The profound shallowness of The Great Gatsby

I’m still not sure what to make of The Great Gatsby, though I must have read it half a dozen times over the years for different reasons. It’s hard not to be distracted by the noise. For such a delicate thing it seems to be burdened with an awful lot of cultural clutter. Is it, for example, the Great American Novel? I’m not sure what kind of beast that would be, but if the phrase suggests anything other than a great novel that happens to be written by an American, I suppose it must be some sort of national epic. 

It seems to me that to fit that definition a novel would need a wider social range. I get that there’s a distinction between Old Money and New Money in The Great Gatsby, but No Money doesn’t get much of a look-in. The narrator Nick Carraway isn’t in the Tom Buchanan class, with the spare cash to transport a stable full of polo ponies at a whim, but he’s able to support himself in New York while he learns the bond business: “Everybody I knew was in the bond business,” he explains. “All my aunts and uncles talked it over as if they were choosing a prep school for me.”

Nick is ironic at his own expense here, as he generally is about Tom and Daisy and the rest of moneyed class.  But that ironic tone is itself a mark of privilege, a style of slightly bored detachment that he shares effortlessly with other members of his narrow social set.

So if not the Great American Novel, is it at least a novel about the American Dream? Well it’s certainly about an American who has a dream. But it’s a peculiarly impractical dream that’s obsessively resistant to forward motion. Gatsby, in case you’ve forgotten, has made himself wealthy by unscrupulous means and bought himself a mansion, which he has thrown open to the whole of New York’s high society, all for the purpose of attracting Daisy, who once rejected him because he was poor. 

The only representative of that class of Americans who work hard in the pursuit of prosperity – or “happiness” as the Declaration of Independence has it – is the utterly hapless George Wilson, husband of Tom Buchanan’s mistress. Wilson struggles to run a garage, a business enterprise in which neither Fitzgerald, nor his narrator Nick Carraway, show any interest. Wilson and the other inhabitants of the “valley of ashes” that lies between Manhattan and New York’s Long Island suburbs are described as “ash-grey men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air.” They hardly register as people, let alone as individuals with their own dreams and aspirations.

The other candidate for American Dreamhood is Gatsby’s mentor, Meyer Wolfsheim. Wolfsheim is definitely a self-made man and, judging by his accent, an immigrant, which makes him a representative of the old world’s huddled masses, who have been drawn over the centuries to make a new life in America. But Wolfsheim is also a gangster who wears cufflinks made from human molars, a grotesque, shadowy figure who needs Gatsby – “an Oggsford man”—to put a semi-legitimate face on his crooked deals.  Fitzgerald is uncomfortably complicit in this and other stereotypes accepted by the privileged insiders.

Of course Fitzgerald can see that his rich characters are indifferent to the lives of the working people on whom they depend. How else could he construct a sentence as brilliantly pointed as this: “There was machine in [Gatsby’s] kitchen which could extract the juice of two hundred oranges in half an hour if a little button was pressed two hundred times by a butler’s thumb.”

But Fitzgerald is no more interested in the Butler than Gatsby is. Work is not his subject. He’s fascinated by wealth, not by the pursuit of wealth, and certainly not by its creation. Class in The Great Gatsby is a static condition and to rise socially seems to depend on a kind of fraud. I think this is why I find references to the novel’s American-ness so unhelpful.

I’m more conscious of its European connections and, behind that , its archetypal resonance. I think of Great Expectations. Gatsby is a cousin to Pip, with Wolfsheim as his Magwitch, the criminal who has made him a gentleman. Pip too harbours the delusion that his social rise will allow him to win the beautiful rich girl who rejected him in his impoverished youth.

In his obsession with the past, Gatsby is related more distantly to Dumas’ Edmond Dantès, who escapes from wrongful imprisonment, acquires fabulous wealth and returns as the Count of Monte Cristo to haunt the lives of those who have injured him, including the beautiful Mercédès, now married to his enemy.

Gatsby’s story is a variation on Wuthering Heights, another tale of an impoverished and low-born lover who is rejected in favour of an aristocratic rival, but returns a wealthy man to brood in his desolate house, across the moor from where his soul-mate endures a life of decorous boredom.

It’s also a version of Beauty and the Beast, with Gatsby’s house as the enchanted castle. And it’s the story of Tam Lin, who lures Janet to his magic forest and then instructs her how she can liberate him from his captivity by pulling him from his horse as he rides with the fairies on Halloween, holding him while he shifts through many fearful shapes, until finally he will appear in his own person as a naked knight.

My guess is that for most people who love The Great Gatsby what they love is Fitzgerald’s ability to capture such a sense of enchantment. And when they talk about his style they mean his ability to spin one outrageously sumptuous sentence after another and most times get away with it. He’s a poet of the fleeting beauty of youth, a master of the melancholy cadence, always more than half in love with the life of careless indulgence that is the object of his satire. He exposes all that’s frivolous about the flapper generation, but it’s when he’s describing their frivolity that he’s at his most characteristically seductive:

All night the saxophones wailed the hopeless comment of the Beale Street Blues while a hundred pairs of golden and silver slippers shuffled the shining dust. At the grey tea hour there were always rooms that throbbed incessantly with this low, sweet fever, while fresh faces drifted here and there like rose petals blown by the sad horns around the floor. Through this twilight universe Daisy began to move again with the season; suddenly she was again keeping half a dozen dates a day with half a dozen men, and drowsing asleep at dawn with the beads and chiffon of an evening dress tangled among dying orchids on the floor beside her bed.

Nick Carraway says of Gatsby that “If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him.” Out of such gestures as this sketch of Daisy’s youthful life, in all its fragility and yearning, is constructed the gorgeousness of Fitzgerald’s novel. 

Footnote: For a bright and elegantly written review of Baz Luhrmann’s film, see the website of friend and colleague Claire Dyer, who liked it much more than me. A fan of the book, Claire confesses to reading it through rose-tinted spectacles, but doesn’t say whether she wore red and blue ones to see the film.   http://www.clairedyer.com/?p=369

Papa don't preach

I’m thinking of a Catholic boy, coming of age in 1950s Scotland, having been raised in a culture that conflates sexuality with sin and does its best to keep the lid on both. Unfortunately, for a boy at this time and place, it’s not girls he finds himself attracted to. The practices that invade his imagination are not only associated with profound social shame, they are also punishable by imprisonment. What tempts him is categorised by his own church as one of the 'four sins crying to heaven for vengeance'.

He throws himself into academic work and is eventually drawn to the priesthood. By the time parliament decriminalises homosexual acts between consenting adults in private, he has been ordained and has put that whole complicated issue behind him, taking refuge in a life of celibacy.  He serves as a curate, a teacher, a parish priest. He’s good at his job.

In mid-life he is put in charge of the spiritual development of young men training for the priesthood. Beyond the walls of the seminary it’s a hedonistic time. There are pockets of wild liberation where gay men are indulging their sexual appetites, no longer fearful of judicial punishment and untroubled by thoughts of hell. Is he influenced by this? Or by the knowledge that his life is half over and half his nature lies dormant? Denied the normal comforts and companionship of marriage to which most people eventually aspire, does he find loneliness creeping up on him? Or does his position of unquestioned authority provide an opportunity he simply can’t resist? In the language of his Church, has his job become one continuous ‘occasion of sin’?

Is this a true story, or an outline for a novel by Colm Tóibín?

How about this one? A senior cleric approaching the end of a distinguished and respected career, about to fulfil the sacred duty of voting for the next pope, faces accusations that thirty years ago he made inappropriate advances to four seminarians, accusations that he denies. Now we’re in Philip Roth territory. In The Human Stain, Coleman Silk, a professor of Classics charged with showing prejudice towards two black students, could clear his name by revealing his own deepest secret that he is himself (in a certain ethno-cultural sense) black, though sufficiently light-skinned to pass as white. What if, like Coleman, our senior cleric has it in his power to replace one scandal with another by revealing a long-standing secret – a relationship, for example, consensual and mutually beneficial, with a woman of his own age? In a strange twist, he surprises his conservative supporters by suggesting that the Church should consider allowing priests to marry, a coded intimation of his desire to normalise his private life and finally assert his long-obscured identity.

Perhaps the truth is even more implausible – something Dan Brown might have dreamt up. The whole thing is a conspiracy led by a villainous Italian cardinal with papal ambitions. Our hero is a tough, plain-talking Scot with the rugged good looks of a rugby player, who has made a name for himself by standing up to politicians cravenly seeking popularity with their liberalising agendas, particularly their plans for gay marriage, 'a grotesque subversion' as he sees it. True to form, he opposes the worldly Italian. Whether politically motivated or bribed with promises of advancement, his accusers, like the four assassins of Thomas à Becket, set out to rid their master of this turbulent priest, to neutralise him, at least, for as long as the Cardinals sit in conclave.  

But enough of fantasies and speculations. The important story is of an institution so blind to its own failings that it projects them out into the secular world, condemning the rest of us for our self-indulgence while it covers up its own crimes, a body so damaged by scandal that no one is much surprised by one more accusation, or much impressed by a heated denial or a half-hearted apology. Perhaps some of these many charges are false. But the credibility of the Church is so damaged in this area that, for someone accused, to be a member of its hierarchy makes guilt seem more likely rather than less.

It’s exactly fifty years since the death of the great reformer, John XXIII, who did his best during his brief papacy to bring daylight into the Catholic Church. I wonder if there are enough cardinals interested in renewing that interrupted process. I’m not holding my breath. Meanwhile the Church might concentrate on its strong suits, such as concern for the poor, and leave questions of sexual ethics to ordinary people.

Early collaborations

I drifted through Grammar School in one of the lower streams. I worked out later that it wasn’t only the boys who were streamed – in some subjects it was the teachers as well. In particular, there was a dynamic English department of which I was barely conscious. Meanwhile our English teachers were the backwoodsmen. They were less than enthusiastic but I liked them. Worse things can happen at school than benign neglect.

For a couple of years we had Alf (as I’ll call him here), a non-specialist who, having overseen the decline of his own subject, was kept occupied overseeing us. Our weekly homework was usually a list of three or four essay titles, dictated out of his head into our exercise books: The Worst Holiday, My Hobby, Loneliness – that kind of thing. The last on the list was always the same: Anything else you can think of. His comments on my work were laconic. 15/20 Good. 14/20 Quite good. 16/20 Good if original. For an essay on Crowds, I cut out and glued a picture from the Gloucestershire Echo of people waiting on the platform to see the Queen pass through the local station. I pointed out the danger that the people at the back might push forward in their excitement, throwing the people at the front under the Royal train. Alf wrote: 14/20 Not very likely.

It was probably my father who’d given me that thought. Health and safety was one of his things. But he was good at stories too. Under the generous rubric of Anything else you can think of, he helped me with a few tales of adventure – first person narratives, often set, I realise now, in the pre-War world of my father’s imagination, in which a couple of pals might set off on their bicycles into the countryside in pursuit of a burglar, to be congratulated by the local constable once the burglar was safely behind bars. I did all the writing, but he was happy to feed me plot ideas while he got on with other jobs.

The story I remember most clearly involved a local convict, whose escape is reported in the local paper. Our first-person hero and his friend do some research and decide to stake out the home of the convict’s aged mother. The convict catches our hero snooping around the house and takes him hostage at gunpoint, while the police, summoned by the friend, gather outside with loud hailers. There seems no way out of this impasse. Then the aged mother turns on the radio, and the newsreader reports that an escaped convict has captured the son of local builder Wilfrid Treasure.

‘You’re never Wilf Treasure’s son!’ the convict says. ‘Best boss I ever ‘ad, ‘e was. I was working on ‘is site, diggin’ the footin’s when they came to arrest me. Insisted on paying me out in full, your dad did, before ‘e’d let them take me away. ‘Ere, Ma, put the kettle on. I’m giving myself up.’

That’s the way I remember it, including the forest of apostrophes. I’ve no idea what Alf made of this crudely embedded commercial  for the family business. He gave me 15/20 and wrote: Implausible, but quite well written.

Squeezing the giant's heart

There’s a Norse folk tale I remember from childhood involving a giant who hides his heart. The hero has to find the heart, so that he can save his brothers who have been turned to stone by the giant, and rescue the beautiful princess the giant has imprisoned. The princess’s job is to find out where the giant keeps his heart. 

It’s a bit like Delilah getting Samson to reveal the secret of his strength, except the secret in this case is more complicated. The heart, apparently, is on an island, in a church, in a well, inside the body of a duck, enclosed in an egg. Helped by creatures he has helped earlier in his travels, the hero eventually gets his hands on the egg and starts squeezing. He promises to save the giant’s life if he will free the princess and liberate his brothers from their petrified state. In the more authentic versions of the story, once all this is done the hero immediately ignores his promise and crushes the egg.

It occurs to me now that this tale of torture and retribution is the archetype of all those ticking bomb scenarios envisaged in dramas such as 24. To free the hostages, some heart has always got to be squeezed. And if you’ve got a problem with that, get over it – you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.

But specifically what put the story in my mind was the latest episode of Homeland. For those who don’t know, this is an America drama about a US marine called Sgt Brody, who is released after eight years of captivity in Iraq. It turns out that during these lost years his captor and sometime torturer, Abu Nazir, befriended him and converted him both to Islam and to the Islamist cause.

We’ve seen Brody on the brink of detonating a suicide bomb. And we’ve watched him being co-opted by the CIA having been seduced (on more than one level) by an agent. Whose side he’s on now is anybody’s guess. Which I suppose is what makes us watch – those of us who do. To be honest, none of it makes any sense if you think too hard about it, but demanding hard thought is not its purpose.

Clearly Abu Nazir is a bad guy, but he’s well matched by the odious Vice President who represents all that’s most callous about Washington politics and the American imperial machine and is, from Abu Nazir’s perspective, a war criminal. And in the climax of the latest episode, Nazir gets to squeeze the VP's heart. It isn’t hidden in a duck’s egg, but on a laptop, because the VP, it turns out, has a pacemaker. Brody, all-American hero and establishment protégé and therefore uniquely placed to play the role of princess, texts the serial number from the VP’s office, thus handing control of the VP’s heart to Abu Nazir’s geeks. The VP shows up just in time to have a heart attack in Brody’s arms.  

We’re used to mythic themes being reimagined in the light of technological advances. Science fiction does this all the time. Huxley’s Brave New World is, among other things, about the ancient dream of eternal youth and its limitations. The crew in Danny Boyle's film Sunshine fly too close to the sun. Philip K Dick’s story ‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?’ (adapted for the screen as Blade Runner) is a version of the Pygmalion myth. But this is the first time I’ve encountered the heart-squeezing trope given the pseudo-scientific treatment. 

Dickens and the Time Lords

I find myself thinking of a good plot as a kind of TARDIS. Partly because it’s a vehicle for time travel, but mainly because the inside is bigger than the outside. There’s no mystery about how to get in – the doorway’s staring you in the face – but it leads to something unexpectedly capacious.

Five people on a daytrip to Margate to scatter a dead friend’s ashes in the sea. That’s the neat exterior of Graham Swift’s Last Orders. You can walk all round it and take in its scope at a glance. But open the door and you get all these entangled life stories, decades of love and conflict and betrayal. Time travel is crucial in this case, but just as important is the capacity of the plot to open up and lead you in many directions without just sprawling shapelessly.

I realise this TARDIS image might have a potency for me that not everyone can relate to. I can’t say where I was when President Kennedy was assassinated, but I know that the following evening I was glued to the first ever episode of Dr Who. I think it was mainly exposition – no Daleks – but something gripped the childish imagination. Two schoolteachers follow one of their students home, a strange girl who is causing them concern, and they watch her walk onto a piece of waste ground and slip inside a police box. I remember their amazement when they followed her through the door and saw the style in which she and the Doctor were living (the white-haired William Hartnell, of course, before Who went hip).

I was hooked for a year or two. Then I probably just grew out of it. But I may have sensed that the plot was destined to be a sprawling mess because it lacked the most basic element, which is an ending. You can wander limitlessly inside, but there’s no outside to contain the journey.

I've just seen the new film of Great Expectations. I particularly enjoyed the young gentlemen Pip mingles with when he comes into his money. Those drunken dinners with the Finches of the Grove reminded me of the Bullingdon Club where I used to hang out with Dave and Boris in my student days (not actually). Dickens’ plot, necessarily stripped of peripheral material, shines through. The twists, revelations and reversals that punctuate Pip’s life provide the containing structure. What opens up inside is the whole of society from its wealthiest heirs to its most abject criminals and the secret networks of personal relationships, financial interests, and moral responsibilities that bind them together.