Careless people of F Scott Fitzgerald's Great Gatsby have a modern equivalent

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• Sharon Verghis
• TheAustralian
• 12:00AM May 4, 2013
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IN the summer of 1924, F. Scott Fitzgerald, one of the most successful writers of his era, sat down at his desk in the balmy, sun-washed Villa Marie in the French Riviera town of St Raphael and began writing his third novel in earnest. The brash young man, a highly paid writer of magazine fiction as well as author of two well-received novels, had big ambitions for this book, telling his editor Max Perkins that he wanted to craft "something new - something extraordinary and beautiful and simple and intricately patterned".

The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald's slim, glittering tale about the rise and fall of a self-made man in love with illusions, was published in April 1925. Instead of plaudits, reactions ranged from indifference and bemusement to active hostility. Critics described the novel as "absurd" and "superficial"; LP Hartley declared sternly that Fitzgerald "deserved a good shaking". It would sell only sporadically during his lifetime; at the time of Fitzgerald's death in 1940, mountains of copies lay mouldering in his publisher Scribner's 43rd Street warehouse.

The resurrection of Gatsby's reputation began only in the 1950s after friend and critic Edmund Wilson took up the novel's cause. Now The Great Gatsby is firmly entrenched as one of the great classics of 20th-century American literature and has sold 15 million copies just in North America. Even its original haunting cover by Francis Cugat, of a pair of sad female eyes against an inky night sky, has attained a certain transcendence.

Later this month, Australian director Baz Luhrmann's much anticipated $US127 million ($123m) film adaptation of the novel, featuring Leonardo DiCaprio as Fitzgerald's "elegant young roughneck" Jay Gatsby, will open the Cannes film festival before a rolling worldwide release. Interest in the novel and its author's volatile, colourful life has been building in the lead-up to the film's opening. The flood of Fitzgerald-centred creative activity includes a six-hour experimental play (Gatz), ballet, art exhibitions and even a computer game. Gatsby-mania is driving interest in everything from flapper fashion to art deco antiques to tours of Long Island mansions. In the US, Scribner's has released a new wildly popular edition of the novel. Gatsby scholar James L. West, who published Trimalchio, Fitzgerald's darker, early version of The Great Gatsby, 13 years ago and worked with Luhrmann on his film research, has recently edited a new trade edition of Fitzgerald's 1922 novel The Beautiful and Damned. No less than four books featuring Zelda, Fitzgerald's beautiful, quixotic wife, are out in the US market and, locally, new editions of Gatsby have been released by Text Publishing and Random House.

So why does this slight, 88-year-old American fable about a tribe of beautiful, empty people remain so alluring? Why are we so drawn to a tale that underwhelmed readers and critics of Fitzgerald's time?

For US-born academic and writer Sarah Churchwell, a Gatsby fan, it has to do with the shock of familiarity. The Great Gatsby is a strangely clairvoyant book. Its power resides in the way it predicts the shape and impulses of our society despite being firmly rooted in the dizzy bubble of 1922, a time Fitzgerald later dubbed "an age of miracles" in his 1931 essay Echoes of the Jazz Age. An annus mirabilis of modernism, 1922 also saw the publication of James Joyce's Ulysses and TS Eliot's The Waste Land, the seemingly overnight rise of the advertising industry, the spread of the motor car (purchased mainly on borrowed money), and the rise of the cult of consumption, reflected in everything from Daisy's $350,000 rope of pearls to Gatsby's Rolls-Royce.

"They were called goods for a reason," Churchwell writes in her new book, Careless People: Murder, Mayhem and the Invention of The Great Gatsby, due out this month. "Purchasing was acquiring a moral valence." So much that is familiar to us in our age was beginning then, she says, from Ponzi schemes to brand-name hunger. Even the dodgy financial products that fed the global financial crisis were newly minted at this time - the word "subprime" popped into use in 1920.

We see ourselves in this world, despite the distance of eight decades, because of Fitzgerald's knack of "guessing right". He saw the fall that was coming as America partied and consumed like there was no tomorrow.

The readers of his time "were living in the heart of the dream", however, and were not inclined to share Fitzgerald's cynicism; modern readers, in contrast, "living in a post-Holocaust, post-nuclear, guiltier world" are more attuned to his message, Churchwell says.

Interest in the novel has surged in post-GFC America, a nation wearied by economic and political travails. She argues that this short, glittering book pinpoints why America lost its way, and contains clues as to its resurrection. It speaks of things that any modern reader would recognise: debt bubbles and class envy, America's cavalier attitude towards risk and profligacy, the way its streak of eternal optimism is as much curse as blessing.

America, she believes, is a fundamentally careless society, blind to history and its lessons. And thus doomed, as Fitzgerald so famously - and presciently - put it in the beautifully elegiac final chapter of The Great Gatsby, to be "borne back ceaselessly into the past".

Luhrmann, too, finds a resonance in this story of a man who chased so futilely after the mystical "green light". Speaking earlier this year with novelist and film historian Richard T. Kelly (the interview is published in Pan Macmillan's new British edition of The Great Gatsby), he says "Fitzgerald ... more or less predicts the Wall Street crash of 1929. He said of the 20s that he was pretty sure 'living wasn't the reckless, careless business these people thought'. To me, that felt very relevant to what we've just gone through in the recent global financial crisis of 2008 and that was probably my single motivating factor telling me I had to do Gatsby now."

Fitzgerald, Luhrmann says, had witnessed how Prohibition had made hypocrites out of an entire society: "It was participating in a collective lie. And this little bit of moral elasticity festered and exploded, and on Wall Street there was a golden orgy of money being made and an awful lot of scams. Now in our own time we've seen a similar sense of unease, a kind of moral blurriness about the way we're making money ... the way the American dream was being realised. And that's why I thought you couldn't get a better fictional reflection of the period we had just come through than what Fitzgerald wrote in The Great Gatsby."

Perhaps the most powerful aspect of Gatsby is its exploration of social mobility and class. Fitzgerald's interest in this area is reflected in one of the original titles he was considering, Among the Ash-Heaps and Millionaires (Charles Scribner, a member of the publishing family that published The Great Gatsby, quipped at a dinner last year that it was a slogan that perhaps "Occupy Wall Street could adopt").

Interestingly, Churchwell says, Fitzgerald was the first to make reference to the 99 per cent, which pops up in a little known short story, The Swimmers, published in October 1929, just five days before the first stockmarket crash. In it, a French woman, watching a group of young American women at the beach, remarks to her husband that their dreams of success are just that: dreams. "That's the story they are told; it happens to one, not to the ninety-nine." Churchwell shivers: "It gave me goosebumps when I read that - I went, wow, he's done it again."

People laughed at Fitzgerald when he hinted at the fallibility of the great American money machine but, as Churchwell says, Fitzgerald beat not just Occupy Wall Street but Marxist critics Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer to suggest the American dream was a rigged lottery and that its capitalist tycoons - America's new aristocracy - were nothing more than "glorified crooks".

"Behind every great fortune is a great crime," Honore de Balzac once said. The globe is littered with the victims of the burst bubble while Wall Street's masters of the universe by and large have escaped unscathed. The actions of these "careless people" have created such a yawning divide that last year economist Alan Krueger introduced the concept of the Great Gatsby Curve, which plots the relationship between inequality and intergenerational social immobility across the world. In the US, the top 1 per cent of income earners make 25 per cent of all the country's wealth, making it one of the most unequal societies.

Like an archeological dig, Gatsby's richness is revealed layer by layer. It's an enduring and fascinating hymn to a brash young New York, perfectly capturing its spiky energy, the smoky speakeasies and jazz bars, the casual intersection of high society and gangster culture. A literary time capsule of sorts, it takes us back to 20s America, a buoyantly exciting time. At the same time, says Don Anderson, for many years a University of Sydney academic specialising in American literature, "one of the key things modern readers understand is that it was really a book about the future". There's an undeniable "shock of the familiar" to the novel, agrees Australian author Melina Marchetta, who has written a foreword to Text's new Australian edition. We recognise ourselves - for good and bad, venal and heroic - in these characters. We all know Gatsby or someone like him (Charles Scribner said Gatsby came to life for him for the first time when he met Bill Clinton at a book party in 2003: "Clinton made Gatsby real; or perhaps Gatsby prefigured Clinton?") We know Myrtle Wilson, the hungry, clawing figure with her face pressed to the window. We know Tom Buchanan - the embodiment of Wall Street's arrogant, born-to-rule alpha males - and we know his wife, Daisy, wilfully delusional and self-obsessed. We know this society, with money conjured from thin air, gleaned from frauds and swindles.

Marchetta sees, too, similarities in the emphasis on reinvention and image, on chasing publicity and the construction of fame as a commodity to be traded. HL Mencken wrote in 1922 that the thing that set the American man apart from others was "social aspiration". Now it's a global trait, it seems. Marchetta says: "I'm struck by how similar the 1920s and 21st-century age of celebrity is. We only have to witness the obsession with the Kardashians, which seems to be all about a culture of consumption and celebrity and vacuousness." (Indeed, Carey Mulligan, who plays Daisy in the film, recently compared her character to a Kardashian.)

Michael Heyward, head of Text Publishing, says it speaks to us because "it's our world, a world of discontent and desire, of wanting all the wrong things in the forlorn hope that they might lead you down the road of love and happiness". Despite its glittering facade, "it's one of the saddest books I've read", says publisher Meredith Curnow of Random House Australia. "The response to the black population, the divide between the wealthy and the poor, those who got everything and those who didn't ... " Curnow is struck, too, by the parallels between the social dynamics of Gatsby's world and the culture of social media. People in Gatsby's world watched and admired and gossiped about the rarefied club of beautiful people at the centre. In a way, this mimics the way social media works. Curnow says: "We're all on the edge, participating and watching others with more glittering lives."

It's not just The Great Gatsby that's attracting interest in the lead-up to the opening of Luhrmann's film. Fitzgerald himself has become a source of renewed interest, his life and work the focus of scores of scholarly articles and biographies. His tragic, volatile wife, Zelda, too, has become an object of much study. It's little wonder. Together, the Fitz, as they were called, were a two-headed force of nature, the bright, photogenic symbols of an emerging celebrity culture.

American writer Therese Anne Fowler, whose novel Z is on The New York Times top 20 bestsellers list, tells Review her aim was to rescue Zelda, a creature of glorious self-invention, from a fog of stubbornly enduring misconceptions about her role and identity. She was no dazed, ditzy muse, Fowler says, but a strong, acutely intelligent woman who was a revolutionary of her time.

Like other Gatsby lovers, Fowler speaks of the shock of familiarity. "We do see ourselves [and our societies] in his longing, in his striving, in his obstinate refusal to recognise the folly of his actions. The powerful desire for wish fulfilment is universal."

America, similarly, is a nation of innately optimistic risk-takers, plagued by historical amnesia. This allows Americans to dream big dreams, Churchwell says, but it also condemns them to a cycle of repetition, and "so once again we see America diving into free fall, unmoored by any critical or intellectual insight into its own myths".

Fitzgerald knew the American dream was not real, that it was just a tantalising chimera that (like Gatsby's futile chase of "the green light") lured you ever forward to - what? "But he also understood instinctively that we could not do without that hope of the American dream. Even now, after the global financial crisis, Americans still have faith in its possibility. Everyone's worried, of course, but they just think it's lost and they'll get it back, not that it never existed in the first place."

The novel's sheer lyricism - the song of a lone nightingale, the colossal unseeing eyes of Dr Eckleburg, Gatsby's slippery, candy-coloured silk shirts, the green light on the dock - can sometimes blur our view of how sharply perceptive a chronicler of the Jazz Age Fitzgerald really was, Churchwell believes. On many levels, she argues, Gatsby is a difficult book to get, built as it on a foamy bed of illusions and suggestions; Gatsby himself is a chimera, a Cheshire cat smile.

This opaqueness, she says bluntly, is partly why Luhrmann "will be the fourth filmmaker to take on Gatsby and fail" (certainly none of the previous adaptations set the critical world on fire). With his brilliant visual imagination, he'll assuredly deliver a crowd-pleasing film but, in the end, Churchwell says, Gatsby is a "uniquely unfilmable book, and I say that knowing that professors are always running around saying great novels shouldn't be made into movies".

Gatsby is "hostile to reality; it dwells in possibility, to paraphrase Emily Dickinson". You try filming that, she says. Luhrmann, unsurprisingly, doesn't buy this view. He's confident the creative liberties he has taken will bring Fitzgerald's tale to life (among other things his film features a hip-hop-heavy score by Jay-Z, and narrator Nick Carraway is transported to a 20s sanatorium, where he tells us his story about Jay Gatsby). And as for the title role? Everyone carries their own Gatsby in their head, he concedes, but so what?

"I sometimes liken Gatsby to an American Hamlet. He has to be attractive but he's also incredibly complex as a character and he goes from being romantic to obsessive and maybe even mentally unstable. And I think Leonardo tracks that journey with such clarity and nuance," Luhrmann says.

The Great Gatsby headlines Cannes on May 15 and opens in Australia on May 30.