Buy my book on mythology Mythologies and their creation
Buy my book on macro economic ideas It's not going to get better
Buy my retro-futuristic Scifi short story collection Tales from the last space age
Listen to my podcast Living in the future
Why I didn’t write the sequel to The Great Gatsby this year
I follow copyright expirations like other people follow NBA draft picks. A few years ago the Sonny Bono copyright extension act began allowing new works to enter the public domain every year, 95 years from publication. The first year to be released was 1923, but the year I anticipated was 1925, which happens to expire on January first 2021. I had plans, you see. The Great Gatsby was first published in 1925 and I thought there would be some amazing things to say about the ultimate work about established wealth and the american dream belonging to all of us. My plan was to write a play and have it performed January first, or as close as possible. My wife works in the theater, and though I had never written a play, I was convinced that with her help and the cleverness of knowing the copyright expiration in advance I could do something substantial. I gave myself the entire year to write it. Then covid happened. I was stuck working from home the entire year in a shoebox apartment.
But it wasn’t just covid. As I began the first two acts seemed straightforward, a retelling of the parts of Gatsby that I would change and then a survey of all the changes that were possible because the work now truly belonged to everyone. A black passing Gatsby, a transgender man as Gatsby, a handicapped Gatsby. All the permutations of identity so that the story truly became a telling that everyone could escape the circumstances of their birth and beat out established wealth on moral grounds. It was after these two parts things became murky. What did it mean that everybody owned the American dream now?
I decided in my story Gatsby would achieve the goal that he yearned for while grasping at the green light from the end of his dock. He would go back through time and alter history. Instead of altering the metaphorical prize of Daisy’s love he would alter his own circumstances. What alteration was still up in the air. Would he travel to see Sigmund Freud and be cured of his obsession with Daisy, or perhaps disenfranchise Tom so that it was his own ancestors who struck it rich. What exactly did I want to say about this new era where we all owned the American dream.
For a while I did research on the LLano Colony in California. The LLano colony was an attempt at a socialist utopia, started by a former vice presidential candidate who had been on the socialist ticket with Eugene Debs. I researched Debs and the socialist movement in america. While Gatsby was wooing Daisy in his military uniform Debs was serving time in prison for speaking out against the war. In 1920 while still in jail he got 3.4 percent of the national vote. The 2020 primary reminded me of Debs and a socialist america and what it meant for something to belong to everyone.
A while later I found a quote from Fitzgerald that while he was writing Gatsby he was reading the work of Oswald Spengler. I glanced through spengler and though now discredited, he had a theory that societies were like Organisms, that they are born, grow, thrive, and die. Spengler called the western civilization from about the 10th century to the present the faustian society because of its quest for knowledge. Spengler believed that after about the year 2000 western society would decline into what he called caesarism by which he meant authoritarian rule. I thought the parallels to an authoritarian trump were interesting and I had planned to have excerpts from Trump in the play.
But what did it mean that it belonged to everyone? If I was to take this as a hopeful sign, that was what I wanted the focus to be. The idea I wanted to amplify was that we were in a new era where America belonged to everybody, maybe not as a socialist paradise, but at least the symbol of american opportunity, the great american novel, belonged to everyone. I was going to say that we were like the dutch settlers at the end of Gatsby seeing a new land of promise observing manhattan for the first time. I thought about this metaphor for several weeks.
As I said my wife works in theater. One of her co-workers is native american, and she directed a play on zoom by a native author. I think if I had been with anyone else the thoughts might not have bothered me. But I kept thinking, that land of promise that the dutch settlers found had people living there. Early on in the brainstorming process before researching the LLano colony, I had wondered if I would have Gatsby join some group of native americans out west. When I thought about the idea I realized I knew nothing about native society. Seeing my wife’s co-worker’s production I realized what the prosperity of the dutch settlers was based on. It wasn’ a new world after all, it was an invaded one, and one in which we had created a fantasy land on the bones of countless people.
Those dead people, they were part of the ‘everybody’ , and I knew nothing about them. They had their own society, with its own problems, and instead of sharing a fertile and beautiful land with them, we took it, killed most of them, and then proceeded to treat people who arrived after our initial theft as subservient for fear they would take from us the way we took from the original inhabitants. I thought about the world, in many ways spent, passing peak output of easily available resources and choking on the waste produced from their consumption. That was about when I decided that maybe the world didn’t need my sequel to Gatsby.
Maybe instead of another overconfident white man’s bold statement about prosperity and opportunity, I’d leave a space for another voice, one that might show us a way that we could all live with each other, sharing what’s left of the bounty of this world without overharvesting from it. Someone who knew something about how to live in a society not obsessed with consumption. Maybe that Gatsby sequel could come from another place in the world where they had figured out to live in some sort of symbiotic relationship with this world. I certainly haven’t and I don’t think that’s what I have to share with this world. I hope the real author of The Great Gatsby 2 will have something beautiful for us. I know I’m anxious to see it.