Gatsby, like most officially great novels, is the least good of Fitzgerald's books. Tender is the Night and The Beautiful and the Damned were way better. There was something about critics of the time who needed to suffer to appreciate anything and it was good of Mencken to hold Fitzgerald to his own standards, but what made authors of the era great were the books that were actually enjoyable. When you look at other authors of the era, where W. Sommerset Maughm is known for his miserable slog, Of Human Bondage, when The Razors Edge, Cakes and Ale, and the Painted Veil were way better, and he's even credited with being the precursor of the spy novel with his Ashenden stories. Hemmingway was a short story writer, but somehow he is remembered for the fawning reception of Farewell to Arms. Evelyn Waugh was savagely funny if you have read Scoop, Decline and Fall or Black Mischief, but Brideshead Revisited was the critical success that got made into a sappy miniseries.
It's like critics take your least spectacular and most vulnerable work and tag you with it as your best so as to ensure you are never known for the great stuff that got you on their radar and that might put their own work to shame. However, it doesn't matter, their lives are absurd. Quite a number of them make a living criticising food now, mostly because it can't defend itself.
The era of great criticism that began with characters like Mencken and, earlier, Bierce ended with the death of Christopher Hitchens I think. None of them, including Vidal, or Hunter S. Thompson would survive the culture today. I think it's too bad that the idea of a literary rivalry now seems as dated as fighting a duel with sabres, and it's as though there is nobody writing today who is capable of putting down a challenger when instead they can claim to be the victim of harassment to attract a mob. Mencken was great, and given Fitzgeralds other work, his Gatsby review was an act of mercy, but I bet he would be banned from social platforms and probably have trouble getting a bank account if he were writing today. Hard to say what we lost, but reading Mencken now, it's definitely gone.
Not sure I agree. You, as with most critics actually, seem to be asserting there are clear "quality" lines to be drawn between great novels. IMO we're into the realm of subjectivity here and it's really up to the reader to decide what they like.
I didn't like Tender is the Night too much, and I love Hemingway's novels more than his stories (generally), chiefly The Sun Also Rises and For Whom the Bell Tolls. Do I know better than you or do famous critics know better than me? I don't think so.
You are denying that writing is an art that has its own inherent (~objective) system of evaluation that transcends the grasp/reading of a specific reader. The individual reader is entitled to its opinion, but any given school of criticism within the confines of the discipline (here writing) is also entitled to its professional assessment of the work.
We make distinction between great and good code. We celebrate certain software at the source code level. And what should we think of say someone who has never written a line of code telling us that there are no clear lines separating source codes and dismiss us as "critics".
Mencken gave a professional review. He rated the story as banal, but true to the scene depicted. He rated the character development as spotty. But he seemed pretty excited about the crafting of the sentences and pages. Now this here is something that will likely escape the notice of the general reader (they may just 'like it a lot' but won't be able to tell you why) but a pro like Mencken zeroes in on that.
> I love Hemingway's novels more than his stories (generally), chiefly The Sun Also Rises and For Whom the Bell Tolls.
I think it's in some ways unfortunate the way we have high school students ready things like A Farewell to Arms, maybe For Whom the Bell Tools, or Old Man and the Sea, rather than for example, moving students through more of a progression. For example, you read The Nick Adams stories that Hemingway used as almost "notes" for his later works. There's something gritty and unrefined about the stories, but you can see Hemingway starting to build a style. Islands in the Stream, published posthumously, is more of an insight into how the writer worked than a complete, finished novel. If we are going claim to your students that this Hemingway guy was the great writer of the 20th century, we should at least owe it to them to really demonstrate why.
It's like critics take your least spectacular and most vulnerable work and tag you with it as your best so as to ensure you are never known for the great stuff that got you on their radar and that might put their own work to shame. However, it doesn't matter, their lives are absurd. Quite a number of them make a living criticising food now, mostly because it can't defend itself.
The era of great criticism that began with characters like Mencken and, earlier, Bierce ended with the death of Christopher Hitchens I think. None of them, including Vidal, or Hunter S. Thompson would survive the culture today. I think it's too bad that the idea of a literary rivalry now seems as dated as fighting a duel with sabres, and it's as though there is nobody writing today who is capable of putting down a challenger when instead they can claim to be the victim of harassment to attract a mob. Mencken was great, and given Fitzgeralds other work, his Gatsby review was an act of mercy, but I bet he would be banned from social platforms and probably have trouble getting a bank account if he were writing today. Hard to say what we lost, but reading Mencken now, it's definitely gone.