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The Great Gatsby: The Graphic Novel

2020; Penn State University Press; Volume: 18; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/fscotfitzrevi.18.1.0254

1755-6333

Kirk Curnutt,

American Literature and Culture

In 1980, an organization called the Limited Editions Club (LEC) published a collector’s edition of The Great Gatsby. A subscription-based publisher, the New York City Company was then celebrating its golden jubilee, having survived with enviable durability the ups and downs of the book business. Founded by twenty-nine-year-old George Macy in 1929, the same year that F. Scott Fitzgerald published such indispensable stories as “The Last of the Belles” (TAR 60–66) and “Basil and Cleopatra” (BJG 165–84), the LEC shipped the very first of its to-date nearly nine hundred titles to its membership the same week that the stock market collapsed (Grissom 1–2). A half-century later, Gatsby appeared during one of the imprimatur’s cyclical renaissances; the Talk of the Town column in The New Yorker even profiled its latest owner, Sidney Schiff (who died in 2010), in its 22 September 1980 issue (“Book”). Regrettably, the article does not delve into Schiff’s ambitions for his Fitzgerald edition, focusing instead on his reasons for selecting Rachel Carson’s The Sea Around Us (originally published in 1951) as his latest objet d’art.Forty years later, secondhand copies of the 2,000-copy press run of the LEC Gatsby float around the Internet, running as cheap as $299 on e-Bay, a site that hardly seems the paragon of bibliophile exclusivity that Macy imagined when he started the company. For roughly the same price, one can attain a copy of Schiff’s edition of Tender Is the Night from 1982. Although both handsomely designed editions feature introductions by Charles Scribner III, their real attraction are the illustrations by Fred Meyer (1922–86), a painter and sculptor who for thirty-five years taught at the Rochester Institute of Technology. For those for whom $299 is too hefty a price tag for such an indulgence, simply Google Meyer’s name and The Great Gatsby and one can readily find photos of his sumptuous renderings of key scenes. Indeed, as of this writing, one site with the forbidding name Book Porn Club—best not to punch it into a search engine on a university computer—reproduces the bulk of the images. (Interior glimpses of the LEC Tender are much rarer.) Populated with angular bodies and bathed in lush shades of blue, orange, and green, Meyer’s artwork looks as if Pablo Picasso nabbed the palette of Gustav Klimt (“F. Scott Fitzgerald”). The illustrations emulate the collage-styled juxtaposition of geometric shapes that made Cubism so controversial but stay far afield of obvious Art Deco hallmarks. They radiate the glitz of the Jazz Age but are flatter and more cartoonish than the artwork one might find in a 1920s issue of Vanity Fair or even The Smart Set. Meyer clearly thought long and hard about how to evoke the milieu without being hamstrung by its clichés.Accomplishing that feat is not as easy as it may sound. Most illustrated versions of Gatsby end up traveling one of three routes: (1) they submerge themselves in the visual stereotypes of the era as if resistance were futile; (2) they feel compelled to err in the opposite direction and plop the story in some alternative world; or (3) in the most depressing instances, they do not even feel as if they should try for any unifying aesthetic whatsoever and end up with a hodgepodge. In 2014, the UK-based Atlantic World, an imprimatur of Atlantic Publishing (itself sometimes cumbersomely referred to as Atlantic Publishing, Croxley Green, to avoid confusion with Boston’s Atlantic Monthly Press), produced a version compiled from period illustrations rather than newly commissioned work from a single artist.Set alongside oft-republished photos of historical figures such as Al Capone, Duke Ellington, and Rudolph Valentino (as well as a bevy of unnamed flappers), the images, almost exclusively licensed from the Mary Evans Picture Library, feel so random that the overall effect is of clipart, a generic mishmash of pastel watercolors, bold acrylics, and colored pencil strokes that distract from rather than enhance the narrative. Only on the back cover is there any kind of acknowledgment that Gatsby comes with its own visual register thanks to Francis Cugat’s iconic 1925 cover. A nocturnal vista of Manhattan featuring the Winter Garden block of Broadway, the (uncredited) painting inevitably conjures Nick Carraway’s famous paean to the “enchanted metropolitan twilight” of New York’s “racy, adventurous feel,” with pedestrians loitering on street corners and jaywalking through traffic hoping to overcome urban loneliness through some chance encounter with “romantic women” (GGVar 69). But if that scene feels appropriately teary and rain-streaked, radiant with indigo and yellow, nothing between the covers feels as if it had been selected to evoke Jay Gatsby or Daisy Buchanan: there is no Long Island Sound, no East or West Egg, not even a green light. Atlantic World’s Gatsby feels as if it could be Encyclopedia Britannica’s Gatsby.That said, at least that edition draws from the Jazz Age. As astounding as it may seem, some illustrated editions lack any attachment to les années folles. A cheap, international version such as the India-based Om Books’s “Om Illustrated Classics” edition (2016) features black-and-white sketches by Manish Singh and Manaj Kumar Prasad that are so rudimentary the best one can say is that their Gatsby seems pitched as a children’s book. Even if the adaptation of the text appears to be aimed to assist second-language learners with their English skills, the drawings make the story appear as disposable as a late-nineteenth-century dime novel.That does not mean extreme takes on the text are necessarily bewildering. In 2008, Allen & Unwin in Australia published a charming “homage” to Gatsby featuring illustrations by Melbourne illustrator Nicki Greenberg that rendered the characters as fantastical creatures. Gatsby is a seahorse, Nick Carraway a salamander, Daisy Buchanan a sea anemone, her husband, Tom, a gargoyle, and Jordan Baker a squid. Reviewing the adaptation for this publication, Daniel Worden wrote, “Greenberg’s choice to use animals and other, imaginary creatures as characters lends the text an impressionistic quality, one that seems, to this reader at least, to fit with the novel’s own allegorical qualities. The characters in The Great Gatsby stand in for larger ideas and social roles, and this violation of literary realism’s emphasis on rounded characters is rendered overt by Greenberg’s use of non-human characters” (233).With The Great Gatsby entering the public domain in January 2021, readers should be prepared for an additional slew of graphic adaptations, although perhaps not as delightfully audacious. Forthcoming in early January is a “Deluxe Illustrated Edition” from Simon and Schuster that, if the cover available online is any indication, will emulate the style of comic books. Its nineteen images are by Diego Jourdan Pereira, whose credits include various Teenaged Mutant Ninja Turtles, Transformers, and Donald Duck projects. Meanwhile, Candlewick Press also has an edition on the way with illustrations by Minnesota native (and Harvard alumna) K. Woodman-Maynard; although it is her debut graphic novel, she has a long history as a freelance designer and animated web series creator. Both the cover and the excerpts previewed on Amazon.com are appealingly dreamy.As owners of the family copyright, the Fitzgerald Estate was able to beat these forthcoming projects to the punch in the United States with its own graphic-novel adaptation published by Scribner this past June. (Previous international adaptations were possible because foreign rights to Gatsby expired long ago.) Helming this authorized version is Blake Hazard, who has assumed management of the Estate after the retirement of her mother, Eleanor Lanahan. Hazard recruited two top talents for her edition. London-based Fred Fordham already had two significant literary graphic novels under his belt when he took on the challenging task of distributing Fitzgerald’s luminous prose throughout the panels or frames adorning each page: he illustrated Philip Pullman’s first foray into visual narrative, The Adventures of John Blake: Mystery of the Ghost Ship (2017) and produced a widely praised version of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (2018). Illustrator Aya Morton, meanwhile, who conceived the visual look and color scheme, comes to the book after contributing artwork to Anne Opotwosky’s His Dream of the Skyland (2018), set in 1920s Hong Kong. The collaboration has resulted in a compelling version of The Great Gatsby that, although not a substitute for the original novel, reenvisions key scenes and passages with dutiful reverence and offers an idiosyncratic medium for savoring the language.“Capturing The Great Gatsby in a visual medium has always been tricky,” admits Hazard in a brief preface. “The language itself is in some ways the main character in the novel, with the other characters playing supporting roles to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s beautiful prose” (iv). There is the immediate challenge of what to do with Nick’s opening commentary, which runs ten pages before we arrive at the first formal scene in which Daisy and Jordan Baker lounge on a couch motionlessly while the windblown curtains “whip and snap” around them (GGVar 10). Both the 1949 and 2013 film versions invented framing devices to substitute for Nick’s exposition, while one of the few merits of Jack Clayton’s stilted 1974 version was to open with Sam Waterston as Nick reciting a portion of the monologue over a montage of him motor-boating to East Egg. As Hazard notes, one benefit of the graphic novel is that the symbiotic integration of words and pictures means “the language can play an active part in the storytelling without the need for elaborate voice-over or other devices accompanying the images” (iv). Accordingly, the opening eight pages of the graphic novel spotlight choice lines from Nick’s soliloquy as he rides from Pennsylvania Station to West Egg, where he picks up his car from his humble cottage and drives, with help from a map, to Tom and Daisy’s palatial estate. There is no effort to synchronize the subject matter and visual focus; Nick could simply be thinking random thoughts as he passes a billboard of a mermaid on his way to Long Island (5). As a result, the reader can enjoy the language and visuals separately, without fretting over whether the latter does justice to the former.Not all of Nick’s classic descriptive passages are retained, however. A reader may no sooner feel secure in Fordham and Morton’s fidelity to chapter 1 when we enter George Wilson’s garage without Fitzgerald’s Waste Land-ish evocation of the Valley of Ashes that opens chapter 2. Morton’s opening panel does depict Doctor T. J. Eckleburg’s billboard behind spectral figures wielding shovels, but the uninitiated might assume the men are shoveling coal as much as refuse (34). While the silhouettes do create the perception that the air is suitably “powdery,” one nevertheless misses Fitzgerald’s phantasmagoric, Eliotic depiction of the “fantastic farm” where “ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke” (GGVar 27). Instead, we are introduced to a Myrtle Wilson who is frankly a bit too alluringly drawn to be vulgar. Neither her jet-black hair, her low-cut dresses (Myrtle’s costume change from crêpe-de-chine to muslin to chiffon does not seem especially trashy [GGVar 30–31, 36]), nor—forgive me—her ample bosom bring to mind Shirley Winter’s blowzy brashness or Karen Black’s histrionic desperation. (Isla Fisher’s Myrtle in Luhrmann’s version, meanwhile, incarnates Betty Boop and is frustratingly cartoonish.) As a result of the visual generosity that Morton affords her, Myrtle never seems to “flounce” (GGVar 38), and the “love nest” scene ends up lacking the novel’s cutting satire of clamoring-but-vapid middle-class aspiration; hesitant to heap too much ridicule on a doomed woman (or her sister, Catherine), this rendering takes aim instead at bourgeois pretension, with Chester McKee’s admirably fey pencil mustache forced to carry the symbolic weight of Fitzgerald’s critique of the photographer’s innocuous art (45). Not until Tom smashes Myrtle’s nose for speaking of Daisy do the images capture the cheap and tawdry atmosphere of the adulterous party: Myrtle’s blood even breaks the frame of the panel picturing Tom’s open-hand swat, splattering into the adjoining image, a clever way of dramatizing the animalistic brutality of Gatsby’s romantic rival (51).This past summer, when the Fitzgerald Society cosponsored an online webinar on Gatsby with Robert Steven Williams, the director of the recent documentary Gatsby in Connecticut: The Untold Story, I asked Hazard whether during the drafting process any classic scene or moment from the novel was initially excluded from the adaptation. Her response was intriguing: she reported that in an initial version the kiss at the end of chapter 6 in which Gatsby incarnates his ambitions in Daisy was missing (“Reimagining Gatsby”; see GGVar 133–34). Hazard’s insistence that the lovers’ lips must meet at some point was a wise one. Morton’s rendering of this pivotal incident is among the graphic novel’s most moving and powerful. Spread across four pages, the tableau crescendos from an understated nod to the “blocks of the sidewalks” that form ladder steps (128), followed by the ladder itself “mounted to a secret place above the trees” (129), to the lovers’ faces moving in for the kiss itself (130), and finally, a sweet, full-bodied representation of the couple embracing amid rays of periwinkle starlight against a navy sky (131). Many of the adaptation’s best moments, in fact, make effective use of either single-panel pages or two-page spreads: Nick’s intoxication at Myrtle’s party (48–49) is a whirlwind of flowing alcohol, dancing, and a bemused Airedale; Gatsby and Daisy’s reunion takes place amid banners of lyrics from Klipspringer’s rendering of “Ain’t We Got Fun,” including its notorious line, “The rich get richer and the poor get—children” (110; see GGVar 115); Nick and Gatsby arriving at the Buchanans’ home for the showdown over Daisy (135); and finally the closing image of the green light with Daisy’s face inscribed into the lapping currents in which a single sailboat is borne back ceaselessly toward West Egg (200). Perhaps, most arresting is the moment Gatsby begins tossing shirts from his dresser, the “sheer linen and thick silk and fine flannel” rendered as explosive streaks of orange, pink, and yellow, forming a veritable rainbow of cuffs and sleeves (107). It is a moment that captures both the opulence and excess of Gatsby’s illegitimate wealth, helping explain why Daisy might feel so overwhelmed that she breaks down in tears: “It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such—such beautiful shirts before” (GGVar 112).Perhaps inevitably, audiences will judge the graphic novel less on its fidelity to the story arc than on the characters’ appearance, both their faces and their physiques. For better or worse, film versions have shaped our expectations as to what the dramatis personae should look like, a reality that can also affect reactions to productions of Simon Levy’s popular 2013 theater adaptation, which has been staged more than one hundred times globally in less than a decade. One reason Toby Stephens’s portrayal of Jay Gatsby in the 2000 A&E/BBC version of the novel is universally dismissed has less to do with the leaden script and static cinematography—although those are certainly factors—than with the simple fact he is a brunette. Between Alan Ladd, Robert Redford, and Leonardo DiCaprio, the image of Gatsby as blond-haired has so dominated adaptations and book covers that deviations from that expectation can spark some cognitive dissonance. In fairness to Stephens, his acting chops are otherwise unimpeachable—he is the son of Dame Maggie Smith and Sir Robert Stephens, after all. He debuted in Sally Potter’s brilliant 1992 film version of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando starring Tilda Swinton and went on a few years after this misbegotten British/American collaboration to turn in a critically acclaimed portrayal of Rochester in the BBC’s 2006 adaptation of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre.Redford is clearly the culprit: his Gatsby is so preternaturally handsome, no matter if his mannered performance seems imprisoned by his seemingly bioengineered genes, that he makes us forget how many raven-headed Gatsbys there have been. One need not picture James Rennie in the George Cukor/Owen Davis Broadway version that ran for 112 performances at the Ambassador Theater from February to May 1926, or Warner Baxter in the film that Paramount Pictures produced from Davis’s adaptation later that year, to appreciate the strange feeling that descends when the mysterious millionaire is depicted as anything other than flaxen or tow-colored; one need only survey the illustrations that accompanied the 1937 newspaper serialization of the novel—such as the Chicago Herald-Examiner’s Sunday supplement edition, published on 23 May that year—or the cover of Bantam’s 1951 paperback, on which an inexplicably aged Gatsby looks like Ray Milland. (The mustachioed James Gatzes are their own subset of weird.) So it is not surprising that Morton’s Gatsby is fair-haired, albeit leaning toward tangerine.What is jolting is how much he resembles a thirtyish version of the title hero of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince (1943): with his round cheeks and chin and squiggles for hair, we are almost surprised that gossipy speculation about his past does not include the rumor that he came to Earth from Asteroid B-612. The association is key to bringing out the man’s essential melancholy. Like the Little Prince, Morton’s Gatsby is profoundly isolated and lonely. In the novel, he is perforce both a walking contradiction and a cipher, guileless in his lies, strained in his smile, evasively optimistic, charismatic, and yet awkward. In Morton’s illustrations, however, the only moment in which his eyebrows are not perpetually furrowed and his mouth a tight O is his first conversation with Nick during the surreal caterwaul of a party in chapter 3 (64–65). As a result, his repressed panic over whether he can realize his dream seems far more palpable than in the novel. Indeed, in what may be the single most poignant panel in the graphic novel, Gatsby admits that Daisy was at the wheel when his car struck Myrtle Wilson. All we see of him are his hands nervously gripping each other (170).Readers will likely not be surprised to discover that Daisy Fay Buchannan, like her lover, is also blonde; despite the novel’s insistence that she has “dark shining hair” (GGVar 180), and despite the celluloid examples of Lois Wilson and Betty Field, illustrators for the past several decades have been thoroughly baptized in Mia Farrow’s peroxide. More surprising is who else in the graphic novel glows like platinum. Tom Buchanan has always been as black-headed as he is black-hearted, from Hale Hamilton to Barry Sullivan to Joel Edgerton, with only Bruce Dern and Martin Donovan (light brunettes) offering some variation. Yet here, the odious polo player could be Gatsby’s older, brawnier brother. (In terms of body type, Tom also looks like he has been popping steroids.) Such is their consanguinity that when the two men square off over Daisy, first at the Buchanans’ estate and then at the Plaza Hotel, telling them apart can be difficult (136, 140–42, 148–59).Even more shocking, however, is the ash-blond complexion of Meyer Wolfshiem. It goes without saying that to avoid ethnic stereotyping any contemporary illustrator would have to steer clear of Fitzgerald’s references to the gangster as a “flat-nose Jew” with “two fine growths of hair” luxuriating “in either nostril.” Including the marks of Yiddish accent in his dialogue, such as “gonnection” (GGVar 83, 85), is likewise verboten. Luhrmann pointedly sidestepped accusations of anti-Semitism that have long dogged the novel—Milton Hindus’s 1947Commentary essay, “F. Scott Fitzgerald and Literary Anti-Semitism: A Footnote on the Mind of the 20’s,” being the most influential)— by casting Indian actor Amitabh Bachchan in the role. The decision baffled reviewers and struck at least some Jewish commentators as “pandering” (Berrin). Morton’s strategy of rendering Wolfshiem Anglo is subtler if less globally intriguing, but it also adds its own confusion to the text. If Tom looks like Gatsby’s big brother, then Wolfshiem looks like Tom and Gatsby’s suave-but-shady uncle. The only trait we have to triangulate him between the West Egg/East Egg opposites are the wide splashes of gray at his temples—a nod, one suspects, to Dr. Reed Richards in Marvel Comics’s Fantastic Four franchise, the most famous salt-and-pepper superhero in comic book history (Cronin).Interestingly, Wolfshiem does not reappear in the story after Gatsby’s murder; Fordham and Morton elide Nick’s visit to the ominously named Swastika Holding Company, where the gambler fills in missing information about Gatsby’s postwar rise to wealth but declines to attend his funeral (GGVar 204–7). While the scene is not necessarily essential in the build-up to Gatsby’s funeral, the excision is indicative of how some of the more uncomfortable aspects of the novel have been sanitized. Although we do see the chapter 4 image of a limousine with “modish” African Americans chauffeured by a white driver crossing the Queensboro Bridge presumably on their way to a Harlem cabaret, Fitzgerald’s description of the passengers rolling “the yolks of their eyeballs” at Nick and Gatsby is deleted (GGVar 83). Doing so sadly mutes the entire point of this socio-racial inversion for younger readers who are not already familiar with the passage, or who are not yet conversant in the history of boundary crossing in what Ann Douglas dubbed the “mongrel Manhattan” of the 1920s (5–6). Nor does the adaptation acknowledge Gatsby’s putative German background, despite revealing his birth name of Gatz (112), Michaelis’s Greek ancestry in chapter 8 (172–75), or the Finnish heritage of Nick’s “demoniac” housekeeper (GGVar 105). These are deeply embedded details, of course, but they are essential to reinforcing the novel’s insistence that race and class are so inexorably entwined that to enter the world of wealth and glamour one must “pass” for Anglo. Without these ethnic indices, the illustrations can feel thoroughly and surprisingly WASPy.That said, Morton brings more than enough invention to the job to make the adaptation enjoyable. When Gatsby tries to hoodwink Nick into believing he “lived like a young rajah in all the capitals of Europe” (GGVar 79), we see him dressed like a proto-Indiana Jones wielding a pair of pistols, an image that is both ridiculous and funny (76–77). The party scenes from chapters 3 and 6 are lavish but not garish, their baby blue, pink, and orange swaths muting the obnoxious brashness in which Luhrmann overindulged (as did Brenon, if the surviving trailer available on YouTube is any indication [Trailer]). And George Wilson’s stalking of Gatsby is powerfully dramatic: a wordless frame in which Wilson—he, too, is blond, by the way—pulls his pistol while an oblivious Gatsby floats in his pool better represents both men’s pain than any extant film version (185). As for other aspects of Morton’s illustrations, one may quibble with her decision to draw Nick as the spitting image of his creator, or with her portrayal of Jordan, who comes off nowhere near as androgynous as Fitzgerald dramatizes her. These minor complaints pale compared to the sheer beauty of the final flashback in which Gatsby describes his and Daisy’s wartime romance in Louisville, especially Nick’s explanation of why Daisy chose to marry Tom instead of wait for her officer’s return (178–81). In such moments, Morton more than ably captures the beauty of Fitzgerald’s prose.Ultimately, how one feels about this adaptation will depend on how one feels about graphic novels. Scholars are long past questioning the ability of the form to tell “mature” or adult stories; readers who persist in dismissing them as glorified comic books might as well tilt at the windmills of smart phones, online courses, or, frankly, at this point, horseless carriages. Like these technologies, the medium is here to stay, and it has already transformed perceptions about interpretation and literacy. Sufficient tools exist, moreover, for understanding the genre’s history and evolving aims to educate us out of whatever prejudices against it that we as “traditional” audiences might bear. One can turn to Jan Baetens and Hugo Frey’s The Graphic Novel: An Introduction or the essays gathered in Stephen E. Tabachnick’s The Cambridge Companion to the Graphic Novel for invigorating discussions of how we assimilate the conjoining of text and image and appreciate the artistry of that dichotomy. At the same time, retelling classic stories in a graphic novel poses challenges that original narratives such as Alison Bechdel’s now canonical Fun Home (2006) or such foundational texts of the medium as Will Eisner’s A Contract with God and Other Tenement Stories (1978) do not face. As with film versions, one must confront the parasitic relationship between the original and the adaptation.Perhaps, then the issue depends less on the format into which we recast The Great Gatsby than our willingness and/or ability to experience it as distinct from Fitzgerald’s novel. As Hazard writes in her preface, “My great-grandfather appreciated the new almost as much as he revered the classic and timeless. I believe he would be charmed by this fresh imagining, with its faithfulness to the text and its beautiful vision of Gatsby’s world” (iv). Even if we as scholars continue to regard books of printed words as the quintessential mode of literary expression, we need not think of a graphic adaptation as taking something away from the original. A “fresh imagining” need not mean the novel is squeezed dry and discarded like the “pyramid of pulpless halves” (GGVar 47) that the fancy juice extractor in Gatsby’s kitchen does to the crates of oranges and lemons delivered to his back door in preparation for his parties. We might rather think of an adaptation as a rose cutting: we clip a stem and transplant it to fresh soil, where it can grow and replenish our appreciation for its beauty. In this regard, The Great Gatsby: The Graphic Novel adds one more fragrant, colorful bloom to Fitzgerald’s garden of literary delights.