April 8, 2025: A Great Gatsby Centennial: Three Phone Calls

[On April 10th,1925, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby was publishedby Charles Scribner’s Sons. While I havemy problems with Gatsby, it remains one of our most influential and importantnovels, and one that opens up so many AmericanStudies contexts. So this week I’llhighlight a handful of them, leading up to a weekend post featuring fellowGatsbyStudiers!]

On threephone calls that illustrate the classic novel’s thoughtful portrayal of Moderntechnologies.

When youteach a book as often as I have F.Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925),you start to focus on different layers each time. Along with the dialogues withother authors/works like Nella Larsen’s Passingthat I talk about in that hyperlinked post, in my last couple times readingand teaching the novel I’ve thought a lot about just how many early 20thcentury technologies play central roles in its story. That’s especially true ofautomobiles, of course; not only in the book’s climactic events (which I won’tspoil here for the few people who managed not to read Fitzgerald’s novel inhigh school), but in the central presence (geographically as well assymbolically) of Wilson’sgas station and auto repair shop. It’s true of Hollywood film, both inpresences at Gatsby’s parties (andFitzgerald’s career) and in the novel’s underlying themes ofsurface and depth, illusion and reality. But it’s also certainly true of thestill relativelynew technology, particularly when it comes to the idea of every household havingone, that was the telephone.

As we meetthe novel’s main characters in the opening few chapters, Fitzgerald uses acouple key phone calls to present mysterious and ambiguous sides to them. InChapter 1, as Nick Carraway visits the beautiful home of his cousin Daisy andher husband Tom for a dinner party, Tom gets a mysterious phone call; Daisysuspects that it’s his mistress on the other end, but of course can’t know forcertain to whom he’s speaking. In Chapter 3, as Nick attends one of the lavishparties at his neighbor Jay Gatsby’s mansion, Gatsby gets a mysterious call;other partygoers suggest that it’s a criminal business partner of Gatsby’s onthe other end, but of course no one knows for certain to whom he’s speaking.These calls reveal both men as defined by secrets, dynamics that preciselybecause of their ambiguity are a source of intense speculation by those aroundthem. And those secrets can only be maintained in these scenes because of thetechnology of the phone, without which their conversants would have to visit inperson (or write a letter, which of course would be far less immediate).

[SeriousSPOILERS in this paragraph.] At the end of the novel, after all theaforementioned climactic events have unfolded, Nick has his own, quitedifferent phone call. He is trying to organize a funeral for Gatsby (or maybeJames Gatz, since his father who knows him by that name is one of the few whoattends that tragic event), and manages to speak with Gatsby’s elusive businesspartner Meyer Wolfshiem on the phone. In one of the novel’s onlymoments where a character says directly what he’s feeling and thinking, shareswhat seems at least to be the unvarnished truth (even when Gatsby and Nick havetheir heart-to-hearts, it’s always an open question whether Gatsby is tellingthe truth), Wolfshiem confesses to Nick that he can’t possibly be seen at thefuneral, that it would be far too destructive for his reputation andrelationships. This is the side of the telephone that allows us to be morehonest, more ourselves, in its conversations than we might manage to be if hadto face someone and something in the flesh. Just another layer to howFitzgerald’s novel reflects the technologies and contexts of its rapidlyevolving Modernist world.

NextGatsbyStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What doyou think? Takes on Fitzgerald’s novel or its contexts?