at the peak of his artistry, like a grand-master of the Renaissance, employing all type of brushes. Herewith one example of the panoramic brush, on first eyeing Gatsby, at a distance:
“The silhouette of a moving cat wavered across the moonlight, and turning my head to watch it, I saw that I was not alone – fifty feet away a figure had emerged from the shadow of my neighbor’s mansion and was standing with his hands in his pocket regarding the silver pepper of the stars. Something in his leisurely movements and the secure position of his feet upon the lawn suggested that it was Gatsby himself, come out to determine what share was his of our local havens.”5
On New York:
“I began to like New York, the racy, adventurous feel of it at night, and the satisfaction that the constant flicker of men and women and machines gives to the restless eye. I like to walk in Fifth Avenue and pick out romantic women from the crowd and imagine that in a few minutes I was going to enter into their lives, and no one would ever know or disapprove. Sometimes, in my mind, I followed them to their apartments on the corners of hidden streets, and they turned and smiled back at me before they faded through a door into warm darkness. At the enchanted metropolitan twilight I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, at felt it in others – poor young clerks who loitered in front of windows waiting until it was time for a solitary restaurant dinner – young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.6”
Gatsby, again, when enjoying the first tête-à-tête:
“He smiled understandably – much more than understandably. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced – or seemed to face – the whole eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favour. It understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.7
Now a microscopic paintbrush:
“Two shining arrogant eyes had established dominance over his face and gave him the appearance of always leaning aggressively forward.”8(about Tom Buchanan)
His mistress:
“...but there was an immediately perceptible vitality about her, as if the nerves of her body were continuously smouldering...”9
But there is also humour:
“I had a dog – at least I had him for a few days until he run away – and an old Dodge and a Finnish woman who made my bed and cooked breakfast and muttered Finnish wisdom to herself over the electric stove.10”
Idem,
while portraying
the human landscape of the “seedy rendezvous” in a New York
flat:
“His wife (Mr.
McKee’s) was shrill, languid, handsome, and horrible. She told me
with pride that her husband had photographed her a hundred and
twenty-seven times since they had been married.11”
Sheer
coincidence had it, a few weeks ago, that a French commenting on a
novel recently published made a
poignant comparison
with The Great Gatsby
12 :
“Il
faut lire ce récit comme un
roman à la Fitzgerald sur le désenchantement en smoking:
toutes ces fêtes luxueuses et ces châteaux hantés cachent
l’immense solitude d’un… »
The luxurious never-ending partying and the over-furnished palaces, haunted by past phantoms and future delusions, are there for one purpose: To hide the immense solitude. Thus le désenchantement en smoking. Yet there is more than a disenchanted portrait of a given epoch.
We have no intention of presenting herewith even a shortish summary of the still unfolding multi-layered ex post interpretations, of the never ending exegesis of one of the most relevant, and accomplished, novels the American literature has contributed, ever since. From Gatsby as the quintessential icon of “The American Dream”, of the relentless “American striver”, a song of praise of American “social-mobility”, notwithstanding the mud one had to traverse, to others who see it as a condemnation of frivolous, unrestrained, resource-wasting capitalism which could not pay the bill in 1929, perhaps even a premonition of “environmental destruction” speeded up by individual egoism. And tutti quanti...
The key question remains: is Gatsby a “romantic” human-being? That adjective being one of the most used and abused, purporting to signify parallelly contradictory definitions, it may well add further confusion, rather than clarifying his innermost raison d’être. A rather monetised “romantic” figure perhaps, as he believes that by displaying even more wealth and luxury than Daisy’s husband, he will re-gain her heart. A true “romantic” would abhor money, if necessary, to win love. Gatsby, and also Daisy, seem to believe that the greater the amount of cash you are sitting on, the purer the love. A rather slippery triumph, if that were to be – and very much fleeting.
It is in a dialogue with Nick Carraway when Gatsby’s expresses his adherence to a dangerous “romantic” conception of time – and life.
“I
wouldn’t ask too much from her,” I ventured. You cannot repeat
the past,”
“Can’t repeat the past?” he (Gatsby)
cried incredulously. “Why of course you
can!”
He looked around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here in the shadow of his house, just out of reach of his hand.”
“I am going to fix everything just the way it was before,” he said, nodding determinedly. “She’ll see.13”
Gatsby believes that a once “now” simply retreated for a while, disguised as “past”, and was waiting in some obscure corner, eager to reappear as a “second-time-same-now-as before”, just waiting for a signal to jump back into the scenery. As Nick Carraway states at the end, Gatsby “...paid a high price for living too long with a single dream.” He should’ve been preciser: living too long with the conviction that a dream of the past could become reality of the present. And such a delusion is simply lethal.
Whatever the discussion may still bring forward, Scott Fitzgerald shall not be forgotten. “I wish I’d written the...”
1 The Guardian, 25 June, 2021.
2 New York Times, Obituary 1940. Cf. Wikipedia.
3 Pg. 8. Gatsby’s dreams.
4 Pg. 66.
5 Pg. 27.
6 Pg. 63.
7 Pg. 54.
8 Pg. 13.
9 Pg. 31.
10 Pg. 9.
11 Pg. 36.
12 Frédéric Beigbeder, Le Figaro Magazine. 02.04.2021. Commenting on a novel by Dominique Bona.
13 pg. 117.
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