The Great Gatsby
by cruel, cruel H. L. Mencken
From Baltimore Evening Sun, 1925.
Scott Fitzgerald‘s new novel, The Great Gatsby, is in
form no more than a glorified anecdote, and not too
probable at that. The scene is the Long Island that
hangs precariously on the edges of the New York city
ash dumps—the Long Island of gaudy villas and
bawdy house parties. The theme is the old one of a
romantic and preposterous love—the ancient fidelis ad
urrum motif reduced to a macabre humor. The
principal personage is a bounder typical of those
parts—a fellow who seems to know everyone and yet
remains unknown to all—a young man with a great
deal of mysterious money, the tastes of a movie actor
and, under it all, the simple sentimentality of a
somewhat sclerotic fat woman.
This clown Fitzgerald rushes to his death in nine short
chapters. The other performers in the Totentanz are of a like, or even worse quality. One
of them is a rich man who carries on a grotesque intrigue with the wife of a garage
keeper. Another is a woman golfer who wins championships by cheating. A third, a sort
of chorus to the tragic farce, is a bond salesman—symbol of the New America!
Fitzgerald clears them all off at last by a triplebutchery. The garage keeper‘s wife,
rushing out upon the road to escape her husband‘s third degree, is run down and killed
by the wife of her lover. The garage keeper, misled by the lover, kills the lover of the
lover‘s wife—the Great Gatsby himself. Another bullet, and the garage keeper is also
reduced to offal. Choragus fades away. The crooked lady golfer departs. The lover of the
garage keeper‘s wife goes back to his own consort. The immense house of the Great
Gatsby stands idle, its bedrooms given over to the bat and the owl, its cocktail shakers
dry. The curtain lurches down.
This story is obviously unimportant, and though, as I shall show, it has its place in the
Fitzgerald canon, it is certainly not to be put on the same shelf, with, say, This Side of
Paradise. What ails it, fundamentally, is the plain fact that it is simply a story—that
Fitzgerald seems to be far more interested in maintaining its suspense than in getting
under the skins of its people. It is not that they are false; it is that they are taken too
much for granted. Only Gatsby himself genuinely lives and breathes. The rest are mere
marionettes—oftenastonishingly lifelike, but nevertheless not quite alive.
What gives the story distinction is something quite different from the management of the
action or the handling of the characters; it is the charm and beauty of the writing. In
Fitzgerald‘s first days it seemed almost unimaginable that he could ever show such
qualities. His writing, then, was extraordinarily slipshod— at times almost illiterate. He
seemed to be devoid of any feeling for the color and savor of words. He could see people
clearly and he could devise capital situations, but as writer qua writer he was apparently
little more than a bright college boy. The critics of the Republic were” not slow to
discern the fact. They praised This Side of Paradise as a story, as a social document, but
they were almost unanimous in denouncing it as a piece of writing.
It is vastly to Fitzgerald‘s credit that he appears to have taken their caveats seriously and
pondered them to good effect. In The Great Gatsby the highly agreeable fruits of that
pondering are visible. The story, for all its basic triviality, has a fine texture, a careful
and brilliant finish. The obvious phrase is simply not in it. The sentences roll along
smoothly, sparklingly, variously. There is evidence in every line of hard and intelligent
effort. It is a quite new Fitzgerald who emerges from this little book and the qualities
that he shows are dignified and solid. This Side of Paradise, after all, might have been
merely a lucky accident. But The Great Gatsby, a far inferior story at bottom, is plainly
the product of a sound and stable talent, conjured into being by hard work.
I make much of this improvement because it is of an order not often witnessed in
American writers, and seldom indeed in those who start off with a popular success. The
usual progression, indeed, is in the opposite direction. Every year first books of great
promise are published—and every year a great deal of stale drivel is printed by the
promising authors of year before last. The rewards of literary success in this country are
so vast that, when they come early, they are not unnaturally somewhat demoralizing.
The average author yields to them readily. Having struck the bull‘s-eye once, he is too
proud to learn new tricks. Above all, he is too proud to tackle hard work. The result is a
gradual degeneration of whatever talent he had at the beginning. He begins to imitate
himself. He peters out.
There is certainly no sign of petering out in Fitzgerald. After his first experimenting he
plainly sat himself down calmly to consider his deficiencies. They were many and
serious. He was, first of all, too facile. He could write entertainingly without giving
thought to form and organization. He was, secondly, somewhat amateurish. The
materials and methods of his craft, I venture, rather puzzled him. He used them ineptly.
His books showed brilliancy in conception, but they were crude and even ignorant in
detail. They suggested, only too often, the improvisations of a pianist playing furiously
by ear but unable to read notes.
These are the defects that he has now got rid of. The Great Gatsby, I seem to recall, was
announced a long while ago. It was probably several years on the stocks. It shows on
every page the results of that laborious effort. Writing it, I take it, was painful. The
author wrote, tore up, rewrote, tore up again. There are pages so artfully contrived that
one can no more imagine improvising them than one can imagine improvising a fugue.
They are full of little delicacies, charming turns of phrase, penetrating second thoughts.
In other words, they are easy and excellent reading—which is what always comes out of
hard writing.
Thus Fitzgerald, the stylist, arises to challenge Fitzgerald, the social historian, but I
doubt that the latter ever quite succumbs to the former. The thing that chiefly interests
the basic Fitzgerald is still the florid show of modern American life—and especially the
devil‘s dance that goes on at the top. He is unconcerned about the sweatings and
sufferings of the nether herd; what engrosses him is the high carnival of those who have
too much money to spend and too much time for the spending of it. Their idiotic pursuit
of sensation, their almost incredible stupidity and triviality, their glittering
swinishness—these are the things that go into his notebook.
In The Great Gatsby, though he does not go below the surface, he depicts this rattle and
hullabaloo with great gusto and, I believe, with sharp accuracy. The Long Island he sets
before us is no fanciful Alsatia; it actually exists. More, it is worth any social historian‘s
study, for its influence upon the rest of the country is immense and profound. What is
vogue among the profiteers of Manhattan and their harlots today is imitated by the
flappers of the Bible Belt country clubs weeks after next. The whole tone of American
society, once so highly formalized and so suspicious of change, is now taken largely
from frail ladies who were slinging hash a year ago.
Fitzgerald showed the end products of the new dispensation in This Side of Paradise. In
The Beautiful and Damned he cut a bit lower. In The Great Gatsby he comes near the
bottom. Social leader and jailbird, grand lady and kept woman, are here almost
indistinguishable. We are in an atmosphere grown increasingly levantine. The Paris of
the Second Empire pales to a sort of snobbish chautauqua; the New York of Ward
McAllister becomes the scene of a convention of Gold Star Mothers. To find a parallel
for the grossness and debauchery that now reign in New York one must go back to the
Constantinople of Basil I.