Max von Gerlach, the Man Behind Jay Gatsby

A German Immigrant Story and Its Impact on the Composition of The Great Gatsby

"... what better right does a man possess than to invent his own antecedents?" Nick Carraway assessing Jay Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby: The Revised and Rewritten Galleys (1990), p. 161

Introduction

There is all but universal agreement that F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby occupies a preeminent place in American literature, in terms of popular appeal and critical acclaim, and that Jay Gatsby, the protagonist, more so than any other character in American fiction, embodies national themes and aspirations. The complex story of the novel's achievement is thus fully deserving of the attention it has been given, its verification worthy of further effort. In its powerful mythical implications and profuse dependence on American materials, both historical and contemporary, The Great Gatsby has indeed left much room for speculation about the author's actual sources of inspiration. The large number and wide range of parallels and correspondences that have been proposed, literary and otherwise, and the number of real people that have been suggested as models for its cast of characters—Jay Gatsby in particular—are as much a measure of its universal quality as of the interest that the author and his work continue to command. But at the same time the abundance of such proposals also hints at the failure of scholarship to determine basic elements of the history of the making of the novel and calls for a continuing effort at clarification. Jay Gatsby, above all, in his commanding presence of nearly 90 years' standing, is holding out a challenge to explore his actual roots, intriguing as they are in their persistent obscurity.

It is in response to this challenge that I return to the case of Max Gerlach. Apart from Edward M. Fuller, William F. McGee, and Robert C. Kerr, whose contributions to his characterization are considered minor, Gerlach was the only model for Jay Gatsby expressly identified by name in 1947 by Zelda Fitzgerald, the author's wife, shortly before her death. And in 1951 Gerlach himself spoke up and claimed to be the individual who inspired Fitzgerald's protagonist. Despite all research efforts, however, Gerlach remains elusive as an historical personage, so that the extent and the exact nature of his influence on the inception and the composition of The Great Gatsby continue to be a matter of debate. Prompted early by Gerlach's German name and carried on in friendly rivalry with Matthew J. Bruccoli, my own explorations eventually led me to the fortuitous discovery of materials in the National Archives and Records Administration in both Washington, DC, and College Park, Maryland, concerning Gerlach's military career in the US Army during World War I, as well as court records in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York concerning his bootleg activities. Working from these and other documents relating to his life both before and after the war, I was able to trace central motifs of the novel and a long list of specific details to incidents in Gerlach's life and thus substantiate previous speculations concerning his role in the genesis of the book. What had escaped my notice at the time—and what I have discovered only since the publication of my findings in The F. Scott Fitzgerald Review in 2002—is an essential fact that turns out to hold a key to both Gerlach's personality and its appeal to the author of The Great Gatsby—that the circumstances of his life in combination with those of the times he lived in had suggested to Gerlach that he proceed to construct and reconstruct varying accounts of his biography in the interest of his own advancement. His very success in this endeavor of necessity entailed the likelihood of error for those engaged in the study of his activities. This turned my own research into an uncommonly challenging, at times frustrating, but also thoroughly rewarding longtime scholarly adventure on two sides of the Atlantic, an adventure not without its share of pleasant surprises. When proof continued to refuse to emerge to support the widely held view of Gerlach as a wealthy Long Island bootlegger, for instance, the search for further details of his life happened to take me to libraries and archives in Germany rather than in the United States, affording me the advantage of ready access to files partly obscured by linguistic usages and idiosyncrasies in print and handwriting, such as occur in historical documents. These German files, along with a variety of materials freshly available on the Internet, turn out to provide significant additions to earlier information about Max Gerlach and suggest a new configuration of the evidence.

Among the more important facts and documents that have come to light in my renewed search are the following:

• Gerlach was born in Germany rather than in the United States, as he had claimed.

• He came to America at age nine as a half-orphan, the stepson of a German immigrant.

• He used his stepfather's last name, Stork, for nearly two decades.

• He presented various contradictory versions of his life story.

• He temporarily returned to Germany and consequently was entangled with American legal authorities.

• A 1915 photo of Max Stork in New York City Police Department evidence files.

• Additional street addresses and business connections in New York City as well as Chicago and Joliet, Illinois.

• His 1919 visa application with passport photo and personal data.

• Several documents relating to his life after contact with the Fitzgeralds.

All in all, the newly recovered details add up to consolidate the typification of Gerlach's experiences as those of an immigrant and to provide a fabric that would allow Fitzgerald to dramatize these experiences as a prototypical account of the rags-to-riches American success story and—in topical variation—its failure in the growing materialism of the American twenties. They do not, however, confirm either his role as a big-time bootlegger or as a neighbor of the Fitzgeralds on Long Island. Rather, and more importantly, it emerges that Max Gerlach brought to the novel an intriguingly complex biography in which unusual personal as well as national predicaments combined to shape his abiding quest for identity as an American citizen. And it appears that it was this quest, rather than the bootlegger's lifestyle and wealth, that appealed to Fitzgerald and made him take Gerlach for a model and Gerlach's very quest as his theme. In addition to correcting long-held assumptions about Gerlach and proposing some...