Celestial Eyes -- From Metamorphosis To Masterpiece

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Celestial Eyes -- from Metamorphosis to Masterpiece
by Charles Scribner III

1. Francis Cugat's jacket for The Great Gatsby. New York:
Charles Scribner's Sons, 1925. First Edition Facsimile
published by Collectors Reprints, Inc., New York, 1988.

In my 1990 F. Scott Fitzgerald seminar at the University of South Carolina, I
discussed the thematic connections between The Great Gatsby and its original
dust jacket, mentioning the mystery of Francis Cugat (or F. Coradal-Cugat).
Little is known about the artist responsible for the most eloquent jacket in
American literary history: he was born in Spain in 1893 and raised in Cuba; he
was brother of orchestra leader Xavier Cugat; he worked in Hollywood as a
designer for Douglas Fairbanks; he had a one-man New York show in 1942; his
death date is unknown. No other Cugat book jackets have been identified.
A student in my seminar, Martha Alston, mentioned the mystery to her visiting
aunt and uncle, Evelyn and Harvey Kilby; they traced a collection of Cugat's
work to the Wilmington, Delaware, artist and restorer Roy Blankenship, who had
acquired them from a Connecticut gallery. Mr. Blankenship permitted me to
purchase the eight pieces I recognized as preceding the Gatsby jacket.

Francis Cugat's painting for F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby is the most
celebrated--and widely disseminated--jacket art in twentieth-century American
literature, and perhaps of all time (fig. 1). After appearing on the first
printing in 1925, it was revived more than a half-century later for the
"Scribner Library" paperback edition in 1979; over a decade (and several million
copies) later it may be seen in classrooms of virtually every high school and
college throughout the country. Like the novel it embellishes, this Art Deco
tour-de-force has firmly established itself as a classic. At the same time, it
represents a most unusual--in my view, unique--form of "collaboration" between
author and jacket artist. Under normal circumstances, the artist illustrates a
scene or motif conceived by the author; he lifts, as it were, his image from a
page of the book. In this instance,: however, the artist's image preceded the
finished manuscript and Fitzgerald actually maintained that he had "written it
into" his book.1 But what precisely did he mean by this claim?
Cugat's rendition is not illustrative, but symbolic, even iconic: the sad,
hypnotic, heavily outlined eyes of a woman beam like headlights through a coba

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