The Not-So-Great Gatsby
I was just reminded that its been 100 years since that summer on West Egg (the North Shore of Long Island) when Nick Carraway and Jay Gatsby dallied with the rich and famous of East Egg. Clearly, 1922 was a carefree moment in U.S. history when the War to end all wars was behind them and the world looked like one big party that would never end. The old money crowd was being wooed by the new money crowd that had made their fortunes doing whatever made them richest, regardless of the means. Meyer Wolfsheim had fixed the 1919 World Series and that was more a matter of awe than a matter of shame. F. Scott Fitzgerald leaves it all very vague as to how Gatsby came upon his fortune, but his connections with the gangster elite and the innuendo about the source of his wealth make it clear that this was not just new money, but dirty new money. I suspect it is similar to something like a fortune acquired these days through money laundering. I think its fair to say that the TV series Ozark does not leave that many people questioning the ethics of Jason Bateman and Laura Linney (both very popular actors in their own right), but rather, wondering how they are going to avoid getting killed by the REAL bad guys from the drug cartel. There are some “victimless” crimes like fixing gambling and sporting events and money laundering that people simply worry less about from an ethical standpoint. That was true in 1922 and it is still true today.
But Fitzgerald shows us that unethical behavior has its cost and those who vote with their wallets rather than their conscience will eventually pay the price of being less discerning about ethical standards, regardless of who is victimized. Caring too much about money and not caring enough about people is at the heart of this romantic tragedy. Of course, its strangely cast such that the guy with the most illicitly obtained funds, Jay Gatsby, is shown to care little for the money and a great deal for the pangs of his heart, the prize of Daisy Buchanan. Does anyone else find it funny that the neutral and perhaps “good”guy in this story is its narrator, who is actually a bond salesman. In today’s world, anyone from Wall Street would be assumed to be way up on the morally corrupt scale, along with politicians and Anthony Fauci (just kidding). But Nick is a quiet and unassuming guy who observes the weaknesses of the rich and famous and tries to be friends with everyone, without ever trying to sell any of them any bonds, I might add. I’m guessing after the ill-fated Gatsby affair, Nick quit the bond business and went into the priesthood or something. He certainly was unlikely to be a success as a bond salesman.
So what exactly made Jay Gatsby so “Great”. It’s unlikely to have come from fame since he tried to hide his light under a bushel and few of his partying friends could even identify him. It wasn’t his business prowess or shrewdness because clearly he was quite subservient to Wolfsheim. Whether you prefer the Werner Baxter (1926), Alan Ladd (1949), Robert Redford (1974), or Leonardo DiCaprio (2013) version of Gatsby, you have to admit that his looks were certainly placing him in the great category. And, or course, his adopted style and partying largess was a very big reason for his greatness in the Roaring 20’s. I suspect that Fitzgerald is thinking he needs to teach us that Gatsby’s version of greatness ain’t so great at all. But the question is whether that is due to his moral corruption as to the source of his wealth or the fact that he didn’t have the strength to keep his party going and avoid the pitfall of becoming soft and weepy over some dame, only to let the dame’s philanderer husband anger a cuckold into shooting him in a misguided effort to seek revenge…a real irony given that Gatsby is sympathetic to the philanderee lady at the ash heap crossroads in Queens.
I find Fitzgerald a very interesting literary figure for many reason, but the biggest is what Wikipedia declares as the great fence-sitting exercise that dominates his four novels. They say he represents, “warfare of moral emancipation against moral conceit”. That’s a pretty interesting fence on which to perch when you think about it. He himself was a middle class Midwesterner (born in St. Paul, Minnesota and raised in Buffalo, New York) and raised a Catholic. Right there you have a moral conflict since Catholicism was a fringe in the U.S. at the turn of the Twentieth Century. Nevertheless, Fitzgerald got himself into Princeton despite his bankrupt, alcoholic father and started writing about characters who aspired for higher social status while being quietly shunned as interlopers…even if they were smart or good-looking (both of which Fitzgerald obviously considered himself to be). He had, through Princeton, emancipated himself from the Midwestern, Catholic, Middle Class roots that spawned him, but its unclear if that translated into moral emancipation or just socioeconomic emancipation. Its clear that the moral conceit he saw was in the landed money crowd that he came up against at Princeton and elsewhere in the circles he ran in. That’s the thing, he was allowed to fraternize with wealth, only to have them bar him from getting too close or, God forbid, thinking he could become one of them.
I am often fond of saying that you can’t build your walls high enough. That is my way of saying that economic elitism cannot shield itself from the masses they exploit, and that sooner or later, when the rich get too rich and the poor get too poor (thank you, Pearl Buck), things will change and your walls will get breached. But the story of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Jay Gatsby tells me that I may be wrong to generalize about walls. I stand by my economic warning about walls, but might have to modify it for social and moral issues. Gatsby shows us that some walls cannot be surmounted and scaled successfully. Social or class walls can stand strong regardless of their moral fiber. No amount of money or success can necessarily breach them. While the Downton Abbey set succumbs to the burdens of generational wealth gone thin, the moral conceit and high walls of Daisy and Tom Buchanan can prevail and go on oblivious to the piled bodies that lie tested and fallen short at the outer base of their walls.
I learned a lot about Fitzgerald when I read that he was named after a distant cousin of his mother’s, Francis Scott Keys, the writer of The Star Spangled Banner. He was the great American novelist of his age, and his age was all about this social drama playing out in America during the 20’s. Think about the titles of his novels, This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and Damned, The Great Gatsby, Tender is the Night and The Last Tycoon. And then there was his rejected and unpublished novel, The Romantic Egoist. Can titles be more telling than that? I think about him in the context of his successors to the Great American Novelist throne, Pearl Buck and John Steinbeck. I find myself intrigued by Gatsby, but unsympathetic. I prefer Wang Lung, Cal Trask and Tom Joad. I am forced to frame Gatsby as Trump and Biden as Joad, and I find myself thinking…I cant wait for the roaring 20’s to stop roaring.