Today I am going to discuss books, in particular two books that possess a unique resonance for me.
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
That’s the final line from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, The Great Gatsby. It’s my favorite work of fiction, perhaps because it strikes so close to home. As does the film Withnail and I, but while that makes watching the movie much, much harder, there’s something about Fitzgerald’s prose that makes it worth the pain of revisiting those old, uncomfortable memories.
I was once Nick Carraway to a punk rock Jay Gatsby, an inveterate optimist whose future dreams were hopelessly tangled up in a romanticized past. Unlike the literary Gatsby, who “turned out all right in the end” (apart from the fatal gunshot wound), the foul dust which preyed upon him did not float in his wake but was carried – proudly and willingly – in his person.
And I watched. And for a while at least, I believed. Or I wanted to.
Because the truth is that Jay Gatsby was a bit of a fool. Granted, the stuff of his foolishness was more honest and pure than the miasma of corruption and selfishness that surrounded and would eventually destroy him, but it was foolish nonetheless. He fixes himself on recapturing a lost moment, and turns all his energies toward making it happen, shrugging off what a saner soul might consider intractable obstacles as being merely “personal.” It’s the American Dream (which like all dreams, is an illusion at heart) of being able to achieve anything, as long as one wants it badly enough. Literary Gatsby wanted Daisy; my Gatsby wanted fame and fortune, Hollywood-style (and women, too, but those would come with package), but his methods weren’t much different from his counterpart’s – elaborate constructs created in service of an intrinsically doomed plan assembled to a repeated chorus of “if only…”
Except Gatsby had the good sense to lay (or float face-) down after Wilson took his misdirected vengeance upon the man. The literary Gatsby exited the stage with his precious dream intact; the real-life Gatsby to which I refer refused to quit, no matter how many holes reality blasted through him, and continued to stagger aimlessly in pursuit of his desire like a shambling revenant from a low budget horror film. It grew too much to take for even the most impartial of unreliable witnesses, and after a half-dozen unnecessary sequels, I quit paying attention. A sadder but wiser Nick Carraway returned home to the Midwest; I fucked off to suburbs northwest of Boston.
Literature and are in general are deceptive by nature, a vicarious spectacle created through the sleight of hand called “craft.” We feel like participants, but the actual process is that of bearing witness, no matter how much we project ourselves into the work. Reality is never as simple as a fictional construct, no matter how elaborate or true to life a work may feel to us.
I can watch The Wild Bunch and get choked up every time at the part where the gang makes the unspoken decision to take back their comrade from the brutal General Mapache, a course of action made all the more noble by its inevitably doomed nature. In the end Pike, Dutch, and the Gorch Brothers reap nothing for the act of redemption but brutal demises under the hot desert sun. They went out proudly, but it makes little difference to the vultures and other carrion-eaters who feast on their corpses. It’s a great place to visit, but not one I particularly care to live in. Reality is messier (or to put it in more blatantly obvious terms, more “real”) and that applies not only to violent western films, but across the entire spectrum of creative expression, from teen comedy films, romance novels, or even Food TV programs. Gatsby turned out all right in the end because there was an end – a terminal string of perfectly constructed sentences that closed up the narrative, leaving the rest in the imagination of the reader or the critical dissecting pan of the graduate student; in reality the narrative keeps limping along, even when the story really ought to have ended. Such was my experience as spectator in the world of dreams unfulfilled (or unfulfillable).
I’ve always been more content to be an observer than a participant. It’s not so much a sluggishness of the blood or failure of nerve as a natural inclination to bear witness. My father once defined heroism in terms of the grainy newsreel footage of the Hindenburg disaster; “You see all those people running away from the flames,” he said, “but there are a handful of folks running toward the wreckage. That’s what heroism is.” I’d like to think that I’d have the presence of mind to be part of the latter category. I have stepped up, with various degrees of trepidation, to the plate on many occasions, but there have been more times where I’ve simply observed and made metal notes while all hell broke loose.
The one incident I remember most clearly involved a fight in a club I belonged to during college. Two members came to blows over a woman who had long since left the group. They tussled, books and boardgames tumbled from shelves, and I sat impassively on a table and watched it unfold. It was my wife, along with another female club member, who boldly waded into the fray and separated the combatants, and she earned a not-quite-broken foot for her efforts. During the post game wrap-up, she asked me why I chose not to intervene. I didn’t, and still don’t, have a better answer to her question than “because it was fascinating to watch.” The notion of doing, or not doing, something never even crossed my mind.
As I said, it’s not a failure of nerve, though if I were to analyze my pattern of behavior, I’d say it stemmed from a sense of comfortable withdrawal, which brings us to Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall. While The Loved One, Waugh’s morbid satire of the American Way of Death, is and shall remain my favorite of his works, Decline and Fall speaks to me on a personal level unmatched by any other novel. Through no fault of his own, college student Paul Pennyfeather finds himself enmeshed in a series of darkly comedic misadventures that end up landing him right where he started from, only more world-weary and with a better sense of what he really is.
In a conversation with his one time finance toward the end of the novel, he likens the world to one of those giant spinning wheels at a funhouse. Many people are content to keep crawling toward the center, no matter how many times the wheel throws them off, but Paul is content to keep to the room’s edge and not make the effort. It’s an admission of self that closely mirrors my own acknowledgement of my limitations, and I cite Paul’s analogy whenever the subject turns to why I hide my light (the brightness of which is usually exaggerated) under a bushel. (A minor clarification: I’m not hiding it under a bushel. It’s hidden in a steel safe entombed beneath a rockrete bunker covered with camouflage netting, okay?)
My “adventures,” if they could even be classified as such, were far more prosaic than Paul’s experiences with South American brothels and dank London prison cells, but the net results in terms of our psyches were the same – a personal (as opposed to political) conservatism and appreciation of stability within one’s immediate sphere. I admit that doesn’t sound “punk rock” at all, but the notions of non-stop excitement and a life amorphous are luxuries of youth. Far better, I think, to admit the romantic fallacy and work from there than to pay lip service to a false dream. Plus, whether you credit a depressing sense of personal stasis or a reasoned self-awareness, I have managed to stay true to my ideals while other acquaintances have become that which they most despised or gotten lost entirely.
T.S. Eliot, speaking through the mouth of J. Alfred Prufrock, asked "Do I dare to eat a peach?" The real question is “Do I want to eat one?” I’ve enjoyed them in the past, but I think I’ve had my fill. They also tend to make one’s hands all sticky, too.
I suspect the mission statement for Armagideon Time lies hidden between the lines of my above ramblings...
Gary Numan – Observer (from The Pleasure Principle, 1979) - Cold, clinical, and detatched. It's perfect.
Groucho Marx – I’m Against It (from Flashbacks Vol. 2: Novelty Songs 1914-1946, 2000) - The contrarian anthem, you say? I beg to differ.
Posts
