To Baz Luhurmann:

 

It’s a lifetime of reading, this Gatsby business, someone once told me. Like something out of Wodehouse, it was one of those comically oblique statements, an idle meditation from one of Bertie Wooster's hapless relatives—stodgy and elliptical and romantic all at once. And maybe because of that, it's also a phrase I've turned to often. At first, I just liked its auditory pulses, the wheezy exhale of its words that sounded simultaneously throwaway and all-important. But later on, I turned to it simply because it was true, because my wanting to be a writer had turned Gatsby into this kind of big-daddy totem, an author’s golem.

 

I think you understand? No? Let me go on.

 

I first heard the phrase when I was sixteen and away at school, and I took it in earnest because when you’re young and generally in awe and seeing first-hand the kind of things you thought only existed in books or movies or just the collective American imagination, you can't help but think in these terms. You simply accepted that a kind of magic can be had, and for me, for a time, that was prep school. I dressed in coat-and-tie at dinner, adhered to the honor code, and was assigned an “old boy” for guidance for when I was a “new boy,” or a “newb,” (which is where that term comes from for all you crack neologists). In morning chapel we sat in Anglican-facing pews on seats carved with the names of dead people who gave money before your grandparents were born. The rowing crew had their own club jackets and we bought snacks in the Tuck shop. Our dorms featured aging, lead-paned windows mounted in stone frames and were always freezing. We lobbied the girls (there were girls!) for furtive assignations in the back of closets, and if you don’t think that that is some kind of magic in and of itself, you only live in the feckless, sexless world of Harry Potter.

 

Indeed, prep school is an exotica, a bizarre and otherworldly creation I suspect equally astounded the river of lock-jawed bluebloods who brushed past me on their way to the campus quad, or the chapel lawn, or the boat house—their hacky sacks, their lacrosse sticks, their Carmex’d grins in tow.

 

And we read Gatsby too, because everyone who goes through that period of high school reads it, no matter where you are, and it is that mysterious obligation that has lent Gatsby a kind of unfortunatehave-to taint, a why-must-we-bother weight. But also because of that it's become something else, something kind of wonderful.

 

Gatsby comes across as a nod and a wink and an unspoken yeah, I been there too look of the face. This would have held true for me and my 16-year-old peers except you can’t really read That Book in the Place Where I Was with any distance or irony or perspective such that you can set it down in a corner and criticize and laugh and generally point the finger. It’s hard, maybe impossible, to do that when you’re sitting next to the very people Fitzgerald held in a kind of Janus-faced reproach, the people he not-so-secretly loved for their effortless approach to everything, but whom he also defamed for their laziness, for their depraved indifference, for their sins. He did so want to be like them.

 

I actually met Charlie Scribner once. He was old and leathery then, and he was receiving awards for being old and leathery and for giving lots of money to his old school, which was also my old school, the one Where I Was. Why do I bring him up? Well, his dad was the one responsible for publishingGatsby in the first place (was also at Where I Was), and also for issuing what was called a “student edition” in the early 1960s. And that is how it came to be That Book. (Incidentally, the guy who edited That Book, Max Perkins, also did the Hemingway edits and was also at school Where I Was, so conspiracy anyone on this Gatsby thing?)

 

Gatsby, of course, was a con. His real name was Gatz. He associated with a character based on real-life mobster Arnold Rothstein. So it’s not just that Gatsby (Gatz) wanted in on this thing of Daisy’s because, yes, he loved her, but also because he was, more elementally, an outsider (religious, ethnic) and not a Class outsider—the more acceptable interpretation given Where I Was.

Another thing. Gatsby is elegantly short, barely 50,000 words, a sleek widget. And despite what others may tell you, that kind of thriftiness is very American. Though perhaps the comic irony here is what really sets us apart, and what makes Gatsby, Gatsby, is our collective impulse to Want It. In no other place in the world is Wanting It so important—it’s what makes us Us. The rest of the world doesn’t think this way. For them it’s Living, or Family, or Nation, or some noble configuration therein.

 

Gatsby himself has always been a tote for that very desire. He was also a fraud, but we Americans kind of like our frauds, don’t we? Tom and Daisy were the bigger and the less deserving in Fitzgerald’s tale and somehow latching on to that aspect, as hidden as it is, is our faint and remaining interest in that wickedly righteous pair.

 

So, Baz, I hear you’re gonna do a movie about our National Epic, and I’ve seen your other stuff and I like your sensibility, but you have to understand that Gatsby isn't just another costume drama. And while I find it curious that an Australian director casting an English starlet and an American movie star hopes to capture all that I’ve discussed (and in 3-D!!!), I'm open to it. I'm an American, and we Americans cherish many things. Including frauds. So maybe, just maybe, Baz, you’ll fit right in.

Best of luck,

Edmund Lee