The Centenary of 'The Great Gatsby': A Guest Post by John Howard

‘In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. “Whenever you like criticizing anyone,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had” (7).’ This is Nick Carraway, the (then nameless) narrator, musing at the opening of The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940). How the paternal advice was to influence Carraway’s thoughts and actions in adulthood permeates the rest of the novel, which was first published one hundred years ago in April 1925.

Fitzgerald had previously written This Side of Paradise (1920) and The Beautiful and Damned (1922), both commercially successful novels that helped to establish him as a celebrity author as well as the voice of a generation that had experienced the Great War, embraced the ‘Jazz Age’, and was being forced to endure (and frequently evade) Prohibition. Fitzgerald had considered several titles before settling on The Great Gatsby. Possibilities had included The Gold-Hatted Gatsby and The High-Bouncing Lover – both deriving from a poem by Thomas Parke D’Invilliers. Although the stanza lost its function as title provider, it survived as the novel’s epigraph. Covering all bases, Fitzgerald had written that as well.

Nick Carraway came to New York from the Middle West to work in the ‘bond business’. For reasons of economy he rented a weather-beaten house in the Long Island village of West Egg, not far from where his distant cousin Daisy, married to Carraway’s old college friend Tom Buchanan, lives in East Egg. The house next to Carraway’s bungalow, a ‘colossal affair by any standard’, is inhabited by Jay Gatsby, who regularly gives large and boisterous parties, but seems to want to avoid all contact with his neighbour. However, eventually Carraway is invited to one of Gatsby’s parties and finds his host courteous and affable. They have things in common, having both originated in the West and fought in France. But it turns out there was an underlying reason for Gatsby wishing to get on friendly terms with Carraway: Daisy Buchanan.

From the outset The Great Gatsby offers a vivid evocation of a swiftly changing and unstable society. The story takes place over some three months during a hot summer; moving through a luminous, often dreamlike, sense of place, characters and settings alike are bathed in heat and light. Colour and sensation are heightened with an almost childlike uncontrived sharpness; and when a storm or brief spell of dull weather interrupts the sunshine, it is a welcome contrast that reinforces the apparent idyll. Night scenes, darkness and the effects of moonlight are equally deftly handled. All of which demonstrates how closely and carefully Fitzgerald wrought his novel. In truth, artlessness demands effort.

Having created an apparently simple and natural background and context, Fitzgerald conceived a suitably similar central character to fit. Of the titles Fitzgerald could have chosen for his book, they rightly included Gatsby himself, whether referred to by name, description, or quality, because he is the novel’s heart and he feeds it as everything revolves around him. The Great Gatsby is the story of the man and his ‘soul’.

Carraway’s connection with Daisy and her husband makes him useful to Gatsby as a go-between and excuse. Entering and experiencing the world that Gatsby has built, Carroway eventually realises that Gatsby is every bit as artificial: he is self-made, his own creation. Over time, Carraway assembles his story – or perhaps myth – from several sources, including Gatsby himself, who is not so much an unreliable narrator as an incomplete one.

We learn with Carraway that in the beginning a teenager named James Gatz left a farm in North Dakota and as Jay Gatsby had been ‘beating his way along the south shore of Lake Superior’ when he did a good turn for the owner of a yacht. He found himself working for multi-millionaire Dan Cody, who in effect adopted him. Gatsby turned his good nature and willingness to adapt to advantage. He learned how to be social and to please; how to make connections and be useful. The boy was formed into a man of the world. Swindled out of a legacy after Cody’s death, the penniless Gatsby started anew – and years later, has come to move in circles which he can never decisively reveal to those he wishes to impress and wants to accept him. And in one particular case, to love him. Carraway uncovers Gatsby’s one great vulnerability: not his associations with criminality, but his obsessive love. That was the reason Gatsby had continued to build up what he had already started, developing his ‘great’ persona in order to regain Daisy – and what it was she had symbolised for him.

In The Great Gatsby everyone and everything turns out unfaithful, one way or another. Gatsby had conjured for himself a great illusion – which could endure only as long as everyone was willing to acquiesce to it. Tragedy overwhelmed it because nothing was as it had seemed – except for the dreams of a driven, striving personality who wished for nothing more than to return to his lost Eden.

(John Howard)