Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography

by Jeffrey Meyers

  Gatsby’s attempt to reinvent himself, move into the upper class and win Daisy from Tom is heroic but doomed. But Gatsby’s effort is also treated satirically because he is (or has been) a liar and a crook. Yet his lies are sad because they are all meant for Daisy, who is really “hollow at the core” and unworthy of his sacrificial quest. And Gatsby becomes as disillusioned with Daisy as Marlow does with the hollow Kurtz. In The Great Gatsby Fitzgerald still uses fiction to tell his own story—reflecting on the superior and brutal qualities of the rich and on the impossibility of becoming one of them—but it is now truly invented fiction, not something carelessly cobbled together from diaries and letters and clever remarks.

  Fitzgerald takes his themes as well as his narrator from Conrad and alludes to his master at three crucial points in the novel. In Conrad’s “The Secret Sharer” (1910), the young captain wonders “how far I should turn out faithful to that ideal conception of one’s own personality.” Carraway also considers this important question and explains the hero’s transformation from the poor, provincial James Gatz into the buoyantly successful Jay Gatsby by observing that he “sprang from his Platonic [that is, his ideal and self-created] conception of himself” and “invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen-year-old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception [of his personality] he was faithful to the end.”15

  Lord Jim, which Fitzgerald called “a great book,” concerns the tragic loss of self-esteem and, Conrad writes, “those struggles of an individual trying to save from the fire his idea of what his moral identity should be.” Jim’s mentor Stein anticipates Gatsby’s idealistic trajectory by urging Jim “To follow the dream, and again to follow the dream.” And when Carraway warns Gatsby: “You can’t repeat the past,” Gatsby naively cries: “Can’t repeat the past? . . . Why of course you can!” Like Jim, Jay is crippled by a past he cannot escape; and Nick gathers that, like Jim, “he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself.”

  Fitzgerald also learned from Conrad to use a more subtle and suggestive conclusion to his fiction. As he remarked to Bishop: “It was Ernest Hemingway who developed to me, in conversation, that the dying fall was preferable to the dramatic ending under certain conditions, and I think we both got the germ of the idea from Conrad.” Fitzgerald also told Hemingway that Conrad’s Preface to The Nigger of the “Narcissus” (1897), which he had reread while writing The Great Gatsby, had taught him that fiction must “appeal to the lingering after-effects in the reader’s mind.”16

  Conrad had concluded his African novella Heart of Darkness by connecting the Thames to the primitive past of mankind, symbolized by the Congo: “The tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed sombre under an overcast sky—seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness.” Adopting the psychological suggestiveness of the riverine metaphor and alluding to Gatsby’s hopeless attempt to repeat the past, Fitzgerald imitated Conrad’s “appeal to the lingering after-effects” in his own concluding sentence: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

  After The Great Gatsby had been published in April 1925, Fitzgerald acknowledged two major flaws in the novel. He admitted that he himself did not know what Gatsby looked like or what criminal activities he was engaged in, and told Bishop that the composite origins of his hero made Gatsby blurred and patchy: “I never at any one time saw him clear myself—for he started as one man I knew and then changed into myself—the amalgam was never complete in my mind.” Another radical fault in the book, he confided to Mencken, was “the lack of an emotional presentment of Daisy’s attitude toward Gatsby after their reunion (and the consequent lack of logic or importance in her throwing him over).”17 Fitzgerald had always been aware of these faults and had disguised them with consummate skill. The elusive ambiguity of Gatsby actually enhances his mysterious character. At the beginning of the novel he vanishes as suddenly as he had appeared, leaving Nick “alone again in the unquiet darkness”—as Kurtz had left Marlow alone in the moral darkness of the Congo.

  Gatsby’s vague connection with Oxford, which Fitzgerald had visited twice in 1921, is an important part of his ambiguous persona. But it is based on rumor, lies, misleading evidence, dubious endorsement, intense scepticism and, finally, on his own rather unsatisfactory explanation. Daisy’s friend Jordan Baker tells Nick that Gatsby once told her he was an Oxford man. Gatsby, who comes from humble origins, tells Nick, with wild exaggeration: “I was brought up in America but educated at Oxford, because all my ancestors have been educated there for many years. It is a family tradition.” And he actually produces a souvenir photograph, taken in Trinity Quad with the Earl of Doncaster, to prove his assertion. The gambler Meyer Wolfsheim dubiously calls Gatsby “an Oggsford man,” but Tom Buchanan, who is incredulous, contemptuously associates the man who wears pink suits with “Oxford, New Mexico.” When Tom questions Gatsby directly in order to discredit him in front of Daisy, Gatsby (contradicting his earlier statement to Nick) uneasily explains: “It was in nineteen nineteen. I only stayed five months. That’s why I can’t really call myself an Oxford man. . . . It was an opportunity they gave to some of the officers after the Armistice. . . . We could go to any of the universities in England or France.” Later on, we learn that Daisy’s letter, announcing her marriage to Tom and inspiring Gatsby’s impossible dream to win her back, reached him while he was at Oxford. Gatsby’s claim to Oxford, commented on by all the major characters in the novel, emphasizes his obsessive need to change as well as to repeat the past.

  Gatsby’s shadowy character is placed against a realistic background and setting. The Great Gatsby captures, better than any other novel about the 1920s, not only the lavish house parties on Long Island but also what one historian has called “the bootleggers and the speakeasies, the corruption of police and judiciary, the highjackers and their machine guns, the gang wars, the multimillionaire booze barons, the murders and assassinations, the national breakdown of morals and manners.”18 The corruption in the novel is exemplified by Meyer Wolfsheim, who is based on the notorious New York gambler Arnold Rothstein. Rothstein was closely involved with Edward Fuller (Fitzgerald’s neighbor in Great Neck) who, with his brokerage partner William McGee, declared bankruptcy and left their firm with a debt of six million dollars. They were convicted and jailed, after four sensational trials during 1922–23, for fraudulently gambling away their clients’ money. Rothstein—who was also behind the Black Sox scandal, when gamblers bribed the Chicago White Sox to lose the World Series in 1919—was killed by anonymous gunmen in 1928.

  In the novel Meyer Wolfsheim is both physically and morally repulsive. He has a strong Jewish accent, and offers Carraway a dishonest and dangerous business “gonnegtion.” He recounts the brutal murder of another gangster and shows off his barbaric cuff links, made of “the finest specimens of human molars.” Like his name, these teeth—an allusion to the human skulls on Kurtz’s fence posts in Heart of Darkness—suggest his rapacious, even cannibalistic traits. When Wolfsheim leaves, Gatsby explains that the gambler had fixed the World Series. Nick, alluding to the maiden name of Daisy Fay and evoking the pervasive theme of bitter disillusionment, thinks: “It never occurred to me that one man could start to play with the faith of fifty million people—with the single-mindedness of a burglar blowing a safe.” After Gatsby has been murdered by Wilson, Nick goes into New York to tell Wolfsheim that the funeral of his friend will take place that day. But Wolfsheim refuses to attend the ceremony and confirms the worst rumors about Gatsby’s character and background, and the source of his wealth, by claiming that he had “made” Gatsby: “I raised him up out of nothing, right out of the gutter.”

  Other real-life models also contributed to the characters in the novel. Daisy Fay has the surname of the Catholic priest, Sigourney Webster Fay. She is based partly on the Chicago debutante Ginevra King and partly on Zelda. While writing The Great Gatsby Scott learned of her affair with Jozan, just as Tom learns of Dais
y’s love for and affair with Gatsby. Tom reclaims Daisy from Gatsby just as Scott reclaimed Zelda from Jozan. Nick’s girlfriend Jordan Baker (whose aunt, Mrs. Sigourney Howard, recalls the first name of Father Fay) was modeled on a close school friend of Ginevra, Edith Cummings, who once won the women’s national golf championship. And (as we have seen) Tommy Hitchcock was the model for Tom Buchanan.

  Great Neck, where Fitzgerald lived during 1922–24, inspired the setting of the novel. Andrew Turnbull notes that while he was living there Fitzgerald’s “magic word was ‘egg.’ People he liked were ‘good eggs,’ or ‘colossal eggs,’ and people he didn’t like were ‘bad eggs’ or ‘unspeakable eggs.’ ”19 Edmund Wilson was “an incomparable egg.” Fitzgerald’s favorite slang expressions were transmuted in the novel into the more affluent East Egg (based on Manhasset) where Tom and Daisy live, and the generally more modest West Egg (based on Great Neck) where Nick lives in a cottage on Gatsby’s estate. Even today, if you stand at night on King’s Point on the tip of Great Neck peninsula, and look across Manhasset Bay, you can still see—as Gatsby did—the promising lights winking on the opposite shore.

  Fitzgerald’s Ledger and Notebooks reveal that he was a habitual maker of lists, and the catalogue of the names of people who came to Gatsby’s West Egg mansion in the summer of 1922, which opens Chapter IV and is one of the wittiest sections of the novel, is the greatest list he ever made. Many of the bizarre names suggest animals, incongruously yoke the exotic and the banal, and indicate the kind of corrupt people who were attracted to Gatsby’s parties. At least four of the guests have disastrous experiences: Webster Civet (yet another allusion to Father Fay) is drowned, Ripley Snell goes to the penitentiary, Henry L. Palmetto kills himself and young Brewer has had his nose shot off in the war.

  The strange, suggestive names of the guests—whom Tom rightly calls “crazy fish” in Gatsby’s “menagerie”—were influenced by two of the most important writers of the century. T. S. Eliot, whom Fitzgerald described as “the greatest living poet in any language,” gave the characters in “Gerontion” (1920) equally peculiar names: Mr. Silvero, “Hakagawa, bowing among the Titians; / Madame de Tornquist, in the dark room / Shifting the candles; Fräulein von Kulp / Who turned in the hall, one hand on the door.” And James Joyce assembled a comically named diplomatic corps to witness the execution scene in the “Cyclops” chapter of Ulysses (1922). Fitzgerald lifted the most obscene name in his own novel—Vladimir Tostoff—from Joyce’s double pun on the name of a character in an imaginary play by Buck Mulligan. This unregenerate masturbator, who habitually “tossed off” and destroyed his own sexual organ, was named “Toby Tostoff (a ruined Pole).”

  The scene in which Gatsby shows Daisy his house (on one of the rare occasions when it is not filled with intrusive guests), and in which his nearly but never-to-be realized dream reaches “an inconceivable pitch of intensity,” is perhaps the greatest in the novel. Gatsby displays his luxurious pile of shirts, reveals his intense materialism and offers his things as well as his love. Daisy, frequently characterized (and made unreal) as a disembodied voice, “full of money,” begins to sob as she realizes that his entire ostentatious life has been created solely to impress her. But even on that exalted afternoon, Nick explains, expressing one of the major themes of the novel in a resonant Conradian phrase, Daisy inevitably “tumbled short of his dreams—not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion.”20 No reality can ever match Gatsby’s elaborate fantasy.

  But winning Daisy’s love is not enough for Gatsby. He must also change and remake reality by eliminating her past love for and sexual relations with Tom, and by transforming Daisy into the innocent girl she was when he first met and took her. In an agonizing, inquisitorial scene, Gatsby arrogantly tells Tom: “Your wife doesn’t love you. . . . In her heart she has never loved anyone except me!” But Tom, with surprising tenderness, persuades Daisy to deny Gatsby’s solipsistic reconstruction of their emotional history: “ ‘Oh, you want too much!’ she cried to Gatsby. ‘I love you now—isn’t that enough? I can’t help what’s past.’ She began to sob helplessly. ‘I did love him once—but I loved you too.’ ” Daisy may even have stayed with Tom because she knew that Gatsby would demand the impossible from her. Gatsby’s romantic illusions are shattered by Tom, who possesses the much-desired Daisy (better perhaps as an ideal than as a real wife) but is unfaithful to her with the vulgar Myrtle Wilson. And the self-made, worldly, criminally connected but idealistic Gatsby is easily unmasked, betrayed and destroyed by the brutal playboy, who calls him “a common swindler who’d have to steal the ring he put on her finger.”

  The climax of the novel is as ambiguous as Gatsby’s character. Daisy—who went into New York in Tom’s car but is driving Gatsby’s car on the way back to Long Island—kills Tom’s mistress and flees the scene of the accident. Tom tells Wilson, Myrtle’s husband, what he subjectively calls the “truth”: that Gatsby “ran over Myrtle like you’d run over a dog and never even stopped his car.” And Wilson (whose dream is an ironic reflection of Gatsby’s and who wants to buy a car like the one that killed his wife) mindlessly murders Gatsby before killing himself.

  Nick sharply observes that Tom’s statement “wasn’t true.” Fitzgerald is deliberately unclear about whether Daisy lied to Tom and told him Gatsby was driving or whether Tom knew Daisy was driving and tried to protect her by blaming Gatsby. In any case, Gatsby saves Daisy from scandal, is rejected by her and is killed for her crime. The Buchanans are both murderers. As Nick observes: “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money.”21

  The Great Gatsby transcends Fitzgerald’s personal life and brilliantly expresses some of the dominant themes in American literature: the idealism and morality of the West (where most of the characters originate and where Nick returns at the end of the novel) in contrast to the complexity and corruption of the East (where the novel takes place); the frontier myth of the independent self-made man; the attempt to escape the materialistic present and recapture the innocent past; the predatory power of rich and beautiful women; the limited possibilities of love in the modern world; the heightened sensitivity to the promises of life; the doomed attempt to sustain illusions and recapture the American dream.

  V

  Fitzgerald sent The Great Gatsby to a number of eminent literary friends, and had the benefit of both a private and public response. On April 11, 1925, the day after the novel was published, Edmund Wilson wrote Fitzgerald, who was then on Capri, with his usual qualifications: “It is undoubtedly in some ways the best thing you have done—the best planned, the best sustained, the best written.” Four years later, in a crucial letter to the novelist Hamilton Basso, Wilson, with uncommon modesty, unfavorably contrasted his own recently published novel, I Thought of Daisy (their fictional heroines had the same name), to Fitzgerald’s best work of fiction. For the first time, but privately, he acknowledged Fitzgerald’s superiority, and placed his achievement on a national rather than on a merely personal level: “[I’ve been] thinking with depression how much better Scott Fitzgerald’s prose and dramatic sense were than mine. If only I’d been able to give my book the vividness and excitement, the technical accuracy, of his! Have you ever read Gatsby? I think it’s one of the best novels that any American of his age has done.”

  Five days later Mencken agreed with Perkins’ judgment about the fine craftsmanship, but found the plot insubstantial: “The Great Gatsby fills me with pleasant sentiments. I think it is incomparably the best piece of work you have done. Evidences of careful workmanship are on every page. The thing is well managed, and has a fine surface. My one complaint is that the basic story is somewhat trivial—that it reduces itself, in the end, to a sort of anecdote. But God will forgive you for that.”

  The following month Gertrude Stein, who had by then met Fitzgerald in Paris, offered, in her characteristically precious mode, generous praise of his extraordinary sen
sitivity and style: “Here we are and have read your book and it is a good book. I like the melody of your dedication [‘Once Again, To Zelda’] and it shows that you have a background of beauty and tenderness and that is a comfort. The next good thing is that you write naturally in sentences and that too is a comfort. You write naturally in sentences and one can read all of them and that among other things is a comfort. You are creating the contemporary world much as Thackeray did his in Pendennis and Vanity Fair and this isn’t a bad compliment.”22

  In June, Edith Wharton, a Scribner’s author whom Fitzgerald greatly admired, agreed with her colleagues that he had made a notable advance on his previous work. But, like Mencken, she had a serious reservation about the incomplete characterization of Gatsby: “My present quarrel with you is only this: that to make Gatsby really Great, you ought to have given us his early career (not from the cradle—but from his first visit to the yacht, if not before) instead of a short résumé of it. That would have situated him & made his final tragedy a tragedy instead of a ‘fait divers’ [news item] for the morning papers.”

  Hemingway, who rarely praised his contemporaries, called it “an absolutely first rate book.” And T. S. Eliot, whose Waste Land had influenced the desolate Valley of Ashes, provided the finest tribute in the chorus of praise: “it has interested and excited me more than any new novel I have seen, either English or American, for a number of years. . . . It seems to me to be the first step that American fiction has taken since Henry James.”23