The Graduate English Journal of Hunter College

           In The Winding Road to West Egg: The Artistic Development of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Robert Roulston argues that F. Scott Fitzgerald considered himself both representative and victim of 1920s New York; the ultimate romantic idealist who would capture both the breathless exultation of the period yet retain the ability to distance himself and carefully critique it. Raised Catholic in the Midwest, Fitzgerald would grow up without the advantages of wealth, but steeped in what he would call the “fundamental decencies” (The Great Gatsby 6) – honor, courage and courtesy.  Although Fitzgerald came to be considered the spokesman for the Jazz Age and its flagship city, he would always remain ill at ease with New York.  As many times as he would arrive, he would depart once more, disillusioned and disenchanted.  From early works such as the novella “May Day” (MD), and continuing throughout novels such as The Great Gatsby (GG), Fitzgerald would explore the ambiguities the contemporary city continues to present: the question of commercialism, the conflict of east and west, and its particular perception of history. His romantic idealists who arrive in New York from the heartland are inevitably shattered by the city. Despite the glamour and exuberance of the so called Jazz Age, for Fitzgerald New York is a modernist symbol; a broken landscape rather than a romantic ideal.

           As John Kuehl points out in F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Study of the Short Fiction, it is no coincidence that Fitzgerald inaugurated his Jazz Age with “May Day”. The actual May Day 1919 riots which form the backdrop for his story were anything but romantic, demonstrating the widening chasm between the upper and working classes of the city. With the very first paragraphs of the story, Fitzgerald establishes his Marxist vision by juxtaposing epic language with the jargon of materialism:

Never had there been such splendor in the great city, for the victorious war had brought plenty in its train, and the merchants had flocked thither from the South and West with their households to taste of all the luscious feasts and witness the lavish entertainments prepared – and buy for their women furs against the next winter and bags of golden mesh and varicolored slippers of silk and silver and rose satin and cloth of gold (MD 126).

           The city has quickly abandoned the idealistic focus of the celebration, recasting the event as an excuse for wanton consumerism.  Fitzgerald continues to utilize this oppositional device throughout the story to emphasize the rift between idealism and materialism in New York.  From its inception, May Day was to be the international holiday for labor, yet Fitzgerald places the Yale dance and the inanities of its social elite at the center of the story.  Although the city celebrates the return of its fighting men, they are not truly welcome; the soldiers Key and Rose are “cold, and hungry in a dirty town of a strange land; they were poor, friendless, tossed as driftwood” (MD 135).  Gordon Sterrett is a victim, forsaken by New York society; the city has little patience for those who cannot succeed. 

            In “May Day”, then, Fitzgerald creates an incongruity of language to demonstrate the problem of materialism at the city’s core.  The language of consumerism also pervades The Great Gatsby, the author’s masterwork, but in a more subtle and mature form. For example, all of Myrtle’s purchases on the way to the apartment – the dog, the magazines, cold cream, perfume, as well as the furnishings in the apartment itself, are meticulously enumerated.  For Myrtle, rising in society is obviously keyed into the accumulation of material goods.  For all of his relative sophistication, Gatsby shares Myrtle’s strategy: obtaining Daisy means that he will have to acquire the right home, the right clothes, the right car.  To attain these, he must in turn engage in questionable business dealings.  Relationships, therefore, become a series of commercial transactions, a problem of “getting”. In “The Great Gatsby” and Modern Times, Ronald Berman notes this language of commodity in the novel, the repetition of words such as “buy”, “want”, “get”, “have”.  In his Concordance to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby”, Andrew Crosland notes that variations on these words occur over four hundred times in the text. At the party, Myrtle rattles off a list of items still to be purchased:

I’ve got to get another one tomorrow. I’m going to make a list of all the things I’ve got to get . . . I got to write down a list so I won’t forget all the things I got to do (GG 41, emphasis mine).

            This language of “getting” implies a marketplace, and the marketplace is necessarily propelled by advertising.  Maintaining his novel writing throughout his career by producing short stories for commercial publications, Fitzgerald was well aware of the relationship between consumerism and advertising.  Roulston notes how marketplace jargon has entered Edith Bradin’s language, “made up of the current expressions, bits of journalese and college slang strung together into an intrinsic whole” (MD 143). Peter and Philip wear the “In” and “Out” signs taken from the restaurant around their neck like advertising placards. Myrtle specifically notes that she Tom first caught her eye as she stood beneath an advertisement on the train. However, Fitzgerald’s most significant expression of the relationship between New York and its media culture is realized in the Ecklesburg billboard in The Great Gatsby.  The billboard, the ultimate symbol in itself of consumer enticement, is the gatekeeper to the city; the characters pass before it each time they come and go. Before these eyes transpire Tom and Myrtle’s adultery and later, Myrtle’s murder.  It is no wonder, then, that Wilson mistakes the eyes for God:

“God sees everything,” repeated Wilson.
”That’s an advertisement,” Michaelis assured him (GG 167).

As Michaelis notes, Wilson is mistaken , but perhaps not for the obvious reason.   These eyes may keep watch, but they are spectacled, not as perfect perhaps as the eyes of God.  As such they also represent the myopic vision of the modern city. In “The Great Gatsby” and Fitzgerald’s World of Ideas, Berman notes the substitution of commercialism for true value and morality. If not an overt religious symbol, Eckleburg’s eyes admonish a society corrupted by commercialism and industrialism that waste the human spirit. 

            In the study Enchanted Places: The Use of Setting in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Fiction, Aiping Zhang notes that Fitzgerald consistently draws a parallel between this spiritual “waste of man” and physical “waste of land”. Wasted land is literally what the eyes watch over.  As a statement of the immorality and desolation that the industrial city brings, the “valley of ashes” recalls the desolate landscapes of modernist writers contemporary with Fitzgerald. The sterile coal towns of D.H. Lawrence’s industrial landscapes, “a meaningless squalor of ash-pits” (The Rainbow 357) and the “stony rubbish” of T.S. Eliot’s waste land (The Waste Land 20) both bear striking resemblance to the valley of ashes,

. . . a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens, where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air (GG 27).

            One must pass through this gray landscape to reach the white city beyond.  As early as “May Day”, Fitzgerald refers to the whiteness of the cityscape: “a very white sidewalk in front of a very white building” (MD 166). In The Great Gatsby, the image of the white city is repeated throughout “. . . one slice in a long white cake of apartment houses” (GG 32), “. . . the white chasms of New York” (GG 61), “ the city rising up across the river in white heaps and sugar lumps” (GG 73),  even the mansions of Long Island are white.  Not only the city, but its people are white; Edith Bradin, “May Day”’s precursor to Daisy, is “powdered to a creamy white” so she would “gleam like milk”, and contemplates “the whiteness of her own arms” (MD 143) before the dance.  Repeatedly, Fitzgerald stresses that Jordan and Daisy dress in white. Tom expresses his bigoted concerns for the white race.  In the Concordance, Crosland notes forty-seven repetitions of the word white in The Great Gatsby.  Perhaps this white vision of New York, as the author puts it, truly is “all built with a wish” (GG 73, emphasis mine).  The houses and chimneys of the ash heap construct a parallel cityscape to that of the New York over the bridge.  Its residents are not seraphs; their white garb only conceals the immorality and materialism beneath. Jordan is “incurably dishonest” (GG 63), Daisy and Tom are “careless”; they “smash up things and creatures” (GG 187), only adding to the accumulating refuse.  Rather than John Winthrop’s city on a hill, a shining example, Fitzgerald’s city presents its antithesis, related more closely to the image of the “whited sepulcher” Joseph Conrad evokes to describe Brussels in Heart of Darkness (Heart ofDarkness 1727).  It is no wonder that Fitzgerald commingles the images of white and materialist refuse; for the modernist writer, the city represents both exuberant promise and abysmal decay.

           What is most intriguing perhaps, about the inhabitants of Fitzgerald’s New York, is that few if any are native to the city.  Gatsby, Daisy, Tom, Jordan and Nick as well as Edith and Henry Bradin, Bartholomew and Gordon Sterrett all come to New York from points west.  The early 1900’s saw the closing of the frontier, the limit placed on the continual, restless expansion that kept American idealism refreshed and renewed for two centuries.  In his essay “Scott Fitzgerald’s Fable of East and West”, Robert Ornstein compares the eastward displacement of persons in Fitzgerald to the eastward, European displacements of the novels of Henry James.  Families like the Carraways who slowly made their way west now send their sons east to college and career.  Yet these westerners coming east to the “old world” find themselves unable to create a community; like the crowds that gather and disperse at Gatsby’s parties, this society is transient.  Nick feels like “an original settler” (GG 8) when he gives directions to a lost pedestrian, but in the end, this group remains intact only for a few weeks, and he will ultimately return west, wiser yet inevitably disenchanted.

           The west Nick intends to return to is “my middle-west . . . the thrilling, returning trains of my youth and the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of holly wreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow” (GG 184).  Edith Bradin asks her brother to return to Harrisburg, in part because she is confused by his socialist activities, but also because she is concerned for his safety in a city so hostile to his views.  Catherine says that if Tom and Myrtle marry, “they’re going west to live for a while until it blows over” (GG 38).  Wilson believes that if he can get Tom’s car and sell it, he and Myrtle can go west, escape the city and resolve their difficulties.  Is the west truly the panacea, the clean, safe haven or refuge they all assume it to be?  Or is it rather less than pristine; all of Fitzgerald’s “careless” characters have arrived in New York from the west. Are they merely witnesses of its urban tragedies, or, as C.W.E. Bigsby suggests in Fitzgerald’s Sense of Ambiguity, have they carried the seeds of destruction eastward with them? The termination of expansion, and the limit it imposed on American cultural consciousness, makes a return to the romantic vision of the west impossible.  Fitzgerald remains ambiguous on the  subject of the west, and this ambiguity further reveals his modernist perspective.  A Midwesterner himself, and a romantic, he nonetheless admits that the circumscription of the west forces it to become a memory, a fond recollection of a romantic past which cannot be recaptured.  Yet it must be recalled, though, that the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock that Gatsby adopts as his pole star reappears in the last moments of the novel, always pointing west, and not east.  It is difficult even for Fitzgerald to let go.

            The past recedes rather quickly in the modernist city. Despite Gatsby’s delusions -  “Can’t repeat the past? . . . Why of course you can!” (GG 116) – history really cannot be repeated or even held on to, whether that history be public or personal.  Speed is an issue for Fitzgerald, and a symbol of New York. The trains speed people in and out of Manhattan, and infrastructure additions like the Queensborough Bridge make access to the nuclear city ever easier.  Peter and Philip’s cab speeds down Broadway in “May Day”; naming the passing streets gives the reader a peculiar sense of breathless motion. This speed is not only physical, but psychological, impacting the city’s perception of its past. In Fitzgerald’s New York, events fade quickly and memory is brief. Fitzgerald places “May Day” in a relatively contemporary historic setting, but distances our vision by opening with Biblical language, a method of describing the event as if it happened long ago.  It is only 1919, the was has not been over for long, and yet New York has quickly tired of its fighting men. In the prologue they are ”pure and brave, sound of tooth and pink of cheek” (MD 126). Yet only pages later, Fitzgerald intimates that this perception has shifted; Key and Rose are “ugly, ill-nourished, devoid of all except the very lowest form of intelligence, and without even that animal exuberance that in itself brings color into life” (MD 135).

           Ultimately, the statue of Columbus in the early daylight reveals the city’s problematic relationship with history.  As the sun rises, it renders the statue dark and indistinct, “silhouetting the great statue of the immortal Christopher” (MD 165), and the dawn mingles “in a curious and uncanny manner with the fading yellow electric light” (MD 165) inside Child’s restaurant. Kuehl suggests that with this moment, the author extols the past and condemns the present.  However, this estimation may be too simple; it must also be considered that Fitzgerald is commenting on the perception of history in the modern city and how is its meaning is manipulated. When the blue light of the dawn, the historical, combines with the yellow man-made electric light of the commercial present, it is distorted, “curious and uncanny” (MD 165), no longer pure. Columbus himself is indistinguishable.  In “May Day”, Fitzgerald suggests that history has been so distanced and exploited that meaningful connection with it is no longer possible.

            Time and the past are major themes in The Great Gatsby as well. Fitzgerald’s best-known discussion of the significance of history is contained in the closing paragraphs of the novel.  If time moves rapidly in “May Day”, Gatsby is long left behind. Time has passed by with a velocity beyond his comprehension : “He did not know that it was already behind him” (GG 189).  If the past is a romantic delusion, Gatsby is its poster child, living ”in that vast dark obscurity beyond the city” (GG 186).  It has been argued that the West represents romantic memory, and that is precisely where Gatsby remains entrapped, in ”the dark fields of the republic” (GG 186).  Martha Banta, in “The Three New Yorks: Topographical Narratives and Cultural Texts”, argues that the arrival of the Dutch recalled by Nick represents the beginning and the end of the romance of New York as well as the rest of the country. It is the last time man is faced with “something commensurate to his capacity for wonder” (GG 186) because as the Europeans set their foot on the pristine continent, its innocent awe ends and corruption begins. The movement of the Dutch sailors is significantly east to west, representing perhaps the first generations of Buchanans and Carraways to infiltrate the interior, beginning the exhilarated westward expansion that will ultimately disintegrate with the end of the frontier.  Fitzgerald’s closing paragraphs again leave us with an ambiguity. Is history itself a just another romantic escape that we look to, or is it something to be escaped from?  As  the great modernist writer James Joyce comments in Ulysses, “History . . . is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake” (Ulysses 52). At the conclusion of “May Day”, Mr. ”In” and Mr. “Out” ride endlessly up and down the elevator; the boats at the end of The Great Gatsby are locked in a repetitive motion pushing forward but also forced backward. To meet the future, perhaps, the city must first find a way to break history’s chain of repetitions and put its lessons into in meaningful perspective.

            In 1932, Fitzgerald would yearn for the New York he knew as a young idealist with the essay “My Lost City”: “For the moment I can only cry out that I have lost my splendid mirage. Come back, come back, O glittering and white!” (My Lost City 579).  In the end, the city “no longer whispers of fantastic success and eternal youth” (My Lost City 578).  For Fitzgerald, as for his alter ego, Nick Carraway, New York has proved to be a disappointment, its glamour and promise merely an  illusion, anything but glittering and white.  Although Fitzgerald may not customarily be included in the canon of modernist writers, the questions he poses about the contemporary city and the broken imagery he employs to explore it certainly echo the modernist techniques of Joyce, Lawrence, Conrad and Eliot.  Despite what critics call his traditional form and the elements of romance that infiltrate his works, Fitzgerald’s these themes of commercialism, social breakdown, regional conflict and the meaning of history and time are classic modernist questions.  For Fitzgerald, these dichotomies divest the city of its ebullient potential, and in true modernist style, leave more questions perhaps than conclusive answers. It is significant that the author most aches for the vanished glittering mirage of New York; in each of his works, the pure, white city would crumble to dust.

Banta, Martha. “The Three New Yorks: Topographical Narratives and Cultural Texts”.
      American Literary History. Volume 7, No. 1. Spring 1995.

Berman, Ronald. “The Great Gatsby” and Fitzgerald’s World of Ideas. Tuscaloosa: University of       Alabama Press, 1997.

Berman, Ronald. “The Great Gatsby” and Modern Times. Chicago: University of
       Chicago Press. 1994.

Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness.  1899.  Literature of the Western World: Volume II –
       Neoclassicism Through the Modern Period. Ed. Brian Wilkie and James Hurt. New York:
       Macmillan Publishing. 1992.

Crosland, Andrew T.  Concordance to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby”. Detroit:
       Gale Research Company. 1975.

Eliot, T.S. “The Waste Land”. 1922.  T.S. Eliot: The Complete Poems and Plays 1909-1950.
      New York: Harcourt Brace and Co. 1980.

Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby.  1925.  New York: Collier Books. 1992.

Fitzgerald, F. Scott.  “May Day”.  1922.  “The Diamond As Big As The Ritz” and Other Stories.
      Mineola, NY: Dover Thrift Editions. 1998.

Fitzgerald, F. Scott. “My Lost City”. 1932.  Writing New York: A Literary Anthology. Ed. Phillip
       Lopate.  New York: Washington Square Press. 1998.

Joyce, James. Ulysses. 1922.  New York: Alfred A. Knopf/Everyman’s Library. 1997.

Kuehl, John. F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne Publishers. 1991.

Lawrence, D.H. The Rainbow.  1915.  New York: Signet.  1991.

Ornstein Robert. “Scott Fitzgerald’s Fable of East and West”.  Modern Critical Views: F. Scott
      Fitzgerald. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea Publishers. 1985.

Roulston, Robert. The Winding Road to West Egg: The Artistic Development of F. Scott Fitzgerald.
      Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press. 1995.

Zhang, Aiping. The Use of Setting in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Fiction. Westport, CT: Greenwood
       Press. 1997.

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