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On Fitzgerald

It occurred to me late last Sunday night that Scott Shepard had been on stage reading The Great Gatsby for 32 of the previous 80 hours. The Elevator Repair Service is returning to the Public Theater in March and April for a reprise of Gatz, and I can say this unequivocally; this is an important work. There have been plays - The King’s Men performing King Lear, Edwin Booth’s Hamlet, Sarah Bernhardt’s Zaire, Robeson’s Othello, Spaulding Grey’s Swimming to Cambodia - where you had to be there, and if you were someone who valued a date with relevance over an evening with obscurity, you were.

Seeing Gatz for the second time at Princeton this past weekend, allowing myself the privilege of sinking into the chair and disconnecting the narrow path from expectation to critique, the play deconstructed my every narcissistic trait. It kept me for a full 8 hours from flinching backward into the self that eats, reads, watches, and buys tickets to things, or does so vicariously through the devices that pad out my existence. The play effortlessly thwarts “modernity,” that vicious disease from which the present always seems to be suffering. Fitzgerald’s prose is most of the reason why. What ERS failed to do when they brought The Select to New York (which was astonishing at Princeton, but flat and dull and over-performed in New York) is that they’ve managed through the play’s entire run to, quite brilliantly, stay the fuck out of the text’s way.

I have always felt that Fitzgerald’s contribution to American letters is nearly as great as that of any other author, but the works that provide ammunition to this claim aren’t the novels. The Great Gatsby of course, but The Crack Up is just as essential; the short stories - The Rich Boy, Absolution, and Babylon Revisited primarily - prove he had the gift right to the end. How he employed that gift is what makes him the fascinating artist we talk about today. His novels are distinct, but not always in memorable ways. To summarize them briefly:

This Side of Paradise - write what you know

The Beautiful and Damned - renounce what you know

The Great Gatsby - eulogize what you’ve since renounced

Tender is the Night - feel profound for having done so

The Last Tycoon - try something new, and die trying

For many American readers, Fitzgerald may be the first author we encounter who draws the demarcating line between popular and serious fiction. The distinction has always been slight in all forms, but we know it; when we look at a sketch by Modigliani and one by a Union Square caricaturist, we’re not intoxicated the same way twice. Perhaps it was the first time we saw a da Vinci or a Van Eyck in a coffee table book, or Willy Wonka without commercials, but Fitzgerald provides the young American reader with fiction’s equivalent. He is an education. He may at times bring me close to the line himself, but when I read Booth Tarkington, James Cain, or Stephen King, I know which side of the line I’m on.

Serious fiction writers know the line just as well, and I’ve always enjoyed reading them for what they sense are the trends in popular fiction invoked by their contemporaries. Henry James was keenly aware of his distance from the current fiction on both sides of the Atlantic. David Foster Wallace knew exactly the conventions of the mass-market paperback and seemed to thwart that reader at every sentence; part of what drove me insane about reading Wallace at 19 was his tendency to manipulate the young man who tries to convert all pleasures into easy ones. A writer like Theodore Dreiser is the exact opposite, completely unaware of what made popular fiction popular; in fact, he went to unimaginable lengths to stymie every reader who encountered him. I’m all the more fond of him because of this.

An education may not be the best metaphor for a Fitzgerald novel - the usefulness of that education is arguable. But at the very least, he serves popular and serious readers alike. His books speak to a sensitivity to change and growth, how we convolute our own purposes, how our emotions derails our objectives, and how behavior is a blend of self-inflicted discipline and arrested sentiment. In an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel, love for one person eclipses our faith in the rest of humanity. When that love is lost, our faith in strangers is returned to us intact. Above all, we begin to believe that a morality exerted in the most ordinary circumstances is as entertaining as any car chase or train robbery. The ideals of singular regard - the ones that consume us whole and leave us with little left for other infatuations - are the driving forces of Fitzgerald’s narratives.

Literature is nothing without the expansive palettes of Thomas Hardy and George Eliot, the drawn-out intrigues within elaborate rooms enacted by Poe and Flaubert, the class intersections of Dickens. The trash-heap pickers from Our Mutual Friend, who discover a body at low tide at exactly the same time the newly-rich Veneerings are hosting a banquet, are impossible in a Fitzgerald narrative. Had we only the attention span for a despicable man’s journey into a worldly abyss of the author’s creation, and not a common man’s revulsion of all things common (Fitzgerald’s unique gift to American letters), we would be hesitant to find any value in Fitzgerald’s work. It is this that I find most fascinating about him; his narrators don’t paint large canvases. They don’t use microscopes either.

The best metaphor I can gather is the inverted telescope; his narrators see themselves from the vantage of a long lens turned entirely inward. The interior world is little more than the flickering lights emitted from distant stars; dim lights out of the past already ancient by the time his narrators behold them. It is a shallow and unfulfilling place - the interior - and Fitzgerald’s narrators see a shallowness few of us would admit to finding. So they turn away from the self and cast about for triumphs in love and business, inevitably fail, and, as the curtain draws together, gaze back into themselves for the past that has predicated their every gesture. Crazy Sunday, Babylon Revisited, The Great Gatsby, Winter Dreams - the narrators all do this. Call it a parlor trick, but how he pulls it off is why we read him; it cannot be easily explained and I won’t try. Fitzgerald takes on the shallow personality of his narrators again and again, what he refers to in Gatsby as “that unbroken series of successful gestures.”

If the kingdom of heaven is indeed within, F. Scott Fitzgerald knew as much as any other great American artist, from Emerson to Whitman to Stevens to Pollock to Groucho to Woody to Basquiat, that no man can bear to stand at the gates of his own heaven, nor can he entirely escape how he conceives of them.
28 Dec 2011 / 8 notes