Happy birthday to “The Great Gatsby” – which came out today, in 1925

First edition of “The Great Gatsby”

1940 letter from F. Scott Fitzgerald to editor Maxwell Perkins (who had edited The Great Gatsby):

Would the 25-cent press keep Gatsby in the public eye – or is the book unpopular? Has it had its chance? Would a popular reissue in that series with a preface not by me but by one of its admirers – I can maybe pick one – make it a favorite with classrooms, profs, lovers of English prose – anybody? But to die, so completely and unjustly after having given so much!

That letter brings tears to my eyes.

Fitzgerald died a couple of months after writing that letter. He would not see The Great Gatsby enter the canon, although we all know that it did. He would not see it become “a favorite with classrooms, profs, lovers of English prose” – and not just them, but “anybody” who reads the damn thing. As far as he was concerned, he died “unjustly after having given so much”. His masterpiece had been forgotten.

The editing process of The Great Gatsby is legendary, a story in and of itself, with Maxwell Perkins ushering Fitzgerald through the process. One of the things I love about the letters back and forth between these two men is how much it shows the craftsman-side of Fitzgerald. How much of a real writer he was. I suppose this isn’t much of a revelation, but when you get the backstage side of things – when you see how much he thought about it, and worked at it – things that seem so effortless in that slim perfect volume – it’s extraordinary. Especially now when I am in an editing process myself. It’s interesting: there’s something magical about The Great Gatsby. It flows. It seduces. It has, perhaps, the most perfect opening in literature.

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.

“Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”

He didn’t say any more, but we’ve always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence, I’m inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought—frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon; for the intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions. Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.

And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit. Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes, but after a certain point I don’t care what it’s founded on. When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction—Gatsby, who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn. If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the “creative temperament.”—it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again. No—Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.

Nothing needs to be added or subtracted. Nothing jars. We are in the presence of a master. We can relax.

To see the work that went into getting the thing right, the anxiety, the dread, the constant editing and parsing – how hard Fitzgerald was on himself, and yet how he didn’t let that stop him … He was an artist. And by that I mean, he had both sides of the coin (as all great artists must): He had transcendent creativity, high-flung, imaginative, but he also had a cool calculating eye and could look at his work objectively. Many artists have either one quality or the other … but the artists who have both? Now nothing in life is a done deal, and I know many great artists who have both sensibilities in spades – and nobody has ever heard their name. There is no guarantee that you will find your audience. F. Scott Fitzgerald, after all, did not live to see The Great Gatsby become what it is today. He had published his first novel at the age of 23, and had become a phenom, a symbol of the zeitgeist, the jazz age … and he wrote a wonderful essay about the dangers of early success, and what that can do to an artist. Anything that came afterwards (even his masterpiece) would be judged as Lesser Than. “Well, sure, Gatsby is good, but it’s not …”

But time passes, and things change.

The zeitgeist shifted, the Jazz Age passed, and Gatsby rose in stature. Sadly, Fitzgerald wasn’t around to see that. He can join the ranks of many great writers, Melville for one, who did not live long enough to see their greatness acknowledged by the world at large.

Regardless: he was a highly intuitive and sensitive artist, in touch with the universal, a keen of sadness through the human experience, and he was also a cold-blooded editor of his own prose. Ruthless.

Example, here is part of a letter he wrote to Maxwell Perkins, during the editing process of Gatsby:

After six weeks of uninterrupted work the proof is finished and the last of it goes to you this afternoon. On the whole it’s been very successful labor.

(1) I’ve brought Gatsby to life.
(2) I’ve accounted for his money.
(3) I’ve fixed up the two weak chapters (VI and VII).
(4) I’ve improved his first party.
(5) I’ve broken up his long narrative in Chapter VII.

Goosebumps. I am not saying that I am in the process of writing the next Great Gatsby, but I am saying that over the last couple of months, being forced to take a cold hard look at what I have created, there is an exhilaration of getting into that zone. The work zone. Where what you have created is precious, sure, and some things must not be mucked with … but some things need to be clarified, adjusted, or gotten rid of altogether. This is hard work. Heartbreaking work at times.

Romulus Linney, playwright, gives advice to his writing students: “You must always be ready to kill your darlings.”

A terrible thought, but one that every writer would do well to keep in mind.

If you find yourself holding onto something really really hard, there is a good chance that it is a “darling”, and you need to let it go. There is no reason that the “darling” can’t work elsewhere, in another piece … but if it doesn’t work with what you are doing right now, then you must be ready to kill it.

And you must be willing to hear, from a trusted editor, that that certain thing needs to go. (I am careful who I show my work to. That may sound odd to say, since I write every day here on the blog – but that is a different process.) Additionally, when I have written personal essays here and have gotten vicious responses – sure, they hurt sometimes – who wants to be called a “stupid cunt”? But I never EVER would edit my writing because of a comment like that from a random driveby stranger who seems to have a viscerally negative response to not just my writing, but who I am. I would never take those comments to heart. Never. I take my advice from people who understand my intent, and who understand my writing. I talk about the “ideal reader”. I have a couple in mind. These are not people who love everything I do, these are people who can say, “Okay, I totally see what you’re going for here – but I think you could say it in a paragraph, rather than two pages.” Or “No, no, don’t break up the narrative at this point – you have too much momentum right now, maybe move that explanation part earlier – so that when you get to the climax there’s no interruption.” These are helpful comments. Not, “Maybe you need to get laid” Or “Wow, enough with the TMI”. Or “God, no wonder why you’re single. Stupid bitch.” Ahhh, blogging.

But to quote a friend, “If someone feels the need to take the energy to call you a ‘stupid cunt’, then you are obviously doing something very right.”

Enough about me. Let’s return to what is really important.

The Great Gatsby was published in 1925. Fitzgerald worked his ass off on this book – and was tormented throughout the process. He wrote, and re-wrote, and re-wrote – holding off his editor, Maxwell Perkins, as long as possible. It was a precious book to him, a deeply personal book, and he feared he had not succeeded.

Perkins’ long letter back to Fitzgerald, after he finally received the manuscript, gives me chills. I won’t print it in its entirety – it’s too long – but it’s an amazing insight into the book, and also … into Fitzgerald the Writer. The guy had an innate gift, yes, but he also was a major craftsman.

Here are some excerpts from Perkins’ initial letter:

I think you have every kind of right to be proud of this book. It is an extraordinary book, suggestive of all sorts of thoughts and moods. You adopted exactly the right method of telling it, that of employing a narrator who is more of a spectator than an actor: this puts the reader upon a point of observation on a higher level than that on which the characters stand and at a distance that gives perspective. In no other way could your irony have been so immensely effective, nor the reader have been enabled so strongly to feel at times the strangeness of human circumstance in a vast heedless universe. In the eyes of Dr. Eckleburg various readers will see different significances; but their presence gives a superb touch to the whole thing: great unblinking eyes, expressionless, looking down upon the human scene. It’s magnificent!

I could go on praising the book and speculating on its various elements, and meanings, but points of criticism are more important now. I think you are right in feeling a certain slight sagging in chapters six and seven, and I don’t know how to suggest a remedy. I hardly doubt that you will find one and I am only writing to say that I think it does need something to hold up here to the pace set, and ensuing.

He then goes on to list a couple of pages of specific criticisms. It’s an amazing literary analysis.

One of the criticisms is this:

The other point is also about Gatsby: his career must remain mysterious, of course. But in the end you make it pretty clear that his wealth came through his connection with Wolfstein. You also suggest this much earlier. Now almost all readers numerically are going to be puzzled by his having all this wealth and are going to feel entitled to an explanation. To give a distinct and definite one would be, of course, utterly absurd. It did occur to me though, that you might here and there interpolate some phrases, and possibly incidents, little touches of various kinds, that would suggest that he was in some active way mysteriously engaged. You do have him called on the telephone, but couldn’t he be seen once or twice consulting at his parties with people of some sort of mysterious significance, from the political, the gambling, the sporting world, or whatever it may be. I know I am floundering, but that fact may help you to see what I mean … I wish you were here so I could talk about it to you for then I know I could at least make you understand what I mean. What Gatsby did ought never to be definitely imparted, even if it could be. Whether he was an innocent tool in the hands of somebody else, or to what degree he was this, ought not to be explained. But if some sort of business activity of his were simply adumbrated, it would lend further probability to that part of the story.

After a couple more paragraphs in this vein, Perkins writes:

The general brilliant quality of the book makes me ashamed to make even these criticisms. The amount of meaning you get into a sentence, the dimensions and intensity of the impression you make a paragraph carry, are most extraordinary. The manuscript is full of phrases which make a scene blaze with life. If one enjoyed a rapid railroad journey I would compare the number and vividness of pictures your living words suggest, to the living scenes disclosed in that way. It seems in reading a much shorter book than it is, but it carries the mind through a series of experiences that one would think would require a book of three times its length.

The presentation of Tom, his place, Daisy and Jordan, and the unfolding of their characters is unequalled so far as I know. The description of the valley of ashes adjacent to the lovely country, the conversation and the action in Myrtle’s apartment, the marvelous catalogue of those who come to Gatsby’s house — these are such things as make a man famous. And all these things, the whole pathetic episode, you have given a place in time and space, for with the help of T.J. Eckleburg and by an occasional glance at the sky, or the sea, or the city, you have imparted a sort of sense of eternity. You once told me you were not a natural writer — my God! You have plainly mastered the craft, of course; but you needed far more than craftsmanship for this.

Now that’s the kind of letter you want from your editor.

The Great Gatsby was not the phenom that This Side of Paradise was. Reviews were mixed. Only posterity would put Gatsby in the canon.

Happy birthday to a great American novel. No, Scott. In 1940, your book hadn’t “had its chance”. Your time would come. I’m just sorry you weren’t around to see it.

Not only does Gatsby have one of the most perfect openings in all of literature, it also has one of the most perfect endings.

And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.

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—to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning——

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

After so many readings, it still has the power to take my breath away.