Juan Villoro
I am writing these lines on April 10, 2025, one hundred years after the publication of a masterpiece of thwarted love: The Great Gatsby, by Francis Scott Fitzgerald.
A herald of the “Jazz Age,” Fitzgerald reinvented how American society saw itself. A portraitist of flappers, intrepid girls who danced the Charleston and “knew how to kiss,” he recreated the euphoric youth of the 1920s, which had graduated from the hell of World War I.
Life and work were intertwined in him. One of his most brilliant disciples, John Cheever, compared him to “a prince in the wrong place.” Elegant and melancholic, Fitzgerald loved Zelda Sayre, a writer, dancer, and actress whose main artistic subject was everyday life, to the point of delirium. From a young age, she flirted with fate; in her high school yearbook, she wrote under her photo: “Why work your whole life when you can borrow it?” An expert in extravagance, she enlivened champagne-fueled mornings in Paris, and her husband wrote numerous stories to pay for them.
“Show me a hero and I’ll write you a tragedy,” Fitzgerald jotted in his notebooks. Zelda never disappointed him in provoking strong emotions. While he was writing The Great Gatsby, which deals with the difficulty of winning back the woman he loved, she fell in love with a handsome French pilot. Diagnosed with schizophrenia, she died in 1948 in a fire at a psychiatric hospital. The novelist did not live to see this outcome: he died in 1940, at the age of 44, in Los Angeles, where he was failing as a screenwriter (his colleagues were unaware that he had written a novel that would be adapted for the cinema several times with enormous success). In 1940, The Great Gatsby sold seven copies, earning the author $13.13 in royalties.
The novel chronicles the ambiguous ambitions of social climber Jay Gatsby. “There are no second acts in American lives,” Fitzgerald wrote. Gatsby failed to win Daisy Buchanan’s heart when he was a “loser” and sought a second chance in the capitalist fervor of the 20th century, flaunting his newly acquired wealth.
The plot would be unpleasant if told by the protagonist, but it is captivating in the voice of Nick Carraway, who idealizes the mysterious tycoon. Rodrigo Fresán has just published El pequeño Gatsby (The Little Gatsby), a book that contains—as is the publisher’s hallmark—everything there is to know about this work. He astutely points out that the novel seduces thanks to a paradox: it invites us to distrust the narrator, who relativizes his opinions by saying “I suppose,” “perhaps,” “I suspect.” That voice has fallen into the trap of a seducer who throws huge parties to attract Daisy. Nick Carraway does not describe Gatsby as he is, but, as Fresán warns, as he should be.
A hundred years later, it is no spoiler to mention the outcome. Gatsby moves into a mansion on the waterfront; on the opposite bank, the green light shines from the house where his lost love lives. That passion defines his existence and brings him emotionally closer to us; we take his side, but certain doubts creep in.
Daisy has married Tom, a man of old money who buys horses for sport and prefers that form of transportation to Gatsby’s speedboat, a social climber eager to prove that he has overcome his humble beginnings. The dramatic twist in the story is that the nouveau riche’s fortune depends on smuggling; to better himself, Gatsby sold his soul.
The ending is tragic in several ways: because of the protagonist’s righteous murder and because of the rare purity that is destroyed. The misfortune is deserved, but Gatsby amassed his money through shady deals and acted selfishly, driven by the irresistible excess of love. He is both victim and villain.
One scene is worth treasuring. When Daisy visits Gatsby’s mansion, a clock falls off a table, and the host catches it midair. That gesture sums up Fitzgerald’s determination to stop time. “When you read Fitzgerald, you know exactly what time it is,” wrote Cheever.
Gatsby lives to recover a lost treasure, the green light on the other side of the water. His distinctive trait is his “extraordinary gift for hope.” The novel ends, in an unbeatable way, with the phrase: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
Fitzgerald left this note in his notebooks: ”Everybody’s youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness.”
That youth is now a hundred years old.
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