4

A Second-Rate, Midwest Hack and the Masterpiece He Wrote

The Great Gatsby is just under fifty thousand words and nine chapters long. In the Scribner’s authorized paperback edition, it runs 189 pages. Fitzgerald always thought that Gatsby’s brevity was a contributing factor in its disappointing sales. Then, as now, readers want plenty of book for their buck. The irony is that, by the late 1950s, Gatsby had become a mainstay of high-school and college syllabi, in part, because it is so short. A Tale of Two Cities, The Old Man and the Sea, and Ethan Frome also owe some of their classroom popularity to the fact that they don’t require English teachers to prod students along on a forced march through vast stretches of prose.

The climax of The Great Gatsby occurs in chapter 5. In the Scribner’s authorized text, Daisy and Gatsby are reunited on page 91, which is a hairbreadth short of the precise numeric dead center of the novel. That’s how obsessively overdesigned this novel is. Daisy has been lured to tea at Nick’s cottage; she’s wearing a tricorner lavender hat that matches the “dripping bare lilac trees”¹ on Nick’s lawn; Gatsby, a nervous wreck, flies out the back door upon her arrival and then, formally, knocks at the front door. It’s a slapstick moment whose comedy is undercut by the fact that Gatsby stands at Nick’s front door now looking like a drowned man. No matter how many times you reread Gatsby, the awkwardness of the first moments of the reunion with Daisy is excruciating. Nick himself can’t stand the tension, so he waits in the hall and “overhears” Gatsby’s mute, ghostlike entrance into the sitting room and Daisy’s first words of greeting, so stiff they could’ve been cribbed from a 1920s etiquette lesson for “How to Properly Greet an Old Flame”:

For half a minute there wasn’t a sound. Then from the living room I heard a sort of choking murmur and part of a laugh followed by Daisy’s voice on a clear artificial note.

“I certainly am awfully glad to see you again.”

A pause; it endured horribly. I had nothing to do in the hall so I went into the room.²

After some pained moments of conversation and tea drinking, Nick slips out the back and leaves the lovers to their privacy. By the time he returns, Daisy is crying and Gatsby has been temporarily restored to life: “There was a change in Gatsby that was simply confounding. He literally glowed.”³ Thus, we readers are shut out of one of the most momentous reunions in all of literature.

The remainder of chapter 5—one of the shortest chapters in the novel—is taken up by the tour of Gatsby’s mansion. As evening descends, Nick says his good-byes to Gatsby and Daisy. We’re told that Gatsby is once again looking unsure of himself, perhaps because what memories of Daisy he’s stored up “in his ghostly heart”⁴ haven’t been matched by her fleshly reality. (Siren Daisy, however, still keeps Gatsby in thrall with her voice: “that voice was a deathless song.”⁵) Then Nick walks out of Gatsby’s mansion and down the marble steps “into the rain,”⁶ leaving them alone together.

Nick tells us that for several weeks afterward he didn’t see Gatsby or talk to him on the telephone, that there was “a short halt”⁷ in their relationship. How bold of Fitzgerald to pause at dead center of Gatsby to allow the principal players their privacy, away from Nick and, of course, us readers.

Fitzgerald himself wanted a time-out in the spring of 1924. He had ground out eleven short stories in the six months between November 1923 and April 1924 in order to pay his debts and buy the freedom to concentrate on his novel in progress. A ledger entry for April 1924 reads: “Out of the woods at last + starting novel.”⁸ The mental strain, however, ran Fitzgerald down; he complained of coughs, itches, stomach problems, and insomnia.⁹ In a letter written in the early weeks of 1924 to fellow Scribner’s novelist Thomas Boyd, Fitzgerald said: “I’ve been sweating out trash since the failure of my play but I hope to get back to my novel by March 1.”¹⁰ Still, the release from short-story writing would mean nothing if Fitzgerald couldn’t extricate himself from the tipsy social life of Great Neck, an area dubbed by some “the Riviera on Long Island Sound.” In that same letter to Boyd, Fitzgerald notes that “Rebecca West + a rather (not too) literary crowd are coming out Sunday for a rather formal party + Zelda’s scared.”¹¹ According to Fitzgerald biographer and friend Andrew Turnbull, West turned out to be a no-show at that dinner, so “Fitzgerald got a pillow, painted a face on it, crowned it with an enormous plumed hat, and put it in the seat of honor. All during the meal he insulted this effigy of the authoress and teased it about her books.”¹² Ring Lardner was Fitzgerald’s partner in crime on Great Neck; on one memorable occasion, the two had a long boozy lunch with neighbor Rube Goldberg. The lunch culminated in Fitzgerald and Lardner giving Goldberg, who’d passed out, a patchy haircut that he had to cover with a hat. Another time, the pair went out to the Doubleday estate in Oyster Bay where Joseph Conrad was rumored to be a guest. They performed a drunken dance on the lawn in order to lure the great writer out but were asked to leave, pronto. If the fun paled on Long Island, there were always forays into New York. When a plainclothes policeman insulted Zelda at a dance at Webster Hall, Fitzgerald punched him. Such was the Fitzgeralds’ celebrity that the headline in the paper the next day read: “Fitzgerald Knocks Officer This Side of Paradise.”¹³

A liquor-fueled life of high jinks, long lunches, and parties, amusing as it may be, is death to serious work; there’s a reason why writers burrow themselves into artist colonies or country retreats. The house in Great Neck was supposed to be Fitzgerald’s very own artist colony, but he was a social creature, and, from boyhood on, he’d always cared too much about being liked. It was just too hard for Fitzgerald to go cold turkey on the invitations his hard-won popularity was generating. In “How to Live on $36,000 a Year,” the comic piece he wrote for the Saturday Evening Post that appeared on April 5, 1924, Fitzgerald struck a pose of bafflement as he tried to figure out how that then-considerable sum had flown out the windows of his Great Neck house during the previous year. “Restaurant Parties” and “Entertaining” were each budgeted at $70 a month, and the Fitzgerald food bill (presumably including hosting dinners at their house) came to a whopping $202 a month. It’s a testament to Fitzgerald’s charisma that he didn’t alienate his readership with this piece, given that, according to the Internal Revenue Service tables for that time, the average net income in America was $3,226.

An escape was needed. In early May of 1924, the Fitzgeralds impulsively vacated the Great Neck house and sailed to Europe, leaving loyal Ring Lardner to deal with the practical business of closing up their rented house on Gateway Drive.

After a brief stop in Paris they moved to the Riviera, which was then a winter resort and, therefore, unfashionable and cheap in the summer. Near the town of St. Raphael, they rented the imposing Villa Marie for seventy-nine dollars a month and settled in with an English nanny for Scottie, a cook, and a maid. Scott certainly didn’t become a recluse—he went to the beach with Zelda and socialized in the evenings—but he did spend a large portion of the day shut inside the villa working on his novel. Consciously or not, all the time he was writing Gatsby, Scott situated himself close to water: Great Bear Lake in Minnesota, where he began the ur-Gatsby manuscript; the Long Island Sound; and now the Mediterranean. While Scott was inside writing, Zelda spent hours on the beach. It was out there by the sea that she began an affair with a French aviator, Edouard Jozan. Fitzgerald’s ledger notes “the Big crisis—13th of July.”

What actually happened between Zelda and Jozan is as shrouded in mystery as what happens between Daisy and Gatsby during the “several weeks”¹⁴ that Nick loses track of his friend. By the way, Fitzgerald came to regard the silence he inserted after the reunion between Daisy and Gatsby as a mistake. A month after The Great Gatsby was published, Fitzgerald wrote to Edmund Wilson, “The worst fault in it, I think is a Big Fault: I gave no account (and had no feeling about or knowledge of) the emotional relations between Gatsby and Daisy from the time of their reunion to the catastrophe.”¹⁵ He echoes this mea culpa in a contemporaneous letter to H. L. Mencken, addressed “Dear Menck”: “There is a tremendous fault in the book—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).”¹⁶

I don’t put much stock in these self-deprecating comments. Fitzgerald was always an energetic breast-beater, and in those letters he sounds to me like he’s trying to act “grown up” about the criticism his novel has received, including the quibbles from his friends. Though both Wilson and Mencken were fairly enthusiastic about Gatsby, they were also men of letters who took themselves extremely seriously; no letter or review was complete without some negative comment. Mencken was kinder about Gatsby in a personal letter he wrote to Fitzgerald than he was in the review that was printed in the Baltimore Sun and Chicago Tribune: “No more than a glorified anecdote.… Certainly not to be put on the same shelf with, say, This Side of Paradise.”¹⁷ (Some friend!) By May of 1925, Fitzgerald was in full self-castigating mode, frantically trying to figure out what he had done wrong to account for why the sales of Gatsby were so sluggish. The silence at the heart of the relationship between Gatsby and Daisy was one of his anxious answers; so was Gatsby’s enigmatic character; so was the brevity of the novel; so was the title (it was “just so so,” he wrote to Max Perkins); so was the fact that it was “too masculine, too muscular” to appeal to women readers. Fitzgerald’s soul took a beating at the reception of Gatsby, just as his heart took a beating when Zelda’s affair with Jozan was revealed.

I don’t agree with Fitzgerald’s self-criticism about the damaging effects of that central silence. Anything “real” that took place between Gatsby and Daisy during those crucial weeks could never measure up to what Gatsby had envisioned in his imagination all those years. Above all, this is a novel about the titanic power of dreams; it’s not a novel about the spell of sex or the naughty giddiness of an illicit affair. I don’t want to know how Daisy’s body felt to Gatsby or how she smelled when he buried his face in her hair. I know how Gatsby felt: he felt let down. We’re told he’s already looking a bit confused by the limited reality of Daisy by the time Nick leaves him and Daisy on the evening of their reunion. Moreover, passing over Gatsby and Daisy’s relationship in silence further intensifies the relationship that is dramatized in the novel: Nick’s enduring love for the dead-and-gone Gatsby.

Back to that tempestuous summer of 1924: It’s not clear if Zelda asked Fitzgerald for a divorce or not. (That there was great sadness in the marriage is evidenced by the fact that Zelda tried to commit suicide by taking an overdose of sleeping pills a few weeks after the July “crisis.”) To my mind, the most crucial—and unanswerable—question about the affair is the one that concerns Gatsby: How much of the trauma of Zelda’s betrayal seeped into the plot of Fitzgerald’s novel in progress? You can hear Fitzgerald’s shell-shocked tone in the last paragraph of an August 1924 letter he wrote to Ludlow Fowler, a Princeton classmate who, significantly, had served as the best man at his wedding: “I feel old… this summer—I have ever since the failure of my play a year ago. That’s the whole burden of this novel—the loss of those illusions that give such color to the world so that you don’t care whether things are true or false as long as they partake of the magical glory.”¹⁸

Some writers are surprisingly clumsy at describing their own work, but not Fitzgerald, at least not here. In this one sentence, Fitzgerald gives a better explanation of what The Great Gatsby is really about than anyone else has come up with to date. Sadly, Fitzgerald is talking not only about his novel, but about the end of something with Zelda.

As biographer Matthew J. Bruccoli points out, the typescript of Gatsby was not sent to Scribner’s until late October, so Fitzgerald had at least three and a half months to write his grief over Zelda’s betrayal into the novel. The Jozan affair would later resurface in a more convoluted fictional form in Tender Is the Night, but at the time Fitzgerald was writing Gatsby, his wounds were raw. Writing, once again, must have provided a refuge, even though the novel he was working on turned out to be one in which practically everywhere a reader looked, someone was cheating on someone else. Would that have been the case if the novel had been written before July 1924?

Or say that Fitzgerald had already completed much of the first draft of Gatsby by that July… imagine how newly and painfully resonant certain scenes in the novel would be. After Daisy publicly professes her love for Gatsby by telling him, “You always look so cool,”¹⁹ Tom, looking on, is “astounded.” In an elegant variation on the epiphany that has sparked many a torch song, we’re told that “his mouth opened a little and he looked at Gatsby and then back at Daisy as if he had just recognized her as someone he knew a long time ago.”²⁰ How could Fitzgerald not have put himself in Tom’s shoes, as well as in the shoes of the other cuckolded husband, George Wilson? A few pages on in that same chapter 7, Wilson is described as “hollow-eyed” and “sick,” since he, like Tom, has just “wised up”²¹ to his wife’s infidelity. And then there’s poor betrayed Gatsby. Let’s briefly return to the climactic scene where Daisy reveals that her love for Gatsby, unlike his for her, is limited:

“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.”

Gatsby’s eyes opened and closed.

“You loved me too?” he repeated.²²

If Fitzgerald had written these bitter scenes pre-Jozan, then rereading them and revising them with Zelda’s help—as he did with the entire manuscript of The Great Gatsby before sending it to Perkins in October—must have been humiliating. And if he wrote all or some of these passages in the aftermath of Zelda’s affair with Jozan, that chronology could account for their punch-in-the-gut intensity.

Who knows? I want to extricate myself from these provocative but unanswerable biographical questions and, as Nick does with Gatsby, call a short halt to our sojourn with the Fitzgeralds. A shattered Scott is sitting alone at his desk in the Villa Marie, “drag[ging] the great Gatsby out of the pit of my stomach in a time of misery,”²³ as he later recalled in a seven-page autobiographical memo he wrote in 1930 while Zelda was hospitalized in the Prangins Clinic in Switzerland. Let’s turn from the flawed affairs of humankind to the near flawless—but very, very weird—novel that Fitzgerald did manage to produce.

Yes, I said “very, very weird.” All great works of art are weird, especially in the archaic sense of that word as meaning “uncanny,” but I think The Great Gatsby, proportionally, contains more than its share of oddities. I’ve already investigated a few of the stranger aspects of the novel: its defiant insistence on breaking the fundamental rule of good fiction by telling rather than showing and the many striking ways in which it qualifies as an early hard-boiled story. The more you reread Gatsby, the curiouser and curiouser it gets. Here’s an abbreviated catalog of some other peculiarities of The Great Gatsby:

(1) Gatsby is neither a character-driven nor a plot-driven novel; instead, it’s that rarest of literary animals: a voice-driven novel. Decades ago, my mother, who’s never been a reader, asked me what Gatsby was about. I remember that this very short conversation took place in the kitchen of the Queens apartment I grew up in, so I must have been reading Gatsby for the first time, in high school. I’m sure I said something like: “Well, it’s about a man who falls in love with a woman, but she marries a rich guy, and so the man, who’s named Gatsby, tries to make a lot of money and throw parties to win her back. And he does, but then he dies.” The end. I have no doubt that my mother shook her head ruefully and probably said something about how the rich always come out on top (even if they’re dead).

If the plot of The Great Gatsby disintegrates upon retelling, the characters—apart from the all-too-real Tom Buchanan and, for a few indelible paragraphs, Meyer Wolfshiem—barely register as flesh-and-blood entities. Daisy is a green light and a voice that’s “full of money”; Nick is also a voice—one that guides us deep into the world of the novel. We don’t know what Nick looks like or how he dresses or what he eats. And what about Gatsby? In that famous letter about the first draft of Gatsby in which Max Perkins raves about Tom, he expresses reservations about the character of Gatsby. Perkins’s long critique begins: “Gatsby is somewhat vague. The reader’s eyes can never quite focus upon him, his outlines are dim.”²⁴ In response, Scott did a strange thing: he asked Zelda to draw sketches of Gatsby so that he could see him more clearly. He tells Perkins in his letter of December 20, 1924, that after he’s “had Zelda draw pictures till her fingers ache, I know Gatsby better than I know my own child.”²⁵ Imagine how precious those sheets of paper would be today. Given that the Fitzgeralds moved around so much, those pictures probably got tossed in some hotel wastebasket in Europe in 1924, but the tantalizing mention of Zelda’s sketches of Gatsby probably has sent many a researcher flipping through papers in Fitzgerald collections at Princeton and the University of South Carolina, hoping for a Da Vinci Code moment where one of Zelda’s lost sketches falls out of an old ledger and we can finally see Jay Gatsby plain.

Or not. Fitzgerald knew Gatsby intimately, but even with Zelda’s help, he never gives a complete physical profile of his central character. Gatsby is a smile, “one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life.”²⁶ He’s his pink suit, rainbow of shirts, and yellow car; his verbal tic of “old sport.” Gatsby is also his aura of solitude; look over the novel again and you’ll be struck by how many times—at his dock, at his parties, outside the Buchanans’ house, and in his pool—Gatsby is alone. Most of the actors who’ve played Gatsby on-screen have been blond and thus bear a passing resemblance to Fitzgerald, but during the late 1930s, when he was working in Hollywood, Fitzgerald mentioned that if the studios ever made another Gatsby film, he thought a very different kind of physical presence—the dark and mustachioed screen idol Clark Gable—would be a good choice to play Gatsby.

Gatsby is the ultimate enigma, the absent center of the novel. Nick projects as much onto Gatsby as Gatsby projects onto Daisy. This is a novel about illusion, after all, as Fitzgerald eloquently said in that letter to Ludlow Fowler. Among The Great Gatsby’s early readers, Edith Wharton, for one, thought that its “hero” was much too mysterious. In a letter thanking Fitzgerald for the copy of the novel he’d sent to her, Wharton writes:

I am touched at your sending me a copy, for I feel that to your generation, which has taken such a flying leap into the future, I must represent the literary equivalent of tufted furniture & gas chandeliers.…

My present quarrel with you is only this: that to make Gatsby really Great, you ought to have given us his early career… instead of a short resume of it. That would have situated him, & made his final tragedy a tragedy instead of a “fait divers” for the morning papers.

But you’ll tell me that’s the old way, & consequently not your way.²⁷

In the decades since The Great Gatsby first appeared, Wharton’s gentle but firm criticism of Gatsby’s character has been taken up time and again, especially when a new film or ballet or opera or play of Gatsby is launched and the received wisdom is resurrected: that the novel is impossible to film or stage because its power is so dependent, not on plot or character, but on language.

And so it is.

Fitzgerald’s language, filtered through Nick’s voice, is above all else what makes The Great Gatsby so extraordinary. Fitzgerald undermines the coarse materiality of rich, careless people like Tom and Daisy in a detached poetic style that elevates but doesn’t obliterate ordinary American language. As is true in the sonnets of Fitzgerald’s beloved John Keats, almost every word of this intensely compressed masterpiece counts. On the very last page, where all vestiges of a plot are completely abandoned and Nick stands in the starlight outside Gatsby’s vacant house—striking the very same pose in which he first spotted Gatsby—we get sentence after sentence packed with intricate meditations. In one of the most famous sentences of those last few pages, Nick, thinking of the Dutch explorers who sailed into New York harbor, says, “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.”²⁸ That’s a sentence to spend a lifetime periodically contemplating: the historical sweep of it, the mournfulness.²⁹ In Gatsby’s most profound moments, Fitzgerald summons up a voice—call it the omniscient American voice—that renders the American Dream irresistible and heartbreaking and buoyant, all at once.

(2) Another “funny” thing about Gatsby is that it’s funny. Because of its Great Book status and the breathtaking power of the more solemn passages in the novel, first-time readers overlook the fact that there’s a lot of comedy in this novel. Some of Fitzgerald’s contemporaries, however, got the joke. In 1925, the only magazine interested in serializing Gatsby was College Humor, a glossy publication that featured cartoons and satiric pieces by the likes of Robert Benchley and Groucho Marx. Fitzgerald turned down the ten-thousand-dollar offer because he was afraid that readers would get the mistaken idea that Gatsby was a football player and that that would hurt book sales.

The major work that Fitzgerald wrote right before Gatsby—as opposed to those short stories he dashed off to pay the bills—was a play called The Vegetable. It was intended to be funny—a political satire. Burton Rascoe of the New York Tribune, for one, thought the play was a hoot: “I chortled and guffawed over it; it is utterly mad and ridiculous, irreverent, bubbling, disrespectful, witty, malicious and gay.”³⁰

At the beginning of Gatsby especially, Fitzgerald is still drawing on his comic talents. To catch the humor, it’s best to read—or hear Gatsby read—out loud. In a letter to me, Eleanor Lanahan, Scott and Zelda’s granddaughter, recalled some of the many times she’d read The Great Gatsby, chief among them at a public reading onstage:

I’ve read it aloud, with many others, on the stage of the Fitzgerald Theatre in St. Paul, under the stage direction of Garrison Keillor, which is the very best way to experience the book. Each time I read it differently. In St. Paul, for the very first time, I realized how much humor it has.³¹

I had similar experiences both times I saw Gatz, the seven-hour reading/dramatization of the novel at New York’s Public Theater. The audience at those performances laughed out loud at some of Fitzgerald’s snappy conversations and the unexpected turns some of his sentences take. In the famous Queensboro Bridge passage, New York City is described as “rising up across the river in white heaps and sugar lumps all built with a wish out of non-olfactory money.” Money that doesn’t smell? Manhattan? Surely Fitzgerald jests. The humor fades as sunlight drains out of the novel and the chill of autumn enters the air—which leads me to the next and perhaps the most incredible oddity of all.

(3) Page for page, The Great Gatsby is as elaborately patterned as other modernist masterworks, such as T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and Joyce’s Ulysses. (Fitzgerald sent a copy of The Great Gatsby to T. S. Eliot, who must have been pleased at the homage to The Waste Land in the image of the valley of ashes.) Unlike those encrypted texts, however, Gatsby can be enjoyed without the aid of an Enigma machine. In fact, Gatsby goes down so smoothly that many readers don’t catch on that the novel is wildly overdesigned.

As Matthew J. Bruccoli observed in his preface to the authorized text of The Great Gatsby: “One gauge of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s achievement is that many admiring readers are unaware of the complexity of The Great Gatsby because the novel is such a pleasure to read.”³² Granted, the green light is hard to ignore, as is the billboard featuring the eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg, which practically has neon lights around it proclaiming, Symbol! But otherwise, Fitzgerald has a pretty deft touch when it comes to symbol patterns and narrative structure. I honestly don’t know how many readings it took for me to catch on that Gatsby and Daisy’s reunion took place in the dead center of the novel. Nick’s voice and the story he tells are so absorbing that, through many years of rereadings, I barely noticed the placement of that scene.

Remember that Fitzgerald told Max Perkins in that famous letter of 1922 that he wanted his next book to be, among other things, “intricately patterned.” Boy, is it ever. I’ve taught Gatsby almost every year for the past three decades and I always think I know most of what there is to know about the novel’s complex scaffolding of symbols, including the central image of water… until I realize, once again, that I don’t. Sometimes, something new will snag my attention in a passage that I’ve read dozens of times before; sometimes, my students point out details I’ve missed that are hiding in plain sight. About ten years ago, I was talking about the drowning motif in class, and a student piped up with the epiphany: “Everybody at Gatsby’s parties is drowning in liquor.” Only last year, my graduate teaching assistant gave a lecture on Gatsby to our freshman class and pointed out the passage on the penultimate page where Nick erases the “obscene word, scrawled by some boy”³³ on the white steps of Gatsby’s mansion. She made the connection between Nick’s action and his role as a narrator who cleans up Gatsby’s story. I was dumbfounded. I should have caught the significance of that moment long, long ago, but I’d always been so focused on the gorgeousness of the final page of Gatsby that my eyes had slid right past that detail. Classroom moments like that are golden. While working on this book, I was startled to realize that at the Buchanan dinner party in chapter 1, Daisy tries to distract everyone’s attention from Tom’s phone conversation with Myrtle by claiming to have heard a bird out on the lawn: “ ‘I think [it] must be a nightingale come over on the Cunard or White Star Line. He’s singing away—’ Her voice sang: ‘It’s romantic, isn’t it, Tom?’ ” An English nightingale (echoes of Keats!) making the Atlantic passage on the White Star Line would be replicating the very same route as the Titanic, which sank ten years before the Buchanans and Jordan and Nick sat down to dinner. Why put all that detail into Daisy’s silly remark if we readers aren’t meant to think of one of the most notorious sinking disasters in history?

Sampling even the topmost crust of the mountain of Gatsby criticism, I’ve come away feeling as though I could spend the rest of my life trying to understand the astounding degree to which Fitzgerald “overwrote” Gatsby. For starters, there are the ten or so major symbol systems I try to cover in classroom lectures. Time is a big one. The indefatigable Bruccoli totted up 450 time words in Gatsby; hours of the day and seasons are noted constantly, and time even enters into titles of songs. At the conclusion of the disappointing party at Gatsby’s house that Daisy and Tom attend, the band plays “Three O’Clock in the Morning,” a “neat sad little waltz of that year.”³⁴ There’s also the oft-acknowledged comic intrusion of the clock in the reunion scene between Gatsby and Daisy: Gatsby leans his head so far back against the mantelpiece in Nick’s sitting room that he’s literally hit over the head with time. Bizarrely, Edmund Wilson, in his New Republic review of the 1926 Broadway play of Gatsby, thought that the adaptation “succeeded in improving on Fitzgerald” by having Gatsby knock over a highball glass rather than the clock and then apologize for “upsetting the vase.” Wilson clearly needed another rereading of Gatsby to catch the importance of the clock.

Like sand in an hourglass, time is running out from the very first pages of this novel: an ultimate “deadline” casts its shadow over Gatsby. Other symbol patterns have to do with temperature (“You always look so cool”), geographical direction (East Egg versus West Egg), names (including the flower names of Daisy and Myrtle), music, vision, vehicles (cars, hydroplanes, trains), birds, color (whole constellations of meaning swirl around greens, grays, reds, and blues), and medieval-quest romances and mythology (Gatsby as Icarus; Gatsby as Apollo the sun god; Gatsby as Prometheus; Gatsby as that old warhorse of many a term paper, a Christ figure). For an overview of the plethora of other symbols in the novel, check out the glut of Gatsby research papers for sale on Internet sites like GradeSaver.com and Tutionster.com (whose ad depressingly promises its customers “Academic Help by PhD Experts!”). You can imagine a modern-day Tom Buchanan disposing thusly of his freshman English requirement at Yale.

The major symbol patterns, however, are just the beginning of the fun. As in those wonderful art deco designs of the 1920s, there are repetitive subpatterns within the larger patterns: geometric cubes within cubes, stories within stories. Consider, once more, that dominant symbol of time. Each of the first three chapters in the novel features a party, and each of those parties occurs at a progressively later time in the day. The Buchanans’ dinner takes place at sunset, followed by the late-afternoon-to-evening bacchanal at Tom and Myrtle’s love nest, followed by Gatsby’s party at which he makes his delayed entrance past midnight. The cumulative effect is to heighten suspense until the moment we readers finally meet Gatsby in the flesh at the third party.

But, as the infomercial pitchmen always say, Hold on, there’s more! That party structure extends throughout the entire novel! Every chapter of The Great Gatsby is built around a party of some sort, including dinners and lunches and the final poorly attended “party” that is Gatsby’s funeral. Some scholars attribute this dramatic structure—which should seem contrived but doesn’t—to Fitzgerald’s extensive playwriting experience at Princeton and on through his flop of The Vegetable.

Speaking of something else that should feel contrived but doesn’t, there’s a pattern of unrequited desire running through Gatsby. One person in every couple in the novel stretches out to grasp the other, who remains forever out of reach. The emblematic image of this yearning is Gatsby in the darkness stretching out his arms for the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. Nick exactly mimics this gesture in the last chapter of the novel: he stands alone, under the stars, in front of Gatsby’s mansion, looking out over the water. Nick not only steps into his dead friend’s shoes but tries to grasp Gatsby by telling his story. Jordan, in turn, languidly reaches for the emotionally unavailable Nick. Even the minor characters take part in this highly choreographed dance of unrequited desire: Wilson’s clutching for Myrtle is mirrored by Myrtle’s clutching for Tom; Tom possessively reaches for Daisy. And Daisy? Daisy reaches for no one, not really, not even Pammy, her daughter. Daisy’s self-containment is in keeping with her narcissistic identity as a femme fatale.

Simply put, the intricacy of The Great Gatsby is staggering. Once you become aware of how deliberate even the most throwaway moments in the novel are, you develop a double vision toward Gatsby, admiring its smooth surface while sensing the fathoms that abide beneath. I’ll just mention one more example of what I’ve come to think of simply as Gatsby’s “too-muchness.” In chapter 2, as Myrtle, Tom, and Nick are riding in a “lavender”³⁵ cab on their way to the apartment on 158th Street, Myrtle suddenly insists they pull over so that Tom can buy her a puppy from a sidewalk vendor. It’s one of those quick comic moments, given that the vendor bears “an absurd resemblance to John D. Rockefeller” and the “very recent” puppies he’s claiming are Airedales instead appear to be “of an indeterminate breed.”³⁶

Later, in the smoky apartment, Myrtle happily natters on, listing all the things she’s “got to get.” That list includes “a collar for the dog, and one of those cute little ash trays where you touch a spring, and a wreath with a black silk bow for mother’s grave that’ll last all summer.”³⁷ Everybody at the party is too drunk to pay any attention to Myrtle. The last time we glimpse the little dog, it’s “sitting on the table looking with blind eyes through the smoke and from time to time groaning faintly.”³⁸ (Edith Wharton, a staunch dog lover, told Fitzgerald in that thank-you note for Gatsby that she couldn’t stop thinking about the fate of the poor puppy.) But it’s Myrtle’s shopping list that really merits a mulling over. The dog collar Myrtle wants to buy is ironically indicative of how she’s treated by Tom Buchanan, the ashtray invokes Myrtle’s lower-class origins in the valley of ashes as well as her approaching ashes-to-ashes fate, and the cemetery wreath is a grim foreshadowing of her death.³⁹ Symbol stacking for symbol stacking’s sake is tedious, but that’s not what’s going on in Gatsby. Fitzgerald was a romantic egoist, a lapsed Catholic, a dreamer; by temperament and upbringing, he saw meaning in the mundane. The distinctive oddity—or miracle—of Gatsby is not that it contains so many symbols but that (green light and Eckleburg excepted) it manages to read as though it barely contains any.

(4) Reviewing Myrtle’s shopping list takes me to the eeriest facet of The Great Gatsby: its predictive quality. This Ouija board aspect of Gatsby is a guaranteed discussion starter on a slow day in freshman English. I can offer no explanations, only observations:

One of the lines in the novel that jars me out of the 1920s every time I read it is Nick’s one-sentence description of the discovery of Wilson’s body near Gatsby’s pool: “It was after we started with Gatsby toward the house that the gardener saw Wilson’s body a little way off in the grass, and the holocaust was complete.”⁴⁰ That word holocaust is arresting, particularly given that this is a novel in which the word swastika appears in connection with a Jewish character wearing human molars as cuff links. My students are not stupid, but like many of the best and brightest young Americans, they’re often a little vague as to time lines in world history. When I remind them that Gatsby was written in 1925 and that the Nazis didn’t come to power in Germany until 1933, they’re confused. They always want to know: What are all these World War II–era words and images doing floating around in Gatsby? I tell them that words like holocaust and swastika didn’t have the meanings in 1925 that they do now, but still, we all agree, it’s strange to find them in a novel about Jazz Age New York.

The Great Depression is another world event that the novel seems to foretell. The lights are turned out in Gatsby’s mansion in chapter 7 and the parties are over, just as the giddy national party that was the Roaring Twenties got shut down on Black Tuesday, October 29, 1929. Certainly Fitzgerald wasn’t alone in suspecting that the good times couldn’t roll on indefinitely, but his novel predicts a crash, for Gatsby, at least, of total wipeout proportions.

There’s also a personal reach to the predictive aura of The Great Gatsby. I’ve already mentioned that Fitzgerald’s first burial hewed pretty closely to Gatsby’s dismal send-off. After Fitzgerald died in Hollywood on Saturday, December 21, 1940, his body was taken to a funeral home, Pierce Brothers Mortuary, in a run-down neighborhood in Los Angeles. A cosmetic mortician went to work on Fitzgerald, and he was put on view in, of all places, “the William Wordsworth room.” A visitor recalled that he was laid out to look like “a cross between a floor-walker and a wax dummy. Except for one bouquet of flowers and a few empty chairs, there was nothing to keep him company except his casket.”⁴¹ Dorothy Parker, one of the few friends present, blurred the lines between life and art when she ironically quoted Owl Eyes’ comment on Gatsby: “The poor son-of-a-bitch.”

Fitzgerald’s body was then shipped back to Maryland, where Catholic authorities denied him burial in the Fitzgerald family plot in St. Mary’s churchyard. On December 27, 1940, biographer Andrew Turnbull attended the viewing at the (still operating today) Pumphrey Funeral Home in Bethesda, followed by the Episcopalian burial service at the Rockville Union Cemetery. (As a boy, Turnbull had come to know Fitzgerald, Zelda, and Scottie when they all lived at La Paix, the estate owned by Turnbull’s parents.) Here’s a snippet of his eyewitness account. Too bad Fitzgerald couldn’t appreciate the Gatsby-esque coincidences:

It was a meaningless occasion, having no apparent connection with the man, save as one of life’s grim jokes designed to make us think.… In the airless hall and communicating rooms of the funeral parlor were a few spindly poinsettias.… The casket was open, and the suave funeral director ushered us up to it. All the lines of living had gone from Fitzgerald’s face.… His clothes suggested a shop window.

We sat on stiff chairs in the overlit room as friends and relatives arrived in twos and threes—the Murphys, the Perkinses, the Obers… Ludlow Fowler, John Biggs, Zelda’s brother-in-law Newman Smith—twenty or thirty in all. At the last, there was a flurry of boys and girls—Scottie’s friends on their way to or from some party.… The coffin was closed. The roll of a carpet sweeper was heard gathering stray leaves and petals, and then the voice of the clergyman droning the Protestant burial. It was as if nothing were being said of him or to him that the heart could hear.

Afterwards, we drove to the cemetery in the rain.⁴²

(5) Here’s the final item in my list of oddities about The Great Gatsby: Gatsby is the only great novel that Fitzgerald ever wrote.

I’ve just lost all you Tender Is the Night fans—and I know how fervent you can be because I’ve run into quite a few, one time en masse on a Baltimore sidewalk. Last winter, I got word that the row house in the Bolton Hill section of Baltimore where Fitzgerald was living when Tender Is the Night was published had just been put on the market and that there would be a real estate agent’s open house on Super Bowl Sunday. Since there are so few Fitzgerald sites that are accessible to the public, I decided to drive up from Washington and have a look.

That Sunday of the open house turned out to be wet and lightly snowy; the Ravens were playing the 49ers and the whole city was a study in black, purple, and gold. Nevertheless, by the time I arrived, a big crowd of people (lots of them in black, purple, and gold) had already gathered on the street in front of the tall gray row house on Park Avenue. Nobody was happy. It turned out a contract had already been signed and the open house was canceled.

I know from reading various biographies of Fitzgerald and from listening to an interview that Scottie gave to Matthew J. Bruccoli that this row house, whose appearance falls somewhere between modest and stately, had hosted illustrious showbiz visitors such as George Burns and Gracie Allen (whom Scottie said her father was “crazy about”) and Clark Gable, who came to lunch.⁴³ The open-house crowd lacked any obvious star power, but I was happy to see a lot of college-age men and women milling about—not the usual demographic of literary tourists. One couple told me they’d driven down from central Pennsylvania that morning; a few other people identified themselves as members of the Fitzgerald Society. Indeed, the sidewalk turned out to be lousy with Fitzgerald experts. (I imagined the shade of Fitzgerald floating around inside the row house, laughing and double-checking the locks.) One woman told me she’d written a play about Zelda, another was working on a book about Sheilah Graham, and an older man claimed he’d been instrumental in relocating Scott and Zelda to their current resting place in the Old St. Mary’s churchyard. Almost everyone I chatted with told me they just had to get in because they loved Tender Is the Night. Not being so devout, I was content to leave and let a Baltimore native, NPR web producer Beth Novey, take me on an impromptu tour around the outside of other Fitzgerald landmarks: the dreary Cambridge Arms Apartments, where Scott and Scottie rented an apartment to be close to Zelda, who was then in the psychiatric hospital Sheppard Pratt; and the still elegant Belvedere Hotel, where Fitzgerald gave Scottie her sixteenth-birthday tea dance, at which he got blotto.

I want to like Tender Is the Night more than I do. Maybe, someday, I will. The novel contains so many stretches of lovely writing, but I have to stand with those critics who label it a beautiful failure. I don’t think it touches The Great Gatsby. The plot of Tender Is the Night is murky, and its omniscient narrator possesses none of the resonance of Nick’s distanced yet enthralled voice. Fitzgerald spent nine years after the publication of Gatsby working erratically on his next novel as he was trying to find—and finance—the best care for Zelda, raise Scottie, and battle his own alcoholic demons. When Tender Is the Night was first published, it sold about twelve thousand copies. By 1934, Americans had a diminished appetite for reading about rich folks on the Riviera. As he had with Gatsby, Fitzgerald obsessively ruminated on what he had done wrong in Tender Is the Night that might account for its poor sales. He focused on the structure of the novel; its middle section was composed of flashbacks, which had confused some readers. Throughout the remainder of the 1930s, Fitzgerald worked on revisions. As an author’s copy of Tender Is the Night in the collection of Princeton’s Firestone Library attests, Fitzgerald even tore pages of the novel out of their binding in order to rearrange them. In 1951, literary critic and Fitzgerald friend Malcolm Cowley, relying on notes that Fitzgerald had made, brought out another version of the novel, this one told in a straightforward, chronological manner. It bombed, and Scribner’s reverted to Fitzgerald’s original. Whatever Fitzgerald had in mind for the ultimate incarnation of Tender Is the Night, I think it’s safe to say his vision was never realized.

Fitzgerald’s other novels are second-tier works. This Side of Paradise is a time-sensitive literary sensation; it made Fitzgerald the sage of the Jazz Age, but, unlike Gatsby, it doesn’t transcend its time. The Beautiful and Damned is interesting because of its glimpses of 1920s New York life and the Fitzgeralds’ already wobbling marriage, but it’s a thinly written story with wooden main characters. That leaves us with The Love of the Last Tycoon, which is maybe a great novel in the making, but only in the making. Fitzgerald planned his Hollywood novel to be short and symmetrically designed, like Gatsby; he left about forty-four thousand words of a projected sixty thousand in a very, very rough draft that was posthumously edited and shaped into an unfinished novel by Edmund Wilson. Like Dickens’s Mystery of Edwin Drood, it’s an appetite-whetting fragment.

Readers expect that if a writer has hit it out of the ballpark once, he or she can do so again and again, but in fact, literary history is studded with singletons. In modern American literature alone, we have the classic examples of The Catcher in the Rye, Invisible Man, and To Kill a Mockingbird. Skipping down a few notches on the value scale, there’s Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1937. MGM put Fitzgerald to work on the screenplay of that novel in the winter of 1939, a job that deeply impressed Scottie, who told her father, to his horror, that she thought Mitchell’s novel was one of the “masterpieces of all time.” Fitzgerald always thought of himself as a poet, and poets burned out early, particularly the Romantic poets he loved. The years of drinking and terrible personal stress ate away at Fitzgerald’s creative and physical stamina, and besides, the muses are notoriously fickle.

Note, though, that I started out this reflection on The Great Gatsby’s singularity by saying that it’s the only great novel Fitzgerald wrote. I think that some of his other writings fall into the masterpiece category, among them the Crack-Up essays, some of his short stories (especially the ones belonging to the Gatsby cluster), and his letters—many of which are emotionally raw and radiant with humor and self-awareness. There are substantial volumes in print of Fitzgerald’s letters to Zelda, to Maxwell Perkins, to Ginevra King, to Harold Ober, and to Scottie. Probably, like many of us, he was his best self in his writing, but I dare anyone to read Fitzgerald’s letters and not come away feeling, as Nick does about Gatsby, that “there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life.”⁴⁴

But it’s time I wrapped up this short halt and returned to the Riviera in the summer of 1924, where love lies bleeding in the sand. After the exposure of Zelda’s affair with Edouard Jozan, Fitzgerald, nevertheless, continued to bend his head down at his desk, working on Gatsby. In September 1924, Fitzgerald turned twenty-eight, and the first draft of the novel was finished. He wrote in his ledger: “Hard work sets in.” Fitzgerald was talking about the hard work of revision, with which Zelda helped. He also sent off a letter to Max Perkins on September 10 in which he says: “the novel will absolutely + definately [sic]be mailed to you before the 1st of October.… It is like nothing I’ve ever read before.”⁴⁵ In October, the ledger notes: “Working at high pressure to finish.” In November, the typescript was sent to Max Perkins, and the ledger proclaims: “Novel off at last.”

Before and after that joyous announcement, Fitzgerald was rewriting and chopping and rewriting. As gifted an artist as Fitzgerald sometimes was, he was just as gifted a craftsman. There were times when Fitzgerald, usually under pressure to make a quick buck with his short stories, coasted on his creative powers. Otherwise, he was the archenemy of the Allen Ginsberg “first thought, best thought” school of impulsive writing. Literature, he told a young family friend in 1938 who’d sent him a story to critique, “is one of those professions that wants the ‘works.’ You wouldn’t be interested in a soldier who was only a little brave.”⁴⁶ Fitzgerald was talking about the emotional courage that good writing demands as well as another kind: the nerve to look steadily at drafts of one’s work, rip them apart, and start over again. His urge to rewrite often shades into obsession. This Side of Paradise went through two major revisions before the third try was the charm with Scribner’s. As we’ve seen with Tender Is the Night, Fitzgerald sometimes kept on revising even after publication. To an extent, this was also the case with Gatsby.

Among the many treasures in the Fitzgerald Papers at Princeton, there’s a rather beaten-up copy of The Great Gatsby that’s especially tantalizing to those readers trying to fathom Fitzgerald’s creative process and intentions. This first edition of Gatsby is Fitzgerald’s own personal copy. We know it’s his because inside the front cover, on the right-hand page, Fitzgerald has written:

F. Scott Fitzgerald

(His copy and not to be Lent)

May 1925

This Gatsby is missing its dust jacket, and its binding is falling apart. Someone has spilled what looks like coffee on page 65 (at the end of chapter 3, where Nick is leaving his first party at Gatsby’s house). It looks like someone tried to flick the coffee away from the page with a thumb.

A tireless rereader of his own novel, Fitzgerald has marked up in pencil almost every thick, soft page of this Gatsby. There are underlinings as well as cryptic vertical lines drawn next to passages; there are notations where Fitzgerald seems to be reminding himself of the source of gestures and bits of dialogue (next to the description of the photographer McKee, for instance, Fitzgerald writes, Lewellen Jones). In still other places, Fitzgerald scribbles the names of reviewers and friends—Burlingame, Rosenfield, Ring—who commented on those specific passages in their reviews and letters. And then there are the changes; lots of little changes. Precisely because almost every one of the changes is so incidental, I find them touching. Fitzgerald is such a perfectionist, he just can’t let go. These changes were picked up in subsequent editions so that Gatsby got closer and closer to Fitzgerald’s Platonic ideal of the novel. In chapter 3, he changes Nick’s military affiliation (why?) from the First Division to, as he abbreviates it, the “3d.” Myrtle’s mouth, in death, is described in the first edition as being “ripped a little at the corners,” but Fitzgerald deletes a little. In chapter 2, where Nick describes Tom’s shameless public behavior with Myrtle—“his acquaintances resented the fact that he turned up in popular cafés with her”—Fitzgerald underlines cafés and writes restaurants in the right-hand margin. (Until I slowly paged through Fitzgerald’s own edition of Gatsby, I hadn’t realized that he chose to hold that profane party at Myrtle and Tom’s apartment on a Sunday, the Sabbath—another subtle way in which this modern novel undermines pious convention.) A they are is changed to a they’re; the fictional Muhlbach Hotel is changed to the real Sealbach (which will be corrected to the Seelbach—Fitzgerald couldn’t spell to save himself). A metal light fixture in Wilson’s garage is changed to a wire one, and on and on Fitzgerald goes, ceaselessly revising his own novel.

These changes were mere tweaks compared to the revisions that Fitzgerald undertook prepublication, as he was writing Gatsby in 1924. I’m not going to walk too far into the weeds here, because scholars of The Great Gatsby can and have devoted lengthy articles as well as books to its editing history. I do want, however, to briefly acknowledge the process—informed by sweat and panicky second-guessing and disciplined craftsmanship—through which Fitzgerald shaped his drafts into the final version of Gatsby.

The arc of Gatsby’s evolution begins at White Bear Lake in 1922, when Fitzgerald first begins writing a Catholic novel set in the Midwest of the nineteenth century (he tossed out most of that eighteen-thousand-word draft, except for what became the short story “Absolution”). The arc extends over to the very edge of Gatsby’s publication.

Fitzgerald did not type; he wrote in longhand, usually in pencil. (There’s a ten-second film clip dating from the early 1920s, now instantly viewable on the Internet, that shows Fitzgerald, dressed in a suit, sitting outside under a tree and writing on a small table. At the very end of the clip, he holds his head in his hand, as though he’s in the throes of creative struggle.) When Fitzgerald completed the manuscript of Gatsby, it was turned over to a secretary, and that typescript of the novel—which Fitzgerald also revised—was the document that was sent to Max Perkins at the end of October 1924. That original typescript, as well as the carbon copies of it, has not survived, but the manuscript has, thanks to the Fitzgeralds’ daughter, Scottie.

In the early 1940s, the executor of Fitzgerald’s estate, Judge John Biggs Jr., who had been Fitzgerald’s friend and classmate at Princeton, urged Scottie to sell some of her father’s papers and manuscripts to the university in order to cover Zelda’s care and pay back her own college loans. Zelda was ready to follow this well-intentioned direction, and it was in her power to do so. (Scott’s will declared that all his books, writings, and possessions were Scottie’s property until such time as Zelda regained her sanity. But since Zelda was never declared legally insane, the estate technically belonged to her, as Scott’s widow.) Scottie, however, argued forcefully for keeping all her father’s papers together in one archive. They were offered to his alma mater, Princeton, which came up with the figure of one thousand dollars for the entire lot.

In Scottie, her forthright and moving biography of her mother, Eleanor Lanahan writes that David Randall, Scribner’s manager of rare books, stepped in at this point to challenge Princeton’s lowball offer. Julian Boyd, then Princeton’s University librarian, refused to raise the bid and, according to Randall, said something along the lines of “Princeton was not a charitable institution, nor was its library established to support indigent widows of, and I quote, ‘second rate, Midwest hacks,’ just because they happen to have been lucky enough to have attended Princeton—unfortunately for Princeton.”⁴⁷

In 1949, Princeton did up the offer to twenty-five hundred dollars. As the sale was going through, Scottie surprised everyone by deciding to make the papers “an outright gift.”⁴⁸ That gift consisted of fifty-seven boxes of correspondence, proofs, records, books, and manuscripts, including the autograph manuscript of The Great Gatsby. The F. Scott Fitzgerald Papers at Princeton have since grown to eighty-nine archival boxes and eleven oversize containers. The collection also includes Sheilah Graham’s papers and books. To Fitzgerald scholars, the Fitzgerald Papers and the related material is priceless. (For those more inclined to speculate about the cold-hard-cash value of the Princeton collection, consider this random fact: a first edition, with dust jacket, of Gatsby was offered for sale in May 2013 by the Jones Brothers, an online rare-book site, for the startling price of $194,000.) In celebration of the centenary of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s freshman year at Princeton (and coinciding with the release of the Baz Luhrmann film), Princeton recently digitized the autograph-manuscript copy of The Great Gatsby. Princeton has also digitized the surviving two pages of the ur-Gatsby (which had been attached to a letter to Willa Cather) and the corrected galleys of what Fitzgerald was calling, by December of 1924, “Trimalchio.” With the aid of the magnification function and, perhaps, reading glasses, Fitzgerald’s cuts, cross-outs, additions, and marginalia are available for viewing on your home laptop.

Digitization is a marvel, but the multitude of Fitzgerald fans fervently hoping to genuflect in person before the original manuscript are kept at a protective distance. Princeton must remain unmoved. Don C. Skemer, Princeton’s current curator of manuscripts, tells me that access to Fitzgerald’s manuscripts were restricted by Scottie, the donor, as part of the gift agreement with Princeton. “Honoring those restrictions,” Skemer says, “is an obligation—what lawyers call ‘donor covenant.’ Scottie knew full well that her father wrote on paper of poor quality—paper that would not hold up to heavy use.”⁴⁹ Scottie also required that Princeton make surrogates of the manuscripts available; by the early 1950s, Princeton did so in the form of microfilm, which was supplemented in the 1970s by a published facsimile edition and is now being replaced by digitization and online access. A visit to Princeton’s campus, even in the slower summer months, helps me to understand the library’s concerns about the impact of literary tourism on the fragile Gatsby manuscript. All day long, buses rumble through the quaint main drag of Nassau Street disgorging tourists, a good number of them college-age kids visiting from Europe and Asia. Many of them want to see The Great Gatsby manuscript. To my surprise, I learn from another Princeton librarian, Gabriel Swift, who assists researchers in rare books and special collections, that the manuscript comes in second on the Firestone Library most-requested list. That’s because the item in the number one spot can be read only at Princeton. It’s an unpublished short story by J. D. Salinger called “The Ocean Full of Bowling Balls” that was scheduled to appear in Harper’s before Salinger pulled it. The story is a prequel to The Catcher in the Rye in that it deals with the death of Kenneth Caulfield (later Allie), Holden’s brother. Salinger’s will prohibits publication (or copying or digitization) until fifty years after his death (2060), although some pirated copies have begun surfacing recently on the Internet. Swift tells me that he fields e-mails from people all over the world who are planning to visit the United States and are set on coming to Princeton for that one Salinger story, which they’re permitted to read in a preservation photocopy, not the original typescript. Of course, the requests for Salinger’s elusive, unpublished story are of a different order than the requests to view the manuscript of what may be our most widely read Great American Novel. Don C. Skemer emphasizes that The Great Gatsby is the university’s single most important modern literary manuscript.

The vision of an unending stream of holidaymakers wearing Princeton Tiger T-shirts and snapping cell-phone shots of the manuscript of The Great Gatsby is nightmarish, but there’s also something wrong about the manuscript’s current if-a-tree-falls-in-a-forest situation. The 302 now-brittle pages of the autograph manuscript lie in state in a big walk-in storage room in Princeton’s Firestone Library. The room is fireproof; the temperature is set at 67 degrees and the humidity at 45 percent. “It’s our best vault,” Skemer commented in an interview with Princeton Alumni Weekly (the very same publication that Fitzgerald was reading when he died). It’s also a vault very few mortals ever get to enter, even those with plausible scholarly reasons. Of course, I tried. I couldn’t even talk my way onto the elevator to look at the vault from the outside. Princeton’s crucial mission is to safeguard one of the most cherished manuscripts in American culture, but doing so means sealing up The Great Gatsby in the dark. Something like the National Archives Rotunda or the British Library’s display room is needed as a site for our national literary treasures. Princeton’s Firestone Library is in the midst of a total renovation, and Skemer is hopeful that some sort of rotating display of highlights of the library’s collection may be possible in the planned state-of-the-art exhibition gallery.

I want to turn away from the vault now and go back to the grubby, pencil-smudged gestation of Gatsby. In his detailed letter of November 20, 1924, Perkins responded to the typescript Fitzgerald sent him, and Fitzgerald went into overdrive making changes. In the introduction to the Cambridge edition of Trimalchio, editor and scholar James L. W. West III says that reading Trimalchio “is like listening to a well-known musical composition, but played in a different key and with an alternate bridge passage.”⁵⁰ It’s a reading experience I find frustrating; I’m itching for Fitzgerald to hurry up and find his way to realizing The Great Gatsby.

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s eraser. Though Fitzgerald didn’t type, Scottie claimed this eraser belonged to her father. (MATTHEW J. & ARLYN BRUCCOLI COLLECTION OF F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA LIBRARIES)

To do so, Fitzgerald took the manuscript he was calling “Trimalchio” down to its skeleton, then he redesigned the structure, ripped out dull patches, and trimmed superfluous words and passages. A stark indication of how intensely and continuously Fitzgerald was rewriting Gatsby is seen in the scribbling on the set of galleys that Max Perkins sent to Fitzgerald in the winter of 1924–1925. Conventionally, when a novel is in galleys, it’s all but done. Fitzgerald, however, revised that set of galleys so extensively that Perkins had to have the galleys reset. That second set of galleys incorporated Fitzgerald’s changes and, subsequently, picked up still more changes.

Some of the alterations were large scale: The relationship between Nick and Jordan faded in prominence, and Jordan, in particular, receded as a character. Originally, Gatsby’s life story was presented in what was a big flat stretch of retrospection in chapter 8. Taking Perkins’s advice, Fitzgerald broke up that long biographical section and scattered it throughout the earlier chapters of the novel. Chapter 3 (Gatsby’s first party) was originally chapter 2; Fitzgerald pushed it back to make readers wait longer to finally meet Gatsby. That change also makes the first three chapters of the novel more symmetrical, in that we readers are treated to a three-tiered tour of the American class system: East Egg’s old money in chapter 1, the valley of ashes in chapter 2, and West Egg’s gaudy new-money revels in chapter 3. Fitzgerald originally set the big Plaza Hotel confrontation scene between Tom and Gatsby and Daisy at a baseball game at the Polo Grounds, and then in Central Park. (New York City offered Fitzgerald an endless array of choices.)

It’s startling to realize that the novel’s landmark symbol—the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock—was an eleventh-hour addition, but that addition makes more sense when you learn that Nick’s incantatory meditation on Dutch sailors and the “fresh, green breast of the new world” originally appeared at the end of chapter 1. Wisely, Fitzgerald transferred that passage to the final page of the novel, so Daisy’s green light was inserted at the beginning of the novel to visually tie her romantic “promise” to America’s. On the final page of his novel, Fitzgerald wrote a word that Perkins queried, one that still throws my students when I ask them to read the end of Gatsby out loud. Perkins wondered whether orgastic was a mistake. Fitzgerald responded that “ ‘orgastic’ is the adjective from ‘orgasm’ and it expresses exactly the intended ecstasy.”⁵¹

There are many, many, more changes, macro and micro. I’m delighted but puzzled by Fitzgerald’s decision to cross out what looks like the Heyers in that over-the-top party list in chapter four and write in the Corrigans. (Is it funnier? More ethnic? More melodious?) The “short halt” that Nick takes in chapter 6 doesn’t appear in the autograph manuscript; instead, chapter 6 begins abruptly with the intrusion of Tom and his riding friends into Gatsby’s mansion. And first time round, Fitzgerald wrote his immortal line differently: “So we beat on, a boat against the current, borne back ceaselessly with the past.” Changing that lone boat to boats sounds, to my ears, more collectively American.

In her sharp and entertaining book on rewriting, The Artful Edit, Susan Bell devotes two chapters to Fitzgerald’s revisions of The Great Gatsby. (She begins the first chapter by admitting that she hadn’t read Gatsby since high school; when she read it again in 2002 at the age of forty-three, she says, “I was floored. Every sentence and event felt necessary.”⁵²) Bell demonstrates, among other things, how essential the quality of restraint—a quality many critics don’t associate with the symbol-heavy Gatsby—is to its final achievement. Here’s just one example: In “Trimalchio,” Fitzgerald went overboard in stressing the bright white beauty of Daisy and Jordan in the Buchanans’ living room. The “Trimalchio” version reads: “They were both in white, and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just blown in after a short flight around the house. I must have stood for a few moments on the threshold, dazzled by the alabaster light, listening to the whip and snap of the curtains and the groan of a picture on the wall.”

In the final less-is-more version, Fitzgerald trusts in his language—and his readers—and doesn’t belabor the image:

“They were both in white, and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house. I must have stood for a few moments listening to the whip and snap of the curtains and the groan of a picture on the wall.”

Fitzgerald made hundreds of such excisions and small shavings of a word or a phrase here and there. In addition to the personal editorial input Fitzgerald received from Zelda, he also responded to suggestions from other editors at Scribner’s and from Ring Lardner and his brother. Rex Lardner was an editor at Liberty magazine and had read The Great Gatsby in proof when it was being considered for serialization. Liberty declined the novel in December 1924, and the rejection letter explains why: “It is too ripe for us.… We could not publish this story with as many mistresses and as much adultery as there is in it.”⁵³

These changes work to clarify the design of Gatsby, highlight the class theme, and render Nick more contemplative and likable. Perhaps this is an instance where someone like me, who’s read the novel so many times, may not be the best person to judge. I see—and hear—Fitzgerald’s changes as better because they accord with the rhythms I’ve become habituated to, rereading after rereading.

Well, that’s not quite true. There is one particular part of Gatsby that Fitzgerald kept playing with: Fitzgerald never found what he considered the right title for his third novel. The working title for Gatsby during the spring and summer of 1924 had been “Among Ash Heaps and Millionaires,” which I think is pretty good in that it captures the novel’s class concerns (although it does nothing for the central theme of lost illusion). When Fitzgerald sent the typescript of the book to Perkins, the title, at first, was “The Great Gatsby” (the preference of Perkins and Zelda). By the time the novel was in galleys, Fitzgerald was calling it “Trimalchio,” after a character in the first-century Roman work Satyricon, by Petronius. (As Sarah Churchwell points out, a new edition of Satyricon was all the rage in the early 1920s, and T. S. Eliot prefaced The Waste Land with a headnote from the play.) In the original play, Trimalchio is a freed slave who’s climbed up the ladder of Roman society through hard work. He’s known for throwing extravagant parties with grotesque gourmet dishes like live birds sewn up in a roasted pig. Need I say that the title “Trimalchio” was a bad idea? Gatsby is not a bombastic type; his parties—which he doesn’t seem to enjoy—are a lure for Daisy, the one person he wants to impress. Wise Max Perkins tactfully nixed “Trimalchio,” and so Fitzgerald brainstormed a slew of other feeble to awful titles: “Trimalchio in West Egg,” “Gold-Hatted Gatsby,” “Gatsby,” “The High-Bouncing Lover,” “On the Road to West Egg,” and “Under the Red, White, and Blue.” Fitzgerald wasn’t fond of “The Great Gatsby” because he said that Gatsby wasn’t really great (although Nick thinks he is, and such illusions are what the novel is about). Fitzgerald also felt that “Gatsby” sounded too much like Sinclair Lewis’s 1922 novel Babbitt. (Lewis, by the way, is another one of Fitzgerald’s contemporaries who won the Nobel Prize—in his case, in 1930.)

The moral here is that everyone, even F. Scott Fitzgerald, needs a good editor, and Fitzgerald had the best. Max Perkins reinforced Fitzgerald’s best impulses, bucked him up when he was flooded with self-doubt, and wasn’t afraid to tell him when his ideas were weak. On March 7, 1925, Fitzgerald cabled Perkins to ask if it was too late to change the title of The Great Gatsby back to “Gold-Hatted Gatsby” or “Trimalchio.” Happily, it was.

All through these long months of shepherding Gatsby through revisions, Perkins was at his desk at Scribner’s in New York while Fitzgerald and his family were on the move. Maybe jumping from place to place helped Fitzgerald manage his nervous energy; maybe the moves also helped distract Scott and Zelda from their marital troubles. They left the Riviera in early November to spend the winter in Rome, but Italy was a bust: since they couldn’t find an apartment to rent, they wound up staying at a damp and expensive hotel. In response to Harold Ober’s suggestion that he write about his Italian sojourn, Fitzgerald proposed an article called “Pope Siphilis the Sixth and His Morons.” (Fitzgerald had come a long way since that 1921 request for an audience with the pope.) At Ober’s tactful urging, that article eventually morphed into “The High Cost of Macaroni”—which Ober was still unable to sell.⁵⁴ In February, the Fitzgeralds moved to a hotel on Capri, and Fitzgerald began work on the Gatsby-cluster story “The Rich Boy.” Then, after a couple of months, they packed up again and left for Paris. That spring was probably the most momentous spring of Fitzgerald’s life: The Great Gatsby came out on April 10, and sometime before the first of May, on a mission as a self-appointed talent scout for Scribner’s, Fitzgerald arranged to meet and then charmed a promising writer—Ernest Hemingway—at the Dingo American Bar in Montparnasse. For Fitzgerald, both events would turn out to be disappointments.

I’ve been a book reviewer for three decades. Perhaps delusionally, I think I’m right roughly 95 percent of the time in my opinion about the books I review. Still, I look at the reviews that The Great Gatsby got in the spring of 1925 and what I mostly feel is queasiness about my profession and self-doubt that, maybe, had I been a reviewer then, Gatsby might have been one of those rare novels that I got wrong. Perhaps even worse, I wonder if I would have reviewed it in the first place. I get upwards of two hundred books a week delivered to my front porch, sent by publishers hoping for a review on Fresh Air. If I take a mental time capsule back and imagine a roughly equivalent situation in 1925 (when a lot fewer books were published each year), I honestly think that my first reaction upon ripping open the Scribner’s mailer and seeing a slim novel called The Great Gatsby might have been: Oh, another Fitzgerald. Like most other reviewers, I would have had Fitzgerald pegged as a “topical” Jazz Age writer, and I think I would have been a little weary of his “flappers and philosophers.” I might well have passed on novel number three. After all, I could have reasoned, it looks a little thin, and the title is kind of blah. But then there’s that arresting Francis Cugat dust jacket. I’ve never judged a book by its cover, but I have lifted books out of the slush pile because of their covers—Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes was one such visually induced pick. I think I would have lingered over that review copy of The Great Gatsby because of Cugat’s offbeat dust-jacket illustration, which suggests that the story inside also might be something original. I would have dipped into chapter 1. Usually, I give a novel fifty pages. If something authentic about the story doesn’t grab me by then—its setting or characters or story or voice—I move on to another review candidate. By page 50 in Gatsby, I know I would have been hooked by Nick’s voice. (This is the adult book-reviewer “me” I’m talking about, not the jaded high-school girl who thought the book was boring.) At least, I’d like to think so, but who knows? The assigning of literary merit is highly contingent.

Plenty of Gatsby’s very first reviewers and adult readers, however, were not hooked. Most of Gatsby’s reviews fall into the gray zone of mixed, with outright praise from notable elites and many pans from the proletarian newspaper reviewers. Self-flagellating Fitzgerald always kept a clipping in his scrapbook of that dreadful unsigned review that ran in the New York World on April 12: “F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Latest a Dud.” Three days later, Ruth Snyder in the New York Evening World concluded her plot-summary-heavy review with this definitive verdict: “We are quite convinced after reading ‘The Great Gatsby’ that Mr. Fitzgerald is not one of the great American writers of to-day.” Another female reviewer (there seem to have been a preponderance of them in the 1920s, unlike today), Ruth Hale in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, was clearly fed up with reading Fitzgerald. Her lede reads: “F. Scott Fitzgerald is a strange little bird.” From there, her estimation plummets: “Why he should be called an author, or why any of us should behave as if he were, has never been explained satisfactorily to me.” At the end of May, an unsigned review in America called Gatsby “an inferior novel” and, a day later, the Times-Picayune review bore the headline: “Literature—and Less.”⁵⁵

Those are some of the worst of the worst; then there are the raves from the highbrows. I think that even those readers who find Gertrude Stein indigestible have to relent a little after taking a look at her letter of May 22, 1925, about Gatsby:

My dear Fitzgerald

Here we are and have read your book and it is a good book. I like the melody of your dedication 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.⁵⁶

T. S. Eliot may have been the very first person to reread and reread The Great Gatsby for pleasure. In a much-quoted verdict, he said that Gatsby was “the first step that American fiction has taken since Henry James.”⁵⁷ Eliot also said, in his letter to Fitzgerald of December 31, 1925, that he had read the novel three times. More publicly influential was critic Gilbert Seldes’s glowing review in the Dial, the modernist literary magazine that first published The Waste Land in America. Seldes is the prominent contemporary critic who came closest to getting Gatsby the first time. His long review, which came out in August 1925, deserves to be read in full, but here are some telling snippets:

The concentration of the book is so intense that the principal characters exist almost as essences, as biting acids that find themselves in the same golden cup and have no choice but to act upon each other.…

[Gatsby] had dedicated himself to the accomplishment of a supreme object, to restore to himself an illusion he had lost; he set about it, in a pathetic American way, by becoming incredibly rich.⁵⁸

The Seldes review clearly made Fitzgerald’s new friend Hemingway jealous. So Hemingway turned around and did something that in today’s Internet lingo is known as “pity trolling.” He told Fitzgerald that Seldes’s laudatory review was bad for him psychologically, because such a tribute set the bar too high for his future writing. There are many reasons why Fitzgerald struggled for nine years to write a novel after Gatsby, but the seed of self-doubt that Hemingway watered certainly may have contributed to the blight.

The reviews were one thing, but also missing the mark were the letters about Gatsby that Fitzgerald received from some of his closest literary friends. Almost all are in agreement that it’s his best work yet, and… they’re looking forward to something even better. Occasionally, the long knives come out. Maybe tough criticism by colleagues is a sign that the 1920s enjoyed a more serious literary culture than our own; maybe, too, there was something in Fitzgerald’s character—an openness, a vulnerability—that encouraged the bluntness. Most of the letters from Fitzgerald’s writer friends are dated in the summer of 1925. In two quite long letters Fitzgerald’s Princeton friend and literary mentor John Peale Bishop objects to the brevity of the book and the vagueness of Gatsby. In a short note, Paul Rosenfeld calls Gatsby “extraordinarily American, like ice cream soda with arsenic flavoring,” and then lights into Nick’s passivity as a narrator and the by now oft-repeated charge of vagueness: “Not that I doubt the reality of his passion; but there was not quite enough of it to make me feel at home in it.”⁵⁹ Fitzgerald answered all of the Gatsby-related letters—both enthusiastic and critical—with the humility of an author whose novel isn’t selling very well. Responding to a kind, if imprecise, note he received from novelist James Branch Cabell (“You have here written a solidly and sharply excellent book”⁶⁰), Fitzgerald wrote to him in early May: “Thank you for writing me such a nice letter about my novel.… I’m afraid the book isn’t a popular success but two or three letters, of which yours is one, have made it a success for me.”⁶¹

The Great Gatsby’s first printing of 20,870 hard covers were sold at two dollars a copy, earning Fitzgerald, at a 15 percent royalty, $6,261.⁶² A second printing of three thousand copies was ordered in August; a portion of this second printing still remained in the Scribner’s warehouse upon Fitzgerald’s death. (In January 1925, an ebullient Fitzgerald had predicted to Perkins that the sales for his third novel would reach eighty thousand copies, the total first-year sales of his two previous novels.) Because of this second printing, Gatsby was never technically out of print; however, in the way of the vast majority of literary novels, it soon vanished from bookstore shelves. If anyone, including Fitzgerald, wanted to buy Gatsby, he or she had to order a copy from Scribner’s.

By mid-May 1925, Fitzgerald was referring in letters to Gatsby’s “flop” and to “the wearying fact that it isn’t going to sell.”⁶³ By the fall of that year, the book was dead. There were no paperbacks back then, of course, and no author tours or audiobooks. In the only recordings we have of Fitzgerald’s voice—recordings that he made on a whim one day in Hollywood, reciting poems by Keats (“Ode to a Nightingale”), John Masefield (“On Growing Old”), and Shakespeare (lines from Othello)—his hammy overarticulation makes him sound like he belongs to the Edwardian rather than the Jazz Age.

The following year saw some reappearances of The Great Gatsby in altered form. The novel was serialized in five issues of the Famous Story Magazine, from April to August, at twenty-five cents an issue. Some poor writer had the grubby task of trying to come up with short headnotes in order to jog readers’ memories of the plot from issue to issue. Thus, in the May issue, we’re reminded, “As the story began: Jay Gatsby was waiting patiently in his mammoth, ivy-wreathed castle on a fashionable point of Long Island Sound, for the realization of a dream.” I noted that an edition of Gatsby was published in 1926 in England by Chatto and Windus after Fitzgerald’s usual British publisher, Collins, passed. The British edition was swiftly remaindered. By 2003, however, the Brits had changed their minds. During that year, the BBC conducted a massive survey of the British public’s reading tastes. Called the Big Read (not to be confused with the NEA program of the same name), it asked over three-quarters of a million people about their best-loved novel of all time. The winner was J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (in general, the list skewed heavily to fantasy fiction and British authors). The Great Gatsby, however, came in at a very respectable number 43, admittedly trailing The Catcher in the Rye (number 15) and Fitzgerald’s old nemesis Gone with the Wind (number 21).

In 1926, the novel was translated into French as Gatsby le magnifique. In 1928, Gatsby was also translated into German (Der grosse Gatsby) without anyone taking much notice. More of an event was the play of The Great Gatsby that opened in New York’s Ambassador Theatre on February 2, 1926, directed by the young George Cukor. New York Times drama critic Brooks Atkinson generally liked it but made a point of saying that Owen Davis’s script “loses some of the perfect nuances of the novel’s comedy and character that cannot be translated in terms of the theatre.”⁶⁴ There, we have Atkinson not only remarking on the humor of Gatsby, but also originating the now critical commonplace that Gatsby is “untranslatable” to stage and screen. Alexander Woollcott, whose own writing was always good for a laugh, reviewed the play favorably for the New York World and particularly praised James Rennie as Gatsby, “this made-while-you-wait gentleman of Fitzgerald’s imagining.”⁶⁵ (Rennie, by the way, was married to Dorothy Gish, sister of Lillian. When the Gish sisters’ mother became seriously ill in England in May of 1926, the successful play closed abruptly so that Rennie could sail off to be at his wife’s side. It ran for 113 performances.)

A major way in which the play streamlined the novel was to turn George Wilson into the Buchanans’ chauffeur. The silent movie, which came out in November of 1926, followed Davis’s script. This time round, “chauffeur” George Wilson was played by William Powell—he who later went on to star in the suave Thin Man movies. The astute reviewer for the New York Times noted that Powell was “not quite in his element.”⁶⁶ Luminous actress Lois Wilson still holds the title as the movies’ only dark-haired Daisy. Apart from the rollicking trailer, complete with a cavalcade of Busby Berkeley dancing girls, no prints have ever been found of this silent film; it’s assumed the nitrate film decomposed into dust, as the novel might have done. What remains are tantalizing references in the reviews to “swimming pool orgies” and “a regular movie deluge of rain” in the Daisy-Gatsby reunion scene. Both the play and the film conjured up a “happy” ending. Gatsby, Christ-like, dies so that others may live more fully: his murder brings Tom and Daisy together again, and they resolve to become better people. It would take the Alan Ladd noir version of Gatsby in 1949 to chisel that whitewash off the ending.

Fitzgerald made a quite tidy $25,000 from the sale of the rights to Gatsby to Broadway and to Famous Players for the 1926 film. Like the tides, the money ran out almost as soon as it came in. In 1934, after Tender Is the Night was published to mixed reviews and disappointing sales (although, as scholars have pointed out, three printings and roughly fifteen thousand copies was no mean accomplishment in the darkest days of the Great Depression), Bennett Cerf invited Fitzgerald to write the introduction for a Modern Library reprint of The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald was paid fifty dollars for the introduction to the edition, which would sell for ninety-five cents. Fitzgerald was unhappy with his introduction (where he sounds exhausted and self-pitying) and asked Cerf for the chance to rewrite it—at his own expense—for future reprintings of Gatsby in the Modern Library series. That opportunity never came. Sales were meager; five thousand copies were printed—and languished. Cerf admired the novel and kept hoping that sales would pick up, but Gatsby ultimately earned the distinction of being one of the poorest-selling titles in Modern Library history. The novel was discontinued as a Modern Library title in 1939. Almost sixty years later, in 1998, the editorial board of the Modern Library issued a list of its top one hundred novels of the twentieth century. The Great Gatsby landed in second place, right under James Joyce’s Ulysses.

There were two more resurrections of The Great Gatsby before Fitzgerald’s death. The novel appeared on May 23, 1937, in the Sunday supplements of newspapers such as the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Chicago Herald-Examiner. Last summer I sat down with a well-preserved copy of the Herald-Examiner’s Gatsby in the rare-book room of the Ernest F. Hollings Special Collections Library on the campus of the University of South Carolina. The first page of the supplement features a striking color illustration of a Gatsby (with a Clark Gable mustache) staring hungrily at a dark-haired Daisy with a peony in her hair (the flower Zelda liked to wear). Although the supplement claimed that Gatsby was “Complete in this Issue,” I found it to be more a case of “all the novel that’s fit to print.” This Gatsby was bowdlerized, probably to accord with a Sunday-supplement preference for sweetness and light. Tom’s racist rant was omitted; a hungover Nick doesn’t wake near McKee’s bed at the end of chapter 2; African Americans and Eastern European immigrants have been swept off the Queensboro Bridge; and Wolfshiem—no longer identified as Jewish!—speaks the king’s English and has ditched the molar cuff links. All mentions of breasts—both the dangling breast of the newly deceased Myrtle Wilson and the “fresh, green breast of the new world”—have been expunged. At the end of the supplement, right under Fitzgerald’s immortal final lines, the ad for the following Sunday’s novel appears: “Next Week: Of Lena Geyer,” a 1936 operatic melodrama by Marcia Davenport.

Also in 1937, the British pulp magazine the Argosy reprinted The Great Gatsby on its smeary pages. Neither this nor the Sunday-supplement appearances could have offered much comfort to Fitzgerald. These days, many Great Books comics—or “sequential-art narratives,” as some cartoonists call them—are expensive artistic creations in their own right; many are also garbage. The Sunday-supplement and Argosy editions of Gatsby were pretty wretched, although not as bad as a homemade graphic version of Gatsby that’s floating around on the web. A sampling of the dialogue goes like this:

Gatsby: “I’m in love with Daisy.”

Nick: “Yeah, I guess she is hot and rich.”

At least Fitzgerald was spared seeing that.

In short, The Great Gatsby’s afterlife in the late 1920s through the 1930s was faint. The literary crowd remembered the novel as a sign of Fitzgerald’s growing promise as a writer; when that promise failed to materialize in Tender Is the Night, Fitzgerald—and his greatest creation—were forgotten, except as once-racy holdovers from the Jazz Age. When a lone fan wrote Fitzgerald in the late 1930s asking for an author photograph, he was told that none were available and that Fitzgerald was holding off “until it’s time for a death mask.”⁶⁷

This “premature-burial” horror tale is not unique to Gatsby or Fitzgerald. So many of our greatest books—Moby-Dick, the collected works of both Poe and Dickinson—were rediscovered years after their authors’ deaths. I mostly believe in a meritocracy when it comes to literature; I think the cream does eventually rise to the top. But the key word there is eventually; the meritocracy doesn’t pay attention to deadlines. What distinguishes Fitzgerald’s life story from that of other now-famous authors’ is that his initial rise, then fall, then postmortem rise happened so rapidly and in such extremes.

Fitzgerald kept working; after all, he had Scottie and Zelda to support. But more than that, he continued to take himself seriously as a writer even when Hollywood treated him as little better than a hack, putting him to work for a few weeks on one picture and then pulling him off that and assigning him to another one. There’s a story about those Hollywood years that I can’t get out of my head. Shortly after he met Sheilah Graham in 1937, Fitzgerald read in the paper that the Pasadena Playhouse was presenting a stage adaptation of his short story “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz.” Fitzgerald decided to put on the dog. He called the playhouse, announced that he was the author, and reserved two seats. He also reserved a chauffeured limousine and took Sheilah, in evening clothes, out to dinner and on to the theater. When they arrived, no one was in the lobby. It turned out that some students were performing the play in an upstairs hall. The upstairs hall was pretty empty too, just about a dozen or so casually dressed people—mostly the players’ mothers, it seemed—in the audience. Afterward, Fitzgerald went backstage to congratulate the student players, later telling Sheilah they were “nice kids—I told them they’d done a good job.”⁶⁸

Anyone who loves Fitzgerald can’t help but wish that he could have had a glimpse into the future. Just a couple of decades beyond his own death, he would have seen crowds of students, much like those Pasadena amateur actors, reading The Great Gatsby in college and high-school classrooms across America. Further on, he would have seen several more Gatsby films, the operas, the ballet, and Gatz. He would have seen volumes of criticism and biographies towering in piles “as big as the Ritz.” And he would have seen the money. How he would have reveled in the money.

But Fitzgerald saw none of that. In the late 1930s, he drew up a three-page list for Sheilah Graham of “Possibly Valuable Books” in his library. The list included a first edition of The Waste Land and “notes” on his personal copies of his own books. At the end of page 3, he writes: “Probable value of library at Forced Sale $300.00.”⁶⁹ Fitzgerald’s last royalty check was for $13.13, and, as his young secretary Frances Kroll Ring remembered, when that final royalty statement came through from Scribner’s, “the handful of sales proved that the author, himself, was the only purchaser. He told me about it, laughing bitterly.”⁷⁰ No wonder parents want their children to become doctors and lawyers.

In May 1940, Fitzgerald wrote a letter to Max Perkins in which he abruptly detoured from updates about his work in Hollywood to talk for two paragraphs about Gatsby. I think it’s one of the saddest literary letters ever written. As often happens with Fitzgerald, though, there’s also that eerie quality of prescience:

I wish I was in print. It will be odd a year or so from now when Scottie assures her friends I was an author and finds that no book is procurable.…

Would the 25 cent press keep Gatsby in the public eye—or is the book unpopular. Has it had its chance? Would a popular reissue in that series with a preface not by me but by one of its admirers—I can maybe pick one—make it a favorite with class rooms, profs, lovers of English prose—anybody. But to die, so completely and unjustly after having given so much. Even now there is little published in American fiction that doesn’t slightly bare my stamp—in a small way I was an original.⁷¹