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In 8 weeks Baz Luhrmann's long-awaited production of The Great Gatsby makes its debut. Leonardo DiCaprio and Carey Mulligan co-star for this glimpse into the early 20th Century.
If you know where to look in Rockville, Maryland about 12 miles north of the Capitol's shimmering monuments which memorialize success, one of the nation's saddest stories is depicted by this inscription: "So we beat-on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." The last words of The Great Gatsby mark the grave of F. Scott Fitzgerald who died 73 years ago. He was the personification of a bi-gone era, his life was a cautionary signpost for this one.
Success (This Side of Paradise) came to him suddenly at 23. At 28 he wrote Gatsby. At 43 he was dead. (In 1919 Gatsby was poor. In the spring of 1922 he was rich. In the late summer of that year, he was dead). Fitzgerald spent most of his life trading his youth and his talent for alcohol and drug abuse. He was an early standard-bearer for self-sabotage.
Not long before Fitzgerald's fatal heart attack, he wrote in a chilling yet poignant past-tense: "In a small way, I was an original." Today it seems in a large way, he was just that. In that time Fitzgerald's way of living ruined his gift but rose like his talent from romanticism. Style, flair, extravagance were in the 1920's as they were in the 1960's, all the rage; bundled in a culture of escapism and carefree living (and sometimes dying). World War I had hit the fast-forward button and the race was on for American cache' that included fast airplanes, fast trains, fast cars, fast living. The headiness of the 1920's rose out of the sensation of never knowing when the merry-go-round would stop. Part of it came to a collision with destiny in October, 1929. For F. Scott Fitzgerald it came to a halt in 1940. George Will put it best: "There is a sense in which the carnival of modernity never closes here, though the nation is more wary, less exhilarated by that prospect."
Fitzgerald and Gatsby's story convey the idea that the Old World would pass to the New that we could live vicariously, uncontrolled and true to our strongest impulses. Fitzgerald's crack-up told a new-old story; living without constraints carries its own ominous warning. "The expression of bewilderment had come back into Gatsby's face, as though a faint doubt had occurred to him as to the quality of his present happiness."
Fitzgerald's literary offerings were like jazz: improvisations on a short theme. Reminding us of the attendant slave who rode in the chariot of a great emperor amid the tumult of triumph and whispering in his master's ear to be cautious; all glory is fleeting.
The forthcoming grand production of The Great Gatsby come May promises to be well worth the ticket. If you're really curious about the late F. Scott Fitzgerald, his grave in Rockville is in a churchyard now crowded by urban clutter surrounded by the sounds and sights of traffic, neon signs, and frenetic endurance. But his life like his stories echo far out across a nation searching for itself.
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