A Letter From F. Scott Fitzgerald
In honor of the 100th anniversary of The Great Gatsby, TFP goes to the archives to share an unexpected letter from the chronicler of the Jazz Age.
April 4, 2024
Dear MJ,
I’ve been meaning to write, for decades actually. But when I saw you lumbering around my old Saint Paul, Minnesota, neighborhood recently—walking up and down Summit Avenue, gawking at its Victorian mansions with pristine lawns like Augusta fairways—I decided the time was right.
Procrastinator that I am—and no, there is no booze in the afterlife, mercifully—I put it off a few more days until the deadly collapse of Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge, which seemed, to me at least, eerily analogous to my own fatal collapse in December 1940, the main difference being I fell into a river of gin. (Fun fact: Francis Scott Key, my namesake—and second cousin three times removed on my father’s side—was the man solely responsible for the dreadful and nearly unsingable “Star-Spangled Banner” lyrics.)
At any rate, today I put pen to paper with that image of you huffing and puffing up and down Summit Avenue still fresh in mind. No offense, MJ, but you’re no spring chicken, as they say, not that they know anything about spring or chickens. (Which reminds me of the time the writer bought a chicken and feed to feed it with and ended up eating the chicken and selling the feed.)
From the looks of it, old sport, you’ve long since eaten the chicken, and from the way you were wobbling around in front of the “F. Scott Fitzgerald House,” strangely deemed a National Historic Landmark in 1972, the chicken was the least of it!
Truth is, 599 Summit Ave. is no mansion but a middle-class row house surrounded by stately homes. As I wrote to a friend in 1919: In a house below the average / Of a street above the average… Story of my life, really, which, incidentally ended in my 44th year, cut short by decades of booze and cigarettes, no doubt, but also a faulty ticker (like bad lyrics, it ran in the family).
But I digress. As you know, I only lived at 599 Summit Ave. briefly after dropping out of Princeton to join the Army. By the time I was ready to ship out, however, the “war to end all wars” had ended. And I found myself neither a war hero nor a Princeton grad, either of which would have been preferable to moving home with the folks to finish up my first novel, This Side of Paradise.
The good news is Scribner loved it, and my novel was published in 1920 to smashing critical and commercial (ugly word) success, allowing me to marry my beloved Zelda Sayre, daughter of Alabama lawyer, politician, and later state supreme court justice, Anthony D. Sayre, an awful man with deep Confederate roots and backward ideas about race and class. I often think—and she’s confirmed this here in the afterlife—that Zelda, free spirited, progressive, artistically gifted and brilliant woman that she was and is (in heaven the illnesses that plagued us on earth fall away), married me more to divorce her family than to marry into a new one.
In any event, Zelda and I both wanted to escape, and the money from my writing allowed us to do so, her from the stifling brutality and gentility of the post Appomattox South, and me from the mediocrity and dwindling fortunes of a family that made a small fortune in the grocery-store business only to see it dwindle to nothingness like Christmas oranges on display.
All this is my way of saying thank you, dear boy, for reading the last lines of The Great Gatsby to your readers in the lead up to its 100th birthday. I always knew it was my best work, and got to the heart of our often heartless American need to climb socially and economically, no matter whose bootstraps we need to pull ourselves up by. (Dear reader, if you haven’t seen MJ’s recorded recitation, just click on the still picture below and it will, through the magic of modern technology, become a moving picture.)
Bravo, MJ! The gasping for breath, notwithstanding, a passable recitation, and yes, the word is “orgastic” not “orgiastic” future. As I explained to my editor at Scribner, Max Perkins, to no avail, “It’s the adjective for ‘orgasm’ and it expresses exactly the intended ecstasy. It’s not a bit dirty.” Thankfully, in newer editions of The Great Gatsby, including your 2020 paperback edition with an introduction by my lovely granddaughter, Eleanor Lanahan, my final revisions have been restored, most importantly my original dedication: Once again to Zelda.
Ok, enough sentimentality—though I do fear that word has gotten a bad rap of late. It was used to great effect by the great Duke Ellington, who, along with Louis Armstrong, was first recorded not long before Gatsby was published, in his tune “In a Sentimental Mood.” The word comes from the Latin sentire (to feel) and only in the latter half of the 20th century turned sappy, perhaps because so many men feared feeling.
I know, MJ, that one of the reasons you’ve been rereading Gatsby and poring over my biography—sordid and supercilious as it may be—is because you’re searching for answers to the big questions and uncertainties of 2024 in my work from 1924. Of course, Gatsby was published in 1925, but I was hard at work on revisions throughout 1924, and you and others are searching for similarities between the enormous wealth and excesses of the Jazz Age (yes, I invented the term, or was it Zelda?) and your age of billionaires, oligarchs, and illiberal democracy.
Some have compared your past president, Donald Trump, to Tom Buchanan, the brutish American blue-blood whose wealth is entirely inherited; who cheats on his young wife, Daisy—the undying object of Gatsby’s desire—and who spews white supremacist propaganda (not unlike Zelda’s father) dressed up in the hood-and robe-euphemisms of eugenics and other racist pseudosciences.
The short answer is, yes, I see the similarities. When I first introduce Tom in Gatsby it’s at a dinner party at his servant-filled estate in East Egg, a fictional representation of the Gold Coast of Long Island with its old-money and mansions. “Civilization is going to pieces,” he pompously asserts near the end of dinner. “I’ve gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read ‘The Rise of the Colored Empires’ by this man Goddard?” That’s a fictional reference to the actual book The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy by Lothrop Stoddard, published by Scribner, my publisher, in 1920, and repeatedly reprinted due to its popularity among thick-headed whites from all classes.
Tom goes on to say, and I’m particularly proud of how I’ve captured his pathetic boorishness here, “It’s a fine book, and everybody ought to read it. The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be—will be utterly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved. … The fellow has worked out the whole thing. It’s up to us, who are the dominant race, to watch out or these other races will have control of things.”
I need to emphasize here, that these racist ideas weren’t hidden. On the contrary, they circulated openly in polite society from Long Island to Los Angeles. Indeed, the “Gray Lady” herself, The New York Times, that bastion of liberal thought, favorably reviewed Stoddard’s white-supremacist tome, saying the author “evokes a new peril, that of an eventual submersion beneath vast waves of yellow men, brown men, black men and red men, whom the Nordics have hitherto dominated . . . with Bolshevism menacing us on the one hand and race extinction through warfare on the other, many people are not unlikely to give [Stoddard’s book] respectful consideration.”
“This idea is that we’re Nordics,” Tom continues. “I am, and you are, and you are… . And we’ve produced all the things that go to make civilization—oh, science, and art, and all that. Do you see?”
Yes, I must admit, even Tom’s cadences sound a bit like, what did he once call himself, “The Donald,” who said not long ago, in his run for re-election, that immigration is “a very sad thing for our country; it’s poisoning the blood of our country.” He also said to the same cheering crowd, in New Hampshire mind you, that “We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.” Now that reminds me of the language of the Roaring Twenties!
The America Firsters of my time like Charles Lindbergh and Elizabeth Dilling clearly had a great deal in common with the America Firsters of your time, including sympathy, if not explicit support, for authoritarian regimes abroad: an isolationist, if not apologist, foreign policy that fails to confront authoritarians, combined with an anti-immigrant domestic policy that reflects racist, white-supremacist views that predate the founding of our nation.
Remember, America First was a phrase first made popular in the 1850s when Irish immigrants—my and your relatives included—poured into America in great numbers during and after the Great Famine. Irish and Italian Catholics were nearly as unwelcome as blacks and nonwhite immigrants, and the Ku Klux Klan targeted the whole lot after the Civil War. Zelda’s father unashamedly railed against “inferior” races and brazenly pushed for the 1893 Sayre Act that, he boasted, would forever ban “the Negro from politics” in his home state of Alabama.
You 21st century folks—with your “wokeness” and “social conscience,” often forget how far this nation has come. Remember, it wasn’t until after the Great War (1914-1918), that women could vote in the U.S. And the Jim Crow laws that people like Zelda’s father helped implement kept, as you know, black men and women across the country from exercising their right to vote for much of the 19th and 20th centuries up until the Civil Rights Movement (1954-1968) and the Voting Rights Act (1965), two years after the assassination of JFK, our first Irish Catholic president—Joe Biden, of course, being the second. And let’s not forget the great strides the gay community has made in getting equal rights and protections under the law in just the past few decades. (Sidebar: I do like your word “queer,” gives us back “gay” as a term meaning simply joyful).
Dear boy, I know you’ve loved my greatest creation, Jay Gatsby, like no other character in literature. And I, being his creator, understand why. Gatsby’s desire to reinvent himself, to acquire great wealth by any means necessary to make himself worthy of Daisy Buchanan’s love (at least that’s what he tells himself) raises him from the rest of the high-class rabble to a certain purity of heart and spirit unfamiliar in our post-Victorian world. He is, in many ways, a knight from an Arthurian legend—my favorite stories growing up—and his nobility and purity of heart illuminate the novel’s dark plot and the rest of its dark characters. As my narrator, Nick Carraway, tells Gatsby near the end of the book: “They’re a rotten crowd. You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.”
I’ll leave you with a disturbing thought—something I often did in person while alive and in much of my work. It’s true, as I wrote in my posthumous collection of somewhat self-pitying and entirely depressing essays, The Crack-Up, “Books are like brothers. I am an only child. Gatsby [is] my imaginary eldest brother.” It’s also true that Gatsby’s quest for “the green light” is not unlike Sir Gawain’s quest for the Green Knight. It’s a romantic, chivalric quest that has little to do with its object, and more to do with him overcoming his own shortcomings and fears.
Moreover, Gatsby represents a move away from societal norms and morals grounded in place, tradition, and religion, and toward the brave new world of celebritydom (terribly ugly word) where artists, industrialists, and the nouveau riche create their own cults of personality. Like Gatsby, Trump’s gains are ill-gotten and his morals questionable. But that makes little difference to anyone attending his lavish parties at Mar-a-Lago or filling stadiums to feel as if they are a part of his world.
Most commentators see Trump’s similarities with Tom Buchanan. What they miss, though, is that The Donald has both the self-serving charm of Gatsby and the outsider, criminal element that Americans have always idolized—think of James Cagney in “Angels With Dirty Faces” or Marlon Brando in “The Godfather”—combined with the raw nativism of America Firsters throughout U.S. history.
In other words, Trump somehow embodies the Gatsby-like dreams of his supporters—a burning desire to beat the “elites” at their own game and recapture past glories—while spewing Buchanan-like vitriol. And that, dear boy, is a frightening combination, whether the calendar reads 1924 or 2024. On that unsettling note, I bid you farewell. Do give my best to your better half. Zelda and I are having the Hemingways over for dinner; it’s always a rollicking good time, even without the booze.
Ever thine,
TFP IS A PROUD MEMBER OF THE IOWA WRITERS COLLABORATIVE
Like Fitzgerald’s work, this column merits re-reading again and again. Thanks, Michael for this moving piece!
Thank you, Michael!