The greatest novels always have a sense of inevitability about them, that they couldn’t have been otherwise than the way they, in fact, turned out to be. All of the great works of art, in fact, seem that way (and even many people, too, don’t you agree?). Like so much else in life, however, that sense of inevitability is the merest illusion, and an illusion, moreover, which does the greatest of disservices to novelists and to other artists (and to people, too, perhaps most of all). For in the end it’s all about choices. Every word, every brushstroke, every note, every one of our lives’ moments is — whether we like it or not — a deliberate decision, necessarily affecting the whole, a decision which can lead to greatness, or to obscurity, to one destination, or to another, or to nowhere.
This week’s case in point, in the novelistic realm, is The Great Gatsby, written by St. Paul, Minnesota’s favorite son, Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald, and published in 1925 when the author was only 29 years old. What could have been more inevitable, it seems, now that we have and know the completed work – required reading throughout the land and defended by many as The Great American Novel? Surely it all, from first word to last, must necessarily have been there from the beginning! But, again, illusion. Would it surprise you, as it surprised your faithful correspondent, to learn that Fitzgerald was never satisfied with “The Great Gatsby” as the title? The earliest working title was “Among the Ash Heaps and Millionaires.” Others considered and rejected by Fitzgerald included “Trimalchio in West Egg,” “Trimalchio” (Trimalchio being the lavish host in the Latin work, The Satyricon, by Petronius), “On the Road to West Egg” (starring Bob Hope and Bing Crosby!), “Gold-hatted Gatsby,” and “The High-bouncing Lover.” Immediately prior to publication, Fitzgerald attempted once again (and too late) to change the title to “Under the Red, White and Blue.” Do you see what I mean about the seeming inevitability of The Great Gatsby? Looked at in retrospect, it seems it had to be The Great Gatsby, and it had to be just what it is – a unique and complex restatement of the American myth of success as the basis for an ultimately tragic vision.
The Story
The stripped-down plot line is simple enough, perhaps deceptively simple: Handsome young Man (Gatsby) meets and falls in love with Woman (Daisy). Man goes off to war and returns to find Woman married to another (Tom Buchanan). Man dedicates life to getting Woman back. Young Outsider (Nick Carraway) befriends Man and engages in dalliance with Woman’s Friend (Jordan Baker), whom he perceives as one of Man’s social peers (Man having become rich and having “transformed” himself, through an act of will, into his own private conception of the Ideal Man). Woman turns out to be femme fatale, resulting in: (i) tragedy all around; (ii) the severing of the relationship between Young Outsider and Woman’s Friend and (iii) growth and perspective for Young Outsider. (Forgive me, Scott!)
By happy coincidence, Gatsby contains elements of both Jane Eyre and Moby-Dick, books to which loyal readers of my musings have been introduced in previous submissions. Like Jane Eyre, Fitzgerald’s work can accurately be described as a Bildungsroman (i.e., a “coming-of-age” book). The narrator, Nick Carraway, grows up, suffers, and grows wiser as a result of his brief, but poignant friendship with Gatsby. He, as did Jane, comes to learn about the world and what it is, but, as importantly (or more), what it is not. As for Moby-Dick, what else is Nick but Ishmael to Gatsby’s Ahab? Remember, Ishmael changed, gained perspective, “expanded” over the course of the novel – almost, as I’ve described in this space before, to the point of a sort of narrative omniscience. Ahab, on the other hand, was changeless, and unchangeable, in his revenge-quest upon the Hwal. Here in Gatsby we encounter Nick, the newly arrived, innocent, “middle-western” neighbor of the mysterious and elusive Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island. Nick is overwhelmed, at first, by the romance and mystery surrounding his neighbor, the aloof “businessman” who throws such uproarious parties but never seems to attend them. As he comes to meet and ultimately know Gatsby and his “social set,” however, Nick’s attitude pronouncedly changes (as regards the social set, not Gatsby himself) from one of bedazzlement to one of distaste and, ultimately, repulsion. The world, Gatsby’s world, which Nick describes with such fascination in Chapter III of the novel, he comes to describe as “grotesque” and “distorted” by the novel’s end. Like Ishmael, he has gained perspective on the human condition. Like Ishmael, also, he is granted by his author a sort of omniscience with respect to the story of which he is a part. He is not present at Gatsby’s death, for example, but describes its circumstances nonetheless, and in detail. No small trick, that.
So Nick bears a certain resemblance to Ishmael (and we mustn’t forget our beloved Jane). But how can the dapper and sophisticated Gatsby be anything at all like Ahab? Well, to begin with, both have an “Ishmael” to serve as foil for themselves (we’ve just demonstrated that). Much more importantly, however, Gatsby is crazy! And he’s crazy in the self-same, compelling way that Ahab was. Both are men obsessed – Ahab with the Hwal and Gatsby with Daisy, his once and (if he has any say in the matter) future paramour. Gatsby both had (in the real, pre-contemporary sense of the word) and lost Daisy – a trifle which came to be known as World War I intervening. But everything in his life since his return from the war has been precisely and single-mindedly calculated to win her back. He is pursuing her, and with typically Ahab-like focus and extravagance. It is only for Daisy, after all, that Gatsby throws his sumptuous free-for-alls at his estate, hoping against hope that she may one day wander in among the revelers.
Time, The Moon and The Sun
It is Gatsby himself who is the book’s central character, on a quest to obliterate his years of separation from Daisy. He doesn’t, can’t, accept that Daisy has married Tom. Nick, at one point, admonishes Gatsby that “You can’t repeat the past.” But Gatsby immediately, almost reflexively, rejoins, “Can’t repeat the past? … Why of course you can! … I’m going to fix everything the way it was before … She’ll see.” Gatsby lives in a dream world, outside of time. Himself a Horatio Alger (i.e., “rags to riches”) hero, even his own self-perception is outside of time, a pure creation of his imagination. As Nick tells us, “The truth was that Jay Gatsby, of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself.” Indeed, Jay Gatsby springs fully formed (no time to wait) from the mind of the young Jimmy Gatz (his real name): “Jay Gatz – Be”! Time imagery, not surprisingly, abounds in Gatsby – at Nick’s tea party (the long-awaited reunion of Gatsby and Daisy) Gatsby knocks over a clock! He’s perfectly comfortable with the upsetting of time, however. It’s in his nature!
In keeping with his timelessness, Gatsby is celestial also, and the particular celestial body with which he is associated is the moon. We first encounter him on his dock in the moonlight, gazing toward Daisy’s house. And he wears white, moon tones (!), to his reunion with Daisy at Nick’s party. Daisy, for her part, is the sun to Gatsby’s moon. Her name, after all, means “Day’s eye,” and she lives not in “West” Egg, like Gatsby (where the sun sets and the moon comes up), but rather in “East” Egg (where the sun rises)! And we know all too well the relationship of the moon to the sun – the one can never quite capture the other, the other fading away just as the one appears. Similarly, from Gatsby’s perspective, Daisy appears always to be just out of his reach. At their climactic reunion at Nick’s, Gatsby waits inside Nick’s house for Daisy to arrive, and then, to appear as if he has arrived after her, ducks out the back door once she has entered the house in order to circle it so that he will be able to knock at the front door – the Moon orbiting the Sun!
Yes, Daisy is always just a bit, but perpetually, out of reach. But Gatsby, of course, is “new money” anyway, in stark contrast to Daisy and Tom. They represent “old money,” and, unlike Gatsby (or Nick), they are fundamentally destructive people. As Nick says of them, “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 ….” Tom cruelly breaks the nose of the woman (Myrtle Wilson) with whom he is cheating on his wife. Daisy, for her part, kills Myrtle directly (if accidentally – what we would today characterize as “vehicular manslaughter”) and thus winds up, in a way, indirectly killing Myrtle’s husband, as well as Gatsby himself. Every one of our lives’ moments is a deliberate decision.
Nick and Gatsby
If Gatsby is the central character, it is Nick who constitutes the narrative soul of the novel. (Far be it from me to identify literary characters with the actors who portray them, but wasn’t Francis Ford Coppola’s choice brilliant in casting the young Sam Waterston as Nick? Not to mention Redford as Gatsby!) We’ve seen that Nick changes, but it is the character of his change that ennobles the text. Nick learns and becomes a mature human being over the course of the novel, but his judgment, also, crystallizes and becomes more sure. Ultimately, Nick approves of Gatsby’s incorruptible dream, the dream of stopping time, of turning back its hands. (Your faithful correspondent approves, also, of that dream.) Gatsby, at the end of the day, for Nick, is the consummate artist, in a sense “creating” Daisy out of whole cloth. He tries with all his might to “recapture” Daisy as he conceived of her – but we know, as readers and as fellow human beings, that Daisy, as Gatsby conceived of her, never really existed in the first place.
Nick himself understands time and knows that the past is irretrievable forever. But he also ultimately realizes that one can at least come to understand the past through the telling of stories, through the imaginative recreation of the past via the medium of art. Nick, at the novel’s end, departs from the East; he will build his own dream on the rock of morality. Thus, by the end of Gatsby, Nick has learned that glory, “greatness,” exists not so much in actualities, but rather in the sense of possibilities. As he calls out to Gatsby (referring to what he used to think of as their friends), “They’re a rotten crowd. You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.” Nick, in short, has had a true friend, a real friend, in Gatsby, and he has learned – through Gatsby – about friendship and love, about morality, about dreams, and, in the final analysis, about true “greatness” and its nature. Amen, old sport.
