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There are any number of ways to drill our world for core samples. Tracking every Twitter reference to “Gatsby” is one. Odd but occasionally fascinating. Have I mentioned my (possibly crackpot) Gatsby-wasn’t-rich theory lately?

There are any number of ways to drill our world for core samples. Tracking every Twitter reference to “Gatsby” is one. Odd but occasionally fascinating.

Have I mentioned my (possibly crackpot) Gatsby-wasn’t-rich theory lately?

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And in Paris, I read so many great ones. Pitch Dark by Renata Adler, which I found in the $3 bin outside Shakespeare & Co. The copy was disintegrating, so I paper-clipped the pages together and read them while sitting on the bench outside the store. The Children’s Hospital**** by Chris Adrian (oh, and I read A Better Angel****** and The Great Night this year, too), which was probably my favorite reading experience. I spent thirty minutes or so every morning reading it, before the city woke up, sitting on the Seine and eating a pain au chocolat. There are probably still crumbs in my copy. I also read The Great Gatsby and A Moveable Feast and reread Wuthering Heights.

- from a year-in-reading post by Kelsey Ford, who had me at pain au chocolat.

And Paris.

And Gatsby.

(this post was reblogged from kelsfjord)

just in case anybody forgot F. Scott Fitzgerald was funny …

From The Beautiful and Damned:

His wife was easier. After fifteen years of incessant guerilla warfare he had conquered her—it was a war of muddled optimism against organized dullness, and something in the number of “yes’s” with which he could poison a conversation had won him the victory.

“Yes-yes-yes-yes-yes,” he would say, “yes-yes-yes-yes-yes. Let me see. That was the summer of—let me see—ninety-one or ninety-two— Yes-yes-yes-yes——”

Fifteen years of yes’s had beaten Mrs. Gilbert. Fifteen further years of that incessant unaffirmative affirmative, accompanied by the perpetual flicking of ash-mushrooms from thirty-two thousand cigars, had broken her.

If David and I ever grab a beer someday, we’ll probably stick with what’s worked and spend hours talking about The Great Gatsby in 140-character bursts. My last tweet — the one that shows up at the top here — really demands some elaboration. Here’s what I noticed. Jay Gatsby, practically by definition, is rich. Just ask the back cover of the Scribner paperback edition. The novel is “the story of the fabulously wealthy Jay Gatsby …” But recently, in my compulsive over-reading of the book, I noticed a detail in the first chapter that made me doubt Gatsby’s wealth. Gatsby is Nick’s next-door neigbor, but Nick’s house is “squeezed between two huge places that rented for twelve or fifteen thousand a season.” Maybe I’m being too literal, but “rented for twelve or fifteen thousand a season” makes me think that Gatsby’s mansion is not so much Gatsby’s mansion as a rented mansion where Gatsby is living. The rented mansion, Gatsby’s gaudy apparent wealth, and his majestic parties prove to be moth-to-flame irresistible to people of indisputable wealth. And what happens in the swirl of the parties? I was immediately struck by the number of young Englishmen dotted about; all well dressed, all looking a little hungry, and all talking in low, earnest voices to solid and prosperous Americans. I was sure that they were selling something: bonds or insurance or automobiles. They were at least agonizingly aware of the easy money in the vicinity and convinced that it was theirs for a few words in the right key. The final chapter only feeds my possibly delusional hunch that Gatsby is merely posing as a rich guy. Meyer Wolfsheim — previously described as “a gambler,” “the man who fixed the World’s Series back in 1919,” and such a “smart man” that “they can’t get him, old sport” — talks with Nick about Gatsby: “Did you start him in business?” I inquired. “Start him! I made him.” “Oh.” “I raised him up out of nothing, right out of the gutter. I saw right away he was a fine-appearing, gentlemanly young man, and when he told me he was at Oggsford I knew I could use him good. I got him to join up in the American Legion … Again, when this above-the-law gambler found out Gatsby had studied at “Oggsford” (aka Oxford), he calculated that he could take this “fine-appearing, gentlemanly young man” and “use him good.” I realize my case here 1) is entirely circumstantial; 2) depends on scrutinizing an imaginary world as if it were real. I don’t care. It’s fun to think about. (Note: I don’t have The Great Gatsby in front of me. The passages quoted here come from the University of Adelaide Library’s electronic edition of the novel. I will amend this post if it turns out that any of the wording, punctuation, etc. is wrong. What I know is this: I went looking for these specific passages just now and the passages were exactly as I remembered them, so my strong hunch is that they’re accurate. Still, caveat lector and all that.)

If David and I ever grab a beer someday, we’ll probably stick with what’s worked and spend hours talking about The Great Gatsby in 140-character bursts.

My last tweet — the one that shows up at the top here — really demands some elaboration. Here’s what I noticed. Jay Gatsby, practically by definition, is rich. Just ask the back cover of the Scribner paperback edition. The novel is “the story of the fabulously wealthy Jay Gatsby …”

But recently, in my compulsive over-reading of the book, I noticed a detail in the first chapter that made me doubt Gatsby’s wealth. Gatsby is Nick’s next-door neigbor, but Nick’s house is “squeezed between two huge places that rented for twelve or fifteen thousand a season.”

Maybe I’m being too literal, but “rented for twelve or fifteen thousand a season” makes me think that Gatsby’s mansion is not so much Gatsby’s mansion as a rented mansion where Gatsby is living. The rented mansion, Gatsby’s gaudy apparent wealth, and his majestic parties prove to be moth-to-flame irresistible to people of indisputable wealth. And what happens in the swirl of the parties?

I was immediately struck by the number of young Englishmen dotted about; all well dressed, all looking a little hungry, and all talking in low, earnest voices to solid and prosperous Americans. I was sure that they were selling something: bonds or insurance or automobiles. They were at least agonizingly aware of the easy money in the vicinity and convinced that it was theirs for a few words in the right key.

The final chapter only feeds my possibly delusional hunch that Gatsby is merely posing as a rich guy. Meyer Wolfsheim — previously described as “a gambler,” “the man who fixed the World’s Series back in 1919,” and such a “smart man” that “they can’t get him, old sport” — talks with Nick about Gatsby:

“Did you start him in business?” I inquired.

“Start him! I made him.”

“Oh.”

“I raised him up out of nothing, right out of the gutter. I saw right away he was a fine-appearing, gentlemanly young man, and when he told me he was at Oggsford I knew I could use him good. I got him to join up in the American Legion …

Again, when this above-the-law gambler found out Gatsby had studied at “Oggsford” (aka Oxford), he calculated that he could take this “fine-appearing, gentlemanly young man” and “use him good.”

I realize my case here 1) is entirely circumstantial; 2) depends on scrutinizing an imaginary world as if it were real. I don’t care. It’s fun to think about.

(Note: I don’t have The Great Gatsby in front of me. The passages quoted here come from the University of Adelaide Library’s electronic edition of the novel. I will amend this post if it turns out that any of the wording, punctuation, etc. is wrong. What I know is this: I went looking for these specific passages just now and the passages were exactly as I remembered them, so my strong hunch is that they’re accurate. Still, caveat lector and all that.)

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When Fitzgerald saw the article, he was so miserable that, as he reported to Ober, he swallowed an overdose of morphine, which he vomited up. The newspaper article was picked up by Time, and Fitzgerald was concerned about preventing Scottie from seeing it at school. Surprisingly, he turned to Hemingway for support, asking him to respond to Mok. Hemingway replied from Montana that he had not seen the article but was ready to help. Fitzgerald acknowledged his offer: WIRED UNDER IMPRESSION THAT YOU WERE IN NEW YORK NOTHING CAN BE DONE AT LONG RANGE AND ON COOLER CONSIDERATION SEEMS NOTHING TO BE DONE ANYHOW THANKS BEST ALWAYS SCOTT.

- from Matthew J. Bruccoli’s Some sort of epic grandeur: the life of F. Scott Fitzgerald

The newspaper article mentioned in the passage was Michel Mok’s “The Other Side of Paradise, Scott Fitzgerald, 40, Engulfed in Despair” from the 9/25/1936 New York Post. An edited version is here. (via squeela)

Now, some will argue that I should shrug off the if-you-don’t-want-this-hunk-of-manhood-then-you-must-be-a-lesbian logic of this comeback. But Dr. Beckerman is a board-certified jokestetrician. So I’m taking his diagnosis seriously, and I’ve decided to dedicate myself to raising awareness of this troubling condition. You — or someone you love — might have no sense of humor if: 1) You get pissed off that a writer is out there making a buck by doing stuff like joking about F. Scott Fitzgerald drinking himself to death at 44. 2) Um, I’m not actually sure what my other symptoms are. What if not knowing my other symptoms is a symptom?  Shit!!!! You’ll have to deduce the other symptoms yourself. Here’s the post that led to my diagnosis.

Now, some will argue that I should shrug off the if-you-don’t-want-this-hunk-of-manhood-then-you-must-be-a-lesbian logic of this comeback. But Dr. Beckerman is a board-certified jokestetrician. So I’m taking his diagnosis seriously, and I’ve decided to dedicate myself to raising awareness of this troubling condition. You — or someone you love — might have no sense of humor if:

1) You get pissed off that a writer is out there making a buck by doing stuff like joking about F. Scott Fitzgerald drinking himself to death at 44.

2) Um, I’m not actually sure what my other symptoms are. What if not knowing my other symptoms is a symptom?  Shit!!!! You’ll have to deduce the other symptoms yourself. Here’s the post that led to my diagnosis.

“Joke people and you make enemies.”

It’s rare that I want to punch someone. Today, briefly, I wanted to punch Marty Beckerman. I don’t even know Marty Beckerman. The little I knew about Marty Beckerman — the thing that made me want to punch him — was this passage from his new book, which showed up on Andrew Sullivan’s blog:

The only time Hemingway cried over alcohol: When Congress made it illegal during Prohibition. But he pulled himself together, as a man does always, and traveled to Paris, as a man does seldom. There Papa committed to a life of glorious, full-throttle chemical dependence alongside “The Great Gatsby” author F. Scott Fitzgerald, who said, “First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.” In Fitzgerald’s case, the drink took ten thousand drinks and then left him dead in the gutter.

Yes, I know: Tragedy plus time equals comedy. Maybe next year Fitzgerald drinking himself to death at 44 will amuse me. Except it probably won’t. No matter how far Fitzgerald’s alcoholism recedes into history, there will always be alcoholics, and some of them will be people we know. Maybe enough time has passed for a comic to tell jokes about the vikings raping and pillaging, but he shouldn’t expect those jokes to get big laughs when he plays Darfur.

Setting that aside, I just don’t see the point of Beckerman’s book. An excerpt that ran on salon.com lists it as “‘The Heming Way: How to Unleash the Booze-Inhaling, Animal-Slaughtering, War-Glorifying, Hairy-Chested, Retro-Sexual Legend Within… Just Like Papa!’, a satirical look at Ernest Hemingway’s life and many misguided ideas.”

I don’t want to read much of it. But look at this. What the hell is this?

Whining is for women; whiskey is for men. The only shoulder a man cries on is marinated beef chuck, and the only tears he cries are tears of joy. “You don’t want to mix emotions up with a wine,” Papa implored in “The Sun Also Rises.” “You lose the taste.”

But that’s not even the quote. Beckerman shortens it and takes it out of context. If it seems pedantic to point that out, just hang with me for a second. Here’s the exchange from The Sun Also Rises, which is so much better than anything you’ll get from me or Beckerman:

The count reached down and twirled the bottles in the shiny bucket. “It isn’t cold, yet. You’re always drinking, my dear. Why don’t you just talk?”

“I’ve talked too ruddy much. I’ve talked myself all out to Jake.”

“I should like to hear you really talk, my dear. When you talk to me you never finish your sentences at all.”

“Leave ’em for you to finish. Let any one finish them as they like.”

“It’s a very interesting system,” the count reached down and gave the bottles a twirl. “Still I would like to hear you talk some time.”

“Isn’t he a fool?” Brett asked.

“Now,” the count brought up a bottle. “I think this is cool.”

I brought a towel and he wiped the bottle dry and held it up. “I like to drink champagne from magnums. The wine is better but it would have been too hard to cool.” He held the bottle, looking at it. I put out the glasses.

“I say. You might open it,” Brett suggested.

“Yes, my dear. Now I’ll open it.”

It was amazing champagne.

“I say that is wine,” Brett held up her glass. “We ought to toast to something. ‘Here’s to royalty.’”

“This wine is too good for toast-drinking, my dear. You don’t want to mix emotions up with a wine like that. You lose the taste.”

So, for giggles, Beckerman shortens this line from Count Mippipopolous and turns it into something that “Papa implored in ‘The Sun Also Rises.’”

OK. Time for two quotes I just found from The Good Men Project’s interview with Beckerman:

1) “Hemingway would think that I’m a total sissy. This book isn’t written from the perspective of ‘I’m the ultimate man, and I’m going to lecture my inferiors.’ It’s written from the perspective of ‘I’m a cosmopolitan infantilized eunuch who eats cupcakes and drinks smoothies just like everyone else with a Y chromosome, and this needs to stop.’I want to learn how to hunt, I want to learn how to sail, I want to learn how to short-circuit my liver … and Hemingway is my North Star.”

2) “I thought it was appropriate to open the book with Hemingway’s quote: ‘The parody is the last refuge of the frustrated writer. … The greater the work of literature, the easier the parody. The step up from writing parodies is writing on the wall above the urinal.’”

See, I read that second one and I’m appalled that I ever wanted to punch the guy. But then he ends the interview like this:

As much as I love Gatsby, Fitzgerald doesn’t have a lasting iconic persona. Nobody aspires to be F. Scott Fitzgerald, except for lame-o English majors and people who hope to die in a gutter.

Let’s be done. One final exchange between Count Mippipopolous and Lady Brett:

“I’m not joking you. I never joke people. Joke people and you make enemies. That’s what I always say.”

“You’re right,” Brett said. “You’re terribly right. I always joke people and I haven’t a friend in the world. Except Jake here.”

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UPDATE: Then this happened.

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But when I next read the book, in my thirties, having lived in New York for a while and seen the strange mix it has to offer — and an uglier mix it was back then, for the city was badly run down, and I’d run into enormous disappointment myself while there and ultimately left — I read that line about power and beauty again, and when I did I sat up with a shock. Fitzgerald, or Carraway, rather, doesn’t look at the skyline and say that it represents all the beauty and power in the world. He says the skyline offers “the promise of all the power and beauty in the world.” The promise. Much different than the real thing.
- David Dobbs on “How The Great Gatsby Flipped America”
“
When I am inclined to complain about having worked so many years and taken nothing but debt, though I feel the want of money so continually (much more, doubtless, than I ought to feel it), let me remember that I come in free, gratis, to the work of hundreds and thousands of better men than myself who often were much worse paid than I have been. If a man’s true self is his karma - the life which his work lives but which he knows very little about and by which he takes nothing - let him remember at least that he can enjoy the karma of others, and this about squares the account - or rather far more than squares it.

- Samuel Butler in 1883, from The Note-Books of Samuel Butler

I came to this tonight via Dear Scott/Dear Max and, specifically, one sentence from a 9/18/1919 letter from F. Scott Fitzgerald to editor Max Perkins: “Every young author ought to read Samuel Butler’s Note Books.”

Fitzgerald did not elaborate. Maybe he liked this Butlerism:

An immortal like Shakespeare knows nothing of his own immortality about which we are so keenly conscious.  As he knows nothing of it when it is in its highest vitality, centuries, it may be, after his apparent death, so it is best and happiest if during his bodily life he should think little or nothing about it and perhaps hardly suspect that he will live after his death at all.

Or this one: “Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises.”

Or this: “A sense of humour keen enough to show a man his own absurdities, as well as those of other people, will keep him from the commission of all sins, or nearly all, save those that are worth committing.”

Or this: “All progress is based upon a universal innate desire on the part of every organism to live beyond its income.”

Or this: “The world will always be governed by self-interest.  We should not try to stop this, we should try to make the self-interest of cads a little more coincident with that of decent people.”

Or this: “There are two great rules of life, the one general and the other particular.  The first is that every one can, in the end, get what he wants if he only tries.  This is the general rule.  The particular rule is that every individual is, more or less, an exception to the general rule.”

So we beat on, boats against the current, etc.

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P.J. O’Rourke, Amy Tan, Elizabeth Spencer, Dana Gioia, and others discuss Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence on “The Big Read,” a podcast from the NEA. I didn’t know about this podcast until last night. Other episodes include The Great Gatsby and A Farewell to Arms.

“a 3-D Gatsby?” ctd.

After seeing still more people pre-hating on the specter of Baz Luhrmann filming a 3-D version of Gatsby, it seems worthwhile to step back and realize what sort of novel can be ruined by a movie version that’s garish, inept, unfaithful, or in any other way bad. It is a novel like my novel.

My novel could be ruined by a crap movie version because even unnervingly attentive readers of this blog probably do not know that my novel exists. My novel could be ruined because it’s not even published. My unpublished novel, unsurprisingly, is not taught in high schools and colleges. Revered writers don’t mention my unpublished novel when they list the one or two books that they’ve returned to again and again — yearly, as a sustaining ritual, in some cases.

Gatsby, in these respects (and possibly a couple of others), is pretty much the opposite of my unpublished novel. Gatsby comes as close as any novel that I can think of to being indestructible. Make a porno version of it; doesn’t matter. Distill it down to a nine-minute rap and compel mildewed finger puppets to spit the rhymes; doesn’t matter.

Nobody — literally nobody — who blames Gatsby itself for a lousy movie version ever stood even the slightest chance of becoming a loving reader of the novel.

So this whole 3-D thing is going to be OK. Right, Mr. Fitzgerald?

… Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.

So, in conclusion, simple marching orders for Baz Luhrmann: Don’t be what preyed on Gatsby; don’t be foul dust.

My earlier post with thoughts on how to film a good 3-D Gatsby is here. The arguably unhealthy extent of my doting on the novel is hinted at here.

A 3-D Gatsby?

Ta-Nehisi Coates is shaking his head about word that Baz Lurhmann may film a 3-D version of Gatsby. His readers have posted a bunch of smart, passionate comments. Anybody who fears that people don’t care about books anymore should go look. Here — with the addition of juicy bits of mostly self-referential hypertext — is the comment I just posted:

It never would have occurred to me to wish for a 3-D Gatsby, but the idea has real potential — especially if it’s a use of 3-D we haven’t seen before. Based on five minutes of “workshopping” this within the confines of my mind, my ideal 3-D Gatsby would be one where we never see Nick, where the whole film is an immersive experience of seeing East Egg and West Egg and the “enchanted metropolitan twilight” of  New York City through Nick’s eyes. Think of a graceful cinematic rendering of this Gatsby paragraph:

“The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon. They were both in white, and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house. I must have stood for a few moments listening to the whip and snap of the curtains and the groan of a picture on the wall. Then there was a boom as Tom Buchanan shut the rear windows and the caught wind died out about the room, and the curtains and the rugs and the two young women ballooned slowly to the floor.”

I think all this and type all this while admittedly under the influence of a 1961 Updike quote that I blogged last night: “… the refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one’s obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of us all.”

The quote comes from a mostly critical review of Salinger’s “Franny and Zooey,” and maybe some similar quote will be needed if ultimately we end up with some mess of a 3-D Gatsby. But the quote is also a road map. We should hope Baz Luhrmann is obsessed with Gatsby. We should hope he risks excess of behalf of that obsession.

Updike’s “Franny and Zooey” review, incidentally, offers up a critique of Salinger that might help Luhrmann calibrate his excess and that those of us who love Gatsby might do well to mull if we’re dead set against adaptation:

“In ‘Hoist High the Roof Beam, Carpenters’ (the first and best of the Glass pieces: a magic and hilarious prose-poem with an enchanting end effect of mysterious clarity), Seymour defines sentimentality as giving ‘to a thing more tenderness than God gives to it.’ This seems to me the nub of the trouble: Salinger loves the Glasses more than God loves them. He loves them too exclusively. Their invention has become a hermitage for him. He loves them to the detriment of artistic moderation. ‘Zooey’ is just too long; there are too many cigarettes, too many goddams, too much verbal ado about not quite enough. The author never rests from circling his creations, patting them fondly, slyly applauding. He robs the reader of the initiative upon which love must be given.”

Any thoughts on all this?