F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, Penguin Popular Classics, 1994

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 judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. (opening, 7)

Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. (7)

Conduct may be [7] 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 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. … 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. (7-8)

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 edge of the universe—so I decided to go East and learn the bond business. (9)

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 find health to be pulled down out of the young breath-giving air. (10)

We walked through a high hallway into a bright rosy-coloured space, fragiley 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 towards 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. (14)

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. (15)

At this point Miss Baker said: ‘Absolutely!’ with such suddenness that I started—it was the first word she had 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 is done beyond me.’ (17)

‘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 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 towards the fervent sun. (19)

She told me it was a girl, and so I turned my head away and wept. “All right,” I said, [23] “I’m glad it’s a girl. And I hope she’ll be a fool—that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.” (23-24)

Her body asserted itself with a restless movement of her knee, and she stood up. / ‘Ten o’clock,’ she remarked, apparently finding the time on the ceiling. ‘Time for this good girl to go to bed.’ (25)

As for Tom, the fact that he ‘had some woman in New York’ was really less surprising than that he had been depressed by a book. Something was making him nibble at the edge of stale ideas as if his sturdy physical egotism no longer nourished his peremptory heart. / Already it was deep summer…and when I reached my estate at West Egg I ran the car under its shed and sat for while on an abandoned grass roller in the yard. The wind had blown off, leaving a loud, bright night, with wings beating in the trees and a persistent organ sound as the full bellows of the earth blew the frogs full of life. (27)

About half way between West Egg and New York the motor road hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land. This is a valley of ashes… 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 wig 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, … (29)

‘Terrible place, isn’t it,’ said Tom, exchanging a frown with Doctor Eckleburg. / ‘Awful.’ / ‘It does her good to get away.’ / ‘Doesn’t her husband object?’ / ‘Wilson? He thinks she goes to see her sister in New York. He’s so dumb he doesn’t know he’s alive.’ (32)

We drove over to Fifth Avenue, warm and soft, almost pastoral, on the summer Sunday afternoon. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see a great flock of white sheep turn the corner. (34)

I have been drunk just twice in my life, and the second time was that afternoon; so everything that happened has a dim, hazy cast over it, although until after eight o’clock the apartment was full of cheerful sun. (35)

The sister, Catherine, was a slender, worldly girl of about thirty, with a solid, sticky bob of red hair, and a complexion powdered milky white. Her eyebrows had been plucked and then drawn on again at a more rakish angle, but the efforts of nature toward the restoration of the old alignment gave a blurred air to her face. When she moved about there was an incessant clicking as innumerable pottery bracelets jingled up an down upon her arms. She came in with such a proprietary haste, and looked around so possessively at the furniture that I wondered if she lived here. But when I asked her she lived here. But when I asked her she laughed immoderately, repeated my question aloud, and told me she lived with a girl friend at a hotel. (36)

‘Can’t stand them’ She looked at Myrtle and then at Tom. ‘What I say is, why go on living with them if they can’t stand them? If I was them I’d get a divorce and get married to each other right away.’ / ‘Doesn’t she like Wilson either?’ / The answer to this was unexpected. It came from Myrtle, who had overheard the question, and it was violent and obscene. / ‘You see,’ cried Catherine triumphantly. She lowered her voice again. ‘It’s really his wife that’s keeping [39] them apart. She’s a Catholic, and they don’t believe in divorce.’ / Daisy was not a Catholic, and I was a little shocked at the elaborateness of the lie. (39-40)

The bottle of whiskey—a second one—was now in the constant demand by all present, excepting Catherine, who ‘felt just as good on nothing at all.’ Tom rang for the janitor and sent him for some celebrated sandwiches, which were a complete supper in themselves. I wanted to get and eastward toward the park through the soft twilight, but each time I tried to go I became [41] entangled in some wild, strident argument which pulled me back, as if with ropes, into my chair. Yet high over the city our line of yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening streets, and I saw him too, looking up and wondering. I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life. (41-42)

…already there are wanderers, confident girls who weave here and there among the stouter and more stable, become for a sharp, joyous moment the centre of a group, and then, excited with triumph, glide on through the sea-change of faces and voices and colour under the constantly changing light. / Suddenly one of these gypsies, in trembling opal, [46] seizes a cocktail out of the air, dumps it down for courage and, moving her hands like Frisco, dances out alone on the canvas platform. (46-47)

When I was here last I tore my gown on a chair, and he asked me my name and address—inside of a week I got a package from Croirier’s with a new evening gown in it.’ / ‘Did you keep it?’ asked Jordan. / ‘Sure I did. I as going to wear it to-night, but it was too big in the bust and had to be altered. It was gas blue with lavender beads. Two hundred and sixty-five dollars.’ / ‘There’s something funny about a fellow that’ll do a thing like that,’ said the other girl eagerly. ‘He doesn’t’ want any trouble with anybody.’ (49)

‘You look at him sometimes when he thinks nobody’s looking at him. I’ll bet he killed a man.’ / She narrowed her eyes and shivered. Lucille shivered. We all turned and looked around for Gatsby. It was testimony to the romantic speculation he inspired that there were whispers about him from those who had found little that it was necessary to whisper about in this world. (50)

By midnight the hilarity had increased. A celebrated tenor had sung in Italian, and a notorious contralto had sung in jazz, and between the numbers people were doing ‘stunts’ all over the garden, while happy, vacuous bursts of laughter rose towards the summer sky. (53)

He smiled understandingly—much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance init, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced—or seemed to face—the whole eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favour. It understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey. Precisely at that point it vanished—and I was looking at an elegant young rough-neck, a year or two over thirty, whose elaborate formality of speech just missed being absurd. (54)

I would have accepted without question the information that Gatsby sprang from the swamps of Louisiana or from the lower East Side of New York. That was comprehensible. But young men didn’t—at least in my provincial inexperience I [55] believed they didn’t—drift coolly out of nowhere and buy a palace on Long Island Sound. (55-56)

She had drunk a quantity of champagne, and during the course of her song she had decided, ineptly, that everything was very, very sad—she was not only singing, she was weeping too. Whenever there was a pause in the song she filled it with gasping, broken sobs, and then took up the lyric again in a quavering soprano. The tears coursed down her cheeks—not freely, however, for when they came into contact with her heavily beaded eyelashes they assumed [57] an inky colour, and pursued the rest of their way in slow black rivulets. A humorous suggestion was made that she sing the notes on her face, whereupon she threw up her hands, sank into a chair, and went off into a vinous sleep. (57-58)

Reading over what I have written so far, I see I have given the impression that the events of three nights several weeks apart were all that absorbed me. On the contrary, they were merely casual events in a crowded summer, and, until much later, they absorbed me infinitely less than my personal affairs. / Most of the time I worked. In the early morning the sun threw my shadow westward as I hurried down the white chasms of lower New York to the Probity Trust. I knew the other clerks and young bond-salesmen by their first names, and lunched with them in dark, crowded restaurants on little pig sausages and mashed potatoes and coffee. I even had a short affair with a girl who lived in Jersey City and worked in the accounting department. (62-63)

I took dinner usually at the Yale Club—for some reason it was the gloomiest event of my day—and then I went upstairs to the library and studied investments and securities for a conscientious hour. There were generally a few rioters around, but they never came into the library, so it was a good place to work. After that, if the night was mellow, I strolled down Madison Avenue past the old Murray Hill Hotel, and over 33rrd Street to the Pennsylvania Station. / I began to like New York, the racy, adventurous feel of it at night, and the satisfaction that the constant flicker of men and women and machines gives to the restless eye. I liked to walk up Fifth Avenue and pick our the romantic women from the crowd to imagine that in a few minutes I was going to enter into their lives, and no one would ever know or disapprove. Sometimes, in my mind, I flowed them to their apartments on the corners of hidden streets, and they turned and smiled back at me before they faded through a door into warm darkness. (63)

Again at eight o’clock, when the dark lanes of the Forties were lined five deep with throbbing taxicabs, bound for the theatre district, I felt a sinking in my [63] heart. Forms leaned together in the taxis as they waited, and voices sang, and there was laughter from unheard jokes, and lighted cigarettes made unintelligible circles inside. Imagining that I, too, was hurrying toward gaiety and sharing their intimate excitement, I wished them well. (63-64)

Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known. (66)

In June she married Tom Buchanan of Chicago, with more pomp and circumstance than Louisville ever knew before… I was a bridesmaid. I came into her room half an hour before the bridal dinner, and found her lying on her bed as lovely as the June night in her flowered dress—and as drunk as a monkey. She had a bottle of Sauterne in one hand and a letter in the other. (82)

Daisy was popular in Chicago, as you know. They moved with a fast crowd, all of them young and rich and wild, but she came out with an absolutely perfect reputation. Perhaps because she doesn’t drink. It’s a great advantage not to drink among hard-drinking people. You can hold your tongue and, moreover, you can time any little irregularity of your own so that everybody else is so blind that they don’t see or care. (84)

His bedroom was the simplest room of all—except where the dresser was garnished with a toilet set of pure dull gold. Daisy took the brush with delight, and smoothed her hair, whereupon Gatsby sat down and shaded his eyes and began to laugh. / ‘It’s the funniest thing, old sport,’ he said hilariously. ‘I can’t—When I try to—’ (98)

…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. (103)

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. (105)

‘Madame expects you in the salon!’ he cried, needlessly indicating the direction. In this heat every extra gesture was an affront to the common store of life. / The room, shadowed well with awnings, was dark and cool. Daisy and Jordan lay upon an enormous couch, like silver idols weighing down their own white dresses against the singing breeze of the fans. / ‘We can’t move,’ they said together. (121)

‘What’ll we do with ourselves this afternoon?’ cried Daisy, ‘and the day after that, and the next thirty years?’ / ‘Don’t be morbid,’ Jordan said. ‘Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.’ / ‘But it’s so hot,’ insisted Daisy, on the verge of tears, ‘and everything’s so confused. Let’s all go to town!’ / Her voice struggled on through the heat, beating against it, moulding its senseless into forms. (124)

‘She’s got an indiscreet voice,’ I remarked. ‘It’s full of—’ I hesitated. / ‘Her voice is full of money,’ he said suddenly. / That was it. I’d never understood before. It was full of money—that was the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it, the cymbals’ song of it…High in a white palace the king’s daughter, the golden girl… (126)

‘Those big movies around Fiftieth Street are cool,’ suggested Jordan. ‘I love New York on summer afternoons when everyone’s away. There’s something very sensuous about it—overripe, as if all sorts of funny fruits were going to fall into your hands.’ (131)

‘We can’t argue about it here,’ Tom said impatiently, as a truck gave out a cursing whistle behind us. ‘You [131] follow me to the south side of Central Park, in front of the Plaza.’ … we all took the less explicable step of engaging the parlour of a suite in the Plaza Hotel. / The prolonged and tumultuous argument that ended by herding us into the room eludes me, … The notion originated with Daisy’s suggestion that we hire five bathrooms and take cold baths, and then assumed more tangible form as ‘a place to have a mint julep.’ Each of us said over and over that it was a ‘crazy idea’—we all talked at once to a baffled clerk and thought, or pretended to think, that we were being very funny… (132)

Myrtle Wilson’s body, wrapped in a blanket, and then in another blanket, as though she suffered from a chill in the hot night, … (145)

And all the time something within her was crying for a decision. She wanted her life shaped now, immediately—and the decision must be made by some force—of love, of money, of unquestionable practicality—that was close at hand. (157)

It was dawn now on Long Island and we went about opening the rest of the windows downstairs, filling the house with grey-turning, gold-turning light. The shadow of a tree fell abruptly across the dew and ghostly birds began to sing among the blue leaves. There was a slow, pleasant movement in the air, scarcely a wind, promising a cool, lovely day. (158)

‘Of course she might have loved him just for a minute, when they were first married—and loved me more even then, do you see?’ / Suddenly he came out with a curious remark. / ‘In any case,’ he said, ‘it was just personal.’ / What could you make of that, except to suspect some intensity in his conception of the affair that couldn’t be measured? (158)

So Wilson was reduced to a man ‘deranged by grief’ in order that the case might remain in its simplest form. And it rested there. (170)

When the phone rang that afternoon and Long Distance said Chicago was calling I thought this would be Daisy at last. But the connection came through as a man’s voice, very thin and far away. (173)

Rise from bed………………………………...6.00 A.M.
Dumbbell exercise and wall-scaling………….6.15-6.30 “
Study electricity, etc. …………………….......7.15-8.15 “
Work…………………………………………..8.30-4.30 P.M.
Baseball and sports……………………………4.30-5.00 “
Practice elocution, poise and how to attain it 5.00-6.00 “
Study needed inventions…………………....…7.00-9.00 “ (180)

About five o’clock our procession of three cars reached the cemetery and stopped in a thick drizzle beside the gate—first a motor hearse, horribly black and wet… (181)

One of my most vivid memories is of coming back West from prep school and later from college at Christmas time. … 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 [182] 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… (182-183)

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 lusterless 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. (183)

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. (187)

…I wandered down to the beach and sprawled out on the sand. / Most of the big places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. …gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes…Its vanished trees, the trees that mad 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 [187] 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. (187-188)

…Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. …his dream must have seemed so close… He did not know that it was already behind him… So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. (end, 188)