By Sarah Seltzer
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great
Gatsby is a staple of high school English classes and “best books” lists, from
20th Century books to American novels to the greatest novels ever written.
Therefore although some Gatsby fans have merely ogled Leonardo DiCaprio or
Robert Redford in the titular role (in one of the unspectacular film
adaptations of a hard-to-adapt novel) most of us have actually read the book.
To us, it may feel like Tom and Daisy Fay Buchanan, Nick Carraway and Jay
Gatsby have always been around. But did you know Gatsby languished in obscurity
for years? The American classic, which celebrates 90 years of publication
today, has a backstory as convoluted and fascinating as the enigmatic,
self-made Gastby’s himself.
To celebrate Fitzgerald’s
critique of, and ode to, jazz age capitalistic excess, here are five
interesting angles on the novel and its history for your consideration.
1. An original proposed title
for the novel was the biggest clunker ever: Trimalchio in West Egg. Another was
Under the Red White and Blue. Hard to imagine Jay-Z scoring a soundtrack to a
movie with one of those titles, isn’t it?
2. World War II helped bring
Gatsby back, after Fitzgerald died thinking it was a failure, even being unable
to find it in bookstores. The Council on Books in Wartime program that printed
American Service Editions of novels for World War II was pivotal in cementing
Gatsby’s reputation as a classic:
Gatsby entered the war effort
after Germany and Japan surrendered, but the timing was fortuitous: While
waiting to go home, troops were more bored than ever. (Two years after the war
ended, there were still 1.5 million people stationed overseas.) With that kind
of audience,Gatsby reached readers beyond Fitzgerald’s dreams. In fact, because
soldiers passed the books around, each ASE copy was read about seven times.
More than one million soldiers read Fitzgerald’s Great American Novel….
For Fitzgerald, it was a great
reawakening. The author’s death in 1940 had rejuvenated academic interest in
his work, and many of his literary friends were already trying to revive his
name. But the military program sparked interest among a wider, more general
readership. By 1961, The Great Gatsby was being printed expressly for high
school classrooms. Today, nearly half a million copies sell each year.
3. Why was Gatsby out of vogue
to begin with? Because it was a huge flop, and many critics mauled it when it
first appeared. Not only did the book fail to print the copies Fitzgerald
expected, but it took a general critical drubbing.
The New York Evening World
called the book “a valiant effort to be ironical,” but “his style is painfully
forced.” The daytime version of the paper ran a headline that called Gatsby “a
dud.”
Isabel Paterson wrote, “What
has never been alive cannot very well go on living; so this is a book for the
season only.” In the Chicago Tribune, H.L. Mencken pronounced it “no more than
a glorified anecdote, and not too probable at that…. Certainly not to be put on
the same shelf with, say, This Side of Paradise.”
Nowadays, when you read Gatsby
side by side with This Side of Paradise, it’s easy to see the latter as an
obvious “first novel” and the former as a more mature, complex culmination of a
writer’s thoughts and talents. But Gatsby still remains a subtle book despite
the excesses it contains, which readers of the time clearly missed.
4. In fact, some of the novel’s
sharper criticisms of its depicted milieu are commonly misunderstood even
today. As Zach Seward wrote in a memorable piece right before the DiCaprio vehicle
arrived in theaters:
So many people seem enchanted
enough by the decadence described in Fitzgerald’s book to ignore its fairly
obvious message of condemnation. Gatsby parties can be found all over town.
They are staples of spring on many Ivy League campuses and a frequent theme of
galas in Manhattan…
It’s like throwing a
Lolita-themed children’s birthday party.
Whenever someone throws a
Gatsby party, I get the urge to yell, “he was shot to death alone in a pool,
you idiots!”
That having been said, perhaps
some of the common misreading is due to the fact that Fitzgerald, like his
contemporary Edith Wharton and other sharp social critics, was known to have
had something of a love-hate relationship with the ultra-rich. Although the
book ultimately shows the hollowness of their lifestyles, so does it detail the
seductiveness of the blithe existence of “careless people” like Tom and Daisy
Buchanan. Like Jane Austen, like Robert Frost and many other easily accessible
writers, one has to dig beneath the surface to find the darker message.
In his piece, Seward also casts
a dubious eye on the contemporary high school teachers who use the “green
light” that Gatsby gazed at to teach students to “strive.” Today the light is often spun into something
noble, waiting to be seized by those who persist and imagine, rather than what
Carraway and Fitzerald see it symbolizing: a false hope, always receding,
embodying what Seward calls the “novel’s jaundiced view of the American dream.”
5. Fitzgerald loved, then
hated, the iconic “eyes” cover design for the novel, and may have even
rewritten part of the book in response to an initial look at the cover art by
Francis Cugat.
In a letter to editor Max
Perkins, Fitzgerald, whose manuscript was late, requested that the art be held for
him. “For Christ’s sake don’t give anyone that jacket you’re saving for me,”
Fitzgerald wrote, “I’ve written it into the book.” It’s not clear exactly what
Fitzgerald meant by this, but it is generally believed that that Cugat’s
haunting image was realized in the form of the recurring billboard for oculist
Dr. T.J. Eckleburg…
It’s unclear which iteration of
the cover design influenced which part of the book, but they were more
symbiotic than we realize, and both grew
into icons over time.
The irony of imagining “Scotty”
searching in vain for his book in stores’ shelves mere decades before it was
thrust into the hands of millions of soldiers and then schoolchildren is nearly
too painful to bear. Of course, agonizing missed moments are the subject matter
make Gatsby the masterpiece it is.