Eamonn Fitzgerald's Rainy Day

The Rainy Day annual, mid-August tradition of re-reading The Great Gatsby is set for today. The custom began some 20 years ago during a magical mid-August holiday on what F. Scott Fitzgerald called "that slender riotous island which extends itself due east of New York". Fitzgerald captured an era in nine short chapters and he captured Long Island's appeal for the hedonistic and the nostalgic in this immortal paragraph:

"The old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes — a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby's house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder."

Now, Rainy Day visitors will be aware that our current reading programme is dominated by the major new book from Niall Ferguson titled The War Of The World: History's Age of Hatred, and it so happens that the Scottish historian's work and the American novelist's masterpiece dovetail in an important aspect. Ferguson spends a great deal of time on the complexities of anti-Semitism, a mania that led to industrialized murder in Europe on a scale never seen before or since, and what's interesting is that Fitzgerald anticipates, chillingly, the coming firestorm. When The Great Gatsby was forming in his mind, one of the decade's popular books was The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy by Lothrop Stoddard, and when we first meet Tom Buchanan, he's reading:

" The Rise of the Coloured Empires by this man Goddard… It's a fine book and everybody ought to read it. The idea is that if we don't look out the white race will be — will be utterly submerged. It's all scientific stuff; it's been proved… we're Nordics… and we've produced all the things that go to make civilization — oh, science and art and all that."

Fitzgerald's book appeared in 1925 and Buchanan prefigures the ugly types who would prop up fascism's bloodlust with pseudo-scientific arguments a decade later. Then, there's Meyer Wolfshiem, the Jewish capitalist hiding Shylock-like behind, of all things, "The Swastika Holding Company". The symbol did not have a sinister meaning at the time, but the brilliance of The Great Gatsby is that Fitzgerald's antennae are perfectly attuned to the signals that were in the air. No wonder, then, that the book remains "Great" because along with describing the "transitory enchanted moment", it prepares us for the coming defeat of youth and idealism. Here goes: "In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice..."