The Great Gatsby, 100 years old this year, prompts this observation: it’s a great American novel because it deepens in meaning with the passing years. It’s a mistake, I believe, to introduce such a book to youngsters who cannot understand Gatsby’s yearning for what it is -- a romantic disaster, stuck in time, the unrealized anguish of misguided nostalgia. Yes, The Great Gatsby offers up a suspenseful, plot-driven story about the American Dream in the Jazz Age, but it does so with what only experienced readers can appreciate: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s stunning prose -- that verb, for example, that describes the changing, curious crowd after midnight that “lapped up” against George Wilson’s garage, after the death of his wife.
It’s said about Daisy Buchanan that her voice defined her. And voice defines The Great Gatsby, an extraordinary novel, with passages that should be read aloud. Its author was 29 when it was published and had the benefit of a fine editor, Maxwell Perkins, who pressed Fitzgerald to rethink and rework manuscripts and typescripts. Which he did, investing in almost every word and knockout image. Can teenagers fathom though, what’s meant by an “obstetrical conversation” which a party-goer is said to be having with two chorus girls? Or can the average high schooler imagine women in diaphanous dresses who float in rooms that “throbbed incessantly with …low sweet fever”? I doubt it.
Do teachers encourage young readers to study Fitzgerald’s style or note the overall structure of the novel, which is a framed, delayed reminiscence by the narrator, Nick Carraway, Daisy’s cousin and Gatsby’s neighbor? Not until one-fourth into the book does Gatsby appear, after the Buchanans’ social status and racism have been established. It’s Nick who opens the narrative, a “book” he’s writing some years after the events, trying to reconcile the “unaffected scorn” he first had for Gatsby with his later awareness of Gatsby’s decency and devotion to Daisy and the past. He recognizes Gatsby’s “honesty” about his origins; his thankless sacrifice of himself to protect Daisy who was driving the car that took Myrtle’s life; .his basic decency even as a criminal, as opposed to the “carelessness” of Tom and Daisy who leave it to others to clean up the messes they make. There’s something almost childlike about Gatsby’s rags-to-riches life that reminds Nick of the innocence of America, long before the sophisticated coasts –New York and California – hardened the naïve Mid-Westerners and Europeans who came seeking wealth and glory.
The last sentences of the book are probably beyond even the typical college student’s easy understanding, as Nick ruminates on the American Dream: “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.” Wow!
The Great Gatsby, as interested readers discover, reflects in part the aspirations and experience of its talented author, whose struggles to succeed as a writer, particularly as a screenwriter in Hollywood, cost him pain, sobriety, and sanity. Fitzgerald died at 44, broken by attempts to confront his trials, especially with Zelda, with whom he pursued for a while the “gold-hated, high-bouncing” life. And yet, what defined him finally as a person and a writer was his capacity to see the truth and dream at the same time. The green light at the edge of Daisy’s dock goes out as we move through the world, sadder, not always wiser. But for some of us, it still pulses occasionally, an ambiguous memory of what was or might have been, beautifully expressed here.
