I was aghast to find so many racist portraits in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby … especially a preponderance of stupid white men and women. In contrast, I found only one bad Jew and hardly a bad person of color to speak of … F. must have been a secret supporter of the Black Zoinists. Yes, I am certain of it.
To read Wolfsheim’s portrait as an anti-Semitic one is to miss its absurdities and F.’s ironic symbolism. Wofsheim wears cufflinks made of human molars and owns the Swastika Holding Company. Isn’t this the most absurd irony? Imagine—a Jewish character adopts the Nazi symbol and mimics its depraved inhumanity before it happens. What could the author’s intention have been? Perhaps, in so badly caricaturing a Jew he warned us, not only of Nazism, but that no race, nation, ethnic group or tribe has a monopoly on evil and stupidity, and the current treatment of Palestinians by Jews is evidence enough that history teaches its lessons very poorly indeed.
Why give us Wolfscheim at all? Was F. playing both sides of the table, catering to the then popular anti-Semitic sentiment in America while cleverly and quietly retracting the anti-Semitic portrait by providing a hidden critique of human behavior that transcends race? Why shouldn’t a man cater? Even intelligent men must earn their bread.
Let me leave The Great Gatsby for the right reason, that is, for its newspaper-like quality. Reading it, I feel like a paparazzi reporter spying on the corrupt well-to-do. The Great Fitz has passed moral vomit off as literature—and quite easily, and not surprisingly, for nowadays moral-vomit is accepted standard of literature.
Finally, let me also commend Fitzgerald for the right reasons; after all, The Great Gatsby makes a strong case against the power of love, romantic love in particular.
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“It’s all beautiful when you read it […] but when you write it down plain it’s like a week in a nuthouse.”
Ironically, this quotation, from “Financing Finnegan,” applies to F. Fitzgerald, and likely does so quite intentionally, at least judging from the identity of the double F initials in both the story and the author.
The narrator in “Financing Finnegan” is an author making observations about another author, namely Finnegan. The narrator is likely a mask for the real author. Therefore, we might say the following: F’s remarkable observation about the false or fictional F’s fiction actually applies to a large number of “beautiful” books, not only his own but … well, I will not name names here.
