The Ephemeral In Writing

I started thinking about Sam Waterston yesterday. He's the actor who has played D.A. Jack McCoy on Law and Order since about 14 years ago. I was watching L&O and for some reason began to recall other work Sam has done, including a play called Lunch Hour he was in on Broadway with Gilda Radner that my sister and I saw in 1981. Mostly, however, I remembered him playing Daisy Buchanan's poor but morally decent cousin Nick in the 1974 version of The Great Gatsby.

If you didn't happen to see that film version of Fitzgerald's book you should probably count yourself lucky. It's not good. Robert Redford was okay as Gatsby, and Sam was wonderful as always, but Mia Farrow was woefully miscast as Daisy. I forget who directed the film but whoever it was let her go off on this tangent that suggested not an emotionally fragile Southern belle as much as some loony tune I would see talking to herself on the El. She was nuts, and nutsy women don't make good heroines unless being crazy isn't their fault. It was definitely Farrow's fault in the film and I didn't care for her at all. I watched the movie countless times for the clothes, Redford (had a huge crush), and the tragedy of lost love (lost love is very alluring to 13 year-old girls) but every time I kept wanting to tell Redford to take up with Jordan Baker. She may have been a cheater but she was played by a much better actress.

Since I've gotten old enough to analyze film I've wondered if that movie was doomed from the start, no matter who played Daisy. I think it was, and this is because Fitzgerald's writing in Gatsby is so much more than merely evocative of a lost American era of elegance and possibility. Fitzgerald is the avatar of 20s writers, the poster child of that wild decade, but he is also this nation's most autobiographical fictionalist, and The Great Gatsby is his most personal testament. As such its spirit is far too ephemeral to capture on film.

True, Fitzgerald wrote about himself and Zelda Zayre in just about every story he ever did; The Crack-Up is such a naked baring of his and Zelda's souls that it's almost too painful to read. Even that, though, as much of a self-immolation as it is, doesn't take a reader as far into Fitzgerald's psyche as does Gatsby. In this novel Fitzgerald wasn't just putting himself and Zelda Zayre into the parts of Gatsby and Daisy as he conjured the characters' words in his head. He was admitting his own self-destructive fascination with the light at the end of Daisy's dock, his own knowledge that what he wanted for himself and Zelda was beyond their reach. Like Gatsby, Zitzgerald wasn't able to stop loving Zelda even though he knew she could never belong to anyone but herself; like Daisy, Zelda wasn't able to stop letting him think that he could make her his because she needed that to keep the demons that constantly preyed on her at bay. With every meeting the Fitzgeralds were sowing the seeds of their own destruction and they knew it, yet only after too much damage had been done could they bring themselves to part. Even so they never completely dissolved their partnership; to the end of Zelda's life they communicated. They always loved each other.

Reading Gatsby one gets the sense that the only way for Fitzgerald not to go mad because of this tragic death-dance was to take refuge in fiction. That's what great writers do: take their pain and exorcise it through the solacing disguise of their imaginations. Real pain is only bearable for a writer when he or she can control it by creating the world it ravages. That is the essence of the writer's soul.

The writer's soul...how does a director convey that to a viewer? Line up all of the best period cars and clothes in Hollywood, get the ultimate historical set designer, rent mansions on Long Island or the Hamptons, and they can do nothing more than paint an empty scene. What gives The Great Gatsby its vibrancy is what Fitzgerald put in the novel's pages that the greatest director in the will never capture. With The Great Gatsby all any camera can do is make an attempt to frame that flashing green light. What it can never show us though, as Fitzgerald did with his words, is what it feels like to stare night after night at that light waiting for Daisy to appear on the dock.

I'm still thinking about not finishing No Country For Old Men. Not that my reason for putting it down after 35 pages wasn't legitimate; it was. Those "and thens" grated, and they are not good prose. Yet I can't help thinking that I should have given Mr. McCarthy's story a little more time before giving in to my reader's frustration and abandoning it. Maybe in chapter 12 he would have given up that annoying run-on sentence fetish. I doubt it, but I suppose it's possible.

My only consolation is that I did not stop reading his work out of that overwhelming jealousy that usually hits me when I pull a work of modern fiction off the shelf and see that its not half as good as something I've created and can't get published. Mr. McCarthy has a way of looking at things that makes for fantastic reading so I don't begrudge him his success. I feel the same way about him as I always did on those occasions when I lost out on an acting part to someone worthy of it: if I couldn't get it, at least the person who did had talent.

I do hate this writer's jealousy of mine. I wish I didn't have it, that I could overcome my disgust when I read paragraphs of a published work that by comparison to mine are not at all good. I want to be magnanimous and open-minded, able to look beyond my own frustrations and try to find something redeeming in the books coming off publishers' presses these days. Reading modern fiction, on the rare occasions I have managed to dig up a work I can appreciate, is tremendous fun. I just don't find those too often. The last one I read was Caleb Carr's second Alienist book...in 1997. Yes, except for a paperback I managed to get half-way through last year, my last successful foray into fiction published after 1940 was 11 years ago. How many fiction works have been published since then? And how many of them are gems that I'm missing because I think that all anyone puts out now is garbage meant only to cash in on whatever literary trend is selling?

I thumbed through one of the Harry Potter books a few years ago. It was reasonably good, although I couldn't see what all the fuss was about (and still can't). Likewise The DaVinci Code. Both J.K. Rowling and Dan Brown are much better than most of the writers cranking out books today, and I'm not saying that I could out-write them. They just don't appeal to me. They're talented but they don't have what I need in an author.

So what do I need from someone I read? I need to be slack-jawed and stunned when I start reading his or her work, and that's just for starters. I need to be jolted out of reality into whatever world this person has created on the page, struck by a literary lightening bolt like Michael Corleone on the hillsides of Sicily when he saw Apollonia in that dress and purple hair ribbon. Only a handful of writers have managed to pull that off with me: Dostoevsky, Fitzgerald, Welty, Wharton, Faulkner, Hemingway, Steinbeck. That's a pretty heavy-hitting literary line-up, I know, and it wouldn't be easy for any group of writers to match them. But they were all born in the span of less than 100 years and many were contemporaries: when Welty took her first breath Steinbeck was seven; Faulkner was 12. Fitzgerald and Hemingway got drunk at the same parties. So if that precious 100 years produced all of these amazing writers, why can't we get a group of equally talented artists these days? Where are our F. Scott and Ernest, our Eudora and Edith and William?

I do count Caleb Carr of the Alienist books as one of these giants of my writing world. And William Styron. That's it, though, for writers born after Welty. Thirty years passed between Styron's birth (1925) and Carr's (1955), so I'm telling myself that sometime in 1985 a writer was born who will soon emerge and take me away to the same transcendent place as Sophie's Choice and The Alienist. Still, I realize that I'll probably only find him because his works are next to Dostoevsky's at Borders.