The Hot Madness of Four O'Clock in Fitzgerald's "Absolution" and Gatsby

THE HOT MADNESS OF FOUR O'CLOCK IN FITZGERALD'S "ABSOLUTION" AND GATSBY Robert A. Martin University of Michigan As early as the summer of 1922, Fitzgerald began thinkingabout the novel that was to become The Great Gatsby. In July, he wrote his editor, Maxwell Perkins, that in his next novel he wanted "to write something new—something extraordinary and beautiful and simple and intricately patterned."1 During the summer of 1923, he completed nearly three chapters of an early version and bythe timehe again resumed work on it in the spring of 1924, "he discovered," writes Henry Dan Piper, "that his conception of the story had changed so radically that he felt obliged to begin it all over again."2 In April, 1924, Fitzgerald wrote Perkins that "much of what I wrote last summer was good but it was so interrupted and ragged and, in approaching it from a new angle, I've had to discard a lot of it—in one case 18,000 words (part of which will appear in the Mercury as a short story). . . . This book [The Great Gatsby] will be a consciously artistic achievement and must depend on that as the first books did not."3 In the June, 1924 issue of The American Mercury 6,000 words of the discarded manuscript appeared with the title of "Absolution," and a few weeks later Fitzgerald wrote in reply to a letter from Perkins, "I'm glad you liked 'Absolution.' As you know it was to have been the prologue of the novel but it interferred with the neatness of the plan."4 While nothing of Fitzgerald's "plan" for the novel appears to have survived, there clearly was one and his correspondence with Perkins indicates that from the first draft to the final galley proofs, Fitzgerald planned Gatsby with an exceptional amount of care. Although there has been an extraordinary amount of critical commentary devoted to The Great Gatsby, relatively few critics have approached the structural relationship between "Absolution" and Gatsby internally. A textual comparison of the two works, however, indicates that some of the original links that would have tied "Absolution" to Gatsby as prologue to novel are still visible beneath the surfaces and that the two works are, in fact, linked by numerous parallels that reflect Fitzgerald's original conception of the novel as an extended treatment of Jimmy Gatz's metamorphosis and career as Jay Gatsby. Studies in American Fiction231 Given Fitzgerald's comment in a letter to a John Jamieson in 1934 that although "Absolution" was intended to be "a picture" of Gatsby's early life, "I cut it because I preferred to preservethe sense ofmystery,"5 his first conception of the novelcan be seen through the surface details of the 1924 revision. The first thing, perhaps, to be said about"Absolution" is that it contains all the elements of style, structure, and narrative method that Fitzgerald would subsequently abandon as he revised his original manuscript to accommodate his "new angle" of approach. In addition to discarding the prologue and compressing the events into a single summer, he changed the setting from the Midwest to the East; the time from the 1880's to the 1920's; the narrative point-of-view from the third person to the first and the chronology from a straight forward to a broken time sequence. Fitzgerald's "new angle," therefore, permitted him to concentrate more fully on whatJames E. Millerhas called "his art of 'magic suggestiveness' "e through a compression of time and events. The second thing to be said about "Absolution" is that, as Robert Sklar has observed, "in outline most of The Great Gatsby is there."7 Although Fitzgerald continued to revise Gatsby through the final galley proofs, several obvious parallels remain. Rudolph Miller is clearly the young Jimmie Gatz whose disillusionment within the religious setting of "Absolution" anticipates the disillusionment of Jay Gatsby within the secular setting of the novel. Both Rudolph Miller and Jay Gatsby have their origins in "the Minnesota-Dakota country,"8 and both have insignificant fathers who greatly admire James J. Hill. While Rudolph's father appears as the local freight agent, Gatsby's parents are "shifdess and...