Quote of the Day (F. Scott Fitzgerald, on a Train Ride Home From School at Christmastime)

“One of my most vivid memories is of coming back West from prep school and later from college at Christmas time….

“When we pulled out into the winter night and the real snow, our snow, began to stretch out beside us and twinkle against the windows, and the dim lights of small Wisconsin stations moved by, a sharp wild brace came suddenly into the air. We drew in deep breaths of it as we walked back from dinner through the cold vestibules, unutterably aware of our identity with this country for one strange hour, before we melted indistinguishably into it again.

“That’s my Middle West—not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede towns, but the thrilling returning trains of my youth, and the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of holly wreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow.”—F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)

Since my twenties, every year around this time, my mind drifts to and fastens on this passage near the conclusion of The Great Gatsby, just before the rhapsodic, better-known last few paragraphs on the Dutch ships discovering the “fresh green breast of the New World” for the first time. 

In the postwar period, and particularly since the deregulation of the airlines that made plane travel more affordable starting in the late 1970s, countless college kids have taken to the air to make their way home. It’s certainly convenient, but high above the earth, they miss so much that Fitzgerald would have seen right outside his window on the train.

In the 1910s, F. Scott Fitzgerald would have taken this holiday trip probably about a half-dozen times—first, while at Newman Prep in Hackensack, NJ, a suburb of New York City, and then at the conclusion of the semester at Princeton University. He would have had a great deal to do that could have distracted him on those trips—reading, jotting down something in his journal, or, Fitzgerald being Fitzgerald, catching his breath at the sight of a pretty girl walking down the aisle of his train.

But these were long trips, and those activities, no matter how consuming, could only occupy his mind for so long. So inevitably, the landscape made its vivid impression on him, and his imagination would freeze-frame the moments. 

Transportation in the forms already evolving in the 1920s—the automobile and the airplane—meant not only the annihilation of distance but the annihilation of individuals in Fitzgerald’s fiction: Jay Gatsby is in a car involved in a fatal hit-and-run accident, while in Fitzgerald’s uncompleted The Last Tycoon, movie producer Monroe Stahr dies in a plane crash. 

In contrast, railroads were a mature industry by this point, but they remained functional and provided (certainly for Fitzgerald) an element of nostalgia that the two forms that have largely supplanted it have never been able to adequately provide.

In an article for The Atlantic four years ago, author and Midwestern Susan Choi told interviewer Joe Fassler that she regarded this as among the most beautiful and mysterious in the entire novel: “When I'm reading the book, I look forward to the arrival of this passage like one of those trains. I know it's going to give me chills, and it always does.”

Read it again. I’m sure you’ll agree.

(The image accompanying this post is of the Minneapolis, St. Paul and Sault Ste. Marie Railroad, a subsidiary of the Canadian Pacific Railway, arriving in Almena, Wisc., sometime in the 1920s.)

Quote of the Day (F. Scott Fitzgerald, on Summer)

“And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.”— American novelist and short-story writer F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)

(I took the picture accompanying this post in June three years ago, in Central Park.)

Flashback, March 1974: Redford’s Disappointing ‘Gatsby’ Premieres

It’s seldom a good thing when a new film’s budget and clothes receive more media attention than its script, direction or even cast. So it proved with the third film version of The Great Gatsby, which premiered in New York on March 27, 1974 and opened in wider release two days later. Attendees at the premiere came dressed in the 1920s flapper beads and feathers depicted in the movie.

Theoni Aldredge won the Oscar for the film’s costumes (though Ralph Lauren, himself a Gatsby-like character with his reinvention of self, probably deserved at least half of the award, as he designed the clothes for all the men in the film), but that proved to be only one of two Academy Awards (and minor ones at that) gained by the movie. Precious little else associated with the adaptation of the classic novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald attracted the public’s attention. The hype, starting with the $6.4 million budget, was so immense—including covers by Time and Newsweek—that it triggered a critical backlash.

Expectations were high also because of its star, Robert Redford, coming into his own then as Hollywood’s epitome of the elusive leading man, following the huge hit The Way We Were. Total domestic grosses for the film were $20.6 million, more than making the film’s money back, but the exalted nature of the source material, the star, and the hype left an air of disappointment around the movie so heavy that a misimpression spread that it was simply a financial disaster for Paramount Pictures.

Much of that had to do with a critical reception that was, at best, tepid. The New York Times’ Vincent Canby represented the consensus by noting that, while the sets, costumes and even some performances were “exceptionally good,” the movie as a whole “is as lifeless as a body that's been too long at the bottom of a swimming pool.”

It might be time to revisit the film, both in comparison to other versions of the book and on its own terms. The budget notwithstanding, this Gatsby was less a case of wretched excess than a piece of cinema as stately as a luxury ocean liner. This was in marked contrast to the Baz Luhrmann version that opened last year—which, against all odds (especially the very mixed critical reaction), became a hit. (See my take on one serious difference between novel and film—the treatment of “incurably dishonest” golfer Jordan Baker.)

Luhrmann made all kinds of questionable alterations in bringing his vision of the book to the big screen—including an anachronistic score (one problem not applicable to Nelson Riddle's Oscar-winning one for the '74 version) and turning the novel’s first-person narrator, Nick Carraway, into an alcoholic retelling the events. The 1926 silent film version was, in the words of Zelda Fitzgerald, so “ROTTEN and awful and terrible” that she and her husband walked out of the theater. In 1949, the first sound version, starring Alan Ladd and directed by Elliott Nugent, featured a script that left little sense of the novel’s subtlety, largely because of its heavy moralizing, its altered youthful background for Gatsby, and (oddly enough, for a film only 20 years after the decade shown) no flavor for the Prohibition era.

In 1974, concern arose over whether a foreign director sufficiently understood the United States to deal what with many people (including myself) regard as the Great American Novel. But that, by itself, should not have disqualified director Jack Clayton. Going back to Alexis de Tocqueville, some of the most astute commentators on America have been foreigners who came to the nation with fresh eyes. In film, Alfred Hitchcock adapted quickly to the United States as a subject, despite spending the first 40 years of his life in Britain.

In fact, much of Clayton’s prior work would have encouraged hope that he was well-equipped to handle this material. Not only had he directed critically acclaimed adaptations of literary classics (e.g., The Innocents, his 1961 version of Henry James’ Turn of the Screw), but he had also directed another film about a male social climber (Room at the Top).

For all the problems that reviewers found in the finished product, it could have been worse. The first screenplay draft, by Truman Capote (Clayton’s collaborator on The Innocents), was understandably deemed problematic: Clayton, according to Carolyne Bevan’s summary of the director’s archive in the British Film Institute, felt it was “like a great fish that is all head and no tail”—too long, with too little about the past relationship between Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan and too much action in the final minutes. 

Moreover, given Capote’s depiction of Nick as gay and Jordan Baker as lesbian, Clayton and Paramount Pictures would have outraged Fitzgerald’s daughter, Frances “Scottie” Fitzgerald Lanehan Smith, for being untrue to the book and for introducing risqué material that would have undercut a potentially large audience: high-school students assigned the book for class.    

Wayne Gooderham, in a post for The Guardian’s blog, has argued that Capote’s 1958 novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s was, in a sense, an attempt to rewrite The Great Gatsby. Sixteen years later, in the midst of a downward creative and personal spiral, Capote went a couple of steps too far in working with the real thing, and he was off the project.

If Scottie Smith did not want the “gangster” elements of her father’s novel to be overemphasized, the selection of Francis Ford Coppola, director of The Godfather, as Capote’s screenwriting replacement would not have reassured her. In actuality, she need not have worried: that film and its sequel, it can be seen now, relate to the same thing as Gatsby: the corruption of The American Dream. Coppola also turned around his screenplay in three weeks, giving Clayton sufficient time to ponder possible improvements (e.g., focusing more intently on Gatsby’s pool as a plot element).

Would any of the other actors considered for the role--Steve McQueen, Marlon Brando, Jack Nicholson, and Warren Beatty—have worked out better than Robert Redford? Possibly only Beatty, of the same age and glamor as Redford. But Beatty’s terms—direct it himself, with Paramount head Robert Evans playing Gatsby—were non-starters. The evidence is not as clear-cut concerning the others vying with Mia Farrow for Daisy: Faye Dunaway, Candice Bergen, Katharine Ross and Lois Chiles. (As things turned out, Farrow edged out Bergen with what Clayton called a “sensational” test performance, and Chiles had the consolation role of Jordan Baker.)

Mia Farrow’s memoir has suggested that Redford was so engrossed in the Watergate hearings during filming that their scenes together lacked sufficient chemistry. But the problem with the film might have been more basic: faithfulness does not necessarily equate to passion, which lifts what would otherwise be Scott Fitzgerald’s bitterly ironic vision of the moral vacuum in post-WWI America.

Blogging about the 1926 silent Gatsby (lost, save for the trailer), The New Yorker’s Richard Brody suggested three other directors active in 1974 who might have been equal to this material: Robert Altman, Luchino Visconti, and Alain Resnais. But, as I argued in a previous post about An American Tragedy, another filmmaker, still alive during the film’s shooting in 1973, might have been the best choice: George Stevens. A master of movement, sound and editing, Stevens had even been able to find grace notes in Theodore Dreiser’s clunky novel of desire, class and crime when he directed A Place in the Sun. Think what he could have done with Fitzgerald’s lyrical elegy on the same subjects.

Quote of the Day (F. Scott Fitzgerald, on ‘Gatsby' Golfer Jordan Baker)

“Jordan Baker instinctively avoided clever, shrewd men, and now I saw that this was because she felt safer on a plane where any divergence from a code would be thought impossible. She was incurably dishonest. She wasn't able to endure being at a disadvantage and, given this unwillingness, I suppose she had begun dealing in subterfuges when she was very young in order to keep that cool, insolent smile turned to the world and yet satisfy the demands of her hard, jaunty body.”—F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)

I never got around to writing about the latest adaptation of Fitzgerald’s masterpiece when it was in the theaters. But did you think I’d pass up the chance to discuss it now that it’s on Blu-ray? Not a chance, old sport. 

Actually, I saw the film in its opening weekend—that’s how eager I was to see how Baz  Luhrmann, with his famously flamboyant visual style, treated what many (myself very much included) consider The Great American Novel. The Australian director’s past work—especially Romeo and Juliet and Moulin Rouge—offered enough clues about how big his many risks can pay off, and how often they can descend into preposterous bombast.

I’ll end the suspense for you immediately, Faithful Reader: this was a sadly misguided adaptation, even though, as with the director’s prior work, it has many good things. On the plus side: Joel Edgerton, as Daisy Buchanan’s womanizing, old-money husband, Tom: buff, bullying, ignorant, insecure—a portrait well within the novelist’s conception of the character. On the minus side, the film’s perverse framing device: Nick Carraway writing and narrating his account of the title character from a sanitarium, where he is being treated for acute alcoholism.

(The novel not only had no such scenes, but not even an implication that this outsider had fallen victim to the same excesses as the era he chronicled. The device, of course, is a nod to Fitzgerald’s own physical and soul sickness, with even the name of the institution—Perkins—an allusion to his legendary Scribner’s editor, Max.)

Now, in the comfort of my home, I could listen to Luhrmann and his collaborators try to justify themselves. Alternatively, I could examine at length where they went wrong. But having opted, with regret, to fork over $4 more to watch their film in 3D, I’m not going to waste my time as well as money. Instead, I thought I would concentrate on one aspect of the movie: its treatment of golfer Jordan Baker. She provides a way to understand both Fitzgerald’s preoccupations and Luhrmann’s faulty understanding of them.

Filmmakers don’t seem to know what to make of Jordan, either physically or psychologically. Elliott Nugent’s 1949 version, starring the egregiously cast Alan Ladd in the title role, ended with Jordan (played by Ruth Hussey, who probably would have been better as Daisy) married to Nick. The 1974 version starring Robert Redford featured as Jordan the former model (and future James Bond girl) Lois Chiles, who thought that her relationship with Robert Evans would land her the role of Daisy (her subsequent flat line readings reveal why the latter possibility would have been even more disastrous for that film than the finished product was.) This time, Luhrmann and co-screenwriter Craig Pearce have eliminated any hint at all of romance between the female golfer and Nick. One change to the novel is as misbegotten as the other.

One of the things that supposedly makes Gatsby unfilmable is Nick’s passivity, an observer rather than actor. His relationship with Jordan, in the novel, goes some way towards refuting that notion.

But the affair does not simply give Nick something to do when he is not reintroducing Gatsby and Daisy, and witnessing the course of their second time around. No, the Nick-Jordan affair serves as a counterpart to their friends.

From first to last, Gatsby is in thrall to his ecstatic vision of Daisy, leaving him not only a prisoner of love but a prisoner of illusion. On the other hand, Nick’s eye, even when it first catches of Jordan, notices something vaguely off-putting about her. Her shoulders are thrown back “like a young cadet” (echoing his wish, after returning from World War I, that the world could stand at “a sort of moral attention forever”). He enjoys looking at her, he admits, but by the third adjective of his description of her “wan, charming, discontented” face, the sense of a dying fall hangs over every letter in the passage. In fact, it colors the reader’s view of her throughout the rest of the book.

Daisy is soft, girlish, flirty, even with her cousin Nick, a 1920s example of an evergreen type: the Southern belle, used to getting her way around men. None of that for Jordan. Hers is a “hard, jaunty body,” almost androgynous, signaling a new type of woman (or, at least, one noticed for the first time) in the Roaring Twenties: “fast.” (Indeed, even her name is a compound of two car models of the time.)

In a time that allowed American women greater freedom than ever before, Jordan equals in intelligence virtually any man she comes in contact with—and certainly Tom Buchanan, whose boorishness provides her (and Fitzgerald) with some of the novel’s slyest satiric passages.

But all that intelligence might not be enough. Immediately, on first acquaintance, Nick vaguely recalls hearing about her somewhere. It’s only later that he figures out where: in the papers, and the subsequent rumors that she was “incurably dishonest.” She avoids “clever, shrewd men” because they might figure out that she is not genuine.

The Great Gatsby is so densely packed with colors, symbols and allusions that it’s easy to overlook Fitzgerald’s use of sports as a vehicle to suggest encroaching corruption in everyday life in America. As a Princeton undergrad, he had tried out for the football team; his school’s football and hockey star, Hobey Baker, became his beau ideal of an athlete of enormous personal and athletic grace (as I described in a prior post); and 20 years later, down on his luck in Hollywood, he continued to follow the fortunes of his alma mater on the gridiron. (He appears to have based Jordan on Edith Cummings, a Chicago socialite who parlayed her golf skills and beauty into a reputation as "The Fairway Flapper"--and the first appearance of a female athlete on the cover of Time Magazine.)

Fitzgerald was the type of person, then, who should have been predisposed to think of the Roaring Twenties—the era of Babe Ruth, Jack Dempsey, Bill Tilden, and Red Grange—as the so-called “Golden Age of Sports.” But perhaps this worship of athletes only raised his antenna about anything that could corrode the purity of sports.

And so, his great novel includes a rumor about Meyer Wolfsheim (widely believed to be based on gangster Arnold Rothstein) helping to “throw” the 1919 World Series; polo star Tom Buchanan using his “cruel” body to dominate his wife and mistress; and Jordan’s cheating to posit that not even sports, a realm where grace and dedication can shine, is beyond the moral malaise overtaking all other aspects of American life.

“It takes two to make an accident,” Jordan tells Nick in the quarrel that precipitates their breakup, as she tries to deflect some of the responsibility for the end of the relationship. The remark weighs especially heavily coming after the traffic accident that, in effect, seals Gatsby’s doom.

But both parties are not necessarily equally at fault in such matters, and certainly not in the one that kills Tom’s mistress, Myrtle Wilson. It is Daisy, not Gatsby, driving the vehicle that runs over Myrtle, yet Tom takes control of Daisy for good (and camouflages the evidence of his affair from Myrtle’s cuckolded, heartsick, not deranged husband) by claiming that Gatsby was behind the wheel.

Jordan’s silent complicity with the Buchanans is yet another signal that, despite their differences in temperament, she shares their poverty of values. (An earlier hint came in her first scene, when she turns to Nick and remarks, snobbishly, "You live in West Egg.”) In the end, the “incurably dishonest” female golfer is not that different from the two “careless people” who earn Nick’s disapproval.

(The image accompanying this post shows Elizabeth Debick, the actress playing Jordan Baker in the Baz Luhrmann adaptation. The director got Jordan's look fine--which makes it all the more astonishing that he got her function in the novel so wrong.)