As The Great Gatsby turns 100, Trump's America gives it special resonance
Trump is a self-mythologising social climber, just like Gatsby. He and his leading MAGA supporters also have much in common with Gatsby’s antithesis, the brutal Tom Buchanan.
“In my younger and more vulnerable year, my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.
“Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone,” he told me, “Just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”
So begins The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel which was published one hundred years ago this week on 10 April 1925 by Charles Scribner’s Sons of New York.
It is a short book, some 47,000 words taking up just 161 pages in my Penguin Classic. Nevertheless, one hundred years on, it lays claim to being The Great American Novel, perhaps of all time – Moby Dick, Anyone? – and certainly of the twentieth century.
Gatsby is an ageless romance of unrequited love set against an alluring backdrop of modern luxury, parties, cocktails and flappers dancing the Charleston – at least according to the many dramatisations of the book.
Like all great art Gatsby also still resonates and speaks to us today.Charles Scribner’s Sons of New York. The arrival of the second Trump administration gives it special pertinence since the novel is set among the white rich inhabitants of east coast America.
Famously, Fitzgerald’s cast of characters includes some of whom his narrator, Nick Carraway, describes as “careless people, Tom and Daisy – they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made”.
The Great Gatsby was written, and is set, in the 1920s, the “Jazz Age” just after the Great War of 1914-1918 and, unknowingly, a few years before the Great Crash and Great Depression of 1929.
Some of the characters, including Nick, joined the American forces sent to Europe in the last nineteen months of the Second World War. Tom did not serve. Fitzgerald joined up as a second lieutenant, but the Armistice came before he was shipped overseas.
No Spoiler Alert! I am not going to reveal any aspects of a plot, steeped in romance, tragedy and melodrama. I hope readers will be driven to the book for the very first time or to refresh their memories. This seems appropriate to a work in which the narrator Nick is not a central actor and in which he himself is only just comprehending the story he is telling.
A hundred years after it was written, there are depressing echoes from the characters in Gatsby and the circumstances in which they find themselves. Some troubling aspects of United States and the American Dream may be perpetual.
The irony is that Fitzgerald himself aspired to the extravagant lifestyle he depicted while considering it “rotten” and doomed to damnation. Gatsby was his third published novel following This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and the Damned.
Donald Trump has almost certainly never read the book but he, like so many of its other fans, has been attracted by its glamourous and opulent setting. There is a pastiche of Art-Deco stylishness in the “Golden Escalator” down which Trump descended to launch his first presidential campaign.
In 2013, the Trump Hotel and Tower resort offered a package to “plunge into the Roaring Twenties” and ‘Pay homage to The Great Gatsby” – or rather Baz Luhrmann’s movie version starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Carey Mulligan, dismissed by one critic as a “hollow exercise in audio visual bluster”.
I prefer Jack Clayton’s elegiac 1974 version with Robert Redford and Mia Farrow. Only stills remain from Hollywood’s 1926 black-and-white film. There have also been numerous stage productions. Marking the centenary,“The Great Gatsby, A new musical” is opening in London this month after a run on Broadway.
Away from the glitz, Gatsby has provided a familiar template for intellectual argument in America. Leading economists including chair of President Obama’s Economic Advisors, Alan Krueger, and Nobel prize winner, Paul Krugman, postulated a “Great Gatsby Curve”, showing that there is low social mobility in countries with wide wealth inequality. The wealth gap in the US has widened again over the past fifty years.
The occupants of Fitzgerald’s Long Island mansions are served by domestics and menial workers almost without thanks. The personal tragedy of the main characters conjures up a sense of foreboding that this class-bound society is unsustainable.
Fitzgerald layered his novel to deal subtly with themes of class, race, sex, and power behind the driving narrative of the story told by Nick. He explores how technology, especially electricity, is transforming society. Between the manicured lawns of East and West Egg and New York City, lies Queens and the Hell-like industrialised landscape which Fitzgerald calls the “Valley of Ashes”. The climax of Gatsby uses a modern American miscellany of guns, automobiles and swimming pools.
All the characters are defined by their type of money. Even Nick, Daisy’s distant cousin, is studying financial books before going into business to sort out his affairs.
Money makes those who have it dishonest. Jimmy Gatz from the mid-west has transformed himself into the plutocrat Jay Gatsby thanks to his shady prohibition era activities, but he is excluded from Daisy’s magic circle of old money. Nick notices that she has a “voice full of money”. Daisy’s amateur tennis champ friend Jordan is “incurably dishonest”. And when Tom tells Nick about his part in the denouement of the story, Nick is left with “the one unutterable fact that it wasn’t true.”
Parallels have been drawn between the young Donald Trump eager to make it across the river to Manhattan from his outer borough of Queens, and Gatsby’s fixation with the green light shining at the end of Tom and Daisy’s dock, across the sound from his brightly lit, newly built, mansion. As The Atlantic magazine pointed out, Trump is a self-mythologising social climber like Gatsby.
The 47th President and some of his leading MAGA supporters also have much in common with the brutal Tom Buchanan, Daisy’s husband and Gatsby’s antithesis. A former ivy league college sports star, Tom is unscrupulous, self-interested and protected by his inherited wealth. He is an unabashed white supremacist, who champions the “Nordic race” and warns his guests: “Civilisation is going to pieces”, unless it can be made great again.
Researching for her 2013 Fitzgerald book, Careless People, the academic Sarah Churchwell came across a newspaper interview with the author two years after Gatsby’s publication. The journalist was amused to find the great writer forecasting doom for his generation.
"The idea that we're the greatest people in the world because we have the most money in the world is ridiculous”, Fitzgerald warned, “Wait until this wave of prosperity is over! Wait ten or fifteen years! Wait until the next war on the Pacific, or against some European combination!”
We now know that the Depression, hyper-inflation in Germany and the outbreak of the Second World War would follow in the 1930s.
When it came out, The Great Gatsby was neither a critical nor a commercial success. Nor was Tender is the Night which was published nine years later, although Fitzgerald considered it his masterwork.
He died aged 44 in 1940, an alcoholic and strapped for cash. In 1945, the United States dropped atom bombs, the latest technological innovation, on Japan. Fitzgerald’s wife, the dedicatee of Gatsby – “ONCE AGAIN TO ZELDA” – perished in a fire at a mental institution in 1948.
Fitzgerald wanted to call his book “Trimalchio in West Egg”, an obscure reference to a character in Satyricon, a Latin literary work from the first century AD. Zelda and his publisher persuaded him to go with The Great Gatsby. They were right. In the end, his father’s injunction not to rush to judgement because of someone’s background results in Nick Carraway telling Gatsby bitterly: “You’re worth the whole damned bunch put together”.
Not that it does Gatsby much good. The most cheering thing Fitzgerald could do was to end his great novel with what has become another of the famous quotations from The Great Gatsby:
“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
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