The sinister truth about The Great Gatsby

Telegraph

19-04-2025

The Great Gatsby has a claim to be the novel of the American century. When it was published in 1925, 'Silent Cal' Coolidge was the 30th president of the United States, the stock market was booming, the Ku Klux Klan was thriving, and a biology teacher from Tennessee called John T Scopes was tried for violating a law prohibiting the teaching of the ­theory of evolution. A hundred years later, we've hit president 47 and a second round of Donald Trump, his red tie as symbolic as Gatsby's green light.
F Scott Fitzgerald's third novel exposed the fracture in my homeland's aspirations. We idolise the fakery, the idea of the 'self-made man', which Jay Gatsby exemplifies: yet the fakery is brutalising, its victims left dead by the side of the road. In the popular memory, Gatsby glitters and seduces, but the deepest truths of the novel offer a blunt demonstration of how shallow is the sheen. Yes, other works of the era endure – Edith Wharton 's The Age of Innocence (1920), Ernest Hemingway 's The Sun Also Rises (1926), Langston Hughes's The Weary Blues (1926) – but none holds the place in our collective consciousness that Gatsby does.
Yet the book's sales were initially low, and Fitzgerald died in 1940 believing it – and himself – to have failed. By then, America seemed to agree. 'The promise of his brilliant career,' ran the obituary in The New York Times, 'was never fulfilled.' The opening paragraphs of HL Mencken's 1925 review of Gatsby were, and remain, notorious:
This story is obviously unimportant, and, though, as I shall show, it has its place in the Fitzgerald canon, it is certainly not to be put on the same shelf with, say, This Side of Paradise. What ails it, fundamentally, is the plain fact that it is simply a story – that Fitzgerald seems to be far more interested in maintaining its suspense than in getting under the skins of its people.
Or, as The New York World put it: 'Fitzgerald's latest a dud'.
But the conclusion of Mencken's critique is less likely to be quoted: he sensed that there was something extraordinary here. The tale, he noticed, 'has a fine texture, a careful and brilliant finish. The obvious phrase is simply not in it.' In 1943, amid the Second World War, the US army and navy library services began distributing millions of paperbacks to US servicemen, free of charge, in an initiative that would continue until 1947. Among them were 155,000 copies of The Great Gatsby – a boost that powered Fitzgerald's novel into permanent public consciousness. In this period, too, the critic Lionel Trilling – like Mencken, little read today, but influential then – identified Jay Gatsby with the country that brought him into being. Fitzgerald's doomed creation, Trilling wrote, 'divided between power and dream, comes inevitably to stand for America itself. Ours is the only nation to pride itself upon a dream and gives its name to one, 'the American dream'.'
That famous dream was not a catchphrase when Gatsby was published, though it has come to be identified with the text; it has had shifting meanings, from a progressive vision of equality to gold lavatory seats for all. Somehow, the novel allows the reader to dream themselves into the text. Read it, or reread it, and I dare you not to be awed by the brilliance and subtlety of Fitzgerald's writing.
Nick Carraway's first sight of his mysterious neighbour at the end of chapter one is one of the finest visions in modern literature: subtle, sure-footed, sinister, suspenseful, as this ­darkl­ing figure regards 'the silver pepper of the stars... Something in his leisurely movements and the secure position of his feet up on the lawn suggested that it was Mr Gatsby himself, come out to determine what share was his of our local heavens.' Yet Carraway then believes he sees him tremble – believes that Gatsby might be looking out at that single green light, which might or might not be at the end of a dock. And then: 'When I looked once more for Gatsby he had vanished, and I was alone again in the unquiet darkness.'
Entitled assurance and unquiet darkness: the mechanisms of the novel, in which a veneer of glamour is relentlessly stripped away by lies and violence, are set in motion. The greatness of Gatsby will prove to be a chimera, as insubstantial as the inflated gains in the stock market that would collapse four years after the novel's publication – The Great Gatsby, the Great Depression. Fitzgerald captured the essence of a freewheeling era and the darkness that was about to consume it – the dream and the nightmare folded into nine neat chapters.
The scholar Sarah Churchwell has written astutely about both Gatsby and the American Dream: she's the author of Careless People: Murder, Mayhem and the Invention of The Great Gatsby – published in 2013, just as Baz Luhrmann's film adaptation, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, was released – as well as Behold America, a 2018 study of the phrases 'American Dream' and 'America First'. She also introduces the new Cambridge Centennial ­edition of The Great Gatsby, an enticing hardback full of scholarly yet accessible notes and illustrations.
If Mencken missed the essence of Fitzgerald's novel upon its initial publication, he wasn't alone. Down the decades, Churchwell says, many have proved little wiser. The Great Gatsby has been 'embalmed in cliché, reduced to a shimmering Jazz Age fantasy of flappers and fun and hackneyed observations about the American Dream that obscure its darker vision of corruption'. If you cast in the title role Robert Redford – who played Gatsby in Jack Clayton's film of 1974 – or DiCaprio, that shimmer will become overpowering. The world to which Gatsby aspires – this self-created man, dazzling in a pink suit, wearing shirts so beautiful that they make his former lover, Daisy Buch­anan, weep – is ruthless beyond his imagination. When Daisy's husband, the brutish Tom, breaks his lover ­Myrtle's nose, the moment retains its power to shock, a century on.
'The novel exposes corruption in all its forms,' Churchwell says. 'Moral, financial, social and spiritual. It's a world where deception is survival, wealth erodes responsibility, and power is protected by brute force – not a world of boundless opportunity, but one where power is preserved by those who already have it. Gatsby's tragedy isn't just that he can't win Daisy back, but that the world of Tom Buchanan will always crush upstarts like him.' Fitz­gerald was ahead of his time: in 1925, the joint was jumping, and the possibilities of prosperity seemed limitless. Americans, as Churchwell puts it, 'were mostly deaf to caution­ary tales about heedless waste'.
And so most adaptations still focus on the glamour and the glitz. Fitzgerald's book was transformed into film as early as 1926 – that silent movie, now lost, was based on a Broadway play, directed by George Cukor, who would later direct the films My Fair Lady and A Star Is Born.
A century later, a new musical, with book by Kait Kerrigan and music and lyrics by Jason Howland and Nathan Tysen, is arriving in the West End. On Broadway, it nabbed a Tony Award for best costume design, but purists heading to the London Coliseum may baulk at its near-complete erasure of Gatsby's past, so crucial to the novel's essence. Marc Bruni, its director, has admitted to already having ­English teachers taking him to task. Yet it offers a further demonstration of just how badly we all want to have a good time: how eager we still are, like the careless people of Fitzgerald's novel, to live in the pres­ent and ignore what was, and what is still to come.
The Cambridge edition of Gatsby reproduces pages from Fitzgerald's manuscript, and the galley proofs, which he corrected up to the last possible moment, making major revisions to a text that the publisher considered finished. For instance, 'Gatsby turned to me, his voice trembling' becomes 'Gatsby turned to me rigidly'. The galley text has Tom Buchanan say, 'Women get these ideas in their heads –', until Fitzgerald changes 'ideas' to 'notions', the latter word carrying a significant whiff of denigration. An idea has weight, a notion does not. The language of The Great Gatsby is its triumph.
'Even as Fitzgerald's plot forecloses possibility,' Churchwell says, 'his prose expands it. If Gatsby's dream was doomed from the start, the novel suggests that language itself – its ability to conjure meaning beyond the material – might be the only real transcendence we have.' Gatsby's real greatness lies in his enduring belief in something more, even if it's only a tragic illusion. And that is the dream that still enchants us, despite the lies and violence that threaten, in this new century, to completely engulf us. Illusion – or hope? It's up to us to decide.