What's So Great About Gatsby?

           Suddenly, like the glow of fireflies on a summer night, The Great Gatsby is everywhere. The Leonardo DiCaprio remake of the film has generated a renewal of interest in the story. Tiffany’s is advertising The Great Gatsby Collection, and Gatsby parties are suddenly the rage. While we might expect  a revival of the fashions of the period as well, the style and excesses of the Roaring Twenties do not account for the greatness of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s seminal work. Many astute readers make a case for The Great Gatsby as the “Great American Novel” for its tight story line, complex characterization, and luminous language. But in the end, the “greatness” of Gatsby lies not in the plot, or the glitz, or the age, but in the character himself.

            What makes Jay Gatsby “great”? It’s not his mystique, though from the start there is an elusive aura of mystery about him.  Someone says he killed a man once, another that he’d been a German spy, still another that he’d served in the American army during the war, and some that he was a bootlegger. “It was testimony to the romantic speculation he inspired that there were whispers about him . . . ,” Fitzgerald tells us. And Gatsby himself seems intent on feeding the wild rumors. He’s the mythical masked man with a mysterious past who throws lavish parties “where men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings.” He wanders incognito among his uninvited guests, there one minute, gone the next, which adds, of course, to the mystique of the man. Gatsby’s enormous wealth does not define his greatness either, for the extravagant preparations for his parties—like the uncut pages of the books in his library—are a superficial display meant only to impress Daisy Buchanan, the girl of his dreams.

            Gatsby’s greatness is found, on the other hand, in his capacity to dream and his determination to pursue that vision, however improbable it seems. The narrator, Nick Carroway, says of Gatsby that there is “some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life” about him, “an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness.” Gatsby’s capacity for wonder, his pursuit of a dream wrapped in enchantment, is captivating and “great” in both scale and imagination. In one of our first glimpses of Gatsby we see him stretching out his arms over the dark waters of the bay toward the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock across the way, as if in homage to his ideal Beauty, the Golden Girl of his dreams. Having amassed a bountiful fortune in order to impress Daisy, he later dazzles her with the evidence of his newfound wealth, only to find that the moment is anti-climactic, as Nick tells us:

                        There must have been moments even that afternoon

                        when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams—not through

                        her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his   
                        illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. . . .

                        No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man
                        will store up in his ghostly heart.

            How does Gatsby’s dream differ from illusion? Well, perhaps it doesn’t, in a way, in that his pursuit of Daisy is not grounded in reality. Who could possibly live up to Gatsby’s idealized image of Daisy? Certainly not Daisy herself, given the shallowness of her character. He has in fact created an illusion of her, rooted in what she once was and in what he needs her now to be, the Golden Girl of his dreams. Yet, once Gatsby is reunited with Daisy, she cannot measure up to his dream and as with the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock, the enchantment vanishes. “His count of enchanted objects,” Fitzgerald tells us, “had diminished by one.”

            The enchantment gone, the remnant of Gatsby’s dream has become a delusion as he squats beneath the bushes of Daisy’s window seeking to protect her from her abusive husband. Inside, she plots with him to abandon Gatsby to clean up her mess.

            And so, we learn from Gatsby in the end that while great passion is admirable, great delusions may be lethal. Nick tells us in the final paragraphs of the novel that he

                        thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the

                        green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long

                        way . . . and his dream must have seemed so close that he

                        could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was

                        already behind him . . . .

Fitzgerald closes the book with the words that grace his own epitaph in a quiet little churchyard in Rockville, Maryland:

            “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

To Every Thing There Is A Season

          On this, the second warm day in a row in the second week of April, we are assured that spring, at long last, has arrived. I’ve removed the tree tape from the red maple sapling and have treated the buck rub wounds with pruning spray in hopes that the deer will find some other place to scratch their backs. The forsythia, oaks, maples, and black cherries are in bud, though the ash and honeysuckle linger in their winter husks awhile longer. Crocuses, daffodils, and bluebells are in bloom, and a breath of spring is felt on the warm, gentle breeze.

            My thoughts turn now to treating the lawn once again. In years gone by I’d work the length of the yard—front, sides, and back—row after row of raking, cutting, seeding, and fertilizing, but now I have the luxury of hiring a landscaper to manage those chores. It is a blessing, surely. Yet I notice once again the shifting contours of the back lawn, a phenomenon that would astound me every year as the grip of winter yielded to the softening spring. Amid the yard that I had come to know so intimately—an outcrop of rock to the right of the hemlock, a bit of thatch here, some moss there, bare patches where I’d cut back the pachysandra, a deep green swath of grass over the septic fields—I’d see some subtle changes in the topography of the yard. It was as if the rocks underground were shifting in silent seismic undulations so that the landscape formed a new and different terrain. Where once had been a little rise, the lawn lay level now; where once a gentle rolling slope, a little knoll appeared; and there, where the rain would puddle in a furrow beside the silver maple, it rolled down the hill toward my neighbor’s yard.

            What are we to make of such reshaping of the earth, such shifting of the landscape every year? Perhaps it's a metaphor of all that changes in Nature from season to season, all that shifts silently, subtly, but certainly from year to year. The trees are imperceptibly taller each spring, some sturdier, some feebler, others more mottled with lichens or blight. Perennial plants nudge their way through the soil reaching toward the sun, bloom for the season, then fade and die. Annuals flourish in kaleidoscopic glory until, exhausted, they spend themselves or succumb to the cool nights of an approaching autumn. The lawns too have their cycles, from the lush greens of a wet spring to the dry and brittle browns of the midsummer heat or the hibernation of late fall and winter. Often we celebrate the joys that the season has to offer, but perhaps more often we take them for granted, hardly noticing the changes as they come to pass.

            It is like that, I think, with us too, in the subtle silent shifting of our own lives from year to year. Oh sure, we live intensely all the seasons, knowing full well “a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance.” But we barely notice the seasons of our lives passing, hardly notice most of the changes until they have come to pass. How could it be that we are ten years out of college now? Or twenty? Or forty? When did our little boys grow to be such fine young men? How is it that my wife and I approach our 42^nd wedding anniversary this year? When, along the way, did my beard become more gray than brown, and my joints begin to ache? It all happened so quickly, it seems. "Life is what happens while you are busy making other plans," John Lennon told us. Perhaps we were too busy living our lives to listen. And so, in the fullness of time, we grow a little older and a little wiser. Unlike the trees, we tend to stoop a little more as the years proceed. But like the lawn, trees, and flowers that keep growing anew each spring, we too greet the next season as it comes, changing subtly as need be, but reaching—always reaching—toward the promise of the sun.

When Once I Carried Him Who'd Carried Me

           I remember a photograph of a time when I was five and at a birthday party. I wore a conical party hat, its thin rubber string strapped beneath my chin, and I was in my father’s sturdy arms, crying. “It’s all right,” he must have said. “Everything’s going to be all right. I’m here.” He would have carried me countless other times, too, in my early years, embracing, nurturing, loving.

            But as I grew and he aged, there came a time when he carried me less, and I him more. Like the time my brother Gerard and I draped his arms around our necks and carried him, stooped forward like a crucified Christ, into Dr. Howley’s office on Alexander Avenue when he’d blacked out in the waiting room, his bandaged hand too tightly wound from an accident at the bakery where he worked as a mechanic. Or the time we carried him braced on our criss-crossed arms across 188^th Street to Union Hospital, stopping traffic as we went, when he’d been held up and stabbed in a robbery at the candy store he owned in the Bronx.

            And then, years later, near the end, the time I helped to carry my father on a stretcher, tilting him nearly upright, gripping and grimacing, down the narrow stairwell on Decatur Avenue to the ambulance that would take him to the hospice. “You just want to get rid of me,” he said in his ache at leaving home to die. Little did he know, little did he know that I’d have held him in my arms the length of all the earth and back again, whispering, “It’s all right, everything’s going to be all right, I’m here,” could I have carried him so.

The Architecture of Trees

                  As I look out the window this February morning, it strikes me how bare the trees are, their bones so evident in the stark clarity of these winter days. The skeletal limbs sway in the wind, silhouetted against the gray sky. Their brittle branches tremble with every gust. The upper boughs fan out their tangled twigs reaching for the muted winter light; the lower reach downward as if yearning to reclaim the leaves that wafted to the earth like feathers some months now past. Tall oaks, like giant sentinels, stand firm beside the spreading maples, while the gnarly ash is blighted by splotches of lichen. Nearby, denying the blandness of winter, the white birch swoops and bends its supple limbs to the pulse of the wind. Yet even now, in these last five weeks of the season, the buds begin to form, tiny pods of hope that bask in the sunlight of these longer days. They will soon burst forth in an exuberance of new growth, new leaves, new branches, new life, and we, along with the trees in their new attire, will welcome the spring once again. 

On the Subway with Madame Bovary

           Tucked into a corner of my bookcase is a list of books I’ve read since I started keeping a record in 1982, now thirty years ago. The list is a reminder not only of what I’ve read, but also of what I’ve not found time to read. Favorite authors like Thomas Hardy, James Joyce, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez are there, of course, as are Pat Conroy, John Banville, and Matthew Pearl. David Baldacci and James Patterson are not. Nor, curiously, are the Harry Potter books (there’s always been so much else to read), though I’ve recently read The Casual Vacancy, J.K. Rowling’s first book aimed at an adult audience.

            Old friends Annie Dillard and Joan Didion show up, and spiritual guides John O’Donohue and Thomas Merton are there. The list includes many titles on American history (Mayflower, 1776, Washington, John Adams, Team of Rivals), and a more universal taste in authors (Paul Coelho, Italo Calvino, Orhan Pamuk, Kaled Hosseini, Jhumpa Lahiri). There are books on my abiding interest in Irish history and literature, and reams and reams of memoir. Forays into contemporaryh fiction include Paul Auster, Jonathan Franzen, Chad Harbvach, and Denis Johnson, while the veteran Philip Roth, who recently announced his retirement from writing, appears one last time. Some books by popular authors Ken Follet and Barbara Kingsolver appear, as do riveting reads like Ian Toll’s An Instance at the Fingerpost and Katherine Howe’s The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane.

            The list suggests to me not only the diversity of my interests, but also their sheer parochialism. My reading is uneven at best. Titles range from literary criticism to fiction, from biography to memoir, history, and poetry. From drama to theology, from mystery to politics. This year I’ve begun to read e-books on my Nook, but I still prefer to feel the heft of a book in my hands, the pulpy texture of the pages, to smell the feint dark scent of the ink.

            In the end, the list provides for me a sort of time capsule. Just as it speaks to me of what I’ve read over the years, so too my list of books often conjures the locale where I was reading a particular title. Mention of Madam Bovary carries me back at once to a crowded subway car in New York City on a sweltering summer morning. Just where Flaubert, Emma, and I were going escapes me now, but I find us on the list of books for 1982. What’s more, it seems to me now that we are there still, rumbling along the tracks toward the next station on the Lexington Avenue line, as we always will be, until perhaps we meet again someplace else in time when I take up the book once more. In the meantime, I look forward to discovering the joys of Harry Potter with my granddaughter, Chloe', sitting beside the fire on a cold winter's night in the years ahead. 

To Climb a Mountain

          I’m thinking this morning of the extraordinary tension between distance and perspective, and I’m reminded of the series of paradoxes you encounter when climbing toward the summit of a mountain. I’ve never climbed the rarefied heights of the Himalayas or the peaks of the American west and have only scaled the foothills of the Adirondacks and the Appalachians in the northeast. Yet I have climbed the slopes of Cuilcagh Mountain in Ireland’s County Leitrim, Knocknarea outside Sligo Town, and Tents Mountain in County Cavan.

            A mountain reveals itself in layers as you climb. Just as you are about to reach what appears to be the summit, another incline yet to be overtaken comes tauntingly into view. And so on you trod, thrusting yourself forward as if pushing into a wind.

            The view from the summit is always worth the trek. From the top of Cuilcagh, a mere 2,182 feet above sea level, the view sweeps an astounding panorama of the valleys of Leitrim, Cavan, and Fermanagh below, and on into Sligo to the west and Donegal to the north. The smaller Knocknarea, at 1,073 feet, is capped by Queen Maeve’s legendary burial cairn at the summit. It overlooks Sligo Bay to the north and the little seaside village of Strandhill to the west. On a clear day the 360 degree view is stunning. If the clouds hang low or a haze obscures the valley, wait a while, as they say in Ireland. The weather truly is that changeable, and usually before long a blaze of sunshine washes over the landscape.

            We climbed Tents Mountain in Cavan, my son Liam and I, following the long slow roads through tracts of bog where his grandfather had "won the turf" as late as 1972. Wanting to see what views of the landscape the mountain would yield, we lugged the camera equipment up the slopes. It was a fine clear summer day. Well before the summit, we felt the first drops of rain and turned to see the dark clouds sweeping in behind us. We paused at a large concrete slab atop the water supply that trickles down to the valley. The limestone slopes of the mountain were devoid of any trees, sprouting only the occasional small brush. As the rain began to lash, we did the only sensible thing. We covered the camera bag, the tripod, and ourselves with our jackets, and—caps pulled over our eyes—lay down on the concrete bed for a nap.

            When the rains had passed we awoke to the utter solitude of the mountain, what Jack Kerouac once called “the reassuring rapturous rush of silence.” Then, lifting our caps from our eyes, we looked about. For just a fleeting second or two we felt disoriented, that sense of not knowing where you are when you awake. Our eyes swept the horizon, scanning patches of sunlight on the slopes, shadows of clouds on the valley below. How insignificant we and our petty cares seemed amid the sweeping majesty of it all, how humbling the moment.

A Remnant

                  I recall as a boy of maybe six or seven, walking down a street in the South Bronx with our mother, the six of u­s in tow. We ranged in age from nine to infancy, and—as children will do—the older of us gawked as we passed at the stack of furniture piled at the curb.

“Don’t stare at those poor unfortunate people,” our mother chided. “Something terrible has happened to them.”

                  As with the other times we’d witnessed such a scene, someone always stood guard. A man, someone’s neighbor, having been evicted for not paying his rent, watched over his worldly possessions, his face masked in a steely frown or grimace. Perhaps his wife had gone off with the children to ask some relative to take them in. Or it might be the mother and children who kept the watch, the father himself having gone in search of lodging or work. They were, by all appearances, just like us.

                  “Say a prayer,” my mother urged us as we passed by, seeming not to notice so as to avoid embarrassing them. 

                  I realize now that such an eviction with a family’s possessions piled on the sidewalk was about the most disgraceful calamity that could befall the Irish-Americans of the South Bronx in the early 1950s. The fear that one’s own family might be only a paycheck away from a similar fate was at times nearly palpable. “It could happen to anyone,” was a common refrain among those proud, poor, hard-working people. “There but for the grace of God . . . .” But the searing shame of such misfortune was inescapable.

                  Irish-American families by the mid twentieth century were four generations removed from the horrors of the Great Famine that ravaged the population of Ireland in the 1840s. Yet the cultural memory of those dark times a century ago had been kept alive, eventually passed down in history and song in succeeding generations. One searing image that lingered in the folk memory from famine times was the spectacle of a tenant farmer and his family, unable to pay their rent because of the potato blight, being evicted from their cottage by the agent of an absentee landlord accompanied by the British constabulary and some Irish housebreakers, themselves desperate for work.  To avoid paying taxes on the empty cottages—or at times to clear the land for the more profitable expansion of sheep or cattle raising—the landlord would then tumble the cottages, forcing the evicted family to live in a ditch or take to the road, foraging for food along the way.

                  A century later, in the streets of the South Bronx, such images of dereliction among the famine Irish had largely retreated to the realm of the unconscious, fading like the sepia tint of an old photo of ancestors no one even recognizes anymore. Yet--despite the years--the treachery, fear, and shame of eviction still lingered in the folk memory of their descendants.