H.L. Mencken Reviews the Great Gatsby (1925) | Hacker News Reader

H.L. Mencken Reviews the Great Gatsby (1925)

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I was lucky not to have The Great Gatsby ruined for me by having to read it in high school. I borrowed it from the library a couple years ago, and wondered if it could live up to the massive hype around it. I have to say that it does.

Mencken's critique seems to be that for all the craftsmanship Fitzgerald displays on the page, the story itself is rather thin and contrived. I don't think I'd disagree with that, though it is interesting that we still read (and teach!) this book a hundred years later. It has a hold on the American psyche not just because the writing is superb (some pages are truly astonishing), but because it feels uniquely American. There is still a recognizable reflection even today in the mirror that Fitzgerald holds up in Gatsby.

I was lucky enough to read it (I think for the first time) in an American Lit of the 20s class I took on the side in grad school. The professor, who I knew well, was a Fitzgerald and Hemingway scholar. It's too bad classes weren't routinely recorded back then.

Dunno -- I got it in high school, and it's one of the few "class" books that have stayed with me through the years. I'd say On the Road, A smattering of Shakespeare, and 1984 did that as well.

"They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made."

You can't look at modern life without seeing that.

I think it's the 18th and 19th century tomes that are tough sledding in high school a lot of the time; many like Moby Dick and much of Dickens are pretty long in addition to the somewhat archaic language.

There are exceptions like The Picture of Dorian Gray although that's very late 19th century--and, of course, Wilde is very accessible.

ADDED: In general, I don't think I read any, but both Fitzgerald and Hemingway seem pretty reasonable for a high school English class. Probably better choices than the like of Catcher in the Rye and A Separate Peace to be honest.

Obviously everyone is different, but (aside from Shakespeare) the two books I read in HS that I most liked were Cather in the Rye and A Tale of Two Cities. I should note that after liking A Tale of Two Cities so much, I tried David Copperfield and Oliver Twist and found neither to my liking. I had my great expectations of Dickens' other work rather crushed at that point.

Oh, and forcing anyone to read Melville should be a crime. A very few people I know loved the experience, but I was unable to finish Billy Bud much less Moby Dick.

I recall not caring much for A Tale of Two Cities. I keep thinking I should try other Dickens like Bleak House. I do enjoy some other Victorian authors--at least the few best-regarded books I've tried like Wilkie Collins and Anthony Trollope.

I vaguely recall not liking Billy Bud in high school although I read Moby Dick as an adult and was mostly glad I worked my way through but it did take an effort.

I don't think I hated Catcher in the Rye at the time. It just didn't make much of an impression one way or the other.

I really loved Great Expectations.

Also Britten's Billy Budd is one of the 2 operas I really love.

1966 BBC version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1lVBfqQyjs

My sixth grade teacher made us read The Hobbit.

The rest is history. I'm a voracious reader of "junky" fantasy books.

But Mencken was a real wordsmith -albeit a really, really cynical one.

> and, under it all, the simple sentimentality of a somewhat sclerotic fat woman.

My dad read me The Hobbit as a bedtime story starting from kindergarten. It was the first non-picture book I ever read.

The BBC's In Our Time discussed Gatsby last year. The guests had a great comment: at the time the story in Gatsby was considered trashy and not worthy of a great novel. It would be as if a great modern author wrote a novel about the Kardashians. Today's readers don't have that problem and can enjoy the great writing.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000r4tq

I care more about the content of the story than any quality of writing. Beautifully captured footage of an automated waste treatment facility in the middle of nowhere is far less compelling than, E.G. low quality traffic cam views that happen to capture timely or educationally useful content.

There's more than enough books vying to be classics; do future readers a favor and select one that fulfills BOTH criteria; Well Written and Interesting to Read.

Interestingly, the same thing was said about Madame Bovary.

As an adult it’s quite fun to re-read all of the books I “hated” in high school. They’re so much more enjoyable!

I hated Gatsby in high school and when I re-read it as an adult, I still didn't like it. None of the characters were interesting to me and when you don't care what happens to them, it's a chore to keep reading.

There were some books in high school that I really enjoyed that I'm afraid to reread because maybe they wouldn't stand up for me. I'm thinking about Lost Horizon, The Chrysalids, Brave New World, Canticle for Leibowitz, On the Beach, and Grapes of Wrath.

I didn't read Grapes of Wrath until I was an adult, but I certainly found it worthwhile. Same for Canticle.

I did read Brave New World in high school, but it didn't do anything for me until I re-read it a couple years ago.

I've read all of those except for On the Beach. I probably wouldn't reread Grapes of Wrath but not because of any dislike--in fact the opposite for both book and film. I'd reread any of the others though I would probably be more inclined to rewatch the 1937 Lost Horizon film. It's a marvelous story but there's nothing particularly exceptional about Hilton's prose as I recall from reading a few of his books decades ago.

> Lost Horizon

I liked this one when I read it years ago, but when I tried to re-read it aloud to one of my kids[1] I discovered that most of Hilton's characters' dialog read exactly the same—they have no voice—plus the prose was really clunky to read—uniquely so among the oddball books I read aloud to my young kids, and I read them some a lot older than that, plus a couple contemporary to Hilton's book, so it's not an age-of-the-writing problem. It was so unpleasant to read aloud that I didn't make it past the first chapter. Really soured me on the book.

[1] Hey, when they're young enough, it hardly matters what you're reading to them, may as well be something you want to read, unless you're reading them a picture book.

[EDIT] LOL, actually, now that I think about it, Gatsby was another one I read aloud to one of my kids. No problems with that one.

There is/was about an 8 hour staged reading of The Great Gatsby called Gatz that may sound like the strangest thing ever to some but I loved it (and so did the person I dragged to it).

https://www.elevator.org/shows/gatz/

I haven't generally found that, but at least not having to read in the mode of trying to memorize all the facts for the coming quiz is an improvement.

I wish I saw what you saw. I was also fortunate not to have it ruined in high school. I didn't read it until my 50s.

I just didn't get it. All I see is a bunch of horrible people being stupid and terrible to each other.

I don't doubt that that's a very American thing. I just don't want to read about it, no matter how well it's written.

Inconsistency note: I love doing Shakespeare, even though it's precisely a bunch of stupid people treating each other horribly, but very, very well written.

I recently read A Confederacy of Dunces, and my feeling was "Yuck. These people were all awful." I looked at reviews, and some people thought the same thing, and the others were like "Ha ha ha. These people are all awful. Isn’t this fun?"

And I was left wondering whether the two groups of people have had different life experiences. Some have had bitter experience of awful people and it'll never be something to enjoy.

That one was ruined for me in college, assigned in freshman English. I hated it so, so much. And literature in general, if that was the literature they felt was so important as to assign it.

I mentioned a love for Shakespeare in a footnote, something I developed long after high school, despite-not-because-of my high school education. I found my way into it via movies. The same happened with Jane Austen, whom I hated as dumb-people-doing-dumb-things until the right film showed me how it actually was supposed to work.

Conceivably such a thing could exist for Confederacy of Dunces, but I'm not going out of my way to find out.

I lived in New Orleans for a time and read Confederacy of Dunces. Saw it much later as a play. Think it's fantastic.

But to your basic point. I was having a conversation with a college friend about series including Orange is the New Black and others that I don't remember--possibly Breaking Bad. And they just couldn't get into a series where you were supposed to sympathize with people who were basically, well, bad to various degrees. Probably (for whatever reason) some people just don't like anti-heroes in literature or video.

There's an interesting comparison to be made between Breaking Bad and its prequel Better Call Saul. Breaking Bad very much wanted you to like its anti-hero even while being an objectively terrible person. Better Call Saul is much less about thrilling to the horrors, but instead hoping that a deeply flawed human being can get better. And he's surrounded by other people who are also good, trying to make him better, and failing.

I don't mean to oversimplify; both are complex shows with extraordinary feats of writing and acting. But I felt Better Call Saul was a more interesting take on the anti-hero because it wasn't just horrible people being mean to each other. If nothing else, comparing and contrasting the differences is a good exercise.

I realize that there is no accounting for taste, but my goodness, A Confederacy of Dunces is laugh-out-loud funny.

Similar example. I'd managed to not read it somehow until 3--4 years ago.

It is quite the yarn.

Gatsby, like most officially great novels, is the least good of Fitzgerald's books. Tender is the Night and The Beautiful and the Damned were way better. There was something about critics of the time who needed to suffer to appreciate anything and it was good of Mencken to hold Fitzgerald to his own standards, but what made authors of the era great were the books that were actually enjoyable. When you look at other authors of the era, where W. Sommerset Maughm is known for his miserable slog, Of Human Bondage, when The Razors Edge, Cakes and Ale, and the Painted Veil were way better, and he's even credited with being the precursor of the spy novel with his Ashenden stories. Hemmingway was a short story writer, but somehow he is remembered for the fawning reception of Farewell to Arms. Evelyn Waugh was savagely funny if you have read Scoop, Decline and Fall or Black Mischief, but Brideshead Revisited was the critical success that got made into a sappy miniseries.

It's like critics take your least spectacular and most vulnerable work and tag you with it as your best so as to ensure you are never known for the great stuff that got you on their radar and that might put their own work to shame. However, it doesn't matter, their lives are absurd. Quite a number of them make a living criticising food now, mostly because it can't defend itself.

The era of great criticism that began with characters like Mencken and, earlier, Bierce ended with the death of Christopher Hitchens I think. None of them, including Vidal, or Hunter S. Thompson would survive the culture today. I think it's too bad that the idea of a literary rivalry now seems as dated as fighting a duel with sabres, and it's as though there is nobody writing today who is capable of putting down a challenger when instead they can claim to be the victim of harassment to attract a mob. Mencken was great, and given Fitzgeralds other work, his Gatsby review was an act of mercy, but I bet he would be banned from social platforms and probably have trouble getting a bank account if he were writing today. Hard to say what we lost, but reading Mencken now, it's definitely gone.

Not sure I agree. You, as with most critics actually, seem to be asserting there are clear "quality" lines to be drawn between great novels. IMO we're into the realm of subjectivity here and it's really up to the reader to decide what they like.

I didn't like Tender is the Night too much, and I love Hemingway's novels more than his stories (generally), chiefly The Sun Also Rises and For Whom the Bell Tolls. Do I know better than you or do famous critics know better than me? I don't think so.

You are denying that writing is an art that has its own inherent (~objective) system of evaluation that transcends the grasp/reading of a specific reader. The individual reader is entitled to its opinion, but any given school of criticism within the confines of the discipline (here writing) is also entitled to its professional assessment of the work.

We make distinction between great and good code. We celebrate certain software at the source code level. And what should we think of say someone who has never written a line of code telling us that there are no clear lines separating source codes and dismiss us as "critics".

Mencken gave a professional review. He rated the story as banal, but true to the scene depicted. He rated the character development as spotty. But he seemed pretty excited about the crafting of the sentences and pages. Now this here is something that will likely escape the notice of the general reader (they may just 'like it a lot' but won't be able to tell you why) but a pro like Mencken zeroes in on that.

Good art is not entirely subjective

> I love Hemingway's novels more than his stories (generally), chiefly The Sun Also Rises and For Whom the Bell Tolls.

I think it's in some ways unfortunate the way we have high school students ready things like A Farewell to Arms, maybe For Whom the Bell Tools, or Old Man and the Sea, rather than for example, moving students through more of a progression. For example, you read The Nick Adams stories that Hemingway used as almost "notes" for his later works. There's something gritty and unrefined about the stories, but you can see Hemingway starting to build a style. Islands in the Stream, published posthumously, is more of an insight into how the writer worked than a complete, finished novel. If we are going claim to your students that this Hemingway guy was the great writer of the 20th century, we should at least owe it to them to really demonstrate why.

The conversations between Maughm and his characters in The Razors Edge are chefs kiss

John Simon was an excellent critic and probably the closest modern analog to Mencken. He died in 2019.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Simon_(critic)

I went on a Mencken binge a few years ago and read a lot of his (mostly excellent) writing. I was surprised to find a recorded interview with him, done in 1948:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QpGzpqU-b04

I've been wanting to read some of his stuff--is there a website or book that you would recommend as a starting point?

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/300841.A_Mencken_Chresto...

https://archive.org/details/CoverageOfTheScopesTrialByH.l.Me...

I got this book about 30 years ago, which I thoroughly enjoyed. (https://www.amazon.com/Impossible-Mencken-Marion-Elizabeth-R...)

As mentioned in a sibling comment, his articles on the Scopes "Monkey Trial" were great.

I actually think the interview I linked to is a good starting point - he has the same sharp, brutal wit in both speaking and writing.

Wow! Thanks for sharing!

I’ve never quite been able to put into words why The Great Gatsby falls short of my expectations for a “classic” novel, but Mencken nails it. This was a fascinating review and i look forward to exploring more of Mencken’s writings. Thank you for sharing.

Length is probably a factor. It packs a lot of nice prose in a slim little volume. Its simple story and characters are, at least, more complex than your average pulp adventure tale—combine that and the length and it's just about an ideal Baby's First Real Literary Novel, which is probably why it's assigned so much in high school and 100-level undergrad literature courses.

I also take a bit more depth from between the lines in the novel, than it may always get credit for, but that may just be me. Largely due to Fitzgerald sticking (perhaps too much) to his perspective character's limitations, there's a lot happening just off the page. A lot of suggestion, a lot left to the reader to fill in, which I personally enjoy.

There is a great deal about modernism and the possibilities associated with it that can taken from The Great Gatsby. The Living Moment by Jeff Hart who used to be on the English faculty at Dartmouth College and was an expert on 1920s American authors among other things is probably the best read on this.

Mencken is very quotable. For example:

> Evil. That which one believes of others. It is a sin to believe evil of others, but it is seldom a mistake.

> There is always an easy solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong.

My favorite:

> The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.

I've seen so many great passages it's hard to chose just one, but this gives the flavour:

"Man's natural instinct, in fact, is never toward what is sound and true; it is toward what is specious and false. Let any great nation of modern times be confronted by two conflicting propositions, the one grounded upon the utmost probability and reasonableness and the other upon the most glaring error, and it will almost invariably embrace the latter. It is so in politics, which consists wholly of a succession of unintelligent crazes, many of them so idiotic that they exist only as battle-cries and shibboleths and are not reducible to logical statement at all. It is so in religion, which, like poetry, is simply a concerted effort to deny the most obvious realities. It is so in nearly every field of thought. The ideas that conquer the race most rapidly and arouse the wildest enthusiasm and are held most tenaciously are precisely the ideas that are most insane. This has been true since the first "advanced" gorilla put on underwear, cultivated a frown and began his first lecture tour in the first chautauqua, and it will be so until the high gods, tired of the farce at last, obliterate the race with one great, final blast of fire, mustard gas and streptococci." - Meditation on Meditation

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/53474/53474-h/53474-h.htm

Quotable, but very seldom recorded.

The one extant audio interview I'm aware of was made at the Library of Congress, in 1948. It's now available on YouTube:

<https://yewtu.be/watch?v=QpGzpqU-b04>

Mencken has a point: Gatsby, like much famous Science Fiction, derives its strength neither from story nor from depth of characterisation, but from the world which it depicts.

Above jihadjihad mentions how very American the book is.

Their comment combined with yours might explain my bemusement once I’d finished it.

‘What was that and why is it so well regarded?’

Fitzgerald was very American--and specifically very Northeast upper class. He was even a writer on the film [Dartmouth] Winter Carnival in 1939--not one of the great 1939 films--but, so the story goes, he ended up getting kicked off the picture because he kept getting drunk in Dartmouth fraternities.

I suspect some familiarity with that milieu helps one appreciate Fitzgerald just as some familiarity with the South helps one fully appreciate Faulkner.

The intersection of Fitzgerald and Faulkner is in the latter's comment on leaving his post office job, when he said he reckoned he'd be at the beck and call of rich folk all his life, but at least now he would no longer be at the beck and call of any SOB who had the few cents to buy a stamp...

Not only was it very American in 1925 (perhaps Mencken wondered why a fish would write such cardboard about water?) but it still is.

Very few days go by when the HN Front Page does not remind me of Jay Gatz:

Gatz' schedule:

  Rise from bed..................................6.00...........A.M.
  Dumbell exercise and wall-scaling..............6.15 - 6.30...."
  Study electricity, etc.........................7.15 - 8.15...."      
  Work...........................................8.30 - 4.30....P.M.
  Baseball and sports............................4.30 - 5.00...."
  Practice elocution, poise and how to attain it.5.00 - 6.00...."
  Study needed inventions........................7.00 - 9.00...."

general resolves:

  No wasting time at Shafters or [a name, indecipherable].
  No more smoking or chewing.
  Bath every other day.
  Read one improving book or magazine per week.
  Save $5.00 [crossed out] $3.00 per week.
  Be better to parents.

Edit: and compare the reference made by the book Tom Buchanan was reading with our spate of anti-woke tweets or "replacement theory" videos, and you will have a good idea of the amount of technical and moral progress the US has made between the 1920s and the 2020s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rising_Tide_of_Color_Again...

So we've only made sufficient "moral progress" (whose morals?) when no one on Twitter questions wokeness and when a nation state has such porous borders that the founding stock of it can only come to the conclusion that they're intentionally being replaced by their elite. Moral progress is when everyone submits to your morals.

Moral progress is when people who nominally espouse a judeochristian culture take the Book of Ruth seriously.

I suspect our axioms are very different, and am trying to think of where in between to start from; will write more later tonight.

Some questions, from back to front:

1/ How are "they" being replaced by "their" elite? What even is the "elite"?

2/ What makes you think this "replacement" is intentional?

3/ How do porous borders imply a single conclusion?

4/ What constitutes a "porous" border?

5/ What is the "founding stock"? (Does it include the 3/5-counted people in 1789? How about people in 1776? Beforehand?)

6/ How does "woke" differ from "not characterising one's country as a Mary Sue" (universally beloved, possessed of all positive virtues and suffering no negative vices)?

7/ What is the difference between your morals and those of Lothrop Stoddard?

from front to back, my positions (we can either seek a middle ground on any of these, or simply agree to disagree):

7/ my morals are secular: "climbers: do not pull the ladder up after you"

6/ "woke" is a recognition that much of US history has been driven by slavery and bigotry — neither of which fit the ideals of the country: "with liberty and justice for all"

5/ Although I don't count, say, Lakota among my people, I do have people who were in the New World before 1789, as well as those who arrived after 1883's "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free..." All were pioneers in their way (I have kept up the family tradition by emigrating from The Old Country); were any more or less "American"?

4/ Can the US border truly be said to be porous if the foreign population is only 14% (compared to my adoptive country's 25%?)

3/ Freedom of movement (one of the 4 freedoms of the EU) can easily be explained on liberty grounds, on economic grounds, as a necessary counterpoint to freedom of capital, etc. There are many possibilities beyond replacement.

2/ if we ascribe stupidity before malice, why should we think replacement (stipulating in this case that it occurs) is due to the latter and not the former?

1/ assuming non-Hispanic white people decline to under 50% of the population, so what? why would that be bad? Are minorities so poorly treated in the US that becoming a minority should be cause for concern?

What great writing (Mencken, I mean).

The silly criticism of the story itself is the first paragraph, true, but then he goes on, beautifully, about Fitzgerald's writing, in a way that you'd rarely see today.

As for the characters: he's right, the author doesn't go inside their heads. In that way, it's more like a play or a movie, where we can only see them from the outside. I think that's perfectly fine. "Third person omniscient" is not the only voice a novelist can have.

I have always been genuinely baffled by the admiration people have for The Great Gatsby. It’s not the best F Scott Fitzgerald book. It’s not even the best novel of that year (Mrs Dalloway is so much better it pains me to mention it in the same sentence).

You don't think the bandage is quite perfectly made; I adore that he put it on just the right place of just the right wound.

One thing about the The Great Gatsby (and I do think it's a masterpiece), is the famous closing paragraph - does anyone else find it just a bit overwrought?

I don't really. It's what I usually copy and paste when I'm trying to compare text to speech voices :-)

ADDED: I think there's a rhythm to the words and that presents a good opportunity to see how natural the TTS is.

Relevant context: Mencken is the namesake of a white supremacist hate group.

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