The Great Gatsby question

In his memoir, A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway devotes a few chapters to Scott Fitzgerald (and Zelda), among which The Great Gatsby is prominently mentioned. Here are a few notable excerpts which convey Hemingway's high regard for Fitzgerald as a writer, and specifically in regard to The Great Gatsby.

(p. 151) "He [Scott] spoke slightingly but without bitterness of everything he had written, and I knew his new book must be very good for him to speak, without bitterness, of the faults of past books. He wanted me to read the new book, The Great Gatsby, as soon as he could get his last and only copy back from someone he had loaned it to. To hear him talk of it, you would never know how very good it was, except that he had the shyness about it that all non-conceited writers have when they have done something very fine, and I hoped he would get the book quickly so that I might read it.

Scott told me that he had heard from Maxwell Perkins that the book was not selling well but that it had very fine reviews. I do not remember whether it was that day or much later, that he showed me a review by Gilbert Seldes that could not have been better.

(p. 174) ...Scott brought the book over. It had a garish dust jacket and I remember being embarrassed by the violence, bad taste and slippery look of it. It looked the book jacket for a book of bad science fiction. Scott told me not to be put off by it, that it had to do with a billboard along the highway in Long Island that was important in the story. He said he had liked the jacket and now he didn't like it. I took it off to read the book.

When I had finished the book I knew that no matter what Scott did, nor how he behaved, I must know it was like a sickness and be of any help I could to him and try to be a good friend. He had many good, good friends, more than anyone I knew. But I enlisted as one more, whether I could be of any use to him or not. If he could write a book as fine as The Great Gatsby I was sure that he cold write an even better one. I did not know Zelda yet, and so I did not know the terrible odds that were against him.

So, Hemingway didn't like the book cover, but he practically raved about TGG, and at the time, Hemingway had not finished his own first novel, The Sun Also Rises.

However, one has to consider that this memoir was written in the late 1950s (from contemporaneous notes and journals recovered in a long forgotten trunk at the Ritz hotel in Paris), long after Fitzgerald's reputation had posthumously soared and sales of The Great Gatsby along with it.

Hemingway comes across as a hero of his own making by lionizing the then deceased Fitzgerald. I'm not sure how to judge this, or if I should even try. But a reader can't escape the feeling that Hemingway's predicting greatness for Fitzgerald, when Fitzgerald's reputation had already long been established.


Insight into Fitzerald's apparent bisexuality is revealed in Hemingway's comments in A Moveable Feast, posthumously published in 1964 long after Scott's death and written from Hemingway's contemporaneous journals recovered in 1958.

At first reading I thought It was like a sickness meant Scott's alcoholism, but homosexuality makes more sense in light of the way Fitzgerald dealt with the subject in both The Great Gatsby and Tender is the Night. In this telling comment, was Hemingway throwing Fitzgerald under the bus by outing him, while pretending to be friendly, or was he expressing genuine sympathy at significant personal professional risk?

Scott Fitzgerald died young, but his sexuality bleeds through in Nick Carraway, asking us to understand and accept the reality of intra-gender attraction. Finally, nearly a hundred years later, perhaps we are.