By ARTHUR MIZENER
he Great Gatsby" is thirty-five years old this spring. It is probably safe now to say that it is a classic of twentieth-century American fiction. There are three editions of it in print, and its text has become a subject of concern to professional bibliographers. It has not always been so, nor has "Gatsby" always sold at the rate of 50,000 copies a year, as it did last year. In 1937, when Fitzgerald wanted to give Miss Sheilah Graham copies of his books, they went from bookstore to bookstore only to be told again and again that there were no copies of any of them in stock. There is a special irony in the belated fame of "Gatsby" because Fitzgerald was a man like Gatsby himself, at least in this, that he had a heroic dream of the possibilities of life and a need, amounting almost to a sense of duty, to realize that dream. If the world was for him, as it was for Gatsby, "material without being real" unless he could live with that dream, the dream was a mere self-indulgence unless he could realize it in the actual world.
As one of his friends said when his work became popular again in the early Fifties, "How Scott would have loved to know that people admired and cared for his books!" He could have, and not out of vanity, but because his sense of achievement, his very sense of identity, depended on recognition.
Like so many of the feelings that went deepest with him, this one came out most clearly in the wry jokes and drunken extravagances of his defeated years. About the time he was discovering that the bookstores no longer carried his books, he wrote himself a postal card. It said: "Dear Scott - How are you? Have been meaning to come in and see you. I have [been] living at the Garden of Allah. Yours, Scott Fitzgerald." And whenever he was drunk, he would insist on telling people who he was and pressing them to recognize him - "I'm F. Scott Fitzgerald. You've read my books. You've read "The Great Gatsby," haven't you? Remember?"
With all the terrible irony of the original speaker, he could have said, "Tis better to be vile than vile esteemed, When not to be receives reproach of being." And indeed, he did say it, in "Pasting It Together." "If you were dying of starvation outside my window," he wrote there, "I would give you the smile and the voice (if no longer the hand) and stick around till somebody raised a nickel to phone for the ambulance, that is if I thought there would be any copy in it for me."
But when , a little later, he summoned up once again his whole sense of life for his last hero - Monroe Stahr, the producer in "The Last Tycoon" - he imagined a man who, though dying, fought to control a whole industry in order that he might create something that was both good and popular. Stahr is deceived about nothing. When a British novelist he has hired to write scripts says, "It's this mass production," Stahr answers, "That's the condition. There's always some lousy condition." Like Stahr, Fitzgerald always tried to make his work as good as he knew how to, and, like him, he could not believe in the reality of an unrecognized good.
Since this was his sense of things, there was a special irony for Fitzgerald in the reception of "The Great Gatsby." It was an immediate success with professional writers and that curious underground of serious readers in America who have, almost alone, kept many good books alive when the reviewers and the popular audience have ignored them, as they did "Gatsby." At its publication they thought it skillful light fiction. For the next twenty-five years, on the rare occasions when it was discussed, it was considered a nostalgic period piece with "the sadness and the remote jauntiness of a Gershwin tune," as Peter Quennell said in 1941.
For a man with Fitzgerald's almost renaissance fooling that "if our-virtues/ Did not go forth of us, 'twere all alike/ As if we had them not," this reception was unfortunate. Indeed, because he had staked on "Gatsby" his hope of the only life he really cared for, the life of a serious writer, it was disastrous. He made later efforts to achieve that life, but in a very real sense he lost his faith in its possibility for good with "Gatsby's" failure to achieve recognition.
He had begun to plan the novel in June, 1923, saying to Maxwell Perkins, "I want to write something new - something extraordinary and beautiful and simple and intricately patterned.' But that summer and fall was devoted to the production of his play, "The Vegetable." When it failed miserably he discovered he had many debts and had to spend the winter of 192 working night and day on magazine stories to pay them. The stories were, he said, "all trash and it nearly broke my heart."
It was not until April, 1924, that he could write in his Ledger, "Out of woods at last and starting novel." But very little of it - not more than the first chapter - was on paper before he was interrupted again when he and Zelda decided to move to the Riviera, where a serious crisis in their personal relations developed. By August, however, he was back at work, not to be interrupted again until he sent the manuscript to Maxwell Perkins on October 30.
The exhausting and valueless work of the previous winter, together with his lifelong anxiety about loss of time, sharpened Fitzgerald's feeling that "Gatsby" was the supreme test. He committed all his imaginative resources to it, and despite his anxious joking about it between its completion and publication he clearly knew it was a good book. The question was whether it would be recognized for what it was. "Write me the opinion you may be pleased to form of my chef-d'oeuvre and others' opinion," he said to John Peale Bishop. "Please! I think it's great because it deals with much debauched materials, quick-deciders like Rascoe may mistake it for Chambers."
Up to the very last possible moment he was busy rushing revisions to Scribner's, including an extensive rewriting of Chapter VI, in which Daisy and Tom Buchanan come to Gatsby's party, and an entirely new version of Chapter VII, which describes the crucial quarrel at the Plaza between Gatsby and Tom. At the same time he refused an off of $10,000 for the serial rights in order not to delay the book's publication.
By publication day - April 10, 1925 - he was almost beside himself, and within twenty-four hours he was cabling Perkins, ludicrously and touchingly, "Any news?" When the news did come, it was far from what he had hoped for. Good readers, to be sure, saw how fine a book "Gatsby" was, and it meant a great deal to him to get perceptive letters of praise form writers life T. S. Eliot, Edith Wharton and Willa Cather. But this was after all private opinion, and much as he treasured it, what Fitzgerald needed was the public recognition of reviewers and readers.
What really shook him was "that of all the reviews, even the most enthusiastic, not one had the slightest idea what the book was about." They found in it only the bright but trivial talent they had seen in his earlier books. "Gatsby" was they said, "clever and brilliantly surfaced but not the work of a wise and mature novelist"; it was "a little slack, a little soft, more than a little artificial, [falling] into the class of negligible novels." Mencken said that it was "certainly not to be put on the same shelf with, say, "This Side of Paradise," and Isabel Paterson that "what has never been alive cannot very well go on living; so this is a book for the season only."
Nor did the sales of "Gatsby" suggest any general recognition of its nature: by October, when the original sale had run its course, it was still short of 20,000. In 1926 Owen Davis' dramatic version had a successful run in New York, and in the same year Paramount issued a sentimentalized movie. Both brought Fitzgerald money that he needed, but they did not bring him what he needed more, the kind of recognition that would make real for him the serious novelist he dreamed of becoming.
In the last year of his life he wrote his daughter, "I wish now I'd never relaxed or looked back - but said at the end of 'The Great Gatsby': I've found my line - from now on this comes first. This is my immediate duty - without this I am nothing.'" But though without this he was, in his own eyes, almost literally nothing, this is to blame himself for not having acted in a way that, given his nature, was not really possible for him.
For at least a decade after the publication of "Gatsby" the reviewers' estimate continued to be the public opinion of it - if it was thought of at all, as it usually was not. In 1933 Matthew Josephson, in an article on "The Younger Novelists," was pointing an admonitory finger at Fitzgerald and urging him to recognize that "there are ever so many Americans who can't drink champagne from morning to night, or even go to Princeton or Montparnasse" - as if Fitzgerald had not shown in "Gatsby" the deep and meretricious tragedy of their longing to.
A year or so later Harry Hartwick was describing his work as the kind "in which sensuality becomes half flippant and half sentimental and plays the youthful ape to sophistication," a remark that must - if Fitzgerald ever saw it - have reminded him ironically of what he believed to be "Gatsby's" one great defect, its failure to represent the relation between Daisy and Gatsby, a failure he admitted was the result of his own unwillingness to face the "sensuality" of the only relation that was possible for them. In 1934 "Gatsby" was introduced into The Modern Library, but it was dropped in 1939 because it failed to see.
All through this time, however, the book kept its underground audience. "'The Great Gatsby,'" says J. D. Salinger's Buddy Glass, "was my 'Tom Sawyer' when I was twelve." (Like Salinger himself, Buddy was twelve in 1931.) Writers like John O'Hara were showing its influence and younger men like Edward Newhouse and Budd Schulberg, who would presently be deeply affected by it, were discovering it. And to their eternal credit, Scriber's kept it in print; they carried the original edition on their trade list until 1946, by which time "Gatsby" was in print in three other forms and the original edition was no longer needed.
By the late Thirties faint echoes of this underground option were being heard on the surface. In 1935, T. S. Matthews, reviewing "Taps at Reveilly" for The New Republic, was saying, "there seems to be a feeling abroad that it would be kinder not to take any critical notice of the goings-on of Fitzgerald [the short-story writer], since his better half [the novelist] is such a superior person but there is no real difference." A little later Herbert Mueller observed with remarkable inconsistency that, though "Gatsby" was "tinged with the flippancy, the hard-boiled sentimentality, and cock-eyed idealism of [its] period," it was "on the whole honestly, soberly, brilliantly done."
This was about the state of opinion when Fitzgerald's death late in 1940 and the republication of "Gatsby" in Edmund Wilson's edition of "The Last "Tycoon" in 1941 produced an outburst of comment. Most of it agreed with the judgement, if not the reasoning, of Margaret Marshall, who observed in The Nation that Fitzgerald had been a failure, apparently because he could not survive the world's discovery that "the October Revolution was nothing but a heap of Stalinish cinders," but that "Gatsby" was "enduring." But the voices of those who had always admired "Gatsby" were getting louder.
The New Yorker's "Talk of the Town" had a devastating comment on the ill-informed obituaries in the New York papers, and The New Republic papers, and The New Republic - then under Malcolm Cowley's literary editorship - put together a group of wholly serious tributes to Fitzgerald from writers as diverse as Glenway Wescott and Budd Schulberg. As late as 1944, when Charles Weir published the first full-length article on Fitzgerald, the two judgments of his work were still just about in balance. But by 1945 the opinion that "Gatsby" was merely a period piece had almost entirely disappeared.
In that year New Directions published Edmund Wilson's edition of "The Crack-UP," and a new edition of "Gatsby," with an introduction by Lionel Trilling which quietly asserted that "Fitzgerald is now beginning to take his place in out literary tradition." In that year, too, "Gatsby" was reprinted in The Viking Portable Fitzgerald and in Bantam Books. There were still faint echoes of the old attitude in the slick magazines. Time continued to suppose that in "Gatsby" Fitzgerald was "portraying the hollowness of his racketeering hero's life," and Newsweek that "Fitzgerald evaded almost every issue of his time." But most reviewers were now taking the importance of "Gatsby' for granted and trying to explain it.
Malcolm Cowley wrote a brilliant article for The New Yorker, and William Troy pointed out that Gatsby is "one of the few truly mythological creations in out culture." By 1946 full-length articles were developing this view in the Kenyon and Sewanee reviews, though it is amusing to notice that the final evidence of a book's acceptance as a classic - a rash of M. A. and Ph. D. essays about it - did not begin until after 1951, the year that two full-length books (three if one counts Mr. Schulberg's "The Disenchanted") were devoted to Fitzgerald.
Now ten years later, the obvious values of the book have been reasonably established, and we are ready to consider the qualities which, though more difficult to deal with, are probably quite as important. One is the book's realization of the fluidity of American lives, the perception being Tom Buchanan's wistful drifting here and there, "wherever people played polo and were rich together, ' in Wolfsheim's sentimental longings for the old Metropole, in Nick Carroway's wry feeling that Tom and Daisy were two old friends I scarcely knew at all," in Gatsby's whole career. Another is the book's voice, "more important," as Lionel Trilling has said, "than [its] shape or its wit of metaphor."
Almost for the first time Fitzgerald created with that voice an image of The Good American of our time in all his complexity of human sympathy, firm moral judgment and ironic self-possession. We can now afford to turn our attention to such things - because, whatever disagreements we may have over Fitzgerald's work as a whole, there remain few doubts of the greatness of "Gatsby" or of its imaginative relevance to American experience.
