The Great Gatsby Read online

  'It might interest you to know that a story of mine, called "Absolution""... was intended to be a picture of Gatsby's early life, but that I cut it because I preferred to preserve the sense of mystery' (to John Jamieson, 15 April 1934). How much the stature of The Great Gatsby depends on what Fitzgerald cut out is a matter to which I will return. Here we might consider what he had initially decided to write in as a crucial episode in Gatsby's childhood.

  Eleven-year-old Rudolph Miller - young Gatsby - has rebelled against his 'ineffectual' father and been forced to attend confession, during the course of which he lies. He has come to tell his story to Father Schwartz, to whom he admits that he is guilty of 'not believing I was the son of my parents' (a fantasy Fitzgerald himself owned to - 'that I wasn't the son of my parents, but a son of a king, a king who ruled the whole world' - exactly Freud's 'Family Romance'). For the dismalness of being Rudolph Miller he substitutes the gorgeousness of imagining himself to be Blatchford Sarmenington. 'When he became Blatchford Sarmenington a suave nobility flowed from him. Blatchford Sarmenington lived in great sweeping triumphs.' But he keeps the lie in the confessional to himself; indeed, the secret lie, like the secret fantasy, comes to constitute his essential self.

  An invisible line had been crossed, and he had become aware of his isolation - aware that it applied not only to those moments when he was Blatchford Sarmenington but that it applied to all his inner life. Hitherto such phenomena as 'crazy' ambitions and petty shames and fears had been but private reservations, unacknowledged before the throne of his official soul. Now he realized unconsciously that his private reservations were himself - and all the rest a garnished front and a conventional flag. The pressure of his environment had driven him into the lonely secret world of adolescence.

  Effectively, the boy is rejecting his biological father and rebelling against his spiritual father, as if to say: most importantly, essentially, I am my 'private reservations' - my refusals, my repudiations, my fantasies, and, yes, my guilty lies. If you want me, don't ask for Rudolph Miller. Ask for Blatchford Sarmenington. Ask for Jay Gatsby.

  But the most interesting aspect of the story is the curiously disturbed state of Father Schwartz. (I am not concerned here speculatively to relate this figure to such people as Father Sigourney Webster Fay, who undoubtedly had an important influence on Catholic Fitzgerald. Andre le Vot has done this well in his biography, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Penguin, 1983.) At the start the Father is clearly disturbed by 'the hot madness of four o'clock' - a 'terrible dissonance' made up of the rustle of Swedish girls, yellow lights, sweet smells and the Dakota wheat that is 'terrible to look on'. After he has listened to the boy's story the Father breaks into a trembling, monologue, which is distracted, if not deranged.

  'When a lot of people get together in the best places things go glimmering... The thing is to have a lot of people in the centre of the world, wherever that happens to be. Then... things go glimmering... my theory is that when a whole lot of people get together in the best places things go glimmering all the time... Did you ever see an amusement park?... It's a thing like a fair, only much more glittering. Go to one at night and stand a little way off from it in a dark place - under dark trees. You'll see a big wheel made of lights turning in the air, and a long slide shooting boats down into the water. A band playing somewhere, and a smell of peanuts - and everything will twinkle. But it won't remind you of anything, you see. It will all just hang out there in the night like a colored balloon - like a big yellow lantern on a pole... But don't get up close... because if you do you'll only feel the heat and the sweat and the life.'

  These are, in fact, the dying words of the Father, and we may take them as expressing his delirious regret for all the sexuality and glamour, the heat and light, that, as a celibate priest, he has repressed and kept his distance from. But as the expression of an eager, tremulous excitement aroused by the thought, the sense, the apprehension, of some kind of glittering glimmeringness - sexual and immaterial, incandescent and transcendent - generated by a forgathering of the beautiful and the blessed (or damned), the glamorous and the gorgeous, at a mythical, unreachable 'centre' - a heavenly amusement park - these words testify to a confused and inarticulate longing - for what? The light that never was on land or sea? - that is somewhere at the heart of Fitzgerald's work, to be indulged or dealt with as the case may be. It is a sort of uninstructed neo-Platonism gone somewhat berserk amid the endless wheat, the untouchable girls and the occasional brilliances of an otherwise dreary and dismal Middle West.

  But there is a crucial difference between Dexter Green's desire to possess the glittering things and Father Schwartz's advice to stand back from the glimmering light, and it lies precisely in the latter's apprehension that getting too close might be dangerous, ruinous to the vision of earthly (and heavenly?) delights. Rudolph Sarmenington Gatsby is partly Green and partly Schwartz (and Andre le Vot has shown how careful Fitzgerald was with his colour ascriptions - of which more later). He thinks he can possess - repossess - the glittering girl. Indeed, he attempts to make his house into a glimmering, glamorous centre to attract her: 'Your place looks like the World's Fair,' says Nick to him, seeing his house 'lit from tower to cellar'. We know that as a boy Fitzgerald was very struck by the brilliance of the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo in 1901, where there was 'a Goddess of Light whose glow could be seen as far away as Niagara Fall' (le Vot, p. 27), and Gatsby also uses the magic of electricity (he is after all a dedicated reader of Benjamin Franklin) to signal what he hopes and believes is a more than electrical glimmering. But for all the dedication of his quest for repossession, re-enactment, he can enjoy, indeed experience, his desire and his dreams better at a distance. He is not really at home in the light he has himself turned on and is more usually to be found, as the good Father advised, standing 'a little way off from it in a dark place'. When he does 'get up close' and encounters 'the heat and the sweat and the life' - particularly in the form of Tom Buchanan, the crude but confident snobbery of his discourse, the class-supported brashness of his hypocrisy, the brutality of his 'cruel body' - Gatsby is indeed destroyed. The Green is gone: all is Schwar(t)z.

  Fitzgerald planned The Great Gatsby during the summer of 1922 but wrote it during the summer of 1924 while living on the Riviera (he - crucially - revised the proofs in Rome during January and February of the following year). This is just when Nick Carraway is writing his book about his summer with Gatsby of two years earlier - but he is back in the Midwest. Fitzgerald has introduced a narrator between himself and his omniscient indulgences. Fitzgerald's book is Nick's book, but Nick is not Fitzgerald, however many refracted biographical fragments we may imagine we can discern. Nick is a character, of confessedly limited literary abilities (he has written only 'a series of very solemn and obvious editorials for the Yale News'), and while Nick is trying to write Gatsby, we are also reading Nick.

  Among writers he admired Fitzgerald had plenty of precedents for the introduction of a narrator. Henry James, discussing how a writer can extract maximum significance from his material, stresses the value of sometimes choosing a particular kind of narrator: 'By so much as the affair matters for some such individual, by so much do we get the best there is of it.' He points out the need for 'a reflecting and colouring medium' and adds:

  We want it clear, goodness knows, but we also want it thick, and we get the thickness in the human consciousness that entertains and records, that amplifies and interprets it... prodigies, when they come straight, come with an effect imperilled; they keep all their character, on the other hand, by looming through some other history - the indispensable history of somebody's normal relation to something.

  Gatsby is a self-styled, self-styling 'prodigy' of some sort - prodigiously criminal, prodigiously romantic - and Nick is, or so he would insist, nothing if not 'normal', though he would add, 'abnormally honest'. Gatsby certainly looms - looms and fades, looms and fades - through Nick's 'history', and Nick certainly 'amplifies and interprets' - amplifies, we
might come to think, quite inordinately.

  Joseph Conrad made some of his most important innovations in the art of fiction through the introduction and deployment of his sailor-narrator Marlow, particularly as Marlow tries to put together a narrative that will somehow make sense of Lord Jim. Was Jim a coward or an idealist? Coward and idealist? What is the significance, what are the implications, for 'us' - us sailors, us British, us decent and reliable white Westerners - of his aspirations and failures, his dreams and defections? Marlow has a lot invested in Jim, and in his attempts at narrative recuperation and evaluation. For surely Jim was 'one of us'. And yet... Mutatis mutandis, much of this is paralleled in the relationship of the bondsman-narrator Nick with the enigmatic Gatsby. Is Gatsby criminal or romantic? Criminal and romantic? What are the implications for us Americans of his grandiose plans and their dubious grounding? Of his glamorous dreams and the 'foul dust' that, inevitably, 'floated in the wake of his dreams' and in his wretched waking from them? Nick has a lot - a lot - invested in Gatsby and in his own written attempt at the retrieval and, indeed, elegiac celebration of the man. 'They're a rotten crowd... You're worth the whole damn bunch put together.' So they are, and so - Nick can make us feel - he is. For surely America can produce something better than Buchanans, more splendid than Carraways. And yet...

  The extent to which the book is Nick's version can hardly be overstressed. To be sure, he assembles his material from different sources. In addition to his own memory, there are documents, like the youthful Gatsby's copy of Hopalong Cassidy with its Franklinesque 'SCHEDULE' on the flyleaf and Nick's own infinitely suggestive list of Gatsby's guests of the summer of 1922, which is now 'disintegrating at its folds', suggesting perhaps the inevitable disintegration of other depositories of time - including the memory of the narrator. Then there is the long oral account of the first phase of the relationship between Gatsby and Daisy, given to him by Jordan Baker, and the accounts of Gatsby's early life, Dan Cody and the war years given to him by Gatsby himself during the doomed and hopeless vigil after the night of the fatal road accident. But it is Nick who transcribes these accounts; how much he may be requoting his sources and how much translating them - transforming, embellishing, amplifying, rewording - we can never know. By the conventions of fictional narrative, if a narrator gives the words of another character in quotation marks, then these were indeed the very words: he is allowed a (slightly implausible) perfect recall. Now, by my admittedly rough count, about 4 per cent of the book is in Gatsby's own words, and it is revealing to discover that Fitzgerald considerably reduced the amount of direct speech given to Gatsby in the draft of the novel. For example: ' "Jay Gatsby!"" he cried suddenly in a ringing voice. "There goes the great Jay Gatsby. That's what people are going to say - wait and see."" ' With such outbursts Gatsby would too crudely and unequivocally have announced and revealed himself. By systematic deletion Fitzgerald makes Gatsby a far more shadowy, less knowable, more ultimately elusive figure. Instead we get more of Nick's hypothesizing, speculating, imagining - and perhaps suppressing, recasting, fantasizing.

  His account is constantly marked by such words and phrases as the following: 'I suppose', 'I suspect', 'I think'; 'possibly', 'probably', 'perhaps'; 'I've heard it said', 'he seemed to say', 'there must have been', 'I have an idea that', 'I always had the impression'. 'As though' and 'as if' (used over sixty times) constantly introduce his own transforming similies and metamorphosing metaphors into the account. 'Possibly it occurred to him...' - and possibly it didn't. We can never know. What we do know is that it occurs to Nick. However we assess or respond to 'Gatsby' - 'the man who gives his name to this book', as Nick rather interestingly scruples to spell out - we should always remember that we are responding to what Nick has made of him. From Gatsby's first appearance ('a man of about my own age') to the moment after Gatsby's death, when Nick is mistaken for Gatsby by a telephone caller and he subsequently experiences 'a feeling of defiance, of scornful solidarity between Gatsby and me against them all', we are aware of a strong tendency on Nick's part to identify with Gatsby as well as to make him a hero. This is why it is so important for him to be able to feel that the account Gatsby gives of his life is 'all true', why he is glad to have 'one of those renewals of complete faith in him that I'd experienced before'. Outside business hours, when he is mainly moving around the money that money makes, Nick invests everything in Gatsby - his Gatsby.

  Nick reveals, or portrays, himself as the very antithesis of Gatsby, as one of Fitzgerald's 'Sad Young Men'. (There is some resemblance here to the emotionally timid Lockwood putting together his narrative account of the passionate Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights.)

  I knew the other clerks and young bond-salesmen by their first names, and lunched with them in dark, crowded restaurants on little pig sausages and mashed potatoes and coffee. I even had a short affair with a girl who lived in Jersey City and worked in the accounting department, but her brother began throwing mean looks in my direction, so when she went on her vacation in July I let it blow quietly away.

  When it comes to emotional or sexual involvements, what he doesn't let blow quietly away he blows away himself - as he did an earlier 'engagement', as he does Jordan Baker. He is a self-isolating voyeur (characteristically, at one point: 'I was conscious of wanting to look squarely at everyone, and yet to avoid all eyes'. In this he is like the sexually anxious Isabel Archer in Henry James's Portrait of a Lady, who wants 'to see but not to feel'.). When it comes to the erotic, life in fantasy is safer than real life.

  I liked to walk up Fifth Avenue and pick out romantic women from the crowd and imagine that in a few minutes I was going to enter into their lives, and no one would ever know or disapprove. Sometimes, in my mind, I followed them to their apartments on the corners of hidden streets, and they turned and smiled back at me before they faded through a door into warm darkness. At the enchanted metropolitan twilight I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others - poor young clerks who loitered in front of windows waiting until it was time for a solitary restaurant dinner - young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.

  As against this - and this is surely 'dismal' - it is perhaps not surprising that Nick looks hungrily for signs of the 'gorgeous' - one of his favoured words - in the life and style of Jay Gatsby. He, he implies, is everything that Gatsby is not. 'Thirty - the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning brief-case of enthusiasm, thinning hair' - thinning everything. As opposed to, and perhaps to compensate for, these gathering attenuations and impoverishments, Gatsby surely embodies more flourishing and fecund, less emotionally etiolated and self-retractive, possibilities and potentialities.

  Nick is a spectator in search of a performer. He sees Gatsby in gestural terms: 'If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life...' No little pig sausages and mashed potatoes for Gatsby, not anyway in Nick's version. His own preferred position, on the other hand, observational and non-gestural, is at the margins. At the first party in New York his instinct is to 'get out', but he keeps getting 'entangled' and 'pulled back'. 'Yet high over the city our line of yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening streets, and I saw him too, looking up and wondering. I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.' Whether he knows it or not, he is quoting Whitman almost verbatim ('in and out of the game, watching and wondering at it'), and 'wonder' - the instinct, the need, the capacity for it - is as important for Nick as it has been for so many American writers. Wondering at often involves and requires distance and betokens a disinclination, if not an incapacity, for participation - a distaste for, if not a fear of, all that sweat and heat and life, and one senses that Nick, for all his regrets, somehow prefers the role of 'casual watcher in the darkening streets'. A difference from Whitma
n is his almost equal capacity for 'repulsion'. When Nick is not enchanted, he is likely to be starting to feel disgusted. For all the seeming reasonableness and the proffered impartiality of his tone, his Gatsby book is generated by a tendency to move between these extremes. It is a very American oscillation.

  At the start Nick puts himself forward, fairly explicitly, as someone with an above-average 'sense of the fundamental decencies' which now manifests itself as a wish for 'the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever'. Could it be that he is briefly attracted to Jordan Baker because, with her male-like ('slender and small-breasted') body and 'erect carriage', she looks like 'a young cadet'? Be that as it may, he clearly has something of an authoritarian character with a developed instinct for discipline, hygiene and tidiness, as he readily admits (it is part of his engagingness as a narrator). At times he is, I won't say priggish, but a touch prim. He prefers life in some sort of uniform. Indeed, on one occasion, at a peculiarly embarrassing moment at the Buchanans', he admits, 'my own instinct was to phone immediately for the police'. When he decides to make a clean break with Jordan Baker, he explains in housekeeping terms: 'I wanted to leave things in order and not just trust that obliging and indifferent sea to sweep my refuse away.' (We may note, however, that he didn't mind some unidentified element blowing an earlier involvement away.) Nick's manifest dislike of 'refuse', a slightly obsessive compulsion to clean things up, reveals itself on a number of occasions, of which I will mention two.