The Great Gatsby
They stood side by side examining it. I was going to ask to see the
rubies when the phone rang, and Gatsby took up the receiver.
“Yes … Well, I can’t talk now … I can’t talk now, old sport … I said a
small town … He must know what a small town is … Well, he’s no use to
us if Detroit is his idea of a small town …”
He rang off.
“Come here quick!” cried Daisy at the window.
The rain was still falling, but the darkness had parted in the west,
and there was a pink and golden billow of foamy clouds above the sea.
“Look at that,” she whispered, and then after a moment: “I’d like to
just get one of those pink clouds and put you in it and push you
around.”
I tried to go then, but they wouldn’t hear of it; perhaps my presence
made them feel more satisfactorily alone.
“I know what we’ll do,” said Gatsby, “we’ll have Klipspringer play the
piano.”
He went out of the room calling “Ewing!” and returned in a few minutes
accompanied by an embarrassed, slightly worn young man, with
shell-rimmed glasses and scanty blond hair. He was now decently
clothed in a “sport shirt,” open at the neck, sneakers, and duck
trousers of a nebulous hue.
“Did we interrupt your exercise?” inquired Daisy politely.
“I was asleep,” cried Mr. Klipspringer, in a spasm of embarrassment.
“That is, I’d been asleep. Then I got up …”
“Klipspringer plays the piano,” said Gatsby, cutting him off. “Don’t
you, Ewing, old sport?”
“I don’t play well. I don’t—hardly play at all. I’m all out of prac—”
“We’ll go downstairs,” interrupted Gatsby. He flipped a switch. The
grey windows disappeared as the house glowed full of light.
In the music-room Gatsby turned on a solitary lamp beside the piano.
He lit Daisy’s cigarette from a trembling match, and sat down with her
on a couch far across the room, where there was no light save what the
gleaming floor bounced in from the hall.
When Klipspringer had played “The Love Nest” he turned around on the
bench and searched unhappily for Gatsby in the gloom.
“I’m all out of practice, you see. I told you I couldn’t play. I’m all
out of prac—”
“Don’t talk so much, old sport,” commanded Gatsby. “Play!”
“In the morning, In the evening, Ain’t we got fun—”
Outside the wind was loud and there was a faint flow of thunder along
the Sound. All the lights were going on in West Egg now; the electric
trains, men-carrying, were plunging home through the rain from New
York. It was the hour of a profound human change, and excitement was
generating on the air.
“One thing’s sure and nothing’s surer The rich get richer and the
poor get—children. In the meantime, In between time—”
As I went over to say goodbye I saw that the expression of
bewilderment had come back into Gatsby’s face, as though a faint doubt
had occurred to him as to the quality of his present happiness. Almost
five years! There must have been moments even that afternoon when
Daisy tumbled short of his dreams—not through her own fault, but
because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond
her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative
passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright
feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness can
challenge what a man can store up in his ghostly heart.
As I watched him he adjusted himself a little, visibly. His hand took
hold of hers, and as she said something low in his ear he turned
toward her with a rush of emotion. I think that voice held him most,
with its fluctuating, feverish warmth, because it couldn’t be
over-dreamed—that voice was a deathless song.
They had forgotten me, but Daisy glanced up and held out her hand;
Gatsby didn’t know me now at all. I looked once more at them and they
looked back at me, remotely, possessed by intense life. Then I went
out of the room and down the marble steps into the rain, leaving them
there together.
VI
About this time an ambitious young reporter from New York arrived one
morning at Gatsby’s door and asked him if he had anything to say.
“Anything to say about what?” inquired Gatsby politely.
“Why—any statement to give out.”
It transpired after a confused five minutes that the man had heard
Gatsby’s name around his office in a connection which he either
wouldn’t reveal or didn’t fully understand. This was his day off and
with laudable initiative he had hurried out “to see.”
It was a random shot, and yet the reporter’s instinct was right.
Gatsby’s notoriety, spread about by the hundreds who had accepted his
hospitality and so become authorities upon his past, had increased all
summer until he fell just short of being news. Contemporary legends
such as the “underground pipeline to Canada” attached themselves to
him, and there was one persistent story that he didn’t live in a house
at all, but in a boat that looked like a house and was moved secretly
up and down the Long Island shore. Just why these inventions were a
source of satisfaction to James Gatz of North Dakota, isn’t easy to
say.
James Gatz—that was really, or at least legally, his name. He had
changed it at the age of seventeen and at the specific moment that
witnessed the beginning of his career—when he saw Dan Cody’s yacht
drop anchor over the most insidious flat on Lake Superior. It was
James Gatz who had been loafing along the beach that afternoon in a
torn green jersey and a pair of canvas pants, but it was already Jay
Gatsby who borrowed a rowboat, pulled out to the Tuolomee, and
informed Cody that a wind might catch him and break him up in half an
hour.
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.
For over a year he had been beating his way along the south shore of
Lake Superior as a clam-digger and a salmon-fisher or in any other
capacity that brought him food and bed. His brown, hardening body
lived naturally through the half-fierce, half-lazy work of the bracing
days. He knew women early, and since they spoiled him he became
contemptuous of them, of young virgins because they were ignorant, of
the others because they were hysterical about things which in his
overwhelming self-absorption he took for granted.
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 the pattern of his
fancies until drowsiness closed down upon some vivid scene with an
oblivious embrace. For a while 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 securely on
a fairy’s wing.
An instinct toward his future glory had led him, some months before,
to the small Lutheran College of St. Olaf’s in southern Minnesota. He
stayed there two weeks, dismayed at its ferocious indifference to the
drums of his destiny, to destiny itself, and despising the janitor’s
work with which he was to pay his way through. Then he drifted back to
Lake Superior, and he was still searching for something to do on the
day that Dan Cody’s yacht dropped anchor in the shallows alongshore.
Cody was fifty years old then, a product of the Nevada silver fields,
of the Yukon, of every rush for metal since seventy-five. The
transactions in Montana copper that made him many times a millionaire
found him physically robust but on the verge of soft-mindedness, and,
suspecting this, an infinite number of women tried to separate him
from his money. The none too savoury ramifications by which Ella Kaye,
the newspaper woman, played Madame de Maintenon to his weakness and
sent him to sea in a yacht, were common property of the turgid
journalism in 1902. He had been coasting along all too hospitable
shores for five years when he turned up as James Gatz’s destiny in
Little Girl Bay.
To young Gatz, resting on his oars and looking up at the railed deck,
that yacht represented all the beauty and glamour in the world. I
suppose he smiled at Cody—he had probably discovered that people liked
him when he smiled. At any rate Cody asked him a few questions (one of
them elicited the brand new name) and found that he was quick and
extravagantly ambitious. A few days later he took him to Duluth and
bought him a blue coat, six pairs of white duck trousers, and a
yachting cap. And when the Tuolomee left for the West Indies and the
Barbary Coast, Gatsby left too.
He was employed in a vague personal capacity—while he remained with
Cody he was in turn steward, mate, skipper, secretary, and even
jailor, for Dan Cody sober knew what lavish doings Dan Cody drunk
might soon be about, and he provided for such contingencies by
reposing more and more trust in Gatsby. The arrangement lasted five
years, during which the boat went three times around the Continent.
It might have lasted indefinitely except for the fact that Ella Kaye
came on board one night in Boston and a week later Dan Cody
inhospitably died.
I remember the portrait of him up in Gatsby’s bedroom, a grey, florid
man with a hard, empty face—the pioneer debauchee, who during one
phase of American life brought back to the Eastern seaboard the savage
violence of the frontier brothel and saloon. It was indirectly due to
Cody that Gatsby drank so little. Sometimes in the course of gay
parties women used to rub champagne into his hair; for himself he
formed the habit of letting liquor alone.
And it was from Cody that he inherited money—a legacy of twenty-five
thousand dollars. He didn’t get it. He never understood the legal
device that was used against him, but what remained of the millions
went intact to Ella Kaye. He was left with his singularly appropriate
education; the vague contour of Jay Gatsby had filled out to the
substantiality of a man.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
He told me all this very much later, but I’ve put it down here with
the idea of exploding those first wild rumours about his antecedents,
which weren’t even faintly true. Moreover he told it to me at a time
of confusion, when I had reached the point of believing everything and
nothing about him. So I take advantage of this short halt, while
Gatsby, so to speak, caught his breath, to clear this set of
misconceptions away.
It was a halt, too, in my association with his affairs. For several
weeks I didn’t see him or hear his voice on the phone—mostly I was in
New York, trotting around with Jordan and trying to ingratiate myself
with her senile aunt—but finally I went over to his house one Sunday
afternoon. I hadn’t been there two minutes when somebody brought Tom
Buchanan in for a drink. I was startled, naturally, but the really
surprising thing was that it hadn’t happened before.
They were a party of three on horseback—Tom and a man named Sloane and
a pretty woman in a brown riding-habit, who had been there previously.
“I’m delighted to see you,” said Gatsby, standing on his porch. “I’m
delighted that you dropped in.”
As though they cared!