The Old Great Gatsby, Post-Olympics Blues

By Roger Rosenblatt

How did it feel to win 122 gold, 78 silver, 93 bronze? How did it feel? Well, wearing all the medals at once was a bit hard on the neck, but otherwise it was awesome. I mean awesome! I was totally psyched! I figured to win the 200-m freestyle and the single scull. But who would have thought I'd also take the decathlon, the triathlon and the mathlon, not to mention the pommel horse, the high horse, the gift horse and the pole vault with horse? By the time I got to the 50,000-m, trans-Sydney long jump, I was wiped. The Games take their toll on an old sport.

Old sport. Jay Gatsby used to call everyone an old sport, including the son-of-a-bitch Tom Buchanan, who did not like it. Fitzgerald borrowed the term from a bootlegger friend, Max Gerlach, who shot himself in 1939. Who could blame him? It's terrible to be an old sport, a creaky, achy, fatty over-the-hill athlete--even when one was a fair athlete at best--and to watch those long-muscled, wrinkle-free kids on TV, and to be borne back ceaselessly into the past.

What would Gatsby's event have been? Track and field, probably. Something where one could peer down a distance at a flickering goal.

I always teach The Great Gatsby just after the end of summer, when the Long Island light has lowered to copper streaks, the "inessential houses," as Fitzgerald called them, have been closed and boarded, and Gatsby is dead again. He is dead every autumn, and I take a melancholy consolation speaking of him to my college students after everything he yearned for is irretrievably gone. That, of course, is the heartbreak of the novel--the yearning to be young forever and to redo, remake. And the yearning does not get more manageable simply because one can do nothing about it.

The pleasure in watching the Olympic kids on TV was their full-tilt surefootedness. "It was awesome! I was totally psyched!" Sports are what happens years ago, except for the attitude they engender--that one may live in a perpetual state of happy expectation, even at an age when victory is out of the question. Fitzgerald said, "The compensation of a very early success is a conviction that life is a romantic matter."

I put it to you: Would you not give up all the fancy boredom of the so-called life of the mind to be standing on a pedestal, mouthing the words to the National Anthem? Forget the Olympics. Would you not be ecstatic simply to be an athlete living young, beginning every morning by climbing into some garish warm-up suit and preposterously engineered running shoes and going higher, faster, stronger?

Think of it. No, don't. Feel it. The life of the body is your principal life. Sans the New York Review of Books. Sans the chitchat of the dead. Sans words like sans.

Fact is, I don't like thinking very much. And I'm not especially good at it. I can do a little in a pinch--and some of my best friends think--but most of the time I'd take a sentiment over a thought. Sentiments are akin to reflexes in sports. And you can hold on to them long past your prime.

They enable you to see life as a romantic matter--just as Gatsby did, and America always does. I don't recall a single basketball game I ever played in as a kid. What I do remember is the romantic matter: Saturday-morning practices; walking, loping four blocks to the school gym; the sun glow on the court, shot through the wire-mesh-covered windows; lifting the ball from the rack; the sleepy-eyed dreams; ball echoes on wood; body rises; arc of flight; endless flight.

I do not mean to dismiss the intellectual life for others. A while back, I saw Harold Bloom, the great old Yale professor and author, most recently of How to Read and Why, talking on C-SPAN's Booknotes. Weepy, flabby, brilliant, he was full of hope and sorrow for the literary life that is mistreated and unvalued today. He spoke up for Cervantes and Shakespeare. He had "divorced" the Yale English department. He hated e-books. If you have a mind like Bloom's, no problem.

How to read and why. Why read The Great Gatsby? To punish oneself with the fact that while wishing life to be eternally renewable, eternally correctable, one knows--in the silent rooms of one's ridiculous mansions on the sea, brooding over the drunken parties and the Ain't We Got Fun? dancers--that it is not.

And yet, rising above all that, and above all the disappointment of time and reality, as from the bottom of a swimming pool, is Gatsby still, better than the rest of them, and, I suppose, Bloom too, for whom life remains a romantic matter.

But I'm no Bloom. I'd take being young and strong any day of the week, and twice on Sundays. Here come the baseball play-offs. Here comes the basketball season. Here comes the past. In the twilight, I peer across the bay at the flickering light, and cling to the remote.