F. Scott Fitzgerald

“In the Twenties, his heyday, he was a kind of king of our American youth”—so a writer of Fitzgerald’s generation remembered him when he died five years ago. It would be pleasant to leave him there, among the fast cars, the bloom of youth, the beat of jazz, ruling from Princeton and Long Island and the Riviera his incoherent kingdom. This would be pleasant and historical; but we cannot do it. We have serious business with one or two of his books, and perhaps with the lesson of his shade,—what he calls back to us, if we care to attend. The king is extremely dead, his subjects are dispersed. We had better be critical, which is to try to save.

Some very good readers will wonder whether anything is worth saving. We may agree that this king went in heavily and childishly for fireworks, beautiful in the immediate darkness, a mess of wire and cardboard in the morning. We want something better than lips which are stated to be thrilling and day-dreams drifting over fatuity. But there can be no doubt that in The Great Gatsby we have something better. This short novel published in 1925 still has readers; three publishers flourish it on their current lists; there is a widespread impression that it is Fitzgerald’s best novel. Undoubtedly it is. An impression less widespread, which I wish to encourage, is that it is a masterpiece.

The word need not be pretentious nor invoke wild rivalries with Hawthorne or Stendhal. Let us mean by it a work of the literary imagination which is consistent, engaging, and dramatic, in exceptional degrees; which exhibits largely mastered a human subject of the first importance; and which seems in retrospect to illuminate the whole physical and spiritual situation of which it was, by the strange parturition of art, an accidental product. One easy test will be the rapidity with which, in the imagination of a good judge, other works of the period and kind will faint away under any suggested comparison with it. Now a small work may satisfy these demands as readily as a large one, and The Great Gatsby satisfies them, I believe, better than any other American work of fiction since The Golden Bowl.

Fitzgerald’s general subject in it is the irresponsible world of American wealth in the early Twenties, into which he thrusts up through the ambiguous levels of our society his elegant young roughneck Jay Gatsby, born James Gatz. Most of his scenes picture the semi-activities of the rich on Long Island and in New York, stretching to include Tom Buchanan’s journeys into the lower middle class to meet his mistress, and Gatsby’s continuing criminal associations. All these parties and meetings are imaged with a clear honesty and an exact feeling for relation. But his precise subject is the impact of this world upon the two outsiders who venture into it, and particularly upon Carraway, Fitzgerald’s narrator, the history of whose disenchantment during one summer the novel practically is. 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 between this and his later novels. The Great Gatsby is in Chekhov’s sense a purely graceful book (“When a man spends the least possible number of movements over some definite action, that is grace”). Not a page could well be lost from it without disturbance to Fitzgerald’s achievement of the rapt immobility of Gatsby fixed upon his far object, and Carraway’s advance toward nausea. To Carraway the nature of the wealth-world can be revealed. He can suffer through his mistress, through his cousin Daisy and her husband Tom, and return to the Middle-west, summing up like an evening bell: “It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together. … ” Gatsby can be physically destroyed, and he is, his is one of the three deaths Tom and Daisy cause. But no revelation of their world can be made to him. Gatsby has had a prior and very different revelation.

He is described at the outset as possessing “an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness,” “some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life,” and it is clear that this is the quality that drew Fitzgerald to his creation. But how far and how strangely he insisted upon it does not appear to have been understood. When Gatsby and Daisy have been reunited, Carraway recognizes in Gatsby’s bewilderment “the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion. … No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man can store up in his ghostly heart.” The theme recurs blankly when Carraway attempts to warn him: ” ‘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!'” And finally in a profound moment as Gatsby is speaking to Carraway of Daisy’s feeling for her husband, whether at the beginning of their marriage she did really love Tom: “Suddenly he came out with a curious remark. ‘In any case,’ he said, ‘it was just personal.’ What could you make of that, except to suspect some intensity in his conception of the affair that couldn’t be measured?”

These passages will locate for us, I think, the obsession which dominates Gatsby, the man and the book, and provides the permanent theme of Fitzgerald’s serious fiction. Carraway is not permitted to understand it fully, but I have no doubt that Fitzgerald himself did and wished his reader to do. In the Introduction he wrote in 1934 for a reprint of Gatsby occurs this startling claim: “How anyone could take up the responsibility of being a novelist without a sharp and concise attitude about life is a puzzle to me.” It was not intended, probably, as a claim, but a claim it is; and although Fitzgerald looked on himself as a moralist (and plainly is one) this seems to me less a reference to morality than to an attitude or pattern of the most general kind, a “figure in the carpet” as James called it. What is the “figure”?

It is not an idealism, and not Hope, though it is kin to these. It is hardly even an attitude toward experience, although it is a way of taking Life. It is a view of Life in which the creature’s supreme admiration is commanded by that which the artist knows to be wrong, in which the supreme allegiance is forced to be felt—producing “creative passion” —toward a hopeless error. It insists that the enthusiast be impersonal or selfless, and certain. It is as if a young artist, a young man, saw every road blocked and sent his characters forward singing. There is helpless irony in the mounting of such a theme, 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. The superior knowledge has no condescension or rebuke. Carraway knows for instance that Gatsby’s chance for Daisy is long past, but there is only love in his witness to Gatsby’s fantastic vigil,—or there is envy. This feeling is as idiosyncratic and as literal as some of Wordsworth’s feelings, and as difficult to understand for the same reason: most people are familiar with the attitude in some diffused form but cannot imagine that anyone really believes it in a strict form. What Fitzgerald valued was a beauty and intensity of attachment, which his imagination required should be attachment to something inaccessible. For the wholly inaccessible he admitted two modes, the never existent and the already past. He drove his characters sometimes towards the first, as in certain of the stories which are actual fantasies, but regularly toward the second, as in Gatsby. And his finest work is saturated with the desperate or ecstatic nostalgia, the firm hope and the firmer despair, of the superb conclusion of this novel.

… And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter — tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. … And one fine morning—

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past