The Great Flatsby

What if The Great Gatsby was called The Great Flatsby, and it was about a bootlegger who was flat because something fell on him?

I don’t know the answer, but I read The Great Gatsby a few weeks ago, and it feels like it was a few months ago. I don’t know when time started doing this thing where I feel like I’m in a swamp and I can’t remember what happened yesterday or a month ago, and everything feels like it was so far away, when it was really right here but removed from the present moment by the illusion of time.

I know I read The Great Gatsby once before, long ago, for school. And I remember being completely bewildered by it. I was too young, I’m sure, to pick up on nuance and find meaning in anything that happens in there. I knew how to read, but I didn’t know how to read.

But I think there’s more to it than that.

I could be projecting the thoughts I have today onto my self of many years ago. But I recall distinctly how confusing I found the basic logistics of the novel, or the geography of it, rather.

Several important scenes—or several scenes, since (arguably, I guess) every scene in that novel is important—take place on a train that takes the narrator from his home outside the city into the city and back again. And when I was young and first read the novel, I had no concept of such a thing.

I mean, I knew what trains were. I had seen trains, I’m sure.

But I had never been on one. I had never gone from one place to another on a train. I knew no one who did that sort of thing.

I had no sense of the unique experience of being on a train, that feeling of being moved through space without having to keep your eyes on the road, without their even being a road, and rather than being stuck facing forward, in a seat you’re strapped into, having the freedom to move about, from car to car, or from table to table, and meeting people with whom you’ve been thrown into the same space by your common need or desire to be somewhere other than where you started out.

The Great Gatsby doesn’t really depend on that so much. But it does place its characters, several times, casually, in this sort of location, or mode of transportation, that the reader of today, in most of America, at least, is not in regular contact with. And while I can handle it now, I think it was disorienting when I was young.

I’m much more aware, now, than I would have been in my youth, of how this country used to have a transportation infrastructure. How trains used to run often and take people wherever they needed to go—and not just in New York, Boston, Chicago, and a couple of other places, but everywhere.

My own hometown in West Virginia had a trolley running through it, long before I was born. There was a path that ran through the woods and over a stream where my friends and brother and I spent a lot of our time. There was a bridge that ran over the stream, because it was where the trolley tracks used to be.

By the time I was born, there were only cars and buses. And you can use buses to get around, sure, but everyone I knew drove in cars.

And so reading The Great Gatsby this time, I was struck by the presence of train travel in it, how it leans against this mode of transportation, this setting for many notable scenes in literature, that’s virtually gone, now.

Mary McCarthy once wrote about a tense conversation she had with a military officer she met by chance on a train in “Artists in Uniform.”

James Alan McPherson wrote a number of stories that take place on trains.

In Swimming to Cambodia, Spalding Gray talked about meeting a guy from the Navy on a train who has really wild ideas about everything, including sex and Russians.

I’ve seen photographs going around on social media, of what cities used to look like, how handsome the buildings were and how densely they’d been built, compared with photos of the same streets today that have been cleared to make way for interstates or for nothing at all. Those photos come up here and there, and I share in many people’s horror at what’s become of the spaces we dwell in now that oil companies and car manufacturers have reshaped everything to look the way they want them to.

But I’m also upset at what we’ve lost as writers, that we no longer have this perfect setting for bringing several characters together and seeing what happens when they start talking.

Trains are places where strangers gather with nothing to do while they wait to reach their destinations. They’ve been replaced with vehicles in which people sit in isolation, or with someone, in most cases, that they already know.

Someone ought to write a blog post, or something, about the scale of what we have lost.