In my younger and more vulnerable
years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in
my mind ever since.
‘Whenever you feel like
criticizing any one,’ he told me, ‘just remember that all the
people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve
had.’
He didn’t say any more but we’ve
always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I
understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In
consequence I’m inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has
opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of
not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and
attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person,
and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of
being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of
wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought—frequently
I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I
realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was
quivering on the horizon—for the intimate revelations of young men
or at least the terms in which they express them are usually
plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions. Reserving
judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid
of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly
suggested, and I snobbishly repeat a sense of the fundamental
decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.
And, after boasting this way of
my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit. Conduct
may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes but after a
certain point I don’t care what it’s founded on. When I came back
from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in
uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more
riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart.
Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt
from my reaction—Gatsby who represented everything for which I have
an unaffected scorn. If personality is an unbroken series of
successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him,
some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were
related to one of those intricate machines that register
earthquakes ten thousand miles away. This responsiveness had
nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified
under the name of the ‘creative temperament’—it was an
extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have
never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall
ever find again. No—Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is
what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his
dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive
sorrows and shortwinded elations of men.
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.
I never saw this great-uncle but
I’m supposed to look like him—with special reference to the rather
hard-boiled painting that hangs in Father’s office. I graduated
from New Haven in 1915, just a quarter of a century after my
father, and a little later I participated in that delayed Teutonic
migration known as the Great War. I enjoyed the counter-raid so
thoroughly that I came back restless. Instead of being the warm
center of the world the middle-west now seemed like the ragged edge
of the universe—so I decided to go east and learn the bond
business. Everybody I knew was in the bond business so I supposed
it could support one more single man. All my aunts and uncles
talked it over as if they were choosing a prep-school for me and
finally said, ‘Why—yees’ with very grave, hesitant faces. Father
agreed to finance me for a year and after various delays I came
east, permanently, I thought, in the spring of twenty-two.
The practical thing was to find
rooms in the city but it was a warm season and I had just left a
country of wide lawns and friendly trees, so when a young man at
the office suggested that we take a house together in a commuting
town it sounded like a great idea. He found the house, a weather
beaten cardboard bungalow at eighty a month, but at the last minute
the firm ordered him to Washington and I went out to the country
alone. I had a dog, at least I had him for a few days until he ran
away, and an old Dodge and a Finnish woman who made my bed and
cooked breakfast and muttered Finnish wisdom to herself over the
electric stove.
It was lonely for a day or so
until one morning some man, more recently arrived than I, stopped
me on the road.
‘How do you get to West Egg
village?’ he asked helplessly.
I told him. And as I walked on I
was lonely no longer. I was a guide, a pathfinder, an original
settler. He had casually conferred on me the freedom of the
neighborhood.
And so with the sunshine and the
great bursts of leaves growing on the trees—just as things grow in
fast movies—I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning
over again with the summer.
There was so much to read for one
thing and so much fine health to be pulled down out of the young
breath-giving air. I bought a dozen volumes on banking and credit
and investment securities and they stood on my shelf in red and
gold like new money from the mint, promising to unfold the shining
secrets that only Midas and Morgan and Maecenas knew. And I had the
high intention of reading many other books besides. I was rather
literary in college—one year I wrote a series of very solemn and
obvious editorials for the ‘Yale News’—and now I was going to bring
back all such things into my life and become again that most
limited of all specialists, the ‘well-rounded man.’ This isn’t just
an epigram—life is much more successfully looked at from a single
window, after all.
It was a matter of chance that I
should have rented a house in one of the strangest communities in
North America. It was on that slender riotous island which extends
itself due east of New York and where there are, among other
natural curiosities, two unusual formations of land. Twenty miles
from the city a pair of enormous eggs, identical in contour and
separated only by a courtesy bay, jut out into the most
domesticated body of salt water in the Western Hemisphere, the
great wet barnyard of Long Island Sound. They are not perfect
ovals—like the egg in the Columbus story they are both crushed flat
at the contact end—but their physical resemblance must be a source
of perpetual confusion to the gulls that fly overhead. To the
wingless a more arresting phenomenon is their dissimilarity in
every particular except shape and size.
I lived at West Egg, the—well,
the less fashionable of the two, though this is a most superficial
tag to express the bizarre and not a little sinister contrast
between them. My house was at the very tip of the egg, only fifty
yards from the Sound, and squeezed between two huge places that
rented for twelve or fifteen thousand a season. The one on my right
was a colossal affair by any standard—it was a factual imitation of
some Hôtel de Ville in Normandy, with a tower on one side, spanking
new under a thin beard of raw ivy, and a marble swimming pool and
more than forty acres of lawn and garden. It was Gatsby’s mansion.
Or rather, as I didn’t know Mr. Gatsby it was a mansion inhabited
by a gentleman of that name. My own house was an eye-sore, but it
was a small eye-sore, and it had been overlooked, so I had a view
of the water, a partial view of my neighbor’s lawn, and the
consoling proximity of millionaires—all for eighty dollars a
month.
Across the courtesy bay the white
palaces of fashionable East Egg glittered along the water, and the
history of the summer really begins on the evening I drove over
there to have dinner with the Tom Buchanans. Daisy was my second
cousin once removed and I’d known Tom in college. And just after
the war I spent two days with them in Chicago.
Her husband, among various
physical accomplishments, had been one of the most powerful ends
that ever played football at New Haven—a national figure in a way,
one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at
twenty-one that everything afterward savors of anti-climax. His
family were enormously wealthy—even in college his freedom with
money was a matter for reproach—but now he’d left Chicago and come
east in a fashion that rather took your breath away: for instance
he’d brought down a string of polo ponies from Lake Forest. It was
hard to realize that a man in my own generation was wealthy enough
to do that.
Why they came east I don’t know.
They had spent a year in France, for no particular reason, and then
drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and
were rich together. This was a permanent move, said Daisy over the
telephone, but I didn’t believe it—I had no sight into Daisy’s
heart but I felt that Tom would drift on forever seeking a little
wistfully for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable
football game.
And so it happened that on a warm
windy evening I drove over to East Egg to see two old friends whom
I scarcely knew at all. Their house was even more elaborate than I
expected, a cheerful red and white Georgian Colonial mansion
overlooking the bay. The lawn started at the beach and ran toward
the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sun-dials and
brick walks and burning gardens—finally when it reached the house
drifting up the side in bright vines as though from the momentum of
its run. The front was broken by a line of French windows, glowing
now with reflected gold, and wide open to the warm windy afternoon,
and Tom Buchanan in riding clothes was standing with his legs apart
on the front porch.
He had changed since his New
Haven years. Now he was a sturdy, straw haired man of thirty with a
rather hard mouth and a supercilious manner. Two shining, arrogant
eyes had established dominance over his face and gave him the
appearance of always leaning aggressively forward. Not even the
effeminate swank of his riding clothes could hide the enormous
power of that body—he seemed to fill those glistening boots until
he strained the top lacing and you could see a great pack of muscle
shifting when his shoulder moved under his thin coat. It was a body
capable of enormous leverage—a cruel body.
His speaking voice, a gruff husky
tenor, added to the impression of fractiousness he conveyed. There
was a touch of paternal contempt in it, even toward people he
liked—and there were men at New Haven who had hated his guts.
‘Now, don’t think my opinion on
these matters is final,’ he seemed to say, ‘just because I’m
stronger and more of a man than you are.’ We were in the same
Senior Society, and while we were never intimate I always had the
impression that he approved of me and wanted me to like him with
some harsh, defiant wistfulness of his own.
We talked for a few minutes on
the sunny porch.
‘I’ve got a nice place here,’ he
said, his eyes flashing about restlessly.
Turning me around by one arm he
moved a broad flat hand along the front vista, including in its
sweep a sunken Italian garden, a half acre of deep pungent roses
and a snubnosed motor boat that bumped the tide off shore.
‘It belonged to Demaine the oil
man.’ He turned me around again, politely and abruptly. ‘We’ll go
inside.’
We walked through a high hallway
into a bright rosycolored space, fragilely bound into the house by
French windows at either end. The windows were ajar and gleaming
white against the fresh grass outside that seemed to grow a little
way into the house. A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains
in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up
toward the frosted wedding cake of the ceiling—and then rippled
over the wine-colored rug, making a shadow on it as wind does on
the sea.
The only completely stationary
object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women
were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon. They were both
in white and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they
had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house.
I must have stood for a few moments listening to
The Great Gatsby
the whip and snap of the curtains
and the groan of a picture on the wall. Then there was a boom as
Tom Buchanan shut the rear windows and the caught wind died out
about the room and the curtains and the rugs and the two young
women ballooned slowly to the floor.
The younger of the two was a
stranger to me. She was extended full length at her end of the
divan, completely motionless and with her chin raised a little as
if she were balancing something on it which was quite likely to
fall. If she saw me out of the corner of her eyes she gave no hint
of it—indeed, I was almost surprised into murmuring an apology for
having disturbed her by coming in.
The other girl, Daisy, made an
attempt to rise—she leaned slightly forward with a conscientious
expression—then she laughed, an absurd, charming little laugh, and
I laughed too and came forward into the room.
‘I’m p-paralyzed with
happiness.’
She laughed again, as if she said
something very witty, and held my hand for a moment, looking up
into my face, promising that there was no one in the world she so
much wanted to see. That was a way she had. She hinted in a murmur
that the surname of the balancing girl was Baker. (I’ve heard it
said that Daisy’s murmur was only to make people lean toward her;
an irrelevant criticism that made it no less charming.)
At any rate Miss Baker’s lips
fluttered, she nodded at me almost imperceptibly and then quickly
tipped her head back again—the object she was balancing had
obviously tottered a little and given her something of a fright.
Again a sort of apology arose to my lips. Almost any exhibition of
complete self sufficiency draws a stunned tribute from me.
I looked back at my cousin who
began to ask me questions in her low, thrilling voice. It was the
kind of voice that the ear follows up and down as if each speech is
an arrangement of notes that will never be played again. Her face
was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a
bright passionate mouth—but there was an excitement in her voice
that men who had cared for her found difficult to forget: a singing
compulsion, a whispered ‘Listen,’ a promise that she had done gay,
exciting things just a while since and that there were gay,
exciting things hovering in the next hour.
I told her how I had stopped off
in Chicago for a day on my way east and how a dozen people had sent
their love through me.
‘Do they miss me?’ she cried
ecstatically.
‘The whole town is desolate. All
the cars have the left rear wheel painted black as a mourning
wreath and there’s a persistent wail all night along the North
Shore.’
‘How gorgeous! Let’s go back,
Tom. Tomorrow!’ Then she added irrelevantly, ‘You ought to see the
baby.’
‘I’d like to.’
‘She’s asleep. She’s two years
old. Haven’t you ever seen her?’
‘Never.’
‘Well, you ought to see her.
She’s——’
Tom Buchanan who had been
hovering restlessly about the room stopped and rested his hand on
my shoulder.
‘What you doing, Nick?’
‘I’m a bond man.’
‘Who with?’
I told him.
‘Never heard of them,’ he
remarked decisively.
This annoyed me.
‘You will,’ I answered shortly.
‘You will if you stay in the East.’
‘Oh, I’ll stay in the East, don’t
you worry,’ he said, glancing at Daisy and then back at me, as if
he were alert for something more. ‘I’d be a God Damned fool to live
anywhere else.’
At this point Miss Baker said
‘Absolutely!’ with such suddenness that I started—it was the first
word she uttered since I came into the room. Evidently it surprised
her as much as it did me, for she yawned and with a series of
rapid, deft movements stood up into the room.
‘I’m stiff,’ she complained,
‘I’ve been lying on that sofa for as long as I can remember.’
‘Don’t look at me,’ Daisy
retorted. ‘I’ve been trying to get you to New York all
afternoon.’
‘No, thanks,’ said Miss Baker to
the four cocktails just in from the pantry, ‘I’m absolutely in
training.’
Her host looked at her
incredulously.
‘You are!’ He took down his drink
as if it were a drop in the bottom of a glass. ‘How you ever get
anything done is beyond me.’
I looked at Miss Baker wondering
what it was she ‘got done.’ I enjoyed looking at her. She was a
slender, smallbreasted girl, with an erect carriage which she
accentuated by throwing her body backward at the shoulders like a
young cadet. Her grey sun-strained eyes looked back at me with
polite reciprocal curiosity out of a wan, charming discontented
face. It occurred to me now that I had seen her, or a picture of
her, somewhere before.
‘You live in West Egg,’ she
remarked contemptuously. ‘I know somebody there.’
‘I don’t know a single——’
‘You must know Gatsby.’
‘Gatsby?’ demanded Daisy. ‘What
Gatsby?’
Before I could reply that he was
my neighbor dinner was announced; wedging his tense arm
imperatively under mine Tom Buchanan compelled me from the room as
though he were moving a checker to another square.
Slenderly, languidly, their hands
set lightly on their hips the two young women preceded us out onto
a rosy-colored porch open toward the sunset where four candles
flickered on the table in the diminished wind.
‘Why CANDLES?’ objected Daisy,
frowning. She snapped them out with her fingers. ‘In two weeks
it’ll be the longest day in the year.’ She looked at us all
radiantly. ‘Do you always watch for the longest day of the year and
then miss it? I always watch for the longest day in the year and
then miss it.’
‘We ought to plan something,’
yawned Miss Baker, sitting down at the table as if she were getting
into bed.
‘All right,’ said Daisy. ‘What’ll
we plan?’ She turned to me helplessly. ‘What do people plan?’
Before I could answer her eyes
fastened with an awed expression on her little finger.
‘Look!’ she complained. ‘I hurt
it.’
We all looked—the knuckle was
black and blue.
‘You did it, Tom,’ she said
accusingly. ‘I know you didn’t mean to but you DID do it. That’s
what I get for marrying a brute of a man, a great big hulking
physical specimen of a——’
‘I hate that word hulking,’
objected Tom crossly, ‘even in kidding.’
‘Hulking,’ insisted Daisy.
Sometimes she and Miss Baker
talked at once, unobtrusively and with a bantering inconsequence
that was never quite chatter, that was as cool as their white
dresses and their impersonal eyes in the absence of all desire.
They were here—and they accepted Tom and me, making only a polite
pleasant effort to entertain or to be entertained. They knew that
presently dinner would be over and a little later the evening too
would be over and casually put away. It was sharply different from
the West where an evening was hurried from phase to phase toward
its close in a continually disappointed anticipation or else in
sheer nervous dread of the moment itself.
‘You make me feel uncivilized,
Daisy,’ I confessed on my second glass of corky but rather
impressive claret. ‘Can’t you talk about crops or something?’
I meant nothing in particular by
this remark but it was taken up in an unexpected way.
‘Civilization’s going to pieces,’
broke out Tom violently.
‘I’ve gotten to be a terrible
pessimist about things. Have you read ‘The Rise of the Coloured
Empires’ by this man Goddard?’
‘Why, no,’ I answered, rather
surprised by his tone.
‘Well, it’s a fine book, and
everybody ought to read it. The idea is if we don’t look out the
white race will be—will be utterly submerged. It’s all scientific
stuff; it’s been proved.’
‘Tom’s getting very profound,’
said Daisy with an expression of unthoughtful sadness. ‘He reads
deep books with long words in them. What was that word we——’
‘Well, these books are all
scientific,’ insisted Tom, glancing at her impatiently. ‘This
fellow has worked out the whole thing. It’s up to us who are the
dominant race to watch out or these other races will have control
of things.’
‘We’ve got to beat them down,’
whispered Daisy, winking ferociously toward the fervent sun.
‘You ought to live in
California—’ began Miss Baker but Tom interrupted her by shifting
heavily in his chair.
‘This idea is that we’re Nordics.
I am, and you are and you are and——’ After an infinitesimal
hesitation he included Daisy with a slight nod and she winked at me
again. ‘—and we’ve produced all the things that go to make
civilization—oh, science and art and all that. Do you see?’
There was something pathetic in
his concentration as if his complacency, more acute than of old,
was not enough to him any more. When, almost immediately, the
telephone rang inside and the butler left the porch Daisy seized
upon the momentary interruption and leaned toward me.
‘I’ll tell you a family secret,’
she whispered enthusiastically. ‘It’s about the butler’s nose. Do
you want to hear about
the butler’s nose?’
‘That’s why I came over
tonight.’
‘Well, he wasn’t always a butler;
he used to be the silver polisher for some people in New York that
had a silver service for two hundred people. He had to polish it
from morning till night until finally it began to affect his
nose——’
‘Things went from bad to worse,’
suggested Miss Baker.
‘Yes. Things went from bad to
worse until finally he had to give up his position.’
For a moment the last sunshine
fell with romantic affection upon her glowing face; her voice
compelled me forward breathlessly as I listened—then the glow
faded, each light deserting her with lingering regret like children
leaving a pleasant street at dusk.
The butler came back and murmured
something close to Tom’s ear whereupon Tom frowned, pushed back his
chair and without a word went inside. As if his absence quickened
something within her Daisy leaned forward again, her voice glowing
and singing.
‘I love to see you at my table,
Nick. You remind me of a—of a rose, an absolute rose. Doesn’t he?’
She turned to Miss Baker for confirmation. ‘An absolute
rose?’
This was untrue. I am not even
faintly like a rose. She was only extemporizing but a stirring
warmth flowed from her as if her heart was trying to come out to
you concealed in one of those breathless, thrilling words. Then
suddenly she threw her napkin on the table and excused herself and
went into the house.