In the 1980s I started toward an understanding of Jay Gatsby.

I write of the Gatsby, as in the novel The Great Gatsby. (For movie lovers I recommend the Robert Redford version of the character). Of course neither Gatsby nor my understanding of him would be complete without the woman. I'll come back to this in a moment.

I first read the novel in the early to mid-70s but it wasn’t until the late 80s that I attempted to emulate that magnificent work of literary art. The delay was necessary. You see, The Great Gatsby is a matter of art imitating life and that usually occurs only when life serves up tragic source material. In other words, up until then I was completely tragedy-free.

That’s kind of how it was for F. Scott Fitzgerald. By several orders of magnitude, The Great Gatsby is F. Scott Fitzgerald. That’s what made the novel work—that and the dedicated effort spent in years of writing, editing and re-writing. As opposed to popular myth, Fitzgerald did not dash out his novel in a state of inebriated inspiration. He planned and re-planned the novel, outlined chapters and carefully crafted his story. He aimed for a conscious literary effort and the result is one of the great American novels.

It is a bildungsroman that was crafted by well-hone literary skill and imagined by an author experienced in the themes about which he wrote. I did not know this when I first read the book. Instead, I merely fell in love with the prose, the story and the vivid imagery.

All that changed in the mid-1980s, after being on the brunt end of a relationship for which I was unprepared: Or more precisely, after the delirious highs and crushing lows of an intoxicating chemical imbalance generalized as love. I didn’t know then what I know now—that the uncontrollable adrenalin of feeling is really emotion unmitigated by intellect. Being inexperienced or ill-prepared is the reason that some will invest all that they hold dear in an emotional effort having little to do with humanity. It is maturity and experience that teaches us that the sudden and intense, “can’t live without you” feelings are merely just that: Feelings. Emotions. Abstract perceptions unmoored from reality. (You may quote me on that.)

It is excess that fictional characters like Romeo and Juliet—or Gatsby—cannot overcome because emotional intensity blinds them to the options. That, and let’s face it, our vicarious enjoyment of fiction would be lost without the elevation of emotion over mature intellect. Gatsby could have easily saved himself the trouble had he only taken the view that Daisy was a rich, shallow, spoiled, weak person who married a man only marginally different from her (not better, just different). But one of the ways fiction suspends disbelief is in the omission of the obvious. In Gatsby’s case, the omission of the obvious was that Daisy wasn’t worth the effort and could never really care for anyone but herself. Sometimes it’s the same sort of act of omission for real people. We elevate a feeling and call it love when it is merely a physical attraction. And then we compound the error by ignoring any data conflicting with what we feel. How much better would it be if instead of saying, “How do you feel about so-and-so?” we approached the situation with, “What do you think about so-and-so?” After all, when the physical allure of newness wanes, that’s what we end up doing. By that time we are usually a few months down the road while asking, “Who are you and what was I thinking?” That’s if we’re lucky and marriage was not the road most quickly taken.

And yes, there is indeed such a thing as love. Real love. But it is so much more than the rush of feelings. The real thing is work. It’s an acceptance that not all will be roses. It’s an understanding that we haven’t the right or even the ability to dictate another person’s life. Love may—just may—provide the impetus for change in a person, but only if freely pursued by the one who will be changing in some way. Out of love you can never demand anything. If you really do love someone, then that means accepting him or her in spite of that with which you may be at odds, And I’m not talking about the “opposites attract” fiction, either. Let’s dispel that notion right now: Opposites do attract, but they eventually repel because toleration cannot long abide contention. And make no mistake about it, toleration—the suffered endurance of unpleasantness—is the only glue that holds together any two opposing people. And that sort of thing can be...well...tolerated only for so long.

In short, then, instead of first going with just our heart and using our intellect to validate those feelings, the experience of maturity teaches us to first go with our intelligence and to validate our reasoning with our hearts.

So, how does all this relate to me? Well, going with my heart—and by virtue of inexperience being ill-equipped to do so—is what happened to me in the mid 80s. And because of my singular inability to otherwise grasp emotional context, it lingered with me for years.

This brings me back to The Great Gatsby and my understanding of both the work as fiction and as an author’s self portrait. My appreciation for his work came at a price—a figurative kicking in of my teeth and a thorough round of thrashing.

My first expression of this education was in the form of a short story in 1987. It was an effort to take a few things I knew by way of experience and blend them into a narrative. The result was a story titled, Socials and it variously shined with brilliance while suffering underdevelopment. The whole of my effort didn’t quite live up to the sum of its parts. Before completely shelving it I spent years trying to convert it into a novel.

But I guess I finally grew into the story. For when I dusted it off last year, the rewrite almost wrote itself. The story flowed, the needed plot materialized and within weeks I had a finished novella.

So, now, SOCIALS is an e-book exclusively available from my publisher, The Lighthouse Press, Inc. 20 some-odd years in the making it came with a cost that I would not have choosen to pay. But I am a better writer for having paid the price.