reading some best sellers (from a hundred years ago) - "I want to get a general view of the whole problem"

Strange sensations reading American fiction lately.  Positive and negative.  The negative is that I am having a bit of an allergic reaction to The Custom of the Country (1913), both to its subject and style.  First, some impatience with the problems of shallow rich people, and second some with the best-sellerishness of the novel, although I do not know how much of a best seller it really was.  It was not a smash like The House of Mirth (1905).

The list of the best sellers of 1913 is a glimpse of an unknown world.  I have heard of maybe six of the books from the decade's best sellers, and read none.  What am I talking about?

I mean scenes like the one that begins Chapter XV, where two minor characters discuss the Problem of Divorce for four pages, in dialogue worthy of the future Hollywood films that presumably use quality authors like Wharton as their models:

“Are there sides already?  If so, I want to look down on them impartially from the heights of pure speculation.  I want to get a general view of the whole problem of American marriages.”

Or see an earlier scene, in Chapter X, in which two (other) minor characters discuss some financial scandal that presumably affects the plot later – I’m only halfway through the book – I hope everything works out well for everyone.  Wharton is vague about the financial details, understanding them about as well as I do.  The dialogue is pretty much screenplay-ready.

None of this has much to do with most of the novel, the good part, Undine Spragg’s rung by rung climb up the society ladder, at whatever the cost (to others).  All of this is terrific, and fiction is often at its best discovering the inner lives of shallow people, but I am enjoying it from a distance.

The Custom of the Country is the eighth Wharton book I have read within the last year or so.  Most of them have been short story collections.  Perfect commercial American magazine fiction of the first decade of the 20th century.  I enjoy it quite a lot, but I should probably take a break from it once I finish this novel.  Although the next thing Wharton does, chronologically, is to become a great French war hero.  Here I am whining about books about shallow people.

The commercial ideal, come to think of it, was also visible in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s first collection of stories, Flappers and Philosophers (1920), where it was immediately obvious why he scored such a hit (This Side of Paradise, his first book, is from the same year).  These stories pop with energy.  They are zingy.  Specifically, the young women, the flappers, are enormous sparkly fun even if the story is fundamentally idiotic.  “The Offshore Pirate,” as an example, in which the flapper is captured by a pirate, ready for an actress to be dropped into the role.    Some kind of parable about Scott wooing Zelda probably.  Anyways, nonsense.  But I can see how readers of the Saturday Evening Post would be pleased to see that the new issue had a Fitzgerald story, just like the Scribner’s readers would feel when they say a Wharton story in the table of contents.  Yes, here’s the good stuff.

"See!" he cried triumphantly. "It's a bona-fide piece of printed matter. It fooled me." - an original idea about The Great Gatsby. Plus: Nick Carraway's second book

Would you believe I at first thought I could pack all of this Gatsby business into one post?  Idiocy. 

The problem is that I’m trying to make what might actually be an original point about The Great Gatsby, which does not happen every day.*  The standards of evidence are different.

A summary, for those who have, wisely, not been following too closely:

Nick Carraway begins to write a book called The Great Gatsby, about an unusually interesting fellow he met one summer.  We know this from page 2.  On page 55, Nick, “[r]eading over what he has written so far,” decides he has not given the right impression.  We’re one third through the book.  The idea that Nick is writing a book, is writing anything, is never mentioned again.

Now, I think we’ve learned something already.  One response to finding problems in what I have written is to revise.  Nick instead writes an addendum, a curious one.  The problem he finds in his first three chapters of his book about Jay Gatsby, in which Gatsby is only barely introduced, is that they do not have enough Nick Carraway in them.  So he tells us about his work, what he eats for lunch, his imaginary stalking (p. 56), and his romance with a golf pro.  The chapter ends with:

Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known. (59)

In a typical novel with an unreliable narrator, if there is such a thing (The Tin Drum, Lolita, The Good Soldier), an avowal of honesty is a signal that the narrator has just been or is about to be outrageously dishonest.  I’m not sure that’s true here.  I’ll set that aside, and just keep the new piece of information that I need, that the text we’re reading is Nick Carraway’s draft of the story.  He is not revising.

One more clue: back on page 2, again, Nick tells us that he “came back from the East last autumn,” and later we learn that he means the autumn when Gatsby ends, in 1922.**  So “now” (page 2 “now”) is sometime in 1923.  Chapter IX (p. 163) begins “After two years I remember the rest of that day, and that night and the next day…” meaning that Nick is "now" writing in 1924.  In another novel, I might dismiss this as the author’s sloppiness, but not here.  We’ve learned that it has taken Nick a year or more to (almost) finish his – not his book – but his unrevised manuscript.

Adding up:  Nick began writing what he had hoped to be a book.  He even had a title picked out.  At some point (when?) in the long process of composition, he abandons the book, but not the writing.  He has some other purpose, a private one.  Looking over the critical work, the main interpretive problem of Gatsby has been to work out Nick’s role in the book, or to properly weight the places of Nick and Jay Gatsby.  If my idea is right, Fitzgerald, using no more than four pieces of information, is telling us that Nick is in fact working on the same problem, and that the mechanism is his writing.  I’m making Gatsby sound more than a bit like The Good Soldier (1915).  Yes.  There’s a reason Carraway’s non-fiction “book” doesn’t look like other non-fiction books.  At some point, it is no longer meant to be a book.

To pursue the idea, I should look for changes in Nick’s ideas, tone, or attitude that are somehow signaled in the writing itself, signals that he hears or understands only by writing them.  That’s for my next time through the novel.  I am deeply suspicious of this passage, from the man with “enormous owl-eyed spectacles,” surely a client of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg:

“What do you think?” he demanded impetuously.

“About what?”

He waved his hand towards the book-shelves.

“About that. As a matter of fact you needn’t bother to ascertain. I ascertained. They’re real.”

“The books?”

He nodded.

“Absolutely real – have pages and everything… See!” he cried triumphantly. “It’s a bona-fide piece of printed matter. It fooled me.” (45)

And in fact, books – non-fiction books, in particular – are treated as objects of suspicion throughout the novel.

I have come up with another novel I would like to read.  It’s a sequel to The Great Gatsby called Nick’s Next Book.  Nick in fact has published his manuscript, but in such a revised form (with all of the libel and slander scrubbed out) that he barely recognizes it as his own.  It is recognized as the great piece of writing it is and makes some money, so Nick wants to write another book.  But about what?  So the novel is a picaresque, Nick’s comic adventures as he searches for his next subject.

Or:  the draft we read is actually published.  It’s a huge smash, but almost all of the money goes to settle the lawsuits brought by Tom and Daisy Buchanan.  Nick is crushed, so he needs to write another book, etc.  In the beginning, set in the 1960s, Nick has just retired (or has died?) from a position in a creative writing program, an acknowledged pioneer of creative non-fiction.

Please write this novel for me.  The Great Gatsby is still under American copyright, I believe, so you may have to wait a few years to publish it.  That’s fine; I’m patient.  Thanks.

* If someone who studies or teaches Gatsby were to stop in and say, “Original? You know, pal, one out of seven undergraduate papers is on exactly this subject,” he would be doing me a favor.

** The chronology of the novel seems well-established.  See the chronology appendix in the 1991 Cambridge University Press edition of The Great Gatsby, p. 215.

The man who gives his name to this book - Nick Carraway's The Great Gatsby

Excuse me – I have a little note here I need to review.  “Spell Nick Carraway’s dang name right.”  Got it.

Readers, I said yesterday, have to buy into the conceits of a writer.  The writer may occasionally put a potted plant over a stain in the book’s carpet.  Is it rude for the reader to lift the pot and point out the stain?  Probably.  How about the critic?  His responsibilities may be a bit different, and what good reader is not also a good critic?

Nick Carraway is writing a book.  How many readers of The Great Gatsby remember, or ever notice, that he’s writing a book?  He says he is, on page 2 (I’m going to need the first sentence later):

When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart.  Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction – Gatsby, who represented everything for which I have unaffected scorn.

And then there is exactly one more reference to the idea:  “Reading over what I have written so far, I see I have given the impression that the events of three nights several weeks apart were all that absorbed me” (55).  That’s it.  Nothing else all the way through the end on p. 180.  Question 1: Is this an idea Fitzgerald tacked on and then forgot to develop?  Seems odd to just drop it.

Question 2:  What kind of book is this book?  Nick Carraway’s The Great Gatsby is a memoir, subjective but still non-fiction.  Is it like other non-fiction of its time, other memoirs about spending a summer hanging out with a – anybody here not read Gatsby? – with a gentleman as interesting as Jay Gatsby?  It certainly does not look much like, to pick some well-known contemporaries, Twenty Years at Hull House (1910) or Eminent Victorians (1918).  But what do I know about the memoirs of 1925?  Nothing, nothing.  Maybe Nick is writing a novel.  That would destroy the book for me, so let’s please forget that option.

How do I know what fiction or non-fiction looks like, anyways?   I recently read Elif Batuman’s The Possessed (2010), ostensibly a collection of essays, ostensibly non-fiction.  Except that it was obviously fiction, obviously!   What a relief when, on page 94, she baldly describes her own book as a novel.  Also, keep an eye on the apples – there are three of them, just like in real life a novel.  So how do I know?  I recognize conventions, style, voice.  Who knows.  The Great Gatsby has too much dialogue, too much immediate precision, and way too much Nick Carraway.  Also, Nick directly accuses a (fictional, but not to him) living person of vehicular manslaughter and other assorted crimes, so too much libel and slander.

I wanted to see if Fitzgerald scholars had looked at contemporary memoirs.  I quickly chewed through ten volumes of Gatsby criticism (criterion for selection: on the library shelf), many of them collections of essays.  No help.  Lots of comparisons, good ones, to fiction, like Heart of Darkness (1899).  No answer to Question 2, though.  How about Question 1?

I found only two critics who even seem to notice that Nick is writing.  Mary J. Tate, author of the Critical Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald, Facts on File, 2007, who, in fairness, has a lot to do in her book, has nothing but this:  “Fitzgerald strengthens Nick’s role as narrator by giving the impression that Nick is the author” (91).  I don’t see how.  If the two references, to the book and the writing, were excised, the narrator’s “role” would be just as “strong,” whatever that means.

George Garret takes the issue more seriously.*  He sees a useful tension between written and spoken language, and identifies a number of particularly deft places where Carraway slips from one to the other – Nick’s a great writer!  The “poetry of intense perception” (written) is mixed in with “a hard-edged, implaccable [sic] vulgarity” (spoken, all of this on p. 111).  This is a real insight into the crackliness of Gatsby’s prose, and it tells us why we need the conceit that Carraway is writing, and not, for example, that we are eavesdropping on his thoughts.  Doesn’t really explain the book, though.

I know why it’s a book.  Tomorrow - this has already gone on too long - I’ll explain the book.  I lifted the plant to discover not a stain, but an intricate pattern.

* George Garret, “Fire and Freshness: A Matter of Style in The Great Gatsby.”  In New Essays on The Great Gatsby, ed. Matthew Bruccoli, Cambridge University Press, 1985.

Yellow cocktail music - Nick Carraway is a great writer

This post is about Charlotte Brontë.  Try to guess how.

For fiction to work, the reader has to willingly buy into its conceits.  We mostly do so reflexively, which is part of the power of fiction.  Kevin, at Interpolations, recently chose to step back while reading Ethan Frome (1911), where he noticed that the electrical engineer telling (by writing?) the story sounded surprisingly like Edith Wharton.*  Anyway, he was certainly unusually talented.

Humbert Humbert (Lolita, 1955), Charles Kinbote (Pale Fire, 1962), and the narrator of Despair (1936) do not resemble each other so much as they all resemble, and write like, Vladimir Nabokov.  They are better writers, actually, since their unrevised first drafts are as well-written as Nabokov’s agonizingly polished novels, and they were all writing under difficult conditions – prison, mental breakdown, police pursuit.  Amazing.

And then there’s Nick Carraway, a bond trader, admittedly “rather literary in college” (4),** whose first book, The Great Gatsby (1925?),*** is a masterpiece.  It’s extraordinary, as good as F. Scott Fitzgerald.  No, better.  I haven’t read The Beautiful and the Damned (1922), but the author of the college lark This Side of Paradise (1920) was hardly in Carraway’s league.  I don’t even know why I thought to make the comparison.  And The Great Gatsby is also a first draft (this requires evidence – tomorrow).

On the one hand, this fine writing from unlikely sources is implausible.  On the other hand, the proof is right there on the page.  Carraway says he’s writing the sentences we’re reading, and there they are.  Should I doubt my own eyes?  I think this is the strongest special effect available in fiction.  I know that Superman does not exist, and that people cannot fly, but I have seen Superman with my own eyes, flying all over the place.  That’s how movies work.  But Nick Carraway is somehow, without having seen him, even more real.  I’ve read his prose:

The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun, and now the orchestra is playing yellow cocktail music, and the opera of voices pitches a key higher. Laughter is easier minute by minute, spilled with prodigality, tipped out at a cheerful word. The groups change more swiftly, swell with new arrivals, dissolve and form in the same breath; already there are wanderers, confident girls who weave here and there among the stouter and more stable, become for a sharp, joyous moment the center of a group, and then, excited with triumph, glide on through the sea-change of faces and voices and color under the constantly changing light. (40-1, at Gatsby’s party)

What addle-pated reader, in the name of empty verisimilitude would want to dispose of the word “yellow” here?****  So we readers, if we’re not fools, swallow it all, collaborate with the writer to make the fiction work.  The writer has his responsibilities, but so does the reader.

At the same time, though, I can try to tear apart what the writer is doing – I can read both ways at once.  Is that voice doing what it’s supposed to be doing?  How far did the author really think through his decisions?  For example, doesn’t that wonderful passage sound a little odd in a memoir?  Not impossible, on its own, but as the book goes on like this, a little odd.  Maybe a little more like something one would find in a novel?  What, exactly, is this book Carraway is writing (he says it’s a book – p. 2)?  Fitzgerald is writing a novel, but Carraway is writing non-fiction, isn’t he?  Aren’t the two things different, shouldn’t they look different?  Tomorrow: Nick Carraway’s strange first book.  A preview: Fitzgerald is playing a marvelous little trick here.

Page numbers from the Scribner paperback, 2004 of Fitzgerald's novel, not Carraway's book.

* An ensuing argument with D. G. Myers pushed me in useful directions.  As usual, the argument began because one of us (me) was actually arguing about something else.

** What did he write?  “[A] series of very solemn and obvious editorials for the Yale News” (4).  But he is certainly a great reader, yes?  “And I had the high intention of reading many other books besides.”  Besides “a dozen volumes on banking and credit and investment securities”!  Someone, Nick or Scott, is having some fun here.

*** F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel of the same title was definitely published in 1925.  I’m not so sure about Nick Carraway’s memoir.

**** The word actually tells us something, that Carraway might be, like Nabokov, synesthetic.