Suddenly, everywhere
you look, there are writings about F. Scott Fitzgerald, and most prominently, “The
Great Gatsby.”
My first brush
with “Gatsby” was in Grade Nine English class. It was the singular most important
novel of the curriculum.
A nonreader, I
confess I didn’t get it. I mean what the hubbub was about.
What it was in
there for a kid attending a small high school in a marine-based town that the
modern economy had forgot, where the scourge of New York style capitalism would
somehow speak to my heart, is lost on me.
“Old Yeller” would
be more like it.
Anyway, now, we’re
tipping into the 2020s, a hundred years after the “Gatsby” decade, and man are
we getting our fill.
In a recent London
Review of Books, a piece by Alex Harvey looks at “Paradise Lost,” a new
biography by David S. Brown published by Harvard U., and Scribner’s “‘I’d Die
for You’ and Other Lost Stories” by FSF himself.
Here’s a beauty
from Harvey review: “The dominant tone is [Fitzgerald’s] work becomes promise
unfulfilled, human waste, the inevitable slide toward ruin.”
Frank Rich in New
York magazine, quoting “Behold, America,” a new nonfiction book by Sarah Churchwell,
reminds us that the plutocratic villain in “Gatsby,” Tom Buchanan, is a white
supremacist prone to observations like “if we don’t look out the white race
will be … utterly submerged” and “It’s up to us who are the dominant race to
watch out or these other races will have control of things.”
Fitzgerald
delivers as the storyteller, the sensitive artist aware of the soulless horror
in which she finds herself.
Why “The Great
Gatsby” is the classic, we’re reminded in this treatise of human failure,
delusion not illusion. In Fitz’s case, a race to the grave. (He died in
Hollywood, suffered the fate of a barely attended funeral … in 1940 he wrote, Hollywood
“was a dump, in the human sense of the word. Everywhere there is … either
corruption or indifference.”) When life masks are seen by those with artistic sight,
the illusion of something richer, better, utopian is revealed for what it is: a
toxic lie.
Here is what could
be the path. Fitzgeraldian stories that in a dramatic telling reveal, describe
the cesspool that is our emotional capital – that we are doomed in Fitzgerald
to live hard, die young, leave a good-looking corpse; in O’Connor we feel a
monastic-style tone, alive to the wonder of human drama, adventure, excitement to
be one that comes from loves remembered, triumphs recalled, dreams to be fulfilled
as dreams, not through some VR stunt or video game prowess but through the
as-yet untapped potential of the human brain.
What does the
modern-day Gatsby reach for? What desperate rite do we expose: the retelling of
“The Great Gatsby” 100 years after? That Hollywood destroys thought, emotion,
the novel?
And Rich ends his
piece with this: Two years after “Gatsby” was published to disappointing
reviews and sales, budding real estate developer Fred Trump would be arrested
at a Ku Klux Klan riot, not far from Tom Buchanan’s home in Fitzgerald’s
fictional Long Island enclave or East Egg.
“Old Yeller,”
anyone?
Next: Running for Your Life: Hot Running: Don’t Knock It
Till You Try It
