Always a great opportunity to post my favorite passage of him about WWI- just hauntingly beautiful:
“See that little stream — we could walk to it in two minutes. It took the British a month to walk to it — a whole empire walking very slowly, dying in front and pushing forward behind. And another empire walked very slowly backward a few inches a day, leaving the dead like a million bloody rugs. No Europeans will ever do that again in this generation.”
“Why, they’ve only just quit over in Turkey,” said Abe. “And in Morocco —”
“That’s different. This western-front business couldn’t be done again, not for a long time. The young men think they could do it but they couldn’t. They could fight the first Marne again but not this. This took religion and years of plenty and tremendous sureties and the exact relation that existed between the classes. The Russians and Italians weren’t any good on this front. You had to have a whole-souled sentimental equipment going back further than you could remember. You had to remember Christmas, and postcards of the Crown Prince and his fiancée, and little cafés in Valence and beer gardens in Unter den Linden and weddings at the mairie, and going to the Derby, and your grandfather’s whiskers.”
“General Grant invented this kind of battle at Petersburg in sixty- five.”
“No, he didn’t — he just invented mass butchery. This kind of battle was invented by Lewis Carroll and Jules Verne and whoever wrote Undine, and country deacons bowling and marraines in Marseilles and girls seduced in the back lanes of Wurtemburg and Westphalia. Why, this was a love battle — there was a century of middle-class love spent here. This was the last love battle.”
Odd to say that the Russians weren't any good, considering the devastating casualties they inflicted (mostly on the Hapsburg forces) and suffered during WW I, and the mass slaughter of WW II. How did the Marne stack up against Stalingrad?
It is fair to say that the losses of WW I induced caution in the British, and left a huge demographic hole in France.
"In November 1918, the University of Liverpool recorded 1,640 names on its Roll of Honour, including 176 fatalities and many others missing. Similar lists were maintained in every university. The exact number of casualties from UK universities is uncertain, but the numbers were awful. Estimates suggest that Oxford lost 19% of those who served, Cambridge 18%, and Manchester and Glasgow 17%."
It wiped the best and the brightest, from a small population. Russia sent serfs into the grinder.
That must have been a great comfort to the Russians, Tsar down to the peasantry.
[Added, less flippant] An army requires officers, and it is fair to guess that the Russian army had a reasonable complement of intellectually capable officers. The standard of education may not have been up to that of the western Allies or the Central Powers, but I suspect that the Russians weren't that bad. One would not know how many of the 191x class of the Russian universities were killed off, for the revolution largely remade those universities, and presumably had no interest in publicizing the works of the men who served the old regime.
I am not sure of the context of the passage, but I would guess that Fitzgerald was aware of the massive slaughter on the Eastern Front but felt that the cultural moment in Western Europe/America that lead up to the fighting on the Western Front meant that it was a different kind of folly than in the east. I don’t think he is commenting on which military was more effective.
Interesting look at some of the details of The Great Gatsby that connect to World War I, and Fitzgerald's own history with the war.
The museum that published this is quite good, though sadly a bit out of the way for many on this site (Kansas City). It's easily reachable with public transit if you're ever there and staying near downtown.
The article mentions that Gatsby's stories are a little inconsistent, and that Nick would have realized this. Do critics generally think that Gatsby fully made them up and perhaps bought a Montenegro medal, or is he just being loose with details?
I will always have a soft spot for Gatsby, it was my gateway drug into literature. I reread it every few years - the book is almost perfect, and short enough that you can get through it on a lazy Sunday afternoon.
I'm afraid I just don't get Gatsby. The characters are all unpleasant people; I don't want to spend any time with them. None of the situations resonate with me. Its prose is a great evocation of a time period, but it's a time period I don't much care about.
I felt the same way about Jane Austen for a long time. It was a parody of manners, for a period I knew nothing about. I finally saw some really great filmed versions and I understood what the author was saying, and now I adore reading her work.
Maybe Gatsby will click for me some day. I reread it every decade or so, just to see if it happened. It hasn't yet.
Mostly in that he hangs around with so many unpleasant people. He's rather passive -- the story isn't about him. He loves Gatsby, and I really can't say why.
I think I'm supposed to identify with the way he gawps at the opulence and the experience of being around the ultra-wealthy. His feelings are mixed, and I think I'm supposed to share that -- on one hand wanting to live that way myself, on the other hand being horrified by how vapid and idle it all is. But I get a lot of the latter and very little of the former, so I get a rather negative view about Nick as well.
I will say, I rather enjoyed “The Chosen and the Beautiful”, a magic-tinted retelling of the story from the point of view of Jordan Baker. I find her a rather interesting character.
Gatsby was a bit soured for me by having read it for the first time as an assignment in high school. Really sucks the fun out of literature when you're yanked out of it after every chapter to write a summary, or answer some dumb quiz questions about what color his car was in chapter 2
That's his debut novel and I think it shows. Experimental, and has some puzzling sections. Having read that, Gatsby, and Tender is the Night, I think the latter is his strongest writing but the plot isn't as grand and dramatic.
Agreed, one of my favorite pieces of literature. It's what got me into American historical fiction - I later ventured into Steinbeck and Mark Twain, both of whom are masters of the genre.
Love Twain and Steinbeck (most especially other works than Grapes of Wrath). Great Gatsby didn't work for me when I read it recently - just not my thing. I loved Catch 22 because I hadn't realized it was a comedy before I read it. It's tough because too often the best known past authors are unenjoyable to read.
“See that little stream — we could walk to it in two minutes. It took the British a month to walk to it — a whole empire walking very slowly, dying in front and pushing forward behind. And another empire walked very slowly backward a few inches a day, leaving the dead like a million bloody rugs. No Europeans will ever do that again in this generation.”
“Why, they’ve only just quit over in Turkey,” said Abe. “And in Morocco —”
“That’s different. This western-front business couldn’t be done again, not for a long time. The young men think they could do it but they couldn’t. They could fight the first Marne again but not this. This took religion and years of plenty and tremendous sureties and the exact relation that existed between the classes. The Russians and Italians weren’t any good on this front. You had to have a whole-souled sentimental equipment going back further than you could remember. You had to remember Christmas, and postcards of the Crown Prince and his fiancée, and little cafés in Valence and beer gardens in Unter den Linden and weddings at the mairie, and going to the Derby, and your grandfather’s whiskers.”
“General Grant invented this kind of battle at Petersburg in sixty- five.”
“No, he didn’t — he just invented mass butchery. This kind of battle was invented by Lewis Carroll and Jules Verne and whoever wrote Undine, and country deacons bowling and marraines in Marseilles and girls seduced in the back lanes of Wurtemburg and Westphalia. Why, this was a love battle — there was a century of middle-class love spent here. This was the last love battle.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night
It is fair to say that the losses of WW I induced caution in the British, and left a huge demographic hole in France.
It wiped the best and the brightest, from a small population. Russia sent serfs into the grinder.
[Added, less flippant] An army requires officers, and it is fair to guess that the Russian army had a reasonable complement of intellectually capable officers. The standard of education may not have been up to that of the western Allies or the Central Powers, but I suspect that the Russians weren't that bad. One would not know how many of the 191x class of the Russian universities were killed off, for the revolution largely remade those universities, and presumably had no interest in publicizing the works of the men who served the old regime.
The museum that published this is quite good, though sadly a bit out of the way for many on this site (Kansas City). It's easily reachable with public transit if you're ever there and staying near downtown.
I felt the same way about Jane Austen for a long time. It was a parody of manners, for a period I knew nothing about. I finally saw some really great filmed versions and I understood what the author was saying, and now I adore reading her work.
Maybe Gatsby will click for me some day. I reread it every decade or so, just to see if it happened. It hasn't yet.
What about Nick is unpleasant?
I think I'm supposed to identify with the way he gawps at the opulence and the experience of being around the ultra-wealthy. His feelings are mixed, and I think I'm supposed to share that -- on one hand wanting to live that way myself, on the other hand being horrified by how vapid and idle it all is. But I get a lot of the latter and very little of the former, so I get a rather negative view about Nick as well.
I will say, I rather enjoyed “The Chosen and the Beautiful”, a magic-tinted retelling of the story from the point of view of Jordan Baker. I find her a rather interesting character.