On Friday night the tower lights of the Empire State Building turn green in elegant tribute to The Great Gatsby, the slender novel whose unforgettable sentences and gossamer characters continue to stalk the American imagination.
Francis Scott Fitzgerald’s novel celebrated the 100th anniversary of its publication on Thursday. Small, heartfelt tributes have been organised in various pockets of the country this weekend, from parties and readings in the writer’s home city of St Paul to literary excursions and jazz in Great Neck, Long Island, where much of the dazzling tragedy of his novel is set.
In the century since its publication to baffled critical notices and an indifferent public, Gatsby has gone from neglect to gradual revival to occupying its unassailable position as not just one of the best works of fiction of the 20th century but as a key to all mythologies of whatever the “American dream” is supposed to be.
That phrase, or cliche, or aspiration, was repeated countless times throughout last year’s election, by all three presidential candidates, including the current occupant of the White House. But ask what that dream is and you will get 350 million answers.
Gatsby is part seductive party-invitation, part moral indictment of the impulses that have driven the United States to its current state. For instance, on the night of Gatsby’s 100th birthday, a television news piece reported on the Natal Conference in Austin, Texas, a movement in its third year promoting an increase in birth rates and lauded by far-fight conservativeswhile subject to opinion pieces and criticisms describing the speakers as race science advocates and eugenicists.
Elon Musk has become a hero to those in the pro-natal cause. The billionaire recently told Fox News the future of humanity is what keeps him awake at night and warned that “unless the birth rate goes up, civilisation will disappear”.
It’s a line that millions of Americans who read and studied Gatsby will find familiar: when Tom Buchanan makes his first appearance, he is limitless in his wealth and boredom, and is fretting about the future of the white race, warning that “civilisation’s going to pieces”.
The novel’s abiding themes – obsession, wealth, corruption, greed, class snobbery, vanity, the fear of ageing – are easily transferable to the distinct decades of America’s progress to what will, next year, be its 250th anniversary or semi-quincentennial.
Describing the ill-fated union of the Buchanans, Gatsby’s narrator says: “I had no sight into Daisy’s heart, but I felt that Tom would drift on forever seeking, a little wistfully, for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game.” That sentence alone is a perfect epitaph to the countless stories of American stars from sports fields to Hollywood, or business to politics who have risen and strived and discovered finally that the very top is simply distant, and lonely. And easy to fall from.
F Scott Fitzgerald died in Hollywood in 1940from a heart attack after years of reckless living, aged just 44. He went to his grave believing Gatsby had been a failure, consigned to irrelevance. It took the decade of the Great Depression and the second World War for Americans to gain sufficient perspective to appreciate that this slim, gorgeous, preposterous story is a kind of spiritual guide to the impulses and soul of the land itself. It has sold more than 25 million copies and who knows how many more have read it, and loved it.
His grave, and that of Zelda, his wife, in Rockville, Maryland, in the Fitzgerald family plot, is a short drive from Washington DC. On Thursday evening, during rush hour, the sky was dull and it was cold. But there was a small, steady stream of Fitzgerald fans paying their respects on the centenary of Gatsby. One couple carried a copy with the original 1925 cover – sorrowful eyes and lip-sticked mouth in a midnight blue backdrop and pearls and jewels dripping from New York’s evolving skyline.
The churchyard is far removed from all of that. The simple white-stone church, St Mary’s, has been a feature of the village since 1817 but is the lone pastoral remnant of the village where his father spent his boyhood. The graveyard is surrounded by thickets of suburban roads and glass-panelled buildings, the churn of cars and the intimidating soullessness of corporate American suburbia.
But there is, at least, a train track behind the church and even in that teatime hour, a big freight train rolled by sounding its mournful signal. It provided a perfect excuse to conclude with a paragraph from the widely-loved passage in which Gatsby’s narrator remembers his train journeys home from boarding school and college and understands, for the first time, that he has been telling a story of the West.
“When we pulled out into the winter night and the real snow, our snow, began to stretch out beside us and twinkle against the windows, and the dim lights of small Wisconsin stations moved by, a sharp wild brace came suddenly into the air. We drew in deep breaths of it as we walked back from dinner through the cold vestibules, unutterably aware of our identity with this country for one strange hour, before we melted indistinguishably into it again.”
