My friend Metropolitan Savas posted this comment today:
In May 1940, a few months before his death at age 44, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote to his editor Max Perkins about "The Great Gatsby," Fitzgerald's third novel, which had come out to disappointing reviews and poor sales in 1925. (Fitzgerald was to die years before the novel was rediscovered.)
"I wish I was in print. It will be odd a year or so from now when [my daughter] Scottie assures her friends I was an author and finds that no book is procurable....
"Would the 25 cent press keep "Gatsby" in the public eye -- or is the book unpopular. Has it had its chance? Would a popular reissue in that series with a preface not by me but by one of my admirers -- I can maybe pick one -- make it a favorite with class rooms, profs, lovers of English prose -- anybody. But to die, so completely and unjustly after having given so much. Even now there is little published in American fiction that doesn't slightly bare my stamp -- in a small way I was an original."
I've read that before, but today it got me thinking about the book, and how some things take time. I first read Gatsby as an adult, when serialized one summer by the New York Times. Initially, I thought it a trite melodrama. I enjoyed it well enough, but I like pulp fiction, too. This is the Great American Novel? Well, yes.
It took weeks for Fitzgerald's book to sink in, for me to appreciate it.
I felt the same way about Cheap Trick when I saw them. Sure, they could play. They were tight, virtuostic, well rehearsed but I couldn't get past the unison riffing in the service of power pop rock and roll I had heard a zillion times. No hint of jam. They were Glen Miller when I wanted Charlie Parker.
I'm not saying Gatsby is the power pop of modern literature--need to think through that analogy--but I learned a lesson about not always trusting initial reactions. My constitutional law professor Marty Margulies always warned against trusting initial reactions to First Amendment questions. He urged doing the analysis, because restrictions on expression, or religious exercise, often seem reasonable at first blush until you think them through.
