“They were smiling at each
other as if this was the beginning of the world.”
LLR Books
With Rockville festival, Fitzgerald’s literary legacy lives on
by Ryan Marshall
Fitzgerald is buried in the
cemetery of St. Mary’s Church on Veirs Mill Road, along with his wife Zelda,
daughter “Scottie” and other relatives.
The festival is not a typical
literary conference geared toward academics, said Eleanor Heginbotham, one of
the festival’s organizers. The panels and discussions are geared to be friendly
toward the public, she said.
Fitzgerald has continued to
capture people’s imagination partly because he and Zelda lived a very glamorous
life, said Jackson Bryer, a professor emeritus of English at the University of
Maryland and president of the organization that sponsors the festival.
The tumultuous marriage has
become part of popular culture “for all the wrong reasons as well as the right
reasons,” he said.
The enduring appeal of
Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” and other works have also driven people’s
fascination.
People fall in love with the
story and characters in “Gatsby,” as well as the poetry and style of the
writing, Bryer said.
The novel often divides
students along the lines of those who think Gatsby is a fool and others who see
him as a yearning idealist, he said.
“It kind of separates the
business majors from the English majors,” Bryer said.
The event will actually begin
Thursday, with a literary luncheon at the Mansion at Strathmore in Bethesda.
Friday will feature readings
and discussion on “Writing the War Experience” with writers Ron Capps, Katey
Schultz and James T. Matthews at the Writer’s Center in Bethesda.
Saturday will include a full
schedule of events, discussions and workshops, including a master’s class by
writer James Salter and a discussion with panelists sharing their favorite
passages in Fitzgerald’s work, including journalist Jim Lehrer and author Alice
McDermott.
Salter will also receive the
2014 F. Scott Fitzgerald Award, which since 1996 has been given to writers
including William Styron, Joyce Carol Oates, E.L. Doctorow, Norman Mailer, John
Updike and Elmore Leonard.
Heginbotham is a professor
emerita at Concordia University in St. Paul, Minn., the city where Fitzgerald
was born in 1896.
When she moved back to
Maryland, she got involved in the festival to help celebrate one of her
favorite authors.
Fitzgerald had deep roots in
Maryland, and did a lot of writing in the state, Heginbotham said.
His father Edward Fitzgerald
was from a prominent family in the county, and young Scott often visited the
family’s farm, Locust Grove.
The festival is about bringing
people together who love Fitzgerald, said Roberta Mandrekas of Montgomery
College.
Any time you read Fitzgerald,
something is bound to resonate with you, Mandrekas said.
When Fitzgerald died in 1940,
sales of his books were infinitesimally small, Bryer said.
But his legend was still big
enough that between 20 and 30 papers wrote obituaries or editorials, although
most celebrated him simply as a bard of the Jazz Age, an “exemplar of a time
gone by,” Bryer said.
It wasn’t until the 1950s that
critics began to regard Fitzgerald as more than just a naturally talented
dilettante, and “The Great Gatsby” became recognized as a classic of American
literature, Bryer said.
Fitzgerald’s reputation also
suffered during his lifetime through comparisons to his contemporary, rival and
sometime-friend Ernest Hemingway.
Hemingway was larger than life,
and his books sold much better, Bryer said.
As result, Fitzgerald envied
Hemingway’s commercial success and Hemingway thought Fitzgerald was the
superior stylist.
In its 18th year, the festival
honoring Fitzgerald’s legacy continues because even today Heginbotham believes
people have a tangible connection to the author.
“In our culture, in our ethos,
we breathe him,” she said.
Why F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby never dies
In a new book, So We Read On:
How The Great Gatsby Came to Be and Why It Endures, literary scholar Maureen
Corrigan explains why the novel failed in its author’s day but has since
enthralled millions
By: Jennifer Hunter The Reader
“His life was depressing at
times, but there is the consolation of art for those of us who believe he
created a masterpiece.”
Maureen Corrigan has an
unabashed passion for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby. For more
than 30 years, the Georgetown University professor and NPR (National Public
Radio (NPR) book reviewer has taught Gatsby, lectured about it across the
United States and researched Fitzgerald’s life and times. She spoke with the
Star about her new book, So We Read On: How The Great Gatsby Came to Be and Why
It Endures. The interview has been edited for length.
Every five years I read all of
Jane Austen, but The Great Gatsby is not something I’ve thought about picking
up since university. Why are you so affected by this particular Fitzgerald
novel? Why do you read it again and again?
The first time I read it was in
high school, which is when most American students read it. I didn’t love it; I
thought it was kind of boring. It was about rich people and I wasn’t
particularly drawn to these wealthy characters, coming from a blue- collar
background myself.
I did my master’s degree in
English literature at the University of Pennsylvania and then, of course, I had
to teach Gatsby to freshmen. As I re-read Gatsby, the language drew me in.
It’s that odd kind of novel. It
is not a character-driven novel or a plot-driven novel, but Nick Carraway’s
voice drew me in, and Fitzgerald’s language captures aspiration and yearning
and regret. He does so in ordinary American diction and even slang sometimes,
but it is made unearthly because he is a poet and his use of words is just
stunning.
To give you an example, the
first time you see Gatsby in the novel, at the end of Chapter 1, he is standing
and looking up at the “silver pepper of the stars.” That’s a phrase that lodges
in my mind.
Who thinks like that except a
poet? It is a perfect phrase to describe how Gatsby is standing because he is a
character who is about aspiration, about stretching his arms farther and
looking up to the stars, even if that aspiration is doomed to failure.
That’s a very long answer to
your question. But it is the language that drew me in and it is the language
that keeps me coming back.
I have never thought of
Fitzgerald as a poet.
Maybe you have to hear it read
out loud. When you read those passages out loud they hit you a different way
than when you are just reading to yourself. You can even catch the humour of
Gatsby.
I teach a course on New York
literature, and one of the ways I teach it is to make students read Gatsby out
loud. That famous Queensboro Bridge passage where Nick and Gatsby are driving
into Manhattan from Long Island, Fitzgerald sticks a joke in there. He talks
about the skyscrapers rising up like sugar lumps built with non-olfactory
money, money that doesn’t smell.
Of course he is being ironic,
especially because in the next scene you meet Meyer Wolfsheim, who is a
gangster. There are moments like that when Fitzgerald is very wry.
It was astonishing to learn that
after Gatsby was published, it wasn’t a bestseller. Sales were dismal. You note
that “by the time Fitzgerald died in 1940, his greatest novel had pretty much
disappeared.” And while he was alive, he couldn’t even buy the book to give to
friends. It wasn’t in bookstores.
A lot of the popular press read
Gatsby as a crime story. They focused on the three violent deaths, the
bootlegging, the gangster aspect.
Fitzgerald himself had a lot of
theories about why his book didn’t sell. His main theory was that the novel
didn’t have a favourable female character. He says in a letter to Maxwell
Perkins, his editor at Scribner’s, that women drive the fiction market.
He always thought the title
wasn’t appealing enough and that the book was too short. Perkins shared that
opinion. It wasn’t enough book for a buck.
There was one beautiful review
by literary critic Gilbert Seldes. Ernest Hemingway (supposedly Fitzgerald’s
best friend) was such a nasty man, and he told Fitzgerald that the positive
review was bad for him psychologically, saying, ‘Too bad about the Gilbert
Seldes review. How could you possibly write anything that is going to garner a
review like that again?’ He was such an awful friend.
What brought Gatsby back to
life in the 1960s?
During World War II, publishers
and librarians got together in New York and decided the army and the navy
needed books to read, and they produced the Armed Services Editions. That
included 1,000 titles, from Moby Dick to My Friend Flicka.
Gatsby was chosen as one of
those. He goes from mouldering in Scribner’s to having 155,000 copies
distributed to the army and navy. You have to believe that had an effect in
bringing Fitzgerald back.
By 1949, there is a second
Gatsby film (the first was a silent), made with Alan Ladd, and in the 1950s you
begin to get people writing about Fitzgerald. There was Arthur Mizener’s
biography and in 1951 Alfred Kazin (writer and critic) brought out a book of
essays about Fitzgerald which are beautiful.
Unfortunately, Fitzgerald never
got to enjoy his later success. He died thinking he was a failure, that no one
wanted to read his stories and novels.
In my book I quote a letter
where Fitzgerald has made an assessment of his library. He was going to leave
it to Sheilah Graham (the Hollywood gossip columnist who became his
girlfriend), and the forced sale, he figured, would add up to $300.
There are a couple of heroines
in terms of preserving Fitzgerald’s papers and work. Frances Kroll Ring was his
secretary in Hollywood, and when Fitzgerald died she boxed everything up,
letters and manuscripts, and sent it to Harold Ober, Fitzgerald’s literary
agent.
Scottie Fitzgerald (his
daughter) is a heroine in terms of literary history. When Fitzgerald died, she
and Zelda (Fitzgerald’s wife) were determined not to sell things off piecemeal.
In the 1940s, she offered all of Fitzgerald’s papers to Princeton (where Fitzgerald
had studied).
They weren’t interested and
finally they made an offer of $1,000 for his manuscripts, including The Great
Gatsby. Ultimately Scottie ended up just giving them to Princeton.
It’s heartbreaking. When
Fitzgerald died, he had a heart attack in Hollywood. He was reading the
Princeton alumni bulletin. And you could see his pencil marks as he was
checking off the names of football players who he thought were promising on the
Princeton team. And suddenly the pencil zigzags off the page.
Today the Fitzgerald papers are
the treasure of Princeton University’s library.
Tiffany’s recently offered
Daisy-style necklaces as Baz Luhrmann’s film came out; there is a computer game
in which Nick Carraway searches for Gatsby; there is an indie rock band called
Gatsbys (sic) American Dream, etc. I don’t think Hemingway’s books have had
that impact, nor Herman Melville. Why does Gatsby?
It’s an acknowledgement of how
many people have read it. I don’t think most high school kids read Moby Dick.
When I ask my class each year about it, only a few freshmen raise their hands.
And there don’t seem to be as many Hemingway readers. Gatsby remains on high
school and college curriculums.
Gatsby is a tragic novel and
Fitzgerald had a tragic life.
There is an aspect of The Great
Gatsby that seems to step out of the realm of being a novel and is prescient
about Fitzgerald’s life.
It is eerie when you think
Zelda had her first breakdown in 1929, four years after Gatsby was published.
And Fitzgerald’s own life takes a short downward turn in the 1930s, when his
books are out of fashion. He wasn’t considered a proletarian author. He is seen
as someone who glorifies the rich.
Most eerie of all is the way
that Gatsby’s funeral anticipates Fitzgerald’s, where he is buried in the rain
by a Protestant minister who doesn’t even know who Fitzgerald is. And there are
only a couple of people at the service.
His life was depressing at
times, but there is the consolation of art for those of us who believe he
created a masterpiece. Maybe he didn’t have happiness in life, but look what he
left behind.
Time Machine: H.L. Mencken's 1925 review of 'The Great Gatsby'
By H.L. Mencken
AuthorsF. Scott FitzgeraldH.L.
MenckenBooksBooks and MagazinesLiterature
Time Machine: A look back at
H.L. Mencken's 1925 review of "The Great Gatsby"
Time Machine is a new Printers
Row Journal feature offering a look at past Tribune books coverage. This week,
we offer H.L. Mencken's 1925 review of “The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott
Fitzgerald.
Scott Fitzgerald's new novel,
"The Great Gatsby" is in form no more than a glorified anecdote, and
not too probable at that. The scene is the Long Island that hangs precariously
on the edges of the New York City trash dumps — the Long Island of the gandy
villas and bawdy house parties. The theme is the old one of a romantic and
preposterous love — the ancient fidelis ad urnum motif reduced to a macabre
humor. The principal personage is a bounder typical of those parts — a fellow
who seems to know every one and yet remains unknown to all — a young man with a
great deal of mysterious money, the tastes of a movie actor and, under it all,
the simple sentimentality of a somewhat sclerotic fat woman.
This clown Fitzgerald rushes to
his death in nine short chapters. The other performers in the Totentons are of
a like, or even worse, quality. One of them is a rich man who carries on a
grotesque intrigue with the wife of a garage keeper. Another is a woman golfer
who wins championships by cheating. A third, a sort of chorus to the tragic
farce, is a bond salesman — symbol of the New America! Fitzgerald clears them
all off at last by a triple butchery. The garage-keeper's wife, rushing out
upon the road to escape her husband's third degree is run down and killed by
the wife of her lover. The garage keeper, misled by the lover, kills the lover
of the lover's wife — the Great Gatsby himself. Another bullet, and the garage
keeper is also reduced to offal. Choragus fades away. The crooked lady golfer
departs. The lover of the garage keeper's wife goes back to his own consort.
The immense house of the Great Gatsby stands idle, its bedrooms given over to
the bat and the owl, its cocktail shakers dry. The curtain lurches down.
This story is obviously
unimportant and, though, as I shall show, 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." What ails it, fundamentally, is the plain fact that it
is simply a story — that Fitzgerald seems to be far more interested in
maintaining its suspense than in getting under the skins of its people. It is
not that they are false: it is that they are taken too much for granted. Only Gatsby
himself genuinely lives and breathes. The rest are mere marionettes — often
astonishingly lifelike, but nevertheless not quite alive.
What gives the story
distinction is something quite different from the management of the action or
the handling of the characters; it is the charm and beauty of the writing. In
Fitzgerald's first days it seemed almost unimaginable that he would ever show
such qualities. His writing then was extraordinarily slipshod — at times almost
illiterate. He seemed to be devoid of any feeling for the color and savor of
words. He could see people clearly and he could devise capital situations, but
as writer qua writer he was apparently little more than a bright college boy.
The critics of the Republic were not slow to discern the fact. They praised
"This Side of Paradise" as a story, as a social document, but they
were almost unanimous in denouncing it as a piece of writing.
It is vastly to Fitzgerald's
credit that he appears to have taken their caveats seriously, and pondered them
to good effect. In "The Great Gatsby," highly agreeable fruits of
that pondering are visible. The story, for all its basic triviality, has a fine
texture, a careful and 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. It is a quite new
Fitzgerald who emerges from this little book, and the qualities that he shows
are dignified and solid. "This Side of Paradise," after all, might have
been merely a lucky accident. But "The Great Gatsby," a far inferior
story at bottom, is plainly the product of a sound and stable talent, conjured
into being by hard work.
Reversing the Order
I make much of this improvement
because it is of an order not witnessed in American writers; and seldom,
indeed, in those who start off with popular success. The usual progression
indeed, is in the opposite direction. Every year first books of great promise
are published — and every year a great deal of stale drivel is printed by the
promising authors of year before last. The rewards of literary success in this
country are so vast that, when they come early, they are not unnaturally
somewhat demoralizing. The average author yields to them readily. Having struck
the bull's-eye once, he is too proud to learn new tricks. Above all, he is too
proud to tackle hard work. The result is a gradual degeneration of whatever
talent he had at the beginning. He begins to imitate himself. He peters out.
There is certainly no sign of
petering out in Fitzgerald. After his first experimenting he plainly sat
himself down calmly to consider his deficiencies. They were many and serious.
He was, first of all, too facile. He could write entertainingly without giving
thought to form and organization. He was, secondly, somewhat amateurish. The
materials and methods of his craft, I venture, rather puzzled him. He used them
ineptly. His books showed brilliancy in conception, but they were crude and
even ignorant in detail. They suggested, only too often, the improvisations of
a pianist playing furiously by ear, but unable to read notes.
These are the defects that he
has now got rid of. "The Great Gatsby," I seem to recall, was
announced a long while ago. It was probably several years on the stocks. It
shows, on every page, the results of that laborious effort. Writing it, I take
it, was painful. The author wrote, tore up, rewrote, tore up again. There are
pages so artfully contrived that one can no more imagine improvising them than
one can imagine improvising a fugue. They are full of little delicacies;
charming turns of phrase, penetrating second thoughts. In other words, they are
easy and excellent reading — which is what always comes out of hard writing.
Pen of Accuracy
Thus Fitzgerald, the stylist,
arises to challenge Fitzgerald, the social historian, but I doubt that the
latter ever quite succumbs to the former. The thing that chiefly interests the
basic Fitzgerald is still the florid show of modern American life — and
especially the devil's dance that goes on at the top. He is unconcerned about
the sweatings and sufferings of the nether herd; what engrosses him is the high
carnival of those who have too much money to spend, and too much time for the
spending of it. Their idiotic pursuit of sensation, their almost incredible
stupidity and triviality, their glittering swinishness — these are the things
that go into his notebook.
In "The Great
Gatsby," though he does not go below the surface, he depicts this rattle
and hullabaloo with great gusto and, I believe, with sharp accuracy. The Long
Island he sets before us is no fanciful Alsatia; it actually exists. More, it
is worth any social historians study, for its influence upon the rest of the
country is immense and profound. What is vogue among the profiteers of
Manhattan and their harlots today is imitated by the flappers of the Bible Belt
country clubs weeks after next. The whole tone of American society, once so
highly formalized and so suspicious of change, is now taken largely from frail
ladies who were slinging hash a year ago.
Fitzgerald showed the end
products of the new dispensation in "This Side of Paradise." In
"The Beautiful and the Damned," he cut a bit lower. In "The
Great Gatsby" he comes near the bottom. Social leader and jailbird, grand
lady and kept woman, are here almost indistinguishable. We are in an atmosphere
grown increasingly levantine. The Paris of the Second Empire pales to a sort of
snobbish chautauqua; the New York of Ward McAllister becomes the scene of a
convention of Gold Star Mothers. To find a parallel for the grossness and
debauchery that now reign in New York one must go back to the Constantinople of
Basil I.
This story originally appeared
in the Chicago Sunday Tribune on May 3, 1925.
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