Mitch Miller has died.

Miller enjoyed a long and successful life as a music producer and impresario of great renown.  Most notably, he understood the Rules of Persuasion.  You might recall an earlier post . . .

“Emotion never makes you a hit,” he said.  “I always tell this to singers:  Emotion is not something you feel.  It’s something you make the listener feel.  And you have to be very cool and know what you’re doing.”

Miller learned early on that, It’s about the Other Guy, Stupid, and rode that rocket to the top of the charts many times with many different artists demonstrating the generality of the Rule and his great skill.

Let’s sing-a-long one more time.

Remember:  All Bad Persuasion Is Sincere!

You may remember that Margaret Thatcher served as conservative Prime Minister for the United Kingdom during the 1980s.  Now, the Iron Lady is getting the Hollywood treatment as Meryl Streep stars in the biopic.  Thatcher’s children are concerned.

. . . the screenplay of The Iron Lady depicts Baroness Thatcher as an elderly dementia-sufferer looking back on her career with sadness. She is shown talking to herself and unaware that her husband, Sir Denis Thatcher, has died.

Cameron McCracken who is a major creative force behind the movie notes

. . . Lady Thatcher’s health will be featured, but insists that it will be “treated with appropriate sensitivity”.  He adds of the film: “Although fictional, it will be fair and accurate.”

This echos, of course, Dan Rather’s infamous line, “Fake, but Accurate” when describing on his CBS News broadcast the fake documents about President George W. Bush’s military service.  Rather got fired for his unpersuasive sincerity.  But, at least Rather meant what he said which is why it was unpersuasive.

But, what about “Fictional, but Accurate?”  It sounds like most artful MovieSpeak.

All Bad Poetry Is Sincere according to Oscar Wilde (as artfully compressed by Harold Bloom) and, thief that I am, All Bad Persuasion Is Sincere.  In the release of Mark Twain’s unabridged Autobiography, we see evidence of the operation of both Rules.

Twain dictated his autobiography during the last four years of his life, then arranged it as a book.  He, however, left explicit directives for the publication of his life story.

“From the first, second, third and fourth editions all sound and sane expressions of opinion must be left out,” Twain instructed them in 1906.  “There may be a market for that kind of wares a century from now.  There is no hurry.  Wait and see.”

At the risk of stupendous simplification, when Twain says to cut “. . . expressions of opinion . . .” he is saying to cut the Sincerity.  Both as poetry and persuasion, Twain understands that sincere expression is bad art and worse rhetoric.  And, as described in the NYT review, one should admire Twain’s restraint in sharing his sincere opinions.

He notes of his youth that “In my schoolboy days, I had no aversion to slavery.  I was not aware there was anything wrong about it.”  He hates the military and views soldiers in the then contemporary wars in Cuba and the Philippines as “uniformed assassins.”  He despises the Rockefellers and robber barons for their low tax bills.  The Times reviewer also observes that, “He complains about his lawyer, his publisher, the inventor of a failed typesetting machine who he feels fleeced him, and is especially hard on a countess who owns the villa in which he lived with his family in Florence, Italy, in 1904.”  And, critics?

“I believe that the trade of critic, in literature, music, and the drama, is the most degraded of all trades, and that it has no real value,” Twain writes. “However, let it go,” he adds. “It is the will of God that we must have critics, and missionaries, and Congressmen, and humorists, and we must bear the burden.”

Considered in brief, Twain’s opinions are categorically just like mine and yours – all our own and best left out of the marketplace if you aim at poetry or persuasion.

“The Great Gatsby” is a difficult novel that successfully polarizes readers, especially ones who take it seriously. That marks great literature. When serious readers react oppositely to the same work, you know you are looking at good, if not great, art. Please note, too, that the range of reviews today mirrors the range of reviews that greeted this book when it arrived new in bookstores over 80 years ago. You can easily search those then-current reviews on the Internet for your own amusement and instruction and once again be surprised over how little people change. For some of us, “The Great Gatsby” is a wonder, while it leaves others wondering at us.

To describe briefly the novel: Set in the American 1920s at the height of a stock market boom in the Roaring Twenties, this novel is narrated by Nick Carraway, a wealthy, young Ivy League graduate who’s learning the bond business on Wall Street. Nick tells us about his life at the time as it connects with a second cousin, Daisy Buchanan, from Louisville, who is married to the fabulously and formidably wealthy Tom Buchanan. Tom and Nick schooled together at Yale where Nick had an uneasy relationship with the larger, wealthier, and crueler Tom Buchanan. The story unfolds with Nick, Daisy, Tom, and an attractive female golf pro, Jordan Baker, out on the glistening lawns of the wealthy sections of Long Island. Fold in Tom’s mistress, Myrtle Wilson and her clueless, but devoted husband, George, and we have a strong story, but nothing about this Gatsby guy. Only when we are well into the story do we hear about the title character, Jay Gatsby, and he is slowly brought into plot and character development. Gatsby has been driving this novel from the beginning, but we don’t know that. We learn in subtle, indirect fashion that Daisy and Gatsby have a mutual past that neither our narrator, Nick, nor her husband, Tom, discern or know. And in that past connection we grasp the proximate, animating force of the novel: Gatsby loved Daisy then and loves her now. The novel unfolds as Daisy learns that Gatsby owns a mansion across the bay from her estate. The old lovers cross paths again – one forcing the reunion, the other gliding into it – and we have all the action that will drive the remainder of the novel. I reveal nothing more and observe: The novel is simple and obvious, a story of wealthy, sophisticated people in boom times, with a narrator watching a married couple that has romantic rivals.

The basic plot and character in part explain why serious readers can be so seriously divided over “The Great Gatsby.” Virtually everyone who dislikes the novel finds it to be simplistic, boring, and obvious. Gee whiz, let’s try to get interested in people who have everything in life yet have trouble doing anything in life well. Tom and Daisy have it all, yet are stupid, shallow, and thoughtless people. Gatsby at least strives for something better and while he achieves great wealth, notoriety, and popularity, he, too, suffers from problems that should be easy to solve given his talents and resources. Jordan Baker, the female golf pro, is successful, famous, and attractive, but alas she can’t make her life work. And, Nick, our narrator, seems to observe everything well, except for himself. All in all, we have a cast of characters who warrant scorn, dismissal, and contempt.

And yet, other serious readers see Gatsby as a great novel, a work of art. How?

Start first with a quality that almost all serious readers notice and admire: The writing. Fitzgerald writes romantic sentences with a Hemingway edge. His words are at once beautiful and descriptive. Even readers who overall disparage the book, heed the writing, and marvel at it. The voice is unique, aesthetic, and sharp. Gatsby is Fitzgerald’s finest writing and certainly some of the best writing in English anytime. But writing skill alone will not save this book for some serious readers.

What earns this disdain, I think, is found in the deceptive simplicity of the book. At a genuine level of analysis the story is rather easy to grasp, understand, and evaluate. Especially if you are reading this book under requirement as it appears many students experience, the psychological demands of the classroom (it’s required, a specific timeline, deadlines for completing various chapters, assignments in class or for homework on the book, etc.) I think lead many readers into the worst outcome for a reading class – you read to survive the course rather than for your own simple entertainment and education. Under these conditions, the obvious, simple, and designed elements of “The Great Gatsby” attract immediate attention in the short term demands of required reading and lead some readers to obvious, simple, and designed conclusions about the book. If you’ve “had” to read Gatsby, give it a year, and try once again. It’s not a maturity issue. It’s a motivation issue: Read it for yourself on your own terms.

If you read for yourself, you can reflect on complexities in the book. Realize first that Fitzgerald writes differently about Tom and Daisy than he does for Nick or Jordan Baker, or the minor, but important characters like Myrtle and George Wilson, but most especially for Gatsby. With Tom and Daisy, Fitzgerald tends to offer direct and immediate observations of their behavior and thoughts as if he is looking them right now with a God’s eye view and telling us about them. He really gets under the skin with Tom and Daisy. With Gatsby, by contrast, most of the writing is a narrative recounting of the past that is cloudy, perhaps misremembered, and operates as description with little interpretation or with contradiction from an unreliable narrator (Nick). This makes the characters of Tom and Daisy seem like high quality photos while Gatsby comes off more like a portrait done by an Impressionist painter: Clearly a portrait, but with shadows and no sharp edges. Tom and Daisy are objects. Gatsby is all subject and he becomes a Rorschach test allowing us to project ourselves onto him.

Next, you need to be alert to absolutely crucial plot actions that are briefly presented and can be easily missed. The climatic action of the story in particular requires the reader to do a lot of work and keep certain actions in mind through a long series of character reactions and developments. Recall the scene late in the book that takes place in a suite at the Plaza Hotel. Who’s in the scene? What do they say to each other? How are relationship conflicts resolved? Then, the characters move rapidly out of the Plaza Hotel and drive back to West and East Egg in separate cars. How do those car rides manifest behaviorally the relationship conflicts resolved earlier in the Hotel? Stated another way, in the Hotel we hear conflict and resolution. From the car rides we see how that conflict and resolution play out in action. This sequence is the ultimate plot point for the novel that drives interpretation. You need to read it carefully.

Finally, you need to relate what we hear and see regarding relationship conflict and resolution with the interpretation and understanding of Jay Gatsby. You’ll recall that Tom and Daisy are bright, detailed, and sharp characters while Gatsby is vague, shadowed, and blurry. You can try to understand Gatsby through the events that occur following the car rides back to the Eggs. For you see, the whole point of the book is in what happens to Gatsby and what happens to Gatsby is caused by his character. (So, Fitzgerald exemplifies that maxim that all writers steal and that good writers steal from the best which in this case is Fitzgerald stealing from Heraclitus!)

For many people the basic theme of “The Great Gatsby” is this: Be careful what you wish for. I think at a simple level of analysis this is true. At a deeper level (one that follows my suggestions above) I would refine that theme into this: Be careful what you aspire to. For me, this novel is a great cautionary meditation on the American Dream and its less pleasant possibilities. In positive form, the American Dream is that you can be more than you started with. That explains in part why this book is often required for younger readers in high school or college who are taking their first real steps toward realizing their own American Dream. Fitzgerald offers Gatsby as a caution to those of us who think that aspiration past our beginnings is a good thing, a desirable thing, and the point of ambition. Everyone in this novel aspires to be more than they seem to be or who they are. Everyone in this novel suffers loss, failure, or disaster. No one in this novel leaves with any awareness of why they failed. Yet most of the characters can be described as either great challengers to the American Dream or else already living the American Dream. How is it possible for such failure to occur?

In my eyes, the answer is found in the last sentence of the novel: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” Aspiration moves “against the current.” Ambition motivates us not to a positive manifestation of the Dream, with the Dream as the Vision or Goal of one’s life, but rather ambition motivates us to a negative manifestation of the Dream, with Dream as Fantasy or Psychosis or UnReality. And for those of us who aspire, we will find ourselves “borne back ceaselessly into the past” a modern Sisyphus doomed to push the stone uphill to the crest only to see it roll down to the valley every time.

That is a soul-chilling thought. Isn’t this kind of ambition a good thing? Don’t all good parents aspire for their children to aspire? Doesn’t it all fall down if we don’t aspire? It is not that anyone in the novel aspires badly or stupidly or illegally, but rather that they aspire at all is the root and branch of their failure. Here, “The Great Gatsby” argues that it is ambition itself that will cause people to fail and worse still to fail without insight and repair, for as long as you continue to aspire you will continue to fail.

This is an interesting and heuristic interpretation. First, it breaks free of the simple and obvious surface appearances and misdirections that divert some readers: It’s the 1920s and irrelevant; it’s about a bunch of spoiled white folks; it’s about the vita loca. Clearly, there’s a lot more going on here and it requires careful, thoughtful reading and reflection. Second, it explains why Gatsby is still appealing to so many people even after 80 years. It turns out that we are still living in a Modern age and the current Postmodern foolishness is explained by the past: Gatsby and Tom and Daisy and Nick would call themselves Postmodern today. The American Dream here is the defining element of Modernism and the fact that we’re still aspiring the same old way like Jay Gatsby connects with us at a deep level. Third, it reinforces the perceived greatness of the novel that many readers see and continue to see. This is not only a well written, well structured, pretty novel, it also addresses eternal human nature and the repetitive futility we experience in life. Gatsby is dramatic philosophy, a better written Platonic dialog.

Or so I think.

P.S.  Where’s the persuasion in this?  Persuasion requires a kind of aspiration in the source.  You don’t persuade to pass the time, but to achieve another goal.  The desire to achieve goals can be seen as aspiration.  Further, persuasion is certainly a fellow traveler with aspiration.  Perhaps, the desire to persuade is also the mark of Fitzgerald’s warning about aspirations?

Observed at Amazon:

The Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ: or How to Philosophize with a Ham by Friedrich Nietzsche~Michael Tanner~R. J. Hollingdale (Paperback – Jan. 1, 1990)