Herron: The mediocre Gatsby

One evening, while amid a gin bender, F. Scott Fitzgerald was driven past a statue of Francis Scott Key, a distant ancestor and writer of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Fitzgerald jumped out of the car and begged his aide not to “let Frank see me drunk.” Complying, the aide waved a handkerchief at the statue to distract it, while Fitzgerald snuck past. This was Fitzgerald the man escaping from Fitzgerald the writer.

Fitzgerald the writer wrote “The Great Gatsby” — the book that is, with the exception of “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” the most American of novels. Although he is credited with defining the 1920s as “the jazz era,” it was a decade that did not love him and merely tolerated his work.

He was able to reach out and touch success but was never able to truly grasp it. He became a lesson on how success, no matter how quickly attained, can just as swiftly depart.

His contemporaries were eclectic and brilliant: T.S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, William Faulkner, Ezra Pound, Virginia Woolf, ee cummings, John Dos Passos, John Steinbeck. Towering among them all was Ernest Hemingway, who shared a friendship with Fitzgerald until Hemingway’s respect for him evaporated.

By 1925, Fitzgerald had attained success. Hemingway had not. Hemingway sought Fitzgerald’s wisdom, and Fitzgerald shared it. Once Hemingway’s first novel, “The Sun Also Rises,” was published, his regard for Fitzgerald turned into irreverence with disdain. “I never had any respect for him ever,” Hemingway wrote after Fitzgerald’s death, “except for his lovely, golden, wasted talent.”

Fitzgerald’s talent wasn’t wasted, but at times, it was abandoned. His life was one of pursuit — he was always chasing. He longed for female approval which, for him, required social status. Ironically, he would gain the former while never truly securing the latter. Zelda Sayre — his “golden girl” — would not marry him unless he was financially secure. So he wrote “This Side of Paradise” and had it published. They married less than two weeks later.

It was this bond — the link between women and money — that surfaced into most of Fitzgerald’s writing. One sees it in “Winter Dreams” and “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz.” But it was “The Great Gatsby” that articulated a longing for glory and grandeur and clarified a national ethos. For Fitzgerald, Daisy Buchanan was the emblematic woman whose voice, as Jay Gatsby described it, was “full of money.” To Gatsby, she was charming, wealthy, graceful and part of a society he longed for. Gatsby, like Fitzgerald, did not pursue wealth and sophistication as an end, but as a means to an end — the woman he longed for.

At the age of 23, Fitzgerald had the woman he longed for. From that moment on, his life became a spiraling tragedy, intermittent with periods of success, but ultimately ending with Fitzgerald’s death in 1940 at age 44. After “Gatsby” was published, Fitzgerald’s literary endeavors merely focused on keeping his extravagant lifestyle afloat. He went as far as writing an essay, in 1924, titled “How to Live on $36,000.”

The relationship between Scott and Zelda would fade in the 1930s. She grew mentally unstable, while Fitzgerald sank into the muck of alcoholism (at times, he consumed up to one quart of gin a day). Furthermore, he had grown more and more attuned to the fact that many considered him a failure. To Fitzgerald, “All life is a process of breaking down.” During the last year of his life, he would make only $13 in royalties. In one of the final letters he wrote to his wife, he stated candidly, “My God, I am a forgotten man.”

What made Fitzgerald uniquely American was his romanticism — his desire for eminence, magnanimity and immortality. Among the literary giants that surrounded him, he was one of the first to fall, and he fell believing himself to be a failure.

For Fitzgerald, the 1920s were magical. Each and every door appeared open, and even the dullest of events still glittered in the aura of a decade that was marked by prosperity and the subversion of the 18th Amendment. Anything went, and everything did. Like the rest of the country, however, Fitzgerald would feel the stagnation and malaise of the Depression — a decade entirely antonymous to the one preceding it.

Fitzgerald declared that “there are no second acts in American lives.” Since his death, “The Great Gatsby” has sold millions of copies, and his other works have seen considerable sales. He has become one of this country’s most treasured writers. Fitzgerald’s life had a second act, he just wasn’t around to see it.

Toward the end of “The Great Gatsby,” the novel’s narrator, Nick Carraway, shouts to Gatsby, “You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.” Fitzgerald didn’t just write this for his book — he also wrote it for himself.

E-mail Mason at mph20@pitt.edu.