Greil Marcus - Under the Red White and Blue: Patriotism, Disenchantment and the Stubborn Myth of the Great Gatsby

Under the Red White and Blue

Patriotism, Disenchantment and the Stubborn Myth of the Great Gatsby

GREIL MARCUS

Frontispiece: Telegram from F. Scott Fitzgerald to his publisher, March 19, 1925. Archives of Charles Scribners Sons (C0101); Manuscripts Division, Special Collections, Princeton University Library.

Published with assistance from the Ronald and Betty Miller Turner Publication Fund.

Published with support from the Fund established in memory of Oliver Baty Cunningham, a distinguished graduate of the Class of 1917, Yale College, Captain, 15th United States Field Artillery, born in Chicago September 17, 1894, and killed while on active duty near Thiaucourt, France, September 17, 1918, the twenty-fourth anniversary of his birth.

Copyright 2020 by Greil Marcus.
All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers.

Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educational, business, or promotional use. For information, please e-mail sales.press@yale.edu (U.S. office) or sales@yaleup.co.uk (U.K. office).

Set in Electra and Nobel types by Tseng Information Systems, Inc.

Printed in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019948602

ISBN 978-0-300-22890-8 (hardcover : alk. paper)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Pearl and Rose, two Minnesota readers

Under the Red White and Blue

An interesting story appeared in the New York Times a few years agoa front-page item, April 23, 2013, headlined Judging Gatsby by Its Cover(s). Because of the upcoming movie version of The Great Gatsby by the Australian director Baz Luhrmann, which was opening two weeks later, there were two new paperback editions of the 1925 F. Scott Fitzgerald novelthe explicit movie tie-in version, with, on the cover, inside a 1920s deco frame, a cutout Leonardo DiCaprio as Jay Gatsby, with Carey Mulligan as Daisy Buchanan below him, the two surrounded by miniatures of Tobey Maguire as Nick Carraway, Elizabeth Debicki as Jordan Baker, Isla Fisher as Myrtle Wilson, and Joel Edgerton as Tom Buchanan, and the unspoken movie tie-in version, a refurbished edition with the original 1925 spooky-eyes cover art. The story was about which stores, like Walmart, were carrying only the DiCaprio edition, and which were only carrying the other one.

The writer of the story, Julie Bosman, interviewed a book buyer named Kevin Cassem at the revered downtown New York independent bookstore McNally Jackson. Its just God-awful, he said about the DiCaprio edition. He went on: The Great Gatsby is a pillar of American literature, and people dont want it messed with. Were selling the classic cover, he said, and have no intention of selling the new one.

Bosman apparently caught something in Cassems tone she didnt like. Maybe it was that people dont want it messed with, or that Cassem, who surely spoke for many, nevertheless felt perfectly fine about speaking for everyone whod ever read the book, or ever heard of it.

She asked Cassem, in her words, whether the new, DiCaprio-ed edition of Gatsby would be socially acceptable to carry around in publicand Cassem took the bait. I think it would bring shame to anyone who was trying to read that book on the subway, he said. Was he saying that American literature is, so to speak, for people who know how to dress properly, or anyway accessorize? That its better not to read the book than to read it with the wrong cover?

It was only the age-old language of aesthetic snobbery, which wasnt the language spoken from the screen when the Luhrmann movie playedespecially in a place showing it in 3-D.movies back at him, or his ghost, and people responded by throwing Fitzgeralds words back at Luhrmann, which were coded in the argument between movies and literature that began with the birth of the movies and will never end. The critical fallout is pretty much identical for all my films, said Luhrmann, who had earlier adapted Romeo and Juliet and Moulin Rouge, when his Gatsby came out. Its not just mild disappointment. Its like Ive committed a violent, heinous crime against a personal family member.

Most of the reviews were contemptuous. Underneath you could perhaps hear what you can hear in the debate over which Great Gatsby edition to stock: panic over the kidnapping of a delicate, moral flower of American democracy by a foreign sex trafficker. The same note was sounded in Joseph ONeills Pardon Edward Snowden, a short story published in late 2016 in the New Yorker that compared the awarding of the Nobel Prize in Literature to Bob Dylan in October to the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States less than a month after that, and ended with a call to protect the good, the true, and the beautiful: Never give in. Never not resist.

Luhrmanns vulgarity is designed to win over the young audience, and it suggests that hes less a filmmaker than a music-video director with endless resources and a stunning absence of taste, David Denby said in the New Yorker. Luhrmanns taste is as garish as his heros, and for much of its running time, his film is an intoxicating cocktail of colour, lights and noise: outlandish party scenes, fantastical New York cityscapes, Tim Walker wrote in the Independent in London. It is crass and superficialand, yes, its often difficult to decide whether the director is exposing the hollowness of the eras decadence or simply fetishising the suits. It was a conversation feeding on itself, to the point where critics risked credibility if they deviated too far from the pole. There was talk of an immortal American tragedy buried in Luhrmanns flash and dazzle, lumbering across the screen like the biggest, trashiest, loudest parade float of all time.

You just cant buy publicity like that. But as Pauline Kael said of Bonnie and Clyde in 1967, it is generally only good movies that provoke attacks. Bad movies dont send critics to the ramparts; they file them by genre and move on. Luhrmann had struck a nerve. It might have been that going on a century since Fitzgeralds story first appeared, Luhrmann had completed it: brought it to a fullness that, when the final note was hit, revealed that the movie was what the book had been searching for all along. He tore the tale around the edges, giving it a new frame. He filled in the plot with drunken visions that could make you think a movie director had somehow divined what a long-dead novelist wanted to say but couldnt. I could have wished the narrator more positively dramatized, Fitzgeralds friend Paul Rosenfeld, a deeply respected music critic, wrote to him in 1925. Dont you find him, at present, a trifle too passive; and the cause of his narration within himself not sufficiently developed? There were hints, to be sure, but he too was a Great Gatsby. Whether or not he ever read Rosenfelds letter, Luhrmann picked up those hints and ran them into a story hiding inside the one Fitzgerald told.