Re-reading "The Great Gatsby"

In the latest edition of the Double Take series, I discover how wrong I was about F. Scott Fitzgerald's jazz-age novel.

If only I had read The Great Gatsby as a child!

This is what I thought, after re-reading Fitzgerald’s classic, when I recalled what Alberto Manguel wrote about his relationship with Alice (of the Wonderland adventures). He first tumbled down the rabbit hole as a child, which meant that when he re-read her tales later in life, he could resist the imposition of other people’s interpretations. None of them, he writes, “have become, in any deep sense, my own”:

“The readings of others influence, of course, my personal reading, offer new points of view or colour certain passages, but mostly they are like the comments of the Gnat who keeps naggingly whispering in Alice’s ear, ‘You might make a joke on that.’”
(Into the Looking-Glass Wood, Alberto Manguel)

Although I was a prolific reader as a child, my literary aspirations remained latent until my late teens — there was no Gatsby for me until I turned twenty. By then, I’d read more pages of commentary on The Great Gatsby than there are pages in the novel itself, and I was unable to meet with the book as if meeting with a stranger. Instead, I’d absorbed all the gossip and rumours about it, like Elizabeth Bennett bringing the baggage of Mr Darcy’s ill-repute to their relationship.

Many readers I’ve spoken with came to The Great Gatsby because a teacher forced it on them, and I first picked up Gatsby not in the organic way we choose most books — out of some incalculable combination of serendipity, whim, half-remembered recommendations from a friend, personal taste, and who knows what else — but because I knew it was classic. In the bookshop of my mind, Gatsby was shelved on a bookcase of Books You Ought To Read Whether You Want To Or Not.¹

Before I even cracked the spine on my handsome Penguin hardback copy of Fitzgerald’s novel, I knew (so I thought) all about that green light Gatsby can’t get enough of. What I actually knew about was the seemingly infinite number of ideas about that green light, about what it represents and means, what it tells us about so many things not directly addressed on the pages of the book: capitalism, greed, envy, the American Dream, fading youth, romantic fidelity, sexual frustration...

When I first opened Gatsby, the book itself was a green light — something obscured by the multitude of theories about it. The Gnat kept whispering in my ear that some people think this is really about that, or she says this thing because Fitzgerald believed that thing. I couldn’t hear the words of the novel over the din of interpretation. When I closed Gatsby after that first read, I realised it had been mis-shelved in the bookshop of my mind, and it actually belonged on the shelf of Books That Everybody’s Read So It’s As If You Had Read Them Too.

Finally, after more than a decade since my first and only reading of Gatsby, the novel moved again in my imaginary bookshop. It belonged in the section for Books Read Long Ago Which Now It’s Time To Reread. So, I returned to it.

Reader, I fell in love.

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Instead of accepting that The Great Gatsby is a classic because everyone else says so, I discovered for myself why everyone says it’s a classic. It was like the difference between a mere description of a flavour and finally putting the food on your own tongue. And it tasted wonderful.

One of the corrections made to my terrible first reading of the novel was realising how much I’d overlooked or forgotten, joys to discover with my freshly opened eyes. I’d forgotten how catty the narrator, Nick Carraway, can be, and how often he sounds to my ear like Truman Capote sniping the unfortunate fools in his way with his ironic, withering derision. For example:

• Having told us that he tends to reserve judgment, Nick immediately says that “the intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions”. (Keep your secrets to yourself, or at least be original about them.)

• On hearing that the brutish jock Tom Buchanan has become evangelical about a book and that he’s cheating on his wife, Nick says that “the fact [Tom] ‘had some woman in New York’ was really less surprising than that he had been depressed by a book”. (Just try to hear that without picturing him taking a self-satisfied sip of a cocktail on delivery of this devastating critique.)

• When Daisy asks Nick if she’s been missed back in her hometown, he says drily, “The whole town is desolate. All the cars have the left rear wheel painted black as a mourning wreath, and there’s a persistent wail all night along the north shore.” Ouch.

One of the only two lines I remembered from the book — remembered because they’re the only two lines anybody quotes — was: “Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.”² What I’d forgotten was that it’s uttered not by our narrator, but by Jordan Baker, one of the many superficial people who toss out utterances they might stand by only in the moment and will likely forget or refute in the next.

I remembered Gatsby as more noble, as a figure of tragedy. It was bracing to learn that he is, in fact, a figure of farce. He takes himself ever so seriously, “trying to forget something very sad that had happened to [him] long ago”. Being a young man when I first met Jay Gatsby, I thought his devotion to a fling from his youth was terribly romantic; today, his obsession strikes me as ridiculous. These characters are so spoiled by their own shallowness that Gatsby’s opulent rendering of a dream in the attempt to relive the past (“Can’t repeat the past?” he cried incredulously. “Why of course you can!”) is all the depth any of them can muster.

This superficiality permeates Gatsby, and I kept noticing how cosmetic change acts as a wallpaper over failures to meaningfully grow. Twice we read that a new season brings with it the chance to start over and be a different person. There’s the line I mentioned above, where Jordan Baker suggests they can have a do-over in the fall. Earlier in the book, Nick waxes lyrical about the coming of spring, “with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees”, which gives him the “familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer”.

Note his familiarity with this feeling. How many times before has he believed he can start over? More to the point, notice how the idea of a new season bringing change is repeated in Gatsby — the phrases differ, the season in question changes, but it’s the same idea underneath. This is how it is with change in The Great Gatsby. Things might look or sound different, but at bottom it all stays the same. Change is just a face-lift that alters the appearance only, not the person beneath.

Gatsby sells himself as an exemplar of that great American notion that a man can reinvent himself, that he can manifest his own destiny. But has he changed in any meaningful sense? He’s wealthy now and wears nice clothes, but he’s still lonely, he’s still without Daisy, he’s still moping after what he lost before he had the cars and extravagant parties. He engineers his outward transformations only to relive what he once had. His reinvention is merely an attempted return to how things used to be.

I also noticed how things we’d have hoped were historical relics are still relevant today — that as much as we think we’ve culturally evolved over a century, we remain remarkably the same. I’m thinking here of Tom’s anxiety over migrants wiping out the “white race” in the West. The book that’s exercised Tom’s feeble mind claims that “if we don’t look out the white race will be ... utterly submerged”. What is this if not the Great Replacement Theory so beloved by certain sections of the modern right-wing? (I couldn’t help but picture Tom as a brawny Tucker Carlson.)

Nick makes a cutting aside about Tom that stands without modification as an indictment of a prominent type of disaffected “bro” stomping around the digital world today:

“Something was making him nibble at the edge of stale ideas as if his sturdy physical egotism no longer nourished his peremptory heart.”

Andrew Tate, Fitzgerald’s looking at you.

Fitzgerald might have had doubts about humanity’s capacity to change (or was it only his own generation he questioned?) but there’s no doubt that the details of our own lives can alter, and that we can subsequently grow. That’s precisely what happened with my relationship to The Great Gatsby. I was a poor reader unduly influenced by the commentaries of others; now, I’m a somewhat better reader able to know my own mind regarding classic novels.

So, I’ll beat on, my readerly boat against the current of modern trends, returning ceaselessly to the great books of the past.

I can’t wait to discover what else I missed.

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1. I’m borrowing Italo Calvino’s wonderful idea in the opening of If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller.

2. The other quote is (no surprise) the closing line of the novel: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”