Yesterday I read The Great Gatsby
straight through in one sitting. I knew it would take me six
hours or less, because that's the running time of Gatz,
a new theater piece
based on an actor reading the entire text aloud. I imagined
that
with the advantage of not having to speak the words aloud I might do it
in four hours. But as it turned out, six is what it took,
allowing for meals and bathroom breaks and maybe the briefest of naps
somewhere in there.
I hadn't been planning to re-read Gatsby,
but a variety of different factors came together and inspired
me
to do it. I happened to read about an upcoming Fitzgerald
movie, The
Beautiful and the Damned, that
will star Leo DiCaprio as Scott and Keira Knightley as Zelda. It's not
an adaptation of the similarly titled novel, but rather a
bio-pic
about the author himself. This seems similar to the strategy
of
my Fitzgerald musical, which uses This
Side Of Paradise as fodder,
but is about the real life Scott,
not his fictional alter ego, Amory Blaine.
Leo-as-Scott seems like pretty good casting. My thoughts went
immediately to a couple of past DiCaprio roles: First,
there's
the story of the lower-class boy and the upper-class girl, as seen in Titanic. This
is similar to
the romance at the center of my musical, between the (relatively)
poor Scott and the fantastically wealthy Ginevra King -- said
to
be the model for Daisy Buchanan in Gatsby.
And then there's
the smooth-talking grifter, Frank
Abignale, from Catch Me If You Can
-- who reminds me of
Fitzgerald's creation, Jay Gatsby... who
in turn reminds me of Fitzgerald himself in his huge ambitions and
pretensions.
In preparing for this round of rewrites, we've talked a lot about the
theme of identity, and about young Scott's obsession with the "mask"
and the "pose" in his quest to define himself. Suddenly, it
seemed essential that I re-acquaint myself with Gatsby, the ultimate
poser. And if I wanted to better understand Ginevra King,
then I
needed to revisit Fitzgerald's portrait of her in Daisy. And
Tom
Buchanan too. He appears in my story as Tyler Pierce, the
rich
rival who ultimately marries Ginevra... but also as Scott's idol Trip
Everett, one of those "careless people" who smash things up.
Once this idea of a reading marathon occurred to me, I found still more
reasons for doing it. Most obviously, I wanted to avoid
having to
do my rewrites. It's easy enough to say to myself, "Well I
shouldn't start writing until I've done my homework... laid the
groundwork." Six hours zipping through 200 masterful pages of
Fitzgerald is a lot more pleasant than six hours slogging away at 4 new
pages of my own.
Even more than that, though, I wanted to do it as an exercise in
absorption. This goes to what I was writing about the other
day
as regards The
Hidden Sky: "Blessed
is she who is lost in her work,"
proclaims a lyric during the extended math sequence. And I
believe that. And I want that for myself. The best
things
I've written have always been the result of deeper, more intense focus.
But that's a place I can never get to anymore in my writing.
Life is too busy and distracting; I've lost the power of
concentration -- which is the essential skill for writing... holding
the scene before one's eyes... extended creative "dreaming."
As
much as I might like to do it, I don't think I have the mental
discipline right now to get lost in my work. But maybe
getting
lost in someone else's work would be a step in the right direction?
I wanted to see if I could at least focus my attention for a
longer length of time.
And so I embarked. I'll spare you my thoughts on the novel
itself, because this post is already plenty long... and I'd probably
end up sounding like a bad college book report. Suffice it to say, I'd
only ever read it in high school -- never as an adult. So much of it
was startling and new to me... and just excellent. Excellent
in a
way that reminds me of how things can be excellent. And how I
must aspire to that. I must do better. I must try
harder.
Tomorrow I will run faster, stretch out my arms farther...
Musings
Past
