Do you remember before keys turned in the locks
When life was a close-up and not an occasional letter,
That I hated to swim naked from the rocks
While you liked absolutely nothing better?…
Growing up in the first half of the 20th century, generations of bookish young Americans were directly affected by two novels: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) and Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926). Plucky young women wanted to live like Brett Ashley, Hemingway’s hard-drinking heartthrob; and already hard-drinking young men embraced the romantic vision of Jimmy Gatz, who had transformed himself into the great Gatsby.
In our day, being unable to afford Champagne or even whiskey, that meant smoking Lucky Strikes with their red bull’s-eye package showing through the pockets of our white shirts, pitchers of beer on the table, and dancing the Charleston to the dizzying rhythms of “Sweet Georgia Brown” and “Tiger Rag” pounded out by The Firehouse Five Plus Two. When we got tired we’d sit down, light up, and tell our date that, she might not believe this, but someday we were going to go to Paris.
Gatsby’s (and Fitzgerald’s) ability to hope is still part of our national character, although it’s getting pretty strained. In Beautiful Ruins (2012) — a wonderful novel by Jess Walter — a young Italian, Pasquale, says he can “spot an American anywhere by that quality — that stubborn belief in possibility” that Americans (unlike Italians) possess. The Great Gatsby’s genius lies in its ability to fuse the hopefulness of our competitive society (the green light) with an equal understanding of the decadence and cruelty beneath it — the Valley of Ashes. The 1 percent cavorting in Gatsby’s mansion are disdainful of the 47 percent supporting them — have you ever heard such a thing? As that Valley continues to widen, stretching the distance between rich and poor, Fitzgerald’s novel speaks to us even more sharply today.
I think Hemingway has lost some of his shine, the stoic macho man taking hits from the rise of feminism and the fall of the Marlboro/NRA/John Wayne-soldier man (some of these don’t know they’ve fallen). The more complicated protagonists of John Le Carré and Stieg Larsson have moved in, Jake and Brett being replaced by the likes of George Smiley and Lisbeth Salander (the girl with the dragon tattoo).
But the rise and fall of Jay Gatsby, as told through the wondering eyes of Nick Carraway, has retained a timely hold on the American imagination (“Everybody I knew was in the bond business,” says Nick); and now another megamovie is pumping up sales of Fitzgerald’s heartbreaking novel. The movie’s worth seeing for itself, though it’s not, despite Leonardo DiCaprio’s terrific performance as the main character, The Great Gatsby.
Fitzgerald was a delicate stylist who stayed within the margins of realism. Director Baz Luhrmann, however, swings the story into fairy tale mode, its cutout characters talking with Mamet-like repetition, fireworks and Jay-Z’s jarring music setting the tone for the parties, both large and small. It does suggest the violent underside of capitalism, with its fixers, gangsters and molls, watched over by the malevolent billboard advertising Dr. T. J. Eckleburg’s eyeglasses; and it ends, touchingly, with a flashback of Gatsby gazing at the green light from Daisy’s dock across the water.
So far, the only successful production of Fitzgerald’s masterpiece is the now-touring Gatz, the 6+-hour play, where the actors read and act the book out, word for word, like a poem. Luhrmann has reimagined the novel as a hip-hop fairy tale. That’s fine, but fairy tales are simplifications aimed at children, and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby is a complex and tender tragedy for adults.
“You can’t repeat the past.”
…And, though the end was desolate and unkind:
To turn the calendar at June and find December
On the next leaf: still, stupid-got with grief, I find
These are the only quarrels that I can remember.
—both quotes from “Lamp in the Window,” by F. Scott Fitzgerald (published in The New Yorker, 1935)
This article appears in May 30 – Jun 5, 2013.