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.