Anne O’Neill
I first read The Great Gatsby
in secondary school in 1983. It was one of the prescribed novels on the Leaving
Certificate Course. It was to be our gateway into modernist literature, the
literary movement that emerged after the first World War where writers explored
the themes of alienation and spiritual bankruptcy evident in society and used
novel modes of representation in prose to express the new sensibilities of the
time.
My original version of The
Great Gatsby was a Penguin version 1972 featuring the willowy and very
beautiful Mia Farrow flanked by Robert Redford. It survived that initial
teenage reading and many address changes through the flux of college life and
still sits on the shelf next to a new hardcover edition featuring gorgeous,
golden art deco patterning bought just two years ago.
Gatsby appealed to my school
girl soul because of the romantic story at its heart, that between Jimmy Gatz,
the poor midwesterner who when stationed at an army base waiting for overseas
deployment meets and falls in love with Daisy Fay, the belle of Louisville. She
promises to wait for him but her devotion wavers as the months of his deployment
drag on and she eventually marries the wealthy Tom Buchanan. Gatsby
subsequently becomes rich through nefarious means (primarily bootlegging) and
buys a house on Long Island Sound directly across the bay from the mansion that
Tom and Daisy occupy.
He throws huge, lavish parties
where “the bar is in full swing, and floating rounds of cocktails permeate the
garden outside, until the air is alive with chatter and laughter” and where “in
his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings
and the champagne and the stars”. The decadent opulence of these scenes,
described with poetic lushness by Fitzgerald’s prose, fired my teenage
imagination and the sheer romance of Jay Gatsby hoping that his lost love Daisy
would wander into his mansion with the other partygoers fed my love of the
dramatic possibilities of love.
The old lovers eventually meet
through the agency of Nick Carraway, a distant cousin of Daisy’s, who has
rented a house next door to Gatsby after coming east to learn the bond
business. The story ends in tragedy with Gatsby’s dead body floating on a
mattress in his pool, shot in a case of mistaken identity, and with Daisy and
Tom retreating back into the impregnable sanctuary of their vast wealth and
carelessness.
I have re-read the novel many
times, often just to marvel at the brilliance of a writer who can conjure a
character, an emotion and a scene using words like the old masters used paints.
The story is narrated by Nick
Carraway and all events are filtered through his point of view and imbued with
his moral stamp, even though in the opening paragraph he states that he was
inclined in his personality to “reserve all judgements.” His aperçus are unique
because he is both a participant in the action of the story and an outsider
because of his midwestern background. This allows him access to “privileged
glimpses into the human heart”.
Nick, like Gatsby, is an
outsider, an étranger among the wealthy of Long Island. Fitzgerald himself
always felt he was on the outside looking in amongst the elite that he mixed
with on the Riviera and at Princeton and it is precisely that stance that made
him such a great writer and allowed him to be the voice of his generation, the
bard of the Jazz Age.
As the years have sped by I’ve
come to appreciate the romance of Gatsby’s character in itself outside of his
love affair with Daisy. Nick describes Gatsby as having “an extraordinary gift
for hope, a heightened sensitivity to the promises of nature” and it is his
unerring pursuit of his dreams symbolised by the green light at the end of
Daisy’s dock that make us love him.
As human beings we are
constantly engaged in a spirit of reinvention and pursuit of dreams and
ambitions, however futile. Despite death and disaster preying on our hopes and dreams
we are made noble by our sisyphean efforts to “beat on, boats against the
current” and paddle towards an “orgiastic future”.
Perhaps it’s the ineffable
sadness of the foul dust that preys on our hopes and dreams, a powerful theme
in the novel that can never be properly conveyed by movie versions of the film,
whether by Paramount in 1974 or more recently in the glitzy modern version by
Baz Luhrmann.
As with the two books on my
shelf, one cover crinkled and shoddy, the other one hard back and ornate, it is
what lies beneath that matters. Fitzgerald’s novel is a portal to the savage
heart of the human spirit, affords a glimpse at our humanity and wonders at our
enormous capacity to dream, to imagine, to hope and to persevere.
Anne O Neill works as a pharmacist
in Tralee, Co Kerry. She has an MA in creative writing from Kingston University
and is a member of Listowel Writer’s Week literary committee. Her short fiction
has been shortlisted for Cuirt and Over the Edge literary competitions and she
is currently working on a novel. Her blog about books and life is called
ofselfandshelf.com