9 ms·

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

63 points by collapse 4y ago

082349872349872 4y ago
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.
- lostlogin 4y ago
  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?’
  - ghaff 4y ago
    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.
    - 082349872349872 4y ago
      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...
  - 082349872349872 4y ago
    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_Against_White_World-Supremacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rising_Tide_of_Color_Again...
    - proxyon 4y ago
      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.
      - 082349872349872 4y ago
        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.
      - 082349872349872 4y ago
        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?
keiferski 4y ago
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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QpGzpqU-b04
- marcusverus 4y ago
  I've been wanting to read some of his stuff--is there a website or book that you would recommend as a starting point?
  - drewcoo 4y ago
    https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/300841.A_Mencken_Chrestomathy https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/300841.A_Mencken_Chresto...
  - chromaton 4y ago
    https://archive.org/details/CoverageOfTheScopesTrialByH.l.Mencken https://archive.org/details/CoverageOfTheScopesTrialByH.l.Me...
  - busyant 4y ago
    I got this book about 30 years ago, which I thoroughly enjoyed. (https://www.amazon.com/Impossible-Mencken-Marion-Elizabeth-Rodgers/dp/0385262086 https://www.amazon.com/Impossible-Mencken-Marion-Elizabeth-R...) As mentioned in a sibling comment, his articles on the Scopes "Monkey Trial" were great.
  - keiferski 4y ago
    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.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- pmayrgundter 4y ago
  Wow! Thanks for sharing!
jihadjihad 4y ago
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.
- ghaff 4y ago
  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.
- wiredfool 4y ago
  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.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    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.
Tomte 4y ago
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.
- myrmidon 4y ago
  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.
  - yesenadam 4y ago
    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 https://www.gutenberg.org/files/53474/53474-h/53474-h.htm
- dredmorbius 4y ago
  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 https://yewtu.be/watch?v=QpGzpqU-b04>
elhudy 4y ago
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.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  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.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    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.
motohagiography 4y ago
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.
- johndhi 4y ago
  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.
seanhunter 4y ago
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).
- Nomentatus 4y ago
  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.
AlbertCory 4y ago
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.
Tycho 4y ago
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?
- ghaff 4y ago
  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.
jedbrown 4y ago
Relevant context: Mencken is the namesake of a white supremacist hate group.

63 points by collapse 4y ago

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.

lostlogin 4y ago
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?’
- ghaff 4y ago
  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.
  - 082349872349872 4y ago
    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...
- 082349872349872 4y ago
  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_Against_White_World-Supremacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rising_Tide_of_Color_Again...
  - proxyon 4y ago
    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.
    - 082349872349872 4y ago
      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.
    - 082349872349872 4y ago
      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?

keiferski 4y ago

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

marcusverus 4y ago
I've been wanting to read some of his stuff--is there a website or book that you would recommend as a starting point?
- drewcoo 4y ago
  https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/300841.A_Mencken_Chrestomathy https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/300841.A_Mencken_Chresto...
- chromaton 4y ago
  https://archive.org/details/CoverageOfTheScopesTrialByH.l.Mencken https://archive.org/details/CoverageOfTheScopesTrialByH.l.Me...
- busyant 4y ago
  I got this book about 30 years ago, which I thoroughly enjoyed. (https://www.amazon.com/Impossible-Mencken-Marion-Elizabeth-Rodgers/dp/0385262086 https://www.amazon.com/Impossible-Mencken-Marion-Elizabeth-R...) As mentioned in a sibling comment, his articles on the Scopes "Monkey Trial" were great.
- keiferski 4y ago
  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.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
pmayrgundter 4y ago
Wow! Thanks for sharing!

jihadjihad 4y ago

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.

ghaff 4y ago
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.
wiredfool 4y ago
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.
- ghaff 4y ago
  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.

Tomte 4y ago

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.

myrmidon 4y ago
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.
- yesenadam 4y ago
  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 https://www.gutenberg.org/files/53474/53474-h/53474-h.htm
dredmorbius 4y ago
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 https://yewtu.be/watch?v=QpGzpqU-b04>

elhudy 4y ago

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.

yamtaddle 4y ago
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.
- ghaff 4y ago
  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.

motohagiography 4y ago

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.

johndhi 4y ago
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.

seanhunter 4y ago

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).

Nomentatus 4y ago
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.

AlbertCory 4y ago

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.

Tycho 4y ago

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?

ghaff 4y ago
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.

jedbrown 4y ago

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