fitzgerald (was: Can't we all just get along ...)

[Dave Monroe]

Why so?  Always interested in a little elaboration, explication.
Interestingly, and perhaps even relevantly, enough, though, during FSF's
lifetime, TGG was NOT necessarily considered his
masterpiece/meisterwerk/whatever.  As I recall, it wasn't until after
his death (1945), when TGG was issued back-to-back with ... well, I
believe it might well have been TITN, that contemporary, prevailing
critical opinion did an about face, not only championing it as FSF's
best work, but as yet another Great American Novel.  The postwar
(post-WWII, that is) ascendance of the US from hemispheric to
international power might well have had something to do with it, as
critical interests, attempting to secure some sort of US cultural
hegemony as well, were more than motivated to find such Great American
Novels, Authors, Painters, Musicians, whatever (see Serge Guilbaut, How
New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art; neatly allegorized in that Mark
Tansey painting--"The Triumph of the New York School"?--of Andre Breton
surrendering to Clement Greenberg, French in WWI calvary gear, Americans
in WWII khakis, Picasso, Dali, Matisse, Rosenberg, Pollock, et al.
looking on), and FSF's little novel of a quintessentially (at least, for
that so-called "Jazz Age") American "self-made man " (Gatsby having
"sprung from [Gatz's] Platonic conception of himself" or somesuch; cf.,
say, Herman Melville, The Confidence Man, or the making and remaking of
Huckleberry Finn, or, for that matter, the making and unmaking of Tyron
Slothrop) suddenly fit the bill.  Indeed, FSF had wanted to change the
title of TGG to Under the Red, White and Blue only weeks before
publication, but Old Man Scribner nixed that.  Imagine, however, how
that title change might have affected the book's reception, changing the
emphasis from Jay Gatsby "himself" to perhaps that seemingly strange
meditation on America and the American Identity at the end of the
novel.  Or so I've heard the story told--see that very useful (and
subtly punctuation-altered) Cambridge University Press ed.  But I'm
going to venture that FSF is, indeed, read quite differently outside of
the States, as that all-important National Lit'rachure issue is rather
less of an issue to non-American readers ...

... and, to connect, however tenuously, back to TRP, apparently, while
at Cornell, Pynchon and Richard Farina (Been Down So Long Looks Like Up
to Me) would go on jaunts dressed as, respectively, Fitzgerald and
Hemingway ...

Lorentzen / Nicklaus wrote:

> Dave Monroe schrieb:
>
> > ... F. Scott Fitzgerald, The  Great Gatsby ...
>
>   "tender is the night" is better, much better.
>
> kfl