When I first discovered reading, it was mostly short stories – detective stories (Asimov), mysteries (Doyle) and horror (Hitchcock). And then there was F. Scott Fitzgerald – a writer’s writer in a very American way. It wasn’t that he wrote prose as langorous and beautiful as Ray Bradbury (he didn’t); and it’s not that he had the wit of Twain (he didn’t), but he was a keen observer, and somehow he carried you into the story and set you down gently…. as gently and graciously as Jay Gatsby. He had the whole package.
Of course when I went off to really study literature and the like, Shakespeare was modern… and I never got even within 500 years of a 20th century writer. So for as much as I loved F. Scotty, he has remained a mostly a memory for a long, long time. There was of course that very bad movie that came out during the courtship of my first girlfriend – when movies were something you did to get out on your own… and the experience put me off from reading Scott’s most well-known Gatzer novel. It wasn’t a short story, and Robert Redford’s rendition… killed more than Myrtle.
So in filling-in the space between my next Orthobook, I picked up my daughter’s college text of “The Great Gatsby” – complete with all her professor’s lectured notations in the margin. I was done in a blink.. and with these things of course.. someone else’s notes start a dialog in your head.
But let me say what joy there is in reading this unhappy prose, and what a masterpiece of its own in its beautiful account of a period not altogether unlike ours. Talking it over with my wife, I almost want to begin reading it all over again… and of course I’ve started to. It’s not that it is good, but that the art of telling so compliments the setting and the characters as if it were itself the perfect white linen, or a 1920 Pierce Arrow Roadster.
And though I’m struggling to think of one good person in the book, and there’s certainly no conception of this as a description of an Orthodox life, re-reading the opening two-page introduction left me pondering whether there weren’t an Orthodox reading of this. We’re talking about the “reserve of judgment” as a matter of hope after all. And it is this key… this suspension of judgment, this not seeing into others hearts but simply observing them as if from afar that starts the mind along this course.. a sort of ascetic aesthetic. Not suggesting that everytime we see something we have to make a leap into searching for an Orthodox retelling… but maybe it’ wouldn’t be bad to consider the possibility.
Sure, part of the appeal and wonder of this may lie in the fact that F. Scott’s not a writer of thick Russian books, but rather shared this land (though perhaps through a besotted haze). Though now he lies under a traffic diamond with Zelda in nearby Rockville, Scott knew our people and our dreams. And maybe there is some key to understanding the meaning and place of Orthodoxy in this. Maybe not. Maybe there’s nothing there after all. I’ll have to keep re-reading.
But in the meantime, I’m not the only one with this standard on my shelf. Surely someone else has given it a thought. All I’m suggesting… is that I’m curious. Feel free to chip in.
jamesthethickheaded