“…Looking up at the Stars”; how the writings of romantics and aesthetes inspired F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.

“…Looking up at the Stars”; how the writings of romantics and aesthetes  inspired F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.  Mike Haldenby

When studying F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, one challenge facing the reader is to explore the  ideas behind the novel- the influences that combined and prevailed to enable Fitzgerald to create his masterpiece. 

His own frenetic life, and his desperate attempt to write a book successful enough to keep the  demanding Zelda in the luxury to which she felt she should be accustomed, has been well documented.  There are many parallels in the text with his own life;  these too have been equally well explored. The Great Gatsby is his “spiritual biography”, says biographer Nicholas Le Vot.  Living the Gatsby lifestyle (without the funding, initially) gave him plenty of material.  Arthur Mizener’s claims, in his 1951 account, that Fitzgerald is an “Original Genius- almost nobody at all influenced the Very Bright Boy” as he was  “hardly aware of his literary sources”.   Yet Fitzgerald was well read, and it seems reasonable to suggest that his favourite authors must have played their part in providing him with themes and ideas.   According to Le Vot,  Fitzgerald read “feverishly” as a student, “plunging” with particular enthusiasm into the work of the great “English aesthetes.”  (Writing a letter in 1939, Fitzgerald admits “the point where the personal note emerges can come very young… long before twenty”).  Comparisons with Henry James have been thoroughly drawn;  Gatsby’s “pathetic” appeal through his “passionate idealism”, finds specific resonance in Daisy Miller (1880), particularly through the “eyes of a spectator” narrative technique, while later critics, such as R.W. Stallman note “numerous”  cadences borrowed from Joseph Conrad;  Marlow’s imaginative narrative in Lord Jim (1899) and his obsession with the enigmatic Kurtz in Heart of Darkness (1902) suggest obvious similarities.  T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) has invited many comparisons, through the barren aridity of Fitzgerald’s valley of ashes and the general modernistic lack of narrative continuity.

 

Keats’ & Wordsworth

Then, it is well known that Fitzgerald’s favourite poet was John Keats.  As well as using the line, “Tender is the Night” as a later title, echoes of Keats’ romanticism surface in Gatsby, particularly in Daisy’s remarkable nightingale, which seemingly crossed from Europe by ship.  Keats is transported by his nightingale’s timeless song and hesitates to accept its mortality while Nick wants his Gatsby not to kiss Daisy as, for him, the dreaming supercedes reality, and the wondrous illusion might disappear in a flash.

Arthur Mizener  cites Keats’ letter  to Benjamin Bailey, in which he states that he sought  a life of “Sensations”—that is, the felt understanding of the imagination—rather than “Thoughts”—the logical conclusions of consecutive reasoning,  leading to Keats’ claim that  “what the imagination seizes as beauty—that is, experienced knowledge—must be true.”  This is at the heart of Fitzgerald’s passion for Keats’ romanticism, but, importantly, it has been filtered through his more recent admiration of Rupert Brooke, whose war poetry, now deemed hopelessly naïve, also struck a chord with Fitzgerald.

And what of the other romantic poets?  Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey explains how the poet  has dealt with “Five years!” away from the beauty of the Wye Valley, which, despite being physically absent, he “felt in the blood, and felt along the heart.”  Perhaps it’s no coincidence that it’s five years that Gatsby has been separated from Daisy.  With his exclamation, “Almost five years!” Nick creates a powerful connection between Gatsby’s dream and the way Wordsworth deals with keeping the past alive.  Gatsby doubts his “present happiness”  and seems to prefer  the “colossal vitality of his illusion”; like Wordsworth, Gatsby’s memories seem to propel and inspire him more powerfully than what he has in front of him; his idealised love for what Daisy encapsulated on that balmy evening in Louisville is an embodiment of Wordsworth’s “sense sublime…something far more deeply interfused”-  which sustained Gatsby “mid the din” of the trenches.  In comparison to the power of what the past represents,  the reality of the present pales.  Wordsworth, then, of all the romantics, would have agreed with Gatsby about being able to somehow  recreate the past, although his way was largely cerebral;  with an “eye made quiet by the power of harmony”, as opposed to Gatsby’s more tangible shirts and cars.   Nick, however,  over-romanticises Gatsby’s scheme into a sensual, dreamlike, existential obsession with  Daisy’s voice, the  “deathless song”, calling him back to 1917.

The Influence of Oscar Wilde

There are other claimants with convincing cases.  Fitzgerald’s chosen milieu- the decadent lives of rich, indolent high society acolytes- places Fitzgerald squarely alongside one writer in particular- Oscar Wilde.  This is underlined by the dilemma faced by both writers; their evident fascination for- and, seemingly, disgust at- the excesses of the idle rich.  Both Fitzgerald and Wilde feed off “society”, and cannot do without it, being drawn inexorably to its lack of ordinariness, its moral self-justification, its decadence.  Both men found themselves just outside the aristocratic circles that they aspired to yet were excluded from.  But the comparison goes deeper than that.

Like Wilde, Fitzgerald drew from the Faust legend to create a protagonist so in love with the potential of his own Platonic creation that considerations of integrity and morality are willingly jettisoned to gain the ultimate dream.  While the reminder of  Dorian Gray’s unholy pact  is a constant presence whispering from the attic (a subterranean cellar would surely have been more satanic), Gatsby’s deal is with Wolfsheim, a Jewish anti-Christ,  who, at dinner,  tries to tempt Nick and Gatsby “over the road”- where it’s “hot and small- and full of memories”.  (If Gatsby is later likened to Christ, his refusal to be tempted here is telling).  Wolsfheim sends his own Mephistopheles and Beelzebub in Owl-eyes and Klipspringer to ensure all goes to plan.  The Wildean aphorism “What does it profit a man to gain the whole world but to lose his own soul?” is applicable equally to both Dorian Gray and Jay Gatsby.  Dorian Gray dies when he ultimately come face to face with the ghoulish spectre of the painting; Gatsby is killed by the ghostly Wilson, an “ashen, fantastic figure, gliding towards him through the amorphous trees”.

 “To become the spectator of one’s own life,” states Lord Henry Wootton, a clear cipher for Wilde himself in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), “is to escape the sufferings of life.”  Nick, in a nutshell.  Tony Tanner describes him as “a spectator in search of a performer.” He opts out of conscious involvement in the business of others so that he can avoid the exposure of his own lack of substance.  When Wilde retorted to Yeats that “a man must invent his own myth”, Fitzgerald was presented  with the basis for Gatsby, and when Wilde, in defending Dorian Gray, stated that “of all men I am the one who requires least advertisement… I am tired to death of being advertised,” Fitzgerald seized the blueprint for Daisy’s telling denouncement of her old love in the hotel heat of Chapter 5.

The Morality of Aestheticism

Wilde’s first great passion, before Bosie, was for John Gray, who signed his letters to Wilde “Dorian”;  Wilde wrote to him, “The world is changed because you are made of ivory and gold.  The curves of your lips rewrite history”.  Gatsby’s love for Daisy, the “golden girl” in immaculate white, reflects a similar, hopelessly romantic but ultimately self-obsessed desire to “repeat the past” and to regain the “real” man, a noble savage that existed before the need for any “Platonic conception”.  Gatsby and Daisy later travel in a yellow car; the colour of eroticism, referencing the “Yellow Book”, a thinly veiled reference to Huysman’s  decadent novel “Au Rebours”,  the erotic inspiration of both Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley.  Colour symbolism permeates Gatsby; it’s an “intimate part …of the book’s substance”, writes Le Vot, with yellow having special meaning. 

Gatsby’s pink-suited gorgeousness is the ultimate aesthetic beauty of immorality, an idealised “Platonic” creation, deeply  flawed yet, for Nick, rising above its corruption, and epitomising Wilde’s typically paradoxical and epigrammatic ideal of beauty separated from moral considerations.  As Richard Ellmann so forcefully puts it in his biography of Wilde, referencing  the “poisonous” “Au Rebours”, “aestheticism is fundamentally an aspiration towards an ideal”; neatly encapsulating both Gatsby’s  dream and Nick’s longing.   It is upon his return to West Egg from his first visit to the Buchanans that Nick initially reaches out for Gatsby, who is standing at night (in a spiritual gutter, but looking up at the “peppery” stars), scanning the sound and seeking, if we accept Nick’s implication, the green light of Daisy’s jetty, “A dreamer … who can only find his way by moonlight”.  Like Wilde, Gatsby represents to Nick " all the sins you have never had the courage to commit."

 

Gatsby himself is no aesthete; his desires are more earthbound.  He recognises quickly and enthusiastically that Daisy’s voice is “full of money”, just like his attempts to be with self- conscious phrases such as “old sport”.  Yet Nick loves the idea of the man more than the man himself, much, as for Wilde, art was more real than life itself.  Gatsby only “comes alive” when Nick realises that his mansion was a magnificent  illusion constructed solely to entice Daisy.  Oscar might have approved.  To the aesthete, to those worshipping gorgeousness, according to Wilde, there is no distinction between moral and immoral acts, only between those that increase or decrease one’s happiness.   Nick, in his love of Gatsby’s dream, reinforces this position.  His decision to reject the offer of quick (probably illegal) profit in chapter 5 gives him a temporary morality later to be swept away by his  more powerful attraction to Gatsby’s useless,  immoral  quest.  Gatsby himself exemplifies the Wildean notion that “the true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible...."  Nick’s admiration here is confusing;  clearly, Gatsby uses then dumps Nick.  But it’s too late- Nick is hooked. In looking for Gatsby’s depths, Nick misses the key point – there aren’t any.   At the end of Chapter 1, Nick sees Gatsby, arms “stretched” towards Daisy, standing on his dock in the moonlight; then, like the shadowy cat, he is gone.  Nick wants more; he seeks the visible, tangible Gatsby that he believes promises so much.  In creating Gatsby’s  Platonic identity, Fitzgerald is diving deep into the very exploration of aesthetics that lies at the heart of Wilde’s most successful work. 

 

Fitzgerald was in tune with Wilde’s own development.  For both The Great Gatsby and Dorian Gray ultimately refute the idea that art transcends responsibility.  Reflecting Wilde’s philosophical volte-face, and presenting a strong case for the inherent immorality of purely aesthetic lives, Gatsby’s death seems to restore a natural order.  When Daisy finally deserts him again, he realises that his dream has dissolved; all the artifices of his life have been stripped away to reveal a world where roses are “grotesque” and leaves, until then growing wildly in blue bursts,  are “frightening”.  There is even beauty in Gatsby’s death, with the glorious description of the pool and its “little ripples that were hardly the shadows of waves”.  This is release. In his creation of Gatsby, Fitzgerald assiduously sticks to Wilde’s revised template of the aesthetic ideal.

The Great Gatsby is, of course, about dreaming, the final emptiness of the American Dream, and the hollow materialism of the age.  But Fitzgerald’s masterpiece can also be read as an acknowledgement of the debate over aestheticism, inspired by Walter Pater, developed by Whistler and made famous by Wilde.  Fitzgerald has Nick present us with Gatsby, who becomes the perfect aesthetic creation; art and morality are kept separate as Nick’s love requires that he distances himself from Gatsby’s immorality.  He tells Gatsby, gushingly, “You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together”, while having paradoxically “disapproved of him from beginning to end”. 

Both Oscar Wilde and Jay Gatsby pay the ultimate price for the dream of a love that dare not speak its name; they are plaintiffs found guilty at kangaroo courts of their own making.  If he accepts that “society often forgives the criminal but never forgives the dreamer”,  Fitzgerald also takes from Wilde the notion that the dreamer’s punishment is that he sees “the (reality) of the dawn before the rest of the world”- yet is unable or unwilling to act upon it.

 

 

F Scott Fitzgerald: Nicholas Le Vot  Allen Lane 1979

John Keats: Letter to Benjamin Bailey, (1817)

Scott Fitzgerald and the 1920’s: Arthur Mizener  Minnesota Review, I (Winter 1961).

 “Conrad and The Great Gatsby”  R W Stallman Twentieth Century Literature   Vol. 1, No. 1, Apr.,  1955 Hofstra University

Introduction to The Great Gatsby: Tony Tanner Penguin 1990

Oscar Wilde: Richard Ellman XXX 199x

American Dreams, American Nightmares, ed. by David Madden, 1970.

“Cadences”  Gilbert Seldes “Spring Flight” The Dial (1925)

F. Scott Fitzgerald: Letter to Morton Kroll, August 9, 1939.

William Wordswoth  Tintern Abbey 180?

Nature and Optics in “The Great Gatsby”, J.S. Westbrook, American Literature (1960/61)