I’m awfully tired of being Scott Fitzgerald anyhow as there doesn’t seem to be so much money in it and I’d like to find out if people read me just because I am Scott Fitzgerald or, what is more likely, don’t read me for the same reason.—F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1939
For one afternoon in January 2013, students at Berea High School, in Cleveland’s western suburbs, went back in time to experience the 1920s complete with sultry black dresses, tuxedos, jazz music, and even a make-believe speakeasy. Only knowing the secret password garnered admission. The riotous celebration marked the culmination of a cross-disciplinary study of The Great Gatsby between the school’s sophomores and juniors, the media center, the Cuyahoga County library, and Baldwin Wallace University.
While some students banged away on the piano, many others learned the Charleston and other period-specific dances, bringing smiles to everyone involved. More importantly, though, for teacher Bill Boone, the gala helped the young people understand the Jazz Age better: “They can get personally involved with this. If we can get them a little more enthusiastic for American Literature and American History with this type of presentation, our goal has been met.” The outcome is palpable, according to high school junior Natori Santiago, who confessed, “I don’t really like to read, but I loved The Great Gatsby. I would have loved if I lived during that time.” Thus, another generation influenced by Fitzgerald’s masterpiece is established.[1]
Given the global excitement regarding the new Gatsby adaptation directed by Australian Baz Luhrmann and featuring Hollywood star Leonardo DiCaprio in the title role, 2013 is a special year for Fitzgerald’s masterpiece. Not only are there 1920s-themed parties and celebrations taking place around the world, but the elation surrounding the film has influenced popular culture across the globe. Nations one would imagine are far removed from the novel’s themes or the movie’s fashions are caught up in the wave of Gatsby mania.
The Internet and the constant churn of content, such as film trailers, clips, music, and other visual and filmic elements, drive the craze for Fitzgerald’s book. However, a pleasant corollary is that the novel itself, including a film-related release with DiCaprio and others on the cover, climbed back to the top of the best-seller lists. So, whether the film sparked new audiences to buy the book or vice versa, the resulting sales demonstrated yet again the ubiquity of Gatsby within American popular culture.
DiCaprio’s intense, slightly sinister interpretation of Gatsby is attracting praise and a large following. The legend of a drunken, defeated Fitzgerald intertwines with the murdered Jay Gatsby to spin into a tale of woe. Yet what the reader should also pull from Gatsby’s pages is the sheer joy in the poetic writing, vivid descriptions of life, and the intellectual heft of the slim volume.
One of the central ideas in Gatsby: The Cultural History of the Great American Novel is that Fitzgerald’s masterpiece has transcended its place as a Jazz Age novel to become a touchstone across American culture. I label this overarching idea “meta-Gatsby,” which symbolizes the way the novel is employed across mass media and in the collective public consciousness. For example, if one were to walk up to any stranger and say the word “Gatsby,” the receiver would immediately conjure up some image that related to the book or one of the film adaptations. It might not be a specific example, but instead a general impression, like a mental picture of a decadent party or a remembered photograph of a Jazz Age flapper. One’s idea could also bounce to something concrete, like a picture of Fitzgerald or Robert Redford from the 1974 film adaptation. The ubiquity of the novel and its tangents created meta-Gatsby.
An interesting aspect of meta-Gatsby is that while using “Gatsby” as a sign symbol is universal, not everyone who uses it actually employs it properly. From examining the tens of thousands of pages of uses across the global mass media from the 1940s to 2010s, one sees that a kind of misdirection is common. Unfortunately, what it also reveals is that either people using “Gatsby” in this manner do not understand the novel and its characters well or that it is just an easy example to pull out of one’s writing bag of tricks, regardless of its meaning.
In other words, “Gatsby” is reduced to a generic group of synonyms, such as “wealthy,” “lavish,” or “rags to riches.” In many respects, this taxonomy is the dominant one employed when journalists and other writers refer to the novel or film. The important question here is what it means for a novel to enter the cultural mind-set of a nation, particularly if that appearance opens the book up to wild, speculative, or even incorrect uses. Over and over again, “Gatsby” is used in ways that reduce the novel to some basic idea that usually oversimplifies what Fitzgerald actually wrote to the point of trivializing his ideas.
Moreover, not only does “Gatsby” mean something across mass media and popular culture, but often “Gatsby” also is employed as a stand-in for the word “novel.” Similarly, “Fitzgerald” has become almost the generic image of “writer.”
The idea of meta-Gatsby is important when one connects the use of the novel in countless high school and college classrooms with the wider goal of public education. What this book advocates even beyond the study of Gatsby and meta-Gatsby is that books, literature, and the humanities greatly matter in contemporary society. That I even have to make this statement demonstrates how far such a reasonable suggestion has fallen. We find many ways to marginalize intelligence in the United States, particularly given the link between hard work and the American Dream.
Based on our agrarian past, the notion that working with one’s hands is a higher calling came to dominate a nostalgic view of the nation, yet today fewer and fewer people hold these kinds of jobs. This position enables some opponents of literature and the humanities to stress that practicality and job training should be elevated at the cost of “soft” disciplines. While I will not cast aspersions on those who emphasize science, math, and technology training since these are important parts of an educated society, I will battle for the humanities as equally important.
There are simply concepts and beliefs that must be developed through deep reading and engagement with great written work. I agree with the link that eminent scholar Louise M. Rosenblatt makes between literature and metalearning. She explains that “active participation with literature” leads to the kind of thinking we should aspire to attain:
Development of the imagination: the ability to escape from the limitations of time and place and environment, the capacity to envisage alternatives in ways of life and in moral and social choices, the sensitivity to thought and feeling and needs of other personalities . . . partnership in the wisdom of the past and the aspirations for the future, of our culture and society. The great abstractions—love, honor, integrity, compassion, individuality, democracy—will take on for him human meaning.[2]
This call to arms is not an intellectual pipe dream. It is a plea that avails us to a better future.
Books open minds to different eventualities. According to scholar Mark William Roche, “Morality is not one subsystem among the others, such that there is art, science, religion, business, politics, and so forth, alongside morality. Instead, morality is the guiding principle for all human endeavors.”[3] The outcomes furnished via stronger critical and contextual thinking can change worlds. We may not need Gatsby to operate computers better or solve mysteries about the physical body, but I contend that we need the novel and other great works of art to help people develop more compassionate, ethical, and humane worldviews.
Some readers might pick up this cultural history of The Great Gatsby with little previous knowledge of Fitzgerald (1896–1940), so let us briefly put the great writer in context. The public image of Fitzgerald is from the go-go 1920s, a dashing young man with movie star looks and Zelda, a beautiful, spirited wife on his arm. His celebrity status reached iconic proportions, the kind reserved today for those at the pinnacle of Hollywood, TV, and music’s A-list. During their Jazz Age heyday, one imagines that Scott and Zelda were the Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie of their era.
In what seemed like the blink of an eye, though, Fitzgerald plummeted just as hard. Even Gatsby (1925) could not generate the kind of sales that would help him back up. The novel met with decent sales and lukewarm critical reception. An excruciating nine years later, Fitzgerald published Tender Is the Night, full of hope that it would be his ticket, but the novel wilted under the same fate as Gatsby.
Two years after Tender, with continued health, alcoholism, and writing challenges, with his wife ensconced in a sanitarium, where she would basically spend the rest of her short, tragic life, Fitzgerald attempted to outline his worldview for his fifteen-year-old daughter Scottie, explaining, “A whole lot of people have found life a whole lot of fun. I have not found it so. But, I had a hell of a lot of fun when I was in my twenties and thirties; and I feel that it is your duty to accept the sadness, the tragedy of the world we live in, with a certain esprit.”[4] Shortly after, Fitzgerald left for Hollywood, his last chance at reviving himself physically, emotionally, and (most importantly) financially.
When he arrived in Hollywood in the summer of 1937, Fitzgerald lived on a $1,000 a week salary from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM). The studio later extended his contract for a year at $1,250 weekly. A princely sum in the late 1930s, the money enabled the writer to pay back his considerable debts, but he made little headway on his fiction. When his contract expired at the end of 1938, Fitzgerald scrambled as a freelance scriptwriter and putting out stories for Esquire. His creditors, including the Internal Revenue Service and Zelda’s North Carolina sanitarium, continued to demand payment.
Without studio backing, Fitzgerald spent the last eighteen months of his life in chaos and near collapse. The most pressing day-to-day concern was money. Overnight, Fitzgerald’s income plummeted to virtually nothing. He searched for bit studio writing gigs and resorted to begging friends and acquaintances for money, which he had done prior to the Hollywood work.
At one point in September 1939, Fitzgerald pleaded with Zelda’s doctor because he could not pay her bills. Describing his own dire situation, including a recent recovery from tuberculosis, he claimed, “It is simply impossible to pay anything . . . when one drives in a mortgaged Ford and tries to get over the habit of looking into a handkerchief for blood when talking to a producer.”[5] Showing his deep concern for his wife, but realistically examining the situation, Fitzgerald hoped “that this does not mean Zelda will be deprived of the ordinary necessities . . . [but] if things go as bad as they have for another month, the hospital can reimburse itself out of life insurance. This is a promise.”[6] Not long after, he died.
The Fitzgerald at the end of his life looked back on the boy genius he had been with scorn and more than a healthy dose of envy. The older man, physically broken by booze, debt, and failing health, however, did not allow his spirit to be destroyed. At the end of his life, in the Pat Hobby short stories and unfinished novel The Love of the Last Tycoon, he produced a new vision of Hollywood, completely different than one would have assumed from his early work. Subsequently, Fitzgerald’s Hollywood at the end of the 1930s is a bitter, lonely place, even though the stories themselves are filled with real-life figures, such as Orson Welles and Ronald Colman, and culled from Fitzgerald’s work as a scriptwriter for MGM and other prominent film companies.
What one cannot overlook, however, in assessing Fitzgerald is the power of his work as a novelist, particularly in Gatsby and Tender, or the ten to twelve short stories he authored that are considered in the upper echelon of those ever written. According to critic Charles Poore:
Buffon said that the style is the man. In Fitzgerald’s case the unity is more expansive: the style, the man, the stories, the novels, the legends, the influences, the friendships, the loves, the disasters make one great mass of infinitely exploitable material.[7]
In the end, it is the writer that stands above the playboy, party character, and the craft that should outlive the legend. We cannot completely untangle these dual personas in the public’s mind, but we can assess the work and its meaning to demonstrate how pervasive meta-Gatsby has been in contemporary America.
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What does it mean for someone or something to be called “Gatsby-like” or compared to the fictional character? If you called an acquaintance one of these terms, how would he or she react? What if an employee said that the boss’s house or a company celebration were “Gatsby-esque”? I can imagine that such declarations might lead to a wry smile or a punch in the nose. Does it mean something different, though, when we label Donald Trump “Gatsby-esque” or some local real estate mogul? Regardless, a person making these kinds of claims would get a reaction, which exemplifies meta-Gatsby at work.
While the 2013 film adaptation is arguably the best movie version of Gatsby, part of the challenge in putting the novel to film is meta-Gatsby. People hold ideas, visions, and impressions of the book and its characters, which influence their subsequent feelings about an adaptation.
Another challenge is that Gatsby is a novel of ideas, rather than a novel of action. This distinction makes Fitzgerald’s masterpiece elusive and difficult to film. For some readers, too, this dichotomy either results in one loving or hating the book. Many simply do not realize that Gatsby is a novel of ideas masked within a novel of action. The cloaking that occurs is the result of Fitzgerald’s ability at managing the intricacies and his beautiful writing style.
Using Nick as a narrator enables Fitzgerald to emphasize the storytelling aspects, while concurrently casting the unreliability in that recounting. According to literary critic Arthur Mizener, “Nick is in the middle, torn between the superficial social grace and the unimaginative brutality of the wealthy and the imaginative intensity and moral idealism of the socially absurd and legally culpable self-made man.”[8] Because Nick is all over the place in retelling the story and weaving it with his own judgments of the action, the reader finds room for interpretation that other novels attempt to force. Thus, Gatsby lives on into the twenty-first century in a way that other books of that era have not.
Joanne Berger DuMound, “The Great Gatsby Arrives at Berea High School,” Cleveland.com, January 30, 2013, http://www.cleveland.com/berea/index.ssf/2013/01/post_14.html (accessed January 30, 2013).
Louise M. Rosenblatt, Literature as Exploration, 5th ed. (New York: Modern Language Association, 1995), 276.
Mark William Roche, Why Literature Matters in the 21st Century (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004), 8.
Matthew J. Bruccoli, ed., F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Life in Letters (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994), 315.
Matthew J. Bruccoli and Margaret M. Duggan, eds., Correspondence of F. Scott Fitzgerald (New York: Random House, 1980), 545.
Bruccoli and Duggan, Correspondence of F. Scott Fitzgerald, 545.
Charles Poore, “Two New Views of Fitzgerald and His Works,” New York Times, July 20, 1963, 17.
Arthur Mizener, The Far Side of Paradise: A Biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1965), 85.