Ernest Hemingway vs. F. Scott Fitzgerald In A Ten Round Bout For The Literary Championship Of The Jazz Age-Two Corner Boys Do What Corner Boys Always Do “Bet” The Over-Under

By Zack James

Recenty I did what I thought would be a little fluff piece about then freshly-retired, maybe semi-retired is better since old writers like old generals don’t seem to fade away Josh Breslin. The piece centered on a “think piece” that he did off-the cuff for his old boss Ben Gold over at The Literary Gazette who basically gave him carte blanche to write whatever came into his head. What came into his head was a little mischievous piece to tweak the academic who have created more fake news about various writers and their influence than you can shake a stick at. Josh’s idea then was to raise hackles with the big academic types over which of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s early novels best typified the Jazz Age his first novel This Side Of Paradise or his classic The Great Gatsby. To ignite the fires he claimed both represented that time equally with the idea that a few sullen undergraduates with time on their hands might take up the cudgels for one side or the other. And they did until they had to clear the path for an Ivy League throwdown between two heavyweight professors who were the acknowledged experts on these respective books. Josh told me they were probably still at it throwing footnotes and epitaphs at each other like a couple of pigs in mud.

Josh, having gotten a taste for the flames after that episode, moved on quickly once he saw how easy it was to frost the academy and so he tweaked out a battle royal between Hemingway and Fitzgerald for the title of literary king of the Jazz Age. As expected he stirred up another hornet’s nest when he decided to fire up Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises as the big boy of the genre, making him the champ. Like the earlier piece the academics went berserk and again are probably still at it. What Josh did not expect although if he had remembered his corner boy days it would have come naturally was that he would be challenged to a bet on who was that literary king back in those hoary Jazz Age days.

               

The bet had been triggered after Josh had told Sam Lowell one night at Terry James’ Grille in Riverdale where they occasionally met to rekindle old time stories from their growing up days about a “firestorm” that he had created. Josh had added that at the end of that review which had caused the battle royal that he had wink, wink “wondered aloud” whether Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises might be more evocative of the Jazz Age doing than Gatsby. Nobody in the melee had seen fit to note that blasphemous statement since they were all Fitzgerald specialists as far as he could tell he told Sam with a wicked grin on his face that a future article would present that case for dissection. Josh had casually mentioned to Sam that he would be willing to bet that bringing that battle of the Titians to the pages of the Gazette would create another set of fireworks in the academy.     

Suddenly Sam called out “Bet.” Josh retorted quickly and almost automatically “Bet.” The only question then was the size of the wager which turned out to be for one hundred dollars. See back in their school boy days Sam, Josh and the other guys who hung around Tonio’s Pizza Parlor on lonesome, date-less Friday or Saturday nights would to wile the time away make bets on almost anything from sports to the size of some girl’s bra. Of course those bets were for quarters, maybe a dollar or two revealing the low dough nature of their existences in those days. The most famous “bet” of all just to give the reader a flavor of how deeply embedded in the night these issues were had been the night the late Peter Paul Markin had challenged Frankie Riley, the leader of the guys around Tonio’s, to bet on how high Tonio (or whoever was working that night) could make the pizza dough they were kneading go. Frankie “won” the bet that night because he had an arrangement with the guy doing the pizza dough who owed him some moola. Markin did not find out about the switch-up until much later. The important point was that when a guy called “Bet” to a guy on any proposition no matter how screwy the other guy was duty-bound to take the bet under penalty of becoming a social outcast. Therefore the speed in which Josh answered Sam’s call to wager on whether there would be another flameless flare-up after Josh’s next article.  

As these propositions went, for a quarter or one hundred dollars, Josh always prided himself on taking pains to try to win. Sam had, perhaps being a lawyer even more naïve about the incessant in-fighting in the academy than Josh had declared that he would bet that there would be no controversy surrounding Josh’s notion that Hemingway’s book was more evocative that Fitzgerald’s. The whole thing seemed childish, his term, and after the dust-up between Professors Jacobs and Lord had exposed all to charges of infantile behavior no one would dare to read even a cursory letter challenging Josh’s frayed little idea. Josh, truth be told, had not read Gatsby in a few years and due to the press of other commitments he did not intend, since he believed he could win the bet without doing so, to do another of his periodical re-readings of the book, one of his favorites. He figured that he could do an end around by viewing the 1970s film adaptation of the book, the one starring Robert Redford and Mia Farrow. One night he along with his third wife, Millie, streamed the Netflix version of the two- hour film.    

After viewing this film Josh began to panic a little at the prospect of, kiddingly or not, trying to defend Hemingway’s book as the definite literature on the mores of the Jazz Age. Afraid that his written claim that The Sun Also Rises was better at that seemed pretty threadbare. He was worried and as he tossed and turned that night he tried to see what in Gatsby, even the film version he would have to deal with in order to draw enough fire to flame up a controversy.

Although any book, any piece of literature, words, printed material   always were more important to Josh’s understanding of the world, understanding in this case of the period he had to admit that the feel of the film really did give a sense of what the Jazz Age was about from the scenes at Gatsby’s over the top mansion where the party-goers danced, wined, ate the night and early mornings away. There was definitely a sense that those who had survived the World War had left their pre-war sense of order and proper manners behind and that “wine, women [men] and song” was a mantra that both sexes could buy into as working day to day premise. It was like the survivors, those who had slogged through France and those who were left behind to wait for the other shoe to drop had a veil lifted. That dramatic effect, that sense of abandoning the old life on a re-reading of the expatriate life in Hemingway’s novel didn’t strike Josh as decisive as in Gatsby.       

The real thread though that Josh thought would undo him was that striving for the main chance that drove Gatsby either to grab the dough or grab the love flame with a show of what he had achieved by his efforts to “prove” himself worthy of Daisy. The new money though couldn’t break through in the end because Gatsby forgot rule number one about the old monied rich, and about Daisy as a representative character, they may make the social messes but somebody else is left to clean up afterward. Funny because in a sense Gatsby really knew that when he was asked to explain what he heard in Daisy’s voice-the sound of money. That said it all.    

Although the film did not quote the whole paragraph from the last summing up page of the book Josh once he heard the talk by Nick about the Dutch sailors and the fresh breast of new land that they found when they came up Long Island Sound back in the 1500s he knew in the back of his brain that he would never have more than a weak argument in defending Hemingway’s book as the definitive Jazz Age take. How could he beat out the notion that the fresh breast of land which had caused those long ago sailors to set out in ragged ships heading into uncharted waters to find their own dreams, to refresh their sense of wonder which had taken a beating in the old country from which they had taken the chance to flee.  

[Sam not unexpectedly won the bet since the only response that Josh got from anybody about his article that time was why he didn’t view the updated 2000s version of Gatsby by some undergraduate student who had never heard of Mia Farrow. And so it goes.]