E. M. FORSTER, A ROOM WITH A VIEW: “...TOO MUCH BEETHOVEN...”

 

E. M. FORSTER, A ROOM WITH A VIEW: “...TOO MUCH BEETHOVEN...”

The quotation in the title does figure as such in the text of the novel (1908) written by Edward Morgan Forster (*1879-†1970)¹, but it is pronounced by the clergyman Mr. Beebe (Simon Callow) in a somewhat different scene of the film-version (1985), directed by James Ivory (*1928), screenplay written by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (*1927-†2013)². It is one of the many jewels contained in the script, which won the authoress several awards‒and a never-diminishing admiration ever since. Forster was a Beethovenian English-man, a resolute and almost vociferous one, whom not even the First World War would assuage.

Ruth Prawe Jhabvalka rightly understood the scene in the Bertolini pension centred on a piano and the German composer, but made it shorter and tighter, pinpointing at the turbulences agitating the heart of the young Lucy Honeychurch (Helena Bonham-Carter, 1985). The expression would then be turned “head-down” in another scene, much later in the novel, already back in England, where we find the phrase:

“and ‘too much Schumann’ was not the remark that Mr. Beebe had passed to himself when she returned.” ³

It was at a dinner-party in London organised by her would-be-husband, Cecil Vynes (Daniel Day-Lewis), mainly to show-off his future to be enslaved oeuvre d’art, the would-be-Mrs. Lucy Vynes, to his upper-class family and acquaintances. She plays first Schumann, he then asks her to play Beethoven, but she refuses, and plays Schumann again. In the film it is Franz Schubert, Piano Sonata No. 4 in A minor, Op. 164, D 537.

E. F. Forster refused sternly to let his opus be filmed, despite substantial offers from Hollywood, already in 1946. That refusal was inherited by the trustees of his legacy to the Cambridge University, until they were seduced by the proposal by James Ivory (director) and Ismail Merchant (producer). We cannot conjecture as to how Forster would have reacted by confronting the first film-version of his novel, aware that the richness and melodiousness of language, the many layers of substratum in the narrative, pose a tremendous challenge to film-makers, at least to those who tremble at the possibility of debasing the original source.

Yet there are perhaps few other examples of such a remarkable interaction between literary-text and screen-translation, both in terms of what the “screen” adds, but also in terms of what the “screen” does not import. The latter, as we want to discuss in this contribution, being also very much relevant.

Beethoven will re-appear in the next novel by Foster, “Howard’s End”, in particular his 5^th symphony, which acts as the décor of a chance but soon to become consequential-meeting of the Schlegel sisters with a young man of a “lower” social extraction. English obsession with class distinctions, and distances, remained a recurrent subject in almost all the novels by Forster. It is there, when the narrator decorticates the soul-turbulences provoked by the music of Beethoven on men and women alike, that he wrote one of the most famous, and relevant, accolades in the history of world-art:

“It will be generally admitted that Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is the most sublime noise that has ever penetrated into the ear of man.”⁴

     

Yet A room with a view is not a novel about Beethoven’s Geist in Italy, albeit it hangs like an overcast sky, a tedesco italianato. It is rather about an English mademoiselle of the “upper-middle-class” (on the threshold between a teenager and a young-woman, corporeally and spiritually) who accompanied by a chaperon (Maggie Smith), her older, spinster cousin, undertakes a tour of Italy. Florence and Rome are the highlights, then a must for any English citizen aspiring to be a connoisseur of the pillars of European civilization, and not a parvenu to be snubbed in a sophisticated soirée.

In the Pensione in Florence they get to know some “queerest, oddest”⁵ tourists, among them Emerson-father and Emerson-son, lower in the social-ladder, impertinent and tainted by an iconoclast radicalism, but very much alive and amiable. There is also a flamboyant romance-writer, Ms Lavish (Judy Dench), who relish to observe her surroundings like an entomologist. Plus two elder spinster sisters, the most amusing Ms and Ms Allan.

 

    Thus a voyage of initiation to that other galaxy, the cradle of the Western world, the country of the Renaissance, of sunny life. Of passionate and sensual love, seemingly camouflaged in late-Victorian England, perhaps still in early Edwardian-England, whenever it happened to be present. That “Southern”, “Catholic”, “epidermic”, “Mediterranean” combustion of emotions and physical desires was–at that time–supposed to be observed by the Lutheran Anglo-Saxons from a given distance, like the sighting of an exotic animal. There are those, however, who came much closer. And were engulfed by flames.

One of them was Miss Lucy Honeychurch, the other the young George Emerson, whom Italy provided the honey, the light and the perfume to water-down the gloomy cogitations of Friedrich Nietzsche, Arthur Schopenhauer et al. Miss Honeychurch is engulfed by the discovery of healthy, spontaneous passion, but only for some minutes, perhaps some hours. Then she returns to her English, Anglican, cool, self-controlled upbringing, refusing to transform an unsolicited (yet perhaps desired) kiss on a violets-swamped hill (“azure foam”) in Tuscany into the possibility of a stable, tranquil married life, comme il faut, back in London.

Not quite a Bildungsroman, as the novel captures only a year of the life of Miss Honeychurch, though not unblemished by the elegant yet unobtrusive clouds of that literary genre, appearing over the horizon-line from time to time. A voyage-novel, indeed, the first part, plus a graciously constructed social-comedy, at times refreshingly hilarious.

It does not take long for Miss Honeychurch to fall under the spell of the country:

“Then the pernicious charm of Italy worked on her, and, instead of acquiring information, she began to be happy.”⁶

Miss Honeychurch is eager to find some emotional pied-à-terre which should, if possible, allow her to discover the compass for a joyous social life, outside. If not, at least to protect her from the cyclical and unpredictable waves in real life.

“It so happened that Lucy, who found daily life rather chaotic, entered a more solid world when she opened the piano”.⁷

Mr. Beebe had already met her in England, in Tunbridge Wells ”at one of those entertainments where the upper class entertains the lower...”⁸, whose one promised item was “Miss Honeychurch. Piano. Beethoven”.

“…when his composure was disturbed by the opening bars of Opus 111 (Note of this author: Beethoven’s last piano sonata, No. 32),...” The Reverend Mr. Beebe was stirred up, “...things were going extraordinarily; in the chords that herald the conclusion he heard the hammer-strokes of victory...” Yet the vicar then tells Mr. Beebe:

“I do not consider her choice of a piece happy. Beethoven is usually so simple and direct in his appeal that it is sheer perversity to choose a thing like that, which, if anything, disturbs.” ⁹

Re-encountering Miss Honerychurch by chance in Florence, who also learnt that Mr. Beebe is to become “their vicar” in the parish enclosing Window Corner, the residence of the Honeychurch family, he now reassess her, again at the piano. He says to her what he expressed to the other vicar, at that entertainment in Turnbridge Wells:

“If Miss Honeychurch ever takes to live as she plays, it will be very exciting–both for us and for her.”¹⁰

There is no mention in the text of which piece of Beethoven was interpreted with so much heart in the Pensione. In the film it is the Piano Sonata No. 21 in C Major, Op. 53, „Waldstein“, 2nd movement: Introduzione: Adagio molto.

Then Lucy mentions that her mother harbours some misgiving about her being so involved with the piano, “Music‒”, said Lucy, as if attempting some generality. She could not complete it...”¹¹

The screen-writer re-translated that particular scene into:

“Mother does not like me playing Beethoven. She said I am always peevish, afterwards.”¹² And this is, again, a marvellous trouvaille.

A very much English outing to the countryside near Florence follows, to which the English chaplain in that city is invited, to accompany the Emersons, Miss Honeychurch, Ms Bartlett, Ms Lavish and Mr. Beebe. No one suspects that such an inoffensive and unpretentious excursion will ignite the passion of one young-man and one young-woman, sculpturing the backbone – in narrative terms – of the whole novel:

“It was PHAETHON who drove them to Fiesole that memorable day, a youth all irresponsibility and fire, recklessly urging his master’s horses up the stony hill. Mr Beebe recognised him at once. Neither the Ages of Faith nor the Age of Doubt had touched him; he was Phaethon in Tuscany driving a cab. And it was Persephone whom he asked leave to pick up on the way, saying that she was his sister – Persephone, tall and slender and pale, returning with the spring to her mother’s cottage, and still shading her eyes from the unaccustomed light.”¹³

 

Yet Mr. Eager does not take long to discover that the caresses between the driver and his impromptu Persephone are far from being just filial. He demands for the woman to descend, and go back alone, to the vain opposition of Mr. Emerson father, and of the females, under the ironic eyes of Mr. Beebe.

    

The film cannot possibly capture all the nuances and the metaphors of the text, as it is precisely the driver, the dispossessed Phaethon, who is going to set the whole earth ablaze, as it almost happened to the son of Zeus, by taking revenge, and leading Miss Honeychurch on the hill not to the clergymen, but to the young George Emerson. 

  

  Another sumptuous contribution of screenwriter and film-director follows. The embrace of the young Emerson with Miss Lucy having been frostily interrupted by the chaperon, the young lady is ushered away with the rest of the group, while George Emerson decides to remain, and then go back alone. There is an old Italian woman in the background, who has no doubt sensed that “something” was in the air, that a sort of “romance” had erupted. 

 

She then says in Italian to George Emerson: “Come into my house, come, I will offer you a glass of wine...”

I believe now that E. M. Forster would have been quite pleased with those congenial and delightful “grafts”.

There is humour (at times sublime), of course, combined - as Malcolm Bradbury pointed out – with a razor-sharp portrayal of the supercilious, social-class obsessed persons, like the spectacles-wearing, bookish, mannered Cecil Vyse. Forster intrudes, softly and elegantly, as the narrator-author, bringing a fresco, just escaped from the Sistine Chapel (Sacellum Sixtinum), displaying, once more, his skills as high-carat writer.

“Cecil enters.

Appearing thus late in the story, Cecil must be at once described. He was medieval. Like a Gothic statue. Tall and refined, with shoulders that seem braced square by an effort of the will, and a head that was tilted a little higher than the usual level of vision, he resembled those fastidious saints who guard the portal of a French cathedral. Well-educated, well-endowed, and not deficient physically, he remained in the will of a certain devil whom the modern world knows as self-consciousness, and whom the medieval, with dimmer vision, worshipped as asceticism. A Gothic statues implies celibacy, just as a Greek statue implies fruition, and perhaps this was what Mr. Beebe meant. And Freddy, who ignored history and art, perhaps meant the same when he failed to imagine Cecil wearing another fellow’s cap.”¹⁴

Cecil would meet Lucy in Rome, to where her cousin took her, to escape from the emotionally charged atmosphere in Florence, and to keep Mr. George Emerson at bay.

“He (Cecil) had known Lucy for several years, but only as a commonplace girl who happened to be musical...” “...But Italy worked some marvel in her. It gave her light, and – which he held more precious -it gave her shadow. Soon he detected in her a wonderful reticence. She was like a woman of Leonardo da Vinci, whom we love not so much for herself as for the things that she will not tell us. The things are assuredly not of this life: no woman of Leonardo’s could have anything so vulgar as a “story”. She did develop most wonderfully day by day.”¹⁵

Cecil is, of course, unaware that the “not-to-be-told-thing” is the seed planted on a hill near Florence, some days before. And, albeit repressed for those curious in the outside world, it keeps germinating and flowering inside. Miss Honeychurch had become a woman with a Beethovenian flame embracing life, but only she, Mr. George Emerson, and perhaps The Reverend Mr. Beebe, know it. 

 

  
 

One of the most successful symbiosis between text and screen takes place around the “Sacred Lake”, near Windy Corner. “The Sacred Lake” does bring a resonance of the “Walden Pond” of Henry David Thoreau (*1817-†1862), one of whose proverbs (”Mistrust all enterprises that requires new clothes”) is painted on the cornice of a wardrobe in the rented-house of the Emersons, which was found, thanks to the unwise intervention of Cecil Vynes, not far away from the abode of Mrs. Honeychurch. The family-name “Emerson” may well have been a fortuitous choice of the author, though perhaps not, as the American essayist and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson (*1803-†1881) was a close friend of Thoreau. But Forster mentions also Wagner, The Twilight of the Gods, as he describes the return to childhood of George Emerson, the brother of Miss Honeychurch, and Mr. Beebe, who decided to take a bath and behave like riotous children.

It cannot be denied that the screen-play had “sweetened” up the original text, softening sharp-edges, leaving aside rougher and more duplicitous roles and comments. Mr. Beebe says in the film, when first visiting the new residence of the Emersons, “...George reads German...” In the text the talk is about Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche¹⁶, a more incisive description of the anti-religious, libertarians avenues explored by that family. Hence precisely the serious accusations aimed at Mr. Emerson father, not detailed in the film, as the English chaplain in Florence, Mr. Eager, accuses him of having “murdered” (emotionally) his own wife, by procrastinating on the suitable and timely baptism of their son (George).

And The Reverend Mr, Beebe, magnificently interpreted in the film as a bon-vivant, amiable, tolerant vicar, an ever-smiling Seelsorger (in German, “the-caretaker-of-the-soul”) does have in the text a multi-layered personality, including a caustic and even cynical mood, who rejoices at the possibility of observing spinster women trying to adjust whatever pieces life has still provided them with. He has his humoured-waspishness, amusing himself by watching the pirouettes of those taking part in the comédie humaine. Who also does not mention to the Pensione’s group his own naughty experience with Italian women, as when a lady intrudes without previous communication into the bathroom, to notice Mr. Beebe laying naked in the bathtub. She swiftly resolved the embarrassing faux pas by saying: “Fa niente. Sono vechia...” (It does not matter, I am an old woman…).

Nor is it mentioned in the film that Miss Lucy bought a postcard, early in the novel, in the Piazza not far away from Gli Uffizi, which her cousin-chaperon urged to get rid of, as soon as possible. It was The Birth of Venus by Botticelli.

Not to be forgotten: This is a novel about Britons in Italy, but not quite a novel about Britons interacting with Italians. The contacts are sporadic, and the expected distance between “Northerners” and “Southerners” is kept.

Yet in spite of all the English idiosyncrasies one might be tempted to underline, we have in our hands one of the sunniest, funniest, as well as most uplifting, novels produced by the English literature in the first decades of the 20^th century.

It leaves you swimming in a subtly perfumed cotton-sea of joie de vivre, as if La Primavera of Sandro Botticelli had become the “Sacred Lake” invoked in the novel.

As stated by Malcolm Bradbury in the introduction to Room with a View:

“E.M. Forster is one of the wisest and the warmest, one of the gentlest and yet one of the most sharp-edged modern English writers.”¹⁷

The key question: Why did Forster select the Sonata Opus 111 of Beethoven as the secluded, smooth “lighthouse” of the novel? It is considered one of the most difficult, enigmatic, polyvalent sonatas of the German composer. An encyclopaedic discussion has been going (and still is…) since the early 19^th century, encompassing contradictory interpretations, and there are even furious skirmishes concerning how its piano interpretation has changed. One of Beethoven’s contributions to world-culture is that of having transformed the “symphony” into an instrument of philosophical expression. The same can be said of the late Sonatas. Opus 111 has been labelled as a musical crystallization of the “crisis of life”, a precursor of “French symbolism”, passing trough “excessive scientificism”, “mislead heroism”, “exuberant German metaphysics”, and tutti quanti.

We dare to suggest that Forster used the Opus 111, as interpreted by Miss Honeychurch, to suggest that the soul of the young lady was bursting, that she was more matured than what her look transpired, longing for a meaning to give to life – and hungry for love. She will also link her “secret” Beethoven to that kiss on a hill in Tuscany, and to the “Sacred Lake” in England. That is why she refuses to play Beethoven at that soirée in the London house of her prospective husband, insisting on, and repeating, Robert Schumann.

Beethoven is to be given, out of her soul, only to the true beloved. But she realises that late – albeit not too late.

“Too much Beethoven?” Yes, perhaps a little bit “too much”, but not really that much. If an overdose were to have been found enacted, lethal it was most certainly not. Just the right amount, to let life blossom inside soul and body.

In an epilogue written much later, in 1950, which does appear in some of the editions of the novel, but not in others, Forster insisted on his Beethovenian leitmotif. Emerson father would die during the First World War, shortly after having a confrontation with the police, which was to arrest Mrs. Lucy because she was playing Beethoven. Mr. Vynes, now relocated as a military officer in Egypt, would succeed in convincing a hostess to play the Moonlight Sonata, arguing that the composer, was, in fact, “a Belgian” (Flemish).

Not to be forgotten: The flamboyant romance-writer carries the first-name Eleanor. Her female heroine in the novel, capturing the seconds of passion between Miss Lucy and Mr. George is called “Leonora”¹⁸. It might have to do with “Leonore”, the initial name Beethoven gave to his only opera, finally to see the light of the world with the name “Fidelio”. An Italian first name which comes from the Latin “fidelis”, the “faithful one”.

Berlin, 19.12.2021.

1E.M. Forster, “A room with a view”, Penguin Classics, 2000, p. 36.

2There is another film version, 2007,directed by Nicholas Renton, which we are yet to see.

3P. 113.

4Forster, Howard‘s End, Penguin Classics, 2000, p. 26.

5The Reverend Mr. Beebe in the 1985 film-version.

6P. 19.

7P. 28

8P. 29.

9P. 29.

10P. 29.

11P. 30.

1200:13:24 to 13:27.

13P. 54.

14P. 81.

15P. 83. Our underlying.

16P. 116.

17…, p. vii.

18P. 142.

F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, THE GREAT GATSBY: “I WISH I’D WRITTEN THE GREAT GATSBY. DOESN’T EVERYONE?”

 

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 20^th 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.