A Gatsbean Odyssey: Fear and Loathing (5/7)

 

I feel closer to understanding The Great Gatsby now, but first the journey must get weirder. Our odyssey has reached the land of the Lotus Eaters, only instead of idylls, the drugs here induce paranoid ravings, for the legendary substance abuser Hunter S. Thomson held The Great Gatsby in the highest regard. His own attempt at the Great American Novel was Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, so now I turn to this unlikely companion for help in understanding Fitzgerald’s work.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is another book that I failed to understand at first. As with The Great Gatsby, my difficulty stemmed from authorial intention. In The Great Gatsby, I thought Fitzgerald intended Jay Gatsby to represent the ideal man, but he turned out to be a crook. On my first reading of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, I thought Thompson was presenting a nightmare America he despised, yet in his own life he exemplified the drug-induced lunacy of his alter ego Duke in the novel.

Two books. Two mysteries.

And yet, with the connection to Hunter S. Thompson I feel my first frisson of understanding. It comes with a simple and perhaps not even essential insight: Fitzgerald liked fantasy, specifically modern fantasy.

In this, he is like Hunter S. Thompson, whose love of fantasy--often hallucinatory--is hard to miss. The bat scene on the first page of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is one that has crept into the popular consciousness, if only through the film starring Johnny Depp and homages like “Bat Country” by Avenged Sevenfold:

“And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. And a voice was screaming: ‘Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?’”

At first glance, F. Scott Fitzgerald would seem leagues from this. We associate him with early 20th-Century America, expats in Paris, the Roaring Twenties, Prohibition, swingin’ jazz, and swank parties where everyone drinks highballs or absinthe.

For me, however, there has always been a fly in this ointment. Gatsby’s mansion, his parties, his staggering wealth always seemed unbelievable, even by pre-Black Tuesday standards. I now suspect this is because Fitzgerald was presenting a fanciful picture of wealth.

This made Baz Luhrmann, visionary director of Romeo and Juliet (1996) and Moulin Rouge! (2001), a fitting choice for a new film adaptation. The parties at Gatsby’s begin as one hell of a house party, then morph into an MDMA-infused rave on a downward spiral to lethargic nightmare. Women wearing massive plumage, giant champagne bottles that pour glitter, a “dubious descendant of Beethoven” emoting on a gilded pipe organ, poolside dance parties with blow-up zebra pool toys, trapeze artists drifting through seas of balloons, a jazz history of the world accompanying fireworks . . . Luhrmann lets it all out.

 

That Fitzgerald wrote fantasy should be obvious. After all, he wrote The Diamond as Big as the Ritz, about a family living in extravagant wealth atop a secret mountain-sized diamond, and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, about a man who ages backwards. The Great Gatsby is not as fantastical as those stories, but it has a dash of that aesthetic, and identifying that removes one of my biggest obstacles to feeling as if I understand the book.

 

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