Gatsby, Gatz, Fitzgerald and Me
As "The Great Gatsby" Prepares to Turn 100, I Revisit "Gatz," Elevator Repair Service's Marathon Stage Adaptation of the Book.
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby will turn 100 years old in 2025. And my fascination with The Great Gatsby will turn 43.
I was fortunate enough this past weekend to mark the coming anniversary by attending Gatz, a six-and-a-half-hour dramatization of the novel enacted by the Elevator Repair Service theater company at the Public Theater in Manhattan. It was my second viewing of the masterful piece of stage work, which easily ranks among my top ten theater experiences in a lifetime of theatergoing.
But before I talk about the play, I want to discuss the book that inspired it and my longstanding relationship with it.
I first encountered what I believe is the Great American Novel during the first class I took during my Freshman year at Northwestern University, in the autumn of 1982. Most people at that age had already read The Great Gatsby in high school. But I didn’t attend any such august institution. My rural school’s graduating class numbered just 87 people, and I think the curriculum required me to read a total of five works of literature over the four years I was there. None of them were The Great Gatsby.
The class at Northwestern was called “Comparative Literature,” and it probably boasted the highest academic firepower of any course I took there. It was taught by the tag team of Alfred Appel Jr. and Erich Heller. The English Heller was 71 at the time and looked and talked like John Houseman in The Paper Chase. Heller taught Death in Venice by Thomas Mann and A Room With a View by E.M. Forster. He had corresponded with both writers. Appel taught Lolita by Nabokov, whom he knew personally. Everyone in the class thus enjoyed one degree of separation from these literary giants. (The copy of The Annotated Lolita that you may have on your bookshelf was edited by Appel.)
It was Appel who taught The Great Gatsby. He had no personal relationship with Fitzgerald, who died in 1940. Appel was too young. (However, Appel did grow up in Great Neck, which is partly the model for the fictional West Egg and East Egg settings of the novel.)
Every single book I was taught in that class— which also included The Stranger by Camus, and Letters to a Young Poet by Rilke—has stayed with me my entire life, but none so much as The Great Gatsby.
Thereafter, whenever I was asked such questions, I stated that The Great Gatsby was my favorite novel and Fitzgerald my favorite writer. I have read many novels since, but I have not wavered in this opinion.
It certainly helped that Fitzgerald was, like me, a son of the Midwest who traveled east to find his path in life.
After graduating from Northwestern, I got into the habit of reading The Great Gatsby every few years. I am not one of those people who re-read books, primarily because I’ve always been a slow reader (20 pages an hour, tops) and I only have so many reading hours on this Earth. If I really like a book, I will read it twice. I have read Gatsby at least 15 times. Whenever I do read it, I still use that same paperback copy of the novel I was given my Freshman year, the Scribner version with the classic cover art by Francis Cugat. The spine is held together by Scotch tape.
I also got in the habit of tracing Fitzgerald’s steps wherever I could, or, failing that, the steps of the characters in the novel.