Gatsby’s America
The Great Gatsby is a novel of manners in which no one minds their manners, narrated by a man who claims to reserve judgment as he constantly casts it. A tale of East Coast decadence populated entirely by Midwestern transplants. A book too slender to sell well when it was first published, a hundred years ago, on April 10, 1925, yet whose brevity helped secure a posthumous canonization, initially among soldiers during World War II, thanks to the Council on Books in Wartime, and then by close readers, screenwriters, and high school students, who still buy half a million copies every year on instruction from their teachers. Perhaps more than any other contender for the title of Great American Novel, it has enjoyed an enduring post-literary afterlife. Adapted for stage and screen within a year of publication, the name ‘Gatsby’ today conjures the image of a white-suited Leonardo DiCaprio, distinguished portrayer of American con men and the star of Baz Luhrmann’s flamboyant 2013 art-deco-cum-hip-hop adaptation.
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is an ironic work whose ironies are lost on Nick Carraway, its unreliable narrator, and the many readers who take him at his word. Popular interpretations have cast the book as somewhere between a moral fable and a tragic romance – a tale of Gatsby’s idealism destroyed by the materialistic society represented by Tom and Daisy Buchanan, of old money gatekeeping the dreams that drive the newly rich. Sarah Churchwell, a Gatsby scholar and commentator, argued recently in the Financial Times that the book is a cautionary tale of what happens when society is run by “careless people” like the Buchanans: people get run over, metaphorically. Nick’s censorious voice invites these kinds of readings, but they’re untenable. Gatsby is hardly a hero, and the Buchanans aren’t villains. Indeed, seen from another angle, Gatsby is a delusional stalker who uses Daisy as an instrument for the satisfaction of his desire. Instead of moving on, he tries to wreck her marriage and her family. He’s indifferent to the fact that she has a daughter, who has no place in the fantasy he’s frozen in amber. His failure, culminating in his murder, leaves Nick as the novel’s true villain, a smiling witness who lets the worst happen and then records it in beautiful prose. Not unlike Humbert Humbert in Lolita, Nick seeks exoneration through his style, only in his case for crimes of omission.
Although admired by T. S. Eliot and Edith Wharton, Fitzgerald complained that his third novel was widely misread. He wrote in a letter to his Princeton friend, the critic Edmund Wilson, “Of all the reviews, even the most enthusiastic, not one had the slightest idea what the book was about.” But it’s this capacity for misreading, both morally and thematically, more than brevity or visual adaptations, which explains its staying power. Even after adolescent cramming and adult streaming, Gatsby still somehow keeps, not just its own secrets, but those of America.
Two years before Gatsby was published, D. H. Lawrence observed that Americans had yet to discover America, that they remained stuck in a stance of rebellion against Europe, unable to define a positive identity. The America of Gatsby reflects this impasse. The frontier had been declared closed in 1890. The Manifest Destiny of westward expansion, which promised land and resources, had come to an end. Fitzgerald put it more colorfully in one of his notebooks: “The long serpent of the curiosity [sic] had turned too sharp upon itself, cramping its bowels, bursting its shining skin.” Out of it fly Gatsby’s many colorful shirts which make Daisy cry.
A hundred years after it was published, The Great Gatsby still reads like a question America hasn’t fully answered. What is America without a frontier? A melting pot? A con man?
Gatsby is not just a story of five Midwesterners meeting for one Long Island summer; it goes further East into scattered intimations of England. Daisy thinks she hears a nightingale and imagines it having come over on a Cunard liner. Jordan Baker recalls Gatsby’s first encounter with Daisy by describing her English golfing shoes. Gatsby himself claims to have studied at Oxford. Even the architecture gestures across the Atlantic: Gatsby’s house is a faux château, while the Buchanans live in a Georgian mansion. England, with its social stratifications, its privileges and obligations, its old settled civilization, threatens to reassert itself on the now charted, unified and aging republic.
In this anxiety of the East corrupting the West, Fitzgerald echoes John Adams’ critique of Jefferson’s ‘natural aristocracy’. Jefferson believed the American elite should be based on merit; Adams feared that all aristocracy, left long enough, ossifies into inheritance. In Gatsby versus the Buchanans, this fear appears realized. Yet appearances deceive. Gatsby is cast as a bootlegger and fraud, but the social distance between him and the Buchanans is minimal. Their social world is narrow and provincial: Daisy has only her Louisville friend Jordan, and Tom spends most of his time with his mistress Myrtle, who lives with her husband in the wastelands of Queens. When Tom tries to assert superiority at Gatsby’s party – “We don’t go around very much… I don’t know a soul here” – he only confirms his provincialism. Among Broadway stars and Long Island notables, he’s the one who doesn’t belong.
One of Gatsby’s sharpest insights is that American identity is performative. You are what you can convince others to believe that you are. Gatsby himself is a character constructed from rumor, hearsay, and invention. He is less a man than a myth in motion, constantly adapting his persona to suit the audience. Even Nick, who claims a special insight into Gatsby, is seduced by his performance. Gatsby is the archetype of the American confidence man: a swindler whose charm is part of the swindle, and whose criminality is forgiven in light of his charisma. The archetype runs from Benjamin Franklin, pioneer of American self-invention, through P.T. Barnum, Jay Gatsby, and Jordan Belfort. And you don’t need to be a criminal to act out this American fascination with becoming someone else: Ralph Lauren, who did the costumes for the 1974 adaptation starring Robert Redford and Mia Farrow, was born Ralph Lifshitz. His empire was built on an aspirational version of an elite East Coast lifestyle he had never experienced.
Fitzgerald knew this story well. As a writer, and a man, he was fascinated by wealth but often contemptuous of the wealthy. His father was a Southern gentleman of founding stock without income; his mother was a grocer’s heiress of Irish descent. His parents named him after a famous relation, Francis Scott Key, author of ‘The Star Spangled Banner’ and his second cousin, thrice removed. Fitzgerald moved in elite circles at Princeton, but failed academically. He volunteered for World War I to save face but missed deployment. At 23, he reinvented himself with This Side of Paradise, his successful debut, “a novel about flappers written for philosophers.” He was part peasant, part gentry, a Catholic outsider to the fading WASP elite, yet the experience of his upbringing taught him that these distinctions ultimately didn’t matter: without money in America, you’re nothing. Harold Bloom argued that Gatsby failed because he overestimated what money could buy. But one could also argue the reverse: Gatsby failed because he didn’t believe in money enough. He didn’t close the deal. He didn’t make Daisy an offer she couldn’t refuse, as Tom had once done with a $300,000 pearl necklace.
Fitzgerald’s vision of a literary life was not bohemian. He wanted to make a lot of money, and, in his early twenties, he did. Having been rejected, like Gatsby, as a suitor on account of his lack of means, he tended to spend money recklessly whenever he had it. During his time on Great Neck, Long Island – fictionalized in Gatsby as West Egg – Fitzgerald would look at the leisure class not with “the conviction of a revolutionist, but the smouldering hatred of a peasant.” Like Gatsby, he didn’t condemn, he wanted in. Arthur Mizener, his first biographer, described him as Janus-faced: half supercilious Pharisee (Nick), half flamboyant Trimalchio (Gatsby): an early title for the novel was Trimalchio in West Egg.
This duality mirrors the contradictions at the heart of American identity. The Pilgrims came to escape authority, to “henceforth be masterless” as Benjamin Franklin put it, yet built theocratic communities governed by the fire and brimstone of the Book of Deuteronomy. Prohibition, backdrop to Gatsby, was a moralist crusade in the land of supposed freedom, unlike anything seen in Europe. Luhrmann’s decision to frame the story as the recollections of a recovering alcoholic is fitting (only an alcoholic would say “I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known”). Carraway, embodying the American schizoid attitude, doesn’t stop with a personal condemnation, but wants to implicate broader society. Even later works of apparently pure libidinal and psychological excess, such as William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch (1959), cannot avoid this same temptation: Naked Lunch begins with a sermon condemning society.
Gatsby gives us a vision of Jazz Age America where the closed frontier has collapsed the myth of opportunity into a zero-sum game, symbolized by Tom and Gatsby’s competition for the same unremarkable woman. But its famous closing lines aren’t tragic. Gatsby dies before confronting the truth that Daisy wouldn’t have chosen him. Nick compares Gatsby’s dream to the “last and greatest of all human dreams,” the settlement of America. Both are comedies of misrecognition. Gatsby views Daisy as the settler once saw the frontier: virgin, without history, there to be claimed as an instrument of desire. Never mind her daughter. Gatsby marks an inward turn, from a geographical to a psychological frontier that came to define post-war American culture. Don Draper meditating and taking psychedelics at the end of Mad Men is as close as we get to Gatsby transplanted to 1969.
A hundred years after it was published, The Great Gatsby still reads like a question America hasn’t fully answered. What is America without a frontier? A melting pot? A con man? Fitzgerald, drawing on his beloved Keats, was well-versed in negative capability: he probably didn’t expect a reply. Its modernist ambiguity reenacts the comedy of misrecognition through the reader, who becomes another actor in the farce, forever misreading, forever missing the point.
“Democracy in America is just the tool with which the old mastery of Europe, the European spirit, is undermined,” wrote D.H. Lawrence in 1923. “Europe destroyed, potentially, American democracy will evaporate. America will begin.” The rupture of Trumpism – with its disregard for Liberal norms, its nationalist rhetoric, and its upending of JFK’s technocratic ‘new frontier’ – might be seen not just as a political aberration but as an answer to Gatsby’s question. Where Gatsby dreams of joining a social elite, Trump defunds it. Where Gatsby imitates Europe, Trump makes it pay. In a republic born of rebellion against monarchy, Trump might be America’s first king: elected to perform a restoration, and ruling on the strength of his image – an image, like Gatsby, of America, rich, brash, and hard to look away from.
Perhaps as Lawrence warned, America hasn’t yet begun. Or maybe it just did.