Revising The Great Gatsby

Now that Wyatt Mason’s blog is no more, although its archives are there to be surfed and enjoyed, hunting round for an alternative led me to The Elegant Variation, Mark Sarvas' blog,
where I came across Revisioning the Great Gatsby by Susan Bell. The site has the piece in four extracts, and is itself extracted from The Writer’s Notebook: Craft Essays from Tin House

Like Bell, most of us read The Great Gatsby at school or university, but, for most of us, it is the second reading that makes the difference. What intrigues, delights, astonishes and moves us in the novel is often the consequence of re-reading it. Fitzgerald's execution is breath-taking, but its unerring technical grace is allied to deep and direct plumb line into the spirit.

A recent Slate podcast, usually a reliable source of enthusing commentary, sounded several cloth-eared suspicions concerning Fitzgerald’s technical brilliance, as if he wrote the book to be taught, which is a nonsense, of course, but it is very much a novel whose excellence is visibly achieved, and it can stand as a primer on how a novel might be conceived and written.

Bell came back to reading The Great Gatsby after reading Scott Berg’s exemplary biography of the editor, Max Perkins. Perkins discovered and edited not only Fitzgerald, but also Hemingway, James Jones, and Thomas Wolfe.
By the way, does anybody still read Thomas Wolfe. He is certainly less than little-mentioned these days, although he is a major influence on Beat writers like Kerouac, and his titles, Look Homeward, Angel, Of Time and the River, From Death to Morning, are very evocative and indicate his singing, swinging prose, and there is also the stunning demotic of his short story, Only the Dead Know Brooklyn

Perkins tussles with Wolfe were detailed and protracted, and Perkins' relationships with him and other writers are astutely recorded in Berg’s biography. Modern editors are less hands-on, perhaps, but there are echoes of Perkins role in the current debate over Gordon Lish’s involvement in the work of Raymond Carver – see The New Yorker and its related links.

Bell’s essay shows between Fitzgerald and Perkins a more generous, sustaining and insightful nexus between editor and writer. Its title, Revisioning the Great Gatsby is the only ungainly thing about it, as revising and not revisioning was what the pair were involved in doing - not in seeing differently the work at hand, but in seeing it truly:

Perkins diplomatically complained of a common structural flaw: clumping. Fitzgerald had shoved a clump of biographical information into one place. Actors have an expression to describe the mere facts an audience must know to understand the story: they call them the plumbing. “I’m not doing the plumbing,” some will protest, when asked to say a few lines that explain plot or a character’s history but stick out from the action like the proverbial sore thumb. At its best, a book’s pipes are laid into the work so suavely that the reader simply feels them function and never notices their cold, hard nature.
But pipes protruded in the original version of the scene in which Nick visits Gatsby after the fatal car accident. The two men go to the terrace and sit “smoking out into the summer night.” Into this static setting, Gatsby gushes his life story. “Suddenly he was telling me a lot of things,” Nick says. The line is a warning to the reader: be patient, you are about to be hammered with “a lot of” information. Yawn. The historical details of Gatsby’s life are given up in a monotonous drone. He explains his Oxford claim, then recounts his teenage reveries, his subsequent apprenticeship with yachtsman Dan Cody, from which followed his army career, during which he met and fell in love with Daisy Fay, after which he received a letter at Oxford telling him he had lost her to Tom Buchanan. Are you with me?
Fitzgerald edited his way out of this clump once Perkins pointed it out to him. He broke up the thick block of data into smaller pieces he judiciously distributed throughout the text and enmeshed in the dialogue and drama. The improvement can be seen in the confrontation between Gatsby and Tom. In the manuscript, this scene carried no reference to Gatsby’s Oxford claim or his army career; in the revised proof, Fitzgerald fully explains and seamlessly weaves the Oxford and army stories into the drama. The final version reads:
Gatsby’s foot beat a short restless tattoo and Tom eyed him suddenly.
“By the way, Mr. Gatsby, I understand you’re an Oxford man.”
“Not exactly.”
“Oh, yes, I understand you went to Oxford.”
“Yes—I went there.”
A pause. Then Tom’s voice, incredulous and insulting:
“You must have gone there about the time Biloxi [a poseur who’d falsely claimed he’d gone to Yale] went to New Haven.”
Another pause. A waiter knocked and came in with crushed mint and ice, but the silence was unbroken by his “thank you” and the soft closing of the door. This tremendous detail was to be cleared up at last.
“I told you I went there.”
“I heard you, but I’d like to know when.”
“It was in nineteen-nineteen. I only stayed five months. That’s why I can’t really call myself an Oxford man.”
Tom glanced around to see if we mirrored his unbelief. But we were all looking at Gatsby.
“It was an opportunity they gave to some of the officers after the Armistice,” he continued. “We could go to any of the universities in England or France.”
I wanted to get up and slap him on the back. I had one of those renewals of complete faith in him that I’d experienced before.
The editor had helped the writer reconceive the information as dramatic.
GG Fitzgerald obliged his editor with no hint of defensiveness or anger. The writer had gone very far on his own with Gatsby and was ready for the last editorial push—one he freely admitted he was incapable of envisioning alone. He wrote to Perkins, “Max, it amuses me when praise comes in on the ‘structure’ of the book—because it was you who fixed up the structure, not me. And don’t think I’m not grateful for all that sane and helpful advice about it.” In fact, it was Fitzgerald who did the fixing, but the writer needed his editor to point the way and was not embarrassed to say it.
Perkins’s influence was more or less limited to the macro-edit. Unlike his editing of Thomas Wolfe’s work, Perkins didn’t mark up Fitzgerald’s text word for word, didn’t roll up his shirtsleeves, dig in, and reposition the prose. The micro-edits of Gatsby were a solitary endeavor. Fitzgerald was a prose techie who could not merely polish but power up a weak passage, raise the ram of a slow sentence. Take this early one: “The part of his life he told me about began when he was sixteen, when the popular songs of those days began to assume for him a melancholy and romantic beauty.” This sentence may seem all right, but I dare any reader to argue its elegance or gravity. Fitzgerald would delete it altogether. In its place, he wrote:
It was this night that he told me the strange story of his youth with Dan Cody—told it to me because “Jay Gatsby” had broken up like glass against Tom’s hard malice, and the long secret extravaganza was played out.
Fitzgerald was driven to edit a sentence silly until it punched.
Inclined to clarity when he wrote, Fitzgerald’s first forays onto the page were at times—as for most mortal writers—blurred with ambiguity. As Somerset Maugham writes in The Summing Up:
[A cause] of obscurity is that the writer is himself not quite sure of his meaning. He has a vague impression of what he wants to say, but has not . . . exactly formulated it in his mind, and it is natural enough that he should not find a precise expression for a confused idea.
Sure enough, Fitzgerald seems unclear of his meaning in an early draft of the crucial scene at the Plaza Hotel. As Nick listens to Daisy, Tom, and Gatsby bicker, he tells the reader:
I was thirty. Beside that realization their importunities were dim and far away. Before me stretched the portentous menacing road of a new decade.
A few paragraphs later, as he rides home with Jordan in a taxi, Nick adds:
I was thirty—a decade of loneliness opened up suddenly before me and what had hovered between us was said at last in the pressure of a hand.
Nick’s thoughts are opaque. A threat looms, but he does not say what it is. Fitzgerald is trying to conjure up the narrator, reveal his deepest concerns, but Nick remains hazy. The writer blankets the insufficiency with three multisyllabic words—realization, importunities, portentous—that sound smart and say little.
Now look at the final version of this same passage, after Fitzgerald dramatically reworked it:
I was thirty. Before me stretched the portentous, menacing road of a new decade.
That’s all. He deleted the rest of the paragraph to aim at one point. In the next paragraph, Nick is in the taxi as before, but this time Fitzgerald picks up the line he had held back—the undefined threat—and casts it:
Thirty—the promise of a decade of loneliness, the thinning list of single men to know, a thinning briefcase of enthusiasm, thinning hair. But there was Jordan beside me, who, unlike Daisy, was too wise ever to carry well-forgotten dreams from age to age. As we passed over the dark bridge her wan face fell lazily against my coat’s shoulder and the formidable stroke of thirty died away with the reassuring pressure of her hand.
Fitzgerald took a couple of wordy, imprecise sentences and transformed them into a limpid exposé of a single idea: the loss of youth. The danger of turning thirty is defined: “the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning briefcase of enthusiasm, thinning hair.” The theme of aging underscores the character descriptions and is not a coarse intellectual aside: “But there was Jordan beside me, who, unlike Daisy, was too wise ever to carry well-forgotten dreams from age to age.” The final sentence was a detached commentary on a detached relationship; now it is a commitment to human tenderness, however flawed: “the formidable stroke of thirty died away with the reassuring pressure of her hand.” By changing “a hand” to “her hand,” Fitzgerald created a truer intimacy that offers the poignant conclusion that human affection alone can compensate for the indignities of growing old.
Fitzgerald, Berg writes, “is generally regarded as having been his own best editor, as having had the patience and objectivity to read his words over and over again, eliminating flaws and perfecting his prose.” But The Great Gatsby would be a different book, and very possibly a lesser one, without Perkins’s counsel. Many consider editing as either the correction of punctuation (copyediting) or the overhaul of a book such as Wolfe’s Look Homeward Angel. The editing of The Great Gatsby sits between these extremes—a testimony to a writer’s discipline to edit himself and his wisdom to let himself be edited by someone worthy: that is how he crossed the gulf.