PGS Lit Soc: The Great Gatsby: The American Dream in Reverse

 by Henry Wiggins

I first read The Great Gatsby at school in the Sixth Form; it remains a very popular ‘syllabus’ book that is taught all over the place. It’s accessible, it’s short, it’s quotable; it’s very exam friendly in short! That ubiquity is not always good news for novels and their place in the canon; they can almost get over-exposed and people - teachers and pupils - can get tired of them. In that sense, choosing to talk about The Great Gatsby is not a particularly innovative or leftfield choice for LitSoc but it was, and remains, my favourite novel and I think it continues to defy any attempts to take a more negative revisionist approach to it, and remains as exciting, contemporaneous and worthwhile book to read as ever. 

Given its well-known status, there has been masses written about Gatsby and the whole ‘world of Gatsby/Scott-Fitzgerald’ genre is pretty well-trodden itself, both in print and on-screen. You can’t do justice to the novel or the mountains of criticism that have followed it in 20 minutes so this is just a relatively scattergun journey through as many reasons as possible why I love Gatsby so much and think it’s pretty much peerless, certainly in terms of 20th century American literature.

I’ve called my talk ‘the American dream in reverse’ for reasons that I’ll elaborate on more fully later but essentially the common critical summary of Gatsby is that it represents the ‘flipside’ of the American dream. I’m not sure that’s right; I think it’s a book that is actually completely and utterly in thrall to the idea of the American dream and the American experience. It does however also appreciate its paradoxes and hypocrisies, and also perhaps above all deals with what happens when you get beyond the American dream and its initial attractions; when initial wonder and excitement gives way to reality.

After school I perhaps unsurprisingly didn’t re-read Gatsby for quite a while but my interest and passion for the book was reignited by a stage version of it in 2010. This was a full 8 hours staged reading of the entire text called ‘Gatz’ that I saw in the West End after it relocated from Off-Broadway. A man in a humdrum American office one day picks up a copy of the book and starts reading it aloud. His fellow office workers join in to speak some of the other parts. It was in three parts with two intervals and was something of an endurance feat but it was also wonderful, one of the best things I’ve ever seen on stage. What I remembered watching the novel being read and acted aloud was how wonderful Scott Fitzgerald’s language was, the many many wonderful phrases in the book, the fantastic set-pieces that pepper the story and how, at the end, what a pointless and tragic tale it is; one filled with almost entirely dislikeable people - ‘careless people’ as Scott Fitzgerald calls them. It’s actually quite an achievement in itself to write a book that readers care about that is almost completely taken up with awful characters; most stories require at least one genuine hero to redeem them and, despite what Nick Carraway says, I’m not even sure that Gatsby himself is that.

Another reason for finding Gatsby fascinating is that the the life of the author and his family who produced it is also fascinating; as I said, the lives of F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda are almost as much written-about now as the novels, short stories and magazine articles that he himself wrote.

There’s a huge faultline of autobiographical  content running through all of Scott Fitzgerald’s work, not least Gatsby. His full name is Francis Scott Fitzgerald and he was named after his second cousin Francis Scott Key who is most well-known for writing the American national anthem ‘The Star Spangled Banner’ in the early 19th century. So one half of Scott Fitzgerald’s family is real American aristocracy - founding father-ish level - whilst the other half is, in his words, ‘straight 1850 potato famine Irish’. This obsession with where you’re from socially, culturally and ethnically is very American and is also very Gatsby. Jay Gatsby - our eponymous hero - is simultaneously American elite and little Jimmy Gatz from North Dakota of poor - probably Germanic - immigrant stock. 

Scott Fitzgerald married Zelda in 1920; she was from fairly elevated old money Alabama society and there was no doubt that Francis was marrying upwards; indeed, she only married him when his debut novel ‘This Side of Paradise’ sold well enough that he was clearly a success and could keep her in the style to which she was accustomed. Gatsby too, for all his wealth, can never quite shake off the reality of the fact that his love Daisy Buchanan is, when all is said and done, out of his league. 

The Fitzgeralds moved to the French Riviera in 1924 and Gatsby was published in 1925. It was, as is often the way with tragic heroes, never fully appreciated during Scott Fitzgerald’s life and wasn’t even mentioned when he died in his NY Times obituary. Whilst there’s no doubt that Gatsby is his finest work, I wouldn’t overlook his other novels and short stories; Tender is the Night published in 1934 is set on the Riviera whilst the unfinished Last Tycoon is a novel set in Hollywood where Scott Fitzgerald moved in 1937 after the breakdown of his marriage to Zelda whose own mental state had deteriorated throughout that decade. Fitzgerald tried to make it as a screenwriter but his own alcoholism was already taking its toll - not for nothing is one collection of his short stories and magazine articles called ‘On Booze’ - and he died of a heart attack aged 44 in 1940. 

Like Gatsby, Scott Fitzgerald did simultaneously well and was ultimately somewhat destroyed by the opportunities in American society in the 20s and 30s. It’s too glib to say that Gatsby is Fitzgerald because there’s definitely at least also some of the author in the book’s narrator Nick Carraway but I think we can safely say that the attractive romantic side of Gatsby was a quality that Scott Fitzgerald took from himself;

“If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the "creative temperament"—it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again. No—Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.”

Quick summation of the main characters and initial plot; Nick Carraway - our narrator - moves to Long Island in the summer of 1922, he re-acquaints himself with some rich old friends of his - Tom and Daisy Buchanan and begins a romantic relationship with a friend of theirs, a golf pro called Jordan Baker. At the same time he comes into the social circle of a mysterious figure called Jay Gatsby who is very rich, throws great parties and...nobody knows much else about him other than that. He might be dodgy - which only adds to the allure for many - but that’s ok because, to be honest,  most of the characters in the book are morally compromised or downright criminal in some way; Daisy is self-absorbed and frivolous, Tom is violent, racist and having an affair behind his wife’s back with the money-grabbing Myrtle Wilson. Even Jordan cheats at golf. Even Carraway is pretty unctuous - he describes himself in the book as ‘one of the few honest people I have ever known’ which is a pretty nauseating and self-regarding thing to say about yourself. So the characters are all horrible but fascinating, another of the reasons to love the book.

Another thing I love about the book is its modernism; this is a literary and cultural genre or tradition that I generally find really interesting and Gatsby belongs firmly in that. It’s a book in love with American modernity and, above all, the American city and its expanding suburbs of the 1920s. 

“Over the great bridge, with the sunlight through the girders making a constant flicker upon the moving cars, with the city rising up across the river in white heaps and sugar lumps all built with a wish out of non-olfactory money. The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world.”

However, it doesn’t shy away from the underbelly of this glamorous world - not the flipside I would argue because most of the time in Gatsby it's, at best, hiding in plain sight and is pretty ever-present throughout. One of the most famous bits of set-piece imagery in the book describes the first journey Nick takes in it from the fictional Long Island community of West Egg through Queens to Manhattan;

“About half way between West Egg and New York the motor-road hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land. This is a valley of ashes—a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of grey cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-grey men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud which screens their obscure operations from your sight.”

This ‘valley of ashes’ was a real place - the Corona Dump - where all the collected garbage, manure and detritus of Manhattan and Brooklyn accumulated in the early 20th century. It was then developed on and is now an area called ‘Flushing Meadows’ which is the home of both the US Open Tennis and the New York Mets baseball ground.

Talking of set-pieces, they are another reason to love the novel and is often very cinematic in its descriptions. There’s a lot of licences taken by Baz Luhrman’s 2013 film of the novel but I think he captures the glamour, squalour and excitement of the first of Gatsby’s parties that Nick attends rather well.

So finally in this brief journey through reasons to love Gatsby we come to the conclusion, both of my summation of the novel and Fitzgerald’s text itself. Simply put Gatsby has the best end of anything written in the English language anywhere ever. Its final lines elevate it somewhere ethereal and elegiac and to an emotional plane that most books get nowhere near for me. I could read it out myself but I love this clip of an American sportswriter called Bill Nack reciting it from memory’

Gatsby is not a condemnation of the American dream; it’s a celebration of it in many ways and it recognises how powerful a force America’s independence and westwards expansion in the 18th and 19th centuries was. It’s significant that all the main characters in the book are not going west though as early European settlers did; they’re returning east and leaving behind the old traditional world of American dream values - ‘street lamps and sleigh bells’ as Nick calls them. 

His depiction of his small-town America always reminds me of Bedford Falls - the town where its always Christmas - in ‘It's a Wonderful Life’ which was released in 1946 and I would suggest is also one of the key cultural artefacts of early 20th century America.

Ultimately the cynicism and ruthlessness of the old world East Coast will chew Gatsby and spit him out but I think that what Fitzgerald is saying here is that sometimes the American Dream doesn’t always work out but it’s still worth trying. This is summed up by a quote he gave a reporter in 1927, two years after Gatsby’s publication;

"There has never been an American tragedy," Fitzgerald ended. "There have only been great failures."