It’s 11.30am on Friday, June 23, 2023. I’ve been rifling the archives and punching in keywords for the past few hours. Suddenly I’m excited. I’ve found a report in a copy of Variety Magazine dated July 27, 1927. It’s unlikely to have been seen by another pair of eyes for close to a 100 years….
Category: Scott Fitzgerald
14 Jones Street — A Failed Jazz Suicide
I want you to close your eyes and try to picture Gatsby’s parties. The corps of caterers have come and gone and left behind them a landscape of luxury. You have several hundred feet of canvas marquees and enough twinkling fairy lights to make a Christmas tree of Gatsby’s enchanted garden. And then there’s the…
“A German Spy During the War” — The Real Jay Gatsby and a New York Spy Hunt
If you’ve read The Great Gatsby—or watched any of the movie adaptations — you’ll remember the scene. Before Nick Carraway ever lays eyes on his host, Jay Gatsby exists as this mysterious, elusive figure whispered over champagne glasses and jazz. We’ve already seen Daisy Buchanan jump out of her skin at the mere mention of…
‘The Protagonist of the Great Gatsby’ — Hallam Keep Williams, Gerlach and Havana
During research carried out for the eight-part Audible podcast, American Dreamer: Who Was Jay Gatsby?, veteran New York journalist, Joe Nocera shared some tantalising new information. A brand new report had come to light. According to a story published in the San Francisco Call in April 1950, ‘Baron Max von Gerlach’ had arrived in Havana,…
The Catholic Church in Gatsby Part II — Sigourney Fay & The Newman School for Boys
TURNING BACK THE CLOCK TO 1885 When Scott finally updated his editor Max Perkins on the progress of his third novel in June 1920, he teased him with a rather surprising spoiler: the new book would be set in the American Midwest in 1885 and would have “a Catholic element.” [52] 1885 had been an…
The Pink-Suited Polytropoi – The Philosophy of Nietzsche and The Great Gatsby
He waved his hand toward the book-shelves. They’re real … absolutely real … have pages and everything. I thought they’d be a nice durable cardboard. Matter of fact, they’re absolutely real … It’s a bona-fide piece of printed matter. It fooled me. This fella’s a regular Belasco. It’s a triumph. What thoroughness!What realism! — The…
‘Bob Handley in the gloom of the Cecil’ — F. Scott Fitzgerald in London, July 1921
“There was London, and Wopping with Shane Leslie and strawberries as big as tomatoes at Lady Randolph Churchills. There was St. Johns Ervine’s wooden leg and Bob Handley in the gloom of the Cecil.” [1] Bob’s name appeared among several names and places mentioned in entries in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ledger covering his trip to…
Like Kant at the Church Steeple
There was nothing to look at from under the tree except Gatsby’s enormous house, so I stared at it, like Kant at his church steeple, for half an hour — The Great Gatsby [2] The Catholic ‘Americanist’ priest, Isaac Hecker, believed that when Kant had asked the question, ‘what can I know?’ and answered it…
A Circus Comes to Town — Gatsby, Gurdjieff and The New Romanticism
In 1907, Alfred Richard Orage, an acolyte of Nietzsche, would write an influential essay for The Theosophical Review in which he made an appeal for a ‘New Romanticism’: “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,…
Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald at the Embassy Club, London
During their stays in London in 1921 and 1925, their London host, Shane Leslie, introduced Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald to an illustrious parade of British dignitaries that included his aunt, Lady Randolph (Jennie) Churchill — the New York-born mother of Britain’s Secretary of State for the Colonies, and Leslie’s cousin, Winston Churchill — and the…