Perhaps the most famous of Scott Fitzgerald's novels, this was published 100 years ago this month.

I honestly wasn't intending to re-read it. I recently read Ursula Parrott's Ex-Wife, which is a sort of counterpoint. Last month I read the contemporaneous Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos. Last year I read Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi, who discusses Gatsby in some depth.

And -- usually a disincentive for me -- everyone was going on about it (one of the greatest 20th-century American novels, depicting "an immortal, compelling, and fascinating literary character"; "the most frequently assigned novel in American high schools"; "uncannily prescient and relevant today"...)

Nevertheless, I decided I really should do a re-read. I was in my late teens or early twenties when I read it the first time. I didn't dislike it, but it left me a little cold. I think I preferred the 1920s of John Galsworthy's A Modern Comedy, or Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, or -- let's be honest -- any of the early stuff by Dorothy L. Sayers.

So I read The Great Gatsby with every intention of being sniffy, and saying it was over-hyped.

Actually, I found it brilliant...

And it's astonishing that Fitzgerald was only 29 when The Great Gatsby was published... It's so thoughtful, so mature, so steeped in things lost and regretted.


F. Scott Fitzgerald

***

The story is narrated by Nick Carraway, who prides himself on not passing judgement, but admits there are limits to tolerance, and what he is about to tell us will indicate how he reached his. But there's an ambiguity. Gatsby both represents everything he scorns, and yet elicits his sympathy: "Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men."

Everyone probably knows the plot. But I'll just pick out a few bones, and decorate them with Fitzgerald's lovely writing.

Nick comes east, to learn the "bond business". He lives out of town, in West Egg. Next door is Gatsby's mansion. Across the bay is East Egg, where the Buchanans, Tom and Daisy, live in an elaborate house overlooking the bay. Daisy is a distant cousin of Carraway's, and Tom comes from an "enormously wealthy" family.

It's to Tom that Nick dedicates adjectives that repel us from the outset: Hard, supercilious, arrogant, aggressive, cruel. It's not long before we find out he's a white supremacist, and a philanderer. He drags Nick off to meet his current girlfriend, Myrtle Wilson, and before the end of that scene, he has broken her nose in an argument... In general, Tom's attitudes to women are antediluvian.

Daisy is beautiful, but somehow brittle and elusive. She tells Nick she's had a very bad time, but there's a kind of falsity about even this.

And Gatsby... Gatsby's intriguing. He hosts extravagant parties. No, super-extravagant. Riotous even. But most of the people who go haven't been invited, and know nothing of Gatsby. Extraordinary rumours circulate about him. He has "one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life". But then the smile disappears, and you're looking at "an elegant young roughneck, a year or two over thirty, whose elaborate formality of speech just missed being absurd". He's well groomed, and at his parties, he stands aloof, and doesn't drink. But he's never still. There's always a foot tapping, or a hand opening and closing.

Over the course of the book, bit by bit, we learn that his is a rags-to-riches story. At first, he's driven simply by the desire to leave poverty behind. Then he strikes up a relationship with Daisy (it's 1917, and he's in the army, so the social gap is concealed). He heads off to the war (in which he's copiously decorated for courage), and then, as a soldier's privilege, briefly to Oxford. But by that time, Daisy has married the rich-and-ruthless Tom. So Gatsby's next task is to win her back... Making a ton of money (in ways that are not entirely legal), and buying a house across the bay from the Buchanans, are part of that strategy. And yes, that latter element does sound a bit stalkerish...


Gatsby country... The Eggs

The Buchanans don't grace his parties, so he needs a strategem -- involving Nick and Jordan (briefly Nick's kind-of-girlfriend) -- to bring Daisy into his orbit.

The scene where they first meet, after all that time apart, is brilliantly done. Daisy admires everything. But there's a strangely ghostly quality to the description as Gatsby shows her round his huge house. We learn that he has kept a folder of clippings about her... That's not good... And sure enough:

"As I went over to say goodbye I saw that the expression of bewilderment had come back into Gatsby’s face, as though a faint doubt had occurred to him as to the quality of his present happiness. Almost five years! There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams -- not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man can store up in his ghostly heart."

Nevertheless, Gatsby and Daisy clearly become an item again.

The Buchanans do finally go to a party at Gatsby's. But Daisy doesn't enjoy herself. She is somehow appalled by "this unprecedented 'place' that Broadway had begotten upon a Long Island fishing village". Tom is suspicious of Gatsby, and says he means to find out about him.

After the party, Gatsby feels far away from his erstwhile love. "He wanted nothing less of Daisy than that she should go to Tom and say: 'I never loved you.' After she had obliterated four years with that sentence they could decide upon the more practical measures to be taken. One of them was that, after she was free, they were to go back to Louisville and be married from her house -- just as if it were five years ago."

You wince at this, as does Nick, who tries to suggest that you can't just rehash the past like that... But Gatsby just doesn't see why not: "He talked a lot about the past, and I gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy. His life had been confused and disordered since then, but if he could once return to a certain starting place and go over it all slowly, he could find out what that thing was."


Now there's a lovely cover...

The next Big Scene -- again, beautifully done -- is the lunch party, where it is clear to Nick that some big announcement is on the cards. It is swelteringly hot. Daisy is restless, and insists on going into town. Already it's obvious -- including to Tom -- that Gatsby and Daisy have an understanding. They drive off to town in Tom's car, while Tom drives Nick and Jordan in Gatsby's car.

On the way into town, Tom stops to tank up at the garage owned by Myrtle's husband, George, who tells them that he and Myrtle are going to head west. He has heard that Myrtle is having an affair (but doesn't know it's with Tom). So the two men are in the same situation. They've both just discovered their wives want someone else... And for Tom, it's even worse news: "There is no confusion like the confusion of a simple mind, and as we drove away Tom was feeling the hot whips of panic. His wife and his mistress, until an hour ago secure and inviolate, were slipping precipitately from his control."

It's in the parlour of a suite in the Plaza Hotel that the big show-down takes place. Tom challenges Gatsby. Then Gatsby announces he has something to tell Tom: "Your wife doesn’t love you... She’s never loved you. She loves me... She only married you because I was poor and she was tired of waiting for me. It was a terrible mistake, but in her heart she never loved anyone except me!"

Daisy is obviously torn. We feel that Gatsby is probably mostly right. But Daisy can't bring herself to put all her eggs in the Gatsby basket... "'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 says Daisy is leaving Tom. She agrees, but "with a visible effort". Tom starts badmouthing Gatsby, saying he's the next thing to a bootlegger. Furthermore, there's some other dodgy thing waiting in the wings... Gatsby defends himself, but Daisy is obviously troubled. Her courage is gone. She and Gatsby head back. Tom takes the others: "So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight."

On the way back, the yellow car that Gatsby and Daisy are in (Tom's car, remember) hits Myrtle, who has rushed out to meet it. She's mortally injured. And the car doesn't stop. We soon find out that it was Daisy who had been driving, but Gatsby is going to protect her by saying he was the one at the wheel.

Having heard the truth of the story, Nick goes back to the house, where he sees Tom and Daisy talking: "They weren't happy... and yet they weren't unhappy either. There was an unmistakable air of natural intimacy about the picture, and anybody would have said that they were conspiring together."

The next day, Nick talks to Gatsby again, and hears more of his early acquaintance with Daisy. Nick has to head to the city for work, and says goodbye: "'They're a rotten crowd,' I shouted across the lawn. 'You're worth the whole damn bunch put together.' I've always been glad I said that. It was the only compliment I ever gave him, because I disapproved of him from beginning to end." There we are, that ambivalence again.


Ginevra King, largely the inspiration for Daisy Buchanan. Fitzgerald met her in 1915, and fell in love. Out of your league, said her wealthy Chicago stockbroker father...

Gatsby waits for a telephone call from Daisy that doesn't come. He must have started to realize he had "paid a high price for living too long with a single dream". Shortly afterwards, George Wilson (acting on information given by Tom) kills Gatsby, and then kills himself.

Nick is left to supervise the funeral: "I found myself on Gatsby's side, and alone." Gatsby's old dad turns up (Gatsby had always told people his parents were dead, but he had secretly been pretty generous to his father). But Daisy and Tom have disappeared. Daisy doesn't even send flowers. And none of Gatsby's associates wants to be involved. It's a tiny party at the graveside. A guy who used to turn up for his parties comments: "The poor son-of-a-bitch..."

Nick has really had it with the eastern seaboard by now. But before he leaves for home, he runs into Tom once more:

"'What’s the matter, Nick? Do you object to shaking hands with me?'

"'Yes. You know what I think of you.'...

"I couldn’t forgive him or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified. It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy -- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made...

"I shook hands with him; it seemed silly not to, for I felt suddenly as though I were talking to a child..."

And then there's that famous ending:

"I wandered down to the beach and sprawled out on the sand...

"And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.

"Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter -- tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms further. And one fine morning --

"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

***

Of course, there are flaws. It's a book of its time, and Fitzgerald is a white male writer. He doesn't attempt to empathize with any black or Jewish citizens who cross his path. And we never get Daisy's side of things.

But it's impressive. For many reasons:

1. It has a story that's timeless on two counts. On the one hand, Gatsby represents the struggle to break out of one class and into another. Most of us have some experience of how damnably difficult that is. The Great American Dream -- along with all its equivalents around the world -- is a chimera. That upper echelon is insulated by centuries of privilege, and impermeable. They always end up winning. In fact, the inverse relationship between income inequality and intergenerational mobility has been named "The Great Gatsby Curve"...



On the other hand, the story of pursuing a dream that's no longer viable is as old as time itself. We've probably all held on to will-o'-the-wisps long after we should have laid them quietly to rest. And when your dream is essentially a reconstitution of the past, you're doubly doomed.

2. It has an unforgettable lead character, and the impossibility of his quest is largely the reason we sympathize with him (well, I do, anyway). We can see very clearly his con-man qualities; we know he's trading on dirty money. And we can't support this impossible -- frankly ridiculous, downright dangerous -- Daisy-centred dream. And yet he's worth hundreds of Toms, as Nick is all too aware.

3. It's much funnier than I'd remembered... So many scenes make you laugh -- or would do, if you weren't so heartsore... The car in the ditch, the clock that Gatsby leans against when meeting Daisy for the first time, the drunken conversations at parties...

4. The prose is lovely. Fitzgerald's descriptions have a haunting, dappled quality that eloquently and movingly expresses transience, regret, heartache.

5. It's particularly timely at the moment. "Careless people" has become a catchphrase: "In 2018, The Atlantic compared Trump to Tom Buchanan, one of Fitzgerald’s 'careless people', describing 'an eerie symmetry […] as if the villain of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel had been brought to life in a louder, gaudier guise for the 21st century'." In fairness, some people also compare Trump with the wheeler-dealer Gatsby. But for me it's Buchanan... The racism, the sexism, the bully-boy tactics, the closed-mindedness, and this: "Something was making him nibble at the edge of stale ideas as if his sturdy physical egotism no longer nourished his peremptory heart."

***

One final note... That original cover is by Francis Coradal-Cugat, born in Girona in 1893:


As displayed on the e-book that's available on Gutenberg

"It's not entirely clear how Cugat came into contact with Fitzgerald's publisher, Charles Scribner. Perhaps it was through Max von Gerlach, a hustler who did business in Cuba and the United States, and who, according to Fitzgerald's wife, Zelda, served as inspiration for the character of Gatsby... When the American writer saw the sketches for the cover of his unfinished book, he wrote to Scribner: 'For the love of God, don't give anyone that dust jacket you're saving for me. I've incorporated it into the book.'... For the artist, those eyes reflected those of Daisy Buchanan, a character inspired by the writer's former love, Ginevra King. However, Fitzgerald saw in them a gaze that transcends reality and gazes out from the pages: the eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg, featured on a billboard on the border between Manhattan and Queens. And that's what he incorporated into the text. These eyes will appear in different scenes throughout the novel. Eyes that observe, but also judge human behavior."

Ernest Hemingway didn't like it... In A Moveable Feast, he calls it "garish": "It looked the book jacket for a book of bad science fiction. Scott told me not to be put off by it, that it had to do with a billboard along a highway in Long Island that was important in the story. He said he had liked the jacket and now he didn't like it. I took it off to read the book."

Hem liked the novel very much, although he can't hold back another nasty little swipe at Fitzgerald's wife, Zelda: "If he could write a book as fine as The Great Gatsby I was sure that he could write an even better one. I did not know Zelda yet, and so I did not know the terrible odds that were against him. But we were to find them out soon enough." That's awfully unfair, as we know...

Anyway... This was a beautiful bit of revisiting. The Great Gatsby deserves its fame.