When we pulled out into the winter night and the real snow, our snow, began to stretch out beside us and twinkle against the windows, and the dim lights of small Wisconsin stations moved by, a sharp wild brace came suddenly into the air. We drew in deep breaths of it as we walked back from dinner through the cold vestibules, unutterably aware of our identity with this country for one strange hour, before we melted indistinguishably into it again.
That's my Middle West - not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede towns, but the thrilling returning trains of my youth, and the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of holly wreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow. I am part of that, a little solemn with the feel of those long winters, a little complacent from growing up in the Carraway house in a city where dwellings are still called through decades by a family's name. I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all - Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life.
Even when the East excited me most, even when I was most keenly aware of its superiority to the bored, sprawling, swollen towns beyond the Ohio, with their interminable inquisitions which spared only the children and the very old - even then it had always for me a quality of distortion. West Egg, especially, still figures in my more fantastic dreams. I see it as a night scene by El Greco: a hundred houses, at once conventional and grotesque, crouching under a sullen, overhanging sky and a lustreless moon. In the foreground four solemn men in dress suits are walking along the sidewalk with a stretcher on which lies a drunken woman in a white evening dress. Her hand, which dangles over the side, sparkles cold with jewels. Gravely the men turn in at a house - the wrong house. But no one knows the woman's name, and no one cares.
After Gatsby's death the East was haunted for me like that, distorted beyond my eyes' power of correction. So when the blue smoke of brittle leaves was in the air and the wind blew the wet laundry stiff on the line I decided to come back home.
There was one thing to be done before I left, an awkward, unpleasant thing that perhaps had better have been let alone. But I wanted to leave things in order and not just trust that obliging and indifferent sea to sweep my refuse away. I saw Jordan Baker and talked over and around what had happened to us together, and what had happened afterward to me, and she lay perfectly still, listening, in a big chair.
She was dressed to play golf, and I remember thinking she looked like a good illustration, her chin raised a little jauntily, her hair the colour of an autumn leaf, her face the same brown tint as the fingerless glove on her knee. When I had finished she told me without comment that she was engaged to another man. I doubted that, though there were several she could have married at a nod of her head, but I pretended to be surprised. For just a minute I wondered if I wasn't making a mistake, then I thought it all over again quickly and got up to say goodbye.
'Nevertheless you did throw me over,' said Jordan suddenly. 'You threw me over on the telephone. I don't give a damn about you now, but it was a new experience for me, and I felt a little dizzy for a while.'
We shook hands.
'Oh, and do you remember' - she added - 'a conversation we had once about driving a car?'
'Why - not exactly.'
'You said a bad driver was only safe until she met another bad driver? Well, I met another bad driver, didn't I? I mean it was careless of me to make such a wrong guess. I thought you were rather an honest, straightforward person. I thought it was your secret pride.'
'I'm thirty,' I said. 'I'm five years too old to lie to myself and call it honour.'
She didn't answer. Angry, and half in love with her, and tremendously sorry, I turned away.
One afternoon late in October I saw Tom Buchanan. He was walking ahead of me along Fifth Avenue in his alert, aggressive way, his hands out a little from his body as if to fight off interference, his head moving sharply here and there, adapting itself to his restless eyes. Just as I slowed up to avoid overtaking him he stopped and began frowning into the windows of a jewellery store. Suddenly he saw me and walked back, holding out his hand.
'What's the matter, Nick? Do you object to shaking hands with me?'
'Yes. You know what I think of you.'
'You're crazy, Nick,' he said quickly. 'Crazy as hell. I don't know what's the matter with you.'
'Tom,' I inquired, 'what did you say to Wilson that afternoon?'
He stared at me without a word, and I knew I had guessed right about those missing hours. I started to turn away, but he took a step after me and grabbed my arm.
'I told him the truth,' he said. 'He came to the door while we were getting ready to leave, and when I sent down word that we weren't in he tried to force his way upstairs. He was crazy enough to kill me if I hadn't told him who owned the car. His hand was on a revolver in his pocket every minute he was in the house -' He broke off defiantly. 'What if I did tell him? That fellow had it coming to him. He threw dust into your eyes just like he did in Daisy's, but he was a tough one. He ran over Myrtle like you'd run over a dog and never even stopped his car.'
There was nothing I could say, except the one unutterable fact that it wasn't true.
'And if you think I didn't have my share of suffering - look here, when I went to give up that flat and saw that damn box of dog biscuits sitting there on the sideboard, I sat down and cried like a baby. By God it was awful -'
I couldn't forgive him or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified. It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy - they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made...
I shook hands with him; it seemed silly not to, for I felt suddenly as though I were talking to a child. Then he went into the jewellery store to buy a pearl necklace - or perhaps only a pair of cuff buttons - rid of my provincial squeamishness for ever.
Gatsby's house was still empty when I left - the grass on his lawn had grown as long as mine. One of the taxi drivers in the village never took a fare past the entrance gate without stopping for a minute and pointing inside; perhaps it was he who drove Daisy and Gatsby over to East Egg the night of the accident, and perhaps he had made a story about it all his own. I didn't want to hear it and I avoided him when I got off the train.
I spent my Saturday nights in New York because those gleaming, dazzling parties of his were with me so vividly that I could still hear the music and the laughter, faint and incessant, from his garden, and the cars going up and down his drive. One night I did hear a material car there, and saw its lights stop at his front steps. But I didn't investigate. Probably it was some final guest who had been away at the ends of the earth and didn't know that the party was over.
On the last night, with my trunk packed and my car sold to the grocer, I went over and looked at that huge incoherent failure of a house once more. On the white steps an obscene word, scrawled by some boy with a piece of brick, stood out clearly in the moonlight, and I erased it, drawing my shoe raspingly along the stone. Then I wandered down to the beach and sprawled out on the sand.
Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher 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 all 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 nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.
And as I sat th
ere brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby's wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy's dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter - tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms further... And one fine morning -
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
Notes
Many of these notes draw on Apparatus for F. Scott Fitzgerald's 'The Great Gatsby', by Matthew J. Bruccoli (University of South Carolina Press, 1974). Professor Bruccoli is the great Fitzgerald scholar, and anyone interested in the textual details of this novel should consult his work.
Title (p. 1 ): Right up to the last moment Fitzgerald preferred Under the Red, White, and Blue as the title and, indeed, blamed the novel's initial lack of success on the title it finally carried - one of his few errors of judgement during the inspired revisionary period.
Epigraph by Thomas Park D'Invilliers (p. 5): Written by Fitzgerald. D'Invilliers is a character, based on John Peale Bishop, in This Side of Paradise.
1. (p. 8) Dukes of Buccleuch: The Duke of Buccleuch also holds the title of Duke of Doncaster. Since Gatsby is snapped with a future Earl of Doncaster in Oxford (p. 65), Fitzgerald may be implying, almost as a private joke, that Nick may be more closely 'related' to Gatsby than he thinks!
2. (p. 9) graduated from New Haven: i.e. Yale.
3. (p. 11) Lake Forest: An exclusive suburb of Chicago. Ginevra King, an early love of Fitzgerald's, lived there.
4. (p.13) the same senior society: There were six senior (which also meant secret) societies at Yale. Election to one of them was a considerable social achievement.
5. (p. 18) The Rise of the Coloured Empires: The allusion is to The Rising Tide of Color by Lothrop Stoddard (New York, Scribners, 1920). Bruccoli speculates that Fitzgerald 'did not want to use the correct title and author'. Also he probably did not want Lothrop Stoddard confused with John L. Stoddard, mentioned on page 47.
6. (p. 23) Westchester: A suburb of New York.
7. (p. 23) Jordan Baker: The Jordan sports car and the Baker electric here seem to come together. Fitzgerald told Maxwell Perkins that she was based on champion golfer Edith Cummings.
8. (p. 23) Asheville and Hot Springs and Palm Beach: Fashionable resorts in North Carolina, Arkansas and Florida.
9. (p. 26) valley of ashes: According to Bruccoli, based on Flushing Meadow, a swampland that was being filled in with garbage and ashes and later became the site of the 1939 World's Fair.
10.(p. 31) Town Tattle: A scandal magazine of the Twenties.
11. (p. 31) Simon Called Peter. A popular novel by Robert Keable (New York, Dutton, 1921), which Fitzgerald disliked and thought immoral.
12. (p. 34) Montauk Point: A town at the eastern tip of Long Island.
13. (p. 42) Frisco: Joe Frisco, a comedian and eccentric dancer.
14. (p. 42) Gilda Gray: A dancing star of the Ziegfield Follies. She introduced a dance called the shimmy.
15. (p. 47) Stoddard Lectures: John L. Stoddard wrote fifteen volumes of illustrated travel books under the general title of John L. Stoddard's Lectures. '"Gad's Hill", Dickens's home near Rochester, was illustrated in Volume Nine' (Bruccoli). See note to p. 152.
16. (p. 47) Belasco: David Belasco, a Broadway producer known for the realism of his sets.
17. (p. 48) First Division... Twenty-eighth Infantry... Sixteenth: In Fitzgerald's own copy these were revised to 'Third... Ninth Machine-Gun Battalion... Seventh Infantry'. See also Argonne Forest (p. 64). Bruccoli has done the work: 'On June 3,1918, Nick's Ninth Machine-Gun Battalion was at Chateau-Thierry and Gats-by's Seventh Infantry was brought up to defend the town on the south riverbank. Both units were in the Third Division... Argonne Forest: Battle in the Meuse-Argonne offensive (September 25 November 13, 1918) in which American troops played the key role. Although Gatsby's Third Division fought in the Meuse-Argonne campaign, it was in the Meuse Sector - at the opposite end of the battle line from the Argonne Forest. However, the First Division, Gatsby's and Nick's division in the first printing, was cited by General Pershing for valor in the Argonne.
'Fitzgerald's revision of Nick's and Gatsby's units makes it possible for them to have seen each other at Chateau-Thierry, but at the same time makes it extremely unlikely for Gatsby to have been in the Argonne Forest. This discrepancy does not necessarily indicate that Gatsby lies about his war record: there is no indication of that in the novel.'
18. (p. 48) hydroplane: in the Twenties this word was applied to both motorboats and seaplanes.
19. (p. 58) Warwick: A suburb of New York City in Orange County.
20. (p. 60) bootlegger: Someone engaged in the illegal sale of alcohol during Prohibition. Said to derive from the fact that dealers in illegal whisky hid the bottles in their boots.
21. (p. 60) Von Hindenburg: A German general in World War I and later President of Germany.
22. (p. 65) Orderi di Danilo: 'Montenegro has an order called The Order of Danilo. Is there any possible way you could find out for me there what it would look like - whether a courtesy decoration given to an American would bear an English inscription - or anything to give verisimilitude to the medal which sounds horribly amateurish?' (Fitzgerald to Perkins, December 1924.) It is absolutely right for Fitzgerald's purposes that he should allow Gatsby to have a medal that looks horribly amateurish (fake) but nevertheless has 'verisimilitude'; also that it is this most improbable of medals that Gatsby proffers, while he claims that 'every Allied government gave me a decoration'. Modesty? Humbug? Teasing?
23. (p. 65) Trinity Quad: Trinity College, Oxford.
24. (p. 66) Port Roosevelt: Bruccoli says this place has not been located or identified with an actual port, though the name is inevitably suggestive. As he stresses, 'Fitzgerald superimposed a partly mythical geography upon the actual geography of Long Island.'
25. (p. 68) Meyer Wolfshiem: Based partly on the famous gambler Arnold Rothstein: 'in Gatsby... always starting from the small focal point that impressed me - my own meeting with Arnold Rothstein, for instance' (Fitzgerald to Corey Ford, July 1937).
26. (p. 71) the man who fixed the World's Series back in 1919: The 'Black Sox' affair. In 1919 a group of players in the Chicago White Sox, who were greatly favoured to win the World Series that year, were paid by a gang of professional gamblers to 'throw' the series to the Cincinnati Reds. (The Chicago players were apparently so ham-fisted that, after the second game, the writer Ring Lardner walked through their train compartment singing: 'I'm Forever Throwing Ball Games'.) The agreement among historians seems to be that Arnold Rothstein did not arrange the fix but knew about it and bet accordingly.
27. (p. 73) Camp Taylor: Near Louisville, Kentucky, where Fitzgerald himself was once stationed and where he met Zelda Sayre.
28. (p. 79) Coney Island: An amusement park in Brooklyn.
29. (p. 82) The Journal: A New York newspaper owned by William Randolph Hearst.
30. (p. 82) Clay's Economics: Economics: An Introduction for the General Reader (New York, Macmillan, 1918).
31. (p. 83) Castle Rackrent: A nineteenth-century novel by Maria Edgeworth.
32. (p. 85) Kant at his church steeple: Immanuel Kant was reputed to be in the habit of staring at a steeple while he was thinking.
33. (p. 88) Adam's study: in the classical style of the Scottish architects and designers Robert and James Adam.
34. (p. 94) underground pipeline to Canada: A Prohibition myth that alcohol was being piped into the United States from Canada.
35. (p. 96) Madame de Maintenon: Francoised'Aubigne (1635-1719), Marquise de Maintenon, second wife of Louis XIV and power b
ehind the throne.
36. (p. 126) Kapiolani: A park on the Hawaiian island of Oahu.
37. (p. 126) Punch Bowl: A peak on the island of Oahu.
38. (p. 127) drugstores: During Prohibition drugstores were permitted to sell whisky on prescription. Many became fronts for bootlegging.
39. (p. 143) 'Beale Street Blues': A famous song written by W. C. Handy in 1917.
40. (p. 147) Hempstead: A town on Long Island.
41. (p. 147) Southampton: A rich community on the South Shore of Long Island.
42. (p. 152) Gad's Hill: According to Bruccoli, no such place can be located on any map of Long Island in the Twenties. So it is part of Fitzgerald's 'mythic geography'. It obviously suggests 'Gatsby' (and Gat-sby suggests gun): it is also the site of the mock robbery of Falstaff by Prince Hal in Henry IV, Part I.
43. (p. 158) handed the bonds over the counter: An indication that Gatsby is involved in handling stolen securities, as Arnold Rothstein probably was.
44. (p. 160) James J. Hill: A railroad tycoon who lived in Fitzgerald's home town, St Paul, Minnesota. He built the Great Northern Railroad, which linked the Great Lakes with the Pacific Coast. Fitzgerald alludes to him several times in his work.
45. (p. 160) Greenwich: A town in Connecticut.
46. (p. 161) 'The Swastika Holding Company': This is not a suggestion that the Jewish Wolfshiem is a fascist! Hitler had adopted the device in 1920, but at the time Fitzgerald was writing this news had not been widely disseminated, and the swastika was simply a decorative device.
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