F Scott Fitzgerald Archives

Gatsby, Huck, and the American Dream

“I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all—Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life.”

You can hear the sigh of despair in Nick’s voice at the end of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. But, why the despair?

The West, after all, is the Land of Promise. It is a rather important part of the American Story. Go West, Young Man! Trivia time: what is the origin of that phrase? Often attributed to Horace Greely (19^th century newspaperman), nobody can find a record of him actually writing or saying it. So, nobody knows the origin of the phrase. Yet, if you want a phase that captures the American Spirit of the West, it is hard to do better. Go West!

What happens when you Go West? You make your Fortune! You live Free! Unbounded possibilities! Take Jay Gatsby. He meets a girl, but alas, she comes from a higher social circle than his. In any other time or any other place, the story ends there. But Gatsby is from the West, so he knows this is not the end of the story. He sets out to make his fortune. He rises to the top.

The Great Gatsby starts off like every other Horatio Alger novel. Poor kid meets someone who gives him an opportunity and the kid seizes the opportunity and becomes wealthy and lives happily ever after. Rags to Riches! Only in America! It isn’t just fictional stories. It’s the American Story! Booker T Washington’s Up From Slavery is exactly the same story. The financial titans of the late 19^th and early 20^th century often started with nothing. Gatsby is just an example of the American Dream.

Except…it doesn’t work. Gatsby becomes extraordinarily wealthy…and ends up dead in his pool.

What happened? This isn’t the way the story was supposed to end, right? Gatsby gets rich, Daisy is still waiting for him, and they marry and live happily ever after. Alright, Daisy got married in the meantime, but that’s OK; Tom quietly quits the scene, leaving Daisy free to head off with Gatsby. OK, Daisy isn’t leaving Tom, but Jordan is there as an acceptable substitute for Daisy and Gatsby marries her instead and heads off into the sunset, living happily ever after. OK, Jordan won’t work out, but at least Gatsby finds joy in being the star of the Cool Kids as they all come to His Parties and He is The Man.

But, no. Gatsby is shot in his pool for something he did not do. But, at least his funeral was a grand affair with Everyone Who Is Anyone there and nary a dry eye in sight. Nope, not that either. Nick:

I found myself on Gatsby’s side, and alone….At first I was surprised and confused; then, as he lay in his house and didn’t move or breathe or speak, hour upon hour, it grew upon me that I was responsible, because no one else was interested—interested, I mean, with that intense personal interest to which every one has some vague right at the end.

Remember, Nick is not a childhood friend or someone who has been with Gatsby through thick and thin. He just happens to be the guy who rented the summer cottage next door to Gatsby’s place. Nick, Gatsby’s father, and the minister are the entire crowd at the funeral.

Remember the American Dream? It is not just Gatsby who is floating dead in that pool. The American Dream died there too. There is no optimistic future possible. You can’t change your situation in life, you can’t rise to the top, there are no riches that come to those in rags. In the end, the past wins and we all go on living the lives into which we were born. You can Go West, but the East always wins. You can go to America, but the long reach of your homeland keeps you from rising.

The Great Gatsby is a Great Novel, but is it The Great American Novel? Is it the tale that most captures what it means to be American? It can only play that role if the American Dream is dead. And therein lies the question at the root of the entire story. Is the American Experiment, the story that we can rise up above ourselves, that we can become a Great People, that we are not shackled by our past, is that Experiment a failure?

The story isn’t finished. If the American Dream dies, then Gatsby was a prescient novel indeed. But, what if the Dream is not dead? That is the funny thing about Dreams; you can always go on dreaming. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn ends on that note of promise, “But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can’t stand it. I been there before.” The Dream lives on. You don’t have to accept the constraints of bein’ sivilized by Aunt Sally.

Fitzgerald and Twain thus make a marvelous pair of books for thinking about the American Dream. Combined, they show the power of literature to be greater than mere texts to be analyzed. Both of these books portray a nuanced view of the American Experiment; neither portrays the country as without virtues or without flaws. Read them in tandem and then ask: Assume that the stories told in both of these books are accurate portrayals of the society. Which book’s conclusion is right? Is the American Dream really dead or is there a reason to go on Dreaming?

A Cautionary Tale

“You know these new novels make me tired….Everywhere I go some silly girl asks me if I’ve read ‘This Side of Paradise.’ Are our girls really like that? If it’s true to life, which I don’t believe, the next generation is going to the dogs. I’m sick of all this shoddy realism. I think there’s a place for the romanticist in literature.”

Thus says a character is F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful and Damned. (Gotta love Fitzgerald having a character complain about Fitzgerald’s previous novel.)

Shoddy realism. That is not something the characters in this novel only want to avoid in their books. They also want to avoid it in their actual lives. Given the choice between a life mired in shoddy realism or a life imbued with romanticism, which would you prefer? It’s a pointless thing to contemplate, of course. You are stuck with realism, shoddy realism at that, in your life.

You are stuck with realism, but are the characters in this novel? They are Beautiful. As you know, the Beautiful are not like you and I. They have more Beauty. They lead Beautiful lives surrounded by Beautiful things and Beautiful people. And by the way, they are also Damned. (Note there is no “the” before “Damned” in the title.)

What’s the problem?

Anthony and Gloria, the Beautiful and Damned of the title, have it all. They have youth and beauty and money. The world sits before them, its wares on display and all for the having. They can do anything they want. Anything at all. What do they want to do? Ah, there’s the rub. Going to parties and getting drunk then moving to the country and getting drunk then moving back to the city and getting drunk, year after year after year after…well, it gets a bit old.

But, this is not a repetitive and dull book. I had the occasion to talk about it with a few former and current students. Every one of them found it terrifying. Why? Loathe as they were to admit it, they all recognized themselves in Anthony and Gloria. Graduating from an elite liberal arts college, full of the energy and beauty of youth, dreaming of a life where they can do what they will, they are faced with all the promise of being the Beautiful. Who could want anything more than my current and former students have?

Starting off the novel with a wonderful image of their future selves, seeing people living that perfect life to the fullest and getting exactly what they want, it is easy to remember only the first two words of the title and imagine this is going to be a story of glittering success. The descent starts slowly enough, but as it gains momentum, you became a bit alarmed. Anthony and Gloria are not alarmed, however; they just keep going on, leading their beautiful lives which are becoming less and less beautiful by the moment. By the end of the novel, Anthony and Gloria are still living in their world of dreams, and it is only the Reader who realizes the Dream is a Nightmare.

How did this happen?

“I’ve often thought that if I hadn’t got what I wanted things might have been different with me. I might have found something in my mind and enjoyed putting it in circulation. I might have been content with the work of it, and had some sweet vanity out of the success.”

Anthony says that, and he is exactly right. The problem was that Anthony did indeed have everything he wanted. He didn’t have to work for a thing; all of life was just handed to him. And, as a result, Anthony never developed that one thing which is indispensable to leading a life worth living: Good Character. It is not enough to have wealth and beauty. You also need a work ethic, a moral code, the willingness to sacrifice today to reap benefits tomorrow, a vocation, a higher purpose. Without these things, all the wealth and invitations to the right parties and the new toys are meaningless nothings. Without these things you can be the beautiful, but then you are also the damned.

It is not that Anthony and Gloria are unaware of the need for building character. In a rather amusing moment, when Anthony mentions that he has done some work and Gloria scoffs, Anthony points to an essay he wrote, exclaiming, “And what’s more Gloria, you know I sat up till five o-clock in the morning finishing it.”

If you didn’t laugh at that line, it is because you are a recent graduate of an elite liberal arts college. These colleges accept the Beautiful: the smart or wealthy or talented or (the gold mine) all three. We run them through a “rigorous course of study.” That “rigor” requires the students to occasionally stay up until 5 o-clock in the morning to do an assignment. Not finish an assignment—do the assignment. It’s not that the students do not work; they do stay up those nights before an exam. What most of them never do, however, is engage in concentrated effort on a single project over a sustained period of time. There are students who do senior theses and there are classes requiring substantive research papers and other classes with large high-stakes exams. But, it is a relatively easy matter to navigate the modern college and avoid all those things that require developing a work ethic which will enable the person to work for long stretches day after day on a difficult project. Don’t blame the students. It is the faculty who have switched away from the “high stakes assessment strategies” to the more “student-friendly” grading.

As a result, the students, both the ones who did work hard in college and the ones who did not, no longer view the world as a cruel and hard place where to succeed you must work very hard. They are truly like Anthony and Gloria. That is why this novel is so terrifying to them.

Dick: (pompously) Art isn’t meaningless.
Maury: It is in itself. It isn’t in that it tries to make life less so.

There is the point of The Beautiful and Damned. The book itself is a meaningless romp watching some characters make a whole bunch of really bad decisions. What makes the book worth reading is that maybe, just maybe, it will remind you that life is more than getting the things you want. A Good Life is a Life with Meaning. What is the meaning of your life? What is your chief end? Answer that and you have a chance of escaping the fate of having your life be described by the title of this book.

The College Carnival

Whenever a school year winds down, nostalgia creeps in.  There is a sameness to the rhythm of college.

While the individuals change, the nature of the average student doesn’t change much.

Indeed, it hasn’t changed much since at least 1920.  That was the year F. Scott Fitzgerald published This Side of Paradise.

This novel is one of those inter-war expressions of the hopelessness of the modern age. And after a century of unbelievable change, I was shocked at how much Amory Blaine would fit right in at a college like Mount Holyoke.

Nearly a century after Fitzgerald’s book was published, college students are still chasing after the same things with the same hopes and fears and the same ennui nagging at the fringes of consciousness.

Amory ends the novel with the declaration: “I know myself, but that is all.” In that phrase is captured all of the angst and problems of the 21^st century undergraduate college.

Amory, of course, does not understand himself at all. He just thinks he does. But he does know that he knows nothing beyond himself, nothing greater than himself. His whole life is reduced to the Self:

“I am selfish,” he thought.
“This is not a quality that will change when I ‘see human suffering’ or ‘lose my parents’ or ‘help others.’
“This selfishness is not only part of me. It is the most living part.
“It is by somehow transcending rather than by avoiding that selfishness that I can bring poise and balance into my life.
“There is no virtue of unselfishness that I cannot use. I can make sacrifices, be charitable, give to a friend, endure for a friend, lay down my life for a friend — all because these things may be the best possible expression of myself; yet I have not one drop of the milk of human kindness.”

That is, of course exactly what the modern college teaches students. Live for the Greater Good because then you will fully express yourself. Study hard because then you will be able to do great things and feel self-fulfillment.

What about all those classes and things those professors make you learn? Knowledge is dead. As Eliot put it in 1934:

Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

What does the modern college student learn? We talk about teaching “critical thinking” and “life skills,” but never wisdom.

So, what is the modern college? It’s just like the frenzy of social activity described by Fitzgerald in a subchapter entitled “Carnival.” It’s also just like the Carnival (“Karn Evil 9, First Impression, Pt. 2”) Emerson, Lake and Palmer described in 1973.

It doesn’t have to be like that, of course. But, the fact that the college Fitzgerald describes and the college my students attend are more alike than it is comfortable to admit, must give one reason to pause in hoping for a dramatic change in the culture of higher education.