Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.
ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THE NOVELS AND STORIES OF F. SCOTT FITZGERALD – PART THREE, F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Continuing my analysis of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s works, I plunge into the Fitzgerald novel that is now regarded as a classic.
Published in 1925, The Great Gatsby is far and away F. Scott Fitzgerald’s best-known novel, regarded as his masterpiece and – in all probability – now read more often than all his other novels put together, especially as it is often required reading in high-schools and university courses in American literature. Curiously, when it was first published it gained applause from many critics but sold poorly. It took a couple of decades before it was accepted as an essential text. So far, it has four times been turned into movies (most of them pretty dreadful) and a number of times dramatized for television. It is often regarded as the novel of the American “Roaring Twenties”, but it is not the wallow in hedonism that it is often taken to be by those who have only seen movie versions and not read the novel itself. Quite the opposite. It is essentially a dour and depressing story. It is also notably quite different in style from Fitzgerald’s first two novels This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and Damned. It is pared back, indulges in less romantic description, and is relatively short, being less than half the length of The Beautiful and Damned. It is also written in the first-person by a narrator who is not witness to some of the plot’s crucial events, allowing us to entertain the idea of an “unreliable narrator”.
I’ll struggle to produce a very compressed synopsis. The first-person narrator Nick Carraway, small-time trader in bonds, happens to occupy a modest bungalow on fashionable Long Island, next-door to the mansion of the mysterious and apparently very rich Jay Gatsby. Gatsby often throws lavish parties for hangers-on who flock in from New York. The parties are described in detail and Gatsby is feted. How Gatsby earned his millions is not clear and is the subject of much speculation and gossip. Gatsby learns that Nick Carraway is a distant cousin of Daisy, the young woman he says he loved but lost years earlier. Gatsby cultivates Nick, wanting to woo Daisy back to him. As it happens, Daisy is married to a brutish man, Tom Buchanan, who frequently cheats on Daisy and has various mistresses, one being Myrtle Wilson, the very working-class wife of working-class George Wilson, a mechanic who runs a dilapidated garage and who hopes to make money by deals with Buchanan. Wilson is at first apparently too naïve to understand that Tom Buchanan is cuckolding him. Gatsby gets his rendezvous with Daisy in Nick Carraway’s house and their love is almost re-kindled, although Daisy (who has an infant child) has her misgivings. Gatsby also dazzles Daisy by showing her all his wealth in his mansion and estate. But Tom Buchanan gets wind of their trysts. Despite his own infidelities, Tom is very possessive of Daisy. He is also prone to violence. There is one episode, early in the novel, in which he breaks Myrtle Wilson’s nose when she dares to mention Daisy’s name. There is now a struggle between Gatsby and Tom over Daisy. In a major row each claims to be the only one who really loves Daisy, with Daisy almost helpless between the two of them. Tom Buchanan has done research and is able to reveal the shady deals, bootlegging [this being the age of Prohibition] and consorting with gangsters that have made Gatsby rich. Gatsby did not come from a refined home. The outcome is much shouting in an environment of booze and anger. Tom Buchanan tells Daisy contemptuously to take Gatsby home. It is night. Daisy drives recklessly. By chance, Myrtle Wilson has just had a major row with her husband George Wilson and she has run out of their home onto the road at the very moment Gatsby’s car comes speeding along. Myrtle is knocked down and killed. It is assumed that Jay Gatsby was the driver and in effect Gatsby shields Daisy. Daisy and Tom rapidly leave the area, believing Gatsby will take the blame. There are no more parties at Gatsby’s mansion. His fashionable hangers-on no longer come his way as he is now under suspicion. Convinced of Gatsby’s guilt, George Wilson, angry and homicidal, takes things into his own hands. He stalks onto Gatsby’s property and shoots Gatsby dead as Gatsby is floating in his swimming pool. Then Wilson, having lost everything, shoots and kills himself. It is left to Nick Carraway, in the closing chapter, to put the pieces in place. He meets Gatsby’s father whose name is Gatz. Gatsby’s given name was James Gatz. Old Mr Gatz is proud of a notebook in which his son “Gatsby” , as a youth, had made up ways to improve himself and become more acceptable to high society. In effect Gatsby had created his persona and the tales he told about himself were fabrications just as his love for Daisy was a fantasy.
A brief synopsis like this is, of course, very misleading. It is a mere skeleton of plot, lacking nuance; and I have missed out a number of characters. There is the gangster and fixer with whom Gatsby consorts, Meyer Wolfsheim, who is clearly Jewish. Fitzgerald has sometimes been criticized for producing a character who comes close to being an antisemitic caricature. Brutish Tom Buchanan’s language is often filled with contempt for blacks. He is essentially what would now be called a white supremacist. More important is Jordan Baker, a golf-playing woman and friend of Daisy, who more-or-less becomes a pal of Nick Carraway and who fills in some of the details about Daisy that Nick would otherwise have not known about. In effect, she is a second narrator. Academics have worked out that nearly every character in this novel is based on people Fitzgerald knew or knew about, but I won’t go down that rabbit hole.
There are some problems with the style of narration. Nick Carraway’s opening – and much-quoted – words set the novel’s main agenda at once. “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 anyone,’ he said, ‘ just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages you’ve had’ ” (Chapter 1) This immediately suggests that there are different social classes and there are have-nots, some of whom want to make their way into the wealthier classes, as does James Gatz, alias Jay Gatsby.
But Nick is very pliable - why does he so conveniently go along with Tom Buchanan to meet Tom’s mistress? And why does he virtually act as pimp in bringing Gatsby and Daisy together in his own house? Could it be that it is simply convenient for Fitzgerald’s plot to have these events? More to the point, Nick simply does not witness some of the important things that happen in the novel.
Fitzgerald delicately removes Nick from the crucial scene (Chapter 5) where Gatsby and Daisy have their first rendezvous (in Nick’s bungalow). Nick Carraway simply has to guess or speculate about Daisy’s impact on Gatsby when they are having their first tete-a-tete after so many years. According to Nick Carraway: “There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams – not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man can store up in his ghostly heart.” (Chapter 5) In effect, Nick Carraway is telling us that Jay Gatsby is really deluding himself with the idea that Daisy was the great love of his life. Later, Gatsby almost fanatically clings to his dream even when it is clear that Daisy is not quite the young woman he briefly knew years previously. Nick tries to warn him by saying “I wouldn’t ask too much of her… You can’t repeat the past.” To which Gatsby responds “‘Can’t repeat the past?’ he cried incredulously. ‘Why of course you can!’ He looked around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here is the shadow of his house, just out of reach of his hand.” (Chapter 6)
A major point where Nick Carraway simply speculates about what he does not know is when he imagines how Gatsby must have felt, floating in his swimming pool, just before he was killed as Wilson crept up on him. Gatsby had been waiting for a phone call, and Nick speculates: “I have an idea that Gatsby himself didn’t believe it would come, and perhaps he no longer cared. If that was true he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream. He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world , material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about… like that ashen, fantastic figure gliding towards him through the amorphous trees.” (Chapter 8) Once again, Nick is telling us what he – and we – want to believe. That Gatsby was deluded about his great love.
Not that Nick is necessarily wrong. As I understand the novel, Daisy is a naïve and somewhat immature woman. Of course we sympathise with her because she has such a brute and philanderer for a husband, but she is far from being the golden girl that Jay Gatsby once thought she was. She is very impressionable, as when Gatsby shows her around his mansion and “ ‘They’re such beautiful shirts,’ she sobbed, her voice muffled in the thick folds. ‘It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such – such beautiful shirts before.’ ” (Chapter 5) She is enchanted by Gatsby’s wealth and has childish impulses. She is hedonistic. When they are sweating in a heat wave on Long Island, she is the first to suggest that they should go into the city (New York) to liven things up. That is the type of vacuous life she really wants. Of course she loves her child, but when Tom Buchanan and Jay Gatsby are quarrelling over which loves her more, she feebly says she loves them both. And although it isn’t necessarily her fault, she (and Tom Buchanan) disappear as soon as Gatsby is in major trouble. Gatsby wants a prize from the past, but she doesn’t really fit the bill.
All of which feeds into one of the main ideas in the novel – that you can’t go back to the past, even if Nick Carraway’s concluding words are “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” This could be taken to mean that, no matter how little we like it, the past will still have a great influence on us and how we have been formed. Or – and I think more credibly – it could be taken to mean that the past is a dream, but only that. Memory distorts reality. It is interesting to know that Fitzgerald knew and had read Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes which is in great part about an attempt to find somewhere that has been lost and can never be retrieved. A decade after The Great Gatsby was published, the verbose Thomas Wolf was planning his You Can’t Go Home Again, which presents the same idea. And dare I mention the 1930s classic French film Un Carnet de Bal? An older woman idealises a ball she went to when she was a teenager – only to find, years later, that the ballroom she remembered was little more than a small local hall of no distinction. Fitzgerald is playing with an idea that has often been dramatized because it is essentially true. Daisy is the lost ideal that can never be retrieved because in many ways she never really existed.
The other dominant idea is the reality that people can only attempt to be other than what they really are. Gatsby has a self-made identity. His habit of addressing male friends as “old sport” is an attempt to make himself sound like a college man. He spins a tale to Nick Carraway and Jordan Baker saying: “I’ll tell you God’s truth… I am the son of some wealthy people in the Middle West – all dead now. I was brought up in America but educated at Oxford, because all my ancestors have been educated there for many years. It is a family tradition… My family all died and I came into a good deal of money… I lived like a young rajah in all the capitals of Europe – Paris, Venice, Rome – collecting jewels, hunting big game, painting a little, things for myself only, and trying to forget something very sad that had happened to me long ago.” He goes on to spin tales of his heroism in the war (Chapter 4). What is interesting here is that Nick and Jordan don’t for one moment believe what he says, because he is a very bad liar. When Nick asks him what part of the Middle West he came from, Gatsby says “San Francisco”, showing he has a distorted understanding of American geography. He claims Venice as one of the capitals in Europe. His remark that he is “trying to forget” seems planted to make him a man of mystery, like something out of a bad novelette. Nick Carraway sums up Gatsby’s claims by thinking “My incredulity was submerged in fascination now; it was like skimming hastily through a dozen magazines.” And yet Nick and Jordan Baker still find him a puzzle – something more than just a liar or fantasist.
All this seems appropriate to a society – the United States – in which it is common for people who have struck it rich to present themselves as other than they are… or who are forced to present themselves as other than they are. I think of film stars who used to be given, by their studios or agents, more acceptable names than the names they were originally had (Marion Morrison becomes John Wayne. Jules Garfinkle becomes John Garfield; Doris Kappelhoff becomes Doris Day etc. etc.); and whose publicists used to make totally fictitious biographies about them.
There is another aspect of The Great Gatsby which is more specific to the era and country in which it was written. When he is ruminating in the last chapter, after Gatsby is dead and his mansion is deserted, Nick Carraway says “I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all – Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life.” (Chapter 9) In this case, when he says “Westerners” he means people from the Mid-West, which is where Fitzgerald came from. In the 1920s, Mid-Westerners were regarded as small towners or farmers, less sophisticated than the educated and cosmopolitan New Yorkers or Ivy Leaguers in the East. This is no longer the case, but it meant that Mid-Westerners had to learn how to be respectable to Easterners... which is how bootlegger Gatsby tries to present himself.
For what it’s worth, I am aware of the symbolism that Fitzgerald sometimes deploys. Best known is the image of Gatsby standing on his lawn at night, and looking across the bay at the green light on the pier where Daisy's and Tom's yacht is moored. The green light becomes an image of the Daisy that Gatsby wistfully imagines, and who is now out of reach or unattainable. Then there is the “Valley of Ashes”, meaning the rubbish dump near where George Wilson and his wife live, symbol of an industrialised world and the privations of a working class who are, possibly, capable of overturning the lives of the well-to-do. And near Wilson’s garage, there is a huge billboard, left by a long-gone optometrist, depicting a huge pair of spectacles. It is almost like a wrathful God looking down on feeble mortals who will be judged… as they are in this novel.
Much more could be said about The Great Gatsby, but this is how I interpret it. It is not the story of a love lost, despite the way it has been distorted in the movies. It is the story of a delusion lost. Nor is it a celebration of America’s “Roaring Twenties” and its partying, hedonism and boozing, much as these things have been highlighted in the movies. Remember, the novel was published in 1925, when the party was still in full swing if ever it was – four years before the Depression hit and the cultural landscape changed radically. F. Scott Fitzgerald was ahead of the pack in exposing the wealthy-class of the 1920s as a sham that was built on fraudulence, some criminality, and false identities. All that roared was untruthfulness.
Footnote: About those “mostly dreadful” four film adaptations that have been made of The Great Gatsby which I mentioned in the opening paragraph of this review…. The first film version of The Great Gatsby was made in 1926, one year after the novel came out. It was based on a play version. It is now a lost film, no prints of it surviving, so one cannot pass judgement on it though, given that it was a silent movie, it is hard to believe that it could have carried much of Fitzgerald’s meaning. The second version was made in 1949 when Fitzgerald’s work had come back into popularity. It was a travesty, using just a slither of the novel’s plot and basically turning it into a gangster movie starring, as Gatsby, Alan Ladd, who was at that stage identified with gangster movies (This Gun for Hire etc.). There were a number of television versions, but the next major film version was the 1974 film, starring Robert Redford as Gatsby and Mia Farrow as Daisy. In fairness, it followed Fitzgerald’s novel more closely than any other film version did, but it was plagued by its slow pace as if the producers were all too aware that they were handling a classic and therefore handled with care. It is tedious to watch. Worse, it really does present Gatsby’s and Daisy’s relationship as a romantic love affair, rather than the novel’s sense of a delusion. As for the 2013 version, sorry, I can’t be bothered going into it. Another travesty, it more-or-less followed the novel’s narrative, but changed radically the characterisation of some major people in the narrative, and it focusest on partying and lavish sets backed by music nowhere near the music of the 1920s – an attempt to grab a youth audience. Tripe. Conclusion? Obviously, if you want to know The Great Gatsby, read the book.
I agree completely about the cinematic adaptions and think the plot and Fitzgeralds writing is probably unsuitable for a film. I thought Carey Mulligan was a pretty good Daisy Buchanan in the otherwise execrable 2013 effort.
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