By Max Dunbar.
Careless People: Murder, Mayhem and the Invention of The Great Gatsby, Sarah Churchwell, Virago 2013
The reporter Nellie Bly, writing about F Scott Fitzgerald in 1922, instructed her audience not to ‘praise a book l...
By Max Dunbar.
Careless People: Murder, Mayhem and the Invention of The Great Gatsby, Sarah Churchwell, Virago 2013
The reporter Nellie Bly, writing about F Scott Fitzgerald in 1922, instructed her audience not to ‘praise a book like that beautiful and damned thing just because a smart and undesirable lot of young nobodies call it literature. It is a pitiful thing to see a young man like Fitzgerald, with a wonderful talent, going as he has, but it is not too late for him, and here is hoping that he will do the great thing which he can and write a book which people would not fear to read aloud to their mothers and other decent folk.’ The NYT‘s Books of the Year roundup entombed Fitzgerald beneath a sediment of filler, with the brief comment that ‘Young Mr Scott Fitzgerald… continued his flippant mood in The Beautiful and the Damned.’ H L Mencken, also, dismissed The Great Gatsby as ‘no more than a glorified anecdote, and not too probable at that.’ Critics do not always recognise the timeless.
Fitzgerald’s novel haunted American culture for decades before Luhrmann’s movie adaptation. Something in us yearns for a looser and more sophisticated time. Mad Men‘s Don Draper (‘the advertisement of the man’) is a Gatsby of his day (and Fitzgerald did work in advertising for a time). The student narrator of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, a working-class man who aspires to academic eminence (and is prepared to participate in a murder to get it) rereads the novel one night and is kept awake afterwards by ‘certain tragic similarities between Gatsby and myself.’ In The Wire, an incarcerated D’Angelo Barksdale discusses Gatsby in his prison book group, theorising about the novel in pessimistic terms (‘Don’t matter that some fool say he different’) that certainly chime with his own sad fate. At the end of the Boston-based Cheers sitcom, landlord Sam Malone has to turn away a mysterious shadowy figure who approaches his bar after it has been locked up — so much like Gatsby’s ‘final guest who had been away at the ends of the earth and didn’t know the party was over.’ Although it is not mentioned in the text, I believe Stephen King’s The Shining owes a little to Gatsby. Jack Torrance is at heart a family man, but in certain inner chambers of his being he dreams of a Jazz Age fantasia, an endless party filled with glittering women, harsh merry laughter, ‘little love, not here, but a steady undercurrent of sensuousness.’ The Overlook — a semi sentient hotel once owned by the kind of cutthroats and bootleggers Gatsby associated with — gets him with alcohol and an endless Black and White Ball that reels on through the spectral eras. King epigrammed his novel with Edgar Allen Poe’s ‘The Masque of the Red Death’: ‘But, in spite of these things, it was a gay and magnificent revel[...]‘
Here’s my theory: ‘The Masque of the Red Death’ is The Great Gatsby‘s literary antecedent. A rich nobleman, Prince Prospero, locks himself and his court inside ‘an extensive and magnificent structure, the creation of the prince’s own eccentric yet august taste.’ Outside, the plague known as the ‘Red Death’ is raging. This plague has ‘devastated the country. No pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous. Blood was its Avatar and its seal — the redness and the horror of blood.’ But Prospero does not care: he’s locked his castle up with furnaces and massy hammers and gates of iron, and inside he’s got all the booze, entertainment and ‘hale and light-hearted friends’ he needs. His halls presage Gatsby’s love of wild colour (‘The second chamber was purple in its ornaments and tapestries, and here the panes were purple. The third was green throughout’) and his ‘gigant
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