Tag Archives: literary criticism

AfterWord, Dale Salwar, Ed.

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University of Iowa, 2011

The editor has collected articles of essays and fake interviews with various writers, each piece being a communication with a dead writer.

Various literary means convey the writings but usually by dialogue which is poorly written.

There are questionable assertions:

“Do you accept the view of Sinclair Lewis, F. Scott Fitzgerald, that you were the first indigenous American to write about American manners rather than European ones?”

EDITH WHARTON: “That’s probably quite true…”

WRONG. Mark Twain wrote about American manners when Edith was a girl. Perhaps the questioner was actually asking about the American Eastern pretense to manners, but other American writers also wrote about those before Edith.

EDITH WHARTON complains (p. 151) she had no formal education. Melville had no formal education. Twain went into the sixth grade. But I agree that WHARTON would have been a far superior author if she had taken the Creative Writing Classes at the University of Iowa.

Edith could have done that. Her family was filthy rich. Edith’s maiden name was Jones and because neighbors like the Rockerfellers and Whitneys always tried to keep up the pace, “Keeping up with the Jones,” became a cliche.  The Jones were the first family with electricity, telephones, flatscreen TVs, and iPads. They never saw an app they didn’t like.

In her interview Wharton complains that Pearl S. Buck got the Nobel Prize and she didn’t. Sour grapes. “Edith, Willa Cather didn’t get a Nobel Prize, either.”

There are statements in some chapters demonstrating an appalling lack of knowledge about the author: Joseph Conrad, who is not all Heart of Darkness. Conrad had no humor in his books. Anyone who hasn’t read Lord Jim should not be writing an essay for this compilation entitled, AfterWord. Anyone who doesn’t know the butterfly chapter in Lord Jim, God help them.

AfterWord, Dale Salwak, Editor., U. of Iowa

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Conjuring the literary dead is the subtitle of this book. The editor has assembled articles (essays) (stories) by various writers, each piece representing a communication with a dead writer.

Various literary means convey the writings, but there is usually dialogue throughout. It is poorly written dialogue.

There are many questionable points. For instance,

INTERVIEWER: “Do you accept the view of Sinclair Lewis, F. Scott Fitzgerald…that you were the first indigenous American to write about American manners rather than European ones?  EDITH WHARTON: “That’s probably quite true…”

WRONG. Mark Twain published books about American manners when Edith was a teenager.

Edith Wharton complains she had no formal education (p. 151). Melville had no college education; Mark Twain went through the sixth grade. However, in Edith’s case I agree that Wharton would have been a far superior author if she had taken the Creative Writing Course at the University of Iowa. I note that Edith could have done that because her family was filthy rich, unlike Twain or Melville’s families.

There are statements in some chapters demonstrating an appalling lack of knowledge about the dead authors: Joseph Conrad [who is not all Heart of Darkness].  Conrad had no humor in his books. Anyone who has not read Lord Jim should not be writing an article for this compilation entitled, AfterWord. Anyone who doesn’t know about the butterfly chapter in Lord Jim, God help them.

Lord Jim, God help them.

TRUE BELIEVER: ATROCITY

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TRUE BELIEVER by Kurt Andersen

Do not buy this book. Waste no time reading it.

Andersen has presented America with a gross self-promotion, and he flat out misrepresents that this book is about the 1960s. Author Andersen is a National Public Radio host, a New York personality and a contributor to The Daily Beast. When asked by that Internet website to compile a list of his favorite books about the Sixties, Andersen put his book as Number One.

True Believer story: Woman in her sixties is writing her memoirs. The first chapter tells of her current life (divorce, professional status, etc.) She says she saved every document about her life from birth certificate to date, but the text belies she did that or she knows what she is writing about. Because of a poorly contrived literary contrivance of this book, I’ll call this woman First Person Girl.

In Chapter One Andersen introduces First Person Girl who is writing her memoirs. The first chapter is first person. Almost every chapter for 250 pages is First Person Girl in her sixties, as a child or as a teenager, and she is always “I.” Flitting between the present day and the Sixties (and sometimes events in between the Sixties and present day) requires a reader with a very complete memory of those 60 years just to know the references. Andersen does not tell what any character is actually thinking and why she is next doing something or changing her mind. He presents no life, no character changes and no character development. The book is a recitation of unconnected events with First Person Girl among them or mentioning them, along with more current and past events. Andersen tries to connect the reader to references by making First Person Girl a James Bond fan. What Andersen accomplishes is making First Person Girl silly, supercilious and superficial.

After introducing First Person Girl in Chapter One, most novelists would drop into the life of the subject. NOPE. There are improbable conversations. A grandchild asks First Person Girl, tell about the hippies. Did you smoke marijuana?!

Of 428 pages of text about half is present day stuff, and the remainder about the Sixties and references to facts in between (Princess Diane’s death). When writing, Andersen opened a reference book of events by year and asked himself: What am I going to put on the page from which year? The Mall March, August 1963, Harry Belafonte wasn’t identified as being there, but the lesser known in 1963 Sidney Poitier was. Next in that chapter was the “first real conversation about the Negro question with a Negro,” the family’s cleaning woman.(page 102) Violet complains, gives impressions and tells aspirations of the Civil Rights Movement, but it conveys nothing. Violet is not a real person; she’s a token stuck in so five pages can be devoted to Civil Rights exposition. First Person Girl next summarizes Violet’s conversations over “hundreds of hours…over the previous decade.”(105) [Which decade and when did First Person Girl have the conversations? Violet dies at age 51 within a decade.] Nothing is learned from the bald recitation of facts and impressions in the contrived, counterfeit drivel. Readers have no insight into Violet’s life, the life and times of the Sixties in general or of the Civil Rights Movement broadly.

It finally became apparent that First Person Girl grew up, in the Midwest, likely Northern Illinois. There are a few lines about listening to the Cubs game but no mention of Ernie Banks. There is a reference of going to Milwaukee, but not to Milwaukee Braves games or seeing Hank Aaron. On page 111 I thought these people were Canadians – a reference is made to “Canadian sophistication.” I was mistaken.

The idle and frequent references to events in the Sixties have no order, no significance and no relevance. They don’t put the reader in the human lives of those times, and they don’t tell what Americans were thinking. While flitting between 2012 and the Sixties, Andersen mentions Le Bron James (305) but fails to mention New York kid, Lew Alcindor [Kareem Abdul-Jabbar], UCLA basketball [nine championships in eleven years] or Cassius Clay [Mohammad Ali]. If Andersen were interested in young forwards playing basketball in the Sixties, he might have mentioned Rick Berry or Julius Erving. NOPE. In an appeal to the modern crowd but conveying nothing, Anderson mentions Mark Zuckerberg (308). The name dropping adds nothing; it tells nothing. It is a waste of ink, paper and distracts from any story of the Sixties. Indeed, while relying heavily on cliches and name dropping, it is important to get everything right and imprudent, lazy and i!rresponsible to use slogans twice: “Hey, hey, LBJ, How many kids did you kill today?” (187, 328)

What wasn’t mentioned about the Sixties? A good economy but not much about the World or even Vietnam. Sports wise omitted were the Boston Celtics, Wilt Chamberlain, Sandy Koufax, Bob Gibson, the New York Mets and the Packers. Movies were mentioned but not Doctor Zhivago, The Graduate, Midnight Cowboy, Joe or The Last Summer (excellent, brutal, cruel story about social pressure among teenagers). “The Smothers Brothers” TV show is mentioned but not Pat Paulson for President. There are no other presidential candidates in 1968 other than Nixon and Humphrey. There were no gays and lesbians in the Sixties. Andersen apparently was not part of any rioting; he mentions riots but not what it is like to be inside a riot. The April 1968 C!hicago riot is not mentioned.

The research for True Believer is poor. It reveals Andersen had his ears closed; his eyes shut; his mouth covered, his hands in mittens. He was a sheltered teenager who went to Harvard University in 1970 after that school had its campus student uprisings. A book was written and published within a year of those events; it tells of the low-key protests. The other excellent book from 1972 gives a decade’s events at Harvard: The Fall of the American University, Adam Ulam.

Approximately page 250 to page 370 First Person Girl, who has juvenile diabetes, fades. Andersen more or less slips into a third person story. First Person Girl goes to Radcliffe, so is an adjunct of Harvard. A Harvard-Radcliffe “cult” (Andersen’s word) forms, is secret, purportedly disciplined, supposedly motivated, presumably knowledgable, financially capable and with the means to change the world. They use artistic license from The Theater: Since everyone in the cult is highly educated, there are show-off references by cult members about other cult members – characters from Shakespeare’s plays like Mr. Indecisive of the cult, Hamlet. That is an idea for use in a movie, but it does not reflect any reality of cults or from any group of the Sixties. The Shakespeare references indicate Andersen’s abysmal failure to research any revolutionary or radical movement or group which was successful. He could have started by reading the writings of Harvard professor, Adam Ulam.

Cults exist through psychological and physical coercion and force, and emotional dependency. Add ideology and there is an political dimension. In the 1960s drugs were used to create submissive, compliant beings, following a Leader to Earth’s end. But drugs and diabetes? First Person Girl does drugs and gets by. Another cult tool was sex, especially with the Leader. Sex sealed relationships and secured devotion. First Person Girl had a boyfriend. I infer he was a Leader of some sort, so he had her exclusively. Anderson doesn’t tell his cult-sex-life, but no doubt Boyfriend was actively porking everything he could. Was there an emotional toll on First Person Girl?

It is difficult to determine which true beliefs anyone in the cult had because there seems no Leader, no herald, no Joshua. The cult decides to assassinate LBJ, President of USA. Because of this limited goal Andersen’s cult is mislabeled. It is closer to a cell. The cult plans, gets prepared, gets into place: LBJ gives his quitter speech on March 31, 1968, and everyone in the cult realizes the assassination should no longer be carried out. Members listen to a Bob Dylan song, and one or two cult members sing along.(336-337) That’s not much of a cult, a cell or any other type of group, except a bunch of spoiled, rich Ivy League Ivory Tower morons occupying this asshole story.

Andersen, though, does not give up. The story is wanting, but he wants a longer book. He drops in more events, and more names. Page 393 students of Harvard (I believe) chant: “Dare to struggle, dare to win, Charles Manson, live like him.” It is extremely doubtful this was chanted in the fall of 1968 or any other time in public. Charles Manson was completely unknown in 1968. The Tate-Labianca murders happened in August 1969. Manson and those murders were anathema to the New Left. When Bernadine Dohrn [name dropped along with Bill Aryes in True Believer, 110] praised the death of Sharon Tate, Leftists said about Dohrn, Aryes and their followers, “The Weather Vain:” “You don’t need to be a Weatherman to know who the assholes are.”

The next page, 394, Andersen bounces to March 1970 – townhouse in New York City explodes; it is a bomb making factory. He regresses to November 1969 with revelation of the massacre on My Lai, Vietnam. He rushes into the future to the killings at Kent State, May 4, 1970. This whipsawing is nonsensical, word wasting, page filing and reveals Andersen is not writing a novel but is listing events and is making up crap about each happening.

I looked for evidence of research. None. In ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Andersen writes condescendingly, “…there were things I needed to learn about…young women in the 1960s.” [Men have penises; women have vaginas.] “I am grateful to all the women I’ve known – in particular to those I know and love the best [names omitted to protect the unwary] for their specific suggestions and corrections, and for splendidly teaching me day in and day out how the other half lives.”

None of Andersen’s female sources appeared to be around during the Sixties, and Andersen read nothing: Not Betty Friedan, not Robin Morgan, not Valerie Solanas, nothing about SDS and the New Left and not Alice Echol’s excellent book, Dare to Be Bad. A defining moment of the women’s movements occurred at a New Left meeting during the summer of 1967. New Leftists were droning on about issues, agenda and dogma. Shulamith Firestone, a tiny, determined woman, got to the microphone with points she wanted raised and discussed. A guy dismissed her (paraphrased): Don’t bother us little girl. We’re talking about real issues.

From that time on, the New Left, radicals, revolutionaries and other groups had difficulty obtaining women. It was fatal to those causes because women were the oil that allowed the machines to function and keep relations civil. Women, who were conscious [not First Person Girl], were unwilling to be mothers to men their own age. They wanted to be women and adopt other roles as opportunities arose. There were arguments over this stance, and especially about no kitchen duty, no cooking duty, no housework, no typing. None of these female concerns were mentioned in Andersen’s cult or in True Believer. It is too bad because if the women he loved had informed Andersen, True Believer may not have been published.

What sort of research should Andersen have done? I cannot tell which sources are available today. When I wrote Bitch., a period not a dot, a verb not a noun (iBookstore, Michael Ulin Edwards), the Berkeley campus housed the one library with the collection of liberationist and feminist texts which had existed in Berkeley since 1970. I wrote the first draft of Bitch., and I returned to that library for research. It was gone. The books (about 10,000) had been moved.

Whereto? Berkeley was going through a spring cleaning trying to free space for new groups with new interests. Women’s issues were passé, especially the thoughts and imperfect expressions from the late Sixties and early Seventies. The books (and I suppose magazines, articles and pamphlets) went to the main library where they were culled. Not many went into the library collections; some went to other UC libraries. Many of the women’s books were mass market paperbacks, and those were put up for sale, a nickel a piece. If there were no buyers, the books were recycled. I paid five cents, found books in libraries, in used bookstores, in library bookstores and at garage and yard sales. I likely read 500 books and looked at another 500.

Reading True Believer, I have no inkling, no sense, no impression that Kurt Andersen researched any issue on any point he mentions: Hippies, Street People, the New Left, Harvard student protests, women, Vietnam, anti-war movement and marches, and liberation issues. He didn’t live among any of those people, so he lacks experience on that level. He may have vast experience with one issue: drugs. 

In True Believer an issue of writing arises. Any author, especially someone writing a memoir as a novel, has a voice separate and apart from the character in the novel. Mark Twain did it as well as can be done in Huckleberry Finn. In True Believer there is no indication that Andersen keeps himself separate from First Person Girl’s voice. Andersen never abandons the author’s voice. Indeed none of the characters have his or her own voice. An example:  

                     “As the Movement grew, and antiwar protests became regular bi-annual festivals of rage,

                   and we learned from the Seed, Chicago’s new underground paper, that Negro riots were

                   actually black rebellions, the adults grew less indulgent. I saw a poll showing that in the

                   last two years, Americans’ support for civil rights demonstrations – civil rights – had dropped

                   from 42 percent to 17 percent. Which meant push was coming to shove. Alex had mentioned 

                   McGeorge Bundy, President Johnson’s national security adviser, because I’d just written an

                   editorial for the school paper arguing that New Trier’s speaking invitations to him and the White

                   House press secretary should be withdrawn. ‘These two men,’ I wrote, ‘share responsibility

                   for the death’s of eight thousand American soldiers and the murder of untold thousands of

                   Vietnamese women and children. While freedom of speech is important, refusing to condone

                   needless death can be more important. As Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes

                   once said, if words ‘create a clear and present danger [such] that they will bring around…

                   substantive evils,’ they should be prohibited.’ My mother called my article ‘extremely well

                   written.’ That was also what she’d said about my editorial in the fall approving the assassination

                   of South Africa’s apartheidist prime minister. But this time she said that my argument struck

                   her as ‘nutty as a fruitcake…’”

                   True Believer, p. 211-212.

Mamas are prone to undue, unwarranted praise. It’s good that this family cliche is in the text for a personal touch. This paragraph begins with the Movement (Leftist, anti-war, civil rights, Black – which one?). It races onto Negro city riots and Underground Newspapers. It mentions Americans ebbing support for civil rights. There’s push “coming to shove,” a cliche with references to nothing in the book and nothing during the Sixties or in the present day. There are invitations to Presidential aides, and how wrong those invitations are. Next is First Person Girl’s editorial, mentioning freedom of speech and Oliver Wendell Holmes. There is apartheid in South Africa and the assassination of a prime minister, the family reaction and the potential Generation Gap.

There is a lot going on in this paragraph, too much for a 16 year old girl(210). It’s 1965: First Person Girl graduates in 1967; she goes to college. If she is referring to anti-war protests, the first large scale “festivals of rage” happened nationally after she graduated from high school. The American death toll in Vietnam reached 8,000 in the Spring of 1966. Chicago had its first large scale race riots after she was at Radcliffe. And it is inconsistent for a James Bond fan in 1966 to be editorializing about the Vietnam when alternative lifestyles may not have been part of her life. Indeed, First Person Girl seems uncomfortable describing any alternative lifestyles as well as living within them. Her life at Radcliffe in the cult seems sterile. Take something as simple as hair. Did First Person Girl have long hair? Did she thread-braid it? Moreover, would First Person Girl think this paragraph should be in her memoirs, thus representing any part of her life? Certainly her mother wouldn’t say it was well-written. 

Instead it is the author’s voice the reader is hearing.  

EDIE – Jean Stein, George Plimpton

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Edie (1982) tells its biography by interviews with friends, acquaintances and business associates of Edie Sedgwick. She is from a wealthy family with roots long into New England, although her parents – heretics, black sheep, apostates – moved to California where Edie was raised and where easy money was made in real estate. The East Coast contacts remained. George Plimpton’s parents were friends of the Sedgwicks.

As a biography Edie doesn’t tell much about the girl, young woman, woman. She has no voice except bits of dialogue from an Andy Warhol movie staring Edie, Ciao! Manhattan. Edie had no education, no writings, no letters, nothing other than being an earlier version of Paris Hilton, letting others document, dissect and distort her life. With friends and acquaintances like the ones interviewed, she was a throw away person. The book slaps together small talk from persons with no interest or with vague recollections of Edie: I was at this party or this place. Edie was standing in a corner with Andy Warhol. What do you remember Andy? I was there and Edie stood next to me because she was afraid and didn’t have anyone else to stand next to. It is no wonder that Edie died of a drug overdose at 28 years, the end chapters of the book. Next comes the philosophical imponderables: Did anyone see it coming? What happened? Was it suicide or accidental?

Edie is 428 pages long, and obviously published because big name people were involved. No one wanted to memorialize or tell about Edie except for a buck: Do a little genealogy about the family and make money from Edie’s existence. Nobody else will. What better tribute could be made to a girl who never made womanhood in her mind, who hung around and was tolerated because her family knew big people and they had contacts. Toss in a couple of topless photos and one fully nude (can’t see pores), and it’s a best seller. She won’t care. She wasn’t modest in life. She’s dead. Rest in peace. 

Edie is empty, crass and cheap. It has been identified as a book about the Sixties; it is not. Edie didn’t go up the river from where she was living in New York City to Woodstock! Edie is emblematic of the long time state of American publishing houses – slap together something to sensationalize to sell shi-. Promote names of undeserving, poor writers – they’re the bunch, our bunch that we can sell like laundry detergent.

Waldon on Wheels by Ken Ilganus

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Waldon on Wheels

Ken Ilgunas, 2013

Wheels, an enjoyable, suitably-assembled, mostly well-written book, is told in many parts with charm and fun.

I object, though, to the title. Thoreau purportedly advocated a simple life, but no writer uses him as a model. Thoreau was a nut. On a winter walk in 1862 he encountered a fallen tree, counted its rings; counting many for too long, he got the sniffles, went home and died.

Ilgunas has far better authors to emulate, and parts of his book resemble Typee (Melville, similar financial condition as Ilgunas) and Roughing It (Twain flees the Civil War). Like Ilgunas both were new authors, and their stories of le jeunehomme, of being outdoors and telling adventure cogently and coherently came with gusto, vibrancy and joy.

Those elements are present in Wheels: Working to get off debt. Working in Alaska. Describing the work well, portraying experiences he would have once and never again or certainly not in the same way. Like Melville and Clemens Ilgunas presents himself as sane, whereas he is only goal oriented – mental health is something else. Enthusiastically and elegantly, Ilgunas economically, efficiently and effectively describes Alaskan wilds and its animals.

There is a valuable lesson in Wheels for persons with debt from school or other sources. Freedom from debt, obligation, outside responsibility is a relief to any human being. At book’s end Ilganus can go off and live the life he wants, making the mistakes we all do, but perhaps he will be wary and careful. Since publishing this volume, student debt has made the news again. It is a problem, but the answer is not in a collective solution but in individual responsibility, like Ilganus amply shows. The solution is at hand for anyone with the mind and discipline to follow through in work and encountering people. Throughout the book his many amusing descriptions of the human world have possibilities, especially in its easy style, but out of Alaska he resorts to regimented, awkward approaches.

An example – hitchhiking across the Continent: Ilgunas does it briefly and without details (actual words of drivers). I was once driven from Dorset to London sitting in the backseat of a mini; the front seat passengers were smokers. Most of the roads seemed a lane and a half; it was poor weather. While I was being asphyxiated, they talked about mounds in the countryside, sliding from the Saxons, to the Romans and ending with the Druids/Aliens/Wicans. Their magazine knowledge exhausted, the driver was inspired and started on Moby Dick. He avoided its driving theme – the consummate power of hate – to go off on fantasies about the white whale. This paragraph has the elements upon reworking, but mostly it needs one or two quotes about the mounds and a few dialogue sentences about the whale, white, blue or sperm.

Wheels does not make connections between the reader and drivers. That was the connection because readers already know the narrator, and the drivers were the persons who could terrorize them. Certainly the narrator/writer would not interrupt and would not add much beyond “I know,” nods, grunts or approval and murmurs of sorrow, as tales of woe came.

Later in the book Ilgunas talks to people impressed by the hitchhiking and interested in doing it themselves. Was hitchhiking as easy as he made it out to be? He provides little insight: At the mercy of the drivers. At the mercy of the elements. Be prepared to be dropped off 30 miles from nowhere. Have no schedule. And those are safe days on the road.

Equally difficult is the human world outside of Alaska, more than half the book. Ilgunas reaches Duke and is living in the van. The details of life are fewer, unlike Alaska which is rich in detail. It seems for Ilgunas, what is seen by humans and externally experienced is magnificent and needs to be told; what happens inside any human being, specifically himself, development of the mind, travails of the mind and body, influences of the environment are less important. Ilgunas raised this very topic and should have developed it:

“The voyage was teaching me how unexceptional I was and how exceptional the human mind and body is. What wonders the human mind and body are capable of achieving! How so few know how much we can do! Our limits are merely mirages on the far side of the lake – we can see them ahead, but that’s all they are: mirages. Our real limits are beyond the scope of our vision, beyond the horizon, a boundary worthy of our exploration.” (p. 117)

The book mostly leaves a memoir style, and resembles a diary/journal with essay analyses. One experience – Alaska to Duke – stealing the stars. The Alaskan weather clears. Ilgunas knows nothing of the stars because he spent his childhood playing video games. But he was not deprived of them because of ecological damage in upstate New York. Later at Duke he is less concerned about another hidden world seen only through a microscope.

While reading about his life in Alaska, I realized he was living a monk’s existence. Toward the end of the book Ilgunas (p.258) also realized it but didn’t fully explore the anomaly: An eremite at Duke and being open and free in empty Alaska. It is no wonder while in graduate school, he voices customary undergraduate complaints, meaningless gripes, retreads from the undisciplined ways of his debt years (circa p. 240-45)[excellent analyses see Adam Ulam, The Fall of the American University].

Instead, Ilgunas’ adventure at Duke does not tell his life – the education of the mind, mental exploration and development, all the while living in the van with earlier and existing cares and concerns. He was motivated to finish school and did. He needs no more classroom work to be original and to write. This book evinces promising talent and a rage that can be disciplined and controlled. Unfortunately, how life and school helped Ilgunas and his mind, other than grades and a degree, is not in these pages.

LOATHING GATSBY

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LOATHING GATSBY

At the official end of summer and the social season on Long Island, it is time to review the literature of that Island paradise. CAVAET: Drain your swimming pools. Pages, below, refer to F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, New York, 1925, Charles Scribner’s Sons.

 

“Classic.” A book which people praise and don’t read, Mark Twain, Pudd’nhead Wilson’s Calendar, Following the Equator, p.241.

 

What Twain did not anticipate is some “classics” are unreadable because they are overblown nonsense, pointless, empty romance, poorly written tripe and a loose amalgamation of words so conglomerated that no idea can be discerned. The Great Gatsby is such a book.

The Gatsby story is scarce and deplorable. Daisy and Tom are married from 1918. They live on Long Island in East Egg in Summer 1922. Tom has an affair with mistress, the wife of an operator of a local garage/gas station. Daisy’s second cousin, Nick the Narrator, lives across the bay in West Egg, a less high-fluting Long Island community. Through Daisy he knows a female tennis/golf pro Jordan Baker.

Gatsby moves into the big house next to Narrator’s to be close to and to improve his chance to remeet Daisy. In 1917 while in the Army Gatsby met and kissed Daisy, and they corresponded a few times. How often the story never tells. He was very impressed by her parents’ house in Louisville, Kentucky.(148) After the War Gatsby (Oxford man for five months) made a fortune. How is a big secret – bootlegger, related to Kaiser Wilheim, inherited money, murdered someone or is a plumber. This mystery is unimportant because Gatsby is a successful businessman who got ahead with wit, charm and ability, supposedly.

On Long Island Gatsby throws big parties – free food, live music, open bar. Guests come uninvited. Gatsby hopes that Daisy will come one evening. Gatsby says of his life and his house, “I keep it full of interesting people night and day. People who do interesting things. Celebrated people.”(91) But a chapter later Gatsby is more honest describing himself as Trimalchio.(113)

Daisy never comes. Gatsby learns Narrator is her cousin and through him meets her. Daisy is detached from a loveless Tom and welcomes the advance. A chapter or two later Tom becomes possessive of Daisy. He investigates Gatsby’s mysterious business past. In a big argument about who Daisy loves, Tom dissuades her from seeing the lover. The remainder will be come later because a new voice completes the story.

 

Gatsby can be told efficiently and effectively in 10-20,000 words, but F. Scott Fitzgerald (Fitzy) adds loads of filler, expanding it beyond 50,000 words. It is easier and more precise to label Nick, Narrator to remind the reader of his role in the book. A narrator has great latitude: give information explaining time, place and background and tell what is happening. A narrator can also clarify confusions the reader may have and should not appear disoriented himself, befuddling the reader more. Finally, a narrator himself should not indicate that he is loaded on drugs.

Over and over, and over Narrator is stupid, imprecise, incapable, heedless and impressionable. He lost a dog (3) but passes that off like he had flushed a gold fish into the New York sewer system. He imposes a limitation on himself, advice given by his father: “Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone…just remember that all the people in this world haven’t have the advantages that you’ve had.”(1) Narrator freely describes and criticizes people that Fitzy does not like but gives peers, the upper class and snobs a pass. Thereby all the characters in the novel, including the primary players, are shallow, superficial and supercilious. In short almost every person in Gatsby is a crushing bore.

 

The person of everyone’s affection and admiration is Daisy. No one calls Daisy beautiful. She is pretty and presentable; her most noticeable quality is her voice, a quality observed late in the story: Daisy didn’t drink, yet, “Perhaps Daisy never went in for amour at all – and yet there’s something in that voice of hers…”(78-79) The Narrator notices the voice inaccurately, “The exhilarating ripple of her voice was a wild tonic in the rain. I had to follow the sound of it for a moment, up and down, with my ear alone [fortunately not his tongue], before any words came though. A damp streak of hair lay like a dash of blue paint across her cheek, and her head was wet with glistening drops as I took it to help her from the car.”(86) The Narrator tries to describe again, “…the voice, held him most, with its fluctuating, feverish warmth, because it wouldn’t be over-dreamed – that voice was a deathless song.”(97) When Daisy sings, Narrator tries a third time, “Daisy began to sing with the music in a husky, rhythmic whisper, bringing out the meaning in each word that it never had before and would never have again. When the melody rose, her voice broke up[climbed?] sweetly, following it, in a way contralto voices have, and each change tipped out a little of her warm human magic upon the air.” (109)

More accurately Gatsby says about Daisy, “Her voice is full of money,”(120) but the Narrator with misunderstands onomatopoeicly: “That was it. I’d never understood before. [A good admission from a narrator.] It was full of money – that was the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it, the cymbals’s song of it…High in a white palace the king’s daughter, the golden girl…” (120)

I know no one whose voice jingles or cymbals.I try to avoid those people and those annoying verbal sounds.

But Daisy’s voice is not reliable and early on not noticeable: “Daisy’s voice was playing murmurous tricks in her throat,”(105) Her conversation was forgettable and incomprehensible, “..unobtrusively and with a bantering inconsequence that was never quite chatter…”(12)

Is Daisy worth hearing? No, she is vapid and vacuous, although she claims to be sophisticated.(18) About her three year old daughter Daisy says, “…the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool…”(17) When taking the tour of Gatsby’s house and seeing Gatsby’s crass materiality including his wardrobe, Daisy says, “They’re such beautiful shirts”(93) ”It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such beautiful shirts before.”(94) Sad!

Daisy gives mixed signals. Married to Tom and courted by Gatsby, she says to Narrator at Gatsby’s party: Just sign the kissing list, and I’ll make time: “These things excite me so…If you want to kiss me any time during the evening…, just let me know and I’ll be glad to arrange it for you.”(105)

Daisy is the woman-girl who has to be the center of attention, and wants everyone else to perform for her. On a very hot day Daisy: “Oh, let’s have fun…It’s too hot to fuss.” In short Daisy is the model found in an impressionist painting, art to be admired but an individual to be avoided: “She used to sit on the sand with his head in her lap by the hour, rubbing her fingers over his eyes and looking at him with unfathomable delight. It was touching to see them together – it made you laugh in a hushed, fascinated way.”(78) By the hour! And because of her shortcomings Daisy uses her primary[only] weapon: She cries. (132-133)

 

I saw a TV movie where two young women were beauty queens. They never took off the crowns, on heads in the kitchen, at interviews, waterskiing and when the boyfriend came over for a chat. Each beauty queen was superficial, supercilious, shallow and silly. I think the same way about Daisy. For Fitzy Daisy is a free spirit, but she is more likely mentally ill, a wandering spirit, a spoiled little brat with no character or personality, unintelligent but believing moronically that forever she will be the most beautiful little girl on Earth.

Husband-Tom may be a detestable jerk, but he is the best defined character. He is very wealthy; he hates the world and most of its people while being an absolute snob, pretentious, proud and arrogant, many traits the Narrator displays and Gatsby unconsciously exhibits. But he has an accurate opinion of his wife: “…sometimes she gets foolish ideas in her head and doesn’t know what’s she’s doing.”(132) To avoid her foibles, he has a mistress(Chapter 2) who is a good hostess(30-31), despite being “fairly stout, carr[ying] her surplus flesh sensuously as some women can,”(25) and possessing “rather wide hips.”(26)

Tom has a perceptive perspective of Gatsby’s party guests: “I was just thinking I don’t know a soul here,”(106) and he is social: He excuses himself from the dull table where Daisy sits in order to sit at a table where, “A fellows getting off some funny stuff.”(107) But he “feels… the hot whips of panic,” upon learning his mistress is going West with her husband(125). And a few hours and five pages later, Tom is overly possessive of Daisy.

Tom’s hypocritical fickleness and Daisy’s imbecility make this couple the most detestable, detached and dullest throughout literature, in commercial fiction and everywhere in mass market publications.

OBVIOUSLY, Fitzy had an outline and character wheels – hots for the mistress, love from Gatsby, possession by Tom, but Fitzy had written his story so poorly and was lost. He couldn’t leave the outline and wheels, his only road ahead. He chose inconsistency: Tom knows his wife (“doesn’t know what she is doing,” 132), yet the next page he believes there are things that Daisy “won’t forget.”(133) And Fitzy’s disdain for Tom is obvious: “Tom appears from his oblivion as we were sitting down to supper…” Of all the characters in the book, Tom is on-key. He is a low-grade schemer who knows his limitations, and he takes opportunities – telling the garage man that Gatsby was driving, etc. Tom seems oblivious to narrator because he doesn’t go in for the unconscious meanderings of narrator, Daisy, Gatsby and Jordan. For Tom and the reader the key word is unconscious.

The tennis/golf player, Jordan Baker is an add-on. She appears when an extra female is needed lending nothing to the other characters and giving nothing to the story. At times her presence generates confusion, which is Fitzy’s fault: “…But there was Jordan…who, unlike Daisy, was too wise ever to carry well-forgotten dreams from age to age.”(136) Point One: For the women [or any human being] in their twenties, it is not unusual to carry thoughts, hopes and dreams from teenage years, but it is not “age to age.” Point Two: Daisy is a first-class twit who’s dreams and thoughts come spontaneously and are instantly forgotten, whereas Jordan Baker might have a memory so could forget. So that sentence is completely non-descriptive, confusing and inaccurate. Yet Jordan’s presence allows Fitzy to draw this phony, inaccurate comparison.

Jordan’s presence affords flashbacks into Daisy’s life from Louisville, nonsensical/ journalistic pieces presenting scattered facts and impressions many of which are impossible for Jordan to know. For this passage the headline reads, MESSENGER GIRL TO BRIDESMAID:

Jordan Baker: “I had on a new plaid skirt also that blew a little in the wind, and whenever this happened the red, white and blue banners in front of all the houses stretched out stiff and tut-tut-tut-tut in a disapproving way.”(75)

[Daisy calls to Jordan while she passes the house]:

“I was flattered that she wanted to speak to me, because of all the older girls, I admired her the most. She asked me if I was going to the Red Cross and make bandages. I was. Well, then, would I tell them that she couldn’t come that day? The officer [sitting on Daisy’s porch] looked at Daisy while she was speaking, in a way that every young girl wants to be looked at some time, and because it seemed romantic to me I have remembered the incident ever since…

“That was nineteen-seventeen. By the next year I had a few beaux myself, and I began to play in tournaments, so I didn’t see Daisy very often. She went with a slightly older crowd – when she went with anyone at all. Wild rumors were circulating about her…

“By the next autumn she was gay again, gay as ever.”(76)

What’s wrong with this passage? Why the “tut-tuts?” Because the wind caught her skirt and she wasn’t wearing whale bone underwear to stiffen it. Jordan remembers an afternoon and an apparent romance in someone else’s life, but has absolutely no romance in her own life. Jordan did not see Daisy often but suggests Daisy is anti-social. From this one message-girl and accidental meetings, Jordan became Daisy’s bridesmaid. Perhaps Jordan says it accurately in the last sentence: “By the next autumn she was gay again, gay as ever.” Perhaps that is why Jordan admired her. I don’t criticize Fitzy for making Daisy gay, but when he’s outing someone he ought to be clear and transparent: Daisy liked to talk with men, but that’s as far as they got.

 

Although he is not, Gatsby should be the main character. He is introduced late, “His tanned skin was drawn attractively tight on his face and his short hair looked as though it were trimmed every day.”(50) “A man about my[Narrator’s] age, young, rough head, a year or two over thirty whose formality of speech just missed being absurd,”(47-48) especially when “The very phrases were worn so threadbare that they evoked no image except that of a turbaned ‘character’ leaking sawdust at every pore as he pursued a tiger through the Bois de Boulogne.”(66)

I’ve never figured out how “tanned skin…drawn attractively tight on” the face made a “roughhead.” The reader can also appreciate that similes are not Fitzy’s forte. Can any reader decipher the sentence from page 66? No one has ever seen anyone or anything including a tree leaking sawdust.

Fitzy believes the romance story is about Gatsby, so he gives an exemption to the Narrator’s paternal advice, page 2: “Only Gatsby…was exempt from my reaction – Gatsby, who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn. If personality is an unbroken series of successive gestures, then there is something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. This responsiveness…was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again.”(2) If the narrator is to be scornful, watch out when he’s complimentary.

Despite his business experience and acumen, Gatsby is awkward, slow and robotic. Showing Daisy and Narrator around his house, “He nearly toppled down a flight of steps,” (92) and out doors Daisy and Gatsby looked at the Bay:

‘If it wasn’t for the mist we could see your home across the bay… You always have a green light that burns all night at the end of your dock.’”

“Daisy put her arm through his abruptly, but he seemed absorbed in what he had just said. Possibly it had occurred to him that the colossal significance of that light had now vanished forever. Compared to the great distance that

had separated him from Daisy it had seemed very near to her, almost touching her. It had seemed as close as a star to the moon. Now it was again a green light on the dock. His count of enchanted objects had diminished by one.”(94)

What thoughts to have when girl touches boy especially by a narrator who guesses, surmises and brain farts! Any other author would have the players do what comes naturally. When Daisy touches Gatsby, there should be fireworks not hesitation, discourse or oblivion.

Likewise, when Tom confronts Gatsby with Daisy present(Chapter 7), Tom says he had Gatsby investigated and recites embarrassing facts including Gatsby’s bootlegger past. Why being a bootlegger is embarrassing is beyond the reader. There is more liquor in The Great Gatsby than in “The Thin Man” movies. Indeed, Fitzy writes the characters as though each is an alcoholic living in Europe. Furthermore, Gatsby had Daisy investigated; he shows her the clippings(95). Yet he failed to investigate the competition, Tom, an obvious step to win Daisy’s heart. Conveniently, Gatsby forgets his business background. He is lame. He is vulnerable. He knows nothing. He is stupid. He is not worthy of Daisy’s attentions. Obviously, Fitzy didn’t put reactions to touching or a counter-investigation into his outline or on his character wheels. Fitzy missed the plain retaliation – Tom’s mistress, so salient in the plot. Hence, there is no basis, except delusion, to consider Gatsby’s “Platonic conception of himself.” “He was the song of God – a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that – and he must be about his Father’s business, the service of a vast, vulgar and meretricious beauty.”(99)

 

Next comes the Narrator who Fitzy confuses with himself and then obliterates Narrator and simply takes over the story. It is impossible to sort everything out, but it’s a good way to add filler. The Narrator is ga-ga about Gatsby’s parties: “Preserved a dignified homogenity, and assume to itself the function representing the staid nobility of the countryside appeal to East Egg.”(45) He goes on for pages describing Gatsby’s guests and visitors, (61-63, 102-104), “three girls” “have forgotten their names.” Yet Narrator lists, “Jaqueline, Consuela, Gloria, Judy or June.” “…their last names were either the melodious names of flowers or months or the sterner ones of the great American capitalists whose cousins, if pressed, they would confess themselves to be.”(63) That pretty much covers the field. None of these guests, visitors, characters are mentioned in the book again so they are surplus, added on – the surfeit of superficiality.

At this point the reader must wonder about style. Narrator/Fitzy introduces couples, a paragraph a piece, yet he cannot give the essentials for Gatsby, Daisy, Tom, or Jordan, so efficiently and intelligibly. His main characters are presented in drivel, tripe and drool.

About a supposed love interest, Jordan Baker (tennis/golf pro), the Narrator fails to recognize her during a foursome dinner party (no one introduces them), but once he hears the name, Narrator recollects “a critical, unpleasant story ‘forgotten long ago…’” So what ever happened, it was unimportant on page 19. HOWEVER by page 57, narrator remembers the scandalous story about Jordan Baker: “…she had moved her [golf] ball from a bad lie in the semi- final round…The incident and the name had remained together in my mind.” Obviously, fact checking wasn’t a big part of proof-reading this novel. And after that Jordan becomes totally a throw-away character, apparently for golf-mischief. Nobody else in Gatsby plays golf so this incident in this novel is a bad lie.

Next from the Narrator comes many absurdities arising from his use of mind altering drugs, “I had never seen [Gatsby] dance before.”(106-107) It is also likely the narrator never saw Gatsby do a backflip before, either. It was so hot for the narrator one day, “My underwear kept climbing like a damp snake around my legs.”(126) It is really awkward when underwear won’t do what is expected, like roll into a predictable, somewhat comfortable, melvin. But anything might happen when the narrator is on mind-altering substances.

This last suggests the narrator cannot perceive and evaluate, as well as provide a decent simile. At the end of a Gatsby party in the early morning hours, an argument ensues. The Narrator notes the “deplorably sober men.”(52) Sober! At a Gatsby party written by Fitzy! A few minutes later he looked up to see, “A wafer of a moon was shinning over Gatsby’s house, making the night fine as before, and surviving the laughter and the sound of his still growing garden.”(56) I hate it when the growing garden outside keeps me awake at night, the clanging of plants growing into the atmosphere and the shaking from rumbling when roots expand into the Earth. And notice the narrator is frequently confused about the time of day: After a Gatsby party, it’s early morning. “I stayed late that night.”(110) It is obvious that Narrator’s mind is addled by an unprescribed substance.

When Gatsby is parked on Narrator’s circular drive, the host goes out and witnesses something that cannot be imagined even in a F. Scott Fitzgerald book: ”He was balancing himself on the dashboard of his car with the resourcefulness of movement that is so peculiarly American – that comes, I suppose, with the absence of lifting work or rigid sitting in youth and, even more, with the formless grace of the nervous, sporadic games. This quality was continually breaking through his punctilious manner in the shape of restlessness. He was never quite still; there was always a tapping foot somewhere…(64) It seems impossible to comment about this paragraph, a nervous, jittery guy balancing himself on the dashboard of a car made in the 1920s. The next observation is also pretty rough. From his own garden narrator sees arriving at Gatsby’s house: “raw materials” for the servants’ dinner.(89) Making dinner is so time consuming when milking the cow precedes butchering it, followed by grinding the wheat into flour and churning the milk for butter and drink.

There is the “sparkling odor of jonquils,”(92) just after the gleaming brass buttons on Daisy’s dress(91) but before the “pure dull gold” in Gatsby’s bathroom. As a reader I know jonquils have no fragrance, gold never tarnishes and brass never shines. But these are small oversights considering other passages of mind-altered nonsense coming from the Narrator. He once excused himself, drunk for the second time in life. The afternoon had “a dim, haze cast over it”(29), yet he describes what is obvious but very few details about the mistress’s party over the next ten pages. So Fitzy uses the Narrator’s dilapidated condition to excuse real writing – it was not part of the outline. Fitzy need not conceive lines attributed to any character within the wheel for that party scene..

From that party comes the Narrator’s mind-altered omnipresence in one paragraph: “I wanted to get out and walk eastward toward the park through the soft twilight, but each time I tried to go I became entangled in some wild, strident argument which pulled me back, as if with ropes, into my chair. Yet high over the city [narrator is outside now] our line of yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening streets, and I was him too[who?], looking up and wondering. I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.”(36) It is possible to say everything factual and possible in this paragraph is 10 words or less, and the remainder is malarky.

At this point does any reader trust narrator’s assessment – “some wild strident argument” when neither narrator nor Fitzy are capable of conveying the arguments and points of view of the characters?

At this point any woman encountering a man of Narrator’s ilk, should stay as far from him as possible. And apparently women of narrator’s day perceived and knew to stay away.

New York City provokes many thoughts for a young man, but mostly two overriding urges: I’m lonely. I’m horny! Fitzy used many more words: “I liked to walk up Fifth Avenue and pick out romantic women from the crowd and image that…I was going to enter their lives, and no one would every know or disapprove. Sometimes in my mind…At the enchanted metropolitan twilight I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others…” (57)

There are more muddles: “I took dinner at the Yale Club…and then I went upstairs to the library…There were generally few rioters around, but they never came into the library.”(57) Rioters in the Yale Club? I might believe roisterers.

Sometimes a thought is neither masculine nor literary: “He [Gatsby] came to me, delivered suddenly from the womb of his purposeless splendor.”79) Narrator is living on Long Island, or he is blushing? Tell which is which and what is impossible: “My own face had now assumed a deep tropical burn. I couldn’t muster up a single commonplace out of the thousand in my head.”(87) Narrator should confess which mind-altering drug he is using; it may make the purported literary devices in the book more understandable.

 

I read about this party (105-111) and while the action is inadequately described and the people are poorly observed when they are shitfaced, I saw no quality of oppressiveness:

“Tom was evidently perturbed at Daisy’s running around alone, for on the following Saturday night he came with her to Gatsby’s party. Perhaps his presence gave the evening its peculiar quality of oppressiveness – … There were the same people, or at least the same sort of people, the same profusion of champagne, the same many-colored, many keyed commotion, but I felt an unpleasantness in the air, a pervading harshness that hadn’t been there before.”(105) Perhaps the Narrator had bad indigestion because this was the party where Tom asked to be excused to sit at a table where people were having a decent conversation.(107)

Oppression may have arisen because neither Fitzy nor the Narrator can find the antecedent for “the girl” anywhere in the book. Daisy says, “‘…and if you want to take down any addresses here’s my little gold pencil’…She looked around after a moment and told me the girl was ‘common but pretty,’ and I knew that except for the half-hour she’d had been alone with Gatsby she wasn’t having a good time.”(107) It is possible from this sentence to infer that the Narrator is using body drugs. Readers can tell because Narrator’s world is really slowing down.

Public transportation was confusing for Fitzy to write and baffling for Narrator. On a hot day the conductor returned Narrator’s ticket. “My commutation ticket came back to me with a dark stain from his [conductor’s] hand. That any one should care in this heat whose flushed lips he kissed, whose head made damp the pajama pocket over his heart!”(115) [I did not make this up! And Cliff Notes were useless to interpret it.] This sentence on page 115 is the clearest indication yet that the Narrator is walking around buzzed and demented.

 

Why be consistent? Why be limited to the physical world? Why not use mind altering drugs and make the story and characters fit an ill-conceived outline and character wheels where pronouns get traits, by describing inaccurately one character’s observations and another’s actions. The mistress is concealed in her garage apartment “in one of the windows over the garage the curtains had been moved a little, and Myrtle Wilson was peering down at the car. So engrossed was she that she had no consciousness of being observed [mostly behind the curtains she was an open book], and one emotion after another crept into her face like objects into a slowly developing picture. [Creep, wrong verb.] Her expression was curiously familiar – it was an expression I had often seen on women’s faces, but on Myrtle Wilson’s face it seemed purposeless and inexplicable until I realized that her eyes, wide with jealous terror, were fixed not on Tom, but on Jordan Baker, whom she took to be his wife.” (125)

When loaded, it is a better experience to be in two places at once, at the car in the gas station and with the mistress upstairs.

It is transparent Fitzy used an outline and followed it because he ignored the obvious: Nowhere does the Narrator who supposedly witnesses Myrtle, mistress in the window, tell or alert anyone, including Jordan Baker: There’s a crazy woman who jealously detests you. She’s liable to go off! If he did, Fitzy would have to write something real, develop it apart this flummery and tell a story beyond giving this impression or that sensation and flitting to the next bunch of word hunches. For instance, Narrator could easily dispel the mistress’s misimpressions by going to Jordan and putting a hand on her shoulder, getting her attention and smile. That’s

what a normal, competent narrator would do, especially for another character, he purportedly liked. Narrator couldn’t do that! It was not in Fitzy’s outline!

THE FINAL THIRD of The Great Gatsby fumbles to tell a straight story: Daisy is conflicted. Tom is between women. Gatsby is in love but can’t protect love or himself. Jordan Baker shows up now and again. Drunk or sober, the Narrator is inept.

On that hot day all drive to New York City. Why? To have the big argument about who Daisy loves. For her part, Daisy “can’t stand this [the argument] anymore.” Gatsby and Daisy return to Long Island in his car where Daisy runs down the mistress. Daisy doesn’t know she is Tom’s mistress and that she, Daisy, has grievances against her. She just flattens the heavyset woman.

Next comes pages of filler, unrelated activities – Gatsby’s father appears, more of Gatsby’s history with Daisy including competition from other men “increased Daisy’s value” in Louisville all repeating what was written earlier.(148) Finally, the garage man shoots Gatsby and himself (end of Chapter 8), signaling an end to the words.

After the mistress is mowed down, Fitzy decides the Narrator needs help. He enters the story which becomes more newspaper and essay like, explaining and giving insights to what happened. By this means Fitzy rounds the players to full cartoon characters. Sadly, no one including Fitzy can ever explain Daisy, Jordan Baker, Gatsby or the Narrator and their incapacities.

Yet the narrator is suddenly smart, telling and analytical. He tells Gatsby: “They’re a rotten crowd…You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.”(154) And after Gatsby is killed, the narrator sums up, Gatsby, “paid a high price for living too long with a single dream.”(162) Bits of Fitzy and from the narrator’s mix. Gatsby’s father says, “If he’d of lived, he’d of been a great man…He’d of helped build up the country.” “‘That’s true,’ I [Narrator] said uncomfortably.” (169) I am unsure why the narrator is uncomfortable, unless he doesn’t believe it, but more likely he was trying to figure it out. For Fitzy “uncomfortably” is an extra word, the wrong long word, to reach a larger word count.

Fitzy comes to the fore when he writes an essay analyzing all the characters, and blaming their shortcomings on their Mid-West origins (177-178). It is easy for a drunk in Europe to criticize the Mid-West. The book is East Coast friendly, but it creates a literary black hole. The setting in any novel is the most determinative element in any story with characters. This novel is set in New York City and Long Island. Fitzy fails to tell how Mid-West roots set off these people, whereas New Yorkers would never do any of these things: bootlegging, mistresses, mental cruelty for spouses, avoiding personal responsibility, breach of the public trust, never knowing oneself. Instead, the East Coast, high-brow show is avoided, misperceived and preposterously unwritten, with half-conceived, scantily described party scenes of pretentious people. Fitzy preaches these are not East Coast traits. He easily excuses the East Coast malignancy manifested in Mid-west people: “They [Tom, Daisy] were careless people…- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept(180) them together and get other people clean up the mess they had made…”(181)

 

From the passages it is reasonable to conclude Fitzy is enamored with New York City and its environment, conveying the poetry of city cement, glass, steel and noise. (Page 36 Narrator two places at once, “enchanted,” “inexhaustible variety of life.” Page 57, “enchanted [again!] metropolitan twilight…” Yet what of the Long Island environment – other than the man-made features? Nada, nyet, nothing, zip. Why life on Long Island? To meet vacationing New York Citiers, sophisticates of the world, people who just blew into town from the Mid-West. It is obvious that Fitzy dislikes nature and can’t describe it to support any part of his novel. He didn’t care about losing a dog(3). He gives Gatsby’s garden city attributes.(56) There is the metaphor/ simile/disconnected-run-on sentence, “leaking sawdust” from page 66. It is fair to say Fitzy is an anti-environmentalist, in favor of dead flowers and killing trees.

Fitzy is also anti-Semitic which actually weakens the story and sullies the narrator. Gatsby introduces narrator to Meyer Wolfsheim, a Jew whose conversation is in standard American for a page until Fitzy uses his tin-ear by writing in dialect: Gatsby is an “Oggsford” man, not an Oxford man. It is imprecise because Jews would not make the mistake of confusing an “g” for a “x.” The “x” sound like “s” or “tz” is widely pronounced in German. Its presence in any word is an anchor to swing between vowels and diphthongs.

At the end of narrator/Gatsby/Wolfsheim meeting, the Jew leaves and Gatsby identifies Wolfsheim as the man who fixed the 1919 World Series. Narrator’s is dumbfounded:

“The idea staggered me. I remembered…that the World Series had been fixed in 1919, but if I had thought of it at all I would have thought of it as a thing that merely happened, the end of some inevitable chain. It never occurred to me that one man could start to play with the faith of fifty million people – with the single-mindedness of a burglar blowing a safe.

“How did he happen to do that?” I asked after a minute. “He just saw the opportunity.”

“Why isn’t he in jail?”

“They can’t get him…He’s a smart man.”

That’s it! The narrator has no curiosity although it takes talent to play with the faith of fifty million people. For the narrator there is nothing, except to shun and to belittle. Criminal or half-criminal, there is something to learn from Wolfsheim, but in this passage narrator was dense and bigoted, like the girl at the mistress’s party who avoided marrying “a little kike” “below her”.(34) During that lunch narrator uses a term Fitzy liked, to describe Wolfsheim’s speech: “somnabulatory abstraction.” But nothing about Wolfsheim approaches the meaning of that term. However, those words perfectly describe the narrator, Daisy, Gatsby, Jordan and Tom.

At the end of the book Fitzy brings Wolfsheim back. Narrator wants him to come to Gatsby’s funeral. He doesn’t. Fitzy tries to be cute and reveals his extracurricular reading. Gatsby was written while in and out of Europe and published in 1925. Fitzy had a chance to read and warmly embrace Mein Kampf (1924). Fitzy’s joke in Gatsby is naming Wolfsheim’s business, The Swastika Holding Company.(171)

Overlooking these deplorable sentiments embraced in the book, one finds a redounding ridicule. From his photo F. Scott Fitzgerald had a beak nose and a pointy chin. Apparently Fitzy had a thing about noses. First is Tom and Daisy’s butler: “I’ll tell you a secret,” she whispered enthusiastically. “It’s about the butler’s nose. Do you want to hear about the butler’s nose?” “That’s why I came over tonight.”(14) Second comes Daisy’s chauffeur: “Does the gasoline affect his [chauffeur’s] nose?” “I don’t think so,” she said innocently. ‘Why?’” (86)

Third is Wolfsheim’s proboscis not supported by a mustache: “…small, flat nosed…regarded me with two fine growths which luxuriated in either nostril…”(69-70) At the table “His [Wolfsheim’s] nostrils turned to me in an interested way.”(71) Has any reader ever seen nostrils with or without hair detach from a face and turn “in an interested way?” Undoubtedly Fitzy was in an alcoholic stupor because he wrote it; or may be the Narrator dropped acid. From here on out, I’ll be straight and sober when I look for this facial feat, whether noses be big, small or Semitic, hairy or waxed.

 

Other than the notations above, elements of a pre-writing outline and the use of character wheels are extant in The Great Gatsby:

1. The characters do something or something happens, and there is no further development of that circumstance, otherwise certain to take the characters in a different direction.

2. Something does not happen when the few facts and incidences suggest it should. For instance all the rich Long Island people in the book have chauffeurs, and presumably the chauffeurs use the garage/ gasoline station. Thereupon the garage man knows which rich person owns which car – this is

not a 30 page learning curve to discover who killed wife/mistress. Out of loyalty to his employer Gatsby’s chauffeur would tell the garageman, My man wasn’t driving when your wife was killed in the hit and run accident. Daisy was. And if you didn’t know, Tom, not Gatsby, was porking your wife. Those few facts alone would make it a much more interesting novel.

3. The dialogue suggests something should happen (more dialogue) and it does not.

4. Not all dialogue and description follow from what immediately proceeded it.

5. Gatsby’s dream (fantasy) – have parties, Daisy will come, I’ll be in love – might look good in an outline, but in real life it never works out.

6. In Chapter 9 Fitzy tries to tie everything together by taking over the narrator’s role completely and analyzing and making story points in an essay.

Apart from the stories and characters diverging from the pre-writing outline and character wheels, there is A GREAT PROBLEM. Each character acts and talks with the utmost seriousness, with no humor, no self effacement or deprecation. no laughing, no joy. There is nothing American about this novel. Does any of them have a sense of humor, a sense of the ridiculous, a sense of fun? Does any character have loves – art, poetry, music? This book presents an ill-disciplined fancy Fitzy found impossible to write within the narrow outline/character wheel confines he constructed for himself. His means and abilities are so inadequate (there are no misspellings), that the reader cannot trust any character, any element of the story or the author.

Could The Great Gatsby be a satire? I detected no overarching themes or reference points leading to other works or concepts.It is too poorly written with no construction and no structure. A satire should be written straight. Gatsby is a series of mediocre sketches and misimpressions conveying no driving force. No author can write a satire with scores of malapropos and misused words. Fitzy tries to show he is a serious writer with the essays in Chapter 9 – Mid-west origins, Swatiska Holding Company, etc., but the writing in the previous eight chapters is juvenile and undisciplined to make the book unreadable. Furthermore, an author cannot write about stupid characters by writing stupidly himself.

Gatsby is a volume that should never be read for any purpose, whatsoever, except as an example: How not to write a novel. Edit severely any writing before submitting it. And never use an outline. I believe it was Robert Penn Warren who warned, I had an outline once and it took me two years to write myself out of it. And avoid use of character wheels, a device taught in Middle School.

But like his characters Fitzy got a pass. One can easily believe the ploy of the powers that be. The publisher, Charles Scribner’s Sons, had a marketing plan: F. Scott Fitzgerald was related to Francis Scott Key, writer of the lyrics of “The Star Spangled Banner.” Few Americans know the words to the song, yet they like it. A classic is a book people praise and don’t read. Don’t worry about editing, writing, consistency. The book can be an atrocity, just advertise and promote. Rely on the forefather, Francis. Make the song the National Anthem (1931), and forever the book will be cherished(after 1945). Get the author on a postage stamp (1996). It will bring us loads of money.

The American public can only hope that no one in that family publishes anything else.