Tragic love

DAVID DAVIDAR

LAST week, a magazine asked me to pick the top 25 novels of our time. Around 20 picked themselves, of which one was The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. The novel was published three- quarters of a century ago, but when I reread it last week (as part of my stated intention to re-acquaint myself with the greatest books of our age) it had not lost its edginess or ability to grip the imagination.

The storyline is simple enough. Poor Boy loves Rich Girl obsessively. Boy Goes Off To War, Comes Back a Man. To his great Disappointment Rich Girl Has Married Rich Boy. Poor Boy Makes His Own Fortune. Romances Many Women But Does Not Forget His True Love. The Star-Crossed Lovers Meet, Find A Brief Moment of Happiness. But the Reader Without A Doubt, That Things Won't Work Out. Sure enough, tragedy follows and the three-hanky movie is bound to hit a screen near you a year later. So what makes The Great Gatsby different from a garden variety Ekta Kapoor soap?

The writing, first and foremost. I'd forgotten how brilliant Scott Fitzgerald could be when he got motoring and before I get any further with the review, I will quote a sample of the sort of writing that only the very best writers are capable of. Here's an exterior scene, the description of a living room, done nearly a century ago, but which ninety-nine per cent of today's novelists would be hard pressed to match: "We walked through a high hallway into a bright rosy-coloured space, fragilely bound into the house by French windows at either end. The windows were ajar and gleaming white against the fresh grass outside that seemed to grow a little way into the house. A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding-cake of the ceiling, and then rippled over the wine-coloured rug, making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea."

However, that is the least of Scott Fitzgerald's accomplishments. His genius lies in investing his characters with depth and range. It is this that separates them from the two-dimensional stereotypes that flit across our TV screens and the pages of commercial blockbusters. Jay Gatsby, the spurned lover, Daisy Buchanan, his inamorata, Tom Buchanan, her cloddish husband, Jordan Baker, Daisy's cool, unflappable friend, even Nick Carraway, the narrator are drawn with such skill that their actions and their tragedies matter to us.

Take, for example, this scene involving one of the relatively, minor characters, the narrator: "Her grey, sun-strained eyes stared ahead, but she had deliberately shifted our relations, and for a moment I thought I loved her. But I am slow-thinking and full of interior rules that act as brakes on my desires, and I knew that first I had to get myself definitely out of that tangle back home. I had been writing letters once a week and signing them: 'Love, Nick', and all I could think of was how, when that certain girl played tennis, a faint moustache of perspiration appeared on her upper lip. Nevertheless there was a vague understanding that had to be tactfully broken off before I was free.

"Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known".

In the space of two short paras, the reader can imagine the character. Exactly. That is genius.

The third skill the writer demonstrates to brilliant effort is his ability to capture perfectly the motivations of human beings. His rendering of the thoughts that lie behind the actions of his characters immediately lift them out of the realm of the sort of pop psychology lesser talents deliver. Indeed, as the New York Times said of him after his death, at the young age of 44, "He was better than he knew, for in fact, and in the literary sense he invented a 'generation'." To that, all I would add is that today his books have a relevance for us beyond the immediate fact that they captured America's Jazz Age. They have come to stand as "splendid excavations of the human condition" and less portentously are brilliant stories that remain fresh and relevant almost 100 years after they were written.

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