Pursuit

by Alex Preston

  Another decade passed while America and the world waited, and then a young writer named Henry James sailed onto the American scene. In 1879, he produced his only extended work of literary criticism about someone else (James reserved most of his critical energies for his own novels, evidently judging that his contemporaries weren’t up to the task). In Hawthorne, James made the same complaint that Cooper had made fifty years earlier, only more so, offering a famous catalogue of ‘the items of high civilization’ that were ‘absent from the texture of American life’:

  No State, in the European sense of the word, and indeed barely a specific national name. No sovereign, no court, no personal loyalty, no aristocracy, no church, no clergy, no army, no diplomatic service, no country gentlemen, no palaces, no castles, nor manors, nor old country-houses, nor parsonages, nor thatched cottages nor ivied ruins; no cathedrals, nor abbeys, nor little Norman churches; no great Universities nor public schools – no Oxford, nor Eton, nor Harrow; no literature, no novels, no museums, no pictures, no political society, no sporting class – no Epsom nor Ascot!

  But these were the necessary wellsprings of the writer: ‘it takes such an accumulation of history and custom, such a complexity of manners and types, to form a fund of suggestion for a novelist’, James declared.

  The endeavour to create a bard of the Western world had a long way to go.

  1916

  BY the end of 1916, the idea that American art and culture were by definition second-rate had become a truism, a national inferiority complex. Could the New World ever produce an art worthy of the name, able to compete with the geniuses of the Old? Given that a list of the most memorable American novels published over the following year would begin with Edith Wharton’s Summer, Sherwood Anderson’s Windy McPherson’s Son and two post-humous, unfinished novels by Henry James, it wouldn’t have looked promising.

  During those months, another impecunious, ambitious young writer was seeking inspiration from other writers – including Keats. In his final year at university, he drafted a poem that ends:

  this midnight I aspire

  To see, mirrored among the embers, curled,

  In flame, the splendor and the sadness of the world.

  He had been neglecting his classical studies, as he was the first to admit, also composing a parody of Keats’s ode ‘To A Grecian Urn’, entitled ‘To My Unused Greek Book (Acknowledgments to Keats)’. But he was avidly reading modern literature, informing a friend around this time: ‘I want to be one of the greatest writers who ever lived, don’t you?’ The friend had not himself entertained this ‘fantasy’, he later reported, but although finding the remark ‘rather foolish’ at the time, he also couldn’t help but respect his friend’s eagerness. ‘I am sure that his intoxicated ardour represented the healthy way for a young man of talent to feel,’ Edmund Wilson, who would become a great critic himself, admitted later.

  Part of the reason this endeavour seemed so foolish when it was blurted out around 1917 was that no American writer had ever yet been widely acknowledged as one of the greatest who ever lived. A year later, the influential critic Van Wyck Brooks was still writing of ‘the desire, the aspiration, the struggle, the tentative endeavour’ to create an American art worthy of the name, and of the need for a national ‘spiritual history’ that might enable such endeavours.

  But in the meantime, the aspiring writer had drafted his first novel, and fallen in love with a Southern belle who then threw him over. He was convinced she’d rejected him because he was poor, because she lacked faith that his writing could support them both. But he was determined to confound everyone who doubted him, including her, and by 1919 he had finished his novel and had it accepted for publication.

  The hero of the novel, which is loosely autobiographical, likes to quote Keats, at one point declaiming all of ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ to the bushes. He doesn’t believe he’ll be a great poet: ‘I don’t catch the subtle things like “silver-snarling trumpets”,’ he explains, alluding to another of Keats’s poems, ‘The Eve of St Agnes’. But he reads ‘enormously’ in modern literature, ‘rather surprised by his discovery’ of a few ‘excellent American novels’: Vandover and the Brute, The Damnation of Theron Ware and Jennie Gerhardt.

  The first two are entirely forgotten today, while Jennie Gerhardt is remembered primarily as lesser Dreiser by people unlikely to agree there’s such a thing as greater Dreiser. But at the time they passed for surprisingly good American novels, in the judgement of an ambitious young writer trying to find the realms of gold, to discover that peak in Darien.

  The news of his first novel’s publication (and his sale of a few magazine stories to Hollywood) was sufficient to give his fiancée, the one with second thoughts, a third thought: she would marry him after all. The novel, and the young couple, would take America by storm that year: This Side of Paradise became a national phenomenon, as did Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald.

  Two years and three books later, probably around his September birthday in 1922, Fitzgerald decided that a successful young author like himself had better keep an eye on posterity, as well as on his accounts, and started what he called a ‘Ledger’. He began the ledger with his tongue in his cheek, but at the same time a sense of an awareness of the eyes of future generations upon him. His career was already impressive, and he thought maybe he should jot down a few highlights, just in case.

  Filling in earlier years, to give himself a kind of capsule autobiography, he offered a marginal précis of each year of his life to date. Of the year he turned twenty, between 1916 and 1917, when he had struggled to formulate his literary ambitions and discover his realms of gold, he wrote that it was a ‘pregnant year of endeavor . . . the foundation of my literary life’.

  Five years later, the endeavour had taken clearer form. He had published his second novel (whose protagonist owns ‘a yellowed illegible autograph letter of Keats’s’); turning his thoughts to the next, he decided to take his own ambitions more seriously.

  In 1922 D.H. Lawrence published Studies in Classic American Literature, in which he dismissed American literature as ‘the false dawn’: ‘the real American day hasn’t begun yet’, he announced. Many in American literary circles were still anxiously agreeing. That summer the literary editor of the New York Tribune pronounced that there were only two things left for a genuine artist in America to do – stay drunk or commit suicide.

  But the centre of literary power was starting to show signs of shifting west, he also acknowledged. ‘American literature, for the first time, it seems, is being treated with seriousness and respect by English critics. The recent reviews of the novels of Joseph Hergesheimer, Floyd Dell, Newton Fuessle, Scott Fitzgerald, Stephen Benét, Harry Leon Wilson and others are peppered with the adjectives of praise.’

  At this precise moment, during the summer of 1922, Fitzgerald – whose work was making English critics sit up – began to think about writing the novel that would become The Great Gatsby. Not until July 1923 did he actually begin drafting the novel, amidst many parties. At one of them, Scott and Zelda ran into the same Tribune editor, who reported that Fitzgerald ‘told us the plot of “the great American novel” which he is just writing (and asked me not to give it away)’. The editor’s tone in reporting those ambitions was decidedly derisive; three months earlier, William Carlos Williams had just published an experimental, kaleidoscopic book reflecting on the impossibility of writing a great American novel, called The Great American Novel.

  Certainly no one would have believed that Scott Fitzgerald of all people, a popular, talented but apparently wildly undisciplined novelist, would be the one to pull it off.

  But here’s one of many ironies in the story: if there’s a single passage in Gatsby that does just that, it’s the novel’s famous closing elegiac account of the sailors who first viewed, with wild surmise, the grandeur of the Americas. The power of the novel comes from the way its jazz poetry about modern life builds to a moment of discovering the new world.

  For
a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

  Looking with wild surmise, silent, upon a peak in Darien.

  The Dutch merchants landing in New York, as Fitzgerald implies, were no less in search of realms of gold than the Spanish conquistadors who’d ventured further south. And that famous passage, in which Nick Carraway reflects on the meanings of America and its potential for aesthetic inspiration, was originally written at the end of the first chapter, not at the end of the novel. In other words, it is very possible that Fitzgerald had already drafted the passage that would go farther than any other to cement his claim to having written the great American novel when he told Long Island party-goers that summer that he was writing it.

  That is not the only Keats in Gatsby – not by a long shot. Fitzgerald reworked lines and images, modernising the metaphors. He even smuggled in the silver snarling trumpets from Keats’s ‘Eve of St Agnes’ (‘probably the finest technical poem in English’, he called it) – the precise phrase that his alter ego had worried five years earlier he’d always fumble.

  Here they are not trumpets, but a jazzy transposition of Keats’s celestial music: ‘The moon had risen higher, and floating in the Sound was a triangle of silver scales, trembling a little to the stiff, tinny drip of the banjoes on the lawn.’ These are the silver snarling trumpets for jazz-age Long Island, beyond the house ‘glowing to receive a thousand guests’, its host standing ‘with heart on fire’, just as in Keats’s vision.

  Like ‘Chapman’s Homer’, Fitzgerald’s first great novel is about endeavour, about ambition without a fixed purpose. But instead of exalted revelation, this is a tragedy, the tale of what happens when such ambition attaches itself to degraded goals. Jay Gatsby has all the things it takes to pursue a dream, the holy grail of his grand ambitions. But in this story tenacity becomes a tragic flaw, like hubris. He can’t survive without his dreams – they define him, and his artistic capacities. But they also destroy him, because they were the wrong dreams.

  In a line from Gatsby’s earliest surviving draft that he deleted from the novel, Fitzgerald described Gatsby as physically growing ‘to be like the unsubstantiated idea that possessed him’, which blurred him until he was unrecognisable, unreadable, illegible. Similarly, Fitzgerald wrote at the novel’s very end that Gatsby ‘believed in the green glimmer’ – nothing so definite as the famous green light. Just a glimmer, a sense of something beyond one’s ken.

  The novel Fitzgerald produced is about the force of vision and will that is necessary to sustain any impossible project. If The Great Gatsby were merely concerned with the failure of Gatsby’s vision, it would be only, as many critics have deemed it, an elegy for one imagined man. But because Fitzgerald links that vision with a high requiem for the nation, it becomes not Gatsby’s doomed spiritual endeavour but Fitzgerald’s successful aesthetic one, in which he seizes the past, with the help of Keats, in order to redefine the present and conquer the future.

  1926

  IN April 1926, exactly a year after the publication of The Great Gatsby, another aspiring American writer published his first novel. A brief collection of portraits, loosely held together by overlapping characters, it might well be called a novella, or even sketches. The writer is not forgotten but his novel largely has been; it was called The Cabala, and it was written by Thornton Wilder, who would go on to much greater fame as the author of The Bridge of San Luis Rey and classic plays including Our Town.

  Set in Rome after the First World War, it features a young American writer encountering high society in a city where the ancient gods still walk, but in modern decline. The shade of Virgil lingers, as does an unnamed young poet, promising but ‘awfully adjectival’, lying on his deathbed (‘dead-poor’) in seedy rooms next to the Spanish Steps.

  The poet is bright-eyed with fever but wants to talk to his new American acquaintances, mentioning a brother who lives in New Jersey (‘I was to have gone over there’). Visitors offer to read to him, perhaps an improvised translation of Homer. That is what he would like most of all, the poet cries: ‘I know Chapman’s well.’

  The narrator responds, ‘unthinking, that Chapman’s was scarcely Homer at all, and suddenly beheld a look of pain, as of a mortal wound, appear on his face’. Horrified, the narrator ‘hastened to add that in its way it was very beautiful, but I could not recall my cruelty; his heart seemed to have commenced bleeding within him’. They try to change the subject, ‘but the insult to Chapman had been working in him’, and the poet begins to weep.

  To cheer him, the narrator launches into encomia for all the great writers, when suddenly the poet bursts out: ‘I was meant to be among those names. I was . . . I was. I was. But now it’s too late.’ He declares he wants every copy of his books destroyed and asks them to make him a promise. ‘There must be no name on my grave. Just write: Here lies one whose name was writ in water.’

  1935

  IN 1935, Fitzgerald’s fourth novel had just been published, for which his ambitions had been high. It borrowed its title from Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’: Tender Is the Night. Its themes, like the poem its title invoked, were the ancient ones of human mortality and the hope that the endeavour of art might provide a kind of immortality, while also asking whether art could produce beauty or truth. The novel even tips its hat directly to Keats, when Dick Diver goes to Rome and walks ‘through the foul tunnel up to the Spanish Steps, where his spirit soared before the flower stalls and the house where Keats had died’.

  When Tender Is the Night failed, so did Fitzgerald, spiralling into uncontrolled alcoholism and the year of what he would call ‘the crack-up’.

  As history happens, during that same terrible year a signed copy of This Side of Paradise, published fifteen years earlier, was auctioned off at someone else’s profit, while Fitzgerald was trying to pull himself out of debt. It was the first time that any of his works had been sold at auction; he was so negligible a figure by this point that no one made a note of the amount it earned. He likely never even knew it had been sold.

  Given the humiliations he endured that year, that’s just as well; Fitzgerald would never have missed the symbolic implications of another writer junking his eager, charged claim to have discovered the realms of gold.

  Four years later, Fitzgerald drew up a reading list, a ‘curriculum’ for his new lover, who had little formal education, and wanted to improve herself. But he was also almost certainly seeking a life-raft himself, as he tried to pull himself out of the dark waters of alcoholism, illness, failure and debt, and climb his way back into the wild surmise necessary to complete a fifth novel.

  His curriculum included ‘A Short Introduction to Poetry (with interruptions)’, which opened with five poems by Keats: passages from ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ and ‘The Pot of Basil’, ‘Bright Star’ and ‘When I Have Fears’, another poem about fame and immortality:

  When I have fears that I may cease to be . . .

  then on the shore

  Of the wide world I stand alone, and think

  Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.

  The fifth Keats poem on the curriculum was ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’.

  Next to Chapman’s Homer, Fitzgerald jotted a marginal note: ‘Re-read Wilder’. Under the American short story, he listed Henry James, Ring Lardner, Gertrude Stein and ‘The Cabala, Wilde’. It’s a typo for Wilder: he would always be drawn to jazz-age renderings of Keats.

  On September 25, 1940 – the day after his forty-fourth birthday – Fitzgerald returned to a friend a volume he had borrowed, with a note of thanks: ‘I am sending you the Chapman to your house with postage . . . I had read Lang, Leaf and Myers’ Iliad and Butler’s Odyssey and most of Pope’s dribble but for years have wanted to read Chapman – probably on account of Keats’s sonnet. Now I
have, thanks to you and feel greatly improved and highly Elizabethan.’

  Three months later, he was dead. His epitaph did not declare his name was written on water but it invoked water all the same: ‘So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.’ The endeavour is circular: our voyages of discovery always take us back into the past.

  A few months before his death, Fitzgerald wrote to his daughter, advising her to read Keats. ‘Poetry is either something that lives like fire inside you,’ he explained, ‘or else it is nothing . . . The Grecian Urn is unbearably beautiful with every syllable as inevitable as the notes in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony or it’s just something you don’t understand. It is what it is because an extraordinary genius paused at that point in history and touched it.’ Once you’d come to understand it, to know what men might mean by it, why then ‘one could scarcely ever afterwards be unable to distinguish between gold and dross in what one read’.

  Afterwards one would choose only to travel in realms of gold, in search of peaks in Darien.

  CONTRIBUTORS

  ELEY WILLIAMS is a writer and lecturer based in Ealing. Her collection of short stories, Attrib. And Other Stories (Influx Press), was chosen by Ali Smith as one of the best debut works of fiction published in 2017. Twice shortlisted for the White Review Short Story Prize, her work has appeared in the London Review of Books, the White Review, Ambit and the Cambridge Literary Review. She has a pamphlet of poetry titled Frit (Sad Press), and is currently co-editor of fiction at online journal 3:AM Magazine.

  DAVID SZALAY is the author of five works of fiction: Spring, The Innocent, London and the South-East, for which he was awarded the Betty Trask and Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prizes, All That Man Is, for which he was awarded the Gordon Burn Prize and Plimpton Prize for Fiction, and shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and Turbulence. Born in Canada, he grew up in London, and now lives in Budapest.