Subject
Re: Nabokov and Fitzgerald
Date
Body
At 10:54 AM 3/6/97 -0800, you wrote:
>From: Galya Diment <galya@u.washington.edu>
>
> I gave a paper a couple of years ago on Nabokov and Fitzgerald,
comparing >MARY and THE GREAT GATSBY. Some of it is quite relevant to the question
>posed here, so I will just reproduce a part of it here:
>
>
>According to Arthur Mizener, Nabokov's colleague at Cornell and Scott
>Fitzgerald's biographer, Nabokov considered Tender Is the Night
>"magnificent" and The Great Gatsby "terrible."
>
>Why, then, was he so critical of The Great Gatsby?
>
>[I'll cut it here so that everyone can answer this tantalizing question
>for him/herself. The rest of my paper dealt with my answer to it.]
>------------------------------------------------------------------
I think the answer is almost disagreeably simple: THE GREAT GATSBY,
featuring the crassly anti-Semitic portrayal of Meyer Wolfsheim, "the man
who fixed the World's Series back in 1919" with his "business gonnegtions,"
could have done nothing but raise, not Nabokov's brows, but his hackles. As
it did, and does, mine.
Joshua Roberts tract@voicenet.com http://www.voicenet.com/~tract
>From: Galya Diment <galya@u.washington.edu>
>
> I gave a paper a couple of years ago on Nabokov and Fitzgerald,
comparing >MARY and THE GREAT GATSBY. Some of it is quite relevant to the question
>posed here, so I will just reproduce a part of it here:
>
>
>According to Arthur Mizener, Nabokov's colleague at Cornell and Scott
>Fitzgerald's biographer, Nabokov considered Tender Is the Night
>"magnificent" and The Great Gatsby "terrible."
>
>Why, then, was he so critical of The Great Gatsby?
>
>[I'll cut it here so that everyone can answer this tantalizing question
>for him/herself. The rest of my paper dealt with my answer to it.]
>------------------------------------------------------------------
I think the answer is almost disagreeably simple: THE GREAT GATSBY,
featuring the crassly anti-Semitic portrayal of Meyer Wolfsheim, "the man
who fixed the World's Series back in 1919" with his "business gonnegtions,"
could have done nothing but raise, not Nabokov's brows, but his hackles. As
it did, and does, mine.
Joshua Roberts tract@voicenet.com http://www.voicenet.com/~tract