The Great Fitzgerald

Almost every evening between 7:00 and 9:00, when I am not at some Tech activity, I sit back and read. Most recently, I read Zelda, a biography about F. Scott Fitzgerald's wife. Of course, the book also reported on much of F. Scott's life as well.

I had read most of Fitzgerald's novels long ago, including The Great Gatsby. As I was reading Zelda, I was reminded how much Fitzgerald modeled his characters on people in his real world--especially Zelda.

You may know how the peak of their lives was in the 1920's and how important a flashy and affluent life was to them. Fitzgerald himself coined the phrase "the Jazz Age" as he and Zelda danced and partied throughout the most fashionable spots in Europe and the United States. During that time, he became dependent on alcohol and Zelda slowly descended in to a state of mental illness. Although the diagnosis and treatment of mental illness was in the early stages, literary historians guess that Zelda suffered from bipolar disorder with tremendous emotional highs and lows.

In one of his novels, Fitzgerald's major female character was a woman undergoing treatment in a sanitorium for mental illness. The unique and, perhaps, distructive relationship between this husband and wife were a creative crucible for much of Fitzgerald's writing. (Zelda was also a writer and artist in her own right.)

With the stock market crash of 1929 and the following long depression, people no longer wanted to read Fitzgerald's novels about high class society and affluence. His book sales plummeted and, with the high cost of Zelda's treatment and his own excesses, he became financially ruined. At the end of his life, he was working on movie scripts in Hollywood (in fact, he worked on a small piece of Gone with the Wind).

The Great Gatsby is read and studied in our Language Arts program at Tech. Because, under the beautiful young characters and tragic love story, is the real story: the story about how important wealth is in our American dream, along with fame and beauty. The reality is that we keep chasing the American dream even though we will never reach it.

At the end of the book: "And as I sat there, brooding on the unknown world, I thought of Gatsby's [young rich man] wonder when he first picked out the green [money] light at the end of Daisy's [love interest--like real life Zelda] dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close the he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night."

"Gatsby believed in the green [money] light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter--tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther....And one fine morning---"

"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

The man could write.