Adapting Gatsby plus Bert Lahr in Godot

There seem to be other mp3 albums of old recordings of plays that look good. Cedric Hardwicke and Charles Laughton in Shaw’s Don Juan in Hell. Hardwicke was, apparently, Shaw’s favorite actor, I think I remember reading somewhere.

IIRC, Don Juan in Hell is one long act (or long scene?) in Shaw’s Man and Superman, not a whole play in itself. And I thought Shaw’s favorite actor was Harley Granville Barker. (At least one author has suggested that Shaw was, even if he didn’t quite realize it, in love with him. But we might as well not get into all that.)

Fitgerald certainly could write poorly, but it is absurd to say he wrote poorly in Gatsby, one of the most elegant and lyrical novels ever produced in the U.S. – as both T.S. Eliot and Ernest Heminway recognized at the time.

To get a sense of how finely Fitgerald crafted the novel, check out these essays:

http://marksarvas.blogs.com/elegvar/2009/05/bell1.html

http://marksarvas.blogs.com/elegvar/2009/05/bell2.html

http://marksarvas.blogs.com/elegvar/2009/05/bell3.html

http://marksarvas.blogs.com/elegvar/2009/05/bell4.html

I read Gatsby for the first time quite recently and can’t say I was blown away – my son’s currently doing it at school & I’ve struggled to remember the characters he talks about. That said, I read “Raise high the roof beam, carpenters!” more recently, and it struck me as doing very much what Fitzgerald did, only more successfully – you got your cool and witty and ultra-perceptive narrative voice, you got your similes and gags and digressions, you got your absurd randomness of life *and* your deeper tragedy which is never quite named directly… and you got your cool, witty narrator. Kind of light-witty, light-witty, tragic tragic light-witty; very New Yorker (reminded me of Thurber’s later & less joky stuff, “In the catbird seat” & suchlike).

I can’t for the life of me figure out why everyone disagrees with me about this

I don’t disagree. I would also add that the whole premis of the book is screwed. Tom and Daisy might be a bit arrogant and privileged and maybe even a bit racist. But look at Gatsby! He’s an organised criminal and a really creepy stalker.

Also, when does the narrator do any work? The bond market doesn’t close down for summer.

Usually her voice came over the wire as something fresh and cool, as if a divot from a green golf-links had come sailing in at the office window, but this morning it seemed harsh and dry.

Actually, this is really quite funny in its incongruity – I wonder if it was lifted from Wodehouse, who wasn’t shy of a golf simile himself.

Also, when does the narrator do any work? The bond market doesn’t close down for summer.

“Sell in May and go away, don’t come back till St Leger day”. In the quieter days of summer, presumably the desk is left in the hands of a junior clerk while the seniors all go off on holiday. Times were leisurely then in the finance business. Look at “Lords of Finance” – one thing that struck me about that book is the amount of time that senior bank officials took off, to sail across the Atlantic or go to Baden-Baden for a month or whatever.

John, if you’re trying to be more reflexively contrarian than 2005-era Slate you’re going to have to work harder.

More seriously: Gatsby got at me the first time I read it partly because I read it in the same class where we’d read Ben Franklin and talked about Calvinism and simplistic definitions of success. Upon reread: those party scenes are much more informative, funny, and tragic when you’ve had friends, and been to parties you enjoyed, and not been the most awkward person in the room. In fact, all the interpersonal stuff is. I’m kind of wondering how it was that high school me loved this book so much for its aesthetics and psychological insight when I was so completely undeveloped on those fronts.

It’s reassuring to see that others have difficulty appreciating Gatsby. I thought it was just me.

The bond market doesn’t close down for summer.

Yes it does. August is pretty much dead.

“Sell in May and go away, don’t come back till St Leger day”.

Good advice in 1720, apparently still valid.

We can argue about whether the writing is crap, but the writing that is in the narrator’s voice is actually designed to be crap. You can’t rely on Nick to actually understand what is going on in the book, and that is intentional. Sometimes he doesn’t understand what is happening, sometimes he is making stuff up. If you pay attention to actual accounts of events that are happening in the present instead of Nick’s spin on things, there is a different story that is told. Think of it as ‘The Usual Suspects” in the Jazz Age.

17: well, you’re right, his career is going nowhere – he goes back to Chicago at the end of the book. His career probably stagnates and ends in disgrace when he’s found to have been a player in the 1958 Chicago Onion Ring.

As I understand, in the 1920s, the world of junior finance employees included a mix of hardscrabble office boys and Yale aristocrats. Indeed, I think it was that way until very recently, when it has become mostly Yale meritocrats (with a few aristocrats, who were able to adapt to the new order and hold on), and much less room for streetwise types with limited formal education.

I am fond of E.G. Marshal because of this show:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CBS_Radio_Mystery_Theater

For some reason, I listened to a lot of those shows for a couple years.

If you think that Gatsby is bad, you should try This Side of Paradise. I fell in love with Fitzgerald when I was a teenager and read a lot of his work then. Thought he was a tragic figure. These days, I think that his Basil Duke Lee stories are some of his best work and that, probably, like another famous “drunk,” US Grant, Fitzgerald was someone who was highly susceptible to liquor, getting drunk on just a little bit.

John Lahr writes about his father, Bert, and his performance in Godot in Notes on a Cowardly Lion, if memory serves.

If calling Bert Lahr an actor in “the pantomime tradition” was intended as a “rebuke to Beckett,” then the reviewer didn’t know anything at all about Beckett, who knew a lot about that tradition and exploited its conventions brilliantly in lots of his work. (Joyce too. I imagine they talked about it when they got deep into the wine.) I’ll bet money that Beckett knew about Lahr and approved.

In fact, Beckett approved Lahr’s casting before Miami, and did not withdraw that approval after the disaster there. (See Anthony Cronin’s Samuel Beckett: the Last Modernist.) Beckett knew what he was getting with Lahr, and Lahr got the play, “it’s tragic, but there are lots of gags in it.”

Oh, give it a rest already. You haters can get back to me when you write something half as unheimlich as this:

No telephone message arrived, but the butler went without his sleep and waited for it until four o’clock– until long after there was any one to give it to if it came. I have an idea that Gatsby himself didn’t believe it would come, and perhaps he no longer cared. If that was true he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream. He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about . . . like that ashen, fantastic figure gliding toward him through the trees.

I am beginning to wonder whether an overdose of graphic novels doesn’t impede a person’s ability to appreciate passages like this.

What Michael said. And here’s another passage, plucked almost at random:

Already it was deep summer on roadhouse roofs and in front of wayside garages, where new red gas-pumps sat out in pools of light, and when I reached my estate at West Egg I ran the car under its shed and sat for a while on an abandoned grass roller in the yard. The wind had blown off, leaving a loud, bright night, with wings beating in the trees and a persistent organ sound as the full bellows of the earth blew the frogs full of life. The silhouette of a moving cat wavered across the moonlight, and turning my head to watch it, I saw that I was not alone — fifty feet away a figure had emerged from the shadow of my neighbor’s mansion and was standing with his hands in his pockets regarding the silver pepper of the stars. Something in his leisurely movements and the secure position of his feet upon the lawn suggested that it was Mr. Gatsby himself, come out to determine what share was his of our local heavens.

I decided to call to him. Miss Baker had mentioned him at dinner, and that would do for an introduction. But I didn’t call to him, for he gave a sudden intimation that he was content to be alone — he stretched out his arms toward the dark water in a curious way, and, far as I was from him, I could have sworn he was trembling. Involuntarily I glanced seaward — and distinguished nothing except a single green light, minute and far away, that might have been the end of a dock. When I looked once more for Gatsby he had vanished, and I was alone again in the unquiet darkness.

Of course the paragraph Michael Bérubé quotes is better than the ones andthenyoufall did (what’s the difference between what he describes and Westchester County?), except for “how grotesque a thing a rose is,” which sounds like the novelist’s attempt to get at his pal Hemingway by writing a nasty parody of his mentor, Gertrude Stein.

Maybe a few more paragraphs will reconcile me again.

And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

I am with Michael Bérubé on this one…And that is definitely my favorite last line of any novel I’ve read.

There’s a problem. The bits people are praising (the lyrical bits) and slating (the purple bits) exist only as prose. You can squeeze a tiny portion into voiceover, but essentially the very things that make a conversation about Gatsby worth having can’t make it into the movie version.
This is why I think the decision to turn it over to Baz Luhrman for an exercise in kitsch is a defensible one.

Fitzgerald wrote a set of short comic stories about Hollywood’s Heroic Age, all centred on the unheroic character Pat Hobby. The collection includes ‘Boil some water, lots of it’, which is a fine title.

It may be that Gatsby is actually a comic novel and most readers are missing the point; as already discussed, Godot is such a work, but there’s also ‘Don Giovanni’, which, I learned yesterday from Radio 3, is very funny but only if you are fluent in Italian; and, as George Orwell remarked, The Diary of a Nobody was very popular in Russia, despite the fact that it probably came over as a bitter fable of frustrated aspiration, hollow friendships and a thankless child – ‘probably very like Chekhov’, I think he said, thereby giving the problem another turn.

I’ve long said that Sinclair Lewis is the Dickens of America.

And also that Fitzgerald seems to get all the lit prof groupies’ attention, while poor Sinclair Lewis sits in a chair at the side of the gym waiting for someone to ask him to dance.

Yesterday was the 60th year since Lewis left us. His writings, however, remain extremely relevant in this latest Gilded Age in this decaying business civilization.

Gilligan’s Wake enjoyably intersects with TGG.

53: which reminds me that HP Lovecraft was also living in New York in the mid 1920s, and didn’t think much of it either. Too many immigrants. (See “The Horror at Red Hook”, which is where he was staying at the time.)

I checked Aljean Harmetz’ book on TWOO to see what it might say about flowers and trees; I didn’t find the answer to the specific question about those flowers, but here is what she does tell us:

The Construction Department encompassed the studio’s 500 carpenters, 150 laborers, 15 plumbers, and 50 plasterers; the 20 scenic artists who painted the muslin backdrops; and the ordinary house-painters who painted the sets. The rule of thumb was simple: if you helped to build, decorate, or tear down the sets, you belonged in Construction, a fact which left Construction crowded with esoteric specialties. The Nursery was in Construction, a unit that was inappropriately named since the nurserymen were much more likely to dress the set with artificial bushes or flowers than real ones; and most of their time was spent wiring artificial leaves or blossoms onto real tree stumps. It was the nurserymen who would wire the artificial poppies to Stage 29.

The Prop Shop was in Construction too. The men in the Prop Shop were responsible for building the monsters devised by Special Effects. They made the talking apple trees out of chicken wire and foam rubber, with liquid latex added to the chicken-wire frames layer by layer. They hung the finished trees from the grids on piano wire. Then some of them climbed inside of the structures they had made to act as the animated souls of the trees.

Not about the American Dream? A novel about a poor country boy who makes a lot of money and (almost) gets a beautiful girl, and does get a big house, isn’t about the American Dream? The green light isn’t that dream? That Nick concludes the dream is a myth doesn’t mean he hasn’t been talking about that dream throughout the book. If you’re right, it’s even more hackish than I’ve been beginning to suspect.

I was going to recommend the Harmetz book, but non-famous Henry beat me to it. A wonderful read. And impeccably sourced, because the author’s mother worked at MGM (in the costume department, IIRC).

The best part is the story of Professor Marvel’s jacket. The costumers picked it out as the most seedy-magnificent from a number of candidates in Frank Morgan’s size bought at L.A. thrift stores. When they looked inside, they found a label showing that it had once belonged to . . . L. Frank Baum! (When the publicity department put the story out, absolutely no one believed them, because all studio press releases were known to be lies and this one was especially far-fetched. But Harmetz was satisfied that it was true. Baum’s widow authenticated the coat.)

Times were leisurely then in the finance business.

In the insurance business also. Wallace Stevens got whole books of poetry written while on the clock.

I do concede that the novel’s fame and reputation and general, untarnished air of glamour is Gatsby’s – the character’s – long con, infecting the readership itself. Which is some kind of literary achievement, in the long con department.

In a lecture at Berkeley, sometime in the middle 80’s, Stephen Booth made exactly this point. He said everyone that enters the novel takes on the moral midgetry of the characters. He claimed folks liked the novel because they wanted to be like Fitzgerald. He also noted that no one reads Vanity Fair because they want to be like Thackery.

I’m not saying I agree w/Booth, but that’s what he said (as far as I can remember).

Oh, and The Confidence-Man is brilliant beyond measure. Also too.

And crying out for comic adaptation. The exchange about “a certain loss” is practically written in speech bubbles.

But this is the thing. I came to American Literature, at college, fresh from the English social novel of the 19th century; I did my undergraduate dissertation on Wilkie Collins. Now, Collins wrote some seriously weird stuff, although at this distance the plots are a bit hazy in my mind – there’s one where a blind woman is courted (without knowing it) by two twins and her skin turns blue, although I can’t remember why; I’m not sure if that’s also the book with the legless megalomaniac. You get the picture. But when he wasn’t trying to give you the fantods he was always trying, quite earnestly, to reflect contemporary society back to itself, and very often the most socially realistic parts of the novels were also the most shocking (there’s one where the hero saves a child prostitute from the streets, takes her home and eventually marries her – wrong on a number of levels, then and now).

So then I start on Melville’n’Hawthorne, writers of the great nineteenth century American novel – not the American Wilkie Collins in stature, more like the American George Eliot or Dickens – and… WTF? The characters are grotesque, the plotting flickers from bizarre to non-existent and back again, the social setting is thin to the point of translucency, the language is arch and overdone, and the narrative voice will not shut up. And, I learn in tutorials, it’s all about the language and the narrative voice: this garrulous narrator who may or may not see things more clearly than you, and may or may not be aware of his own absurdity, isn’t just a comic creation (an Oswald Bastable or Billy Fisher) but a deeply serious philosophical enterprise which is at the heart of the entire novel. Possibly, even, at the heart of The Novel in its local form.

As I said earlier on, a light and amusing story with something grotesquely horrible lurking in the middle of it, as told by a witty and intelligent self-regarding bore (who may or may not be aware that he’s a self-regarding bore) … I think I’ve just defined American literature. Discuss.

66: Kafka too, IIRC. (Well, he may have waited to get home before writing.) And he (apparently) invented the workman’s hard hat! What a guy!

71: fantods = the creeps, the shivers, the heebie-jeebies.

73: hmm, good point. A quick google finds no sources apart from Drucker for this. Drucker also says that he won a gold medal for it in 1912 from the American Safety Society, which doesn’t seem to exist. There is an American Society of Safety Engineers, which existed in 1911 (under a different name) but I can’t find any link between them (under either name) and Kafka.

What a strange thing to make up!

This is indeed the very nub of the gist. Are the very fine bits enough? One can often forgive a great many weaknesses in exchange for the elevated moments. But obviously, the acceptable ratio varies from person to person. For that matter, what counts as elevated?

‘Elevated moments’ are not textual features; they’re states of mind. The prose is what gets you there – all the prose. Can’t flip to page 35, get ‘elevated,’ shut the thing, as if the mountain were merely a peak suffering the nearness of its steep faces. Good writing works. History tells us that Gatsby works. Bored the shit out of me in high school. Well, so did high school. History tells us I’ve got some problems as well, though.

Ah yes: “The farm was crouched on a bleak hillside, whence its fields, fanged with flints, dropped steeply to the village of Howling a mile away.” Three stars for that one, IIRC.