FOREVER GATSBY
Forever Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald's masterpiece turns 100
By Stephen E. Smith • Photographs by Tim Sayer
Photographed at Weymouth Center for the Arts & Humanities
At 1 p.m. on Thursday, January 27, 1966, I sat in the old Southern Railway depot in Greensboro waiting to catch the Peach Queen to D.C. for the semester break. It had been snowing all day, and the train was running late, but I’d brought along my English 112 anthology with the intention of reading The Great Gatsby, which was assigned to all second-semester freshmen: “In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since . . . ” and so forth.
I tried to connect with the characters, but I didn’t know anyone like Nick Carraway or Tom and Daisy Buchanan. My family didn’t drive a snazzy automobile or live in a mansion with a swimming pool, but I read through chapter five before putting the novel aside. I spent the remainder of the evening playing penny-ante poker.
The conductor called “All aboard!” at about 11 p.m., and my fellow refugees and I climbed onto an olive-drab heavyweight pre-war passenger car that had been added to the train to accommodate the increase in ridership. The heat wasn’t working properly and the lighting was poor, but I picked up reading Gatsby in chapter six as we lurched out of Greensboro. By the time we arrived in Richmond, Fitzgerald was waxing poetic and I’d made the necessary connection:
“When we pulled out into the winter night and the real snow, our snow, began to stretch out beside us and twinkle against the windows, and the dim lights of small Wisconsin stations moved by, a sharp wild brace came suddenly into the air. We drew in deep breaths of it as we walked back from dinner through the cold vestibules, unutterably aware of our identity with this country for one strange hour, before we melted indistinguishably into it again.”
I finished my reading of Gatsby as the Peach Queen rocked through northern Virginia. It was still snowing, and it occurred to me, in my fatigued, mildly sentimental state, that Fitzgerald was correct: the future was already gone, “ . . . lost in the vast obscurity where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.” It was obvious that he had a clear vision of what it meant to be an American: “ . . . tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms further. . . .” I knew, too, that the novel wasn’t intended to be read as a realistic depiction of life. It was an allegory with meaning and intent beyond its narrative components. Mostly, I was struck by the novel’s resonance — the futility of Gatsby’s untimely demise — and during the semester break, my mind kept drifting back to passages that struck me as lyrically poignant. I’ve been an admirer of Gatsby ever since.
In more than 50 years of hanging out with writers of various stripes and persuasions, I’ve never known one who didn’t consider F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby an essential and enduring moment in American literature. Gatsby was published 100 years ago, and considering the intervening Great Depression, World War II, the endless military, economic and political turbulence that has bombarded our consciousness — and the sad fact that we now live in an America where the laundry detergent we buy amounts to a political statement — it would seem inevitable that the novel would have lost some of its relevance. But that has not happened. For the thoughtful reader, Gatsby speaks as clearly and profoundly now as it did in 1925.
It’s reasonable to expect contemporary audiences to be mildly annoyed by the social ambiguities that intrigued readers a century ago. For example, there is no justice in Gatsby. In the early 20th century narratives — cinema, drama, black and white TV, print media — the bad guys rarely got off without suffering the consequences of their misdeeds. Tom and Daisy, the characters Gatsby most admires, betray him, mastermind his murder by proxy, and are none the worse off for having done so. “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or the vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together and let other people clean up the mess they had made.” There’s undoubtedly a touch of the real world in that outcome.
Moreover, Fitzgerald set his novel during Prohibition, a long-forgotten period when the possession of alcoholic beverages was against the law. Audiences reading the novel a century ago were very much aware of the scourge of alcohol addiction and the lawlessness of the cold-blooded criminals who controlled the distribution of intoxicating beverages. The passage of time has turned the mobsters of the ’20s into cartoons. In our world, criminals pop up on our phones and computer screens and stand on our street corners peddling overdoses. We’ve come to expect that they will get away with it.
Fitzgerald was no intellectual or social critic, but he was a masterful prose stylist, and the best passages in his stories and novels are all based on the musings of a perpetually love-sick frat boy who can’t let go of the past. Alcohol exacerbated this nostalgic inclination — and Fitzgerald was a hard drinker. The tales of his near-apocalyptic benders are legion and oft-repeated in biographies. Excessive drinking would eventually kill him, and it probably robbed his audience of more and better art. Still, the prominence of heavy drinking in the novel was a daring inclusion in 1925. Only Hemingway made a bigger deal out of alcohol consumption, and his settings were in foreign countries. To his credit, Fitzgerald constantly points out the ill effects of excessive alcohol consumption (Hemingway does not), but he never possessed the self-awareness to incorporate that knowledge into his disorderly lifestyle.
I suspect Gatsby strikes many contemporary readers as “quaint,” and its historical context no doubt casts a nostalgic shadow over those who find the Roaring ’20s — that frenzied period of economic prosperity and cultural change as depicted in Baz Luhrmann’s 2013 razzle-dazzle film treatment — captivating and kitschy. But what else does the novel offer? Orgies and automobile accidents, suicide and murder, unrequited love and impotence, giant symbolic eyeglasses, an ash heap, and a fatal fascination with the relationship of the past to the present — bits and pieces of plot and substance we might find in any postmodern American novel. None of these minor inducements explains Gatsby’s lasting appeal.
It comes down to the theme — what Fitzgerald tells us about ourselves. The simple, direct and obvious message is best couched as a question: Is it possible to realize spiritual happiness through material possession? We may pretend to know the answer, but few of us ever practice a viable response, so we keep reading — and pondering. And Gatsby lives on and on.
Having bragged about my writer friends’ appreciation for Gatsby, I admit that an equal level of enthusiasm was not always shared by the college students I taught during my 34 years in academia. Once a semester, I’d announce that we’d be reading The Great Gatsby, and I’d look at my students, their faces a gauzy web of bewilderment, and I knew that I’d be unable to adequately communicate my enthusiasm for Fitzgerald’s masterwork. For a teacher of literature, there is no more discouraging moment than when he or she realizes that a student isn’t going to comprehend the joy a great book can impart, and how it can change one’s life for the better.
I’d tell the students how I’d discovered Gatsby, replete with snowstorm and my rail trip north, and I’d read a few of my favorite passages. In most cases, I convinced them to read and enjoy the novel. Of course, there were always a few souls who’d resented the assignment since before they were born, but by and large, my students came to understand what Fitzgerald was telling them. I like to believe their lives were better for it.
For those who live in the Sandhills, a Fitzgerald connection is immediately accessible. In the late spring of ’35, the author of The Great Gatsby visited with novelist James Boyd and his wife, Katharine, in their home in Weymouth Heights, now the Weymouth Center for the Arts & Humanities. Boyd and Fitzgerald shared an editor at Scribner’s, the celebrated Maxwell Perkins, who also edited Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe and Sherwood Anderson, and at Perkins’ insistence, Boyd had been cajoling Fitzgerald to visit for more than a year. He hoped that Boyd, solid citizen that he was, would have a positive influence on the wayward Jazz Age author. That did not happen. Fitzgerald drank too much while visiting with the Boyds, and a week after his stay in Southern Pines, he wrote a lengthy letter of apology from Baltimore’s Hotel Stafford. “In better form I might have been a better guest,” he wrote with typical candor, “but you couldn’t have been better hosts even at the moment when anything that wasn’t absolutely — that wasn’t near perfect made me want to throw a brick at it. One sometimes needs tolerance at a moment when he has least himself.”
If Fitzgerald was the American author most representative of the Roaring ’20s, that final evening with the Boyds in the Great Room at the Weymouth Center marked the end of the Jazz Age. The mid-’30s were the darkest period of his life. He was heavily in debt to Perkins and his agent, Harold Ober. His wife, Zelda was confined to the Sheppard-Pratt psychiatric hospital in Baltimore, and his financial resources were drained by his high living and his daughter’s tuition at the exclusive Bryn Mawr School. Because of his wastrel reputation, his short stories, always his primary source of income, were becoming difficult to place in popular magazines.
Fitzgerald soon relocated to Hollywood to write for the movies. When he died there in 1940 at the age of 44, Boyd wrote to Perkins that he’d recently reread The Great Gatsby and considered it the finest work of fiction written between the wars. He was correct in that appraisal.
Fitzgerald’s last royalty statement from Scribner’s, dated 1 August 1940, was for $13.13, which included the sale of seven copies of Gatsby. The novel was reissued to GIs during World War II. Eventually, it became ensconced in our literary canon, fitting neatly into the “major themes” approach to teaching American literature. In recent years, The Great Gatsby has sold over half a million copies annually, with over 30 million copies in print worldwide.