Under the Red White and Blue: Patriotism, Disenchantment and the Stubborn Myth of the Great Gatsby by Greil Marcus

Yale University Press, 165 pp.

The Great Gatsby, The Graphic Novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Illustrated by Aya Morton, Text Adapted by Fred Fordham

Scribner, 200 pp.

By Allen Barra

If, as Benjamin Franklin is said to have said, originality is the art of concealing your source, then I am the most original writer in America: I’ve been stealing stuff from Greil Marcus since I was editing my school paper at the University of Alabama, and have continued to do it. So have a great many others. I won’t name names; they know who they are.

To a generation that took rock as seriously as we took Camus and Borges, Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock’n’Roll Music (1975) lit a path through lost highways to Robert Johnson and Jimmie Rodgers and countless others with ancestral links to the music we grew up with – Dylan and the Band, the Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix. It dissolved the lines between popular culture and what school had taught us was high culture and proved to us that our instincts were right, that the America reflected by Hank Williams, Muddy Waters, and Chuck Berry was as legitimate as the one found in Melville, Twain and Faulkner. Marcus and longtime Village Voice rock critic Robert Christgau have been as important to followers of popular music as Pauline Kael was to film lovers in the ‘70s and ‘80s.

In Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century (1969), Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes (1997), Double Trouble: Bill Clinton and Elvis Presley in a Land of No Alternatives (2001), The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy in the American Voice (2006),The History of Rock 'n' Roll in Ten Songs (2014), and Real Life Rock (2015), a collection of his popular columns from the Village Voice, Salon, and others, Marcus has mapped our alternative cultural history.

Under the Red White and Blue is about everything they left out of The Great Gatsby when you studied it in school. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel resonates like no other American fiction of the twentieth century, “for generations exerting a gravitational pull so insistent that it can seem to have colonized the imagination both of its own country and of people imagining that country from somewhere else.”

The title Under the Red White and Blue is among the ones Fitzgerald wanted for Gatsby, his greatest work of fiction; luckily his editor, Maxwell Perkins, pointed him in a different direction. Marcus follows the DNA strands emanating from the most celebrated American novel of the twentieth century. I use “celebrated” as a catch-all for popular, critically acclaimed, most widely discussed, and, inevitably, the Great American Novel, though Marcus is unconcerned with anointing Gatsby any of these honorary titles.

It is the Great American Novel, though when it was published many were too close to Gatsby’s themes to understand that it would outlive other much-heralded books by prominent authors the mid-1920s, such as Sinclair Lewis’s Arrowsmith, John Dos Passos Manhattan Transfer, Faulkner’s first novel, Soldier’s Pay, and Hemingway’s first story collection, In Our Time.

Was Hemingway, whose best-known novels would be set outside the U.S., too jealous to acknowledge a novel that caught the heartbeat of an America he never understood? It was another expatriate who instantly perceived Gatsby’s greatness: T.S. Eliot wrote to Fitzgerald in 1925 that The Great Gatsby was “the first step that American fiction had taken since Henry James.”

Marcus says Fitzgerald “was seeing, or trying to see, the whole arc of American history, keeping it in his mind’s eye like a map tacked to the wall in front of his desk.” Gatsby is read as a kind of secret history of America, one that “absorbed the ferment of its time.” Fitzgerald “took into his book the action of the previous five years [of the twenties] – the fortunes, crimes, and songs -- and with such an acute sense of what the time wanted and what it feared that he was able to create an atmosphere in which the action of the next five years – the speculation, the panic, and the songs – had already taken place.” The era “was a bacchanal that left every question worth asking hanging in the air.”

For instance, the racist rants of Daisy’s husband, Tom Buchanan. “Civilization’s going to pieces,” Tom says in, as Marcus points out, the first spoken passage in the book besides those of the narrator, Nick Carraway. Tom is obsessed with the racist tome The Rise of the Colored Empires: “The idea is that if we don’t look out, the white race will be – will be – utterly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved.”

“In 1925,” writes Marcus, “Fitzgerald couldn’t know that in less than fifteen years Tom Buchanan’s white genocide theories would rule Europe and send millions to extermination.” Or that almost a hundred years later a president and his senior advisor would be so closely aligned with those theories.

In one of those passages in which Marcus makes you feel as if you came up with the idea the moment he wrote it, he quotes George Will who, watching the Trump inauguration, called him “a Gatsby for our time.” Marcus disagrees. No,” he says, “Adulterer or president, Trump was always Tom.” Tom, like Trump, was one of the angry rich, raised with a bedrock belief in his entitlement and privilege; Obama, in contrast, “seemed like his own creation. That was the source of his aura, the sense of self command that drew people to him …”

At the novel’s end, with three characters dead from accident, murder, and suicide, Fitzgerald writes “the holocaust was complete.” Fitzgerald, Marcus writes of that line, “could have had no idea what a wind history would put at its back.”

Marcus casts a wide net relating Gatsby’s antecedents, influences and associations, a net so wide that it pulls in a whale: “If only because it has been done to death, the last sentence of The Great Gatsby may be the most famous ending in American literature. Melville came up with the most famous opening line in American literature, and the American tall tale, in the American shaggy dog story.” As with The Great Gatsby, “there is something there [in Moby-Dick] that, as another writer put it speaking of ‘Verdi’s arias, various blues songs, and certain poems, gives the sense that ‘the creator came upon them by accident and we are, for the first time, discovering them for him.’”

“In every way,” Marcus says, “to read Moby-Dick is to reread it.” Which, as many continue to discover, is also true of The Great Gatsby, a book that seems to have been rewritten each time you pick it up. The text doesn’t change, but what we want from it does, and each time you read it, it’s as if something has been added.

His references are lodestars of popular culture:

-- Gilbert Seldes was a friend of Scott Fitzgerald and perhaps the first serious critic of the American popular arts. Marcus finds Seldes’s influential The 7 Lively Arts, “an affirmation of movies, radio, newspaper satire, comic strips, the Broadway review jazz, Hollywood comedy, and far more.” It’s “a portable manifesto,” and “still forms the values of people who have never heard of it.” Seldes was “part of Fitzgerald’s literary conversation” and wrote “with love, passion, nosiness, and a capacity always to be surprised,” “putting the shock over how deep and how high culture can go – the everyday culture of everyday life – on the page.”

Fitzgerald put much stock in Seldes’s praise for Gatsby, and “he couldn’t have been disappointed: ‘Fitzgerald has ceased to content himself with a satirical report on the outside of American life and has with considerable irony attacked the spirit underneath …’ “

-- Raymond Chandler loved The Great Gatsby and wanted to adapt a screenplay from it. He finally gave up the idea and, tapping into many of Gatsby’s themes, “in 1953 began his book The Long Goodbye, even dropping the West Egg mansion into Los Angeles (‘whoever built that place was trying to drag the Atlantic seaboard over the Rockies. He was trying hard, but he hadn’t made it.’)” Chandler’s best novel features an alcoholic novelist suggestive of himself who exalts F. Scott Fitzgerald.

-- Philip Roth, whose novel The Human Stain, published 75 years after Gatsby, features a protagonist, Coleman Silk, who is African American but has passed as white – as a Jew, actually – his whole life. Like Gatsby, Silk has rewritten his past, creating a new life. Roth “fixed Gatsby’s heroism and wove it, more directly, less subtlety, and in a few stray, lightning moments as powerfully as Fitzgerald did, into the American fabric …”

-- Jelly Roll Morton, the self-proclaimed inventor of jazz was a contemporary of Fitzgerald – Scott died in 1940 at age 44, Jelly Roll the following year at 50. His music provided the tempo and mood for Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age and his classic “Monrovia” is on the soundtrack of Baz Luhrmann’s film version of The Great Gatsby. To those who may question Marcus’ footloose method of cultural connection I would reply that it is precisely his ability to perceive a kinship between Fitzgerald and Jelly Roll Morton that makes him the most galvanizing cultural critic since Jacques Barzun invented the term.

Marcus is at his best tracing the strange history of Gatsby in the movies. He has a field day writing about the hysterically off-kilter 1949 version with Alan Ladd in which every idea in the novel was smothered by the cock-blocking of the Hayes Code. For instance, here’s the voiceover by Macdonald Carey’s Nick Carraway: “Out of the twenties and all they were came Jay … Gatsby, who built a dark empire for himself because he carried a dream in his heart.” At the end, Gatsby repents: “Nick, I made a mistake somewhere. I thought I was right. . . . But look at what I’ve done to myself and everyone else to get where I am, and for what?”

Marcus writes, “It’s as embarrassing to type these lines, as it should have been to say them.”

But the 1949 film is an easy target. Marcus’s analysis of what went wrong with the 1974 version with Robert Redford and Mia Farrow gets right to the fundamental error of seeing Gatsby through a haze of nostalgia: “The songs sound corny and the sound is always tinny. Old records play and you wonder: Were they issued with scratches? The songs lie on the screen, inert. They’re not music, they’re an effect, presented as symbols of the bygone, not as anything anyone ever actually liked.”

Marcus goes on: “Every woman is by definition a fashion victim; no female character dresses as herself. The dancing scenes seem like a hysterical obligation. Jumping, shouting, throwing arms in the air: everyone seems to be working: you know you’re watching a movie with a lot of underpaid people in it.”

Gatsby’s imposing mansion is, Marcus says, “stolid and dull, a British pile. Mia Farrow’s Daisy seems to be on barbiturates. Robert Redford acts like he’s not completely thawed out.”

As you might have guessed, Marcus is enthusiastic about Australian director Baz Luhrmann’s 2013 film, mostly reviled by critics. (Just a 49% rating on that metric of middle-browism, Rotten Tomatoes.) One critic described it as “lumbering across the scene like the best, trashiest, loudest parade float of all time.” Marcus thinks, “Luhrmann didn’t seem afraid of the book. His picture was the ambition to throw Fitzgerald’s bitter dismissal of the movies back at him, or his ghost …” He quotes Luhrmann at the time his movie was released, “It’s not just mild disappointment. It’s like I’ve committed a violent heinous crime against a personal family member.” (A New Yorker critic wrote, “Luhrmann’s vulgarity … suggests that he’s less a filmmaker than a music-video director with endless resources in a stunning absence of taste.”)

Luhrmann shows us for the first time Gatsby’s spectacular mansion even though there is practically no description of the mansion in the novel (which Marcus finds “relentlessly built …half supernatural, like the castle in Orson Welles’s Chimes at Midnight.” We see a Gatsby party where “You can feel people actually having fun, the extras moving as if they’re thrilled to be there. And finally, we really meet Jay Gatsby and Nick Carraway.”

Under the Red White and Blue opens with an amusing account of a New York independent bookstore buyer who judged a cover by its book, refusing to stock The Great Gatsby with the movie tie-in cover featuring Leonardo DiCaprio. “It’s just God-awful. The Great Gatsby is a pillar of American literature, and people don’t want it messed with.” The buyer added, “We’re selling the classic cover and have no intention of selling the new one.”

He missed a chance to put the first true screen Gatsby on display – Luhrmann’s film “creates and vivifies a character Fitzgerald could not. DiCaprio has the glow Fitzgerald wrote around his character.”

“Gatsby had to be given a physical presence he never had before – not in the novel, not in the allusions to him piling up in every form of discourse over the decades, not on the stage, and not on the screen . . . He has to look exactly like himself, a self no one could picture before but once glimpsed in the flesh would be recognized instantly and absolutely.”

I must interject here. When, Tobey Maguire’s Nick, attending his first party at Gatsby’s mansion, is greeted by DiCaprio – “I’m Gatsby,” he says with a smile as fireworks explode overhead to the climax of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue – I felt as if I was seeing Jay Gatsby for the first time, as Nick Carraway must have felt when he first saw him, and that I would probably never see him again.

The actor who plays Gatsby “must have the beauty to make his case: to make you feel, in the end, that something at once small and immeasurable has been lost. DiCaprio could do that, as Ladd and Redford couldn’t – as, it seems they didn’t understand that that was their role …” In the pivotal scene where Tom Buchanan confronts Gatsby that he is not of the same class as he and Daisy (a terrific piece of acting from Joel Edgerton) “DiCaprio freezes. Anger, fear, and most of all bitterness – over the whole vicious lottery of birth – pass across his face.” He “empties Gatsby’s face so completely you glimpse his future destruction.”

DiCaprio brought another important perspective to the character of Gatsby. Talking to the Hollywood Reporter, the actor offered an insight which has eluded both critics and admirers of the book: “My recollection from high school was always of this hopeless romantic. I didn’t quite see the emptiness of Jay Gatsby. He concentrates on his love of this woman, but does he really love her? When he finally has her in his arms, is it enough, and is she enough?”

The answer, of course, is no. Perhaps Gatsby begins to see this when he takes Daisy and Nick to his house and points across the bay to the green light at the end of her dock. “It had seemed as close as a star to the moon,” Nick tells us. “Now it was again a green light on a dock. His count of enchanted objects had diminished by one.”

Luhrmann “saw that the real drama, the ordinary drama, the love story, was not between Gatsby and Daisy but between Gatsby and Nick . . . who “can’t imagine himself outside of his life as defined by other people … and Gatsby can.” This serves as a counter to those who have criticized Fitzgerald for making a bootlegger into a romantic hero: Gatsby is shallow, and his ambition, however opulently romantic it may appear, is shallow. Gatsby is really only a hero to those like Nick, whose dreams of romanticism are shallow in the first place. That’s one of the things Gatsby is about; another is the fatal allure of that romanticism.

Fitzgerald’s literary reputation has had its ups and downs over the past one hundred years. A couple of decades ago Fran Leibowitz said that “John O’Hara was the real F. Scott Fitzgerald,” which elicited snickers from her readers, who probably hadn’t read either. Still, even in periods when Fitzgerald was as forgotten as O’Hara is now (and Leibowitz will soon be), The Great Gatsby survived and thrived.

In Marcus’s words, Gatsby “seeks its own readers, who read the book back to itself, and the book changes, and moves through time, rewriting the history not only of 1922, or 1925, but of all the time it has crossed over.” That quote should appear on the back of all subsequent editions when The Great Gatsby goes into public domain next year. With Leonardo DiCaprio’s picture on the cover.

You might think that Baz Luhrman’s film makes a graphic novel of Gatsby superfluous, but every interpretation is appreciated – especially illustrated by Aya Morton, whose lavish illustrations brought Anne Opotowsky’s His Dream of a Skyland to vivid life, with text adapted by Fred Fordham, of the 2018 graphic novel of To Kill A Mockingbird.

Morton has chosen to render Gatsby Fitzgerald’s vision, mostly in pastels – pinks, oranges, blues, lilacs – set against neutral gray backgrounds. Gatsby’s mansion is an eye-popper with high ceilings, arches that look like the setting for shootouts in John Wick movies, and long, winding staircases out of an MGM musical. The library, at least fourteen shelves high in one panel, could be out of a Borges story. The green light on Daisy’s pier is a faint green presented over a wordless black and gray backdrop. Gatsby, Daisy and Tom are all Aryan-blond; Tom’s bullish build and close-cropped haircut suggest Robert Shaw in From Russia With Love.

Fordham’s selections from Fitzgerald are spare and select, well-matched to Morton’s illustrations. Fordham ends, of course, with the most famous closing sentence in American literature, words well matched with Morton’s depiction of the green light over a bay strewn with moonlit images from the novel, images from Nick Carraway’s subconscious -- and by extension our own.

Allen Barra writes about books and film for Truthdig, the Atlantic, the Daily Beast, the Guardian, Salon, and the New Republic. He was recently cited by the National Arts and Journalism Awards for literary and film criticism. He thanks Margaret Barra for her contributions to this piece, particularly on the subject of Leonard DiCaprio.