“Francis Scott Fitzgerald was born in 1896 in St Paul Minnesota the son of an alcoholic failure from Maryland and an adoring, intensely ambitious mother, he grew up acutely conscious of wealth and privilege—and of his family’s exclusion from the social elite. He left Princeton without graduating to join the American army too late to serve overseas. He wrote his first novel at 13.
Scott fell in love with a series of rich women who looked down on him. One, whose father rejected him by saying: “Poor boys shouldn’t think of marrying rich girls. "
He had few prospects and spent his early years writing copy for advertising.
Zelda Sayre was a southern belle and only married Scott in 1920, after the success of his novel, This Side of Paradise
Zelda was a writer in her own right and provided the creative force. Their lives of soon evolved into a series of wild parties, heavy drinking and carousing. They traveled to Paris, eventually settling in Provence where Zelda met and fell in love with a French Pilot, Jozan. Scott, mad with jealousy locked her up. Later Zelda taunted his lack of success. Mostly with her knowledge, Fitzgerald also lifted material from Zelda’s letters and diaries. Biographers agree that Zelda “was the dominant influence on Scott’s writing.” Fitzgerald himself admitted, “I don’t know whether Zelda and I are real or whether we are characters in one of my novels.” By the fall of 1924, the Jozan affair had ended, and Fitzgerald was ready to send out the manuscript. He wrote to his editor, “at last I’ve done something really my own.”
By 1930, Zelda suffered a series of mental break downs spending months in expensive mental institutions. Scott increasingly turned to drink and died at the age of 44.
Meg Waite Clayton, claims The Great Gatsby, published in 1925, is considered Fitzgerald’s finest work. While he achieved limited success in his lifetime, he is now widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century. It is based on a fellow soldier, Max Gerlach, a successful bootlegger.
The then-29-year-old Fitzgerald wrote of the novel before it was published, “It represents about a year’s work and I think it’s about ten years better than anything I’ve done.”
The New York Times called it “a curious book, a mystical, glamorous story of today.” But others weren’t enamored. The New York World ran a review under the headline “F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Latest Dud” (ouch!), and Perkins wrote at the time that so many people attacked him over the book that he felt “bruised.”
Early 20th century literature narrates a hero’s infatuation with aristocrats – a besotted fascination with mindless glamour so effectively. Eliot’s early poetry, Woolf’s parties, Proust, Fitzgerald’s Gatsby indicate battlers trying to be accepted by their betters.
W.B. Yeats, just like all other people at the time, was exposed to confining conventions established by “The parish of rich women”. He too strove to ape the British aristocracy.
Veterans of WWI #
America entered the first world war reluctantly and its veterans did not receive a warm welcome home.
Returning soldiers frequently feel let down. While they were away, others have surged ahead and girl friends have found new partners. Gatsby was looking forward to a life with Daisy but finds she has married a rich man called Tom Buchanan. He then tries to earn as much money as possible - assumed to be bootlegging.
At the start of 1920 the US entered a sharp deflationary recession lasting eighteen months. In 1919 labor and racial unrest, as well as political uncertainty, had provoked riots and the so-called Red Summer, which led to a draconian crackdown ending in the Palmer Raids of January 1920, during which at least three thousand people were arrested, almost all of whom were immigrants, accused of being leftists.
Articles with headlines such as “Raids Drive ‘Reds’ to Cover” on the front pages of Hearst’s papers reported that hundreds of “aliens” and “radicals” were being summarily deported, beneath a masthead reading “America First!” That slogan had dominated the presidential campaign of 1916, helped persuade America to vote against joining the League of Nations, and remained so popular that Warren G. Harding rode it to the White House in November 1920.
On May 1, in cities across America, returning veterans attacked socialist groups celebrating the Bolshevik revolution; in New York, homemade bombs were discovered addressed to politicians, while thousands of servicemen roamed the streets in search of “reds” and raided meeting places, including the offices of a socialist daily, The Call, where a man jumped twenty-five feet from a window to escape the mob.
During Hoover’s rule, veterans of WWI, demand money promised for time served. When denied, they camped out for five weeks. Hoover declares the veterans a communist front. Tanks and infantry men attacked the veterans with 54 injured and 134 arrested.
It was World War II, though, that gave “The Great Gatsby” a real boost in readership. As the war came to a close, 150,000 pocket-sized “Armed Services Edition” paperbacks were sent to soldiers, men who were perhaps left dreaming of swapping their uniforms for all those monogrammed shirts, and almost certainly of Daisy. The paperback was reprinted five times by 1954.
Roaring Twenties #
Sarah Churchwell of the NYRB writes that the caricature of Fitzgerald as frivolous and unfailingly rhapsodic obscures the bracing acidity of his satire and the cool eye of his intelligence. The enchanted terms in which Fitzgerald portrayed modern America still blind us to how scathingly he judged it. “It was an age of satire,” he wrote, and yet we suppose that the writer who both embodied the Jazz Age and identified satire as its essential feature never employed it himself. Fitzgerald’s sardonic humor and his disquiet—the sense that “life is essentially a cheat and its conditions those of defeat,” — give his best work moral realism and gravitas, grounding the flights of his prose.
All those New Year’s partygoers seem to have forgotten that the revelry ends with Gatsby dead in a swimming pool, an obscene word scrawled on the porch of his preposterous house. Gatsby is a cautionary tale about the consequences of misreading history, while its parties depict a society spinning out of control. The Jazz Age doesn’t end well in the novel that’s supposed to make it sound like so much fun.
May Day depicts a callous society in which the children of the elite flaunt their wealth at a restaurant a few blocks north of J.P. Morgan’s mansion, while ragged soldiers roam the streets looking for a drink. It is a tale of privilege and dispossession, entitled aristocrats and their careless harm—the motifs of Gatsby in far more explicit terms.
The literary naturalism Fitzgerald employs in May Day, converged with popular eugenicist ideas of biological determinism, as endorsed in books like T. Lothrop Stoddard’s The Rising Tide of Color, published a month after Fitzgerald finished “May Day” and thinly disguised as the book Tom Buchanan recommends at the start of Gatsby.
Min Jin Lee, writing in the New Yorker, claims nearly a hundred years after its publication, Gatsby is considered “the Greatest American Novel.” I cannot imagine a more persuasive and readable book about lost illusions, class, White Americans in the 1920s, and the perils and vanity of assimilation. It remains a modern novel by exploring the intersection of social hierarchy, White femininity, White male love, and unfettered capitalism. I’ve read and loved Gatsby for a very long time, and with each new reading, my understanding of it has grown more layered and provocative.
Women #
Min Jin Lee of the New Yorker writes:
Four months prior to Gatsby’s publication, Fitzgerald had written to his editor about the weakness of his female characters: “I’m sorry Myrtle is better than Daisy.
Fitzgerald’s female characters are static. They are acted upon, unable to recognize or reverse how they are perceived or alter their behavior. Myrtle Wilson is a castrating, betraying shrew who is killed graphically for seeking an escape from her marriage to a man she loathes. She is crass, vulgar, and deceitful.
Jordan Baker, the professional golfer, is “incurably dishonest” and a snob. She is unlovable, and Nick dumps her unceremoniously, lumping her with her corrupt social set even though he recognizes that it is not entirely fair.
Gatsby’s beloved Daisy embodies the worst possible qualities of White womanhood of that era, representing the Veblenesque lady of leisure—idle, status-conscious, and useless except as symbol. She is a trophy wife with a voice “full of money,” merely tolerated by her husband. Daisy marries Tom, her wealthiest prospect, whom she does not love, then remains with him despite his adultery, cruelty, elitism, and White supremacy. Tom chooses only to be himself; Daisy chooses him repeatedly. She commits vehicular manslaughter, flees responsibility, and rejects the man she loves because he is “Mr. Nobody from Nowhere.” She is a destructive siren whom Gatsby is powerless to resist.
Her quote: “I hope she’ll be a fool – that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.”
Literary critic Marius Bewley writes that Daisy expresses the “monstrous moral indifference” of the indolent rich. Thanks to bad film adaptations, there may be some temptation to fall under the spell of Daisy’s allure and, like Gatsby, become intoxicated by her appeal, but to do so would disregard Fitzgerald’s unhidden message: The “most popular of all” girl who grows up to be a rich wife is an unrepentant casual killer.
In short, Fitzgerald’s principal women characters are beyond redemption, and the married ones should come with warning labels.
Jay Gatsby is too, of course. He is self-invented and also self-deluded, spinning out fantasies for himself and others as easily as he gives parties.
Symbolism: #
The following is a passage from Chapter II depicts the desolation of a city before esthetic mores forced planners to hide the ugly side of waste products that we produce. The scenes appear out of hell, Hades or representing the sepulchral weltschmerz of Dante’s Inferno with continuous smoke, scavengers and the manager appearing likes devils. This is nature overwhelmed by man.
About halfway between West Egg and New York the motor road hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land. This is a valley of ashes—a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of ash-grey men, who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of grey cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak, and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-grey men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud, which screens their obscure operations from your sight.
But above the grey land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg. The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic—their retinas are one yard high. They look out of no face, but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a nonexistent nose. Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set them there to fatten his practice in the borough of Queens, and then sank down himself into eternal blindness, or forgot them and moved away. But his eyes, dimmed a little by many paintless days, under sun and rain, brood on over the solemn dumping ground.
The valley of ashes is bounded on one side by a small foul river, and, when the drawbridge is up to let barges through, the passengers on waiting trains can stare at the dismal scene for as long as half an hour. There is always a halt there of at least a minute, and it was because of this that I first met Tom Buchanan’s mistress.
The Green light at the end of Daisy’s dock is a symbol for Gatsby first noted when Nick first sees his neighbour, Gatsby looking at it:
But I didn’t call to him, for he gave a sudden intimation that he was content to be alone—he stretched out his arms toward the dark water in a curious way, and, far as I was from him, I could have sworn he was trembling. Involuntarily I glanced seaward—and distinguished nothing except a single green light, minute and far away, that might have been the end of a dock.
When Gatsby eventually meets Daisy, the magic is dispeled:
“If it wasn’t for the mist we could see your home across the bay,” said Gatsby. “You always have a green light that burns all night at the end of your dock.”
Daisy put her arm through his abruptly, but he seemed absorbed in what he had just said. Possibly it had occurred to him that the colossal significance of that light had now vanished forever. Compared to the great distance that had separated him from Daisy it had seemed very near to her, almost touching her. It had seemed as close as a star to the moon. Now it was again a green light on a dock. His count of enchanted objects had diminished by one.
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms further … And one fine morning—
Other symbols of the roaring twenties include the cars, the music and the bootlegged alcohol.
Fitzgerald Quotes: #
“There are no second acts in American lives.”
The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.
“In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.
“Whenever you feel like criticizing any one, just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”
“It’s a great advantage not to drink among hard drinking people.”
Our parent’s children, “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
“The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is stare blankly.”
The silhouette of a moving cat wavered across the moonlight, and turning my head to watch it, I saw that I was not alone–fifty feet away a figure had emerged from the shadow of my neighbor’s mansion with his hands in his pockets . . . (p. 21)
“He smiled understandingly-much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced–or seemed to face–the whole eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.”
When Gatsby threw his large parties, he was rarely seen amongst his guests and was most often alone, observing them.
“Gatsby, standing alone on the marble steps and looking from one group to another."(p. 50)
The one time that Gatsby is noticed talking to his guests is when he introduced himself to Nick and started a conversation with him. Yet, most of the time that he throws these parties at his own home, he is alone and does not socialize with the people who attend.
“And I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.”
You see I usually find myself among strangers because I drift here and there trying to forget the sad things that happened to me.” Gatsby, is a Midwesterner, a self-made millionaire, and a habitual loner, armoured against all attempts to invade his emotional privacy.
To Tom Buchanan, Gatsby is “Mr. Nobody from Nowhere,” while to Nick he is a shimmering enigma, first glimpsed through the window of his colossal home.
“There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.”
Wolfsheim
“Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead.”
“I was within and without. Simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.”
“Reserving judgements is a matter of infinite hope.”
“Can’t repeat the past?…Why of course you can!”
When the narrator Nick last sees Gatsby, he calls out:
They’re a rotten crowd,” I shouted across the lawn. “You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.”
I’ve always been glad I said that. It was the only compliment I ever gave him, because I disapproved of him from beginning to end.
George Orwell once said,
“Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.” We can’t completely understand and build a better future without the knowledge of the past. The past informs the future.
No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.”
The murder-suicide of Gatsby and George, demonstrating that Daisy and Tom are “careless people…they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money” and would “let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
“If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him”
“Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known.”
To Tom Buchanan, Gatsby is “Mr. Nobody from Nowhere,” while to Nick he is a shimmering enigma, first glimpsed through the window of his colossal home.
Jay Gatsby is too, of course. He is self-invented and also self-deluded, spinning out fantasies for himself and others as easily as he gives parties.
Jason Di Rosso says The Great Gatsby never quite convinces you, like the book does, of the terribleness of the world, of its capacity to make people loathe themselves.
Trimalchio is a character in the 1st century AD Roman work of fiction Satyricon by Petronius. He plays a part only in the section titled “Cena Trimalchionis” (The Banquet of Trimalchio). Trimalchio is a freedman who through hard work and perseverance has attained power and wealth.
His wife’s name is Fortunata, a former slave and chorus girl. Trimalchio is known for throwing lavish dinner parties, where his numerous servants bring course after course of exotic delicacies, such as live birds sewn up inside a pig, live birds inside fake eggs which the guests have to ‘collect’ themselves and a dish to represent every sign of the zodiac.
•There is a single mention of Trimalchio in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby as his showy parties and background parallels that of Gatsby: Chapter Seven begins, “It was when curiosity about Gatsby was at its highest that the lights in his house failed to go on one Saturday night - and, as obscurely as it began, his career as Trimalchio was over.” Trimalchio and Trimalchio in West Egg were among Fitzgerald’s working titles for the novel.
Critics #
The reviews were among the best Fitzgerald would receive in his career.
T. S. Eliot read Gatsby three times and wrote that it “seems to me to be the first step that American fiction has taken since Henry James.”
Edith Wharton said it was “a great leap” from his prior works.
Gertrude Stein compared it to Thackeray’s Vanity Fair.
In The Dial, critic Gilbert Seldes wrote that Fitzgerald “has mastered his talents and gone soaring in a beautiful flight…leaving even farther behind all the men of his own generation and most of his elders.”
Nevertheless, proving that no author can make every critic happy, H. L. Mencken called Gatsby “a glorified anecdote.” Assuming you’re lucky just to get reviews, these were exceptional. Most authors could have died happy, but not our Scott. He had wanted so much more.
Instead, Fitzgerald died disappointed and broken. But that’s not how I see him. I agree with literary scholar and cultural historian Morris Dickstein’s assessment of him as a writer “who uses his frustrations and disappointments as new material, producing work that shows quantum leaps in human understanding.”