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Great Gatsby, 'truest lie ever told,' turns 90

"The Great Gatsby" by F. Scott Fitzgerald
"The Great Gatsby" by F. Scott Fitzgerald

"Scott Fitzgerald's new novel, The Great Gatsby, is in form no more than a glorified anecdote, and not too probable at that."

-- H.L. Mencken, in The Baltimore Sun

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Democrat-Gazette file photo

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby was published 90 years ago. This photo dates from the 1920s.

"Ernest speaks with the authority of success. I speak with the authority of failure."

-- F. Scott Fitzgerald, on the difference between himself and Ernest Hemingway

The Great Gatsby was never a perfect book.

There were five typographical errors in the first published edition of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, which was released 90 years ago this month.

Though you might find here and there a reference to the "plethora" of typos in the first edition, that's an unremarkable number, for despite the best efforts of proofreaders and editors, mistakes happen. In any collection of 50,000 words you might find as many instances of what Matthew J. Bruccoli, the pre-eminent Fitzgerald scholar and biographer (his 1981 book Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald remains the best work on the author's life) once called "inadvertent and nonfunctional authorial errors."

For instance, on Page 205, the first edition contains the phrase "sick in tired" when Fitzgerald obviously meant "sick and tired." On Page 165, "it's" appears instead of "its." On Page 119, "northern" is used when "southern" was intended. On Page 211, "Union Street station" appears instead of "Union Station." The word "chatter" on Page 16 was later corrected to "echolalia." I'm not even sure the last two typos were really typos -- they were changed in later editions, but Fitzgerald could have intended his Midwestern-born narrator Nick Carraway to use the somewhat awkward elocution and to my mind, the "boom of a bass drum, and the voice of the orchestra leader" could just as easily ring "out suddenly above the chatter of the garden."

But what will make your first-edition copy of The Great Gatsby worth six figures rather than four is the original dust jacket by Francis Cugat, where the enigmatic eyes of a woman (presumably the alluring Daisy Buchanan) float over a night scene of Coney Island. There's a typo on the back of that original jacket as well -- the "j" in "Jay Gatsby" was printed lowercase and corrected by hand before the books were shipped.

As striking as the cover is, it's more than a finishing touch. Fitzgerald was actually shown a copy of the proposed artwork -- which Cugat called "Celestial Eyes" and for which the artist was paid $100 -- while he was working on the book. Fitzgerald later told his editor Max Perkins he had written the jacket imagery into the novel. This suggests one of the book's most famous and enduring symbols -- the eyes on the billboard advertising an optometrist:

"The eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic -- their irises are one yard high. They look out of no face, but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a nonexistent nose. Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set them there to fatten his practice in the borough of Queens, and then sank down himself into eternal blindness, or forgot them and moved away. But his eyes, dimmed a little by many paintless days, under sun and rain, brood on over the solemn dumping ground."

It's these eyes that a minor character, the mechanic turned murderer Wilson, likens to the "eyes of God," the eyes that watch over the valley of ashes between West Egg and Manhattan. The imagery is also echoed in a passage at the end of Chapter 4, where Fitzgerald has Carraway describe Daisy as the "girl whose disembodied face floated along the dark cornices and blinding signs."

...

But imperfection does not preclude greatness and Gatsby, like the Mona Lisa or a Navajo rug, is actually stronger for its flaws. It's superficially the story -- told through the voice of everyman Carraway -- set in the summer of 1922, about a former gangster named Jimmy Gatz who has reinvented himself as mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby.

Gatsby is obsessed with Daisy, Nick's second cousin once removed, a Louisville, Ky., belle with a voice "full of money." Gatsby had a brief relationship with Daisy five years earlier when he was a young military officer preparing to fight in the First World War. While Daisy promised to wait for his return, she married the brutal and rich (and racist) Tom Buchanan in 1919, while Gatsby briefly attended Oxford (as part of a post-Armistice "opportunity" granted military officers).

When Gatsby returned from England, he bought his West Egg mansion because it was situated across the bay from the green light glowing at the end of Daisy's dock. He threw lavish parties to try to impress her, and lure her back.

It doesn't work, and Gatsby is eventually killed in a case of mistaken identity. Almost no one comes to his funeral.

Gatsby is a yearner, an American peasant born of Midwestern farmers who dreams of becoming part of the East Coast aristocracy. He not only pretends to be "an Oxford man," he uses the expression "old sport," he throws lavish parties where people he doesn't know and who don't care to know him come to drink his booze and eat his food and dance to the musicians he has hired. He is a wretch; a stalker, a deluded and ultimately ineffectual man whose dreams are thwarted by the moneyed classes willing to avail themselves of his hospitality even though they have no use for him. (At one point Fitzgerald, never happy with the title, wanted to call the book Trimalchio or Trimalchio in West Egg, after the former slave arriviste in The Satyricon.)

Gatsby is a self-made man. He "sprang from his Platonic conception of himself" and has "just begun to be." He is an American prototype, a self-made myth. You see Gatsby echoed in Robert Zimmerman's re-creation of himself as Bob Dylan. You see his tragic story reiterated in Elvis Presley's rise. Gatsby is America itself, a New World rising to the chagrin and vague distaste of Old Europe. He is Jackson Browne's Pretender, making love with his dark glasses on, believing "in whatever may lie, in the things that money can buy." He has such beautiful shirts that certain kinds of women are moved to tears. He has to die so we might all remember our place and the evanescence of dreams.

I love this book so hard. It is a great American novel. It is everything they say about it -- the truest lie ever told. People say it didn't sell, but that's not true. It sold respectably, just not as well as Fitzgerald's first two books, This Side of Paradise, which had been a surprise best-seller, and his next, The Beautiful and Damned. Those novels each sold about 50,000 copies; Fitzgerald hoped his third would sell 75,000 copies. It didn't, though the first printing eventually did sell out -- there were 20,870 copies, which means the first edition isn't remarkably rare. Scribner's ordered an additional 3,000 copies. When Fitzgerald died 15 years later in 1940, there were still copies of that edition on warehouse shelves. (A Modern Library edition of the book was issued in 1934, but it didn't sell either, and the title was discontinued.)

Fitzgerald was so out of favor and disgraced at the time of his death (he had a heart attack four days before Christmas while making a list of Princeton's top football recruits) that many assumed he had died years before. In a tersely worded obituary, The New York Times said: "Roughly, his career began and ended with the Nineteen Twenties." After he died, they found among his personal effects a newspaper with circled advertisements for a lonely hearts club and a psychic.

But during World War II, the nonprofit Council on Books in Wartime, a group of book publishers, librarians and booksellers determined to promote books as "weapons in the war of ideas," distributed 155,000 paperback copies of Gatsby to American troops. (Many of these Armed Services Editions of the novel were distributed to soldiers on the eve of D-Day, and were carried onto the beaches of Normandy in uniform pockets.) Awareness of the novel was heightened; it found its way onto high school and college reading lists. Today it reliably sells 500,000 copies a year.

...

Like Gatsby, Fitzgerald died young and unfulfilled. The author never owned a house and left behind only a few novels and some unfinished work. Long before he died, he had been cultivating this myth of the Beautiful Loser, publishing in Esquire a collection of postmodern essays that were posthumously collected by Edmund Wilson and published as The Crack-Up.

This led to the return of all his novels to print and in 1951, the publication of The Far Side of Paradise, the Arthur Mizner biography that stood as definitive until Bruccoli's came along 30 years later. English critic Cyril Connolly observed that "apart from his increasing stature as a writer, Fitzgerald is now firmly established as a myth, an American version of the Dying God, an Adonis of letters."

But Connolly's praise was not unqualified; he went on to write that "Fitzgerald is overrated as a writer ... his importance, apart from Gatsby and a few stories, lies in his personality as the epitome of a historical moment."

By that he meant that more than the work, Fitzgerald was defined by his celebrity and especially alcohol-fueled antics: Stories stories of how he and his wife, Zelda (Scott's own Daisy), would jump into the Pulitzer fountain near the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan, how they would destroy apartments, insult servants and turn in false fire alarms. Fitzgerald may have participated in as many boozy fistfights as Hemingway -- the difference was, he invariably lost them. In the weak light of morning, none of these acts seem glamorous -- they're just pathetic gestures made by unpleasant people.

But we are touched by Fitzgerald: There is something that transcends his sometimes transitory prose and his sloppy living. What may be most poignant about Fitzgerald is how painfully aware we are of the toll it took on his art.

Never able to control his alcoholism or achieve financial equanimity, Fitzgerald lived as a man beset. His great subjects were American aspiration and social attainment, self-invention and self-pity; he was attuned to the signals of snobbery and horrified that he might be found out. Fitzgerald was the Great Pretender, and his work is consonant with that lesser or greater part of ourselves we secretly believe fraudulent. He was Gatsby. And he knew it.

And there is his magnificent, alarmingly effortless style. He wrote with spooky certitude of Gatsby's "blue gardens" and Tom Buchanan's "cruel body" not quite hidden beneath "the effeminate swank of his riding clothes." He had -- he retains -- an uncanny ability to make the reader see the world through his eyes, to accept his prejudices and enthusiasms, to assume his appetites and preferences. Fitzgerald was a generous writer in that he allowed each reader to become the fair-haired, graceful and gentle-minded soul the author imagined himself capable of becoming. (Je suis Gatsby.)

I know how a taste for Fitzgerald can be embarrassing, for he can seem facile and self-flattering. Yet it is also true that, as he wrote a few months before his death, "there is little published in American fiction that doesn't slightly bear my stamp -- in a small way, I was an original."

Fitzgerald has a reputation as a writer best read while young, but there is something about him that, like wine, deepens with age and might be better appreciated by a more mature audience. There is an acuity to his observations and a great gray tenderness to his heart.

His charm is Keatsian -- a kind of controlled exquisiteness -- and it can be resisted by conscious effort. You can refuse to respond to Scott Fitzgerald's pretty sentences, just as you can ignore Matisse's stained-glass windows or Guy Clark's "Dublin Blues."

The Great Gatsby was never perfect. But it is 90. It is eternal.

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