Professor David Peimer
The Great Gatsby: Capturing an Age: Long Gone or Echo Today?
Professor David Peimer - The Great Gatsby: Capturing an Age Long Gone or Echo Today
- Hi, everybody, and hope everybody is well everywhere, and thanks so much, Hannah, for today. So we’re going to dive today into a quite remarkable novel which everybody knows, I’m so sure, or studied it at school or perhaps university, but so many have read it, studied it everywhere. From the 1920s, published in 1925, Mr. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby.” And I want to look at this today with just a couple of primary questions of does it still endure, or is it really tied into the period of the Jazz Age, the Roaring Twenties, which, of course, ends, in the Great Depression and before that, the era of Prohibition. Is it tied into that period, and what does it mean if it is coming before the nightmare of the 30s? Or does it somehow perhaps still speak to us today or at least throw out questions that we might consider not as, you know, exactly suggesting something for today but that it has allusions which we can connect to what’s going on in our own times. And that’s always the question for me, is how to make these great masterpieces of literature, whether it’s from two and a half thousand years ago, the Greeks, the Romans, wherever, it doesn’t matter, in the world, and does it still have some echo in our times today or not? Because I think it’s so important that these pieces are not only seen as period pieces or as semi-historical, semi-documentary, because in the end, of course, they’re fictional, and what can they say about our times?
So there are a couple of things that I think it does speak to and which I want to suggest once we’ve had a look at the novel itself in a bit more detail, and why choose it? I think it does suggest that there’s something about an era of narcissism, and I know this is a word bandied around so much today, but the sense of self obsession, the sense of everybody is, obviously, times are tough, and, you know, the sense of completely self-absorbed worlds, which we see in Gatsby, his idealised love for Daisy, his complete idealised fantasy of her. How does she relate to him? What does she see in him? What about the narrator character, Nick, who is a, let’s say, 29, 30-year-old younger version of Fitzgerald himself? What is it trying to suggest in this extremely hedonistic period of the Roaring Twenties, the mid 20s exactly, that he’s writing it? What does it suggest anything today before the cataclysmic beginnings of the 30s, obviously going to the end of the 30s and what happens there? Does it hint at something that we’re involved in? You know, as we see more and more right wing, to use the language of our times, populism, right wing, fascism increasing everywhere in the world, the threat of the axis of Iran, Russia, China, the threat of not only Hamas and Hezbollah and what’s going on but the geopolitical threat and what’s really going on and what’s going on in home countries, whether it’s, you know, America, Britain, parts of Europe, elsewhere, et cetera.
So does it link in some way? And I’m going to suggest I do think it does in certain ways, but obviously it’s not, you know, history doesn’t repeat itself. You know, Mark Twain, it was said, doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes. Well, I dunno if it rhymes, but I think there can be echoes which we can pick up, but, of course, it’s through a piece of fiction. Is it just a naive coming-of-age love story, you know, of these young characters fall in love and these fantasies and constant completely out of touch, idealistic fantasies they have of each other or especially Gatsby has for Daisy? Is it something of that which just plays itself out? Is it just a story of, you know, middle class boy falls for rich girl, parents say, you know, “Can’t stay together,” so a bit of a “Romeo and Juliet” story, got apart and what happens? It is obviously all of that, or is it something more as well? I do think there’s something linking that self obsession and the narcissism of our period, the inability to even listen to or understand another point of view which may be very different, on a smaller micro level and a macro level as well, in a sense. So I also want to look at briefly, you know, how F. Scott Fitzgerald, in a sense, deals with antisemitism and the Jewish characters and his relationship to the Jewish lady who was his secretary in a way.
We’d call it PA today, I guess, and that is important because there are references in the novel to this, and then look at one or two other, you know, some of the main ideas. This is one of the great covers that I’ve put here on the first image, and it was well recognised by a pretty unknown Barcelona artist, and he was invited to create it, and it became and has become very iconic, the first cover of “Gatsby” when it was published in the 20s. And we see the two eyes, obviously, and we can link it to so many of the images that Picasso later picks up on, the blue background, but then there’s also a sense of fire, fireworks, carnival. There’s a whole mixture in this sense of New York of the 20s, the Roaring Twenty era, and yet, there’s something very detached and coolly observant looking down on the dog and yet alluring at the same time. It’s a fascinating image of a mixture of contradictions, a totally different context with a completely different meaning. It’s as iconic as Sergeant Pepper’s, the cover of the album. Okay, so obviously, “The Gatsby” is written in what’s called the Jazz Age today with the narrator, the Nick Carraway character. Now that’s interesting because it’s a book written by Nick Carraway, but, of course, it’s Fitzgerald writing the whole thing. But because he has the narrator who’s writing, the narrator figure, we enter the world of the characters and the story through the writer who’s writing a memoir, you know, very popular form of writing in our times, the memoir, but it’s fascinating. It enables Fitzgerald to be at least twice removed from the characters, which is a huge help, I think, for any writer to not be as immediately one to one involved.
And it’s interesting when you come into it because we forget this is Nick writing, but, of course, it’s Fitzgerald ultimately. So it’s about him and his connection with the multimillionaire Gatsby we all know. I’m not going to go through the story ‘cause I’m sure so many people know, but just allude to parts of the plot as we go along, and it’s basically Gatsby’s obsession, and it’s a massive total obsession to reunite with his what we would call today coming of age or teenage, almost teenage lover, Daisy, Daisy Buchanan in the novel, and he’s so obsessed with her all the way through, he cannot give her up. There’s a bit of a link for me with “The Old Man and the Sea” of Hemingway, “Moby Dick,” the obsession with one thing. But how Melville and Hemingway deal with it is completely different. This is an obsession, which is infatuation or love, whichever we choose, which cannot be let go of. The other two of Hemingway and Melville are really metaphors for internal struggles, which one has to go through like Oedipus in the ancient, you know, Homer story. They are inner struggles, and they’re metaphors of the inner battle we have to wage with ourselves, you know, to achieve whatever we want to in life, so very different. This has got an external object, which is the love obsession of Daisy, was inspired by Fitzgerald’s very youthful romance that he had with a socialite at the time, and the teenager at the time, her name was Ginevra King.
And, of course, it’s all the parties and the decadence, the hedonism, the fun of the parties on Long Island that Fitzgerald himself went to some of them, at least, in 1922. Okay, if we can show the next slide, please. So this is an image of young Fitzgerald on the left, and this is Ginevra. This is the teenager who was 16 or 17 when they met, and he fell completely infatuated or in love, whichever we choose, and as far as we know, far as we understand, he remained pretty much infatuated with her for most of his life. And they had this very powerful love affair in a very young age, which, of course, is the basic premise of the whole novel. It’s inspired by this. The novel in its own times, it only sold 20,000 copies, which was regarded as pretty much of a flop, although he really had hopes to have a big seller and make a lot of bucks. Fitzgerald died in 1940, so a pretty young age, and he died, I’m sure we all know, very disillusioned and, to put it mildly, very disappointed with himself. He thought he hadn’t scaled the great heights that he was destined to. He’d written two of the other novels, “Beautiful and the Damned,” et cetera, but, you know, he hadn’t really reached that pinnacle that he thought. Reflected by the sales and reflected by the general image, but he was friendly with Hemingway and many of the other great writers and artists, certainly in America, of his time. During World War II, and this is what’s interesting, the novel, that’s when it began its surge in popularity after his death.
He dies in 1940, but in the early 40s, once America enters the war after Pearl Harbour December '41, once the American soldiers enter the war, a whole lot of American publishers got together, and they formed what was called the Council on Books in Wartime, and they chose which books would be distributed amongst the GIs all over the world from from the east and later, of course, to the west, you know, to England and then, of course, you know, Normandy. But everywhere in the world, they sent novels, and one of the ones they chose was “Gatsby.” Interesting, and it’s fascinating that they would choose “Gatsby” as an iconic novel to send out to all the GI troops globally, and, of course, the sales rocketed and went through the roof, you know, and then after the war, millions and millions sold, and, of course, it’s on school curricula, university curricula, studied all over now. But what began it very ironically was America’s entrance into the Second World War and these publishers choosing to put it on. What struck a chord, first of all, the publishers to do it, and secondly, more importantly, what struck a chord with these young soldiers that would suggest they would want to read this book which was written by this, at the time, fairly obscure writer and an obscure novel that had barely sold, maybe, you know, a few thousand literati and critics and scholars, academics, whatever, but nobody else really knew about it? So what struck a chord?
Is it just the cliche of the American dream gone sour, the broken dream? Is it because it was about the Jazz Age, the 20s, Prohibition, the roaring, you know, the glowing, hopeful times in America, which then became times of despair as the 30s take over? Is it because it’s a coming-of-age love story? So of course, young soldiers who are 18, 19, 20, 21 can identify 'cause many of them have got not only sisters but have maybe got girlfriends or young wives back home? All of this together, a sense of a hope to remind them, perhaps, of what the American dream could be, the land of opportunity, the land of hope, the land of doing something, why it’s worth fighting for, why it’s worth dying for, to put it mildly. It’s why it’s worth dying for in all these far away countries around the world during this Second World War. So to me, that’s a fascinating moment in literature because something grabs these soldiers because they read it, many of them, and they’re sent it and take it on. So I’ve always found that a really interesting note, that it’s not just trying to be politically correct by this council who decide to send it out, but because, of course, otherwise, these young GIs wouldn’t have read it. So it’s something much more inside these young GIs that must really be grabbing them, and I think it’s a combination of all of it, young love, young infatuation, hope that might happen, might not, even though the end of the novel, of course, is broken dream, but the reminder of what America can be, opportunity, freedom, obviously, a sense of pleasure, you know, happiness, hedonism, and, of course, love and a certain degree of achievement, even though the novel ends with disillusionment.
So it struck a chord. It’s also about class, and let’s remember that, in the war, we’ve got GIs, officers who may come from the very rich upper class, middle class, and, of course, the American working class. So all the classes are thrown together in platoons and battalions who are sent out to fight everywhere, and the greatest leveller of all to me is always wartime. And when, you know, anybody as a soldier who’s been in the Army knows doesn’t matter which class you already come from 'cause everybody, you know, bullets don’t distinguish. So there’s something about that which is collapsing class barriers and wealth barriers for me in these GIs reading it, and the hope, one of the main ideas in the novel is middle-class guy who falls in love with the upper-class girl, you know, comes from the American aristocracy, almost old money as they say, but, you know, their love isn’t allowed. So there’s something there also, that it’s a push. It’s a way to try and puncture the class barrier in the states. So all of this, I think perhaps is part of it, you know, and the racial barriers and the idea of the self-made man, which Gatsby is compared to inherited old money, which Tom is. So Fitzgerald cleverly represents both, the new self-made young man Gatsby, okay? He is doing it through the illegal endeavours of prohibition and bootlegging, but doesn’t matter, he’s a self-made man. Yeah, he’s got links with the mafia, et cetera. He’s self made. You can do it, the old part of the American dream as opposed to, you know, just inherited, which was much more the legacy of England and Europe going way back. So these are ideals which suggest to me why it might’ve struck a chord. Of course, Fitzgerald had this lifelong obsession with Ginevra here.
She was a socialite, as I said, and she was what regarded as one of Chicago’s most desirable debutantes and, of course, inspires the character of Daisy. It’s set in the prosperous Long Island area, 1922, Prohibition, Jazz Age, we all know this. It’s a period of economic prosperity before, of course, the Great Depression hits and changes everything forever, and it’s also part of what was known at the time as the flapper culture and where the idea of the libertine, what today, you know, which goes back to France, of course, around French revolution times, the Libertine values, not only rebellious youth and speakeasies but where morals are radically loosening up. Women are playing golf, women, the votes, women education, all changing in an exciting, brilliant way. So the role of women and men and the relationships between the two radically changing. There’s the hedonism of the Jazz Age, the raucous, the flashy era in this period of American history. The idea of the flapper, of the woman as flapper was seen as part of a morally permissive time where morals were loosened, changed, challenged at least, and social norms being radically challenged and pleasure seeking being held up to be great, wonderful. Why not? And all of this is part, of course, what became known in the phrase the Roaring Twenties or the Jazz Age. Fitzgerald himself, you know, I think, it’s reflected in the novel, he loves it, but he also is anxious about it. Where’s it going?
What’s it leading to? What could happen? If I’m just self obsessed for today myself and my own bank balance or my own this or that, whatever it might be, where would it lead to in terms of a culture? Of course, the Great Depression, the war changed everything, but in Fitzgerald’s time writing this. So, you know, I think it reflects these obsessions and this remarkable time in the 20s, and let’s not forget what’s happening in Paris with artists and singers and musicians as well, the mix of races in the 20s in Paris, this idealistic artistic age, complete idealistic, but it is happening for at least a few thousand artists, not everybody, of course. What’s fascinating to me is we have to realise an alternative, which is, in Germany, everybody knows. We talk about, you know, the German culture before the war and how cultured it was and then what happened. How could it happen with a society that was so remarkably cultured and going to, you know, the heights of science and education? So many things in Germany, and then, of course, comes Nazism. But you know, and I’ve done quite a bit of research on this, about 1.5% of the population in Germany in the 20s into the early 30s had been to university. That’s it. I mean, it’s virtually negligible. It’s so little. So it’s really, when we talk about the greatness of Germany at the time, the greatness of even America or wherever, England, England was about 3%. Now, not that being to university means society’s going to steer away from fascism, not at all. Intelligence has nothing to do with a lack of fascism, as we know, that’s for sure, but it does suggest that there’s been a mythical connotation we have today to Germany of the period before the Nazis, and then, of course, and England and America as well. It’s a tiny percentage, you know, probably have an education beyond the age of 16 or 17, if that.
Okay, so I just say all this because I think it’s important to have a context of what do we actually mean by the Roaring Twenties, the Jazz Age. Who’s really benefiting not only economically, but culturally, intellectually, and, you know, a global understanding and, of course, ideas of enlightenment and humanism? So the novel reflects Fitzgerald’s youth. He was a westerner, a mid-westerner, as we all know, from Minnesota. Like the novel’s narrator, the narrator Nick went to Yale, but Fitzgerald went to Princeton, and Ginevra, the lady here, was madly in love with him. Her upper-class family were totally against the relationship because of his, let’s call it lower-class status, and her father apparently told Fitzgerald, and I’m quoting, “Poor boys shouldn’t think of marrying rich girls.” And, of course, he said, that’s the essence of the novel. The rest is just, you know, part of the canvas of the novel. So he’s rejected by her family 'cause of a lack of money. He enlisted in the Army himself, First World War. He’s a second lieutenant. He meets Zelda, we all know, a vivacious, 17-year-old Southern belle, and then he learnt while he’s in the Army, that she has married a wealthy Chicago businessman. Fitzgerald and Zelda go to Long Island. They’re part of the parties and the wealthy period, and he’s striving to emulate the rich. He wants to because he knows he’s caught up in that ambivalence, his moral ambivalence, but he wants the money, of course, as well.
So I think to put it in the way that some scholars in a contemporary context do, morally ambivalent, as we see in the novel, about the privileged lifestyle because everybody wants to be part of it, of course. But, you know, there’s always a Faustian bargain to be made. You know, what’s the emotional, if there is any, emotional cost? So although Fitzgerald, you know, he admires Gatsby, he can’t write the character otherwise, and we admire. Of course, we know there’s something underneath that’s cooking. Okay, if we can show the next slide, please. This is an interesting picture of Edith Cummings. Now, she was an amateur golfer, and she inspires the character of Jordan Baker, who is Daisy’s very close friend. Now Edith Cummings was a very good friend of Ginevra, the lady, obviously, you know, who was his real girlfriend as a teenager and his obsession, and Edith Cummings was one of the most famous debutantes and socialites of Chicago. Golf very popular amongst these young-aged socialites in Chicago and elsewhere in the states. Interesting to me that they’re often shown in pictures like this, which, of course, is also used in the novel. Okay, I don’t want to go through the story. We’ve got the essence of it here. The last character I want to just mention is Tom Buchanan, and Tom is the football star. He’s a millionaire, and he eventually marries Daisy, who’s the Ginevra character, of course, and he is a white supremacist in the novel. He’s a kind of imperious Yale man, let’s say, from Yale who loves polo, and he completely identifies with old money, the upper class, and made money in that way, and, of course, he’s a football star, having gone to Yale.
He comments about African Americans and about others are pretty disparaging, to put it mildly, in the novel. So Fitzgerald’s very aware of prejudice in a racial and religious context in the book. Okay, we go to the next slide, please. These are two images of Oheka, forgive my pronunciation, Castle and Beacon Towers. Now these are since demolished, but these are regarded, they were in Long Island, and of the times, and they’re regarded as inspirations that Fitzgerald took for Gatsby’s mansion, castle, whatever we call it today. So we get a sense of this real wealth and privilege that the world of Gatsby inhabits because, of course, the world of Gatsby is so important for us today to know, and the contrast between this and the world that Nick comes from, the world that Fitzgerald himself came from, very, very different. Fitzgerald himself wrote, and I’m quoting here, he wrote this in a letter. “The whole idea of 'Gatsby’ is the unfairness of a poor young man not to be able to marry a girl with money. I lived it.” That’s Fitzgerald in a letter he wrote to a very good friend of his, Edmond Wilson. Okay, if we go on to the next slide, please. This is Maxwell Perkins. I’m sure many of you have heard. For me, he was a brilliant, remarkable editor, editor to many of the others. He was Hemingway’s editor as well. Brilliant sense as an editor of how to look at original writing and how to shape it and mould it into something brilliant and bestsellers as well.
So Perkins took on “Gatsby” as well, and first, he wrote back complaining, you know, “Fix it up. The character’s vague. His motivation, how has he made money?” This, that. You know, when you read the detail, you see, it really helped Fitzgerald, youngish Fitzgerald, you know, with writing the novel. Okay, if we can go on to the next slide, please. Fitzgerald, original title for the novel was “Among Ash Heaps and Millionaires.” It was Perkins who persuaded him to change it to “The Great Gatsby” because he thought, “Who’s going to buy a book called ‘Among Ash Heaps and Millionaires’?” I think very few are going to buy a book then or today, and, you know, he changes the title, and we have what we know today, and these things are important, titles. This is an interesting picture. This is to give you an idea of the “Saturday Evening Post” in Chicago, and this is regarded 1922 cover of the newspaper. This is the image of the socialite of the times. You can see obviously young, attractive, all these qualities, wealth, dripping with jewellery, all the rest of it. This is one of the iconic images of the Roaring Twenties, of course, before the crash, of the Great Depression. So this is to give an idea of the aspiration of the society for young boys and young girls, young men, young women to aspire to from all sides in a way, not only, of course, the hairstyle, which we all know very well, but, you know, an aspirational quality, and I guess today, it’s been completely taken over by celebrity culture and all the crazy ambivalences we might have with it.
So now what’s interesting, some of the phrases in the novel, this is his description of Daisy that she was, and I’m quoting, “A girl whose disembodied face, disembodied face floated along the dark cornices and blinding signs.” I mean, that’s such an ambivalent phrase that Fitzgerald uses in the writing. Is a beauty, but it also is a sense of being completely out of touch. Okay, if we can go on to the next slide, please. Okay, this is somebody I’m going to talk about in a minute. Arnold Rothstein, who was the Jewish gangster that we all know about, who was killed at a pretty fairly young age in New York, but he was right up there as a gangster with Meyer Lansky, Dutch Schultz, you know, with Lucky Luciano and others, part of the real Jewish mafia who, as we all know, lived and I’m going to use the word worked, worked in some way as mafia in New York City of the times, and Rothstein, part of bootlegging basically, and making money. He was an inspiration, Fitzgerald met him once, but inspiration in the novel. So the newspapers at the time, “The New Yorker,” wrote, “Gatsby is its heroic victim, is otherwise a good deal of a nut.” Gatsby is a nut. This is “The New Yorker” writing in the 20s. “And the girl who is its object is idealised only by Gatsby.” This is a critic in the newspaper writing. So words of the negative side of it, of the novel, but then also writing, “Gatsby shows a rough,” and I’m quoting it, “shows a rough diamond of devotion and chivalry. Cast before swine on Long Island, he’s the romantic hero in the Long Island high life.” These are some of the phrases written, the romance in “Gatsby.” Okay, this is just taken from a whole lot of newspapers. “The plot, the characters, they might be petty, they might be full of Jazz Age decadence, but there’s still something in ‘Gatsby’ that compels, that attracts. Is it just a romantic constancy, a romantic idealism? Is it the heroic victim, Gatsby, in the end, dies for his love for her?”
You know, what more heroic image can you get? It’s like in Goethe’s early book story of Werther, you know, there’s this classic romantic young hero who dies because of his love. His love is rejected or his love isn’t held, you know, all this stuff which is so popular amongst these times. There’s also the chivalry. You know, what compels, you know, not only those soldiers to read it in the 40s and 50s, but also what compels us to read it today? Is it a romantic hero? Is it a version of such naive, ridiculous, idealised love like “Romeo and Juliet”? There’s less than 50,000 words in the novel. He uses the word love nearly 50 times. So it’s not such a thick novel, but the word love. Is there something about it, the eternal need, the eternal desire, anybody of any age, but especially, of course, you know people, you know, those in their teens and in their 20s to find, you know, endless love or believable love? Is “Gatsby” just a love story? Let’s look at it. Myrtle is Tom’s mistress. So Tom, who marries Daisy, has a mistress. They don’t speak of love. Is Tom really in love with daisy, infatuated? Is it money? Is it old money link? There’s Nick, who is the narrator who has a kind of a love affair, relationship, we call it today, with Jordan Baker, and she is, of course, Daisy’s friend, but they’re together quite briefly.
In the end, they kind of go apart. There’s no real great love there. When Jordan tells Nick that she’s going to marry someone else, he is moved, and this is from the novel, quoting Fitzgerald. “Angry and half in love with her and tremendously sorry, I turned away.” It’s such a stunningly, beautifully written phrase. Fitzgerald, I’m going to say it again, writing about Nick and his relationship with Jordan. “Angry and half in love with her and tremendously sorry, I turned away.” It’s such a mixture of love and not love, of anger and desire and obsession but not fully. Half in love is not the same as in love, obviously, and this pales next to Daisy and Gatsby. But he is the lover. She’s the object of his love. She might have loved him once, but she doesn’t stay with him after she discovers that his money is made through bootlegging illegally, Prohibition times. She chooses to stay with Tom. Now if she’s really in love with him, surely she would leave Tom and go with Gatsby. Maybe. Is this the morals of our times? What’s Fitzgerald trying to say about that connection between money and love or money and desire or wealth and how the wealth is made? In the end, he gives his life for Daisy. He dies for his love. In literature, of course, this is such a macabre, sentimental achievement and idea, which has been written about for centuries, and I think that there’s something about it that Fitzgerald is trying to say, “What is idealised love? What is love? What is love that lasts or endures? To remember Shakespeare’s sonnet, "Love is not love, which alters when it alteration finds nor bends with the remover to remove. No, it is an ever-fixed mark.” You know, interestingly, Shakespeare is much more, quite like oak like and solid about a sense of love.
You know, he isn’t just this fantasies in some of the great sonnets that he has about it. So in Kentucky, you know, he had a month of love. Gatsby remakes his entire life with the illusion of the idealistic love he has for her, for Daisy, and not even a world at war, a world on fire. Nor her decision to marry a wealthy guy, Tom, can change his idealistic stuck image that he has stuck in his head. I mean, it’s a fascinating image. It’s a fascinating idea of obsession, of narcissism with idealistic love, with anything idealistic that nothing will change. Nothing will alter him. Of course, he doesn’t have the chance to go to therapy or understand anything, you know, whatever, but nothing’s going to change it. You know, it’s fixed, stuck. In the pivotal scene in the plaza where they have the big fight, you know, amongst them all, she says, “‘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.’” “Ah, I can love both,” in other words. “Gatsby’s eyes opened and closed. ‘You loved me, too?’ he repeated.” And then one of the most famous lines in the novel. “Can’t repeat the past? Well, of course, you can.” Fascinating, and it makes what Daisy says all the more painful and final. “All it is is that the now is rooted in the past. The present is rooted in memory.” Gatsby goes back to Louisville. He wanders the streets looking for, and I’m quoting from the novel, “looking for the pale magic of her face along the casual street.”
Beautiful writing. I mean, he really is an extraordinary writer, Fitzgerald, but she’s only in his imagination, not reality. “The pale magic of her face along the casual street.” Look, every time Gatsby’s playing with idealistic picture and the real, always he gets it. So even though he knows it’s in the past, he knows it’s toast, it’s a love that’s way gone, it belongs to ancient history, he spends the whole novel living in the past. So the present is informed by the past. Where’s the future? And that’s, to me, the ultimate tragedy of the novel, the ultimate greatness of this novel, not only trying to repeat those days, but it is living in the past, living in memory, not being able to say, “Look, it’s over. It was teenage love. Great, wonderful. It was amazing. Come on, come on, come on, Gatsby. Get a move on. Move and get into something else, whatever it is.” People stuck in the past, not only with idealised love but stuck for whatever reason, and they can’t move on, and that’s a tragedy. It’s not just comical, it’s a tragedy, and that to me is the ultimate meaning what we can grab today for our times. You know, we can be stuck in the past, whether it’s about geopolitics, whether it’s about our community, whether it’s about our love, whether it’s about, you know, changing events, great events of history. Of course, we’ve been through massive changes the last couple of months, as we all know, you know, not obviously Israel and elsewhere. To be stuck in the past in any way is a nightmare from which we have to try and awake, and I think this is the deepest tragic moment or idea in this entire book, and I think it’s the real reason it strikes such a chord. Fitzgerald’s fidelity is an ideal. Sorry, Gatsby’s fidelity is to an ideal, an image in his head, but it also makes him a romantic hero for modern times. Let’s look at “Casablanca” and the Humphrey Bogart character but many others. It’s a romantic hero because it is heroic to stay with that, but it’s also completely silly and naive. He’s a dreamer against the pain of reality.
What’s fascinating with Gatsby is that the dreams aren’t pure, just naive and idealistic. His path to get there is the path of a crook. It’s illegal, bootlegging. He’s made bucks out of selling illegal alcohol in Prohibition, and that’s the reason Daisy gives why she can’t go back to him and stays on with Tom, but it makes him more of a man that his past is flawed, you know, that is, yes, he’s become rich, but like Arnold Rothstein, he’s done it off the backs of being a bootlegger, of being a mafia guy, of being crooked, but made a fortune. Well, we admire these kind of romantic heroes because they’re not only as naive as they might seem in the beginning. There’s something else inside. How they’ve gone up the ladder of success, at least with wealth, has been a very dodgy past, to put it, you know, in one way. Of course, Daisy isn’t a girl anymore. She’s another man’s wife. She’s a mother. It’s all changed. We don’t know. Also, interestingly, Fitzgerald doesn’t describe how tall is she? Short? Many of these things aren’t because he sticks with the fantasy that Gatsby has of her as that teenager that he first met. Can’t forget or get rid of it or change it. It doesn’t matter to Gatsby, she’s tall or not or this or that. She has become such a fixated, idealised memory in his imagination, stuck. So love may be blind, but it’s his love. Once Gatsby’s gone, we never see Daisy again. Fascinating choice that Fitzgerald makes in the book. Today, of course, the name Gatsby’s shorthand for the Jazz Age, you know, the end of the Roaring Twenties, et cetera, you know, a whole hedonistic period, but for me, it’s this tragedy of time and how memory can become stuck in one period and not move on.
And I don’t only mean move on with technology but move on psychologically and emotionally and move on how history changes our society constantly. It’s not fixed. In the words of Stuart Hall, one of the great theorists, you know, “Identity is in constant production. It’s never a fixed thing. It’s constantly changing like something in production.” So there’s a romantic readiness in Gatsby. He’s also the elusive and sentimental, but also, you know, he’s a criminal. He’s semi-mafia together with this. He’s not a perfect hero happily in love with a perfect heroine and all that. That would be the dullest of stories. You know, it is because they’re all so flawed in the end, and this idea of love is such a flawed notion in the end as well. They’re imperfect like all of us. They’re human, all too human, and they love great, but it was fleeting. It’s toast, but he can’t move on. HL Mencken criticised the plot. He called it “highly improbable.” “The New York Times” at the time wrote, “It’s a mystical, glamorous tale of the Jazz Age.” “The LA Times” wrote at the time, “It leaves the reader in a mood of chastened wonder.” “The New York Post” said, “It’s scintillating and brilliant.” “The New York Herald Tribune” at the times wrote that it’s a “literary lemon meringue. It contains some nice little touches of contemporary observation you couldn’t imagine.” Completely condescending critics of the times, some of them. Gatsby is a mythical version of himself, and Daisy is part of that, and he tries to live up to it, and I think the fact that it has become so mythical that Fitzgerald somewhere, consciously or unconsciously, knows how to write a myth, and a couple of people talking about Bob Dylan’s work, spoke about how he’s able to turn ordinary events into almost mythical, which is what the ancient Greeks and many other great writers have done, Shakespeare and many others, when you can turn an ordinary event and create, unconsciously, maybe, or consciously, a kind of a myth out of, it becomes so lasting and powerful in a culture, and I think that’s what he does as well, Fitzgerald, which makes it last.
And by this stage, it’s sold, to latest accounts, at least 30 million copies worldwide. The American dream are purposely left out, but, of course, it’s there is the idea of it. What is it? In essence, the belief that every individual, regardless of the origin, can at least achieve something of their goals and the land of opportunity. Whether we believe this idea still exists or not, it’s there inside the self-made Gatsby, as I mentioned. You know, and as Harari has spoken and written about, we need myth. Every culture needs a myth. How else does it hold together? You know, whether it’s as simple as 30 people living in ancient caves and deciding, “We’ve got 10 bananas. Who should get most bananas? Who should get one banana, two bananas, three? How are we going to divvy it up?” What’s the myth that is created? Who deserves what? How, when? What’s the rules? What’s become known as the laws? We need myths. Communities, groups, they need a story. They need a myth to hold them together. There’s no historical archaeological evidence the story of Exodus ever happened, but everybody needs the story, the myth, the meaning of it to hold, and in so many other cultures, myths are needed. Otherwise what really holds a group together? Why not just kill each other and move apart? What’s stopping them? It’s not just, you know, the laws and punishment. So it’s the ability of literature to create a myth out of seemingly ordinary events, you know, coming of age, young teenage love, et cetera. This is part of the power of the novel, plus make a myth out of memory and being stuck in memory. Okay, I want to show just a couple of brief clips. If we can go on to the next slide, please. This is from the trailer of Baz Luhrmann’s recent movie version of “Gatsby.”
[Nick] New York, 1922. ♪ Human beings in a mob ♪
[Nick] The tempo of the city had changed sharply. The buildings were higher, the parties were bigger, the morals were looser, and the liquor was cheaper. The restlessness approached hysteria.
Shall we?
Who is this Gatsby?
Do you know him?
War hero.
Mr. Gatsby doesn’t exist.
Gatsby? What Gatsby?
I beg your pardon. Mr. Gatsby would like to speak to you alone.
I’m certainly glad to see you again.
This would be Daisy.
I’m certainly glad to see you as well.
When I made the pleasure of Mr. Gatsby’s acquaintance, I discovered a man of fine breeding.
Very interesting.
Is everything all right?
Yes.
Okay, if we can hold it there please. ♪ Blindness, I don’t want to see ♪
Just to give you a slight impression of a fairly recent movie by a fantastic filmmaker. He made “Elvis, he made "Romeo + Juliet,” and others, a wonderful and very visual filmmaker, Baz Luhrmann. Can we go on to the next clip, please?
I’m stealing her away, Carraway.
Ladies and gentlemen! A jazz history of the world and accompanying fireworks!
Come on! Nick!
Look around you. Rich girls don’t marry poor boys. She’s mine.
His face is familiar. Weren’t you in the 3rd Division during the war?
Oh yes, the 9th Battalion.
I was in the 7th.
Excuse me. You look familiar. Having a good time, old sport?
Well, the whole thing’s incredible. I live just next door. He sent me an actual invitation. Seems I’m the only one. I still haven’t met Mr. Gatsby.
No one’s met him.
They say he third cousin to the kaiser and second cousin to the devil.
Afraid I haven’t been a very good host, old sport. You see,
Can we hold it there?
I’m Gatsby.
Great, thanks. It’s that look that Leonardo DiCaprio captures, the head down, the eyes up. There’s a classic look, you know, of, “I’m the hero. I’m in charge. You know, I’m the confident high status character and person,” that classic look he gives, which so many other romantic heroes have given and protagonists. So just to give you an idea, of course, Baz Luhrmann in the film focuses very much on the visual, the visceral, the Jazz Age, the 20s, everything we know about it only too well. An incredible expression of decadence and wealth and privilege and the celebration of it and the relishing of it, and it’s certainly not hidden or any hesitation. The point is to show you got it. Show it, flaunt it. Okay, and, “I’m Gatsby.” If we go onto the next clip, please, this is the green lights.
[Nick] After Gatsby’s death.
Sorry, if we can just hold it for a second, Hannah. Just freeze it. Thank you. This is at the end of the novel. So Gatsby has died and basically given up his life to protect Daisy without going into all the stories of the plot. But she’s already rejected him ‘cause she’s discovered that he made his money out of bootlegging, as I said. She goes on with Tom, and Nick has left New York, going back to the Midwest, or he’s leaving because he’s disillusioned with what has happened, disillusioned with this lifestyle that he was so enchanted and entranced by wants to be a part of. But his moral ambivalence, his emotional ambivalence about it has come out 'cause of what he’s seen, what it leads to, and he’s leaving, and this is the green light image, which is so famous everywhere that Fitzgerald wrote about where, from Gatsby’s place, you could look across from Long Island, and you could see where Daisy lived, and the green light, you know, which is stuck in everyone’s literary imagination from this here. If we can show it, please.
[Nick] That city, my once golden, shimmering mirage, now made me sick. On my last night in New York, I returned to that huge incoherent house once more. Wolfshiem’s associates had cleaned it out.
[Person] He threw all those parties hoping she’d wander in one night.
It’s like an amusement park.
How do you live all alone?
She makes it look so, so splendid, don’t you think, old sport?
[Daisy] Music, and then we can dance.
[Gatsby] Will you come, old sport? We need you.
[Daisy] I wish it could always be like this.
It will be.
[Nick] I remembered how we had all come to Gatsby’s and guessed at his corruption while he stood before us, concealing an incorruptible dream. The moon rose higher, and as I stood 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 such a long way, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it, but he did not know that it was already behind him. Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic 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 farther, and one fine morning, so we beat on, boats against the current, born back ceaselessly into the past.
Hold it there please. “Boats against the current, born back ceaselessly.” It’s extraordinary writing. For me, it pulls it all together. Gatsby has this dream. Gatsby is stuck in the past, reaching out for it but would perhaps be less of a man if he didn’t but is also naive to carry on doing it. All of this is there, you know, and that New York, and it would’ve been glittering and shining, you know, which had once so much, had made him sick now. It’s all these things come together in those stunning final sentences for me in the novel. I think it’s amazingly beautiful and just such powerful writing in this way. Okay, I want to go on a little bit to, if we can show the last image, please. It’s the slide number 12. This is, of course, the first film that was made of it in 1926. All that exists is a one-minute version of the trailer. I’m not going to show it, of course, but just to give you an idea, it was a movie made shortly after the novel. Obviously, it didn’t do well, you know, et cetera, but it just gives us a sense of how long this novel has lasted in the imagination, you know, of so many people around the world, certainly in the West.
I want to talk just the last couple of minutes briefly about Fitzgerald and the Jewish connection with Arnold Rothstein. We can go back to slide number seven, please. Thank you. So with Rothstein and with other Jewish characters 'cause it’s important to acknowledge. There’s another character who in the book, Meyer Wolfshiem, who’s based on the Jazz Age racketeer of Arnold Rothstein, and Rothstein himself was murdered in 1928, and he was blamed for match fixing the 1919 World Series. So I mean, Rothstein was pretty high up there amongst mafia elite, let’s say. Fitzgerald has been subsequently accused of a lot of antisemitism because of the Jewish stereotypes in the novel. There’s Wolfshiem, who’s a Jewish friend and mentor of Gatsby, even though he only appears twice in the novel, and Wolfshiem is a corrupt profiteer who assists Gatsby’s bootlegging and helps him fix the 1919 World Series but also only appears very briefly twice in the novel. Fitzgerald described Wolfshiem, as I’m quoting, “A small flat-nosed Jew with tiny eyes and two fine growths of hair in his nostrils.” Talking about the Jewish nose, “Wolfshiem’s nose is expressive, tragic. It can flash indignantly.” So all these stereotype images are there inside the novel, and we have to absolutely acknowledge it. Is it because of vicious antisemitism? Is it not only obviously part of the times, you know, the rampant antisemitism of its times, which is obviously, you know, reared its seriously powerful ugly head in our times? Is it because of Fitzgerald himself?
Is he trying to pander to a broad readership? Doesn’t matter, it’s there inside it nevertheless, and, of course, it’s ultimately the Jewish miser, the rich but miserly stereotype who’s corrupt as well. Now interestingly, Fitzgerald had a Jewish secretary, a lady called Frances Kroll, who worked with him for many years, and Fitzgerald said, and he wrote it in a letter, said, “Wolfshiem’s character,” quoting, “merely fulfils a function in the story that had nothing to do with race or religion.” Well, she cooked for him. She typed for him, Frances Kroll. She was a nice Jewish Bronx girl. Fitzgerald probably never met many Jews. He was Irish Catholic. He went to Princeton in 1913. In a 1921 letter, he wrote, this is Fitzgerald, “The Negroid,” and I’m quoting, “The Negroid streak creeps northward to defile the Nordic race. Already, Italians have souls of blackamoors.” He later changed these early beliefs, and he wrote that his reactions had been, and I’m quoting from him again, “Philistine, provincial, racially snobbish.” So he is a, yeah, racist right at the start. He then recants or, you know, goes against it later. But Fitzgerald did write as a young man, and I’m quoting, “I believe in the white man’s burden. We are as far above the Frenchman as he is above the Negro.” That’s a quote from early writing of Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald admired Irving Thalberg, who, of course, was Jewish and ran MGM in these times, and he based one of his characters in one of the other novels on it.
It’s possible that Frances Kroll was even the first Jewish person he really spent time with, but we can’t get away from the description of Meyer Wolfshiem, you know, the small flat nose, the tiny eyes, et cetera. We see all this, these attitudes, the caricatures of Jewish people. So, of course, we’ve got to be very aware of this as well. He wrote much later about many nationalities, from African American to Irish to Jews. He wrote that Jewish people lose clarity in his notebooks. This is what he wrote about the Irish. He wrote that Irish people get slovenly and dirty. Anglo-Saxons get frayed. He wrote about all nationalities, but the germane, what we are interested here is this portrayal of the Wolfshiem character. Frances Kroll, you know, when she was asked about these accusations of antisemitism in Fitzgerald, she said, and of course, he, you know, basing one character on the character on Rothstein here and Dutch Schultz, Meyer Lansky and others, she said, Frances Kroll, she said, “He was a frayed alcoholic, a difficult man to work for. Nothing was simple with Scott Fitzgerald.” And in her memoir, she wrote, “Fitzgerald was a polite, sickly, appreciative, middle-aged man. He was interested in my family.” There’s quite an affectionate portrayal of Fitzgerald in parts of her memoir. In “The Last Tycoon,” Monroe Stahr is based on Irving Thalberg, the MGM mogul, and Stahr’s Jewishness is very occasionally alluded to, but he isn’t disparaged, he isn’t really stereotyped. And in fact the phrase in the novel that has gone down is about the character of Monroe Stahr. Quoting, “He had worked with Jews too long to believe the old legends that they were small with money.” In other words, he’s really writing against the stereotype there.
“He was a man of contradictions,” Frances Kroll writes and is said in interviews, and then she writes towards the end of her memoir, “My memory harbours a gentle man.” Interesting. “My memory harbours a gentle man.” It’s her memory of him. So it’s important that we take this into account, and I’ve gone two or three minutes over, but it’s important that we look at, you know, what was his attitude to Jewishness and to Jewish people and their rampant antisemitism like it is today. The echoes today, of course, are all there in even more vitriolic ways. The echoes are there today, as I said, of this idea of narcissism, memory, all these other things, and perhaps a foreboding sense of what might come in our own times, what might come globally. Is the world going to go on fire? Is it going to dampen down? You know, we are at the moment where it’s a fault line, which way and where, and we come out of this a version of an idealised hopeful time. Are we moving towards something? The opposite? Is it going to hold? Is the centre going to hold or not? Okay, I’m going to hold it there, and we can look at some questions.
Q&A and Comments:
Happy New Year, Rhonda. Thank you, and Happy New Year to you and to everyone. Yeah, we did the Marx Brothers last week. Thank you, Rhonda. And next week, I’m going to do Charlie Chaplin. Okay, thanks for that.
Eileen, “'Gatsby’ is one of my favourites.” Oh, well, thank you, Eileen.
Q: Lindy, “Was Amor Towles influenced by this novel?”
A: Great question. I’m not sure. I have to find out that, Lindy. Towles, oh, okay.
Q: Janet, “Do you know the name of the book cover artist? He was.”
A: Yeah, I’ve got it in my notes somewhere. Gosh, what was it, Francis . Sorry, it’s just slipped my mind at the moment, but I’ve got it in my notes. I can get it for you.
We have answered it there, just below for you. There’s some links just below.
Ah, there. Great, Rita, thank you. Cugat, older brother of Javier, Javier, I forget my pronunciation, Cugat. Thanks, Hannah. Appreciate it. The artist that illustrated, he was very unknown Barcelona painter, but his cover became very iconic.
Annette. Oh, thank you.
Q: Arlene, “Wasn’t Gatsby’s obsession with Daisy and their class differences reference to Fitzgerald and Zelda?”
A: Yes.
He claimed to have coined the term Jazz Age, but I can’t find evidence that he really did. So he might have, he might not have, because he didn’t, I mean, the word jazz comes from New Orleans where jazz musicians, there was one jazz musician who had a girlfriend called Jasmine and used to call her Jazz. Anyway, out of that, apparently this is a fairly truthful story, the word jazz itself, but did he coin it or not? I don’t know. Miriam, thank you very much.
Q: Myrna, “How did Ginevra get to New York?”
A: She was a debutante of Chicago, yeah. They met on a holiday in the summer, and that’s where it all started. Thanks, Myrna.
Judith, “First read ‘Gatsby’ in my 20s. I reread it 50 years later, and became an entirely different novel to me.” Interesting. Yeah, that’s what I did in preparation today.
“More admiring of the work in the second reading. Life experience made a difference.” It’s a great point, Judy, and I think, you know, when we do read some of these great things we read in our early 20s, maybe as university students or whenever for school or afterwards, and to read them much later is, to me, a much more interesting experience. Also, we don’t have, ah, , we don’t have the influence of too many lecturers giving us notes and what to rewrite. Barbara, thank you very much. Very kind.
David, “Rothstein was felt to be involved in the Black Sox year, the bribery baseball scandal.” Yep. Thanks, David. I love it ‘cause there were these fantastic Jewish gangsters. I mean, Lansky is the most well known, and Bugsy Siegel, you know, but there were many others, which is great. Sorry, there were, of course, Irish, Jewish, Italian, and a whole lot of others in New York, you know, were the real mafia.
Annette. Annette, of course, you know, Lansky, as I’m sure many know, sent an a huge amount of weapons to Israelis just before the 1948 war, just to try and help as much as he could. Okay, Annette, thank you for that. “Discussion of the novel, our relation to the 2013 Baz Luhrmann film.” Great. It’s quite mixed, the reaction. Some of the reaction to the Baz Luhrmann movie has been, yeah, visually it’s great, and it’s visceral and all that, but it goes far away from the novel in any kind of original meaning and focused much more on the Robert Redford version, which is more, I suppose, faithful, if you like, to the actual plot of Fitzgerald’s book. Baz Luhrmann takes far more liberties. But there’s something about Baz Luhrmann’s which I think is very contemporary. You know, he gets the flashiness, the narcissism of it more, I think.
Malcolm, “I’ve always felt the style of writing seems very mature for young Fitzgerald.” Yeah, he was hugely influenced by Conrad, “Heart of Darkness” and all the other novels by Joseph Conrad. So Conrad and others, he tried to emulate in a way with their remarkable precision with the English language and prose and that maturity and how to put a sentence together in characters, of course.
Q: Rita, “Is this Arnold Rothstein mentioned, Nicky Arnstein in the Barbara Streisand movie?
A: Nicky Arnstein was a professional gambler and worked closely.” It’s a great question, Rita. I’m not sure. I need to check that if it’s in the Barbara Streisand movie.
Nina, “Imagine being outsider at Princeton was a major influence.” Yes, very much so. Outsider because of Irish Catholic background but also because he’s not as rich as the others. He doesn’t come from that legacy of not only inherited but, you know, old money.
Faye, “Baz Luhrmann’s my favourite.” Ah, great. “I found his version easier to believe.” Yeah, I think it does strike a chord much more of us today than the Robert Redford that tries to stick, I think, almost too faithfully to the novel and the plot of the novel whereas I think Baz Luhrmann, as he does with “Elvis” and others, he tries to visually make it so exciting and find ways to really connect with contemporary audiences. It’s the narcissism. It’s the self obsession and, you know, the sense and how Baz Luhrmann plays with time and memory, which he does with “Elvis” and others.
Ruth, “I have a beautiful illustrated copy of 'Gatsby,’” yeah, “published in England in 20.” Oh, great, lovely. Thanks about that. “The name Gatsby suggests racketeer, gat meaning gun.” That’s a great, interesting idea. Of course, the Gatlin gun. That’s it, Glenda, thank you. Great connection.
Arlene, “Fitzgerald’s long-term companion was Sheilah Graham, Jewish.” Ah, interesting. Thank you.
Susan, “Frances Kroll worked for him at the end of his life the year before he died.” Yeah. From what I understand, and correct me, you will probably know more than I do, Susan, but they got to know each other pretty well. They seemed to have a friendship. The memoir, hers, there seems to be like quite a much closer than just sort you know, she worked for him connection but that they were pretty friendly in many ways.
Gail, thank you. Nima. Oh, thanks very much. Annette, thanks.
Susan, “‘Last Call’ is a movie about Fitzgerald and Kroll in his last year.” Oh, interesting. I didn’t know that, Susan. That’s really interesting.
Myrna, “Toronto, Detroit, and a Jewish mafia, the Purple Gang.” Probably also mixed up with bootlegging. Yeah, of course. It’s, you know, everywhere, great.
Ron. Hope you’re well, Ron. “Perhaps Lansky contributed to Israel in order to pave the way to get away paying his own taxes.” It’s a great thought, Ron. That would make an interesting play.
Okay. Susan, “Her memoir shows that they were very friendly.” Yeah, thanks for that point. That’s what I felt when I read. I didn’t read the whole memoir. I’ve read parts of it. It does seem friendship, not just employer, employee.
So thank you very much, everybody, and have a great year. Happy New Year, and take care please, everybody, in these really, really dark times around the world, and Hannah, thank you very much.