In 1925, when F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby was published, it sold less than 25,000 copies. The short nine-chapter novel of love and longing and the essential loneliness of being, about a young, handsome, fabulously rich — however dubious the source of his wealth — man’s attempt to win back the heart of an upper-crust girl who had cast him off, didn’t awe the critics either, though some of the best writers of the time including Edith Wharton and T.S. Eliot embraced it warmly.
The story is narrated by Nick Carraway, who has just moved east to New York from the mid-West to try his hand at the bonds business, armed with a “familiar conviction” that “life was beginning over again”. Hoping to live the American dream, he moves in at West Egg, a slightly less-fashionable neighbourhood than East Egg across the bay, home to the rich and beautiful. To the right of Carraway’s “weather-beaten cardboard bungalow” is a huge mansion with 40 acres of lawn and garden where Jay Gatsby lives. We first meet Gatsby as he wanders into his lawn in the night, as Carraway watches, staring at what seems like a “single green light, minute and far away”, at the end of a dock. That’s where Daisy is, the love Gatsby lost to a wealthy, but philandering and bullying Tom Buchanan.
Fitzgerald uses a layered tragic love story to bring the Jazz Age of the 1920s alive, with its immense possibilities, of both enchantment and disenchantment. He also recreates the eternal conflict between imagination and reality, thus making the book leap to the universal. When Gatsby is reunited with Daisy in Chapter 5, she “tumbled short of his dreams — not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion”. Gatsby is left questioning the ephemeral “quality of his present happiness”, regret seeping in for a moment lost: “No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man can store up in his ghostly heart.”
Gatsby is obsessed with time, but doesn’t want to yield to it: “Can’t repeat the past? he cried incredulously. Why of course you can!” But of course he can’t. As the narrator says, “Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter — tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms further... And one fine morning — So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
The tepid reaction to the novel he gave his all deeply disappointed the writer but, ironically, it’s when Fitzgerald died in 1940, when he was only 44, that there was a revival of Gatsby . As the great Fitzgerald scholar Professor Matthew J. Bruccoli says in his introduction to New Essays on The Great Gatsby , published in 1985, “Critics praise timeless works, but a timeless work is one that people keep reading.” Gatsby has been on every Best Books of the Century list and has sold millions of copies worldwide, and counting.
The writer looks back at one classic each fortnight.
