Sometimes you pick up a classic,
and sometimes a classic picks up you. By the throat. And shakes vigorously. I
must have read Gatsby at least twice during my school career: definitely in middle school, and then again in high school, and both times, it was completely
went over my head. I had later on seen the Robert Redford/Mia Farrow and Toby
Stephens/Mina Sorvino movies, and it still didn’t do a lot for me, but I had
the vague sense that it was a book I ought to come back to someday.
So I finally made it down my Netflix queue to last year’s Baz
Luhrmann Leonardo DiCaprio/Carey Mulligan production, and having some past
experience with Luhrmann, I wasn’t expecting much more than some VERY lavish
party scenes, so I’m standing in front of the TV on a Saturday afternoon
folding laundry, and DiCaprio as Gatsby invades Nick’s house with a truly ridiculous
profusion of cascading orchids and is sitting there, looking fidgety and
miserable, and I GOT IT.
In the book, Fitzgerald writes:
He talked a lot about the past and I gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy. His life had been confused and disordered since then, but if he could once return to a certain starting place and go over it all slowly, he could find out what that thing was. . . . Chapter 6
That wish to go back to some earlier point and do things
over, that this time, somehow, you could make things turn out better – the idea
that the solution could be to recapture the past, as Gatsby insists, instead of
finding a way forward in the future because the present has become too tangled
and so many regrets lie behind – that’s something no one who has not crossed
the midpoint of their life can really relate to. Truly, classics are wasted on
the young, which is when, more likely than not, we are exposed to them, and
perhaps for the only time.
I started thinking about Gatsby and
Ahab, who both have fairly colorless first-person narrators somewhat
inexplicably attracted to following them, who both are dominated by an idée fixe so powerful that it leads to
their downfall, who both die floating passively in water. I think that last
part is not accidental: someone with an obsession strong enough to try to bend
life to their individual will is finally left swimming (borne up, but without personal
direction or effort) in the unconscious, greater forces that a person in
balance knows enough to respect. What I think it really, truly brilliant about Gatsby is that he actually achieves his
goal, only to find the many ways in which it is not and never could be what he
wanted, and it’s a slow, dismaying process of disillusionment that never quite takes
hold because he refuses to let it, but there’s that beautiful line “His count
of enchanted objects had diminished by one,” and you sense the defeat contained
within the victory. This leaves me to wonder what would have happened to Ahab
had he managed to kill the white whale – surely he doesn’t go on to become a
happy man (“OK, job well done!”). And I think this is where the Luhrmann
version really stands out, because the Stephens (2000) and Redford (1974)
movies read too much like a love story, but I think the psychological
brilliance of the text is that Daisy is not worth it: she is very pretty, and
used to being rich, but ultimately a weak reed, and essentially shallow.
The
other surprise for me on coming back to the book now after so many years was
Tom. He is an unlikeable character, but I think Fitzgerald’s depiction of him
is absolutely brilliant, and he so easily could have been a stock character. I
love his inarticulate appeals to pseudo-science (purity of races and other repulsive
nonsense) to bolster himself up. I love his total lack of self-awareness when
he begins pontificating about the sanctity of traditional “family life and
family institutions…” only to break off, as he usually does, because his ideas
are so limited. “Flushed with his impassioned gibberish he saw himself standing
alone on the last barrier of civilization,” Fitzgerald writes. I love his
essential inability to see the similarities between himself and Wilson,
although the narrator and reader can. It’s just a brilliant description of a
character with a shallow mind and robust, yet shallow, ego, who takes from life
without recognizing his common humanity.
In the
Luhrmann movie, Luhrmann and his coauthor, Craig Pierce, take the Chapter 7
climax scene farther, and while it is usually a very iffy idea to try to improve
on an original text, they do it: it’s so absolutely on target that it feels as
inevitable and satisfying as watching a basketball swish through the net at end
of a successful three-point shot. All through the novel, you’ve been building
to this head-to-head conflict between Gatsby, the man of subtlety and
deception, and Tom, the unconscious, self-righteous brick, and you finally get
it in the scene in the hotel, but Fitzgerald leaves it to fizzle out with Tom
making vague accusations that Gatsby not only made his fabulous wealth bootlegging,
but is associated with shady people and that he’s “got something on now” that
is even worse, although we never learn what that is. This apparently blows
Gatsby’s cool, and Fitzgerald describes him in a rather cumbersome, bizarre way
that finally concludes he looked “as if he had killed a man.” (Guilty? Enraged?
I still can’t figure this one out.) Daisy is described as withdrawing further
and further into herself, and it is not clear whether this is because she is
afraid of what has been revealed, or because Gatsby has lost his polished
luster. Possibly both.
In the Luhrmann screenplay the
scene keeps going, with Tom sneering at Gatsby for his low birth and his
essential inability to ever be like one of them, which builds logically on his quack
“master race” theories and you can see it absolutely gets under Gatsby’s skin
in a way the mere allusions to his shady dealings would not, because Gatsby has
been trying to remake himself into “one of them” and it gets at his creeping
sense of failure. He has lied and bought his way into his position and
maintains it only at a cost that seems to be taking its toll on him throughout
the story. And you see Gatsby finally really lose it: and instead of “looking
like he killed a man”, DiCaprio actually punches him in the face, and then you
know the jig is up. He has publicly, irretrievably lost his suave detachment (showing
that the accusations hit home) and revealed himself as a violent thug, not the
Oxford man of Queensbury rules. It is
not just Daisy who turns away, but Nick, and Jordan, and to some extent the
audience: the fiction of millionaire, debonair Gatsby can no longer be credibly
maintained, even though he tries to patch it back together.
I think the other genius stroke in
Luhrmann’s film is the casting of Indian Bollywood star Amitabh Bachchan as
Meyer Wolfshiem. He is suitably exotic, and creepy, exuding a feeling of mysterious
wealth to capture the part, which Fitzgerald wrote as a shameless “stock”
Jewish character. The unconscious anti-Semitism embedded in the text reminded
me “House of Mirth”, but at least there Wharton was able to rise above it.
Minus points for Fitzgerald on this one. I also like the speakeasy setting in which Wolfshiem first appears, with the chorus girls who fascinate Tom, even though he is a racist - what we deny has a way of coming out twisted.
One of the things that continues to
puzzle me about Gatsby is why the narrator (and reader) should find him any
different than the other people, like Tom and Daisy and Jordan, that the book
finally comes to reject:
They were careless people…they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made. . . . Chapter 9.
Gatsby is equally selfish (a user of other people, e.g. his
cultivation of Nick as a personal “friend” for his connection to Daisy), but I
suppose you might distinguish him by saying at
least his selfishness and using people for his own ends has someone else
(Daisy) as its goal, and he is willing to sacrifice himself for her, and that,
perhaps, make him more admirable. I think a lot of the change in tone – where
Gatsby goes from being a rich playboy who throws parties to an almost Christ-like
figure (despised, rejected, a man of sorrows, as Messiah goes), is actually due to the deep misanthropy buried in
the book. Fitzgerald goes out of his way to describe the selfishness of the party goers and contrasts the crowds who came for the fun
with the solitary funeral no one wants to attend. There is another, crueler,
better, scene in Chapter 6 in which Tom and two of his acquaintances impose
themselves on Gatsby’s hospitality and barely conceal their disinterest in
their host. It is a particularly good scene because Gatsby falls for it and is
surprised and disappointed when they leave him behind, and this makes him more
pathetic and more human than the aloof rich man who doesn’t go to his own parties
that we are introduced to in the beginning. Nick, on Gatsby’s behalf, tries to
get one, any one, of Gatsby’s previous “friends” to attend the funeral, but he
has been abandoned, and this draws Nick, and the reader, I think, closer to him
retrospectively. BUT. I also think Fitzgerald leaves a few things out: for
instance, Jay’s father does attend (that counts as one person, doesn’t it?),
and moreover, this is a man whom Gatsby rejected. He has acted throughout in an
obsessive, single-minded way that turned people (Nick, Jordan), into
instruments for his own ends. He has built a life based on secrets, which
necessitates keeping people at a distance, and engaged in purely mercenary
business dealings for the sake of amassing his fortune to win Daisy. I don’t
know, with the inclusion of Jay’s father, whether Fitzgerald has any awareness of
Gatsby’s own role in creating a loveless, disconnected life for himself, but I
tend to read the book as “not”: I think Fitzgerald put too much of his own
personal sorrow and contempt for the humanity he associated with and got
wrapped up in it. I am reminded, in contrast, by that extraordinary scene in Christmas Carol which always struck me
as a child, in which Marley shows Scrooge the ghosts outside his window:
Many had been personally known to Scrooge in their lives. He had been quite familiar with one old ghost, in a white waistcoat, with a monstrous iron safe attached to its ankle, who cried piteously at being unable to assist a wretched woman with an infant, whom it saw below, upon a doorstep- The misery with them all was, clearly, that they sought to interfere, for good, in human matters, and had lost the power for ever.
Marley says (a little earlier, but in the same vein):
'Oh! captive, bound, and double-ironed… Not to know that any Christian spirit working kindly in its little sphere, whatever it may be, will find its mortal life too short for its vast means of usefulness! Not to know that no space of regret can make amends for one life's opportunity misused! Yet such was I! Oh! such was I!''But you were always a good man of business, Jacob,' faltered Scrooge, who now began to apply this to himself.'Business!' cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. 'Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!'
It is hard to feel too deeply the pathos of Gatsby’s
alienation from this perspective. It is, nonetheless, a tremendous book,
beautifully written, and worth the read as an adult, if you have not already
gone back to pick it up again.
