The Great Gatsby Read online

  At the first, drunken, party in New York, as things are disintegrating into increasingly messy incoherence, even though this is one of the two times in his life Nick has allowed himself to get drunk, his fastidious instincts do not fail him: 'Mr McKee was asleep on a chair with his fists clenched in his lap, like a photograph of a man of action. Taking out my handkerchief I wiped from his cheek the spot of dried lather that had worried me all the afternoon.' Shortly after this Tom Buchanan breaks Myrtle's nose, and the party collapses into terminal chaos. But that's the Buchanans for you. 'They were careless people... they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clear up the mess they had made...' Tom brutally spills blood; Nick meticulously wipes off a speck of shaving lather, a tiny fragment of that matter-out-of-place which we call dirt. As well as having a politely controlled instinct to be society's moral policeman, Nick also has it in him to be one of its janitors.

  The most graphic example of this is what is effectively the last gesture he makes before leaving the East for good. He returns for one more look at Gatsby's 'huge incoherent failure of a house': 'On the white steps an obscene word, scrawled by some boy with a piece of brick, stood out clearly in the moonlight, and I erased it, drawing my shoe raspingly along the stone.' Part of his 'fundamental decency' no doubt, and one can readily share and approve of his instinctive distaste for disrespectful defacement and profanation. But this gesture of 'erasure' has a farther-reaching aptness and suggestiveness. While it might be too much to say that Gatsby's actual career (we'll set aside his dreams for the moment) is itself an 'obscenity', his career, money and identity are clearly grounded in a series of more or less dirty, more or less criminal activities. There are signs that he more than once tries to signal as much to Nick and make him confront and recognize this fact. Nick always refuses: he prefers to 'erase' whatever might be the 'dirty' side of the story, either by omission, denial, over-writing, reinterpretation, or by transformation, though, of course - it is part of the brilliance of the book - we keep getting glimpses and intimations of what he is trying to keep, and write, out. (For instance, he makes of the early relationship of Gatsby and Daisy a romantic, poetic affair, and it is only subsequently he learns that he took her 'ravenously and unscrupulously'.) For the purposes of his book, Nick prefers to concentrate on the figure of the hopeful, hapless dreamer in the pink suit. At one point he informs us that he is putting down what he has subsequently learned about Gatsby's early life - Dan Cody and so on - 'to clear this set of misconceptions away', these being the wild and silly rumours that circulated around the enigmatic Gatsby. He certainly clears these away, but it is possible that he clears away - cleans up - much more as well. We take what he tells us about Dan Cody as faithfully transcribed. But what about this as a compressed account of Gatsby's adolescence?

  But his heart was in a constant, turbulent riot. The most grotesque and fantastic conceits haunted him in his bed at night. A universe of ineffable gaudiness spun itself out in his brain while the clock ticked on the washstand and the moon soaked with wet light his tangled clothes upon the floor. Each night he added to his fancies... these reveries provided an outlet for his imagination; they were a satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded on a fairy's wing.

  Who is this? Gatsby? Or Nick? Or should we by now simply say Nick Gatsby? Gatsby tries to use the light of the moon (dream, imagination) to defeat the tick of the clock (history, irreversibility), but Nick also favours moonlight, and he tries to prevent its being fouled and contaminated by the inscribed obscenities of the real. Gatsby provides Nick with an outlet for his imagination - he is Nick's reverie of 'gaudiness' - and seems to offer him a satisfactory, or almost satisfactory, hint of 'the unreality of reality'. The 'rock of the world' is hard and breaks fragile, vulnerable things, as do Tom Buchanan's fists and words; Nick prefers to imagine Gatsby imagining the world's rock impossibly taking second place to the fairy's wing - as if anything could be founded on fairy, grounded in gossamer, as we might say. The more general point is that it is invariably impossible to know when Nick is adding or subtracting, to establish when he is amplifying or erasing, to guess when he is simply fantasizing or, more imaginatively, empathetically eliding. On page one he tells us that, perhaps because of his perceived inclination to 'reserve all judgements' (he unreserves them in this book), he has often been the recipient of 'intimate revelations of young men' and that he has noted that the terms in which they express these 'are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions'. We may thus be alerted early to the possibility that his own 'intimate revelations' - perhaps all such revelations-will also and inevitably be marked by these characteristics as well. Nick may be one of the few honest people he has ever known, but Jordan Baker may not be all wrong when, by way of farewell, she tells him that, in his way, he is 'another bad driver'.

  Let me put it another way. When Nick first drives out to Wilson's garage in the valley of ashes, this is his response: 'The interior was unprosperous and bare; the only car visible was the dust-covered wreck of a Ford which crouched in a dim garage. It had occurred to me that this shadow of a garage must be a blind, and that sumptuous and romantic apartments were concealed overhead...' Nick cannot tolerate the thought of confronting a reality that is merely poor and bare, dust-covered and wrecked. There must be more than that, a whole hidden dimension of sumptuousness and romance for which the manifest impoverishment and degradation of the apparitional, the given, are simply a misleading 'blind', a deceptive mask. But the untranscended bareness of the garage in the valley of ashes is real enough and conceals nothing except a squalid affair. In the valley of ashes what you see is what you get. The phantasmal 'sumptuous and romantic apartments' are provided by the more generous architecture of his imagination, a function at once of his deprivation and desire. So that rather than thinking of repression and plagiarism, we might more accurately speak of erasure and supplementation provided by his imagination, and of course his writing.

  I want to focus on three examples of the 'supplementation' evident in some of the key lines and passages of the book. One of the many master-strokes in Fitzgerald's almost uncannily sure-handed, almost inspired, deletions and additions to the galley proofs of the novel was the insertion of Gatsby's famous comment, 'Her voice is full of money.' Nick's comment and gloss are remarkable and remarkably revealing: 'That was it. I'd never understood before. It was full of money - that was the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it, the cymbal's song of it... High in a white palace the king's daughter, the golden girl...' Nick is off on a reverie of unsyntactical free association. But one might legitimately feel that that is not it at all, and jingles and symbols and king's daughters are not at all to the point. Gatsby is more probably intimating that Daisy is a very expensive product, that it takes a great deal of money to make and maintain such a product, that she veritably breathes money, and signalling his awareness of this. Nick prefers to pass over the material base, 'the rock of the world', and take wing into fairyland. Whatever Gatsby meant by his fine, enigmatic statement, it is Nick who, confessedly, from the first finds Daisy's voice 'thrilling', full of not money but 'excitement' and 'promise'. When he speculates - 'I think that voice held him most, with its fluctuating, feverish warmth, because it couldn't be over-dreamed' - we may perhaps be more certain that it was the voice that held Nick most because it certainly can be over-dreamed, as he later shows (in the passage quoted above). As well as being something of a disenchanted moralist, Nick reveals himself to be quite a committed 'over-dreamer'. It is by no means a wholly unsympathetic characteristic.

  At one point, when Nick has entirely taken over Gatsby's story, which he is telling in confident third-person indirect discourse, he indulges himself with this lyrical account:

  Out of the corner of his eye Gatsby saw that the blocks of the sidewalks really formed a lad
der and mounted to a secret place above the trees - he could climb to it if he climbed alone, and once there he could suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder.

  His heart beat faster as Daisy's white face came up to his own. He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips' touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete.

  Through all he said, even through his appalling sentimentality, I was reminded of something - an elusive rhythm, a fragment of lost words, that I had heard somewhere a long time ago. For a moment a phrase tried to take shape in my mouth and my lips parted like a dumb man's, as though there was more struggling upon them than a wisp of startled air. But they made no sound, and what I had almost remembered was uncommunicable forever. [My italics.]

  Perhaps the first question to ask is: whose appalling sentimentality? Gatsby, we learn, took Daisy 'unscrupulously and ravenously' and perhaps did not have much about 'unutterable visions' and 'perishable breath' on his mind. Tuning forks on stars are the stuff of a hundred popular songs, and not the best ones at that, and they must be humming in Nick's mind. It is surely the confirmed bachelor Nick who feels that for maximum gratification it is better to climb alone, just as there is surely something regressive about the thought of climbing to a secret place to suck wondermilk from the pap of life. (There will be more to say about paps of life and milk of wonder.) This hint of nostalgia for the pleasures of childhood is extended by the use of the word 'romp', and to compare the anarchic and egotistical freedoms and indulgences of the nursery with the mind of God is an audacious attempt to give a religious slant to these regressive yearnings. Whatever Gatsby was thinking when he was courting Daisy, he surely wasn't thinking all this, was he?

  The question gains force once we discover that at one stage Fitzgerald added to the galley proofs six pages that made it very clear that the 'appalling sentimentality' was centrally Gatsby's. There is a dialogue between the two men in which, for instance, when Nick sympathetically says that Daisy is 'a pretty satisfactory incarnation of anything', Gatsby says, with far too much clear-eyed resignation: 'She is... but it's a little like loving a place where you've once been happy.' Even more ruinous would have been the insertion, or retention, of this self-analytical confession from Gatsby: ' "But the truth is I'm empty and I guess people feel it... Daisy's all I've got left from a world that was so wonderful that when I think of it I feel sick all over."" He looked round with wild regret. "Let me sing you a song - I want to sing you a song... the sound of it makes me happy. But I don't sing it often because I'm afraid I'll use it up." ' The song, something he wrote when he was fourteen - fourteen! This man's future really is the past - is quoted in full and amply justifies Nick's comment on his 'appalling sentimentality'. All this disastrous, self-reducing explicitness was, unerringly as ever, cut. Fitzgerald left in only the last paragraph of the passage quoted above. The deletions increase the unknowability of Gatsby, while the retained paragraph suggests that whatever chord of nostalgia, memory and desire the figure of Gatsby might touch, it remains irrecoverable, uncommunicable, inarticulable-lost (like, indeed, the American Dream). And it is no longer clear where the sentimentality, and the regressive impulses, are coming from. We sense only that they are in the air - in the air of the writing. And the writing is Nick's.

  Perhaps the following is the most famous paragraph of the book.

  I suppose he'd had the name ready for a long time, even then. His parents were shiftless and unsuccessful farm people - his imagination had never really accepted them as his parents at all. The truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God - a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that - and he must be about His Father's business, the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty. So he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen-year-old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end.

  He supposes - but goes on to declare 'the truth'. This 'truth' that he asserts about Gatsby - and that audaciously, if not blasphemously, invokes the authority of both Plato and God - springs from the fact that Gatsby never accepted his parents as his parents. Like Rudolph Miller, like Fitzgerald himself, and like many another self-parenting figure in the history of America, life and literature. The reasons for this determination or instinct to reject or deny the parents - more specifically it is mainly a repudiation of the authority, prescriptive and prescriptive, of fathers, biological or Founding - range from the practical (slough off your immigrant identity) to the ideological (throw off the coercive, restrictive, predetermining weight of the past). I am not so foolish as to suggest that the instinct to deny parents is peculiarly American - after all, Freud's 'Family Romance' would suggest that it is more or less universal; but there is no doubt that it is felt with special force in America. Moreover, it receives specific cultural endorsement and support. Indeed, it is embedded in American literature as something of an obligation and a prerequisite for the achievement of an 'American' identity. 'Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers.' So starts Emerson's first work, the enormously influential 1836 essay 'Nature'. Building sepulchres to the fathers is just exactly what Americans should not be doing, as far as Emerson was concerned: fathers (and fathering countries, like England) are to be forgotten. 'Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?... The sun shines today also... There are new lands, new men, new thoughts.' Emerson, and many writers who followed him, stressed self-reliance, self-sculpting, self-architecturing, self-inventing - the metaphors are many. The American 'self-made man' had a prestigious legitimation and encouragement. (The Self-Made Man by Greeley appeared in 1862.) Jay Gatsby is a very American young man.

  But what about God and Plato? Here I must bring together a few passages to point up a particular characteristic of Nick's vocabulary. Near the end, after summarizing the legal and logistical business that followed the shooting of Gatsby, Nick writes: 'But all this part of it seemed remote and unessential.' Even nearer the end he refers to the 'inessential houses' melting away as the moon rises. Between 'un' and 'in-', as prefixes expressing negation, there is not much difference: either way, not essential, not of the essence. When Nick imagines Gatsby's state of mind as he awaits a phone call from Daisy, and instead receives a visit from Wilson, he becomes quite metaphysical.

  I have an idea that Gatsby himself didn't believe it would come, and perhaps he no longer cared. If that was true he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream. He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about... like that ashen, fantastic figure gliding toward him through the amorphous trees.

  'Material without being real' is a straightforward neo-Platonic distinction (the really Real is to be found, or sought, in the realm of unchanging Ideas or Forms). But Nick is transcribing something more like a moment of existential panic, such as is described by Sartre in La Nausee when Roquentin, staring at a tree, experiences a terrible sense of the sheer, absurd, horrible gratuitousness of things - a negative epiphany in which matter without meaning turns monstrous, 'frightening', 'grotesque'. To Gatsby, thinks Nick, this is how the world empty and bereft of his dream of Daisy must have appeared: to Nick, perhaps, this is how the world without Gatsby, and thus without Gatsby's tenacious but doomed dreaming, is beginning to look.

  This passage is followed by Nick's description of what he saw when they hurried down to the pool in which Gatsby had been shot. 'There was a faint, barely perceptib
le movement of the water as the fresh flow from one end urged its way towards the drain at the other. With little ripples that were hardly the shadows of waves, the laden mattress moved irregularly down the pool. A small gust of wind that scarcely corrugated the surface was enough to disturb its accidental course with its accidental burden.' (My italics.) In a book in which there is much bad driving and so many accidents, including the fatal one that precipitates the catastrophic conclusion, the italicized word is highly appropriate. But the deliberate repetition serves to remind us of the more general, philosophical meaning of the word - exactly, not essential. Nick tells us that when Gatsby met Daisy he found himself in her house by a 'colossal accident': wittingly or not, he has chosen an ominously apt phrase, for their relationship also ends with and by a 'colossal accident' of a more horribly literal kind. Was it all an 'accidental' matter, from beginning to end? Now that Gatsby is dead, it would seem that Nick feels he is confronting a wholly contingent world. Inessential. Unessential. When Tom Buchanan, confident that he has exposed Gatsby as a common criminal, contemptuously dismisses Gatsby and Daisy to drive back together, Nick writes: 'They were gone, without a word, snapped out, made accidental...' In a world dominated by Buchanans, pure contingency reigns: frightening, grotesque.