Boswell and Fitzgerald
Rainy Day's love for (obsession with?) The Great Gatsby is well known to regular visitors here. It's our Desert Island Discs book choice and like all great texts it keeps revealing secrets and delightful synchronicities. Here's a new one with antecedents that reach back as far as the 18th century. "Maybe there was never anyone so young as Boswell was in the spring of 1763," remarked Christopher Morley referring to the Scotsman's early adventures in London. Recalling his first sighting of the great city, James Boswell wrote in his London Journal: "When we came upon Highgate Hill, I was all life and joy." He knew in that moment that if one had sufficient imagination, one could do anything, be anyone in London.
Fast forward now to the 20th century and the scene in Gatsby where Nick Carraway has his Manhattan epiphany:
The City seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its wild promise and all the mystery and beauty in the world. …"Anything can happen now that we've slid over this bridge," I thought, "anything at all."
For Boswell and Fitzgerald, the city was an idea and an ideal, a place of promise filled with potential. It was Dickens who recreated London as a sewer and the fashion of presenting the city of fiction as a dehumanizing landscape where threats lurk and where impossibility replaces opportunity was established. Is there any writer today who can visualize a great city "in its wild promise and all the mystery and beauty in the world"?
By the way, John Baker says that Fitzgerald favoured a rhythmical prose and wrote for sound rather than sight. "He thought that Scribners, his publishers, should be responsible for grammar, but they weren’t any better at it than he was." Ah, grammar. As Joan Didion once said: "All I know about grammar is its power."
Comments
Well, Boswell was a Scot and Fitzgerald a transplanted Midwesterner, while Dickens was a born Londoner from a humble background. It's not surprising that the first two would see the city as "an idea and an ideal," while Dickens focused on the sordid and dehumanizing aspects of London. Yet, like New York natives who complain endlessly about life in the Big Apple and wouldn't dream of living anywhere else, Dickens remained in London his entire life.
Since I'm from the sticks myself, I can relate more to Boswell's and Fitzgerald's view of the city. The first time I visited New York, I struggled very hard not to gawk and stare at the skyscrapers and the sights like a total hick. I was trying to look like someone who had walked past Central Park and Rockefeller Center every day of her life. Inwardly, I wanted to dance down the street with a big grin on my face and shout, "New York! You're beautiful!"
I still feel that way about great cities.
Posted by: Donna | December 9, 2006 4:11 AM