The Maturing of F. Scott Fitzgerald

Twentieth Century Literature, Spring, 1997 by Alan Margolies

It is not known when Fitzgerald first knew of these theories and how much, if any, of Stoddard and Goddard he read. But sometime between 1921 and 1931 (when Zelda Fitzgerald's father, Judge A.D. Sayre, died), he became aware of a volume that included a discussion of Goddard's work with the Kallikak family (30-33) and Samuel J. Holmes's survey of contemporaneous theories of eugenics, The Trend of the Race. "This is too long for a mouthful but the most interesting to me," Fitzgerald wrote in an undated inscription on the front free endpaper of a copy that he gave to Judge Sayre."

One can only guess whether Fitzgerald, in The Great Gatsby, purposely combined Goddard's name with the title of a book that sounded like one by Stoddard or whether he confused the two names. Associating Tom Buchanan's dullness with someone who has studied the Kallikuk family and the feebleminded, however, is very funny and may have been intentional on Fitzgerald's part, just as it was his intention to contrast Tom Buchanan with Wolfshiem. Tom is obviously a Nordic, especially with his straw-colored hair. He has two truly American names, combining possibly the first names of Thomas Jefferson or Tom Paine and the last name of President Buchanan. (Naming characters after American heroes was not new in Fitzgerald's work.) Tom has "a gruff husky tenor" voice, "a rather hard mouth," "two shining, arrogant eyes," and a body with "enormous power" (9). Wolfshiem, the Jew, on the other hand, has tiny ratlike eyes that glance furtively around the room and seem to stand out in the darkness. He eats "with ferocious delicacy" (57), like an animal. Even his name suggests something subhuman. Yet, there are similarities between Wolfshiem and Buchanan. Tom is involved in a murder; Wolfshiem is presumably a bootlegger and a counterfeiter, and, above all, the man who fixed the 1919 World Series.

Wolfshiem's hypocrisy is illustrated in a number of ways. He is portrayed in a humorous way as being false to his religion and, in addition, lacking taste. At the end of the novel when Nick visits Wolfshiem to convince him to attend Gatsby's funeral, Wolfshiem is whistling "The Rosary," one of the most popular songs of the early part of the century. Despite its close to 2.4 million copies of sheet music sold through 1924, it was a sentimental, maudlin religious song that disparaged a serious subject (Sullivan 424).

But Wolfshiem's cover for his illicit business, "the Swastika Holding Company," is not so funny. the swastika, an ancient sign as well as sacred symbol, had appeared early in Christian art and was associated early with the Christian cross (see, e.g., Ross). Fitzgerald had even mentioned a swastika in "Absolution," that 1924 story that had probably been part of an early version of Gatsby and had associated this swastika in the story with Christianity. In "Absolution," Father Schwartz, the crazed priest whose faith is vacillating, first listens to young Rudolph's confession of sin and then stares at a pattern in the carpet in his office in the church, at "the swastikas and the flat bloomless vines and the pale echoes of flowers" (Short Stories 269). It is a decoration, of course, but it also symbolizes Father Schwartz's conflict: the swastika suggesting his faith, the flat bloomless vines and the pale echoes of the flowers suggesting the fading of his faith. This association of the swastika with Christianity in "Absolution" may have some relationship with Wolfshiem's whistling of "The Rosary" and his "Swastika Holding Company." Of course, the swastika was also a symbol used by Native Americans. In Gatsby, according to some, it "evokes the 'old warm world' of the Great West in the immemorial sign of American Indians" (Stern 261).