American Icon: Fitzgerald's the Great Gatsby in Critical and Cultural Context

City University of New York.

“Robert Beuka has constructed an immensely valuable resource for teachers, students, and scholars. We have needed a book like this for a long time; Gatsby criticism seems in little danger of exhaustion anytime soon, and it becomes extremely difficult for readers to organize extant criticism simply because it’s so vast. This book will be read and reread, annotated and underlined, for many years to come.” —Kirk Curnutt, Troy University Montgomery

Cover image: Dust jacket of first edition of The Great Gatsby, published by Charles Scribner’s Sons in 1925. The image is Francis Cugat’s Celestial Eyes. Photo used by kind permission of the Matthew J. and Arlyn Bruccoli Collection of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Irvin Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, University of South Carolina Libraries.

Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby in Critical and Cultural Context

Beuka

“American Icon is a terrific book.€.€.€. Professor Beuka has made sense of decades of fragmented insights.” —Ronald Berman, University of California, San Diego

American Icon

Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby in Critical and Cultural Context

Robert Beuka is Professor of English at Bronx Community College,

American Icon

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itzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is widely seen as the quintessential “great American novel,” and the extensive body of criticism on the work bears out its significance in American letters. American Icon traces its reception and its canonical status in American literature, popular culture, and educational experience. It begins by outlining the novel’s critical reception from its publication in 1925, to very mixed reviews, through Fitzgerald’s death, when it had been virtually forgotten. Next, it examines the posthumous revival of Fitzgerald studies in the 1940s and its intensification by the New Critics in the 1950s, focusing on how and why the novel began to be considered a masterpiece of American literature. It then traces the growth of the “industry” of Gatsby criticism in the ensuing decades, stressing how critics of recent decades have opened up study of the economic, sexual, racial, and historical aspects of the text. The final section discusses the larger-thanlife status Gatsby has attained in American education and popular culture, suggesting not only that it has risen from the critical ash heaps into which it was initially discarded, but also that it has become part of the fabric of American culture in a way that few other works have.

Cover design: Frank Gutbrod

Robert Beuka

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American Icon

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Studies in American Literature and Culture: Literary Criticism in Perspective Scott Peeples, Series Editor (Charleston, South Carolina)

About Literary Criticism in Perspective Books in the series Literary Criticism in Perspective trace literary scholarship and criticism on major and neglected writers alike, or on a single major work, a group of writers, a literary school or movement. In so doing the authors  — authorities on the topic in question who are also well-versed in the principles and history of literary criticism  — address a readership consisting of scholars, students of literature at the graduate and undergraduate level, and the general reader. One of the primary purposes of the series is to illuminate the nature of literary criticism itself, to gauge the influence of social and historic currents on aesthetic judgments once thought objective and normative.

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American Icon Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby in Critical and Cultural Context Robert Beuka

Rochester, New York

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Copyright © 2011 Robert Beuka All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation, no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded, or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. First published 2011 by Camden House Camden House is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt. Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620, USA www.camden-house.com and of Boydell & Brewer Limited PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK www.boydellandbrewer.com ISBN-13: 978-1-57113-371-7 ISBN-10: 1-57113-371-2 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Beuka, Robert, 1965– American icon: Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby in critical and cultural context / Robert Beuka. p. cm. — (Studies in American literature and culture) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-1-57113-371-7 (hardcover : acid-free paper) ISBN-10: 1-57113-371-2 (hardcover : acid-free paper) 1. Fitzgerald, F. Scott (Francis Scott), 1896–1940. Great Gatsby. I. Title. II. Series. PS3511.I9G8243 2011 813'.52—dc22 2011020005 This publication is printed on acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America.

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For my mother and father

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Contents

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Preface

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1: A Book of the Season Only: Early Reactions to The Great Gatsby

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2: A Green Light: The “Fitzgerald Revival” and the Making of a Masterpiece, 1940–59

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3: The Gatsby Industry: Tracing Patterns and Pushing Boundaries in the Criticism of the Sixties and Seventies

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4: Gatsby, in Theory (and Out): New Paradigms in the Eighties and Nineties

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5: Twenty-First-Century G: The Great Gatsby as Cultural Icon

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Works Cited

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Index

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of working on this book has been discovering the very wide range of opinion and reaction that Fitzgerald’s classic 1925 novel, The Great Gatsby, has generated through the years. Beyond the expected debate in the scholarly journals, I found through my research how deep and varied the book’s influence has been on American popular culture and discourse as well. In this regard, the study that follows at times diverges somewhat from the strict focus on analyzing trends and ideas in academic scholarship that is characteristic of the Literary Criticism in Perspective series. While my primary object of study is indeed the formal scholarship on Gatsby, to do justice to the profound cultural impact of this novel, I found it necessary — and rather enjoyable! — to look occasionally beyond the realm of scholarly books and journals, into the world of popular culture. From the coverage it has received in newspapers and magazines to adaptations, reworkings, and other assorted tips of the cap in fiction, film, theater, and music, The Great Gatsby has been a part of the larger cultural conversation in the United States over the past several decades, notably so in recent years. One of my goals in this study, then, is to attempt to account for the seemingly perpetual cultural relevance of a novel that, on its publication, was criticized for being too tied to its own historical moment to have any real shot at lasting appeal. The main concern in the pages that follow, though, is to trace the scholarly reaction to the book through the years — in a sense, to tell a story about how and why Gatsby came to be considered a classic of American literature, while also accounting for the changing modes of interpretation that have affected our understanding of the novel. I look at not only what the evolution in critical perspectives says about the book itself, but also what it says about the changing interests, values, and methodologies in American literary criticism. If, as various critics have suggested, The Great Gatsby serves as a sort of mirror to both the ideals and the anxieties of American culture, it also might be said to reflect much the same about the critics who interpret its meaning. While this could be said of most classic literary texts, Gatsby, with its intricate formal construction and established reputation as a national classic, has provided a particularly compelling field of play for various critical approaches, as I hope to demonstrate. My interest in the issues explored in this book began about a dozen years ago, when I presented a conference paper on Gatsby and first met the members of the F.  Scott Fitzgerald Society, many of whom have NE OF THE GREAT PLEASURES

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since become valued friends and colleagues. Their influence on this book is greater than they probably know. I wish to thank Kirk Curnutt, Ronald Berman, Peter Hays, James L. W. West III, and Bryant Mangum for their advice and timely words of encouragement along the way. I also would like to thank Jackson Bryer, whose superb bibliographic work on Fitzgerald made my job of analyzing the early critical reaction to the novel so much easier than it could have been. A special thanks goes out to my friend Ruth Prigozy, executive director of the Fitzgerald Society and my coeditor at the Fitzgerald Society Newsletter, for her enthusiastic support of this project, and for always having an answer to my hectic email inquiries. I am indebted as well to the good people at Camden House, who have been unfailingly gracious and supportive. Scott Peeples was kind enough to offer me the opportunity to take on this project, and his careful readings and reactions to early sections of the manuscript helped me greatly. Jim Walker, editorial director at Camden House, has guided the project along, not only with his keen critical eye but also with a collegiality and patience above and beyond the call of duty. Thank you, gentlemen. A portion of chapter 5 appeared previously in the volume Approaches to Teaching Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby,” edited by Jackson Bryer and Nancy VanArsdale, published by MLA Press in 2009. I thank the press for their permission to reprint this material here. My fondest thank-you I have saved for last: My wife, Nadine, and our children, Malcolm, Juliet, and Delia, have been both inspiration and guardian angels throughout the time it took to write this book. Their love and forbearance are a big part of these pages, too.

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1: A Book of the Season Only: Early Reactions to The Great Gatsby A Mixed Bag: The Initial Reviews

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GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL: What does this phrase signify? Is there such a thing, and if so, what is it? In the roughly one and a half centuries in which Americans have produced novels equipped to stand the test of time, few could be said to have the qualities to elevate them into such rarefied air. Critical consensus would put F.  Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby on the short list of candidates for the title of Great American Novel — alongside such works as Melville’s Moby Dick, Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. It certainly seems safe to say that no other American novel has become a part of our cultural lexicon so fully as Fitzgerald’s masterpiece. The novel’s aura of glamour, its modern romanticism, and its questioning of core American values have made it, in the eyes of many, the quintessential American novel. The consensus view of Gatsby as an American masterpiece is continually reinforced by, among other things, its presence in the classroom: Taught in high school English classes, undergraduate surveys of American literature, and graduate seminars, The Great Gatsby remains perpetually part of our cultural conversation. Partly as a result of its omnipresence in the educational system, the book also puts up remarkable sales numbers each year. As recently as 2002, a half-million paperback copies of the novel were sold in a single year (Goldstein). The paperback also tends to hover within the top 150 of online bookseller Amazon.com’s best sellers, and this for a novel published over eighty years ago. The Modern Library’s famous list, from back in 1998, of the “100 Best Novels” written in English in the twentieth century ranked The Great Gatsby as number two, behind only James Joyce’s Ulysses. And no less a cultural barometer than the search engine Google makes Gatsby’s ongoing relevance clear: Google “Gatsby,” and you will bring upwards of ten million hits. Given its great critical and popular success, it may be difficult for the reader of today to imagine a time when The Great Gatsby was not a best seller, or a time when the novel earned indifference and even scorn, as well as praise, from the critics. And yet this is entirely the case: Upon its publication in 1925, The Great Gatsby met with mixed reaction from critics in the major newspapers and literary journals. No doubt even more HE

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disheartening to its author was the reception by the buying public: The Great Gatsby went through only two Scribner’s printings in Fitzgerald’s lifetime, totaling only 23,870 copies, some of which remained unsold at the time of Fitzgerald’s death (Bruccoli, Reference, 175). Sales of The Great Gatsby during Fitzgerald’s lifetime were less than half of those of both his sensational, if uneven, debut novel of five years earlier, This Side of Paradise, and his sophomore effort, the largely forgotten The Beautiful and Damned (1922), topping only the poor showing of his last completed novel, Tender Is the Night (1934).1 It is one of the central ironies of Fitzgerald’s life and writing career that the novel that would eventually secure him a spot in America’s literary pantheon was, during his own lifetime, something of a flop. In fact, after years of disappointing sales following its initial publication, The Great Gatsby would eventually disappear from bookshops and the public consciousness. Though Fitzgerald would ask his publishing house, Scribner’s, repeatedly over the years to issue an inexpensive paperback edition of the novel, with the hope of improving sales and generating a revival of sorts for the book, Scribner’s refused. Fitzgerald’s business sense may actually have exceeded that of his publisher on this question. Subsequent paperback editions of the novel, issued years and decades after Fitzgerald’s death, would be instrumental in prompting the novel’s comeback, as well as its eventual rise to the status of American classic. Nonetheless, that acclaim and success came posthumously. At the time of Fitzgerald’s death in 1940, The Great Gatsby was long gone and forgotten. Something seems not quite right with this story. It is true that any student of literature can call to mind examples of authors and texts whose reputations have risen and fallen over the years, and indeed some examples can be rather dramatic. Melville’s Moby Dick (1851), another book on that rather small shelf of the Great American Novels, also failed during the author’s lifetime and waited far longer for its renaissance than The Great Gatsby — a century in the wasteland compared to Gatsby’s mere two or three decades. Or consider Kate Chopin’s 1899 work The Awakening, which is now considered a core American novel but which caused such controversy at the time of its release that it was dropped by its publisher after only one initial printing. Still, the extremes to which the pendulum has swung for Fitzgerald’s great work seem surprising. The reader of today, approaching the novel as not merely as an established classic, but indeed a cultural icon, could be forgiven for wondering how it could ever have been seen otherwise. Its author was bemused as well. Scott Fitzgerald had big plans for The Great Gatsby and sensed that the novel marked a major breakthrough for him. In an excited letter to his editor at Scribner’s, Maxwell Perkins, written when he was nearing completion of the manuscript, Fitzgerald remarked, “I think my novel is about the best American novel ever written” (in Bruccoli, Reference, 135). As such

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a bold (if, ultimately, accurate) statement implies, Fitzgerald was also an author acutely concerned with his place in American letters, and particularly with his posterity. In his “Author’s Apology” included in the third printing of his debut novel, This Side of Paradise (1920), Fitzgerald famously remarked, “My whole theory of writing I can sum up in one sentence: An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward” (“Apology”). Given his awareness of the importance of future critics’ and scholars’ assessments, Fitzgerald had to be particularly disappointed by the reaction of the many contemporary critics who viewed The Great Gatsby as an exciting diversion, but not a great novel that would stand the test of time. Consider, for example, a review by Isabel Paterson published in the New York Herald Tribune shortly after the April 10, 1925, release of the novel; a perceptive critique of the novel, the review nonetheless predicts its short shelf life, in the phrase that supplies the title for this chapter. Paterson praises Fitzgerald’s keen attention to detail and contemporary style — “In reproducing surfaces his virtuosity is amazing. He gets the exact tone, the note, the shade of the season and place he is working on; he is more contemporary than any newspaper” — before going on to conclude that this ability to capture the spirit of the age would also prove to be the book’s fatal flaw: “But he has not, yet, gone below that glittering surface except by a kind of happy accident, and then he is rather bewildered by the results of his own intuition. . . . What has never been alive cannot very well go on living; so this is a book of the season only, but so peculiarly of the season, that it is in its own small way unique” (202).2 The reader of today might surmise that Paterson gets the story partially right, as one unmistakable feature of the novel is its author’s ability to capture the “glittering surface” of high society life in the twenties; however, this critique, written in the midst of the “season” Patterson describes, is unable to account for the enduring appeal of this historical era in American life. Nonetheless, Paterson was not the only critic to fault Fitzgerald for getting the surface right at the expense of real depth: No less a literary lion of the age than H. L. Mencken, in a generally positive, but still mixed review of The Great Gatsby for the Baltimore Evening Sun, complained that the novel “is in form no more than a glorified anecdote, and not too probable at that” (211). Despite praising Fitzgerald’s technical achievements in the book, Mencken concludes that the “story is obviously unimportant” (211), citing its “basic triviality” (212). Mencken’s indictment of the novel’s triviality was shared by other contemporary reviewers in the newspapers as well. Fitzgerald scholar Matthew Bruccoli reminds us that leading newspapers of the day, especially those based in New York, were key shapers of literary opinion.3 (Reference, 188) Consider the case of the New York World, which Bruccoli lists among the “most influential periodicals and opinion-makers”

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(188): An unsigned review in this paper, published just two days after the novel’s release, complains that “there is no important development” of the protagonist, a flaw indicative of the overall shallowness of the narrative: “‘The Great Gatsby’ is another one of the thousands of modern novels which must be approached with the point of view of the average tired person toward the movie-around-the-corner, a deadened intellect, a thankful resigning of the attention, and an aftermath of wonder that such things are produced” (in Bryer, 195). Perhaps banking on their status as literary tastemaker, the publishers of the New York World seem to have been intent on getting this brief, utterly negative review out early; it is among the first reviews of The Great Gatsby to appear in print. Interestingly, the World would subsequently print another review of the novel, this time by the writer Laurence Stallings, only ten days later; this one would precisely contradict the points made in the first, unsigned review. In praising Fitzgerald’s accomplishments in the novel, Stallings argues, “The Great Gatsby evidences an interest in the color and sweep of prose, in the design and integrity of the novel, in the development of character, like nothing else he has attempted. If you are interested in the American novel this is a book for your list” (203). The stark contrast between the two New York World reviews offers an instructive, and particularly acute, example of a split in the perceptions of contemporary critics regarding Fitzgerald’s literary merits. Almost no critical assessment of this (or really any) Fitzgerald work doubted the author’s way with words, or his ability to create exciting stories appealing to a contemporary audience; typically, the Fitzgerald debate concerned whether or not his writing had the weight to carry it forward to future generations, or whether he was an all-style, no-substance flash-in-the-pan doomed to a short literary shelf life. As with any rule, there are exceptions in this case as well, and one unsigned review in The Independent found the novel to be lifeless, complaining that the book “has the flavor of skimmed milk” (in Bryer, 216). Nonetheless, most critical appraisals of The Great Gatsby that appeared in 1925 praised Fitzgerald’s “facility” with language, while grappling with the question of the novel’s literariness. Ironically, after Fitzgerald’s death, the Gatsby revival would be sparked by critics who saw the novel’s ultra-modern tone as a characteristic that would help it to endure. In a seminal essay on Fitzgerald (first published in 1945 in the Nation, and five years later collected in The Liberal Imagination), Lionel Trilling made this argument, seeing Gatsby’s timeliness as part and parcel of its potential timelessness. “The Great Gatsby . . . after a quarter-century is still as fresh as when it first appeared; it has even gained in weight and relevance, which can be said of very few American books of its time” (251). Trilling cites Fitzgerald’s deep understanding of his historical moment as his rationale for this assessment of the novel’s lasting value: “The Great Gatsby has its interest as a record of contemporary

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manners, but this might only have served to date it, did not Fitzgerald take the given moment of history as something more than a mere circumstance, did he not . . . seize the given moment as a moral fact” (251). In direct contrast to critics of Fitzgerald’s own age, like Paterson, who saw in the novel’s modern tone its fatal flaw, subsequent critics and scholars, following Trilling’s lead, often noted Fitzgerald’s incisive portrayal of his contemporary scene as a distinguishing literary feature of the novel. Trilling’s thoughts on the novel and its author would in fact be influential in helping to restore Fitzgerald’s critical reputation in the years following the author’s death. By contrast, at the time of the novel’s publication, no critical consensus had yet been reached on the value of Fitzgerald’s style. Indeed, some reviewers of his work found Fitzgerald’s ultra-modern tone, with its allusions to current fashions and styles, and its liberal use of contemporary slang, to be not merely superficial, but offensive. John McClure, for example, in his review of the novel for the New Orleans Times-Picayune, derides Fitzgerald as “one of the Wednesday-and-Thursday boys. His books are the cleverest of the week, sometimes of the month or the year” (232). McClure argues that Fitzgerald, in The Great Gatsby, “is so addicted to the use of Wednesday-and-Thursday terms . . . new words that everybody is using . . . that the style is raw. . . . Unless they are used with consummate skill they are as objectionable as new paint, slick, shiny, crude and glaring. They grate on the nerves. Mr. Fitzgerald, in using an up-to-the-minute vocabulary, pays the penalty of crudeness” (232). Fitzgerald, for his part, was acutely aware of the allure of 1920s style; he not only coined the phrase “the Jazz Age,” providing the era with its unofficial moniker, but he also made a living, at least early in his career, through fresh, often glossy portrayals of the young women and men of the era, its “flappers” and “philosophers,” and their willingness to flout conventional morality and social standards.4 Unlike some of his critics, Fitzgerald seemed to understand, before the point was elucidated by Trilling and others, that his time and place would continue to captivate readers of future generations as well. One strain of negative criticism directed toward The Great Gatsby upon its publication focused on a particular aspect of the book’s modern nature: Fitzgerald’s depiction of a reckless, fast-living youthful set. Some reviewers criticized the lack of virtuous characters, and in a larger sense bemoaned what they saw as the novel’s moral relativism. The reviewer for the Raleigh News and Observer offers a representative example of that assessment: “The book is more or less exhilarating as read, but after it is all read and we look back at what Mr. Fitzgerald has given us, we have a wistful feeling that we wish there had been somebody good in the book” (in Bryer, 217). Another unnamed reviewer, in the Kansas City Star, takes a similarly offended tone, arguing that the immoral nature of the story and its characters makes it essentially not worth reading: “Mr. Fitzgerald

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is a clever writer, but in ‘The Great Gatsby’ his chosen field is so sordid and depressing that if the cleverness is there it is obscured by the details of his story” (in Bryer, 221). One of the more scalding attacks on the novel along these lines comes from Harvey Eagleton, in his review of Gatsby for the Dallas Morning News. In a fiery review, Eagleton launches into a broadside against not only the sordid material of the novel, but also of the character of its author, claiming that Fitzgerald had been both a sensationalist and a pseudo-reformer lacking any real ideas for reform in his first novels. Through such strategies, Eagleton argues, he managed to play one generation of readers off of the other and profit from the controversy, but Eagleton feels he has seen through this sham to the essential emptiness beneath, discussing Fitzgerald’s “fundamental lack of imagination”: “in spite of all his cleverness, and his wit, he has no creative faculty. He has a photographic mind. He can not create beyond himself nor imagine experience very different from his own. He is continuously autobiographic. His heroine, as I have said, is his wife, and his hero is himself” (223). In The Great Gatsby, Eagleton feels that Fitzgerald tried to strike out in a new direction, sensing a generation of imitators massing around him, but the result is an abject failure: “The book is highly sensational, loud, blatant, ugly, pointless. There seems to be no reason for its existence” (224). Eagleton concludes his review by pronouncing his postmortem on Fitzgerald: “One finishes ‘The Great Gatsby’ with a feeling of regret, not for the fate of the people in the book, but for Mr. Fitzgerald. When ‘This Side of Paradise’ was published, Mr. Fitzgerald was hailed as a young man of promise, which he certainly appeared to be. But the promise, like so many, seems likely to go unfulfilled. The Roman candle which sent out a few gloriously colored balls at the first lighting seems to be ending in a fizzle of smoke and sparks” (224). Eagleton’s concluding thought — that The Great Gatsby represents the petering out of Fitzgerald’s career as an author — may strike admirers of the novel today as rather humorous, not merely for its all-but-perfect misjudgment of the book’s place in his oeuvre (Gatsby is certainly Fitzgerald’s best novel), but also for its strikingly confident tone in declaring Fitzgerald washed up at that point in his career. Nonetheless, it is true that Fitzgerald never fully recovered from the modest sales and mixed reception earned by The Great Gatsby, which he seemed also to see as his best work. Though he would publish another fine novel in Tender Is the Night (1934), as well as a number of important and accomplished short stories, and leave another novel (The Last Tycoon)5 unfinished at the time of his death in 1940, Fitzgerald would never regain the stature he enjoyed in the first five years of his writing career. Eagleton’s pompous pronouncement is not all that far off after all: Post-Gatsby, Fitzgerald’s “fizzle” had, in fact, begun. What may be more interesting about Eagleton’s review,

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however, and what aligns him with a wider cross-section of critics of the time, is his tendency to view Gatsby through the lens of Fitzgerald’s earlier work. Time and again in contemporary reviews of The Great Gatsby, critics held the novel up against the reputation Fitzgerald had carved out for himself in the early part of his career. And while this seems only the logical thing to do — considering a novel in relation to the author’s larger body of work — in Fitzgerald’s case such comparisons invoked not only the literary merits of the author’s oeuvre, but also the sensation he created upon publication of his first novel, This Side of Paradise, in 1920. Indeed, it is not an overstatement to argue that Fitzgerald would for the remainder of his life be measured against the image and reputation of the precocious young rule-breaker of a novelist who shocked the literary world with the publication of his scandalous first book at the tender age of twenty three. Because This Side of Paradise cast such a large shadow over Fitzgerald’s future work, including The Great Gatsby, its reputation and reception are worth considering briefly.

The Perils of Precociousness: Fitzgerald’s Early Reputation, and Its Shadow Critics and the reading public alike were fairly astounded by Fitzgerald’s first novel. A thoroughly modern bildungsroman, This Side of Paradise tells the story of young Amory Blaine, a protagonist Fitzgerald drew from his own life experiences. Driven by his conception of himself as a romantic figure (Fitzgerald’s original title for an earlier version of the novel was The Romantic Egotist), Amory leaves behind his midwestern roots for an eastern prep school and eventually life among the Ivy League elites at Princeton. Through the course of his adventures in the narrative, Amory experiences a number of romances, a flirtation with the Catholic religion, riotous times at Princeton and in New York City clubs, war, and — eventually — a severe bout of disillusionment over both the hypocrisies of his society and his larger lack of purpose or direction in life. Fitzgerald’s depiction of social standards and modern manners shocked a reading public unaccustomed to such direct representations of contemporary life. His descriptions of the romantic escapades and “petting parties” of teenagers and young adults were particularly eye-opening, as was his vision of the college life in the elite Ivy League as a playground for fashionable dilettantes, would-be philosophers, and drunken revelers. The critics praised Fitzgerald’s colorful take on college life; Harry Hansen, writing for the Chicago Daily News, states simply, “I cannot conceive of a college man who won’t read this book and say, ‘It’s real’” (2). The college men concurred: R. F. McPartlin, for The Dartmouth, argues that the novel is “true to life” and “fulfills the demands of readers who know undergraduate life

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at first-hand” (16); David W. Bailey, for the Harvard Crimson, describes the book as “a truly American novel, bewildering, brilliant” (19); and an unsigned review in the New York Times congratulates Fitzgerald on capturing the essence of modern collegiate life: “As a picture of the daily existence of what we call loosely ‘college men,’ this book is as nearly perfect as such a work could be” (in Bryer, 21). But perhaps more compelling than the critical response to the content of Fitzgerald’s debut novel — and more relevant to a discussion of his future reputation — was the manner in which reviewers responded to Fitzgerald’s style. It is fair to say that the freshness of This Side of Paradise caught the publishing world quite by surprise. Though the 1920s would usher in a great age of experimentation in fictional forms, at the outset of the decade, American fiction was in something of a holding pattern, with major writers of established reputations, like Wharton, Dreiser, and Cather, at the top of the literary food chain, and no shortage of unspectacular popular writers putting out predictable works to keep the reading public happy and buying books. In the midst of this staid literary world, Fitzgerald released a novel so cheekily experimental that it seemed its author was intentionally trying to see how many literary conventions he could flout in one work and get away with it. Though in essence a coming-of-age novel, a traditional enough form, This Side of Paradise features repeated forays into different genres altogether. Passages of verse, as well as sections of chapters written in dramatic form, appear every now and again to disrupt the flow of the linear narrative. The effect of this playfulness is a very noticeable authorial presence, as well as a narrative that feels as if it is constantly being reinvented as it proceeds. While one might expect a mixed reaction to such tactics from the literary establishment, instead the young author had the critics eating out of his hand. The reaction to This Side of Paradise is crucial to understanding Fitzgerald’s later critical reputation, because the bar was set so very high from the start. H. L. Mencken, in his review in The Smart Set, lavishes praise on the young Fitzgerald, contrasting him favorably to the typical “young American novelist,” whom Mencken characterizes as a “naïve, sentimental and somewhat disgusting ignoramus.” Of the book, Mencken argues that it is “a truly amazing first novel — original in structure, extremely sophisticated in manner, and adorned with a brilliancy that is . . . rare in American writing” (in Bryer, 28). Mencken, who concludes his review by suggesting that Fitzgerald is the most exciting American author to emerge since Frank Norris, was not unique in his sentiments. Burton Rascoe, in the Chicago Daily Tribune, takes this line of thinking a step further: “If you have not already done so, make a note of the name, F. Scott Fitzgerald. It is borne by a 23 year old novelist who will, unless I am mistaken, be much heard of hereafter. His first novel . . . bears the impress, it seems to me, of genius” (3). Rascoe was by no means the only

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critic to invoke the g-word. Robert Benchley, for the New York Morning World, states, “I should be inclined to hail as a genius any twenty-threeyear-old author who can think up something new and say it in a new way so that it will be interesting to a great many people” (14). Edwin Francis Edgett, in the Boston Evening Transcript, describes the novel as “a boisterous exhibition of youthful though somewhat unregulated genius” (“Young,” 22). Across the board, the adjectives rolled in for the young author and his debut work: brilliant, perfect, fascinating, and beautiful, the experts said. Aside from the praise of the work itself, the other common theme uniting the reviews of This Side of Paradise is the sense among critics that they are discussing a writer at the outset of a great career. Recognizing Fitzgerald as a writer with an uncanny knack for creating engrossing, stylized narratives, many of the critics of the day spent a good deal of their reviews looking forward, predicting great things from the young writer in the future. An unsigned review in the Philadelphia North American sums up this perspective on the young author: “A youth which has so much of steely insight and elastic strength as Fitzgerald’s, combined with his artistry and originality . . . will grow to a maturity that will stamp itself on the palimpsest of American letters” (in Bryer, 6). As in this review, the expectation among critics, time and again, is that the great work is yet ahead of Fitzgerald. John Black, writing for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, sums up this viewpoint in describing This Side of Paradise as “merely a presage of much greater things on the part of Mr. Fitzgerald” (9). The call from the critics turned out to be accurate: The notion that the precocious young author would, once he focused more keenly on form, produce a work of enduring quality was exactly right. Though Fitzgerald made his splash as a maverick writer, one whose narrative playfulness and trickery in some ways anticipated the experimentalism of the modernists who would shock the literary world in the twenties, he made his lasting contribution to literary history with the more traditional narrative form of The Great Gatsby, written five years after This Side of Paradise. To be sure, Gatsby features plenty of narrative experimentation, particularly in the handling of time frames, but the gimmicky shifts into verse and drama that helped make This Side of Paradise a sensation had been replaced with a more subtle testing of the boundaries of linear narrative. For Fitzgerald, the popular and critical smash success of his first novel was of course most welcome. Never known as a retiring wallflower, the young Fitzgerald had set off on his writing career with the brash goal of becoming a literary celebrity, and had, on his first real try, done exactly that. Shortly after the publication of the novel, the newly famous young man married Zelda Sayre of Montgomery, Alabama, and the couple became fixtures on the New York social scene. At the same time, Fitzgerald continued to pursue his craft, regularly publishing short stories in

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magazines ranging from those geared toward more literary tastes, like Mencken’s The Smart Set, to glossier, mass-market magazines like The Saturday Evening Post. Some of the early Smart Set stories, like “Benediction” and “May Day,” both published in 1920, are among Fitzgerald’s best, while the material he published in the Post and other wide-circulation magazines, such as the 1920 Post stories “The Camel’s Back” and “The Offshore Pirate,” tended to be well-written but lightweight entertainments. Fitzgerald collected the best of these early stories for his next book, the short story collection Flappers and Philosophers, published later in 1920. While still enjoying the first flush of critical and commercial success, even at this early point of his career, Fitzgerald was beginning to establish a pattern to which he would adhere throughout his writing life: the alternation between “serious” works — the novels, and the better short stories — and the commercial short stories that paid the bills and for which, at least in the early 1920s, there seemed to be unlimited demand from the glossy magazines. For a writer keenly aware of his own reputation, the problem posed by this bifurcated writerly identity — equal parts literary artist and commercial scribe — would be clear enough. Publishing too many fluff pieces in the glossy magazines would be sure to compromise his status as a writer of serious literature. By the time The Great Gatsby was published in 1925, this sort of critical backlash against Fitzgerald as merely a purveyor of facile commercial fiction informed one strain of critical reception, as we have already seen. Indeed, as early as Fitzgerald’s second novel, The Beautiful and Damned (1922), we can see how the author could be hamstrung by his critical reputation. As would later be the case with Gatsby, with The Beautiful and Damned Fitzgerald had to fight against a critical reputation that preceded him. This novel failed, in the eyes of most critics, to live up the high standards set by This Side of Paradise. Hence, the glowing reception by critics at the outset of Fitzgerald’s career may have in some sense worked against the author as well, setting up an impossible set of expectations. After initially being praised up and down by the critics as a literary wunderkind, Fitzgerald would never again be able to live up to the hype surrounding his explosion onto the literary scene. Perhaps in an attempt to distance himself from his lightweight commercial short stories (as well as the negative critical reaction that he would be likely to meet if he stayed in that vein), Fitzgerald seems clearly to have tried very hard to make The Beautiful and Damned a serious, weighty novel. He wrote the novel during a period when he was becoming interested in the hard-edged realism of writers of the naturalist school championed by H. L. Mencken, like Theodore Dreiser and one of Fitzgerald’s favorite writers of the day, Frank Norris. The influence shows: Like Dreiser and Norris, who fashioned deterministic narratives about characters unable to transcend entrapping and often brutal environments and lives,

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Fitzgerald, in The Beautiful and Damned, eschewed his more characteristic blend of romanticism, lyricism, and humor in favor of an unremittingly bleak portrayal of a couple’s fall from high society living to the depths of penury and despair. The novel tells the story of Anthony Patch, an effete heir-in-waiting to a massive family fortune who whiles away his days in New York City, waiting for his grandfather to die and his inheritance to arrive. The largely unlikable protagonist occupies himself in pretentious banter with his friends, various aesthetic contemplations, and rounds of increasingly habitual and heavy drinking. Anthony’s love interest and eventual wife, Gloria Gilbert, is a dazzling beauty who shares Anthony’s disdain for convention, as well as his taste for the high life. Anthony and Gloria’s dissipation worsens as the novel progresses, leading them inexorably toward their ruin, as Anthony’s pious grandfather, sickened by the couple’s exploits, cuts them out of his will. Though a coda to the narrative informs us that Anthony eventually wins his inheritance through a lawsuit, the damage has already been done; the two are ruined as a couple, and Anthony seems to have suffered permanent damage as a result of his unchecked appetites. Though it received a decidedly mixed appraisal overall, critics of the novel were nearly unanimous in recognizing The Beautiful and Damned as a more carefully constructed and more traditionally plotted novel than the striking but flighty This Side of Paradise. Perhaps the most important endorsement came from Mencken, who admired not only the execution of the book but also what he hailed as a growing seriousness of purpose in the author. This reaction is not surprising, given Mencken’s preference for literary works that explored the stark realities of modern life. Matthew Bruccoli points out that Mencken “may have been the strongest influence on Fitzgerald’s attempt to write a deterministic novel” (Some Sort, 164), and there is no doubt that Fitzgerald’s respect for Mencken — “the only man in America for whom he had complete admiration” (138) — shaped his work in this novel and beyond. While the impact of Mencken’s influence was not discussed by critics of the day (indeed, it perhaps has not yet been fully explored), Fitzgerald’s new attention to form that accompanied his shift to the more starkly realistic mode certainly was a focus for critics. Henry Seidel Canby, for example, in his review for the New York Evening Post, argues that “if This Side of Paradise showed in certain passages and in the essential energy of the whole that [Fitzgerald] had glimpses of a genius for sheer writing, this book proves that he has the artist’s conscience and enough intellect to learn to control the life that fascinates him.” However, not all critics had the enthusiasm for the book expressed by Canby, who saw it as an “almost uncompromising tragedy” that exposed the bleak fate awaiting a “rudderless society steering gayly for nowhere” (63). Thomas Caldecott Chubb, in his review for the Yale Literary Magazine, strikes about as different a chord as could be imagined, flatly

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pronouncing, “The Beautiful and Damned is a tedious, dull book with hardly an illuminating flash in all of its 400 odd pages” (62). Chubb was hardly alone in his assessment of the novel’s dullness: Most reviewers felt that Fitzgerald’s notable advancements in formal structure in The Beautiful and Damned had come at the cost of a loss of the exuberance that had characterized his earlier writing. And there was another relationship to Fitzgerald’s earlier reputation that was mentioned, time and again, in the reviews of The Beautiful and Damned, as would later be the case with reviews of Gatsby. Critics seemed intent on discussing not only the respective literary merits of the two works, but also the growth and development of young Scott Fitzgerald, celebrity author. Because he had come out of nowhere with his first novel, and because he had cut such a figure as the precocious young rulebreaker of a writer, Fitzgerald would find himself judged by the critics not only as a writer but also as a personage, a celebrity. More accurately, his reputation and celebrity status became intertwined with aesthetic concerns, at least in the eyes of critics. Most commonly, reviewers of The Beautiful and Damned began to express annoyance over the same brash, youthful quality that they had praised in Fitzgerald’s writing only two years earlier. Already an established spokesman of a rebellious younger generation, following the success of This Side of Paradise and the story collection Flappers and Philosophers, Fitzgerald now began to face critics tiring of not only his stylistic tricks, but also his celebrity. Edwin Francis Edgett, reviewing The Beautiful and Damned for the Boston Evening Transcript, offers a representative example of this type of critique, stating, “It is apparent from ‘The Beautiful and Damned,’ as it was from ‘This Side of Paradise,’ that the devious ways of fiction are preferred by Mr. Fitzgerald to the straight and narrow path. Youth is something glorious to have in our possession, but unhappily it sometimes runs riot in our lives and ambitions, and we thereby proclaim our juvenility too vociferously” (“Beautiful,” 81). If Edgett sounds like someone perhaps missing his own youth too much, it is worth noting that he was not alone in this sort of reaction against Fitzgerald. Edward N. Teall, in the Worcester Gazette, follows a similar line, referring to Fitzgerald as “the Boy Wonder who started with a Best Seller,” before arguing that the juvenility of The Beautiful and Damned, “Fitzgerald’s newest literary prank . . . makes it seem as though . . . Mr. Fitzgerald were reversing the natural order and growing younger” (79). Other critics also latched onto Fitzgerald’s youth as a focal point of their critiques. Phil Kinsley, in the Philadelphia Record, wonders aloud whether Fitzgerald is a “new beacon pointing the way to emancipation from the old method of literary adventuring” or a “babbling babe, a jester who is more a fool than a philosopher.” Kinsley extends the insulting metaphor, likening the author to “a wild child dashing aimlessly

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about his nursery, smashing toys and breaking windows,” before concluding, “Some day the child will outgrow the nursery” (87). While Kinsley’s attack, followed by a prediction of better, more mature things to come may sound rather odd, in fact it was a common approach in Fitzgerald criticism by this point. Even Fitzgerald’s good friend John Peale Bishop, in a very perceptive review of The Beautiful and Damned for the New York Herald, called attention to Fitzgerald’s immaturity, while still praising the depths of his talent: “His ideas are too often treated like paper crackers, things to make a gay and pretty noise with and then be cast aside; he is frequently at the mercy of words with which he has only a nodding acquaintance; his aesthetics are faulty; his literary taste is at times extremely bad. . . . But these are flaws of vulgarity in one who is awkward with his own vigor” (74). The common thread uniting the reviews of Fitzgerald’s second novel — an impatience with a carelessly youthful style, coupled with a prediction of more mature work to come — is best summed up in E. W. Osborn’s New York World review, in which he not only anticipates the achievement of Gatsby, but even seems to anticipate some of the language of its memorable closing passage; Osborn writes that The Beautiful and Damned “confirms in us the idea that some day, when he has outgrown the temptation to be flippant, Mr. Fitzgerald will sit up and write a book that will give us a long breath of wonder” (78).

“It was my material”: Gatsby’s Literary Reputation during Fitzgerald’s Lifetime However, by the time Fitzgerald had written the book that ought to have been commensurate to his critics’ capacity for wonder, he was dismayed to see that his youthful reputation — and all the baggage that came along with it — still seemed to precede him. Some of the first reviews to come out, in the daily newspapers, employed the established approach of attacking the author’s maturity, at the expense of any real substantive discussion of the novel. Ruth Hale, who published one of the first reviews, in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, took such a line: “Find me one chemical trace of magic, life, irony, romance or mysticism in all of ‘The Great Gatsby’ and I will bind myself to read one Scott Fitzgerald book a week for the rest of my life. The boy is simply puttering around. . . . Why he should be called an author, or why any of us should behave as if he were, has never been explained satisfactorily to me” (197). Another early reviewer, Ruth Snyder, writing for the New York Evening World, accused Fitzgerald of crafting a “cynical” novel, written in a style that “is painfully forced” (195). After briefly and accurately summarizing the plot but otherwise offering no other commentary on the novel whatsoever, Snyder concludes her review by stating, “We are quite convinced after reading ‘The Great

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Gatsby’ that Mr. Fitzgerald is not one of the great American writers of today” (196). The pattern seen in reviews such as these — bold attacks on the author’s stature and even character, based on only the most superficial reading of the work — would be bound to agitate the author; indeed, Fitzgerald was disturbed by this trend, as he wrote to Max Perkins after reading some early reviews in the papers: “Most of the reviewers floundered around in a piece of work that obviously they completely failed to understand and tried to give it reviews that committed them neither pro or con until some one of the culture had spoken” (in Bruccoli, Reference, 160). He would later repeat this idea in a letter to his good friend, the writer and critic Edmund Wilson, claiming that “of all the reviews, even the most entheusiastic [sic], not one had the slightest idea what the book was about” (178).6 Indeed, the first early reviews stung Fitzgerald so badly that they seemed to have him contemplating a career change, as he commented to Perkins, in a letter written from France just after the release of the novel: In all events I have a book of good stories for this fall. Now I shall write some cheap ones until I’ve accumulated enough for my next novel. When that is finished and published I’ll wait and see. If it will support me with no more intervals of trash I’ll go on as a novelist. If not I’m going to quit, come home, go to Hollywood and learn the movie business. I can’t reduce our scale of living and I can’t stand this financial insecurity. Anyhow there’s no point in trying to be an artist if you can’t do your best. I had my chance back in 1920 to start my life on a sensible scale and I lost it and so I’ll have to pay the penalty. Then perhaps at 40 I can start writing again without this constant worry and interruption. (In Bruccoli, Reference, 158)

Fitzgerald’s complaints about the critics’ sensibility, as well as his concerns over the novel’s financial prospects, no doubt reveal something of a wounded pride, but his line of thinking regarding the newspaper reviews has merit as well. The appraisals that eventually appeared from more prominent literary reviewers did take the work more seriously, and generally offered a more rounded, and more appreciative view of Fitzgerald’s achievement than the reviews offered by the newspaper scribes. Still, the critiques of the cultural heavyweights were not without problematic moments, either. Take the case of H.  L. Mencken, who had practically hailed the twenty-three-year-old Fitzgerald as a genius in his review of the debut novel, This Side of Paradise. By contrast, his Baltimore Sun review of Gatsby is more of a mixed affair. He insists throughout his brief review that the book is unimportant, even trivial, while at the same time hailing the technical accomplishments of its author. “What gives the story distinction is . . . the charm and beauty of the writing,” Mencken wrote. “The story, for all its basic triviality, has a fine texture, a careful and

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brilliant finish. The obvious phrase is simply not in it. The sentences roll along smoothly, sparklingly, variously. There is evidence in every line of hard and intelligent effort” (212). For an author hoping by this point in his life to live down his boisterous public image and be recognized as an artist more than just a celebrity, Fitzgerald must have been pleased by Mencken’s recognition of the consciousness of the novel’s artistry. At the same time, Mencken’s assessment of Gatsby’s merit relative to Fitzgerald’s larger body of work had to rankle: “This story is obviously unimportant, and though . . . it has its place in the Fitzgerald canon, it is certainly not to be put on the same shelf with, say, ‘This Side of Paradise’” (212). While Mencken’s conclusion may seem absurd from today’s perspective (This Side of Paradise, nowadays, is for all of its inventiveness and originality lucky to find a spot on the shelf at all), it demonstrates the kind of shadow cast by the debut novel. Mencken was not alone in this opinion. Ralph Coghlan, writing for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, argues that The Great Gatsby “lacks power,” because it is missing the “ebullience,” “mellowness,” “profundity,” and “old abandon” of Fitzgerald’s earlier writing. While Coghlan clearly favors Fitzgerald’s early style, even going so far as to praise the “poetic outbursts” of the earlier fiction, and “those chapters in which he was wont to divert the straightaway prose into dramatic form,” he — like Mencken — does draw attention to the improvements in structure and form evident in Gatsby: “What he has lost in effusiveness, in buoyancy, he has gained in cleaner workmanship. Just at the moment we are inclined to think that the exchange represents a net loss” (206). Other critics, though, congratulated Fitzgerald on moving beyond his early gimmickry and finding a more mature voice and structure in this novel. Walter Yust, in the New York Evening Post Literary Review, congratulates Fitzgerald for “growing up,” claiming that in the new novel, “from the opening page to the last, he has held successfully to one tone, to one vision” (214); for Yust, this results in a novel with the “power to throw a spell over the reader” (215). The reviewer for the Literary Digest International Book Review also complimented Fitzgerald for a newfound maturity in the novel, singling out “a new awareness of values in his attitude” (in Bryer, 209). Fitzgerald’s hometown paper, the St. Paul Pioneer Press, agreed, calling Gatsby “far the best of his novels,” and refuting reviewers who had objected to the novel on moral grounds by drawing a distinction between action and sensationalism in the narrative: “There are enough homicides, murders, suicides and illicit relationships to equip a moving picture, yet the book is not typical movie stuff. Back of it is intelligence and a growing perception of values” (in Bryer, 203). In a brief but interesting review for the Chicago Daily Tribune, Fanny Butcher picks up on a similar point as that made by the St. Paul reviewer, saying of the novel, “It is bizarre. It is melodramatic. It is, at moments, dime novelish. But it is, despite its faults, a book which is not

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negligible as any one’s work, and vastly important as Scott Fitzgerald’s work” (197). Butcher’s thesis runs directly counter to Mencken and others who lamented the loss of the cheeky experimentalism of This Side of Paradise. While agreeing that Paradise captured the vibrancy of a new generation and the “secret eagerness and spoken cynicism” of the modern twenty-year-old, Butcher points out in her review, “It was inevitable that he should lose that quality in his work” (197). In contrast to the depressing, self-conscious attempt at naturalistic fiction in The Beautiful and Damned, for Butcher Gatsby represented a great leap forward. Hunter Stagg, in his review for the Baltimore Evening Sun, expressed a similar statement, claiming, “Scott Fitzgerald’s first novel was probably one of the worst pieces of writing that ever got into print. But it had one virtue which none could deny it. The book was alive.” The second novel, although more accomplished, “was dead” (198). For Stagg, The Great Gatsby “combines the virtues of the first two and eliminates their vices” (198). For an early newspaper review, Stagg’s critique seems more significant than many, in that he anticipates lines of analysis that would appear in later, more in-depth discussions of the book. He praises Fitzgerald’s unique blend of idealism and irony, correctly noting how these seemingly contradictory traits animate the enigmatic title character. He also draws attention to matters of form: Striking a similar tone to Mencken’s, Stagg says of the novel that “it is written with the apparent effortlessness and spontaneity which is a sure indication of a great deal of very hard work, careful planning and earnest thinking” (198). While critics for years had been writing off Fitzgerald’s “way with words” as a matter of mere “felicity,” reviewers of Gatsby — even those who offered mixed reviews, like Mencken — tended to take note of the artistry and formal strength of the novel. Formalistic approaches, which would eventually constitute one main branch of Gatsby criticism, were just beginning to surface in some of the major reviews of The Great Gatsby that appeared in the spring and summer of 1925. One of the reviews that recognized both the formal and the thematic richness of the novel was that of William Benét, from the Saturday Review of Literature. As with many other early reviewers, Benét draws a distinction between the youthful, fluffy Fitzgerald, the sensation of the first novel and early stories, and the writer of Gatsby, who for Benét shows a great leap forward in maturity, work ethic, and thematic depth. What distinguishes Gatsby in Benét’s view is the author’s ability to correct the fatal flaw of his earlier work, its lack of depth: “But brilliant, irrefutably brilliant as were certain passages of the novels and tales of which the ‘boy wonder’ of our time was so lavish . . . there remained in general, glamour, glamour everywhere, and, after the glamour faded, little for the mind to hold except an impression of this kinetic glamour” (220). In contrast, The Great Gatsby “reveals thoroughly matured craftsmanship. It

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has structure. It has high occasions of felicitous, almost magic, phrase” (220). Benét anticipates the appraisals of New Critics in the 1950s who would single out portions of the novel for their formal excellence, claiming that “there are parts of the book, notably the second chapter, that, in our opinion, could not have been better written. There are astonishing feats that no one but Fitzgerald could have brought off, notably the catalogue of guests in Chapter IV” (221). Benét’s critique also breaks from those reviewers who had seen the characters of the novel only as two-dimensional, as types, rather than as what would seem like real, living beings. (Indeed, Fitzgerald himself, along with editor Maxwell Perkins, privately expressed a good bit of concern over the roundedness of his characters, particularly the shadowy, mysterious Gatsby.) In contrast, Benét says of the characters, “They are actual, rich and poor, cultivated and uncultivated, seen for a moment or two only or followed throughout the story. They are memorable individuals of today — not types” (221). Another perceptive early review, from Edwin Clark in the New York Times Book Review, explores similar ideas. Clark focuses in his review on the Long Island setting that gave rise to the novel, claiming that the glamorous life lived there “expresses one phase of the great grotesque spectacle of our American scene. It is humor, irony, ribaldry, pathos and loveliness.” In contrast to critics who had assailed Fitzgerald for a vulgar or sensationalized depiction of modern metropolitan life, Clark sees in the novel’s tension between a racy plot and a searching, idealistic undercurrent “a conflict of spirituality caught fast in the web of our commercial life. Both boisterous and tragic, it animates this . . . novel . . . with whimsical magic and simple pathos that is realized with economy and restraint” (199). Clark’s perceptive understanding of Fitzgerald’s key theme of modernity as a spiritual wasteland would find much support in explications of the novel written twenty and thirty years later. In his own day, he had company, too: William Curtis, writing for Town & Country, went so far as to say, “In ‘The Great Gatsby’ Mr. Fitzgerald . . . has produced something which approaches perilously near a masterpiece” (227). The reason Curtis is willing to elevate the book to such heights is its success in a form of social realism in which he has found American writers, almost without exception, sorely wanting: “It is one of the very special qualities of Mr. Fitzgerald’s ‘The Great Gatsby’ that, while proceeding in the calm manner of sophistication and taste, with no trace of the moral reformer or apologist, he has given us a picture which is, to us at least, as terrifying as any tragedy Aristotle could have wished for” (227). If words like “sophistication,” “taste,” “economy,” and “restraint” were to this point unheard-of terms in the lexicon of Fitzgerald criticism, the phrasing of critics like Clark and Curtis does point the way toward a sea-change of sorts in Fitzgerald’s aesthetics at this point in his career. And if those terms seem more appropriate in a discussion of a Henry James

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than of a Scott Fitzgerald, this was precisely a connection that several contemporary reviewers made. Herbert S. Gorman, writing in the New York Sun, argues, “In telling his story Mr. Fitzgerald has adopted a style that is slightly oblique. Indeed, in certain aspects it is Jamesian — the building up of a figure through the observations of a participator in the action and the adornment of this figure through meditative analysis” (210). He is quite right: The shift away from the intrusive third-person narrative perspective Fitzgerald used in This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and Damned is crucial to the aesthetic achievement of The Great Gatsby. In Gatsby, Fitzgerald employed a first-person participant-observer mode, or what James liked to call the “central fine intelligence” — a character in the story whose fine sensibilities allow him to relay the story to the reader with subtlety, as well as psychological and emotional depth. Other reviewers picked up on the connection: Clark compared Gatsby to The Turn of the Screw; poet Conrad Aiken likened it to The Awkward Age; Gilbert Seldes suggested that Fitzgerald picked up his new narrative method “from Henry James through Mrs. Wharton” (“Spring,” 240); and Fitzgerald’s fellow novelist Carl Van Vechten saw the closest parallel being to Daisy Miller. Van Vechten’s appraisal is helpful, in that it indicates what these critics were driving at in noting the Jamesian connections — not so much a suggestion of an imitative quality to the work, as a recognition of the author’s maturation in terms of both technique and aesthetic sensibility. Van Vechten says, of Jay Gatsby: This character, and the theme of the book in general, would have appealed to Henry James. In fact, it did appeal to Henry James. In one way or another this motif is woven into the tapestry of a score or more of his stories. In Daisy Miller you may find it complete. It is the theme of a soiled or rather cheap personality transfigured and rendered pathetically appealing through the possession of a passionate idealism. Although the comparison may be still further stressed, owing to the fact that Mr. Fitzgerald has chosen, as James so frequently chose, to see his story through the eyes of a spectator, it will be readily apparent that what he has done he has done in his own way, and that seems to me, in this instance, to be a particularly good way. (230)

From being called “loud, blatant, ugly [and] pointless” to being linked to no less a literary master than Henry James, from being described as having “the flavor of skimmed milk” to being hailed as something “perilously near a masterpiece,” The Great Gatsby elicited a wide range of critical perspectives in the weeks and months immediately following its publication. The last review of the season may have been the strongest, and in that sense may have presaged the fuller appreciation the novel would eventually receive, years and decades down the road. After the

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early reviewers had had their say, Gilbert Seldes published his review in The Dial in August 1925. His opening paragraph leaves little doubt about the argument he will make for the significance of the novel: There has never been any question of the talents of F. Scott Fitzgerald; there has been, justifiably until the publication of The Great Gatsby, a grave question as to what he was going to do with his gifts. The question has been answered in one of the finest of contemporary novels. Fitzgerald has more than matured; he has mastered his talents and gone soaring in a beautiful flight, leaving behind him 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. (“Spring,” 239)

Seldes goes on to praise Fitzgerald’s “effortless precision” and “technical virtuosity,” as well as his “irony and pity” and “consuming passion” (239). He closes the review by praising the author for maturing beyond his status as “the white-headed boy of The Saturday Evening Post” and for recognizing “both his capacities and his obligations as a novelist” (241). By the end of 1925, the critics had pretty much had their say over the work that Isabel Paterson had called “a book of the season only.” There were, however, some further rumblings in the press in the following year. 1926 saw an edition of the novel published in London, as well as a stage adaptation, by Owen Davis, enjoying a successful run in New York. The success of the stage play spawned a subsequent silent film version, directed by Herbert Brenon, and starring Warner Baxter and Lois Wilson, which was released by Paramount in late 1926. Each of these releases kept the novel and Fitzgerald in the press and to some extent in the public eye, but they did not spur the sort of groundswell of interest that might have altered the fate of the novel during Fitzgerald’s lifetime. Scribner’s gave the Modern Library permission to publish a hardcover version of Gatsby in 1934, and Fitzgerald seized the opportunity, in his preface to the new edition, to defend his great novel, which he felt never got a fair shake from the critics: Now that this book is being reissued, the author would like to say that never before did one try to keep his artistic conscience as pure as during the ten months put into doing it. Reading it over one can see how it could have been improved — yet without feeling guilty of any discrepancy from the truth, as far as I saw it; truth or rather the equivalent of truth, the attempt at honesty of imagination. . . . I had recently been kidded half haywire by critics who felt that my material was such as to preclude all dealing with mature persons in a mature world. But, my God! it was my material, and it was all I had to deal with.

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What I cut out of it both physically and emotionally would make another novel! . . . . If there is a clear conscience, a book can survive — at least in one’s feelings about it. . . . In addition, if one is young and willing to learn, almost all reviews have a value, even the ones that seem unfair. (“Introduction,” 156–57)

Notwithstanding the hint of optimism that can be found amidst the defensive tone of the preface to the Modern Library edition, it was only through the publication of inexpensive versions of the novel following Fitzgerald’s death — precisely the sort of marketing strategy he had proposed to Scribner’s, without success — that the novel finally started to reach a mass audience. The first of these posthumous reissues was Scribner’s release in 1941 of a volume edited by Edmund Wilson, which contained Wilson’s edited text of Fitzgerald’s unfinished Hollywood novel, which Wilson gave the title The Last Tycoon, along with The Great Gatsby and five of Fitzgerald’s best stories. A second important step was the Armed Services Editions printing, which provided 150,000 free copies of The Great Gatsby to American soldiers. After this, inexpensive editions followed throughout the reminder of the 1940s (Bruccoli, Reference, 217). Affordable editions of the novel helped in providing a spark for the eventual revival of interest in Fitzgerald and his masterpiece — both, at the time of Fitzgerald’s untimely death of heart failure in 1940, largely forgotten.

Notes 1

Matthew Bruccoli, in his definitive Fitzgerald biography, Some Sort of Epic Grandeur, notes that This Side of Paradise required twelve printings, totaling over 49,000 copies, in the first two years following publication; it would “prove to be Fitzgerald’s most popular book” (137); The Beautiful and Damned went through three printings totaling 50,000 copies, while Tender Is the Night went through three printings, totaling just over 15,000 copies.

2

Paterson’s review, as well as all of the other newspaper reviews cited in this chapter, can be found in the collection edited by Jackson R. Bryer, F.  Scott Fitzgerald: The Critical Reception (1978). Bryer’s collection is invaluable to anyone who wishes to research the contemporary critical reactions to Fitzgerald’s books. A chapter is devoted to each of Fitzgerald’s books; each chapter features a wide selection of contemporary reviews, reprinted in their entirety.

3

Like Jackson Bryer, Matthew Bruccoli has contributed immeasurably to our understanding of Fitzgerald’s writing and its context. His F.  Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby”: A Literary Reference (2000) is another reference work that supplies contemporary critical reactions and other contextual materials to assist the reader in understanding the history of the novel’s reception.

4

As Bruccoli points out, Fitzgerald’s decision to name his second collection of stories Tales of the Jazz Age was not without risk; he chose the title “against the

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advice of the Scribners salesemen . . . after convincing himself that it would not damage his reputation as a serious novelist. Fitzgerald claimed the phrase ‘jazz age’ as his contribution to the language” (Some Sort, 171). 5

This is the generally agreed upon title for the book, though Fitzgerald had not selected an official title for the work-in-progress before his death. The book was first published in 1941, the year after Fitzgerald’s death, under the title The Last Tycoon: An Unfinished Novel. The Last Tycoon was chosen as the title by Edmund Wilson, who edited the manuscript for publication. Generally, subsequent editions of the book carry this title. However, Matthew Bruccoli, who edited and prepared the manuscript for publication as part of the definitive Fitzgerald Edition, selected for the book’s 1993 publication the alternate title The Love of the Last Tycoon: A Western. According to Bruccoli, Wilson’s choice of title, back in 1941, was suspect and based on insufficient evidence that the author would have wanted the book to have this name: “It is characteristic of Wilson’s editorial policy that no source is provided for the title — allowing the reader to assume that The Last Tycoon was Fitzgerald’s final choice. Yet Fitzgerald never referred to his novel by title in his correspondence. The only title page that survives with the draft material names the work STAHR/A Romance” (Fitzgerald, Love, xiv). Bruccoli goes on to note that on a list of what appear to be potential titles for the book (Fitzgerald headed the list with the word “Title,” written in crayon), the only candidate not crossed out is “The Love of the Last Tycoon/A Western,” which has a check mark next to it (Love, xiv). Based on the evidence, Bruccoli concludes, “No good case for the title ‘The Last Tycoon’ can be made on the basis of the surviving Fitzgerald documents. The choice is between ‘Stahr: A Romance’ and ‘The Love of the Last Tycoon: A Western.’ The latter is preferable because it is close to the title by which the novel has been known and because it has the Fitzgerald bouquet. Fitzgerald was in fact writing a western — a novel about the last American frontier, where immigrants and sons of immigrants pursued and defined the American dream. It is appropriate that these tycoons made movie westerns: they too were pioneers” (Love, xvii).

6

A case could be made that there is a certain irony in Fitzgerald’s confiding in Wilson about critics who failed to take him seriously. Bruccoli has argued that Wilson set the tone for future dismissals of Fitzgerald’s intelligence and artistic integrity in a 1922 Bookman essay. For Bruccoli, Wilson’s “condescending” assessment of Fitzgerald’s literary intelligence — “that he was a natural, but not an artist” — influenced the author’s critical standing “for the next thirty years” (Some Sort, 165).

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2: A Green Light: The “Fitzgerald Revival” and the Making of a Masterpiece, 1940–59 The Forties: Curtain up on the “Second Act”

O

F.  SCOTT FITZGERALD’S more famous and oft-quoted statements is an observation he jotted down amidst the working notes for his final, unfinished novel: “There are no second acts in American lives.” This observation is regularly exhumed and reused in our own day, by everyone from journalists to sportswriters to pop-culture bloggers, typically as a preamble to a story about some ephemeral newsmaker who has, after a period of obscurity, reemerged into the limelight. Some observation along the lines of, “Fitzgerald got it wrong!” will invariably be the cheeky rejoinder that then leads in to a tale of some nearly forgotten figure who, after his or her period lost in the wilderness, has returned to notoriety and credibility. This familiar story replays with consistency in our popular culture (see, for example, A&E’s “Biography” and every episode of “VH1’s Behind the Music”), perhaps as much because of its ratification of our culture of acceptance and forgiveness as for the reassuring familiarity of its glory-ruin-restoration narrative formula. There is a certain irony in Fitzgerald’s involvement in such stories, not only because he was an early example of a national pop-culture celebrity, even superstar, but also because he never quite did get to see the “second act” of his own life and career. Indeed, this thought about “no second acts” is particularly apropos of Fitzgerald’s own life, if in a darkly ironic sense. The author’s meteoric ascent to literary stardom in the 1920s was followed, in the Depression years and in Fitzgerald’s own thirties and early forties, by an extended period of frustration, futility, and failure. After releasing three major novels, as well as many of his best short stories, between the ages of twentyfour and twenty-nine (culminating in the publication of The Great Gatsby in 1925), Fitzgerald would publish only one more completed novel (Tender Is the Night, 1934) in the final fifteen years of his life; additionally, the quality of some of his stronger stories and essays from this period was undercut by the large quantity of hastily written commercial stories he published in order to generate income. When one considers as well Fitzgerald’s mounting personal problems throughout the decade of the NE OF

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1930s, including his alcoholism, his wife Zelda’s deteriorating mental state, and the erosion of their relationship (all of which have been well documented by Fitzgerald biographers), it is tempting to conclude that the author was discussing his own life when crafting this theatrical metaphor about “no second acts.” The irony lies in the fact that there would be a second act for Fitzgerald, and a grand one at that, but that it would only come after his death. In fact, one could argue that the second act could only have come posthumously, as Fitzgerald’s death seems to have been something of a precondition, or at the least a precipitating cause, of his reevaluation and ultimate lionization by critics, scholars, the literary establishment, and the reading public. At the heart of the posthumous turnaround in Fitzgerald’s fortunes is, of course, his masterpiece, The Great Gatsby. But the story of how this book came, eventually, to be regarded as an American masterwork — perhaps the greatest in our national literature — is a circuitous tale involving changing personal and critical reputations, nostalgia for a lost era, and the emergence of a new wave of American literary scholars seeking to define and codify a national literary tradition by establishing a canon of classic American literature. The springboard for the ascent of The Great Gatsby into this literary pantheon was the so-called “Fitzgerald revival” of the forties and fifties. The roots of this revival go back to the years immediately following Fitzgerald’s death — when publication and reissuing of his work sparked a renewed critical interest. The Great Gatsby itself had not been entirely forgotten by critics in the later years of Fitzgerald’s life. Reviews of his final completed novel, Tender Is the Night, and of the last story collection he published during his lifetime, Taps at Reveille (1935), both made references to Gatsby, often citing it as the author’s best work. A common note in much of the critical appraisal of Tender Is the Night upon its release is an assessment of a less consistent technical mastery in this novel. Some critics trotted out the old hobby horse of Fitzgerald’s “immaturity” as the explanation for what they saw as formal flaws in the work; in an otherwise perceptive analysis of Tender, Malcolm Cowley, one of Fitzgerald’s staunchest supporters who would later be a key factor in the Fitzgerald revival, seems unable in his review for the New Republic to resist referring to Fitzgerald as “a romantic but hard-headed little boy” (“Breakdown,” 324), while Gertrude Diamant, in the American Mercury, sniffs that Fitzgerald is, fifteen years into his career, still little more than a “precocious child” (328) whose fictional technique is “that of the child-writer” (329). To a writer nearing forty years of age, these must have seemed fairly insulting assessments or perhaps examples of old critical habits dying hard. They are, in fact, both. Still, the issue of formal mastery elicited a great number of references to The Great Gatsby, and typically quite positive ones. Horace Gregory, in the New York Herald Tribune, compares Gatsby favorably

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to Tender, referring to the earlier novel as a “remarkable performance” (306); John Chamberlain, in his review of Tender Is the Night for the New York Times, calls Gatsby “perfect in its feeling and its symbolism, such a magnificent evocation of the spirit of a whole decade” (294); and Fitzgerald’s friend and admirer Gilbert Seldes notes in his review of Tender for the New York Evening Journal that Gatsby was “the turning point in his career, the first novel which indicated that he could control all his powers” (“True,” 292). As always with Fitzgerald, there was no shortage of naysayers in the crowd, as well. In general, the decade of the 1930s was not kind to Fitzgerald’s reputation, for a number of reasons. As has often been pointed out, Fitzgerald’s personal and artistic fortunes seemed to parallel the trajectory of the nation itself over the two decades of the twenties and thirties. The boom-bust cycle of the postwar insouciance of the twenties (the decade Fitzgerald himself dubbed “the greatest, gaudiest spree in history”) followed by the despair and desperation of the Great Depression in the thirties was mirrored by Fitzgerald’s own tale of meteoric rise to prominence and celebrity in the twenties, followed by a long, painful and public slide into obscurity in the next decade. Artistically, Fitzgerald’s work, redolent with images of rich boys and rich girls negotiating high society life, fell out of favor with critics of the 1930s who were concerned with the plight of the suffering masses, as well as the ascent of a more proletarian strain in the national literature. Leftist journals such as New Masses, which rose to prominence under the editorship of Mike Gold in the late twenties and thirties, championed a brand of socially engaged writing about the plight of the common man, rejecting what they saw as increasingly irrelevant “bourgeois” literature. Gold’s 1929 New Masses editorial, “Go Left, Young Writers!” is often credited as starting in earnest the proletarian literature movement in the United States. The landscape would never be quite the same for Fitzgerald: As Azar Nafisi succinctly puts it in her recent, popular memoir, Reading Lolita in Tehran, Gold and his followers “took over. . . . In the thirties people like Fitzgerald were pushed out by this new breed” (88). Part of the critical problem for Fitzgerald lay in the rapidly increasing remoteness of the world he described. The reviewer for the New York Sun makes this case in a review of Taps at Reveille: “It is hard, in these days of the depression, to be fair to Mr. Fitzgerald. The children of all ages — from 13 to 30 — that decorate his pages seem as remote today as the Neanderthal man” (in Bryer, 346). Nafisi, with the benefit of historical perspective, expands upon the problem and puts it in the context of Fitzgerald’s career trajectory: “The Great Gatsby was published in 1925 and Tender Is the Night in 1934. In between the publication of these two great novels, many things happened in the United States and Europe that . . . diminished Fitzgerald’s importance, making him almost irrelevant to the social and literary scene.

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There was the Depression, the increasing threat of fascism and the growing influence of Soviet Marxism” (107).The Marxist critic Philip Rahv, in his review of Tender for the Daily Worker, felt little sympathy for its author’s plight. Engaging in a little armchair psychologizing, Rahv begins his review by diagnosing the hidden malady lurking behind Fitzgerald’s artistic successes of the 1920s, like The Great Gatsby: “He himself was swept away by the waste and extravagance of the people he described, and he identified himself with them” (316). Rahv concludes that Fitzgerald had become hopelessly out of step with the hard realities of the time, and he closes the essay with a prophetic admonition that has gone down in the annals of Fitzgerald lore: “Dear Mr. Fitzgerald, you can’t hide from a hurricane under a beach umbrella” (317). While one could quibble with Rahv’s self-righteous proclamation — Fitzgerald hardly spent the decade of the thirties hanging out under a beach umbrella — his suggestion of bleak times to come could not have been more accurate. The period of the middle 1930s, which Fitzgerald described in his series of confessional Esquire essays of 1936 that would be posthumously collected and published in The Crack-Up, was marked by physical illness (in part spurred by his debilitating alcoholism) and severe personal and professional misfortunes.1 While Zelda Fitzgerald began her stays in sanitariums in the early thirties and would remain under psychiatric care for the rest of her life, Fitzgerald struggled, after the publication of Tender Is the Night, to find the means to pay for her hospital care and the education of their daughter, Scottie. No longer the commercial success he once was as a short story writer, he moved to Los Angeles in 1937 and took up work as a Hollywood screenwriter to pay the bills and get out of debt. Though he had long felt an affinity for the movies, and had twice earlier tried his luck in Hollywood, in fact Fitzgerald found little success in his screenwriting efforts in the latter part of his life, though he would remain in Hollywood from 1937 until his death in 1940. He was credited as a writer on only one film, Three Comrades for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures, in 1938. Fitzgerald expressed on many occasions that both the commercial short stories and the work on film scripts amounted to hack writing that diluted his artistic credibility, but his seemingly unending financial crises made such work a necessity. Though he had made significant progress on a promising fifth novel, the story of a Hollywood producer that would eventually be published, posthumously, as The Last Tycoon in 1941, this work would remain unfinished. Fitzgerald died of a heart attack in Los Angeles, on December 21, 1940. He was forty-four years old. The reappraisal of his literary reputation would begin almost immediately, first playing out in the obituary sections of the nation’s daily newspapers. Most of the newspaper obituaries were, if not dismissive, less than enthusiastic regarding the question of Fitzgerald’s literary merit. Typical

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in this regard was the obituary in the New York Times, which stated simply, “The promise of his brilliant career was never fulfilled.” While this obituary does go on to single out Gatsby as Fitzgerald’s finest work, it does so in superficial fashion: “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 Mr. Fitzgerald’s school of writers), it received little acclaim” (“Scott Fitzgerald,” 23). An anonymous follow-up the next day in the Times elaborated on the idea of unfulfilled artistic promise, speculating that in recent years, “Fitzgerald, and others of his time, were really ‘lost’ — that they could not adjust themselves to the swift and brutal changes of these times. It is a pity, for here was real talent which never fully bloomed” (“Not Wholly Lost,” 10). In this article we see an ambivalent opinion toward The Great Gatsby, which clearly had not yet begun its ascent into the canon of American literature: “It was not a book for the ages, but it caught superbly the spirit of a decade” (10). Some newspapers took a harsher angle on Fitzgerald’s literary legacy, resurrecting the argument seen in early criticism of Gatsby and other works that Fitzgerald was more personality than artist. We see this in the tone of the obituary in the New York Herald Tribune, wherein praise for his technical merit is offset with disdain for what he seemed to represent: “F. Scott Fitzgerald is said to have invented the so-called ‘younger generation’ of two decades ago. At any rate, he was the most articulate writer about the rich, young set which was also variously referred to as ‘the lost generation’ and the ‘post-war generation,’ and as such he acquired a reputation far out of proportion to his works” (“F. Scott Fitzgerald Dies,” 4). Without question, the most negative, even offensive, appraisal of Fitzgerald in the days following his death came from the syndicated column of the conservative newspaper writer, Westbrook Pegler. In his column of December 26, 1940 (ironically titled “Fair Enough”), Pegler uses Fitzgerald’s death as the occasion for bashing the disillusioned youth of the 1920s’ lost generation: “The death of Scott Fitzgerald recalls memories of a queer brand of undisciplined and self-indulgent brats who were determined not to pull their weight in the boat and wanted the world to drop everything and sit down and bawl with them. A kick in the pants and a clout over the scalp were more like their needing” (15). Throughout this strange essay, Pegler delivers just such a rhetorical kick in the pants to both Fitzgerald and his cohort, berating the “sensitive young things of whom Mr. Fitzgerald wrote . . . because he could exploit them as material for profit in print” (15). The indelicacy of such a column needs no comment, but it should be noted that Pegler’s vicious depiction of Fitzgerald demonstrates the extent to which the author was still linked, in the popular imagination, to the world of the flappers he depicted two decades

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earlier. Pegler’s apoplexy over the prospect of the popular press lionizing someone he seemed to see as a sort of figurehead of dissipation not only shows Fitzgerald’s enduring link to the era of the twenties, but also suggests a growing resurgence of interest in the era. And, indeed, a revival of interest in the Roaring Twenties was related to the Fitzgerald revival that would begin to take shape in the years following his death. Pegler, in his disgust over a glorification of the Jazz Age, seems more than a tad Tom Buchanan-esque in his shrill defense of civilized behavior; he closes the essay by comparing the directionless youth of the twenties with the morally sound young people of his own day, whom he praises for “preserving their self-respect” by “minding their business” (15). The irony of Pegler’s tasteless column lay in the fact that his target was not, at least initially, being celebrated much at all by others in the popular press. Writing for the Nation two months after Fitzgerald’s death, Margaret Marshall offers an apt summary of the depth to which his reputation had sunk by the outset of the 1940s: “In the weeks since the death of Scott Fitzgerald I have read or reread each of the nine books he published. It has been on the whole a depressing experience — partly because one must agree with the glib epitaph assigned to him in the newspaper obituaries: a man of talent who did not fulfill his early promise” (159). While Marshall concedes that Gatsby and “a few short stories . . . will continue to be relevant because they caught and crystallized the underlying ‘values’ of a period,” she concludes that it is “easy to overrate Fitzgerald’s powers,” and that, ultimately, “his was a fair-weather talent which was not adequate to the stormy age into which it happened, ironically, to emerge” (159). However, Marshall would be making this pronouncement at just about the moment when Fitzgerald’s literary reputation would be beginning its return from oblivion. Fitzgerald’s friend Edmund Wilson, whom the author had referred to as his “intellectual conscience,” arranged for a series of commemorative essays on Fitzgerald to run in the New Republic in early 1941. Angered by the treatment Fitzgerald had received in the popular press from the likes of Pegler and others, Wilson and his contributors — friends and contemporaries of the author — set out to save his reputation. Nearly all of the essays in the New Republic tribute specifically attack Pegler’s reproachful column, and more generally they all seek to correct the impression that Fitzgerald was a writer (to use Isabel Paterson’s phrase) “of the season only.” Glenway Westcott discusses Gatsby in this regard, claiming, “Its very timeliness, as of 1925, gave it a touch of the old-fashioned a few years later; but I have reread it this week and found it all right; pleasure and compassion on every page. A masterpiece often seems a period-piece for a while; then it comes down out of the attic, to function anew and to last” (214). John Dos Passos approached the same issue from a more general perspective: “It’s the quality of detaching itself from its period while embodying its period that

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marks a piece of work as good” (213). After the others had their say, Malcolm Cowley reflected on these ruminations in his brief summary essay, “Of Clocks and Calendars,” in which he sought to reconcile the critics’ concern over the “period” quality of his work with what he saw as one of the greatest strengths of Fitzgerald’s artistry: He was haunted by time, as if he wrote in a room full of clocks and calendars. . . . He worked hard and patiently to find the exact color of a season that would never be repeated. And isn’t that a virtue inherent in his writing, rather than a weakness falsely imputed to it by the critics? . . . And it seems to me that if Fitzgerald’s best books succeeded in detaching themselves from his decade — as Dos Passos says they did — it is precisely and paradoxically because he immersed himself in it, plunging deep into the river of time until he ended by glimpsing the landscape of the river’s bed. (376)

As Cowley points out in his essay “The Fitzgerald Revival, 1941– 1953,” Wilson’s decision to arrange for the New Republic tribute to Fitzgerald was only the beginning of his influence in the restoration of the author’s image. Cowley credits Wilson as the driving force behind the initial renewal of interest in Fitzgerald, as his editing and publishing of two posthumous Fitzgerald volumes had a major impact. The first of these efforts was his preparation and publication of Fitzgerald’s unfinished final novel, The Last Tycoon, in 1941. By packaging the novel in a volume that also contained The Great Gatsby and five of Fitzgerald’s best stories, Wilson made both a wise business move and a step in renewing the reputation of Gatsby. There would be numerous reissuings of Gatsby in the ensuing years, including, among others, a reprinting from Scribner’s (1942); Viking’s volume The Portable F. Scott Fitzgerald (1945); a free edition given out to World War II servicemen; a 1946 printing from New Directions Press with an introduction by Lionel Trilling, part of their New Classics series; and a twenty-five-cent edition from Bantam books, which first appeared in 1945 and was reprinted numerous times throughout the decade and into the 1950s.2 The second important Fitzgerald publication that Wilson would oversee was the 1945 collection of essays, letters, and miscellany entitled The Crack-Up. Featuring the series of confessional essays that Fitzgerald had published in Esquire magazine in 1936, this book sparked fresh public interest in the private life of Fitzgerald. As Cowley notes, The Crack-Up “aroused very wide interest and the Fitzgerald revival was under way” (“Revival,” 11). Indeed, between the popularity of The Crack-Up and the continual reprintings of Gatsby, there was fodder for a good deal of chatter about Fitzgerald in the popular press by the middle forties, perhaps the most ink devoted to him in two decades. As Charles Poore wrote in the New York Times, in opening his

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September 1945 review of The Portable F. Scott Fitzgerald, “There is no end to the requiems on the work of Scott Fitzgerald. Someone is always blowing taps over his books” (19). If a popular revival was under way by the middle forties, it is fair to say that serious scholarly reevaluation was still a few years off at that point. In a College English essay from 1951, the literary critic Granville Hicks would remark on the stunning turnaround in Fitzgerald’s reputation in the post-World War II years, contrasting the near total critical neglect at the time immediately after his death to “something that might be called a Fitzgerald cult” (190) that had influenced not just readers, but scholars as well, by the dawn of the fifties. One of the handful of serious critical articles from the years between his death and the first stirrings of a revival of scholarly interest in Fitzgerald in the second half of the 1940s, reveals a lingering disdain for the period to which Fitzgerald seemed tethered for good: The work of F. Scott Fitzgerald reveals with extraordinary sharpness the essential differences between the major writer and the minor writer. He will no doubt be remembered in the years to come as the chronicler of the jazz age.  .  .  . Today, in the year 1944, nothing seems deader or more dated. The jazz age, the flapper and her circle, the sensual anarchism of the early 1920s, appear to us to be so many exhibits in a sociological waxworks, so many well-illumined signposts of an irretrievable past. (Gurko, 372)

The authors of this article, Leo and Miriam Gurko, go to some lengths to hem Fitzgerald into their tailor-made definition of a “minor writer”; central to their argument is the notion that Fitzgerald had never been able to transcend the trappings of his own time and place. In a sense, this argument recalls Isabel Paterson’s 1925 review of Gatsby, in which she had written the novel off as a “book of the season only.” The Gurkos push the argument further, implying that in the end Fitzgerald would remain a writer “of the season only”: “It is a curious and significant phenomenon of literary history that the minor writer is always associated with his period, the major writer with himself. . . . Lewis, Hemingway, and Dos Passos, the major novelists of the 1920’s, reveal to a greater or lesser degree signs of breaking out of the time limits of their age, limits within which Fitzgerald curls and snuggles in supercomfort” (372–73). As with most early Fitzgerald criticism, we eventually see ambivalence on the part of the critics, and one senses a desire by the end of this brief essay to break Fitzgerald out of the confines of “minor” writerdom. The Gurkos conclude the essay by claiming that “one senses within him the seeds of greatness which . . . would have required only the proper combination of time and social climate to be brought to full harvest” (376). This final observation, ironically, has some merit to it, though not in the

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way the critics had seemingly intended. While they imply that Fitzgerald’s talent might have ripened given the “proper combination of time and social climate,” in fact it was the evaluation of his talent that changed with the changing times and social climate. Less than ten years after this confident assessment of Fitzgerald as a “minor” talent, the inferior of Dos Passos, Lewis, and other contemporaries, he would be celebrated as one of the defining literary voices of his age; within twenty years, it would be a commonplace assumption among literary critics that The Great Gatsby was one of a small handful of American literary masterpieces. Indeed, within a year of that College English article, we can see the beginnings of this critical turn. Charles Weir, Jr.’s essay from the Winter, 1944 Virginia Quarterly Review, “An Invite with Gilded Edges,” lays some groundwork for a critical reevaluation. While arguing, along the lines of Leo and Miriam Gurko, that Fitzgerald’s “greatest weakness, ironically, was that he was so completely of his time and of his country” (134), Weir also seems to sense that Fitzgerald’s superior ability in capturing his moment would give his best work a value more lasting than that of his contemporaries. He argues, for example, that Fitzgerald’s “natural” eye for time and place makes, by comparison, “the careful reconstructions of Dos Passos seem mechanical and artificial” (134). The most significant contribution of this essay, particularly as it relates to future criticism of Gatsby, is Weir’s interpretation of Fitzgerald’s treatment of wealth in his novels and stories. Weir argues: His preoccupation with the rich has generally been considered a rather snobbish peculiarity. A more careful reading of his work can open up several new lines of inquiry for the critic. All of Fitzgerald‘s major work is tragic. All of it recounts aspiration, struggle, and failure. The characters and setting chosen to embody this theme are indeed limited, but no more so than the characters and setting of Faulkner, Wolfe, or Hemingway. The immediate problem is essentially twofold: why did Fitzgerald see and express life in such terms; and did he provide an adequate expression? (138)

Weir provides a double-edged answer to his own question; in arguing that the “dominating idea in his life was that of success” (138), Weir is able to demonstrate in the essay how Fitzgerald’s preoccupation with the tragic underside of success makes his best work far more than merely the glossy portrait of American high society life it was often taken to be. In fact, Weir argues that in The Great Gatsby and elsewhere, Fitzgerald was presenting a unique perspective on the question of American wealth: Money drew him with a golden spell; there is in American literature no more penetrating investigation of certain aspects of its power. Not that Fitzgerald was ever very concerned with how money was

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made. The analyses of a Dreiser, a Norris, or an Upton Sinclair were not for him. Most of his characters have made their million before they appear in his pages — in railroads, in mines, in oil — it really does not matter. But there is no naiveté in this summary dismissal of origins. Fitzgerald was under no illusions as to the means by which a fortune is generally acquired. His interest lay in another direction: the fortune being made, what could be done with it, what was done with it? Wealth meant power, magnificence; and it was the only road to power. . . . Still, Fitzgerald went far beyond adoration of power merely as power. . . . It was the tragedy of a capitalist society that Fitzgerald attempted to write, a tragedy in which the kings and commanders have been replaced by millionaires. (140–41)

While any reader of The Great Gatsby — from a critic reviewing the novel at the time of its publication on through a high-school student reading it today — could tell you that in one sense the book is fundamentally about money, what Weir offers in at least skeletal form here is an avenue for pushing the discussion of wealth in the novel in new directions. The claim that Fitzgerald was interested in presenting “the tragedy of a capitalist society” is one that would be restated, explored, and debated in critical interpretations of The Great Gatsby in the coming decades. For Weir’s part, ultimately he concludes that Fitzgerald did not fully realize his tragic vision, because he failed to achieve sufficient distance between his own aspirations and those of his fictional counterparts: “For Fitzgerald, personally entwined with the subjects of his work as he was, every failure was in a sense tragic, yet the reader cannot be expected to feel so. . . . Essentially symbolic like most art, tragedy cannot succeed if its symbols are not understood or are rejected. Too often Fitzgerald will meet with rejection” (144). Ironically, it was the dense symbolic patterning of the novel that would keep academic critics busy with interpretive forays for some time to come, and setting in motion the critical Gatsby industry of the later 1950s and onward. Still, Weir’s claim of a too-close personal connection between author and material would continue to surface in other critical analyses of the mid-forties. Though critics had long noted, fairly, Fitzgerald’s tendency to project himself into his fictional characters, at no point was this critical tendency to dig deep into autobiographical and psychological connections more apparent than in the middle 1940s. Nineteen forty-five would see publication of Wilson’s edited volume The Crack-Up and in turn a spate of review essays that reassessed Fitzgerald in light of his confessional essays. Given the introspective nature of that collection of essays, some commentators seemed drawn to ponder how Fitzgerald’s own internal conflicts and divided perspective on his material played out in his fiction. At times the parallels drawn between Fitzgerald and his characters were so direct and oversimplified as to be unintentionally comic, as in

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Alfred Kazin’s claim, of Fitzgerald, that “In fact, he was Gatsby. It was for him . . . that the green light burned at the end of the dock. . . . It was he who wanted Daisy. . . . He could create Gatsby only at the price of never admitting that he was Gatsby” (178). While Fitzgerald had referred to his books and their protagonists as his “brothers” and had once noted in a letter to his friend John Peale Bishop that Jay Gatsby “started out as one man I knew and then changed into myself” (in Crack-Up, 271), a critical insistence on such a direct identification between author and protagonist seems overstated at best, if not somewhat beside the point. A more nuanced take on Fitzgerald’s connection to the character of Jay Gatsby can be found in Andrews Wanning’s essay “Fitzgerald and His Brethren,” published in 1945 in the Partisan Review. Wanning plumbs the Crack-Up essays for some explanation of the ongoing conflict — seen in both Fitzgerald’s life and his fiction — between the clear-eyed sensibility of a “moralist” and “fatalist” (164), on the one hand, and the undying attraction to a world of glittering material success, on the other. For Wanning, it is Fitzgerald’s youthful experiences as an outsider among his more wealthy friends — his position as part of the “genteel poor” (162) — that help to shape the indelible conflict that marks so much of his best writing, the simultaneous attraction to and repulsion from the world of the rich. Wanning sees this conflict play out not only on the thematic level, but also on a stylistic level, as Fitzgerald’s luminous language adorns what are often, at heart, moralistic tales: “His style keeps reminding you . . . of his sense of the enormous beauty of which life, suitably ornamented, is capable; and at the same time of his judgment as to the worthlessness of the ornament and the corruptibility of the beauty” (165). The conflicts Wanning describes play out most clearly in The Great Gatsby, and in his discussion of the novel Wanning notes the connection between author and protagonist, but he goes on to suggest far broader connections, ones that would be picked up and discussed by subsequent critics: The Great Gatsby is Fitzgerald’s best novel because here the congruity of story and style and attitude is closest and most meaningful. Here he had a story whose central character not only symbolized his own conflicts and confusions, but made a moving commentary on a period and a country as well. . . . But if the feeling of the novel owes a good deal to its author’s identity with his subject, its impact owes a lot too to its range; to the fact that Gatsby is not merely a disguise for Fitzgerald. . . . The tragedy of Gatsby was a fable for his America; it is not, I should say, by any means dead yet. (165–66)

Wanning was not the only critic at this time looking at Gatsby as an American “fable” or symbol, nor was he the only one to be predicting its second life. One of the first important scholarly essays of the Fitzgerald revival also appeared in the wake of publication of The Crack-Up: William

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Troy’s “Scott Fitzgerald — the Authority of Failure,” which appeared in the Autumn 1945 issue of Accent. From the opening sentence of the essay, Troy makes clear the writing on which Fitzgerald’s chance for a lasting literary legacy will rely: “Of course, in any absolute sense, Scott Fitzgerald was not a failure at all; he has left one short novel, passages in several others, and a handful of short stories which stand as much chance of survival as anything of their kind produced in this country during the same period” (56). The “short novel” he mentions here is of course The Great Gatsby, and indeed one of the reasons that he singles Gatsby out is for the full enunciation of the theme of failure that Troy finds running throughout the better stories, and even the lesser novels as well. But in order to put his argument in context, it may be helpful to note that this essay came out shortly after the initial critiques of The Crack-Up had appeared in the periodicals. If Wilson had sought with the book to generate a compassionate reevaluation of Fitzgerald, Troy suggests, with obvious disdain, that this goal was not immediately met: “Upon the appearance of The Crack-Up . . . it was notable that all the emptiest and most venal elements in New York journalism united to crow amiably about his literary corpse to this same tune of insufficient production” (56). It is in the wake of this renewed dredging up of the argument concerning Fitzgerald’s “wasted potential” that Troy sought out, in this essay, to provide a deeper examination of what failure meant for Fitzgerald. Troy quotes a line from Fitzgerald’s notebooks, in which he ruminates on his problems with Ernest Hemingway: “I talk with the authority of failure. . . . Ernest with the authority of success. We could never sit across the same table again” (60). In his defense of Fitzgerald’s character, Troy argues that this “failure” that Fitzgerald perceived in himself was akin to Jay Gatsby’s inability to live up to his “Platonic conception of himself.” His aspirations — not merely commercially, but artistically — were so high that he was fated to fail to meet them. “His failure was the defect of his virtues,” Troy writes, “And this is perhaps the greatest meaning of his career to the younger generation of writers. . . . The stakes for which he played were of a kind more difficult and more unattainable than ‘Ernest’ or any of his contemporaries could have even imagined. And his only strength is in the consciousness of this fact” (60). Troy’s most convincing case for Fitzgerald comes in his discussion of The Great Gatsby, in which he lays out several ideas that would help to spur scholarly discussion of both the author and the novel in the ensuing decade. The first of these notions has to do with Fitzgerald’s dividing his own sensibility in the novel between the characters of Nick Carraway and Jay Gatsby. For Troy, this allows the author to examine the theme of failure — “the consistent theme of his work from first to last” (56) — in a more complex light than in earlier work. He lays out this key idea of the essay in a dense paragraph worth quoting here in its entirety:

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Here is a remarkable instance of the manner in which adoption of a special form or technique can profoundly modify and define a writer’s whole attitude toward his world. In the earlier books author and hero tended to melt into one because there was no internal principle of differentiation by which they might be separated; they respired in the same climate, emotional and moral; they were tarred with the same brush. But in Gatsby is achieved a dissociation, by which Fitzgerald was able to isolate one part of himself, the spectatorial or aesthetic, and also the more intelligent and responsible, in the person of the ordinary but quite sensible narrator, from another part of himself, the dream-ridden romantic adolescent from St. Paul and Princeton, in the person of the legendary Jay Gatsby. It is this which makes the latter one of the few truly mythological creations in our recent literature — for what is mythology but this same process of projected wish-fulfillment carried out on a larger scale and by the whole consciousness of a race? Indeed, before we are quite through with him, Gatsby becomes much more than a mere exorcizing of whatever false elements of the American dream Fitzgerald felt within himself: he becomes a symbol of America itself, dedicated to “the service of a vast, vulgar and meretricious beauty.” (57)

While Troy was not the first critic to notice that Fitzgerald had achieved some level of narrative distance in the novel — even many early reviewers praised Fitzgerald for finding a way to reduce his authorial intrusions in this book — his discussion of a splitting, or “dissociation” of the author’s own sensibility between the two primary characters would give future scholars something to chew on for a good many years to come. The key here is Troy’s linking of the divided perspective and the notion of Gatsby as a figure of “projected wish-fulfillment,” since it is this mechanism, in Troy’s view, that allows Gatsby to become a mythical figure, an embodiment of “America itself.” Clearly, this latter notion, echoed at around the same time by Lionel Trilling in his introduction to the 1945 New Directions edition of Gatsby, introduced a primary thematic concern of critics who would follow in the scholarly revival of the coming years. Indeed, as early as 1947, Maxwell Geismar, in The Last of the Provincials: The American Novel, 1915–1925, would discuss Fitzgerald’s geographic imagination, his tendency to project the romantic and moral dilemmas of his fiction onto the national map. Geismar also alludes to the mythic national dimensions of The Great Gatsby when he identifies Jay Gatsby as “a cousin, say, of Huck Finn” (320). Like Twain’s protagonist, Gatsby, for Geismar, represents the American “outsider” (318), whose story is set to “the rhythm and words of an American myth” (320). Also occasioned by the publication of The Crack-Up, Malcolm Cowley’s New Yorker essay from 1945, “Third Act and Epilogue,” works away — in a manner related to that of Weir, Wanning, and Troy — at

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establishing both the connections and dissociations between Fitzgerald and what Wanning had called his fictional “brethren.” Cowley, though, pushes this discussion further by invoking the optical metaphor of “double vision,” a trope that seems particularly appropriate in explaining the repeated patterns of doubleness, or divided perspective, that characterize so much of Fitzgerald’s fiction. As Cowley explains, this doubleness goes beyond the tension between identification with and judgment of his protagonists: He cultivated a sort of double vision. He was continually trying to present the glitter of life in the Princeton eating clubs, on the Riviera, on the North Shore of Long Island, and in the Hollywood studios; he surrounded his characters with a mist of admiration and simultaneously he drove the mist away. . . . It was as if all his novels described a big dance to which he had taken, as he once wrote, the prettiest girl . . . and as if at the same time he stood outside the ballroom, a little Midwestern boy with his nose to the glass, wondering how much the tickets cost and who paid for the music. He regarded himself as a pauper living among millionaires . . . and he said that his point of vantage “was the dividing line between two generations,” prewar and postwar. It was this habit of keeping a double point of view that distinguished his work. There were popular and serious novelists in his time, but there was something of a gulf between them; Fitzgerald was one of the very few popular writers who were also serious artists. There were realists and romantics; Fitzgerald was among the wildest of the romantics, but he was also among the few Americans who tried, like Stendhal in France, to make the romance real by showing its causes and its consequences. (150–51)

The closing couple of oppositions Cowley includes here — the tensions between “popular” and “serious” fiction, and between romance and realism — are particularly relevant to the enduring appeal of Gatsby. Like its partner on the list of most loved and greatest of American novels, Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Great Gatsby is that rarest of birds: a literary “classic” that everyday people actually enjoy reading. And this may have more than a bit to do with the quality — shared by both of these works — of blending romance and realism, presenting a mythic vision of American experience filtered through a vivid, realistic, and socially astute portrait of a specific time and place. Though Cowley does not discuss The Great Gatsby in any particular detail in this brief essay, his notion of Fitzgerald’s “double vision” would prove useful in years to come for scholars working to unpack the seemingly inexhaustible series of contrasts and oppositions that animate that novel. Indeed, in two essays that appeared in the following year, 1946, we can see other notable critics working through the conflicts and doubleness that characterize Fitzgerald’s major work, and Gatsby in particular. John

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Berryman, in his brief but thought-provoking Kenyon Review essay of 1946, titled simply “F.  Scott Fitzgerald,” identifies in The Great Gatsby what he calls “the permanent theme of Fitzgerald’s serious fiction” (105), which he sees as the conflicted portrayal of a protagonist’s beautiful and intense attachment toward an object that is inaccessible — or, in Berryman’s apt phrase, “toward a hopeless error” (106). “There is helpless irony in the mounting of such a theme,” Berryman argues, “owing to an incongruity between what the hero is made to be obsessed by, his impersonal devotion and confidence, and what the author knows, his own despair. But this irony is not tragic in Fitzgerald; it is as unhappy and tender as a farewell” (106). Berryman’s analysis possesses the advantage of seeing this conflicted or divided perspective as a conscious artistic achievement, rather than a happy accident befalling an author not particularly aware of what he was doing or fully in control of his own powers. He also astutely points out that the more profitable comparison between author and fictional counterpart is between Fitzgerald and Nick Carraway, not Jay Gatsby. While Fitzgerald himself had remarked on his connection to the character of Gatsby, in critical terms there is little to be made of the resemblance between the two that can rise above the level of platitudes and poor psychologizing; however, the Fitzgerald/Carraway relationship presents a critical goldmine that was, at this point at the very beginnings of the Fitzgerald revival, wholly untapped. Though Berryman moves briefly through this idea (correctly noting that “the history of [Carraway’s] disenchantment during one summer” [104] provides the heart of the novel), he takes care to underscore Fitzgerald’s achievement in crafting the figure of the narrator: “Carraway stands with less distortion for the author himself than, probably, any other character he created — the initiated but detached Middle-westerner, the moralist; and the closeness with which Fitzgerald’s cleaves to his narrator’s perception partly accounts for the great difference in control” (104) between Gatsby and his other novels. Perhaps we can see here the tide of Fitzgerald criticism beginning to turn a bit, at least, away from the evaluative mode and toward the scholarly and analytic. Certainly Berryman has no qualms about dispensing with the need for evaluative argument; at the outset of the essay he makes plain his goal of pushing readers and critics beyond thinking of Gatsby as only Fitzgerald’s best novel: “An impression less widespread, which I wish to encourage, is that it is a masterpiece” (103). Perhaps taking a cue from Eliot’s famous remark, from his personal letter to Fitzgerald, that The Great Gatsby marked “the first step that American fiction has taken since Henry James” (in Kazin, 93), Berryman claims that Gatsby meets the criteria of a literary masterpiece “better than any other American work of fiction since The Golden Bowl” (104). In praising the novel’s superb construction (“Not a page could be lost from it without disturbance

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to Fitzgerald’s achievement” [104]) and elucidating the disillusion or disenchantment theme, with its concomitant atmosphere of “desperate or ecstatic nostalgia” (107), Berryman provided, if in miniature, a good store of material for future scholarly explorations. A final essay from the mid-1940s worth consideration is Arthur Mizener’s 1946 “Scott Fitzgerald and the Imaginative Possession of American Life.” This essay in revised form3 combines biography with critical assessment; in the ensuing years Mizener published a number of such articles, leading up to the publication of his popular 1951 Fitzgerald biography, The Far Side of Paradise. In this 1946 essay, Mizener praises Fitzgerald for having “realized in completely American terms the developed romantic attitude” (“Imaginative,” 66), an approach born of “his acute sense of the irrevocable passage of everything into the past” (67). In a sense echoing Cowley’s claims about Fitzgerald’s unique ability to bridge the realms of romance and realism, Mizener delves into the “pastness of the past” as it is presented in Fitzgerald’s best fiction, arguing that the author had a unique ability for conveying at turns an “almost historical objectivity” and “a Proustian minuteness of recollection of the feelings and attitudes which made up the experience as it was lived” (67). For Mizener, Gatsby is the novel in which he “found his theme and its fable” (68), and in the discussion of the book he offers two claims that would be discussed at some length during the critical resurgence of the 1950s. The first is that during the time leading up to The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald “had been reading Conrad and as a result adopted the modified first-person form which suited his purposes so well” (77). Mizener does not go into specific detail regarding Fitzgerald’s debt to Conrad, instead simply praising the narrative approach in The Great Gatsby over what had come before it in Fitzgerald’s career, which Mizener characterizes, fairly enough, as relatively unplanned narrative structures disrupted by “the constant interference of the author’s own person” (77). In criticism of the 1950s and 1960s, as we shall see, the nature and extent of Fitzgerald’s connection to Conrad would become a source of great critical exploration and debate. The other significant contribution of Mizener’s essay is the attention he pays to the contrast of the eastern and western settings of the novel. Citing the English critic William Empson’s pioneering work on the pastoral mode in literature, Mizener labels The Great Gatsby “an example of Mr. Empson’s tragic pastoral, with the east the exemplar of urban sophistication and corruption, and the west, ‘the bored sprawling, swollen towns beyond the Ohio,’ the exemplar of simple virtue” (78).4 Mizener argues that Fitzgerald’s symbolic geography is key to understanding the central insights of the novel; just as Nick Carraway comes to understand the moral corruption that underlies life in the sophisticated east and long for the “moral order” of his native “middle-west,” so too does the contrast between the “moral cowardice” of Tom and Daisy Buchanan

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and the “incorruptibility at the heart of Gatsby’s corruption” (79) become apparent to both the narrator and the reader of the novel. Mizener closes his discussion of The Great Gatsby in this essay by contrasting this formal excellence with what he sees as a potential shortcoming: While arguing that “the art of his book, in the narrow sense, is nearly perfect” (79), Mizener worries that Fitzgerald commits too fully to his protagonist’s romanticism and may himself have failed to perceive “some fundamental inadequacy in Gatsby’s attitude” (79). Mizener would continue to stoke public and critical interest in Fitzgerald in the following years, particularly with his 1951 biography; already in this 1946 essay he introduces certain ideas — regarding the nature of Fitzgerald’s romanticism, and the “tragic pastoral” mode at work in Gatsby — that would be debated in the years to come.

The Fifties: From Popular Revival to Scholarly Resurgence The turn of the decade from the forties to the fifties was a key period of momentum for the Fitzgerald revival. The emergence of three works in rapid succession kept Fitzgerald’s name in the popular press and exposed the author to an ever-growing audience: the Paramount Pictures film The Great Gatsby, in 1949 (the second film adaptation of the novel); Budd Schulberg’s novel The Disenchanted (1950), a fictional account of Schulberg’s working relationship with Fitzgerald; and Arthur Mizener’s Fitzgerald biography, The Far Side of Paradise (1951). The 1949 film adaptation received mixed notices. Bosley Crowther, reviewing the film for the New York Times, cited a “weak script” in arguing that “most of the tragic implications and bitter ironies of Mr. Fitzgerald’s work have gone by the board” (20) in the film version. Manny Farber, in the Nation, referred to the film as a “limp translation” of the novel, but suggested that “it captures just enough of the original to make it worth your while and rekindle admiration for a wonderful book” (245). Irrespective of its cinematic merits, the very appearance of a second film version, coming at the end of a decade that saw numerous new editions and reprintings of the novel, indicates the extent to which The Great Gatsby had by this time reentered the public consciousness. Undoubtedly more influential in the resurgence of public interest in Fitzgerald, however, was Hollywood writer Budd Schulberg’s hit 1950 novel, The Disenchanted. As a young screenwriter Schulberg was assigned in 1939 to work with Fitzgerald on the screenplay for the collegiate romantic comedy Winter Carnival; their trip to the film’s location, Dartmouth College, turned into a disastrous drunken escapade that resulted in Fitzgerald’s removal from the project. (The extent to which this story has passed into the realm of pop culture legends can be measured by the

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fact that it was featured prominently, seventy years down the line, in the recent obituaries of Schulberg, who died in 2009 at the age of 95.) Schulberg would offer a fictionalized account of this experience in The Disenchanted, with the Fitzgerald character renamed Manley Halliday. While a gripping novel in its own right, The Disenchanted poses a problem for fans of Fitzgerald in its depiction of Halliday as a sad, washed-up alcoholic who sees the futility of his longing to recapture past glory. As one contemporary reviewer noted, “Manley Halliday is a magnificent portrait of the wreck of a brilliant man. . . . That such a man should fall so low induces in the reader a painful combination of pity, embarrassment, and revulsion. . . . One shrinks from any more of this invasion of privacy” (Prescott, 25). While Schulberg maintained in interviews over the years that Halliday was more a composite portrait of the formerly great writer slumming it in Hollywood than a depiction of Scott Fitzgerald in particular, the direct biographical connection belies this argument. Scholars have debated the effect the portrayal had on Fitzgerald’s reputation, but one thing is certain: The popularity of this novel, as well as its appearance immediately before Mizener’s biography, The Far Side of Paradise (1951), contributed greatly to a renewed public interest in Fitzgerald, in turn adding more fuel to the Fitzgerald revival at the dawn of the 1950s. As for Mizener’s The Far Side of Paradise, it is difficult to overstate the book’s importance in terms of Fitzgerald’s return to prominence. It is the first, and still considered by many the most readable, biography; at the same time, the book features valuable critical insights as well. The section devoted to The Great Gatsby contains much of the material from the Sewanee Review essay, featuring his observations about the “tragic pastoral” mode in the novel and about the structural and thematic centrality of Nick Carraway and his evolving sensibilities. The situating of this textual analysis within a larger biographical sketch ensured its reaching a much wider audience and furthering discourse on Gatsby. Indeed, the popular appeal of both Schulberg’s novel and Mizener’s biography (the latter more surprising than the former) bespoke as much a rising interest in Fitzgerald the personage, the public figure, as it did an interest in the literary artist. As one reviewer noted, “The life of F. Scott Fitzgerald was so intrinsically dramatic, so colored with the extravagance of romance, that it is a question whether Mr. Schulberg’s novel is any more unlikely than Professor Mizener’s biography. . . . One is tempted to predict that despite the excellence of The Great Gatsby and a handful of short stories Fitzgerald’s reputation will be centered around the very real interest in his personality” (“Notes and Queries,” 77–78). And while this may have been true of the Fitzgerald revival among the reading public, in the academic world a critical revival was dawning, and at its heart was The Great Gatsby. In addition to Mizener, another critic who can be thought of as doing work that in a sense legitimized scholarly interest in Fitzgerald was Lionel

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Trilling. Trilling revised and combined two of his previous pieces on Fitzgerald for an essay he included in his major 1950 work, The Liberal Imagination — a volume that had wide-ranging appeal among the reading public. If Trilling’s aim was, broadly speaking, to explore the moral values of the American tradition of social and intellectual liberalism, then Fitzgerald may have at first struck some readers of the time as an odd choice of subject matter. He had, after all, secured the dubious distinction of being the poster child for the riotous twenties, the would-be great one brought down by his own frivolousness and dissipation. And as for his connection to any sort of American intellectual tradition, even his admirers had always treated Fitzgerald as something of a knucklehead, someone born with the gift for language but woefully unschooled in his own artistic and intellectual heritage. In contrast to this image of Fitzgerald, Trilling presents a view of a “heroic” (243) person and a writer with a strong “connection with tradition” (253), a “moralist to the core” whose writing was motivated and enlivened by “his power of love” (244). He singles out for praise The Great Gatsby, arguing that its “ingenious” formal structure derives from what he calls “radical foreshortening” (252). Trilling expands on this Jamesian phrase, explaining that Fitzgerald employs a series of what he calls “ideographs,” densely symbolic objects, settings, and even characters, to convey the larger meanings of the work. Hence, through the associations he builds between depictions of the eyes of Dr. Eckleburg, the valley of ashes, and the Washington Heights apartment, for example, Fitzgerald builds a kind of symbolic economy in the work that, for Trilling, “gives the novel an affinity” (252) with T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. Trilling’s brief survey of the symbolic field of the novel prefigures ideas that would be explored in some of the major essays of the 1950s. His reference to Eliot’s The Waste Land also suggests a rich connection critics would explicate later on, as does his passing mention of the “vaguely homosexual Jordan Baker” hint of a subtext of the novel that would eventually be explored by critics of another generation. Perhaps the most lasting contribution to later criticism, however, is the specific connection Trilling builds between the narrative of the novel and the larger national narrative: Gatsby is said by some to be not quite credible, but the question of any literal credibility he may or may not have becomes trivial before the large significance he implies. For Gatsby, divided between power and dream, comes inevitably to stand for America itself. Ours is the only nation that prides itself upon a dream and gives its name to one, “the American dream” . . . Clearly it is Fitzgerald’s intention that our mind should turn to the thought of the nation that has sprung up from its “Platonic conception” of itself. To the world it is anomalous in America, just as in the novel it is anomalous in Gatsby, that so much

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raw power should be haunted by envisioned romance. Yet in that anomaly lies, for good and bad, much of the truth of our national life, as, at the present moment, we think about it.” (251–52)

Notwithstanding Professor Trilling’s penchant for sweeping statements and fondness for the “royal we,” this claim is one that helps to define the terms by which the novel would be discussed for generations to come. Trilling was not the first to suggest that The Great Gatsby holds up a mirror to the larger American experience; however, he may have put it most forcefully, in the process arguing for a special place for this book in our literary canon while suggesting its lasting, if not perpetual, cultural relevance. The influence of this critical stance persists, and this is not merely a matter of rarefied scholarly discourse: Each time a high-school English teacher or college professor poses to a class a question — “what exactly is Fitzgerald saying about the nature of the American dream?” (it will happen thousands of times this year, in classrooms across the land and, indeed, around the world) — the discussion that ensues will, whether the participants know it or not, be picking up on this point made by Trilling so many years ago. Thanks to the groundbreaking work of writers like Trilling and Mizener, the stage was set by the outset of the 1950s for a critical revival of Fitzgerald and Gatsby, to match the ongoing popular revival. Evidence that a more scholarly interest in Fitzgerald and his legacy had emerged by this point can be found in articles such as Henry Dan Piper’s 1951 American Quarterly essay, “Fitzgerald’s Cult of Disillusion” and Leslie Fiedler’s 1951 New Leader essay, “Some Notes on F.  Scott Fitzgerald” (republished in his 1955 book, An End to Innocence). Piper, who would go on to make significant contributions to Fitzgerald studies in the form of a reference work on the background and critical reception of The Great Gatsby and a scholarly monograph on Fitzgerald’s work, in this early essay discusses a widespread culture of disillusion prevalent in the first quarter of the twentieth century, and credits Fitzgerald’s early writing, specifically This Side of Paradise, for giving the “first widespread popular expression to that post-World War I ‘disillusion’ that is now recognized as one of the twenties’ most characteristic notes” (“Cult,” 69). Piper seems fairly ambivalent about Fitzgerald’s achievements, in a sense crediting him for tapping into the zeitgeist of his moment, but at the same time dismissing the young author for being ignorant of the full contours of the American intellectual and literary traditions. Similarly, Fiedler — who would later offer a compelling analysis of The Great Gatsby in his major work of 1960, Love and Death in the American Novel — here offers a mixed assessment of Fitzgerald’s literary legacy. While he worries over the exuberance of the revival, claiming that Fitzgerald’s compelling life story makes him “particularly amenable to sentimental idealization” (Innocence, 174),

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Fiedler does examine Fitzgerald’s treatment of class issues in a compelling fashion. He builds a contrast between Fitzgerald’s depiction of the rich and the exaggerated form of class-consciousness that characterized the proletarian fiction of the 1930s, the very writing that had superseded Fitzgerald’s romantic realism in popularity during the years of the Great Depression. Unlike “the nasty rich in proletarian novels,” Fiedler argues, Fitzgerald’s rich are “myths rather than platitudes, viable to the imagination” (181–82). In both essays, one gets the sense of a nascent effort to place Fitzgerald within the prevailing literary and intellectual climate of his times, and this sort of reassessment would gain momentum as the Fitzgerald revival developed. Readers familiar with Fiedler’s critical writing, with its emphasis on analysis of psychological and sexual themes, would imagine that in an essay on Fitzgerald, he would find more to discuss than merely the depiction of the wealthy class, and indeed this is the case. His brief 1951 essay also includes a number of pointed references to Fitzgerald’s fluid depiction of gender, points that he would leave largely undeveloped but that would be taken up decades later, as critical interest in Gatsby from feminist and queer theorists would offer new angles for discussion of the work. He also argues that “almost all” (178) of Fitzgerald’s main characters are projections of himself, and their emotional and sexual conflicts reflect back on the author’s own internal conflicts. While Fiedler never develops his psychoanalytic claims with serious textual analysis, and while this theoretical model would lay dormant for some time in Fitzgerald studies, it is worth noting the appearance of another psychoanalytic take on Fitzgerald and Gatsby shortly after Fiedler’s. In the Autumn, 1952 Arizona Quarterly, D. S. Savage published “The Significance of F. Scott Fitzgerald,” an article that dives headlong into the psychoanalytic funhouse that Fiedler had opened, arguing that “what emerges most patently from Fitzgerald’s biography is his character as a mother’s boy,” and that “the incest motive is in fact central to all of Fitzgerald’s novels” (206). Say what one will about Savage’s talents as a psychoanalyst — I would say he lives up to his name in his vicious depiction of Zelda and Scott in the article — it is in his discussion of Gatsby that Savage, like Fiedler, draws near some potentially interesting interpretive avenues, only to back away from them entirely. He suggests that Gatsby’s “parable of Innocence and Experience” (208) can be read not only in terms of a conflict between morality and corruption, but also psychoanalytically, as the playing out of the conflict between what Freud called the “reality principle” and the “pleasure principle.” Gatsby, Carraway, and other of Fitzgerald’s major characters, according to Savage, “are romantics in contradiction with themselves, in that they wish to make of experience a means to the renewal of innocence” (208). Savage analyzes how this contradiction relates to the overt incest theme of Tender Is the Night and seems just on the verge of doing

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the same sort of work on Gatsby — before, apparently, deciding not to: “It is precisely the same incestuous regression which, in fact, determines the unconscious symbolism of The Great Gatsby — a symbolism, however, which I lack space to elucidate in the present article” (205). His psychoanalytic mystery would remain well kept in the years to come, as this early foray into psychosexual readings of Gatsby offered by Fiedler and Savage would represent a potentially compelling approach, but one largely unexplored until a couple of decades later. If Freudian readings of Gatsby saw an early bloom and quick wilt, we might say the same about interpretations from a Marxian perspective. While examinations of Fitzgerald’s class-consciousness and his portrayal of the life of the rich have been absolute mainstays of Gatsby criticism all along, more properly radical treatments of his work have not. Richard Greenleaf’s 1952 essay, “The Social Thinking of F.  Scott Fitzgerald,” makes an interesting effort to argue for an evolution in Fitzgerald’s sensibility, over the course of his writing career, toward a more Marxian standpoint by the end of his life. Greenleaf takes umbrage at leading voices in the Fitzgerald revival, like Trilling and Piper, for focusing only on aesthetic qualities in the work and not seeing Fitzgerald as a writer responding to the class issues of his day. Though Greenleaf claims that Fitzgerald’s ironic treatment of the rich “attained its full sharpness in The Great Gatsby” (109), he has surprisingly little to say about this ironic treatment and ultimately seems disappointed that Fitzgerald’s denouement was not more radical: “The hypocrisies of the rich Buchanans lead to their near-destruction; by a final nefarious maneuver they turn it into the destruction of Gatsby” (109). John W. Bicknell, in his 1954 essay “The Waste Land of F. Scott Fitzgerald,” perhaps sorts out the frustration seemingly apparent in Greenleaf’s discussion of Gatsby. Also arguing from a Marxian perspective, Bicknell praises Fitzgerald’s achievement of an atmosphere of foreboding and doom in the novel. He focuses in on the deterministic trajectory of the plot, examining the demise of the “pathetic” (559) George and Myrtle Wilson, who are “unaware of the forces pressing” (560) on them, and “the perverted version of the selfmade man” (560), Gatsby, who also “dies ignorant of the forces that preyed upon him” (561). Unlike Greenleaf, however, Bicknell does not see Fitzgerald as a writer committed to class struggle. Key to this argument is Bicknell’s distinction between tragedy and mere pessimism; he assigns Gatsby — and, indeed, all of Fitzgerald’s novels — to the “pessimistic” camp as they offer, for Bicknell, bleakness without struggle, a sense of declining fates about which nothing can be done. For critics devoted to the “necessity of struggle” (566), Bicknell argues, Fitzgerald’s “literary achievement falls short of tragedy” (571). If these early forays into Marxist and psychoanalytic readings of Gatsby proved to be a bit ahead of their time, we can identify other

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patterns or trends in the emergent Gatsby criticism of the 1950s that were very much of the moment. Given the vogue of the school of New Criticism in the American academy, with its focus on the formal patterns and aesthetic qualities of the literary work, Gatsby quickly proved to be a favorite among scholars. The novel’s dense symbolic patterning, as well as its particularly strong marriage of form and content, with Nick Carraway’s involved-yet-detached, participant/observer narration giving shape to the theme of American dream and disillusionment, provided a rich mine of material for scholarly discussion and debate. Three overlapping areas one could identify as mainstays in the criticism of this period would be influence studies, the examination of narrative perspective in the novel, and explorations of symbolic patterns and their relationship to the larger American themes of the book. Across the span of the decade, critical “conversations” begin to emerge along the lines of intersection between these various approaches. For example, influence studies, which most commonly pointed back to Joseph Conrad, as well as the lessons of Henry James, typically come at some point to focus in on the central role of the first-person narrator, Carraway; the question of Nick Carraway’s impact on the meanings of the novel has proven inexhaustible to this day, and it already had taken off as a critical discussion in the 1950s, as we shall see. Similarly, essays centering on Nick’s ambivalent role share concerns with those that examine what seems to be Fitzgerald’s larger ambivalence toward the American scene he depicts. Though the specific terms of the critical discourse around the novel would shift markedly in the ensuing decades, the basic elements of the critical conversation surrounding The Great Gatsby would emerge in a series of compelling essays in the 1950s. Essays tracing sources and influences on The Great Gatsby ranged widely from the classical to the contemporary. Paul MacKendrick, in a 1950 essay in The Classical Journal, traces the parallels between Jay Gatsby and Trimalchio, the vulgar, ostentatious party host from the Satyricon of Petronius. Among Fitzgerald’s working titles for the novel had been Trimalchio in West Egg, and, simply, Trimalchio. MacKendrick examines not merely parallels in the presentations of the two characters, but also the purposes to which they were put, arguing that the gaudy milieux of both characters was part of their respective authors’ efforts at “describing their age as they see it: socially, intellectually, politically corrupt” (314).5 Richard Schoenwald, in his 1957 essay “Scott Fitzgerald as John Keats,” looks to the more recent past in tracing what he sees as a key source of Fitzgerald’s lyric romanticism. Though Schoenwald is certainly correct in his discussion of Keats’s profound influence on Fitzgerald, unfortunately only scant connections to Gatsby are made in the essay.6 Such is not the case with Philip Young’s 1956 essay “Scott Fitzgerald’s Waste Land,” in which Young examines the structural and thematic parallels between The Great Gatsby and poet T.  S. Eliot’s modernist

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masterpiece, The Waste Land. Eliot’s praising of the novel in a letter to Fitzgerald sparked a friendship between the two, one based on mutual admiration. Surely Eliot must have noticed Fitzgerald’s direct references to The Waste Land in Gatsby: Nick Carraway once refers to the desolate Valley of Ashes as a “waste land” (GG, 22), and on another occasion describes the “throbbing taxi cabs” (47) lining the darkened streets of New York City, borrowing an image from Eliot’s Tiresias, who waits “at the violet hour, when the eyes and back / Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits / Like a taxi throbbing waiting” (ll. 215– 17). Young, in this solid essay, does more than merely note such similarities, instead demonstrating how both works follow a similar pattern in building toward their grand ruminations on “the spiritual sterility of the contemporary world” (224). While he focuses this provocative discussion on the waste land setting of the valley of ashes, the “dead center of the book” (225), Young argues that the rot at the center of the ash valley permeates throughout the varied landscapes and societies of the novel: “As in the earlier waste land, one telling symptom of general chaos in Gatsby is that most traditions are broken or lost. There is no religious faith; God’s functions are taken over by an advertisement for eyeglasses. Tom, a decayed survival of what may once have been a competent aristocracy, is reduced to corruption and the vicious ignorant speeches he makes” (226). Young’s reading of the famous ending passages of the book again connect back to Eliot; just as the protagonist of The Waste Land gathers, perhaps futilely, the “fragments I have shored against my ruins” (l. 431), so too does Nick Carraway look beyond the waste land of the East in seeking solace in more enduring values: “Nick Carraway finds himself (like the protagonist of Eliot’s poem) brooding on the superiority of the past, and appealing to certain traditions of an earlier era” (227). As for the influence of contemporary novelists, several cases were made in the journals. Henry Dan Piper argued that Frank Norris was “the most influential” (“Norris,” 393) of the naturalists on Fitzgerald, while Eric Solomon, building on a point made earlier by Maxwell Geismar, argued that Theodore Dreiser’s 1919 short story “Vanity, Vanity, Saith the Preacher” was a direct influence on The Great Gatsby.7 Solomon traces a number of specific parallels shaping the two tales of “the innocent who is destroyed by the same decadent society he sought to dominate” (187). The most frequently made connection among contemporary novelists, however, was certainly to Joseph Conrad. Conrad, who had employed Jamesian principles regarding narrative perspective, particularly in his use of the participant-observer narrator, clearly influenced Fitzgerald’s approach to writing Gatsby — and Fitzgerald himself said as much on more than one occasion. Robert Wooster Stallman, in his 1955 essay “Conrad and The Great Gatsby,” makes more explicit the connection to Conrad that had been discussed previously by other critics.

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Stallman most thoroughly examines the influence of Conrad’s 1902 novel Heart of Darkness on The Great Gatsby, but also makes connections to the major Conrad novels Nostromo (1904) and Lord Jim (1900). For Stallman, what Fitzgerald learned from Conrad “includes not only the device of the perplexed narrator and turns of phrasing, but also themes and plot-situations, ambivalence of symbolism, etc. — in fact, the craft of the novel, including a theory of its construction” (“Conrad,” 5). The most specific link Stallman examines is the resemblance between Nick Carraway and Marlow, the narrator of both Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim, a point that leads us directly to a series of studies on Nick and the central issue of narrative perspective in the novel. Indeed, one of the articles that directly references Stallman’s argument here is Jerome Thale’s 1957 essay “The Narrator as Hero,” which takes up the point of the “remarkable similarities” (69) between Gatsby and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and goes on to make the argument that the works’ respective narrators, Carraway and Marlow, are in fact the central characters and “heroes”: “Nick and Marlow, then, are not simply the voices necessary for telling stories like these. They are too much engaged and they react too strongly, to be mere fictional conveniences. . . . Nick is the hero of the novel, and Gatsby is a fact, the fact, in his development” (71). If, as many critics of the decade would claim, the novel is essentially moralistic in nature, then Thale’s point is logical and seemingly irrefutable; after all, Gatsby in the course of the novel is essentially a “simple and static” (70) character, whereas the development of moral perspective occurs entirely within Nick, occasioned by his experiences in New York and Long Island in the summer of 1922. But is the case really this simple? Not so fast. Cue, once again, Robert Stallman, who argues in one of the most interesting and audacious essays of the decade, “Gatsby and the Hole in Time,” that Nick Carraway is “morally ambivalent,” a “hypocrite” (4) who lacks “faith in humanity and . . . life itself” and suffers from “spiritual bankruptcy” (7). This hardly seems the description of a “hero,” much less the kind of guy in whom one would entrust the moral weight of the Great American Novel. Stallman’s point is echoed by W. M. Frohock, who argues in his 1955 essay “Morals, Manners, and Scott Fitzgerald” that Nick is “short on moral perspective” (227), but vigorously refuted by Thomas Hanzo, who argues in “The Theme and Narrator of The Great Gatsby” that it is imperative to accept Nick’s “sensibility and intelligence as the recognizable determinants which inform the story with its meaning” (184). Indeed, for Hanzo, even more so than for Thale, Nick’s sensibility is the meaning of the story; he concludes his essay by describing the novel as: “the personal history of a young American provincial whose moral intelligence is the proper source of our understanding and whose career, in the passage from innocence to revaluation, dramatizes the possibility and mode of a moral sanction in contemporary America” (190). If the stakes of this debate

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seem rather high and dramatic, perhaps that reveals the extent to which Gatsby was becoming, by the mid-fifties, a central document in American literature. In any case, there really is no winner to an argument like this; instead, the divergence of views between Thale and Hanzo, on one hand, and Stallman and Frohock on the other, points to a central fact about this novel, one that does derive directly from Fitzgerald’s decision, following the lead of Conrad-via-James, to tell the story from a first-person, participant-observer perspective: The way one relates as a reader to Nick Carraway — as a believer, or as a skeptic — will profoundly influence the way one interprets the novel and its insights. The questions about Nick’s character, credibility, and reliability do not go away; they have kept critics and teachers busy since this debate first surfaced in the 1950s. If the debate about Nick Carraway provided one avenue for scholars to take apart the novel and examine its messages and how they are conveyed, certainly another point of entry into the text for scholars of the age — in fact, the source of the most influential and canonical essays on Gatsby from this period — was the vision presented in the narrative of America itself. Most of the major essays from the fifties approach, from one angle or another, the nature of Fitzgerald’s commentary on America and the American dream in the novel. Published in 1952, Tom Burnam’s “The Eyes of Dr. Eckleburg: A Re-Examination of The Great Gatsby” is an early example of a scholarly analysis of the connection between the American themes of the novel, particularly its social criticism, and its formal or structural properties. Burnam argues that the novel features a “duality of symbolic structure” (10) in which a primary theme regarding aspiration and disillusionment (as symbolized by the green light on Daisy’s dock) runs concurrently with, and at times counter to, a “subtheme” concerning larger questions of chaos and social decay (as symbolized by the omniscient yet artificial billboard eyes of Dr. Eckleburg). He compliments Fitzgerald on the structure of the book, but does so in a curious manner, arguing that “Fitzgerald may not have entirely realized what he was doing” (8) in his complex layering of symbols and themes. (Apparently Burnam did not share Trilling’s view of Fitzgerald’s craftsmanship and keen intellect.) At the crux of the matter, for Burnham, is the manner in which Fitzgerald splits his perspective between his fictional surrogate or counterpart, Nick Carraway, and his own authorial presence in the book. Burnam, in a formalistic reading, analyzes how Fitzgerald unwittingly creates a narrative that functions on two contrasting levels, due to the tension between the themes associated with the narrator, Carraway — concerning Gatsby’s dream and downfall — and those associated with the author, Fitzgerald — concerning larger questions of morality and order. Ultimately, Burnam argues, the author’s concerns take over the narrative, and this secondary, “Fitzgerald theme” (8) becomes the point toward which the novel’s intricate form leads:

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But F.  Scott Fitzgerald is the one who introduces, I think unconsciously, a fascinating examination of certain values only peripherally related to Gatsby’s rise, his dream, and his physical downfall. And, if we turn to this other area, this non-Carraway thematic possibility, we see at once that The Great Gatsby is not, like Lord Jim, a study of illusion and integrity, but of carelessness. Our “second” theme — perhaps the more important regardless of Fitzgerald’s original intention — becomes a commentary on the nature and values, or lack of them, of the reckless ones. (9)

Two keys to Burnam’s reading are particularly worth noting. The first is his focus on two narrative voices coexisting in the novel: “Fitzgerald-as-Fitzgerald and Fitzgerald-as-Carraway, the gleeman of the Gatsby saga, are not the same, though both appear alternately throughout the novel, intertwining like threads in a fabric” (8). In this regard, Burnam’s argument seems to pick up on Walker Gibson’s suggestion, made two years earlier, that Nick is a sort of “mock speaker,” shadowed by “another speaker somewhere” (268) in the narrative. As we shall see, Nick’s function as narrator, and the Nick-Fitzgerald relationship, would remain subjects of critical scrutiny for decades to come. The second key aspect of Burnam’s essay is his understanding of Fitzgerald as a moralist, and of The Great Gatsby as a work of social criticism from an author addressing the prospect of social decay. This is of course a marked departure from the vision of both the author and the novel found in the criticism of the twenties and thirties. Indeed, one of the common complaints registered against the book in early newspaper criticism centered on the apparent immorality of a tale filled with booze, illicit love affairs, gaudy parties, car crashes, violence, and murder. But where some of the more genteel early critics saw distasteful characters engaging in scandalous behavior devoid of redeeming social value, Burnam in this essay sees the characters and events of the novel as all part of a carefully constructed work of not only romantic lyricism, but also serious social criticism. He nods to Lionel Trilling’s assertion that Jay Gatsby stands for “America itself,” but diverges from Trilling’s focus on a larger, mythic vision of Americanness in the novel. Burnam’s take is more specific, and he suggests at the close of his essay that the target of Fitzgerald’s social message is nothing less than the moral anomie of modern life in the United States: The cause of the horror is, in The Great Gatsby, the terrifying contrast between the Buchanans, Jordan Baker, the obscene barflies who descend in formless swarms on Gatsby’s house, all symbolized by the gritty disorganized ash-heaps with their crumbling men, and the solid ordered structure so paradoxically built on sand (or ashes) which Gatsby’s great dream lends to his life. And over it all brood the eyes of Dr. Eckleburg. . . . Do not the eyes in spite of everything

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they survey, perhaps even because of it, serve both as a focus and an undeviating base, a single point of reference in the midst of monstrous disorder? (12)8

Only a couple of months after Burnam’s article, Edwin Fussell published one of the major early scholarly essays on Fitzgerald. “Fitzgerald’s Brave New World,” which appeared in December 1952, took much further the notion of Fitzgerald as a moral critic of American culture. Though the essay spans the breadth of Fitzgerald’s career, a good portion of it is devoted to The Great Gatsby, and Fussell makes plain from his opening sentence that that novel is the foundation for Fitzgerald’s literary reputation: “Ultimately, Fitzgerald’s literary stature derives from his ability to apply the sensibilities implied by the phrase ‘romantic wonder’ to American civilization, and to gain from the conjunction a moral critique of that civilization” (291). Implicitly arguing for Fitzgerald’s place in the ranks of major American writers, Fussell suggests that Fitzgerald’s contribution is his own twist on the “American theme” that had, in one guise or another, occupied most of his great predecessors in the national literature: “Fitzgerald’s story, roughly, is of the New World, or, more exactly, of the work of the imagination in the New World. It has two predominant patterns, quest and seduction. The quest is the search for romantic wonder, in the terms which contemporary America offers for such a search; the seduction represents capitulation to these terms” (291). Fussell builds on the assertions made by Troy and Trilling that Gatsby stands as a kind of mythical symbol of the nation, alluding to the “vast back-drop of American civilization against which Gatsby’s gestures must be interpreted” (295). In other words, Gatsby represents the inherent contradiction in the American dream, with its idealism seemingly ever undercut by the irresistible lure of material success. Fussell argues, rightly, that Gatsby shares the values of the odious Buchanans and points out Fitzgerald’s critique of his compromised dream extends outward to the American mythos; central to this larger critique is Fitzgerald’s invocation of Founding Father Benjamin Franklin’s famous “plan for moral perfection,” which is mimicked in young Jimmy Gatz’s list of “General Resolves” (GG, 135), written on the back flyleaf of his boyhood copy of Hopalong Cassidy: Gatsby is meant to be a very representative American in the intensity of his yearning for success, as well as in the symbols which he equates with it. Gatsby performs contemporary variations on an old American pattern, the rags-to-riches story exalted by American legend. . . . But the saga is primarily that of a legendary Benjamin Franklin. . . . Grounding his parody in Franklin’s Autobiography gave Fitzgerald’s critique a historical density and a breadth of implication that one associates only with major fiction.” (296–97)

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Floyd Watkins would second Fussell’s view in a 1954 essay, claiming that Fitzgerald had specifically invoked Franklin “in order to give concreteness to the historical tradition of Gatsby and to make Gatsby . . . a personification of the national dream as it had been corrupted” (252). Marius Bewley, in his major essay of 1954, “Scott Fitzgerald’s Criticism of America,” would go further than this, citing the novel as an exposé of the “deficiencies inherent in contemporary manifestations of the American vision itself” (245–46). For Bewley, Gatsby’s inability to see through the “sham” of the society that surrounds him makes him representative of a people that have lost their bearings and come to replace more elemental values (belief in “the goodness of nature and man” [223]) with blind desire for material advancement. Bewley argues that this incisive critique of the national mythology is what makes the book an American masterpiece: “The Great Gatsby offers some of the severest and closest criticism of the American dream that our literature affords. Read in this way, Fitzgerald’s masterpiece ceases to be a pastoral documentary of the Jazz Age and takes its distinguished place among those great national novels whose profound corrective insights into the nature of American experience are not separable from the artistic form of the novel itself. . . . The theme of The Great Gatsby is the withering of the American dream” (223). Not all critics would agree with this view. Robert Ornstein’s 1956 essay, “Scott Fitzgerald’s Fable of East and West,” is a quite direct rebuttal to the arguments made by Fussell and Bewley; in contrast to their readings, Ornstein argues that the novel “is little concerned with twentieth century materialism and moral anarchy, for its theme is the unending quest of the romantic dream, which is forever betrayed in fact and yet redeemed in men’s minds” (139). Ornstein worries that interpretations like Fussell’s and Bewley’s are too critical of America as a “corrupt society” and in fact seems to see such readings as attacks on the novel, referring to them as “negative” interpretations (139). Ornstein argues in contrast that Fitzgerald, in his reversal of the mythic American east-towest journey to the frontier portrays a “profound displacement of the American dream” (141) by depicting the lure of the East to his western characters. He refutes the notion of a contrast between eastern corruption and traditional western values (made by Mizener and others), arguing instead that Jay Gatsby’s eastward journey was “at least a journey of life and hope” (143). That is, though his efforts may be futile, Gatsby symbolizes, for Ornstein, the undying idealism of the American, his naïve belief in illusion still representing something vastly preferable to a hardened cynicism. “Scott Fitzgerald’s fable of East and West,” for Ornstein, “does not lament the decline of American civilization” (143). Ornstein’s argument indicates the extent to which critical discourse on Gatsby was coming to see the novel as a commentary on the contemporary American

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experience. Other critics would continue to examine the American theme in the novel, couching discussions of the book’s contemporary relevance with analyses of its mythic overtones. John Henry Raleigh, writing in 1957, offers one such discussion that approaches the American themes on both realistic and mythic levels. Raleigh begins with the thesis that the novel addresses a fundamental tension in the American experience between the contrasting values of “mercantilism and idealism.” “At either end of American history, and all the way through, the two impulses have a way of being both radically exclusive and mutually confusing, the one melting into the other: the human faculty of wonder, on the one hand, and the power and beauty of things, on the other” (55). For Raleigh, the great power of the novel lies in its ability to dramatize the interplay of these contrasting pulls. While he sees this tension played out throughout the novel, he focuses in particular on what he dubs the two “ecstatic moments” in the novel — the first, when Gatsby gazes upon and then kisses Daisy on the sidewalk in Louisville, and the second, the closing of the novel in which Nick imagines the Dutch sailors first laying eyes upon the “fresh, green breast of the new world” (GG, 140). The two passages embody the connections between the material and ideal worlds, as in both cases, according to Raleigh, we see “the boundless imagination trying to transfigure . . . the endlessly beautiful object” (55). By thus connecting the glamorous, materialistic sheen of the book to larger impulses in American life, Raleigh counters the early critique of Gatsby that it was too glossy, too of-the-moment. Rather than a superficial novel of manners, Raleigh sees The Great Gatsby, with its haunting enactment of a fundamental American contradiction, as being transcendent. He echoes Maxwell Perkins, who had once written to Fitzgerald about the novel’s “sense of eternity,” by claiming that it deals with “the permanent realities of existence” (57). Ultimately, Raleigh hails Fitzgerald for transmuting the fleeting ephemera of his day into something lasting: “The genius of the novel consists precisely in the fact that, while using only the stuff, one might better say the froth and flotsam of its own limited time and place, it has managed to suggest, as Perkins said, a sense of eternity” (58). Raleigh’s analysis suggests that The Great Gatsby functions as both a realistic novel and a sort of mythic romance, a point taken up by other critics of the day as well. Richard Chase, who discusses Gatsby in his 1957 book The American Novel and Its Tradition, sees the work as more than a typically realistic novel of manners. Instead, he echoes Mizener’s and Fussell’s reading of the mythic elements and pastoral tone of the work, arguing that the character of Gatsby is “of the company of Natty Bumppo, Huck Finn, and Melville’s Ishmael. For although he is treated with more irony than they, as befits a later worldliness, he shares their ideal of innocence, escape, and the purely personal code of conduct. Like them he

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derives his values not from the way of the world but from an earlier pastoral ideal” (165). However, Gatsby is, for Chase, unlike these characters as well, for he serves a function in a modern novel also characterized by biting social criticism; inasmuch as he dares to make “an assault on a plutocracy that has settled into a position of power and prestige . . . Gatsby . . . becomes what his predecessors never were: a tragicomic figure in a social comedy” (166). John Kuehl, in his 1959 essay “Scott Fitzgerald: Romantic and Realist,” echoes Chase’s take on the novel, arguing that “The Great Gatsby is not only romance. It is also a realistic study of a nation’s values and their effect on an individual” (415). He, too, likens the novel to Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn for its mythical romantic vision of America, while also remarking on Fitzgerald’s “interweaving of pastoral nostalgia and cultural history,” a pairing that undergirds the romance with “social realism” (416). Like John Aldridge, who at the beginning of the decade had read Gatsby’s story as a “parody of the Great American Success Dream” (50), Kuehl concludes that his mythic quest must also be read as social criticism: “To the extent that American concepts deceive Gatsby by making him believe that he can really buy his way into a higher class and that this class, the rich, is superior to ordinary humanity, the novel is the tragedy of the middle-class American under the democratic-capitalistic system” (416). With the essays of Raleigh and Kuehl synthesizing the twin strains of romance and realism, of mythic undertones and pointed social criticism, two of the main areas of critique from this key decade seem fairly well mapped out. But before departing the criticism of the fifties, it is important to note a couple other important contributions that fall outside the parameters so far discussed. The first of these is the study of Fitzgerald’s craftsmanship and language use. The artistry of the novel would be much explored in criticism of the coming decades, and two early works that broke important ground, both from 1957, are W.  J. Harvey’s “Theme and Texture in The Great Gatsby,” and James E. Miller, Jr.’s The Fictional Technique of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Harvey calls attention to a matter he feels has been neglected by critics: the “extreme density of texture” (13) that results from Fitzgerald’s careful, patterned use of language. In a detailed and interesting discussion, Harvey demonstrates how Fitzgerald repeats certain key phrases, images, and metaphors — he centers his discussion around the nautical imagery apparent from the very beginning of the novel and the repeated mentioning of restlessness, and how both patterns come together in another repeated “key-word” (18) of the text, “drifting.” Harvey deftly points out how this use of language and image patterns, particularly as it relates to the protagonist, prepares the reader for the resounding ironies of the novel’s close: “We remember Gatsby not as drifting but as voyaging to some end and it is this sense, hinted at all the way through the book, which gives impetus to that imaginative leap

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whereby we encompass the ironic contrast between Gatsby and Columbus or those Dutch sailors” (20). Harvey closes his discussion by pointing out he has hardly exhausted the study of patterning in the book, arguing that “any one of a dozen other starting points might have been taken” (20). Those dozen, and then some, would soon be explored in the critical essays of the sixties and seventies. Like Harvey, Miller — whose Fictional Technique has the distinction of being the first book-length critical study of Fitzgerald’s writing — is concerned primarily with the craft of the novel, as opposed to thematic interpretation. His study commences from the idea that Fitzgerald’s style evolved over the course of his writing career, as he shifted allegiances between what Miller identifies as the two contrasting — indeed, competing — modes of fiction prevalent at the time: the “novel of saturation,” championed by H.  G. Wells, and the “novel of selection,” favored by Henry James. As Miller points out, Wells was a favorite author and a model for the young Fitzgerald of This Side of Paradise. A champion of what he called a “discursive” approach, Wells envisioned the novel as a life-like panorama of a particular social scene, often messy and crowded, like life itself. James, in contrast, favored a selective approach to included detail and a minimum of authorial intrusion, believing that acute narrative focus leads to the greater art. Miller sums up the contrast in a manner that reflects on the difference between the early novel, This Side of Paradise, and the mature work, The Great Gatsby: “In the novel of saturation, irrelevance is a virtue because it makes the novel more life-like; it lends credibility to the ‘slice of life.’ In the novel of selection, relevance is a virtue, because it emphasizes the ‘pointed intention’ or ‘centre of interest’” (Technique, 9). Miller notes that we see the clear Jamesian influence on Gatsby, with its taut narrative constructed of carefully patterned imagery and manipulated timeframe, all presented by a sensitive, participant-observer narrator. His detailed discussion of the text, and particularly his analysis of the use of flashback, emphasize Fitzgerald’s artistry. There is “an artistic order in the disorder” (97) of the narrative’s shifting temporal schemes, evidence of Fitzgerald’s newfound ability, in this novel, to craft a narrative form equal to the power of the ideas and themes contained within.9 But where Miller and Harvey found order, Stallman, in an essay briefly mentioned earlier, finds nothing but holes, lacunae. In “Gatsby and the Hole in Time” Stallman argues that just about all of the big names who have confidently read the book as a comment on the withering of the American dream (Troy and Bewley) or a tragic pastoral (Mizener) are guilty of “oversimplification” (2). Indeed, from Stallman’s perspective, any narrowly focused reading of the novel is bound to amount to an oversimplification, since at the heart of the text, for Stallman, is an extremely careful patterning that leads not to seamless order, but to chaos, at least

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in a temporal sense. With its constant tension between dreams of the past and visions of the future, the novel seems to inhabit a space outside of a knowable time-frame, an “In between time” (GG, 75), in the words of a tune played in the novel: While Gatsby woos Daisy, Ewing Klipspringer pounds out on the keyboard the popular hits entitled “The Love Nest” and “Ain’t We Got Fun?” The whole novel gets its time-theme summed up in the words of the latter: “In the mean-time/In between time — .” What is defined here is a hole in time. It is this empty in-between time that Fitzgerald renders in The Great Gatsby, that void of the corrupted present canceled out by the corrupted past — America’s as well as Gatsby’s. (3–4)

To say that Stallman finds an absence at the heart of the text might be to push the terminology of his discussion some three decades into the future, into the glory days of poststructuralist analysis, but certainly in many ways this is the direction he is heading. Not merely the disjointed time-scheme, but also the lack of any sort of moral authority leaves the text decentered. As mentioned earlier, Stallman does not buy the notion of Nick as a moral authority, and he minces no words about it: That Nick is to be seen as the moral center of the book . . . is a notion possible only to the duped reader who has been beguiled by the deceptive flow of Nick’s words to take them at their face-value. At the center of the book what is there but a moral and temporal hole? Not Nick but Time is the true moralist. Fitzgerald has contrived that first page of The Great Gatsby as a front to the whole book. Here is Nick as arch-prig all dressed up in a morally hardboiled starched shirt of provincial squeamishness and boasted tolerance, the hypocrite! His boasted tolerance, as we come to see through his protective mask, is in fact intolerance, and his rugged morality but polished manners. His proposal to regiment the world amounts to a negation of faith in humanity and of faith in life itself, and it masks his own spiritual bankruptcy. No moral vision can radiate from Nick’s closed heart. (7)

The essay is filled with energetic arguing such as this, and it features several catalogues of textual detail — nearly Whitmanesque in their breadth and ambition — that amply and vibrantly explicate his points about the “hole in time,” about mistaken identities and divided selfhoods, and about the resultant moral anomie. At times Stallman overreaches; his dismantling of Mizener’s assertion that the text amounts to a tragic pastoral, wherein the western setting embodies moral virtue, succeeds in demonstrating that Fitzgerald “presents not a single character to exemplify” (5) this claim, but then stretches into a larger discourse on geography in

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the novel that falls victim to its own hubris. But the essay as a whole is vitally important to the history of the novel’s scholarly reception because of its insistently questioning tone. Stallman’s skewering of Nick is primarily responsible for creating a decades-long debate over the narrator’s credibility, and his linking of the text to the writing of German philosopher Oswald Spengler opened another line of discussion that would persist for decades to come. Perhaps the strongest contribution of the essay, though, comes in one of its simplest statements. In assessing Fitzgerald’s achievement in this novel, Stallman concludes that its greatest virtue lies not in a sense of organic wholeness, but in something quite the opposite: “The moralist Fitzgerald strikes out against the fragmented morality of his age by rendering it thus: confused and fragmentary” (11). There really could be no other essay with which to conclude the discussion of Gatsby’s amazing ascent into the American literary canon in the 1950s than Stallman’s “Gatsby and the Hole in Time.” This is not because the essay neatly sums up the main trends of the influential scholarship on the novel during this period; quite to the contrary, like a punch in the gut, Stallman’s essay undercuts just about everything that had been so confidently pronounced about the book thus far. In this sense, he does not at all sum up the work of his peers in the fifties, but he certainly anticipates the work of his colleagues in the decades to come.

Notes 1

The essays, “The Crack-Up,” “Pasting It Together,” and “Handle with Care,” appeared in February, March, and April issues of Esquire, respectively, in 1936.

2

For a concise overview of these versions of the novel that appeared in the 1940s, see Nicolas Tredell, F. Scott Fitzgerald (1997), 42. For a complete list of posthumously published editions of The Great Gatsby, from 1941 through the end of the twentieth century, see Bruccoli, Reference, 250–59.

3

Mizener’s revision appeared under the title “F.  Scott Fitzgerald 1896–1940: The Poet of Borrowed Time,” in Willard Thorp’s collection Lives of Eighteen from Princeton (1946) and again as the lead essay in Alfred Kazin’s 1951 collection F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Man and His Work.

4

See William Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral, originally published in 1935.

5

James L. W. West, III published Fitzgerald’s original Trimalchio draft in 2000, part of Cambridge University Press’s Fitzgerald Edition. See West, Trimalchio.

6

For a fuller look at the Keatsian echoes in The Great Gatsby, consult Tristram P. Coffin’s “Gatsby’s Fairy Lover,” Dan McCall’s “‘The Self-Same Song that Found a Path’,” George Monteiro’s “James Gatz and John Keats,” Joseph B. Wagner’s “Gatsby and John Keats,” and Lauren Rule-Maxwell’s “The New Emperor’s Clothes.”

7

Geismar originally made the point in a chapter on Theodore Dreiser in Rebels and Ancestors (1953).

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8

Milton Hindus, in “The Mysterious Eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg,” goes further than this in his discussion of the symbolic meaning of the billboard eyes. While Burnam seems more concerned with secular disorder, Hindus reads the eyes as an ironic symbol of spiritual yearning. An ambivalent symbol, the eyes are both a “mockery” (30) of conventional religion and also “the most potent suggestion of God’s presence in Fitzgerald’s imaginary universe” (30). Hindus believes that Fitzgerald uses this symbol to “communicate to us his innermost belief that man may not be alone in an empty, nihilistic universe but that, however absurd the hypothesis may be at first glance, his actions are under continual critical scrutiny from above” (31).

9

Miller’s thesis about Fitzgerald’s conversion to a Jamesian method has not been universally accepted. Robert Roulston, in his 1980 essay “Traces of Tono-Bungay in The Great Gatsby,” humorously characterizes Miller’s approach to Fitzgerald’s influences as “a literary morality play in which the fledgling author had to discard the artistic vices he had acquired from Wells . . . in order to achieve the Jamesian compactness, allusiveness, stylistic polish and moral perspicacity of The Great Gatsby” (68). Roulston, by contrast, sees numerous parallels to Wells’s 1909 novel in terms of both theme and narrative perspective.

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3: The Gatsby Industry: Tracing Patterns and Pushing Boundaries in the Criticism of the Sixties and Seventies Pattern and Perspective: The Focus on Form Intensifies

A

S WE HAVE SEEN,

during the span of time from F.  Scott Fitzgerald’s death to the end of the 1950s, The Great Gatsby went from being a largely forgotten novel — one remembered, if at all, as a period piece of the Roaring Twenties — to an established classic of American literature. Following the popular revival of interest in Fitzgerald’s life and writings, the scholarly revival led to the firm entrenchment of Gatsby in the national canon. Discussion and debate over the novel in the literary journals had taken, by the end of the decade, a fairly predictable shape, with most critical attention divided between issues regarding narrative perspective and form, source and influence studies, and analyses of the symbolic, thematic, and mythic resonances of the book. Though an essay like Stallman’s “Gatsby and the Hole in Time” threatened to upset the apple cart, for the most part the terms of discussion were stable and well established at this point. The early part of the 1960s saw further exploration of several of these issues: The debate about Nick Carraway’s function, reliability, and character would continue unabated; a number of essays would push the discussion of symbolic patterning in the novel in interesting new directions; and hypotheses about Fitzgerald’s literary influences would remain a mainstay. A series of book-length studies of Fitzgerald’s work would appear over the course of the decade of the sixties, further cementing his place in the canon. With the political turmoil and civil rights struggles of the later sixties and seventies, interesting things started to happen in the world of Gatsby criticism. Long understood by this point as a novel that reflected the American experience, The Great Gatsby would, with the changing times, come to be analyzed from a whole new range of approaches and perspectives. Scholars writing in an age of civil unrest found new corollaries to modern unease in the novel’s political subtext; critics examined the racial, ethnic, and sexual politics of the novel in ways that had been entirely unaddressed in criticism of the previous generation; feminist

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critics scrutinized the gender dynamics of the narrative, in the process calling into questions tacit assumptions concerning character and theme made by previous scholars; and other scholars approached the novel from a religious perspective, looking deeper into the spiritual subtext and Catholic imagery of the novel. Moving from familiar beginnings into entirely new territories, the criticism of the sixties and seventies pushed the discussion forward while continuing to demonstrate the literary and social relevance of the book. Meanwhile, a third film version was released to an eager viewing public in 1974, fueling yet another popular revival of interest in the novel. Over the span of this period, as the book gained in both popular and scholarly resonance, and as critical approaches began to open out in manifold new directions, it began to appear, as Fitzgerald scholar Matthew Bruccoli would put it a few years later, in 1985, that the book’s ability to provoke discourse and interpretation was, indeed, “inexhaustible” (New Essays, 12). At the outset of this major period in Gatsby criticism, it seems that the pioneering work of the 1950s had laid the groundwork for more specific formal examinations of the rich patterning that makes the book such an artistic achievement. In a sense, critics must have felt free to take on this level of explication as there no longer seemed to be a need for evaluative work on the novel; as Nicolas Tredell points out, by the outset of the 1960s, general consensus on the stature of The Great Gatsby “created a climate in which particular aspects of the novel could receive a fuller examination, without the need to make a more general case for its achievement” (74). If, indeed, the book was now more or less secure as a classic of American literature, then the time was right to develop the thematic discussions laid out in the 1950s with more intense readings of patterns in symbolism, imagery, setting, characterization, and narrative structure. Fitzgerald himself had said of the novel, in a letter to Maxwell Perkins from July of 1922, when he was just starting to work on it, that the book would be “something new — something extraordinary and beautiful and simple + intricately patterned” (in Bruccoli, Reference, 53). That he succeeded in his efforts to make the book “intricately patterned” can be seen in any number of critical essays to emerge in the 1960s. Following the precepts of the New Critical model, with its emphasis on “close reading” of the literary text, as well as the influence of Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye, who argued for the importance of studying formal patterning within literary works and connecting these to the larger literary archetypes from which they spring, critics of the age began a spirited dissection of The Great Gatsby. Far more than mere exercises in “symbol hunting,” the best of these formalist explorations of the “intricate pattern” of The Great Gatsby are insightful in allowing readers to trace deeper structures of meaning in the work, while also boasting the added side benefit of being immensely enjoyable to read.

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This trend toward closer looks at the patterning of the novel can be seen in the first major Gatsby essay of the decade, J.  S. Westbrook’s “Nature and Optics in The Great Gatsby” (1960). Westbrook identifies the two key patterns of the novel as having to do with problems of seeing and with the idea of nature; these two patterns are thematically interlocking, and together they amount to a “hallucinatory order of nature” (83) that is at the core of the novel’s meaning. Westbrook argues that Nick Carraway’s experiences in the East amount to an “ocular initiation into the mysteries and wonders of a magical country” (79); he traces a series of images Nick takes in that seem distorted nearly to the point of hallucination. Against this code of visual distortion is the famous symbol of Dr. Eckleburg’s eyes, which for Westbrook are the novel’s clearest image of a sense of “distorted vision” (82). The most consistently distorted images in the novel are natural ones: In contrast to Mizener’s famous description of the book as a “pastoral elegy,” Westbrook calls our attention to a tone more hallucinatory than elegiac, characterized by “continual references to violated nature” (81) that help to define the novel. Citing such details as the “great bursts of leaves” that grow on the trees of West Egg as things grow “in fast movies” (GG, 7), the piles of crushed flowers and fruit rinds that litter Gatsby’s garden paths after his parties, and the “all sorts of funny fruits” (97) that Jordan Baker expects to fall from the skies of New York, Westbrook concludes, “The profusion of horticultural effects becomes, at last, oppressive. There is an overripeness, an unnatural plenitude in this new Eden” (81). The garish, “overripe” vision of nature in the novel is, Westbrook argues, reflective of a society that has not so much “renounced” nature as they have failed to “perceive its limits” (80). The conflict between a materialism that would supersede natural limits and a natural world that refuses in the end to be fully silenced is what, for Westbrook, gives the close of the novel its singular force: But in fleeting intervals throughout the story we are confronted with unadulterated nature. They happen late at night when the lights of the houses have gone out. The moon survives the glow of Gatsby’s parties, the stars wheel in their courses; on the night that Carroway [sic] descries Gatsby genuflecting to the light on Daisy’s dock, “the bellows of the earth have blown the frogs full of life,” and there is a sound of “wings beating in the trees.” At such intervals the intensity of nature’s own utterances is a little eerie and inexplicable, like the crashing of surf on a deserted beach. These are adumbrations of the forgotten, the “unknown” island, which can now be summoned in its fullness only in visions. Carroway’s [sic] vision of it, like a buried theme in music, struggles for articulation from the early pages of the novel to the moment near its terminus, with Gatsby dead and the houses in West Egg shut up, when it emerges in the famous “ode”

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to a buried fertility, the “green breast of the new world” that greeted Dutch sailors’ eyes. (83)

Westbrook’s assertion that a key to the novel is its lament for an “irrecoverable” (83) natural world in the age of modernity and mechanization makes his analysis less a contrast to Mizener’s “pastoral elegy” than a variation on it. And there would be continued work on this thematic and symbolic pattern in the novel in the coming years. M. Bettina in 1963, argues that throughout The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald uses an image pattern in which natural imagery is paired with the artificial; through this pattern, Fitzgerald “touches nature herself with artificiality, and in the comparison she takes on freshness” (140). This contrived, artificial “freshness” of nature, for Bettina, points toward “the book’s higher meaning” (140), centering on the essential aloneness of the characters, the “distance” between them and “nature and God” (141). Kenneth Eble, in his 1963 book F. Scott Fitzgerald, also looks at the sense of a lost pastoral dream, approaching the point from a social and historical context. Looking into the symbolic geography of the novel, its counterpoising of eastern and western locales, Eble builds on the work of Robert Ornstein, while suggesting a broader comment on an American preoccupation at the time of the novel’s composition: “The loss of a rural paradise haunts many writers” of early twentieth-century America, Eble claims. “Fitzgerald’s attitude makes The Great Gatsby almost a fictional counterpart of Frederick Jackson Turner’s The Frontier in American History. Being deprived of that edge of the frontier against which energies, ambitions, ideals, can be freshly honed, the American character must undergo change” (Fitzgerald, 96–97). Eble points out that both Carraway and Gatsby seem ill equipped for life in an America of the postfrontier age. If, as Turner had claimed in his famous frontier hypothesis, the western frontier had been a central symbol to the American philosophy of rebirth and renewal, then its closure, at the end of the nineteenth century, signaled an end to an innocent conception of limitless possibility inherent in American life. For Eble, both Gatsby and Nick are duped by the “myth of the second chance” (97). David Trask, in his brief, excellent “Note on Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby,” would second this point, arguing that the novel is haunted by the death of the Jeffersonian agrarian myth. In a deft reading, Trask points to the much-studied oculist, T.  J. Eckleburg, as a symbol (initials and all!) of “none other than a devitalized Thomas Jefferson, the preeminent purveyor of the agrarian myth” (200). Trask discusses the surreal, polluted imagery of the Queens landscape over which Eckleburg’s eyes preside, that “fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens” (GG, 21), and convincingly identifies it as a “remarkably evocative description of the corruption that had befallen Jefferson’s garden” (Trask, 200). Similarly, Charles Thomas

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Samuels, in “The Greatness of ‘Gatsby’,” (1966) argues that the central theme of the novel is “the wasting away of America as it grows from wilderness to civilization” (793). Leo Marx, in his highly influential 1964 work The Machine in the Garden, also discusses Gatsby as a book that centers on the loss of connection to the natural world in the modern age. Marx’s central thesis concerns a recurring thematic focus of American writers, the depiction of a pastoral landscape irrevocably changed by modernization and mechanization, the intrusion of the “machine” into the “garden.” In an epilogue to the book, which otherwise focuses primarily on writing from the nineteenth century, Marx examines the ways in which Fitzgerald explores the theme in a twentieth-century context in Gatsby. He, too, sees patterns of artificiality in the natural settings, from the “synthetic and delusive” (357) lawns of Long Island to the “hideous, manmade wilderness” (358) of the valley of ashes. The irony of Gatsby’s pastoral desire to transcend and reverse time lies in the fact that he is so fully immersed in the mechanized workings of “progress”; it is his outrageous car, after all, that brutally extinguishes Myrtle’s life in the valley of ashes (it is the machine in the garden). Marx ultimately argues that the distinction between Gatsby’s muddled, unreflective pastoral idealism and Nick’s critical consciousness of his own attraction “to images of pastoral felicity” amounts to the distinction “between sentimental and complex pastoralism” (362). That is, Nick understands the futility of being drawn to an Edenic past in a way that Gatsby simply cannot. Nowhere is this clearer than in one of the book’s most famous passages, when Nick, after hearing Gatsby’s plan to bring Daisy back to Louisville and “be married from her house — just as if it were five years ago” (GG, 86), tries to explain just this point: “I wouldn’t ask too much of her,” I ventured. “You can’t repeat the past.” “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 in the shadow of his house, just out of reach of his hand. “I’m going to fix everything just the way it was before,” he said, nodding determinedly. “She’ll see.” (86)

Given his more complex (or at least more realistic) understanding of the workings of time and place, Nick’s return to the West at novel’s close is, for Marx, to be read less as a return to a landscape of virtue (as Mizener and others would have it) than as a relatively futile retreat from the inexorable forces of modernity: “Nick’s repudiation of the East is a belated, ritualistic withdrawal in the direction of ‘nature.’ It is ironically set against the fact, which the entire novel makes plain, that the old distinction

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between East and West has all but disappeared. Nick’s final gesture is a mere salute to the memory of a vanished America” (364). Perhaps the fullest exploration of the pastoral mode in The Great Gatsby can be found in David Stouck’s 1971 essay “White Sheep on Fifth Avenue.” Stouck begins by establishing a pastoral pattern in the narrative, recounting a number of passages notable not only for rural imagery, but also for “glimpses . . . of an innocent, childish view of the world” (335). For Stouck, the childlike pastoral imagery reveals, in both the narrator and the tale, a “deep-seated yearning for the recovery of lost innocence” (336). Taking further the long-established notion of Nick Carraway’s identification with Gatsby and his dream, Stouck argues that the two characters are “scarcely distinguishable” from one another and that they share in “a parallel process of growing awareness and inevitable disillusionment” (336). As Marx had also argued, Stouck believes it is Nick’s more complex and ironic mode of awareness that allows him to survive his disillusionment. The most significant contribution of this essay is the manner in which it pairs careful close reading — for example, Stouck convincingly links Daisy, through her repeated connections with white and green colors, to an ideal of innocent pastoral love — to larger statements about how the novel resonates with a certain strain of American idealism. “The American imagination has been essentially pastoral,” Stouck argues, and as such has been preoccupied with “the arresting of time” and the “possibility of going back” (340) to a mythic or Edenic natural past. Through the perspective of his narrator, Fitzgerald is able to capture both the lure of this dream and an ironic understanding of its limits. These essays tracing patterns of natural and pastoral imagery comprise one of several strains of patterns elucidated by critics throughout the sixties and early seventies. Certainly one of the most important articles in this vein is Victor Doyno’s 1966 “Patterns in the Great Gatsby.” Through his study of various drafts of the novel, from the holograph pencil version to the galley proofs and revisions, Doyno stresses the conscious artistry that produced the intricate design being explicated by so many of his fellow critics, noting that “the patterns which appear in the final text are often the result of laborious revisions” (95). Doyno’s approach and conclusions build off of similar work done by Kenneth Eble in his 1964 essay, “The Craft of Revision: The Great Gatsby.” Like Doyno, Eble found through comparisons of first draft and revisions that “few of the pages” (325) of the book are free of revision.1 Doyno’s essay could also be thought of as continuing the work done in the late 1950s by W.  J. Harvey and James E. Miller, Jr., and existing also in a line with Robert Emmett Long’s later work, The Achieving of the Great Gatsby, in that all are “genetic” critical works focusing directly on Fitzgerald’s craftsmanship in composing the novel through a series of drafts. Doyno looks at less-studied patterns in the book — intentional repetitions in characters’

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phrasing, repeated physical gestures and positioning of couples, even correspondences between descriptions of different kisses — and demonstrates, convincingly, how Fitzgerald uses such patterns to guide the reader toward particular interpretations and impressions of characters and events. In a broader sense, he also examines the larger units of the narrative (focusing acutely on the codas one finds at the ends of chapters, for example), showing how Fitzgerald’s revisions on this larger, structural level worked to heighten dramatic effect and underscore dominant themes. Like Doyno, James Mellard, in “Counterpoint as Technique in The Great Gatsby,” goes at the issue of patterning in the novel from a standpoint of narrative technique, emphasizing how the author creates order through contrast. He examines Fitzgerald’s sustained use of “counterpoint,” or the playing off of one character, setting, or item against another as a means to bring out, by contrast, the essences of both. Mellard refers to counterpoint as the “major technical device” (853) of the novel and discusses how Fitzgerald uses the technique as a key to characterization, treatment of physical setting, and narrative structure itself. He examines how the technique plays out with paired characters, like Gatsby and Tom, on one hand, and Myrtle and Daisy on the other, and he also examines contrapuntal settings such as the repeated contrasts, on both micro and macro levels, of east and west settings, picking up on a point discussed previously by Ornstein and others.2 Where Mellard breaks new ground, and prefigures some critical work that would come into vogue much later, in the 1990s, is in his discussion of contrapuntal narrative structure. He invokes Northrop Frye’s notion of “modal counterpoint” in narrative, the sense evident in some works of a juxtaposition of contrasting modes (as in the case of the tragicomic novel) and applies this to Fitzgerald’s treatment in Gatsby of the theme of American innocence. Using R.  W.  B. Lewis’s famous work The American Adam as his framework, Mellard suggests that the novel offers two counterpoised visions of the Adamic journey, and this counterpoint is what creates the enduring achievement of the novel: its paradoxical treatment of America as an Edenic paradise. For Mellard, both Gatsby and Nick represent variations on the figure Lewis identifies as a common hero in American literature. An outsider, free of connections to family, traditions, and social confines, the American Adam is an innocent who is forever changed, perhaps destroyed, by his entrance into and experiences in society.3 Mellard argues that Gatsby represents one version of this hero, the Christlike Adamic figure who suffers and is sacrificed for his innocent idealism, while Nick represents the contrasting Adamic figure, whose story is one of fall, redemption, and resultant wisdom. Their contrasting embodiments of a common archetypal figure help to create the interplay in the narrative between a mode of doomed idealism and one of wry commentary and judgment. Mellard’s method of looking at contrasting narrative

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modes offers, I would suggest, an answer to that vexing question of just what exactly Fitzgerald is saying about the American dream and American innocence or idealism in the book. If we pay attention to the continual play of counterpoint in the narrative, we ought to see, along with Mellard, that there is no fixed answer to such a question: “Fitzgerald’s theme is a paradoxical combination of two counterpointed attitudes toward the American Dream. . . . Consequently, the final major problem in the novel seems to involve the resolution of these antithetical themes. But there is no real need to achieve a synthesis, for one theme is just as valid as the other” (859). In other words, the seeming ambivalence at the heart of the book, long thought by many to be a puzzle to be resolved, is, for Mellard, instead a carefully constructed and patterned dual vision, itself perhaps the greatest strength of the work and source of its undying appeal. In addition to the work on patterning in imagery and on the level of narrative structure, any number of critics in the sixties and seventies penned essays that identified and explicated patterns of symbolism in the novel. The range of patterned material ripe for explication is impressive in its own right, and this period saw a burst of new approaches. Though too numerous to cover here with any sufficiency, the range of approaches is suggested by a quick look at some notable entrants in this field. Robert F. McDonnell’s appetizingly entitled 1961 essay, “Eggs and Eyes in The Great Gatsby,” examines the convergence of ocular imagery with the description of the twin peninsulas of East and West Egg, arguing that the relationship connotes the gaze of the “omniscient, all-encompassing, and largely disinterested God” who oversees the “folly” (36) of the society depicted. Daniel Schneider, in his 1964 “Color Symbolism in The Great Gatsby,” provides — through careful, close readings of “color-symbols and their complex operation in rendering . . . the central conflict of the work” (13) — material for generations of future undergraduates seeking to make sense of Gatsby’s “blue lawn,” “yellow cocktail music,” and “gorgeous pink rag of a suit.”4 Arthur Mizener, in a 1965 essay, points out that houses in the novel “are much richer in meaning than the book’s more obvious symbols” (“F. Scott,” 186), and he explains how the fakery or emptiness behind the Gatsby and Buchanan houses marks the worlds of both West and East Egg as “morally and imaginatively infantile” (189). And Laurence MacPhee, in his clever 1972 essay “The Great Gatsby’s ‘Romance of Motoring’,” looks at the portrayal of automobiles in the novel, arguing that Fitzgerald uses cars “as part of a pattern of images embodying the disorder of the Twenties and, particularly, the chaotic lives of the central characters” (207). Even in essays like MacPhee’s that rightly emphasize an atmosphere of “disorder” in the novel, what these essays on image and symbol patterns share in common with one another, and with much of the critical work of the middle to late fifties, is a desire to confer a sense of order on the novel itself; that is, the teleological aim

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of much of this critical work is the presentation of a complex, highly patterned, unified whole. We see such an impulse at work in Bruce Stark’s excellent 1974 essay, “The Intricate Pattern in The Great Gatsby.” In this work, Stark moves from a highly specific discussion of reverberating image patterns to a larger statement about the nature of signification in this novel. In a compelling analysis, Stark discusses the parallels between female characters, noting how both Myrtle and Daisy are bound to Tom Buchanan “like expensive pets” (54). He demonstrates this point through a close reading of what might otherwise seem minor symbolism. For Stark, the dog collar Tom buys for Myrtle functions symbolically in the same way as the “string of pearls valued at three hundred and fifty thousand dollars” (GG, 60) that he gives to Daisy the day before their wedding. “What . . . this indicates is that Myrtle is Tom’s ‘bitch’; it also suggests that Daisy, who puts Tom’s string of pearls around her neck and is kept by a wealth that ‘imprisons’ as well as ‘preserves,’ is his expensive, well-bred house pet” (53). Similarly, he links Daisy Fay to Ella Kaye, the betrayer of Dan Cody, through the “phonological equivalences” (58) of these characters’ names. In this argument, Ella Kaye rises from the status of minor character in a side story to a crucial foreshadowing of Gatsby’s downfall at the hands of Daisy. Stark analyzes several more specific examples of such reverberating signification throughout the novel, but it is in the larger point, with which he closes the essay, that we get a compelling statement concerning what all of this pattern-tracing criticism leads us to; the patterned images and characters, Stark argues, are not just empty signs that refer to external meanings, nor merely pleasing verbal ornaments, they are elements in an extremely complex and unified system of internal, nonreferential meanings. As such, the novel’s words are concrete exemplifications of Northrop Frye’s assumption that “a poem’s meaning is literally its pattern or integrity as a verbal structure. Its words cannot be separated and attached to sign-values: all possible sign-values of a word are absorbed into a complexity of verbal relations.”5 When this absorption is as completely realized as it is in The Great Gatsby, the result is a unique verbal artifact whose words resonate with one another in an ever-widening circle of internal signification. It is this multiple use of a few elements that makes The Great Gatsby, like a successful poem, at once simple and yet complex, and it is this complex simplicity, this meaning that is in the book’s web of words, that makes it extraordinary and beautiful and simple. (59)

The keywords here are: complexity, unity, and internal signification. As opposed to more socially and politically oriented criticism that would become more prominent in the later sixties and seventies, critics of this

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time were, by and large, following New Critical and Archetypal approaches to analyzing The Great Gatsby, seeing the text (to borrow a phrase from the famous New Critic W. K. Wimsatt) as a “verbal icon” — a complex and intricately crafted prose poem whose meanings could be deduced by tracing the internal patterns of signification. If the quest to identify pattern, form, and completeness was a common thread of criticism from the early and middle sixties, particularly as this form and pattern related to the book’s American themes, it was not the only noticeable strain in critical discourse on Gatsby at the time. At the same time, others were looking beyond the American themes, and looking at the questing tone of the work from universal and spiritual angles. British critic A.  E. Dyson’s gracefully written 1961 essay, “The Great Gatsby: Thirty-Six Years After,” affirms the tragic vision of the novel while stepping outside of the strictly American context explored by previous critics. Arguing that the book represents themes “even bigger than the demythologizing of the American Myth” (113), instead capturing something of “the tragic predicament of humanity as a whole” (112), Dyson examines the Carraway-Gatsby relationship in an effort to account for the novel’s haunting tragic vision. For Dyson, the valley of ashes setting, itself symbolic of “the human situation in an age of chaos” (113), is central to understanding the terms of Gatsby’s tragedy. We see in Dyson’s reading a hint of the exploration of Christian themes that would appear in criticism of the coming years. He refers to the eyes of Dr. Eckleburg as a “haunting symbol of the deus absconditus,” an image whose emptiness as a religious symbol “precludes the possibility of judging the ‘ash-gray men’ against traditional religious norms” (113). In 1964, Dale Randall seconded this point, referring to Eckleburg’s eyes as “an inverted symbol, more suggestive of absence than presence,” a sign “of what is no longer viable and no longer available spiritually” (56). In Dyson’s view, the self-fashioned Jay Gatsby, “the apotheosis of his society” (117), serves as a fitting symbol of a post-spiritual age, one who must rely on his “faith,” a profound belief “in himself and his illusions” (117), as the only sufficient counterbalance to the cynicism and hypocrisy of the world he inhabits. Dyson’s use of the term “faith,” which he places in quotation marks, suggests the novel’s underlying tone of spiritual questing, while also emphasizing the characters’ essential aloneness. For Dyson, Carraway’s eventual tribute to Gatsby, epitomized by the last words he calls out to Gatsby, “They’re a rotten crowd. . . . You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together” (GG, 120), reveals Nick’s growth, his development of genuine “human warmth and pity” (123), which is what paves the way for his visionary conclusion to the book, in which he realizes a “universal tragic vision” (123). Henry Dan Piper took up the question of faith and its role in The Great Gatsby in his essay “The Untrimmed Christmas Tree,” which was

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first published in Frederick Hoffman’s 1962 reference book “The Great Gatsby”: A Study and later appeared, in expanded form, as a chapter in Piper’s 1965 work, F.  Scott Fitzgerald: A Critical Portrait. Piper traces the religious element of the novel back to the 1924 short story “Absolution,” which Fitzgerald had mentioned to Perkins was originally intended as a “prologue of the novel” (in Piper, “Untrimmed,” 323). In “Absolution,” the ten-year-old protagonist, Rudolph Miller, experiences an awakening regarding his relationship to the church; though he is initially torn between a cavalier disregard for the church’s moral strictures and occasional bouts of guilt and compulsions to repent, his moral quandary is unconventionally resolved due to his encounters with Father Schwartz, the parish priest who longs for the secular life, which he sees as a world redolent with sensual pleasures and shimmering beauty. Rudolph, who has created in his mind a dashing, imaginary alter-ego by the name of Blatchford Sarnemington (a figure unfettered by Rudolph’s own sense of conscience), decides in the end to be more like his imagined identity. The rather unexpected advice of the priest, who rhapsodizes about the image of the amusement park and its Ferris wheel as a symbol of the “glittering” things of life, in effect pushes Rudolph away from the church. Despite his horror at the priest’s odd discourse, he resolves at story’s end to embrace the secular: “All this talking seemed particularly strange and awful to Rudolph, because this man was a priest. . . . But underneath his terror he felt his own inner convictions were confirmed. There was something ineffably gorgeous somewhere that had nothing to do with God” (“Absolution,” 271). With its complex and unconventional treatment of Catholicism and its glowing imagery, there is little doubt that “Absolution” is one of Fitzgerald’s strongest stories. At the same time, one can rightly ask what all of the above has to do with interpreting Gatsby. This is where the waters get a little muddy. Though Fitzgerald originally conceived the story as background for the protagonist of the novel that would become The Great Gatsby, he ultimately decided against this move, cutting the material because, as he noted in a letter, “I preferred to preserve the sense of mystery” (in Piper, “Untrimmed,” 324) about the protagonist, Gatsby. Nonetheless, Piper and other critics who have written about the religious aspect of Gatsby consider “Absolution” to provide material relevant to the novel. Indeed, Piper sees a discussion of “Absolution” not only as fair game, but as required territory: “Any attempt to come to terms with The Great Gatsby . . . cannot afford to overlook its relationship to ‘Absolution.’ The short story is especially important because it makes explicit the religious considerations that served its author as the basis for the moral judgments that he made so conspicuously in its sequel, The Great Gatsby” (324). The point is arguable, as should be evident by Piper’s description of Gatsby as a “sequel” to “Absolution.” Given Fitzgerald’s decision to separate the two works, treating Jay Gatsby

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as the grown-up version of Rudolph Miller — as Piper does — is, despite their numerous similarities, problematic at best. Similarly, there is the potential problem of larger themes becoming conflated in the two distinct works; Piper’s analysis of the novel treads lightly on religious motifs in the book itself, instead deflecting questions of religion and spirituality back to “Absolution.” He argues that Rudolph Miller is “irretrievably damned” (328) by his decision to turn his back on the church, and that this damnation plays out in the fate of Jay Gatsby in the novel. As for an explicit religious framework, Piper notes that unlike “Absolution,” The Great Gatsby does not express directly a conventional Christian viewpoint, instead offering “the residual tradition of moral values . . . without the sectarian dogma” (333). A decade and a half later, Joan Allen, in Candles and Carnival Lights: The Catholic Sensibility of F. Scott Fitzgerald (1978), would make a similar argument, deepening the connections between “Absolution” and Gatsby, and seeing Jay Gatsby as a grown-up and gone-wrong Rudolph Miller: “With the innocence and wonder that had made his Catholic indoctrination so effective, Gatsby commits himself to the false values of materialism and adapts the residual symbolism of his faith and ritualistic habit of spirit to his new religion. He becomes a celebrant-priest dedicated to the ritualized acquisition of wealth and the futile pursuit of an idealized City of Man” (102). Of course such an interpretation suffers from the imposition on the character of a “Catholic indoctrination” not even mentioned in the novel (Allen brings it in from “Absolution,” instead); nonetheless, this notion of a latent conflict between the material and spiritual playing out in Gatsby’s misdirected idealism is a provocative one that runs through other spiritually minded Fitzgerald criticism as well. Giles Gunn argues similarly that “Gatsby seems a grotesque parody of some high priest or shaman who is continually dispensing holy waters, consecrated food, and other elements of the sanctified life to whatever aspirants he can gather around him” (174); he reads this parodic treatment as a key to Fitzgerald’s commentary on American spiritual emptiness and its replacement of the “original theocratic impulse to found a City upon a Hill to the greater glory of God” (179) with the worship of material success as seen in the City of Man. Indeed, several commentators have noted Christ-like attributes in Jay Gatsby that serve to heighten Fitzgerald’s ironic commentary on a spiritual void in contemporary America. Allen notes that “ironic parallels between the figures of Christ and Gatsby are unmistakable” (109), while Bernard Tanner reads the entire novel as a “jazz-like parody of the life of Christ . . . in a minor, sardonic key” (467). If Gatsby does, in some sense, resemble a Christ-like figure (David Trask even asks whether Fitzgerald, with his fascination with names, was “rendering the literal ‘Jesus, God’s boy’ in the name of Jay Gatsby” [198]), it is still necessary to account for the significance of the resemblance. While

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several critics see the connection in ironic terms, James Gindin reads Fitzgerald’s moral message in a contrasting light. Arguing that Gatsby is Fitzgerald’s “tightest” novel from a theological perspective (73), he sees the central conflict surrounding Jay Gatsby as part of a “moral fable” that comments not only on the paradox of the American dream, but indeed on the nature of man and of original sin. For Gindin, the romantic hero who would “play God” (64) by transcending normal human bounds through the sheer force of his will and ambition is, in Fitzgerald’s world, necessarily defeated. In contrast to some of the arguments about spiritual absence in the novel, Gindin argues that The Great Gatsby presents a traditional vision of “Gods and fathers”: Where there is a direct, unbroken line between father and son (spiritually and in a familial sense), moral values are passed on. As Gindin notes, Nick has this connection to his father, whereas Gatsby, though he may imagine himself a “son of God,” lacks a connection to a guiding father. Thomas J. Stavola seconded this point in 1979, arguing that Nick Carraway possesses a “fundamental moral heritage” (132) that allows him to escape the destruction that awaits Gatsby, and the moral bankruptcy that characterizes the misguided lives of most of the other characters. Though the generosity of Gatsby’s romanticism and his belief in the goodness of others is, for Stavola, a good example of “the Christian view of man’s imperfect nature” (130), Gatsby’s misdirected application of these beliefs, in the secular world, is what brings his demise. The novel’s comment on Gatsby’s fate is what makes it, for Stavola and like-minded critics, “a religious work, a moral fable” (125).

Imagery of Disorder: The Plot Thickens in Gatsby Criticism To this point we have focused in on the criticism of the period that sought to identify the formal patterning in The Great Gatsby as well as analyses of the book’s spiritual/religious overtones. Both of these critical strains might be said to continue, in their own ways, the impulse of much of the criticism from the 1950s in deducing an overarching sense of wholeness and unity in the work. To these interpretations we should also add the observations put forth in several books on Fitzgerald’s writing that came out in the period. In addition to the works already mentioned by Piper and Eble, Sergio Perosa’s The Art of F. Scott Fitzgerald (1965), Richard Lehan’s F. Scott Fitzgerald and the Craft of Fiction (1966), Robert Sklar’s F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Last Laocoön (1967), and Milton Hindus’s F. Scott Fitzgerald: An Introduction and Interpretation (1968) each featured substantial chapters on Gatsby that assessed the book’s themes and craftsmanship. Eble, as noted earlier, is notable for his study of the Fitzgerald’s craftsmanship and revisions; another contribution of Eble’s chapter on

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Gatsby is the connection he makes to previous Fitzgerald works. While other critics had to this point been primarily interested in showing how Conrad and other writers had been influential in shaping Fitzgerald’s mature approach in Gatsby (and Eble dutifully notes the Conrad influence), here we also see a discussion, if only a brief one, of how Fitzgerald himself had been working toward the themes and ideas of his great novel in previous short stories. Eble astutely singles out not only “Winter Dreams” (1922), a clear precursor to Gatsby from which Fitzgerald had directly taken some material and “Absolution,” which by Fitzgerald’s own accord was originally meant to be an introduction to the novel,” but also the less famous stories “John Jackson’s Arcady” (1924) and “‘The Sensible Thing’” (1924), which prefigure both the romantic disillusionment theme of Gatsby as well as the novel’s preoccupation with the passage of time and its effect on romance. As we shall see, the work of later critics to establish thematic and stylistic connections to earlier stories picks up on the threads identified by Eble here. Like Eble, Perosa traces developmental steps for Fitzgerald, looking at precursor stories to Gatsby. He also singles out “Winter Dreams” and “‘The Sensible Thing’” as “attempts to come to terms with the new material that Fitzgerald was to utilize in the novel. They are, in a way, preliminary studies or tentative sketches” (58). Perosa explains how both of these stories introduce the juxtaposition of a youthful, idealized sentimental romance against the story of a protagonist’s rise to material wealth (though he is a bit dismissive of “Winter Dreams,” one of Fitzgerald’s great stories). In his brief discussion of “Absolution,” Perosa steers clear of the assumption made by Piper that the story is a sort of missing chapter to Gatsby, and instead draws attention to a technical connection between story and novel. Noting the story’s flashback mode of narration and its patterned symbolism, Perosa claims that in “Absolution” “we can find all the premises for the technical and stylistic maturity of the novel” (60). As for the outside influences on that “stylistic maturity,” Perosa invokes the familiar figure of Conrad, but also draws more direct attention to Henry James than had been common to this point. For Perosa, Gatsby, with its use of “foreshortening” and its structure based around a series of dramatic scenes, reveals the influence of James to be “of paramount importance” (76). This connection to James would be echoed by other critics. John Randall suggested Gatsby’s indebtedness to Daisy Miller (581), while Kermit Vanderbilt draws parallels between James and Fitzgerald as moral critics of their respective American scenes. Arguing that “Fitzgerald, through Gatsby, delineated the developing national character since James” (302), Vanderbilt goes beyond technical comparisons and puts Gatsby, with its developed “moral allegor[y] of American experience” (290), in the American “high romantic tradition” (294), alongside James, Hawthorne, and Poe. James E. Miller, Jr., in his 1975 essay “Fitzgerald’s

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Gatsby: The World as Ash Heap,” would further cement the Jamesian connection, arguing that Fitzgerald’s ability to convey what James called the “deeper psychology” is evident in his use, à la James, of “dramatized relationships among people and through the use of powerfully charged concrete images” (184). Other critics working on influences found some new territory in the traditions of satire and social realism. Michael Millgate, in a 1962 essay, links Gatsby and Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country, arguing that “Fitzgerald, as a social novelist, is much closer to Edith Wharton than to any of his predecessors or contemporaries” (339), while Steven Curry and Peter L. Hays draw parallels between Gatsby and Thackeray’s Vanity Fair in narrative techniques, character types, and settings. Still, the winner of the influence sweepstakes remained Conrad. By the time of the appearance of Gary Scrimgeour’s 1966 Criticism essay “Against The Great Gatsby,” the connections between Conrad and Fitzgerald, and particularly the similar roles of Marlow, in Heart of Darkness, and Carraway, in The Great Gatsby, were well rehearsed. Nonetheless, Scrimgeour adds to the discussion by using the comparison to argue against the greatness of Fitzgerald’s achievement by pointing out “how much better Conrad could think and write” (70). Scrimgeour praises Conrad for crafting a narrator who both tells the story and, through his involvement, gives it its depth; though the “situation of Carraway is the same as that of Marlow,” Scrimgeour nonetheless believes that Fitzgerald “did not realize the dual nature of his narrator and therefore handled him very clumsily” (71). Scrimgeour’s argument is worth considering in some detail, because his interpretation of Nick’s “dual nature” not only leads us back into the perpetual debate first opened by Stallman in 1955 about Nick’s credibility as narrator, but also points toward larger questions of authority and representation in the book that open out into some of the more politically oriented criticism of the 1970s. The basis of this argument — that Fitzgerald really had little control over his own craft, even in his best novel — would have felt right at home in the criticism of Fitzgerald’s own age; that such an argument was, by the middle sixties, a maverick stance taken against an established American classic, reveals just how far Gatsby and Fitzgerald had risen in the literary pantheon in about a decade and a half. For Scrimgeour, the problem with Gatsby stems from Nick Carraway’s moral ambivalence and lack of development over the course of the narrative. He builds the argument by comparing Carraway to Marlow; while Conrad had his narrator at times intrude into the narrative to address his reader directly, thus calling attention to his own status as narrator and thus his subjectivity, Fitzgerald does no such thing with Carraway. To Scrimgeour, this refusal to call attention to the narrative as a text consciously crafted by the narrator is the crucial difference between Heart of Darkness and Gatsby; he finds the latter novel

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wanting because he sees Carraway’s seeming transparency as narrator to be a flaw that undercuts the “truth” value of the narrative as a whole: “It is quite legitimate to ask why Fitzgerald should follow Conrad closely in narrative technique except for those elements which warn us that the narrator may be giving us a truth which is anything but unvarnished” (72). There are a couple of serious flaws with Scrimgeour’s argument. The first is the explicit assumption that The Great Gatsby is a conscious, and failed, imitation of Heart of Darkness. While the influence of Conrad had been well established by this point, the notion that Fitzgerald was not quite bright or adept enough to complete his imitation faithfully is too much of a stretch, one that not only belittles Fitzgerald’s achievement but also, more importantly, constricts its own analysis of the narrative itself. Indeed, one senses Scrimgeour’s recognition of these problems, as he seems at times to entertain the notion that the moral relativism of Fitzgerald’s narrative was, in fact, a conscious decision and achievement: “One would like to think that Fitzgerald knew what he was doing, that in the opening pages he intended Carraway’s priggishness and enervation to warn the reader against the narrator. Certainly there is enough evidence in the novel to support such a view.” However, Scrimgeour can only conclude by arguing that Fitzgerald was not “capable of such ironic perception” (80). Yet, a good part of the essay is devoted to analyzing Nick’s character flaws, and it is in this aspect that the essay becomes not only rather interesting, but also influential. It is a measure of Nick’s “hazy minded” (74) sensibility that he falls under the spell of Gatsby’s adolescent romanticism, in effect elevating Gatsby to the status of idol just as Gatsby had done with Daisy. More tellingly, Scrimgeour attacks Nick for his duplicitous treatment of Jordan, his role as go-between in the Gatsby and Daisy affair, and, most pointedly, his silence at the police inquisition following the killing of Myrtle (which is, surprisingly, a scene very seldom discussed by critics). The ample evidence he compiles leads Scrimgeour to conclude, in telling phrasing, that “Carraway’s honesty is a matter not of principle, but of convenience” (76). Where Scrimgeour’s argument about Nick falls into perilous territory is the point at which he totals up his various indictments of Nick’s character and arrives at this conclusion: “If the reader cannot accept Carraway’s statements at face value, then the integrity of the technique of the novel is called into question” (77). One could argue, conversely, that it is the very lack of an objective moral stance in the novel, the use of a subjective and at times compromised narrator as moral center, that gives the novel its modern feel. One could argue that Fitzgerald’s handling of Carraway does not amount to “careless technique and cloudy thinking” (80) at all, but rather to an adaptation of the techniques of James and Conrad fit to suit a morally uncertain and questioning narrative. That said, Scrimgeour’s argument “against” The Great Gatsby, with its detailed treatment of the issue of Nick’s credibility, made

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a significant contribution to an argument that would only pick up steam in the years to come. Published in the same year as Scrimgeour’s essay, John Fraser’s “Dust and Dreams in The Great Gatsby” argues that indeed Nick’s subjectivity is of a particularly modern sort and that it shapes our interpretation of characters and themes. Fraser analyzes Nick’s attraction to popular culture — his taste for popular magazines and songs, as revealed in some of his narrative asides — and argues that this habit of mind in Nick is what makes him like “most of us” and what leaves the novel feeling “so glowingly modern” (556) despite the passing years. At the same time, however, Nick’s mindset, as informed by popular culture, affects his ability to read other characters and hence his credibility as a moral judge: “We are in a world — very much a twentieth-century, media-permeated urban world — where the boundaries between ‘life’ and ‘art,’ stereotypes and private individualities, have lost their definiteness and in which the question of when some of the characters are being truly ‘themselves’ becomes almost impossible to answer. And it is from Nick himself that we get these perceptions” (556). For Fraser, the romanticized modern sheen can only undercut the seeming seriousness of the novel’s message. Countering a generation of critical opinion, Fraser finds Nick’s lyrical closing to the novel not moving and genuine, but instead redolent of “Hollywood” (564): In place of genuine American idealism and values, the reader gets, from Nick, romanticized imagery. For Fraser, the novel as a whole, with its celebration of a criminal and his adolescent dreams of love, does not so much lament lost American virtues as it does fail to present any genuine virtues or idealism. Others would jump to Nick’s defense. Oliver Evans concedes that Nick is taken in by Gatsby’s allure and fails to judge him properly for his actions, but argues that he remains “fundamentally decent” (125) and a valid, if flawed, moral center. Robert Sklar, in The Last Laocoön, argues that Nick’s “doubleness,” his ability to both participate and observe, enables him to “encompass all the novel’s life within his values and his understanding” (175) and thus in effect to contain “within himself the natures and motives of the others . . . and stand for them all” (176). E. Fred Carlisle, in “The Triple Vision of Nick Carraway,” would do Sklar’s double vision one better. Arguing that Nick actually embodies three different perspectives of varying detachment from the action (which he helpfully labels Nick1, Nick2, and Nick3), Carlisle suggests that understanding the narrator’s level and mode of involvement in the action helps to sort out the seeming ambivalence in the narrative and “should also confirm that Nick is finally honest” (351). Mathematical wizardry aside, not all commentators were persuaded by these pleas on behalf of Nick. Thomas Boyle, in a 1969 essay, pulls no punches in accusing Nick of “shallowness, hypocrisy, immorality, and compromise” (23), and he argues rather

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fervently that “the bulk of forty years of Gatsby criticism attests to our having been taken in by Carraway in somewhat the same way that Carraway has been taken in by Gatsby” (22). David Parker concurs, pointing out that Nick “wears his honesty for adornment. . . . It is not something he values absolutely” (14). And Ron Neuhaus argues that Nick is “a character who cannot deal with the literal, and who must always construct an elaborate and moralistic rhetoric to insulate him from confrontation. Almost immediately, his smugness and complacency become too fulsome” (25). Beyond complaints over Nick’s personality traits, Neuhaus levels the rather more serious charge that Fitzgerald violates the rules of narrative perspective, at times granting Nick an omniscience that he cannot, as a first-person narrator, possess. Though he bases this assessment on only a few late passages, in which Nick surmises what Gatsby or Daisy might have been thinking, Neuhaus claims that these lapses into near omniscience “destroy any integrity in the fiction” (33). The argument, based on insufficient evidence, is overly fussy at best, and the somewhat moralistic conclusion that Fitzgerald “fails to create a responsible fiction” (23) is unwarranted. Nonetheless, the ardor of the discussion shows that the trouble with Nick had not dissipated in the least over the span of three decades. Quite in contrast to Neuhaus, who calls for responsibility and integrity in fictional forms, Richard Foster, in his confidently titled 1970 essay, “The Way to Read Gatsby,” revels in the slippery, decentered narrative and the narrator who offers it. He argues that most readers and critics have misunderstood the role of Nick Carraway, and points out that critics like Scrimgeour are barking up the wrong tree in looking for stable truths and moral centers in the book. Instead, Foster argues that Nick’s ironic detachment, as well as his carefully cultivated and largely disingenuous air of moral rectitude — “Nick the scorner of artifice in others is all artifice himself” (102) — make him the ideal narrator for a moralistic novel of a thoroughly modern age, one characterized by its moral relativism. That is, Nick serves as a viable and compelling storyteller for a story of an age of irony. As Foster states, “Nick Carraway is the modern man of integrity; and Fitzgerald’s characterization of him as subtly corrupt and potentially corrupting in his relations with the unlucky people he observes constitutes a shrewd and original comment on the new laws of consequence that make the modern world modern” (107). Arguing against those who would see Nick as Fitzgerald’s failed attempt to create his own Marlow, Foster instead identifies a narrator whose “moral vision is at best of an uncertain purity” (107) and whose presentation of that moral vision amounts to a “kind of siren song whose seductions are quite clearly discerned and definitely to be resisted” (108). David Minter, in his 1968 “Dream, Design, and Interpretation in The Great Gatsby,” offers a contrasting view, claiming that a primary role Nick

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serves through his narrative is to confer order on the disarray surrounding Gatsby, noting that Nick’s “interpretive vision,” which serves to “arrange and deepen, recapture and relate,” is “all we have” (87). In this regard he echoes one of the most cogent essays on this debated topic, Peter Lisca’s “Nick Carraway and the Imagery of Disorder” from 1967. Directly referencing the debate about Nick’s character and conceding that there “can be no reconciliation” (18) between those who see Nick as a hypocrite and those who see him as a moral center, Lisca works instead to delineate Nick’s functional role in the narrative. For Lisca, the greatest contrast in a narrative built on contrasts (east/west, future/past, romance/realism) is “the larger contrast between order and disorder” within which all the other elements of the novel are “subsumed” (23). Not merely Gatsby’s contrived identity and the reckless gayety of his parties and guests, but also the messiness of the Buchanans’ lives, the deceitfulness of Jordan Baker, and a host of other elements add up to a world of disorder and disarray. It is Nick’s role in the book, whatever his other shortcomings, to create a sense of order from the chaos. Does this mean that he is, then, a viable moral judge? Not necessarily. Lisca concludes his discussion with an observation that is fairly brilliant in its simplicity; the novel, written by its author, is to be judged, in the end, by the reader: Although he is not a “hypocrite” and spiritual bankrupt neither is he an acceptable moral norm. He acts as if he were, but the moral center remains, as always, in the reader, who must judge not only the story of Gatsby, but also the judgment of that story by the narrator himself. . . . The meaning of the novel does not lie in Nick Carraway, nor in the opposite of what he stands for, but merely includes Nick and his judgments as part of the novel; and Nick is restored to his important role as narrator. By tending to slight this role and exaggerate his function as moral fulcrum, criticism has obscured the technical brilliance of The Great Gatsby and encouraged essential misunderstandings about the novel’s theme and Fitzgerald’s moral imagination. (27)

Lisca’s notion of Nick serving a function of maintaining order in a world of disorder seems as apt an introduction as any to two books on Fitzgerald that appeared in the early seventies — Milton R. Stern’s The Golden Moment and John F. Callahan’s The Illusions of a Nation. Born of the same tumultuous historical moment as Lisca’s essay on “disorder,” these two works demonstrate, more than any single essay could, the extent to which Gatsby was beginning to be read in a larger cultural and political context than one had seen in the fifties and earlier sixties. If criticism of that first major phase had drawn on certain unspoken cultural norms concerning what makes great literature great, much of the critical work from the later sixties and through the seventies would, tacitly or explicitly, call

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into question normative cultural institutions and reading practices alike. That is, in contrast to the established body of work that argued, convincingly, for the “organic” completeness of the novel, critics of this later period, doubtless influenced to some extent by the political and social upheavals of their own day, began to remark on the feints, concealments, and fractures (as opposed to a seamless wholeness) contained within this representative American novel. Far from diminishing the value of Gatsby, the new breed of more politically acute criticism to emerge in this period demonstrated the ongoing relevance of Fitzgerald’s ambivalent American theme. As Stern succinctly put it, studying Fitzgerald’s work helps to “illuminate . . . the ‘identity crisis’ of our American time” (xi). Stern’s historically minded reading of Gatsby, centered on the apparent longing for an idealized, Edenic America of the imagination (and an emphatic endorsement of Nick as the book’s moral center), does not in itself represent a radical break from the interpretations of Westbrook, Trask, and Stouck, for example, but rather a more contemporary variation on their points, one haunted by certain key phrases and concepts — such as placelessness, interchangeability of individuals, and a disordered, chaotic contemporary social scene — that tie the reading to its own historical moment. Stern looks past the differences in characters, settings, and types, seeing instead in the various characters a larger commonality in their futile yearning to overcome the void in their lives. Along these same lines, he complicates the long-held critical notion of a binary contrast between the eastern and western settings in the novel: “In the amorphous, yearning nervousness of American life, there is no distinction between East and West. . . . All of the people in this novel come from the same America” (203). Stern sees the characters as trapped in a nostalgia that is more than personal. Their longings for lost Edens — whether Gatsby’s Louisville of 1917 or Nick’s “middle-west” of his youth — bespeak, in Stern’s view, a larger American longing for a place more congruent with an idealized vision of America than with the corrupted land they now inhabit: “Fitzgerald sees that what has become of the dream of the past is inescapably present, and that almost all Americans are indistinguishable from each other in the irresponsible betrayal of the idea of America by the wealth of America” (206). Given that Stern’s analysis was published in 1970, in the midst of an extended period of political and civil unrest in the United States, one could argue that his book thrusts Fitzgerald’s writing into the turbulence of the critic’s own times. Looked at another way, his discussion of Gatsby suggests how the book has proven particularly malleable, providing a kind of moral, political, or philosophical mirror for readers and critics to hold up to their own visions of America. One can almost hear, for example, the tensions of the late sixties playing out in Stern’s reading of Nick’s ultimate decision to return home at novel’s close:

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Nick knows that his moral choice is in part squeamish provincialism, for the realities beneath the apparent regional differences are the same. But it is a moral choice in that Nick chooses the memory of the manners of an older America that was supposed to have provided the dream, even though it did not, chooses that memory over the absolute limbo of the haunted El Greco night-scape — chooses, in short, moral nostalgia over immoral present fact. (207)

Discussing the ever-changing nature of things in the eastern setting of the book, Stern refers to it as “a panorama of the sense of placelessness and yearning . . . that, unarticulated, is the real meaning of American mobility and fluidity” (210). Stern also argues that the yearning for success, which results in “misplaced power and energy” (224), unites characters from the various class levels — Tom, Gatsby, and Myrtle. All construct facades as a means of attempting to lay claim to a social standing they either will never attain (as is the case with Gatsby and Myrtle) or whose powers and privileges they abuse, as with Tom. Ultimately, what Stern argues about these characters is that they all become alienated from their true selves: “No matter where one looks, in whatever social level, all one finds are non-people who have lost their dreams and don’t know where to find them, non-identities wheeling and wandering and colliding carelessly in a wistfully desperate attempt to overtake a self” (231–32). Stern’s argument in effect transposes Gatsby not only into the world of post–World War II realistic fiction, in which alienation was a central theme resounding across the writing of a couple of decades, but also into the chaotic social turbulence of the late sixties and dawn of the seventies. Still, his commentary goes beyond matters of class affiliation or alienation from place and experience; his reading of Gatsby traces Fitzgerald’s commentary on the withering American dream back to the historic and mythic source material invoked in the novel. In a sense summarizing and consolidating the work done by previous historically minded critics of the novel, he examines the ironic use of Franklin’s “Way to Wealth,” the reversal of Thomas Jefferson’s agrarian vision in T.  J. Eckleburg’s urban ash valley, the ironic references to Stonewall Jackson Abrams and to Mrs. Ulysses Swett, and the replacement of Buffalo Bill Cody, “the last of the great scouts” (243), with the “pioneer debauchee” (GG, 78), Dan Cody. Stern implies that this repeated, even insistent pattern of undercutting figures from the mythic national past underscores the dilemma at the heart of the novel — the irreparable break between the ideal America and the real thing. This predicament plays out, symbolically, in Gatsby’s romantic quest: “The core of what Fitzgerald wanted his readers to see is that Gatsby’s demand on Daisy is the demand of the American imagination upon America: nothing less than that the past should be the imagined past, that history should have been the actualization of

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the ideal, and that the non-ideal actualities of history continuing into the present should not be true” (251). While Stern pulls up short of flatly stating that it is Daisy, rather than Gatsby, who — in professor Trilling’s famous words — “comes inevitably to stand for America itself,” his equation of Gatsby’s futilely overreaching romantic idealism with the innocent American imagination offers an interesting twist on Fitzgerald’s American theme as seen in the novel. Americans are fated, Stern suggests, to deny reality, to assert ignorance, if need be, over recognition of our flawed history and present. Appearing in 1972, two years after Stern’s The Golden Moment, John F. Callahan’s The Illusions of a Nation continued the exploration of Fitzgerald’s national vision and his ironic portrayal of the American’s contradictory, even paradoxical relationship to the nation’s history and mythos. Callahan is unabashedly political in his treatment of the material: References abound to the Vietnam War and the idealistic but failed 1968 presidential run of Senator Eugene McCarthy, and Callahan states plainly at the outset his belief that American history is a compendium of horrors, guilt, and madness, and that the legacy of the relentless push of “civilizing” forces, from the first European settlers onward, is “a schizophrenia from which American history and literature have been unable to escape” (6). He sees just such a divided perspective at work in Gatsby, arguing that Nick’s closing to the novel, his invoking of the mythical moment of origin, the Dutch sailors’ vision of the “fresh, green breast of the new world” (GG, 140), marks an attempt to step outside of the incomprehensible present, outside of time itself. Nick’s eloquent invocation very nearly allows for an escape, if only for a moment, from the force of history; however, what the novel shows us, for Callahan, is the impossibility of such a retreat from history, and hence the paradox built into an idealized vision of America as an unspoiled land, a new Eden: “The Great Gatsby sketches the evolution of America from ‘fresh green breast of the new world’ to ‘valley of ashes,’ from continent with a spirit ‘commensurate to man’s capacity for wonder’ to place of nightmare, exhaustion, and death. Founded upon the myth of a new Eden, the history of the United States has displaced that vision into an industrial, excremental reality” (12). Again we see in Callahan’s reading, far more forcefully than in Stern’s, an example of how the novel is used to comment on contemporary concerns. Callahan identifies Fitzgerald’s major theme, in Gatsby and onward in Tender Is the Night and the unfinished Last Tycoon, as revolving around “the failure of the American idealist either to integrate himself with or change the course of American history” (24). Fitzgerald attempts to show the reader, Callahan argues, how an inability to develop a historical consciousness, to understand the “nightmare” of our national history, will lead to an individual’s ruin. This character flaw plagues not only Jay Gatsby, who refuses to even accept the passage of time, but also, more

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subtly, Nick Carraway, who Callahan perceives as attempting to construct a separate space for himself outside the forces of history and social responsibility. Indeed, due to his refusal in the end to tell the truth to Tom about the death of Myrtle (and, as a result, Gatsby and Wilson), Callahan accuses Nick of not merely being a man of few words, but instead of harboring a furtive “moral and epistemological superiority complex” (44). More simply put, Nick sees himself as above it all, a stance that ironically indicates his irresponsibility and culpability. In a larger sense, Callahan seems to battle, throughout his analysis, with the question of how Carraway’s narrative relates to Fitzgerald’s own political and historical consciousness. Central to his argument is the idea that Nick’s “pastoral, Edenic allusions” (49), which invoke the Jeffersonian view of the young, unspoiled nation, ignore the historical realities that were part and parcel of the “American dream” as it grew along with the republic. Regarding this missing or elided historical subtext, Callahan does not mince words: “Carraway forgets or does not regard as central the fact that this republic owed its life as much to its institution of slavery and its colonial policy (really, a policy of extermination) toward the Indians as it did to the courage and democratic institutions of its citizens” (49). This impassioned line of analysis commingles the aesthetic and the political in a manner that invites its own set of challenges: Should Fitzgerald have had his narrator hold forth on American slavery and genocide? Would doing so have made Gatsby a better book? One imagines that most readers, irrespective of political persuasion, would say no, but by the same token the reach of Callahan’s demands on the text suggests the cultural power and weight of Fitzgerald’s ironic take on the American myth in this novel. Callahan ultimately separates author from narrator, and praises Fitzgerald for creating a sort of national jeremiad by using the “sickness” (58) of his narrator to make a political point. Other critics of the period would not always be so willing to draw a distinction between the author’s and narrator’s view on the novel’s political points. The question of race and ethnicity in the novel, which had bubbled under the surface of most critical work on Fitzgerald for the past few decades without making much of a stir, rose to the surface during the late sixties and seventies, initiating a complex debate about Fitzgerald’s racial and ethnic politics. Robert Forrey, in his 1967 article “Negroes in the Fiction of F.  Scott Fitzgerald,” criticized the author’s portrayal of black characters, arguing that “darker skinned individuals . . . are generally relegated to clownish and inferior roles” (203) and concluding based on textual evidence that “it does not seem unfair to suggest that Fitzgerald believed in the inherent inferiority of Negroes” (295). While Forrey does not specifically discuss Gatsby, Lewis Turlish, in a 1971 note, situates the novel specifically within racial discourse of the early 1920s, pointing out the novel’s affinity with the ideas promulgated by Lothrop Stoddard, “the

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most popular American racist of the 1920’s” (443). Like Turlish, Richard Lehan, in a 1970 essay, makes the connection to Stoddard, pointing out the allusion in the novel to Stoddard’s popular 1920 book The Rising Tide of Color against White World-Supremacy (Tom Buchanan refers to the book as “‘The Rise of the Coloured Empires’ by this man Goddard” [GG, 14]). Tom effectively mouths the racist ideas of Stoddard, who believed that the white or “Nordic” race was imperiled by the expansion of ethnic others who would compromise and threaten Western culture (Lehan, “Focus”). Lehan would push the connections to Stoddard and Oswald Spengler further in a 1980 essay, to which we will return in the next chapter. But clearly, by the late 1960s and early 1970s, the question of Fitzgerald’s treatment of race and ethnicity in the novel was beginning to gain traction. Josephine Z. Kopf, in a 1969 essay, decries Fitzgerald’s portrayal of Meyer Wolfshiem as a “villainous Jew” (93). She notes how Fitzgerald’s depiction of Wolfshiem — “A small flat-nosed Jew raised his large head and regarded me with two fine growths of hair which luxuriated in either nostril. After a moment I discovered his tiny eyes in the half-darkness” (GG, 55) — draws attention to his “animalistic qualities” and in turn serves to “arouse in the reader feelings of repulsion and abhorrence” (97). Seeing no other reason for the character to be identified as Jewish (and logically, justifiably pointing out that other characters do not get so insistently linked to their religious background), Kopf ascribes the caricature to Fitzgerald’s own anti-Semitism, a point also raised earlier in the decade by Leslie Fiedler, who saw such caricaturing as resulting “not from mere habit or tradition, but from conviction and passion” (Waiting, 80). Two essays from 1973 looked deeper into the dynamics of ethnicity in the text. M. Gidley argues that the novel is ambivalent with regard to ethnicity, but that it reflects, in both “conscious and unconscious” ways, the “racial movements of the time” (181). Gidley argues for a connection to both Stoddard and to Madison Grant, whose 1916 book The Passing of the Great Race, also warned, in what today would be seen as patently racist rhetoric, about the coming demise of the white race at the hands of ethnic others. Gidley suggests that the name Fitzgerald chooses for the author of the racist book Tom discusses, “this man Goddard,” is an amalgam of the names of Grant and Stoddard; he sees Fitzgerald as aping the views of these writers both to satirize and also “to borrow ideas which underpin the structure and philosophy of history of his novel” (172). Peter Gregg Slater, in “Ethnicity in The Great Gatsby,” argues that questions over whether or not “Fitzgerald possessed racist and anti-Semitic attitudes” (53) are somewhat peripheral to the dynamics of the text itself; instead, Slater suggests that a heightened “consciousness of ethnicity” (53), itself characteristic of the popular mindset in the twenties, is a significant aspect of the novel. Of course Tom Buchanan provides

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an obvious embodiment of such a form of consciousness, but Slater compellingly spends more time in his essay looking at how Nick’s narrative is shaped by his awareness of ethnicity and his biases. Slater rightly points out that Nick “tends to point out the ethnic affiliation of the individuals with whom he comes into contact whenever their ethnicity is not of an Old American type as is his own” and suggests that what this shows is Nick’s “unstated belief in the superiority of his own type” (55). In situating the novel’s depiction of ethnicity within the context of the racial rhetoric of the age, these writers were opening a discussion that would be explored further by scholars in coming decades, as we shall see in the next chapter.6 Like the handling of ethnicity, the gender dynamics of The Great Gatsby would also become part of the critical conversation in the 1970s and onward. This critical turn began with a series of reconsiderations of Daisy Fay Buchanan, who had been all but universally maligned in the scholarly criticism of the fifties and sixties — the vast majority of which, it should be noted, was written by male scholars. Joan Korenman, in a 1975 essay, looks afresh at the character of Daisy, and more specifically at, of all things, her hair color. While seemingly a whimsical topic, Korenman’s discussion of the “varying descriptions of Daisy’s hair color” (574) — at times she seems to be described as blonde, at other times dark-haired — subtly sheds new light on the character. Korenman speculates on the possible biographical connections, noting the critical assumption that Daisy may have been based on the two great loves of Fitzgerald’s life, the “startling brunette,” Ginevra King, and Zelda Sayre, with her “honey-gold hair” (575). But she also pushes the character analysis into compelling new directions, suggesting that the question of hair color invokes a larger literary tradition and in turn invites another look at a previously overlooked character: “Romantic tradition assigns diametrically opposed roles to fair and dark women. In his creation of Daisy, Fitzgerald reflects the influence of this tradition. The character that results is both cool innocent princess and sensual femme fatale, a combination that further enhances Daisy’s enigmatic charm” (578). If almost no previous critics had even considered Daisy as an “enigma” worth exploring, much less a charming one, then such a statement reveals a changing understanding of how gender operates in the novel. If Korenman indirectly suggests that previous scholars may have been overlooking some of the depth in Fitzgerald’s leading female character, Leland Person, in his fascinating 1978 “‘Herstory’ and Daisy Buchanan,” comes right out and levels the charge: “Few critics write about The Great Gatsby without discussing Daisy Fay Buchanan; and few, it seems, write about Daisy without entering the unofficial competition of maligning her character” (250). Person argues that a line of heavyweight scholars of this novel, from Bewley and Ornstein to Kazin and Fiedler, have scapegoated Daisy as the source of the noble Jay Gatsby’s ruin, contrasting

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what they see as her shallow self-centeredness against Gatsby’s romantic idealism; the problem with this thinking, for Person, is that it imposes an overly simplistic “Good Boy/Bad Girl” formulation that “arises from a kind of critical double standard and simply belittles the complexity of the novel” (250). Person argues in contrast, quite effectively, that Daisy can be thought of in a far more complex manner, as a romantic figure like Gatsby, his counterpart or “female double” (251), whose hand is forced by her objectification and entrapment. To support this argument Person refers to the scene when Jordan informs Nick about the events leading up to Daisy’s marriage to Tom: Despite the $350,000 string of pearls around her neck, when Daisy receives a letter from Gatsby the night before the wedding, she is ready to call the whole thing off. Gatsby’s appeal far surpasses Tom’s, and the pearls quickly end up in the wastebasket. The important point to recognize is that Gatsby is as much an ideal to Daisy as she is to him. . . . Thus, it is only after she is forced into an ice-cold bath and the letter which she clutches has crumbled “like snow” that Daisy can marry Tom “without so much as a shiver.” She has been baptized in ice, and with her romantic impulses effectively frozen, Daisy Fay becomes “paralyzed” with conventional happiness as Mrs. Tom Buchanan. (253)

In this reading, Daisy transforms from victimizer to victim, in that her own “complex story, her own desires and needs” (253) remain unexpressed in the text. Person reminds us that the various elucidations of Daisy’s identity — as an “enchanted object” and a “Golden Girl” with a voice “full of money” — are all projections from Nick and Gatsby. Hence, Daisy’s own identity is effectively silenced by the text, much as she is “victimized by a male tendency to project a self-satisfying, yet ultimately dehumanizing, image on women” (257). While Person argued that Daisy was both silenced within the text — via her objectification by Gatsby and Tom, and by Nick’s narration — and had also been unfairly attacked by a patriarchal critical establishment, a leading feminist critic of the day would add another wrinkle to the discussion, suggesting that the novel fits an ingrained pattern in American fiction of hostility toward women. During the first wave of feminist literary criticism, few texts were more influential than Judith Fetterley’s The Resisting Reader (1978). In a chapter devoted to The Great Gatsby, Fetterley argues, along similar lines as Person, that Daisy is “the object of the novel’s hostility and its scapegoat” (73). In a compelling discussion, she reads Nick Carraway as embodying the force of hostility toward women. In mounting his own defense of Gatsby, Nick begins preparing the reader in the first chapter to ensure that Daisy “will have no claims on our sympathy” (85). He does so by calling attention to Daisy’s

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insincerity, as when he notices, after Daisy’s intimations about her painful past with Tom, an “absolute smirk on her lovely face” (GG, 17). Such asides to the reader, Fetterley argues, are meant to build a sort of alliance against the female character; hence, the deck is stacked against Daisy from the very beginning of the narrative.7 While Fetterley’s occasional general pronouncements about the workings of “the male mind” (73) date and unnecessarily simplify the analysis, the reading, along with Person’s, offers a much needed corrective to a decades-old critical blind spot. Fetterley’s notion of hostility toward women in the text would find another mode of elaboration in A. B. Paulson’s essay of the same year, “Oral Aggression and Splitting.” Working from a psychoanalytic perspective, Paulson analyzes the novel as Freudian romance, with Jay Gatsby’s relentless pursuit of Daisy Fay Buchanan amounting to a reenactment of the desire for the Oedipal mother: “For Daisy is really a ‘first love’ to which he remains so intensely faithful that we wonder if it is not some earlier woman — that first ‘first love’ of all little boys — to whom he is so fanatically devoted” (80). In support of his thesis, Paulson calls our attention to the text’s seeming fascination with breasts. Recall Nick’s description of Gatsby’s first kiss with Daisy, on the street in Louisville, back in 1917: One autumn night, five years before, they had been walking down the street when the leaves were falling, and they came to a place where there were no trees and the sidewalk was white with moonlight. . . . Out of the corner of his eye Gatsby saw that the blocks of the sidewalk really formed a ladder and mounted to a secret place above the trees — he could climb to it, if he climbed alone, and once there he could suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder. (GG, 86)

In a text filled with split or doubled character types, Paulson argues, if Daisy represents an unattainable, idealized mother figure — and if Gatsby’s punishment for having “possessed the mother” (80) is his death — then Myrtle Wilson “stands as the degraded half of this split image of the mother” (79). He argues that Myrtle’s violent death — she is found with her “left breast . . . swinging loose like a flap” and her mouth “wide open and ripped at the corners” (GG, 107) — indicates not only the novel’s aggression toward women in general, but also another embodiment of the Oedipal plot: “Myrtle . . . is the first of several figures in the text who play out versions of the mother. In her death, the primitive object of rage and frustration — the ‘unappeasable hunger’ — appears as the mutilated breast” (78). Perhaps aware of the paucity of psychoanalytic interpretations of The Great Gatsby, Paulson seems at times bent on making up for the lack all in one fell swoop. There are few Freudian notions he seems unwilling

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to give a whirl; and while many of the ideas hit the mark, some border on the absurd. After convincingly discussing Jordan Baker as an example of a “phallic woman” (82) based on textual evidence — we recall Nick’s initial description of Jordan as “a slender, small-breasted girl with an erect carriage which she accentuated by throwing her body backward at the shoulders like a young cadet” (GG, 12) — Paulson then indicates, in something of an insouciant tone, that he will see if he can make a similar case about Daisy: “Fitzgerald twins her with Daisy so many times that it is tempting to search for phallic characteristics in her as well” (82). The “search” leads him to the famously funny scene in which Gatsby flings his many colored shirts into a pile and Daisy, overcome with emotion, buries her head in the rich fabrics and sobs. After aptly noting the “uncomfortably fetish-like intensity” of the scene, his conclusion that, with Daisy’s storm of tears, “a climax is reached . . . in which Gatsby, uniting fetish with his girl-phallus, provokes what amounts to an ejaculation” (83), seems to strain credulity a tad, particularly since Paulson has already set Daisy up, in rather contrasting terms, as an idealized mother figure. But such quibbles are minor when compared to the contributions of this unique essay; by tapping into a psychosexual level of the text merely grazed by scholars to that point, Paulson opened up questions about the dynamics of gender and sexuality in the novel that would continue to be explored by critics to follow. One critic who pushed such discussions in another new direction is Keath Fraser in his 1979 essay, “Another Reading of The Great Gatsby.” While the modest title implies that the analysis will be yet another predictable discussion of character or image patterns — it may be the worst title in all of Gatsby criticism — what is contained within is a step in a new direction. Fraser addresses a question that is frequently asked by students who read the novel today but had never been posed at all in the critical literature to that point: Is Nick gay? Fraser argues that the novel possesses a “quality of concealment” (58) that has duped previous readers into looking beyond scenes that call Nick’s sexuality into question. In situating his discussion, Fraser invokes Leslie Fiedler’s brief essay from Love and Death in the American Novel as being one of the few critical pieces to address the fluidity of gendered and sexual identities in Fitzgerald’s fiction. But while Fraser finds Fiedler “reluctant to admire” (61) this quality in the writing, he suggests that the novel’s sexual ambiguity is a central factor, at the heart of larger issues of narrative reliability and uncertainty. “What The Great Gatsby seems about in part, and where it derives its suggestiveness and energy, lies in what is not accounted for, what is undisclosed” (68). Fraser calls our attention to the scene that transpires with Mr. McKee at the end of Myrtle’s party. Amidst the blood and chaos at the end of the evening,

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Mr. McKee turned and continued on out the door. Taking my hat from the chandelier I followed. “Come to lunch some day, he suggested as we groaned down in the elevator. “Where?” “Anywhere.” “Keep your hands off the lever,” snapped the elevator boy. “I beg your pardon,” said Mr. McKee with dignity. “I didn’t know I was touching it.” “All right,” I agreed, “I’ll be glad to.” . . . I was standing beside his bed and he was sitting up between the sheets, clad in his underwear, with a great portfolio in his hands. “Beauty and the Beast . . . Loneliness . . . Old Grocery Horse . . . Brook’n Bridge. . . .” Then I was lying half asleep in the cold lower level of the Pennsylvania Station, staring at the morning “Tribune” and waiting for the four o’clock train. (GG, 32; ellipses in original)

Noting the phallic imagery of McKee’s grabbing of the lever, the seemingly spontaneous decision of the two men to retire to McKee’s bedroom, and the prevalence of ellipses, with their implication of matters left unsaid and moments unaccounted for, Fraser finds that the scene “illustrates what is typical of Fitzgerald’s treatment of sex in the novel, that is, its ambiguity” (61). While the McKee episode is certainly a main piece of evidence for Fraser’s argument, it is by no means all. He explains the fascination for Nick of Tom Buchanan’s physical presence, the “enormous power of that body” within the “effeminate swank of his riding clothes” that seems to “fill those glistening boots until he strained the top lacing” (GG, 9). Discussing this passage, which concludes with Nick eyeballing the “great pack of muscle shifting when his shoulder moved under his thin coat” (GG, 9), Fraser rightly concludes that Tom possesses “a body of rather more interest to Nick than the one he courts in Jordan Baker. In fact, it fascinates him” (62). When Nick does bother to mention Jordan’s body it is, as noted above, to praise its “erect,” masculine qualities. Fraser also discusses the Facsimile of the Gatsby manuscript, where he found some potentially revealing changes from the original draft, including the deletion of a reference by Nick to “the man I balled around with most all summer” who “doesn’t appear in this story at all” (59). The cumulative effect of such feints and suppressions is, for Fraser, a fluid and undefined sexuality — a “kind of sexual anarchy” (65) — that is a defining, if previously unexplored, element of the novel’s larger atmosphere of ambiguity. It may seem by this point that The Great Gatsby had undergone a fairly remarkable evolution, at least from a critical perspective, transforming in a couple of decades from a richly patterned, unified, and complete exploration of American dreams, myths, and realities into an unstable text

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laden with ethnic and gender anxieties, sexual suppression, and narrative manipulation. Edward Wasiolek, in a 1975 essay, considers this evolution and predicts a further critical development away from the familiar “grids” of interpretation imposed on the novel during the heyday of the New Criticism. “Multiple novels lie in The Great Gatsby, and only a few — despite the great volume of criticism — have been written. The novel has been congealed in the ‘grids’ of Fitzgerald’s problems and special views of his age, in the historical realities of the twenties, and in the mythic quests of America” (“Texts,” 389). By way of contrast, Wasiolek suggests that a shifting of the “grid” of interpretation would open the novel to compelling new interpretations from Marxist, Freudian, and gendered perspectives. Is this the same as a critic imposing meaning onto a text, privileging theoretical framework over artistic achievement? Not so, says Wasiolek: “Seeing Gatsby through different grids is not a matter of translating the text into alien structures. The ‘alien’ structures are the text, unless we feel that the text reads itself, a view that the New Critics seemed to hold. We read the text and we read it with the best and most we and our age can give” (390). The perspective offered here by Wasiolek is worth considering as we depart the critical discussion of the sixties and seventies. Published in the second volume of Critical Inquiry, which would become a central journal of the age of literary theory in the United States, Wasiolek’s vision of the open, even “alien” text would predict the range of new strategies brought to The Great Gatsby in the coming decades.

Matters of Style: A Glamorous Flop and an Artistic Achievement Before leaving the seventies behind altogether, it is important to note that, while the critical discourse churned along in the academic journals, Gatsby itself continued its larger public existence as an icon of glamour and style. In 1974, Paramount Pictures released the third film version of the book. Directed by Jack Clayton, with a screenplay adapted by Francis Ford Coppola, and starring Robert Redford, Mia Farrow, Bruce Dern, and Sam Waterston, Paramount’s The Great Gatsby was a vastly hyped work that would capture the national imagination in the time leading up to its springtime run in the movie theaters. As was the case with the film adaptations of 1926 and 1949, the release of the motion picture renewed public interest in the novel. In fact, with the prevalence of modern marketing techniques — including a range of product tie-ins, from fashions to Scotch, to the most outrageous of the marketing gimmicks, white-colored Teflon pans linked to the film — this version of Gatsby created nothing less than a national stir. The New York Times reported on “weeks of

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calculated frenzy, hoopla, and hype” leading up the New York premiere, noting that the film had “replaced Watergate as the No. 1 topic of gossip on the chic cocktail circuit” (Klemesrud, 45). Time magazine summed up the blitz of hype surrounding the film rather succinctly with the cover of its March 18, 1974, issue, devoted to covering the movie’s release; accompanying a still of Redford and Farrow is the caption: “The Great Gatsby Supersell.” Unfortunately, once the film finally arrived, it landed with a fairly resounding thud. Given the glowing, cinematic quality of so much of Fitzgerald’s imagery in The Great Gatsby, it might seem a curious fate that the book presents some sort of Bermuda Triangle for filmmakers. The case becomes even more ironic when we consider that Fitzgerald’s own attempts to make it as a Hollywood screenwriter also never got off the ground. Though there would be numerous cinematic adaptations of his works (most recently, David Fincher’s mawkish 2008 film, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button), most of them never quite hit the mark. Ultimately, it seems that the visual medium of film is not particularly well suited to Fitzgerald’s work, the pleasure and power of which derive from his haunting use of language, his unique romantic lyricism. When those transcendent passages of description are translated by a screenwriter into dialogue, or replaced with visual cues, the bottom falls out. Such is the case with Paramount’s Gatsby. It looks right — it fits the suit, if you will — but possesses little of the magic of the book. Though the film would find a few defenders, like the reviewer for the New Yorker, who found it a “stately film” of “beauty” and “thoughtfulness” (Gilliatt, 288), most were rather more direct in their choice of descriptors. Vincent Canby, in the New York Times, wrote that the film “is as lifeless as a body that’s been too long at the bottom of a swimming pool” (32). A guest columnist for the New York Times was so overwrought by the “disaster” of a film, that he worried the movie might do permanent damage to the reputation of the novel. He describes the guilt he felt when his nine-year-old daughter asked him, on leaving the theater, why they called Gatsby “great”: “It was my fault. . . . I only hope she can forget it and years from now go to the book with no memory of the film at all, and find out for herself why he was great” (Darst, 281). No doubt these fears about the book’s fragility were unfounded: One piece of evidence to the contrary is that Bantam Books, after getting the rights to release a cheap paperback edition of the book tied in to the movie’s release, promptly printed up 480,000 copies (Severo, 36). As in the early fifties, when The Disenchanted and The Far Side of Paradise put Fitzgerald back on the popular culture map, Paramount’s 1974 film, whatever its artistic merits or failures, only further ingrained Gatsby — novel, myth, legend — into the public consciousness. Of course, the young girl’s question about the greatness of Gatsby is only fitting. How to account for the greatness of Gatsby has been a

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question that has concerned scholars and critics of Fitzgerald — as well as even his most ardent fans — for a long time. One scholar who made a full-fledged effort to try to answer this question was Robert Emmet Long in 1979. In some ways it seems fitting that the last major work on Gatsby in the 1970s would be entitled The Achieving of “The Great Gatsby.” By this point, three decades of critical inquiry and explication had firmly established the reputation of both novel and novelist, and works tracing the novel’s sociological relevance, patterns of symbolism, and narrative point of view had plumbed the formal and thematic depths of the book extensively. Where Long’s study adds to this mix is in his consideration of the creation of the masterpiece as a culmination of the author’s previous fictional efforts, literary relationships, influences, outside reading, and craftsmanship. While previous scholars had considered many of these ideas in isolation — the fifties and sixties in particular saw the publication of any number of influence studies, as we have seen, and writers like James E. Miller, Jr. and Kenneth Eble, to name two notable examples, had shown Fitzgerald’s artistry in the novel to be the evidence of careful, devoted practice of craft — Long’s work takes a multifaceted approach that adds to our understanding of the great leap forward Fitzgerald made with Gatsby. The book is divided into sections devoted to what Long sees as the primary influences on Fitzgerald’s artistic development, leading to Gatsby. It begins with a study of Fitzgerald’s earlier fiction, the “apprentice period” preceding Gatsby, and goes on to include an extended discussion of Conrad as a key influence, as well as a discussion of Fitzgerald among his own artistic and fictional milieu in the twenties. In tracing the writing of what he calls Fitzgerald’s apprentice period, Long probes earlier works for evidence of the technical and thematic touchstone of the later masterpiece. This Side of Paradise introduced not only Fitzgerald’s stylistic flourish, but also his thematic concern with the individual alienated from society; The Beautiful and Damned, despite its notorious flaws, showed not only a stronger hold over the formal properties of the novel, but also a deepening concern, inspired by his relationship with Mencken and his admiration of literary naturalists like Norris and Dreiser, with “money and its effect on the lives of . . . characters” (46), as well as first hitting on one of the main themes of Gatsby: “the spiritual emptiness of the great city and its suburbs” (60). Long also discusses the major early stories — “May Day” (1920), “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz” and “Winter Dreams” (1922), and “Absolution” (1924) — seeing in them precursors to Gatsby’s sweeping historical vision and national critique (evidenced in “May Day” and “Diamond”), as well as to the novel’s themes of romantic longing and disillusionment (as seen in “Winter Dreams” and “Absolution”). For the most part Long steers clear of some of the minor stories that also presage themes seen in Gatsby; He makes brief mention of “‘The Sensible Thing’” and “John Jackson’s

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Arcady,” two 1924 stories that mine the same thematic territory of the attempt to recapture a romantic love from the past that we see in Gatsby. Both stories also, like “Winter Dreams,” evoke the associative power of houses of the past, another key link to Gatsby. And both were written during the Fitzgeralds’ time living in Great Neck, New York, the gestation period for Gatsby. While Long’s case may have been even stronger had he considered minor stories like these in greater depth, in all, his careful working through of the important early works offers a corrective response to the overly simplistic view that Gatsby was simply a bolt out of the blue for a writer who had shown few signs of such promise before. Long’s argument suggests, in contrast, that the novel was the culmination of years of fictional efforts. In devoting a substantial portion of his book to Joseph Conrad as an influence on Fitzgerald, Long does not open uncharted territory, but rather deepens a discussion that had been afoot for some time. As Long notes, among the many critics who had earlier weighed in on Fitzgerald’s fictional technique and the influences on it, James E. Miller and Robert Stallman had both specifically pointed to Conrad as the inspiration behind Fitzgerald’s decision to use the third-person, participantobserver perspective in Gatsby. Whereas Miller, in The Fictional Technique of F. Scott Fitzgerald (1957) and Stallman, in his essay “Conrad and The Great Gatsby” (1955) focused squarely on Fitzgerald’s technical or structural indebtedness to Conrad (concerning matters of point of view and narrative control), Long digs deeper into the connection between the two writers, discussing thematic connections as well as patterns of character types that Fitzgerald seemed to have borrowed or inherited from Conrad. Working from lesser-known material such as Conrad’s first novel, Almayer’s Folly (1895) and the short story “Youth” (1902) to the major novels Lord Jim (1900) and Heart of Darkness (1902), Long presents compelling textual evidence of Fitzgerald’s connection to Conrad. The similarity of the Carrraway/Gatsby relationship to that of Marlow and Kurtz receives a good bit of attention, not surprisingly; Stallman had mapped out these connections thoroughly, even exhaustively, in his 1955 article. More unexpected are the connections Long builds to the earlier works. Through close readings and cross-references, he builds a case for Fitzgerald’s larger indebtedness to Conrad. Going beyond the issue of narrative perspective, he demonstrates how Gatsby shares with Almayer’s Folly a disillusionment theme, an ironic treatment of time and the past, and even an obsession with the symbolic resonance of houses. Miller does not mention the work of Robert Sklar in this section of his book, but if we add in to the Conrad sweepstakes the work of Sklar — who sought to debunk the connections to Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness but added in his own claim about Fitzgerald’s indebtedness to Nostromo — then we could claim that, in the quarter century between Stallman’s “Conrad and

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The Great Gatsby” and Long’s Achieving of “The Great Gatsby,” the case for Conrad as the prime influence behind Fitzgerald’s mature artistry in Gatsby was made from nearly every possible angle. The great “influence” debate seemed to have been won by the end of the seventies, one reason perhaps why this strain of scholarship on Fitzgerald, while not dead, has subsided in subsequent decades.8 But there is another kind of “influence” Long discusses: the impact of Fitzgerald’s own literary contemporaries, as well as the thinkers who shaped the intellectual climate of the day. Long claims from the outset that “to be fully appreciated Fitzgerald’s achieving of the novel must be understood as a very large and complicated act of cultural assimilation” (11), and it is in making this case that he seems most convincing and provocative. Arguing that “The Great Gatsby emerges out of a quite definite intellectual-literary milieu” (172), Long connects Fitzgerald’s ideas to those of his friend Edmund Wilson, as well as to Walter Lippmann and Van Wyck Brooks. What makes Long’s discussion interesting is the extent to which it counters an age-old popular conception of Fitzgerald as a kind of artistic idiot savant, an unschooled wonder-boy who somehow just happened to churn out the Great American Novel, without even really understanding what he was doing or what the book signified. Long’s counterpoint, that Fitzgerald was very much engaged in the intellectual ideas of his age, has influenced subsequent scholars, perhaps most notably Ronald Berman, who has written a number of compelling books tracing Fitzgerald’s connection to the prevailing public philosophy of his day. In broadening out his discussion of Fitzgerald’s “intellectual-literary milieu,” Long considers The Great Gatsby alongside the other major American novels of 1925, Dreiser’s An American Tragedy and Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer. Though not arguing for mutual influence among the works, Long’s interesting discussion notes the thematic and philosophical links between the 1925 novels, perhaps most notably the fact that all of them “are about the end of the American dream” (173). As long points out, both Gatsby and An American Tragedy invoke but ultimately subvert the Horatio Alger rags-to-riches theme. Like Jay Gatsby, Dreiser’s protagonist, Clyde Griffiths, is first presented as a “rootless American youth, a naïve searcher for a better, more fulfilling life” (174). Long argues that the publication of these two novels in the same year, while of course on one level coincidental, reveals a deeper connection to fundamental American concerns, ones that persisted in an era marked in equal measure by material success and philosophical uncertainty: “Both [novels] tap the same archetype of the poor boy as ‘outsider’ that is so deeply embedded in the American imagination,” and this sort of connection “reveals Fitzgerald’s immersion in an archetypal pattern of American consciousness” (174–75). Long also relates Gatsby to Dos Passos’s kaleidoscopic but ultimately haunting and cautionary image of New York City

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in Manhattan Transfer, arguing that Dos Passos’s New York denizens, like Fitzgerald’s, lead lives that are “shortcuts from nothing to nothing” (176). While generations of critics had noted (and often lamented) that The Great Gatsby was a novel of its “moment,” Long dismisses the shopworn notion of Gatsby as merely a glossy period piece, putting forth the much more profitable argument that the novel engaged with its sociohistorical “moment” on far deeper and more compelling levels: Dos Passos, Dreiser, and Fitzgerald approach their common subject from different sides, in works different in kind; but the shared theme itself, occurring in significant novels of the same year, is a reminder of how deeply The Great Gatsby is part of its moment, rather than being, as it might seem on a casual reading, the expression of a purely special sensibility. . . . The Great Gatsby is central to the literature of the twenties in more than surfaces; in its articulation of modern estrangement, it is in the mainstream of American realism as it emerged after World War I. (177)

Indeed, as we have seen, by the end of the seventies Gatsby could be recognized as something more than a central text of the literature of the twenties; in its ability to elicit impassioned critical discourse from everwidening perspectives, while remaining a popular favorite and a synonym for glamour and style in American culture, The Great Gatsby had become, by this point, a central text of American literature and culture.

Notes 1

Regarding these revisions, the relationship between author and editor is worth considering as well. Carla Mulford, in a 1982 essay, revisits Fitzgerald’s revisions to the manuscript, and particularly those that were made in response to advice from his editor, Maxwell Perkins, and suggests that we be more cognizant of Fitzgerald’s “debt” to Perkins, in that “Perkins’s comments . . . helped the author to shape the book into its present form” (210).

2

In his discussion of paired characters, Mellard does not mention Gatsby and Myrtle Wilson, though he might well have. Indeed, Barry Edward Gross makes a good case for thinking of the two of them not merely as similar to one another, but as a sharp contrast to all of the other major characters. Above and beyond their obvious similarities as desperate social climbers, Gross notes the affinities in other aspects, such as their taste in home décor: “As Myrtle is a Gatsby in miniature in extremis, her New York apartment is a West Egg in stiflingly constricted miniature. . . . Myrtle’s apartment is, like West Egg, a nouveau riche try for elegance that serves only to distort traditions and pervert the past” (58). Robert Sklar, in The Last Laocoön, also links them, as “two careless, immoral lower-class figures destroyed by their own too great determination, destroyed by the greater power of the careless and immoral rich” (192).

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3

Lewis’s book, originally published in 1955, traces the Adamic figure through nineteenth-century American literature, but he also includes an epilogue in which he briefly considers Gatsby as a modern incarnation of this American motif. “The legend of the second chance is . . . poignantly re-enacted by Gatsby,” Lewis writes, “as he carries forward his incorruptible dream beneath the surface of his guessedat corruption. In The Great Gatsby, the Adamic anecdote retains a singular purity of outline; the young hero follows the traditional career from bright expectancy to the destruction which, in American literature, has been its perennial reward. But the image of the New World . . . is subtly exploited by Fitzgerald as a mirror to reveal the true ugliness of society’s hard malice and shallow sophistication” (197).

4

For another detailed, close reading of Fitzgerald’s use of color patterns in the novel, see A. E. Elmore, “Color and Cosmos in The Great Gatsby.”

5

The Frye passage is quoted from The Anatomy of Criticism, 78.

6

For an interesting, more recent discussion of Fitzgerald’s evolving attitudes toward racial and ethnic others, see Alan Margolies, “The Maturing of F.  Scott Fitzgerald” (1997).

7

In a recent (2000) essay, “Redirecting Fitzgerald’s ‘Gaze’,” Scott Stoddart uses the language of feminist film theory to make a similar point about Nick’s manipulation of our perspective on Daisy. Invoking Laura Mulvey’s pioneering 1975 essay in feminist film theory, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Stoddart argues that, as narrator, Nick wields the power of the “male gaze” in passages such as this to control our perceptions of Daisy.

8

A more fashionable recent choice as influence on the novel is Willa Cather. For discussion of Cather’s influence, see Tom Quirk, “Fitzgerald and Cather: The Great Gatsby”; Robert Seguin, “Ressentiment and the Social Poetics of The Great Gatsby”; and Stanley Browdin, “F.  Scott Fitzgerald and Willa Cather: A New Study.”

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4: Gatsby, in Theory (and Out): New Paradigms in the Eighties and Nineties A Sense of the Past: Situating Gatsby

I

f the period from the end of World War II to the end of the fifties saw the dramatic rise of The Great Gatsby from neglected novel to celebrated American masterpiece, and if the sixties and seventies saw the further canonization of Gatsby in particular and the rise of Fitzgerald studies in general, the eighties and nineties would see Gatsby criticism turn in new directions yet again. This period lacks the dramatic arc of the previous four decades (after all, the battle for recognition of Gatsby as a great American novel had long since been won, and seemingly every conceivable image pattern and narrative nuance had been traced, and an endless supply of interpretations on the novel’s mythic, historic, and romantic themes — some vital and illuminating, some not — been offered). Nonetheless, as the institution of literary studies took a major turn toward new theoretical models in the United States in the eighties (following the lead of European literary critics from the sixties and seventies), not only would new works be considered as part of the canon of the nation’s literature, but the accepted classics would be reinterpreted from new angles. Hence, it would turn out that all had not, in fact, been said about Gatsby back in the glory days of the tweed-jacketed English professor. A new generation of scholars, informed by poststructuralist, new historicist, and narratological theories, would consider the novel from a range of new perspectives. To be sure, some studies mined familiar territory while finding some new ways to contribute to the ongoing discourse on the novel. Brian Way’s 1980 book F. Scott Fitzgerald and the Art of Social Fiction eschewed the mythic and archetypal approaches of the past and focused instead on Fitzgerald as a social realist. While Way considers this a much needed corrective to a superabundance of material focusing on the overarching American themes (and one cannot deny that, by 1980, he had a point there), still his study, with its focus on manners and class issues in Fitzgerald’s work, is not as groundbreaking as he may have thought. Nonetheless, his chapter on The Great Gatsby does touch on an aspect of the novel surprisingly neglected in much of the critical work — the book’s sense of humor. Way focuses in specifically on the character of Jay Gatsby, arguing that he is “Fitzgerald’s greatest success” (112) in achieving a comic tone

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in the novel. While it is probably arguable that Gatsby’s creativity lies in his “power to arouse wild incredulous laughter” (112), still Way’s discussions of the extremely humorous reunion scene with Daisy and the levity and outrageousness of Gatsby’s parties, as well as the favorable comparison he draws to the coarser comedy achieved in Petronius’s depiction of Trimalchio’s banquet, serve as a good reminder that Gatsby is, among its many other merits, at times a very funny book. Other critics of this time offered subtle variations on established approaches to the text. Glenn Settle, in his 1985 American Literature essay “Fitzgerald’s Daisy: The Siren’s Voice,” pairs the tried and true frameworks of the character study and the elucidation of classical allusions to offer a new look at the character of Daisy Fay Buchanan. Daisy, who had received nothing but critical scorn throughout the first few decades of serious scholarly work on the novel, had by this point, after the essays of Korenman, Person, and Fetterley in the seventies, come into something of a critical vogue. While the emergence of a more complex and nuanced view of Daisy’s character owes much to the rise of feminist criticism in the 1970s and beyond, Settle’s essay itself does not follow a feminist methodology, instead establishing connections to the figure of the Siren from classical Greek and Roman literature. Indeed, a feminist critic might shudder at the steps Daisy takes backward, when viewed from this perspective, into the realm of perhaps the ultimate sexist archetype (the irresistible female whose cooing voice woos good men to their ruin); nonetheless, Settle makes his case with valid textual support. Of course the primary appeal of Daisy, as noted by generations of scholars, is the allure of her voice (also the weapon of the classical Siren); and Settle also traces the floral and seafaring imagery in the novel, particularly Gatsby’s connection to the sea as seen through both his early career and the imagery connected to him, to further establish the parallels to Jason, Odysseus, and other classical heroes brought to near-ruin by the temptations of the Sirens. Other critics of the period offered pieces linking Gatsby to traditional literary antecedents. Elizabeth Morgan, in a 1984 College English essay, also looks at the Daisy/Gatsby relationship from the perspective of literary history, arguing that Fitzgerald invokes the courtly love tradition in the novel, using it in an ironic way to comment upon the “bankrupt” (176) values of the day. Morgan offers something of a paint-by-numbers critical approach, defining the components of the courtly love tradition and then demonstrating, one at a time, how the novel matches up to these criteria. While the case made in the article seems reasonable, the justification for it is slim and perhaps misguided; claiming that extant criticism has turned the novel into “a personal and cultural period piece” (173), Morgan concludes that her study of Fitzgerald’s ironic use of the courtly love tradition in The Great Gatsby “gives texture to the novel and provides

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yet another proof that he is an artist, not merely a social historian” (175). Such comments, of course, bear little if any relationship to the critical stature of both the novel and its author. D.  G. Kehl and Allene Cooper, in a 1993 essay, take yet another route from literary history toward the Gatsby/Daisy romance, viewing Gatsby’s love as a “grail quest” from medieval tradition. Like Morgan, they establish a step-by-step definition of the grail quest, from Arthurian legend, and then make the match to Gatsby. They also seem similarly unaware of previous criticism of the novel, as based on their claim that no previous scholars had examined the grail quest theme in the book (203).1 The essay’s sometimes humorous misspellings2 also undercut its authority, and the conclusions reached by the authors — that “Gatsby as grail quest knight is an archetype of fidelity to the ideal in a paradoxical world,” and that he “illustrates Fitzgerald’s paradoxical view that such dreaming, though never to be fulfilled, greatly enriches life” (215) — are hardly original. Nonetheless, Kehl and Cooper deserve credit for cleverly tracing the Arthurian echoes in the comic 1922 story “O Russet Witch!” and showing how it prefigures the use of such material in Gatsby. This minor, farcical story is not often mentioned as a precursor to Gatsby, and the point is original and interesting. At the outset of the 1980s, one of the major scholars on Fitzgerald and The Great Gatsby would make a literary connection to the past that would prove more valuable. Richard Lehan, who had published essays on Gatsby and the 1966 book F.  Scott Fitzgerald and the Craft of Fiction, and who would go on to produce the book-length study, “The Great Gatsby”: The Limits of Wonder in 1990, published “F.  Scott Fitzgerald and Romantic Destiny,” an article that elucidates his ideas on Fitzgerald’s connection to the ideas of German philosopher Oswald Spengler. As we recall, the connection to Spengler had first been made by Stallman in his apple-cart-upsetting 1955 essay, “Gatsby and the Hole in Time,” and Lehan had further defined Fitzgerald’s connection to Spengler’s thought in his F. Scott Fitzgerald and the Craft of Fiction. Why the need for more on Spengler in the eighties, then? In part, Lehan’s return to the topic was occasioned by a fairly interesting little controversy on this subject. Several critics, notably Robert Sklar, in The Last Laocoön, had seemingly debunked the notion that Fitzgerald could have been influenced by Spengler when writing The Great Gatsby (as Fitzgerald himself said he was3), since Spengler’s major work, The Decline of the West, was not translated into English until 1926, the year after Gatsby’s publication, and Fitzgerald could not read German. Lehan, in making his case for the connection as an important one, begins his 1980 essay by countering Sklar’s claim, pointing out that Spengler’s ideas were in wide circulation in Englishlanguage publications in the early twenties, and that “his general theory of the West was debated in intellectual circles in both America and Europe” (“Destiny,” 137). Publications in which Spengler’s ideas were summarized,

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analyzed, and extensively quoted included Century magazine, one of Fitzgerald’s favorites (137). It may not be possible to tell precisely how many of Spengler’s excerpts Fitzgerald had gotten hold of during the time when he was writing The Great Gatsby, but Lehan’s exploration of the links between Spengler’s ideas and those of the novel is worth considering in some detail, as the ideas promoted by Spengler were by no means the isolated ruminations of one man alone. Indeed, as Richard Overy points out in his recent history of interwar Britain, The Morbid Age (2009), Spenglerian anxieties about the coming fall of civilization were commonplace in the twenties and thirties. Overy describes the time as “a period famous for its population of Cassandras and Jeremiahs who helped to construct the popular image of the inter-war years as an age of anxiety, doubt or fear” (2). And while his particular focus is on the spread of this mindset in Great Britain, Overy argues that ideas generated in Britain concerning the decline of civilization were “rapidly and widely disseminated in America and Europe” (7). The title character of Edmund Wilson’s 1929 novel I Thought of Daisy, asked by the narrator where she had come up with a line about “the downfall of western civilization,” caually replies, “Oh . . . that was just something I picked up at the Ritz Bar in Paris!” (211). If Wilson’s line suggests the ubiquity of such ideas about social decline and decay, Overy reminds us that Spengler was most often credited, correctly or not, as their source: “Spengler and ‘Spenglerian’ thinking became popular shorthand for any form of pessimistic determinism applied to the decay or collapse of civilization” (32). As previously noted, Spengler’s major philosophical idea from The Decline of the West is his cyclical notion about the rise and fall of civilizations. For Spengler, the progression from “culture” to “civilization” — from a unified, localized, organic group tied to its landscape, to a modern, urban, rootless, plural society — is necessarily and inevitably a process of decline. Himself writing in the shadow of World War I and in the midst of cultural upheaval across Europe, Spengler argued that Western societies faced an inevitable decline. Though certainly controversial, Spengler’s thoughts had a good deal of influence in an age characterized by reactionary concerns over growing cultural plurality. (The first part of the twentieth century also saw the rise of the “science” of eugenics, the study of “improvement” of the human gene pool through selective breeding.) Lehan claims that an “affinity of mind” (“Destiny,” 138) between Spengler and Fitzgerald can be seen through examination of his later novels, beginning with The Great Gatsby. The case he builds by examining the landscape of the novel is rather compelling and worth quoting at some length. Lehan discusses how in Spengler’s view a culture, under the influence of modernity, mechanization, and progress, suffers from a sense of dislocation in which

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the sense of the infinite gives way to cold reason, science, and technology. Man no longer feels at one with the land, moves to the new city, which has become a money center. The rise of a new breed of money brokers turns the old world upside down. Spengler believed the movement from country to city involved a destructive process. In historical terms, Culture gives way to Civilization; . . . the priestking is replaced by the new Caesar, the man of money and power. When this happens, a primitive sense of race is lost, and the decay embodied in the idea of Civilization begins. All of these Spenglerian elements infuse The Great Gatsby. While Fitzgerald does not labor the point, he clearly shows in what way an artificial, urban world has replaced a natural landscape. In his description of the Valley of Ashes, for example, we find that a “fantastic farm” brings forth ashes which “grow like wheat into ridges and hills”; nature has given way to “grotesque gardens, where ashes take the form of houses and chimneys,” as if the process of nature had been inverted, bringing forth a distortion of itself, as Spengler maintained happens when the countryside is transformed by the city. Beneath the city streets lies a lost world. (“Destiny,” 140)

In this Spenglerian reading, Gatsby and Tom emerge as far more than romantic rivals; instead, they embody different moments in a culture’s decline. Gatsby, the dreamer, represents what Spengler dubbed “Faustian man,” the doomed idealist whose fate is to not know that his goals are unattainable in the cold modern world, while Tom is the face of modern “Civilization,” the moneyed force who rules over a world that is increasingly heterogeneous and uncontrollable. From this perspective we see, as Lehan notes, that Tom’s relentless fears about the impending doom of civilization (whether due to the insidious “Rise of the Coloured Empires” or because “pretty soon the earth’s going to fall into the sun”) bespeak another Spenglerian connection: “That Tom’s remarks are abstract, unfeeling, garbled, and contradictory is to the point, and reveal a quality of mind in keeping with Spengler’s description of modern man who has been separated from the rhythms of nature by scientific systems of thought” (142). The most shocking of Tom’s pseudo-“scientific” beliefs about the downfall of civilization is his theory about race, taken from a “fine book” he has been reading. This is the original passage from the novel: “Civilization’s going to pieces,” broke out Tom violently. “I’ve gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read ‘The Rise of the Coloured Empires’ by this man Goddard?” “Why, no,” I answered, rather surprised by his tone. “Well, it’s a fine book and everybody ought to read it. The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be — will be utterly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved.”

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“Tom’s getting very profound,” said Daisy with an expression of unthoughtful sadness. “He reads deep books with long words in them. What was that word we — ” “Well, these books are all scientific,” insisted Tom, glancing at her impatiently. “This fellow has worked out the whole thing. It’s up to us who are the dominant race to watch out or these other races will have control of things.” (GG, 14)

Lehan points out that the book Tom discusses by “this man Goddard” is, as mentioned previously, most likely a thinly veiled reference to Lothrop Stoddard’s popular 1920 book, The Rising Tide of Color, which warned against the impending doom facing the white or “Nordic” race at the hands of the “colored” races. Stoddard’s text not only found a sympathetic audience in an era that saw the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan and an increasing sentiment of nativism in the United States, but it also, as Lehan notes, reflected a sensibility aligned with Spengler’s vision of Western culture falling amidst an increasing heterogeneity. Given the real-world echoes of Tom’s rant, this would seem to be a point where Lehan’s argument would push up to its logical conclusion of assaying whether Fitzgerald was invoking the Spenglerian view to endorse it or to criticize it. If it is merely Tom Buchanan who serves as the mouthpiece of Spengler, via Stoddard, then it would seem that the Spenglerian view is being critiqued. After all, Tom is a buffoon and the target of much of the book’s most pointed humor (indeed, I would argue against Brian Way and his point about Jay Gatsby as the book’s comic force; a good case can be made for Tom in that role), and his huffy proclamations about “civilization” are clearly held up by Nick for our ridicule. However, as Lehan points out, echoes of Spengler’s philosophy run throughout the text, and indeed, despite his derision toward Tom’s overheated rhetoric, Nick, too, seems to recoil from the racial heterogeneity that he encounters. Given the Spenglerian view of the city as the center of a civilization’s “decline,” it is no coincidence that encounters with ethnic and racial others transpire primarily within the boundaries of the city. In much the same way that confrontation and physical violence are initially situated in the city itself, visibly “ethnic” others are also carefully and specifically placed in the city early in the novel. While Meyer Wolfshiem, the stereotypical Jewish gangster, holds forth in his midtown Broadway haunts, other ethnic figures seem to mark the boundaries of the city: While passing over the Queensboro Bridge into the city, Nick spies a car full of mourners in a funeral procession who look at him with “the tragic eyes and short upper lips of south-eastern Europe,” and immediately afterwards a limousine passes in which a white driver is ferrying “three modish Negroes, two bucks and a girl” (GG, 55). Nick’s reaction to his company on the bridge suggests his resistance to, even fear

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of, the racial pluralism of the city: “‘Anything can happen now that we’ve slid over this bridge,’ I thought; ‘anything at all’” (55). This observation, in its emphasis on geographic and demographic boundaries, recalls in a gentler fashion Tom Buchanan’s paranoid fantasy about the “Rise of the Coloured Empires”; indeed, it might be argued that the direct correlation between increasing violence and increasing “visibility” of race and ethnicity in this novel is itself a narrative underscoring of Tom Buchanan’s own reactionary, racist philosophy. Lehan chooses not to go quite this far with his reading. He claims that Fitzgerald links a “sense of the lost promise” of contemporary America “with racial disharmony,” and he quotes the Queensboro Bridge passage, claiming that it “bursts with implied and double meaning” (“Destiny,” 143), but he does not elaborate on this meaning before moving on to another point. George Garrett, in his 1985 essay “Fire and Freshness: A Matter of Style in The Great Gatsby,” takes a different approach to the Queensboro Bridge passage; he argues, in contrast, that “the author’s intention in this brief sight gag was clearly to show Carraway’s modernity, his openness to and delight in the otherwise shocking (to the reader) confusions of order in America” (107). Whether or not Fitzgerald is ultimately mocking or endorsing racist rhetoric of the 1920s seems less verifiable than the fact that the novel’s anxiousness over a spreading racial and ethnic plurality does extend beyond the vilified character of Tom Buchanan. As the Queensboro Bridge passage demonstrates, Nick, as much as Tom, identifies ethnic others as a potentially disruptive element in the social order, one associated with the bustle of the contemporary urban environment.

Text and Context: Reading the Novel in the Age of High Theory If Lehan, in reading the novel as a reflection of Spenglerian notions of social decline, finds Fitzgerald’s portrayal of race and ethnicity to be fraught but ultimately ambivalent, others would take a more pointed approach to this issue. Jeffrey Louis Decker finds Fitzgerald’s allusions to Stoddard perfectly fitting in a novel that oozes with what Decker sees as the white American’s ethnic and national anxiety in the “Tribal Twenties” (53). A backlash against waves of immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe manifested itself in national policy with the Emergency Quota Act of 1921 and the Immigration Reform Act of 1924, which would restrict immigration from these regions; moreover, in terms of broader public sentiment this backlash would find its way not only into popular periodicals but also the academic and literary realms. Decker, in examining the novel from a new historicist perspective, argues that a familiarity with the climate of racial nativism afoot at

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the time “provides a context for understanding the production of classic American literature at mid-decade” (53). As for Gatsby, we see echoes of nativism in the manner in which Fitzgerald invokes, only to undercut, the classic American “uplift” story of the self-made man, a staple of the culture from Franklin through Alger, in his depiction of Jay Gatsby. In juxtaposing Gatsby’s mysterious and unprincipled ascent and Tom’s hysterical nativism, the narrative bespeaks larger fears about the decay of white culture: “A story of entrepreneurial corruption, accented by the language of nativism, competes with and ultimately foils the traditional narrative of virtuous American uplift. In this way, Gatsby stages a national anxiety about the loss of white Anglo-Saxon supremacy in the Twenties” (52). Key to Decker’s argument is the impression of Gatsby as somehow “not quite white” (64); his shadowy origins, as well as his partnership with the Jewish immigrant gangster, Meyer Wolfshiem, taint his ethnic identity and as a result undercut the validity of his identity as a self-made American man.4 For Decker, the novel must be read against the Nordicist theories of popular writers like Stoddard and Madison Grant, “the most important nativist in modern American history,” who argued that cross-breeding with non-Nordics would lead to the “degenerative process of ‘mongrelization’” (64). Decker traces how widespread such ideas were in mainstream culture of the early twenties, from the halls of Congress to the pages of Good Houskeeping magazine. Viewed in this context, the battle between arch-Nordicist Tom Buchanan and mysterious Gatsby over Daisy, a product of her “white girlhood” (GG, 19) whom Decker provocatively describes as “a version of the all-American girl . . . a symbol for Nordic national identity in the Twenties” (64), takes on considerable cultural weight. Decker quotes a passage from the Plaza Hotel showdown, where Tom applies his infamous label to Gatsby: “I suppose the latest thing is to sit back and let Mr. Nobody from Nowhere make love to your wife. . . . 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” (GG, 101). While some, including Walter Benn Michaels, have read Tom’s words as implying that Gatsby is “in some sense black” (195), Decker interprets the passage as further evidence of the anxiety over Nordic racial purity that runs through the novel: “According to the nativist logic of Tom’s argument, Gatsby seems less-than-white because of his intimate connection with immigrant crime. The association licenses Tom’s accusation that Gatsby jeopardizes the health of the family, the institution indispensable to maintaining white racial purity” (66).5 While at times Decker’s argument may seem to strain a bit, as in his equation of the novel’s “dream of Nordic national origins seen through Dutch explorers’ eyes” with Marcus Garvey’s contemporaneous dream of “a distant but glorious African past” (59) that fueled his

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back-to-Africa movement, this essay pushes discussion of race and ethnicity in the novel decidedly forward, by contextualizing the analysis in terms of the debate over race, ethnicity, and national identity that reverberated throughout the culture in the early 1920s. We see in an argument like Decker’s an effort to use social and historical context in order to move discussion of ethnicity in the novel beyond questions of perceived bias or racism and into a more complex terrain; his objective, broadly speaking, is to consider textual representation in light of a broader social representations and discourse. A similar evolution can be traced in discussion of gender and sexuality in the novel. We recall the pioneering reevaluations of the character of Daisy in the late-1970s essays of Korenman, Person, and Fetterley. Further work in the coming two decades would progress from recapitulation to complication of the points these writers raised. Sarah Beebe Fryer’s 1984 essay “Beneath the Mask: The Plight of Daisy Buchanan” seems philosophically aligned with Person and Fetterley’s discussion of the character’s victimization but goes about making its case in different manner, by defending Daisy’s character traits and personality. Fryer mines various scenes of the novel, with an eye toward peeling back Nick’s judgmental opinions and revealing the true character beneath, and praises Daisy’s “hopeful nature” (158), “capacity for feeling” (160) and “stubborn honesty” (165). Nicolas Tredell aptly points out that Fryer’s discussion suffers from the fallacy of “treating Daisy as if she were a real person” (Tredell, 137), but then again, perhaps the weight of decades of critical vilification warranted the approach. In any case, Fryer does offer a valuable reminder that our perception of Daisy is in large measure a construct of our readerly allegiance with — or subservience to, depending on how you look at it — Nick Carraway’s perspective. While Fryer continued the examination of patriarchal bias in the text, other critics would dig deeper into what Keath Fraser had dubbed the atmosphere of “sexual anarchy” in the novel. Picking up on many of Fraser’s points, Edward Wasiolek reads the novel as a tale of repressed homosexual love between Nick Carraway and Jay Gatsby. As with Fryer’s essay, one sometimes gets the sense from Wasiolek that he is attempting to read the characters’ minds or emotions, as if they were real people, about whom only he knows the real story: “Nick favors Gatsby because he favors what Gatsby is, feels so intensely for Gatsby because he feels what Gatsby feels. Put bluntly we are confronted with the sympathy of one homosexual for another. Is there anything in or [sic] text to support this. Yes, rather blatantly so” (“Drama,” 18). As for this “blatant” evidence, Wasiolek discusses the McKee scene and Nick’s description of Jordan’s body, as had Fraser a decade and a half earlier. Wasiolek praises Fraser’s essay but faults him for being “too timid . . . in making firm and definite Nick’s homosexual proclivities” (19). The quest for a firm case

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leads Wasiolek to consider Jordan and Daisy — in many ways parallel characters, as he aptly notes — as what might be called, in the vernacular, “beards” for Nick and Gatsby, respectively. Wasiolek is not always careful, however, in his reading of the text (or in his spelling, but that is another matter); en route to proving his case about Nick’s homosexuality, he hones in on the manliness of Jordan, pointing out, “When she perspires the suggestion of a moustache appears on her upper lip” (19–20). This is a misreading of the text; Nick is not describing Jordan in that passage, but rather recalling how his lady friend from back home in Minnesota would perspire when playing tennis. Ultimately, Wasiolek finds homosexuality everywhere in the text; even seemingly hyper-hetero Tom Buchanan fits the mold, as we learn that “his exaggerated masculinity is as much a sign of his homosexuality as is Gatsby’s idealism” (21). While the premise of exploring the sexual dynamics of the text is an absolutely valid one — and indeed, the definitive essay on the topic may be yet to be written — Wasiolek’s take on the issue suffers from the lack of a theoretical framework or rationale. Where one might expect some synthesizing remarks about the discussion, instead the essay ends with an absurd conclusion that expounds, without evidence, upon the repressed homosexuality and other psychosexual demons that tore apart Scott Fitzgerald himself — “He kept his fears at bay by hatred and repugnance. And for a while it worked” (22). This sounds rather more like the opening lines to a film noir than the conclusion to an attempt at serious literary criticism. A far more compelling and theoretically informed look at the novel’s sexual dynamics can be found in Frances Kerr’s 1996 essay, “Feeling ‘Half Feminine.’” The title phrase, “half feminine,” comes from a description Fitzgerald once made of his own sensibility as a writer: “I don’t know what it is in me or that comes to me when I start to write. I am half feminine — at least my mind is” (in Turnbull, 259). Kerr situates this and other remarks Fitzgerald made about feminine aesthetic sensibilities within a larger framework of masculinist discourse pervasive among male writers in the modernist period. Male modernists, Kerr argues, tended to associate serious literary effort and craft with masculine achievement; conversely, “the modernist avant-garde chose female images of disease, fat, ignorance, laziness, or sentimentality to signify a lack of either emotional or intellectual vigor” (405). She provides numerous quips from literary giants of the day, ranging from Pound and Joyce to Mencken and Edmund Wilson, to support her contention. By reading the novel against this “modernist dialogue on the gender of emotion in art” (406), Kerr finds a compelling new angle into not only questions of ambiguous sexuality in the book, but also the seemingly time-worn issue of Nick Carraway’s connection to his author. Kerr suggests that Nick, like Fitzgerald, finds himself at the helm of a man’s story, but one so wrought with romantic longing that it threatens to teeter over at any moment into

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feminine sentimentality. Similarly, Nick’s own idealistic admiration for Gatsby can be read as a cover for a far stronger, emotional connection to the “gorgeous” protagonist. The various feints and suppressions of Nick’s narrative are thus manifestations of Nick’s gender trouble: “Nick’s fear of being perceived as feminine and the secret knowledge that he is feminine create the troubling fissures in his personality that we have traditionally described as either moral lapses or narrative unreliability. . . . Nick acts like a man, but — sometimes — feels like a woman” (410). Much as Decker’s essay advances our understanding of ethnicity in the novel through his careful analysis of contemporary discourse on race in America, Kerr’s examination of the text against the backdrop of modernist discourse on gender opens up new ways to look at sexuality in the text.6 As opposed to Wasiolek’s relentless and relatively aimless “outing” of male characters, Kerr, while examining several of the same relationships, reaches conclusions that situate the novel within its own historical and aesthetic moment in compelling ways. Consider her discussion of the McKee episode. While noting that Nick’s references to time at the end of chapter 2 leave some three hours of time unaccounted for, hours presumably spent with McKee, the important questions about Nick and McKee center not so much on what transpired between them but rather on the nature of their mutual attraction. In escaping the aggressive and violent masculinity of Tom and leaving the party with McKee, the effeminate would-be artist, Nick traverses very different modes of masculinity and male relationships, and his usual reserve seems to crumble. Nick’s suppression of details in the scene, a key moment in Fitzgerald’s sexually ambiguous novel, connotes a sense of “homosexual panic,” a term Kerr borrows from queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick to describe an anxiety over disclosure of feelings outside the heterosexual norm.7 In this regard, the odd little episode at the end of chapter 2, consciously or unconsciously ignored by critics for decades, is for Kerr a moment that comments back on gendered and sexual anxieties that exist throughout the novel and indeed have informed its aesthetics as well: What is important here is not whether Nick feels homosexual desire for Mr. McKee but Nick’s responses to both McKee and Tom, responses which create the ambiguity of the whole McKee episode. Rather than an absolute ideological statement about “feminine” emotion in art or a clear revelation of Nick’s sexuality or gender identity, the chapter registers Fitzgerald’s ambivalence toward the high modernist taboo on sentimentality and personal expression and perhaps also anxiety about the nature of his own artistic talent. The chapter’s strange gender transgressions suggest Fitzgerald’s discomfort with strict divisions between masculine and feminine behavior and personality. Homosexual panic, aesthetic and personal — not explicit homosexual desire — is the fragmented subtext of chapter 2. (416)

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In a more general sense, the notion we see here from Kerr — of a text in some way in conversation with the cultural discourses from which it emerged — reflects the influence of new historicist criticism, which would continue to shape criticism of the late twentieth and early twentyfirst centuries. In fact, in a book published just a year before Kerr’s essay appeared, Bryan Washington’s The Politics of Exile (1995), we see another attempt to situate both the gender and race dynamics of The Great Gatsby into the context of broader social and literary discourse. Specifically, Washington considers Gatsby as a sort of response to Henry James’s drama of the American girl attempting to navigate the social order of the Old World, “Daisy Miller.” Washington suggests that in the relationship between Nick and Daisy Fay Buchanan, we are given something of a reimagining of the Winterbourne/Daisy Miller relationship in James’s classic story. Like Winterbourne, Nick observes, classifies, and judges; also like Winterbourne, it is in Nick’s nature to moralize privately rather than engage publicly. But it is the larger textual connections, for Washington, that are most significant: Both texts, he argues, express anxiety at, even “revulsion” (46) over, the prospect of female sexuality, and both are also preoccupied with defending an ideal of whiteness embodied in their respective lead female characters. Hence, though Fitzgerald’s connection to James had been argued from a technical and, to a lesser extent, thematic standpoint for decades by this time, here we see a very different use of intertextual argument, one that situates the discussion specifically within the purview of late-twentieth-century literary criticism. Class, race, gender, and sexuality are often invoked in the criticism of this age as points of entry into unpacking literary texts. Taking a cue from poststructuralist theory — which highlighted the discursive, socially constructed nature of texts — class, race, and gender theorists opened new avenues of approaching classic texts by isolating and destabilizing what were seen as socially constructed systems of meaning at work in the writing. Such is the case with Washington’s take on Fitzgerald’s anxious depiction of race and sexuality in Gatsby. Like Kerr, Washington uses as a jumping off point Sedgwick’s notion of “homosexual panic”; however, he extrapolates beyond the sexual confines of Sedgwick’s formulation to see a text in “various states of panic: sexual, racial, and social” (35). A measure of the impact that contemporary theory had had on Gatsby by this point is that Washington considers his contention about racial anxiety and homosexual panic as central to the novel to be “hardly startling” (35). Washington’s chapter on Gatsby, in fact, provides a good example of both the strengths and weaknesses of the politically inflected, 1990s-style of literary explication. In identifying a fear of female sexuality as a driving force in the narrative, Washington makes a compelling point. Like Paulson, he sees the female figure as split

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in the text, between Daisy (silenced and contained, and therefore acceptable) and Myrtle, who is, in all her vibrant, uncontrollable sexuality, “the potentially relentless force in this gendered cultural garden” that must be “expeditiously weeded out because she places male (textual) authority in . . . peril” (41). In his discussion of racial “panic,” however, Washington provides an object lesson in the dangers of privileging the theory over a careful reading of the text. While his contention that race “dominates the discourse” (40) of the novel and that Fitzgerald ultimately supports Tom Buchanan’s views is certainly a valid, arguable stance, his support of this case is based largely on a misreading. The central point of evidence offered is this: Nick says of his mysterious neighbor: “I knew I had discovered a man of fine breeding after I talked with him for an hour. I said to myself: ‘There’s the kind of man you’d like to take home and introduce to your mother and sister.’” . . . As I shall demonstrate, this is an intricate textual moment. Arguably, it is at this point that Nick’s readiness to welcome Gatsby to the nativist family, to extend a fraternal embrace, is at its most pronounced. Given his earlier reservations about his background, Nick’s renewed conviction that Gatsby is indeed a “man of fine breeding” can be read as an ethnological sigh of relief. (44)

Clever language about nativist families and ethnological sighs aside, the problem with this analysis is that it is based entirely on a misreading. Nick Carraway never makes the “man of fine breeding” speech; the speaker in the passage quoted is Meyer Wolfshiem. Indeed, the passage is so characteristic of Wolfshiem’s manner of speaking, and so opposed to Nick’s, that it is difficult to understand the source of the confusion. The analysis of this scene, unfortunately, continues: “But complicating the deliberation over bringing Gatsby home is desire itself. Does Nick speak as a man, a woman, or both? Like Eliot’s Tiresias, Nick is ‘within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life’ . . . capable, that is, of being both male and female, Jew and gentile, black and white” (45). Again, the rhetorical flourishes here are based on nonexistent textual evidence; there almost seems to be a suggestion made that Nick is “deliberating” about taking Gatsby home to his family in the Midwest. To point out these interpretive errors is not to discount valid ideas that Washington advances, but rather to note that fidelity to the text matters; and we see not only in this work, but also in those of Wasiolek and Kerr, characters misidentified and resultant interpretive gaffes that seem to slight the integrity of the text in favor of advancing methodological or theoretical points.8 While contemporary theory of the late twentieth century enlivened literary analysis by moving beyond the New Critics’ narrow focus on merely the internal dynamics of the text, in

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so doing it also presented the risk of loose handling of the text itself. The central New Critical axiom of “close reading” of the literary text — careful treatment and consideration of what is on the page — is something that should not go out of style in literary analysis, regardless of the prevailing mode of discourse. To be sure, close reading of Gatsby was by no means a thing of the past in this era; several notable works of the eighties and nineties used particularly close textual analysis to advance understanding of narrative perspective and image patterns in the work. André Le Vot, in his 1983 biography of Fitzgerald, examines patterns of light and darkness in the novel, taking in a new direction the discussion of color imagery that dates back to the sixties. Donald Monk, in his very well argued 1983 article, “Fitzgerald: The Tissue of Style,” looks more broadly at image patterns in the book, arguing that the interlocking patterns not only enhance the story, but in effect are the story, far more so than character or plot. Monk traces the pattern of images related to the sporting life and deftly shows how this pattern is linked to the novel’s larger concern about fabricated self-image. Arnold Weinstein, in his 1985 essay “Fiction as Greatness,” focuses on how Fitzgerald’s linguistic and dramatic inventiveness finds its thematic counterpart in the repeated trope of self-invention in the novel. He spends much of the essay examining a passage almost entirely ignored by critics, the “Blocks” Biloxi discussion that transpires between the group at the Plaza hotel, just before Tom’s showdown with Gatsby commences. Calling it the “most fascinating sequence of The Great Gatsby” (33), Weinstein argues that the group conversation about a man who may or may not have even existed highlights the notion of the individual as “irrepressible ghost,” of the “complete self-made man” as a “construct of words” (34). In this regard, Biloxi, the “liberated signifier” that can be shaped “to yield countless . . . signifieds” (37), not only mirrors the self-made Gatsby, but embodies the novel’s larger playfulness, its repeated insistence that, as Nick says, “Anything can happen . . . anything at all” (GG, 55). Further close readings managed to shed new light on what by this point could be seen as a well-worn theme, the notion of the novel as a meditation on American history. John Rohrkemper in 1985 touched on a recurring pattern in which historical or mythic allusions are shown to devolve, in the present day, into shadows or even perversions of their former selves. Hence, the “figure of Daniel Boone de-evolved to Buffalo Bill Cody as embodied in Dan Cody” (156) suggests a loss of genuine American vitality and spirit, as does the reimagining of Franklin’s “plan for moral perfection” in Gatsby’s boyhood schedule and list of “General Resolves” scribbled into his copy of Hopalong Cassidy. The net difference, again, is a loss of founding American idealism: “Gatsby’s plan, unlike Franklin’s, makes no mention of moral improvement; his goal appears

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never to be more than success — material success. Fitzgerald seems to suggest throughout the novel that, in pursuit of our dreams, we have abandoned that element which connects them with the larger dream” (157). The valley of ashes — as a poisoned “farm” — is, in Rohrkemper’s reading, a further example of this patterning in which mythical American allusions become debased: It is Jefferson’s agrarian ideal “corrupted in modern America” (160). In a related vein, John Callahan argues that the American ideal of the “pursuit of happiness” is transformed, in the novel, into a pursuit of property and possessions, resulting in “an American world bleaker and, for all its glut of accumulations, more insubstantial than the spare, monotonous prairie James Gatz started from in rural North Dakota” (“Evolving, 383). Other critics focused more squarely on the workings of narrative. Colin Cass, in a 1980 essay, grapples with Nick’s role as a pander to Gatsby and Daisy’s romance, noting that if Nick is indeed guilty of pandering then the moral weight of his narrative would be called into question. Rather than attempt to resolve Nick’s character issues, as previous critics had done, Cass instead views the conundrum over Nick’s involvement in the affair as a problem of narrative perspective. Having chosen the first-person form, Fitzgerald was forced into a position where his narrator needed to be on hand at the novel’s key events. How, then, to place Nick at the reunion scene while absolving him of culpability? Cass argues that Fitzgerald pulls this off by having the normally astute Nick fail to realize the seriousness of his actions in arranging the reunion. Regarding Nick’s thought that Gatsby’s request of him to set up the reunion was really “such a little thing” (GG, 62), Cass comes to the interesting conclusion that Fitzgerald here consciously allows Nick to miss the point of the request and fail to understand its larger moral ramifications, in order that he can preserve Nick’s integrity as a moralist and the book’s conscience: If Nick had refused on moral grounds, he would have excluded himself from the book’s central scene. And if he had agreed with a worldly tolerance for waywardness in others, then he would have denied himself the right to the sweeping moral pronouncements that the book begins and ends on. Fitzgerald’s only choice is to make Nick seem temporarily to have missed the point. For the plot’s sake Nick must cooperate, but for the theme’s sake he must not appear to cooperate with anything he recognizes as seriously immoral. Furthermore, the author does all he can to distract us from the moral ramifications of what does amount to pandering. (120–21)

Cass goes on to play off Nick’s role in this arrangement against the famous “Dutch sailors” passage at the end of the novel, comparing the two images of pandering in the novel and weighing Nick’s culpability. Ultimately, Cass

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argues that there is so much evidence of Fitzgerald’s efforts to underscore Nick’s credibility and basic moral soundness that Fitzgerald “intends that the reader should not regard Nick as a pander” (122). Where Cass saw problems with perspective, others examined the complexity of time in the narrative. Thomas Pendleton, in his 1993 book I’m Sorry About the Clock, studies with surgical detail the great number of references to time, dates, and seasons that recur throughout the novel. In the process, Pendleton traces a series of chronological inconsistencies and claims that these problems, unnoticed by scholars and presumably nearly all of the book’s countless readers over the previous seventy years, seriously undermine its artistry. While allowing that the novel is not “totally without effective structuring elements” (136), Pendleton argues that The Great Gatsby cannot seriously be considered a masterpiece due to its chronological errors and ambiguities. This argument, however, is based on a narrow and prescriptive view of how time and chronology ought to work in a novel, and also on the sense that Fitzgerald was not in control of the storyline he was creating; others would argue that the playfulness with time is part of the novel’s modernist vision and that “the fragmentation of the linear narrative is probably far from haphazard” (J. Skinner, 135). Indeed, for some, temporal disjunctions comprise the very essence of the novel’s deepest meanings. Tony Magistrale and Mary Jane Dickerson, in a 1989 essay, make such an argument about Gatsby. The use as a framework Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the literary chronotope, a moment of temporal/spatial intersection in the text that heightens the reader’s awareness of time and place. They see the reunion scene, and particularly the incident with the defunct clock from which Pendleton takes the title of his book, as one such chronotope that embodies the text’s larger drama of competing systems of time at work. Their analysis deftly uncovers the serious nuances of the funny scene: That Gatsby has been reunited with Daisy gives momentary substance to his belief that the advance of history can be altered or even halted. And this thesis is symbolically portrayed as Gatsby’s head, the place where his memories of the past originate, is juxtaposed with the broken clock. Actual contact between head and defunct clock, then, suggests a conscious suspension of time in which Gatsby has conquered the passage of time itself. Moreover, this scene is an illustration of Bakhtin’s time-space relationship: Gatsby exists physically in one temporal arena, but mentally inhabits quite another. The clock occupies the center of the chronotope here, as it is materially representative of time in the present, but actually is not, like Gatsby himself, an accurate or valid manifestation of what it appears to be. (122)

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The Bakhtinian perspective used here helps us to see the temporal dislocations of the novel as something other than mere inconsistencies or faults, as Pendleton would have it. They can also be viewed as central to the narrative’s mode of signification. Indeed, the theoretical work of Bakhtin, which was translated into English in the 1970s and ’80s, proved very influential to literary critics and theorists in the last two decades of the century. We see other Bakhtinian approaches to The Great Gatsby in this period, including Richard Godden’s compelling 1982 essay, “The Great Gatsby: Glamor on the Turn.” Godden invokes Bakhtin’s notion of the carnivalesque — that which playfully inverts or distorts accepted social norms — from his work Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, to explain Gatsby’s self-invention: “Gatsby . . . might be the very spirit of carnival. Reality is laughable because it is changeable. Gatsby was Jay Gatz, and look at him now. Daisy loves him through his property — perhaps she too may be changed” (352). Here Bakhtin helps Godden contextualize his case that the novel provides an example of a work existing on two different levels of meaning, the fabricated drama played out by characters who are themselves putting on a glamorous, carnivalesque show, and the deeper drama of Nick Carraway’s narration and its significance. Elsewhere, in stressing the staged nature of the action, Godden relates the plot to Brechtian drama to make a similar point. This fascinating essay shows what theoretically informed reading can do with an open text like The Great Gatsby; rather than enforcing a single analytical framework onto the text, Godden surveys the field, drawing from Marxian, poststructuralist, and psychoanalytic theories in an essay whose playful nature matches that of the text it studies. The goal of the essay, itself related to Bakhtin’s notion of the “doublevoiced” text, is to show the reader how to look beyond the sheen of the dramatic action, to discover what he calls “Nick Carraway’s furtive text,” the “novel within a novel” (371) hidden beneath the glamorous surface. In contrast to what he sees as the “slack and obscuring language” (359) that characterizes the bulk of the critical interpretations over the years, Godden sees in the story a hidden tale of class warfare, one that is submerged in Nick’s narrative precisely because Nick’s “ambivalence toward his own class” (360) prevents him from speaking plainly about such matters. The passage in which Godden reveals this thesis, beginning with his invitation to the reader to think of Gatsby’s death as “a minor skirmish in a continuing class war” (359), is worth quoting at some length: In such a reading, Tom Buchanan, having disembodied his own wife for purposes of display, needs to approach denied satisfactions through the body of the working-class female; an upwardly mobile Gatsby seeks status via the release and theft of the feminine leisure class body. In response, Tom extends the hegemony of his class to

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the abused industrial male. (One can only speculate on how it was done, but it would seem likely that appeals to sexual ownership prompt a man with minimal property to murder Gatsby and destroy himself.) The double death secures Buchanan’s grip on the leisure class “token” and releases him from the growing threat of his own uneasy liaison with the industrial class. Along the way vengeance is enacted by the leisure class female on the offending body of her working-class counterpart — one of Myrtle’s breasts is left flapping, the blood drains away and her vitality is conspicuously evacuated. Nick cannot afford to write this kind of murder story. . . . Consequently, whenever the contradictions within his subject become too disquieting, he turns social aspiration into “dream,” sexual politics into “romance,” and translates class conflict as “tragedy.” (359)

While the notion of considering Gatsby’s class dynamics was not new — and indeed, other critics of this time would examine the book from Marxian and Veblenian perspectives — Godden’s unique contribution lies in his textual approach to class issues in the novel; the idea of a second, “furtive” text of class warfare running in contraposition to the glamorous surface text adds yet another twist to our understanding of the novel’s essential “doubleness.”9 A Bakhtinian perspective of the “double-voiced” or dialogic text also anchors one of the more theoretically complex discussions of the novel from the 1980s, Michael Holquist’s 1988 “Stereotyping and Historiography: Colonialism in The Great Gatsby.” While the title might suggest an examination of attitudes toward race and ethnicity in the novel, in fact Holquist approaches the concept of “stereotyping” from a linguistic perspective. Following Bakhtin’s notion of dialogism, Holquist begins his analysis by working through a philosophical discussion of the relationship between self, other, and language. Holquist argues that notions of self-identity, themselves contingent on immersion in the symbolic field of language, involve a constant negotiation between self and other. Much as the linguistic sign can only aspire to confer fixed meaning on an object through the silencing of other potential or contingent meanings, the “self” can only be defined through contraposition to knowable “others.” Hence, to label or define the other is to attempt to secure one’s own selfdefinition, through the linguistic act of stereotyping. For Holquist, it is thus in the nature of how we use language to stereotype, and therefore all literary texts, not merely postcolonial works, will evidence the use and power of the stereotype. He argues that The Great Gatsby is an exemplary text in this regard, because it “textualizes its own stereotyping with the clarity of a paradigm: in large measure it is ‘about’ the suppression of difference and change required to maintain the (stereotypical) illusion of identity and stasis” (463). If, as Holquist argues, all characters in the book stereotype others, there is no greater stereotypical figure than Jay

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Gatsby himself, a “composite figure . . . of key American stereotypes” (469) whose self-creation amounts to an effort to step outside the boundaries of the symbolic order, outside of time itself, and enter the realm of the mythic. That Nick repeats this gesture in his own portrayal of Gatsby underscores the power of stereotyping in the narrative. While Bakhtinian analyses such as those of Holquist and Godden combine precisely detailed textual readings with an eye toward the broader social relevance of the text, the theoretical school of narratology features a tighter focus on the workings an narrative itself, offering, as one critic put it, the “opportunity to explore how a novel’s formal structures create its aesthetic effects” (Coleman, 208). Narratological analysis of The Great Gatsby may be said to have reached its zenith in Patti White’s 1992 book, Gatsby’s Party. White uses Nick’s famous list of guests who had attended Gatsby’s parties as a jumping off point for discussing the prevalence and function of such listing in modern narratives. What makes Nick’s list paradigmatic, White argues, is its dual functioning both as a meaning-rich component of the narrative and as an identifiable, self-referential structural marker of how meaning is transmitted in the narrative. That is, for White, the logic of listing as seen in Gatsby reflects the larger function of narrative, which entails using listing, patterning, and other internal structures as a way of limiting and organizing information to create a meaningful whole — or, as White puts it, as a means of “maintaining order in the face of encroaching chaos” (29). Like many others who work from a narratological perspective, White writes with a scientist’s eye for detail and structure of narrative; thus, useful insights into the functioning of the narrative sometimes need to be unpacked patiently from a blur of dense, multisyllabic pronouncements. For example, after helpfully defining novels as “supersystems” composed of a series of “coherent and cooperative systems” (59) such as the author system, reader system, and textual system, White digs deeper into what makes the textual system of Gatsby work: The narratological component of The Great Gatsby is a function of internal operations that categorize data and transmit formal codes in a structural language. . . . Gatsby’s entire systemic structure suggests a realization of pattern recognition and formal transmission, and certainly its narrative strategy is initiated by Nick Carraway’s attempts to collect, filter, and categorize information about Jay Gatsby. And that strategy is formalized by Carraway’s subsequent codification of information into a transferable structure. Thus, Carraway’s narrative is informed by his information-processing endeavors, which are themselves informed by the patterns into which Gatsby data clusters resolve over time. Indeed, a multiscalar recursive symmetry, encoding pattern recognition and translation procedures, operates between and across each systemic level so that the Gatsby supersystem is pattern dependent at any point of observation. (63–64)

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Does any of that sound familiar? It should, but it may not. Essentially, what we have here is a return to the discussion, popular from the early sixties onward, of the importance of patterning in the novel. One might recall Bruce Stark’s observation, from some twenty years earlier, that the rich patterns of the book are “elements in an extremely complex and unified system of internal, nonreferential meanings. . . . Its words cannot be separated and attached to sign-values: all possible sign-values of a word are absorbed into a complexity of verbal relations” (59). And while it is true that narratology (and some strains of poststructuralism) could be said to be, with their intense focus on the formal properties of the text, dressed-up New Criticism, it is what the narratologists do with their focus on patterning and narrative systems that sets this later criticism apart. White, for example, renders all of the critical huff over Nick Carraway’s credibility, character, and morality over the years to be utterly beside the point, at least from a systemic perspective. For White, Nick is important as the structuring agent of the narrative, the one who decides what goes into and what gets left out of his account of Jay Gatsby. It goes without saying, therefore, that he will privilege some types of information and exclude others; this fact is not evidence of unreliability or deception but rather part of the very essence of his role as narrator — to manage information, to communicate messages, to control chaos. In a sense part of White’s argument recalls Peter Lisca’s interesting 1967 essay, “Nick Carraway and the Imagery of Disorder.” Whereas Lisca had argued that Nick served as a mediating factor amidst the social chaos that surrounded him within the world of the novel’s action, for White, his role is to impose a sense of order on textual chaos. It is the nature of narration itself to attempt to create, through selectivity, patterning and internal signification, some kind of order from a chaotic plenitude of material, an alwayslooming textual riot that constantly threatens disorder. Nick as narrator is therefore neither to be lauded nor condemned for his moral fiber; what matters is the tension that runs throughout the novel between Nick’s success and failure in transmitting his vision of Gatsby and of the events of that summer. The guest list itself is the embodiment of this tension: With its extensive length, detail, and intimations of ethnic and class affiliations among the summer’s guests, it aspires “to represent a fullness” (68), but Nick’s omissions, failures of memory, and inclusion of seemingly unnamed or interchangeable characters push the list into a “condition of ambiguity” (69). Paradigmatically, self-referentially, the list embodies the value of structure and pattern while simultaneously undercutting it. The resultant ambiguity is nothing to fret over; indeed, it is, as White suggests in her provocative summary of the battle between order and chaos in the narrative of Gatsby, the name of the game:

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Complex systems thrive on imperfection, on environmental challenge and ambiguous data. Predictability and precision actually squelch the . . . processes that enable complex systems to extend their operations; without internal or external chaos to manage, such systems become unregenerative, inert, and doomed. . . . With sufficient variation and difficulty in the data pool, however, systems flourish, inhabiting a region that fluctuates between order and chaos. (70)

The objective and precise language of narratology — evident in the above passage from White, with its references to “complex systems” and their “operations,” drawn from a varied “data pool” — threatens on occasion to make literature sound more like a science than an art. Nonetheless, the objectivity and precision of narratology help to generate acute insights into the workings of narrative; for a richly crafted and complicated narrative like the one Fitzgerald produced in The Great Gatsby, such textual insights enhance our understanding of the work’s significance. A very different kind of textual approach to Fitzgerald’s writing in The Great Gatsby — perhaps it would be more accurate to call it a contextual approach — can be seen in Ronald Berman’s two books on the novel from the 1990s, works with which we will complete our discussion of Gatsby criticism in the 1990s. In contrast to formalist critics who looked inwardly at the workings of the narrative, in “The Great Gatsby” and Modern Times (1994) and “The Great Gatsby” and Fitzgerald’s World of Ideas (1997), Berman looks outward; using a kind of dialectical perspective, he works to situate the novel within its own historical moment, arguing that the text reveals its author’s deep engagement with both the popular culture of his day and, perhaps more significantly, intellectual and philosophical conversations afoot at the time. In “The Great Gatsby” and Modern Times, Berman situates the characters and events of the novel within the prevailing cultural context of its times — no, not the world of bathtub gin and flapper dresses, but a world caught up in the onrush of modernity, where fixed ideas and identities were dissolving in a new, fluid social order. Berman examines how echoes of this spirit of modernity infuse the text. The spectacular assemblage of settings and place references — “few other works of fiction locate themselves so firmly among so many identified places” (45) — inexorably dissolves into a sense of geographic confusion, reflective of modern rootlessness and “drift” (44), and a repeated yearning for a “lost Eden” (46); some characters’ attempts at self-reinvention — from Jimmy Gatz’s anglicizing of his name to Myrtle Wilson’s relentless decorating and accessorizing — echo the age’s spirit of self-improvement as seen in popular periodicals and through the advertising industry; other characters’ tendency to pose and don temporary, contrived identities — such as Daisy,

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who “generally plays to an audience and has a shrewd sense of how she is being received” (114) — reflects the influence of the visual mass media and arts, stage and film, on one hand, and print advertising, on the other; and in a larger sense, the text as a whole, particularly Fitzgerald’s use of the visual code and his handling of dramatic scenes, displays the profound influence of motion pictures on the novel. We might say that Berman’s work in this study approaches the novel from an intertextual perspective, illuminating in fresh and exciting new ways the sense of how the novel was in conversation with ideas, concerns, and attitudes bubbling throughout the popular culture of the day. In “The Great Gatsby” and Fitzgerald’s World of Ideas, Berman pushes his contextual discussion in directions that open the text to yet more new approaches. Arguing for a new outlook on Fitzgerald’s writing that accepts and analyzes the author’s engagement with his own historical moment, Berman reacts against both the critical tradition that insists on viewing the novel from a mythic, and thus trans-historical, standpoint, and the work of scholars who would impose a contemporary historical perspective on a work from an entirely different generation and historical moment — indeed, from a different America and a different world. A founding assumption of Berman’s approach is his revaluation of Fitzgerald as a member of an artistic and intellectual community: “Fitzgerald was a first-rate observer of the American scene. It is, I think, no longer possible to think of him as a lightweight; he was, in fact, more knowledgeable and considerably more sensible than those who have confused his life with his mind” (2–3). Understanding the important argument that Berman puts forth in this work necessitates some context of its own: To be sure, Berman is not the first scholar to have suggested Fitzgerald’s connection to prevailing philosophical questions and issues. As noted in this chapter and indeed throughout, Richard Lehan and others have studied reflections of the philosophy of Spengler and of eugenicists and nativists like Grant and Stoddard in The Great Gatsby, and others have likened the text’s recoiling from a chaotic modernity in favor of stable, mythic images of the past to the prevailing tone of Henry Adams’s influential The Education of Henry Adams (1905). Where Berman does break new ground is in the cultural conversation within which he places Fitzgerald and, specifically, Gatsby. Arguing that the author was attuned to the ideas being debated by the “Public Philosophers” of the age, including Santayana, Dewey, Lippmann, and Royce, Berman claims that in both themes and language, The Great Gatsby “echoes a great American conversation” (7) that transpired throughout Fitzgerald’s lifetime. One example of this “conversation” in play in the text involves the tension invoked throughout between the urban center and a series of landscapes of memory — from images of pastoral myth to memories of childhood small towns. The tension that Fitzgerald sets up between the city

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and the provinces, Berman argues, responds to an ongoing debate about the issue among the public philosophers. Following the lead of William James, “the principle figure of Public Philosophy” (31), who linked the modern city with anonymity and alienation, thinkers like Royce argued for a return to the provinces as the answer to that sense of alienation. As Berman notes, “It is a plot that Fitzgerald considers; although it might be said that he changes the scenario from a cavalry charge to an exhausted retreat” (36). Indeed, this idea of a “retreat” from the chaotic life of the metropolis also situates the novel in conversation with the Public Philosophy in a larger sense: Unlike James and Royce, who argued the importance of the individual’s active engagement with civil society (especially the educated and well-to-do individual), a character like Tom is quick to pronounce his verdict on society, but utterly unwilling to engage with his world or lend his considerable energies to it: “Tom’s response is to see America — and ‘the modern world’ of which it is a part — as a pigsty. He and Daisy will ‘retreat’ from it, close themselves off hermetically from present realities. The response itself is an American issue, transplanted by Fitzgerald from contemporary arguments on the need to come to terms with the times” (41–42). On the other side of the coin is a character like Myrtle Wilson, who devotes all her energy into being part of a larger social scene but who lacks any sort of social agency that would allow her to direct her energies productively. Instead with her mind “tactically shaped” (51) not only by Tom but also by middle-brow popular culture, via magazines like Town Tattle and its advertisements, Myrtle’s vitality results only in an unquenchable acquisitiveness that leads to the humorously cramped and chaotic furnishing of her apartment in Washington Heights. As Berman notes, the physical chaos that ensues there also can be read as a fictive representation of the concern over chaotic modern times expressed throughout the culture, from the realm of the Public Philosophy to the literature of Fitzgerald’s fellow American authors. Indeed, Berman traces a larger theme of contrast between contemporary social chaos and the social order of an imagined or faded past throughout the work. He analyzes the nature of Gatsby’s parties — their inevitable descent from the outmoded sense of order embodied by their host to the chaos that prevails later on — as well as Nick’s famous list of Gatsby’s guests as textual embodiments of this tension: Fitzgerald is sympathetic to the energies of the new majority, but he is also aware that the democratic crowd in the early twenties was a literary and political trope of disorder. The writings of the Public Philosophy address the crowd as a danger to community. The crowd is the reason why national character must be leavened by aristocracy: that is, by those who really are what Tom Buchanan wants to be. (93)

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That is, the peculiarly democratic social world that Gatsby builds, with its mix of old-guard clans and immigrant family names, connotes not just a sense of interchangeability (Berman aptly points to Nick’s description of Benny McClenahan’s “four girls,” who are “never quite the same ones in physical person but . . . so identical one with another that it inevitably seemed they had been there before [GG, 50]), but also an undermining of the social register altogether. In this sense, Fitzgerald is delving into an area of great concern to philosophers such as Santayana, who dreaded the prospective vulgarization of society, should the masses be allowed to influence the broader culture without the moderating presence of an aristocratic tradition. Fitzgerald, Berman argues, not only imagines Santayana’s fear in Gatsby but in fact “has made the case more extreme: the aristocracy has not affected the mass but has been absorbed by it. In the process, it has been denatured” (95). What is left of the aristocratic influence, in the world of this novel, is two-faced Tom Buchanan objecting to the “menagerie” of Gatsby’s home, and then dashing off at Gatsby’s party, under cover of the raucous crowd, to try to pick up another woman. Berman’s analysis in this work sets itself apart from much previous critical (and, for that matter, biographical) work on Fitzgerald through its insistence on seeing Fitzgerald’s thinking and writing in general — and The Great Gatsby in particular — as part of its cultural and historical moment. That this moment was something far more than a riotous Jazz Age stereotype and in fact reveals itself to be, on examination, a fascinating period in our history when highbrow culture met low, when artists were alive to the stirrings of a more widely accessible world of popular culture, and when philosophy was part of the public domain and life, is a key contribution of Berman’s scholarship in his two books on Gatsby from the nineties. That his work has been influential can be seen in the number of works already published in the twenty-first century that attempt, in various ways, to consider The Great Gatsby through the lens of historical, intellectual, and cultural context.

Notes 1

By this point, the grail quest theme had been covered many times by critics. Indeed, the parallel had been a staple of critical discussion since the novel first began to be taken seriously by critics. As noted in chapter 2, one of the earliest scholarly essays of merit, William Troy’s “Scott Fitzgerald: The Authority of Failure,” established many areas of interest that would be explored by future scholars. Among these was his assertion that “By means of its enforced perspective the book takes on the pattern and the meaning of a Grail-romance — or of the initiation ritual on which it is based” (57).

2

Misspelling the last name of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg (as “Eckleberg” [214]) is one thing, but these writers also misread a section of the text, a little piece of

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characterization in which Nick describes Gatsby’s lavish bathroom, including his “toilet set of pure gold” (GG, 91). In their reading, Kehl and Cooper refer to Gatsby’s “toilet seat of pure gold” (213), invoking an unintentionally funny scatological image probably better left on their own editing room floor (though thankfully not!). 3

As Lehan notes, Fitzgerald wrote to Max Perkins, “I read [Spengler] the summer I was writing The Great Gatsby, and I don’t think I ever quite recovered from him” (in Lehan, “Destiny,” 137). See Letters of Scott Fitzgerald, 289.

4

In a 2006 essay, Joe Kraus argues a related point: “Gatsby is no self-creation; he is instead Wolfshiem’s creation. As a consequence, Gatsby is part of a four-century game of moving from the outside in. . . . Gatsby may not be ethnic in the sense that Wolfshiem is . . . but he is nonetheless someone caught up in the same forces confronting anyone trying to find his or her way into what he imagines as America” (141). Kraus argues that this strange parallel between Gatsby and the vilified, stereotyped Jewish gangster provides a case in point for how the novel can be read as a work of ethnic fiction.

5

For another view of how the novel reflects contemporary anxieties over ethnic purity and reacts to the “scientific” literature being published on the topic, see Bert Bender, “‘His Mind Aglow’: The Biological Undercurrent in Fitzgerald’s Gatsby and Other Works.” Bender argues that the “principles of eugenics, accidental heredity, and sexual selection” (400) are central to the novel, and that in his working through of these issues Fitzgerald was indebted to the “biogenetic” theories of Ernest Haeckel, as put forth in his 1900 book, The Riddle of the Universe at the Close of the Nineteenth Century.

6

For a more recent exploration of gender in the novel that functions along similar lines, see Greg Forter’s essay, “Against Melancholia.” Using the framework of contemporary mourning theory, Forter argues that the novel mourns the loss of an expressive form of masculine identity, as seen in Jay Gatsby.

7

See Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet. For a related discussion of how Fitzgerald’s writing struggled with accepted gender definitions of the day, see Catherine B. Burroughs, “Of ‘Sheer Being’,” where Burroughs describes Fitzgerald as “keenly observant and deeply connected to the predicament facing both men and women who rebel against gender roles. He is more attuned than any author I know to the plight of the man who feels deeply and wants to express his emotions while still receiving assurances that society will accept him as ‘a regular guy’” (105).

8

Like Wasiolek, Kerr misidentifies Jordan as the woman whom Nick recalls sporting a moustache of perspiration when she plays tennis.

9

Arguing from a Marxist perspective, Ross Posnock in 1984 states that the novel presents “a capitalist society that Fitzgerald reveals to be profoundly incoherent” (202); E. Ray Canterbery in 1999 looks at the novel through the lens of Thorstein Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class and concludes that “the class distinctions made in The Great Gatsby are clearly Veblenian, not Marxist” (303).

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5: Twenty-First-Century G: The Great Gatsby as Cultural Icon Performance (and) Anxiety: The Cultural Turn in Gatsby Scholarship

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hile it is surely too soon to make definitive statements about the trajectory of Gatsby criticism in the new millennium, certainly the industry is alive and well, as the volume of scholarly output continues unabated. While one could argue that the age of high theory has passed, the theoretically informed approaches of the 1980s and ’90s have impacted the shape of Gatsby criticism to this day. Of particular note is the sustained interest in the historicity of the text, and particularly how it responded to the discourses of its own moment — from pervasive notions about race, gender, and national identity discussed in the popular magazines to the imagery offered in popular music and entertainment. A brief look at some of the more interesting scholarly takes on Gatsby from the new millennium shows a concerted effort to examine the novel’s cultural relevance. Scholars are continuing to deepen the connection between the text and its own age, and in the process expanding our understanding of Fitzgerald’s historical consciousness. One of the primary sources for much of the innovative work on Gatsby in the new century has been the F.  Scott Fitzgerald Review, an annual journal of Fitzgerald studies, founded in 2002. The Review picks up where the founding periodicals in Fitzgerald studies — the quarterly Fitzgerald Newsletter (1958–68) and the Fitzgerald/Hemingway Annual (1969–79) — left off some years earlier, in providing scholars an opportunity to explore specific texts, approaches, and interpretive avenues free of the constraints potentially imposed by more general interest journals. The Review published some twenty articles devoted specifically to Gatsby in the first decade of the century, and in this broad range of work there is evidence of both traditional frameworks and entirely new directions. While the influence study lives on, for example, the range of source material has taken interesting new turns: Dickens, Kipling, Chekhov, and Chaucer were all explored as influences on Gatsby in separate Review essays, while the already established connection to John Keats was pushed in innovative new directions by Lauren Rule-Maxwell, in her 2010 Review essay, “The New Emperor’s Clothes.” A number of essays continued the

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work of situating the novel more specifically within its cultural and intellectual moment: While Raymond M. Vince, in a 2006 essay, argued for connections between Gatsby and the “new physics” of Einstein, and Ronald Berman, in 2005, considered the relationship between Fitzgerald’s writing and Freudian psychology in the 1920s, other critics published in the Review explored further Fitzgerald’s ties to the popular culture of the day. Recent essays by Thomas Dilworth and Sharon Hamilton explore Gatsby’s connections to the contemporary worlds of advertising and gossip magazines, respectively. Eric Rawson, in a 2010 essay, examines the novel’s links to emergent communication technology; he analyzes telephone calls as a structuring agent in the narrative, arguing convincingly that a “telephonic logic . . . collapsing real time and virtual space, is one of the fundamental narrative strategies of The Great Gatsby” (92). If these essays suggest a desire among recent critics to push established models of thought about the novel in new directions, much the same could be said about one of the first major twenty-first-century Gatsby essays, Scott Donaldson’s “Possessions in The Great Gatsby.” While he approaches the book by way of examining its perspective on economics and class (a stable enough interpretive category, by now), Donaldson focuses our attention squarely on the function of commodities in the text, in the process granting Fitzgerald credit for a more complex and subtle critique of American capitalism than had previously been noted by most commentators. Donaldson employs Marx’s notion of “commodity fetishism” — the mistaken belief that a product has value in itself, outside of the labor required to produce it — in this compelling analysis of the relation between people and things in the novel.1 He argues that nearly all of the major characters become so absorbed in the acquisition and display of commodities (Veblen, and his key concept of conspicuous consumption, also figure into this analysis) that they become overtaken by their own fixation on material things and, in turn, are themselves “reduced to commodities” (201). This sorry state is most apparent in the case of the two manslaughter victims, the pair linked by their futile aspirations of social advancement, Myrtle and Gatsby. Donaldson’s analysis of these characters calls to mind Pierre Bourdieu’s ideas on the links between cultural capital and class distinction. Much as Bourdieu argues that acquired goods and aesthetic dispositions together comprise the cultural capital that defines an individual’s class position, Donaldson sees in the victims of this novel individuals who understand the need to participate in a culture game, but who just don’t know how to play it.2 Both Myrtle and Gatsby are “guilty of a crucial error in judgment. They are alike unwilling or unable to comprehend that it is not money alone that matters, but money combined with secure social position. In the attempt to transcend their status through a show of possessions, they are undone by the lack of cultivation that

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drives them to buy the wrong things” (194). That their failure is essentially predetermined is a central point of Fitzgerald’s critique of the class system in the novel. Though critics “often stress Fitzgerald’s ambivalence toward the moneyed classes,” Donaldson argues that “over the course of his career Fitzgerald’s admiration for the rich faded and his criticism of their way of life intensified” (198). If the somewhat offhanded nods to socialist thought present in his first novel, This Side of Paradise, would eventually lead to “the attack on capitalism dramatized in Tender Is the Night” (198), then Gatsby, with its insistent focus on both thoughtless acquisitiveness and the careless cruelty of the rich, marks, for Donaldson, a turning point in Fitzgerald’s economic sensibilities. Though he does not consider Gatsby a Marxist novel — “It is highly unlikely that Fitzgerald had read any Marx when he wrote Gatsby, yet his political thinking had come a long way since This Side of Paradise” — he does argue that the novel’s critique of capitalism demonstrates that “Fitzgerald intuitively grasped and illustrated basic Marxian precepts” (199). One of the more compelling aspects of Donaldson’s essay is his sense of what we might call the performativity of class status, wherein characters attempt to adopt or act out — some successfully, others not — class affiliations and attitudes gleaned from the popular culture of the day. In a different but not unrelated vein, Kirk Curnutt, in his recent essay, “The Great Gatsby and the 1920s,” explores the performance of romance and sexuality in the novel, setting his analysis in the context of popular novels and films of the day. The conclusions Curnutt reaches may surprise readers of today who might assume Gatsby to have been a “racy” novel for its time. After all, we recall the shock of some contemporary newspaper reviewers who recoiled at the moral looseness of the novel. But seeing the book in its literary and pop-culture context, Curnutt argues that such an understanding of the novel is quite far off the mark. He situates his discussion by arguing a key point about the 1920s: “Every bit as much as the fabled 1960s, the decade was obsessed with eros and eroticism” (“Great,” 640). Curnutt cites as examples such works as Elinor Glyn’s bestselling erotic romance novel, It (1927), and Edith Maude Hull’s 1919 romance novel, The Sheik, which was subsequently made into the immensely popular 1921 silent film of the same name, starring Rudolph Valentino. Seeing in such works evidence of a sexual revolution in the decade, Curnutt argues that The Great Gatsby contrasts markedly with their eroticism, particularly in its protagonist, whose idealized sense of romance is a far cry from the rapacious sexuality of a male lead like Hull’s Sheik. In contrast to the growing fad, in fiction and film, for seductive male leads, Curnutt notes “something often overlooked in The Great Gatsby: when compared to such figures, Jay Gatsby does not strike one as particularly sexy” (642). Curnutt’s goal in this fresh look at romance and sexuality is to encourage a reassessment of Fitzgerald’s reputation — not so much transforming

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him “from libertine to prig” (in the novel’s terms), but suggesting something more complex. Ultimately, Curnutt regards Fitzgerald not as the standard-bearer for the newly open sexuality of the age, but a critic of it: “Gatsby’s lack of sexual animalism reflects Fitzgerald’s disenchantment with the gender determinism that lay beneath the 1920s’ conception of true romance” (643). Curnutt’s essay invites us to see the novel in a new light, through the connections he builds to the popular novels that shared shelf space with Gatsby. Similar connections to contemporary popular culture factor into one of the more ambitious essays published at the beginning of the new century, Mitchell Breitweiser’s “Jazz Fractures: F. Scott Fitzgerald and Epochal Representation.” Breitweiser focuses his discussion on the significance of jazz in the novel, arguing that the distinctly modern musical form, African American in origin and essence yet already, in the 1920s, being appropriated by white orchestras and as entertainment for white audiences, represents more than a musical backdrop to the action of the book. Instead jazz, a musical form “understood as energy and velocity” (368) and associated with black culture, resonates with those elements of the narrative that threaten to disturb the unity of the society depicted — including Gatsby, “the restless, not-quite-really-white roughneck” (368). Breitweiser looks specifically at the composition played at one of Gatsby’s parties, a fictitious piece by an invented (and cheekily named) composer, “Vladimir Tostoff’s ‘Jazz History of the World’” (GG, 41). He argues that this piece embodies the threat to organic unities posed by this insurgent, individualistic, improvised musical form and includes discussion of a long passage from the manuscript version of the novel in which Nick attempts to describe each of the movements of the largely baffling “Jazz History,” a passage entirely deleted from the final, published version. Nick’s fascination and frustration with the composition indicate Fitzgerald’s own struggle to come to terms with the significance of a musical form that was not only popular, but symbolically reflective of the fractures, discontinuities, and improvisations of modern culture. This is not the only essay of the new century to discuss Fitzgerald’s use of music in the novel. T. Austin Graham, in his recent article “The Literary Soundtrack,” focuses on the popular music represented in the text. He counters Breitweiser’s assertion that the insurgent African American art form of jazz has a particularly strong weight in Gatsby: “Breitwieser’s eloquent and compelling argument leaves untouched the novel’s many real and literally audible songs, very few of which are likely to strike the contemporary listener as signifying blackness in any meaningful way” (524). Instead, Graham highlights Fitzgerald’s repeated references to popular music, the ditties of the day that would have been as recognizable to a contemporary reader as last year’s fashion trend. This approach, Graham argues, “anchors Fitzgerald’s mythic, imagined world in a specifically

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dated, eminently recognizable setting, reinforcing the novel’s signature contrast of Platonic conception and persistent actuality” (540).3 In his discussion of Gatsby, Graham focuses particularly on the song “Three O’Clock in the Morning,” which Daisy sings “in a husky, rhythmic whisper” (GG, 84) at Gatsby’s final party. While Nick is enthralled by her voice in the scene, finding her delivery “bringing out a meaning in each word that it had never had before and would never have again” (84), Graham points out that “Three O’Clock in the Morning” is in fact a rather obvious love song with the most self-evident of meanings. Yet Fitzgerald’s selection of songs for his novel’s “soundtrack,” Graham argues, deepens characterization even in cases, such as this one, where it would appear to suggest a sense of superficiality: “Even when it seems so harmonious as to be almost hackneyed, music makes Fitzgerald’s point by negative rather than positive example, in this scene rendering Daisy increasingly unknowable even as it seems to lay bare her mood and mind, pulling readers into her performance at the same time that Fitzgerald points toward something in it that defies description” (540). The persistent use of forgettable pop music also highlights the fleeting, ephemeral nature not only of the romances, but also of the society Fitzgerald depicts in the novel. Meredith Goldsmith, in her 2003 essay “White Skin, White Mask,” also turns to the issue of music, and particularly to “Vladimir Tostoff’s ‘Jazz History of the World,’” arguing that Fitzgerald’s inclusion of this fictitious piece draws our attention to the larger performativity of race and ethnicity in the novel. In its appropriation of a black musical form for the harmless entertainment of white guests, the piece embodies repeated textual echoes of hidden or subsumed ethnic identity: “Like Gatsby’s techniques of class assimilation, the ‘Jazz History’ substitutes imitation for authenticity: when the ‘Jazz History’ actually uses jazz, it uses only the pieces most familiar and unthreatening to a white middle-class audience” (455). Goldsmith, like Breitweiser, sees Fitzgerald’s decision to remove a long passage about the “Jazz History” as a significant suppression in the text: “The ultimate excision of the ‘Jazz History’ masks parallels between Gatsby’s self-transformation, racial passing, and ethnic Americanization, driving a deeper wedge between notions of race, ethnic, and workingclass difference” (445). Much as the excised material highlighted a kind of cultural conversation between white and black musical forms, the protagonist of the novel follows a path toward cultural assimilation that marks him as similar to protagonists of ethnic and African American novels of the early twentieth century. In noting that Nick compares Gatsby’s success to that of ethnic immigrants and Tom obliquely equates Gatsby’s romantic pursuit of Daisy to “intermarriage between black and white” (GG, 101), Goldsmith argues that we can read Jay Gatsby as a character making an (ultimately failed) attempt to “pass” as white Anglo Saxon and thus gain social acceptance. Indeed, Goldsmith claims that both the

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character of Jay Gatsby and the novel as a whole can profitably be read in terms of a relationship to “early-twentieth-century literary models of black and ethnic self-invention” (445). In this focus on Gatsby as a character embodying ambiguous or multiple ethnic identities, Goldsmith is by no means alone. In his 2001 “Undiscovering the Country: Conrad, Fitzgerald, and Meta-National Form,” Peter Mallios argues that Jay Gatsby serves as the catalyst for Nick Carraway’s ruminations on national identity precisely because of his unknowable, and hence malleable, ethnic and class identity: Just as Gatsby personally serves as the missing center of his parties — no one ever seems quite sure where he is — he also narratively serves as an elided site through which the novel ponders the class, racial, and ethnic boundaries his presence seems to blur. Gatsby is of the humblest social origins yet the highest class approximation; he is a concrete intimate of Wolfsheim yet has had (and will have again) concrete intimacy with Daisy; he summons images of ethnic immigrants and internal racial minorities, and yet he also captivates Nick Carraway’s imagination as cricket-playing associate of the Earl of Doncaster at Oxford. Gatsby . . . occupies the social center of his novel . . . because he marks the border zone where worlds collide. (370)4

In this reading, Gatsby thus allows Nick to envision a pluralistic national identity while also claiming Gatsby as one his own. While the portrayal of Gatsby in the text is evidence of Nick’s own ambivalent national vision, “Gatsby also becomes the site at which Nick attempts, through various strategies, to assemble narratives of American cultural continuity” (384). In contrast to Goldsmith, who argues that Gatsby’s attempts to work his way into East Egg society are akin to contemporary narratives of racial passing, Mallios sees the stubborn vacancy at the heart of Jay Gatsby — “Mr. Nobody From Nowhere” — as something of a philosophical or rhetorical tool with which Nick, and Fitzgerald, work to create a vision of national identity. Or, on the other hand, perhaps Jay Gatsby is black. This is the contention raised by Carlyle Van Thompson in his 2004 book, The Tragic Black Buck. Thompson takes Goldsmith’s argument to another level: Where Goldsmith saw philosophical and narrative correlations to narratives of racial passing, Thompson declares that Gatsby is in fact a narrative of racial passing: “Indeed, the narrative constantly whispers the presence of blackness. Fitzgerald’s extravagant protagonist and antihero Jay Gatsby is the manifestation of his creator’s deep-seated apprehensions concerning miscegenation between blacks and whites, in that Fitzgerald, writing about the quest for the American Dream, guilefully characterizes Jay Gatsby as a ‘pale’ black individual who passes for white” (75). Thompson’s argument

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is based on the sound assumption that Jay Gatsby is, in fact, “passing” himself off as something other than he is, and moreover the discussions of the both the novel’s and author’s racial attitudes are effective. The essay strains credulity, however, in that no convincing evidence is offered to explain why one should consider Jay Gatsby to be an African American character. Thompson’s assertions that Fitzgerald’s descriptions of Gatsby’s extravagant parties and mode of dress “create a minstrel image” of the character, one akin to “a black actor in whiteface” (85) lack sufficient textual support to make the claim hold. The case becomes yet more tenuous when Daisy is identified as another black character passing for white; here, the discussion reaches outside the world and language of the novel altogether in search of support: Daisy’s names hold an interesting racial possibility, because daisies are flowers that have mixed colors. In terms of Fitzgerald’s naming of Daisy Buchanan, according to Webster’s International Dictionary a ‘nigger daisy’ is yellow outside and brown inside. The suggestion here is Daisy may also be a product of miscegenation or possibly a light-skinned black woman passing as white. Fitzgerald delicately whispers this possibility through naming and characterizations. (83)

Analysis such as this suggests the limits inherent in imposing a theoretical framework on a text in too lockstep a fashion. While Thompson’s analysis, like Goldsmith’s, usefully complicates our understanding of the drama of Gatsby’s attempts at “passing,” his reliance on a black-white binary unnecessarily limits the discussion of a text that does display, as Thompson notes, manifold racial and ethnic anxieties. A more sound and compelling treatment of Gatsby as both ethnic outsider and, paradoxically, American Everyman can be found in Barbara Will’s 2005 essay, “The Great Gatsby and The Obscene Word.” As the title of the essay suggests, Will focuses in specifically on the moment, in the penultimate scene of the novel, in which Nick spies an obscene word scrawled on Gatsby’s steps; Nick erases the word, “drawing my shoe raspingly along the stone” (GG, 140). Will aptly notes that few critics discuss the scene at all, much less consider it particularly significant (I also look at this scene, from a different perspective, in my essay on the novel, which I will discuss shortly). For Will, the passage is crucial, in that the erased obscenity can be thought of, both symbolically and textually, as reflecting Gatsby himself. Like an obscenity, a textual symbol that is unspeakable because it lies outside the boundaries of conventional signification, “Gatsby is a figure who problematizes the nature of figuration itself, drawing the text toward an abject void. . . . But Gatsby is also a figure whose obscenity lies in the challenge he poses to ‘the presentable,’ to the natural and the normal” (128). Like the obscenity that must be erased in order to preserve a sense of decorum, Gatsby is a figure outside the bounds of

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“normal” society, a “threatening figure of the alien, unassimilable” (128) to the larger culture. In this regard, Will links Gatsby to the figure of the ethnic others who so threaten a Nordicist like Tom Buchanan. By calling attention to Nick’s erasure of the obscenity, Will argues, Fitzgerald “deliberately emphasizes the process through which the ‘whitewashing’ of Gatsby’s reputation takes place” (128). In this fascinating reading of the unjustly overlooked scene, Will demonstrates that it is only through the erasure of his “obscene” properties that Gatsby becomes eligible to stand in for a mythic vision of America in the novel’s famous close. Following points made by Decker and others, she suggests that it is Gatsby’s mysterious origins and background, his “racial indeterminacy” (132), that must be removed if he is to come, as Lionel Trilling famously put it, “inevitably to stand for America itself.” Because it is erased, “Gatsby’s obscenity becomes the absence that allows the text’s ultimate presence to emerge: the presence of generations of Nordic American settlers, mythically united for a moment in Nick’s transhistorical vision of national essence” (139).

The Schoolmasters of Ever Afterward: Gatsby in the Classroom Several other essays touching on issues of race, class, historicity, and national vision in the novel would appear in the first major collection of new essays on Gatsby in the new century, Jackson Bryer and Nancy VanArsdale’s Approaches to Teaching Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” (2009). In some ways, it is no surprise that a number of significant essays on Gatsby from the new millennium would come from a volume devoted to approaches to teaching the novel. While this study has looked at various reasons for the ascent of The Great Gatsby from forgotten period piece to national classic — from initial biographical interest in Scott Fitzgerald, to the emergence of American literature studies under the aegis of the New Criticism and the subsequent search for richly patterned works that reflected American themes, to the dense social and historical valences of the book that seem ever ripe for new interpretations — one key factor that has been lurking in the background all along has been the use of The Great Gatsby as an assigned novel in college and high school classrooms. We recall Fitzgerald’s comment in the “author’s apology” that prefaced an edition of his 1920 debut novel, This Side of Paradise: “My whole theory of writing I can sum up in one sentence: An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward.” It seems that Fitzgerald, with this novel at least, realized his dream. Received as a racy novel “of the season” on its release, and dissected relentlessly by scholars in the decades following Fitzgerald’s death, the book has proven

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so successful and durable in the classroom that it may well appeal to the schoolmasters “of ever afterward.” In an essay from almost four decades ago, Kenneth Eble suggested, in attempting to come to term’s with Gatsby’s meteoric rise from forgotten period piece to national treasure, an angle somewhat different from the usual discussions of social relevance, mythic sweep and conscious artistry: “The continuing popularity of Gatsby, even its high reputation among academic literary critics, is no certain measure of its greatness. For one thing, the revival of interest in Fitzgerald coincided with the great expansion of higher education. Students in lit classes had to have something to read, and Gatsby was American, reasonably recent, and short” (“Great,” 34). Bryer and VanArsdale, in their preface to their volume of essays, indicate that the trend continues today, reporting that “the novel is taught in countless secondary school, undergraduate, and graduate courses throughout the world” (xi) and sells some 400,000 copies annually. Anecdotal evidence suggests that it is quite common for students to encounter Gatsby more than once in their academic life, as it is taught regularly at both high school and college levels; and a study has shown The Great Gatsby to rank among the top five in most frequently taught American works in U.S. high schools (Applebee, 3). The book has been part of the National Endowment for the Arts’ “Big Read” program, and the Web is filled with resources and research materials geared toward student and teacher. Given its central position in the nation’s education system, it is only fitting that The Great Gatsby would be the subject of a volume of essays devoted specifically to pedagogical concerns. The widely varied essays in Approaches to Teaching give further indication of why Gatsby has remained a fixture in the classroom. Material covered ranges from essays that focus specifically on Fitzgerald’s language, style, and patterning in the work to others that examine the book’s connection to cultural and historical referents from the popular music of the day to the cultural aftershocks of World War I. In my own essay in the volume, “Love, Loss, and Real Estate: Teaching The Great Gatsby in the Suburban Age,” I offer an approach to the book that takes a slightly different tack than the traditional view of how landscape functions in the novel. While generations of critics and scholars — from Mizener, Ornstein, and Eble onward — have rightly focused on Fitzgerald’s symbolic geography in the book, examining, most notably, how his use of eastern and western locales reverberates with connections to the American mythology, I focus more on the correlation between the settings of the book, particularly East and West Egg, and the actual places on which these settings are loosely based. My goal in the essay is not to supplant the examinations of place as a mythic construct in Gatsby; to do so would be to shortcircuit what is in my view one of the richest lines of scholarship and interpretation on this classic novel. Rather, my take on the book

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stresses how Fitzgerald’s geographic imagination tends to work toward counterbalancing myth with reality, or romance with realism, or the pull of the irrecoverable past with the momentum of a culture and landscape hurtling into the future. The novel’s deep nostalgia for lost, Edenic landscapes is, I argue, a function of its setting in a modern environment that is in the process of transforming away from the natural and toward the manmade — toward the modern metropolitan landscape of city, highway, and suburb that is the habitation of most of the book’s readers of today. As Fitzgerald closes The Great Gatsby with Nick Carraway’s extended reflection on landscapes of the past, which moves from his recollections of the “middle-west” of his youth to the final, lyrical passage in which he contemplates the once-wondrous vision of the Long Island landscape — “the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes — a fresh, green breast of the new world” (GG, 140) — the first-time reader of the novel gains a retrospective understanding of something those who have been reading and teaching The Great Gatsby for years take as a given: that one of the primary concerns of the book involves the characters’ attempts to come to terms with the places they physically and psychologically inhabit. In Gatsby, Fitzgerald created both a yearning remembrance of a vanishing pastoral terrain and a bustling, proto-suburban narrative that chronicles the commodification of the natural landscape. Of particular note is the embattled sense of place in the novel’s suburban milieu, the towns of East and West Egg on Long Island’s North Shore or “Gold Coast.” It is in this setting where Fitzgerald makes most clear the disparity between the major characters’ relationships to their present environment and the idealized visions they continue to hold of landscapes from their past. That all of the major characters eventually fail in their quest to establish for themselves a comprehensible and fulfilling connection to this place suggests one of the central preoccupations of the novel — portraying the anxiety that inheres to place-bound experience in an increasingly metropolitan and rootless age. For students coming of age in an era characterized by continued, relentless suburban development and sprawl, Fitzgerald’s glamorous portrayals of New York City and the stately Gold Coast might seem, at best, a distant cultural memory. On the other hand, the connections between Jay Gatsby’s gaudy West Egg estate and the architecturally outrageous “McMansions” that tower over today’s cul-de-sac suburbia seem almost too obvious to miss. In fact, in many regards The Great Gatsby can be thought of as a kind of pre-suburban-age novel. This approach allows readers to bring their own contemporary frame of reference to bear on the text, while also exposing a less discussed side of this work, its fascinating presentation of an American landscape in transition. The emotional resonance of houses and of landscapes from the past is a theme that Fitzgerald had already been exploring before Gatsby. As noted earlier, the

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classic story “Winter Dreams” (1922), as well as two lesser-known works, “‘The Sensible Thing’” and “John Jackson’s Arcady,” both published in 1924, center on male protagonists fixated on both loves and houses from their pasts. Fitzgerald wrote the latter two stories while living in Great Neck, the suburban Long Island town that would be the model for West Egg, making the link to Gatsby all the more telling. Fitzgerald’s depiction in the novel of a rapidly evolving and often alienating landscape is a function of the specific historic and geographical setting of the novel, central factors worth reviewing in some detail. In 1922, the time of the novel’s action (and the year when Fitzgerald moved to Great Neck), Long Island’s Gold Coast accommodated over five hundred estates similar to the Buchanan and Gatsby mansions (Randall, 14). Built by millionaires and industry tycoons, these palatial homes both utilized and reshaped the natural geography of the North Shore, signifying social class through elaborate architecture and appropriation of the rural, seaside landscape. The creation of these homes, which Gold Coast historian Monica Randall calls “an architectural phenomenon unparalleled both in excessiveness and originality” (11), began shortly after the turn of the century and continued into the twenties. As Ronald Berman has argued, this phenomenon was most notable for its symbolic overtones, for the sense that “a new American history could be created in twenty-four hours, an illusion of ancestry long in the land” (Modern, 41). Berman’s observation is an apt one, for it is the very elusiveness of dreams of ancestry and connection to the landscape that provides much of the dramatic tension and carries much of the thematic weight of The Great Gatsby. Readers need not look far to find the deep and often conflicted connections between landscape and a sense of history and belonging in this novel. The paradigmatic connections between place and identity are set up in the opening pages, when Nick situates the Carraway family as “something of a clan,” who have been anchored to the same “middlewestern city,” a land of “wide lawns and friendly trees,” for the past three generations (GG, 6–7). By contrast, Tom and Daisy Buchanan, whom we first meet a few pages later, are characterized by Nick as “drifters”; still, despite Nick’s incredulity, Daisy has declared their move to East Egg a “permanent” one. And the carefully landscaped opulence of the Buchanan home suggests some sense of permanence, or in Berman’s terms a feeling of “ancestry long in the land.” Nevertheless, this sense of permanence and groundedness is manufactured and illusory, and as Tom stands on the porch showing Nick his estate, his proprietary ease seems to be undercut by a need to explain the orchestrated magnificence of the place: “I’ve got a nice place here,” he said, his eyes flashing about restlessly.

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Turning me around by one arm he moved a broad flat hand along the front vista, including in its sweep a sunken Italian garden, a half acre of deep pungent roses and a snub-nosed motor boat that bumped the tide offshore. “It belonged to Demaine the oil man.” He turned me around again, politely and abruptly. “We’ll go inside.” (10)

By deferring to the previous owner of the estate at the end of this speech, Tom reveals the anxiety that has accompanied his purchase of an unreadable symbolic landscape. As a homeowner thus once-removed from his own landscape, Tom Buchanan quickly emerges as a character who is offbalance and quite literally “out of place,” one reason perhaps for his clinging to a reactionary and idealized vision of a lost “civilization,” one based on Manichean racial attitudes and a larger sense of exclusionary paranoia. Like Tom, Nick also finds himself “out of place” from the outset. As he confesses in the beginning of his narration, the “practical thing” upon moving to New York would have been to “find rooms in the city”; instead, drawn by his longing for an environment at least superficially similar to that of his hometown, Nick settles in the “commuting town” of West Egg (6–7). Hence, though Nick and Tom have very different reasons for settling on the North Shore, both share a desire to create meaning and a sense of belonging through connection to this landscape. While they both fail in this effort, they fail for different reasons, because these two characters represent different historical moments in the evolution of their common environment: Tom represents the vulnerable second-generation of a Gold Coast elite whose time was already on the wane, while Nick — whether he recognizes it or not — stands as a member of the new commuter class, the growth of which was already in this era beginning to turn Long Island into the suburban mecca that it still is today. If Tom cannot read the symbolic excess of his landscape because it is already a part of the past, Nick’s dilemma is that the landscape to which he should belong — the soon-to-be-born Nassau County suburbia — has not yet quite arrived; the incongruity of his lone “cardboard bungalow” (7) sandwiched between numerous West Egg mansions is an image that perfectly captures this novel’s larger sense of a landscape in transition. It is perhaps the most visible manifestation of Fitzgerald’s tendency to use landscape to look both forward and backward in time. As Richard Lehan argues, this is a novel that not only considers the lure of the past but also, at times, catches a “sense of the future” (Limits, 7). Gatsby himself embodies this sense of being caught in an insupportable present — situated, according to Lehan, “between a dead past and an implausible future” (38). But Gatsby’s temporal dilemma is quite clearly a spatial one as well, as his romantic quest is consistently played out in terms of landscape. From the first appearance of Gatsby in the novel — as

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Nick spies him peering longingly across the Sound, hands outstretched toward the green light on Daisy’s dock — to his last appearance, when Nick describes him just before the murder as being in “A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about” (126), Gatsby’s dream resides in landscapes. Nonetheless, Gatsby, whom Tom aptly refers to as “Mr. Nobody from Nowhere” (101), remains utterly disconnected from any sort of verifiable geographic background, a fact that poses a dilemma for those like Tom trying to read Gatsby. Nick eventually associates Gatsby with his West Egg home, but does so in a way that effaces any real connections to place or landscape, insisting instead on the absolute autonomy of Gatsby’s manufactured identity: “Jay Gatsby, of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God” (77). If this observation confers upon Gatsby a sort of idealized, Adamic status, at the same time it emphasizes the plasticity of his identity, something he attempts to counter through the presentation of his West Egg landscape. Gatsby’s manipulation of his own landscape draws attention to the malleable nature of the Gold Coast environment, and in so doing emphasizes what Nick early in the novel refers to, somewhat mysteriously, as the “bizarre and not a little sinister contrast” (8) between East Egg and West Egg. Gatsby’s idea is to keep his home “always full of interesting people, night and day” (71) in order to impress Daisy. This attempt to keep alive a sort of perpetual tableau vivant for Daisy’s sake necessitates a constant flow of partygoers, whom Gatsby shuttles in from the city in his Rolls Royce and from the train stations in his station wagon, and whose “cars from New York are parked five deep in the drive” (34) on a given Saturday night. Gatsby’s need to populate his symbolic landscape — indeed, the guests are the principal symbol of this landscape — accentuates the sense of West Egg as a transitory landscape, a place quite literally filled with commuters. Such a state is abhorrent to an East Egger like Tom Buchanan, a man who is attempting to shape exurban space in a different fashion, emphasizing an expansive rurality and the exclusive class identifications that go with it. Indeed, Tom not only bristles at the insurgent, democratic impulse of Gatsby’s parties — suggested by the ethnic family names on Nick’s famous list of the partygoers — but fears the push of urban progress itself, precisely because he recognizes that urban progress involves expansion and intrusion, processes that are already imperiling his rural fantasy landscape. Daisy as well shares in this disdain for Gatsby’s parties and what they represent; Nick’s interpretation of her view of West Egg emphasizes her fear of the changing, increasingly mobile and urban, landscape: “She was appalled by West Egg, this unprecedented ‘place’ that Broadway had begotten upon a Long Island fishing village — appalled by its raw vigor . . . and by the too obtrusive fate that herded its inhabitants along a short cut from nothing to nothing” (84).

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The irony of Daisy’s reaction to Gatsby’s parties and what they represent lies in the fact that Gatsby is not trying to create a landscape of the future, but instead is seeking rather desperately — through the manipulation of landscape — to return to the past. The “Gatsby mansion” and all that comes with it are mere symbolic devices meant to lure Daisy away from East Egg and back to a relationship that is psychologically situated in the Louisville landscape of 1917. As Nick’s narration so clearly emphasizes, Gatsby’s dream-vision of Daisy is inextricably bound up with his memories of Louisville, and more specifically of Daisy’s girlhood home: “He went to her house, at first with other officers from Camp Taylor, then alone. It amazed him — he had never been in such a beautiful house before” (116). Remarkable for the way that it links romance and real estate, this passage goes a long way toward explaining the motivations behind the creation of what Nick calls “that huge incoherent failure of a house” (140) that Gatsby maintains at West Egg. And yet it is no coincidence that Gatsby’s stories of Louisville produce in Nick a sympathetic reaction, one in which he too is on the verge of remembering “something — an elusive rhythm, a fragment of lost words” (87) from his own past. As many critics have noted, Gatsby is not the only character in this novel who is in some sense trapped in landscapes of the past. Indeed if, as Berman suggests, the “ur-dream” of this novel is “the memory of Eden” (Modern, 102), it seems that all of the major characters maintain visions of their own personal Eden — Nick’s “middle-west,” Daisy’s “white girlhood,” Gatsby’s Louisville of five years past, Tom’s “civilization” — places which are idealized, for the most part imaginary, and ultimately inaccessible. The disparity between such idealized images of past environments and the realities of the contemporary landscape is a recurring motif in the novel, nowhere more carefully portrayed or infused with the force of history than in the scene of Gatsby and Daisy’s first reunion. In a telling passage from this reunion scene in Gatsby’s house, Nick describes the onset of night in West Egg: “Outside the wind was loud and there was a faint flow of thunder along the Sound. All the lights were going on in West Egg now; the electric trains, men-carrying, were plunging home through the rain from New York. It was the hour of a profound human change and excitement was generating on the air” (75). Fitzgerald’s language here is significant; his synesthetic pairing of the “flow of thunder along the Sound” with the “plunging home” of the commuter trains reminds us (to borrow Leo Marx’s phrase) of the machine in Gatsby’s garden; this is not Louisville, 1917, but Long Island, 1922 — a bustling suburb in the making, a lapsed Eden characterized by a merely illusory sense of rootedness, and a stark contrast to the transcendent Louisville landscape that exists forever fixed in Gatsby’s mind. It is not very surprising when Nick observes, immediately following this moment, that “the expression

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of bewilderment had come back into Gatsby’s face” (75); thrust into the present time and place, Gatsby at this moment realizes the incongruity between his dreams and reality. It is indeed the hour of a profound human change. This is not the only moment involving specific mention of commuting in this novel. With its near constant motion between New York and East and West Egg, the narrative is literally shaped by the act traveling to and from the city, and what the various commutes reveal is the sharp contrast between ways of living in urban and suburban spaces. New York itself comes to be associated with violence, as in Tom and Gatsby’s showdown at the Plaza and, more explicitly, in Tom’s breaking of Myrtle’s nose in the 158th Street apartment. East and West Egg, by contrast, are represented at least early in the novel as havens, fantasy worlds seemingly protected from violence and decay by their very distance from the urban center. The third term in this equation is the valley of ashes, the industrial Queens landscape that is traversed in the various commutes between the city and the exurbs. Beneath the vacant gaze of Dr. Eckleburg’s eyes, the “waste land” serves as a visible record of the outward progress of urban blight. The site cannot be avoided; while the commuters’ motor road and railroad run beside one another temporarily in an attempt to “shrink away” from this landscape, the effort is futile, for we are told that “passengers on waiting trains can stare at the dismal scene for as long as half an hour” (21). Hence the very visibility of this landscape is what gives the lie to the myth of commutation — that one can be a “city person” while at the same time maintaining a rural identity. Instead, the surreal inversion of rurality in the valley’s landscape, which is likened to a “fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens” (21), emphasizes the corruptibility of landscape. By situating the killing of Myrtle in the valley, Fitzgerald uses the setting to underscore the fear of urban violence and decay spreading outside the bounds of the city center. Fittingly, Myrtle’s death occurs during — indeed, is caused by — another drive out of the city. In subsequently making his final trip east to Gatsby’s home, George Wilson completes the movement of “urban” violence eastward into the suburban landscape. After the death of Gatsby and the disappearance of Tom and Daisy, actions that in their own right reveal the changing nature of the Gold Coast environment, two other moments transpire near the end of the novel that serve as reminders of the extent to which The Great Gatsby can be read as an examination of a landscape in transition. The first involves Gatsby’s father, who excitedly shows Nick a prized possession: It was a photograph of the house, cracked in the corners and dirty with many hands. He pointed out every detail to me eagerly. “Look there!” and then sought admiration from my eyes. He had shown

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it so often that I think it was more real to him now than the house itself. (134)

While the irony of Mr. Gatz’s action — being fixated on an old photograph of his son’s house even as he stands inside the house itself — borders on the pathetic, he is really doing nothing more than others have done throughout the novel: confusing idealized representations of place for the “real thing,” searching for place-bound connections to the past in the face of an alienating and unreadable present moment. Indeed, one of Nick’s final actions carries the same symbolic message. In what may be, from the perspective of landscape and place, the most telling moment of the novel, Nick describes his final effort to preserve the idealized memory of Gatsby’s landscape: On the last night, with my trunk packed and my car sold to the grocer, I went over and looked at that huge incoherent failure of a house once more. On the white steps an obscene word, scrawled by some boy with a piece of brick, stood out clearly in the moonlight and I erased it, drawing my shoe raspingly along the stone. Then I wandered down to the beach and sprawled out on the sand. (140)

This action — which immediately precedes Nick’s expansive, lyrical close to the narration — underscores the inevitability of the decay of this exurban landscape. But perhaps more significantly, Nick’s erasure stands as a last effort to maintain an idealized vision of place, to freeze a living, evolving landscape into a fixed and permanent symbol. That such an effort is doomed to failure is one of the principal insights of this novel. Like many contemporary readers of the novel, Fitzgerald himself, during his time on Long Island, lived in a bustling environment undergoing rapid changes. And like many of his characters, he repeatedly looked back in time, invoking in his fiction architectural and environmental symbols from the past, rich with emotional resonance, as counterweights to the uncertainty of the present. While a sense of longing for beloved environments of the past would become a standard theme in suburban fiction and popular culture of the postwar years and onward, when suburban sprawl would rapidly remake and homogenize the American landscape, we see a sort of pre-suburban version of a similar anxiety infusing The Great Gatsby. In a larger sense, the novel provides any number of angles through which a reader of today can bridge the gap to an era that saw transitions, on several levels, into modernity. For example, Kirk Curnutt’s excellent essay from Approaches to Teaching, “All That Jazz,” illuminates ways in which today’s students can get a sound understanding of the historicity of the novel through examinations of its echoes of popular culture of the day. His essay builds on Berman’s work, in “The Great Gatsby” and Modern Times, in that, like Berman,

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Curnutt presents a text that is in conversation with other texts and discourses that defined the popular culture and arts of the day. He discusses how the novel responds to the “shifting values of the modern age” (40) in that it reflects the rise of a mass culture with a noticeable emphasis on youth, leisure, and consumption. Curnutt argues that the rise of consumerism in this age of advertising, as well as the success of magazines like The Saturday Evening Post, which strove to be an “arbiter of middlebrow refinement” (44), ushered in a distinctly modern era in which personality itself became part of the popular culture marketplace. Curnutt demonstrates how this spirit infuses the characters of the novel, and not merely Gatsby, with his patently contrived identity. Curnutt argues that all of the characters have been shaped by the style and values afoot in the popular culture, and in this regard the difference between Myrtle Wilson, who dreams to live the life she read about in Town Tattle, and Tom Buchanan, whose nativist editorializing may as well have come directly from the pages of The Saturday Evening Post (which supported and published the ideas of writers such as Madison Grant), is not one of kind but of degree of consciousness: “Gatsby dramatizes this concern over the authenticity of personality by contrasting characters who revel in the selfconscious theatricality of their modes of externalization and those who naively assume that their gestures create their real selves” (41).5 Given that our own media-saturated age is shaped by the relentless marketing of a middlebrow, youth-oriented culture, this angle into the novel is particularly fruitful; as Curnutt concludes, “It allows students to view the story as a living link to a past decade whose confluence of changing values and ideals continues to influence our own time” (49).

The Shadow Lengthens: Echoes of Gatsby in Popular Culture and Arts What the conclusion of Curnutt’s essay suggests, with its notion of the novel as a “living link” between generations and eras, is the relevance of the book’s themes in our own day. If the prevalence of Gatsby and its influence throughout contemporary popular culture is any indication, Curnutt is on to something. The broad literary and cultural influence of The Great Gatsby was the subject of a compelling essay from back in 1985, Richard Anderson’s “Gatsby’s Long Shadow.” As Anderson argues, the stylistic and thematic influence of the novel could be felt among widely varied writers of ensuing generations, ranging from Cheever and O’Hara to Raymond Chandler and Jack Kerouac. Anderson’s essay offered a much-needed counterbalance to decades’ worth of influence studies that had worked only in the other direction, tracing influences upon Fitzgerald in his writing of the book. By the late twentieth century, Gatsby had

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become a classic of the national literary canon, as Anderson’s discussion of the “shadow” cast by the novel helps to demonstrate. Where we might add to his analysis of the book’s influence is in noting the rather remarkable presence of the book in twenty-first century popular culture. Google “Gatsby,” and the hits you generate will travel far and wide beyond the literary realm. Aside from the links to predictable “Gatsby”-themed bars, restaurants, and other businesses, such a search will lead you to offerings as varied as the Japanese “Gatsby” line of haircare products; the Korean web comic strip The Great Catsby, featuring a cast of cartoon dogs and cats, with a storyline revolving around the travails and romantic entanglements of a young college graduate (later made into a live-action TV series in Korea, starring real humans); the computerbased video game, released in 2010, Classic Adventures: The Great Gatsby, in which the player, adopting the role of Nick Carraway, navigates scenes from the novel while finding and collecting hidden objects to advance in the game (one must, as the game begins, immediately find five clocks hidden in the surrounding scenery); and the 2010 “Gatsby” application for social networking devices like Facebook and Foursquare: “Whenever you check in, Gatsby will see if there is anyone nearby who shares interests with you, and if there is, he’ll text you both with your first name and shared interests.” Well, he always did know how to throw a good party. Musical connections also abound, from the Seattle-based pop band Gatsby’s American Dream to folkies Reg and Phil, whose song “Daisy Buchanan” attempts to liven up the shopworn pop music theme of unrequited love by imagining a connection to Fitzgerald’s protagonist (presumably on the night of his futile vigil outside the Buchanan house, no less): “Mr. Gatsby, I know how you feel / It’s almost 2 in the morning / She ain’t coming so we’ll / Wash up this mess / And clear out our heads / It’s getting late so let’s best get to bed.” A more subtle musical tribute comes from a fellow Minnesotan and giant of American culture. Bob Dylan, in his 2001 song “Summer Days,” makes an unmistakable lyrical tip of the cap to Fitzgerald and to Jay Gatsby’s most memorable pronouncement: “She’s looking into my eyes, and she’s a-holding my hand / She looks into my eyes, she’s holding my hand / she say, ‘you can’t repeat the past,’ / I say ‘You can’t? What do you mean you can’t? / Of course you can.’” More evidence of the enduring appeal of Gatsby can be found in the number of stage adaptations performed in recent years. In 1999, composer and librettist John Harbison brought his opera, The Great Gatsby, to New York’s Metropolitan Opera and subsequently, in 2000, to the Lyric Opera in Chicago. Reviewers praised the work’s attempts to translate the novel to so very different a form but found the opera “a little strenuous in its reverence” (Jones) for the novel. In the summer of 2006, Simon Levy’s dramatic adaptation The Great Gatsby took the stage at Minneapolis’s Guthrie Theater. This was a major occasion in Gatsby history, in

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that this was only the second authorized stage production of Gatsby, and the first in eighty years. (The first authorized production of The Great Gatsby was Owen Davis’s 1926 adaptation, which opened in Fitzgerald’s one-time stomping grounds of Great Neck, Long Island, before enjoying a run on Broadway.) The adaptation by Levy, who had previously adapted both Tender Is the Night and The Last Tycoon for the stage, met with mixed reviews. While critics praised the polish of the production, several reviewers noted that Levy’s determination to remain faithful to the novel resulted in a play with a sometimes leaden pace and an overall lack of spark. In a fairly representative review, Richard Morin, of the Seattle Weekly, claimed that the play “lacks magic,” a problem he attributed to “relying too heavily on a linear recounting” of the novel. For Morin, this strategy resulted in a play that was, unfortunately, “borne back ceaselessly into the mundane” (Morin). The year 2006 was a clearly a big one in the world of Gatsby. While Levy’s version played in Minneapolis and Seattle, another, lower-profile adaptation was also touring, to high critical acclaim. The experimental downtown New York performance group Elevator Repair Service launched the official U.S. debut of their marathon performance piece entitled Gatz at Minneapolis’s Walker Art Center in September of 2006. The group had first begun tinkering with adapting The Great Gatsby in 1999, and after years of development — including a series of workshop performances in New York in 2005 and an official premiere in Brussels in May, 2006 — the Minneapolis opening marked the American debut of a major work that has become an unlikely success. What ERS has come up with is a concept that is at once avant-garde and, in a strict sense, very true to the novel. Gatz is a unique performance in which the entire novel is read aloud, word for word, while cast members adopt the roles of Fitzgerald’s characters. The performance is set in the modern day, in a mundane, run-down office. As the action opens, the central character/“narrator” (a beleaguered office employee played by Scott Shepherd) stumbles upon an old copy of The Great Gatsby as he kills time in the office, waiting for his computer to be repaired. He begins to read aloud from the novel. Somewhere between six and a half to seven hours later (including a couple of intermissions), he will finish. As Shepherd’s character — who serves as a surrogate Nick Carraway — reads, other ensemble members float on and off stage, taking on personas related to the novel’s characters, and occasionally interrupting the reading to recite dialogue from the novel. As Jason Zinoman pointed out in the New York Times, this audacious interpretation is, at heart, a celebration of the novel: “At six and half hours . . . ‘Gatz’ is one of the most faithful adaptations in the history of theater. Falling somewhere between a reading and a conventional play, it is certainly an unusual theatrical experiment” (A8). Quinton Skinner, reviewing the Minneapolis performances for Variety, was equally effusive

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in his praise, describing Gatz as “a revelatory and exuberant experience.” Skinner singled out the performance of Shepherd, claiming that he gave “as fine a reading” of Fitzgerald’s prose “as one could imagine,” in a performance of “exceeding passion and grace.” Of the work as a whole, Skinner concluded: “‘Gatz’ creates its own dramatic universe. It illuminates a familiar text, breathing strange new life into it while honoring its inherent completeness. One is left not primarily with the expected exhaustion, but with a unique and lasting texture of amusement, insight and possibility” (Q. Skinner). After its successful debut in the United States, Gatz headed off to Europe, while Elevator Repair Service awaited permission from the Fitzgerald estate to produce the show in other U.S. cities. The reason for the wait had to do with a problem Gatsby himself could identify with: unfortunate timing. Since Gatz and the Levy adaptation of Gatsby just happened to debut at roughly the same time, the Fitzgerald estate, presumably hoping to avoid flooding the market with adaptations, initially supported Levy’s more conventional adaptation, at the expense of Gatz. Once it was clear the Levy Gatsby had fizzled, Gatz got the green light, as it were, to return to the United States. After a highly successful run in Boston — Brian Arundel, writing for the F.  Scott Fitzgerald Society Newsletter, hailed the play as “nothing short of magical, an unforgettable experience” (9), and Ben Brantley, reviewing the Boston performances for the New York Times, called Gatz “one of the most exciting and improbable accomplishments in theater in recent years” (“Novel,” C1) — the show finally was cleared to open in New York in the Autumn of 2010.6 To say that Gatz took New York by storm would be an understatement. It made numerous year-end “best of” lists from the critics, and was ranked as the best show of the year by both New York magazine and the New York Times, in which Brantley referred to Gatz as “The most remarkable achievement in theater not only of this year but also of this decade (which, gee, means this century too),” stating that the play “captured — in inventively theatrical terms — the unmatchable, heady rush of falling in love with a book. And Scott Shepherd, as a common reader seduced by a great American novel, gave — hands down — the year’s most heroic performance” (“Hath,” 7).7 If the sheer number of stage adaptations suggests Gatsby’s enduring appeal, perhaps even stronger evidence of its relevance to contemporary writers and artists can be found in a string of recent reworkings or reimaginings of the novel. Suzanne del Gizzo, in a recent Fitzgerald Review essay, examines one such popular novel with strong ties to Gatsby, Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club (1996). As del Gizzo points out, following the cult success of his novel and the popularity of FOX pictures’ 1999 adaptation starring Edward Norton and Brad Pitt, Palahniuk wrote an afterword to a new edition of the book in which he offered his take of the novel’s meaning by giving an unexpected nod to Gatsby: “Really, what I

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was writing was just The Great Gatsby, updated a little. It was ‘apostolic’ fiction — where a surviving apostle tells the story of his hero. There are two men and a woman. And one man, the hero, is shot to death” (in del Gizzo, 69). In exploring this intertextual connection — which seems, on the surface, somewhat surprising — del Gizzo examines both novels’ focus on the world of commodity culture. Like Donaldson, del Gizzo finds early-twentieth-century commodity fetishism to be at the heart of Gatsby; in Fight Club, written at the end of that century of exhaustive consumption, all of the characters resemble mini-Gatsbys, defined by the things they buy and present to the world, “secur[ing] their sense of self and their social identity through condos in certain parts of town, particular cars, and certain types of sofas. . . . In short, the world of Fight Club is a logical extension of the culture of commodification at the center of The Great Gatsby” (71). del Gizzo’s compelling analysis of this connection demonstrates that the two novels, on the surface presenting such a stark contrast between glamour and grunge, are in fact “remarkably similar” (71). This fact in itself suggests the continued relevance of Fitzgerald’s social critique in the novel. While Palahniuk credits Gatsby for implicitly providing inspiration for his work, a more explicit reworking of the novel can be found in Bodega Dreams, the 2000 debut novel of New York writer Ernesto Quiñonez. Bodega Dreams tells the story of Willie Bodega, the mysterious power broker of East Harlem who tries to transmute his riches, garnered from the heroin trade, into a rebuilt and revitalized neighborhood, a place populated by a powerful, educated Latino class. Like Gatsby, Willie Bodega amasses his empire in the effort to recapture a lost love and in a sense turn back time. As Sapo, the streetwise friend of the novel’s narrator, Chino, puts it, “Bodega believes ever’thin’ he told you about. But he’s also in love with some bitch from his past. Or he’s still in love with the past. I don’t know which or both or what the fuck” (Quiñonez, 50). Sapo’s humorous confusion concerning Bodega’s motives masks a key difference between Bodega and Gatsby; Chino, who as participant-narrator is the Nick Carraway counterpart, perceptively notes that Bodega’s efforts to turn back time are motivated not only by romantic idealism, but also by his paradoxically strong social conscience: “Bodega was still the same, believing he could recapture what had been lost, stolen, or denied to him and his people. As if the past was recyclable and all he had to do was collect enough cans to make a fortune and make another start” (125–26). The novel is filled with such references to Gatsby — some direct (the reunion scene between Bodega and his lost love, Vera, is a marvelous recreation of the Gatsby-Daisy reunion), and some oblique (Chino relates one of the novel’s most profound ruminations on the troubled cultural history of East Harlem while he is in a car about to drive over the Queensboro Bridge, that crucial locale from Gatsby). What may be most fascinating

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about the work, however, is the manner in which Quiñonez appropriates the figure of Jay Gatsby. In an interview, Quiñonez pointed out that his use of The Great Gatsby as a template for his own novel stems from his reading of the protagonist as an irrepressible cultural outsider: “When I see Gatsby, I see a poor guy who would do anything to become rich. . . . When rich people see Gatsby they think that he belongs to them, but Gatsby does not belong to the rich. Gatsby belongs to the poor. He was a hoodlum” (in Weigand). This notion of Jay Gatsby’s “belonging” to a particular class or social group indicates the extent to which the character has left the printed page and become a part of our cultural fabric. Further evidence of this phenomenon of Gatsby as cultural signifier can be found in SONY Pictures’ 2005 film, G. Directed by Christopher Cherot and featuring an African American cast, the film is a hip-hop adaptation of The Great Gatsby; the storyline portrays the efforts of protagonist Summer G, a rap music producer and industry mogul, to recapture his lost love with Sky, the cousin of our Nick Carraway stand-in, Tre, who writes for a popular rap music magazine. Sky is married to the very wealthy, powerful, and physically and emotionally abusive Chip Hightower, a near-perfect modern embodiment of Tom Buchanan who courts his wealthy white neighbors in tony Southampton, New York, and is disgusted by the raucous antics and hip-hop music blasted at the parties held at Summer G’s neighboring mansion. (Yes, Summer G’s house is right across the bay.) While the climax of the movie delves into melodrama, replacing Gatsby’s ruminative, mythic closing visions with a violent finish that lacks in significance, still the movie’s fidelity to the narrative of The Great Gatsby — even as it reimagines that narrative in a very different social context — indicates the lasting popular influence of the text. It seems almost as if the story told in the novel — its pitting of self-invention and romantic idealism against the hard realities of life in American society — has itself become a kind of cultural myth, and Jay Gatsby the embodiment of the tragic dreamer, the bodacious but futile aspirant in a closed, deterministic society. To use Anderson’s terms, these recent interpretations of the novel suggest that the “long shadow” that Gatsby has cast over the popular culture only grows longer in the new century. In contrast to these imaginative reworkings of the book, however, Hollywood has had a poor track record with Gatsby. The extent to which the culture has the stomach for yet another Hollywood attempt at an adaptation will be tested in the nottoo-distant future, as Australian director Baz Luhrmann has signed on with Warner Brothers to film a new version of the novel, starring Leonardo DiCaprio as Gatsby, Tobey Maguire as Nick, and Carey Mulligan as Daisy. The movie will be shot in Sidney, Australia, with filming to commence in August, 2011. While one questions the necessity of yet another big-budget adaptation, the fact that Luhrmann, who had been working

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on getting the project going for quite some time, was able to bring Warner Brothers on board suggests the potential for the film’s financial success. Somewhat curious, though, was the announcement made, shortly after the deal with Warner Brothers was struck, that the film would be shot in 3-D. While this plan most likely signals the increasing centrality of 3-D technology in contemporary film more so than it necessarily raises the specter of visual pyrotechnics (Myrtle seeming to be hurled, by the force of the “death car,” right into one’s theater, for example), still there seems cause for concern when one of the first major announcements about the film has to do with the use of technological wizardry to create surface-level visual detail. Of course the visual code is absolutely central to moviemaking, but one hopes that as much thought (if not far more) is going into the heretofore unattainable task of somehow capturing onscreen Nick Carraway’s voice and sensibility, the heart of the novel.

Coda: Gatsby and the Endless Summer Just as I was finishing up work on this study, a “summer novel” happened to come along and quickly rise up the list of “must-read” books for the season of beachy romance novels. Cosmopolitan, Vogue, Glamour, People, and even Oprah Winfrey’s O listed Danielle Ganek’s The Summer We Read Gatsby as a romance novel fit for afternoons on the beach blanket. The story concerns the life and loves of two thirty-ish half-sisters, Cassie and Peck, who inherit their eccentric, artistic Aunt’s summer home in Southampton. (Like Cherot in his film G, Ganek retains a Long Island shore location, but relocates the action from Fitzgerald’s stately north shore to the well-heeled vacation mecca of the Hamptons, on the Island’s south shore.) A decidedly lightweight affair, the novel makes occasional references to The Great Gatsby, some rather obvious (the novel opens at a “Gatsby party” being thrown by Peck’s love interest, the incredibly rich Miles Noble, at the gaudy mansion of “thirty or forty rooms” [Ganek, 151] he had recently had built) and some more subtle (just before the climactic party at the end of the novel, Cassie, the narrator, thinks to herself, à la Nick Carraway, “anything could happen, anything at all” [277]). In essence, though, the book is a fairly standard-issue summer romance novel. In a review in the New York Times, Liesl Schillinger describes the novel as “a plucky homage to Fitzgerald’s masterpiece that has about as much in common with ‘Gatsby’ as Diet Coke has with Perrier-Jouët. There’s little harm and zero calories in Ganek’s feather-light fare, so it would be illogical to seek more from it than simple refreshment. . . . Yet the question arises: Why bring ‘Gatsby’ into this story of two women husband-hunting in the Hamptons?” (14). The question has obvious merit, especially since the narrator’s habit of periodically referencing or quoting from Gatsby adds little to the actual

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events or significance of the narration. And yet there is that title — The Summer We Read Gatsby — with its evocation not only of the American classic but also of the romantic season it not only depicts, but seems to embody. Fitzgerald is quick to draw our attention to Gatsby itself as a novel of the summer: In Nick’s opening exposition, he describes becoming accustomed to life in his new home in West Egg: “And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees — just as things grow in fast movies — I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer” (GG, 7). Fitzgerald’s cinematic vision here sets the tone for the “history of the summer” (8) that follows; his suggestion of an infinitely renewable, verdant freshness at the outset of the narrative is bracketed by the famous closing image of “the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes — a fresh, green breast of the new world” (140). If the greenness of that “old island” is now, as our historical fate would have it, inaccessible, the inexhaustible, and peculiarly American, freshness of The Great Gatsby is not. We see echoes of it in our popular culture to this day, and not only in Ganek’s reimagining of Gatsby as light summer romance; we see it also in the character of the aptly-named Summer G, another fresh gangster/doomed dreamer on the summer shores of Long Island; and we see it in the closing passages of Quiñonez’s Bodega Dreams, with their earthy vision of el barrio reborn, if only at the cost of the death of an idealistic and utterly corrupt anti-hero: “I looked out to the neighborhood below. Bodega was right, it was alive. Its music and people had taken off their mourning clothes. The neighborhood had turned into a maraca, with the men and women transformed into seeds, shaking with love and desire for one another. Children had opened fire hydrants, and danced, laughing and splashing water on themselves” (Quiñonez, 212). What these textual echoes suggest is the extent to which F.  Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, with its double vision of glamour and desperation, of freshness and futility, of dream and disillusionment, has become an American icon — has come to be part of the very fabric of the national culture that it so glowingly, hauntingly represents.

Notes 1

For Marx’s explanation of commodity fetishism, see chapter 1, section 4 of Das Kapital: A Critique of Political Economy.

2

For Bourdieu’s fullest enunciation of these concepts, see Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste.

3

As Graham notes, his and other analyses of popular music in Fitzgerald’s writing are indebted to the pioneering essay on the subject, Ruth Prigozy’s 1976 essay, “‘Poor Butterfly’: F. Scott Fitzgerald and Popular Music.”

4

In the passage quoted, Mallios refers to Meyer Wolfshiem, but spells his name differently: Wolfsheim. The cause of the confusion here is that, while Fitzgerald

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spelled the name with the “ie” spelling, the most popular editions of the novel, such as the Scribners paperbacks, feature the name emended to the “ei” spelling. Matthew Bruccoli, who edited the 1991 Cambridge Edition of Gatsby, argues forcefully that the Scribners paperback is a “flawed text” (Getting It Wrong, 3) as a result of this and many other emendations that stray from Fitzgerald’s manuscript and 1925 first edition. Of the Wolfshiem issue, he says this: “Wolfshiem is the invariable spelling in Fitzgerald’s manuscript and in the first edition of the novel (1925). Edmund Wilson introduced the emendation to Wolfsheim in his edition of The Last Tycoon: An Unfinished Novel, together with The Great Gatsby and Selected Short Stories (1941). Wilson also incorrectly emended orgastic to orgiastic in the penultimate paragraph of the novel” (13). I do not mean to single out Mallios for this spelling issue; in fact, anecdotally speaking, I would say that most critical essays on the novel use the “ei” spelling of the name. 5

Sharon Hamilton, in “The New York Gossip Magazine in The Great Gatsby,” concurs with this reading of the influence of popular culture on characters’ identities, arguing that Fitzgerald’s references to Myrtle’s fictitious gossip magazine, Town Tattle, comprise “an incisive criticism of the period’s loss of moral direction with the rise of the gossip industry and the beginnings of American celebrity culture” (34).

6

The show was nominated for five 2010 Elliot Norton Awards, recognizing excellence in Boston-area theater. It took home three of the awards — for Outstanding Visiting Production, Outstanding Director, Large Company (John Collins) and Outstanding Actor, Large Company (Scott Shepherd).

7

Among other regional publications, Newsday (New York) ranked Gatz eighth on its year-end list; the Boston Phoenix put the play atop its list of the best of the year.

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Works Cited Aiken, Conrad. Review of The Great Gatsby. In F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Critical Reception, edited by Jackson R. Bryer, 243–44. New York: Burt Franklin, 1978. Aldridge, John W. After the Lost Generation: A Critical Study of the Writers of Two Wars. New York: The Noonday Press, 1958. Allen, Joan M. Candles and Carnival Lights: The Catholic Sensibility of F. Scott Fitzgerald. New York: New York UP, 1978. Anderson, Richard. “Gatsby’s Long Shadow: Influence and Endurance.” In New Essays on “The Great Gatsby,” edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli, 15–40. New York: Cambridge UP, 1985. Applebee, Arthur. A Study of Book-Length Works Taught in High School English. Albany: Center for the Learning and Teaching of Literature, State University of New York, Albany, Report Series 1.2, 1989. Arundel, Brian. “The Great Gatz.” F.  Scott Fitzgerald Society Newsletter 19 (2009): 7–9. Bailey, David W. “A Novel about Flappers and Philosophers.” In F.  Scott Fitzgerald: The Critical Reception, edited by Jackson R. Bryer, 19–20. New York: Burt Franklin, 1978. Bakhtin, Mikhail. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Translated by Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984. Benchley, Robert C. “Books and Other Things.” F.  Scott Fitzgerald: The Critical Reception, edited by Jackson R. Bryer, 14–15. New York: Burt Franklin, 1978. Bender, Bert. “‘His Mind Aglow’: The Biological Undercurrent in Fitzgerald’s Gatsby and Other Works.” Journal of American Studies 32 (December 1998): 399–420. Benét, William Rose. “An Admirable Novel.” In F.  Scott Fitzgerald: The Critical Reception, edited by Jackson R. Bryer, 219–21. New York: Burt Franklin, 1978. Berman, Ronald. “American Dreams and ‘Winter Dreams’: Fitzgerald and Freudian Psychology in the 1920s.” F. Scott Fitzgerald Review 4 (2005): 49–64. ——— . “The Great Gatsby” and Fitzgerald’s World of Ideas. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 1997. ——— . “The Great Gatsby” and Modern Times. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1994. Berryman, John. “F.  Scott Fitzgerald.” Kenyon Review 8, no. 1 (Winter 1946): 103–12. Bettina, M. “The Artifact in Imagery: Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.” Twentieth Century Literature 9 (October 1963): 140–42.

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Schneider, Daniel J. “Color-Symbolism in The Great Gatsby.” University Review 31 (Autumn 1964): 13–18. Schoenwald, Richard L. “F. Scott Fitzgerald as John Keats.” Boston University Studies in English 3 (1957): 12–21. Schulberg, Budd. The Disenchanted. New York: Viking, 1975. “Scott Fitzgerald, Author, Dies at 44.” New York Times, December 23, 1940, 23. Scrimgeour, Gary J. “Against The Great Gatsby.” In Twentieth Century Interpretations of “The Great Gatsby,” edited by Ernest Lockridge, 70–81. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1968. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1990. Seguin, Robert. “Ressentiment and the Social Poetics of The Great Gatsby: Fitzgerald Reads Cather.” Modern Fiction Studies 46 (Winter 2000): 917–40. Seldes, Gilbert. “Spring Flight.” In F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Critical Reception, edited by Jackson R. Bryer, 239–41. New York: Burt Franklin, 1978. ——— . “True to Type — Scott Fitzgerald Writes Superb Tragic Novel.” In F.  Scott Fitzgerald: The Critical Reception, edited by Jackson R. Bryer, 292–93. New York: Burt Franklin, 1978. Settle, Glenn. “Fitzgerald’s Daisy: The Siren’s Voice.” American Literature 57 (March 1985): 115–24. Severo, Richard. “For Fitzgerald’s Works, It’s Roaring 70s.” New York Times, March 20, 1974, 36. Skinner, John. “The Oral and the Written: Kurtz and Gatsby Revisited.” Journal of Narrative Technique 17 (Winter 1987): 131–40. Skinner, Quinton. Review of Gatz. Variety, October 1, 2006. Sklar, Robert. F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Last Laocoön. New York: Oxford UP, 1967. Slater, Peter Gregg. “Ethnicity in The Great Gatsby.” Twentieth Century Literature 19 (January 1973): 53–62. Snyder, Ruth. “A Minute or Two with Books — F.  Scott Fitzgerald Ventures.” In F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Critical Reception, edited by Jackson R. Bryer, 195–96. New York: Burt Franklin, 1978. Solomon, Eric. “A Source for Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.” Modern Language Notes 73 (March 1958): 186–88. Spengler, Oswald. The Decline of the West: Form and Actuality. Translated by Charles Francis Atkinson. New York: A. A. Knopf, 1926. Stagg, Hunter. “Scott Fitzgerald’s Latest Novel Is Heralded as His Best.” In F.  Scott Fitzgerald: The Critical Reception, edited by Jackson R. Bryer, 198–99. New York: Burt Franklin, 1978. Stallings, Laurence. “The First Reader — Great Scott.” In F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Critical Reception, edited by Jackson R. Bryer, 203–5. New York: Burt Franklin, 1978. Stallman, Robert Wooster. “Conrad and The Great Gatsby.” Twentieth Century Literature 1, no. 1 (April 1955): 5–12.

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——— . “Gatsby and the Hole in Time.” Modern Fiction Studies 1, no. 4 (November 1955): 2–16. Stark, Bruce R. “The Intricate Pattern in The Great Gatsby.” Fitzgerald/ Hemingway Annual (1974): 51–61. Stavola, Thomas J. Scott Fitzgerald: Crisis in an American Identity. London: Vision, 1979. Stern, Milton R. The Golden Moment: The Novels of F.  Scott Fitzgerald. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1970. Stoddard, Lothrop. The Rising Tide of Color against White World-Supremacy. New York: Scribner, 1920. Stoddart, Scott. “Redirecting Fitzgerald’s ‘Gaze’: Masculine Perception and Cinematic License in The Great Gatsby.” In F. Scott Fitzgerald: New Perspectives, edited by Jackson R. Bryer, Alan Margolies, and Ruth Prigozy, 102–14. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2000. Stouck, David. “White Sheep on Fifth Avenue: The Great Gatsby as Pastoral.” Genre 4 (December 1971): 335–47. Tanner, Bernard. “The Gospel of Gatsby.” English Journal 54 (September 1965): 467–74. Teall, Edward N. “Trumpets Herald Scott Fitzgerald.” In F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Critical Reception, edited by Jackson R. Bryer, 78–79. New York: Burt Franklin, 1978. Thale, Jerome. “The Narrator as Hero.” Twentieth Century Literature 3, no. 2 (July 1957): 69–73. Thompson, Carlyle Van. The Tragic Black Buck: Racial Masquerading in the American Literary Imagination. New York: Peter Lang, 2004. Thorp, Willard, ed. Lives of Eighteen from Princeton. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1946. Trask, David F. “A Note on Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.” University Review 3 (Spring 1967): 197–202. Tredell, Nicolas, ed. F.  Scott Fitzgerald: “The Great Gatsby.” New York: Columbia UP, 1997. Trilling, Lionel. The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society. New York: Viking, 1950. Troy, William. “Scott Fitzgerald — the Authority of Failure.” Accent 6 (Autumn 1945): 56–60. Turnbull, Andrew. Scott Fitzgerald. New York: Scribner, 1962. Turlish, Lewis. “The Rising Tide of Color: A Note on the Historicism of The Great Gatsby.” American Literature 43 (November 1971): 442–44. Van Vechten, Carl. “Fitzgerald on the March.” In F.  Scott Fitzgerald: The Critical Reception, edited by Jackson R. Bryer, 229–30. New York: Burt Franklin, 1978. Vanderbilt, Kermit. “James, Fitzgerald, and the American Self-Image.” Massachusetts Review 6 (Winter-Spring 1965): 289–304. Vince, Raymond M. “The Great Gatsby and the Transformations of SpaceTime: Fitzgerald’s Modernist Narrative and the New Physics of Einstein.” F. Scott Fitzgerald Review 5 (2006): 86–108.

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Wagner, Joseph B. “Gatsby and John Keats: Another Version.” In Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby,” edited by Harold Bloom, 35–41. New York: Chelsea House, 2004. Wanning, Andrews. “Fitzgerald and His Brethren.” In F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Man and His Work, edited by Alfred Kazin, 161–69. New York: Collier, 1967. Washington, Bryan R. The Politics of Exile: Ideology in Henry James, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and James Baldwin. Boston: Northeastern UP, 1995. Wasiolek, Edward. “The Sexual Drama of Nick and Gatsby.” The International Fiction Review 19 (1992): 14–22. ——— . “Texts are Made and Not Given: A Response to a Critique.” Critical Inquiry 2 (Winter 1975): 386–91. Watkins, Floyd C. “Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatz and Young Ben Franklin.” New England Quarterly 27, no. 2 (June 1954): 249–52. Way, Brian. F.  Scott Fitzgerald and the Art of Social Fiction. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1980. Weigand, Chris. “Ernesto Quiñonez: Bodega Dreams: Spanglish Stories.” Spike Magazine. Online. http://www.spikemagazine.com/0201bodegadreams. php 1 August 2010. Weinstein, Arnold. “Fiction as Greatness: The Case of Gatsby.” Novel 19 (Autumn 1985): 22–38. Weir, Jr., Charles. “An Invite with Gilded Edges.” In F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Man and His Work, edited by Alfred Kazin, 133–46. New York: Collier, 1967. West, James L.  W., ed. Trimalchio: An Early Version of The Great Gatsby. Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge UP, 2000. Westbrook, J. S. “Nature and Optics in The Great Gatsby.” American Literature 32 (March 1960): 78–84. Westcott, Glenway. “The Moral of Scott Fitzgerald.” New Republic 104 (February 17, 1941): 213–17. White, Patti. Gatsby’s Party: The System and the List in Contemporary Narrative. West Lafayette: Purdue UP, 1992. Will, Barbara. “The Great Gatsby and The Obscene Word.” College Literature 32 (Fall 2005): 125–44. Wilson, Edmund. I Thought of Daisy. New York: Farrar, Straus and Young, 1953. Young, Philip. American Fiction, American Myth. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 2000. Yust, Walter. “Jazz Parties on Long Island Beach — But F. Scott Fitzgerald is Growing Up.” In F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Critical Reception, edited by Jackson R. Bryer, 214–16. New York: Burt Franklin, 1978. Zinoman, Jason. “Is This Town Big Enough for Two Gatsbys? Maybe Not.” New York Times, July 16, 2006, A8, A22.

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Index “Absolution” (Fitzgerald), 67–68, 70, 88 Adams, Henry, 114 Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The (Twain), 1, 34, 35, 52 African Americans, 100–101, 121–24, 139. See also race Aiken, Conrad, 18 Aldridge, John, 52 Alger, Horatio, 90, 100 Allen, Joan, 68 “American dream,” 40, 64, 69, 79, 90 An American Tragedy (Dreiser), 90, 91 Anderson, Richard, 134–35, 139 anti-Semitic views, 80–81, 98, 100, 117n4 Arthurian romances, 94–95, 116n1 Arundel, Brian, 137 Bailey, David W., 8 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 108–11 Baxter, Warner, 19 Beautiful and Damned, The (Fitzgerald), 88; early reactions to, 2, 10–13, 16; plot of, 11; print runs of, 20n1 Benchley, Robert, 9 Bender, Bert, 117n5 Benét, William, 16–17 Berman, Ronald, 90, 113–16, 133–34; on creating history, 128; on psychoanalysis, 119 Berryman, John, 35–37 Bettina, M., 60 Bewley, Marius, 50, 53, 81–82 Bicknell, John W., 43 Bishop, John Peale, 13, 32 Black, John, 9

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Bodega Dreams (Quiñonez), 138–39, 141 Bourdieu, Pierre, 119 Boyle, Thomas, 73–74 Brantley, Ben, 137 Brecht, Bertolt, 109 Breitweiser, Mitchell, 121, 122 Brenon, Herbert, 19 Brooks, Van Wyck, 90 Browdin, Stanley, 92n8 Bruccoli, Matthew, 3, 58; on editorial emendations, 142n4; on Mencken, 11; on Wilson, 21nn5–6 Bryer, Jackson R., 20n2, 125, 126 Burnam, Tom, 47–48 Burroughs, Catherine B., 117n7 Butcher, Fannny, 15–16 Callahan, John F., 75–76, 78–79 Canby, Henry Seidel, 11 Canby, Vincent, 87 Canterbery, E. Ray, 117n9 capitalism, 30–31, 110, 117n9, 120. See also Marxist approaches Carlisle, Fred, 73 Cass, Colin, 107–8 Cather, Willa, 92n8 Chamberlain, John, 24 Chandler, Raymond, 134 Chase, Richard, 51–52 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 118 Cheever, John, 134 Chekhov, Anton, 118 Cherot, Christopher, 139, 140 Chopin, Kate, 2 Chubb, Thomas Caldecott, 11–12 civilization. See culture Clark, Edwin, 17, 18

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class, 42, 43, 110, 117n9; and culture, 115–16, 119–20; and ethnicity, 122–23. See also Marxist approaches Clayton, Jack, 86 Coghlan, Ralph, 15 Coleman, Dan, 111 commodification, 119, 127, 138 Conrad, Joseph, 44–48, 70–72, 89–90; Heart of Darkness, 46, 71–72, 89; Lord Jim, 46, 48, 89; Nostromo, 46, 89 Cooper, Allene, 95 Cooper, James Fenimore, 51–52 Coppola, Francis Ford, 86 counterpoint, 63, 64. See also narrative techniques courtly love tradition, 94–95 Cowley, Malcolm, 23, 37; on FSF’s double vision, 35–36; on FSF’s literary reputation, 28 Crack-Up, The (Fitzgerald), 24, 28, 31–35 Crowther, Bosley, 38 culture: and class distinctions, 115–16, 119–20; versus nature, 59–61, 63, 76, 79, 92n3, 97; popular, 50–51, 54, 68, 73, 87, 120–22, 134–40; and Public Philosophy, 90, 114–16. See also landscapes Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The (film), 87 Curnutt, Kirk, 120–21, 133–34 Curry, Steven, 71 Curtis, William, 17 Daisy Miller (James), 70, 104 Davis, Owen, 19, 135 Decker, Jeffrey Louis, 99–101, 103, 125 del Gizzo, Suzanne, 137–38 Dern, Bruce, 86 Dewey, John, 114 Diamant, Gertrude, 23 Dickens, Charles, 118 Dickerson, Mary Jane, 108–9 Dilworth, Thomas, 119 Disenchanted, The (Schulberg), 38–39, 87

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Donaldson, Scott, 119–20, 138 Dos Passos, John, 27–30, 90–91 Doyno, Victor, 62–63 Dreiser, Theodore, 10–11, 31, 45, 88, 90, 91 Dylan, Bob, 135 Dyson, A. E., 66 Eagleton, Harvey, 6–7 Eble, Kenneth, 60, 62, 69–70, 88, 126 Edgett, Edwin Francis, 9, 12 Einstein, Albert, 119 Elevator Repair Service (performance artists), 136–37 Eliot, T. S., 40, 44–45, 105 Elmore, A. E., 92n4 Empson, William, 37 ethnicity, 80–81, 86, 98–99, 103, 105, 124; and class, 122–23; and immigration policies, 99–100; and stereotyping, 110 eugenics, 96, 114, 117n5. See also race Evans, Oliver, 73 Farber, Manny, 38 Farrow, Mia, 86–87 Faulkner, William, 30 “Faustian man” (Spengler), 97 feminist theories, 42, 92n7, 94, 101. See also gender Fetterley, Judith, 82–83, 94, 101 Fiedler, Leslie, 41–42, 81–82; on FSF’s anti-Semitism, 80; on sexual ambiguity, 84 Fight Club (novel & film), 137–38 Fincher, David, 87 Fitzgerald, F. Scott: and Conrad, 44–48, 70–72, 89–90; Cowley on, 23, 28, 35–37; death of, 20, 25–26; “double vision” of, 35–36, 47–48, 73, 109, 141; and Eliot, 40, 44–45, 105; on Gatsby, 2–3, 6, 32, 58; and James, 17, 40, 44–47, 53, 56n9, 70–71; and Mencken, 3, 8, 11, 14–15, 88; Perkins on, 17, 51; as screenwriter, 14, 25, 87; tragic vision of, 30–31; and Twain,

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INDEX 1, 34, 35, 52; and Wells, 53, 56n9; Wilson on, 21n6, 27–28. See also specific works Fitzgerald, Scottie, 25 Fitzgerald, Zelda Sayre, 9, 25, 42, 81 Flappers and Philosophers (Fitzgerald), 10, 12 Forrey, Robert, 79 Forter, Greg, 117n6 Foster, Richard, 74 Franklin, Benjamin, 49, 77, 100, 106 Fraser, John, 73 Fraser, Keath, 84, 101 Frohock, W. M., 46, 47 Frye, Northrop, 58, 63, 65 Fryer, Sarah Beebe, 101 Fussell, Edwin, 49–51 G (film), 139–41 Ganek, Danielle, 140–41 Garrett, George, 99 Garvey, Marcus, 100–101 Gatz (play), 136–37 Geismar, Maxwell, 34, 55n7 gender, 40, 58, 81–85, 117n6; and male gaze, 92n7, 101; and queer theory, 42, 103–4; and romance, 121; and sexuality, 83–85, 101–5; and wealth, 65. See also feminist theories Gibson, Walker, 48 Gidley, M., 80 Gindin, James, 69 Glyn, Elinor, 120 Godden, Richard, 109–11 Gold, Mike, 24 Goldsmith, Meredith, 122–23 Gorman, Herbert S., 18 gossip magazines, 115, 119, 134, 142n5 Graham, T. Austin, 121–22 grail quest, 95, 116n1 Grant, Madison, 80, 100, 114, 134 Great Gatsby, The (Fitzgerald): cinematic qualities of, 15, 87, 141; color imagery in, 106; film versions of, 19, 38, 58, 86–87, 139–40; FSF’s comments on, 2–3, 6, 32, 58;

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humor in, 93–94; Modern Library edition of, 19–20; novels inspired by, 137–39; opera based on, 135; preface to, 19–20; sales figures for, 1–2, 87, 126; stage adaptations of, 19, 135–37; teaching of, 58, 125–29; title of, 44 Greenleaf, Richard, 43 Gregory, Horace, 23–24 Gross, Barry Edward, 91n2 Gunn, Giles, 68 Gurko, Leo, 29–30 Gurko, Miriam, 29–30 Haeckel, Ernest, 117n5 Hale, Ruth, 13 Hamilton, Sharon, 119, 142n5 Hansen, Harry, 9 Hanzo, Thomas, 46–47 Harbison, John, 135 Harvey, W. J., 52–53, 62 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 1, 70 Hays, Peter L., 71 Heart of Darkness (Conrad), 46, 71–72, 89 Hemingway, Ernest, 29, 30, 33, 118 Hicks, Granville, 29 Hindus, Milton, 56n8, 69 hip-hop music, 139. See also music Hoffman, Frederick, 67 Holquist, Michael, 110–11 homosexual panic, 103–5. See also sexuality Hull, Edith Maude, 120 I Thought of Daisy (Wilson), 96 idealism, 51, 61–62, 77–79, 97, 102; and Platonic conceptions, 33, 40–41, 122, 130; romantic, 110, 127. See also realism immigration policies, 99–100. See also ethnicity James, Henry, 17–18, 40, 44–47, 53, 56n9, 70–71; Daisy Miller, 18, 70, 104; Golden Bowl, 36; Turn of the Screw, 18 James, William, 115

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160

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INDEX

“Jazz Age,” 5, 20n4, 27–29, 50, 116 jazz music, 68, 121–22. See also music Jefferson, Thomas, 60, 77, 79, 107 Jews, depiction of, 80–81, 98, 100, 105, 117n4 “John Jackson’s Arcady” (Fitzgerald), 70, 88–89, 128 Joyce, James, 102 Kazin, Alfred, 32 Keats, John, 44, 55n6, 118 Kehl, D. G., 95 Kerouac, Jack, 134 Kerr, Frances, 102–5 King, Ginevra, 81 Kinsley, Phil, 12–13 Kipling, Rudyard, 118 Kopf, Josephine Z., 80 Korenman, Joan, 81, 94, 101 Kraus, Joe, 117n4 Kuehl, John, 52 landscapes, 45, 96–97; Edenic, 51, 60–62, 78, 127, 141; of memory, 114, 127, 131; suburban, 126–33. See also culture Last Tycoon, The (Fitzgerald): editor of, 20, 21n5, 142n4; preparation of, 28; stage adaptation of, 136; title of, 20, 21n5 Le Vot, André, 106 Lehan, Richard, 69, 80, 95–99, 114 Lewis, R. W. B., 63 Lewis, Sinclair, 29 Liberal Imagination, The (Trilling), 40–41 Lippmann, Walter, 90, 114 Lisca, Peter, 75, 112 Long, Robert Emmet, 88–91 Lord Jim (Conrad), 46, 48, 89 “lost generation,” 26 Luhrmann, Baz, 139–40 MacKendrick, Paul, 44 MacPhee, Laurence, 64 Magistrale, Tony, 108–9 Mallios, Peter, 123

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Manhattan Transfer (Dos Passos), 90–91 Margolies, Alan, 92n6 Marshall Margaret, 27 Marx, Leo, 61 Marxist approaches, 30–31, 86, 109, 110; to class dynamics, 42, 43, 110, 117n9, 119–20; to commodification, 119, 127, 138; to proletarian fiction, 24, 42, 120 “May Day” (Fitzgerald), 88 McCarthy, Eugene, 78 McClure, John, 5 McDonnell, Robert F., 64 McPartlin, R. F., 7–8 Mellard, James, 63–64, 91n2 Melville, Herman, 1, 2, 51–52 Mencken, H. L., 11, 88, 102; Beautiful and Damned review by, 8; Gatsby review by, 3, 14–15; Paradise review by, 8, 14, 15 Michaels, Walter Benn, 100 Miller, James E., Jr., 52, 53, 56n9, 62, 70–71, 88, 89 Millgate, Michael, 71 Minter, David, 74–75 Mizener, Arthur, 37–39, 50, 59–61, 64, 87; and Chase, 51; on landscapes in Gatsby, 126; and Stallman, 53 Moby Dick (Melville), 1, 2, 51–52 Monk, Donald, 106 Morgan, Elizabeth, 94–95 Morin, Richard, 136 Mulford, Carla, 91n1 Mulvey, Laura, 92n7 music, popular, 54, 68, 121–22, 139. See also culture Nafisi, Azar, 24–25 narrative technique(s), 93, 107, 110–13; of Conrad, 46, 70–72; counterpoint, 63–64; Frye on, 58; of James, 44–47, 53, 56n9, 70–72; Perosa on, 70; of Wells, 53, 56n9; White on, 111–13 nativism, 99–100, 105, 114, 124–25. See also race

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INDEX Neuhaus, Ron, 74 New Criticism, 17, 58, 66, 86, 105–6, 125; and naratology, 112, 113 new historicism, 93, 99–100, 104 Norris, Frank, 10–11, 31, 45, 88 Nostromo (Conrad), 46, 89 “O Russet Witch!” (Fitzgerald), 95 O’Hara, John, 134 Ornstein, Robert, 50–51, 63, 81–82 Osborn, E. W., 13 Overy, Richard, 96 Palahniuk, Chuck, 137–38 Parker, David, 74 Paterson, Isabel, 3, 5, 27, 29 Paulson, A. B., 83–84 Pegler, Westbrook, 26–27 Pendleton, Thomas, 108–9 Perkins, Maxwell, 14; editorial contributions of, 91n1; on rounded characters, 17; on sense of eternity, 51 Perosa, Sergio, 69, 70 Person, Leland, 81–82, 94, 101 Petronius’s Satyricon, 44, 94 Piper, Henry Dan, 41, 45, 66–67, 69 Platonic conceptions, 33, 40–41, 122, 130 Poe, Edgar Allan, 70 Poore, Charles, 28–29 popular culture, 50–51, 73, 87, 120–22, 134–40. See also culture Portable F. Scott Fitzgerald, The, 28–29 Posnock, Ross, 117n9 poststructuralism, 54, 93, 104, 109, 112 Pound, Ezra, 102 Prescott, Orville, 39 Prigozy, Ruth, 141n3 proletarian fiction, 24, 42, 120. See also Marxist approaches Proust, Marcel, 37 psychoanalytic approaches, 42–43, 82–86; Berman on, 119; and gender dynamics, 82–83, 117n6 Public Philosophy, 90, 114–16

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queer theory, 42, 103–4. See also sexuality Quiñonez, Ernesto, 138–39, 141 Quirk, Tom, 92n8 race, 79–81, 96–101, 103–5, 139; and eugenics, 96, 114, 117n5; and nativism, 99–100, 105, 114, 124–25; performativity of, 122–24; stereotyping of, 110–11 Raleigh, John Henry, 51 Randall, Dale, 66 Randall, Monica, 128 Rawson, Eric, 119 Reading Lolita in Tehran (Nafisi), 24–25 realism, 10–11, 91, 93; of Dreiser, 10–11, 31, 45, 88, 90, 91; versus idealism, 51, 61–62, 77–79, 97, 102; of Frank Norris, 10–11, 31, 45, 88; versus romance, 110, 127 Redford, Robert, 86–87 Rohrkemper, John, 106–7 Roulston, Robert, 56n9 Royce, Josiah, 114, 115 Rule-Maxwell, Lauren, 118 Samuels, Charles Thomas, 60–61 Santayana, George, 114, 116 Satyricon (Petronius), 44, 94 Savage, D. S., 42–43 Sayre, Zelda. See Fitzgerald, Zelda Schneider, Daniel, 64 Schoenwald, Richard, 44 Schulberg, Budd, 38–39, 87 Scrimgeour, Gary, 71–73 second chances, myth of, 22–23, 60, 92n3 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 103, 104 Seguin, Robert, 92n8 Seldes, Gilbert, 18, 19, 24 “Sensible Thing, The” (Fitzgerald), 70, 88–89, 128 Settle, Glenn, 94 sexuality, 83–86, 101–5; of Jordan Baker, 40, 84, 102; of Daisy Buchanan, 83–84, 104–5; of Nick Carraway, 84–85, 101–4; and queer theory, 42, 103–4; and romance, 120–21. See also gender

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162

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INDEX

Shepherd, Scott, 136, 137 Sinclair, Upton, 31 Skinner, John, 108 Skinner, Quinton, 136–37 Sklar, Robert, 69, 73, 89, 91n2, 95 Slater, Peter Gregg, 80–81 Snyder, Ruth, 13–14 Solomon, Eric, 45 Spengler, Oswald, 55, 80, 95–99, 114 Stagg, Hunter, 16 Stallings, Laurence, 4 Stallman, Robert Wooster, 45–46, 53–54, 57, 89–90, 95 Stark, Bruce, 65, 112 Stavola, Thomas J., 69 Stendhal, 35 stereotyping, 73, 98, 110–11 Stern, Milton R., 75–78 Stoddard, Lothrop, 79–80, 98–100, 114 Stoddart, Scott, 92n7 Stouck, David, 62, 76 suburban landscapes, 126–33 Summer We Read Gatsby, The (Ganek), 140–41 Tales of the Jazz Age (Fitzgerald), 20n4 Tanner, Bernard, 68 Taps at Reveille (Fitzgerald), 24 Teall, Edward N., 12 Tender Is the Night (Fitzgerald), 6, 22, 120; initial reaction to, 2; print runs of, 20n1; reviews of, 23–25; stage adaptation of, 136 Thackeray, William Makepeace, 71 Thale, Jerome, 46 This Side of Paradise (Fitzgerald), 88, 120; “Author’s Apology” to, 3, 125; early reactions to, 2, 7–16; original title of, 7; print runs of, 20n1; H. G. Wells’s influence on, 53 Thompson, Carlyle Van, 123–24 Three Comrades (film), 25 Trask, David, 60, 68, 76 Tredell, Nicolas, 55n2, 58, 101

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Trilling, Lionel, 4–5, 28, 34, 48, 78, 125; Liberal Imagination, 40–41 Troy, William, 32–34, 49, 53 Turlish, Lewis, 79–80 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 60 Twain, Mark, 34, 35 Valentino, Rudolph, 120 Van Vechten, Carl, 18 VanArsdale, Nancy, 125, 126 Vanderbilt, Kermit, 70 Veblen, Thorstein, 110, 117n9, 119 Vince, Raymond M., 119 Wanning, Andrews, 32 Washington, Bryan, 104–5 Wasiolek, Edward, 86, 101–3, 105 Waste Land, The (Eliot), 40, 44–45, 105 Waterston, Sam, 86 Way, Brian, 93–94 wealth: and commodification, 119, 127, 138; and gender, 65; and power, 30–31, 42. See also class Weinstein, Arnold, 106 Weir, Charles, Jr., 30–31 Wells, H. G., 53, 56n9 Westbrook, J. S., 59–60, 76 Westcott, Glenway, 27 Wharton, Edith, 18, 71 White, Patti, 111–13 Will, Barbara, 124–25 Wilson, Edmund, 14, 90, 102; as editor of Crack-Up, 25, 31, 33; as editor of Last Tycoon, 20, 21n5, 142n4; on FSF’s literary stature, 21n6, 27–28; novel of, 96 Wilson, Louis, 19 “Winter Dreams” (Fitzgerald), 88, 89, 128 Wolfe, Thomas, 30 Young, Philip, 44–45 Yust, Walter, 15 Zinoman, Jason, 136

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City University of New York.

“Robert Beuka has constructed an immensely valuable resource for teachers, students, and scholars. We have needed a book like this for a long time; Gatsby criticism seems in little danger of exhaustion anytime soon, and it becomes extremely difficult for readers to organize extant criticism simply because it’s so vast. This book will be read and reread, annotated and underlined, for many years to come.” —Kirk Curnutt, Troy University Montgomery

Cover image: Dust jacket of first edition of The Great Gatsby, published by Charles Scribner’s Sons in 1925. The image is Francis Cugat’s Celestial Eyes. Photo used by kind permission of the Matthew J. and Arlyn Bruccoli Collection of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Irvin Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, University of South Carolina Libraries.

Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby in Critical and Cultural Context

Beuka

“American Icon is a terrific book.€.€.€. Professor Beuka has made sense of decades of fragmented insights.” —Ronald Berman, University of California, San Diego

American Icon

Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby in Critical and Cultural Context

Robert Beuka is Professor of English at Bronx Community College,

American Icon

F

itzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is widely seen as the quintessential “great American novel,” and the extensive body of criticism on the work bears out its significance in American letters. American Icon traces its reception and its canonical status in American literature, popular culture, and educational experience. It begins by outlining the novel’s critical reception from its publication in 1925, to very mixed reviews, through Fitzgerald’s death, when it had been virtually forgotten. Next, it examines the posthumous revival of Fitzgerald studies in the 1940s and its intensification by the New Critics in the 1950s, focusing on how and why the novel began to be considered a masterpiece of American literature. It then traces the growth of the “industry” of Gatsby criticism in the ensuing decades, stressing how critics of recent decades have opened up study of the economic, sexual, racial, and historical aspects of the text. The final section discusses the larger-thanlife status Gatsby has attained in American education and popular culture, suggesting not only that it has risen from the critical ash heaps into which it was initially discarded, but also that it has become part of the fabric of American culture in a way that few other works have.

Cover design: Frank Gutbrod

Robert Beuka

Beuka_cover.indd 1

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