Out In The Jazz Age Night- F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby

FromThe Pen Of Frank Jackman

One would have to be rather pedantic not recognize that F. Scott Fitzgerald was an important novelistic voice of the Jazz Age in post World War I America. Certainly not the only voice of that age but the voice which best exemplifies the tensions between the mores of ‘old wealth’ and the emerging sources of ‘new wealth’ that were produced by the huge amount of money available, mainly through government contracts as result of the war, or riches gained through the illegal liquor trade. That is the sociological underpinning that drives Fitzgerald’s work. This is no better example of those strivings than the Great Gatsby. If nothing else it is a dramatic enactment of the strivings of the new money to ‘make it’ in the world of high society, one way or another. And what better way to do that than in the age old tradition of buying one’s way into that society through marriage. This is the modern American version of that story.

And the story itself? One Jay Gatsby, the former Jimmy Ganz, freshly reinventing himself after indeterminate service in the American military in World War I and loaded with cash from questionable financial resources, attempts to win, or rather re-win the affections of one Daisy Buchanan his vision of the perfect life companion and exemplar of the‘old money’ crowd that he wishes to crash. One little complication, however, gets in the way. She has found herself married to a brutish but wealthy member of that ‘old money’ crowd. Gatsby’s fumbling but lavish attempts to lure her away from the high society of Long Island, then the summer watering hole of the‘old money’, forms the core of the story. Gatsby’s trial and tribulations on the way as narrated by Nick Carroway (and Gatsby’s somewhat unwitting accomplice in the matter) keeps the story line going until the final deadly ending. The morale- the very rich are indeed very different from you or me. Moreover, someone else will always have to pick up the messes they have made for themselves. They merely move on. This may serve as a cautionary tale for that time and possibly today. Certainly nobody has chronicled the end of the age of American innocence signaled by the Jazz Age better than Fitzgerald.

A word on literary merits. According to the inevitable changes in literary fashion as well as literary politics Fitzgerald, for long a leading figure in the canon of American literature has been somewhat eclipsed by other more post-modernist trends. While I firmly believe that the Western canon is in dire need of expansion to include ‘third world’, woman and minority voices Fitzgerald’s literary merits stand on their own. His tightly- crafted story line, his sense of language and the flat-out fact that that he knew the subject matter that formed the basis of his expositions merit renewed consideration by today’s reader. Simply put, if you want to understand part of what was going on in America in the 1920’s before the Great Crash of 1929 then you simply have to read the man. If nothing else read the last few pages of Gatsby. If there is a better literary expression of the promise of America as seem by the early Dutch settlers of New York as the last best hope of civilization and the failure of that promise at the hands of the ‘robber barons’ and their descendents I have not read it.