yesterday i turned the great gatsby from a SHOULD into a HAVE DID. i did it quite quickly because, bloody, it is good. but i couldn't stop from 'recontextualising' and superimposing 'modern accents' and thinking about marc jacobs eau de parfum. i can see don delillo writing a short novel about a hideous writer 'bringing gatsby into our times' and proposing to have planes explode instead of cars, and for the jazz to be atonal. i feared to google this title in case i found an answers.yahoo.com anti-boffin asking 'so like what happens at the end of the great gatbsy i don't get it???' and some answer saying 'daisy and tom buchanan r having affairs. and they both find out aobut it and get pretty mad lol. and gatsby buys a house and throws massive parties and then i think he kills soemone?'
it turns out i don't really feel like saying much about the book, mostly because it seems everyone else read this book in year 11. (meanwhile, my main examinable text in english was the movie shine starring geoffrey rush.) it is pretty difficult to believe that gatsby came only three years after the beautiful and damned (my copy of which is likely to remain for some months with its bookmark at page 29, at least until i start hearing that the movie is coming out) with its almost insufferable lack of self-restraint. tony tanner's amusingly rhetorical but nevertheless compelling introduction in the 1990 edition of the great gatsby states that it was by fitzgerald's own hand that gatsby was edited and restructured from a messy, confessional thing into its final form. there is a somewhat magical perfection to this book and i think it likely that i will re-read it one day, on purpose.
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It can be quite an experience coming to a classic long after it was written. It's hard not to feel that the author has copied their style from various other writers, forgetting of course that they invented the style and it's everyone else who's borrowed from the original.
I've always been a bit a surprised that Gatsby is such a popular high school choice, because I think there's a lot in it for adult readers that may or may not be clear to adolescents. Then again, we did 'Heart of Darkness', which, while I loved it instantly and have read it several times, surprised me more than a bit as a high school text choice!
Gatsby owes much of its current genius to the equal genius of empathic editor Maxwell Perkins, who was like Dude, this will be great once we clean it up. Or, you know, the Jazz Age equivalent of that. They just don't make editors like that anymore.
david, do you know (forgiving my current case of intellextual laziness) whether perkins edited many of fitzgerald's other books? i don't guess he ever went near beautiful and damned.
I think he did serve as editor for that one, though I'm not 100% sure ... he was responsible for signing Fitzgerald with Scribner's in 1919, and B&D was written in 1922, I think, so he would have been involved. But he really restructured/developed Gatsby , and it definitely shows.
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