How we misread The Great Gatsby
The greatness of F Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, published 100 years ago, lies in its details. But they are often overlooked, buried beneath a century of accumulated cliché.
On 10 April 1925, the day The Great Gatsby was published, F Scott Fitzgerald wrote to Max Perkins, his editor, asking that great care be taken promoting his novel about modern carelessness. “Be sure and keep all such trite phrases as ‘Surely the book of the spring!’ out of the advertising,” he directed. A far more fastidious writer than his reputation suggests, Fitzgerald was withering about clichés, his letters peppered with objections to inherited phrases and ideas. Despite his best efforts, however, his most acclaimed novel arrives a century after its publication encrusted with them: the American Dream, the Roaring Twenties, Gatsby’s green light, hot jazz and cold gin, feathered flappers dancing the Charleston, a book that’s all one extravagant spree.
If Fitzgerald would have been delighted to know that Gatsby would one day be acclaimed as an American masterpiece, he would probably find our hackneyed ideas about it disappointing. “I want to write something new,” Fitzgerald famously told Perkins when he started thinking about Gatsby, “something extraordinary and beautiful and simple and intricately patterned.” Most readers readily appreciate that Gatsby is extraordinary, beautiful and simple, while many scholars have mapped Gatsby’s modernism to show how new it was. Its intricate patterns can be harder to discern, however – especially beneath a century of accumulated cliché. Gatsby has not been set in amber, which might at least have reflected its rich and lambent peculiarity, so much as shrink-wrapped in plastic and slapped with stock labels.
