In 1951, a 65 -year -old blind man named Max Gerlach was listening to the radio when something caught his attention. A guest had appeared who had just published only one biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald, the deceased, great chronicler of the roars of the 20s and the search for the American dream.
In a matter of minutes, Gerlach called the radio station. He not only knew Fitzgerald, he said, but inspired his masterpiece.
“I am the real Jay Gatsby,” he said.
At that time, no one paid Gerlach, a former car mechanic who had fallen in a bad weather, of any mind. He spent the last year of his life trying in vain to communicate with the biographer of Fitzgerald, writing letters asking him to let him tell his story. He ended up dying at the Bellevue Hospital in New York City in 1958, at the age of 73, forgotten.
That is, up to about 40 years later, when another biographer of Fitzgerald, Matthew Bruccoli, from the South Carolina University, found a note that a “Max Gerlach” had written in one of Fitzgerald’s cuts albums in 1923. The last line was “How are you and the family, old?”
“It is Gatsby’s decisive phrase,” said Howard eat, a private detective that Bruccoli got ready to obtain more information about the mysterious Gerlach in 2002 (Bruccoli has died since then). “That phrase, Greatby”, “ISSby”, “Gatsby”, “Gatsby,” “Gatsby”.
“The Great Gatsby” celebrates its centenary this month. The elusive central character of the novel, a smuggler with a mysterious past who organizes luxurious parties with the hope of recovering his lost love, continues to deceive.
Fitzgerald, who routinely extracted his own life for his fictions, admitted that Jay Gatsby “began as a man who knew and then changed in myself.”
For decades, academics, detectives and fans have tried to discover the identity of that “a man.”
“There seems to be an infinite fascination with discovering who the real Jay Gatsby could have, almost as if Fitzgerald were incapable or imagining such a man,” said James West, a retired English professor at Penn State University and author of Stateald. He pointed out that there are multiple suspects.
Herbert Bayard Swope was a newspaper who launched luxurious parties in his mansion in Great Neck, to which Fitzgerald and his wife, Zelda, attended.
Joseph G. Robin, an immigrant born in Russia to the United States, changed his name, made a fortune in the bank and kept elegant “car parties” in Long Island Gofore going to prison for bribes and emillers.
Last year, journalist Mickey Rathbun published a book about his grandfather, George Gordon Moore, claiming Hey It was “the real Gatsby.”
There are dozens of people who believe they have some type of connection or understanding of the person on which the great novel was based.
“When I first reviewed it as a general editor of Fitzgerald’s Collected Works, I received electronic emails and letters of people who” absolutely knew “who was the original Jay Gatsby,” West told The Post. “I answer them all, but nothing came,” he recalled with a laugh.
However, among some obsessive Gatsby, Gerlach has become a leading candidate. A 2014 book, “F. Scott Fitzgerald at work”, of the American scholar Horst Kruse, argues that the German immigrant served as the basic for the character.
Last year, research journalist Joe Nocera launched a series of eight -part podcast called “American Dreamer”, which deepens Gerlach and his alleged connection with this famous novel.
Gerlach was born in 1885 in Germany, although he then told everyone that he was from Yonkers. His father, who served in the German army, died when Gerlach was 2 years old, and he arrived in the United States with his mother and his second husband when he was 9 years old. (For a while, Gerlach used his stepfather’s last name, Stork, before returning to his birth name).
Gerlach studied Auto Engineering and worked as a machinist, garage mechanic, car seller and racing car promoter in New York, Chicago and Cuba. He was real in Germany when World War I broke out in July 1914, and went to the American embassy to leave Europe as quickly as possible. He requested to serve in the US Army. In 1918, towards the end of the war, which probably softens the suspicions that he was a Hitler supporter.
It is not clear when and how Gerlach with F. Scott and Zelda, but their shoulders were definitely rubbed.
It is possible that they have connected through Gerlach’s work as a car mechanic specialized in elegant and fast cars. The work puts it in touch with the fashion inhabitants of New York City. Cars also play an important role in “The Great Gatsby”, both as a plot driver as a symbol of power, speed and destruction.
At some point, Gerlach scolded as Max von Gerlach (who conferred a noble position) and distributed rumors that he was related to Kaiser Wilhelm II. He cultivated an elegant accent, said he had gone to the University of Oxford and began calling everyone “the old sport.” He also ventured into some smugglers, and associated with the head of the crime of Knights Arnold Rothstein, who fixed the 1919 World Series, as well as the Gatsby Chief, Meyer Wolfsheim, in “The Gratsby”.
“He has tried to rebuild himself,” Kruse told the post. “It tells one story after another, in ingenious requests for the army, in interviews, in passport requests: it is always the fact that it is a German immigrant. Invents stories about itself, all the stories to make hatred. Gatsby does it.”
Of course, the tragedy of “The Great Gatsby” is that all the money in the world cannot elevate the poor “Gatz” to the upper cortex. The rich Margarita material, the love of her life, leaves her rich pole husband for him. Gatsby will always be poor, it will always be “another”, no matter how many riches acquire.
Fitzgerald published “The Great Gatsby” in 1925. It was a failure. In the summer of 1927, Gerlach was arrested for selling alcohol illegally, and the great depression lost a lot of money. He tried to commit suicide in 1939 shooting himself in the head with a gun, but blinded himself.
Fitzgerald died in 1940 at the age of 44, a drunk. Zelda perished in 1948 in a fire in the asylum where they committed it. Before he died, he reminded Henry Dan Piper, then a university student who would later write a book about Fitzgerald, which Scott had based Gatsby on a man named “von Gerlach”, who “was in trouble on the placement of boats.”
“The Great Gatsby” was rediscovered from World War II, when it was launched as a pocket book. Around that time, Gerlach said telling people that he was the model of the protagonist of the book. But many lost generation men could see themselves in the romantic hero of Fitzgerald, in his desperate search for the American dream.
“When I started studying Fitzgerald, I thought it was easy: that there was a relationship between a real person and a character, but the more you get it, you discover that it is much more complicated,” West said. “Jay Gatsby in the novel is a manufacturing. It contains characteristics of several different people … including Fitzgerald.”