Fitzgeralds Last Laugh on Hemingway

The two titans of literature in the early twentieth century never really vied for the spot of Best Writer at all. Hemingway knocked out Fitzgerald right after he gave him a leg up by writing to Max Perkins and telling him about a young writer in Paris who is the real thing. The real thing then turned his back on Fitzgerald and pilloried him in print, disparaged him to his editor, and then left him in the dust with publications, movies, media, becoming the HE MAN writer while Scott hacked it out in a hotel room in Baltimore and then later died in Hollywood a broken man. The Great Gatsby and the rest of his work cooled in Scribner warehouses with little demand.

Now lets fast forward to 2013. The mannered Hemingway prose has not translated well. Still widely read as high school fare and universally admired but not modern nor could anyone see one of his books being made into a contemporary movie with Leo and the Toby. But maybe I'm wrong that someone could take another crack at For Whom The Bell Tolls or Old Man and Sea or Farewell To Arms but there is lacking that modern story. And that is what Fitzgerald gave us with Gatsby a modern story for the ages that has crashed back onto the bestseller list and beckons to  us from airports and drugstores. Revenge is a dish best served cold.

Because Hemingway did treat him like a drunken has been from the beginning. He set his sites on crushing Fitzgerald and anyone else got close to him. There was to be only one man in the ring and that was Ernest Hemingway but now with both men gone and the Hemingway megaphone long silence, Fitzgerald seems to be the one in the ring with both hands held high. Jay Gatz has been transported through the years and we can relate and that effable Fitzgerald prose has no equal. Even Hemingway cant touch it.

And so Fitz did have the last laugh. The ninety eight pound weakling came back stronger than ever and kicked the bully straight back on his ass.

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The Brilliance of The Great Gatsby

The critics have not been kind but they are wrong. The Great Gatsby shimmers on the screen. The film does what Fitzgerald did; it takes us in the eye of the metaphor and jumps into it and then does what any art does...exaggerates. Take the green light. Perfect. Of course we build around that visionary beam of the American Dream. It is nothing less than Gatsby's soul and in the movie the green light beams and beams like a laser strobe across the bay from Daisy's dock. It is the coalescence of the Fitzgerald novel...the magnet that catches all the metal filings. And we open and close with that green vision of hope... but lets move on.

The flowing billowy curtains that takes Fitzgerald's prose and puts it into form. The eloquence of that metaphor is the women and the room are all floating around the ceiling and when Tom Buchanan shuts the door he shuts it all down and everyone floats back down...the effortless ether of the rich against the hard malice of Tom. And then of course the parties that seem to bother everyone. Have you never partied? Maureen Dowd of NY Times and others just couldn't get around the fact that these parties were over the top  and fantastical. Did we ever live through the first twentieth century boom before income tax? During prohibition? And of course the original prose was over the top. When Fitzgerald describes the party it is the top of the top doing what they do best.

And then of course the driving. The crazy driving and Gatsby's car which is described as a leather conservatory in the novel and an amazing yellow car nickel plated and swollen with hat boxes and fenders and curves and so we create Gatsby's car and the way he drives and the way everyone drives in the roaring twenties. And could the party in Toms apartment been any more than the drunken bacchanal of sex, jazz,  and booze that was the twenties?  And then we go on to the showdown at the Plaza and Gatsby cracking up against Toms hard malice. And what is amazing is the film stayed on Fitzgerald's metaphors and prose giving way to the book by putting the actual words on the screen and yes the use of Nick Caraway as the writer might have bothered some but it did anchor us in time and yes the relationship between Nick and Jordan Baker was lost but a small point for finally taking on the  love story of Jay Gatsby and Daisy and giving the story its markers as the last will and testament to the American Dream.

I was all set to hate this film. In fact I never believed the novel could be brought to life on the screen but the movie brought to life the story and tipped its hat to the prose all along the way. The brilliance of the movie is that it made brilliant Fitzgerald's prose....a film of metaphors and for someone to pull that off in the year 2013 and bring high brow entertainment to the masses...I'll drink a highball to that any day and say with Jay Gatsby in his pink suit...
Cant repeat the past!...of course you can old sport!

Rocket Man...the upside down American Dream

Gatsby's American Dream

With the new movie almost out it is fitting to reflect on the American Dream once again as put forth by Jay Gatsby. I assume you read the book and know Gatsby's story of bootlegger turned landed gentry and ready to secure the girl of his dreams Daisy Buchanan. Ah the green light at the end of the dock that means so much. Gatsby's dream. The American dream. That beacon in the Long Island night that represents all we want but cannot obtain.

And of course Gatsby is done in by the darkness of the American Dream. It is the price right? We know now the high price of the dream because we have been living it for the last five years. Only a few can hit such heights and those that do usually lose some part of themselves as Gatsby did. Fitzgerald put forth the idea that this dream comes with too high a price and in fact it can kill you which of course it did with Gatsby.

And we are  now at a point where the American dream has turned upside down. Our houses worth less than we owe, jobs still scarce, money not abundant. And we are looking now for something we might have missed and left behind us. And of course there is nothing new as Fitzgerald says at the end of Gatsby in the most eloquent line in American literature. "So we beat on, boats against the current, born back ceaselessly into the past."

Still so true.

Rocket Man...the American Dream upside down

The green Light at the end of our dock

Well you have heard by now Daisy Buchanan's mansion has been torn down due to the price of upkeep. Forty five hundred a day. High price for a literary touchstone. But still, it does seem to fall in with the times and who can forget that green light at the end of Daisy's dock. It is really the heart of Gatsby. The young man who yearns for so much and yet he cannot touch it and there is that green light out in the harbor, a symbol for all that he aspires too and yet can not have.

You cannot read Fitzgerald's early masterpiece of the last century and not think about its relation to where we are now. Gatsby of course wants it all and cannot have it. He is rich but he does not have the girl and so he has nothing. And we have nothing now. We have the fabulously wealthy but the very heart of the American Dream Fitzgerald saw as being corrupted has been fully diseased. Greedy unseen forces did Gatsby iin a much earlier part of our history. The Tom Buchanan's of the world who stood in for the larger world that really held the power and money.

And we have found now that the dream does have a high price. An entire country has suffered of course for the extravagance Gatsby paid for with his life. Certainly this mansion Gatsby saw as having all that life could offer is touching in its demolition because life has lost even the chimera glamour of that old dream. During Fitzgerald's time the American Dream was still being formed, but he saw it's Horatio Algier underside and left the cautionary tale of Gatsby's fate.

So the old mansion is no longer. And I assume the green light at the end of Daisy's dock burned out years before. All we are left with is the novel and the glow of our own fading dreams.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man will blast off this summer