"What's in a Name, Old Sport?": Kipling's The Story of the Gadsbys as a Possible Source for Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby

Robert Roulston wryly observed that in three decades of scholarly attention, the "catalog of the authors whose writings have supposedly left traces on The Great Gatsby is as full of bizarre incongruities as Nick Carraway's list of guests at Gatsby's parties. Flaubert is there with Stephen Leacock and Dreiser with Edith Wharton. There too are Charles Dickens and Ford Madox Ford, Joseph Conrad and Anthony Hope, Coleridge and Clarence E. Mulford, Thackeray and Harold Bell Wright, T.S. Eliot and George Eliot, Petronius and Stendhal, Mark Twain and Emily Brontë, Herman Melville and Horatio Alger, Oswald Spengler and Willa Cather, John Keats and the anonymous creator of Diamond Dick, H.G. Wells and his nemesis Henry James, and poor John Lawson Stoddard, who finds himself confused with the racist Theodore Lothrop Stoddard. And not far from the center, as conspicuous as he would have wished, is the sage of Baltimore, H.L. Mencken." ¹ And, more recently, Elinor Glyn. ² It is almost with a sense of apology, then, that I offer yet another possible influence to this lengthy list.

Karen Bellenir writes that "when Fitzgerald has young James Gatz christen himself 'Gatsby,' he gives his readers a riddle to ponder," ³ a "difficult puzzle to solve." ⁴ Bellenir speculates that Gatsby's initials—J.P.—allude to financier J.P. Morgan and help "define the boundaries of his new name and personality. Thus, James Gatz became 'J. Gatz P.' For ease of articulation, Fitzgerald rendered the name Jay Gatsby." ⁵ Crim and Houston, meanwhile, suggest that Jay, the name Gatsby takes as an adult, derives from James, which in turn derives from the biblical name Jacob, meaning "the supplanter," and that Gatsby "attempts to supplant Tom for the life and love of Daisy." ⁶ Alexander R. Tamke sees in "Gatsby" the 1920s slang term for revolver, "gat," ⁷ while Horst Kruse suggests that "Gatsby" derives from "Gadsby," the name of a Washington, D.C., hotel mentioned in Mark Twain's A Tramp Abroad, the significance of the name reinforcing the sense of Gatsby's mansion functioning as a hotel for wayward guests. ⁸

Kruse may be right about the "Gadsby" connection, but Ernest Hemingway points the way to a more convincing source. "East is East and West is West," Rudyard Kipling wrote, "and never the twain shall meet." ⁹ Nor, apparently, East Egg and West Egg. Two years after The Great Gatsby was published, Hemingway wrote Scott Fitzgerald that he was titling his new collection of stories Men Without Women. Kipling, Hemingway explained, "had been there before me and swiped all the good [titles] so I called the book Men Without Women hoping it would have a large sale among the fairies and old Vassar girls." ¹⁰ This is vintage Hemingway—the hurtful, yet playful jabs at Fitzgerald's Ivy League background and paranoia over his manhood, as well as the unabashed repetition of a word Robert McAlmon had been using to spread rumors about Fitzgerald and Hemingway. ¹¹ But what stands out most and invites further consideration is Hemingway's pointedly sarcastic reference to Kipling and "swiping" titles—especially if we bear in mind Hemingway's earlier veiled attacks on Fitzgerald in print and in letters. ¹² A Kipling connection is not as remote as it might seem, since one critic already has observed a common denominator: that "Kipling's 'The Finest Story in the World' seems one of the key texts behind Eliot's most famous poem," The Waste Land, ¹³ an "oft-debated topic" of affinity with Fitzgerald's novel. ¹⁴ Something inspired Fitzgerald to change The Great Gatsby from a novel set in Victorian-era New York and the Midwest ¹⁵ to a Modernist fable...