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 was 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. Usually it did not take much, maybe a trip to New York City via the Long Island Ferry 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, 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. 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 Acre working class neighborhood youth, a rat’s ass about his reviews of books already reviewed one hundred or so years ago. Moreover he decided that he would, now that he did not need to depend on his fees to cover his costs of living, would tweak a few noses, be a little provocative, a little edgy, edgy as some literary piece could ever 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 were 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. Not so fast since Professor Jacobs, the retired English Lit department head big wig at Harvard let the cudgels down and had through some connections 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 was 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 breathe 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 caught the spirit of the impending post World War I Jazz Age with Paradise and that Gatsby merely brought the era into sharper focus once the period ran to full bloom. Cited about twelve footnotes 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.                                 

The bet had been triggered after Josh had told Sam one night at Terry James’ Grille in Riverdale where they occasionally met to rekindle old time stories from their growing up days about a “firestorm” that he had created. Josh had added that at the end of that review which had caused the battle royal that he had “wondered aloud” whether Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises might be more evocative of the Jazz Age doings than Gatsby. Nobody in the melee had seen fit to note that blasphemous statement since they were all Fitzgerald specialists as far as he could tell and as he told Sam with a wicked grin on his face that a future article would present that case for dissection. Josh had casually mentioned to Sam that he would be willing to bet that bringing that battle of the Titians to the pages of the Gazette would create another set of fireworks in the academy.     

Suddenly Sam called out “Bet.” Josh retorted quickly and almost automatically “Bet.” The only question then was the size of the wager which turned out to be for one hundred dollars. See back in their school boy days Sam, Josh and the other guys who hung around Tonio’s Pizza Parlor on lonesome, date-less Friday or Saturday nights would to wile the time away make bets on almost anything from sports to the size of some girl’s bra. Of course those bets were for quarters, maybe a dollar or two revealing the low dough nature of their existences in those days. The most famous “bet” of all just to give the reader a flavor of how deeply embedded in the night these issues were had been the night the late Peter Paul Markin had challenged Frankie Riley, the leader of the guys around Tonio’s, to bet on how high Tonio (or whoever was working that night) could make the pizza dough they were kneading go. Frankie “won” the bet that night because he had an arrangement with the guy doing the pizza dough that night who owed him some moola. Markin did not find out about the switch-up until much later. The important point was that when a guy called “Bet” to a guy on any proposition no matter how screwy the other guy was duty-bound to take the bet under penalty of becoming a social outcast. Therefore the speed in which Josh answered called to wager on whether there would be another flameless flare-up after Josh’s next article.  

As these propositions went, for a quarter or one hundred dollars, Josh always prided himself on taking pains to try to win. Sam had, perhaps being a lawyer had been even more naïve about the incessant in-fighting in the academy than Josh had declared that he would bet that there would be no controversy surrounding Josh’s notion that Hemingway’s book was more evocative of the Jazz Age than Fitzgerald’s. The whole thing seemed childish, his term, and after the dust-up between Jacobs and  Lord had exposed all to charges of infantile behavior no one would dare to read even a cursory letter challenging Josh’s frayed little idea. Josh, truth be told, had not read Gatsby in a few years and due to the press of other commitments he did not intend to since he believed he could win the bet without doing so, to have to do another of his periodical re-readings of the book, one of his favorites. He figured that he could do an end around by viewing the 1970s film adaptation of the book, the one starring Robert Redford and Mia Farrow. So one night he along with his third wife, Millie, streamed the Netflix version of the two hour film.    

After viewing this film Josh began to panic a little at the prospect of, kiddingly or not, trying to defend Hemingway’s book as the definite literature on the mores of the Jazz Age. Afraid that his written claim that The Sun Also Rises was better at that seemed pretty threadbare. He was worried and as he tossed and turned that night he tried to see what in Gatsby, even the film version he would have to deal with in order to draw enough fire to flame up a controversy.

Although any book, any piece of literature, words, printed material   always were more important to Josh’s understanding of the world, understanding in this case of the period he had to admit that the feel of the film really did give a sense of what the Jazz Age was about from the scenes at Gatsby’s over the top mansion where the party-goers danced, wined, ate and sexed the night and early mornings away. There was definitely as sense that those who had survived the World War had left their pre-war sense of order and proper manners behind and that “wine, women [men] and song” was a mantra that both sexes could buy into as working day to day premise. It was like the survivors, those who had slogged through France and those who were left behind to wait for the other shoe to drop had a veil lifted. That dramatic effect, that sense of abandoning the old life on a re-reading of the expatriate life in Hemingway’s novel didn’t strike Josh as decisive as in Gatsby.       

The real thread though that Josh thought would undo him was that striving for the main chance that drove Gatsby either to grab the dough or grab the love flame with a show of what he had achieved by his efforts to “prove” himself worthy of Daisy. The new money though couldn’t break through in the end because Gatsby forgot rule number one about the old monied rich, and about Daisy as a representative character, they may make the social messes but somebody else is left to clean up afterward. Funny because in a sense Gatsby really knew that when he was asked to explain what he heard in Daisy’s voice one time-the sound of money. That said it all.    

Although the film did not quote the whole paragraph from the last summing up page of the book Josh once he heard the talk by Nick about the Dutch sailors and the fresh breast of new land that they found when they came up Long Island Sound back in the 1500s he knew in the back of his brain that he would never have more than a weak argument in defending Hemingway’s book as the definitive Jazz Age take. How could he beat out the notion that the fresh breast of land which had caused those long ago sailors to set out in ragged ships heading into uncharted waters to find their own dreams, to refresh their sense of wonder which had taken a beating in the old country from which they had taken the chance to flee.  

[Sam not unexpectedly won the bet since the only response that Josh got from anybody about his article that time was why he didn’t view the updated 2000s version of Gatsby by some undergraduate student who had never heard of Mia Farrow. And so it goes.]