Covering a Debt: F. Scott Fitzgerald and Francis Cugat
The current Scribner Classics paperback edition of The Great Gatsby features on its cover the illustration from the novel's original 1925 dust jacket. In his introduction to that edition, Charles Scribner III comments that "after half a century the highly stylized image once again appears fresh and effective, and in vogue: such are the cycles of taste" (Gatsby xiii). In one way, though, the jacket image points up how tastes have changed: the barely-discernible female nudes in the pupils of Daisy's eyes are reminders of how daring the novel was for its timeÂ—too daring, in fact, to be serialized in leading magazines, one of whose editors found Gatsby "too ripe" for its readership, too full of mistresses and adulteries" (Mellow 226). Scribner also makes a rather more significant claim about the cover illustration by Francis Cugat. "The dominant symbol of the novel, the billboard eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg, owed its origins to the artist Francis Cugat," declares Scribner. "I do not know of another case in which an author acknowledges so central a debt to an illustrator" (Gatsby xiii). If substantiated, Scribner's claim would not only identify an important debt indeed but also would have great bearing on our understanding of the creative process behind The Great Gatsby (the earliest drafts of which do not survive)Â—both because of the apparent source of this image, and even more because of the relatively late introduction it would suggest for