An extract from Gatsby: Death of an Irishman, by Patrick O’Sullivan Greene
Gatsby: Death of an Irishman (Wordwell) delivers a compelling new insight into the life of F. Scott Fitzgerald and the genesis of The Great Gatsby
Before Fitzgerald commenced writing the novel, he explained his artistic goal to Perkins, ‘I want to write something new – something extraordinary and beautiful and simple and intricately patterned.’ In a letter to an admirer, he outlined his approach, ‘I am so anxious for people to see my new novel which is a new thinking out of the idea of illusion … The business of creating illusion is much more to my taste and my talent.’
The business of creating illusion is much more to my taste and my talent
His recent bitter life experience added a layer of disillusion on top of the illusion and wonder he had had beginning the novel; financial pressure, the failure of his play, forced to write short stories for money, Zelda’s affair and his own tendency towards dissipation. He gloomily wrote to Ludlow Fowler, a Newman and Princeton classmate, and his best man: ‘I remember our last conversation and it makes me sad. I feel old too, this summer – I have ever since the failure of my play a year ago. Thats [sic] the whole burden of this novel – the loss of those illusions that give such color to the world so that you don’t care whether things are true or false as long as they partake of the magical glory.’
He yearned for his younger days that were full of wonder and infinite opportunity. ‘I don’t want to repeat my innocence,’ he wrote in This Side of Paradise. ‘I want the pleasure of losing it again.’ He sent a letter to Harold Ober: ‘I’m twenty eight [sic]. I was twenty-two when I came to New York and found that you’d sold Head and Shoulders to the Post. I’d like to get a thrill like that again but I suppose it’s only once in a lifetime.’
‘Head and Shoulders’ was the first story he sold to the Saturday Evening Post. The young protagonist, Horace Tarbox, an intellectual prodigy at Princeton destined for a successful academic career regrets falling for a spirited dancer.
‘I don’t want to repeat my innocence,’ he wrote in This Side of Paradise. ‘I want the pleasure of losing it again.’
Fitzgerald wanted to return to that point in his life when it was most open to possibility. Alcohol would soon become his time travel machine: ‘The drink made past happy things contemporary with the present, as if they were still going on, contemporary even with the future as if they were about to happen again.’ During the summer of 1924, it was his novel that offered the possibility of time travel.
Carraway stays late at the party, well after Tom and Daisy go home. Gatsby explains that he wants Daisy to tell Tom that she never loved him. By doing so, the past would be ‘obliterated’. After she was free, they would go back to Louisville and be married from her house, ‘just as if it were five years ago’. Carraway advises a more practical approach:
‘I wouldn’t ask too much of her,’ he ventured. ‘You can’t repeat the past.’
‘Can’t repeat the past?’ He cried incredulously. ‘Why of course you can!’ … ‘I’m going to fix everything just the way it was before,’ he said, nodding determinedly. ‘She’ll see.’
Gatsby wanted ‘to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy. His life had been confused and disordered since, but if he could once return to a certain starting place and go over it all slowly, he could find out what that thing was.’
In a gratuitous exercise of prose and tone virtuosity, Fitzgerald offers a surreal explanation of ‘that thing’ that Gatsby – and he – had lost. Gatsby and Daisy were walking down a street on an autumn night in Louisville before he went to war. They stopped and turned toward each other:
Out of the corner of his eye Gatsby saw that the blocks of the sidewalk really formed a ladder and mounted to a secret place above the trees – he could climb to it, if he climbed alone, and once there he could suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder.
His heart beat faster and faster as Daisy’s white face came up to his own. He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips’ touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete.
