Instead of shoehorning Fitzgerald into the present, we should let Fitzgerald speak to us from the past.
F. Scott Fitzgerald has never been more relevant than in 2022.
T he genius of F. Scott Fitzgerald was in far more than simply writing The Great Gatsby, his most famous work. It was in nailing down the aspects of a person that endure over time and those features that come to mark a society indelibly, from the beautiful and charming to the downright hideous.
On the centennial of the publication of Fitzgerald’s collection Tales of the Jazz Age, which first appeared on September 22, 1922, it is hard not to marvel at how much of our contemporary moment is recognizable in Fitzgerald’s elegant, playful, if sometimes mannered prose, even as he savagely reviled and parodied the excesses of his age.
The most famous story in Tales of the Jazz Age is “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”: the story of a baby born old, for whom the aging process plays out in reverse as he moves through life, watching his friends and loved ones age and die off while he edges ever closer to childhood and infancy. Its fame is helped by the fact that in 2008, David Fincher released an adaptation, with Brad Pitt in the title role. The film is a sly marriage of style and subject matter, in which the dark ambiance and gaudy yellows of the Fincher palette accentuate Fitzgerald’s irony and pessimism. And on a more serious note, the story may force viewers in a celeb-soaked and youth-obsessed culture to reflect on what immortality would mean in practice and on the value of every moment shared by two radically distinct lives.
But director Fincher went too far in “updating” the tale, cramming it with events and contexts far afield from Fitzgerald’s own life. These range from the Pearl Harbor attack of December 7, 1941 — nearly a year after the author’s death — to skirmishes between merchant vessels and U-boats, to the civil-rights struggle, to 1970s disco and talk shows, to the crisis of the delinquent addicts and runaways, all the way to Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The white male tough guys of the story are mostly grotesques for comic relief or fodder for the filmmakers to kill off. In doing so, Fincher did not adapt Fitzgerald’s nuanced social and moral themes, which encompass an ingenious critique of those in our society who have amassed great advantage and status, so much as hammer them into a contemporary Hollywood template about the value of diversity and the Golden Rule.
Instead of shoehorning Fitzgerald into the present, we should let Fitzgerald speak to us from the past. The 1920s were a time of great wealth — and of great superficiality, just as the 2020s are proving to be. That many of our era’s great fortunes are owed to technology unrecognizable to Fitzgerald does not make the way that wealth affects the wealthy also unrecognizable. Indeed, certain tendencies in a particular kind of American striver whose ego and ambition far exceed his decency are timeless.
Look to another one of Fitzgerald’s stories from Tales of the Jazz Age: “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz.” In this story, John T. Unger accompanies Percy Washington, his classmate from a Boston-area boarding school, to an estate in Montana, where Percy’s father oversees a diamond mine. John believed Percy had exaggerated its size while boasting about his father being the richest man in the world. But Percy told the truth. The titular diamond, and the source of Washington’s wealth, is the mountain that his grandfather found and turned into a mine, now the base of an awesome family empire run by Percy’s father, Braddock.
Braddock guards the mountain against discovery from any rivals in the prospecting business or even those who come upon it by chance. As the diamond has made Percy’s family fabulously, indecently rich, they will go to virtually any lengths — even murder — to guard their fortune and keep its source a secret. Braddock has a private army at his disposal, and he is as ruthless as he is devious.
Here again, Fitzgerald has captured a timeless truth, one applicable to our own time: Economic power, no matter how randomly or illegally amassed or undeserved, quickly transforms into real power, full stop. It is no surprise that an environment in which such awesome power can arise merely from one’s having stumbled on a resource or opportunity just a bit sooner than others similarly motivated quickly becomes populated by individuals with highly questionable moral, ethical, professional, and educational credentials.
Think, for example, of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, one of the “accidental billionaires” of Ben Mezrich’s book of the same title. Mezrich details how a 19-year-old college dropout, who started “The Facebook” with a few friends in his Harvard dorm room as a way to rank fellow undergrads on their “hotness,” seized on his luck to become the head of a ubiquitous multinational conglomerate. As for economic power translating into power per se, see how Facebook (now “Meta”) has played watchdog over the elections in Europe’s most powerful country, shaped the course of job growth around the world, helped foment genocide in Myanmar, and fueled epidemics of depression and suicide among users.
What enabled a young dropout in a state of arrested development to stride the world like a colossus? Simple: He happened upon the mountain of rich, minable social currency a little bit sooner than others who were out to find and exploit the same thing. It did not have to be Mark Zuckerberg, any more than it had to be the Washingtons in “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz.” For example, Mezrich details the race between Zuckerberg and the Winklevoss twins, fellow Harvard undergrads, and their bitterness toward Zuckerberg for allegedly having seized on an idea they originally brought to him.
In Fitzgerald’s novella, Braddock turns out not to be anything close to the benevolent eccentric he originally seems. In the course of his time with Percy, Unger learns that when Jasmine, Percy’s sister, previously invited her own friends to visit the Montana site, they disappeared mysteriously. He also discovers that Braddock has designed a bizarre subterranean cage for those “aviators” who made their way out to the mountain, where he has total oversight over them, can hold them up for scrutiny, and banish them from sight by using his walking-stick to flip lights on and off as he pleases. Unger hopes to bring the secret to other prospectors, the public, and entrepreneurs or investors who might want to get in on the action. But Braddock sure can’t let that happen.
For his part, Zuckerberg doesn’t have to imprison his rivals. He can just buy them off. Meta has acquired 91 companies and counting, notably WhatsApp for a cool $16 billion. Zuckerberg has said, “We have not once bought a company for the company. We buy companies to get excellent people.”
He gets them, all right. The staffs of Friendster, CrowdTangle, Giphy, Ready at Down, Confirm, Beat Games, Within, WhatsApp, Instagram, and many other tech firms get their payouts, and aren’t kept in a cave. But Zuckerberg keeps his mountain. And as we use his products for “free” (not realizing we are the product), we fail to realize that we are the real prisoners.
Despite his skepticism of the corrupting effects of great wealth, however, Fitzgerald was hardly some Luddite Marxist. Rather, it is Fitzgerald’s awareness of the potential of the educated class, of what it could and should achieve, that makes him contemptuous of its sloth and unforgiving of its failings. He asks, demands, that we realize what is latent in ourselves. His call to probity comes across powerfully in “May Day,” another novella-length entry in Tales of the Jazz Age.
Yale graduate Philip Dean plans to attend a reunion and dance at the Biltmore Hotel, but romantic triangles and personal venom ruin the affair for some of the guests. Philip’s friend Gordon Sterrett is deeply in debt and asks to borrow money from Philip, who vacillates and finally says no. After the dance, the action cuts to a diner and to the Commodore Hotel, where Philip and a friend shamble in drunk, order a quart of champagne for breakfast, drink it all, and try to order a second quart. The waiters refuse. Interspersed with the atrocious behavior of the Yalies is an account of a pair of demobilized soldiers — the brother of one of them works at the hotel — as they seek to get in and help themselves to the booze. They are part of a swarm of veterans let loose on the city who soon run riot and invade the offices of a newspaper they accuse of far-left affiliations.
“May Day” is a reminder of a time when class divisions inspired some of the most memorable passages in both popular and highbrow fiction. Andrew Turnbull states in Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography that the raid on the newspaper office is based on an actual incident, the storming of the offices of the New York Call. Turnbull also tells us that “Sterrett embodies Fitzgerald’s horror of poverty” and that the character’s suicide with a firearm at the end of the story is itself based on the fate of a young Princeton graduate.
But Fitzgerald’s purpose here is not to caricature ex-service members and flatter self-satisfied middle-class readers. Sterrett’s tragic fate comes about amid his wondering, in the face of the graduates’ appalling antics, exactly how the prohibitively expensive educations of the Yale students have elevated or improved them. If their behavior is no better than the demobilized mob, if this is where four years in a rarified intellectual milieu has led them, then what is their elite education is worth? What distinguishes them from those they disdain? And what is the university’s vaunted mission of instructing and edifying good for? What kind of discourse is common among the educated of our time? All are questions worth asking today.
The distance of 100 years, then, separates Fitzgerald from us only by time, and by some of its trappings. His penetrating literary studies of human nature speak to us today. That’s more than enough reason for our appreciation of his work to rise above a half-hearted survey of The Great Gatsby in some dimly lit high-school English class.