Baz Luhrmann, the audacious director of The Great Gatsby, was packing enough box office muscle to knock even Iron Man from the No 1 spot. He got off the plane some time ago in Australia from Cannes to be greeted by the news that his $180 million adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's literary classic was at the top of the international box office, 10 days before its Australian release on May 30 2013. With this film in the air this week, I thought I’d post a few items, several personal perspectives, which I’ve written over the last few years about this famous novel, novelist, and some historical, some sociological and psychological perspectives.-Ron Price, Tasmania.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHANGING ORDERS
They were a whole race going hedonistic, deciding on pleasure. -Scott Fitzgerald in Freud, Religion and the Roaring Twenties: A Psychoanalytic Theory of Secularization in Three Novelists--Anderson, Hemingway and Fitzgerald, Henry Idema III, Rowman& Littlefield Pub., 1990, p.5.
An old world was dieing
all around them as they*
laid the foundation for
the new one so few knew.
At the Somme and
Passchendaele the
dull thunder of the guns,
the trench warfare
saw millions die while
He quietly penned more
Tablets** for a different
kind of war for a new Order.
It was just then taking its
first form as that great war
was enduing and orders were
changing directions and forms.
But it all happened so quietly
as noise changed the face of Europe,
as religions died on the battlefield
and people in the millions turned to
sex, alcohol and secular substitutes.
They roared into the twenties with
the flapper, bathtub gin, howling jazz,
silent screen movies, lavish mansions,
sleek automobiles, and lots of glitter
and tinsel--missing the first formative
years of an Order that would change
the face of history, and exhaust the
energiesof a young man and make him
oldbefore his time; holding the world,
thenew Order on his shoulders was too
muchas the world went hedonistic, went
for pleasure—and millions still are caught.
* they='Abdu'l-Baha and Shoghi Effendi
** Tablets= Tablets of the Divine Plan
Ron Price 5/4/’96 to 22/5/’13.
EARLY PACKAGING BY AN EAGLE’S WINGS
All the sad young men of Scott Fitzgerald, and the lost generation of Ernest Hemingway, are seekers for landmarks and bearings in a terrain for which the maps have been mislaid. Theirs was the God-abandoned world of modernity where individuals define their own code, summon the necessary discipline, if possible, and make their story: tragic, pitiful, human, an infinity of secular trajectories through space, with nature as all and nothing at the centre, except perhaps a slowly crafted self with all its ambiguities and mysteries, some old and tired religion, and immense quantities of popular-literary psychology. -Ron Price, with thanks to Robert Penn Warren for his “Ernest Hemingway”, Modern Critical Views: Ernest Hemingway, editor, Harold Bloom, Chelsea House Publishers, 1985, pp.35-62.
The Order was just taking form, then,
and happiness far removed from the
glitter-and-tinsel of mere sensations,
astonishing immediacy, flourishing
moments of now…A freshness was
found in depth and poignancy in a
vision of oneness quite profound
and a background of civilization
gone to pot, war and death with a
gratification raised to cult-status—
sensation…A whole new basis for
the intellect deeply laid in the life
of a new God-man, two God-men,
three God-men now all gone: and
charisma institutionalizing, just
beginning to form in this new &
technologically united world.
For this new Form had been watered
with the blood of martyrs and more than
a century* of searching, finding, intense
discouragement, sweat and tears. Here
was new meaning, new wine in new bottles,
not just the accidents, changes and chances
that seem to form this mortal coil and human
naturestruggling intensely within confines.
Private spaces with fate, self and all that makes
this life of grandeur and emptiness, pleasure and
pain, simplicity and staggering complexity, small
places and an infinite universe. Here were faintest
beginnings back then, the earliest architecture: all
that pain and wonder packaged in an eagle’s wings.
Ron Price
26/2/’96 to 7/4/’13.
* Shayhk Ahmad left his home in 1792 and there followed a century of searching for the Promised One until 1892 when Baha’u’llah died. Slowly, after Baha’u’llah’s passing, the institutions of a new world Order began to form, especially after 1921. In the 1920s and 1930s, when F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, among others, did most of their writing it was a remarkably creative literary epoch in America. The Baha’i administrative order, the precursor of a future world order, took the form which was necessary for the international teaching plan to operate within.
THE AGE WE LIVE IN
Part 1:
It is not so much my authorial ego, or that I am a compulsive self-historiographer, which compels me to document my life more fully than most. All this poetry is my workshop where my awareness of life expresses itself quintessentially. I also see myself as part of a global pattern, a representative figure, part of a mytho-historical process which may be of use to future generations. I was born into a new age with the Kingdom of God just beginning when I was nine years old. In my lifetime the Baha'i administrative process, the nucleus and pattern for a new Order, went through a radical growth period. I have been committed to the promises and possibilities of this new way of Life.1
As F. Scott Fitzgerald was committed to and had a belief in American life in the 1920s, as American was going through new beginnings so, too, do I feel strongly, passionately, a new commitment, a new belief and new beginnings.
Part 2:
George Bull points out in his introduction to his massive biography of the life of Michelangelo that people are often best understood "in the crowded context of the significant changes and continuities of the age."2 The age I have lived in and through has also faced "significant changes and continuities." My life, I have little doubt, can be understood, too, as Michelangelo's and so many others have been understood, in this same general context of their age. -Ron Price with thanks to 1 Matthew Bruccoli, editor, The Notebooks of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Harcourt, Brace and Jovanovich, NY, 1945, p.vii; and 2George Bull, Michelangelo: A Biography, Viking Press, 1995, p.xviii.
I, too, saw myself as coming at
the end of a historical process,
so complex, staggeringly so. It
had its beginningsin the district
ofAhsa, those birds flying over
Akka,& those Men with beards
and I identified with it strongly.
I was born near the start of yet
another Formative Age:would
it last as long as the Greeks?1
I understood profoundly well
the claims of this new belief
as you did the claims of your
craft.2I was, like you, fortune's
darlingin this new age & I was,
too,the shell-shocked casualty
of a war that was more complex
than any of us could understand.
1 the Formative Age in ancient Greek civilization lasted from 1100 to 500 BC; this one which took place in modernity began 23 years before I was born and it’s still going strong.
2 F. Scott Fitzgerald, arguably the major American writer between the wars: 1919-1939.
he would like to eliminate totally.-Ron Price with thanks to 1ABC Radio National, September 23rd, 2005; and 2F. Scott Fitzgerald: On Writing, editor, Larry Phillips, Charles Scribner’s Sons, NY, 1985, pp.135-6.
LIMITS OF WONDER
Price hoped that readers would find in his poetry the ‘willingness of the heart’ that F. Scott Fitzgerald said described America. Perhaps, too, some might find the signs of his replenishing and revivifying vision of the world. Sheer awareness underpinning an analytical intellect, the power of analysis, a deepening complexity of response to society, a heightened sensitivity to the promise of life, a romance and hope, an exploration of the limits of wonder, willingness and fate: all of these Price saw in his poetry and he hoped others, who took the trouble to read his work, would also find this same richness. -Ron Price with thanks to Tony Tanner, The Reign of Wonder: Naivety and Reality in American Literature, Cambridge UP, 1965, pp. 355-361.
Written things are not for speech; their form is literary; they are stiff, inflexible and will not lend themselves to happy and affective delivery with the tongue....they have to be limbered up, broken up, colloquialized and turned into the common forms of unpremeditated talk--otherwise they will bore... -Mark Twain, The Autobiography.
Poetry is the discovery, the love,
the passion for the name of anything,
for the rhythm of the visible world and
the infinite truths which are each beautiful,
unique, separate, interrelated with their
roots deep down in the soil about them
bringing an endless continuum from the eyes
and ears with moods monitoring all of it.
There’s a glistening and shining amidst the dull
fragments which are part of the poison, vanity,
and emptiness of this semblance of reality…..I
limber it up, colloquialize it for you, here, try to
turn it into some unpremeditated talk, poem, to
deliver it happily to your mind, eye, and your ear.
Ron Price
19/7/’97 to 7/4/’13
