If you went to high school after the 1950s, you probably find it inconceivable that The Great Gatsby wasn’t published to great fanfare. Critics loved it, but the public greeted its arrival with the same exuberance as they might a downstairs neighbor they could hear through the floor. Evidently crates and crates of it sat in the publisher’s warehouses for decades, until they were dusted off and handed out to my sophomore English class in 1989.
Gatsby embodies every little bit of the Roaring Twenties. Flappers, jazz, women smoking in public, speakeasies. Gatsby is rumored to be a bootlegger and he throws lavish parties for elites. He calls Nick “Old Sport.” The book is the cat’s pajamas.
At the time Gatsby was written, America was in the middle of prohibition, which made the sale or consumption of alcohol illegal. To be fair, America had developed a bit of a drinking problem. I mean, America had always been a drinker. The Pilgrims came off the Mayflower wondering which apples would make the best cider. Throughout the 18th century, beer, wine, and cider washed down breakfast, lunch, and dinner. For a long while America had a good happy buzz. But as farmers cultivated grains in the late 18th and 19th centuries, whiskey and rum replaced beer and cider. And America traded in its beer mugs for shot glasses. With this switchover came problems like rising death rates due to alcohol, domestic abuse, and unemployment. By the early 20th century, it’s arguable that America needed an intervention.
The Temperance Movement hoped to remove the temptation to drink. But this, and I can’t stress this enough, did not work. People found a way around being sober. In the 1920s speakeasies were booming, bathtub gin was common, and doctors would prescribe whiskey for ailments like back pain, stomach pain, or being married to an asshole. The prisons were filled with bootleggers and drinkers and everyone apparently had syphilis. Bathtub gin was crippling people, making them blind and leaving them paralyzed. So the Temperance Movement did not stop people from drinking as much as it made them more creative, destroyed lives, and indirectly made people’s genitals burn.
France was a different story (but not with syphilis). At the same time that America was trying to stop people from drinking, France was encouraging it. France was in a period of post-war euphoria. There were new fashion trends, new music, new artistic movements, and booming tourism. Artists, musicians, and writers were among those who found France preferable to their native land. France was cheap and artists relished the idea of living in close approximation to legal alcohol, like-minded thinkers, and prostitutes. And among these numbers were the Lost Generation. The term, coined by Gertrude Stein and used by Hemingway in The Sun Also Rises, referred to the “directionless wandering” spirit of the war’s survivors striving to cope with the carnage and destruction of the First World War. (No wonder they all needed a drink). They were unable or unwilling to cope with living in America, preferring instead a place with a once-in-a-generation arts community and the ability to get drunk without a doctor’s note.
Not only are the Lost Generation writers known for their drinking prowess, they’re believed to be the origin of the archetypal alcoholic writer. While every culture has its drunk pen-smiths, the concentration is highest among male American writers. And not only male American writers, but those born in the late 1800s and writing in the 1920s to the 1950s. All one needed was a penis, a rollneck sweater, and a crippling yet charismatic weakness to fit the pattern of the mythic genius writer. For F. Scott Fitzgerald this weakness was never in doubt. Booze. He was a self-professed alcoholic. “I’m Scott Fitzgerald, the alcoholic,” he would introduce himself. And then he would probably fall asleep on the floor or go swimming in a fountain with his insane wife. While at Yale, he would often brag in his letters that his shaky script was a result of “beers and a few Bronxes [cocktails].” Perhaps the true wonder of Gatsby is that Fitzgerald stayed sober enough to write it.
Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda’s relationship teetered on a rickety bar cart. In the brutal character evisceration of his friends known popularly as A Moveable Feast (subtitle: My Former Friends and Why They Suck), Hemingway claimed that Zelda kept Fitzgerald drunk because it would disable his writing. She had literary ambitions of her own and was evidently jealous of his success. She in turn claimed (not in his book) that Hemingway and Fitzgerald were lovers. So while Fitzgerald tried to stay sober long enough to write, Zelda gummed up the works. In her defense, it wasn’t hard. And if it was her goal, it worked. Hemingway pointed out that in the mid-1920s Fitzgerald was drinking too much and barely working. By the mid-late 1920s he was drinking while writing which led to unpublished and unaccepted stories. In the hopes of keeping himself sober enough to work, Fitzgerald invited Hemingway to their cottage town and waxed happy about their potential day. We’ll find an inexpensive villa and we won’t drink and it’ll be like the good old days and we’ll swim and be healthy and brown and we’ll have one aperitif before lunch and one before dinner. It’s sad in a sort of nostalgic, was-Zelda-onto-something kind of way. (NB: Zelda’s claim is not harmed by the fact that at a café once, Fitzgerald asked Hemingway to check his penis to make sure it was big enough. Spoiler alert: it was fine).
As all parties do, the good old days at Montparnasse came to an end. By the late 1920s the relationships of the Lost Generationers were fraying in several ways. Some, Like Ezra Pound, moved to get away from the strain of the Paris expatriate lifestyle. Zelda’s alcoholism and mental illness got worse and so did Fitzgerald’s drinking. Hemingway hated everyone but the closest bottle of gin. He and Fitzgerald no longer considered each other the cat’s pajamas. Eventually, Zelda would end up in an asylum and Scott ended up a sad character. He tried to quit or rein in his drinking a number of times in his 30s but nothing ever took. Not a “beer only” policy. Not a drinking schedule. Not even candy. He finally died of a heart attack when he was forty-four (while eating candy). When he did, those stacks of The Great Gatsby were still in his publisher’s warehouse just waiting for me to get to high school 48 years later.
If you’re looking for a link here and you’re not above stretching a metaphorical relationship beyond what is reasonable, because, say for a purely hypothetical reason, you wanted to write something funny and you’re on a deadline and the thing you wrote isn’t funny, you might say that while Gatsby encapsulates the American Dream, Fitzgerald embodies America’s relationship with alcohol. It started out fun and harmless enough, it inspired him, but then it got serious, became problematic and uncontrollable, and eventually destroyed him. Fitzgerald is a personification of American drinking.
So, what to drink? (because I’m guessing you need one if you read that whole thing).
Fitzgerald’s drink of choice was gin. Though he didn’t turn down wine, champagne, beer, or anything with an ABV of over .002%. He apparently chose gin because he believed it didn’t make his breath smell, but since he would swim in fountains before passing out the floor, it was sort of a moot gesture. According to some sources, his favorite was the Gin Rickey. This is also the only cocktail mentioned by name in The Great Gatsby. Tom Buchanan mixes them up while Gatsby makes out with his wife. It’s an easy cocktail that shouts “drink me in the summer but please don’t screw my wife, old sport.”
Gin Rickey
– 2 oz gin
– ½ a lime
– Club soda
Pour the gin over ice, squeeze that lime over the drink like it was talking about your mom, and drop the helmet in the glass. Top it off with soda and drink “greedily” as if someone has just called you “old sport” unironically. You could also go with the drink that Fitzgerald bragged about drinking in his early days: The Bronx Cocktail.
– 2 ounces gin
– ¼ ounce dry vermouth
– ¼ ounce sweet vermouth
– 1 ounce fresh orange juice
– 1 dash orange bitters (optional, but really, why wouldn’t you?)
Add all ingredients to a glass of ice, shake it up, and pour into a chilled glass. Sit back, listen to jazz, and thank any deity you believe in that you aren’t mentioned in A Moveable Feast. If you want to peruse some of the dozens of other cocktails that came out of Paris in the 1920s, check out this list of Paris Cocktails. Extra points if you drink them while wearing cat pajamas or even your cat’s pajamas.
