GUEST ESSAY: REVISIONING "THE GREAT GATSBY" (II)

Herewith, Part Two of Susan Bell's essay "Revisioning The Great Gatsby," which can be found in The Writer's Notebook: Craft Essays from Tin House, and is reprinted here courtest of Bell and Tin House.  Bell is the author of The Artful Edit.

Besides research, the writer used visual imagery to flush out his hero. Fitzgerald’s wife Zelda’s drawings of Gatsby must have made Gatsby more tangible, because after spending time with them the author added several superb physical descriptions. Among them: “His tanned skin was drawn attractively tight on his face and his short hair looked as though it were trimmed every day.” This is a good deal better than the original, ultimately (and thankfully) excised description of Gatsby, which is chock-full of generic adjectives and adverbs: “He was undoubtedly one of the handsomest men I had ever seen—the dark blue eyes opening out into lashes of shiny jet were arresting and unforgettable.” Finally, after the Perkins critique, the Fuller research, and Zelda’s drawings, Fitzgerald came up with this description of Gatsby’s smile:

[Gatsby] smiled understandingly—much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced—or seemed to face—the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey. Precisely at that point it vanished—and I was looking at an elegant young roughneck, a year or two over thirty, whose elaborate formality of speech just missed being absurd.

Fitzgerald wasn’t satisfied making his hero only more physically palpable. With one smile, he exposes the entire range of Gatsby’s character: the sincerity and generosity of the man who flips unpredictably, tragically into blankness and self-absorption. It is safe to say, then, that Jay Gatsby was not written so much as edited into a physical—and metaphysical—presence.

Gatsby was not the only character that needed work. Unprompted by Perkins, Fitzgerald amplified Daisy by stacking a metaphor of paralysis that betrayed her inability to grow up emotionally. In chapter seven, Nick arrives to find Daisy and her friend Jordan lying on a couch in the excruciating summer heat. Referring to the torpor, the women say only, “We can’t move.” After this scene was written, in galley proofs, Fitzgerald returned to chapter one to thread in a prescient phrase that underscores the one above: on seeing Nick for the first time in years, Daisy says, “I’m p-paralyzed with happiness.” Daisy’s inability to move in chapter seven reverberates with her paralysis from chapter one. The metaphor, begun in the writing, gets built up in the edit.

The Great Gatsby’s problems exceeded the need for character definition. In one section, the manuscript, as Perkins put it, “sagged.” Fitzgerald had sensed a drag in the prose but couldn’t see its cause. Perkins did:

I think you are right in feeling a certain slight sagging in chapters six and seven . . . I thought you might find ways to let the truth of some of [Gatsby’s] claims like “Oxford” and his army career come out bit by bit in the course of the actual narrative.

In giving deliberately Gatsby’s biography when he gives it to the narrator you do depart from the method of the narrative . . . , for otherwise almost everything is told, and beautifully told, in the regular flow of it,—in the succession of events in accompaniment with time.

Perkins diplomatically complained of a common structural flaw: clumping. Fitzgerald had shoved a clump of biographical information into one place. Actors have an expression to describe the mere facts an audience must know to understand the story: they call them the plumbing. “I’m not doing the plumbing,” some will protest, when asked to say a few lines that explain plot or a character’s history but stick out from the action like the proverbial sore thumb. At its best, a book’s pipes are laid into the work so suavely that the reader simply feels them function and never notices their cold, hard nature.

But pipes protruded in the original version of the scene in which Nick visits Gatsby after the fatal car accident. The two men go to the terrace and sit “smoking out into the summer night.” Into this static setting, Gatsby gushes his life story. “Suddenly he was telling me a lot of things,” Nick says. The line is a warning to the reader: be patient, you are about to be hammered with “a lot of” information. Yawn. The historical details of Gatsby’s life are given up in a monotonous drone. He explains his Oxford claim, then recounts his teenage reveries, his subsequent apprenticeship with yachtsman Dan Cody, from which followed his army career, during which he met and fell in love with Daisy Fay, after which he received a letter at Oxford telling him he had lost her to Tom Buchanan. Are you with me?

(Essay continues tomorrow.)

Comments

[Matt]

Just wanted to say this is great, great stuff. Kudos, ole'!, etc.

[Pamela]

Wonderful! Can't wait to read the next two parts.

[Blake]

Great collection so far. Love the Lucy Corin especially.

[Jerry Sticker]

I'm with you.