Book reviewers in America often didn’t get a byline in the magazine’s first few decades. That is a shame because I would love to know who wrote this short 1925 review of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s new novel, which was published 100 years ago this week:
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s earlier books, unfortunately, ran into a large number of printings. “The Great Gatsby” will probably meet with like success, despite the fact that it is an inferior novel, considered from any angle whatsoever. It is feeble in theme, in portraiture and even in expression. It purports to picture society, as in New York and Long Island.
To be fair, America wasn’t the only outlet to hate on Gatsby. The New Yorker (a johnny-come-lately only three months old at the time) wrote that Fitzgerald “still reveres and pities romantic constancy, but with detachment. Gatsby, its heroic victim, is otherwise a good deal of a nut, and the girl who is its object is idealized only by Gatsby.” A few weeks earlier in The Baltimore Evening Sun, the great H. L. Mencken was similarly critical:
What ails [Gatsby], fundamentally, is the plain fact that it is simply a story—that Fitzgerald seems to be far more interested in maintaining its suspense than in getting under the skins of its people. It is not that they are false; it is that they are taken too much for granted. Only Gatsby himself genuinely lives and breathes. The rest are mere marionettes—often astonishingly lifelike, but nevertheless not quite alive.
It would take another two decades for The Great Gatsby to take its place among the “great American novels” and become required reading for generations of high school students—in part because the Red Cross and other organizations sent more than 100,000 copies of the novel to American soldiers in World War II. The novel, originally considered a commercial failure, has now sold over 25 million copies. Fitzgerald didn’t live to see it.
America returned to the novel in 1951, presumably recognizing Gatsby’s newfound popularity, in a long essay on Fitzgerald by the Catholic literary critic and Georgetown professor Riley Hughes. He praised Gatsby as a novel of “striking humor and a delicate wit,” but buried Fitzgerald: “Few of his writings, it would seem, other than The Great Gatsby and a handful of the short stories, will be remembered as anything more than period pieces.”
Part of the reason America and other Catholic journals disliked Fitzgerald, it seems, is that he was not subtle about his “ex-Catholic” status. (His journal from 1917 describes it as a “year of enormous importance. Work, and Zelda. Last year as a Catholic.”) In addition to serving as the literary high priest of the somewhat daring flapper era and the Jazz Age, Fitzgerald also once dismissed his Catholic upbringing as “scarcely more than a memory.”
That last bit is not really true—but more on that later.
Born in St. Paul, Minn., in 1896, Fitzgerald enrolled in 1913 at Princeton University, where he would meet Edmund “Bunny” Wilson and Ginevra King (the model for many of his female characters). After a difficult breakup with King, Fitzgerald enlisted in the army; while stationed in Montgomery, Ala., he met Zelda Sayre, whom he would marry in 1920 in St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York.
That same year, he published This Side of Paradise, an inventive but fairly autobiographical account of his own college and romantic experiences. Its commercial and critical success lifted Fitzgerald out of a series of low-paying jobs. Paradise would soon be followed by The Beautiful and Damned (1922) and Gatsby (1925). Almost a decade later came Tender Is the Night (1934), followed seven years later by the posthumous The Last Tycoon. Fitzgerald also wrote over 160 short stories, published in four volumes in his lifetime.
In the years after Paradise, F. Scott and Zelda became the talk of the town in New York—as much for their boozy shenanigans as their society status as the “It” couple. Despite their glitzy reputation and sojourns in Rome, Hollywood and the French Riviera, however, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald did not have an easy marriage; between alcoholism and financial troubles and infidelity and mental illness, the two were no one’s idea of a blissful couple.
The Great Depression—and mounting bills for Zelda’s treatments at various hospitals—left Fitzgerald in financial straits and far from his Jazz Age popularity by the mid-1930s. Already in 1932, the prominent media priest Daniel A. Lord, S.J., had joked in America that “F. Scott Fitzgerald has passed through ‘This Side of Paradise’ to that side of oblivion.”
Fitzgerald eventually borrowed a page from many a fiction writer’s playbook in that era: He took a job writing and editing scripts for M.G.M. He wasn’t particularly good at it—though he did do punchup work (uncredited) on 1939’s Gone With the Wind—and Hollywood proved no place for Fitzgerald to escape his demons. He died in Los Angeles of a heart attack on Dec. 21, 1940, at the age of 44. (Random fact if you’re an L.A. history buff: Real estate magnate Harry Culver was there at his death.) Zelda would die eight years later.
In a 1996 column in America, editor in chief George W. Hunt, S.J., recounted the sad tale of Fitzgerald’s initial burial. The local bishop refused to permit his internment in the Fitzgerald family plot at St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Rockville, Md., on the grounds that Fitzgerald was a “notorious apostate.” The author (and later Zelda) were buried in nearby Rockville Union Cemetery. “Fortunately, Vatican II occurred, followed by further investigation of Fitzgerald’s more complex sentiments about Catholicism, and in 1974 the bodies of Scott and his wife, Zelda, were reburied in the family plot at St. Mary’s, where they lie in consecrated ground,” Father Hunt wrote. “May you rest in peace, Scott Fitzgerald, and welcome back.”
One could argue—one does—that Fitzgerald never really left, or at least not to the extent he or the church claimed. Much of Fitzgerald’s fiction retains echoes of his Catholic upbringing, and his early mentor from high school, the Rev. Cyril Sigourney Fay, is paid homage in the prominent character of Msgr. D’Arcy from This Side of Paradise.
While at Princeton, Fitzgerald also wrote a short story, “The Ordeal,” about an encounter at a Jesuit seminary at Woodstock, Md., which he later published as “Benediction” in his 1920 collection, Flappers and Philosophers. The story, wrote Anthony Lusvardi, S.J., in 2011, showed Fitzgerald to be “a writer and a man of the deepest Catholic sensibilities.” Fitzgerald’s detailed descriptions of the young Jesuits at Woodstock made it seem like he had an inside source—and in fact he had visited a Jesuit there: Thomas J. Delihant, S.J., Fitzgerald’s cousin and himself a prominent preacher and scholar. Fitzgerald later called Delihant one of his heroes.
In a 2017 America book review of David S. Brown’s biography of Fitzgerald, Paradise Lost, David Leigh noted that if anything, biographers like Brown tended to overlook the role of religion in Fitzgerald’s life. There are times when the author sounds like an old-time Chestertonian distributist: “Fitzgerald’s own values are embodied in the Gatsby narrator, Nick Carraway,” wrote Leigh, “who prizes the ‘old virtues of work and courage and gestures of courtesy’ that have been corrupted by industrial capitalism and consumerism, as well as by urban greed and sexual manipulation.”
Indeed, many of Fitzgerald’s stories (even the early ones) can be read as condemnations of the ethos of the very era with which he was most associated: the Jazz Age. “The glitterati of the author’s postwar youth near New York City—the newsmakers, entertainers, film stars, investors and writers,” wrote Leigh, “appear as victims of their own excesses.”
Is Jay Gatsby numbered among them? Seven decades after America’s initial negative review of Gatsby, Father Hunt returned to the novel in 1996, giving Fitzgerald credit for launching him on a life of literary appreciation:
On reading Gatsby I realized for the first time what enthusiasts had meant by the magic of literature, how words, mere ink flecks on a page, can generate excitement through restraint, how the cadence of sentences can pulse with irony, poetry, sentiment without sentimentality—and do all this simultaneously. And I realized for the first time the pleasurable power of a simple, non-florid style, a style intent on intimation, where its very clarity heightened mystery and complexity. Had I not encountered Fitzgerald and Gatsby early on, I suspect the magical joys of literature would have been lost to me.
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Our poetry selection for this week is “Paperless,” by Hannah Monsour. Readers can view all of America’s published poems here.
Members of the Catholic Book Club: We are taking a hiatus while we retool the Catholic Book Club and pick a new selection.
In this space every week, America features reviews of and literary commentary on one particular writer or group of writers (both new and old; our archives span more than a century), as well as poetry and other offerings from America Media. We hope this will give us a chance to provide you with more in-depth coverage of our literary offerings. It also allows us to alert digital subscribers to some of our online content that doesn’t make it into our newsletters.
Other Catholic Book Club columns:
The spiritual depths of Toni Morrison
Doris Grumbach, L.G.B.T. pioneer and fearless literary critic
Pat Conroy: ‘I left the Church but she has not left me.’
Moira Walsh and the art of a brutal movie review
Father Hootie McCown: Flannery O’Connor’s Jesuit bestie and spiritual advisor
Happy reading!
James T. Keane
