The Gatsby Centenary
Anthony Burgess on F. Scott Fitzgerald's best-known novel
Published 100 years ago, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald is one of the most famous novels of the twentieth century, its reputation having been bolstered by adaptations for film, television and stage. It often appears on reading lists at schools and colleges, partly because of its brevity and the simplicity of its language. In our own time, when the morals of the wealthy are under scrutiny in TV dramas such as Succession and The White Lotus, Fitzgerald’s short novel about decadence among the super-rich might be thought to possess an enduring relevance.
The book is set in East and West Egg, fictional districts on Long Island, New York State. The narrator, Nick Carraway, is a Midwesterner who rents a house in West Egg while looking for work as a bond salesman on Wall Street. There he meets Jay Gatsby, a mysterious millionaire, who is charming, flamboyant, and obsessed with his married neighbour Daisy Buchanan. Carraway describes the lives of wealthy and entitled people from the outside, even as he is gradually seduced by their charms. As every high-school student has been taught, it is a novel about the beginning of the ‘American Century’, the corruption of the American Dream, and a portrait of the carefree decade between 1918 and the Great Depression.
Anthony Burgess’s first experience of The Great Gatsby was not a literary one. In 1927, he saw an early silent-film adaptation, starring Warner Baxter as Gatsby and Lois Wilson as Daisy. Burgess was ten years old, and he admits that it ‘was some time before I became aware of the literary provenance.’ As he grew older, he discovered the work of Fitzgerald through an interest in other writers of the 1920s, such as T.S. Eliot, James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway.
While is unlikely that Fitzgerald had any influence on Burgess’s writing, he once compared himself to his American predecessor: ‘I call myself a novelist who is forced to write other things on the side: the situation is more Fitzgeraldian than Joycean.’ Burgess was referring to the years when Fitzgerald was producing short stories for magazines and unfilmed scripts for Hollywood studios.
Burgess put the case more bluntly in 1979 when, reviewing The Price Was High: The Last Uncollected Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, he stated that Fitzgerald ‘should have been writing novels, not wasting his time on sub-literary prostitution.’ Neverthless, he seems to understand that Fitzgerald devoted time to writing sub-literary works on the grounds that they were very lucrative. Burgess reports that, in 1925, Fitzgerald’s income for five stories in the Saturday Evening Post was $11,025, while The Great Gatsby earned him less than $2000.
Burgess, who subsidised the production of his own novels by reviewing books, writing film scripts, and appearing on TV, goes on to say that Fitzgerald failed to exploit the opportunities offered by the success of his short stories:
The stories were craft meant to subsidise art, but in fact they subsidised high living. It was tempting for Fitzgerald, once having learnt the craft, to despise the merely consumable and consume the rewards with a kind of self-contempt.
Although Burgess’s admired the ‘great skill and delicacy’ of Fitzgerald’s writing, he argued that his dissolute lifestyle led to disappointment and an early death at 44, hastened by severe alcohol abuse.
Both he and his wife Zelda were wild, spendthrift, and drank heavily. They were outrageous but never coarse, raffish but never elegant. They were already storing up the materials of their later tragic and spectacular downfalls. Fitzgerald, responsible enough in his art, was irresponsible in nearly everything else.
Among Fitzgerald’s novels and short stories, Burgess classifies The Great Gatsby as ‘relentlessly literary’. In an introduction to the 1992 Penguin ‘Authentic Text’ edition of the novel, Burgess offers his most substantial analysis of Fitzgerald’s book, trying to identify why it stands out above the work of contemporaries such as Ernest Hemingway:
Fitzgerald’s skill lay in applying a romantic technique to unromantic subjects. Nothing could be more sordid than the theme of The Great Gatsby, yet the creamy smoothness of the récit can delude some readers into believing that they are in the world of Keats’s The Eve of Saint Agnes. The comparison is appropriate, for Fitzgerald was a genuine Keatsian while Hemingway was nurtured on the Kansas City Star newspaper.
Burgess’s comparisons with Keats and Hemingway are two of many literary connections he draws to The Great Gatsby. With this novel, Fitzgerald is, like Proust, credited with documenting a decadent culture that he ‘merely, though masterfully, recorded.’ As a neutral observer, his opinions are difficult to work out. Fitzgerald (Burgess claims) goes further than James Joyce in being ‘removed from his work, not even granting us a clue to his reasons for writing it.’ These comparisons show that Burgess believed The Great Gatsby had transcended its American origins to become part of the global canon of literature in English.
Indeed, the wider world leaks into the novel, with Gatsby being revealed as a First World War veteran who had commanded troops in Europe. Burgess recognises that the character of Gatsby is a foreign element which seeps into an elite community which is hermetically sealed by hereditary wealth. He writes: ‘The man named Gatz, which at that time suggested sordid East European immigration, transforms himself into a kind of WASP, and this qualifies him to declare love for Daisy Buchanan, who personifies old money.’
Elsewhere in his non-fiction writing, Burgess’s careful analysis of The Great Gatsby gave way to more direct praise. In They Wrote in English, a volume of literary history published in 1979, he made a much bolder statement of admiration:
The Great Gatsby, which says everything about the Great American Dream, is one of the few perfect novels in any language.
Find out more
Buy The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (affiliate link).
Buy The Collected Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald (affiliate link).
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Read more about Burgess’s view of American fiction:
