“It’s not all rubbish,” cried Amory passionately. “This is the first time in my life I’ve argued Socialism. It’s the only panacea I know. I’m restless. My whole generation is restless. I’m sick of a system where the richest man gets the most beautiful girl if he wants her, where the artist without an income has to sell his talents to a button manufacturer. Even if I had no talents, I’d not be content to work ten years, condemned to celibacy or a furtive indulgence, to give some man’s son an automobile.”

F Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise (1920)

“‘Her voice is full of money,’ he [Gatsby] said suddenly. That was it. I’d never understood before. It was full of money—that was the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it, the cymbals’ song of it. … high in a white palace, the king’s daughter, the golden girl. …”

The Great Gatsby

“Russia is your example of a beneficent violence, I suppose?” “Quite possibly,” admitted Amory. “Of course, it’s overflowing just as the French Revolution did, but I’ve no doubt it’s really a great experiment and worthwhile.”

The Great Gatsby

Fitzgerald’s superb novel is set in the summer of 1922. The plot is about a young man from the Midwest, Nick Carraway. Carraway sells bonds on Wall Street and lives on Long Island. As Fitzgerald points out, Carraway lives in a small house compared to the huge mansions surrounding him. The enigmatic Jay Gatsby owns one. Gatsby lives close to a philandering husband, Tom Buchanan, who represents older money to Gatsby’s new wealth. Gatsby has made his millions (through bootlegging and stock fraud in partnership with gangster Meyer Wolfsheim.

As the Marxist art critic David Walsh writes, “Fitzgerald’s work is a brilliant effort, easy to underestimate in its brevity, delicacy and the simplicity of the drama. The novel has something of the diaphanous sensibility of Keats, the author’s favourite poet. At the same time, it is an angry, scathing work, as thoroughgoing a debunking of the “American dream” as there ever has been”.

The Great Gatsby is a deceptive book. While it is only 146 pages long, it is an extraordinarily insightful look into the intellectual and social life of the top echelons of the American ruling elite during the first part of the 20^th century.

 As Walsh writes, “ A novel is not a history book or a political manifesto. The important artist accumulates thoughts, feelings, moods and themes over the course of years and works them into concrete and coherent imagery charged with meaning. Any serious work also includes ambiguities, complexities, and “asymmetrical” elements that are not easily reducible to immediate social analysis. However, the individual artist does not draw his or her conceptions and emotions from empty space, nor are they simply the expression of eternal psycho-biological urges. Significant artistic ideas and representations are always shaped by collective human experience by historical and social development. Fitzgerald thought a good deal about political events and social life. His books and letters only have to be read carefully for that to become apparent. Born in 1896, the novelist belonged to a generation deeply affected by the First World War, the Russian Revolution and subsequent developments.”[1]

Fitzgerald’s very subtle hints about the racist and fascist outlook of a section of the American bourgeoisie are dropped into the text like a bombshell.  One example is when Tom Buchanan talks about a book he has read called The Rise of the Colored Empires, “by this man Goddard.” He goes on: “The idea is if we don’t look out, the white race will be—will be utterly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved.”Fitzgeralds’ fictionalized reference is to Lothrop Stoddard’s The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy (1920). A deeply reactionary. Stoddard was a Nazi sympathizer and anti-communist who wrote “Bolshevism: The Heresy of the Underman” and “Social Unrest and Bolshevism in the Islamic World.”

Fitzgerald was not a Marxist or Communist, although he certainly knew his way around Marx’s great works such as Das Kapital Walsh writes, “One need not overestimate the references in Fitzgerald’s letters to “We Marxians…,” “I’m still a socialist …,” “I’m a Communist enough …”, to grasp the degree to which he knew his way around these issues.

The Great Gatsby works on many levels. Aside from being a great story, Gatsby is a stinging attack on the rich in America. In a line that could describe America’s ruling elite today, Fitzgerald writes, “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made. …”

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[1] https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/05/14/grea-m14.html