I
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 anyone,” 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 judgements, 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 judgements 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 short-winded 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 centre 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—ye-es,” 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 neighbourhood.
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
wonder to the gulls that fly overhead. To the wingless a more
interesting 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
eyesore, but it was a small eyesore, and it had been overlooked, so I
had a view of the water, a partial view of my neighbour’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 savours of
anticlimax. 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 towards the front door for a quarter of a mile,
jumping over sundials 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 snub-nosed motorboat that bumped
the tide offshore.
“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 rosy-coloured 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-coloured 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 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-paralysed 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 three 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?”