April 10, 1925—When Scribners released The Great Gatsby, viewed by many (including the present blogger) as the Great American Novel, F. Scott Fitzgerald was far away from his publishing house and the locale of his greatest masterpiece, in the south of France—hoping, like other American writers of the period, to live more cheaply there.
Over a year ago, my college friend Greg e-mailed me that he was so enthralled by the style of Tender Is the Night, Fitzgerald’s next novel, that his copy was underlined from beginning to end. Much the same thing happened to my paperback copy of Gatsby (which, due to more than half a dozen re-readings since college, is now cracked down the middle).
No other book has so repaid me with consistent surprise, delight, amazement, and renewed faith in the possibilities of the written word.
The cost of the experiences required by the author to produce this extraordinary achievement was enormous. Upon publication, initial reviews and reactions of associates were respectful and, in some cases, absolutely on the mark (Fitzgerald’s “intellectual conscience,” Edmund Wilson, told his Princeton classmate that it was "the best thing you have done — the best planned, the best sustained, the best written").
But by the fall, sales still weren’t strong enough to repay Fitzgerald’s $6,200 debt to Scribners. The tepid commercial reaction, along with his mounting expenses, led him to crank out much short fiction that fell short of his increasingly high standards.
Earlier in the decade, Fitzgerald came east with equally glamorous wife Zelda from his native Minnesota to conquer New York—in the wake of a war that, in devastating Europe, left Gotham as the de facto financial and media capital of the world. (The couple lived on Long Island while partying in the Big Apple.) It’s no accident, then, that Gatsby’s quartet of principal characters are Midwesterners—like their creator, adrift in the East, in an age of material excess and moral confusion.
(By the way, if you want to see a fascinating discussion of the religious and moral issues of the novel, tune in—as I did tonight—to this C-Span rebroadcast of “the Dead Theologians Society” discussion of “God & Morality in The Great Gatsby.”)
I could go on and on about this novel--about:
* why its ineffable magic has failed to translate to the big screen (Robert Towne turned his hand to the second project offered by Paramount head Robert Evans, Chinatown, because he didn’t want to be known as the man who fouled up Gatsby on film);
Over a year ago, my college friend Greg e-mailed me that he was so enthralled by the style of Tender Is the Night, Fitzgerald’s next novel, that his copy was underlined from beginning to end. Much the same thing happened to my paperback copy of Gatsby (which, due to more than half a dozen re-readings since college, is now cracked down the middle).
No other book has so repaid me with consistent surprise, delight, amazement, and renewed faith in the possibilities of the written word.
The cost of the experiences required by the author to produce this extraordinary achievement was enormous. Upon publication, initial reviews and reactions of associates were respectful and, in some cases, absolutely on the mark (Fitzgerald’s “intellectual conscience,” Edmund Wilson, told his Princeton classmate that it was "the best thing you have done — the best planned, the best sustained, the best written").
But by the fall, sales still weren’t strong enough to repay Fitzgerald’s $6,200 debt to Scribners. The tepid commercial reaction, along with his mounting expenses, led him to crank out much short fiction that fell short of his increasingly high standards.
Earlier in the decade, Fitzgerald came east with equally glamorous wife Zelda from his native Minnesota to conquer New York—in the wake of a war that, in devastating Europe, left Gotham as the de facto financial and media capital of the world. (The couple lived on Long Island while partying in the Big Apple.) It’s no accident, then, that Gatsby’s quartet of principal characters are Midwesterners—like their creator, adrift in the East, in an age of material excess and moral confusion.
(By the way, if you want to see a fascinating discussion of the religious and moral issues of the novel, tune in—as I did tonight—to this C-Span rebroadcast of “the Dead Theologians Society” discussion of “God & Morality in The Great Gatsby.”)
I could go on and on about this novel--about:
* why its ineffable magic has failed to translate to the big screen (Robert Towne turned his hand to the second project offered by Paramount head Robert Evans, Chinatown, because he didn’t want to be known as the man who fouled up Gatsby on film);
* how it touches on issues and intellectual trends (e.g., Prohibition, eugenics and racial anthropology) of its own time while transcending them;
* how several people influenced major characters (e.g., polo player and WWI pilot Tommy Hitchcock inspired much of Tom Buchanan);
* how its cover art—by Francis Cugat, brother of orchestra leader Xavier Cugat—might have influenced the description of the famous eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg; even
* how the Golden Age of Sports figures into it (Tom Buchanan is a great polo player, while Jordan Baker is an “incuriously dishonest” golfer).
But let’s finish up with something that summons up the world Fitzgerald left behind—and the world his narrator, Nick Carraway, returns to, in an attempt, if not to recapture the past, as Gatsby had tried to do, then to experience values that never died.
Toward the end of the novel, Carraway recalls, in lushly romantic prose only surpassed by the description immediately following it of “the fresh green breast of the New World,” “my Middle West—not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede towns, but the thrilling returning trains of my youth, and the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of holly wreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow.”
Significantly, this vision celebrates returning home during an interval of light in an otherwise dark season. It gives literal life to the sense of grace that the lapsed Catholic and wandering Midwesterner Fitzgerald sought throughout his far-too-short life, and that he embraced, for "a transitory enchanted moment," in The Great Gatsby.
D-Squared notes that it is the inverse of The Talented Mr. Ripley (or, more temporally, vice versa).
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