By Stuart Mitchner

A little over two months ago, Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer was all the rage, and Princeton and the Garden Theatre were at the center of the cinematic universe. A little over 10 years ago, in May 2013, Baz Luhrman’s big, jazzy, flamboyantly picturesque improvisation on The Great Gatsby was all the rage, and Princeton and the Garden Theatre were again at the center of the cinematic universe. One big difference is that Oppenheimer himself, or Hollywood’s version of him, was the hero, or anti-hero, of the celebration. Ten years ago the true hero, Gatsby’s creator F. Scott Fitzgerald, seemed to be the forgotten man, overshadowed by his own creation.

As I wrote at the time, “Gatsby lives, while his creator, the poet laureate of Old Nassau, is a tragic phantom. The charismatic Gatsby is front and center along with the Great Baz and a lot of chatter about poor boys, rich girls, and the American dream, while Fitzgerald seems to be hanging on to his creation’s coattails.” And when the author died in 1940, a self-confessed Jazz Age has-been, the novel appeared to be dead as well. Dorothy Parker famously made the connection, so the story goes, with her remark, “The poor son of a bitch” at Fitzgerald’s passing, a direct quote of the comment made by the only one of Gatsby’s party people who bothered to come to his funeral.

The Man in the Library

Since a first edition of The Great Gatsby is among the headline items at this year’s Friends and Foundation of the Princeton Public Library Book Sale, it makes sense to begin in the “high Gothic library” of Gatsby’s Long Island mansion. As the novel’s narrator Nick Carraway wanders into a room “paneled with carved English oak, and probably transported complete from some ruin overseas,” he is greeted by “a stout, middle-aged man with enormous owl-eyed spectacles” sitting “somewhat drunk on the edge of a great table, staring with unsteady concentration at the shelves of books.” He’s quite excited, having discovered that the books are “absolutely real — have pages and everything.” To prove it, he goes to the bookcases and comes back with a volume of the Stoddard Lectures, presenting it as “a bona fide piece of printed matter … What thoroughness! What realism! Knew when to stop too — didn’t cut the pages.”

Would you believe that the only one of the Gatsby crowd who came to his funeral and made the famous remark was the man in the library?

The World of Books

My first exposure to secondhand books came at the age of 10. I can still see the row of shops along both sides of Fourth Avenue in the bookish gloom of a late December Manhattan afternoon. My father turned me loose in the general direction of the Hardy Boys and Baseball, and so my life in the world of books began. The character Nick eventually refers to as “Owl-Eyes” had settled down in Gatsby’s library to sober up after being drunk for a week. It was the other way around for a 10-year-old going from the sober light of day into the excitement of a vast, mysterious realm of books towering overhead like a city within the city.

Eight years later, for no more than a few dollars, I bought a soft-covered 1934 Modern Library edition of The Great Gatsby in one of the same Fourth Avenue bookshops. As the novel’s reputation rose from relative obscurity to the pinnacle of literary prestige in the decades after the author’s sudden death in December 1940, so did the cost. The Gatsby first edition being offered for sale by the Friends and Foundation of the Library would have gone directly to an auction house had it been wrapped in the dust jacket bearing Francis Cugat’s visionary cover showing the eyes of Daisy Buchanan, Gatsby’s dream and his doom, “whose disembodied face floated along the dark cornices and blinding signs … sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth.” Dressed in that jacket, a plain green volume similar to the library’s copy recently sold for $377,000.

Alone and Alone

Fitzgerald’s introduction for the edition I bought in 1957 and still own gave it a value beyond numbers, thanks to the closing words: “No one felt like this before — says the young writer — but I felt like this; I have a pride akin to a soldier going into battle; without knowing there will be anyone there, to distribute medals or even to record it.” The final sentence is set apart for maximum impact: “But remember, also, young man: you are not the first person who has ever been alone and alone.”

At work on my first novel when I read those words, I decided of course that Fitzgerald was speaking to me, and that only young writers like myself understood what was meant by “alone and alone.”

“The Promises of Life”

For the first time since the 1960s, I just read my original copy of Gatsby all the way through, with attention to the parts the “young writer,” or YW, read and marked and read over again that special summer. The first mark appears on the opening page, when Nick Carraway recalls being “privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men” — which was like a reprise of the “alone alone” message: the hint of special access.

A page later there’s a ballpoint star next to the first reference to Gatsby: “If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away.”

Finding it impossible to sit still after reading that sentence, the YW walks around the room with it asking himself why the word gorgeous sounds so right in a sentence that ends “ten thousand miles away.” And why is it especially right when read aloud on a warm New York night when “the promises of life” seem to be waiting outside the window in the paths and lights and voices and murmurous breezes of Washington Square?

The Valley of Ashes

Nothing in the opening chapter prepares you for what Fitzgerald creates out of “a certain desolate area of land” in Chapter 2: “This is a valley of ashes — a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and finally, with a transcendent effort, of ash-gray men, who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of grey cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-grey men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud which screens their obscure operations from your sight.”

And while you’re gazing “above the gray land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it,” you see the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg, which “are blue and gigantic,” with retinas “one yard high” looking “out of no face but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a nonexistent nose.”

Now there’s nothing for it but to walk out into the New York summer night. No use marking the passage when nothing can be said. So the YW walks up Sixth Avenue as far as 23rd Street and then back down to finish the chapter. But first the excited YW heads for his Olympia typewriter and starts pounding away. Will he write anything even remotely as amazing as the Valley of Ashes? Of course not, but it feels good to believe you’re following the same line, breathing in the luminous dust left in the magician’s wake, putting words together, looking for some comparable wonder, even if only a hint of it.

Soldier Readers

In last Saturday’s New York Times, an article on the impact of the Armed Forces paperback editions sent by the U.S. government to troops during World War II (“Powerful Weapons In Their Pockets”) reminded me of the stray volumes from the series that occasionally turned up on the tables at past library book sales. I don’t know that the donations ever included a copy of the Armed Forces edition of The Great Gatsby like the one shown in the article, but I was interested to read that these editions “also boosted the fortunes of some authors,” notably Fitzgerald, whose Gatsby, published in 1925, “had barely sold 20,000 copies.” After it was selected as an Armed Services Edition, “more than 120,000 copies were distributed, spurring its transformation into a classic.”

So it seems that three years after his death, Fitzgerald’s finest novel, which he wrote with “a pride akin to a soldier going into battle,” was going into real battles with soldier readers as well as young writers with “some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life.” One such writer was J.D. Salinger, who wrote The Catcher in the Rye on and off the battlefield and who pays tribute to Fitzgerald’s influence by way of Holden Caulfield: “I was crazy about The Great Gatsby, Old Gatsby. Old sport. That killed me.” 

Some Special Offerings

Some of the other special items in addition to Gatsby at this year’s Friends and Foundation Book Sale are the English edition of Zelda Fitzgerald’s autobiographical novel Save Me the Waltz; signed copies of Toni Morrison’s novels Love and A Mercy; Kurt Gödel’s On Formally Undecidable Propositions; the Italian dancer Carlo de Blasis’s L’Uomo Fisico, Intellettuale e Morale (a scarce, beautifully illustrated book published in 1857); a signed copy of photographer Richard Avedon’s In the American West; 1970s Delacorte editions of Kurt Vonnegut’s novels Player Piano, Cat’s Cradle, and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater; a signed first edition of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation’s Edge; and firsts of Ian Fleming’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

For detailed information about the sale, which begins with a preview on Friday, October 13, from noon to 12 p.m., and ends with a half-price day on Sunday from noon to 5:30 p.m., email cbertrand@princetonlibrary.org, or call (609) 924-9529 x 1227.