The novel sold modestly—not nearly as well as either of his previous books. By 1936, Fitzgerald’s annual royalties from book sales amounted to around eighty dollars. That year, he published “The Crack-Up,” a series of essays about his own physical and psychological collapse. “I began to realize that for two years my life had been a drawing on resources that I did not possess, that I had been mortgaging myself physically and spiritually up to the hilt.” In the end, Fitzgerald would die just a few years later, at the age of 44, his books mostly forgotten.
But then, in 1942, the U.S. Council on Books in Wartime began sending books to American troops fighting in World War II. More than 150,000 copies of the Armed Services Edition of Gatsby were shipped overseas, and the book became a hit at last. Armed Services Editions were paperback books that fit into a soldier’s pocket; they popularized several books now considered classics, including Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Smith’s book was one of the few books by women included in the program; the vast majority were written by white men.
The Council on Books in Wartime’s slogan was “Books are weapons in the war of ideas,” which was the kind of slogan generals could get behind even if many of the books chosen, including Gatsby, weren’t particularly patriotic. The program proved a tremendous success. One soldier told the New York Times that the books were “as popular as pin-up girls.”
By 1960, Gatsby was selling fifty thousand copies a year; these days it sells over half a million copies a year, not least because it’s difficult to escape high school English in the U.S. without being assigned the book. It’s short, reasonably accessible, and rather than being a book for “the season only,” it has proven to be a book for all seasons.
Gatsby is a critique of the American Dream. The only people who end up rich or successful in the novel are the ones who start out that way. Almost everyone else ends up dead or destitute. And it’s a critique of the kind of vapid capitalism that can’t find anything more interesting to do with money than try to make more of it. The book lays bare the carelessness of the entitled rich—the kind of people who buy puppies but won’t take care of dogs, or who purchase vast libraries of books but never read any of them.
And yet Gatsby is often read as a celebration of the horrifying excess of the Anthropocene’s richer realms. Shortly after the book came out, Fitzgerald wrote to a friend, “Of all the reviews, even the most enthusiastic, not one had the slightest idea what the book was about.”
Sometimes, that still feels true. To tell a story of my own horrifying excess, I once stayed at the famous Plaza Hotel in New York City and received a “free upgrade” to the Great Gatsby suite. The room was a study in visual overstimulation—sparkling silver wallpaper, ornate furniture, fake trophies and autographed footballs lining the mantel. The room seemed utterly unaware that, in the novel, Daisy and Tom Buchanan are the bad guys.
Eventually, in what may have been the most entitled moment of my life, I called and requested a room change because the ceaseless tinkling of the Gatsby Suite’s massive crystal chandelier was disturbing my sleep. As I made that call, I could feel the eyes of Fitzgerald staring down at me.
But Gatsby lends itself to the confusion that Fitzgerald lamented. Yes, it is unwavering in its condemnation of American excess, but even so, the whole novel pulses with an intoxicatingly rhythmic prose. Just read the first sentence aloud: “In my younger and more vulnerable years, my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.” You can damn near tap your foot to it. Or take this one: “Gatsby turned out all right in the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.”
When words roll like that, it’s hard not to enjoy the party, and for me that’s the real genius of Gatsby. The book makes you feel for the entitled spoiled disgusting rich and the poor people living in the valley of ashes, and everyone in between. You know the parties are vapid and maybe even evil, but you still want to be invited. And so in bad times, Gatsby feels like a condemnation of the American idea, and in good times it feels like a celebration of that same idea. David Denby has written that the book has “become a kind of national scripture, recited happily or mournfully, as the occasion requires.”
So it has become for that sentence near the book’s end. “For a transitory enchanted moment, man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.”
There’s just the one problem with that line, which is that it’s not true. It’s not true that “man” held his breath in the presence of this continent, because if we are imagining “man” as all of humanity, then “man” had known about, and indeed lived in, the area for tens of thousands of years. In fact, the use of “man” in the sentence ends up telling us a lot about whom, precisely, the narrator thinks of as a person, and where the narrator centers their story.
That “last time in history” also proved wrong, of course. Within a few decades of Gatsby’s publication, human beings stepped foot on the moon. Not long after that, we sent a telescope into space that allowed us to glimpse what the universe looked like just after the Big Bang.
Maybe the novel knows this. It is, after all, a book about hearkening back to a past that never existed, trying to fix some single moment from the past into permanence, when the past is neither fixed nor fixable. And so maybe the novel knows that hearkening back to these transitory enchanted moments is a doomed enterprise. Maybe the Plaza knew they were making a room about （and for） the baddies.
But I will confess this endless parsing of ambivalences and ironies exhausts me. Here’s the plain truth, at least as it has been shown to me: We are never far from wonders. I remember when my son was about two, we were walking in the woods one November morning. We were along a ridge, looking down at a forest in the valley below, where a cold haze seemed to hug the forest floor. I kept trying to get my oblivious two-year-old to appreciate the landscape. At one point, I picked him up and pointed out toward the horizon and said, “Look at that, Henry, just look at it!” And he said, “Weaf!” I said, “What?” And again he said, “Weaf,” and then reached out and grabbed a single brown oak leaf from the little tree next to us.
I wanted to explain to him that you can see a brown oak leaf anywhere in the eastern United States in November, that nothing in the forest was less interesting. But after watching him look at it, I began to look as well, and I soon realized it wasn’t just a brown leaf. Its veins spidered out red and orange and yellow in a pattern too complex for my brain to synthesize, and the more I looked at that leaf with Henry, the more I was compelled into an aesthetic contemplation I neither understood nor desired, face-to-face with something commensurate to my capacity for wonder.
Marveling at the perfection of that leaf, I was reminded that aesthetic beauty is as much about how and whether you look as what you see. From the quark to the supernova, the wonders do not cease. It is our attentiveness that is in short supply, our ability and willingness to do the work that awe requires.