Maureen Corrigan is the author of the new book So We Read On: How The Great Gatsby Came to Be and Why It Endures. She is the book critic for NPR's Fresh Air, and she also has written Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading: Finding and Losing Myself in Books. She teaches literature at Georgetown University, and she lives in Washington, D.C.
Q: Why did you decide to write about The Great Gatsby?
A: The short answer is that my husband told me I had to do
it. He was so overwhelmed by the torrent of literary criticism and passion
after he and I saw [the play] Gatz. [He said], “This is the book you should
write!” My initial reaction was that there are so many books about Fitzgerald
and Gatsby.
Why did I really write it? I can’t stop thinking about it. I
loved what Scott Shepherd, the actor who played Nick Carraway in Gatz, told
me—there are still passages in the novel that puzzle him.
Every time I reread it, once a year at least, there are new
things to find, even it’s as minor as, “There’s another water image!”
It’s one of those inexhaustible novels. As a book critic, as
a teacher, as a reader, I’m always in the position of being a worshipper of
great books—“How does somebody do that?”
Q: Why was the book less successful during Fitzgerald’s life,
before becoming more popular after his death?
A: Some critics did see that it was something special,
mostly highbrow critics. Gilbert Seldes—he got it. That’s the one where
Hemingway said, you’ll never recover from that review.
Fitzgerald himself thought one reason it was not successful
is that there are no sympathetic female characters in it. He said to [editor] Maxwell
Perkins, Women drive the fiction market. I said, Wow, even in the 1920s there
was the assumption that women read fiction and men read nonfiction.
Maxwell Perkins thought it was too short; people like to get
a lot of book for their buck.
I think people at first underrated it as a generic crime
novel. Going through the reviews, [it was interesting to see] how many saw it
as underworld crime and ignored everything else in the novel.
Once the Great Depression hit, everything glorifying excess
of the rich [was unpopular]. [Bennett] Cerf brought it back in the Modern
Library, and it was the worst-selling title in Modern Library history, less
than 500 copies. These days, it comes in at number two, after Ulysses.
I think Fitzgerald was on to something. There weren’t any
women characters who were sympathetic. P.S., it’s not a character-driven
novel....
Even as a crime novel, it’s not like Dickens, with a great
plot. It’s really the mood and the language; that’s what keeps me coming back.
That’s kind of a hard sell.
Q: You’ve mentioned that many people saw The Great Gatsby as
a crime novel, and you have a section in your book about Gatsby as a “Rhapsody
in Noir.” What are some of the main elements that cause you, and others, to see
it that way?
A: The sex, the violence, the seedy scenes like the meeting
with Meyer Wolfsheim and the conversation about the 1919 Black Sox scandal. [In
Gatsby’s world,] where does the money actually come from? One of the big things
that unites Gatsby with the noir tradition is that it’s told in retrospect.
There’s no way out.
Like the noirs, there’s this faded feel to everything going
on in Gatsby. There’s a sense of time running out. There are over 400 time
words [in the book]. Noir always has that, the sense of time.
And the woman in the driver’s seat, the fascination with
cars. There’s a Freudian sense—out of control drivers, out of control cars.
Especially when you get a woman in the driver’s seat; that’s a scene you get
over and over again in noirs.
Daisy, drinking and driving, almost conveniently running
over her husband’s mistress—it’s kind of a sordid story. And then the Buchanans
get out of town….
Gatsby is the poor sap who takes the rap and gets killed,
and Nick is left to tidy up.
Q: You write in the book about the relationship between
Fitzgerald and Hemingway. How would you characterize it?
A: I do say in the book that it’s hard not to see Fitzgerald
as Gatsby to Hemingway’s Tom. Even physically, Hemingway was a big physical
presence, and [Fitzgerald] seems to have had a slighter frame.
I didn’t expect going in that coming out of the book I’d be
feeling so angry at Hemingway, whose work I still love, but what a bastard!
Fitzgerald was first a mentor figure, he hooks Hemingway up
at Scribner’s. Fitzgerald was essentially generous to other writers. He does
that, he’s so supportive of Hemingway, and then it quickly turns.
Hemingway does not like to be mentored; he’s very
competitive. Hemingway bullies him a lot. He doesn’t like Zelda; he thinks
she’s crazy. He thinks Fitzgerald is led around by the short hairs by Zelda.
He really specializes in comments where he appears to praise
Fitzgerald, but there’s always a twist of the knife. The Gilbert Seldes review
is a perfect example.
By the 1930s, there’s a famous story—in the late ‘30s,
Hemingway was involved in a documentary about the Spanish Civil War, and there
was a big viewing in Hollywood and a party afterwards. Fitzgerald saw the film
but couldn’t make himself go into the party. He felt like he was the failure
and Hemingway was the success.
It soured pretty quickly. I put most of the blame on
Hemingway. It didn’t help that the Fitzgeralds were drinking so heavily…I am a
partisan. Fitzgerald, yeah, he couldn’t hold his liquor, he was a sloppy puppy
sometimes, but he never retaliated in kind, and I want him to! It wore away at
his self-confidence, and it didn’t help that they shared an editor, Maxwell
Perkins.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I’ve been tossing around an idea for a long time—the lost
landscape of literary New York. I remember as a kid in the early ‘60s my dad
took me to Macy’s, and they had a huge book department. All the department
stores had book departments.
I’ve been reading old Publishers Weeklys, and there’s a big
section devoted to bookstore windows. One bookstore in New York had Salvador
Dali design a window.
I love New York, I love New York history, and I would love
to write some time travel book like Jan Morris did in Manhattan ‘45 invoking
that time. I’d love to pick a year—the late 20s, maybe…
The world is changing so quickly with books, I would like to
know more about that earlier time.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: I was really conscious with this book that I wanted to
get out in the world more. Not just do a close reading of Gatsby and its
literary history, but also see whether it shows up on the Princeton syllabus,
and go out on the Long Island Sound on that Gatsby boat trip, and the archives,
and the Big Read stuff, and to my high school.
Every place I went, I found librarians, and students, and
ordinary civilians who told me Gatsby was their favorite book and they love it.
It was great to hear, and it prodded me in to further thinking. What is it about
this strange little novel? It’s so affecting to me that Fitzgerald dies and it
quickly comes back and he has no clue. I think he knew he had created something
special….
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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