Tuesday 4/2/24
No one writes more on F. Scott Fitzgerald and his work than I. Of course, this could be said about many, many, many things, but right now we're talking about F. Scott Fitzgerald and his work, namely, The Great Gatsby.
The Great Gatsby is a popular book that is not actually popular. What I mean by that is that for a book that so many have read, it's not very well read. It's a work that is cited more than it is liked or loved, because the people who do that citing are usually being disingenuous, though more in a careless or embarrassed fashion than for reasons of, say, intended no-good.
Most people don't read at all. There is no great literature being made in the world and there is really no writing being produced by anyone that is worth is reading or that anyone would truly enjoy reading. I don't mean for show or so that one can walk around with a Paris Review tote bag. There is no one who honestly enjoys a Paris Review short story in 2024. There is no one out there later today who will be thinking, "I can't wait to get home and read that J. Robert Lennon story," or whatever one of these godawful writers one might mention. They all suck, and they all suck equally--which is to say, if there's a last place in the quality standings, they're all tied for it.
This having been the case for generations is going to mean that people won't read, people have no conception of what a great work of writing can offer them, and I don't mean in some dry, academic, "This is an official great text by Homer, you'll read it like you eat your spinach and it will be good for you, so get it down" kind of way. And even when people wrote better, and there were books and authors worth reading, you know what almost all of those authors did? They wrote the same thing each time out. Just about everyone. Once you read one thing, you knew what you were getting, whether that's Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, Keats, whomever one might name. There have been very few authors in history--if any others--with whom each work was a totally new experience and work unlike their last one, their next one, and anything else they ever made. Where you never have any idea what you'll be getting.
F. Scott Fitzgerald--and you'll see people with their consumer ratings take him to task for this--basically wrote works about rich young people who had lots of advantages in life, went to an Ivy League school, and their romances, and he didn't invent that much. He just didn't. He didn't use his imagination. He may not have had much of one. Or, it could be that his gifts of imagination were centered on language, in the making of his prose at the level of language, which can be a different thing than at the level of story. Ideally, they work together, language and story, and are inseparable as agents of the achieved ends, the work of literature that is more than a work of literature: It's a life experience.
The best writing must feel like it's not reading when you read it. If it feels like you're reading, it's not working as well as it can. And the more it feels like you're reading and trying to get through something--like with one of these horrible Baffler stories, or stories published by the bigots at American Short Fiction, or pedestrian, here, have a tote bag! New Yorker nothingness from our man J. Robert Lennon, or what's put forward by the discrimination-loving, busted Michael Ray of Zoetrope, or that piss-poor fiction we saw the other day courtesy of Carolyn Kuebler in New England Review--the worse it is.
Fitzgerald fictionalized his life. Read his letters, and you'll see instance after instance where he tells someone, "This character was based partially on you, partially on him, and this other person, too." He plundered his wife's Zelda's life for material, even going into her letters and journals for material. In her own correspondence, she talked about him lifting her words from the page.
At the end of his life--and remember, Fitzgerald died aged only forty-four--Fitzgerald had something of a second act as a writer, though he remained a fiction writer who wrote less from invention and more via the method of fictionalizing his own life and the lives of those he knew.
Me, I invent. I always invent. There's a good chance I'll finish "Friendship Bracelet" today (I know--still going), and it's about two middle school girls, one of whom is dead in large part because of the other. Obviously, I'm not any of these things.
Feeling himself a failure near the end of his life--though still with plenty of people to back him, hook him up, put forward his work, and both pay him and lend him money, the latter on top of money already lent with debts that basically were not expected to be repaid by that point--Fitzgerald began writing about guys who were failures, felt themselves to be forgotten, had drank too much and had it catch up with them, etc.
But he was still doing him, do you know what I mean?
Again, this is coming from the world's leading expert on F. Scott Fitzgerald. I know his work--every last line of it--every which way. And I also know why people cite The Great Gatsby like they do, and what it really says.
If there is someone who creates things, and they create a lot of things, and you experience one of those creations for the first time, and you love it--I mean you actually, honestly, for real love it, not pretend bullshit, I'll-just-say-I-love it love it--you won't stop there. You will get something else of theirs.
Think about it. Do you think there's ever been anyone who listened to, say, A Hard Day's Night as their first Beatles album, loved it, loved it, loved it, and then never tried another? So that, twenty, thirty years later, when asked their favorite album, they might say, "A Hard Day's Night!" upon which, someone else, wishing to discuss the Beatles, could then say, "What do you think about Rubber Soul?" and then have the first person say, "I don't know--I haven't heard anything else by the Beatles but A Hard Day's Night."
That would never happen, right? It'd be crazy (on Sunday or otherwise--Fitzgerald joke for those familiar with his second act writings.) But it's what happens with The Great Gatsby, because no one means--or very few people do--when they say it's their favorite book. They had to read it in high school. They probably haven't read a book since. Or they read what they were told to read in college.
No one actually goes to college to learn, and no one learns in college. That's not the point of college. That's not what is actually happening with college. If learning was what mattered to you, you could learn a great deal of things today. You could go out and learn about--you pick the subject. Billie Holiday, Cubism, the discovery of DNA, the 1-3-1 neutral zone trap, ten new words, the French Revolution, the Dead Ball era of baseball, but you know what you're going to go out and learn about today, in all probability? Nothing!
That's just reality, right?
So for these reasons alone, Gatsby is cited as someone's favorite book. They are highly unlikely to have read anything else by its author. Reading is not fun. It's boring. It's dusty and mouldering as an experience. It's spinach to be gotten down for "improvement."
It's the opposite, actually, with what I do, but I'm the only one who does what I do. Not just now, but ever.
Gatsby is not Fitzgerald's best novel. The highly flawed Tender Is the Night is. It's not his best work. I can name, oh, twenty, let us say, that are better. It's short-ish, and if it was 25,000 words longer, it probably wouldn't have been a part of all of those high school curricula.
Think about that: Let's pretend it was 25,000 longer and a lot better: There'd be next to no one in the world who cited it as their favorite book.
It's just an answer people give that says nothing about the book or its quality or even anything about how they felt about the book. They have to answer, so here's the answer. For all of these other reasons.
But they are the reasons.
Fun anecdote about Gatsby's cover: The book was basically done, and then Fitzgerald wrote the cover image into it. This is also detailed in the letters.
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