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F. Scott Fitzgerald at Work
The Making of "The Great Gatsby"
By Horst H. Kruse The University of Alabama Press
Copyright © 2014 The University of Alabama Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8173-8770-9
CHAPTER 1
Max von Gerlach, the Man Behind Jay Gatsby
A German Immigrant Story and Its Impact on the Composition of The Great Gatsby
"... what better right does a man possess than to invent his own antecedents?" Nick Carraway assessing Jay Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby: The Revised and Rewritten Galleys (1990), p. 161
Introduction
There is all but universal agreement that F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby occupies a preeminent place in American literature, in terms of popular appeal and critical acclaim, and that Jay Gatsby, the protagonist, more so than any other character in American fiction, embodies national themes and aspirations. The complex story of the novel's achievement is thus fully deserving of the attention it has been given, its verification worthy of further effort. In its powerful mythical implications and profuse dependence on American materials, both historical and contemporary, The Great Gatsby has indeed left much room for speculation about the author's actual sources of inspiration. The large number and wide range of parallels and correspondences that have been proposed, literary and otherwise, and the number of real people that have been suggested as models for its cast of characters—Jay Gatsby in particular—are as much a measure of its universal quality as of the interest that the author and his work continue to command. But at the same time the abundance of such proposals also hints at the failure of scholarship to determine basic elements of the history of the making of the novel and calls for a continuing effort at clarification. Jay Gatsby, above all, in his commanding presence of nearly 90 years' standing, is holding out a challenge to explore his actual roots, intriguing as they are in their persistent obscurity.
It is in response to this challenge that I return to the case of Max Gerlach. Apart from Edward M. Fuller, William F. McGee, and Robert C. Kerr, whose contributions to his characterization are considered minor, Gerlach was the only model for Jay Gatsby expressly identified by name in 1947 by Zelda Fitzgerald, the author's wife, shortly before her death. And in 1951 Gerlach himself spoke up and claimed to be the individual who inspired Fitzgerald's protagonist. Despite all research efforts, however, Gerlach remains elusive as an historical personage, so that the extent and the exact nature of his influence on the inception and the composition of The Great Gatsby continue to be a matter of debate. Prompted early by Gerlach's German name and carried on in friendly rivalry with Matthew J. Bruccoli, my own explorations eventually led me to the fortuitous discovery of materials in the National Archives and Records Administration in both Washington, DC, and College Park, Maryland, concerning Gerlach's military career in the US Army during World War I, as well as court records in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York concerning his bootleg activities. Working from these and other documents relating to his life both before and after the war, I was able to trace central motifs of the novel and a long list of specific details to incidents in Gerlach's life and thus substantiate previous speculations concerning his role in the genesis of the book. What had escaped my notice at the time—and what I have discovered only since the publication of my findings in The F. Scott Fitzgerald Review in 2002—is an essential fact that turns out to hold a key to both Gerlach's personality and its appeal to the author of The Great Gatsby—that the circumstances of his life in combination with those of the times he lived in had suggested to Gerlach that he proceed to construct and reconstruct varying accounts of his biography in the interest of his own advancement. His very success in this endeavor of necessity entailed the likelihood of error for those engaged in the study of his activities. This turned my own research into an uncommonly challenging, at times frustrating, but also thoroughly rewarding longtime scholarly adventure on two sides of the Atlantic, an adventure not without its share of pleasant surprises. When proof continued to refuse to emerge to support the widely held view of Gerlach as a wealthy Long Island bootlegger, for instance, the search for further details of his life happened to take me to libraries and archives in Germany rather than in the United States, affording me the advantage of ready access to files partly obscured by linguistic usages and idiosyncrasies in print and handwriting, such as occur in historical documents. These German files, along with a variety of materials freshly available on the Internet, turn out to provide significant additions to earlier information about Max Gerlach and suggest a new configuration of the evidence.
Among the more important facts and documents that have come to light in my renewed search are the following:
• Gerlach was born in Germany rather than in the United States, as he had claimed.
• He came to America at age nine as a half-orphan, the stepson of a German immigrant.
• He used his stepfather's last name, Stork, for nearly two decades.
• He presented various contradictory versions of his life story.
• He temporarily returned to Germany and consequently was entangled with American legal authorities.
• A 1915 photo of Max Stork in New York City Police Department evidence files.
• Additional street addresses and business connections in New York City as well as Chicago and Joliet, Illinois.
• His 1919 visa application with passport photo and personal data.
• Several documents relating to his life after contact with the Fitzgeralds.
All in all, the newly recovered details add up to consolidate the typification of Gerlach's experiences as those of an immigrant and to provide a fabric that would allow Fitzgerald to dramatize these experiences as a prototypical account of the rags-to-riches American success story and—in topical variation—its failure in the growing materialism of the American twenties. They do not, however, confirm either his role as a big-time bootlegger or as a neighbor of the Fitzgeralds on Long Island. Rather, and more importantly, it emerges that Max Gerlach brought to the novel an intriguingly complex biography in which unusual personal as well as national predicaments combined to shape his abiding quest for identity as an American citizen. And it appears that it was this quest, rather than the bootlegger's lifestyle and wealth, that appealed to Fitzgerald and made him take Gerlach for a model and Gerlach's very quest as his theme. In addition to correcting long-held assumptions about Gerlach and proposing some adjustments in chronology, the present study thus finds its ultimate rationale in having us perceive an altogether different focus in Fitzgerald's interest in his source of inspiration and at the same time giving us a different perspective on the novel.
In some instances, Gerlach's experiences will be shown to reflect Fitzgerald's own encounters, as well as his anxieties and ambitions. And while this may have been one of the reasons Fitzgerald took an interest in Gerlach as a model, such convergences must have made it easy for the author to instill aspects of his own life into that of the fictional character and finally to have them prevail when in the course of writing he began to discover Gerlach's deficiency as a model. As Fitzgerald informed Charles T. Scott in a 1927 inscription in a copy of The Great Gatsby, "Gatsby was never quite real to me. His original served for a good enough exterior until about the middle of the book he grew thin and I began to fill him with my own emotional life" (qtd. in GG Documentary Vol. 27), echoing an earlier remark in a letter to his friend John Peale Bishop, which stated that Gatsby "started as one man I knew and then changed into myself" (Letters 358).
Both statements have given Fitzgerald biographers and scholars a pretext to downplay the importance of Gerlach in the inception of The Great Gatsby. But in reality it was a matter of these researchers simply failing to turn up even a minimum of reliable information to begin to appraise Gerlach's true role. In order to assess Fitzgerald's aims and intentions in writing his novel, however, as well as to study the workings of his creative imagination in the process, we are not so much interested in the author's own emotional life that helped to fill in what appeared to him a good enough exterior as we are in the original source of inspiration, the one man who sparked the central idea in all its brilliance and originality. It is this one man, Max Gerlach, and his actual role in the inception of The Great Gatsby that will form the primary focus of this investigation.
The Myth of Max von Gerlach, the Long Island Bootlegger
From his first mention in Fitzgerald biography and scholarship, Max Gerlach is referred to as "a Long Island bootlegger" (Mizener, The Far Side of Paradise 171) and a "neighbor" of the Fitzgeralds' while they were living at 6 Gateway Drive in Great Neck (Zelda Fitzgerald to Henry Dan Piper as reported by Bruccoli in 1975; GG Documentary Volume 20). When documentary evidence failed to emerge to substantiate these facts, the adjective "mysterious" began to attach itself to his name. So persistent and pervasive was this image of Gerlach as a Long Island resident—and so apparently authoritative its presentation in early Fitzgerald biography—that later scholars, myself included, felt inclined to adjust their accounts to fit this supposition. As details of Gerlach's career began to emerge from the newly discovered sources in my earlier search—his employment as a marine gas engineer, machinist, automotive mechanic, and broker of automobiles, along with his knowledge of Spanish, his repeated visits to Cuba, and two convictions on charges of violation of the Volstead Act—they almost naturally prompted my speculations about his activities as a gentleman bootlegger in order to account for his supposed wealth and its attributes during the twenties. But my continued searches—of real estate maps, community directories, telephone books, census records, and other material—have failed to yield the slightest trace of a Max Gerlach living in either Great Neck or in any of the adjoining Long Island towns—reason enough to reexamine the early accounts that would seem to place him and his impressive mansion in that neighborhood.
Zelda's identification of Gerlach occurred in an interview conducted in 1947 by Fitzgerald scholar Henry Dan Piper, whose conjectural transcription of the name resulted in the faulty spelling "Guerlach." The information he received from Zelda was about "a neighbor named von Guerlach or something who was said to be General Pershing's nephew and was in trouble over bootlegging," as Piper put it in 1974 in his answer to a query from Matthew J. Bruccoli (GG Documentary Volume 20). As early as 1950, Piper had also passed on the information to Arthur Mizener, Fitzgerald's first biographer. In his own 1965 study of the author, F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Critical Portrait, as well as in other published work, Piper made no reference to Gerlach whatsoever. Piper's widow, Roberta—for her part insisting that the inspiration for Gatsby "came from Fitzgerald's imagination" and that, therefore, the quest for the prototype of Gatsby must remain "a fruitless search" (letter to Princeton Alumni Weekly, November 14, 2002)—concluded that Piper had quite deliberately disposed of "Gurlach" and whatever information he had received about him from Zelda, that he "probably didn't consider it of any great importance" ("The Ghost in My House" 3). But Piper quite obviously did believe in the essential usefulness of establishing and discussing Fitzgerald's sources, as evidenced by his meticulous account of the activities of Edward M. Fuller (FSF: A Critical Portrait 115–20). It is through Piper's painstaking reconstruction of Fuller's personality and commercial transactions that this Long Island businessman now figures as a significant contributory source in the creation of Gatsby. Piper's failure to pursue the case of Gerlach was hardly a deliberate dismissal of him as a potential prototype. It was rather that, quite unlike Fuller, Gerlach had not left a conspicuous trail of evidence of his existence in contemporary newspapers, from which Piper sought most of his information. Piper, therefore, was clearly unable to turn up any material about Gerlach to help him assess and appreciate the latter's role in the compositional process of Fitzgerald's novel. And failing to do so, he never came to see any reason to correct his idiosyncratic faulty spelling of "Guerlach," continuing to use it, in fact, as late as 1974 in his reply to Bruccoli's query.
The first published mention of Max Gerlach as a model for Gatsby occurred in a somewhat ambiguous add-on footnote in Arthur Mizener's The Far Side of Paradise in 1951. As Mizener drafted his chapter on The Great Gatsby —late in 1947 or early in 1948—he started out with information received from critic Edmund Wilson, Fitzgerald's friend and fellow Princetonian, with whom Mizener had been consulting since the early 1940s about his projected biography. The critic had in effect steered Mizener to Wilson's own play, The Crime in the Whistler Room of 1924, and Mizener proceeded to quote the following scene in which the protagonist, a young novelist named Simon, describes his encounter with a wealthy bootlegger:
He's a gentleman bootlegger: his name is Max Fleischman. He lives like a millionaire. Gosh, I haven't seen so much to drink since Prohibition.... Well, Fleischman was making a damn ass of himself bragging about how much his tapestries were worth and how much his bathroom was worth and how he never wore a shirt twice—and he had a revolver studded with diamonds.... And he finally got on my nerves—I was a little bit stewed—and I told him I wasn't impressed by his ermine-lined revolver: I told him he was nothing but a bootlegger, no matter how much money he made.... I told him I never would have come into his damn house if it hadn't been to be polite and that it was a torture to stay in a place where everything was in such terrible taste. (The Far Side of Paradise 171–72)
Mizener took notes of what Wilson said (see Mizener's April 12, 1948, letter), and, writing to him in March 1948, reminded Wilson to have claimed that "Simon's description of Max Fleischman [...] was really Fitzgerald's description of an evening with the bootlegger who gave him the idea for Gatsby's grandeur" and also that Wilson had "repeated the description fairly literally" (see Mizener's March 22,1948, letter). And Wilson, although clearly rejecting the prevalent identification of the young novelist in his play as his friend Fitzgerald (except for "certain traits suggested by him"), had written back to confirm that "the incident about the bootlegger was [...] true of Scott, as I told you" (see Mizener's March 30, 1948, letter). This was reason enough for Mizener to conclude that the Long Island bootlegger described in The Crime in the Whistler Room was the actual model for Jay Gatsby, if only in the externals of his existence. Moreover, there was a curious piece of evidence that appeared to corroborate his conclusion. None other than Fitzgerald himself had glossed the same passage in his copy of a reprint of the play (in Wilson's collection entitled This Room and This Gin and These Sandwiches) in a marginal note on page 75, which read, "I had told Bunnny my plan for Gatsby" (FSF: Inscriptions, item 86). As will emerge, however, Mizener was wrong in his conclusion. Fitzgerald's comment certainly need not be read to vouch for the incident as literal transcription of factual experience. And the wording chosen by Wilson, while referring to a bootlegger, does not actually suggest that this bootlegger was Fitzgerald's model for Jay Gatsby but, rather, simply someone "who gave him the idea for Gatsby's grandeur" (as Mizener himself had put it).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from F. Scott Fitzgerald at Work by Horst H. Kruse. Copyright © 2014 The University of Alabama Press. Excerpted by permission of The University of Alabama Press.
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