What makes Gatsby run?

Let me play literary critic for a moment. I’ve just finished a book that I haven’t read since high school. It’s Budd Schulberg’s “What Makes Sammy Run?”, a scandal when it was first published in 1941 and far over the head of this reader circa 1952.

But now older and much better read, I saw something I wouldn’t have seen before, nor would many other readers: it is a companion book to the pre-eminent novel of the twentieth century, Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby”.

American Lit is now in session. Both novels have first person narrators: Sammy’s Al Manheim is Gatsby’s Nick Carrington. Both main characters are uneducated young men who make big money and achieve success on their terms. Both Gatsby and Sammy change their name to “Americanize” it. Both yearn for the same wrong and unattainable woman. Both books have New York City as central locales.

Of course the action takes place a decade apart and the backgrounds are very different. Gatsby is from the Midwest and Sammy Glick is from a poor lower Manhattan family.

It happens that Schulberg and Fitzgerald knew each other in Hollywood and worked on a film together with disastrous results.

Gatsby remains the greatest novel of the twentieth century while “Sammy” is now just a footnote, like other Hollywood novels such as Christopher Isherwood’s “Prater Violet” and Nathaniel West’s “Day of the Locust”

Scratch a novelist and you’ll find a moralist, which is the strong bond between the two books. The final passage of Gatsby is considered one of the most lyrically tragic and beautifully written in literature.

But the final paragraphs of “Sammy” are no slouch either, reflecting on the moral lessons life teaches us. “It was too late to hate him or change him,” says the narrator, “his will had stiffened, formed to the life-molds, the terrible hungers of body and brain, the imposed wants, the traditional oppressions and persecutions”…and so we beat on, boats against the current.