The Great Greats
Here’s a little inside information: in next week’s book section, Paul Collins is weighing in on the NYT’s contentious best-novel-of-the-last-25-years list. (Though he goes in a very Paul Collins direction with it. You’ll see. [If you don’t remember Collins’s audience review from a few years ago, refresh your memory].)
The Great Gatsby wasn’t on the list because The Great Gatsby wasn’t published in the last 25 years, but Collins makes a point about it nonetheless, and today over lunch I ran into some more thoughts about it in an interview with Haruki Murakami in the first issue of A Public Space. I know, I know, people talk about The Great Gatsby all the time; if you are one of those people who is sick of everyone talking about The Great Gatsby, stop reading here. Because I’m one of those people who is sick of people who are sick of talking about The Great Gatsby. After all: (1) it’s damn near perfect; (2) it was scorned by critics and readers alike when Fitzgerald was alive; and (3) it’s gloriously short. Murakami would take issue with me describing it “damn near perfect” because in this A Public Space interview, in which he talks about American writers he’s translated (and he only translates writers he wants to—so, yes to Salinger and Fitzgerald and Carver, no to Paul Auster, Stuart Dybek, and Steven Millhauser), Murakami says:
Before I started translating it, I had felt that The Great Gatsby was a perfect novel. As I worked on it line by line, though, I began to feel that the magic of this novel lay in fact in its imperfection: long sentences without much consistency, certain excesses in setting, occasional lack of consistency in the way characters conduct themselves. The beauty this novel possesses is supported by the accumulation of all these imperfections. I might go so far as to say that it is a special kind of beauty which could only have been expressed by being imperfect. This is probably something I would never have realized if I hadn’t actually translated it into Japanese.
I’m not convinced that he’s right, that characters not being consistent spells flaws—to paraphrase Woolf: is life that way? must novels be?—but reading the interview made me excited for the book all over again, and I’ve read the damn thing several times. If you haven’t, well, guess what, it’s a great summer novel. Here, let’s put our toe into chapter three, shall we?
There was music from my neighbor’s house through the summer nights. In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars. At high tide in the afternoon I watched his guests diving from the tower of his raft, or taking the sun on the hot sand of his beach while his two motor-boats slit the waters of the Sound, drawing aquaplanes over cataracts of foam. On weekends his Rolls-Royce became an omnibus, bearing parties to and from the city between nine in the morning and long past midnight, while his station wagon scampered like a brisk yellow bug to meet all trains. And on Mondays eight servants, including an extra gardener, toiled all day with mops and scrubbing-brushes and hammers and garden-shears, repairing the ravages of the night before.
Every Friday five crates of oranges and lemons arrived from a fruiterer in New York—every Monday these same oranges and lemons left his back door in a pyramid of pulpless halves. There was a machine in the 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…
I suppose I better get back to work. (The whole novel’s here.)
For some fascinating insights about Fitzgerald's novels, read "Max Perkins: Editor of Genius" by A. Scott Berg.
Perkins worked very closely with his exclusive clients, including Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, and he deserves credit for prompting revision or restructuring of their best novels in draft stages. Among other things, it was Max Perkins who convinced Fitzgerald to go with the title "The Great Gatsby" instead of the novel's draft title of "Trimalchio in West Egg."