How Fitzgerald’s Least Popular Novel Became an American Icon (The Great Gatsby, Part 1)

In this inaugural episode of the Norton Library Podcast, we welcome Anne Margaret Daniel to discuss how F. Scott Fitzgerald came to write his Jazz Age masterpiece. We also explore some of the themes that have captivated readers for over a century—self-improvement and the "American Dream," the power and limits of wealth in the upper reaches of the elite, and the narrative filtering of Gatsby's world through the perspective of outsider Nick Carraway.

Anne Margaret Daniel is the editor of the Norton Library edition of The Great Gatsby and teaches literature at The New School University in New York City. She is also the editor of I’d Die For You and Other Lost Stories, Fitzgerald’s last previously unpublished short stories, and of the forthcoming selected letters of Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald.
 
The Norton Library edition of The Great Gatsby  features the complete text of the first 1925 edition, along with a selection of earlier short stories by Fitzgerald. To learn more or purchase a copy, go to https://seagull.wwnorton.com/gatsby.

Learn more about the Norton Library series at https://wwnorton.com/norton-library.

Listen to our Spotify playlist inspired by The Great Gatsby: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/38hcFnY4wCoBbr3Q6Nz6dp?si=861dd02247b4411b.

Have questions or suggestions for the podcast? Email us at nortonlibrary@wwnorton.com or find us on Twitter @TNL_WWN.

Episode transcript at: https://seagull.wwnorton.com/thegreatgatsby/part1/transcript.

Transcript

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[Mark:] You are listening to the Norton Library Podcast, where we explore classic works of literature and philosophy with the leading scholars of the Norton Library, a new series from W. W. Norton that introduces influential texts to a new generation of readers. I'm your host, Mark Cirino, with Michael Von Cannon producing, and today we present part one of our interview devoted to F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 novel, The Great Gatsby, with its editor, Anne Margaret Daniel. In this first episode, we'll discover who Fitzgerald was and how the novel came to be, while also discussing some of its prominent themes and its unforgettable language. Anne Margaret Daniel teaches literature at the New School University in New York City and has published widely on Fitzgerald, modernism, and music. Anne Margaret Daniel, welcome to the show!

[Anne Margaret:] Thank you so much, it's a real pleasure to be here with you today.

[Mark:] Well, it's great to be able to talk with you about The Great Gatsby. And maybe we can start by talking about F. Scott Fitzgerald himself: about his biography and what led him to write The Great Gatsby. So, who was F. Scott Fitzgerald?

[Anne Margaret:] Well, F. Scott Fitzgerald, um, Francis Scott Keith Fitzgerald, to give him his long name, was a Midwestern-born, for a long time East coast-based, and then, uh, Europe-based, American writer. He has come to be regarded as one of a trinity of Great American male modernist writers: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner. They were all writing, uh, during roughly the same time period. Faulkner was a teeny bit later. But they were active from the late 1910s through, in Fitzgerald's case, 1940. Um, he was the first of the three to die – he actually died quite young, having finished only a handful of novels and almost 200, uh, very popular short stories. He was primarily a fiction writer, although he did write several plays. Notably, when he was an undergraduate at Princeton University, he wrote some musical comedies that stand up surprisingly well. He always wanted to be a big Broadway playwright, but that never quite happened for him. He also wrote some poetry, that is the least well-known out of his, uh, out of his, um, his whole sweep of his literary career. He's probably best known for his novels, and the chiefest among them – the one for which he is really globally remembered today – is The Great Gatsby, which was written from 1921 to 1925 and published in April of 1925. 

[Mark:] Anne Margaret, what can you tell us about his first two novels? And why are they not as enduring as The Great Gatsby?

[Anne Margaret:] That's an excellent question, because during his lifetime, they were infinitely more popular than The Great Gatsby. His first novel was one that he began – he actually started thinking about it while he was still an undergraduate at Princeton. Um, he did not graduate from Princeton. He was a member of the class of 1917, but there was a war on and he went off to officer training school. And while he was at training camp, uh, in Kentucky and then in Alabama, he started working on a novel that he referred to as “The Romantic Egoists.” It was about a young man who was an undergraduate at Princeton and very involved in the literary and artistic scene at the university, and thinking about where life would lead him once he had graduated. Uh, this was a classic move of Fitzgerald's. He tended to set his novels in the chapter, if you will, of his life that he had just completed or that he was recently completing. Um, he submitted “This Side of Paradise,” which was called “The Romantic Egoists” at that point, to Charles Scribner's on the recommendation of his friend, the Irish-based writer Shane Leslie, who was a Scribner writer. And, uh, Charles Scribner and Max Perkins, the great Scribner editor, uh, sent it back to him and said, “We can't publish this novel, but we do encourage you to revise it.” And at this point, Fitzgerald had gotten engaged to a young woman he met when he was in officer training camp in Alabama, Zelda Sayre. His father was an Alabama-based judge and his prospects weren't great at that time. He was working for an ad agency in New York, and after some months of being engaged, Zelda broke off the engagement, “I don't think you're particularly going anywhere.” And he took his rejected manuscript home with him to his parents’ house in Saint Paul, gave up his advertising job in New York, and he spent the next chunk of months revising the novel extensively into what became “This Side of Paradise.” Scribner accepted it; it was published in the spring of 1920 to great popularity and a fair amount of critical acclaim. Even people who viewed it as kind of a juvenile or a college novel – Which is fair enough. It is. – um, said that it was interestingly well written. It's written a bit like James Joyce's, uh, novels in style, uh, interestingly enough. It's, uh, it has chapters that read like a play. It has chapters that are much more introspective. Fitzgerald is working with stream of consciousness, you know, developing his manner of a writing stream of consciousness, and it made him a lot of money very quickly. Um, he was, he was young. He was, you know, just 24-25 years old. Zelda was, uh, was just about to turn 20. And they did get married that spring, and, uh, he immediately started writing a second novel, which he called “The Beautiful and Damned.” And this was about a young couple, um, Anthony and Gloria Patch, who are very, very much like Scott and Zelda. In fact, he – from his letters to his editor at Scribner’s, we know he used her diaries, um, parties that they actually attended. He used the material of his life as a basis for this novel, as well. And that, too, was a big seller. Um, he published it in serial form first, in a prominent magazine, and then Scribner brought it out in 19, uh, I believe 1922. And all the time he was working on this novel, he was also writing short stories. “Babes in the Wood” was a hit for him in 1919. He continued writing short stories and selling them, because he could do them quickly and they made a lot of money for him. This became something of a trap he fell into later in life.

[Mark:] In the Norton Library edition of The Great Gatsby, you also include, in addition to the novel The Great Gatsby, three short stories. What was your strategy behind that, and how do reading those short stories inform our reading of the novel?

[Anne Margaret:] Well, an important thing to know about the way that Fitzgerald wrote is that he considered himself primarily a novelist. That's how he wanted to be thought of. And this is not to discredit his short stories – he was very proud of some of them. But he used his short stories as a quarry, as a testing ground for ideas that he later worked into his novels. By the time he was working on The Great Gatsby, he had a backlog of, you know, five or six years’ worth of published short stories. And the tear sheets for those, as well as the printed versions of the many from the Saturday Evening Post, survive in the Fitzgerald papers at Princeton. It's a commonplace for him to take phrases, words, sentences, whole paragraphs, and he'll circle them in the short stories’ printing, and he'll write next to it, you know, “used in The Great Gatsby,” and then the page where it appeared. And across the top of these stories, he quite often will write, “Stripped and permanently buried” [Laughter] – which sounds very film noir before the days of noir – but by that, he meant he had used what he found best in these stories and didn't necessarily want them to be reprinted. Um, at least, not at the time. The reason I included the three short stories that I do include at the end of the Norton Edition are because they are directly involved in Gatsby. Um, one of them, the story called “Absolution,” was actually intended as the preface for what he was thinking of, in 1921 and 1922, as a novel about a young Catholic boy, to be set in the Midwest and in New York City during the 1890s and early 1900s. And by the time he published “Absolution” in H. L. Mencken's magazine, The American Mercury, in 1922, he had – he'd gotten away from that idea. He was no longer interested in writing a Catholic novel. Um, he didn't want to be, I think, that autobiographical. [Laughter] He was interested in a far more imaginative and contemporary project. He ended up setting The Great Gatsby almost exclusively in New York, although it definitely has Midwestern roots, and he set it during the summer months of 1922, from about, you know, the end of May through early September. That's when the meat of the novel takes place, apart from some of the flashbacks. The story “The Sensible Thing,” I included because it has a plot very like an integral portion of Gatsby's plot, namely a poor boy who's in love with a rich girl. And, you know, he ends up getting her in the end, but that, uh, that works out differently in Gatsby.

[Mark:] In fact, that leads me to a point that you make forcefully in your introduction, which is maybe one of the advancements that Fitzgerald makes in The Great Gatsby, which is narrative perspective. And you talk a lot about Nick Carraway, who is the narrator of the novel. And maybe you can tell us a little bit about him, and what his role is in The Great Gatsby, and if – maybe if that is an innovation that Fitzgerald uses in this novel that he never used before.

[Anne Margaret:] I think it definitely is. If you look back at the first two novels, “This Side of Paradise” and, uh, “The Beautiful and Damned,” the narrative voices in those are very, very different. The central character – who is at least your putative narrator a lot of the time, um, or around whom the narrative revolves – is, uh, is a very different kind of speaker. Nick Carraway is someone who – I mean, Fitzgerald, at one point, gives him the line when he's standing looking out the windows of a party scene in New York, he's thinking about being “within and without” in that wonderful passage, uh, where he wants to get away from Tom and Myrtle Wilson's apartment and get out and walk across the park. Nick is a constant observer, and he wants us to think that he is an objective, fair-minded, uh – to use the word he applies to himself – honest narrator. Whenever a narrator tells you themself that they are honest, you can always – always – suspect them. [Laughter]

[Mark:] And that he reserves judgment, right? 

[Anne Margaret:] Oh yes, he makes judgments in every single line, Nick Carraway does.

[Mark:] Well, I just wanted to pursue that quote that you talked about, because you add it in your introduction: “I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.” What does – What do you take that to mean?

[Anne Margaret:] Honestly, I always focused on the word “without.” This novel is immensely about things Nick Carraway is lacking. Um, Nick very much feels himself an outsider. I think, in some ways, that Fitzgerald did. And I've included a short story in this edition called “Winter Dreams,” where you have a young man who is the narrative focus, who's very Carraway-esque in a lot of ways, more than he is, let's say, Gatsby-esque. Um, Nick is – Nick is lacking in so many ways. And he's conscious of that. He's smart enough to be conscious of it. He has left his safe haven in the middle west to go to school at New Haven, he's a Yale graduate, and he hasn't particularly distinguished himself there. There's nothing really notable about his college career: he hasn't been, you know, a literary force, he hasn't been a big football player like Tom Buchanan, his classmate, uh, and then he goes off to war. And we understand – pretty elliptically, but we understand he has been serving for almost the entirety of the World War. He comes back, he says, “restless,” doesn't want to go back to the Midwest, and decides to come east and learn the bond business. This – You know, Wall Street is just getting going. And he doesn’t know anything about it, we don't really see him doing a lot of work. He doesn't have a lot of money – his family are funding him. He's comfortable, but he's not making, you know, much money on his own. We understand that from the novel. He wants to be involved in a relationship, but none of his relationships seem to go anywhere. So, he is without a partner. Um, it's the lack that seems to me so important in Nick Carraway, and that's why I focus on that, where he talks about being “within and without.” He's thinking about his own internal consciousness and also all the things he doesn't have. 

[Mark:] And so, are we – are the readers of The Great Gatsby – we are relying on Nick for the authentic reportage of what is going on, or are we relying on him for some sort of a moral guidance about how we should feel about the other characters? What is – What is our relationship to Nick as our narrator?

[Anne Margaret:] Unhappily, in some ways, we’re stuck with Nick. [Laughter] We know from the things he observes and from the language that Fitzgerald gives him in this book, that Nick – for all of his experience as a soldier and traveling the world, Nick is fairly parochial. Um, Nick is fairly narrow-minded. Uh, he is prejudiced. Uh, look at the way he refers, let's say, to Meyer Wolfsheim. Look at the way he refers to African American characters. Uh, he's not a nasty bigot in the way that Tom Buchanan is, but he definitely has his prejudices. Uh, he's prejudiced in some ways against women. You know, “Dishonesty in a woman is never something you can, you know, feel too badly about. You know, you sort of forgive them because they can't help it,” seems to be his attitude toward Jordan Baker and her dishonesty, uh, which, in a way, is generous, but it's also very demeaning and patronizing. Um, he also knows about the various affairs in this novel – all the adulteries that are being committed – and, you know, he doesn't particularly say a word about it, even when he might be legally bound to do so. [Laughter] It's interesting to me how his espousing of morality and his pretension of being a straight arrow really doesn't hold up. Uh, he's quite a slippery narrator, and he goes in lots of different directions. Um, he's searching for something. He doesn't want to commit, a lot of the time, including to a narrative statement, and he's very hard to hold on to. But he's what we've got, and that's why we have to stick with him.

[Mark:] So, with Fitzgerald's biography in mind, do you associate Fitzgerald with Nick Carraway the narrator, or do you associate Fitzgerald with the grandeur of The Great Gatsby?

[Anne Margaret:] I honestly don't associate Fitzgerald and his biography with either character. Much later, he retrospectively would talk about Amory Blaine, the central character in “This Side of Paradise,” as his little brother. Uh, he would talk about Anthony Patch as being, you know, also a brother of his. Gatsby, kind of his big brother in some ways. He talked of the central characters in this fashion, but, of course, this is a writer talking about his characters. I don't see, actually, a lot of kinship between Fitzgerald and Nick, apart from the being a constant observer. Fitzgerald was a ruthless observer. Anybody who has ever lived with or been a writer knows that they will take things they observe, scraps of conversation they overhear, lines from your letters. [Laughter] He was – He used all these things in his own fictions. So yes, to the extent that he's using the stuff of his life and his own experience in writing The Great Gatsby, uh, I suppose Fitzgerald's biography informs all the characters. But we can't discredit the man's imagination. I mean, the driving force behind the creation and realization of these characters is not somebody he knew or writing them, you know, to be like himself, but the fact that Fitzgerald had an absolute, you know, sort of lightning bolt, uh, energized one-in-a-hundred-million imagination and was able to put all that into this incredible book.

[Mark:] Another central theme that you address in your introduction of The Great Gatsby is this notion of “the American dream,” which sometimes, when we think of The Great Gatsby, you say, “Oh, that's the – that's a novel about the American dream.” But it would be really helpful to know what the American dream is, uh, or was in 1925, and how that manifests itself in the novel.

[Anne Margaret:] The whole idea of “the American dream,” the concept of the American dream, technically didn't exist as a phrase in 1925. [Laughter] Um, it – it's something that famously, uh, was said to be coined by a guy named James Truslow Adams. He was an American historian, um, a writer – no relation, I think, to the Adams family of presidents in Massachusetts. But the idea of “the American dream,” um, in Adams's construction, was the idea that America symbolized – as a kind of a national ethos – it symbolized the fact that life in America was full of possibility. It – There was the ability in America that you can live better, that you can be richer. It's very much tied up in ideas of money and wealth – that you could be richer, that you could achieve what you want to achieve, and here's the kicker, regardless of the circumstances of your birth or your social status. You don't have to be an aristocrat, uh, coming from a European country. You don't have to be, um, you don't have to have any sort of family wealth to back your play. That you could just achieve it in America. Um, to say that that is a false construction and not applicable to everyone, is – seems very basic to me, a basic truth. Uh, was this true for people who were brought to America in slave ships, to live out their lives as enslaved persons in this country? No. The American dream was not available for them. Um, is it true for people who don't have anything to help them, who really are, as Tom Buchanan calls Gatsby in the novel, “Mr. Nobody from nowhere”? Um, that's debatable, I think it's safe to say. Uh, interestingly, Fitzgerald himself used the term “American dream” before James Truslow Adams did. Uh, he applied it to a girl in a short story called, “The Hotel Child.” A European count is looking at this wealthy, young, American woman, and he refers to her as “my American dream girl.” So, this is a concept that Fitzgerald is thinking about. Um, obviously, the construction of the American dream in Gatsby and in the hundreds of thousands of critical articles that have been written on Gatsby and the American dream – term papers, essays, name it – uh, it applies to Gatsby. Uh, how can a poor boy from, uh, a fairly nondescript middle western family, a young man named Jimmy Gatz, how can he rise to become Jay Gatsby with this fabulous wealth and a backstory that nobody knows, that everyone's talking about, that's always open to speculation? You know, this has, in a way – that whole theme of Gatsby has become, now, a part of the definition of the American dream. 

[Mark:] So, does Fitzgerald or Nick Carraway ultimately say, like Benjamin Franklin, who is invoked at the end of this novel, “Oh well, he just did – was determined to improve, self-improvement, and then he figured out a way through hard work, and then he was able to do it. So, we should honor that”? Or is it also, “Well, Gatsby did improve himself and increases the status and wealth, but look at the price that he had to pay to do it. Look at the means that he had to engage in in order to do it”? So, do we ever get a verdict, from either the narrator or the novelist, on the wisdom of the American dream? 

[Anne Margaret:] Well, I think we get the verdict that you stated in your latter point: from the novelist. That you – You know, and what you're talking about is the section at the end, where we see Jimmy Gatz's copy of “Hopalong Cassidy” with his list of items for self-improvement. This is how you not only improve yourself, but how you make it. Um, we also see Gatsby clearly during the course of the novel involved in some sort of illegal activities, whether it's bootlegging or – the intimation in the phone call he gets after he, um, is not there to take it anymore – that he's been passing fake bonds, that he's part of an organization that are selling false securities. Um, and that ties in interestingly to what Nick Carraway is doing. And Nick has turned down the offer to work with Gatsby in this arena. So, I think – I don't think Nick Carraway gets it in the end. All he wants is to return to the safety and reliability of the middle west and think about what's happened to him in the east. And the result is this novel, I mean, that's the construction. That's one thing I think Baz Luhrmann gets absolutely right in his recent movie version of Gatsby. He actually has Nick Carraway emerging from a sanatorium, where he's clearly had some sort of a breakdown. And while he has been institutionalized, he's composed the novel. I don't think that's far wrong, frankly, but when it comes to Fitzgerald and thinking about the American dream, Fitzgerald is always saying, “Watch out.” He's saying, “Absolutely dream, but be really careful. Because you may think you've achieved it, and it's all based in a cloud and it comes crashing down and there's nothing you can do to get it back.” Um, he's very anxious about engaging in anything illegal to achieve that dream. That's why he has the whole setup of Gatsby the Bootlegger, Gatsby the, um, the Securities Fraudster, Gatsby working with Meyer Wolfsheim as his associate. That's why he makes all that very scary, um, because I honestly do think he himself is judging that and is afraid of it and doesn't want lives to be lived that way. 

[Mark:] So, there is a division in the novel between old wealth and new wealth, between the Buchanans and Daisy Buchanan, and Tom Buchanan, and also Gatsby? So, does Fitzgerald differentiate between those two? And is he trying to make different points about how one comes to wealth in America?

[Anne Margaret:] Absolutely, he is. Um, we know that the – Daisy and the Fays are – that's her maiden name, Daisy Fay – that they are among the wealthiest families in Louisville, which is saying something. But it's also saying a small town, uh, compared to, let's say, New York or Chicago at that time. We know from Jordan Baker that Daisy's family has the largest lawn and the biggest white house, right? The biggest house in a fairly small, uh, at that point, middle western town. Tom Buchanan is on a different level. He's on a different kind of order of wealth. Uh, Nick describes him as, you know, being a rich boy in a rich boys’ school at Yale. And Nick says, even at New Haven, where there were so many super wealthy people who came from old wealth, Buchanan's freedom with money was a matter for reproach, right? He just – and he brings, he brings his own Polo ponies with him when he travels. When he comes to Louisville to marry Daisy, he hires a string of private railroad cars to bring all his friends down in luxury from Chicago. Uh, he's got that sort of wealth. You know, it's sort of Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, robber baron wealth. Um, Morgan wealth, you know, that goes back generations. Um, Astors. You know, it's that kind of wealth. Gatsby has nothing approaching that. Uh, and Gatsby's new money – There's a fantastic passage where Nick and Gatsby are driving into New York and, uh, in Gatsby's fantastic car, and it's where they're coming across the, uh, the Queensborough Bridge. And Nick, in his description, refers to the sort of – these sugar heaps and all the towers and spires of New York as being built out of non-olfactory money. [Laughter] Right?

[Mark:] Yeah.

[Anne Margaret:] Which is to say, money that doesn't stink. Money that – Money that doesn't have a taint applied to it. Gatsby's money is entirely olfactory money. [Laughter] Gatsby’s money smells. And it's no accident that by the end of the novel, it's just vanished. It's this – It's this sort of bubble money that has been created based on something false. Uh, we don't know where all Gatsby's millions have gone to. We don't know who's going to inherit his house, who's paying the mortgage. It's all just gone. It's the kind of money that can blow up in your face. It's a gamble. It's a hazard. It's obviously related to the stock market and to the bond business, but, um, but very interestingly, kind of suppressed, um, unless you really think about it. And that's the kind of money that is available to people trying to achieve the American dream, but that's also part of Fitzgerald's suspicion and anxiety about it: that it could blow up in your face.

[Mark:] Anne Margaret Daniel, thank you so much for joining us in talking about The Great Gatsby, and I look forward to our next conversation on this topic.

[Anne Margaret:] A real pleasure, thank you so much.

[Mark:] The Norton Library edition of The Great Gatsby, edited by Anne Margaret Daniel, is available now in paperback and ebook. Check out the links in the description of this episode for ordering options and more information about the Norton Library, including the full catalog of titles.

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