INTRODUCTION CRITICAL RECEPTION OF THE GREAT GATSBY LITERARY INFLUENCE

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1 INTRODUCTION CRITICAL RECEPTION OF THE GREAT GATSBY When The Great Gatsby 1 was published in April 1925, the first critical reaction was rather mixed. H.L. Mencker in The Baltimore Evening Sun wrote that the plot was no more than a glorified anecdote. But on the other hand Francis Scott Fitzgerald received letters of praise from Gertrude Stein, Willa Cather and Edith Wharton. And T.S. Eliot called it: The first step that American fiction has taken since Henry James (reprinted in The Crack-Up, ed. Edmund Wilson, N.Y.: New Directions, 1945). Yet the sales were not up to expectations and during Fitzgerald's lifetime The Great Gatsby sold less than 24,000 copies in the Scribner edition. It was only ten years after his death that he was established as a major writer in American literature. LITERARY INFLUENCE Fitzgerald clearly stated that Joseph Conrad, Anatole France and John Galsworthy were the three living authors he admired most. And he acknowledged that he was indebted to J. Conrad in particular, whose preface of The Narcissus he read before beginning to write The Great Gatsby. The craftsmanship degree of control of Fitzgerald's novel is related to the aesthetic ideals of J. Conrad. Technically, Fitzgerald uses J. Conrad's narrative method with the narrator who is both spectator and actor in the story. He also uses irony and a constant going back and forth in time. From the point of view of content, 1. Les références au texte de Fitzgerald (1925) sont indiquées entre parenthèses et renvoient à l'édition Penguin Books (1950). 11

2 J. Conrad and Fitzgerald both have heroes with dreams, who are defeated but remain faithful to their dreams, which gives them a heroic stature. There is also a resonant style and the same tendency to symbolise. INTERPRETATIONS The Great Gatsby can be seen from various angles. An anatomy of a society and a time: the twenties In his novel, Fitzgerald probes the philosophy of the spheres he studies. Three social levels are represented: East Egg, West Egg and the valley of ashes. It is mainly the power of money as corrupting moral values which is pointed out. In East Egg, the Buchanans live in a materialistic world of plenty where one finds money, illusions, a lack of stable relationships, rootlessness, a flippant gay and cynical society. West Egg, where Gatsby lives, is also a glittering world of entertainement, flippancy and money, but this money is acquired through shadowy means. Behind Gatsby looms Meyer Wolfshiem, and a whole network of corruption is thus evoked, at work in the twenties. The Great Gatsby is set against a realistic background. In the twenties the citizens were in open rebellion against prohibition, so crime was big business and big magnates or tycoons bought politicians, the police (hinted at in the episode where Gatsby shows a white card to a policeman who then lets him go), to have immunity. As for the people in the valley of ashes, they work for the others, strive for money which they never obtain and are barely alive or try to rise above the common like Myrtle Wilson. The spirit which pervades The Great Gatsby is that of the decade following the First World War, called the Jazz Age. Fitzgerald characterized that age by depicting a word of pleasureseeking and reckless exhuberance. Gertrude Stein referred to this spirit as the lost generation of the post World War. 12

3 E. Hemingway, who for a while was Fitzgerald's close friend, depicted in The Sun Also Rises (1926) a group of expatriate Americans wandering restlessly round Europe (like the Buchanans, or Fitzgerald himself), leading a purposeless life. The American Dream Gatsby, himself, has also been said to represent America. As Lionel Trilling writes: Gatsby, between power and dreams, comes inevitably to stand for America itself (in Lionel Trilling's introduction to The Great Gatsby, N.Y. New Directions, 1945). On the one hand Gatsby represents the social values of the twenties, which are expressed in the cult of success. Gatsby is a self-made man proving that with work and stubbornness anyone can achieve social success. There is, in the American mind, the veneration of riches and success. On the other hand, Gatsby's dream (his love for Daisy), his idealism, echoe the pursuit of the dream and sense of wonder of the first settlers who went all the way across the American continent, pushing the frontier ever Westward. But the American pioneer who was the real heir of the Dutch sailors, and inherited their idealism, discovered that the dream, or vision, or meaning, had disappeared and what was left was just the material, just as what is happening in the America of the twenties, in the spiritless world of the Buchanans where sincerity, feelings and values have disappeared. Even if Gatsby's dream was an illusion, he is akin to the first settlers because he remains faithful to it. He has kept his sense of wonder. The existential predicament But below the surface of The Great Gatsby, there is an allusion to universal human experience to which we all respond. It is the contingency, transiency, ungraspability and lack of direction of human life which is pointed out in this novel. This is quite patent in the description of Gatsby's parties and the Buchanans' life. And Gatsby's endeavour to win Daisy back and repeat the past 13

4 exemplifies men's doomed illusions. Nick Carraway likens human efforts to boats against the current (p. 172). THE GREAT GATSBY AND FITZGERALD'S LIFE The Great Gatsby is not only a fiction, it is based on real life models and some aspects of Fitzgerald's life. Models Daisy Fay has the surname of the Catholic priest Sigourney Webster Fay. She is based partially on the Chicago debutante Ginevra King and on his wife Zelda. As for Tom Buchanan, Tom Hitchkock was the model and Arnold Rothstein (a gambler) who was believed to have fixed the World series in 1919, was the basis for M. Wolfshiem. The parties described by Fitzgerald represent those he and his wife organized or attended and where they got themselves drunk. And the Buchanans' moving around Europe echoes the Fitzgeralds' own trips and life in Europe. As for his character, Gatsby, Fitzgerald wrote in a letter to John Peale Bishop: I never at any time saw him clear myself. For he started as one man I knew (Edward M. Fuller) and then changed into myself. His life Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born on 24th September 1896, in Saint Paul, Minnesota, in a rather modest family. His father who was a weak character, had various unsuccessful activities (at one point he ran a furniture business) which took him to New York and back to the Midwest. Fitzgerald studied at St Paul's Academy, Newman school in New Jersey and Princeton University. He started writing while still at school. He fell in love with Ginevra King, a 16-year-old girl from a wealthy family, who rejected him because he wasn't rich enough (hence Nick's remark: High in a white Palace, the king's daugther, the golden girl [112]). 14

5 Fitzgerald went into the army from 1917 to 1919, met Zelda Sayre who became his wife in He worked in an advertising agency, and started to publish stories in magazines and making contributions to the Saturday Evening Post. The couple went to Europe in 1921 and started travelling around. They had a daughter, named Scottie, in October Fitzgerald published This Side of Paradise in The Beautiful and the Damned was serialised in Metropolitan Magazine in The Fitzgeralds lead the pleasureseeking life of the characters in The Great Gatsby (1925). In 1930, Zelda became mentally ill and had to stay on and off in mental hospitals until the end of her life. Fitzgerald's life, from then on, was focused on making money for Zelda's care so he dashed pieces for newspapers, which Hemingway reproached him with, thinking he was wasting his talent. Fitzgerald became increasingly alcoholic and had financial problems. He wrote Tender Is the Night in He had to do some film work for Hollywood which didn't work out. In October 1939 he started The Last Tycoon and died of a heart attack in Hollywood on 21st December Fitzgerald also wrote The Diamond as Big as the Ritz (1922), The Crack-Up (1936), My Lost City (published in 1945) and Echoes of the Jazz Age (1931). Lastly one may add that The Great Gatsby was adapted as a play, and as a Hollywood movie on three occasions (in 1926, 1949 and 1974). The Great Gatsby is considered as a major artistic achievement and one can say that Fitzgerald has reached his aim which was: to write something new, something extraordinary and beautiful and simple and intricately patterned. (quoted by A. Turnbell, Scott Fitzgerald, N.Y., 1962 [ ]). 15