Dear Editor:

My wife and I recently saw in Minneapolis at the new Guthrie Theater the world premiere of "The Great Gatsby," adapted by Simon Levy, and the first authorized stage version of the novel since 1926. [F. Scott] Fitzgerald was a native son of St. Paul, so it is appropriate for the anniversary of his birth to present a new version in Minneapolis. It will be soon followed by a staged reading of the novel (six hours and a half!) at the Walker Art Museum in Minneapolis.

The Guthrie has all the bells and whistles you can imagine for the staging of the play. But much of the meaning of the novel depends upon Nick Carraway's interpretation of the story as it proceeds, and those passages can't be visually dramatized. They can only be spoken directly to the audience. They tend therefore to be sacrificed to what can be visually presented.

In the novel, for example, Nick at the end places the events in an interpretation of history as a declension from the time when the continent was first glimpsed by Dutch sailors' eyes in New York, a moment when it was commensurate "for the last time in history" to man's "capacity for wonder." What dominates the present in Nick's mind, however, is a sense of what Oswald Spengler called "The Decline of the West," which Fitzgerald had read. It is also no accident that three years earlier than the novel, T.S. Eliot's poem "The Waste Land" was published.

The Levy adaptation of the novel focuses on the time of the jazz age, but Fitzgerald also had in mind a larger pessimistic sense of history. Romain Rolland, the French writer, formulated a concept -- "pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will" -- that Fitzgerald might have recognized as a way to express his own conflicting feelings about Gatsby and his world.

Cushing Strout is Cornell professor emeritus of American studies and humane letters. He has taught "The Great Gatsby" many times and written about it in "Making American Tradition" (1990).