The American Dream: All Gush and Twinkle by Louis Anchincloss

I have classified Nathaniel Hawthorne‘s The Scarlet Letter, Emily Bronte‘s Wuthering Heights, and F. Scott Fitzgerald‘s The Great Gatsby as “perfect” for a special reason. In each case the author has created something totally unreal, yet at the same time totally satisfying, a dazzling artifact, compact, cohesive, a fine hard jewel that can be turned round and round, and admired from every angle. In each case the author has stripped himself, or herself, of the aids on which a reader normally relies to relate the page before him to some familiar aspect of his own environment. The author has deliberately chosen to be exotic. We see the conjurer, the magician at work.
A woman punished for life for a single fault, a monster of inhumanity on the Yorkshire moors, a bootlegger who lives in a fantasy world—the creators of such protagonists cannot rely on their readers‘ recognition or identification. They are dealing almost with myths.
Now just what do I mean by that? I mean that they are dealing with human stories which, with the use of a little imagination, can be made to relate to any time or condition of man. We can be thrilled by these stories without everwholly understanding them. Are myths ever meant to be wholly understood? Like Delphic oracles, they invite each man‘s interpretation. They have something to say to everybody. . . .

The Great Gatsby

In The Great Gatsby Scott Fitzgerald makes a hero out of a kind of monster. Jay Gatsby, born James Gatz, acquires a fortune, or at least what appears to be one, by the age of thirty, by means that are far from clear but that are certainly dishonest. He starts with bootlegging, but in the end he seems to be engaged in the theft or embezzlement of securities. As Henry James leaves to our imagination how his heroes made their money (because he did not really know), so Fitzgerald allows us to make up our own crimes for Gatsby. But there is no doubt that he is a crook and a tough one, too. He has no friends, only hangers-on, no intellectual interests, no real concern for people. His entire heart and imagination are utterly consumed with his romantic image of Daisy Buchanan, a selfish, silly, giddy creature, who turns in the end into a remorseless hit-and-run driver. What seems to attract him to Daisy is the sense of financial security that she emanates: she has always been, and somehow always will be, abundantly, aboundingly rich. She is the tinselly department store window at Christmastime to the urchin in the street. Her very voice, as Gatsby puts it, “is full of money.”
Fitzgerald is a courageous author. For what is Daisy, dreadful Daisy, but his dream and the American dream at that? He seems to make no bones about it. Vapid, vain, heartless, self-absorbed, she is still able to dispel a charm the effect of which on Gatsby is simply to transform him into a romantic hero. The American dream, then, is an illusion? Certainly. It is all gush and twinkle. But nonetheless its effect on a sentient observer is about all life has to offer.
Is Fitzgerald then seriously telling us that to fall in love with a beautiful heiress with a monied laugh, even if she‘s superficial, selfish, and gutless, is a fitting goal for a man‘s life, and one to justify years of criminal activity? Perhaps not quite. What he may be telling us is that he, the author, by creating the illusion of that illusion, may be doing the only thing worth doing in this vale of constant disillusionment.
To create his illusion of illusion Fitzgerald must set downthe dismal atmosphere of Gatsby‘s life: the senseless, drunken parties, the dull, hard people, the inane conversations, the curious juxtaposition of the luxury of West Egg with the huge garbage dumps of Flushing—and yet make the whole gleam with a hard brittle beauty. It is difficult to see just how he does it, but he does. It is a book of beautiful sentences. Consider this passage in the epilogue:

Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors‘ eyes—a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby‘s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

To me there is much in common between Fitzgerald‘s prose and the paintings of Edward Hopper. Hopper selects dull houses, drab streets, plain people, and invests them with a glow that is actually romantic. No matter what we think of Jay Gatsby and the triviality of his dream, it is impossible not to see what he sees and even feel a bit what he feels. I find myself almost embarrassed, in the end of the book, at regretting his sorry death. As one character says,"He had it coming to him.” He certainly did. But Fitzgerald has caught the magic as well as the folly of Gatsby‘s dream.

A Lonely Experience with Lonely Characters

There is a peculiar power in these three novels that may stem from the isolation of their protagonists. [The Scarlet Letter‘s] Hester lives in a world that is consistently cruel to her. Even those who care about her treat her harshly: her husband tortures her; her lover allows her to be punished alone. [In Wuthering Heights,] Heathcliff lives in a world that hates him and that he despises. Gatsby lives in a world where nobody understands him, except, in the very end, the narrator. Yet Nick Carraway‘s ultimate understanding of his friend costs him his own romance with Jordan Baker. He perceives at last that with her he does not even have the short-lived hope that Gatsby had of sharing with Daisy a perfect life.
The reader‘s experience with these three lonely characters is itself a lonely one. It is difficult to say just why one‘s reaction is so intense. Sometimes I think it is only self-pity. One likes to identify with a person as unjustly treated as Hester; it makes one feel the single sensitive soul in a world of horrid gaolers, and hence something finer than the world. One likes to identify with a dreamer like Gatsby whose dreams are better than anyone else‘s. Or even with Heath-cliff, who revenges himself on a world that has mistreated him and then throws that world away. But the term “self-pity” may be simply denigrating. The business of living is a lonely one for all of us, and these novels repeat, embellish, and illuminate our own inner feelings.

The Great Gatsby as a Business Ethics Inquiry by Tony McAdams

For some time a small but growing number of professors have employed fiction in studying ethics. Perhaps the most prominent exponent of that approach is the child psychiatrist Robert Coles of Harvard who argues that stories engage readers and stir “the moral imagination” in a manner that cannot be matched by other materials. Coles has employed  The Great Gatsby at Harvard to examine ethics. A letter he received from a former Harvard Business School student suggests the power of literature to capture our moral attention:

All of my friends are talking about Ivan Boesky. They want to know what made him tick. I want to know, too. But yesterday, as we talked, 1 realized that I did know—as much, probably, as anyone will ever know. I‘d read The Great Gatsby, and suddenly, as I sat there, in a Wall Street restaurant, Jay Gatsby came to my mind, and our long discussions of what Gatsby is meant to tell us about ourselves. I told my buddies: go get The Great Gatsby, read it, think about it, and then we can talk some more about Boesky (Coles, 1987, p. 14).

For the past two semesters I have experimented with The Great Gatsby in our required, upper division Legal and SocialEnvironment of Business course. The preliminary response has been encouraging, and on that basis I am detailing here an approach to Gatsby as, in part, an expression of Fitzgerald‘s doubts about America‘s moral direction…

Characters

Our first ethics inquiry is an exploration of the book‘s central characters as moral commentaries. In so doing, we introduce the key figures while beginning to treat Gatsby as an examination of American values…
1. Liars. We simply proceed through the principal characters and examine their moral “images.” For example, I argue that each character is a “liar” in some fundamental sense. We then talk about Tom Buchanan and his mistress, Daisy‘s failure to reveal her role in Myrtle Wilson‘s death, Gatsby‘s life as a lie and an illusion, and so on. Broadly, we note the characters‘ cavalier attitudes toward the truth. Nick sets that tone early in the book in commenting on Jordan‘s dishonesty:

It made no difference to me. Dishonesty in a woman is a thing you never blame deeply—I was casually sorry, and then I forgot

At that point, I acquaint the students with some studies attempting to measure the current incidence of lying in America including one poll reporting the remarkable finding that 91 percent of those surveyed admit to “lying regularly” although only 36 percent admit to telling “serious lies” (Patterson, 1991).
2.  Nick‘s moral growth. Professor David Parker, in commenting on The Great Gatsby, raises the issue of Nick‘s moral growth from an inexperienced, complacent midwesterner to a much wiser, more mature man who, after his time in the East, had acquired an understanding of the complexity of humanity (1986, pp. 35-39).
Early on, we learn of Nick‘s traditional prescriptions for life. He recalls his father‘s advice chat “a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.” Even after returning home from the East, Nick admits to wanting the world “at a sort of moral attention forever.” During his first visit to Tom and Daisy Buchanan, his priggish, rule-bound view of life comes to the fore when he learns that Tom is taking a call from his mistress:

To a certain temperament the situation might have seemed intriguing—my own instinct was to telephone immediately for the police.

Later, Nick admits to being “slow-thinking and full of interior rules.” As we proceed through the story, however, Nick begins to sense the complexity in others and in life generally. He comes to admire a man, Gatsby, who breaks all of the rules. He comes to look at life from a variety of viewpoints in keeping with the remarkable array of personalities he had encountered on his sojourn East. Toward the end of the story, as he leaves Jordan behind, Nick acknowledges a new sense of perspective in his moral life.

Jordan: I thought you were rather an honest, straightforward person. I thought it was your secret pride.

Nick: I‘m thirty, I said. I‘m five years too old to lie to myself and call it honor.

Clearly, Nick is confused after his Gatsby experience. He wants to cling to the rules of his midwestern youth, but he senses that life provides more complexity than his rules suggested. Nick‘s moral floundering thus provides an apt point of entry for examining contemporary theories of moral development. I rely on the work of noted developmental psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg (1981) as well as his critics and admirers, but others could be used. Kohlberg built an empirically based theory in which he identified six universal and progressively higher stages of moral development that depended in good part on age (at least up to the early twenties) and education:

• Stage 1: Obey rules to avoid punishment. Accept the dictates of those in authority.
• Stage 2: Follow rules only if doing so is in one‘s self-interest. Cooperate with others in order to secure rewards for oneself.
• Stage 3: Peer pressure. Conform to the expectations of others.
• Stage 4: Rule orientation. Obey the law. Uphold the social order.
• Stage 5: Social contract. Laws and duty are obeyed on the grounds of rational calculations to serve the greatest number.
• Stage 6: Moral autonomy. Follow self-chosen universal principles. In the event of conflict, principles override rules and laws.

Nick‘s unambiguous rule orientation as he heads East stands in clear contrast with the confusion he feels as he prepares his return to the Midwest. Nick seems to be virtually the embodiment of Kohlberg‘s conception of moral growth as he gains increased moral maturity via the intellectual dissonance that leads to moral adjustments…
3. Gatsby and a life of illusion. Jay Gatsby is a boorish fraud. He is adolescent in love. He makes use of others for his selfish purposes. His entire adult life is a lie. Nonetheless, we like and even admire Gatsby. As Nick says to Gatsby, “They‘re a rotten crowd... . You‘re worth the whole damn bunch put together.” Still Nick goes on to note his disapproval of Gatsby “from beginning to end.” Why … do we admire Gatsby? Of course, Gatsby exhibits great charm. In an important sense, he is the embodiment of the American Dream. He has faith in life. However, the theme that we dwell upon is Gatsby‘s zealous commitment to his cause: Daisy. However foolish that choice of causes may be, we admire Gatsby. That is so, I believe, because Gatsby has been true to himself or at least to his invented self. We admire him for taking a path that, in his case, seems to rise to the level of a moral conviction; that is, an absolute commitment to his personally conceived vision of life.
To illustrate that theme, I remind students of the famous passage in Hamlet (Act I, Scene 3) where Polonius advises his departing son, Laertes:

Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar.

Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice;
Take each man‘s censure, but reserve thy judgment.

Neither a borrower nor a lender be;

This above all: to thine own self be true. (emphasis added)

We then spend some time talking about the utility and limitations of that single line, “To thine own self be true,” as an ethical standard by which to guide one‘s professional and personal lives.
4.  Tom and Daisy. We do not dwell upon these two rather transparent figures. We note that they are careless, shallow people living in eternal moral adolescence. Tom and Daisy serve  as  personifications  of the  doubts  that  Fitzgerald seemed to  be feeling about the wealthy  world that he yearned for and yet criticized.
Of course, Daisy does display some redeeming features. She is intelligent and charming. She shares Gatsby‘s romantic sensibilities. And at times, she seems to be aware of the shallow quality of her own life. Consider her account to Nick of her daughter‘s birth:

Well, she was less than an hour old and Tom was God knows where. I woke up out of the ether with an utterly abandoned feeling, and asked the nurse right away if it was a boy or a girl. She told me it was a girl, and so I turned my head away and wept. “All right,” 1 said, “I‘m glad it‘s a girl. And I hope she‘ll be a fool—that is the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.”

Scholar Mary McCay argues that Daisy represents something of the emptiness of life for the many women of that era who really had no role of their own (1983, p. 311). Indeed, Fitzgerald regularly rebuked Zelda for what he took to be her empty values and underachievement.

American Values

1. Wealth and class. Clearly, in considerable part, The Great Gatsby is a commentary on the themes of wealth and class in America of the Roaring ‘20s. For example, Gatsby thinks of Daisy as a sort of icon of wealth:

Gatsby was overwhelmingly aware of the youth and mystery that wealth imprisons and preserves, of the freshness of many clothes, and of Daisy, gleaming like silver, safe and proud above the hot struggles of the poor.

In one of the more famous and clever lines in American literature, Gatsby says of Daisy, “Her voice is full of money.” And as Professor Milton Stern reminds us, Daisy “belongs to the highest bidder” (1970, p. 165).
Fitzgerald himself, while drawn to the pleasures of high society, apparently was troubled by what he took to be the unfairness of a culture marked by great divisions of wealth. Like Gatsby, Fitzgerald had sought a “golden girl,” a young Chicago socialite named Ginevra King. King, however,married a wealthy suitor. Fitzgerald later sought to marry Zelda, but she put him off on the grounds that his prospects were uncertain. Fitzgerald then published his first novel, This Side of Paradise, Fitzgerald and Zelda married, and eventually Ginevra and Zelda served as “models” for Daisy. Class divisions in America became a central theme in Fitzgerald‘s thinking and writing:

“That was always my experience,” he wrote near the end of his life, “a poor boy in a rich town; a poor boy in a rich boy‘s school; a poor boy in a rich man‘s club at Princeton… I have never been able to forgive the rich for being rich, and it has colored my entire life and works.” He told a friend that “the whole idea of Gatsby is the unfairness of a poor young man not being able to marry a girl with money. This theme comes up again and again because I lived it” (Stern, 1970, p. 164).

We then look briefly at the United States of the 1920s, the Jazz Age, and the conspicuous affluence of the upper class of the time. In that context, we investigate the issue of wealth in contemporary America… Thus Gatsby becomes a helpful vehicle for examining whether dramatic inequalities in wealth constitute a moral issue.
2. The American Dream. The gleaming possibilities, both spiritual and material, in a youthful, potent, exuberant America are central to Gatsby. However, as scholar Marius Bewley (1954) argues, Gatsby is also the story of the withering of that American Dream in a dissolute era.
The roots of the American Dream seem particularly to lie in the movement westward with its accompanying optimism and faith in humanity‘s inherent goodness. At the same time, the American Dream is also a product of our historical pursuit of spiritual progress and liberty. The Dream has taken on new dimensions for changing times, but its core, as we passed through the remarkable entrepreneurial/industrial successes of the nineteenth century, resided increasingly in material abundance. Professor Charles Sanford argues that doubts about the emergent materialist Dream have become a staple of American letters:

The main theme in American literature during the twentieth century has been … America‘s abandonment of the security and innocence of an earlier day through some essentially sinful act, an act most frequently associated with industrialism and the commercial ethic (1961, p. 255).

What is Gatsby‘s dream? We remember that Gatsby “invented” himself. Hence, he and his vision are the expressionof his dream. We catch glimpses of that dream via his heroic, ultimately foolish, quest for Daisy, and we find it embellished in Fitzgerald‘s picture of Gatsby: his youth, his beauty, his faith in life, his capacity for wonder, his romantic commitment, his idealism; indeed, his very capacity to dream. Fitzgerald seems to be suggesting that the American Dream lies in the limitless possibilities in being human while warning of the risks in losing sight of those possibilities in the glare of wealth and its accoutrements.
Hence, The Great Gatsby simultaneously depicts both the allure of wealth and moral disapproval of the sometimes empty, corrupt, unsatisfying lives of those who achieve wealth (Hearn, 1977). Fitzgerald evidences this tension in his characterizations of Tom and Daisy, on the one hand, and Gatsby on the other. The Buchanans‘ materialist American Dream is at least as authentic as Gatsby‘s romantic version, but Tom and Daisy‘s spiritual corruption denies the American soul, while Gatsby‘s idealism affirms it (Bewley, pp. 243-6).
Gatsby should not be read as a yearning for some imagined, Edenic, pre-commercial past that needs only to be recaptured. Rather Fitzgerald mourns the loss of possibilities. Bewley explains:

The Great Gatsby is an exploration of the American Dream as it exists in a corrupt period, and it is an attempt to determine that concealed boundary that divides the reality from the illusions. The illusions seem more real than the reality itself. Embodied in the subordinate characters in the novel, they threaten to invade the whole of the picture. On the other hand, the reality is embodied in Gatsby, and as opposed to the hard, tangible illusions, the reality is a thing of the spirit, a promise rather than the possession of a vision, a faith in the half-glimpsed, but hardly understood, possibilities of life (pp. 224-5).

Scholar Letha Audhuy (1980) provides further support for this “Dream corrupted by materialism” analysis. She points to the picture of emptiness and sterility in life that was the theme of T.S. Eliot‘s great work “The Waste Land” (a poem Fitzgerald very much admired)…

A Trio of Reservations

In closing I am obliged to note a trio of important reservations regarding the narrative approach to moral education. First, this suggested use of stories risks a charge of indoctrination in that one is necessarily teaching a particular content and probably a particular point of view thus violating the neutrality that we normally seek in moral education. Presumably, some element of indoctrination is virtually unavoidable. My inclination has been to willfully and openly take a pointed position and endeavor to counterbalance it with an equally pointed rebuttal. Specifically, our discussion of Gatsby and Fitzgerald‘s questions about America‘s direction follow an aggressive defense of the free market vision of Milton Friedman, Ronald Reagan, et al.
Secondly, we must simply remind ourselves that we are dealing with fiction. The characters and themes are constructs reflecting the author‘s world view, the nature of the times, the state of knowledge in that era, and so on. In this case, Fitzgerald drew, as noted, upon his own experiences and acquaintances in building his story. His values, his sense of the direction of America, his interpretation of the economic climate of the Jazz Age—these forces and manymore are at work in this book. Obviously, The Great Gatsby cannot be understood to be an effort at an objective depiction of the reality of America in the Twenties. Gatsby can, however, be understood to be a provocative instrument for raising a variety of enduring ethics/values themes so long as we recognize that we are doing so via the mediating influence of a particular author in a particular time and place.
Finally, while stories have always been a staple of moral development efforts we have never been sure that they really do much good. We still do not have definitive evidence although recent scholarly developments provide encouragement. As noted, my students have responded quite affirmatively to Gatsby as a moral lesson, but whether that satisfaction translates to improved moral insight or moral decision making is simply unknown.

References

• Aldrich, E.R.: 1989, ‘"The Most Poetical Topic in the World": Women in the Novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald‘, in Lee, A.R. (ed.), Scott Fitzgerald: The Promises of Life (Vision Press, London), pp. 131, 153.
• Audhuy, L.: 1980, ‘The Waste Land Myth and Symbols in The Great Gatsby,‘ in Bloom, H. (ed.), F. Scott Fitzgerald‘s The Great Gatsby (Chelsea House Publishers, New York, 1986), p. 109.
• Bewley, M.: 1954, ‘Scott Fitzgerald‘s Criticism of America‘, The Sewanee Review 62(2) (Spring), 223.
• Coles, R.: 1987, ‘Storytellers‘ Ethics‘, Harvard Business Review 65 (2) (March-April), 8.
• Coles, R.: 1989, The Call of Stories (Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston), p. 159.
• Fetterley, J.: 1978, The Resisting Reader (Indiana University Press, Bloomington).
• Fryer, S.B.: 1988, Fitzgerald‘s New Women (UMI Research Press, Ann Arbor, MI), pp. 1-17.
• Hearn, C: 1977, The American Dream in the Great Depression (Greenwood Press, Westport, CT).
• Kohlberg, L.: 1981, The Philosophy of Moral Development: Moral Stages and the Idea of Justice (Harper and Row, San Francisco).
• McKay, M.A.: 1983, ‘Fitzgerald‘s Women: Beyond Winter Dreams‘, in Fleischman, F. (ed.), American Novelists Revisited: Essays in Feminist Criticism (G.K. Hall & Co., Boston).
• Parker, D.: 1986, ‘Two Versions of the Hero‘, in Bloom, H. (ed.), F. Scott Fitzgerald‘s The Great Gatsby (Chelsea House Publishers, New York).
• Parr, S.R.: 1981, ‘Individual Responsibility in The Great Gatsby,‘ The Virginia Quarterly Review 57(4) (Autumn), 662.
• Parr, S.R.: 1982, The Moral of the Story (Teachers College Press, New York), p. 117.
• Patterson, J.: 1991, The Day America Told the Truth (Prentice Hall, New York), pp. 45-6.
• Sanford, C: 1961, The Quest for Paradise (University of Illinois Press, Urbana).
• Stern, M.: 1970, The Golden Moment—The Novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald (University of Illinois Press, Urbana).
• Vitz, P.: 1990, ‘The Use of Stories in Moral Development‘, American Psychologist 45(6) (June), 709.

Some Like it Hot: The Development of Atmosphere as a Test of Character in The Great Gatsby by Wayne Crawford

When F. Scott Fitzgerald turns on the heat in Gatsby, he amplifies a single detail into an element of function and emphasis that transforms neutral landscapes into oppressive prisms. Through these prisms which distort and color the lives of Fitzgerald's characters, we see why human's elations are, as Nick Carraway describes them, "shortwinded". Heat is the antithesis of Jay Gatsby. It is symptomatic of his undoing, his nemesis. As he suited up in his cool demeanor time and time again, perhaps we should have guessed that his coldly methodical five-year plan to restore the past would end up, in the sizzling heat of a five-hour showdown, as useless as one of the spent matchheads Daisy flings so carelessly after lighting a cigarette.

From midafternoon at the Buchanan palace to twilight at the Plaza Hotel, Fitzgerald's emphasis on the oppressive heat sticks out as clearly as Gatsby's pink suit against Daisy's crimson carpet. It is an emphasis that has a cumulative effect of placing characters into a setting they cannot escape and into a situation that reflects their internal discomfort. The plot heats up as the setting heats up, furthering suspense while placing untested characters in such boiling heat that their lives can find expression only in explosive release or resignation. Their tempers flare as the temperature rises and it is not until they lose their composure that anything begins to cool. In Fitzgerald's stylish hands, heat functions to shape plot and test character. His acute recognition of the role of atmosphere in both furthering conflict and testing character is illustrated by his unwavering use of detail from first to final draft.

From the beginning of these scenes to the end, we are made to feel the relentless heat as clearly as we see the green leather seats in Gatsby yellow car. Fitzgerald's revision adds more than degrees to the hot day. Heat serves to parallel the acceleration of conflict between Gatsby and Tom. Heat gives their conflict a further sense of inevitability. Fitzgerald does not miss his many opportunities to remind us that the heat of the moment is testing his characters, wearing away the outer veneer they wear so well, and revealing them as they struggle in a hot situation.

In the manuscript, Nick rides on a train during the "simmering hush of noon" toward his luncheon engagement. By the time final copy was written, a new line was added: "The next day was broiling, almost the last, certainly the warmest day of the summer". In the original manuscript, the conductor on the train says the word "hot" six times. In the published version, he repeats the word seven times.

The constant reference to the heat creates an atmosphere of strain so that small text changes can have a cumulative atmospheric effect: Man versus nature while man versus man. The weather takes its toll on character's moods. "Make us a cool drink, said Daisy," in the manuscript. '"Make us a cool drink, " cried Daisy" in the published version. It is a small detail. Its significance is that so many small details like this one were included that our perception of the scene and the characters is altered. We begin to anticipate that tension will get the best of these characters. "They certainly look cool," said Gatsby pleasantly" (of the drinks) in the manuscript. In the final version, Gatsby repeats his line "with visible tension".

When Gatsby, Tom and Nick walk out on the Buchanan veranda, which Nick describes as "stagnant in the heat," Fitzgerald establishes the rivalry between Tom and Gatsby that will result in one becoming victor and the other vanquished by day's end. In the typescript, Gatsby says, "I live there," and Tom replies, "I see." Revised, Gatsby says, "I'm right across from you," and Tom says, "So you are." Fitzgerald establishes the face-off, positioning competitors across from one another. It is the heat that will force articulation of the conflict--it will become so unbearable that no one will be able to stay cool and composed nor to pretend that the situation is cool and comfortable.

We are reminded of the "dog days" in both the original and the published version, and reminded that the Buchanan salon is "darkened against the heat." It is because it is so hot that Daisy suggests going to town. We are told in the manuscript that Daisy's voice "struggled on through the heat, beating against it, molding its deadly senselessness into forms. In the transcript revision, "deadly" is removed, allowing the reference to stand more simply and to blend into the text more effectively. In the manuscript, Daisy asks of Gatsby, "How do you look so cool? Tell us your secret, brother Gatsby." In publication, she cries, "Ah, you look so cool." She repeats, "You always look so cool." "Brother Gatsby," hardly indicative of their relationship, is appropriately omitted, and we are left to realize the contrast between cool Gatsby and everyone else whose composure is wilting in the heat.

In both the manuscript and typescript, Tom's response to Daisy's awe of Gatsby is to interrupt quickly and to order, "Get your fur coats." In the published version, the fur coats have been omitted, doubtlessly in view of the heat. Again heat comes into the picture before they can leave. Daisy suggests that they should smoke a cigarette before leaving. Tom says they did that all through lunch. In the final version, Fitzgerald adds to Daisy's dialogue, "Oh, let's have fun. It's too hot to fuss." As they board their cars, Daisy suggests that she and Gatsby follow the others in Tom's car. In the transcript, she is described as speaking "coldly" to Tom. In the final version, "coldly" has been cut. In the transcript, they left "toward the city through the oppressive afternoon," but in final form, they "shot off into the oppressive heat."

Heat plays another important function. It is important to stop at Wilson's garage, for Myrtle (whose nerves were continually "smoldering" in an earlier chapter) to mistake Jordan for Daisy, and for Myrtle to recognize the car. Tom says he's probably got enough gas to get to town but Jordan objects. "I don't want to get stalled in this baking heat," she says. Thus, Fitzgerald has provided a believeable reason for stopping at the garage, a reason in keeping with his characterizations.

Missing from previous drafts is Nick's added comment upon leaving the garage that "the relentless beating heat was beginning to confuse me." By now, we have become so aware of the oppressive nature of the heat that we are not surprised to find Nick wearing out, nor do we expect anyone else to be fresh; the weather has worked on everyone's nerves. The unmitigating heat adds tension to the upcoming confrontation but it also delays the action so that the confrontation scene can be more fully exploited and believed.

As Tom pulls out of the garage, suddenly aware of the parallel between his life and George Wilson's, he is described at first as feeling "the cold touch" of panic. After revision, what he feels is "the hot whips of panic."

In the original manuscript, as Tom catches up to Gatsby on the road, Daisy simply says, "You go first. We'd rather follow you." In final form, she says, "It's so hot. You go. We'll ride around and meet you after."

Once in the Plaza, Nick tells us that the room is "large and stifling," with too few windows, and through these come only a "gust of hot shrubbery from the park." In the transcript this same "hot shrubbery" was the setting for a little cafe in Central Park.

Just as heat represents the building up of emotions and losing of control, cool represents control. Added in Fitsgerald's final draft, Tom says, "The thing to do is to forget about the heat," our first hint that Tom may be the one most able to control himself, even though he's been portrayed as an intellectual buffoon.

Nick remembers vaguely the argument that occurred at the Plaza. What he remembered vividly is that his underwear kept climbing around his legs and beads of sweat raced across his back. In his earlier manuscript, Fitzgerald said of the ballpark that "it was so hot that my underwear climbed like a damp snake around my legs, so hot that when I took off my coat, beads of sweat raced cold across my back." Obviously, Fitzgerald knew to retain the descriptive element of heat as he moved his meeting from the ballpark to the Plaza and his hot shrubery from the little cafe to the gardens outside the Plaza windows.

When the subject of marriage came up originally, no reference to heat was made. In the final version, Jordon cries dismally, "Imagine marrying anybody in this heat!" (84). Also added: "From the ballroom beneath, muffled and suffocating chords were drifting up on hot waves of air."

When Tom argues that Daisy loved him when they were married, Daisy's voice is described as being "cold," (88) a description missing in earlier drafts. She also throws a burning match on the carpet. The reader recognizes that when Daisy is defeated, when her courage leaves her, her voice goes cold and the fire is thrown away from her. From this point on, there are no more references to heat. The fire in Daisy has been extinguished and Gatsby begins to panic.

When Gatsby and Daisy leave the Plaza suddenly like children being dismissed from supper, even the heat of Tom's temper has cooled, and when the scene ends at 7:00 that evening, Nick and Jordon and Tom drive through "the cooling twilight."

Heat is a detail emblazoned on our senses by repeated emphasis until it alters our percepton of a normal day in the city and becomes the overpowering atmosphere in which people struggle to direct or redirect their lives. The heat led Daisy to show to her husband her love for Gatsby. The heat directed this luncheon party from the Buchanan house where Gatsby felt that he could do nothing to the Plaza where he could claim his true love. It led Tom Buchanan to George Wilson's garage where a jealous Myrtle Wilson mistook Jordon for the source of her imprisonment in her desert on the highway. It is the heat that finally wilts Daisy's daring , that makes her as tired as she was when she first met Tom Buchanan and saw a way out of Louisville. And it is in the heat of debate that Gatsby is handed defeat. To the rekindled romance that might have been, it doesn't matter what happened once Daisy and Gatsby left the Plaza. To the fair-weather princess, their passions had become too heated. Theirs was, after all, an early summer love, and the fair-weather was no more.

Gatsby, 35 Years Later

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.

What Happens in Vagueness Stays in Vagueness

What Happens in Vagueness Stays in Vagueness:The decline and fall of American English, and stuff.

 

     I recently watched a television program in which a woman described a baby squirrel that she had found in her yard. “And he was like, you know, ‘Helloooo, what are you looking at?’ and stuff, and I’m like, you know, ‘Can I, like, pick you up?,’ and he goes, like, ‘Brrrp brrrp brrrp,’ and I’m like, you know, ‘Whoa, that is so wow!’ ” She rambled on, speaking in self-quotations, sound effects, and other vocabulary substitutes, punctuating her sentences with facial tics and lateral eye shifts. All the while, however, she never said anything specific about her encounter with the squirrel.

     Uh-oh. It was a classic case of Vagueness, the linguistic virus that infected spoken language in the late twentieth century. Squirrel Woman sounded like a high school junior, but she appeared to be in her mid-forties, old enough to have been an early carrier of the contagion. She might even have been a college intern in the days when Vagueness emerged from the shadows of slang and mounted an all-out assault on American English.

     My acquaintance with Vagueness began in the 1980s, that distant decade when Edward I. Koch was mayor of New York and I was writing his speeches. The mayor’s speechwriting staff was small, and I welcomed the chance to hire an intern. Applications arrived from NYU, Columbia, Pace, and the senior colleges of the City University of New York. I interviewed four or five candidates and was happily surprised. The students were articulate and well informed on civic affairs. Their writing samples were excellent. The young woman whom I selected was easy to train and a pleasure to work with. Everything went so well that I hired interns at every opportunity. Then came 1985.

     The first applicant was a young man from NYU. During the interview, he spiked his replies so heavily with “like” that I mentioned his frequent use of the word. He seemed confused by my comment and replied, “Well . . . like . . . yeah.” Now, nobody likes a grammar prig. All’s fair in love and language, and the American lingo is in constant motion. “You should,” for example, has been replaced by “you need to.” “No” has faded into “not really.” “I said” is now “I went.” As for “you’re welcome,” that’s long since become “no problem.” Even nasal passages are affected by fashion. Quack-talking, the rasping tones preferred by many young women today, used to be considered a misfortune.

     In 1985, I thought of “like” as a trite survivor of the hippie sixties. By itself, a little slang would not have disqualified the junior from NYU. But I was surprised to hear antique argot from a communications major looking for work in a speechwriting office, where job applicants would normally showcase their language skills. I was even more surprised when the next three candidates also laced their conversation with “like.” Most troubling was a puzzling drop in the quality of their writing samples. It took six tries, but eventually I found a student every bit as good as his predecessors. Then came 1986.

     As the interviews proceeded, it grew obvious that “like” had strengthened its grip on intern syntax. And something new had been added: “You know” had replaced “Ummm . . .” as the sentence filler of choice. The candidates seemed to be evading the chore of beginning new thoughts. They spoke in run-on sentences, which they padded by adding “and stuff” at the end. Their writing samples were terrible. It took eight tries to find a promising intern. In the spring of 1987 came the all-interrogative interview. I asked a candidate where she went to school.
“Columbia?” she replied. Or asked.
“And you’re majoring in . . .”
“English?”

     All her answers sounded like questions. Several other students did the same thing, ending declarative sentences with an interrogative rise. Something odd was happening. Was it guerrilla grammar? Had college kids fallen under the spell of some mad guru of verbal chaos? I began taking notes and mailed a letter to William Safire at the New York Times, urging him to do a column on the devolution of coherent speech. Undergraduates, I said, seemed to be shifting the burden of communication from speaker to listener. Ambiguity, evasion, and body language, such as air quotes—using fingers as quotation marks to indicate clichés—were transforming college English into a coded sign language in which speakers worked hard to avoid saying anything definite. I called it Vagueness.

     By autumn 1987, the job interviews revealed that “like” was no longer a mere slang usage. It had mutated from hip preposition into the verbal milfoil that still clogs spoken English today. Vagueness was on the march. Double-clutching (“What I said was, I said . . .”) sprang into the arena. Playbacks, in which a speaker re-creates past events by narrating both sides of a conversation (“So I’m like, ‘Want to, like, see a movie?’ And he goes, ‘No way.’ And I go . . .”), made their entrance. I was baffled by what seemed to be a reversion to the idioms of childhood. And yet intern candidates were not hesitant or uncomfortable about speaking elementary school dialects in a college-level job interview. I engaged them in conversation and gradually realized that they saw Vagueness not as slang but as mainstream English. At long last, it dawned on me: Vagueness was not a campus fad or just another generational raid on proper locution. It was a coup. Linguistic rabble had stormed the grammar palace. The principles of effective speech had gone up in flames.
In 1988, my elder daughter graduated from Vassar. During a commencement reception, I asked one of her professors if he’d noticed any change in Vassar students’ language skills. “The biggest difference,” he replied, “is that by the time today’s students arrive on campus, they’ve been juvenilized. You can hear it in the way they talk. There seems to be a reduced capacity for abstract thought.” He went on to say that immature speech patterns used to be drummed out of kids in ninth grade. “Today, whatever way kids communicate seems to be fine with their high school teachers.” Where, I wonder, did Vagueness begin? It must have originated before the 1980s. “Like” has a long and scruffy pedigree: in the 1970s, it was a mainstay of Valspeak, the frequently ridiculed but highly contagious “Valley Girl” dialect of suburban Los Angeles, and even in 1964, the film Paris When It Sizzles lampooned the word’s overuse. All the way back in 1951, Holden Caulfield spoke proto-Vagueness (“I sort of landed on my side . . . my arm sort of hurt”), complete with double-clutching (“Finally, what I decided I’d do, I decided I’d . . .”) and demonstrative adjectives used as indefinite articles (“I felt sort of hungry so I went in this drugstore . . .”).

    Is Vagueness simply an unexplainable descent into nonsense? Did Vagueness begin as an antidote to the demands of political correctness in the classroom, a way of sidestepping the danger of speaking forbidden ideas? Does Vagueness offer an undereducated generation a technique for camouflaging a lack of knowledge?

     In 1991, I visited the small town of Bridgton, Maine, on the evening that the residents of Cumberland County gathered to welcome their local National Guard unit home from the Gulf War. It was a stirring moment. Escorted by the lights and sirens of two dozen fire engines from surrounding towns, the soldiers marched down Main Street. I was standing near the end of the parade and looked around expectantly for a platform, podium, or microphone. But there were to be no brief remarks of commendation by a mayor or commanding officer. There was to be no pastoral prayer of thanks for the safe return of the troops. Instead, the soldiers quickly dispersed. The fire engines rumbled away. The crowd went home. A few minutes later, Main Street stood empty.
Apparently there was, like, nothing to say.
Clark Whelton was a speechwriter for New York City mayors Ed Koch and Rudy Giuliani.

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