The Great Gatsby Read online

  During the reunion of Gatsby and Daisy, recounted at the very centre of the book, according to Nick Gatsby sometimes 'stared around at his possessions in a dazed way, as though in her actual and astounding presence none of it was any longer real'. More filtered neo-Platonism with the higher 'actual' (ideal) displacing and devaluing, indeed effectively de-materializing, the merely materially real. No wonder that Gatsby feels momentarily ontologically all at sea. 'Once he nearly toppled down a flight of stairs.' Where Gatsby is concerned, just what is 'real', and where it is to be found, becomes problematical, surprising. There is a marvellous scene in which the slightly drunk guest with the owleyed spectacles, whom Nick and Jordan come across in Gatsby's library, begins to eulogize admiringly.

  'What do you think about that?' he demanded impetuously.

  'About what?'

  He waved his hand toward the book-shelves.

  'About that. As a matter of fact you needn't bother to ascertain. I ascertained. They're real.'

  'The books?'

  He nodded.

  'Absolutely real-have pages and everything. I thought they'd be a nice durable cardboard. Matter of fact, they're absolutely real. Pages and - Here! Lemme show you.'

  Taking our scepticism for granted, he rushed to the bookcases and returned with Volume One of the Stoddard Lectures.

  'See!' he cried triumphantly. 'It's a bona-fide piece of printed matter. It fooled me. This fella's a regular Belasco. It's a triumph. What thoroughness! What realism! Knew when to stop, too - didn't cut the pages, But what do you want? What do you expect?'

  David Belasco was a Broadway producer famous for the realism of his sets. Gatsby theatricalizes himself and his surroundings, and it is often difficult to know which parts of the show - how much of what he shows - is 'real'. It can happen that just where you expect, or suspect, the most obvious artifice and artificiality - in the books in his library, say, or in his embarrassingly cliched account of his life, which does not so much challenge credulity as defy it - you find you have stumbled into authenticity: 'They're real... Absolutely real', 'Then it was all true.' Perhaps, then, we should look for the 'real' where we might least expect it, ready in the case of Gatsby (perhaps in the case of America) to discern merit in meretriciousness, value in the vulgar.

  It is worth pausing briefly on the word 'absolutely'. It is the first word Jordan Baker says in the opening scene, so seemingly a propos of nothing it makes Nick jump; she is also, she says, 'absolutely in training'. 'Is this absolutely where you live, my dearest one?' Daisy gaily asks Nick as they approach Gatsby's house; and on another occasion she indeed calls Nick 'an absolute rose' - a less appropriate description of the somewhat prim and shrinking wallflower, Nick, it would be hard to imagine. Clearly, 'absolutely' has here become one of those empty words that make up part of the bantering argot of a particular social set, or indeed period, and is conceptually meaningless. So we should not lean too heavily on the word, nor hear too much in it, when the man in the owleyed spectacles remarks in some amazement on the absolute reality of Gatsby's books. But clearly there is in Nick's narrative discourse a hunger for something absolute, something essential, something that is Real in a more than contingent, material, 'accidental' way. There is a theological and metaphysical yearning - confused and vestigial thought it may be - mixed up with Nick's desire to believe in some form or figure of gorgeousness to offset the dismalness with which he is all too, and now increasingly, familiar, which is why he deliberately and daringly invokes God and Plato in his celebratory elegy of the sentimental American criminal in the pink rag of a suit. At the end of Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 the heroine, Oedipa Maas, has come to a personal crisis that also involves no less than the meaning of America itself.

  Another mode of meaning behind the obvious, or none. Either Oedipa in the orbiting ecstasy of a true paranoia, or a real Tristero. For there either was some Tristero beyond the appearance of legacy America, or there was just America and if there was just America then it seemed the only way she could continue, and manage to be at all relevant to it, was as an alien, unfurrowed, assumed full circle into some paranoia.

  Nick is no Oedipa, and Gatsby is not the Tristero (an ambiguous secret society operating beyond or beneath the reach of the official established power structures). But there is a similarity in the stance, and the need, and the perceived alternatives, that is recognizable and may be found throughout American literature. From the time of the Puritans, the idea that it might be 'just America' has been felt to be intolerable and unacceptable. There must be 'another mode of meaning behind the obvious'. You may discover and assert it the Puritan way (God) or the Transcendentalist way (Plato), but one way or another the urge to do so, or fear of being unable to do so, is recurrent. It drives and worries Nick, as it does Oedipa Maas, and while Nick gives no indication of having recourse to Oedipa's alternative of paranoia, it could be argued that he finds a refuge in writing and fantasy to console himself in a post-Gatsby world. He catches glimpses of some of the uglier and more sordid social, sexual and economic realities of the story he has to tell, but he refuses to let them dominate his narrative as they do life - if they did, there would be 'just America'. Consequently, writes Richard Godden, 'whenever the contradictions within his subject become too disquieting, he turns social aspiration into "dream", sexual politics into "romance", and translates class conflict as "tragedy" ' (Fictions of Capital, Cambridge University Press, 1990, p. 92 - the book contains one of the most striking and probing essays on The Great Gatsby I have ever read).

  When Nick is introducing himself to us, he speaks about his family with such casual, disarming honesty that it is easy to overlook the implications of what he reveals.

  My family have been prominent, well-to-do people in this Middle Western city for three generations. The Carraways are something of a clan, and we have a tradition that we're descended from the Dukes of Buccleuch, but the actual founder of my line was my grandfather's brother, who came here in fifty-one, sent a substitute to the Civil War, and started the wholesale hardware business that my father carries on today.

  Underneath the cosmetic vocabulary of 'clan', 'tradition', 'Dukes', etc., this 'actual' is a pretty inglorious, cowardly, materially opportunistic affair. Towards the end of The American Scene Henry James, having visited the old town of St Augustine in Florida, recalls how the magazine illustrators had contrived, or conspired, to give the town an intensely 'romantic character', investing it, quite falsely, with all sorts of vistas and attributes of 'Spanish antiquity'. This sets James musing:

  It points so vividly the homely moral that when you haven't what you like you must perforce like, and above all misrepresent what you have... The guardians of real values struck me as, up and down, far to seek. The whole matter indeed would seem to come back, interestingly enough, to the general truth of the aesthetic need, in the country, for much greater values, of certain sorts, than the country and its manners, its aspects and arrangements, its past and present, and perhaps even future, really supply; whereby, as the aesthetic need is also intermixed with a patriotic yearning, a supply has somehow to be extemporized, by any pardonable form of pictorial 'hankey-pankey' - has to be, as the expression goes, cleverly 'faked'... the novelists improvise, with the aid of the historians, a romantic local past of costume and compliment and sword-play and gallantry and passion; the dramatists build up, of a thousand pieces, the airy fiction that the life of the people among whom the elements of clash and contrast are simplest and most superficial abounds in the subjects and situations and effects of the theatre; while the genealogists touch up the picture with their pleasant hint of the number, over the land, of families of royal blood... It is the public these appearances collectively refer us to that becomes thus again the more attaching subject; the public so placidly uncritical that the whitest thread of the deceptive stitch never makes it blink, and sentimental at once with such inveteracy and such simplicity that, finding everything everywhere perfectly splendid, it fairly goes upon
its knees to be humbuggingly humbugged.

  Nick certainly doesn't find 'everything everywhere perfectly splendid', and I would never for a moment suggest that even in the most metaphorical way he ever goes upon his knees before Gatsby to be 'humbuggingly humbugged'. But there is about him just a touch of the novelist and dramatist James describes, and once or twice he makes a point of not blinking at the white threads of some fairly visible deceptive stitches. And if he himself refuses to go along with the sort of genealogical 'hankey-pankey' that apparently prevails in his family - rather, indeed, blowing the whistle on it, albeit in passing - he nevertheless reveals, or conjures up, a society tolerably permeated with 'hankey-pankey', not to say misrepresentation and fakery, of many kinds.

  There is certainly a lot of visible architectural hankey-pankey, starting with Gatsby's own mansion, which is 'a factual imitation of some Hotel de Ville in Normandy'. In the ambiguous atmosphere in which Gatsby moves and operates factual imitations cannot easily be distinguished from imitation facts. (If you fix the World Series, you have created an imitation fact. Gatsby knows the man who did it: that is part of the company he keeps.) The mansion has a tower that is, as Nick's often entirely unhumbugged eye notes, 'spanking new under a thin beard of raw ivy'. This perfectly exemplifies the practice of 'misrepresentation', the hankey-pankey and fakery that earned James's strictures: the crude superimposition of a false veneer of antiquity (the thin beard of raw ivy) on the 'spanking newness' of - well, of America, James would say. This desire to affix a prestigious patina of pastness to a less obviously distinguished present can spring from many sources. Gatsby didn't build his phoney French mansion. It was commissioned a decade earlier by a brewer who took his passion to reimpose an alien pastness on the new American landscape to extreme lengths: 'there was a story that he'd agreed to pay five years' taxes on all the neighbouring cottages if the owners would have their roofs thatched with straw.' They wouldn't, and he died. Crazy indeed; but Gatsby also, in his own way, seeks to 'repeat the past' - ' "Why, of course you can!" ' Things aren't so different over on more fashionable East Egg. The Buchanans live in a 'red-and-white Georgian Colonial mansion' with an 'Italian garden'. Tom certainly has the worst kind of 'colonizing' mentality - all others exist only to satisfy his needs and appetites - but he is no more grounded in, or significantly related to, ancient American history than Gatsby. This house originally belonged to 'Demaine, the oil man', and one can see how deftly yet unobtrusively Fitzgerald makes his points. A brewer and an oil man: the money that could afford to erect these grandiose architectural masks, drawing on Europe and history for facades at once to cover and dignify the origins of their wealth, is derived from alcohol and oil, two of the basic raw materials that indeed serve to fuel much of American society, moving both the economy and the people in different and dangerous ways: think how much of this novel is taken up with drinking and driving - and drunken driving. Later in the novel Tom boasts that, while you often hear of people making a garage out of a stable, he is the first man to make a stable out of a garage. It is a suggestive conversion: once you have made enough money - let's say in oil - you can 'thatch' it over with your preferred pastoral fakery. Of course, there are many, many American garages that are doomed to remain always and only garages - unprofitable, unconvertible, irredeemable. Ask Wilson in the valley of ashes.

  There is more decorative hankey-pankey in the book - the tapestried furniture covered with 'scenes of ladies swinging in the gardens of Versailles' in Myrtle's apartment, for example - but enough has been noted to indicate that Fitzgerald gives us glimpses of a country where the past is pretty thin on the ground and of a society in which people, once they can afford to, reach out eclectically for all kinds of imported facades (exotic, historic) to cover not just the naked facts of how they make or made their money (which is not unique to them - Victorian England did that too) but also their 'spanking newness'. There is a nice moment recorded by Nick, who, shortly after arriving in West Egg is feeling alone and new when a stranger asks him the way to the village. 'I told him. And as I walked on I was lonely no longer. I was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler.' This is Nick's tone at its most sympathetic, a kind of tasteful exaggeration that contrives to be at once playful and modest. But in the lightest of ways he is touching on a matter of great import. His instant transformation from lonely newcomer to 'original settler' is a comic version of something that has concerned Americans in various ways since the first settlements. As the inhabitants of America (once the Indians had been effectively erased) have all been, in a sense, displaced newcomers, they have always wanted to 'originate' themselves somehow in America; they have conducted a search, let us call it, for modes of more or less instant racination. In their agonistic confrontation, Tom derides Gatsby as 'Mr Nobody from Nowhere'. He is talking defensive 'gibberish' at the time, as Nick notes, but the phrase does pose an implicit question: can anybody in this book be said to be Mr, or Ms, Somebody from Somewhere? They are all restless nomads from the Midwest, simply with more or less money: restlessness is the predominant mood of the novel, and the word and its variants occur frequently. 'There is no there there,' said Gertrude Stein of Oakland: one might, not unfairly, extend the remark to cover the America of this book. 'I didn't want you to think I was just some nobody,' says Gatsby to Nick in their first real conversation, explaining why he has ventured to tell him his life story to date. And if any of these nobodies, driving from nowhere to nowhere, does become Somebody, then, by the grace of Nick's text, it is Gatsby - the great Gatsby.

  But how and why 'great'? And how much of Gatsby is 'hankey-pankey'? Does Nick to any extent allow himself to be 'humbuggingly humbugged'? There is a most revealing exchange between the two men at the start of their first conversation and Gatsby's life story.

  'I'll tell you God's truth.' His right hand suddenly ordered divine retribution to stand by. 'I am the son of some wealthy people in the Middle West - all dead now. I was brought up in America but educated at Oxford, because all my ancestors have been educated there for many years. It is a family tradition.'

  He looked at me sideways - and I knew why Jordan Baker had believed he was lying. He hurried the phrase 'educated at Oxford', or swallowed it, or choked on it, as though it had bothered him before. And with this doubt, his whole statement fell to pieces, and I wondered if there wasn't something a little sinister about him, after all.

  'What part of the Middle West?' I inquired casually.

  'San Francisco.'

  'I see.'

  'My family all died and I came into a good deal of money.'

  His voice was solemn, as if the memory of that sudden extinction of a clan still haunted him. For a moment I suspected that he was pulling my leg, but a glance at him convinced me otherwise.

  Incurably dishonest herself, we may perhaps expect Jordan Baker to know a liar when she hears one, and indeed most of this part of Gatsby's story is pure hankey-pankey, even if the Armistice did give him five not-in-the-ancestral-family-tradition months at Oxford. The question is, how much does he expect to be believed? The invoking of God and the theatrical gesture with the right hand, followed by the sideways look... Of course his statement falls to pieces. But something odder follows. When he puts San Francisco in the Middle West - rather as if, in Britain, someone told you he came from Glasgow in the Midlands - Nick simply says, 'I see.' Now at this point Gatsby is surely showing Nick the white thread of the deceptive stitch, and Nick chooses not to see it, or rather not to acknowledge or draw attention to it. There is a way of saying 'I see' (it is probably Nick's) that tacitly states: 'I know you're lying, and I know you know I know you're lying, but for my own reasons, perhaps politeness, perhaps embarrassment at such brazen mendacity, perhaps something more inscrutable, I choose not to challenge your statement.' It is exactly what Nick says again when Gatsby suddenly and inexplicably dismisses his former staff and fills his house with a bunch of deliberately rude and villainous-looking thugs. Gatsby 'explains': 'They're all brothers and sister
s. They used to run a small hotel.' This, surely, is another exposure of the deceptive white thread. I think Richard Godden is absolutely right to suggest that with this sudden and crude termination of his lavish, star-studded, hyper-elegant, conspicuously consuming summer parties Gatsby is deliberately showing Nick (and perhaps, indirectly, Daisy) his real milieu, his 'actual' criminal grounding - really rubbing his nose in it, as it were. Nick 'sees' but chooses not to see or, rather, chooses to concentrate on seeing something else.

  As Nick has revealed, he knows a thing or two about families inventing ancestors and traditions, and he even extends to Gatsby's relatives his preferred and rather pretentious word 'clan', a more inappropriate appellation, surely, for Gatsby's 'shiftless and unsuccessful farm people' even than for the war-dodging Carraways. It is as if a part of him at least is prepared to participate in Gatsby's hankey-pankey - it runs in the family, we might say. Another part of him knows very well that he is having his leg pulled - Gatsby could hardly have tipped him a more visible wink - but he is extraordinarily quick to be 'convinced otherwise'. We may see this as eager credulity or engaging trust. Constant suspicion and a wary determination never to be taken in are not the most attractive of characteristics, and there is something sympathetic in Nick's tremendous keenness to give Gatsby the benefit of the doubt. How much this is generosity prompted by attraction to the man (and revulsion from the others) and how much is collusion, the willing suspension of disbelief, motivated by a desire for the 'gorgeous', would be impossible to determine. What is clear is that, faced with the Buchanans of this world, Nick will go along with Gatsby's hankey-pankey, will, indeed, justify, amplify and celebrate it in his writing. He is certainly loyal to him to the end, taking charge of his exequies at that sad funeral to which an ungrateful and forgetful 'Nobody' comes except for a few servants, his pathetic father who 'et like a hog' and the man in owl-shaped spectacles who wondered at the absolute reality of Gatsby's books and who pronounces one of his epitaphs, 'The poor son-of-a-bitch.' Nick will write a more encomiastic commemoration.