An Autobiographical Portrayal Of F. Scott Fitzgerald As Jay Gatsby, In The Great Gatsby Essay, Research Paper
Dreaming The Impossible Dream:
An autobiographical portrayal of F. Scott Fitzgerald as Jay Gatsby, in The
Great Gatsby
Frances Scott Key Fitzgerald, born September 24, 1896 in St. Paul,
Minnesota, is seen today as one of the true great American novelists.
Although he lived a life filled with alcoholism, despair, and lost-love, he
managed to create the ultimate love story and seemed to pinpoint the
American Dream in his classic novel, The Great Gatsby. In the novel, Jay
Gatsby is the epitome of the self-made man, in which he dedicates his
entire life to climbing the social ladder in order to gain wealth, to
ultimately win the love of a woman: something that proves to be
unattainable. As it turns out, Gatsby s excessive extravagance and love of
money, mixed with his obsession for a woman s love, is actually the
autobiographical portrayal of Fitzgerald.
While attending Princeton University, Fitzgerald struggled immensely with
his grades and spent most of his time catering to his social needs. He
became quite involved with the Princeton Triangle Club, an undergraduate
club which wrote and produced a lively musical comedy each fall, and
performed it during the Christmas vacation in a dozen major cities across
the country. Fitzgerald was also elected to Cottage, which was one of the
big four clubs at Princeton. Its lavish weekend parties in impressive
surroundings, which attracted girls from New York, Philadelphia and beyond,
may well have provided the first grain of inspiration for Fitzgerald s
portrayal of Jay Gatsby s fabulous parties on Long Island (Meyers, 27).
Although Fitzgerald was a social butterfly while at Princeton, he never
had any girlfriends. However, at a Christmas dance in St. Paul, MN during
his sophomore year, he met Ginevra King, a sophisticated sixteen-year-old
who was visiting her roommate, and immediately fell in love with her.
Although Scott loved Ginevra to the point of infatuation, she was too
self-absorbed to notice. Their one-sided romance persisted for the next two
years. Fitzgerald would send hundreds of letters, but Ginevra, who thought
them to be clever but unimportant, destroyed them in 1917. The following
year, Ginevra sent Scott a letter that announced her marriage to a naval
ensign. Just before Fitzgerald was to meet with Ginevra after a twenty-year
absence,
2
he proclaimed to his daughter, with mixed feelings of regret and nostalgia:
She was the first girl I ever loved and have faithfully avoided seeing her
up to this moment to keep the illusion perfect, because she ended up by
throwing me over with the most supreme boredom and indifference (Meyers,
30). Although heartbroken at the time, Fitzgerald answered Yeats crucial
question– Does the imagination dwell the most / Upon a woman lost or a
woman won? — by using his lost love as imaginative inspiration. For in
his 1925 masterpiece, The Great Gatsby, he recreated the elusive,
unattainable Ginevra as the beautiful and elegant Daisy Fay Buchanan.
Throughout the novel, Fitzgerald described Daisy as an almost disembodied
voice which, Gatsby realized at the end, was full of money. Fitzgerald
wrote, her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes
and a bright passionate mouth, but there was an excitement in her voice that
men who had cared for her found difficult to forget (Fitzgerald, 14). It
should be noted that, Gatsby s ability, like Fitzgerald s, to keep that
illusion perfect sustains his self-deceptive and ultimately
self-destructive quest, with the help of his own fabulous money, to win
Daisy back from her husband (Meyers, 30).
Although Ginevra King was Fitzgerald s first true love, she certainly was
not his last. In July 1918, while stationed in Montgomery, Alabama with the
military, Scott met a gracious, soft-voiced girl named Zelda Sayre at a
country club dance. Scott recalled that night that, she let her long hair
hang down loose and wore a frilly dress that made her look younger than
eighteen. She came from a prominent though not wealthy family and had just
graduated from Sidney Lanier High School (Meyers, 42).
Despite Zelda s striking beauty and strong personality, she had numerous
flaws that were impossible to hide. She was often rude, selfish, sexually
promiscuous, and lacked restraint. As well, Zelda s family history of
mental illness and suicide would one day claim her. Fitzgerald was well
aware of of Zelda s character flaws, but found them
3
to be provocative and exciting, for she was, to Scott s delight, an
inspiring example of the postwar modern girl (Meyers, 44). Fitzgerald was
excited– and sometimes tormented –by other men s love for Zelda, which
enhanced her worth in his eyes. This precise uncanny feeling is felt by Jay
Gatsby towards Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald writes, It
excited (Jay) too, that many men had already loved Daisy–it increased her
value in his eyes (Fitzgerald, 141).
Fitzgerald was very surprised and hurt to realize, despite her sexual
responsiveness, that Zelda would not marry him before he had achieved
financial success. In The Great Gatsby, this is the same reason that Daisy
rejected Jay Gatsby (before he became an extremely wealthy man.) At that
time, women from the middle to wealthy classes simply did not marry men from
the lower-class. However, when Scott sold the movie rights for his first
novel for the vast sum of $2,500, he expressed his generosity and love
towards Zelda, and tried to convince her to marry him, by spending the money
on gifts for her. This proved to be the deciding factor for Zelda to marry
Scott.
F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda Sayre were married on April 3, 1920. Over
the next four years, Scott and Zelda managed to maintain their unstable
marriage despite numerous problems. Scott completely succumbed to
alcoholism, and Zelda s odd behaviour often got her into trouble. She would
drink excessively, and then expose herself in public. After having their
first child, a girl named Scottie, Zelda went on to have three abortions.
Their lives in shambles, the Fitzgerald s took whatever money they had and
sailed off to France in May 1924, where Scott began to write The Great
Gatsby.
During the summer of 1924, on the beach at St.-Raphael, Zelda met a
handsome French naval aviator named Edouard Jozan. He was dark, athletic,
and romantic, everything that Scott wasn t. As Scott worked intensely on
his novel, Zelda
4
became bored and restless, and fell completely in love with Jozan. Although
the affair
never lasted very long (as Jozan ended up fleeing), it had an extremely
negative effect on Scott, for while writing The Great Gatsby Scott learned
of (Zelda s) affair with Jozan, just as Tom learns of Daisy s love for and
affair with Gatsby. Tom reclaims Daisy from Gatsby just as Scott reclaimed
Zelda from Jozan (Meyers, 126). Fitzgerald had now managed to weave
Ginevra King s beauty as well as Zelda s corruption into his deceiving
portrait of Daisy Buchanan.
Great Neck, along the coast of Long Island, where Fitzgerald lived
between 1922-24, inspired the setting of The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald s
biographer, Andrew Turnbull, noted that while Fitzgerald was living there,
his magic word was egg. People that Scott liked were referred to as good
eggs or colossal eggs, and people he did not like were considered bad
eggs or unspeakable eggs. Fitzgerald s favourite slang expressions were
converted in the novel into the more well-to-do East Egg (based on
Manhasset) where Tom and Daisy lived, and the generally more simple West Egg
(based on Great Neck) where Nick lived in a cottage on Gatsby s estate.
Even today, if you stand at night on King s Point on the tip of Great Neck
peninsula, and look across Manhasset Bay, you can still see– as Gatsby did
–the promising lights winking on the opposite shore (Meyers, 126).
While living in the Great Neck area, Fitzgerald s closest friend was the
aristocratic war hero and polo star, Tommy Hitchcock, whom he often saw
playing in championship matches on Long Island. Born into a wealthy,
upper-class family in 1900, Tommy went to war while still in his teens, and
after having his plane shot down in German territory, escaped to Switzerland
by jumping off a moving train. He earned numerous awards for his bravery.
After the war, Tommy attended Harvard and, like Jay Gatsby, spent a term or
two at Oxford. Fitzgerald idolized Tommy, who possessed many of the
qualities he himself desired. Tommy had the great wealth, social class
5
and fine breeding of Gerald Murphy (whom Scott would meet in 1925) combined
with
the good looks, athletic ability and heroic war record of Ernest Hemingway
(Meyers, 103). Fitzgerald held Tommy Hitchcock in such high regard, that he
inspired Scott s portrait of Tom Buchanan, Daisy s husband in The Great
Gatsby. Fitzgerald gives a tremendously visual portrait of Tom s physical
stature when he states that Buchanan s clothes could not hide the enormous
power of that body–he seemed to fill those glistening boots until he
strained the top lacing, and you could see a great pack of muscle shifting
when his shoulder moved under his thin coat. It was a body capable of
enormous leverage–a cruel body (Fitzgerald, 12).
Jay Gatsby, like Fitzgerald, was fascinated by money and power, and
impressed by glamour and beauty. However, they both knew that they could
never fully belong to this prosperous and secure world, and that the goal of
joining this careless class was an illusion. Fitzgerald s novel, shows
what happens to people who pursue illusory American dreams, and how society
(which they have rejected) fails to sustain them in their desperate hour.
The Great Gatsby embodies the failure of romantic idealism. The hero
achieves a great deal, but he loses the individual qualities that defined
him at the beginning of the book and ends, as he lived, essentially alone
(Meyers, 343).
One of the dominant themes of The Great Gatsby was surely one of the
prevailing themes of Scott Fitzgerald s life. Jay Gatsby became
love-stricken and despite rejection, dedicated his entire life to winning
back that elusive love, disregarding everything along the way that was
moral, despite realizing at the end that reaching his goal was unachievable.
Scott Fitzgerald had the same dream as Gatsby, for he yearned to join the
ranks of the upper-class and accordingly obtain the love that had escaped
him. It was an unfortunate outcome, one of hopelessness and despair. In
reference to the theme, it is pointed out that, in all truth. . . The Great
Gatsby is about
6
something a long way removed from (Gatsby s) legend and popular reputation:
it is
about wanting better bread than can be made out of wheat and then finding
each loaf rotten with decay, about the corruption beneath the glittering
surface, about the soul of man in a society bent on dissolution (Priestly,
13).
In Fitzgerald s description of Jay Gatsby, he has courageously explored and
revealed his own character, leaving us not a glamorous legend, but a vivid
record of self-examination. Fitzgerald s description of Gatsby s tenacious
character and lust for wealth and women was so real and graphic, that it
could only be expressed by someone who had actually endured such feelings.
For in The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald uses fiction to tell his own story–
reflecting on the superior and brutal qualities of the rich and on the
impossibility of becoming one of them (Meyers, 123).
REFERENCES
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. London: Penguin Books Ltd, 1970.
Meyers, Jeffrey. Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography. New York: Harper Collins
Publishers, 1994.
Priestly, J.B.. The Bodley Head Scott Fitzgerald. London: The Bodley Head
Ltd, 1958.