F Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise (1920)
“‘Her voice is full of money,’ he [Gatsby] said suddenly.
That was it. I’d never understood before. It was full of money—that was the
inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it, the cymbals’
song of it. … high in a white palace, the king’s daughter, the golden girl. …”
The Great Gatsby
“Russia is your example of a beneficent violence, I
suppose?” “Quite possibly,” admitted Amory. “Of course, it’s overflowing just
as the French Revolution did, but I’ve no doubt it’s really a great experiment
and worthwhile.”
The Great Gatsby
Fitzgerald’s superb novel is set in the summer of 1922. The
plot is about a young man from the Midwest, Nick Carraway. Carraway sells bonds
on Wall Street and lives on Long Island. As Fitzgerald points out, Carraway
lives in a small house compared to the huge mansions surrounding him. The
enigmatic Jay Gatsby owns one. Gatsby lives close to a philandering husband,
Tom Buchanan, who represents older money to Gatsby’s new wealth. Gatsby has
made his millions (through bootlegging and stock fraud in partnership with
gangster Meyer Wolfsheim.
As the Marxist art critic David Walsh writes, “Fitzgerald’s
work is a brilliant effort, easy to underestimate in its brevity, delicacy and
the simplicity of the drama. The novel has something of the diaphanous
sensibility of Keats, the author’s favourite poet. At the same time, it is an
angry, scathing work, as thoroughgoing a debunking of the “American dream” as
there ever has been”.
The Great Gatsby is a deceptive book. While it is only 146
pages long, it is an extraordinarily insightful look into the intellectual and
social life of the top echelons of the American ruling elite during the first
part of the 20th century.
As Walsh writes, “ A
novel is not a history book or a political manifesto. The important artist
accumulates thoughts, feelings, moods and themes over the course of years and
works them into concrete and coherent imagery charged with meaning. Any serious
work also includes ambiguities, complexities, and “asymmetrical” elements that
are not easily reducible to immediate social analysis. However, the individual
artist does not draw his or her conceptions and emotions from empty space, nor
are they simply the expression of eternal psycho-biological urges. Significant
artistic ideas and representations are always shaped by collective human
experience by historical and social development. Fitzgerald thought a good deal
about political events and social life. His books and letters only have to be
read carefully for that to become apparent. Born in 1896, the novelist belonged
to a generation deeply affected by the First World War, the Russian Revolution
and subsequent developments.”[1]
Fitzgerald's very subtle hints about the racist and fascist
outlook of a section of the American bourgeoisie are dropped into the text like
a bombshell. One example is when Tom
Buchanan talks about a book he has read called The Rise of the Colored Empires,
“by this man Goddard.” He goes on: “The idea is if we don’t look out, the white
race will be—will be utterly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been
proved.”Fitzgeralds' fictionalized reference is to Lothrop Stoddard’s The
Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy (1920). A deeply
reactionary. Stoddard was a Nazi sympathizer and anti-communist who wrote
“Bolshevism: The Heresy of the Underman” and “Social Unrest and Bolshevism in
the Islamic World.”
Fitzgerald was not a Marxist or Communist, although he
certainly knew his way around Marx’s great works such as Das Kapital Walsh
writes, “One need not overestimate the references in Fitzgerald’s letters to
“We Marxians…,” “I’m still a socialist …,” “I’m a Communist enough …”, to grasp
the degree to which he knew his way around these issues.
The Great Gatsby works on many levels. Aside from being a
great story, Gatsby is a stinging attack on the rich in America. In a line
that could describe America's ruling elite today, Fitzgerald writes, “They were
careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then
retreated into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that
kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made. …”
