Fitzgerald on ‘Gatsby’

1. “The uncertainties of 1919 were over - America was going on the greatest, gaudiest spree in history and there was going to be plenty to tell about it. The whole golden boom was in the air - its splendid generosities, its outrageous corruptions and the tortuous death struggle of the old America in prohibition. All the stories that came into my head had a touch of disaster in them — the lovely young creatures in my novels went to ruin, the diamond mountains of my short stories blew up, my millionaires were as beautiful and damned as Thomas Hardy's peasants.” F. Scott Fitzgerald

2. Fitzgerald on ‘Gatsby’ In Gatsby I selected the stuff to fit a given mood or ‘hauntedness’ or whatever you might call it, rejecting in advance in Gatsby, for instance, all the ordinary material for Long Island, big crooks, adultery theme and always starting from the small focal points that impressed me – my own meeting with Arnold Rothstein for instance. The letters of F.Scott Fitzgerald Penguin 1968

3. Factors that contributed to the way that the novel was produced. • Fitzgerald’s own aims: to achieve financial success and support the extravagant lifestyle that he enjoyed with his wife. • To capture the ebullience of the 1920’s but to be seen also as a critic of the 1920’s. • To be recognised as a ‘serious writer’. • The development of the American City – specifically New York.

4. Factors affecting the way that the novel is produced The process of writing ‘The Great Gatsby’ began in 1922. It was subject to many revisions as his letter to his editor in 1925 indicates. Fitzgerald wrote: • I’ve brought Gatsby to life • I’ve accounted for his money • I’ve fixed up the two weak chapters (VI and VII) • I’ve improved his first party. • I’ve broken up his long narrative in chapter VIII

5. The Great American Novel? • The concept was introduced by John William De Forest in 1868. • American Literature was lacking in texts to claim this title – Uncle Tom’s Cabin was thought to capture the American way of life accurately enough to claim this title. • Fitzgerald felt that in writing Gatsby he was creating something that could claim this title: “ I want to be one of the greatest writers who ever lived, don’t you?”( Edmund Wilson Thoughts on being Bibliographed.) • Argument against: “Fitzgerald’s novel is animated by and makes its impacts through a writer’s intensely devoted attempt to understand a portion of human experience.” • “Gatsby , despite its brevity, illuminates the American past and present, answers the challenge of getting within its pages something of the scope and variety and dynamics of American life, the light and dark of American experience, the underside and upperside of American society. Moreover, it does so within a larger framework of human experience, invariably moving readers to the dimensions of myth that convey meaning independent of time, place and particulars of experience. “ The Great Gatsby and The Great American Novel Kenneth E. Eble.

6. AO4 – Responses to Fitzgerald through time. Review when the story was first published The story is obviously unimportant…What ails it, fundamentally, is the plain fact that it is simply a story – that Fitzgerald seems far more interested in maintaining its suspense than in getting under the skins of its people. It is not they are false; it is that they are taken too much for granted. Only Gatsby himself genuinely lives and breathes. The rest are mere marionettes – often astonishingly lifelike, but nevertheless not quite alive. What gives the story distinction is something quite different from the management of the action or the handling of the characters; it is the charm and beauty of the writing. Baltimore Evening Sun 1929

7. AO4 – Responses to Fitzgerald through time: 1920s • Fitzgerald was viewed by the readers of Post as the writer who best represented the post-war generation of ambitious middleclass Americans wanting to enjoy the spending boom of the 1920s. • The book was a commercial disappointment – in 1925 it sold 23, 870 copies (In Comparison to This Side of Paradise which sold 41,075 copies in 1920) • However, The Great Gatsby received some of Fitzgerald’s most favourable reviews: “ Fitzgerald has more than matured; he has mastered his talent and gone soaring into beautiful flight, leaving behind everything dubious and tricky in his earlier work, and leaving even farther behind all the men of his own generation and most of his elders.” • The novel was dead in the market before the end of 1925.

8. The Lost Weekend Charles Jackson 1944 He took down The Great Gatsby and ran his finger over the fine green binding. “There’s no such thing,” he said aloud, “as a flawless novel. But if there is, this is it.” He nodded. The class looked and listened in complete attention, and one or two made notes… “People will be going back to Fitzgerald one day as they now go back to Henry James.” He walked back and forth, tapping the book in his hand. “Pay no attention, either, to those who care for his writing merely; who speak of ’the texture of his prose’ and other silly and borrowed and utterly meaningless phrases. True, the writing is the finest and purest, the most entertaining and most readable, that we have in America today… but it’s the content that counts in literature… Apart from his other gifts, Scott Fitzgerald has the one thing that a novelist needs: a truly seeing eye.”

9. AO4 – Responses to Fitzgerald through time: 1930’s – 1940’s • Fitzgerald was viewed by the readers of Post as the writer who best represented the post-war generation of ambitious middleclass Americans wanting to enjoy the spending boom of the 1920s. • Fitzgerald was aware by the 1930’s that he was no longer a literary or public celebrity. • In 1933 Matthew Josephson, in an article on "The Younger Novelists," was pointing an admonitory finger at Fitzgerald :"there are ever so many Americans who can't drink champagne from morning to night, or even go to Princeton " • In 1934 "Gatsby" was introduced into The Modern Library, but it was dropped in 1939 because of its poor sales. • The common view of Fitzgerald was an author who had failed to achieve his potential – however, his contemporaries including Dos Passos claimed that Gatsby was “ one of the few classic American novels.” • American Responses to Fitzgerald after death: “ My generation thought of F. Scott Fitzgerald as an age rather than as a writer, and when the economic strike of 1929 began to change the sheiks and flappers into unemployed boys or underpaid girls, we consciously and a little belligerently turned our backs on Fitzgerald.” (Kazin, The man and his work.) • 1945, William Troy identified Gatsby as Fitzgerald’s only completely successful novel.

10. Taken From Fitzgerald’s obituary: The New York Times The best of his books, the critics said, was ‘The Great Gatsby’. When it was published in 1925 this ironic tale of life on Long Island at a time when gin was the national drink and sex the national obsession (according to the exponents of Fitzgerald’s school of writers), it received critical acclaim. In it Mr. Fitzgerald was at his best, which was, according to John Chamberlain, ‘his ability to catch…the flavour of a period, the fragrance of a night, a snatch of an old song, in a phrase.’

11. AO4 – Responses to Fitzgerald through time:1950s revival • Fitzgerald’s death created a new perception of the writer: Fitzgerald the failure, alcoholic author and husband of a madwoman. • Fitzgerald revival of the 1950’s – Consequence of the two novels ‘ The Disenchanted’ (Budd Shulberg 1950) and ‘Far side of paradise.’ (Arthur Mizener 1951) Schulberg claimed he had created “The new generation of readers, admirers and critics he had been hoping for in vain throughout the 1930s.” • Role of Ernest Heminway

12. AO4 – Responses to Fitzgerald through time:1970s to present day. • The popular image created by Schulberg of Fitzgerald as a ‘burnt out jazz novelist’ was only dispelled in the late 70s and 80s. • The popularity of Gatsby coincided with the rise of New Criticism – a focus on the significance of themes and symbols within literature. • Other novels shifted the perception of Fitzgerald’s work. The Catcher in the Rye makes an intertextual link with Gatsby: “The Great Gatsby. … I was crazy about The Great Gatsby.Old Gatsby. Old sport. That killed me.” • Salinger’s admiration was further expressed in a letter to a friend: “Re-read a lot of Scott Fitzgerald’s work this week. God, I love that man. Damn fool critics are forever calling writers geniuses for their idiosyncracies[sic]—Hemingway for his reticent dialogue, Wolfe for his gargantuan energy, and so on. Fitzgerald’s only idiosyncrasy was his pure brilliance.” • Interest in Gatsby was also generated through popular culture: advertisements for the Plaza Hotel New York ( the setting of Tom and Gatsby’s confrontation) featured excerpts from the novel.

13. Gatsby’s Long Shadow The long shadow of Jay Gatsby has faded from the lawns of West Egg, but it falls more and more deeply across the hearts and minds of each succeeding generation of American readers and writers. Like Gatsby, even the most hardheaded Americans conceive of themselves (whether correctly is not the point) as idealists whose dreams can be made true, as eternal youths whose innocence can never really be lost, as magicians who can mesmerize the world into accepting their dreams. Fitzgerald, in tapping that cultural myth, made The Great Gatsby an American—indeed, a world—classic, a persistent and permanent presence in American culture. Richard Anderson

14. The settings of the story • West Egg: • East Egg: • New York: • All Three are representative of success in Capitalist society. The power of wealth to create glamour and conceal moral inadequacy. • The Valley of Ashes: The ‘underside’ of the other three locations in the text. Reminiscent of the ‘Valley of the shadow of death’. The home of Wilson- who is linked by language to Gatsby ‘nobody’, ‘nowhere’, ‘nothing’.

15. Fitzgerald and Gatsby In the thirties America entered the deepest depression in its history. And the immediate cause of Fitzgerald's private catastrophe was also the failure of that form of self-confidence we call illusion. Like Gatsby, he knew that experience always fell short of the dream, knew how laughable his attempts were to be the man he wanted to be. He knew, too, that only illusions can bridge the gap. For a long while Zelda, the couple's driving force and the person who set his imagination alight, helped him believe in those illusions, or pretend he believed. Her defection, her slow drift out of love and out of her mind coincided with what he thought of as the end of his youth. It was that youth, that love, those illusions that were buried when, a few months after the Wall Street crash, Zelda was confined in a mental hospital.