Living Gatsby programme

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THE GREAT GATSBY LIVING LITERATURE

‘I like large parties. They’re so intimate.’

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CONTENTS 3 Excerpt - The Great Gatsby (1925) 4 Introduction 6 Excerpt - The Great Gatsby (1925) 8 Cocktail hour 9 Excerpt - ‘A Short A utobiography’ (1929) 10 Excerpt - ‘The Jelly-Bean’ (1922) 12 The rules of street craps 15 Essay - ‘A Jazz History of the World’ in 1922 18 Excerpt - ‘Dice, Brassknuckles, and Guitar’ (1923) 20 Excerpt - The Great Gatsby (1925) 22 Excerpt - Etiquette (1922) 25 Essay -The Great Gatsby in London, 1927: A silent film comes to Britain 27 Epilogue

Femme Fatale, 1922

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EXCERPT From The Great Gatsby (1925)

by F. Scott Fitzgerald “He’s a bootlegger,” said the young ladies, moving somewhere between his cocktails and his flowers. “One time he killed a man who had found out that he was nephew to von Hindenburg and second cousin to the devil. Reach me a rose, honey, and pour me a last drop into that there crystal glass.” Once I wrote down on the empty spaces of a time-table the names of those who came to Gatsby’s house that summer. It is an old time-table now, disintegrating at its folds and headed “This schedule in effect July 5th, 1922.”

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INTRODUCTION Welcome to Living Gatsby, the first of a new series we will be offering each spring at Senate House called Living Literature.

Sponsored by the School of Advanced Study at the University of London, these immersive, creative events use research expertise to bring iconic works of art to life for the public. Trying to get in the spirit of a given book, experts will create exploratory events in which audiences encounter the ideas, themes and contexts that shaped it.

Think of The Great Gatsby, and you think of a party: so for our first outing, we decided to throw one. But this is a party with an educational twist, using curated scholarship to deepen our understanding of what a party in 1922 — the kind of party F. Scott Fitzgerald routinely attended, and which his novel is rendering — was really like.

History and literature converge in a novel that is suffused with sensory experiences

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(which is one of the reasons why it remains so vivid in so many readers’ memories). We have designed an event that lets you experience some of those imagined pleasures for yourself. Using a combination of museum-style displays, pop-up talks, roaming ‘experts at large,’ and the information in this programme, we have tried to creatively share our research into this fascinating moment in history, and the magical novel it inspired.

And throughout the event we have planted ‘clues’ linking all of these contexts back to the novel and to the realities of Scott Fitzgerald’s jazz-age world.

We believe passionately that serious learning can be seriously fun. And, like Jay Gatsby himself, we remain stubbornly convinced that maybe, against all the odds, we can recreate the past…

Professor Sarah Churchwell Director, Living Literature

New York Tribune, July 2, 1922

‘The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon. They were both in white and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house…’

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EXCERPT From The Great Gatsby (1925)

by F. Scott Fitzgerald AT least once a fortnight a corps of caterers came down with several hundred feet of canvas and enough colored lights to make a Christmas tree of Gatsby's enormous garden. On buffet tables, garnished with glistening hors-d'oeuvre, spiced baked hams crowded against salads of harlequin designs and pastry pigs and turkeys bewitched to a dark gold. In the main hall a bar with a real brass rail was set up, and stocked with gins and liquors and with cordials so long forgotten that most of his female guests were too young to know one from another.

By seven o'clock the orchestra has arrived—no thin five-piece affair but a whole pitful of oboes and trombones and saxophones and viols and cornets and piccolos and low and high drums. The last swimmers have come in from the beach now and are dressing upstairs; the cars from New York are parked five deep in the drive, and already the halls and salons and verandas are gaudy with primary colors and hair shorn in strange new ways and shawls beyond the dreams of Castile.

The bar is in full swing and floating rounds of cocktails permeate the garden outside until the air is alive with chatter and laughter and casual innuendo and introductions forgotten on the spot and enthusiastic meetings between women who never knew each other's names.

The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun and now the orchestra is playing yellow cocktail 6

music and the opera of voices pitches a key higher. Laughter is easier, minute by minute, spilled with prodigality, tipped out at a cheerful word. The groups change more swiftly, swell with new arrivals, dissolve and form in the same breath— already there are wanderers, confident girls who weave here and there among the stouter and more stable, become for a sharp, joyous moment the center of a group and then excited with triumph glide on through the sea-change of faces and voices and color under the constantly changing light.

Suddenly one of these gypsies in trembling opal, seizes a cocktail out of the air, dumps it down for courage and moving her hands like Frisco dances out alone on the canvas platform. A momentary hush; the orchestra leader varies his rhythm obligingly for her and there is a burst of chatter as the erroneous news goes around that she is Gilda Gray's understudy from the “Follies.” The party has begun.

New York Tribune, July 30, 1922

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COCKTAIL HOUR Mint Julep mint 1 teaspoon sugar 3 oz. bourbon old-fashioned glass Place 5 or 6 leaves of mint in the bottom of glass. Add sugar and crush slightly with a muddler. Pack glass with finely cracked ice. Pour bourbon over the ice, finish with ice and garnish with mint.

‘Another pause. A waiter knocked and came in with crushed mint and ice but the silence was unbroken by his “Thank you” and the soft closing of the door. [...] “Open the whiskey, Tom,” she ordered.’

Gin Rickey 1 1/2 oz. gin juice of 1/2 lime carbonated water 1 lime wedge Pour juice of lime and gin into a highball glass over ice cubes. Fill with carbonated water and stir. Add the wedge of lime and serve.

‘With a reluctant backward glance the welldisciplined child held to her nurse's hand and was pulled out of the door, just as Tom came back, preceding four gin rickeys that clicked full of ice.’

The Last Word The Last Word is said to have been invented in 1922 at the Detroit Athletic Club by bartender Frank Fogarty. ¾ oz. gin ¾ oz. green Chartreuse ¾ oz. Maraschino liqueur ¾ oz. freshly squeezed lime juice Shake ingredients and strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Garnish with a lemon twist.

‘Finally we came to Gatsby's own apartment, a bedroom and a bath and an Adam study, where we sat down and drank a glass of some Chartreuse he took from a cupboard in the wall…’

EXCERPT ‘A Short Autobiography’ by F. Scott Fitzgerald The New Yorker May 25, 1929

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The Bourbon smuggled to officers’ rooms by bellboys at the Seelbach in Louisville.

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The Sazzarac Cocktails brought up from New Orleans to Montgomery to celebrate an important occasion.

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Red wine at Mollat’s. Absinthe cocktails in a hermetically sealed apartment in the Royalton. Corn liquor by moonlight in a deserted aviation field in Alabama.

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Leaving our Champagne at the Savoy Grill on the Fourth of July when a drunk brought up two obviously Piccadilly ladies. Yellow Chartreuse in the Via Balbini in Rome.

1922

Kaly’s crème de cacao cocktails in St. Paul. My own first and last manufacture of gin.

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EXCERPT ‘The Jelly-Bean’ by F. Scott Fitzgerald from Tales of the Jazz Age (1922)

“I’M right to-night,” Nancy sang out, “and my four bits is in the ring.”

“Faded!” snapped Taylor suddenly.

“Why, Mr. Taylor, I didn’t know you shot craps!” Nancy was overjoyed to find that he had seated himself and instantly covered her bet. They had openly disliked each other since the night she had definitely discouraged a series of rather pointed advances.

“All right, babies, do it for your mamma. Just one little seven.” Nancy was cooing to the dice. She rattled them with a brave underhand flourish, and rolled them out on the table.

“Ah-h! I suspected it. And now again with the dollar up.”

Five passes to her credit found Taylor a bad loser. She was making it personal, and after each success Jim watched triumph flutter across her face.

She was doubling with each throw — such luck could scarcely last. “Better go easy,” he cautioned her timidly.

“Ah, but watch this one,” she whispered. It was eight on the dice and she called her number.

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“Little Ada, this time we’re going South.”

Ada from Decatur rolled over the table. Nancy was flushed and halfhysterical, but her luck was holding.

She drove the pot up and up, refusing to drag. Taylor was drumming with his fingers on the table but he was in to stay.

Then Nancy tried for a ten and lost the dice. Taylor seized them avidly.

He shot in silence, and in the hush of excitement the clatter of one pass after another on the table was the only sound.

Now Nancy had the dice again, but her luck had broken. […]

“How ‘bout another?” she said wildly. “Jes’ any bank’ll do — money everywhere as a matter of fact.”

Jim understood —-the “good old corn” he had given her — the “good old corn” she had taken since. […]

When the clock struck two he contained himself no longer.

“May I— can’t you let me roll ’em for you?” he suggested, his low, lazy voice a little strained.

Suddenly sleepy and listless, Nancy flung the dice down before him.

“All right — old boy! As Lady Diana Manners says, ‘Shoot ’em, Jellybean’— My luck’s gone.”

“Mr. Taylor,” said Jim, carelessly, “we’ll shoot for one of those there checks against the cash.”

Half an hour later Nancy swayed forward and clapped him on the back.

“Stole my luck, you did.” She was nodding her head sagely.

Jim swept up the last check and putting it with the others tore them into confetti and scattered them on the floor.

Someone started singing and Nancy kicking her chair backward rose to her feet. […]

“My error,” she laughed, “she — stoops to — stoops to — anyways — We’ll drink to Jelly-bean . . . Mr. Jim Powell, King of the Jelly-beans.”

John Held, Playing in by Moonlight (undated)

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THE RULES OF STREET CRAPS The lingo The shooter is the player who rolls the dice, and will be a different player for each game The come out is the initial roll To pass is to roll a 7 or 11 on the come out roll To crap is to roll a 2, 3 or 12 on the come out roll The point is any value between 4 and 10 rolled on the come out To seven out is to roll a 7 before rolling the point

The basics Craps is played with two dice, which are used by a single player in each game.

Players roll the dice to determine who will roll for that game, and then all the participants will place bets on whether or not the person rolling will ‘pass’ on the first roll (by rolling a 7 or 11), or ‘crap out’ (by rolling a 2, 3 or a 12). If one of those values is reached on the first roll, the game is over and the bets are distributed accordingly.

The player shooting the dice is the first to bet and the other players must match the bet before the game can continue. If the bet cannot be matched, the shooter can lower the

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bet, or handicap the odds. Once the shooter's bet has been matched, the other players may place side bets.

The rules of the point If the shooter neither passes nor craps out on the first roll, then the number rolled becomes the ‘point’. Now, the only two values that matter are the point value and 7.

The player must continue rolling until the point or 7 is reached. All bets that the shooter would ‘pass’ are now bets that the shooter will re-roll the value of the point, before rolling a 7. All bets to the contrary are bets that 7 will be rolled first. The game goes to point when the shooter rolls the point or 7, the game is over and the bets are awarded.

Cecil B. Demille’s Manslaughter: released September 24, 1922, Scott Fitzgerald’s 26th birthday

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Image from The New York Evening World, June 7, 1922

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ESSAY ‘A Jazz History of the World’ in 1922

by Sadaf Fahim

AGAINST the advice of his publisher, F. Scott Fitzgerald called his 1922 short story collection Tales of the Jazz Age. At the time, ‘jazz’ was generally a pejorative, suggesting a trivial passing fad (much as ‘pop’ is used today). But Fitzgerald’s phrase ‘the jazz age’ was swiftly adopted, becoming the decade’s permanent title.

When Fitzgerald wrote The Great Gatsby two years later, he set the novel in the summer of 1922 — the year he would later call the ‘peak’ of the jazz age. Jazz, a name used to describe a crude ‘hokum’ music treated as a novelty, was new to the American scene. What we now regard

Paul Whiteman and his orchestra, 1921

as one of the defining art forms of the twentieth century was then regarded with derision — or worse.

With racial segregation still firmly in place, there was little opportunity for the general public to hear, unfiltered, the jazz played by African-American musicians. For people in Fitzgerald’s almost entirely white milieu, ‘jazz’ could denote almost any kind of popular music — from the ‘sweet’ orchestral jazz popularised by America’s most famous band leader Paul Whiteman, to the comical or sentimental vaudeville tunes of Tin Pan Alley. The songs Fitzgerald names in The Great Gatsby all fit the bill: the jaunty, darkly ironic ‘Ain’t We Got Fun’ was first performed in the revue Satires of 1920; ‘Beale Street Blues’ was popularised by Gilda Gray in the Gaieties

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of 1919; ‘Three O’Clock in the Morning’ was the closing number in the Greenwich Village Follies of 1921, before Paul Whiteman’s instrumental recording made ‘a neat, sad little waltz’ of it in 1922; ‘The Love Nest’ was a catchy pop hit from George M. Cohan’s 1920 musical comedy Mary; the 1921 Tin Pan Alley hit ‘The Sheik of Araby’ was written in response to the wildly popular Rudolph Valentino film The Sheik. Many later critics have argued that these types of popular music were not truly jazz at all. But to the Americans in 1922 — the Americans portrayed in Gatsby — this was jazz.

Moreover, it was the only jazz that most Americans had heard.

It was not until 1924, as Fitzgerald was composing The Great Gatsby, that mainstream white composers — most influentially George Gershwin — began to experiment seriously with jazz as a musical artform. The results, though commercially successful, were widely met with ridicule and disgust. Fitzgerald wrote those jazz experiments, as well as the more popular forms of jazz music, into his novel.

The jazz composition that is played at Jay Gatsby’s first party, as he stands alone on the marble steps, is ‘Vladimir Tostoff’s Jazz History of the World’ — a parody of Paul Whiteman’s 1924 concert, ‘An Experiment in Modern Music,’ held at New York City’s Aeolian Hall. The New York Times reviewer, Olin Downes, wrote that a ‘litter’ of rickety pianos and various sizes of brass instruments were strewn about the stage, as well as ‘frying pans, large tin utensils and a speaking trumpet, later stuck into the end of a trombone.’

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The programme explained that Whiteman wanted to demonstrate how far popular music had come from ‘the discordant jazz, which sprang into existence about ten years ago from nowhere in particular, to the really melodious music of today, which — for no good reason — is still called jazz.’ Before the now-familiar opening strains of Gershwin’s ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ filled the hall, Whiteman offered the audience his tour of jazz history, starting with the 1917 hit ‘Livery Stable Blues.’ What Whiteman intended as a burlesque of the music’s crude origins, as many saw it, was met with enthusiasm instead. There was a great deal of lively, suggestive humor in the earlier jazz. ‘Jests permissible in musical terms but otherwise not printable were passed between these friends of music,’ Olin Downes wrote.

This jazz was a dirty joke — which is why Fitzgerald gives his composer the very rude name ‘Tostoff’ and says it was delivered ‘lustily’ by the bandleader. The joke was familiar; Gatsby’s party guests all laugh at the reminder of the ‘sensation’ caused in the papers. That sensation — like the sensation Gatsby himself creates — was ridiculed. The jazz Fitzgerald gives us in The Great Gatsby is vulgar, rude, and satirical.

Jazz signalled the arrival of the modern world. Its fast pace and improvisational vigour struck many people, unaccustomed to its sounds, as senseless, chaotic and ugly. This is the music of West Egg, the music of Jay Gatsby’s kaleidoscopic, gorgeously riotous world.

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EXCERPT From ‘Dice, Brassknuckles, and Guitar’

by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1923)

SHE took the card. In large lettering it bore the legend JAMES POWELL; J.M. “Dice, Brassknuckles and Guitar”

She stared in amazement.

“Dice, Brassknuckles and Guitar?” she repeated in awe.

“Yes mamm.”

“What does it mean? What—do you sell ’em?”

“No mamm, I teach ’em. It’s a profession.”

“Dice, Brassknuckles and Guitar? What’s the J. M.?”

“That stands for Jazz Master.”

“But what is it? What’s it about?” […]

“I got to thinkin’ that these girls nowadays—these society girls—they lead a sort of dangerous life and my course of study offers a means of protection against these dangers.”

“You teach ’em to use brassknuckles?”

“Yes mamm, if necessary. […]

She just reaches down in her pocket and 18

slips her fingers into a pair of Powell’s defensive brassknuckles, débutante’s size, executes what I call the Society Hook, and Wham! that big fella’s on his way to the cellar.”

“Well—what—what’s the guitar for?” whispered the awed Amanthis. “Do they have to knock somebody over with the guitar?”

“No, mamm!” exclaimed Jim in horror. “No mamm. In my course no lady would be taught to raise a guitar against anybody. I teach ’em to play.

Shucks! you ought to hear ’em. Why, when I’ve given ’em two lessons you’d think some of ’em was colored.”

“And the dice?”

“Dice? I’m related to a dice. My grandfather was a dice. I teach ’em how to make those dice perform. I protect pocketbook as well as person.”

“Did you—Have you got any pupils?”

“Mamm I got all the really nice, rich people in the place. What I told you ain’t all. I teach lots of things. I teach ‘em the jelly—roll and the Mississippi Sunrise. Why, there was one girl she came to me and said she wanted to learn

to snap her fingers. I mean really snap ’em—like they do.” […]

They walked around among the groups. Some girls with metal knuckles were furiously insulting two punching bags on each of which was painted the leering, winking face of a “masher.” A mixed group, led by a banjo tom-tom, were rolling harmonic syllables from their guitars. There were couples dancing flat-footed in the corner to a phonograph record made by Rastus Muldoon’s

Savannah Band; there were couples stalking a slow Chicago with a Memphis Sideswoop solemnly around the room. […]

During all the discussion of it afterwards no one ever denied that it was an enormous success, and no pupil ever regretted having received its degree— Bachelor of Jazz.

John Held, Where the Blue Begins, 1923

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EXCERPT From The Great Gatsby (1925)

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

At Myrtle Wilson’s Apartment

So Tom Buchanan and his girl and I went up together to New York. […] At the news-stand she bought a copy of "Town Tattle" and a movingpicture magazine and, in the station drug store, some cold cream and a small flask of perfume. Upstairs, in the solemn echoing drive she let four taxi cabs drive away before she selected a new one, lavender-colored with grey upholstery, and in this we slid out from the mass of the station into the glowing sunshine. […] Several old copies of “Town Tattle” lay on the table together with a copy of “Simon Called Peter” and some of the small scandal magazines of Broadway.

Mrs. Wilson was first concerned with the dog. A reluctant elevator boy went for a box full of straw and some milk to which he added on his own initiative a tin of large hard dog biscuits—one of which decomposed apathetically in the saucer of milk all afternoon. Meanwhile Tom brought out a bottle of whiskey from a locked bureau door.

I have been drunk just twice in my life and the second time was that afternoon so everything that happened has a dim hazy cast over it although until 20

after eight o'clock the apartment was full of cheerful sun. Sitting on Tom's lap Mrs. Wilson called up several people on the telephone; then there were no cigarettes and I went out to buy some at the drug store on the corner. When I came back they had disappeared so I sat down discreetly in the living room and read a chapter of “Simon Called Peter”— either it was terrible stuff or the whiskey distorted things because it didn't make any sense to me.

The New York Herald, October 15, 1922

Town Topics cover, 1922

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EXCERPT ‘The Clothes of a Gentleman’ Etiquette by Emily Post (1922)

THE TUXEDO The Tuxedo, which is the essential evening dress of a gentleman, is simply the English dinner coat. It was first introduced in this country at the Tuxedo Club to provide something less formal than the swallow-tail, and the name has clung ever since. To a man who can not afford to get two suits of evening clothes, the Tuxedo is of greater importance.

It is worn every evening and nearly everywhere, whereas the tail coat is necessary only at balls, formal dinners, and in a box at the opera. […] The dinner coat has no tails and is cut like a sack suit except that it is held closed in front by one button at the waist line. (A full dress coat, naturally, hangs open.)

The lapels are satin faced, and the collar left in cloth, or if it is shawl-shaped the whole collar is of satin.

The trousers are identical with full dress ones except that braid, if used at all, should be narrow. “Cuffed” trousers are not good form, nor should a dinner coat be double-breasted. Fancy ties are bad form. Choose a plain black silk or satin one. Wear a white waistcoat if you can afford the strain on your laundry bill, otherwise a plain black one. By no means wear a gray one nor a gray tie.

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THE HOUSE SUIT The house suit is an extravagance that may be avoided, and an “old” Tuxedo suit worn instead. A gentleman is always supposed to change his clothes for dinner, whether he is going out or dining at home alone or with his family, and for this latter occasion some inspired person evolved the house, or lounge, suit, which is simply a dinner coat and trousers cut somewhat looser than ordinary evening ones, made of an all-silk or silk and wool fabric in some dark color, and lined with either satin or silk. Nothing more comfortable—or luxurious—could be devised for sitting in a deep easy-chair after dinner, in a reclining position that is ruinous to best evening clothes.

Its purpose is really to save wear on evening clothes, and to avoid some of their discomfort also, because they can not be given hard or careless usage and long survive. A house suit is distinctly what the name implies, and is not an appropriate garment to wear out for dinner or to receive any but intimate guests in at home.

The accessories are a pleated shirt, with turndown stiff collar, and black bow tie, or even an unstarched shirt with collar attached (white of course). The coat is made with two buttons instead of one, because no waistcoat is worn with it.

THE BUSINESS SUIT Don’t get too light a blue, too bright a green, or anything suggesting a horse blanket. At the present moment trousers are made with a cuff; sleeves are not. Lapels are moderately small.

Padded shoulders are an abomination.

Peg-topped trousers equally bad. […]

The clothes of a gentleman are always conservative; and it is safe to avoid everything that can possibly come under the heading of “novelty.”

OTHER HINTS The well-dressed man is always a paradox. He must look as though he gave his clothes no thought and as though literally they grew on him like a dog’s fur,

and yet he must be perfectly groomed.

He must be close-shaved and have his hair cut and his nails in good order (not too polished). His linen must always be immaculate, his clothes “in press,” his shoes perfectly “done.” […] Ties and socks and handkerchief may go together, but too perfect a match betrays an effort for “effect” which is always bad.

The New York Evening World, April 1, 1922

“An Oxford man!” He was incredulous. “Like hell he is! He wears a pink suit.”

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Programme cover from London’s Plaza Theatre’s silent film screening of The Great Gatsby, 1927

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ESSAY The Great Gatsby in London, 1927: a silent film comes to Britain

By Martina Mastandrea

IN 1925 The Great Gatsby was rejected

by F. Scott Fitzgerald’s British publisher William Collins, who explained: ‘I do not think the British public would make head or tail of it and I know it would not sell.’

Fitzgerald was ‘awfully anxious’ to have his third novel published in England, as he believed it was ‘the sort of book which the English say that Americans can’t write.’

But William Collins deemed the novel ‘too American in its scene to be understood in England.’ Chatto and Windus agreed to publish Gatsby in early 1926, and it proceeded to sell a grand total of 254 copies outside of the US over the next 12 months. That same year saw the first stage version of Gatsby, as well as a silent film adaptation of it, directed by Herbert Brenon, which is now presumed lost: all that remains of the first silent film version of The Great Gatsby is the original trailer, exactly one minute long.

That silent film version quickly made its way to London, however, where it premiered in the West End on 25 February, 1927. The Great Gatsby was most likely shown in the brand new 1,896-seat auditorium of The Plaza, one of most prominent West End cinemas, at the corner of Lower Regent Street and Jermyn Street (the building now houses Tesco Metro and the Vue Piccadilly Circus). Opening a month after Gatsby was published by Chatto and Windus,

the Plaza became Paramount’s British showcase, where the film company screened its most popular moving pictures for exhibitors. The Great Gatsby may in fact have been one of the first films reproduced with Magnoscope, an exciting new system for increasing the size of the picture for special sequences that Paramount had installed at The Plaza that same month.

The grand, ornate building, featuring a café and a Wurlitzer organ, was designed in the style of the Italian Renaissance, the foyer furnished with genuine antiques. Jay Gatsby, one imagines, would have felt right at home.

British audiences may not have been interested in Fitzgerald’s novel, but the silent film version was widely discussed.

The Great Gatsby is now widely construed as a glamorous, nostalgic and romantic tale, but 1920s British newspapers and film magazines attest to the extent to which Gatsby was understood as a realistic critique of modern times; as Gertrude Stein told Fitzgerald when she read the novel in 1925, he was ‘creating the contemporary world.’

Contemporary audiences in both the US and Britain saw it as a work of realistic, and somewhat dark, satire. The Times Literary Supplement review in February 1926 admired the novel, while mentioning Fitzgerald’s ‘hard, sardonic realism’, and ‘the really very unpleasant characters of this story.’ A week after the London release of the film, the leading trade paper for the British film industry, Kinematograph Weekly, noted the ‘amount of novelty in this somewhat grim triangle’, while the Stoll Herald enjoyed the story’s ‘blend of romance, intrigue and satire’, promising 25

the film offered a ‘realistic hero such as no other film has ever possessed, because he is like many of the public figures whose names are household words to us.’ British local newspapers also emphasised the realistic and satirical power of The Great Gatsby. The Scottish newspaper the Falkirk Herald called the film ‘a brilliant picture adapted from the famous novel. A pleasing social satire, centring about a romantic mysterious personality’ — a review that suggests that the success of the film helped spread awareness of the novel. Another Scottish local paper suggested its readers go and see ‘an altogether pleasing social satire’, while the Nottingham Evening Post also deemed Gatsby as a ‘very attractive film’, stressing, again, ‘its clever social satire’.

The Hull Daily Mail considered the story unusual ‘in its choice of a hero who, unlike the male character in the average film, does not participate in the final “fade out”.’

The film was shown throughout Great Britain at least from 25 July 1927 to 11 April 1928, reaching a much greater audience than the novel did in its first years of release. While Fitzgerald asked his editor Maxwell Perkins, ‘Has the play’s success helped the book Gatsby?,’ it is also legitimate to wonder how many of the hundreds of purchasers of the book in 1927 bought it thanks to the substantial exposure of its film adaptation on the British silver screens. Although, to Fitzgerald’s distress, the novel The Great Gatsby was ‘dead in the (American) market before the end of 1925,’ the movies kept its story alive a few years more, at least in the UK. Joseph Stella, The White Way II, 1920-1922

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EPILOGUE With thanks to the alumni and friends of the University of London for their generous support, and thank you to our partners AB Lighting, Katy Balfour, Caitlin Albery Beavan, Blackwell’s books, Brighton Gin, Cosprop, How To: Academy, The London Gin Club, Sacred Gin and 4160Tuesdays.

Thanks to our performers Matthew Blake, Kate Hargreaves, Kathryn McGarr.

Programme designed by Jo Chard.

Programme and exhibition contents curated by Professor Sarah Churchwell, Sadaf Fahim, Martina Mastandrea.

Image credits Page 2 © Sue Napier / Shutterstock.com Page 5 Public domain via Chronicling America Library of Congress Page 6 © 501room / Shutterstock.com Page 7 Public domain via Chronicling America Library of Congress Page 11 © Illustration House, Ltd Page 13 Public domain via Wikimedia Commons Page 14 Public domain via Chronicling America Library of Congress Page 15 Fredrik Tersmeden / Public domain via Wikimedia Commons Page 17 Public domain via Wikimedia Commons Page 19 Public domain via Chronicling America Library of Congress Page 20 Public domain via Chronicling America Library of Congress Page 21 Public domain via Chronicling America Library of Congress Page 23 Public domain via Chronicling America Library of Congress Page 24 Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Exeter Page 26 Public domain via Wikimedia Commons Patterns by © supermimicry / Shutterstock.com

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‘So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.’

School of Advanced Study Senate House Malet Street London WC1E 7HU United Kingdom Email sas.info@sas.ac.uk Telephone +44 (0)20 7862 8833 www.sas.ac.uk bit.ly/SAS_newsletter

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