Morris Dickstein's Blog, page 4

From Gatsby to Gatz

The hottest ticket in New York this month, surprisingly, is not a musical or comedy on Broadway but an adaptation of a thoroughly familiar eighty-five-year-old novel at the Public Theater. It is an idiosyncratic piece of theater, not so much an adaptation as an illustrated reading of the whole text of The Great Gatsby – more than six and a half hours of theater spread over some eight hours. Gatz has been performed around the world for five years, and the whole New York run has long been sold out.

At a recent performance the audience seemed riveted by this spectacle. A man in a ramshackle office, rather bored, with time on his hands, reads aloud from a battered paperback, with some of his coworkers gradually chiming in as they take up roles in the book he is reading. With its antiquated computers, the office looks like a scene from the 1980s, yet, as the book kicks in, this venue shifts effortlessly to the settings in the novel – a commuter train from Long Island, Myrtle Wilson's love nest, Gatsby's garish parties. As he grows more engaged, the speaker morphs from a contemporary bond trader into Fitzgerald's rueful and eloquent narrator, Nick Carraway, through whom all the shadowy turns of the story are filtered, along with its central figure, Gatsby himself.

Carraway conjures up Fitzgerald's scenes and characters in a fashion that has little precedent in modern theater. Long-form adaptation has a lineage going back mainly to the 1980s, with the Royal Shakespeare Company's marathon version of Dickens's Nicholas Nickleby, the landmark TV dramatization of Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, and Steppenwolf's epic recreation of Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, which held its own beside John Ford's classic film version. Each of these productions was the watchword in fidelity, capturing and bringing to life virtually every page of a long fictional text.

Gatz is a different matter, as its title suggests, for The Great Gatsby fiercely resists translation into another medium. As a narrated work, with so much of its plot impressionistically recalled rather than enacted, it violates the first commandment of all writing programs – show, don't tell – along with the Jamesian imperatives of the scenic art. We hear about the enigmatic Gatsby long before we actually see him, and key elements of his backstory – his courtship of Daisy, his apprenticeship to Dan Cody and assumption of a new identity, his Midwestern childhood – trickle out much later, each of them reaching further back into the past, not as flashbacks but as luminous summaries, an infinite regress of stories within stories. Even some of the "present" action, like Myrtle's death and Gatsby's murder, are imparted to us second hand, by report, like masticated rumor; here too, Carraway is said to be writing two years after the events he reports. This kind of narration can sometimes be found in movies, from the flashbacks of Citizen Kane and film noir to the voiceover, taken straight from the original book, in Truffaut's Jules and Jim, but almost it's almost never seen on the stage. It demands a novel kind of theater, here supplied by the director John Collins and his wonderfully named company, the Elevator Repair Service, and especially by the indefatigable Scott Shepherd, who plays Nick Carraway and reads the text with a fluency and stamina that are almost indescribable.

Nothing is more central to the novel than Nick's bittersweet ruminations. Everything that happens passes through his consciousness, and Gatz, to a remarkable extent, manages to put consciousness on the stage. One might compare his role to that of the Stage Manager in Thornton Wilder's Our Town, except that Nick, far from being an omniscient voice, is very much part of the action. But the challenge posed by Fitzgerald's work is not simply in Carraway's narration, with its mixed tones of scorn and admiration for Gatsby, his satiric contempt for those around him and awed wonder at the foolish grandiosity of his vision. The greatest difficulty lies is in the prose itself, which is often so impalpable and poetic that it matches Gatsby's own soaring ambitions: "Out of the corner of his eye Gatsby saw that the blocks of the sidewalks really formed a ladder and mounted to a secret place above the trees – he could climb it, if he climbed alone, and once there he could suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder." How do you transmit this except by reading it aloud, not too fervently but with empathetic feeling and yet a reserved detachment, a trace of ironic distance? It can't be staged; it can only be evoked as a mysterious spectacle of human longing, a half-benighted dream of the absolute.

Fitzgerald's descriptions of his characters and the places they live and work pose a similar problem, for Fitzgerald puts his own spin on every phrase. Of Gatsby's old father, who stumbles onto the scene after his death, impressed by what his son became, we're told that "his eyes leaked continuously with excitement." Gatsby's rented mansion is described as "that huge incoherent failure of a house." These are not the descriptions we expect from realistic fiction but attitudes, metaphoric glosses. Gatz rises to this challenge simply by retaining Fitzgerald's prose, every word of it, and leaving the visual detail to the imagination, as Fitzgerald himself largely does. Astonishingly, it works. After eight hours, not a single member of the audience had left the theater, weary as they may have been.

Embedded in this narration were plenty of scenes that worked well for the stage. When Gatsby and Daisy, Gatsby and the brutish Tom, Gatsby and Carraway directly confronted each other's hopes and illusions, the company found ingenious ways of putting them across. Gatsby's absurd parties, for example, were evoked by a stage littered with office paper. Tom Buchanan, a racist and nascent fascist, has never seemed so casually coarse, or Daisy so flighty and ambivalent, so trapped, or Gatsby so opaque, so high-minded yet self-deceived. But they were all framed by Nick's (and Scott Shepherd's) enfolding narration. In the end the audience was less mesmerized by these fragments of straightforward drama than caught up in the rapture of language that beats at the poetic heart of the novel. The stage and the page have rarely seemed so well matched.

Philip Roth’s New Novel – NEMESIS

Published in

A writer’s late books, beset by flagging energy and invention, rarely add major works to the literary legacy. But they can be fascinating as they revisit earlier themes with fresh lenses: a pitiless awareness of aging, an encroaching sense of mortality. Roth’s recent novels are obsessed with death but also focus on all that can lead up to it, illness of every kind, waning physical powers, impotence, as well as memory loss, loneliness, and depression. Sometimes these books are salted with anger at the young, simply for being young, having all that time ahead of them, but they also pulse with sexual attraction to the young, also for being young. Even the books set in the past, taking Roth back to the scenes from his own youth, push inexorably toward death. The hero of Indignation (2008), thrown out of college much like the one Roth attended, will die in Korea. Nemesis, which deals with a polio outbreak in Roth’s Newark in the summer of 1944, is saturated with death, the foreboding of death, and the bitter, pointless protest against it. Roth’s settling on polio as a subject is inspired – I can still recall the fears that haunted parents through the1940s and 1950s – yet his controlled and well-researched account of the epidemic raises troubling questions.

Roth’s protagonists have typically come in two stripes. There are the lecherous ones, narcissistic and offensive, who grab life by the horns, take as much as they can get, and deride those who are more timid or repressed, especially the family types hemmed in by conventional morality. (In The Dying Animal the main character, Kepesh, who has lived according to his libidinal lights, mocks his troubled 42-year-old son for actually caring what other people think of him.) For these self-absorbed characters “old age is a shipwreck” – as De Gaulle said of Marshal Pétain – and the very thought of death robs life of meaning.

But Roth’s books can have another kind of protagonist, fundamentally good or simply youthful and innocent, perhaps a devoted son (like the writer himself in Patrimony) or a conscientious father, the product of centuries of moral discipline (such as the Swede in American Pastoral). At his best Roth can combine these two strands. The wild comic energies of Portnoy’s Complaint, along with its psychological insight, are grounded not solely in Portnoy’s raging id but in all the trouble it brings him, its conflict with “strongly felt ethical and altruistic impulses,” including a well-developed sense of guilt.

Bucky Cantor, the superb athlete, playground director, and waterfront counselor of Nemesis, is a younger version of that Good Man, Swede Levov, and he’ll be punished for his goodness – or will punish himself – even more harshly than the Swede, whose daughter, as a wild young sixties radical, becomes his worst nightmare. Essentially an orphan – his father was a thief, his mother died in childbirth – Bucky has been raised by a caring grandmother and a grandfather whose life is a lesson in duty, honor, and fearless masculinity. At twenty-three Bucky is engaged to a woman he loves, with whom he has idyllic sex. Only his bad eyesight has kept him out of the war, much to his chagrin, and he brings the firm conviction of battle to the war on the home front that he cannot win, a war against a mysterious virus, against fear itself.

Toward his youthful charges, threatened by the spread of the disease, Bucky is an a role model, even a hero, bringing physical grace and courage to everything he does. But when he feels that he may have brought the polio virus into their young lives, he turns his sense of duty on himself, first blaming God for bringing such misery into the world, then castigating himself for being its carrier. Later, when he himself falls ill, he simply opts out of his life, even after he manages a partial recovery. Deaf to the emotional pleas of his fiancée and the entreaties of her father, a doctor he warmly admires, Bucky insists that he can’t allow her to throw away her life on a “cripple,” even one she desperately loves. He feels he is “no longer man enough to be a husband and a father.” (258) Now deeply bitter, he sees this renunciation as “his last opportunity to be a man of integrity.” (262) Possessed by this high-minded motive, undone by his conscience, he tosses away his own life instead.

How credible is this? Would anyone really take such a high line, at his own expense? Despite its fatalistic title, which suggests divine retribution, Nemesis is a realistic novel, not a parable. Roth’s playful adventures with postmodern narrative in The Counterlife and Operation Shylock are long behind him. Like American Pastoral and the books that followed, Nemesis is an meticulous recreation of the times. Its portrayal of polio, of athletic competition and summer camping, of Newark itself in 1944, spins out a tissue of Updikean detail, minutely researched, with up-front acknowledgment of Roth’s sources. But like so many realistic writers going back to Hardy, Norris, and Dreiser, Roth also has a vision, a thematic grid he imposes on the action. He cannot resist putting his thumb on the scales to ensure that things will go badly for his characters, not in spite of their goodness but because they are good, and because our world is indifferent to good and evil alike. Roth draws deliberate parallels between the war abroad and the death of these children at home. For Bucky this means that God, if he exists, is cruel and life itself absurd. This stark outlook, so far from the comic turns of his early work, goes back to the existentialists who were in vogue when Roth was young but also much further back to the protesting and suffering hero of the Book of Job, on which Nemesis is a series of variations.

Despite the undoubted impact of this novel, this disturbing vision bends the story in an unlikely direction. When Bucky gives up on life and becomes a kind of recluse, it seems less the result of gnostic theology or an exacerbated ideal of manhood than of sheer depression. Many polio victims overcame physical disabilities to lead productive lives, not only FDR but writers like Wilfrid Sheed and Leonard Kriegel, who married, raised children, and also wrote prolifically. Kriegel, exactly Roth’s age, once an avid athlete like Bucky Cantor, was stricken with polio the same summer of 1944. He went on to grapple with his experience in a series of arresting memoirs and meditations on manhood including The Long Walk Home, Falling Into Life, On Men and Manhood, and Flying Solo. The narrator of Nemesis, one of Bucky’s young playground admirers, also surmounts polio to construct a life for himself. “You look like a contented man,” Bucky tells him, perhaps sardonically, when they meet again in 1971. But Roth invests little interest in this man except as a foil for Bucky and a vehicle for his story. He serves as Nick Carraway to Bucky’s Gatsby, but he’s not even identified until forty pages from the end, and Roth gives him no narrative voice distinct from his own.

If Roth were a different writer, then this narrator, someone who didn’t give up, might have been at the center of his polio story, not Bucky. But Roth’s dark mood of the past decade made this out of the question. As he does with the stricken boys, Roth rubs in the harsh contrast between vigorous, hopeful creature Bucky once was and the living wreck he became, as deformed in mind as in body. The novel ends with a recollection of one of his great athletic feats, a virtuoso demonstration of throwing the javelin, which Roth turns into an exercise in bittersweet irony, a terrible might-have-been.

Roth’s trademark has always been to take things to extremes, even to the breaking point. His voice, pitched like Kafka’s between humor and anguish, turned him into a man on fire. In Portnoy’s Complaint, The Anatomy Lesson, and Sabbath’s Theater this fierce energy gave his work tremendous power. But in other works such as American Pastoral, with its far-fetched depiction of demented young terrorists, the same vivid excess led him into blatant distortion. Roth’s output – this is his thirty-first book in fifty years – remains one of the wonders of the literary world. But there was no way a “contented man,” a husband and father who managed against fearsome odds to achieve an ordinary life, would ever fill the bill as the protagonist of a Philip Roth novel.

Philip Roth's New Novel – NEMESIS

Published in

A writer's late books, beset by flagging energy and invention, rarely add major works to the literary legacy. But they can be fascinating as they revisit earlier themes with fresh lenses: a pitiless awareness of aging, an encroaching sense of mortality. Roth's recent novels are obsessed with death but also focus on all that can lead up to it, illness of every kind, waning physical powers, impotence, as well as memory loss, loneliness, and depression. Sometimes these books are salted with anger at the young, simply for being young, having all that time ahead of them, but they also pulse with sexual attraction to the young, also for being young. Even the books set in the past, taking Roth back to the scenes from his own youth, push inexorably toward death. The hero of Indignation (2008), thrown out of college much like the one Roth attended, will die in Korea. Nemesis, which deals with a polio outbreak in Roth's Newark in the summer of 1944, is saturated with death, the foreboding of death, and the bitter, pointless protest against it. Roth's settling on polio as a subject is inspired – I can still recall the fears that haunted parents through the1940s and 1950s – yet his controlled and well-researched account of the epidemic raises troubling questions.

Roth's protagonists have typically come in two stripes. There are the lecherous ones, narcissistic and offensive, who grab life by the horns, take as much as they can get, and deride those who are more timid or repressed, especially the family types hemmed in by conventional morality. (In The Dying Animal the main character, Kepesh, who has lived according to his libidinal lights, mocks his troubled 42-year-old son for actually caring what other people think of him.) For these self-absorbed characters "old age is a shipwreck" – as De Gaulle said of Marshal Pétain – and the very thought of death robs life of meaning.

But Roth's books can have another kind of protagonist, fundamentally good or simply youthful and innocent, perhaps a devoted son (like the writer himself in Patrimony) or a conscientious father, the product of centuries of moral discipline (such as the Swede in American Pastoral). At his best Roth can combine these two strands. The wild comic energies of Portnoy's Complaint, along with its psychological insight, are grounded not solely in Portnoy's raging id but in all the trouble it brings him, its conflict with "strongly felt ethical and altruistic impulses," including a well-developed sense of guilt.

Bucky Cantor, the superb athlete, playground director, and waterfront counselor of Nemesis, is a younger version of that Good Man, Swede Levov, and he'll be punished for his goodness – or will punish himself – even more harshly than the Swede, whose daughter, as a wild young sixties radical, becomes his worst nightmare. Essentially an orphan – his father was a thief, his mother died in childbirth – Bucky has been raised by a caring grandmother and a grandfather whose life is a lesson in duty, honor, and fearless masculinity. At twenty-three Bucky is engaged to a woman he loves, with whom he has idyllic sex. Only his bad eyesight has kept him out of the war, much to his chagrin, and he brings the firm conviction of battle to the war on the home front that he cannot win, a war against a mysterious virus, against fear itself.

Toward his youthful charges, threatened by the spread of the disease, Bucky is an a role model, even a hero, bringing physical grace and courage to everything he does. But when he feels that he may have brought the polio virus into their young lives, he turns his sense of duty on himself, first blaming God for bringing such misery into the world, then castigating himself for being its carrier. Later, when he himself falls ill, he simply opts out of his life, even after he manages a partial recovery. Deaf to the emotional pleas of his fiancée and the entreaties of her father, a doctor he warmly admires, Bucky insists that he can't allow her to throw away her life on a "cripple," even one she desperately loves. He feels he is "no longer man enough to be a husband and a father." (258) Now deeply bitter, he sees this renunciation as "his last opportunity to be a man of integrity." (262) Possessed by this high-minded motive, undone by his conscience, he tosses away his own life instead.

How credible is this? Would anyone really take such a high line, at his own expense? Despite its fatalistic title, which suggests divine retribution, Nemesis is a realistic novel, not a parable. Roth's playful adventures with postmodern narrative in The Counterlife and Operation Shylock are long behind him. Like American Pastoral and the books that followed, Nemesis is an meticulous recreation of the times. Its portrayal of polio, of athletic competition and summer camping, of Newark itself in 1944, spins out a tissue of Updikean detail, minutely researched, with up-front acknowledgment of Roth's sources. But like so many realistic writers going back to Hardy, Norris, and Dreiser, Roth also has a vision, a thematic grid he imposes on the action. He cannot resist putting his thumb on the scales to ensure that things will go badly for his characters, not in spite of their goodness but because they are good, and because our world is indifferent to good and evil alike. Roth draws deliberate parallels between the war abroad and the death of these children at home. For Bucky this means that God, if he exists, is cruel and life itself absurd. This stark outlook, so far from the comic turns of his early work, goes back to the existentialists who were in vogue when Roth was young but also much further back to the protesting and suffering hero of the Book of Job, on which Nemesis is a series of variations.

Despite the undoubted impact of this novel, this disturbing vision bends the story in an unlikely direction. When Bucky gives up on life and becomes a kind of recluse, it seems less the result of gnostic theology or an exacerbated ideal of manhood than of sheer depression. Many polio victims overcame physical disabilities to lead productive lives, not only FDR but writers like Wilfrid Sheed and Leonard Kriegel, who married, raised children, and also wrote prolifically. Kriegel, exactly Roth's age, once an avid athlete like Bucky Cantor, was stricken with polio the same summer of 1944. He went on to grapple with his experience in a series of arresting memoirs and meditations on manhood including The Long Walk Home, Falling Into Life, On Men and Manhood, and Flying Solo. The narrator of Nemesis, one of Bucky's young playground admirers, also surmounts polio to construct a life for himself. "You look like a contented man," Bucky tells him, perhaps sardonically, when they meet again in 1971. But Roth invests little interest in this man except as a foil for Bucky and a vehicle for his story. He serves as Nick Carraway to Bucky's Gatsby, but he's not even identified until forty pages from the end, and Roth gives him no narrative voice distinct from his own.

If Roth were a different writer, then this narrator, someone who didn't give up, might have been at the center of his polio story, not Bucky. But Roth's dark mood of the past decade made this out of the question. As he does with the stricken boys, Roth rubs in the harsh contrast between vigorous, hopeful creature Bucky once was and the living wreck he became, as deformed in mind as in body. The novel ends with a recollection of one of his great athletic feats, a virtuoso demonstration of throwing the javelin, which Roth turns into an exercise in bittersweet irony, a terrible might-have-been.

Roth's trademark has always been to take things to extremes, even to the breaking point. His voice, pitched like Kafka's between humor and anguish, turned him into a man on fire. In Portnoy's Complaint, The Anatomy Lesson, and Sabbath's Theater this fierce energy gave his work tremendous power. But in other works such as American Pastoral, with its far-fetched depiction of demented young terrorists, the same vivid excess led him into blatant distortion. Roth's output – this is his thirty-first book in fifty years – remains one of the wonders of the literary world. But there was no way a "contented man," a husband and father who managed against fearsome odds to achieve an ordinary life, would ever fill the bill as the protagonist of a Philip Roth novel.

War, Economy, History: Politics by Other Media

Published in Dissent, Summer 2010.

When Kathryn Bigelow's movie about the Iraq War, The Hurt Locker, swept the Academy Awards, it was a signal triumph for a plucky independent movie on a grave topical subject. Directed by a woman and made in Jordan without the usual cooperation from the Department of Defense, the movie was not released during awards rush at the end of the year but in the summer, ordinarily a time for mindless comedies and action films. Very much an action film itself, it...

Besieged: The 1950s at War and at Home

Then other week I took in two engrossing films from the 1950s that reminded me, if I needed reminding, of the enduring fascination and complexity of an era in American life that is still not well understood. Not surprisingly, these movies were made by directors who seemed marginal at the time, solid professionals who worked largely in genre films. Such work drew little cultural respect, yet by flying below the radar of positive thinking they managed to avoid the upbeat clichés of the period a...

Ambassador Book Award for DANCING IN THE DARK

(My apologies for posting another speech, though presumably this will be the last one for some time. I made these remarks on June 10 in accepting the 2010 Ambassador Book Award in American Studies from the English-Speaking Union for Dancing in the Dark. an award honoring works "that contribute to the understanding and interpretation of American life and culture" and "providing people around the world with an important window on America's past and present in the best contemporary English."...

The Ph.D., the Economy, and the Knowledge Environment

(I delivered the following remarks at the Commencement exercises of the CUNY Graduate Center at Avery Fisher Hall of Lincoln Center on June 2, 2010. It seemed impossible to address the graduates, most of them newly minted Ph.D.s, without also addressing the job crisis in the humanities, especially in college teaching positions. I hope I was able to do so without putting a damper on the happy occasion. MD)

Before I begin I'd like to thank President Bill Kelly for the inspired leadership that...

The Inner Nerd: Why Greenberg?

 

Thanks to the narcissism of its central character, who is at once insecure and aggressive, there could hardly be a more cringe-inducing current film than Noah Baumbach's relentless Greenberg. Roger Greenberg's only rival at saying gauche or obnoxious things to anyone in almost any situation is the character played by Larry David in the HBO series Curb Your Enthusiasm. But that program, once a refreshing dose of bile and misanthropy, degenerated into a formula after the first season or two...