As you might expect, Corrigan offers some literary analysis of The Great Gatsby. Many think of The Great Gatsby as a tragic love story involving rich people, and that’s true enough, but there is so much more. Gatsby was a poor boy who strived to better himself, like Benjamin Franklin. In his estimation, he was a nobody from nowhere, and he wanted to reinvent himself. As a young man, he fell for Daisy, a rich society girl who represented all the things Gatsby wanted to be. Gatsby’s adoration of Daisy was never simple or merely about romantic or sexual attraction. There was a great deal of ambition mixed up in Gatsby’s desire for Daisy. Corrigan reminds us that Fitzgerald does not describe Daisy as a great beauty. She isn’t remarkably intelligent, witty or insightful. She isn’t bubbling over with charm. So what does she have? A voice full of money. She doesn’t have to strive because she, along her husband Tom, were born in the club, the very club Gatsby wants or thinks he wants to belong to.
This is what drives him, and there’s something askew, not quite right about this representation of the American dream. There is something desperate about Gatsby. The conspicuous spending. The excess. His shady business dealings. But no matter how hard Gatsby tries, he’s always left on the wrong side of the bay where the new money people live. Daisy and Tom are always out of reach. Corrigan insists several times in her book that the green light isn’t as important as Gatsby’s reaching out for it. And what’s between him and that green light? Water, lots of water. Gatsby loses himself in his ambition and ends up dead in his swimming pool, something he thought and hoped was a symbol of his arrival.
And was being in that club really worth it? Gatsby was envious of Tom, but who was he without the money he never earned? He was an insensitive, racist moron who treated women like his playthings. And who was Daisy? She was someone who would run down her husband’s mistress and let someone else take the blame. And we shouldn’t forget that Jordan was a cheat. The Valley of Ashes reminds us that great wealth and high living comes at a great cost, and the eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg represent an absent god who is powerless to do anything about the injustice. Myrtle is like the female counterpart to Gatsby. She is so desperate to escape poverty that she forgets who she is. She throws herself at Tom in the same way Gatsby does for Daisy. And this destroys her. Many think the novel celebrates wealth, money and luxury, but the story is actually a scathing critique of the rich. When we’re told Tom and Daisy are careless people, that’s far from a complement.
Nick survives to tell the tale because he floats effortlessly between these factions. He has no money, but he was born in the club just like his cousin Daisy. And he reminds us of that right at the beginning when he tells us about the wisdom imparted by his father, that stuff about how not everyone had the same advantages he has had. Nick might live in a small cottage, and he might still be working his way up the ladder on Wall Street even though he’s almost thirty, but he’s always welcome at the Buchanans. Corrigan tells us that contemporary readers pick up on clues that Nick might be gay, and she sees no reason not to give that idea some thought. Nick might be enamored by Gatsby more than Daisy ever was. There’s a scene in which Nick ends up in the bedroom of another man after a night of drinking, and there’s another scene in which an elevator boy tells him to keep his hands off the lever.
Corrigan points out The Great Gatsby has elements of hard boiled fiction and film noir. There’s Gatsby’s connections with gangsters and bootlegging. His name might have reminded readers in the ’20s of a slang term for a gun. And there are three brutal deaths in the novel. Like Sunset Boulevard, the story is told in flashback, and the main character will end up dead in a swimming pool. Gatsby is already dead on page one.
So why would Fitzgerald write such a story? Well, he was sort of a Gatsby figure himself. His family always had enough money to live well, but they were not quite in the club. Fitzgerald went to fancy schools where he never quite fit in. Then he went to Princeton, and he wasn’t a social success there either. He was reportedly an unpopular boy, and one of the reasons might have been he tried too hard, making him appear weak and needy. There was also a rich society girl who turned him down because he didn’t have enough money.
The Great Gatsby was never a popular novel in Fitzgerald’s lifetime. It only sold about twenty thousand copies. Scribner gave it two runs, but the second printing never sold out, so if you wanted a copy in the ’30s , you had to order direct from Scribner and a book would be retrieved from their basement storage room. Fitzgerald made his money primarily through the sale of short fiction to magazines in the twenties. He ended up broke, alcoholic and nearly forgotten, and his wife Zelda was confined to a mental hospital. His last royalty check came to about seventeen dollars, and someone did a little digging and found that most of this money came from sales to Fitzgerald himself. He sometimes ordered copies of his books for friends. At some point in the ‘30s, he read about an amateur production of a play based on The Great Gatsby that was to be performed at a nearby college. Fitzgerald showed up in his finery only to discover the theater was locked. The play was to be staged in an upstairs hallway, and aside from Fitzgerald, only the young actors’ mothers came out to watch. When he died at forty-four, his funeral was almost as sparsely attended as Gatsby’s.
So how was Fitzgerald revitalized? Well, it started almost immediately after his death in 1940. Fitzgerald had been part of a circle of literary friends, and many of them still had influence. They began rereading his stuff and giving him high marks in newspapers and magazines. Then World War II broke out, and someone had the idea that soldiers should be given books to read. They began producing inexpensive and portable paperbacks that were meant to be passed from one soldier to another. Corrigan found out that someone connected to Scribner was on one of the selection committees, and Max Perkins, Fitzgerald’s editor, was still alive and working at the publishing house. Perhaps through their influence, over one hundred thousand copies of The Great Gatsby were printed.
Interest in Fitzgerald and his novels steadily grew throughout the ’40s and ’50s, and by the ’60s, The Great Gatsby was one of those novels nearly everyone had heard of.
Like many, I first read the novel as a teenager. I’ve always been fascinated by Gatsby, and by Scott and Zelda. When I was young, I probably couldn’t have articulated a reason why I found Gatsby interesting. But in my own way, I was a kind of Gatsby figure. I was never obsessed with being super rich. Even in my youth, I knew you had to be born a Vanderbilt to be a Vanderbilt, but I wanted to belong to the upper middle class. I wanted an educated, worldly family. I wanted liberal parents who appreciated learning and art and sons who happened to be gay. Basically, I wanted Elio’s life from Call Me By Your Name, and I had watched enough Public Television during high school to know there were people like that out there. I could get by without chauffer driven limousines and mansions, but I wanted to drive a BMW. I wanted my parents to own a house in the country with a guest cottage or a room over the garage that I could use. I wanted a studio in Greenwich Village. I wanted to be invited to spend weekends at beach houses and woodsy vacation homes. I wanted smart, civilized conversations about literature and art with nice people who were interested in and accepting of me. I wanted something I couldn’t have, and it took me a while to appreciate and accept who I was. In fact, I’m still working on that.
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