Gatsby at 100
One of the most memorable bits of symbolism in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby is the giant set of spectacles and matching giant blue eyes advertising the services of the optometrist Dr. T.J. Eckelburg.
Every time I think of them I recall my days at the University of Illinois in the late 1960s. Near the Champaign-Urbana campus was a sign advertising the services of a local optometrist, Dr. Seymour Landa.
No joke. I don’t know whether the name inspired the choice of vocation or the vocation inspired the name, but Seymour Landa was a real person. For all the ink spilled over the giant Eckelburg glasses and other outsize symbols in Gatsby, you’d think they were real, too.
April 10 was the 100-year-anniversary of publication of Gatsby. It is routinely hailed as one of the top several candidates for The Great American Novel.
I reread it last summer, not aware of the approaching anniversary. Then I watched the two most recent movie adaptations of the book. Finally, a few days ago, I reread the book itself. I’m finally getting around to writing about it.
I don’t remember whether it was in a high school or college freshman lit class, or maybe both, but I do remember one or more teachers waxing poetic over the symbolism of the book. As if the symbolism were the most interesting or most important thing about it.
The symbolism is pretty much laid on with a trowel, so it’s hard to miss. I am more taken with the way the characters embody the hedonism of the jazz age and slyly convey Fitzgerald’s criticism of the age, and perhaps the way he and his wife Zelda are true to the age.
The narrator is Nick Carraway, a young Midwesterner off to New York to make his fortune selling bonds. Nick is wide-eyed and impressionable but in some ways wise beyond his experience. Somehow the offhand cynicism of those around him fails to rub off, and he emerges from the story mostly unscathed.
Nick is “second cousin once removed” to Daisy, whose voice is “full of money.” She is married to Tom Buchanan, an irritable boor who also comes from old money. Fitzgerald describes them as “careless people” who smash things up and then retreat back into their money.
On the north shore of Long Island is a (fictional) peninsula divided by an inlet that creates two similar wings, the East Egg and the West Egg, inhabited by old and new money, respectively. Nick rents a shabby little West Egg house that sits in the shadow of a giant mansion owned by Jay Gatsby.
Gatsby is a self-made gazillionaire with a murky, perhaps shady, almost certainly fictional, past. He throws elaborate parties every weekend, and it takes awhile for the story to reveal that the parties have a purpose beyond their wild extravagance. Gatsby has loved Daisy from afar since they met years before, and he hopes to win her heart back from Tom.
Based on the same book, the two most recent movie versions are obviously similar in most ways. I prefer the 1974 version starring Robert Redford and Mia Farrow as Gatsby and Daisy. Sam Waterston plays Nick. (I keep expecting to learn that he later goes into law.) Bruce Dern is a snarling Tom, and Karen Black is an alluring and sad Myrtle, Tom’s mistress.
The script by Francis Ford Coppola is occasionally so close to the book that you’d think Coppola sometimes just handed in pages torn out of the book. By contrast, the 2013 version takes more liberties with the story – sometimes OK, sometimes not.
The stars here are Leonard DiCaprio and Carey Mulligan; Tobey Maguire as Nick; Joel Edgerton as Tom; and Isla Fisher as Myrtle.
Two other performances are notable in the 1974 version: Elizabeth Debicki as the “incurably dishonest” golf pro Jordan Baker, who says she hates careless people and apparently doesn’t realize she is one of them: and Jason Clarke as Myrtle’s jealous husband George, who propels the story deeper into tragedy at the end.
All of the characters are seeking their version of the American Dream, and several – most obviously Gatsby – are full of hope that the dream can be fulfilled in their lives. Alas, these seekers – again, most notably Gatsby – are so self-deluded that their lives are empty of meaning.
In Fitzgerald’s symbolic world, the green light that blinks at the end of the Buchanan dock lures them all toward an illusory hope and impossible dream.
It’s an oddly compelling story that holds up well after 100 years. Wouldn’t you agree, old sport?