Scott Fitzgerald’s Legacy: Here, There, and Everywhere

"Was The Great Gatsby an influence on Brideshead Revisited?” The question came from my students in class last week. (Not sure: Evelyn Waugh’s ace biographer Martin Stannard says inconclusively that Waugh read the novel “in later life.”) Meanwhile in the New Yorker, Adam Gopnik was proposing that F. Scott Fitzgerald’s truly influential book is The Crack-Up, for it

helped invent a genre: the addiction confession, which became a strong form of American writing in the second half of the twentieth century. “The Crack-Up” is hanging over the shoulder not just of the confessional poets but of “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” and “A Fan’s Notes” and, for that matter, “Eat, Pray, Love.”

Gopnik’s piece about recent books dealing with Fitzgerald – dealing with the Fitzgeralds; that is, with Scott and Zelda both – takes in the new book on The Great Gatsby by Maureen Corrigan, who is Georgetown’s critic-in-residence as well as the book critic for NPR’s Fresh Air. Gopnik (who has never met a book he fully likes about a book he really likes) takes issue with Maureen’s assertion that Gatsby — a murder mystery, in part — anticipates film noir. But he praises her reporting: “Sylvia Plath, she surprises us, was a Fitzgerald fan, densely annotating her copy of `Gatsby.’”

Here’s the passage from Maureen’s book, So We Read On:

How did the undergraduate Plath read Fitzgerald? The answer is studiously. Plath underlines sentences on practically every page of her Gatsby. Most of the underlinings have to do with color symbolism … There are lines under Myrtle’s sister’s “sticky bob of red hair,” George Wilson’s “light blue eyes,” and Myrtle’s “brown figured dress.” Indeed, a lot of the comments and underlinings convey the impression of a good student taking down a professor’s lecture notes.

Maureen sees Fitzgerald’s legacy as, well, Gatsby. Gopnik sees it as The Crack-Up. New York's book critic, Kathryn Schultz, sees it somewhere else:

The Great Gatsby might be the least funny book about rich people ever written. The British, who kick our ass at writing about class, know how useful a dash of humor is—how it can lift up or deflate, jostle or soothe, comfort or eviscerate. (In a literary hostage exchange, I would trade a thousand Fitzgeralds for one Edward St. Aubyn, 10,000 for an Austen or Dickens.) In leaving that note out, Fitzgerald is not just making a stylistic choice, nor even just signaling his solemnity of purpose. He is all but inventing a new narrative mode: the third-­person sanctimonious.

The photograph is of Sylvia Plath’s marked edition of The Great Gatsby.

• 23 September 2014
• 2