Maureen Corrigan. So We Read On: How The Great Gatsby Came to Be and Why It Endures. Little Brown, 2014.

So We Read On is a collection of seven essays by the author, a literary critic for NPR, about F. Scott Fitzgerald and The Great Gatsby. Because the different essays each have a different focus, this review mostly shares of some of the ideas about The Great Gatsby that the author shares in her book.

There is a certain amount of duplication in the essays; it appears each was written at a different time for a different purpose. In this case, though, the repetition may be helpful to the reader. After all, repetition helps us remember better. Even so, as I was reading this, I said to myself, if I were still teaching The Great Gatsby, I might want to read this a second time. It contains a lot.

One item of interest is that T. S. Eliot and Fitzgerald admired one another’s writing. Corrigan tells us that Gatsby is indebted to The Waste Land. We think not only of the Valley of Ashes, which is a kind of literal wasteland, but of the “unreal city” Nick visits with Jay Gatsby on occasion and the made-up words to popular songs like Eliot’s “Oh, that Shakespearean rag.”

T. S. Eliot may have been the very first person to reread and reread The Great Gatsby for pleasure. In a much quoted verdict, he said that Gatsby was “the first step that American fiction had made since Henry James.” (205)

Fitzgerald himself admired Edith Wharton, whose social perspective and background were similar to those of James. We are told that Andre Malraux’s Man’s Hope inspired Fitzgerald as well.

Corrigan notes in a number of places the extent of the water imagery in the book. Some of it, of course, foreshadows the way Gatsby dies. But there seems to be more. Early in the novel Daisy speculates about a nightingale coming across a White Star luxury liner. Readers of the novel when it first came out would recognize that the Titanic belonged to the White Star Line. Daisy is like a river, like water, taking whatever shape she needs or wants to. I am reminded of Othello’s insult when he accuses Desdemona of infidelity, “She was false as water.” (5.2.137)

Corrigan also questions the incident that Hemingway tells about Fitzgerald saying “the rich are different.” Anyone who has read the opening paragraphs of FSF’s short story “The Rich Boy,” gets an explanation of what Fitzgerald meant by that. According to critic Mary Colum, it was Hemingway who actually made the comment, and Colum gave the rejoinder, “Yes, they have more money.” Hemingway would fictionalize the incident and attribute it to Fitzgerald in two different works.

Corrigan also considers The Great Gatsby an early example of noir fiction. It glamorizes the underworld, and the more “hard-boiled” people like Meyer Wolfsheim and the Buchanans survive. That is why she likes the 1949 Gatsby film with Alan Ladd of all the Gatsby films that have survived. To this reviewer, the film was preachy, and I find it hard to believe that Nick ends up marrying Jordan. But it is certainly the most noirish film version, perhaps because it came out when film noir was big.

This got me thinking of the other film versions I am familiar with. The 1974 with Robert Redford focuses on the stars of that era. It seems a lot of it is just Redford and Farrow looking gorgeous. The 1999 version with Paul Rudd was a made for TV version that more resembles a soap opera, a standard for the small screen. The recent one with Leonardo Di Caprio emphasizes excess just as our Internet age seems to do. “Anything you can do, I can outdo it.”

Like elements in most noir tales, Corrigan also notes that The Great Gatsby is funny. Even though the story ultimately has serious themes, there is a lot of humor. Some of it is ironic, some of it is dark humor (molar cuff links?). She tells of a stage adaptation of Gatsby in which the audience laughed quite a bit. Ring Lardner and others noted this when the book first came out.

In A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway tells us he and Fitzgerald were friends. Both in that book and in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” we get the sense that Hemingway feels sorry for him, that he never met his potential and that Zelda was no good for him. Corrigan presents Hemingway as a false friend who torments Fitzgerald. She quotes Lillian Hellman describing conversation between Hemingway and Dashiell Hammett. They both have had too much to drink, and Hemingway starts showing off. Hammett says to him:

“Why don’t you go back to bullying Fitzgerald? Too bad he doesn’t know How good he is. The best.” (143-144)

Hemingway understood this as a rebuke both to his behavior and to his writing.

Corrigan observes that “Gatsby is neither a character-driven nor a plot-driven novel; instead, it is that rarest of literary animals: a voice-driven novel.” (171) The plot is simple and even trite. Except for Tom Buchanan and Meyer Wolfsheim, the characters are “unreal.” Even Fitzgerald’s legendary editor Maxwell Perkins noted that “Gatsby [the man] is somewhat vague.” As Corrigan puts it, “Nick projects as much onto Gatsby as Gatsby projects onto Daisy. This is a novel about illusion, after all…” (173) Its “power,” she says, is in its language.

Corrigan spends much time going over the life of Fitzgerald. This is what led this reader to believe the various chapters were originally written as stand-alone essays because numerous details from his life are mentioned in more than one place.

Although one of Fitzgerald’s college friends said that all Fitzgerald’s women are modeled from Zelda, Corrigan notes that his first big crush was a rich beauty from his home state of Minnesota, one Ginevra King. Unlike Zelda but like Daisy, for example, she had brown hair. (Corrigan notes that only the 1925 film version has Daisy as a brunette rather than a blonde—typical Hollywood, I guess). While they dated and corresponded quite a bit, Ginevra’s father made it clear that his daughter must marry a rich man. Besides Daisy, this also resonates with Judy Jones in Fitzgerald’s short story “Winter Dreams.”

Corrigan suggests that The Great Gatsby has some latent racism or anti-Semitism, but this seems overstated. First, simply that in the 1920s Irish (like someone with the name of Fitzgerald) might be considered as inferior. Ronald Reagan said that in the 1920s and 1930s his father, a traveling salesman, could not stay at a lot of hotels because he was Irish. Tom Buchanan is the one overt racist, and he is the least sympathetic character. He is the one character who looks down on Wolfsheim because he is Jewish.

Corrigan notes that Meyer Wolfsheim speaks with an accent. It was not unusual in Fitzgerald’s day for realistic writers to write dialogue in dialect. This is true at least from Twain to O’Neill. The character of Wolfsheim is loosely based on Arnold Rothstein, who likely was involved in the 1919 World Series fix and the Great Bond Robbery and was Jewish. It would have been less realistic to portray him as something else. From his own words, we know that Mayor Jimmy Walker of New York had connections to Rothstein. Why wouldn’t Meyer’s co-worker Jay Gatsby be connected with the police commissioner? Wolfsheim and Gatsby were connected, but were they accepted?

This does get to what may be Corrigan’s greatest contribution to the discussion of Gatsby besides her observations on its style. Gatsby is a novel about class. Corrigan believes that Tender is the Night is Fitzgerald’s other good, if not great, novel. This reviewer prefers The Beautiful and Damned to that—probably because it is more believable and because it also emphasizes class.

The water imagery connects with floating. To Fitzgerald the “very rich” do not struggle or work, they float. When we first see Daisy and Jordan in the novel, Nick describes them as floating like the curtains in the breeze.¹ They also float off, like Sally Bowles in the film version of Cabaret: “Goodbye.” One word. That’s all. I’m elite, Daddy’s an ambassador; I can do whatever I want, and you can do nothing about it.

Corrigan might be getting into some pop psychology here, but Fitzgerald, though he went to a prep school and Princeton, was not really part of the elite. His immediate family was lower middle class, and so there was a sense that while he associated with the elite, he was not one of them. When I consider my own middle class, public school background when I attended Harvard, I get it. The rich were different. One friend would imitate one of the elite students by saying, “My God, man, where did you prep?” It was kind of an uneasy joke.

That is the real conflict in The Great Gatsby. Jay Gatsby was a “nobody from nowhere.” Tom Buchanan could look down on him with scorn. Daisy was attracted to him, but in some ways her attraction was like Tom’s for Myrtle. Tom Buchanan with his race theories is a real example of “white privilege.” He is a genuine “one percenter.”

Fitzgerald was very good looking. He was voted the “prettiest” in his college class. He could attract and be attracted to elite beauties like Ginevra and Zelda, but could he really fit in with them? Corrigan shows that Zelda’s affair with a French aviator took place while her husband was writing Gatsby. So could Jay Gatsby really fit in, in spite of his lavish parties and expensive lifestyle?

Corrigan sees this as a distinctively American problem, though I suspect it is more universal. America’s political liberty and free market system provide opportunities for nobodies from nowhere to succeed financially. But how do they fit in socially? In a couple of different places she notes a line from Fitzgerald’s story “The Swimmers,” an ironically humorous story but with a keen observation about America that suggests the lines at the end of Gatsby:

France was a land; England was a people; but America, having about it still that quality of the idea, was harder to utter…(302)

The only people at Harvard I felt sorry for were those who were trying to identify with the elite when everyone knew they weren’t there yet. Was it worth it? Was it worth it for Jay Gatsby? “For what shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world but lose his own soul?” (Mark 8:36) That verse suggests what it may really mean to “beat on, boats against the current.”

Note
¹ One of the cleverest panels in the recent graphic novel version of The Great Gatsby is the image of the two ladies floating in the breeze as Nick encounters them.