"The Great Gatsby" is Fitzgerald's eternal pain.
In the early 1920s, Fitzgerald was thriving. The hot sales of "Paradise on Earth" and the popularity of the critics have made his ambitions inflated, and he longed to be famous in the world literary world, and he hoped to earn a lot of money to support the huge expenses of his and his wife Zelda's luxurious life. In 1922, Fitzgerald set out to curate his third novel, a work that would allow him fame and fortune. In a july correspondence with his editor, Max Perkins, Fitzgerald revealed for the first time his expectations for a new work: "I wanted to write something different, an extraordinary, wonderful, minimalist and refined work. At this time, Fitzgerald was still a popular writer in popular magazines, and his experience in writing a winning short story made him well versed in the best-selling secret: "Who should a writer write for?" It should be the young people of his contemporaries, the critics of the next generation, and the principals of secondary schools in different eras after that. In August 1924, Fitzgerald, who was living in France, completed the first draft of The Great Gatsby in the southern town of Saint-Raphaël, and before sending it to Perkins, he spent two months revising it, subversively changing from the story structure, plot design, and scene description. In Fitzgerald's own words: "The things I deleted and rewritten almost made a new novel." ”
"The Great Gatsby" was once highly anticipated, poured into, and polished with excellence, and has been recognized by critics for its excellence many years later. For Fitzgerald, however, these only exacerbated his disappointment after the novel was published. On April 20, 1925, ten days after the publication of The Great Gatsby, Perkins sent a telegram to Fitzgerald: "The response to book reviews is acceptable, and the market sales are not optimistic." In fact, although there are praises in the critics at this time, they are more tepid evaluations, and even no lack of doubts. Some commentators said that "the novel reads exaggerated and strange, and from time to time shows traces of cheap novels"; some people classify it as a second-rate work, because "the novel has no exciting boiling point, no mellow and profound aftertaste, and the author seems to be somewhat bored and tired", and even ridiculed it as if it was better to simply change the title to "Ten Nights on Long Island"; others criticized that "the novel is too loose and weak, and the deliberate sense of mannerism will make it quickly forgotten"; even Fitzgerald's good friend H.L. Menken is affirming the characterization of the novel. After the highlights of the detailed description, etc., still regretfully claiming that "The Great Gatsby is difficult to match such a masterpiece as "Paradise on Earth", Edith Walton privately corresponded with Fitzgerald, pointing out that his portrayal of Gatsby is not "remarkable" enough, and Gatsby's final ending is also lacking in "tragedy", reading more like a "social news" in the corner of the morning newspaper. The market reaction was even more depressing, with the novel being published selling just over 20,000 copies that year, less than half of the sales of Paradise on Earth, while other bestsellers sold hundreds of thousands of copies in the same year. Until Fitzgerald's death in 1940, the warehouses of the contracted publishing houses were still piled up with unsold reprints, and the number of reprints was only 3,000 copies.
The dismal sales brought Fitzgerald not only disappointment, but also confusion. In a letter to Perkins, he dissected himself, attributing the slow sales to the lack of positive female characters and thus the inability to arouse the interest of female readers; he also complained that the novel's poor response was due to the book's title. Because "The Great Gatsby" was the title chosen by the publisher for the novel, Fitzgerald was not satisfied with it. In his opinion, compared with his own several topics - "Terry Malcho of the West Egg", "The Road to the West Egg", "Gatsby in a Golden Hat" and "The Soaring Lover", the title of "The Great Gatsby" is "vague and insufficient, with more than enough and less precise.". But Fitzgerald was unable to convince Perkins and the publishers and compromised to accept the name.
The huge gap between expectations and reality made Fitzgerald depressed for a while, and the vice of alcoholism escalated again. For the rest of his life, he was not only not labeled as the "great novelist" he pursued all his life, but was almost abandoned by the market and readers. In 1937, Fitzgerald walked into a bookstore in Hollywood, and when he found that there was not even a single book of his on the shelves, he was shocked and puzzled, and began to self-deny and even despair: "I am tired of the name Scott Fitzgerald, a name isolated from money. I'd love to know if people read my work just because my name is Scott Fitzgerald, or more likely, because they don't want to read my book because of the name. ”
"Is there still a chance for Gatsby? If you add it to a best-selling series republishment, and ask someone who appreciates it (not me) to preface it, will it win the favor of the classroom, the university professor, or any lover of English literature? It died like this, and though it was not fair at all, it died utterly and utterly, even though we had paid so much for it. This is Fitzgerald's letter to Perkins of May 20, 1940.
Seven months later, Fitzgerald died of a sudden heart attack. What he didn't know was that within five years, The Great Gatsby had become a household name; in the 1940s alone, it had 17 new or reprinted editions and began to make its way into high school and college classrooms; in 1960, the New York Times defined it as "a classic of the American novel of the 20th century"; and to date, it had sold nearly 30 million copies, making five versions of the film alone. If Fitzgerald had been alive, he could have rolled around in the royalties instead of dying with the last royalty check for just $13.
What turned the fate of The Great Gatsby was World War II. After the United States entered the war, the American Red Cross publishing house cooperated to implement a "pocket book" project, and a number of novels with short length and strong readability were printed into small folios and sent to the front line of the US army. By 1945, more than 12,300 copies of The Great Gatsby had been distributed to soldiers, and Gatsby, who was also a World War I officer, gave them a strong sense of substitution. These young soldiers were not only moved by Gatsby's desperate love story, but also through Fitzgerald's description of Post-World War I American society, as if they foresaw what they would look like when they returned home after the war. If what awaits them is the same as the hustle and bustle of the 20s, where will they go in a society where national power is flourishing, materialism is rampant, and values are vacuumed? If the dream of striving to be upstream and becoming rich and famous is justified in itself, then can the life of a drunken fan who does whatever it takes to realize his dream and realize his dream come true? If Gatsby's persistence and tenacity make them respectful, does Gatsby's lamentable ending also make them shudder?
"Gatsby believed in the green lights, in the intoxicating future that left us year after year. It's slipped past us, but that's nothing – tomorrow we'll run faster... One day—" Fitzgerald turns Gatsby's story into "our" story, holding up a mirror for readers nearly a century and years to come. From a world of bullying, violence and corruption, a social atmosphere of material supremacy and faith, a greedy, profligate lifestyle, "we" see the present in the shadows. From an insignificant little person, a trajectory of life that is constantly climbing and falling, a sense of fate full of optimism and hope, but doomed to disappear and disillusionment, "we" also see ourselves more or less. To some extent, does this reappearance also confirm Fitzgerald's final prediction in the novel: no matter how "we" "paddle forward", we cannot stop "the boat that swims against the current, constantly regressing and entering the past"?
Perhaps it was this unsatisfactory "prophecy" that left The Great Gatsby in the cold at the beginning of its appearance, after all, people immersed in the glittering lights of the 20s would not believe that the clouds of the Great Depression were accumulating, and that what awaited them would be a cold winter of the century. Perhaps it is this "prophecy" with cross-era warning significance that makes "The Great Gatsby" a timeless classic of world literature, from which generations of readers are inspired, and in the ever-changing new era, they see the familiar past again and again.
Author: Sun Lu, Ph.D. in Literature, Associate Professor, Shanghai University of Foreign Chinese
Planner: Chen Xihan
Editor: Xu Luming
Editor-in-Charge: Liu Qing
*Wenhui exclusive manuscript, please indicate the source when reprinting.