Fitzgerald did not give part of Nick’s story to Michaelis because it was convenient. By seamlessly transferring Nick’s vision into Wilson’s Greek neighbor, Fitzgerald lifts the narration out of the “merely personal.” Nick sees beyond himself, and this second sight is reinforced by the eyes of Eckleburg and the owl eyes of the man in the library. Nick sees vicariously what Michaelis and another man actually witness: Myrtle’s dead body, the body Daisy will not see and cannot face. It is more than enough. The men undo Mrs. Wilson’s shirt “still wet with perspiration” and see “that her left breast was hanging loose like a flap, and there was no need to listen to the heart below.” Later, Nick tells Gatsby, “She was ripped open.” He did not have to be there to see. For a moment, with Nick, the reader stares into the heart of being, and it has stopped. I see what I did not see. I experience that which is outside my own experience. This is the magic of reading novels. This is the working out of the problem of illusion. I take a book off the shelf. I open it up and begin to read, and what I discover in its pages is real.
1997
Franklin Pangborn: An Apologia
I DON’T KNOW WHEN MR. FRANKLIN PANGBORN FIRST CAME TO my attention. A man of the screen’s margins, his legacy comes of repetitions. He pops up in one movie here, in another there. He rules a moment or a full-fledged scene, never an entire film. It was only after I had seen many American films of the thirties and forties that his name came to signify the pompous underling for whom I have come to feel affection. I like the reliability of his character, and I like his name. It combines the elevated connotations of Franklin, as in Ben and Roosevelt, with the pathos of pang, and the fact that this pang is married to born delights me with its Dickensian aptness.
With certain modulations, Pangborn always played the same man. Before he uttered a word, his character was in place. The quintessential tight-ass, he held himself in constant check. His posture erect to the point of distortion: back swayed, butt out, chin raised a quarter of an inch, his gestures colored by a shade of snooty effeminacy, he is the man who, if he remains on the screen long enough, will be brought down. His is a ridiculous life, a life of rules maintained at all costs, of self-inflated dignity, of the fully buttoned suit, of obsessive cleanliness, of correctness. When he speaks, his voice swells with enunciations that are decidedly un-American. In truth, his tone beam a suspicious resemblance to that other English, sometimes known as the King’s. For Americans, this accent connotes either genuine grandness or pretension. Pangborn has the voice of the small-lime snob.
But why do I find Franklin Pangborn endearing? Why do I get pleasure from this altogether persnickety being who returns in one movie after another? It is partly because he is always ineffectual. In a position of real power the same character turns loathsome, but Pangborn appears time and again as the “manager” of something — store, hotel, apartment building — whose directives are subverted by the bedlam that takes place around him. And yet his desire to keep order, to maintain boundaries, to ignore the madness of others has a noble as well as pathetic dimension. Guided by decorum, the stiff man carries on, often ruffled but rarely defeated. He is the very image of threatened civility.
When I was growing up, my Norwegian mother had ideas about form, attachments to the signs of bourgeois life, which did not always match my American father’s more democratic ideals. Not long ago my mother told me that, at least in Norway, one never put out candles for a dinner without having lit the wicks. The candles should not be stumps. They may be new, but the wicks must be blackened before guests arrive at the house. I asked my mother why. “I have no idea,” she said, and laughed. “That’s just the way it was.” I now ignite my wicks before my guests arrive for a dinner party. Surely this shows a Pangbornian aspect to my personality, a will to form wholly unrelated to reason. Of course my father had no objection to blackened wicks. It is possible that he never even noticed this sign of good manners throughout his now forty-four-year marriage to my mother. Wicks fell under her domain — a domestic and feminine one.
My parents differed on the issue of fences, however, a deeper dispute that has further Pangbornian significance. My mother yearned for a fence around our property in Minnesota. For her it had nostalgic resonance, the comfort of enclosure, as well as aesthetic value. As a European, fences seemed natural to her. My father grew up as a farm boy on the prairie. He remembers barn raisings, quilting bees, and square dances. Fences reined in cows, but the idea of delineating one’s property smacked of the unneighborly. Pangborn is a character defined by fences, formal divisions that articulate boundaries, difference, hierarchies. In terms of broad American mythology, these fences have a feminine quality. Franklin Pangborn’s character stands in stubborn opposition to a freewheeling, democratic, masculine ideal as seen through the lens of American movies in the nineteen thirties and forties.
In an early, brief appearance in Preston Sturges’s The Palm Beach Story, Pangborn, the manager of an apartment building on Park Avenue, leads potential tenants to the apartment of a couple played by Claudette Colbert and Joel McCrea who, having fallen on hard times, have not paid the rent. Elegant in a dark, close-fitting suit, a spotless white handkerchief protruding from his breast pocket, Pangborn serves as a foil to the near-deaf Weenie King, a western millionaire in a shabby light-colored overcoat and cowboy hat, who is accompanied by his overdressed wife. As unrefined as he is loaded, the King bangs on the walls of the corridor with his cane and shouts non sequiturs while Pangborn works hard to maintain his dignity in the face of these vulgar high jinks. A Hollywood fantasy of the American West, the Weenie King doesn’t give a damn about form, grammar, deportment, or fences of any kind. Pangborn answers most of the King’s initial questions with the refrain “of course,” interrupted by a telltale clearing of his throat, a tic that recurs in the Pangborn persona. It is as if the sum of his disapproval has lodged itself as a bit of phlegm in his throat. The Weenie King’s wife notices that the apartment is dirty. The manager acknowledges this and apologizes. But the King yells that he likes dirt, that it’s as natural as (among other things) “disease” and “cyclones.” Sturges knows dirt is the bottom line here. Pangborn is nothing if not immaculate.