The Great Gatsby Read online

  While waiting for proofs in Rome, Fitzgerald wrote to Maxwell Perkins: 'Strange to say, my notion of Gatsby's vagueness was O.K.... I myself didn't know what Gatsby looked like or was engaged in... Anyhow after careful searching of the files (of a man's mind here)... I know Gatsby better than I know my own child. My first instinct was to let him go and have Tom Buchanan dominate the book... but Gatsby sticks in my heart. I had him for a while, then lost him, and now I know I have him again' (circa 20 December 1924). And in a letter to John Peale Bishop a little later: 'You are right about Gatsby being blurred and patchy. I never at any one time saw him clear myself' (9 August 1925). This is all exactly right. Nick has Gatsby, loses him, then has him again in a different way. More generally, now you see Gatsby, now you don't. On more than one occasion Nick looks for Gatsby, only to find him 'not there', and, of course, he does not even appear until Chapter Three (a quarter of the way into the book) and disappears before the end. In a way Tom does dominate the book; he dominates everyone and every thing, and Nick drinks with him before he meets Gatsby and shakes his hand after Gatsby's death. Buchanans, as a type, go on for ever, survive everything. Gatsby, for all his 'gonnections', is frailer and more vulnerable. And, in a more general epistemological sense he is and remains (for us the readers too) vague as to what he is and what he does. As we have seen, Fitzgerald deliberately contributed to his vagueness by cutting out too explicit dialogue, and this was not a matter of, as it were, withholding information in the interests of mystification; that strange hint of ontological insubstantiality about him is absolutely crucial. Of a look that passes over Gatsby's face while Tom is insulting him Nick states that it was 'definitely unfamiliar and vaguely recognizable'. Notice the perfection, for suggestivity, of the apparent oxymorons: the recognizability is vague, but the unfamiliarity is definite. Gatsby looms and fades, sharpens and blurs. Now you see him, you think; and now you don't, you are almost sure. This wonderfully maintained 'vagueness' is better than 'O.K.': it is an essential part of the magic of the book. For, after even the harshest scrutiny of the figure of Gatsby - which might reduce him to a sentimental roughneck, a criminal with a soppy dream, a ruthless social climber determined to buy himself a very classy piece of female goods - Gatsby does, somehow, stick in the heart.

  At times, when he does appear, he reminds people of a popular journal or an advertisement. 'My incredulity was submerged in fascination now; it was like skimming hastily through a dozen magazines,' writes Nick of his response to Gatsby's life story. 'You resemble the advertisement of the man... You know the advertisement of the man-' Daisy doesn't finish her sentence. Presumably he looks like the man in any number of advertisements. (Jordan Baker is said to look like a 'good illustration': the effects are everywhere.) In today's parlance we might say that he sometimes strikes people as being all 'simulacra'. Advertising was booming in the America of the Twenties. Gatsby is very much a child of his culture and equips and surrounds himself with all the most fashionable and flamboyant commodities, from shirts to cars. The 'formal note' with the signature in a 'majestic hand' with which he first announces himself to Nick is the first sign of his careful self-fashioning (and observe how quick Nick is to pick up hints of regality in this democratic republic). In a way his ostentatious house and expensive parties are an elaborate advertising display designed to impress Daisy. His certainty that he can repeat the past, his confidence that he can 'fix everything just the way it was', owes a lot to this advertising culture. (In the book I have referred to Richard Godden details how Henry Ford, in 1922, recreated his old home exactly as it had been sixty years earlier. 'In the marketplace, time is reversible,' Godden comments.) In reality, of course, his dream founders on his impossible insistence that time can be not only reversed but erased. He has lost Daisy (and dream) from the moment he tries to make her tell Tom that she had never loved him, 'and it's all wiped out forever'. You can wipe away graffiti and stray shaving soap but not time; time is the one thing Gatsby cannot 'fix'. He cannot even handle it very well: in the central chapter of the book (Five), when he meets Daisy again, he very nearly knocks over a clock. This clock happens to be 'defunct', which perhaps makes it a fitting adjunct and material witness to the attempt he is making to stop time, but elsewhere the clocks are ticking like mad. (There is an unusually large number of time words in the novel - over four hundred.) It is no wonder that he looks at Daisy's child with surprise: 'I don't think he had ever really believed in its existence before.' And Tom has only to cite the times and places of his sexual possession of Daisy, and Gatsby is pretty well done for. I should say 'Gatsby' - ' "Jay Gatsby"" had broken up like glass against Tom's hard malice, and the long secret extravaganza was played out.' His constructed identity, the simulacrum, which has been buoyed up and motivated by the cherished notion of a recapturable, repurchasable, Daisy and an erasable time, is in ruins. Daisy stays bought.

  So is 'great' an irony or a wishful hyperbole that recoils on itself? Is the whole work the self-consoling hankey-pankey of a miserable failure of a bachelor, who invents a 'gorgeous' figure to compensate for the 'dismal' Middle West to which he has retreated - Nick's fakery of Gatsby's fakery? This cannot be all there is to it, although I believe there are those who think so. To the extent that it is this, we know it from Nick himself. Just as Gatsby occasionally shows him the white thread of the deceptive stitch, so Nick does to the attentive reader. There is more to Gatsby than the shivered glass of his custom-made identity after his shattering encounter with Tom's 'rock' at its most obdurate, something that in the end he inadequately articulates and imperfectly incarnates but is indeed part of the 'essence' of that self-inventing, self-parented nation of which he is at once so remarkable and so representative a product. We may call it, with Nick, 'an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness', an adherence to, or gesturing towards, a conviction or a feeling that there must be something more to life than the 'corruption' that surrounds and attends Gatsby, the appetitive, self-gratifying, sheer, mere materiality in which the Buchanans are so heedlessly at home. That this hope takes the form of a romantic dream or impossible obsession, which is at once doomed and unrealizable, does not necessarily invalidate the need or desire that nourished it. If 'the colossal vitality of his illusion' does finally go 'beyond everything', and thus must perforce be disappointed and come too naught, it does not mean that the devitalizing lifelessness that may result from determined disillusion necessarily offers the better way. It does mean that there is a special kind of sadness to the book. For there is pathos (as well as, if you like, puerility) about Gatsby - his aura of loneliness and isolation, the emptiness that seems to flow from his house, his piles of 'beautiful shirts', his always unappreciated generosity (no thanks for covering for Daisy, which costs him his life), his mean death and unattended funeral. And to the extent that Gatsby - 'Gatsby' - is excessive, foolish and foredoomed, so, the whole book suggests, is America.

  Not long after the novel was published Fitzgerald wrote to Marya Mannes: 'America's greatest promise is that something is going to happen, and after a while you get tired of waiting because nothing happens to people except that they grow old, and nothing happens to American art because America is the story of the moon that never rose' (October 1925). When the moon famously does rise at the end of The Great Gatsby, it prompts one of the most famous paragraphs in American literature:

  the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes - a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby's house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood or desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder. (My italics.)

  This passage was originally at the end of Chapter One until, with another of
those unerring corrections, Fitzgerald moved it to the end, the dusk of the narrative where its crepuscular tone is so fitting. The original early positioning indicates that the book was always going to be an elegy, pervaded with a sense of something muffed, something lost - a chance missed, a dream doomed. The 'green breast of the new world', the pap of a possible new life, might have offered an inexhaustible supply of the 'milk of wonder'. But whatever the sailors came for - all the sailors, from Puritans to pirates - they came not to wonder at America but rather, in various ways, to 'rape' it, to use William Carlos Williams's metaphor for the various and multiple spoliations of the American land. The green breast of the new world has given way, as an image, to the shocking spectacle of Myrtle's left breast, 'swinging loose like a flap' after the road accident. Fitzgerald was very insistent about retaining this spectacle: 'I want Myrtle Wilson's breast ripped off - it's exactly the thing, I think' (to Maxwell Perkins circa 20 December 1924). Fitzgerald knows, of course, exactly what he is doing. He wants to show America desecrated, mutilated, violated. Whatever the might-have-beens of the new world - and the incoherent, hopeful yet hopeless reachings out of a Gatsby perhaps offer a vague, vestigial and distorted hint of a kind of gladly accepted 'capacity for wonder', desired if not fully understood, that might have made something better out of the great last chance that was America - America has contrived to make itself utterly accidental and accident-prone. Of what might have been a Wonderland (a theme endemic to American literature suggests) we have made a wasteland.

  Fitzgerald knew T. S. Eliot's poem of that name pretty much by heart, and of course he created his own wasteland in the valley of ashes (indeed, one title he considered for the novel was Among the Ash Heaps and Millionaires): 'a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of ash-grey men, who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of grey cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak, and comes to rest.' 'Transcendent' is a peculiarly loaded word in America, and it is used here with dark irony. This is negative transcendence, a travesty, the very reverse of what Emerson and his friends had hoped for America, with the land actually producing, growing, ashes. Fitzgerald was neither the first nor the last American writer to have an entropic vision of America - the great agrarian continent turning itself into some sort of terminal rubbish heap or wasteland, where, with ultimate perversity, the only thing that grows is death.

  Fitzgerald was canny enough to associate this process with the exponential spread of the automobile. As already noted, the book is full of cars, bad driving and accidents, and together they conspire to kill not only people but the land itself. Bad driver Jordan Baker's very name is composed of the brand names of two automobiles. Aptly, Fitzgerald places the garage - Wilson's garage, but let us say the generic garage - at the heart of the valley of ashes that it is producing. Henry Adams, who was the first American writer to employ the word 'entropy' to describe the future he foresaw, related this predicted accelerating entropy to the rapid increase of new discoveries of sources of energy and power, coupled with a decrease in the human ability to control it. In his Education he wrote:

  Power leaped from every atom, and enough of it to supply the stellar universe showed itself running to waste at every pore of matter. Man could no longer hold it off. Forces grasped his wrists and flung him about as though he had hold of a live wire or a runaway automobile; which was very nearly the exact truth for the purposes of an elderly and timid single gentleman in Paris, who never drove down the Champs Elysees without expecting an accident and commonly witnessing one; or found himself in the neighbourhood of an official without calculating the chances of a bomb. So long as the rates of progress held good, these bombs would double in number and force every ten years.

  Fitzgerald chose to double up on the automobile accidents. A contemporary writer might prefer to go for bombs.

  Overlooking, though not overseeing, the valley of ashes are, of course, the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg.

  The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic - their retinas are one yard high. They look out of no face, but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a non-existent nose. Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set them there to fatten his practice in the borough of Queens, and then sank down himself into eternal blindness, or forgot them and moved away. But his eyes, dimmed a little by many paintless days, under sun and rain, brood on over the solemn dumping ground. Andre le Vot has most sensitively traced the various subtle ways in which Fitzgerald deploys colours, above all blue and yellow. As le Vot points out, blue is water, the sky, twilight, cool, restful, inviting. Yellow is wheat, sunshine and fertility but also whisky, gold (lucre) and dead, combustible straw, and is thus ambiguous, for what seems attractive and warm may turn combustible, violent, too hot. (Tom is 'straw-haired'.) Ideally the two colours, and all they evoke, should be in harmony with each other, as in Nick's odd but suggestive phrase 'the blue honey of the Mediterranean'. But in this book they seem to drift apart and tend to opposition. Misleadingly, perhaps, Gatsby's car is yellow (though it is part of the dubiety that surrounds him that people disagree about the colour: one describes it as cream-coloured, another light green - like its owner, it appears differently in different lights), while Tom's convertible is blue. But, appropriately, they exchange cars, at Tom's insistence, when their struggle over Daisy heads for climax and show-down.

  To return to Doctor T. J. Eckleburg, to the extent that his blue eyes are fading and 'dimming a little' while the yellow spectacles persist untarnished, this may intimate, as le Vot suggests, 'a withering of spiritual power and a corresponding increase in materialism'. Spectacles are designed to help you to see better. But see what? See how? For Nick, after Gatsby's death, 'the East was haunted... distorted beyond my eyes' power of correction', so he retreats (one might be tempted to say 'regresses') back home which at the start of his narrative seemed like 'the ragged edge of the universe' but is now again, perhaps, 'the warm centre of the world'. The 'wild wag oculist' whom Nick posits and who has also absented himself from the area, may be an allusion to a God who should oversee the world but who has become a deus absconditus, or who no longer cares to turn his eyes on man in the wasteland he has made, or who may simply be dead, having left behind what man hath made - an advertisement. After the accident Michaelis is shocked to see that while Wilson is invoking God, he is looking at the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg. ' "God sees everything," repeated Wilson. "That's an advertisement," Michaelis assured him.'

  Whatever may have been the religious intentions and aspirations of the original Puritan settlers, the landscape is now dominated entirely by commercial and material considerations (though religious and commercial concerns may have been linked from the start. In America's Coming of Age Van Wyck Brooks suggests that this is so: 'Thus the literature of the seventeenth century in America is composed in equal parts, one might fairly say, of piety and advertisement.'). As we have seen, Gatsby lives in and through an advertising world and is something of a composite advertisement himself. The question, perhaps, is whether his 'gestures', which result from and express, thinks Nick, 'some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life', are indicative of an inchoate form of a 'piety' all his own.

  When Nick says that the East is 'haunted for me like that, distorted beyond my eyes' power of correction', 'that' refers to 'a night scene by El Greco'. El Greco is famous for his elongations and what some might call his feverish exaggerations. Since by Nick's own confession his vision of what happened is uncorrected and uncorrectable, we should perhaps take the hint, intended or not, that he has given us an El Greco-ish version - heightened, enlarged, excitably glorified - of Gatsby and what surrounded him. But El Greco, like Vermeer, whom we may regard as much less inclined to distortion than El Greco (indeed, as painting with as miraculously a correct vision as is possible to at
tain) is an artist, and all art involves distortion - selection, interpretation, amplification. It could be argued that distortion is inseparable from representation. Whatever the motivation for Nick's writing, even if it was simply a 'winter dream' to occupy and console him in the dismal fastnesses of the Middle West, he has still delivered a work of art; and there can never be any unravelling of the motives that lie behind the making of a work of art.

  It is Fitzgerald's book, of course, and in showing us Nick working on the problems and pitfalls involved in 'seeing' his material, working out his way of 'writing' Gatsby, both faking and feting him, Fitzgerald added a whole new dimension to his work. Henry James once wrote: 'There is the story of one's hero, and then, thanks to the intimate connexion of things, the story of one's story itself.' In giving us not only the story of Gatsby but the story of Nick trying to write that story, Fitzgerald confronts no less a problem than what might be involved, what might be at stake, in trying to see, and write, America itself. The result is short (those inspired excisions), deceptively simple, with something of the lean yet pregnant economy of a parable (for a book so explicitly rooted in the Twenties, it contains, as Matthew Bruccoli has noted, surprisingly little 'in the way of sociological or anthropological data'). It is word-perfect and inexhaustible. The Great Gatsby is, I believe, the most perfectly crafted work of fiction to have come out of America.

  When Nick attends his first party at Gatsby's mansion he is 'on guard against its spectroscopic gaiety': he finds some things 'graceless', others 'vacuous'. After two glasses of champagne 'the scene had changed before my eyes into something significant, elemental, and profound'. There is a touch of self-mockery in the knowing exaggeration (if that's all it takes...). A critic such as Richard Godden might say that the champagne is pretty flat (his chapter on the novel is entitled 'Glamour on the Turn'), but this, I think, is to miss something of the undoubted magic of the book and its irreducible polyvalency. Call it undecidability. Some days the car is yellow; on others it looks light green. At times Gatsby may stick in your throat as well as your heart. Perhaps he is like the books in his library: 'absolutely real' where you most expect him to be fake, but finally absolutely unreadable because his inner pages are uncut.