Under The Sign Of The Jazz Age-With The 1970s Film Adaptation Of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” In Mind  

By Zack James

Josh Breslin, the longtime columnist for American Left History and a million other publications when he was younger and just starting out some of which have folded others like Left History gone solo on-line to survive, had recently been astonished by the fact that he still could be thrilled by either reading F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby or viewing the 1970s film adaptation starring Robert Redford and Mia Farrow. (The later Leonardo De Caprio version did not “speak” to him and he had barely gotten through that interpretation and was still shaking his head years later about who thought that would fly. Jesus what were they thinking.)  Usually it did not take much, maybe a trip to New York City down coastal Connecticut to the Long Island Ferry and onto Long Island itself, maybe some headline about a new kid on the block rich guy who was trying to bust into high society and was taken down a peg for not having three names or able to ride to the hunt or something like that, maybe some crazy political fundraiser where the cream of the crop so-called gathered to donate tons of money, money gotten from who knows where, to some cause or candidate, or maybe it was just the need to read some outstanding descriptive language in a classic American novel or view the lavish and outlandish spectacle of the rich when they gather the tribe in against the newcomer, against the proletarian horde they always lived in fear off before uppity blacks drove them to distraction. This time however Josh was driven by a bet, a bet made with his old-time friend Sam Lowell whom he had known since high school days in his growing up town of Riverdale some thirty or forty miles outside of Boston.          

Josh Breslin, for those not familiar with the name, had been after his stormy youth, a youth drive by the joys, sadness, and excesses of the countercultural 1960s as had Sam’s been a free-lance cultural critic, mostly music and film for a whole assortment of small publishing houses, small presses and small coffee table journals (which he forced his friends to subscript to under penalty of excommunication). Upon his recent retirement, or perhaps semi-retirement is a better way to put the matter, he had taken a few off-hand assignments for Ben Gold the editor of The Literary Gazette to write occasional reviews about whatever he wanted to write about on cultural matters. Given that free rein Josh had decided that he would write reviews of old-time books that he believed should still be in the American literary pantheon, still be read by millennials and whoever else appreciated great literature. His motivation for writing about what would be mostly “dead white male” authors was that unlike the irate authors, musicians and film directors who complained about his acidic reviews, complained that he did not know good books, music, film from a hat-rack nobody would give, to use an expression from his Lake Heights working class neighborhood youth, a rat’s ass about his reviews of books already reviewed one hundred or so years ago. Moreover Josh decided that he would, now that he did not need to depend on his fees to cover his costs of living, tweak a few noses, be a little provocative, a little edgy, edgy as some literary piece could even get, and challenge the orthodoxy.

Little did Josh know, not having been around the academy for a long time that academic types actually read the Gazette and are willing with mighty pen in hand (or better these days fingered word processor) to smite the Philistines or anybody who encroaches on their protected turf. Josh in his first article had merely postulated that F. Scott Fitzgerald’s early work This Side Of Paradise which made him both famous and sought after by book and magazine publishers alike should be bookended with The Great Gatsby as comparable classics by that master. The initial response had been tepidly understandable, mainly a few college English Lit major undergraduates who had been assigned the readings and had done some term papers on one or the other book defending Gatsby against the savage Visgoths. Kid’s stuff really, mostly a rehash of whatever their professors had directed them to think about the literary worthiness of either novel. He thought nothing more of it, weeks passed by while he was working on another piece, thought he was done with that small bit item and could move on. Then the deluge. No so fast since Professor Jacobs, the retired English Lit department head big wig at Harvard let the cudgels down and had through some connection actually got his response placed in the Letters To The Editors pages of the Gazette (Ben Gold claiming somewhat disingenuously Josh thought that he knew nothing about the matter since it was not his bailiwick at the publication).

The good professor’s point was that of course the earlier work Paradise which were simply the well-thought out meanderings, his term, of an Ivy League prodigy, nothing more and that anybody who placed the two in the same breath was mentally deficient, or worse. Josh made a short sweet reply directly to the professor stating that he was merely tongue-in-cheek attempting to upgrade Paradise as an important novel depicting the Jazz Age. Done. Again not so fast. Professor Lord the well- known Fitzgerald scholar who had held the Fitzgerald chair at his old alma mater Princeton took on Professor Jacobs’ remarks in a subsequent letter to the editors also published in that section stating that Professor Jacobs was essentially clueless about how Fitzgerald had very early on with the spirit of the impending post World War I Jazz Age and that Gatsby merely brought the era into sharper focus once the period ran in full bloom. Cited in about twelve footnotes from about six articles he had written on the subject which Jacobs had obviously been unaware of and thus contributed mightily to his own misunderstanding of Fitzgerald, the Jazz Age and most of the literature of the middle third of the 20^th century. That ignited the “firestorm” as the adherents of both sides armed themselves to the teeth with footnotes and addenda. Josh merely stepped aside and smiled to himself that he had done what he set out to. The two sides were probably even now sucking the air out of cyberspace trying to best the other.