A Plea for Eros (8 page)

Things and nothings. Bodies and nobodies. The ground and the air. The tangible and the intangible. The novel moves restlessly between these dichotomies. Surely Fitzgerald was right when he said that
The Great Gatsby
was “a new thinking out of the idea of illusion.” Illusion is generally coupled with its opposite, reality, but where is the real? Is reality found in the tangible and illusion in the intangible? Besides the nuts and bolts of hardware out west, there is
ground
in the novel, the soil of ashes in West Egg, the ground that Eckleburg un-blinkingly surveys, but it is here that Fitzgerald lavishes a prose that could have been taken straight from Dickens, a prose of fantasy, not realism.

This is the valley of ashes—a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke, and finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air.

With its crumbling men, the valley of ashes plainly evokes that other biblical valley of death, and this miserable stretch of land borders the road where Myrtle Wilson will die under the wheels of the car driven by Daisy. But like the pink clouds, it lacks solidity and dissolves. The difference between the vision of Gatsby’s mansion and this earth is that money does not disguise mortality here. The gaping cracks of poverty are fully visible.

Nevertheless, among the residents of this ashen valley is Myrtle Wilson, the only person in the novel to whom Fitzgerald assigns “vitality.” The word is used three times in reference to Mrs. Wilson, Tom Buchanan’s working-class mistress: “… there was an immediately perceptible
vitality
about her as if the nerves of her body were continually smouldering.” As Nick passes Wilson’s gas station in a car, he sees her “at the garage pump with panting
vitality.”
And in death: “The mouth was wide open and ripped at the corners, as though she had choked a little in giving up the tremendous
vitality
she had stored so long.” It is this vivid life, not her character, that makes Myrtle Wilson’s death tragic. A silly and coarse woman, she is nevertheless more sympathetic than her lover, Tom, who is worse: stupid and violent. Between them, however, there exists a real sexual energy that isn’t found elsewhere in the novel. The narrator’s attraction to Jordan is tepid at best, and Gatsby’s fantasies about Daisy seem curiously unerotic. The slender girl has no body to speak of. She seems to be made of her beautiful clothes and her beautiful voice. It is hard to imagine Gatsby actually having sex with Daisy. It’s like trying to imagine a man taking a butterfly. And although her marriage to Tom has produced a daughter, as a mother Daisy communicates detachment. She coos endearments at the child, Pammy, and then dismisses her. Only once in the novel is the reader reminded of Daisy as a creature of flesh and blood, and, significantly, it is through a finger her husband has bruised. Daisy looks down at the little finger “with an awed expression.” “You didn’t mean to,” she says to Tom, “but you
did
do it.” The passage is not only a premonition of Tom’s brutality that erupts horribly in New York when he breaks Myrtle’s nose or of Myrtle’s bruised and opened body on the road. Daisy’s awe expresses her remote relation to her own body and to mortality itself, which her money will successfully hide, not forever, of course, but for now.

What Tom and Myrtle have that Jay and Daisy don’t is a
personal
relation, with its attendant physicality and mess. That is why, after admitting to Nick that Daisy may have once loved Tom “for a minute,” Gatsby comforts himself by saying, “In any case, it was only personal.” What Gatsby has been chasing all these years is neither
personal
nor
physical.
Its transcendence may have been lodged in the person of Daisy, but it is not limited to her. Her very shallowness makes Gatsby’s dream possible. But Myrtle Wilson is not a simple incarnation of the flesh and its weaknesses. She harbors dreams as well. As it does for Gatsby, her intangible wish finds form in an object. In her drawer at home, wrapped in tissue paper, Mr. Wilson finds the expensive dog leash Tom once bought for her to go with the dog he also bought. The dog didn’t come home. The useless, beautiful thing is a sign of absence, a string of absences, in fact—the dog, the lover, and the emptiness of desire itself. Just as the green light shining from Daisys house may be counted among Gatsby’s “enchanted objects,” one he loses when Daisy actually enters his life again, the dog leash possesses a kind of magic. It is the tissue paper that makes me want to cry, that sends this frivolous possession into another register altogether, that imbues the silver-and-leather dog leash with the quality of true pathos.

The tangible and the intangible collide to cast a spell. But can a person or thing ever be stripped naked? Can we ever discover reality hiding under the meanings we give to people and things? I don’t think so. And I don’t think Fitzgerald thought so either. His book meditates on the necessity of fiction, not only as lies but as truths. The play between the material and the immaterial in
The Great Gatsby
is riddled, not simple. The fairy tale contains the valley of ashes as well as the castle by the sea, the heavy weight of the corpse and the pretty bodies blown in the wind. And which one is more real than the other? Is death more true than life? Are not dreams as much a part of living as waking life is? The book goes to the heart of the problem of fiction itself by insisting that fiction is necessary to life—not only as books but as dreams, dreams that frame the world and give it meaning. Nick imagines Gatsby at the pool just before Wilson kills him. The man has understood that there will be no message from Daisy, that the great idea is dead.

He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about… like that ashen, fantastic figure gliding toward him through the amorphous trees.

This passage tells of dramatic change, but it is not a change from illusion to reality, from enchanted nature to real nature. This world may be new, but there are ghosts here, and they are fantastic. It is now a world made of matter, but that matter is no more real than the magic lights and music of the summer parties that went before it.

One can argue that nearly every word of dialogue uttered in the novel, every exchange, and every event is ordinary. Tom Buchanan and the poor Wilsons are glaringly limited and unattractive. Gatsby’s business partner, Wolfsheim, is clever and dishonest without the grandeur of being satanic. Daisy’s charm is not revealed in anything she says. Gatsby converses in a stiff and cliched manner that sets Nick back on his heels. Jordan is a cheat. These characters do not elevate themselves above the crowd. They are not remarkable people, and yet to read this novel is to feel as if you have taken a walk in a fairy wood, as if while you are reading you glimpse the sublime.

The magic is in the book’s narration, in its shades of sunlight and darkness, its allusions to folk tales, to music, songs, to dusty dance slippers and bright voices. Better than any other writer I know, Fitzgerald captures the tipsy aura of parties, that slight glazing of the mind that dawns after two glasses of champagne. The ordinary world trembles with
adjectival
enchantment here—Fitzgerald’s prose is dense with surprising adjectives. Although some of his characters are glib, the narrator is not. The sorcery that infuses the book cannot be explained as the golden effect of money, although that is part of it, or even by youth. They are mostly very young, these people, and life still holds an unwrapped newness for them. Nick Carraway’s voice carries a deeper understanding of enchantment, which at once grounds and elevates the narration. It returns us to the beginning. The father’s words render up a world in which every human being, no matter how flawed, is granted an essential dignity. Remember, every person is a product of his own history, one that is not necessarily like yours. He or she has come out of a particular story, and to judge that man or woman is not fair unless you know the story. The advice is a call to empathy, the ultimate act of the imagination, and the true ground of all fiction. All characters are born of this effort to be another person. And its success is rooted in the grounded self. The “carelessness” of Tom and Daisy manifests itself in flightiness. Unballasted, they flit from one place to another, and their wealth only facilitates their disconnectedness. Yet we trust Nick, this man who speaks to us, and we believe him when he says, “I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known.” And we trust his
imaginings,
because the imaginary is crucial to his tale. He did not witness Gatsby’s murder. He cannot be Gatsby, but he says, “He must have …” Nick Carraway’s voice bears the conviction of his empathy.

Fitzgerald did not give part of Nick’s story to Michaelis because it was convenient. By seamlessly transferring Nick’s vision into Wilson’s Greek neighbor, Fitzgerald lifts the narration out of the “merely personal.” Nick sees beyond himself, and this second sight is reinforced by the eyes of Eckleburg and the owl eyes of the man in the library. Nick sees vicariously what Michaelis and another man actually witness: Myrtle’s dead body, the body Daisy will not see and cannot face. It is more than enough. The men undo Mrs. Wilson’s shirt “still wet with perspiration” and see “that her left breast was hanging loose like a flap, and there was no need to listen to the heart below.” Later, Nick tells Gatsby, “She was ripped open.” He did not have to be there to see. For a moment, with Nick, the reader stares into the heart of being, and it has stopped. I see what I did not see. I experience that which is outside my own experience. This is the magic of reading novels. This is the working out of the problem of illusion. I take a book off the shelf. I open it up and begin to read, and what I discover in its pages is real.

1997

I DON’T KNOW WHEN MR. FRANKLIN PANGBORN FIRST CAME TO
my attention. A man of the screen’s margins, his legacy comes of repetitions. He pops up in one movie here, in another there. He rules a moment or a full-fledged scene, never an entire film. It was only after I had seen many American films of the thirties and forties that his name came to signify the pompous underling for whom I have come to feel affection. I like the reliability of his character, and I like his name. It combines the elevated connotations of
Franklin,
as in Ben and Roosevelt, with the pathos
of pang,
and the fact that this
pang
is married to
born
delights me with its Dickensian aptness.

With certain modulations, Pangborn always played the same man. Before he uttered a word, his character was in place. The quintessential tight-ass, he held himself in constant check. His posture erect to the point of distortion: back swayed, butt out, chin raised a quarter of an inch, his gestures colored by a shade of snooty effeminacy, he is the man who, if he remains on the screen long enough, will be brought down. His is a ridiculous life, a life of rules maintained at all costs, of self-inflated dignity, of the fully buttoned suit, of obsessive cleanliness, of correctness. When he speaks, his voice swells with enunciations that are decidedly un-American. In truth, his tone beam a suspicious resemblance to that other English, sometimes known as the King’s. For Americans, this accent connotes either genuine grandness or pretension. Pangborn has the voice of the small-lime snob.

But why do I find Franklin Pangborn endearing? Why do I get pleasure from this altogether persnickety being who returns in one movie after another? It is partly because he is always ineffectual. In a position of real power the same character turns loathsome, but Pangborn appears time and again as the “manager” of something—store, hotel, apartment building—whose directives are subverted by the bedlam that takes place around him. And yet his desire to keep order, to maintain boundaries, to ignore the madness of others has a noble as well as pathetic dimension. Guided by decorum, the stiff man carries on, often ruffled but rarely defeated. He is the very image of threatened civility.

When I was growing up, my Norwegian mother had ideas about form, attachments to the signs of bourgeois life, which did not always match my American father’s more democratic ideals. Not long ago my mother told me that, at least in Norway, one never put out candles for a dinner without having lit the wicks. The candles should not be stumps. They may be new, but the wicks must be blackened before guests arrive at the house. I asked my mother why. “I have no idea,” she said, and laughed. “That’s just the way it was.” I now ignite my wicks before my guests arrive for a dinner party. Surely this shows a Pangbornian aspect to my personality, a will to form wholly unrelated to reason. Of course my father had no objection to blackened wicks. It is possible that he never even noticed this sign of good manners throughout his now forty-four-year marriage to my mother. Wicks fell under her domain—a domestic and feminine one.

My parents differed on the issue of fences, however, a deeper dispute that has further Pangbornian significance. My mother yearned for a fence around our property in Minnesota. For her it had nostalgic resonance, the comfort of enclosure, as well as aesthetic value. As a European, fences seemed natural to her. My father grew up as a farm boy on the prairie. He remembers barn raisings, quilting bees, and square dances. Fences reined in cows, but the idea of delineating one’s property smacked of the unneighborly. Pangborn is a character defined by fences, formal divisions that articulate boundaries, difference, hierarchies. In terms of broad American mythology, these fences have a feminine quality. Franklin Pangborn’s character stands in stubborn opposition to a freewheeling, democratic, masculine ideal as seen through the lens of American movies in the nineteen thirties and forties.

In an early, brief appearance in Preston Sturges’s
The Palm Beach Story,
Pangborn, the manager of an apartment building on Park Avenue, leads potential tenants to the apartment of a couple played by Claudette Colbert and Joel McCrea who, having fallen on hard times, have not paid the rent. Elegant in a dark, close-fitting suit, a spotless white handkerchief protruding from his breast pocket, Pangborn serves as a foil to the near-deaf Weenie King, a western millionaire in a shabby light-colored overcoat and cowboy hat, who is accompanied by his overdressed wife. As unrefined as he is loaded, the King bangs on the walls of the corridor with his cane and shouts non sequiturs while Pangborn works hard to maintain his dignity in the face of these vulgar high jinks. A Hollywood fantasy of the American West, the Weenie King doesn’t give a damn about form, grammar, deportment, or fences of any kind. Pangborn answers most of the King’s initial questions with the refrain “of course,” interrupted by a telltale clearing of his throat, a tic that recurs in the Pangborn persona. It is as if the sum of his disapproval has lodged itself as a bit of phlegm in his throat. The Weenie King’s wife notices that the apartment is dirty. The manager acknowledges this and apologizes. But the King yells that he likes dirt, that it’s as natural as (among other things) “disease” and “cyclones.” Sturges knows dirt is the bottom line here. Pangborn is nothing if not immaculate.

Some time after I became an adult I began to clean. I have become a zealous cleaner, a scrubber of floors, a bleacher, a general enemy of dirt and dust and stains. It is probably unnecessary to say that my mother has cleaned fervently all her life. My husband, who occasionally discovers me in these endeavors—down on my hands and knees in the recesses of some closet—has been known to cry, “Stop!” He takes the long view of order and cleanliness. Why hang up your jacket if you are going to wear it in an hour when you go out? Why empty the ashtray when you can fit in one last cigar butt? Why indeed? I organize and I clean, because I love to see the lines of every object around me clearly delineated, because in my domestic life I fight blur, ambiguity, cyclones, and decay (if not disease). It is a classically feminine position, which is not to say that there aren’t scores of men who find themselves in it. I don’t know if Pangborn is ever seen actually cleaning in a film, but it is not necessary to see him at it. His character is spotless and obsessive, a figure of perfect order. In terms of American mythology, he is a traitor to his sex, an anti-cowboy who has joined the girls. The fun consists in rumpling him, making him sweat and stumble and get dirty.

Sturges, ever alert to the class bias of Americans who nevertheless revel in the excesses of money, makes the western Weenie King the movie’s fairy godfather. The King peels off bills from a bankroll twice the size of his fist and hands them out to the lady of the apartment, whom he discovers hiding in the shower. Pangborn is left in the large living room of the upper-crusty flat, exhausted and appalled at the rigors he is forced to endure in the course of a day’s work, rigors that have left him a little crumpled.

Without western populism and its Weenie Kings, the Franklin Pangborn character could not have the same force. Uppity, pinched, urban, and sissified, he is a figure of prairie prejudices, whose elevated diction and manners are a target of ridicule. In
My Man Godfrey
we see him for only a few seconds, but those seconds are important. As Depression wish fulfillment, this film remains among the best. Typically, Pang-born plays a fellow attempting to run things in a climate of chaos. One guesses that he is the chairman of the misguided charity committee, which has organized a scavenger hunt for the very rich. Among the “objects” the players have been asked to bring in is “a forgotten man.” Carole Lombard discovers William Powell (Godfrey) in a dump by the river, and after considerable back-and-forth, the daffy but good-hearted creature played by Lombard brings the unshaven, ragged Godfrey into a glittering party of people in gowns and tails. Pangborn tests the forgotten man’s authenticity by seeking permission to feel Godfrey’s whiskers. (Another player has tried to cheat with an imposter.) Pangborn does this with a bow of his head, the words “May I?” and a clearing of the wonderful throat. But it is his gesture that wins my heart. He lifts his fingers and, with a flourish not seen since the eighteenth-century French court, waves a hand in the direction of the beard and declares it real. It is a beautiful moment. In that hand we see both the rigors of politeness, which forbid intimate contact with another’s body, and the distaste for a body that is unwashed, unperfumed, and generally unacceptable. After being declared the genuine article, a truly forgotten man, Godfrey dubs the company around him “a bunch of nitwits,” is hired by Lombard as a butler, and the story begins. I have now lived in New York for twenty years and have wound up from time to time among the nitwits. Although I have never subscribed to the bias of my hometown—that the rich are worse than other people—it is true that vast sums of money have a tendency to look ridiculous from the outside, that the spectacle of spending and playing has a tawdry appearance that turns the stomach of the born-and-bred midwesterner. For a sight of pure silliness and smug self-congratulation, little can compete with the charity ball. They knew this in Hollywood and used it. When my grandparents’ farm was going to ruin in Minnesota, there were city slickers in New York who had managed to hold on to their dough.
My Man Godfrey
played for audiences in the sticks, too, audiences that feasted on the opulence of the grand New York house while they laughed at the absurdities of those who lived in it. Godfrey is the frog prince of an American fairy tale, a man whose experience of poverty transforms him. Pangborn, on the other hand, defies enchantment. The static being of bureaucratic management, he will never be transformed.

This stasis finds its best expression in W. C. Fields’s
The Bank Dick.
Pangborn plays the bank examiner, J. Pinkerton Snoopington. In tight black suit, bowler hat, and pince-nez, he is the picture of a stick-in-the-mud. Pangborn’s fate is to be nearly done in by Fields—Egbert Sousé. Fields’s hatred of banks and bankers is well known. And although his aesthetic is anarchic, not agrarian-populist, misanthropic, not humanist, his spleen against bankers must have struck a deep chord among audiences in 1940. It is worth remembering that torturing a bank examiner had greater fantasy value at that time than it does now.

W. C. Fields was not a great champion of women either. He plays a man whose every move is circumscribed by some foolish womanly notion. In Fieldsian myth, marriage, order, codes of behavior, and, above all, temperance are invented by women to fence in the natural man’s appetites. It is notable that as Souse lures his victim, Snoopington, to the Black Pussy Cat Cafe, he asks the bank examiner whether he has noticed Lompoc’s beautiful girls. The examiner harrumphs that he is married and has a grown daughter “eighteen years of age.” In other words, marriage has closed his eyes to other women. The man is no man. Souse, on the other hand, continues muttering under his breath. “That’s how I like ‘em, seventeen, eighteen …” Souse drugs Snoopington with a Mickey Finn in the Black Pussy Cat Cafe, half leads, half carries him to a room in the New Old Lompoc House, then either allows him to fall or pushes him out the window of that new old establishment, hauls the bruised and disheveled examiner up the stairs once again, back into the room, and puts him to bed—all because Snoopingtons sole desire in the world is to examine the books at the bank where Souse and his future son-in-law, Og, have made an “unauthorized” loan.

Even this brief summary reveals the Dickensian spirit of Fields, a comedian whose joy in naming things is as great as his joy in the visual joke. Should we be in doubt as to the source of the filmmaker’s inspiration, the bank examiner assists us. From his sickbed, the prissy Snoopington worries aloud about his wife. “My poor wife,” he moans, “Little Dor-rit.” But, as it turns out, Souse has underestimated the bureaucrat’s willpower. The examiner somehow manages to crawl from his sickbed and arrive at the bank ready for duty. Although he is obviously woozy and a tad unstable on his feet, Snoopington’s pressed suit betrays no sign of his earlier misadventures. The wily Souse conspires to crush Snoopington’s spectacles and render the examiner blind. Souse succeeds in smashing the glasses under his foot, upon which the examiner opens his briefcase. The camera zooms in on a close shot of its contents. The man has five extra pairs of spectacles neatly lined up within. The eyewear tells all. Driven by duty, this man comes prepared. In the finicky realm of ledgers, numbers, and accounts, he has no rival. We know, however, with absolute certainty, that he will live and die a bank examiner. Souse, on the other hand, through mad accident and wild connivance, becomes fabulously wealthy. At the end of the movie he is happily ensconced in his mansion, where his formerly abusive family now dotes on him. Fields makes a contented exit. He is off to the Black Pussy Cat Cafe as of old. His family declares him “a changed man,”

Fenced in, stuck on a rung of the social ladder, the Pang-bornian man has no appetite for change. Like most children he prefers sameness, routine, consistency. This, too, I understand. Repetition is the essence of meaning. Without it we are lost. But taken to its extreme, a love of system becomes absurd. Franklin Pangborn played a man who worshipped the system in which he found himself, a system ruled by that Manichaean American divinity, its God and its Satan: money. Money haunts Pangborns character in most of his movies. He does not have much of it himself, but he is victim to its charms, part of its overriding machinery, and overly impressed by its power. The quintessential manager, he’s a dupe of the rich. In another Preston Sturges film,
Christmas in July,
Pangborn plays the manager of a department store, eager to please the hero and his girlfriend, who falsely think themselves newly rich and go on a shopping spree. The manager shows them a bed, a piece of furniture outfitted with an elaborate mechanism that will afford them every convenience at the touch of a button. Pangborn unfolds this wonder of American consumerism, and then in a voice at once elevated, proper, and obsequious he says, “And then on the morrow , …” He presses the proverbial button and the bed collapses back into itseif.