Many people won’t know that The Great Gatsby once had a prologue. It was ditched by Fitzgerald when he realised that it didn’ fit with the ’general neatness’ of the book’s design. Instead, he offered to H. L. Mencken’s new American Mercury magazine for a $118. It’ s a deeply enigmatic tale, so what is it about? And did Fitzgerald preserve elements of the story in the novel published the following year?

On June 20^th 1922, some four months before his arrival in Great Neck, Scott wrote to his editor, Maxwell Perkins at Scribners. He wanted to update him on a series of stories he was preparing for publication in Tales of the Jazz Age — a collection of eleven tales either inspired by or published by newspapers and magazines in the wake of his new found celebrity as Flapper guru. At 26 his time as ‘gifted youth author’ was on the wane. His second novel, The Beautiful and Damned had extended his run somewhat, but America’s Adrian Mole was no longer 22 and ¾ and his secret diaries were no longer secret. The novel’s sales, moreover, had been satisfactory but not inspiring. Scott was seeing the time on the clock slip by. The thought that other writers had achieved so much by the same age was making him more and more anxious. By the age of thirty, his literary hero, Theodore Dreiser, had written Sister Carrie. Percy Bysshe Shelley, whose poetry Scott would be avidly re-reading in Great Neck, had written most of his major works, including Mont Blanc, by the age of 22.

Reflecting on the period in his 1931 essay, Echoes of the Jazz Age, Scott had been sensing that the flower of the Jazz Age was no longer in bloom. It was, he wrote, as dead as the Yellow Nineties had become by 1902. He was feeling unworthy. His debut novel, This Side of Paradise, had made him a star for no other reason than for telling people that he felt exactly as they did. Something had to be done with “all that nervous energy that had been stored-up and unexpended during the war” and Scott had given youth of America the clearance to do just that. The author had taken all the nobody people of the world and plugged them back in the national mainframe. In return they had shored-him up, flattered him and put more cash in his pocket than he could have ever dreamed of. The world that he had helped create had emerged from the ashes like a new planet, but now that planet was dying.

Scott had few doubts about how and why it had all ended. The age in which girls had “dramatized themselves as flappers” had “overreached itself” more through lack of taste than through any lack of morals. The rot had set in when the adults had got involved. They had grown “tired of watching the carnival with ill-conceived envy” and now seemed intent on replacing the young stars. For a while something “bright and alien had flashed across the skies”, lifting the spirits and giving hope. But the “wild youth” was approaching middle age. It was all “fat thighs and flabby calves”. For the ‘greybeards’ like Scott, the joke was wearing thin. [1] The man who had fallen to earth had found himself becoming just like everybody else. Oh yes, the clock was ticking.

Clearly feeling like his novelty was wearing off, Scott was determined to prove that he had more tricks up his sleeve. He explained to Perkins that he had a new idea for a novel set in the Midwest and New York that would have “a Catholic element”. The period he had in mind was 1885. It was an iconic year in many respects; the Statue of Liberty had arrived in Hudson Bay, Grover Cleveland had clinched the Presidency, former President and Civil War hero, Ulysses S. Grant had died at home in New York, Mark Twain had published Huckleberry Finn and local hero, Bishop John Ireland had opened the Saint Thomas Academy, America’s first Catholic seminary, in his hometown of Saint Paul. Scott maintained the sudden surge of momentum he was feeling by picking up a copy of Ulysses, the ‘book of the future’, but once he had moved to Great Neck the inevitable lure of the parties placed their inevitable drag on progress. In October that year he wrote to his Cousin Cecie: “Great Neck is a great place for celebrities”. Scott thought it most amusing after the “dull healthy mid-west” to have found himself rubbing shoulders with big names like Mae Murray, Frank Craven, Herbert Swope, Samuel Goldwyn and General Pershing. [2] Rather predictably, it would still be some six-months before he managed to produce a word for “the book with a Catholic element.”

The story that Scott came up with when he did sit down to write was a surreal and curious tale. In years to come he would refer to it as the intended prologue to Gatsby. It would tell you what the hero of his novel was like during the years of his youth in the bleak Midwest. In the end it would be curtly rejected. Scott felt that the fifteen or so pages he had written would interfere with the general ‘neatness’ of the book’s design. He had written these pages because he had wanted to express his increasing alienation from the faith of his youth. Since the death of friend and mentor Father Fay in 1919, Scott’s feelings toward Catholicism had become increasingly ambivalent. His friend Arthur Hartwell said that during a car journey in New York in 1920 Scott had screamed “God damn the Catholic Church; God damn the church; God damn God” as they cruised drunkenly past one its churches. [3] In an entry in his ledger for October 1917 Scott had offered even more clarity on his position: “a year of enormous importance. Work and Zelda. Last year as a Catholic”. It wasn’t true of course. Not entirely. The young author wasn’t unknown to take a fistful of creative license when it came to reporting the events of his life. The ledger had been compiled later than the dates on some of the earlier entries suggest, but in some symbolic way it might well have been true. [4] Meeting Zelda had altered the paradigm of his world. Within months of their meeting, this troubled but hugely talented southern belle had become a unique and dominant force in his maturing world-view. Things didn’t disappear from his life exactly, they just took on an extra dimension. There things that had been tucked into the shadows were brought into the light. As far as Scott was concerned, Zelda just moved things around a little. The light of God that had shone brightly during his seven-year friendship with his Shane Leslie and Monsignor Fay was dimming. As tutors at his Catholic prep-school in New Jersey, the pair had made the church a “dazzling, golden thing”, giving it all the “romantic glamour of an adolescent dream”. [5] But things were changing. It was like the Dreamland and Luna Park amusement parks at Coney Island;the more brilliantly either of them shone, the more unremarkable and unappealing the other seemed next to it. If we gaze above our heads in January, a similar phenomenon is being played out in the night sky. Look in the direction of Orion’s Belt and you’ll find that there are several brilliant stars. One of them, Rigel, appears as a dazzling blue-white light. But hidden in Rigel’s brilliance are several fainter stars. Much the same thing was going on here. The influence of Fay and Leslie had not vanished from Scott’s life, it was just that Zelda and fame were shining more brightly. The relentless pursuit of commercial success was now dominating his soul and the route to greatness that dreams of the priesthood had briefly offered had now never seemed so boring.

Despite the changes he’d made to his life, Scott still kept in touch with his life-long friend, Father Joe Barron, who baptized their daughter Frances, and his old friend Shane Leslie, habitually quizzing the latter on the response of the Catholic press in Ireland to his work and filling him in on any slights he had managed to coerce from the religious group in America. One thing certainly hadn’t changed; Scott seemed intent on courting trouble. The publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses in France and its immediate ban in the States had told him that a little controversy could go a long, long way. If censure and hullabaloo wasn’t going to be offered willingly, he was more than prepared to shake it from them.

For Scott, the sales of his first novel had allowed him to clamber to the elevated promenade of his own private little Luna Park, and it was from here that he surveyed the faith of his youth. The flame still burned in within him but with a little less clarity and warmth each year. The world was full of intense colour, it was no longer black and white. Scott had made it over the rainbow and arrived in Oz. The centuries-old certainties that had provided comfort and support for almost two millennia were in an irreversible state of decline. The 1920s had seen the birth of Modernism. Everything was being called into question. Einstein was replacing Newton and mysticism was replacing religion. Theories of relativity were destroying all frames of absolute reference. The West was suddenly enabled with a multi-angle feature, accelerated in part by global migration and an increase in tolerance and social mobility. Catholics had now been brought into contact with Protestants, Jews, Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists and even atheists. Taboos as well as barriers were being broken. Zelda’s family were southern Episcopalians so compromises and allowances had always had to be made by both families —  the Fitzgeralds and the Sayres. The couple had eventually been married in a Catholic ceremony and their daughter Frances had been likewise baptised in one, the bride’s family having made most of the major and more practical religious concessions. But these decisions were, by and large, made as part of sentimental regard for tradition. Grey areas were creeping into Scott’s beliefs. Zelda’s sister and her mother, the eccentric Minerva Machen-Sayre, had been dabbling in even more exotic pursuits after being turned on to the New Age wisdom and spirituality of Helena P. Blavatsky and Henry Olcott’s Theosophical Society, totally transforming their view of sexuality, reincarnation and the unseen forces of the universe. Describing how a local spiritualist had encouraged them to get married because they were soul mates, Zelda had written to Scott in attempt to unravel the experience: “Theosophists think that two souls are incarnated to-gether, not necessarily at the same time, but they are mated, since the time when people were bi-sexual.” [6] How Fay or Leslie would have responded to the couple’s moonage daydreams is difficult to assess, but it’s probably fair to say that both of them would have been deeply anxious about it.

In terms of a mixed-marriage, it was a veritable cocktail of a relationship — the Bridge boards and the Ouija boards of Mother Minnie Sayre providing the kooky, non-linear surface on which Scott would gamble his religious future and test the bounds of his faith to their limit. The church had secured locks to the secrets of the universe and the Sayres had provided the keys. Scott’s life was turning ‘mellow yellow’. [7] Quite suddenly, the absolutism that came bundled with the Catholic faith became the sound of a door slamming shut on urgent questions. In a story they published jointly some seven years later, Zelda provided a picture of her ‘kaleidoscopic’ self, wavering “back and forth between Theosophy and Catholicism”. Beneath the series of masks one wore in public there was no absolute self. And if there was no absolute self then there were no absolute moral laws. The belief in right and wrong was at best arbitrary. God was at best arbitrary. Although she was talking about Gay, the heroine of the story, there was little doubt that Zelda was thinking about her own reliance on disguises. The projection of a personality was just another ‘masquerade’. It was a recurring theme in Modernism. In another story, The Popular Girl, Scott would write of having one’s mask torn from one’s face and being exposed as a ‘pretender’. [8] In their increasingly divided view of the world there was no one true God any more than there was one true self. Little in the world was tangible and little was real. They’d partially deleted their memories and unhooked themselves from their pasts. [9] Absolution would be Scott’s attempt to explore the event horizon. He had found himself hovering between the comfort and security of his faith and the bewitching black hole of Modernism.

Were Modernists like Scott, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein and T.S. Eliot actually aware that they were Modernists? It would appear so, yes. And not only, they were also aware of the challenges being made against Modernism too. The term had originally gained traction among Baptist leaders who were concerned that the low moral standards and indiscipline of ‘Modernism’ both in and outside the church was not only endangering society but encouraging scores of Protestants to convert to Catholicism. The argument they put forward was that the fundamentalist members of their faith were seeking refuge from the laxities of Modernism in the bosom of ancient Rome where authority was firmer and ideology more absolutist. Speaking at a meeting of the recently formed Baptist Fundamentalist League in New York in April 1923, Dr T. T. Shields described how ‘Modernism’ was a cuckoo which never builds its own nest but lays its eggs in the nest of another. It was the “opposite of truth” in that it sought to gain control of all “ecclesiastical machinery” and the “propagation of the Christian faith”. [10] In the spring of 1922 businessman, painter and critic of decadent pictures, Charles Vezin had distributed a pamphlet among members of the Salmagundi Club in Greenwich Village in which he prudishly denounced the “protagonism of professional Modernists”. The pamphlet, What is Happening to Art angrily dismissed New York’s Art Museums as “Aesthetic Bolshevism”. According to Vezin the museums were “Tammanyizing Art”. He even went so far as redubbing the Metropolitan exhibition of Post-Impressionism as “Post-Sewerism”. The cult of “Flapperism” being led by Scott and Zelda came in for particularly good bashing: “how many generations of ethical soundness will it take to repair the moral attrition of our youth?” Vezin (not unlike Scott) anticipated a time when the youth would turn. The easy, superficial charms of the flapper might be attractive to the average seventeen year old, but as time wore on “the flapper would cease to flap” and the man of thirty would yearn for something genuine. The “flapper and flappee” would be stuck in a loveless marriage. The “vile absurdities” of Modernist art and literature were reducing art to “self-expression’. [11]

Scott clearly believed in something at this stage in his life, he just wasn’t sure what. He fretted about his estrangement from the church, but in all fairness, this tense emotional struggle had done little to curb his appetite for new sensations. And so he pressed ahead, his instinctive sense of romance and drama transforming what was probably only ever a guilty response to encountering new kinds of people and new kinds of experiences into a debilitating battle for his soul. The truth, however, was probably a lot less complicated than even Scott was prepared to admit: he liked the security and the sense of past that the Catholic faith provided but he didn’t like its rules. Yes, the steeple of the church had become partly obscured by trees, and by ‘cosmic patterns’ and things of a wilder nature, but it had never stopped him looking for it. [12]

The Art of Lying

At first glance the story told in Absolution seems rather simple. After supper on a muggy Tuesday evening in summer, eleven year Catholic boy, Rudolph Miller is yelled at by his father to attend confession. The boy hasn’t attended confession in a month, something unheard of in a family who make a point of going every week, rain or shine. Reluctantly he goes and admits to missing confession “the previous Saturday, three days ago” when he had been playing with some friends. The next scene shifts to the “previous Saturday”. Rudolph Miller is in confession with Father Schwartz, a priest with “cold watery eyes” whose grasp of reality is beleaguered by age, a fading memory and a palpable fear of the ‘hot madness’ of earthly matters. The first sin the boy confesses is fairly straightforward: he and some friends had been rude to an old woman. The second is that he had been guilty of “not believing he was the son of his parents” (a view that would eventually be shared by Gatsby). A series of ‘minor offences’ follow: he has been guilty of swearing, of smoking, and of calling people names behind their backs. The final sin is a little more complex. It related to “dirty words and immodest thoughts and desires” and the boy seems in obvious agony to tell it. Behind the ‘plush curtain of the confessional booth’ the boy slowly reveals the truth. On the previous Saturday he had been playing in the loft of a barn with some friends, two boys and a girl when he had experienced his ‘immodest desires’. He doesn’t tell the priest the full story — how his heart had raced with excitement and his pulse had bumped in his wrist — he holds this back.. Whatever he did experience though, whether it was a full blown sexual encounter or a little bit of petting and kissing, it has left him with ‘the ebony mark of sexual offences upon his soul’. When asked if he had lied about anything, perhaps by missing something out, the boy acts as if it is the last thing he would ever do: “Oh no Father, I never tell lies.” Out of all the things the boy has said, it is lying that he feels most ashamed by. Despite his best efforts at confessing all his sins, the boy is unable to come clean about his secret dependence on lying. The author writes that “like all those who habitually and instinctively lie, he had enormous respect and awe for the truth.” In denying that he told lies, the boy had committed ‘a terrible sin’ by lying in confession. His response is classic Jay Gatsby. Instead of torturing himself over his sin he starts repeating over and over to himself the name, ‘Blatchford Sarnemington’. The boy had created a separate ‘suave’ persona to absolve him of any blame. When he was ‘Blatchford Sarnemington’ he was beyond all reproach — all sin. It was a “corner of his mind where he was safe from God”. It was here that he “prepared the subterfuges with which he often tricked God.”

To avoid the consequences of his lying in confession the boy resolves to avoid confession the next day by tricking his father into thinking he cannot attend mass on the Sunday. It’s an elaborate charade. The boy plans to leave a glass of water on the table at breakfast in a bid to prove that he has not fasted before confession. The whole thing was ingenious. The boy knows that if he has not fasted he is not eligible to receive the sacrament and won’t be required to attend church that Sunday. Corporal fasting was thought to be the antidote to the ‘concupiscence’ (lusts) of everyday lives. Man was literally chained to the world by his senses. Catholics had a word for it: the ‘burden of the flesh’. Salutary abstinence offered partial liberation. In the first part of the story, the author shows Father Schwartz going about his daily business in the town, anxious to avoid the ‘terrible dissonance’ of the innocent laughter of the Swedish girls and the smell of cheap toilet soap as he hurried past the local drug store. It’s an image of a man running away from his own senses, a man looking to escape the corporeal world around him and the mortal cravings of his own body.

The boy, by contrast, has built himself a completely different escape mechanism: the suave and slippery alter-ego, Blatchford Sarnemington, a name full of aristocratic affectations and revealing etymologies. The word Blatch in Old English, means to blacken or to smear. The word ‘ford’ refers to water or a crossing. The word Sarnem when coupled with the quintessentially English-sounding ‘-ington’ provides the same illustrious sheen as Gatsby’s famous salutation, ‘Old Sport’ in that it sounds vaguely aristocratic, but the word ‘Sarnem’ actually features in the Latin Eucharist: “in nobis christus per carnem, dum eius sarnem accipimus” (‘Christ in us in the flesh while we receive his body’) [13] The young boy’s alter-ego is an abstraction of all that is blackened and defiled, including the flesh. His first name finds a parallel in the last name of the priest: ‘Schwartz’, also meaning ‘black’ in German. If I’m reading this correctly then Fitzgerald seems to be suggesting that the boy and the priest have something in common; they are both tarnished goods. The priest hides behind one screen — the plush curtain of the confessional booth — and the boy hides behind his more swashbuckling and aristocratic alter-ego. When he becomes ‘Blatchford Sarnemington’ the boy believes himself to be capable of getting away with anything, much like the Old Money sophisticates Daisy and Tom Buchannan can get away with anything in the finished Gatsby novel. Scott’s encounters with the privileged Old Money families at Princeton had shown him that for some there was exemption from any kind of moral accountability. As far as Scott was concerned, culpability for a sin wasn’t just determined by a person’s level of knowledge, consent, and freedom of choice, it really came down to what family you were born into — a rich one or a poor one. Whether you were among the ash heaps or the millionaires.

It’s impossible to know for certain if Scott was conscious of every figurative nuance of the names that he’d created in Absolution, and whether or not he intended to extend these themes in the finished novel. The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg may not be physically present in Absolution but they make their presence felt in the penetrating stare of God into the trembling soul of the boy. God had already known about his lie, the boy knows that much. The cuckold garage owner Wilson observes much the same thing in The Great Gatsby: “God sees everything”, he says looking up at the eyes of Dr T. J. Eckleburg, the huge billboard advertisement that stares out above his home in the Valley of Ashes. [14] In Absolution the eyes still feature prominently, but they are the ‘cold, watery eyes’ of the priest, and the cobalt blue-eyes of the boy. This time the penetrating gaze is coming from with within — from Rudolph’s niggling inner conscience. As the boy takes communion on the Sunday and reviews the series of ‘mortal sins’ he has engaged in since Saturday last, he breaks out in a heavy sweat. He takes the wafer in his mouth and as it dissolves on his tongue he becomes aware of the ‘dark poison’ he is now carrying in his heart. It’s not the body of Christ he has received but the devil: “the sharp taps of his cloven-hooves were loud upon the floor”. [15]

Things Go Glimmering

So far the story is a simple one; a boy sits trembling in church as he contemplates his sins and awaits confession. There is unlikely to have been a Catholic alive who wouldn’t have recognised the scene in front of them. It is the last section of the story that really shocks. There is a dramatic shift in focus and the tale takes a surreal and peculiar direction. It begins with a reference from Psalm 90: “Sagitta volante in dei” (“the arrow that flies by day”). It’s a psalm that talks about the refuge that faith in God provides. Christians believe that faith provides a shield against the arrows of temptation and vice that life will shoot at you from time to time. The shield becomes your refuge and your fortress. The priest is in the grip of a sudden delirium. The clocks ticks insistently and he starts staring intently at the patterns in the carpet. Suddenly there is a wild, haunted look in his eye. It could be the beginnings of a nervous breakdown or the symptoms of dementia. Fitzgerald never explains why. The old man’s nerves are jangling and the sound of a hammer outside interrupts his train of thought. He can no longer remember what he is supposed to tell the boy. The priest is in a state of panic. Something was slipping further and further away from him. The refuge that the church had provided was being taken away, the shield was down and the beads of the rosary hanging around his neck are “crawling and squirming like snakes upon the floor.” His very soul is under attack. We’ve moved from some sleepy Midwestern town to a scene from the X-Files. The story is taking a very macabre turn and the style of the story moves from the gothic and claustrophobic realism of Poe to something a little more surreal. The shift in style is reflected in the transformation we see in the priest. The poor man is now completely disorientated and his knowledge and awareness of his surroundings continues to recede. The author sheds no further light on it. All we really know for certain is that the old man is coming apart and has a heightened sensitivity to extraneous noises. In his hypervigilant state he is aware of the smallest of earthly details — “the clock ticked in the broken house”. Beyond the outermost sphere of the heavens, time was infinite. But here on earth it was different. The noisy hands of the clock are a constant reminder that life is a gift and should not be wasted.

Clocks make several appearances in the Gatsby novel. The first is a reference to a broken clock that sits on the mantel of Nick Carraway’s home on the afternoon that Gatsby and Daisy are reunited:

“Gatsby, his hands still in his pockets, was reclining against the mantelpiece in a strained counterfeit of perfect ease, even of boredom. His head leaned back so far that it rested against the face of a defunct mantelpiece clock.” [16]

As a result of his nerves Gatsby knocks the clock with his hand and it very nearly topples to the floor. Luckily, he prevents it from falling. Perhaps it’s an allusion to Jay’s longing to reverse or hold-back time or perhaps it’s just to illustrate how nervous he is. It might be both. The second is the “clock that ticks on the washstand” as Gatsby recounts his miraculous transformation from 17 year old James Gatz into the suave and successful millionaire, Jay Gatsby. If the clock of Absolution resembles any of those in Gatsby it’s the latter. The same “grotesque and fantastic conceits’ haunting the young James Gatz in his bedroom at night, and the “universe of ineffable gaudiness” that spins out in his brain as the clock ticks, is the same one haunting the priest.

In the pages of the story that follow there is a radical shift in tone as Father Schwartz stares manically at the boy before exclaiming: “When a lot of people get together in the best places, things go glimmering.” The boy, clearly unsettled, has no idea what the priest is talking about. Neither has the reader. It’s a disturbing and unpleasant non sequitur. The priest follows it up with something that is just as obtuse: “The thing is to have a lot of people in the centre of the world, wherever that happens to be … then … things go glimmering.” The priest then quizzes the boy about his aspirations. The youngster tells him that when he grows up he would like to be an actor or navy officer. Responding to the boy’s bright and effusive daydreams, the priest remarks that it looked as if things had already started ‘glimmering’ for him. The boy is scared, he thinks he’s crazy. Returning to his “mysterious preoccupation” Father Schwartz exclaims that “they have lights now as big as stars”. Stars have always enjoyed a privileged yet fluid status in ancient and modern spirituality — and of course theatre. Scott marked his awareness of this in his first novel, This Side of Paradise when he equates the bright star he sees in February 1911 with his first experience of Broadway: “a picture of splendour that rivalled the dream cities of the Arabian nights”. [17] The image serves not just to emphasise how bright these lights are, but to remind us that they have a deep and mystical properties. The Egyptians associated the stars they saw in the night sky with eternity and the afterlife, believing that they provided a mirror or portal to the world on earth. The world for the Egyptians was literally reflected in the heavens. Egypt itself was regarded as an earthly imitation of the infinite. According to a poem by Nietzsche, whose book, Thus Spake Zarathustra Scott had been reading around this time, the world was formed from the “wreckage of stars”. The unexplored skies were the seas of the future, “dazzling with malicious delight”. It was here that one searched for a mirror-reading of the truth. It was here that truth and hope glimmered.  A similar reading of the world can be found in two of Scott’s favourite literary pieces: Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) and T.S Eliot’s The Wasteland (1922). As the crew of the streamliner, The Nellie disappear up the Thames, Conrad’s narrator, Charles Marlow describes how it is the fate of the modern man to live “in the midst of the incomprehensible.” Beneath the “spectral illumination of moonshine” the world glides past the seaman, until nothing but darkness remains. Just occasionally however it may be possible to make out lights on the shore from a lighthouse or a passing ship. Conrad suggests that it was possible to derive some partial meanings from the “misty glow” that the moonlight cast upon things.

By the early 1900s the certainties and larger narratives of the Old World had begun to collapse. For those who were prepared to sail into the heart of darkness and explore the territories of the wild unknown there were untold rewards. “What greatness had not floated on the ebb of that river into the mystery of an unknown earth!… The dreams of men, the seed of commonwealths, the germs of empires”, cries Marlow in the opening pages of Conrad’s novel. Those brave enough to face the darkness were the “bearers of a spark from the sacred fire”. Humankind was no longer be content with the blank spaces on the map. The man of the 21^st Century would learn to live in the “midst of the incomprehensible”.  [18] It would be frightening but also fascinating and in the end we would all live like pioneers. The fearless ones among us would let our little spaceships drift into outer-space discovering new worlds, new galaxies, like the prospectors of old. Instead of fretting like the souls back home, the brave and courageous space adventurer would only gaze upon the sheer, gorgeous wonder of it all. The future of America was no longer in the hands of men like General Ulysses S. Grant, it was in the mind-blowing science of men like Thomas Eddison and Albert Einstein. Modernists like Conrad and Fitzgerald were gradually coming round to the idea that the best we could really hope for in life were “glimpses” of the eternal. The only thing immutable in life was the sea. “We live in the flicker”, explains Marlow in The Heart of Darkness. The ship would plough forward and the world would glide past. There would be a flash of lightning in the clouds and for the briefest of moments there would be meaning, consolation, and if you were lucky enough perhaps, even hope. [19]

The impact that Conrad was having on Scott’s approach to point of view and narrative structures is apparent in the letters that the author exchanged with his editor, Max Perkins, as he completed the final drafts of Gatsby in Paris. His admiration for Eliot was no less profound. For T. S. Eliot, a man that Scott regarded as “the greatest living poet in any language”, it was the “heart of light” that he found himself staring into. [20] Flashes of meaning were to be derived from the gaps in “broken images”, like the gaps in trees found by the sun. [21] Man was now living in the wasteland of the twilight, a world that was no longer completely dark but never completely light. It’s a theme that the poet would return to in The Hollow Men, the story of “death’s dream kingdom” that redrafted the themes of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness for the spiritually dead world of post-war Europe. In Eliot’s limbo-world, hope can occasionally be glimpsed like sunlight through “a broken column” or in the glow of a “fading” or “twinkling star”. [22] Like the priest of Absolution, the poet’s characters live in the unsatisfactory incandescence of a flickering world. The world had been broken into a fragments. It’s one of the commonest tropes of the Modernist genre and Absolution is typical in this respect. It’s a non-linear account of mental collapse. Memories collide and thoughts are interrupted in a way that both reflects and reinforces the violent assault on the faith of the priest and the convictions of the boy. The cracks that are beginning to show in the material world around him are literally tearing the priest apart.

Scott returns to the theme of fragmentation in the Gatsby novel when he describes the spell that the modern metropolis holds over Nick: “I began to like New York, the racy, adventurous feel of it at night, and the satisfaction that the constant flicker of men and women and machines gives to the restless eye.” Like Conrad’s Marlow, Nick is content to “live in the  flicker” of an otherwise dark and mysterious world. He says he likes to walk up Fifth Avenue picking out women and imagining himself following them home and entering their lives without any sense of shame or fear of being judged. [23] It was this “enchanted metropolitan twilight” that fuelled Scott’s imagination and creativity too. The modern world no longer offered a constant stream of light. Nothing was absolute any more. Nothing was for certain anymore. Art and Literary historians are generally agreed that the world of the 21^st Century —  the world of the Modernists —  was a flickering, fragmented world. Surrealism was splitting the atom at a visual level, taking the assumed reality of things and piercing it with holes so that the powerful light of the unconsciousness could shine through. People were finding beauty in the strange and unexpected, in things that existed slightly beyond reality. Shortly after arriving in France to complete the novel, André Breton had published Manifeste du Surréalisme (Manifesto of Surrealism). That December, Eugene Rossetti of the Chicago Tribune in Paris explained that Breton’s idea of Surrealism (Super Realism) was to “plain realism” what “Superman was to plain man”. It some instances, Surrealism didn’t just over-reach reality, it would flatly contradict and deny it. Rossetti’s report suggested that Breton was objecting to the “plague” of realism in the world of literature. Super-realism would be played like the Aeolian harp, in that it would express only the more ethereal, harmonic frequencies that men and women were able to tap into. [24] It is perhaps pertinent to note that Breton, a poet and Marxist, had moved to Paris from Normandy on January 1^st, 1922, just in time for Pound’s Year Zero, where he quickly knitted himself into the clique of Avant Garde artists that included Joyce, Ezra Pound, Marcel Duchamp and Mary Reynolds — the so-called American Queen of Montparnasse. [25]

Breton described man as that “inveterate dreamer”, routinely unhappy with his destiny and denying himself the perspective of “several lives lived at once”. The only time man allowed himself to express his imagination was when it was in “strict accordance with the laws of arbitrary utility”. True escape from slavery meant freeing the imagination. Breton’s idea of Super-realism didn’t stop at what is, it extended what can be. It was a madness that one locked-up. Like the priest in Absolution  the tragedy was that those of unstable mind were often “victims of their own imaginations”. The insane were “honest to a fault”. In many ways his views were not unlike those of Conrad in the Heart of Darkness: if Christopher Columbus should have set-out to discover America, he should have done it “with a boatload of madmen”. [26]

As Scott sat down to write, he was beginning to come round to the idea that the “first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world” was now to be glimpsed in the sunlight that flickered through the girders as one roared across Queensboro Bridge with “fenders spread like wings”. [27] The world could be comprehended as a beautifully interrupted series of impressions that through no fault of their defied reason. Things could be observed at unclear distance and from various dissonant angles. The morals and tastes that kept reality in-check were dismissed by Breton and the Surrealists as dogmas that needed to be exploded. The grand narratives of religion and civilisation that kept the world in darkness with its phoney ideals and fake certainties offered by priests and politicians were becoming flakier by the day. There were whole new ways of thinking to had outside the box.

A Light in the Darkness

By the time that the second revolution took place in Russia in October 1917, scientists at Princeton University were explaining to America’s press how the ‘Blink’ microscope was allowing astronomers to detect planets and stars beyond our solar system using the Transmit Method. The ground-breaking techniques being used at the Union Observatory in Johannesburg were now making it possible to measure microscopic decreases in a star’s luminosity to reveal previously ‘invisible’ celestial bodies. [28] It soon became clear that greatness and understanding could take root in the oscillating light, the light that hinted at something dark, something unknown but something potentially at least, quite profound. Great things were beginning to emerge from the chaos and the ‘wreckage’ of the stars. Although it wasn’t likely to be some instant ‘big bang’ event, Ezra Pound was basically correct; the world clock was about to be re-set to zero. And the man that the Modernists had to thank for all this was Einstein.

In 1905, Einstein’s Theory of Relativity had revolutionised our understanding of light and time. In May 1919, his theories were back in the headlines with the Eddington Experiment, when British astronomers Frank Dyson and Arthur Eddington attempted to measure the gravitational deflection of starlight passing near the sun during a total solar eclipse. His theories were being revived again some three years later, just as Scott was arriving in Great Neck. At the end of September 1922 the world was being treated to another solar eclipse. The observations made during this period confirmed everything that Einstein had said. It was a scientific revelation that turned religion — and even science — on its head. The findings, which began to emerge in April 1923 as Scott sketched out the first ideas for Absolution, didn’t just change our understanding of light, they also changed the way we thought about time. Suddenly everybody was talking about stars and crazy notions of relativity. Einstein’s idea of ‘time dilation’ was taking root in the imaginations of the public: the faster than light we moved, the more likely we are to go backwards. The questions now on everyone’s lips: were the heavens really where they appeared to be? And was it possible to travel through time? [29]

Writing of the metaphysical needs of the thinker in 1878 book, Human, all Too Human, Nietzsche had written that in man’s determination to be liberated from the earthly world of his senses he may feel like he is floating above the earth in a starry dome” where “all the stars seem to glimmer around him”. [30] For some, Einstein’s theories supported Nietzsche’s infinitely less scientific Eternal Recurrence theory, the idea that people, especially lovers, are predestined to continue repeating the same experiences time and time again. Every sigh, every joy and every unutterable pain would have to be relived indefinitely. The “eternal hourglass of existence” was being turned upside down again and again. The “eternal play of repetition” would come to kiss and corrupt us in an ongoing cosmic romance. Even the spider we see and the “moonlight between the trees” would one day return to us. Man was trapped like a moth around the constant flickering flame of time in a repeating block universe. [31] In the early 1920s perceptions about everything were changing, even our understanding of time.

At this point it is probably worthwhile mulling over the distinction between things that ‘dazzle’ and things that ‘glimmer’. The priest in Absolution says that when people start massing at the centre of things, “things go glimmering”. Unlike something that dazzles, something that glimmers is not a constant stream of light but something more intermittent. It’s a pulse that shines faintly. As Conrad writes in the Heart of Darkness “we live in the flicker”. Visiting one of Gatsby’s parties for the first time, the books’ narrator, Nick Carraway, speaks of the “spectroscoptic gaiety” of it all. Two things that fall broadly under the banner of Spectroscopy are the rainbow and the aurora borealis — the Northern Lights. This phenomenon is, scientifically speaking the effects of electromagnetic radiation bouncing off the canopy of the world to produce magical, natural light displays. In mythology these dynamic flickers of the aurora borealis can be everything from the souls of the dead, the goddess of the dawn, the divine spark of creation, the fireworks of hell or an omen of death. They even make an appearance in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: A Modern Prometheus. Like the stars they are slow alterations in light. The display it provides doesn’t shine as such, it glimmers. When Gatsby makes his very first entrance in the novel he silhouetted against the moonlight looking up at the “silver pepper of the stars” as if they were part of his own private empire. [32] Gatsby inhabits his own magic realm. Even his garden is no ordinary place. There’s a sensation that time itself has been suspended, that somehow, within the ‘spectroscoptic gaiety’ of it all, he could quite plausibly ‘repeat the past’. All he relies on is his energy source. Nietzsche had written that the “most powerful magic of life” was like a woman. It was “covered by a veil interwoven with gold, a veil of beautiful possibilities, sparkling with promise and seduction”. [33] Gatsby finds this magic in Daisy and the priest of Absolution finds it in the things that “go glimmering”. People have often said that you will never know the true value of a moment until it becomes a memory. And if, like Nick, you were to go out into Gatsby’s garden and look up at the sky on one of those ‘spectrographic’ evenings you might well be reminded that the light from the nearest star can take up to four years to get here. It too is a distant memory; a glimpse into the past, which leads us neatly into another of the novel’s preoccupation: the passing of time.

In his introduction to the 1991 Penguin edition of The Great Gatsby, British literary critic Tony Tanner remarked that time in the novel is part of the ‘genealogical’ links between Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby and Trimalchio of Petronius’s ancient tale The Satyricon. Whilst Gatsby is referred to as ‘Trimalchio’ only once in the novel, it was at one time Scott’s intended title. The riotous parvenu, Trimalchio — a Roman slave who becomes fantastically wealthy and hosts lavish parties — has a trumpeter and a water-clock in the room in which they dine. [34] At regular intervals the trumpeter will announce the time. The reason for this is simple: Trimalchio is obsessed with death, and because he is obsessed with death he is obsessed with not wasting time. He represents everything that is of the earth and of the senses. Not the temporal world of the heavens, but the corporeal world, all the material things that die. The sound of the clock that the priest hears ticking in the hall in Absolution is very similar in this respect, in that it is a reminder of the finite nature of the world of the senses. In the priest’s agitated and unbalanced state the “stiff monotony” of its ticking becomes a nagging reminder of the finite nature of the world: time moves on, the sunset (death?) approaches. For the priest, it is the sound that keeps us anchored to the world and our spirits down. The stars on the otherhand represented that “small glimmering light of free thought”. [35] Some of what Scott was saying had its roots in the progressive Catholicism of Isaac Hecker, the Americanist priest whose niece opened Fitzgerald’s prep school, The Newman School for Boys. Time was important to Hecker. In a diary entry dated May 1843, the young student would write that the light of the past grew faint, whilst the light of the future filled his heart with a “glowing joy”.

During his youth Hecker had been introduced to John Anster’s translation of Goethe’s Faust. One passage in particular appears to have caught his imagination: “Lose this day loitering … Seize this very minute, What you can do, or think you can, begin it; Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.” Of the three main states of time — past, present and future — it was the present that they valued the most. The only reality we had was now. The past, the Brook Farmers surmised, could only drag you back. An entry in Hecker’s diary on May 16, 1844 reads: “The present is an eternal youth … hoping wistfully, intensely desiring … dimly seeing the bright star of hope in the future, beckoning him to move rapidly on, while his strong heart beats with enthusiasm and glowing joy. The past is dead.” It was a torch that had been lit originally by the father of American Transcendentalism, Ralph Waldo Emerson: “A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within.” For Hecker it was the big bright star of hope that beguiled him. In Absolution it is the light as big as a star at the amusement park that bewitches the priest. And in Gatsby, it is the green light at the end of the dock. For each of these men, though, light is a manifestation of a supernatural presence, a twinkling spiritual world that would occasionally pierce the film of darkness that screened our mundane and earthly lives and drive us on; part-immanent, part-transcendent, part-within, part-without. “The spirit world is near and glimmering all around me,” writes Hecker. The whole thing chimed with Emerson’s gospel of ‘Self-Reliance’: “To believe that what is true for you in your private heart, is true for all men,—that is genius.”

The Theosophists of the period maintained that Lucifer, the Morning Star, the personification of evil in Western culture, had been grossly misrepresented in Christianity. In early Christian history, Lucifer and Satan were separate entities. Somewhere along the line they had become fused. Lucifer — the ‘shining one’ — was believed to bring light to the world of darkness, helping us to reconcile our earthly and ‘sinful’ natures with the divine spark of God within us all. In doing so he would offer a deeper level of absolution. If God was our ‘inner light’ then Lucifer was it was blinding torch that illuminated the darkest niches of our world. He brought enlightenment, understanding. It is only fair to point at this stage that the Luciferianism of the Theosophists shouldn’t be confused with Satanism. Luciferianism had its basis in the belief systems early Christians sects of the First Century AD, which had been substantially influenced by Buddhism, Zoroastrianism and Platonism. The kind of Theosophy that Zelda Fitzgerald’s mother and sister both flirted with was a mystical melting pot of esoteric world religions. In an Open Letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury, the group’s leader, Helena P. Blavatsky did her best to defend the Theosophical movement. Her members were not the “enemies of Christ”. Theosophy was “not a religion”, its only intent was the “penetrate into the meaning of the dogmas and ceremonies of all religions” — to find unity and common ground and reveal the Secret Doctrine that had been “disguised to suit the capacity of the multitude”. Their aim was to move encourage its students to move beyond the medieval superstitions, intolerance and guilt that kept them weighted down in the world through ignorance. The Eastern Religions had shed a “flood of light” upon the inner meanings within Christianity. It was Blavatsky’s intent to share them: “to bring light to the hidden things of darkness”. [36] As previously mentioned, among those students were Scott’s wife Zelda and her mother Minnie Machen Sayre. Scott might have expressed no small amount of scepticism and private amusement where some of the group’s more eccentric ideas and practices were concerned, even going so far as to take a “crack at it” in The Beautiful and Damned, but there is little doubting its impact on his thinking at this stage of his career and his exposure to Friedrich Nietzsche. He may not have been flag-waving member of the society itself, but he “got it”, so to speak.

Theosophy’s Russian guru, Helena P. Blavatsky had been so seduced by the idea of archangel’s light-bearing qualities that ‘Lucifer’ became the name of the movement’s first journal. In the late 1890s it was renamed The Theosophical Review. Among the books that Blavatsky had reviewed in Lucifer was Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra — the book that Scott Fitzgerald had told the New York World had made him something of a ‘hot Nietzschean’. [37]  Was the swastika in the pattern of the carpet that the priest stares at the end of Absolution, a nod and a wink to Sanskrit swastika that Blavatsky and the Theosophists used as a symbol of ‘cosmic evolution’ on the group’s official seal? Sadly, we’ll never know. These things were certainly entering the mainstream consciousness. People had them on advertisements, on business cards, in fact anything that might benefit from conveying a touch of the exotic. In its simplest level it was good luck charm and on another something a little more esoteric. But what about the star? What did star mean to the Priest? Where was it leading them to? “They had lights now as big as stars”.

Upon hearing of the death of Frederick III (the father of Kaiser Wilhelm) Nietzsche wrote that he was “a small glimmering light of free thought, the last hope of Germany.” Perhaps at their simplest level, the stars in the story were hope and ambition — the promise of a better and freer world. “I heard of one light they had in Paris that was as big as a star. A lot of gay people had it”, says the priest in Absolution, but he never explains what ‘it’ was. “They had all sorts of things now that you never dreamed of.” The boy and the reader are left none the wiser. We can only try and fill in the gaps. Perhaps the stars were offering clues about the boy’s (and Gatsby’s) potential — his escape from the acute melancholy of the real world and his deliverance into wilful, romantic blindness? Stars in Christian mythology at least, tended to lead people places. They were symbols of miracles, symbols of prophecy. Maybe the priest was hinting at some distant period of fulfilment in the young boy’s life — a path for the boy to follow. People have been wishing on stars for centuries, especially those that shoot across the sky. Star light, star bright, first star I see tonight had been a nursery-rhyme jingle since the early 1880s. By the 1920s, the ‘Wish Star’ had combined with the American Dream to produce something of a cultural asterism. It was something you longed for but couldn’t reach. But then there was the reference to Paris: “I heard of one light they had in Paris that was as big as a star”. By the mid-19^th century, Paris had become known as the City of Light (La Ville Lumière), partly on account of the fact that it was the first of the major cities in Europe to use gas lighting and partly because of the role that the city had played during the Age of Enlightenment. [38] But a light as big as a star? The city’s brightest light was probably the one on the Eiffel Tower, the centrepiece of the 1889 World’s Fair. Ten thousand gaslights had been installed on the tower’s tall, slender frame and at night it was illuminated from the ground up with a tricolour of sparkling spotlights projecting three separate beams of red, white and blue light — the three colours most closely associated with freedom. [39]At its summit sat a bright beacon, encircled by a glass rotunda and covered with a small dome. Perhaps this is what Scott had in mind when he wrote it, as it was replicated throughout America as part of the 1901 Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo — the light as a symbol man’s genius, his chaos and his madness.

As the story reaches its climax, the priest asks the boy if he had ever visited an amusement park. They were “like a fair only more glittering”. He instructs him to visit one at night and observe it from a safe distance, advising him to tuck himself away in a dark place under the trees:

“Well, go and see an amusement park,”’ the priest waved his hand vaguely. ‘‘It’s a thing like a Fair, only much more glittering. Go to one at night and stand a little way off from it in a dark place—under dark trees. You’ll see a big wheel made of lights turning in the air and a long slide shooting boats down into the water. A band playing somewhere and a hard smell of peanuts—and everything will twinkle. But it won’t remind you of anything, you see. It will all just hang out there in the night like a colored balloon— like a big yellow lantern on a pole.” (Absolution, American Mercury, June 1924, p.149)

It’s an illusion to the fairgrounds of Coney Island. The big yellow lantern hanging in the night sky like a coloured ballon is the Ferris Wheel and the sliding boats are the Shoot the Chute ride in which a flat-bottomed boat slides down a ramp or inside a flume before splashing into the water. “Everything will twinkle”, he tells the boy, but with it comes a word of warning. Like Gatsby at his own parties, the boy wasn’t to get too close. If he did get too close he would only smell the “heat and the sweat and the life”. The priest was probably on to something here. If the illusion was to be maintained, it was better that the amusement park remain at a glimmering, romantic distance. It was the only way of prolonging its magic. The boy could watch but he wasn’t to touch. To touch it would see it collapse. Suddenly the boy is filled with something “ineffably gorgeous” welling up inside in that had “nothing to do with God”. As startled as he was by the ravings of the priest it only confirmed what he’d suspected all along; that temptations made the world a more exciting, more radiant place. Better still, God was probably pleased with him for being so creative with his lies. The priest on the otherhand is beside himself with grief. Muttering “inarticulate and heartbroken words” he crumples to the floor and cries out to God. In panic the boy runs from the house. The priest remains there on the floor, his head teeming with different faces and different voices before he finally emits a long and twisted shriek of laughter.

The visual correlations between the twinkling brilliance of the amusement park, the bright lights of Gatsby’s parties and the pulsing green light at the end of the dock are impossible to ignore. Not only that, the priest’s allusion to the fantastic ‘glimmering’ lights of the 150 feet ‘Wonder Wheel’ at Coney Island would become the focal point of dust-cover designed by Francis Cugat for the first edition of The Great Gatsby published in April 1925. “Let’s go to Coney Island!” shouts Gatsby in Chapter Five of the novel. Nick tells him no, its too late, but in an earlier draft of the book, they probably do go to Coney Island. Contrary to what some might think, the author didn’t ditch everything from the finished novel. That “something ineffably gorgeous” that wells up inside the boy as the priest describes the Ferris Wheel could have come straight out of Gatsby. Even at a verbal level it chimes with the sentiment expressed by Jay as he describes his transformation from farm boy to millionaire: “a world of ineffable gaudiness spun itself out in his brain as the clock ticked on the wash-stand.” The narrator in both stories believes that there are some things in life that are beyond the reach of mortal words and mortal thoughts, that there are impulses, drives and ideas too powerful to express. Rudolph Miller and Jay Gatsby both seek refuge in the sanctuary of lies. Both hide behind carefully conceived illusions — Jay to escape the burden of his low social standing and Miller to dodge the arrows of the moral absolutism of the church. In his poem about the “wreckage of the stars” Nietzsche had also written that ‘The poet, who can willingly and knowingly lie, can alone tell the truth.’ For someone like Scott, JayGatsby and Rudolph Miller may have represented aspects of the author’s own literary consciousness as he attempted to disclose a series of hidden truths about himself to the world. Perhaps the eleven year-old Rudolph Miller and the thirty-two year-old Jay Gatsby represent aspects of the creative imagination. Gatsby’s narrator, Nick Carraway is quick to identify this particular quality of his nature in the very first chapter of the novel. Despite all his misgivings about Gatsby’s wealth, his millionaire neighbour has the heart and the soul of a poet: “there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life … it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again.” [40]  Scott writes that we shouldn’t mistake whatever characteristics that Gatsby had with anything as undignified as ‘creative temperament’, but there is, nonetheless, something rather Shelleyean about him. He’s the dandy rebel, a New Romantic, the Rockefeller prince of an ideal world. There’s not just something gorgeous about Gatsby, there’s something ethereal and timeless about the character too. He’s full of binaries and contradictions —guilty bootlegger and innocent child, part pure and part-corrupt.

In Plato’s view of the world, poets moved away from the truth. Poetry was the lies of fools. For Friedrich Nietzsche, however, the colourful screens that poets drew around their worlds and the elaborate masques these ‘liars’ performed — their “broken words and false rainbows” — freed others from the burden and the obligation of the truth. The poet’s ‘conscious lie’ was a way of viewing the truth from a safe dark place, somewhere from which he might view the better part of the spectacle. [48] People didn’t want the truth, they wanted something better. It was as true then as it is now. The only truth that Jay Gatsby has any belief in in the novel is his love for Daisy Buchannan. Everything else he presents to the world is just sham. It may not be wise or practical — and he may not believe the truth when he hears it — but the lies that Gatsby keeps telling himself about Daisy give him something that is so much more inspiring than the truth.

With the exception of Daisy, his world has no meaning. Gatsby had found a bright, warm pot of gold at the end of his own false rainbow. There was once a very maudlin song performed in the 1980s: “I don’t know much, but I know I love/And that may be all the is to know”. It may seem pitifully trite now but before the polished production notes of Soft Rock came along to smooth off the sentiment’s rougher edges, the notion would have seemed strangely profound. In a desperate bid to make meaning from our lives and have some sense of going forward we invented our own rewards. It was the perfect golden slumbers: the love you take was equal to the love you make. It’s roughly what Nietzsche had said: we created our own light in this world. But for a man who ended his days lonely and insane, his words should be treated with no small amount of caution. Nietzsche believed that at best, love was a transitory experience. There would never be any love without pain.

For Nietzsche, like for Nick in the book, it wasn’t love that was real but friendship. Friendship was the thing that really lasted. Love was only ever a necessary delusion. On this point at least, Scott and Nietzsche seemed in total agreement: some illusion or other was all that was really needed to make life tolerable. It was a sentiment shared by Alfred Richard Orage, an acolyte of Nietzsche. Writing in The Theosophical Review in 1907, Orage made an appeal for a New Romanticism — a “wilful blindness”: “Romanticism is in essence an attempt to escape from the compulsory vision of things as they are, by imagining them to be what they are not.” Orage, an enthusiastic student of Theosophy, believed Romanticism to be the things we “substituted for the real world”. When people looked upon reality the only thing we felt more often than not was an acute sense of misery. It was only natural that people responded by seeking refuge and escape in the world of appearances. A ‘New Romanticism’ would consist of “a deliberate vision and creation of the world, not as one thinks it ought to be, but as one thinks it can be.” The world of the New Romantic would be a “real world by virtue of its potentiality”. He would be creating the “perfectly impossible future”. First he would draw the line and then he would pursue its trajectory. [42] Jay Gatsby seems to have grasped the bones of what Orage was saying — and so does the Priest in Absolution.

For a good proportion of the world’s working class, amusement parks continue to offer a sanitised route of momentary escape. The gaudy amusementscapes found at Coney Island had also been built from the wreckage of the stars. With its authentic replicas of Venice, Babylon and scenes from Arabian Nights, these ‘factual imitations’ of the mansions and the palaces found in the various kingdoms of the world titillated and inspired the millions of New Yorkers who flooded through its gates each year. Anticipating the ornate movie-theatres of the 1920s, William H. Reynold’s Dreamland had fashioned a world of almost implausible opulence, built to the specifications of “popular notions of magnificence”. Dreamland provided a “Newport for the masses”, the tall, palatial buildings recreating the “aristocratic splendour” of the Gilded Age. [43] Its centre-piece was ‘Beacon Tower’, a colossal 50 foot square tower painted in the purest white and studded with some 44,700 electric bulbs. Just several years after the tower was dismantled, Sand Point’s Mother Superior, Alva Belmont would revive the name and all its shining symbolism for her ‘factual imitation of the Hotel de Ville in Caen — the inspiration for Gatsby’s mansion. The ‘Beacon Tower’ of Coney Island now stood in all its Catholic splendour on Long Island’s Port Washington North.

Enormous Power

In a letter to his editor, Max Perkins on April 10, 1924, Scott explains that he had ditched much of what he had written the previous summer. Some 18,000 of the novel that would become Gatsby had been discarded, including the novel’s prologue (Absolution), which he said would now appear as a short story in H. L. Mencken’s American Mercury. Scott was, however, careful to say that not all of the work had been ditched, so we can only infer that some of what made it into the final Gatsby novel was an extrapolation of the material he had published as Absolution in June 1924 and which he had ‘vaguely’ explained to Perkins at an earlier date. [44] Perkins responded to Scott’s letter six days later on April 16 and mentions The Great Gatsby by name. On June 18^th, 1924 Scott had written to Max from France saying that he was glad he had liked Absolution, which as he knew, had originally been intended as “the prologue of the novel”. [45] It is then, only logical to conclude that Absolution had appeared in an earlier version of the novel. Perkins may not have seen the finished version of Absolution until it appeared in the American Mercury in June, but he had been given a rough idea of how Scott’s work had been progressing. The conclusion we can draw is clear: the boy would eventually become Jay Gatsby was at one time meant to be Catholic.

In his letter to Max, Scott had some good news about the novel. He was approaching it from a whole new angle. For the first time in years Scott felt he was doing the best he could. He said there was “an enormous power” building within him. The author’s excitement was palpable: Max could look forward to the “sustained imagination of a sincere yet radiant world.” [46] He also had a new working title for the novel: ‘Among the Ash Heaps and Millionaires’. As tactfully as he could, Perkins explained that he wasn’t too keen on that idea. It didn’t really nail it for him. As far as Max was concerned, the wooliness of the expression failed to give the reader an obvious clue about the meaning of the story that Scott was trying to tell. It was too figurative, it would need explaining. He liked ‘The Great Gatsby’, Scott’s original title, much better.

I think we can be fairly certain that the novel that Scott continued writing in France was not an idea he was starting from scratch, but one that we was reworking on a more lavish scale. This is supported by discoveries made by Matthew J. Bruccoli in 1978 which suggest the Gatsby-Daisy-Nick plotline was conceived earlier than previously thought, perhaps even at a time when Fitzgerald rather than Nick narrated the book as ‘omniscient author’. [47] The author’s description of an “imaginative … radiant world” suggests it was conscious decision to move away from the more fashionable naturalistic approach of Dreiser’s Sister Carrie and Joyce’s Dubliners to something slightly beyond the doors of perception — a world with a little more magic, a world that ‘glimmered’.

As a prologue, Absolution would, in all fairness, have probably worked reasonably well within the context of the final novel. It didn’t fit perfectly, of course, the tone was completely different, but there was certainly plenty in the way of continuity. The reference to James J. Hill in Absolution and the swastika emblem certainly resurfaced in the finished Gatsby, but they constitute a fairly superficial likeness compared to other aspects of the story that Scott was clearly anxious to preserve, particularly its themes about deception and the power that illusion had in the modern world. Nobody ever really knows for sure knows about Gatsby’s religious background. When Nick enters Wolfshiem’s office to invite him to Gatsby’s funeral, Wolfshiem is whistling The Rosary, a favourite among Catholics at the turn of the last century. The arrangements of a Lutheran funeral by his friend Nick at the end of the novel are never fully explained. As the young James Gatz made his way from Minnesota to Lake Superior, Nick Carraway tells us that Gatsby had worked briefly at a Lutheran College. It’s the only other reference to the faith in the novel and it may well be the basis for the decision that Nick makes to call a Lutheran minister in the days after his death. The arrival of Gatsby’s father, who seems oblivious to Nick’s arrangements, throws no additional light upon the matter. One thing is for sure: transforming Gatsby from a Roman Catholic into a Lutheran would have a brave and unusally provocative move — his old mentor Monsignor Fay having done little to hide his prejudice against its church and the sinister role he imagined its church leaders to have played in the Great War with Germany.

At the end of the day, both stories are guided by the principles of absolution as performed and understood in the Catholic ‘sacrament of reconciliation’. In a letter to Scott that his religious guide and mentor Shane Leslie had written from London, the Irishman invited the young author to take him back into his confidence: “You may write to me under the seal as a confession and I shall respect the seal on anything.” [48] The power of confession in the Catholic faith shouldn’t be underestimated. Scott had been confessing things to Leslie and Fay in the same way that Gatsby confesses things to Nick. Despite all his many transgressions and all his obvious sins, Gatsby is truly forgiven: “Gatsby turned out all right in the end”, explains Nick. “It’s what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams.” [49] Nick, the “absolute rose”, has assumed the role of the priest. It’s there in the phrase itself — ‘an absolute rose’. The word itself can be traced to the Latin absolvere: to set-free, to bring to an end, to separate. Something that achieves absolution becomes detached from all that is foul or polluted around it. It becomes ‘pure’ or ‘absolute’. It is free from restriction, free from sin.

Shortly before the eleven-year old Rudolph Miller runs from the house in terror, the priest loses his patience with the boy: “Stop worrying about last Saturday. Apostasy implies an absolute damnation only on the supposition of a previous perfect faith. Does that fix it?” The boy clearly doesn’t have apostasy (the formal renunciation of one’s beliefs) on his mind. The reader knows that much. The priest’s tetchy outburst is an impatient response to the relatively trifling nature of the young boy’s concerns. The priest, we might infer, is consumed by more weighty, existential matters. His eyes are wild and his head is racing. Rudolph, on the otherhand, doesn’t have the faintest idea what the old man is talking about. Despite this, it begins to dawn on the boy that he’s being offered absolution of sorts, albeit by unconventional means. As the priest continues talking about the lights of the Ferris wheel at the amusement park, Rudolph feels the burden of guilt lifting from his young shoulders. He is filled with a new sense of courage and resolve. Sitting there half-terrified and half-enthralled, the boy fantasies of a leading a troop of “German cuirassiers” during a cavalry charge at Sedan, the sun bouncing off his breastplate and white tunic and his spurs like ‘stars of light’. [50] The boy has seen it as a sign that God is not angry anymore. Instead of punishing him, God is rewarding him for the ingenuity he has shown in making the church a dazzling “radiant” place. His honour is now “immaculate”. He’s been forgiven. It’s a complex, chaotic image that encapsulates just how confused the author may have been feeling about his faith.

At the boy’s most fragile and vulnerable moment, the moment he is about collapse before the grace and will of God, he becomes a dazzling Nietzschean ‘Superman’ leading a rebellion against God. No matter how gross or shameful the boy’s behaviour, he believes he is now free to shake-off his humble surroundings and exist beyond the usual laws of nature and morality. Once safely secured in the armour of his arrogant alter-ego, Blatchford Sarnemington, the boy could effectively sin no more. He’s become like Nietzsche’s pneumatikoi. He is quite literally a free man, beyond good and evil. As the boy runs from the church the scene described by Scott is full of  subtle Nietzschean imagery. The “girls with yellow hair” walk sensuously along the roads, calling “innocent, exciting things to the “tall young men from the farms” working on the grain. A “blue sirocco” wind trembles nervously over the wheat. The wind is no match, however, for “the blond Northern girls”. For Nietzsche, the gentle breath of the sirocco — a light Mediterranean wind of the Sahara desert — personified the weak and lazy will of Christian mediocrity that was grossly inferior to the powerful winds of the north. God’s suffocating breath was blowing meekly across the wheat fields of the young boy’s Midwestern hometown. The sirocco was no match for the winds of the north just as the church is no match for the precocious sexuality of the girls in the story. In the boy’s eyes at least, the townspeople have a lazy servility to God. Self-realization would be impossible in this town. The compromises they had made had been cowardly. Nietzsche thought it better to live amid the ice and thunderous roaring wind of the north than the warm, fatalistic breezes of the tropical south, which, he believed, sapped the energy out of man and curbed the egotism of the strong — “a conspiracy of the chandala against the free functioning of their superiors and the free progress of mankind”. The majority of men “preferred delusion to the truth”. In Nietzsche’s view it was the winds of the Sirocco that weakened the will. Christianity had waged a war against the highest type of man.

Writing in 1973, William A. Fahey would dismiss the allusion to Sedan as “cheap and pretentious”, wrongly assuming that Scott’s only intention was to convey what he himself might well have described as the “romantic glamour of an adolescent dream”. [51] Despite it being perfectly consistent with the way in which Scott presents Blatchford Sarnemington as the boy’s armour-plated inner retreat — his “garnished front” — Fahey suggests it fails in its “desired effect”. I think Fahey couldn’t more wrong on this point. As pretentious as it might be, the image provides a key to unlocking the frustrating inner conflict that characterises the story and the disunity of consciousness which divided Scott’s religious self-image at this time. But to explain it, we may need to do a little digging.

The Battle of Sedan

The Battle of Sedan, which was fought during the Franco-Prussian War in the late 1800s, was a decisive moment in the collapse of the Papal States. Wilhelm I and his chancellor, Otto von Bismarck of Prussia (a German kingdom) were both passionate Lutherans. As Garibaldi’s rebel troops advanced on Rome, a series of swift Prussian and German victories in the first week of September 1870 ensured the defeat of Catholic France. The French had seriously miscalculated. Knowing that a critical stage in the conflict had been reached, Napoleon III had recalled his garrison from Rome, exposing it to a final rebel onslaught. At the end of the Battle of Sedan, Napoleon III was captured and a new French government was announced. Bismarck’s ‘White Cuirassiers’ had triumphed. Rome was taken by rebel troops a few weeks later and declared the capital of a unified Italy. As a result the Papal State was annexed and absorbed into the Kingdom of Italy, Pope Pius IX being made a virtual prisoner at St Peter’s Basilica in Rome.

Shortly after Germany’s victory at Sedan, von Bismarck launched an aggressive campaign against the power of the Roman Catholic Church by pushing the secular liberal principles that had been taking shape in Germany ever since the Age of Enlightenment. Bismarck’s objective was to remove the teeth from the Catholic Church; that is, strip it of any influence it had in German government. This ‘Kulturkampf’ as it was known subsequently took root in Minnesota in the late 19^th century and early 20^th century as the Lutheran German-Americans grappled with the significant inroads that the Catholic Church was making in American politics. What possessed Scott to use an allusion to the charge of the Lutheran Cuirassiers at Sedan might never be known, but it almost certainly wouldn’t have been lost on any of his former classmates and teachers back at Newman. It was a military defeat with disastrous consequences for Rome and the Catholic Church. Scott’s friend Shane Leslie was clearly familiar with the rout. In his 1946 book, The Irish Tangle for English Readers, he used the battle as an illustration of English Protestant betrayal: “English neutrality enabled the Prussian to bully and menace Europe for a half century after France fell at Sedan … In time all England’s allies turned and stung her like vipers: even the Italian kingdom she had created out of the Pope’s demesnes.” [52] It had been a humiliating defeat not just for the French but for Irish Catholics — France’s commander, Patrice de MacMahon, captured at Sedan that day, was of devout Irish stock. [53] The books on Catholic history that Fitzgerald would have read at Newman could not have failed to address the far-reaching penalties the defeat incurred. As a consequence, we shouldn’t be blasé about the deeply confrontational nature of Scott’s allusion, as obscure as it may seem to us now. What we have here is an eleven year Catholic boy celebrating, however unconsciously, a significant Papal defeat by the forces of Lutheran Germany. The fact that that the boy’s family have a painting depicting the charge at home is either an allusion to the Miller family’s German heritage or a darkly amusing crack at the church by Scott. Either way, it’s a little confusing and may ultimately serve to highlight the often contradictory nature of cultural and ethnic loyalties experienced by America’s immigrants in the early Twentieth Century.

As difficult as it is to follow the logic, it’s obvious that the boy has had a light go on in his brain. Attempting to make sense of the priest’s rambling and disturbed narrative, the boy is imagining that God has forgiven him his original sin of lying for the heroism and ingenuity he has shown in the confessional box. He’s having his Walter Mitty daydream, and it’s at this precise moment that something rather profound begins to dawn on him: the route to redemption and spiritual wellbeing isn’t through some dull and monotonous admission of guilt but through applying his imagination — his poetic and creative vision, or his lying skills rather — to the challenges that God presents him with in life. If Scott had allowed the novel to progress as he had planned originally, this would probably have been the moment that the eleven-year old Rudolph Miller runs out of the church, travels north to Lake Superior and becomes Jay Gatsby — the white-suited ‘cuirassier’ of Long Island.

One of the very first things that Nick reveals about himself in the novel is that whilst he was at college he was “privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men”. For this he says he was accused, somewhat “unjustly”, of being a politician. ‘You can tell Nick anything’, that’s what he’s there for. His place in the novel is to hear the “intimate revelations of young men” — young men like Tom Buchannan and Jay Gatsby, and young women like Jordan Baker. And what makes Nick especially suited to this, is that he is capable of “reserving judgement” and offering “tolerance”. [54] Contrary to what Nick tells us, the picture that he presents of himself to the reader isn’t that of a ‘politician’ but a priest —an option I think Scott may have originally preferred before the risks of being ‘too obvious’ brought their own weight to bear upon the story. A good friend of mine, a Catholic, once tried to explain the experience of having someone hear a confession. They described it as being like a light going on in a house that had been in complete and utter darkness. The aspects of our lives that had failed would be corrected, our sins wiped clean and our souls would be restored. Computers have a system restore feature that works in much the same way when the system gets damaged or when files become corrupted. Hitting the system restore button reboots the system, erases the damage and we are reconciled with all the good work and progress we feared we had lost.

When Nick leaves Gatsby by the pool at the end of the novel, Gatsby seems to have found some inner peace. He has told Nick everything about his life — his poor upbringing, his debauched adventures with Dan Cody — and he knows at this point that the best of his days are behind him. As he contemplates using the pool for the first time, there’s a quiet and unapologetic sense of acceptance and resignation about him. Despite everything, he still believes. Gatsby believes in the light at the end of the dock, just as he believes in Daisy. Yes, he has been given precious few reasons to believe in Daisy, but he still dares to believe in their eventual reconciliation. It’s a celebration of faith partly obscured by doubts. The doubts in this instance though, are Nick’s. Gatsby’s “incorruptible dream” is left intact. As Nick leaves him at the pool he flashes him a ‘radiant and understanding smile’. It’s a gesture of reassurance and forgiveness: “you’re worth the whole damn bunch together,” he shouts as he leaves. They have just had breakfast together — their ‘last supper’. Gatsby has confessed his lies, whereas Daisy and Tom Buchanan continue to live their own lives in complete and shameless denial. It was Daisy who was driving the car when it hit and killed Tom’s mistress, Myrtle, just as it was Daisy who had refused to stop the car. Gatsby has taken the rap and his debt to society is paid. He has offered himself up as the ultimate sacrifice to the cult of “careless people”. Nick retracting his hand from Tom when they meet in New York some weeks after Gatsby’s funeral denies him the absolution that Tom assumes is rightfully his. Their sins are not forgiven and Tom and Daisy Buchanan retreat back into their wealth, their vast carelessness and lies, unabsolved by Nick. [55]

Did Scott genuinely ditch the prologue to the novel because it didn’t fit the ‘neatness’ of the book’s design or because he was talked out of it by Leslie? Leslie had already reprimanded his former student for using letters from Fay in his first novel; was he similarly concerned that the world would draw the wrong conclusion and equate the wild-eyed Father Schwartz with his late, and deeply respected friend? The nervous breakdown that Fay had suffered whilst serving as Episcopalian minister in 1907 was well known among his friends, but whether it resulted in the same mournful confusion as the priest in the story isn’t known. Either way, if Scott had felt even the least bit uneasy about it then Shane Leslie was almost certainly going to be offended. Even if the likeness had been coincidental it was difficult to deny that there was an uncanny and often uncomfortable resemblance to Leslie’s ‘mystical’ and tortured friend. Handing it to Mencken American Mercury, a repository of America’s “gaudiest and damnedest” material certainly kept it away from those who were likely to be most offended.

In his review of This Side of Paradise Leslie makes a special point of correcting Scott on one important fact: Father Fay had no misgivings at all about his conversion to Catholicism. The fact that’s Leslie is correcting Scott, however, suggests the issue had at least been raised. If this is the case, then the mental collapse of the priest in Absolution and his disturbed, abstracted ramblings may well have been a little too close to the bone. Obviously, Scott may have been left smarting after the rebuke he received from Leslie after using Fay’s letters, but he was certainly never anything less than respectful. Scott may no longer have sought Leslie’s approval as he had done in his youth, but neither is there any evidence that he wanted to hurt or embarrass him — certainly not now Leslie had just been made Chamberlain to the Pope in Rome. There would have been far too much at stake. [56] Fay and Leslie had both warned Scott of the arrogant pursuit of notoriety at the expense of others. Scott was a very clever man, Leslie duly acknowledged that, but as he had said in his letter, “men are only clever when they are on the pry for forbidden fruit of mind and body and better still for mystical or even non-existent fruitage.” [57] Delving too deeply into one’s own private affairs, or the affairs of a mutual friend, would almost certainly lead to a fall. After Fay had ‘bequeathed’ Scott to Leslie in his last will and testament, Leslie felt it his was duty to ensure that Scott’s talent “harms nobody” including Scott himself. [58]

Whatever you make of Absolution, there’s no denying that it shows a lack of proper respect for the Catholic Church. Scribners had a rather Conservative bent and were generally wary of courting controversy or causing offence. As the epitome of self-censorship, it’s hard to imagine them agreeing to its inclusion — even if Scott had offered it to them, which it seems he didn’t. [59] Scott may have been impatient for the Catholic Church to change but not everyone shared his view. Americanism in the Catholic Church was still a problematic and sensitive subject. Few would have wanted to reverse the progress the church had made in American politics or stoke-up the kind of vitriol unleashed by the Knights of Luther and its organ, the Aurora Menace, especially at a time when the Vatican was supporting the US backlash against the world’s gravest new threat, Russian ‘Bolshevism’. As soon as he gained power in October 1917 Lenin had launched an aggressive campaign against the church. America’s commitment to eliminating the Soviet Menace was shared by Rome, it’s new ally. Aside from Leslie, Scribners had several other popular Catholic authors on their books including Mrs Humphry Ward (Mary Augusta Ward) and French novelist, René Bazin. It also had a sound relationship with Scott’s old university Princeton, which had done more than most to calm the troubled waters of sectarianism by opening their doors to Catholic, Jewish and other non-Presbyterian students in 1906 after ditching religious testing. In discarding the intended prologue, Scott would have found he had even greater freedom to address these urgent personal issues, albeit at a more figurative and subliminal level without causing the scale of offence it would have caused at Scribners. Afterall, as Nietzsche fond of saying, the lies of the poet often offered a more profound way of telling the truth. And then there were the monetary incentives. Carving off an unnecessary portion of the novel would have its dividends in cash. Magazines were willing to pay handsomely stories like these and the novel would easily carry its loss. It was a bit like baking a cake and making a little bit of extra cash by selling it off in slices. In the end he received just $118.00 for it. It wasn’t anything like the fees he would pick up from the Saturday Evening Post, but at least Mencken was prepared to put it out there uncensored.

On balance though, it seems more likely that Scott’s decision to ditch Absolution as a prologue to The Great Gatsby and approach the novel from a fresh angle was based on a realisation that in its original format at least, the book that he had written was too personal and too ‘Catholic’ in scope; he needed something more universal. Blatchford Sernemington might work as a name and alter-ego within the narrow context of a haunted little grotesque like Absolution, but in a more contemporary setting it could only ever sound slightly ridiculous. Once Fitzgerald brought the action forward from 1885 to 1922, the name seemed no longer relevant. It needed something more of its age; something hipper and less conceited, but which still retained an old and aristocratic flavour. ‘Jay’ was stylish, modern and über-American — a popular choice of name among immigrants looking to blend seamlessly into their new surroundings [60] ‘Gatsby’, on the otherhand, was ‘old world’. It sounded graceful and rather elegant.

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[1] ‘Echoes of the Jazz Age’, F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack Up, Penguin, 1979, pp.14-19

[2] A Life in Letters’, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Simon and Schuster, 1995, p.63

[3] The Far Side of Paradise; a Biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Mizener, Arthur , p.151, Houghton Mifflin, 1965

[4] Scott’s biographer Matthew J. Bruccoli suggests that Scott may have started his ledger in 1922.

[5] ‘Homage to the Victorians’, F. Scott Fitzgerald, New York Tribune, May 14, 1922, p.6

[6] Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda : the Love Letters of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Zelda Fitzgerald, Letter to Scott, April 1919, Bloomsbury, 2002, pp.31-32

[7] Ibid, p.27

[8] ‘The Popular Girl’ (1922), Bits of Paradise : 21 Uncollected Stories by F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Scribner, 1973, p.54

[9] ‘The Original Follies Girl’ (July 1929), Bits of Paradise : 21 Uncollected Stories by F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Scribner, 1973, pp. 211-217

[10] ‘Modernism’, Cincinnati Catholic Telegraph, April 26, 1923, p.11

[11] ‘Flappers Ugliness Arraigned by Vezin: Bunco Art Denounced’, The New York Herald, May 10, 1922, p.8

[12] ‘Cosmic patterns ..’ In a letter to Scott that Zelda mailed to Scott from hospital in 1937, Zelda wrote: “The soul of the artist is beautiful and precious and without the artist neither would we be able to decipher the purpose of life nor would we be able to correlate our lives with the cosmic patterns.” See: Dearest Scott, Dearest Zelda, p.236.

[13] ‘De Tertiom Modo Man’, Sermo XX, Passionis Domini Nostri Iesu Christi, Albertus Magnus OP, 1615, pp11-112

[14] TGG, p.152

[15] ‘Absolution’, The Collected Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Penguin, 1986, pp.398-408

[16] TGG, pp.104-105

[17] TSOP, p.27

[18] Heart of Darkness (1899), Joseph Conrad, Penguin, 1995, pp.17-20

[19] Heart of Darkness (1899), Joseph Conrad, Penguin, 1995, pp.17-20

[20] Dear Scott, Dear Max, Scribners, 1973, p.134

[21] The Wasteland (1922), T.S Eliot, Selected Poems, Faber & Faber 1982, p.51

[22] The Hollow Men (1925), ibid , pp.77-80

[23] TGG, p.69

[24] ‘Recent French Books, Manifeste du Surréalisme by André Breton’, Eugene Rossetti, The Chicago Tribune (Paris Edition), December 1, 1924, p.5; Manifeste du surréalisme, André Breton, Éditions du Sagittaire, October 15, 1924

[25] Mary Louise Reynolds (1891-1950). The artist from Minnesota who became romantically involved with Laurence Vail and Marcel Duchamp.

[26] ‘Manifestoes of Surrealism’ (1924), André Breton, trans by Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane, Ann Arbor Paperbacks, The University of Michigan Press, 1972, pp.3-6

[27] “The constant flicker of men and women … “ (TGG, p.57) “The sunlight through the girders making a constant flicker …” (TGG, p.67)

[28] ‘New Star Proves to be our Nearest Neighbour’, Coshocton Tribune, February 5, 1918, p.3; Two Faint Stars with Large Proper Motion, Abstract, Adriaan  van Maanen, Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, December 1917.

[29] ‘Are the Stars Really Where We See Them?’, Washington Times, September 10, 1922; ‘Einstein’s Theory of Relativity Confirmed’, Burlington Times, April 12, 1923,  p.12

[30] Human, All Too Human: a Book for Free Spirits, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, University of Nebraska Book, 1996, p.102

[31] ‘Book Four’, The Gay Science, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufman, Vintage Books, 1974, p.273. As Walter Kaufman explains in his commentary, the idea of Eternal Recurrence was not Nietzsche’s own, but a development of existing theories and philosophical tropes.  

[32] TGG, p.25

[33] ‘Book Four’, The Gay Science, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufman, Vintage Books, 1974, p.272.

[34] A water-clock is one oldest time-measuring instruments. It can look a little like an egg timer. Also known as a clepsydra.

[35] The words Nietzsche used to describe Kaiser Friedrich III.

[36] ‘Lucifer to the Archbishop of Canterbury; an Open Letter’, H.P. Blavatsky, Lucifer Magazine, 1887. The poet W.B. Yeats who brought his influence to Scott’s novel Tender is the Night had also been stirred by Blavatsky’s Theosophical Society.

[37] Conversations with F. Scott Fitzgerald, F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1896-1940, University Press of Mississippi, 2004, p.121-122. Nietzsche and Theosophists like Blavatsky, both drew upon philosophy of Zoroastrianism. The Zarathustra of Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra is just another name for Zoroaster, the spiritual founder of Zoroastrianism.

[38] Its reputation as the City of Light had started under France’s ‘Sun King’ Louis XIV, who introduced lanterns throughout the city to deter crime.

[39] ‘The Beacon and Projectors at the Eiffel Tower’, Scientific American Supplement, No. 705, July 6, 1889, p. 11260. The colours provide the basis of both the French Tricolor and the American flag.

[40] TGG, p.8

[41] A Poetic Philosophy of Language: Nietzsche and Wittgenstein’s Expressivism, Philip Mills, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2002, p.99

[42] The New Romanticism, A.R. Orage, The Theosophical Review, Vol. 40, March 1907, pp.50-56

[43] Amusing the Million, John F. Kasson, pp.65-66

[44] Dear Scott, Dear Max, Letter to Max, April 16, 1924, Letter to Scott, pp.70-71. We might infer from statements Scott makes in the letter that he had revealed the ‘vaguest’ of plot outlines to Max Perkins sometime in January 1924 (“it is only in the last four months that I’ve realized ..”).

[45]  Life in Letters, Scott to max Perkins, June 18^th, 1924, p.76

[46] Dear Scott, Dear Max, Letter to Max, Letter to Max, April 10, 1924, pp.69-70

[47] ‘An Instance of Apparent Plagiarism: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Willa Cather, and the First Gatsby Manuscript’, Matthew J. Bruccoli, The Princeton University Library Chronicle, Spring 1978, Vol. 39, No. 3, pp. 171-178

[48] Shane Leslie, Talbot Square, Hyde Park, September 3, 1920, F. Scott Fitzgerald Papers, Princeton University, Box 46, Folder 17 – Leslie, Shane (C0187)

[49] TGG, p.8

[50] Absolution, p.411. This was a battle that took place in the Franco-Prussian War of the 1870s. The cuirassiers were a heavy, armoured cavalry division. It’s interesting to note that the painter, Elizabeth Butler, a friend of Shane Leslie had been preparing sketches for an oil painting that would depict the French Cuirassiers preparing the dawn charge at Sedan. She mentions this in her autobiography of 1922 (Constable & Co Ltd, p. 111).

[51] F. Scott Fitzgerald : and the American Dream, William A. Fahey, Crowell, 1973, p.11; ‘Homage to the Victorians’, F. Scott Fitzgerald, F. Scott Fitzgerald on Authorship, University of South Carolina Press, p.73

[52] The Irish Tangle for English Readers, Shane Leslie, Macdonald & Company Limited, 1946, pp.230-234

[53] The MacMahons were the former Lords of Corcu Baiscind who lost their lands in the 16^th Century under Cromwell.

[54] Ibid, p7

[55] “I couldn’t forgive him … their vast carelessness”, TGG, p.170

[56] Shane Leslie to F. Scott Fitzgerald, Paris, April 3, 1922, F. Scott Fitzgerald Papers, Princeton University, Box 46, Folder 17 – Leslie, Shane (C0187)

[57] Shane Leslie, Talbot Square, Hyde Park, September 3, 1920, F. Scott Fitzgerald Papers, Princeton University, Box 46, Folder 17 – Leslie, Shane (C0187)

[58] Shane Leslie, Talbot Square, Hyde Park, September 3, 1920, F. Scott Fitzgerald Papers, Princeton University, Box 46, Folder 17 – Leslie, Shane (C0187)

[59] As mentioned earlier, in a letter from his Scribners editor, Max Perkins on April 16, 1924, Max reveals that Scott had given them the ‘vaguest’ of outlines for a novel tentatively titled, The Great Gatsby, written the previous summer, which included a prologue we know today as ‘Absolution’.  I am not aware of any record in which Scribners expressed any reservations about the novel as it existed at this stage.

[60] The surname Gatsby can be traced to Gaddesby, a parish in Leicestershire, England. In the 20th Century Gaddesby Hall was the home of faux-British Liberal Politician and motor-racing driver, ‘Baron’ Maurice de Forest, adopted don of Baron Maurice de Hirsch. He had converted to Roman Catholicism from Judaism in 1904. During the First World War attempts had been made to prosecute de Forest as an enemy sympathiser as result of his close family ties to Austria Hungry. His real father had been an American Circus performer. Like Leslie, de Forest was a close friend of Winston Churchill, whose childhood friend Ethel Gerard owned the Gaddesby estate.