How much poorer would our culture be if F. Scott Fitzgerald had, as he originally intended, set The Great Gatsby in the Midwest in 1885, and called it The High-Bouncing Lover? Such a question is impossible to answer, for we can only guess at how barren the U.S. literary landscape would appear without Gatsby's West Egg mansion in it, just as we can scarcely conceive of a U.S. canon of literature without Fitzgerald himself.
There are reasons why this book is engrossing, and then there are reasons why it is important. Among the former are its impeccable style, its nearly flawless execution and its brilliant, charged prose.
Fitzgerald has inspired generations of writers, partly because he made writing look easy — the sign of a master. Editor Max Perkins praised early versions of the manuscript, saying each sentence contained insight, substance and beauty.
But it did not seem so to the reading public upon the modest first printing, in 1925. When Fitzgerald died, in 1940, most of the copies from the tiny second run sat unsold in a warehouse. It was not until the 1950s that The Great Gatsby entered the popular consciousness. By 1960, after the Beat Generation had risen to notoriety, but before the great disillusionment of Vietnam, it was Scribner's top seller.
It was its placement in history, just as the last, pathetic layers of the United States' facade were collapsing, that determined the book's fate, for it resonated with those who had finally caught up to Fitzgerald's desire to expose the myth of U.S. greatness. The execrable hypocrisy of the ruling class, as personified by Tom Buchanan, is as prevalent in the story as it is in today's news: "Nowadays people begin by sneering at family life and family institutions, and next they'll throw everything overboard and have intermarriage between black and white."
Gatsby the man is a complete fiction, as he admits to narrator Nick Carraway: Just as the United States was carved from the wilderness, he fashioned himself an identity as a wealthy, Oxford-educated gentleman, sustaining it through sheer determination and bravado — that is, the willingness to tell bald-faced lies. He is the shadow of the American dream. Seen through Nick's eyes, Gatsby is revealed early on as a shallow, self-conscious poseur. This means that the reader gets to play the knowing voyeur, as the sycophants and sybarites of New York and Long Island attend Gatsby's lavish parties, drink his booze, behave in ways that only the debauched children of the Jazz Age could, and then abandon him. First it's fun, then it's boring, and finally it becomes sick.
The U.S. love-hate relationship with money is central to the plot as well. All the wealthy characters in this book are despicable, a fact that cannot fail to resonate with the 99 per cent of the population who do not control vast fortunes. "Her voice is full of money," Gatsby says of Daisy. Yet money does not a snob make; Myrtle Wilson's nose is higher in the air than anyone's, despite the fact that she has not a sou of her own. And it is she, along with Gatsby himself, the other great pretender, who pays the ultimate price for stepping out of bounds. The lesson is clear: The rich are heartless. "They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made …"
Fitzgerald was just 29 when The Great Gatsby was published. Throughout much of the 20th century, and perhaps even today, it was hardly possible for a young American to dream of becoming a writer without wishing to emulate some part of his experience. And Jay Gatsby, despite his shortcomings, or perhaps because of them, has earned a place among our pantheon of enduring literary characters. He "believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter — tomorrow we will run faster, stretch our arms out farther. … So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."
William Kowalski is the author of four novels. He lives in Nova Scotia.
Next week: Middlemarch by George Eliot
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