F. Scott Fitzgerald almost ruined his best novel by titling it "Trimalchio." It is a literary allusion to Petronius's Satyricon, which contains a long description of a Roman dinner party given by Trimalchio, an ex-slave who is now a millionaire. Trimalchio is depicted as a vulgar show-off boasting of his possessions and trying to impress his guests with elaborately fancy food and entertainment.
It is true that The Great Gatsby story launches with descriptions of the parties given by a mysterious millionaire in an old-rich neighbourhood of Long Island. The coming and going of drunken fun-seekers attracts the attention of accidental neighbour, straight-laced Nick Carraway; and we gradually start unraveling the mystery as we find out why Gatsby befriends Nick and that Gatsby wants his old flame Daisy to come and be impressed that he too has made the upper class. Gatsby's parties are so central in the book that Fitzgerald, casting around for a catchy title, thought Trimalchio would expand its cultural resonances.
Here are two reasons why it would have been a bad title. One is that it makes Fitzgerald sound pretentious and old-fashioned, just the opposite of his actual reputation as the poet of the 1920s Jazz Age. Only a highbrow literary audience would recognize the allusion. I doubt whether Trimalchio would have a shot at being the most famous American novel of the 20th century.
The other reason is that Petronius's Trimalchio is not at all like Fitzgerald's Gatsby. Petronius, who was the Emperor Nero's master of ceremonies and arbiter of taste, knew a lot about lavish entertainments, and satirizes Trimalchio and his guests as a drunken ignoramus surrounded by sychophants. But Gatsby is Fitzgerald's hero-- immensely charming, sincere, and self-sacrificing. His only fault is having been born on the wrong side of the tracks; if now he is a front for bootleg gangsters, that doesn't matter in the moral scheme of the Prohibition era.
You have only to look at the films made of the two books: Fellini's Satyricon presents Trimalchio as fat, belching and farting, drooling wine, while his guests are ugly, painted, gluttons applauding and laughing on cue. Gatsby has been filmed in a series of blockbusters, famed above all for the party scenes with their elegance, sexyness, and hot-dancing fun. Fellini's Satyricon more or less accurately depicts ancient Rome as full of grotesque superstitions and sadistic cruelty. Gatsby is one of the rare great books that come across even better in film, because the visuals are so stunning. Unless you are a prude one can hardly help wishing you could be at one of Gatsby's parties when you see it on the Technicolor screen.
Petronius, of course, is an ultra-snob; and he must have been a sycophant to get along with Nero. His main charge against Trimalchio is that he is an ex-slave; and that such a person should now have a lot of money and give dinner parties like the hereditary aristocracy is self-evidently a matter for contempt. In fact, Trimalchio's one virtue is what Petronius scorns the most: Trimalchio makes a drunken speech in which he says, he is proud to invite freedmen (i.e. ex-slaves) to his dinners; that he intends to set all his slaves free when he dies; that slaves are humans too. For Petronius, this blasphemy against Roman values is so blatant that it needs no comment. *
* How, one might ask, could an ex-slave in First Century Rome become a millionaire? Trimalchio tells us that he was an accountant; took care of the books for his master's estates; was freed at his death; and expanded into shipping imports and exports for the Mediterranean-wide imperial economy. In a society so permeated with slavery, including educated people enslaved by conquests in Greece and the Middle East, the Roman landowners with their military traditions relied on slaves to do all the work that in modern times would be considered the professions and business management.
Gatsby, on the other hand, is everything a hero should be. He is extremely good-looking (whether cast by Alan Ladd, Robert Redford, or Leonardo di Caprio)-- a point that comes out more clearly on film than in the book. Why should Daisy have fallen in love with a penniless young army lieutenant in the first place? Because he is so good looking, so magnetically charming. Daisy is tearfully quoted as saying "rich girls don't marry poor boys"; but she omitted to say they can fall in love with a poor boy if he's good-looking enough. Hence the real-life fairy tale quality that Fitzgerald captures. Gatsby is a plausible fairy tale that rises to serious literature because it builds into classic tragedy, ending with the hero killed and the wealthy escaping into their "vast carelessness... and let other people clean up the mass they had made."
Calling his book Trimalchio would have lowered its literary resonance, not raised it. Petronius's Satyricon consists of fragments of a wandering novel with little plot, no dramatic scenes or memorable characters. Fitzgerald's Great Gatsby is at the opposite end of the spectrum, tightly plotted with two interlocking adulterous triangles, memorable, iconic.
Why then did Fitzgerald think Trimalchio was the right title? Fitzgerald did a lot of revising texts and changing his narratives. After publishing Gatsby in 1925, Fitzgerald started another ambitious novel called The Boy Who Killed His Mother (alternatively titled The World's Fair and Our Type); in a major revision, it became The Drunkard's Holiday, then Doctor Diver's Holiday, before Fitzgerald retitled it Tender is the Night just before publication in 1934. [Mizener 1959: 10, 206, 232, 251] The manuscript during those nine years went back and forth between 400,000 words and cutting to a quarter that length. [Cowley 1953: iv] Fitzgerald was not a spontaneous writer; he made elaborate outlines and kept notebooks strategizing what he should write. The best excuse for all the indecision is that he was drunk so much of the time.
"The Great Gatsby" was one title among many; others considered were "Gold-hatted Gatsby", "The High-bouncing Lover", as well as "Among the Ash Heaps and Millionaires", "On the Road to West Egg", and (what was he thinking?) "Under the Red, White, and Blue". Corresponding with his editor at Scribners, Fitzgerald initially called it The Great Gatsby, but a few weeks later instructed him to title it Trimalchio in West Egg. Maxwell Perkins and the other editors didn't like the title. Fitzgerald wavered throughout the publication process, and wrote from Europe that "Trimalchio might have been best after all." [West 2000: xvii] But it was too late; the book was already printed, and acquired fame as The Great Gatsby.
In fact the resonance is exactly right. At the end of the book, we find that the hero's father is named Gatz-- a middle-European immigrant name. Jay changes it to Gatsby, for its ring of the English aristocracy. The title captures the ethnic as well as class snobbery that is the setting for this romance of failed social climbing. Gatsby manages to be the romance of money and true love, and what the world is really like.
References
Malcolm Cowley. 1953. Introduction to Tender is the Night. Three Novels by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Scribner's.
Arthur Mizener. 1959. The Far Side of Paradise: A Biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Random House.
James L.W. West III. 2000. Introduction to Trimalchio: An Early Version of The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Cambridge Univ. Press.
