Scott's midnight cowboy

   Everybody's talkin' at me

   I don't hear a word

   they're sayin' ..

   A few years ago, it just happened to surface

   in the press, in passing, that some three 

   hundred thousand copies of The Great Gatsby

   were then being sold in the English language,

   every year. The text has enjoyed a scrupulous

   editing and continues to sustain the name of

   its Princetonian publishing family, Scribner,

   quite single-handedly, relieving any pressure

   on Hemingway. There really are plenty of en-

   during literary gestures in the American can-

   on but possibly none which can be said to be

   so plain and so impregnable. This is not an

   impenetrable book; but it is a book in the

   most autonomous sense, a communication des-

   tined for absorption in one distinctive way,

   steeped in a metabolic flux which gives the

   fairest warning against transposition into

   other constructions. 

   Here they go again, one could say, but it is

   not their fault. The Great Gatsby beats on,

   quietly unassailable and free. This is not

   allure; this is the current it comes in. It
   is always the Gatz boy, who was young when
   he left home, 

   .. going where the sun keeps shinin', 
   through the pourin' rain,
   going where the weather suits [his] clothes

   .. skipping over the ocean like a stone.


   

   

Fred Neil

Everybody's talkin' at me

1966©