The Great Fitzgerald

If you read John Braine’s book How To Write A Novel, you end up reading a list of novels that he recommends. One of these is The Great Gatsby by F.Scott Fitzgerald. This is the world’s most perfectly written novel. You’ll never write this good. If you’re a writer and you’ve read it, you’re buggered.

I read it once, then read it again. I was working on a building site some years ago and while I mixed up a batch of mortar, I held The Great Gatsby in my hand, transfixed, while big globs of cement welded the pages together.

The Great Gatsby is a First person narrative about Nick Carraway and his new life in New York City where he meets Gatsby and a strange tragedy that unfolds before his eyes. This book, as you read its simple poetic story and critique of the American dream, makes all those detective novels, with their strung out, morose policemen, look like the Beano.

I own and have owned several copies of The Great Gatsby. I can’t go into a second hand book shop without buying an edition I’ve never laid eyes on before. I once bought a nice and thin hard back edition, just because it looked nice. Yes, this is a compulsion. Have you seen Conspiracy Theory with Mel Gibson? They track him, by brain washing him into buying a copy of The Catcher In The Rye every time he enters a book shop. His book shelves are crowded with editions of the book. Spooky. They say that many of the famous assassins of history also owned many copies. I don’t want to know if they owned The Great Gatsby too and how many.

I have so many copies that, when I moved last month, I had to throw away many other books to make room for them in my new home. As I opened a bin bag and threw the worn paper backs inside, I felt evil, condemning these works or art to their grave. For those few moments, I was a Nazi, throwing books on a bonfire.

I have, I’m proud to say, a copy of the Trimalchio, the original version of The Great Gatsby, which has slight alterations. When out shopping with my friend, Cathy, I found the book in a large London book shop, I made my self walk away from it. I noted that it was very expensive at nearly forty pounds and slid it back into the shelf. For a few moments, I was desperately proud of my self. To celebrate, I bought Cathy a coffee and dinner in a local restaurant. She suddenly dipped into her shopping bag and held the bright red and perfect looking copy of Trimalchio out to me, telling me she had snuck off to buy it for me. It was an early birthday present, she said. I gripped it tightly to my chest. Yes, this is very sad.

To understand my obsession you have had to have read Fitzgerald’s finest novel. It starts with a simple statement about Nick Carraway’s relationship with his father, unlike modern novels that always seem to start with a dead body or some similar shocking event. I fear the days of simple, but intriguing stories have gone. It’s like John Doe says in SEVEN, the movie, ‘You have to hit them with a sledgehammer, then you’ll notice you have their strict attention’. He is quite right.

Written many years before the Second World war and not long after the Great War, Fitzgerald even sees an empty future for the rich and mindless, that will come to blame societies problems on the Coloured races. He seems to imagine Tom Buchanan as an almost right wind bigot, the kind that walks the earth in Twenty First Century, spouting about the immigrants wiping us all out.

There is more than just political visions in Gatsby, there are also simple truths, like Carraway’s understanding of Gatsby to be one of those few people you meet in life, that when they look at you and smile, you think everything is going to be all right in the end. They have that ability to take away your doubt. There are so many moments in this book to make you recognise something from your life. I, myself, find so much remembered pain in Gatsby’s own search for his lost love and when he comes in from the rain and confronts Daisy for the first time in five years, my heart always threatens to boil over.

At University, when I studied Literature, I remember being excited when I found out we would be studying The Great Gatsby, knowing that in my own way, I had been taking the book apart and putting it back together like a broken radio for years. I even, when asked to find a quote to illustrate Gatsby’s lost love obsession, read out a whole paragraph, without looking down at the book. I remember the lecturer looking at me strangely.

This book will sting you in the heart and in the next section, make you laugh. I recall Daisy, arranging to meet the rest of the gang at a New York hotel, saying ‘I’ll be the man smoking two cigarettes’. Of course, soon the tragedy is underway and you have to watch Gatsby’s dream sink away from him and the whole world seem to turn grey before his eyes. I have to admit that I ignore most of the ‘American Dream’ stuff and concentrate on the pure emotional poetry of the novel.

So, F Scott Fitzgerald has done it, he has managed to write, in my opinion, the greatest novel ever. Forget Dickens and all the rest, for it is all in The Great Gatsby, everything you need for a good story and I hate Fitzgerald for it and love him at the same time. I even tried to write my own version called THE DANCE TRAGEDY set in modern day England, but of course it was a mere shadow of this great text. It was a good way to learn though; a good way to learn that I’ll never write a book that good, ever and never so young. Fitzgerald was barely twenty five when he published Gatsby, becoming successful and winning over the love of his life, Zelda Sayre. She was probably Fitzgerald’s Daisy and The Great Gatsby is now my Daisy, my lost love.