This Collins Classroom Classics edition includes an introduction and glossary to support students, written by an experienced teacher.
The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald
If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life‌
ISBN 978-0-00-837181-4
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The Great Gatsby 9 780008 371814
F. Scott Fitzgerald 14/11/2019 17:29
Introduction What a relief it must have been for F. Scott Fitzgerald, following the mixed reviews The Great Gatsby received when it was first published in April 1925, to get a letter from Gertrude Stein, an American writer now regarded as one of the key literary innovators of the 20th century, giving her own feedback on the novel: ‘You write naturally in sentences and one can read all of them and that among other things is a comfort.’1 In most other circumstances, this would be the very definition of damning with faint praise, but although Stein’s letter does not necessarily suggest that she sees the novel as special or great there is actually a serious compliment here. Stein goes on to say that he is ‘creating the contemporary world’ in the same way that Thackeray had done; that Fitzgerald has made ‘a modern world and a modern orgy’ which, ‘strangely enough... never was done until you did it in This Side of Paradise’.2 Stein’s words are ‘make’ and ‘create’, not reflect or record, as though Gatsby itself were producing the world it portrays. Her reference to Thackeray situates Fitzgerald in a tradition of literary satire, but she also suggests that he is doing something distinctively new, decisively modern. One of the criticisms Fitzgerald received for the novel was that it merely reflected the superficial lives of the kind of people in or around his social circle. H.L. Mencken famously called Gatsby ‘a glorified anecdote’.3 But Stein turns this idea around: it isn’t so much that Fitzgerald simply provides a window to look in on the lifestyle and behaviour of wealthy Americans in the booming 1920s, but that he is ‘creating’ that sense of lifestyle, that world. iv
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Introduction
Years later, Stein repeated these remarks – or very similar ones – in her Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933).4 There, she praises Fitzgerald as ‘the only one of the younger writers who wrote naturally in sentences’.5 Though we might think that this is the bare minimum for any author, it appears as though Stein sees some special quality in Fitzgerald’s style at the level of the sentence. In fact, she goes on to say that she ‘thinks Fitzgerald will be read when many of his well known contemporaries are forgotten’.6 Characteristically, she then immediately suggests that the whole thing might be a wind-up: ‘Fitzgerald always says that he thinks Gertrude Stein says these things just to annoy him by making him think that she means them.’7 Nevertheless, she has proven to be prophetic: Fitzgerald, and The Great Gatsby in particular, continue to be read, discussed, mulled over and enjoyed for a great variety of reasons. What Stein’s remarks hint at is that the novel isn’t just about the glamour of the parties, the doomed love story, the flawed characters, or even any of the symbolism – though these are all certainly important parts of it. No, this ‘compliment’, coming from a writer much more experimental in style than Fitzgerald, tells us that there is also something going on around the edges in Gatsby, something about the style or grammar of the writing, something in the way Fitzgerald ‘make[s] a modern world and a modern orgy’. Finally, Stein’s playful ambiguity about whether she thinks Gatsby is a good novel is perhaps a helpful attitude to adopt when approaching the text. We don’t need to treat it with too much solemnity or read it thinking that every detail has a great symbolic meaning, but we do need to mind out for the little things that are hinted at or left v
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THE GREAT GATSBY
unspoken – some of them beautiful, pleasurable or funny, and some of them darker or more disquieting.
Contexts and concerns The city and modern life As Nick travels with Gatsby over the Queensboro Bridge towards Manhattan Island in Chapter 4, he describes New York City as a wonder that keeps renewing itself. The buildings are unreal; he calls them ‘white heaps and sugar lumps’ (p.69), as though out of some fairy story. However, they have been built with ‘non-olfactory money’ – money that stinks – and so we get from Nick, as so often throughout the book, a combination of wide-eyed appreciation and quiet, almost euphemistic criticism. Immediately, he goes on to describe the passengers of a funeral convoy and a limousine in queasily racialised terms – ‘a limousine passed us, driven by a white chauffeur, in which sat three modish negroes, two bucks and a girl’ (p.69) – perhaps causing us to question Nick’s own tone and perspective. He registers the cosmopolitan character of the city and at the same time makes it seem like something unnatural or fantastical, something that should not really be. In the background to this encounter on the bridge is the so-called Great Migration, a large-scale movement of African Americans from rural southern states to more urban parts of the USA.8 While poverty and inequality remained ingrained in the lives of many black Americans, new opportunities for intellectual and artistic community also emerged, together with increased wealth and prosperity for some individuals and groups.9 All this is part of Fitzgerald’s response to one of the most significant contexts of The Great Gatsby, and vi
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CHAPTER 1
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 feel like criticizing any one,’ he told me, ‘just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.’ He didn’t say any more, but we’ve always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence, I’m inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought – frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon; for the intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions. Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if 1
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THE GREAT GATSBY
I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth. And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit. Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes, but after a certain point I don’t care what it’s founded on. When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction – Gatsby, who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn. If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the ‘creative temperament’ – it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again. No – 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 shortwinded elations of men. * * * My family have been prominent, well-to-do people in this Middle Western city for three generations. The Carraways are something of a clan, and we have 2
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chapter 1
a tradition that we’re descended from the Dukes of Buccleuch, but the actual founder of my line was my grandfather’s brother, who came here in fifty-one, sent a substitute to the Civil War, and started the wholesale hardware business that my father carries on today. I never saw this great-uncle, but I’m supposed to look like him – with special reference to the rather hardboiled painting that hangs in father’s office. I graduated from New Haven in 1915, just a quarter of a century after my father, and a little later I participated in that delayed Teutonic migration known as the Great War. I enjoyed the counter-raid so thoroughly that I came back restless. Instead of being the warm center of the world, the Middle West now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe – so I decided to go East and learn the bond business. Everybody I knew was in the bond business, so I supposed it could support one more single man. All my aunts and uncles talked it over as if they were choosing a prep school for me, and finally said, ‘Why – ye-es,’ with very grave, hesitant faces. Father agreed to finance me for a year, and after various delays I came East, permanently, I thought, in the spring of twenty-two. The practical thing was to find rooms in the city, but it was a warm season, and I had just left a country of wide lawns and friendly trees, so when a young man at the office suggested that we take a house together in a commuting town, it sounded like a great idea. He found the house, a weather-beaten cardboard bungalow at eighty a month, but at the last minute the firm ordered him to Washington, and I went out to the country alone. I had a dog – at least I had him for a few days until he ran away – and an old Dodge and a Finnish woman, 3
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Glossary Chapter 1 3 Dukes of Buccleuch: an aristocratic title from Scotland; the Carraways’ ‘tradition’ is meant to claim noble heritage for the family 3 substitute: During the American Civil War (1861–65), the Enrollment Act (1863) was used to conscript additional troops into the armies of the North. It included a clause that allowed for someone who had been selected to pay a fee and elect a substitute to fight in his place. 3 Civil War: the American Civil War (1861–65) between the North (also known as the Union) and the South (also known as the Confederacy, comprised of eleven slave-owning states) 3 New Haven: shorthand for Yale University, one of the most prestigious in the United States, located in the city of New Haven, Connecticut 3
Dodge: American brand of car
4 Midas and Morgan and Maecenas: All three names are meant to imply great wealth. In Greek mythology, King Midas of Phrygia (a region in modern-day Turkey) turned everything he touched to gold, a gift that ultimately became a curse. J.P. Morgan (1837–1913) was one of the most prominent American financiers during the second half of the 19th century, sometimes associated with using unscrupulous means to gain his wealth. Maecenas (c. 70–8 BC) was a citizen of Rome and patron of prominent poets such as Horace and Virgil. (See also the later reference to Trimalchio, p.115.) 5 Long Island Sound: a body of water to the north of Long Island, itself at the northern end of New York City 5 egg in the Columbus story: Christopher Columbus (1451–1506) was the first European to lead an expedition to the continent of America. The story Nick alludes to, which is probably fictitious, takes place after Columbus has returned to Europe. Some Spanish noblemen tell him over dinner that if he hadn’t found America, someone else would have done. 188
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Glossary
Columbus challenges them to make an egg stand on its end; they all fail, then he knocks the egg on the table, flattening the end, and succeeds. 5
Hotel de Ville: town hall, typically a grand public building
6 powerful ends: ‘End’ describes a position in American football. 6 Georgian Colonial mansion: a type of architecture from the 18th and early 19th centuries, particularly before the American War of Independence (1775–83) 10 bond man: Bonds are a kind of financial product that involve the seller owing a debt to the buyer. Bond transactions expanded significantly in the 1920s, both in the USA and financial markets around the world. 13
‘ The Rise of the Colored Empires’…Goddard: This is an allusion to Lothrop Stoddard’s The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy (1920), a white supremacist book published by Scribner’s (a prominent US publishing house). It advocated strict separation between races and stoked fears of population growth and migration challenging white dominance.
14
Nordics: in racialist discourse of the 19th and 20th centuries, supposedly a sub-group of the white or Caucasian race
16
C unard or White Star Line: These were two major cruise lines that ran routes across the Atlantic. The nightingale is, by implication, British or at least European.
17 the war: the First World War (1914–18), also known as the Great War (as it was then called) 17 out of the ether: Ether was used as a form of anaesthetic during surgical operations, including childbirth. 18 Saturday Evening Post: American magazine, published weekly, in which some of Fitzgerald’s own stories appeared 19 rotogravure: type of printing process particularly associated with newspaper and magazine production 19 Asheville and Hot Springs and Palm Beach: these three locations were well known in the 1920s for wealthy holidaymakers and sporting pastimes such as golf and tennis 189
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21 published the banns: public announcement of an intended marriage Chapter 2 25 crêpe-de-chine: a type of light silk fabric, fashionable in the 1920s 27 Town Tattle: This is a made-up gossip magazine, perhaps based on Town Topics. The real-life magazine was involved in a prominent libel trial in the early 1900s and its publisher was accused of blackmailing people to avoid the magazine publishing stories about them. 27 John D. Rockefeller: one of the most prominent American businessmen of the late 19th and early 20th centuries (compare with J.P. Morgan; see entry for p.4) 27
Airedale: type of large terrier often used in police work and during the First World War
28 The Park… the West Hundreds: Fitzgerald is referring to Central Park and the streets to the west and northwest of it, from the wealthy Upper West Side through Harlem and up towards Washington Heights. 29 gardens of Versailles: The Palace of Versailles was the residential seat of the French royal family, noted for its lavishness and grandeur. Simon Called Peter: This popular novel by Robert Keable 29 was published in 1921. Nick’s judgment about the book may reflect Fitzgerald’s own view of it. 30 bob: type of short haircut, fashionable in the 1920s and associated with the flapper style 30 ectoplasm: This is an allusion to spiritualism, a popular movement in the 1920s, which held that the spirits of the dead remain and are able to communicate with the living. Ectoplasm is a substance it is thought that spiritual mediums emit when communing with the dead. 32 Montauk Point – The Gulls… The Sea: McKee’s titles seem exaggeratedly stylish and modern, possibly pretentious. Montauk Point is on Long Island, at the easternmost tip, and is sometimes referred to as ‘The End’ – the final point in New York State looking out toward the Atlantic, and Europe. 190
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