Playwright Martyna Majok and Fitzgerald scholar Jackson Bryer offered new perspectives on “The Great Gatsby” at a recent conference in New York. (photo by Steve Paul)
Little-known fact from American literary history of the 20th century: Two young and aspiring writers, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, years before their complicated friendship began in Paris, spent months in the Kansas City area at the very same time.
Hemingway, we know well, in the fall of 1917 had begun his journalism apprenticeship as a reporter at The Kansas City Star. He’d arrived in town after graduating high school in a Chicago suburb. Fitzgerald, a product of St. Paul, Minnesota, and Princeton University, was in training with the U.S. Army at Fort Leavenworth, 30-odd miles north of Kansas City, and making a stab at writing a novel.
The two never crossed paths here, though I once speculated whether Fitzgerald might have been among the Fort Leavenworth soldiers commingling with art-school women at a dance Hemingway notably wrote about for the newspaper. Not possible, I’ve since learned, given that by the spring of 1918, when the dance occurred, Fitzgerald had left Kansas for a posting in Kentucky.
I bring this up … why? Well, it’s summer as I write, and I happened to spend a week at a conference in New York immersed in Fitzgerald and his touchstone novel, “The Great Gatsby,” which was published 100 years ago this year.
“Gatsby” did not make much of a stir for Fitzgerald when it came out, though he remained well known for his earlier novels, “This Side of Paradise” and “The Beautiful and Damned,” and for a string of short stories, published in popular magazines, that helped define the “Roaring Twenties” and “the Jazz Age.”
It was only in the 1940s when “Gatsby” caught fire as an insightful portrait of American greed, corruption and hope. This occurred because the U.S. government distributed more than 150,000 pocket-sized paperback copies of the novel, along with more than a thousand other titles, to service members around the globe during World War II. Imagine that. And imagine the U.S. government, such as it is today, having any interest at all in enlightening citizens and soldiers with the joys and challenges of literature.
Of course, just the opposite is happening, as the recklessly shrinking federal government is doing all it can to squeeze the life out of our libraries, our schools, our museums, our intellectual laboratories in the arts and sciences — academia, that is — that work each and every day toward the advancement of our culture.
What are any of us doing to counteract this repression? You can imagine Nick Carraway, the gently perceptive war veteran and underachieving “bond-man” narrator of “The Great Gatsby,” posing this same question to his readers.
Fitzgerald seemed acutely aware of some of the forces tearing at American democracy and community a century ago. “Gatsby” as a cultural product is too often remembered as a portrait of the spangled glamour of the American dream. But the glitz of “Gatsby” is a trap, Fitzgerald scholar Jackson Bryer reminded us at the Fitzgerald Society conference. “What’s underneath is where the real story is.”
The novel is about “the duality of who we are as Americans,” added Martyna Majok, the Polish American, Pulitzer-winning playwright who is co-creator of the musical “Gatsby: An American Myth,” scheduled to reach Broadway in 2027. (Not to be confused with the current Broadway show, “The Great Gatsby,” which by many accounts is a measly, money-grubbing production having little faith in the original book.)
Assessing the novel means coming to terms with the meaning of Gatsby’s yearning for the ineffable thing represented by the shimmering green light at the end of Daisy Buchanan’s dock across the bay.
“The idea that America panders to our fantasies is the precise opposite of the American dream,” the British scholar and conference speaker Sarah Churchwell has written. “We are forever chasing the green light, a chimera, a false promise of self-empowerment in which we are desperate to believe.”
Majok, Churchwell and other conference speakers highlighted the often-overlooked lives of the working-class characters in the novel — the tragic figures of George and Myrtle Wilson and the mostly invisible staffs of the grand Gatsby and Buchanan households.
Also worth recognizing is the nativist orientation of Tom Buchanan, the despicable two-timing polo player, who alerts his guests to the book he had just read (a real one from the early 1920s) that warned Americans about the rise of dark-skinned immigrants and the fragility of white dominance.
“One of the reasons it lasts,” Bryer said, “is it gives new meaning to people at different times.”
Of course, “The Great Gatsby” has its debatable qualities, including whiffs of a barely hidden antisemitism and moments of racism. (The 2013 Baz Luhrmann movie version of the novel, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, aimed to mitigate the latter issue by its visual representation of high-society Black New Yorkers, a recognition of the Harlem Renaissance that paralleled the white Gatsby universe.)
But the more I reread it, and the more that I heard Fitzgerald’s most memorable lines spoken and slide-showed throughout the conference week, the more I realized how utterly gorgeous his writing could be. As Majok put it, “It’s the most beautiful language that has ever been put together in English.”
One evening we were treated to a performance of the last sections of the novel by the acting troupe known as the Elevator Repair Service. Some years ago it brought Fitzgerald’s language alive in an eight-hour show, “Gatz,” which amounted to a reading of the whole novel. (The company is currently rolling out a production of James Joyce’s “Ulysses.”) Here, in a bland second-floor hall at the New School, Scott Shepherd spoke the role of Nick Carraway, in the aftermath of Gatsby’s death, including brief encounters with Tom Buchanan, Jordan Baker and a mysterious Gatsby visitor, a man in “owl-eyed glasses.” (Pay attention, students, to this recurring image in the book.)
Shepherd, who has owned the role from the beginning, brought the soft-spoken, walk-off lines — So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly to the past — to a heartrending peak.
Our Fitzgerald conference concluded with a twilight dinner cruise on the Hudson River, on a boat gliding with and against the current. It seemed somehow more poignant that day in New York, a city long identified with vibrant American possibility, to watch the molten orange sun setting on the horizon behind the stalwart symbol in the harbor, the Statue of Liberty.
One Thing (Or Two)
A knockout exhibit of Amy Sherald’s portraits of Black Americans recently closed at the Whitney Museum in New York, and it’s worth a mention that two of the paintings on display came from Kansas City collections. Hanging in the opening room of “Amy Sherald: American Sublime” were a piece from the collection of Bill and Christy Gautreaux and one from Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art. The exhibit, also featuring many of Sherald’s best-known portraits — including those of Michelle Obama and Breonna Taylor — began what was to be a three-museum run last fall at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. In late July, the artist cancelled the exhibit’s Sept. 19, 2025 to Feb. 22, 2026 showing at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., following her concern that the museum might remove her painting of a transgender Statue of Liberty to avoid blowback from the White House.
