The Massachusetts Review, Inc.

The Greatness of "Gatsby" Author(s): Charles Thomas Samuels Reviewed work(s): Source: The Massachusetts Review, Vol. 7, No. 4 (Autumn, 1966), pp. 783-794 Published by: The Massachusetts Review, Inc. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25087514 . Accessed: 04/04/2012 12:37Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

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Charles

Thomas

Samuels of "Gatsby"was immediately seen, but soonletter" to

TheGreat The Fitzgerald,and a sort the carping

Greatnessexcellencewrote

Gatsby'sbegan.

Mencken

"a most

enthusiastic

in whichof anecdote.

he complained. . ." In

that "the centralblend of

story wasmodesty,

trivialtemer

a characteristic

ity, and odd spelling, Fitzgerald replied: "Without making any invidious between Class A and Class C, if my novel is an anecdote comparisons so isThe Brothers Karamazoff." Nevertheless, point and agreed that it Fitzgerald granted Mencken's to becloud the relationship between Gatsby and had been a mistake from the time of their reunion until Gatsby's death. Yet Fitz Daisy that relationship gerald's error was his triumph. Had he dramatized could be no fulfillment of he would have been validating a sham. There shows all that happens or could have Gatsby's tragic dream. Fitzgerald happened: Daisy joyfully crying into Gatsby's shirts; Gatsby realizing, at failure in last, that her siren's voice was merely full of money; Daisy's the hotel room and in the accident; Myrtle's body and mangledGatsby's of a cluster on the of float, turned from its "accidental course" by some Owl-eyes the "touch leaves." gave always his critics more appraisal than of their his due, and What such im de

Fitzgerald has balance

marred

work.

clared at Gatsby'sover poor Fitzgerald's son of a bitch."

gravehas

and Dorothya flat note great so great

Parkerin the the work,

so affectinglychorus of the man's thought. Can

repeated

sounded However is not

"the praise: a life was we ignore

fiasco?perhaps

the work

as we

as he admitted. the life in the writing? is Gatsby, Surely Fitzgerald What else isNick but a shield against the blinding rays of too easy, too If Fitzgerald was, in the words of an early and complete resemblance? sensitive critic, "the Authority of Failure," can he ever have succeeded?Isn't there some softness at the heart of his masterpiece just as there was,

in his life?the the glaring sentimentalism notoriously, wife? Could so bad a risk be a great writer?

liquor,

the mad

783

The MassachusettsWe have not been willing to leave his

Reviewlife alone. The current monu

mentthe

in Fitzgerald studies, The Far Side of Paradisey contains page after page of Scott and Zelda in Paris and New York but only eight onart in Gats The by. novel's It sees Nick as a structural to device a neat and dichotomy an author's between therapy. meaning is reduced

are told that the book's relevance was limited We by total commitment to romantic ideals and that the Fitzgerald's Eyes of are merely an accidental Dr. Eckleburg gift from Max Perkins' pre East and West.mature Since importance dust jacket. Such are the uses of Mizener's has biography, at least, been, criticism recognized; at book scholarship. has shot nearer and the neat the mark. dichotomy to Nick's be

tween Eastcriticism that

and Westmost

has been qualifiedlife seems, successful last, is a

so that the novel'sclear. great We novel. need

profoundshow now

of American

Fitzgerald's

2

Its fundamental achievement is a triumph of language. I do not speak merely of the "flowers," the famous passages: Nick's of Gatsby yearning toward the green light on Daisy's dock, description love is "only personal," the book's Gatsby's remark that the Buchanans' last page. Throughout, The Great Gatsby has the precision and splendorof a lyric poem, yet well-wrought prose is merely one of its triumphs.

Fitzgerald'sitself. This great

distinctionother

in this novelThe Great art

is to have madeis about from of view,

languagethe the power novel's the

celebrateof art. second of

Among celebration

things, of literary

achievement?its

management

Gatsby is inseparable of point more

creation

Nick. Withconcentration he witnesses; The than persona that: he

his persona, Fitzgeraldof he is?as effect. describes critics Nick the have describes act been

obtained morethan and consequences

than objectivitythe of experience telling but he about

andit.

which

is a character

engaged

seeing?a in a significant

character, action.

is more

iswriting a book. He is recording Gatsby's experience ; in the act of recording Gatsby's experience he discovers himself. his prose has all along been creating for us Gatsby's "ro Though mantic readiness," almost until the very end Nick insists that he deplores is not a reasoned judgment. Gatsby's "appalling sentimentality." This Nick disapproves because he cannot yet affirm. He is a Jamesian specta ill-suited to profound engagement of life. tor, a fastidious intelligence But writing does profoundly engage life. In writing about Gatsby, Nick alters his attitude toward his subject and ultimately toward his own life. Nick

784

The Greatness

of "Gatsby

As his book nears completion his identification with Gatsby grows. His final affirmation is his sympathetic understanding of Gatsby and the book which gives his sympathy form: both are a celebration of life; each is a gift of language. This refinement on James's use of the persona mightbe first the cause of Eliot's which assertion the American that The Great had made advance novel Gatsby since represented James. the

In Nick's opening words we find an uncompleted personality. There are contradictions and perplexities which (when we first read the passage) are easily ignored, because of the characteristic suavity of his prose. He begins the chronicle, whose purpose is an act of judgment and whose title is an evaluation, by declaring an inclination "to reserve all judg ments." The words are scarcely digested when we find him judging:The to detect to this is quick and attach itself mind quality it appears in a normal and so it came that about person, a accused of being because I was lege I was unjustly politician, privy men. secret griefs of wild, unknown abnormal when ance] tone is unmistakable?a combination of moral censure, [toler in col to the

The

self-pro

tectiveness, and final saving sympathy that marks Nick as an outsider who is nonetheless drawn to the life he is afraid to enter. So when he tells us a little later in the passage that "Reserving is a judgments matter of infinite hope," we know that this and not the noblesse oblige he earlier advanced explains his fear of judging. Nick cannot help judging, but he fears a world in which he is constantly beset by objects worthy of rejection. He is "a little afraid of missing something" ; that iswhy he hears the promise in Daisy's voice, half-heartedly entertains the

idea of loving Jordan Baker, and becomes involved with the infinite who represented everything for which hope of Jay Gatsby?"Gatsby, [Nick had] an unaffected scorn." WhenGatsby

Nickthat

begins

the book he feels the same ambivalencehis attitude toward life: a simultaneous

towarden

characterizes

places him "within and without." When he has finished, he has become united with Gatsby, and he judges he has something to admire ; contemplating Gatsby Gatsby great. Finally redeems him from the "foul dust [which had] temporarily closed out [his] interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded dations of men." The economy with which Fitzgerald presents those sorrows and short winded Great dations Gatsby symbols while of the book's major achievements. In The to develop a story by means contrived of Fitzgerald at the same time investing those symbols with vivid is another

chantment

and revulsion which

785

The Massachusettsactuality.mansion thing seems

Reviewis symbolic,which critics he

Everythingto the wild so "true and to

in the bookaimless life"

from Gatsby'sthere, to see

ersatz

parties some that

gives continue

every yet that novel

is about the primarily as a recreation of the 20's. The Great Gatsby or that The is about whaling 20's only in the sense that Moby Dick the liveliness of Fitz Scarlet Letter is about Puritan Boston. Comparing book with Melville's better still, with Hawthorne's or, gerald's (whichresembles its tight dramatic structure and concentration), you have a

good indication of the peculiar distinction in Fitzgerald's work. Of the novel's symbols, only the setting exists without regard to to project meaning. The Great Gatsby has four verisimilitude, purely and their ultra-tradi locales: East Egg, home of the rich Buchanans where the once-rich and tional Georgian Colonial mansion; West Egg the parvenus live and where Gatsby apes the splendor of the Old the wasteland of the average man; and New York, where Nick World; are East and West labors, ironically, at the "Probity Trust." Egg"crushed flat at the contact end"; they represent the collision of dream

and dreamer which"universe of ineffable

is dramatizedgaudiness"

whenthrough

Gatsbythe crass

tries to establishmaterials of the

hisreal

world. The

is a valley of ashes in which George Wilson wasteland dis penses gasoline to the irresponsible drivers from East and West Egg, eventually yielding his wife to their casual lust and cowardly violence. a sterile, immoral world represents iconographically Fitzgerald's society. Over this world brood the blind eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg:the sign for an oculist's a blindness can which to which cheat. They value are might not the business never be a sign false be which corrected. was never Like of the opened, symbol in the book other objects are a of Dr. Eckleburg thinks, moneyed but only voice, an or ad the

attached, of God, promise

the eyes as Wilson of Daisy's

vertisement?like

greenThese

light on her dock, whichmonstrous eyes are the

is invisible in the mist.novel's major symbol. The book's chief

are blind, and they behave blindly. Gatsby does not see vicious emptiness, and Daisy, deluded, thinks she will reward her Daisy's lover until he tries to force from her an affirmation she is gold-hatted characters too weakmovement"

to make. Tomhe breaks

is blind to his hypocrisy;nose for daring

withto mention

"a short deftthe name

Myrtle's

she is helping him to deceive. Before her death, Myrtle for mistakes Jordan for Daisy. Just as she had always mistaken Tom salvation from the ash-heap, she blindly rushes for his car in her need to escape her lately informed husband, and is struck down. Moreover, of the wife

786

The Greatness

of "Gatsby"

Daisy is driving the car ; and the man with her isGatsby, not Tom. The final act of blindness is specifically associated with Dr. Eckleburg's eyes. sees them as a sign of righteous judgment and righteously pro Wilson is ceeds to work God's judgment on earth. He kills Gatsby, but Gatsbythe wrong man. In the whole novel, only Nick sees. And his vision

comes slowly, in the act of writing the book. the book is, as I have said, an act of judgment. The act of writing Nick wants to know why Gatsby "turned out all right in the end," despite all the phoniness and crime which fill his story, and why Gatsby was the only one who turned out all right. For, in writing about the Nick discovers the near ubiquity of folly and despair. others, of life The novel's people are exemplary types of the debasement and Jordan lack the inner which is Fitzgerald's subject. Daisy, Tom,resources to enjoy what their wealth can give them. They show the

life palls. the pinnacle, dream. At peculiar folly of the American Nick first sees her she seems to be floating is almost unreal. When Daisy inmidair. Her famous protestation of grief ("I'm sophisticated. God, I'msophisticated") is accompanied by an "absolute smirk." Her extravagant

love for Gatsby is a sham, less real than the unhappy but fleshly bond with Tom which finally turns them into "conspirators." Her beauty is a snare. Like Tom's physical prowess, it neither pleases her nor insures her and both for "stale forsakes Daisy for Myrtle pleasure in others. Tomideas." Jordan's balancing act is a trick; like her sporting reputation, a

precarious lie. They are all rich and beautiful?and and Gatsby. toward them are Myrtle Yearningdesires gleaming "the youth . . . above and the mystery hot that struggles wealth of the

unhappy. Like Gatsby, Myrtleand Unlike preserves. him, . . her

imprisons poor."

"panting vitality" iswholly physical, merely pathetic; whereas Gatsby's ismaimed and victimized by Daisy's quest is spiritual and tragic. Myrtle selfish fear of injury (Daisy could have crashed into another car but, at the last minute, loses heart and runs Myrtle down) ; Gatsby's death is and he suffers voluntarily. but the final stage of disillusionment,Gatsby is, of course, one of the major achievements I have been not

see little of him and scarcely ever hear him speak, his ing. Although presence is continually with us; and he exists, as characters in fiction seldom do, as a life force. He recalls the everlasting yea of Carlyle, as well as the metaphysical rebellion of Camus. His "heightened sensitivity to the promise of life" is but one half of his energy; the other being a pas we sionate denial of life's limitations. Gatsby's devotion to Daisy is an im on the human condition. His passion would defy time and plicit assault

787

The Massachusettsdecay present. to make His glorious is passion the first moment

Reviewof wonder, even which is past, In his eternally famous

supra-sexual,

super-personal.

to Nick about Daisy's love for Tom, he is making two asser tions: that the "things between Daisy and Tom Tom [which insists] he'll never know" are merely mundane and that the Daisy which he loves is not the Daisy which Tom had carried down from the Punch Bowl but the Daisy who "blossomed for him like a flower," incarnating his dream, the moment he kissed her. Gatsby's love for life is finally an indictment of the life he loves. Life does not reward such devotion, nor, for that reason, does it deserve it. Gatsby is great for having paid life the compliment of believing its promise. When Hamlet dies amidst the carnage of his bloody quest for justice, he takes with him the promise that seeming will coincide with remarkand that man the hope being remnant of the universe. When can Ahab strike dies a blow a victim for truth own and save harpoon, a to his

he kills the promise that man may know his life and the hope that knowledge will absolve him. When Gatsby dies, more innocently than a "criminal," he lacks utterly their taste for they (since, thoughdestruction), he kills more be a certainly precious, can ever that desire promise inclusive more than and poignant perhaps the theirs: kills Gatsby more promise

gratified.

In additionAmerica which

to the story of Gatsbythat story suggests and

and Daisywhich finds

and

the parableadum

of

its marvelous

bration in Nick's last words, The Great Gatsby tells another tale of the blindness of desire and of the rock-like indifferenceuniverse. Nothing lives up to your image of it. This romantic

tale: a of theagony,

formerlywhich

expressed

by Fitzgerald'smasterpiece.

beloved Keats,In the uneven

is the majornovel which

themeim

animates

Fitzgerald's

clearly articulated what had al mediately preceded Gatsbyy Fitzgerald ways been his tragic sense of life. The epigraph to The Beautiful and the "written" by its hero, dourly observes that "the Victor belongs Damnedy to the spoils." Midway in the fable which exemplifies this sad moral, itsauthor, Anthony just stops it?but the Patch, cheats and you. cries It's some do out: like a sunbeam skipping here and there poor about fools else, want a . . . desire room. to grasp you've gone. got It

gilds we when

object, inconsequential moves on the sunbeam part, but the glitter

and we

inconsequential

to something that made you

try and it is

Anthony'sGreat Gatsbyys

observationcharacters

is the donn?erespond in one

of Fitzgerald'sof three ways

fiction.to this

Theun

788

The Greatnessfortunate truth. The Buchanans and

of "Gatsby9Jordan avoid deep attachments

(Daisy thinks to make Nick fall in love with Jordan by accidentally locking them in linen closets), and drift "unrestfully wherever people rich together." Wilson and Nick escape the played polo and were phantom of desire by not desiring. Myrtle, stupidly, and Gatsby,grandly, modus take vwendiy life's all gambit, of these are people and cheated, are unhappy. destroyed. Whatever their

is a tragedy of the moral sense. Moby Dick Hamlet is a tragedy of the intelligence. The Great Gatsby is a tragedy of the will. the barrenness Intensity of will makes Gatsby a great man. Despite of his beginnings, despite the evil world of Dan Cody which was his first reward, despite Daisy's selfish denial and final treason, Gatsby believes in the promise of life. He will believe?this is his tragedy and vin that life cannot repay his devotion. his knowledge dication?despite knows that desire is a cheat, yet he persists in his aspirations? Gatsby I do not think that this fact has been properly appreciated. In the forms a passage which ends the sixth chapter and which magnificent climactic stage in Nick's of Gatsby, Nick comprehension growing first kisses the girl of his dreams. imagines the scene in which Gatsby The and night is suitably bathed in moonlight. (In The BeautifulDamned Fitzgerald concludes Anthony's rumination on the nature of

desire by remarking the bad complexiondrowsy street."). " The

how "the moon, at its perennial labor of covering of the world, showered its illicit honey over theentire universe seems to participate in Gatsby's

passion. Thereequinox that with its of the blocks

is "a stir and bustlemysterious the sidewalks could of life, excitement." really climb gulp

amongThen

the stars;"Gatsby and mounted alone,

there

is the

imagines to a secret once there

formed to

a ladder climbed

the trees?he place above he could suck on the pap

it, if he the

and milk

down

incomparable

of wonder.

remained unattached, if he had not grown up to adult he could have gained the mystical ecstasy which his sexuality, imagina tion sought. "He knew that when he kissed [Daisy], and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never this knowledge, Gatsby romp again like the mind of God." Despite chooses life. He hesitates, "listening for a moment longer to thetuning-fork innocent, that pre-sexual, had struck upon a star." Finally, alone he renounces brings one the in other-worldliness which

If Gatsby

contact with Like God,

ideality to marry the temporal, perishable, sexual world. he renounces unlimited promise for love of humanity. He

789

The Massachusettspermits "milk the incarnation, and and born from into that the world

Reviewmoment of sex, he is weaned and ashes. from the

of wonder"

cash,

Gatsby'scomprehends compares

choicehis Gatsby

ismade

in the fullnessordeal. On a

of knowledge.the book's

Moreover,page, Nick machine.

he

subsequent to a seismograph,

second responsive

wonderfully

Whenhe has confound

Daisybecome time

comes to the mansionanother and machine?a to the return

which Gatsbyclock. source But of wonder

purchasedsince has

only for her,desire "an to in

Gatsby's reached

conceivableputs her arm

pitch of intensity,"through Gatsby's,

the clockshe loses

is runningthe

down. Whenof

Daisydistance,

enchantment

and Nick notes that her green light is no longer a star to Gatsby but the novel, Nick hears merely "a green light on a dock." Throughout in Daisy's voice; Gatsby realizes that it is full only of money. promise Gatsby knows the desperate game he is playing, and his fervent pas is elegant, a sion is controlled by form (for all his vulgarity, Gatsbyfigure in a ritual). He represents, in short, a formed attempt to reorder

reality, to wrest for the will a hitherto impossible victory. Gatsby a kind of artist; but whereas Nick works with words, Gatsbywith life. Life is the more recalcitrant.

is also works

a special discipline, Gatsby ignores what he knows in order Through to pursue his quest. Only before he dies can he understand that "he " then will he look at the sky "through had lost the old warm world; only a rose is and how frightening leaves" and see "what a grotesque thingraw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass."

the greater discipline of art, Nick is able to see the real Through and affirm the glory of life. He can see Gatsby's landscape vulgarityas well as his greatness. Words save Nick from Gatsby's catastrophe

but Gatsby gives Nick for they hold life at bay and permit contemplation, a life worth celebrating in language and therefore the will to write as well as the will to live. I started. Nick. Nick and Gatsby. Which brings me back where are the novel's subject. Their follow Nick's relationship. We Theydevelopment in the novel?Gatsby is static?and we reach the first

the first chapter, stage in his growth when he meets Gatsby. Writing Nick is still a divided, deluded man. He writes not out of knowledge possessed, This, conclusions more even reached, than the but superb in an prose, attempt gives to know the book and its air to of conclude. happen

ing now. Though Nick tells us he reserves judgments, though he brags about his tolerance, he is quickly revolted by Tom Buchanan. BeforeTom even speaks, Nick recalls that "there were men at New Haven

790

The Greatnesswho

of "Gatsby"

Nick comes ultimately to un had hated [Tom's] guts." Though moral squalor, he is initially taken in. He sees her in derstand Daisy'ssincerity, ask him ity but to he expects her away to her from flee to run Tom. Tom's from His the house, take He reaction love nest in arms, and baby to Buchanan's steril its middle class

is naive.

wants

with

pretensionin the a from The

(Myrtle'sof of

furnitureVersailles,

tapestried withher "impressive seeing attain that, has

scenes of ladies swinginghauteur" he begun can which get only to produce results drunk. inner

gardens change

sophistication

costume). he came

After East to

in Nick meets Gatsby, everything changes. Gatsby deadening. When volves him in fife. Gatsby wins his admiration. Gatsby dies, and Nick lives. is contrasted with Daisy. Daisy's voice is cal From the first, Gatsby culated to make you lean toward her. Her grief is "a trick of some sortto exact a the whole contributory world external emotion." for an Gatsby instant, "faced?or and then seemed concentrated to face? on you

an irresistible prejudice is, Gatsby nevertheless brings He fails with Daisy; but, by bringing life to Nick. When withthe womb of his purposeless

in your favor." Totally self-absorbed as he life to others. He is the incarnating God. the way and without plan, he succeeds in once Gatsby is "delivered from [to Nick]Nick finds a raison acetre.

splendor,"

he had been denying life. Nick had not been reserving judgment; He came East to flee home and the girl who was to help him settle to find bored him. Unable down there. After the war, the Mid-West a place where he belongs, he comes East to find a new life, but findsonly ably, a wasteland. at the end Gatsby of the saves book him Nick from goes withdrawal, cynical once more; home and, not suit because

home is better but because his own imperfect life. ButThroughout

it is home. Gatsby

enables Nick

to accept the truth.Baker, ex

before

that finalthe novel,

acceptance NickNick half-heartedly

has to tell himselfcourts Jordan

plaining... I am

his indecisiveness withslow-thinking that and I knew and first full

a characteristicof interior rules

bit of self-justification:that definitely act as brakes out of that on my

desires, back

I had

to get myself

tangle

home.

when Jordan calls Nick after Myrtle's death, he refuses to However, see her because he is more interested in Gatsby than in the woman he thinks he might love. Before the end of the book Jordan tells Nick that he never loved her and that his whole treatment of her had been, despite his protestations, dishonest. Tauntingly, she accuses him :

791

The Massachusetts". it was

Reviewperson. to lie to I thought and

. . I an honest, rather you were thought straightforward secret your pride." "I'm too old "I'm five thirty," years [Nick replies] call it honor."

myself

This

is the measure of Nick's growth. Discovering in the act of Gatsby about him, Nick discovers that he had deluded himself, that he writing had been dishonest, and that he had better go back and start all over. Like everything else in this great novel, Nick's is spiritual growth rather than discussed. In the last chapter the symbolically represented the stages in his identification with Gatsby are clearly depicted. After murder, Nick stands by Gatsby simply because "no one else was interested?interested, everyone has some I mean, vague with right at that the intense end." personal But when interest the others to which refuse

to come

to Gatsby's scornful funeral, Nick begins to feel "defiance, between Gatsby and me against them all." When solidarity Gatsby's father arrives, Nick admits that he and Gatsby "were close friends." In the famous last scene Nick affirms Gatsby's greatness by seeing him asthe prototype of the dreamers who established the new world.

Thismore Most

famous passagebeautiful of the than has shore

shows the greatnessbeen remarked.

of Gatsby.

It is richer

and

lights except as the moon ally sailors' trees to the ment

were now closed and there were any hardly across of a ferryboat And the Sound. moving glow rose higher to melt the inessential houses away until began gradu aware I became of once the old that flowered island here for Dutch big places the shadowy, eyes?a that had last and man must fresh, made green way for breast Gatsby's all human his breath of the new world. had once Its vanished trees, the

house, dreams; in the

pandered

of greatest have held

into an aesthetic pelled to face for the last time ity for wonder. as I And

he contemplation in history with something

for a transitory of this continent, presence nor desired, neither understood commensurate to his

in whispers mo enchanted com face capac

wonder Gatsby's had dock. He

on the old, of unknown I thought world, brooding out the green he first picked light at the end of Daisy's a come to this blue must and his dream have lawn, long way so close that he could seemed fail to grasp it. He did not know that it hardly was somewhere back in that vast behind the him, already obscurity beyond on under of the republic the dark fields rolled the night. city, where sat there when believed Gatsby us. recedes before run faster, stretch So we beat on, in the It eluded out boats our green us the orgiastic future that light, but that's no matter?tomorrow then, . . .And one fine farther. morning? back ceaselessly the current, borne year by we year will

arms

against

into

the

past.

792

The GreatnessNick's Gatsbythe novel's

of "Gatsby

final vision carefully parallels his other sympathetic vision of in chapter six. Taken combine all of together they figurativelythemes. Gatsby and Daisy pass beyond the trees into a moon

sees through the "inessential" lit scene where wonder lurked ; Nick world of Long Island to the trees which were cleared away to make a place for that world. Like Gatsby who saw "the secret place above the trees" where he could suck the pap of life, Nick sees the "green breast to the Dutch of the world" which "pandered in whispers" sailors who sailed to find the promised land of America. But Nick also sees that the promised land had been a cheat. Its greenness became Daisy's green light ; not the fecund green of the forest but the green of machines and the money which buys them. Like the sailors, Gatsby tried to return tothe source of life, to imbibe wonder at its breast. But man ages, time

the secret place above the goes on, and life is a slow dying. Renouncing but daisies die. When trees, Gatsby embraces the flower Daisy; Gatsby the sailors took the new world loved Daisy he lost his dream; when they began the degradation of America's promise; when God saw what he had incarnated he went back to Heaven leaving only a blind sign of the business he would not now open. The past is our future. We have come to the end of possibility. 3 The theme of Fitzgerald's novel ismore inclusive and more shocking than we have known. Its subject is atrophy; the wasting away of the self as one grows into the world of sex and money and time ; the wastingaway of America as it grows from wilderness to civilization, of the uni

verse as it grows by its impossible plan. the novel reflects the disillusionment and the failure of Humanly, dreams which is so marked a feature of man's lot. Culturally, youthfulit dramatizes, perhaps more cogently than any other American novel,

the cause and cost of America's identification with eternal beginnings. it suggests the apocalyptic vision with which we have be Cosmically,come familiar in our literature, our intellectuals, and our newspapers.

to have painted It is the novel's greatest achievement ture with the brightest of colors. Never has the dyingsweetly or so surely.

this bleak pic swan sung so

What gives the book its vitality, these words about death which are not dead (surely, in our time, at once the greatest and the most diffi cult of literary effects) ? First, there is the style. In it, everything is sheer audacity, sheer refusal to be tight-lipped about a by heightened;

793

The Massachusettsworld that sets one's teeth on edge (what

ReviewHemingway, the brave,

lacked the courageto turn Then the death there

to do), Fitzgeraldinto who a gorgeous is more

is able to color the face of death,dance. than just a clever manipulation of

agony is Nick,

we finish the last page we have no certainty that point of view. When Nick will escape the blind desire which drives the others, but we are sure that he has, at least, seen life and glory. And that, surely, is no smallachievement, for he has made us see it too.

there is the incredible tightness in plotting, characterization Finally, is one of and detail. In Joyce's sense of the word, The Great Gatsbythe few novels written in our language. are In concentration of meaning,

nuance,compare

and effect,it. In haunting

there are few books in any language with whichscenes, there few literary works which live

toso

longa

in one's memory:couch ; the

Jordanoverturned

and Daisyauto with

floatingOwl-Eyes

throughslowly

the air onclimbing

stationary

out to proclaim that he does not know how it happened, that he doesn't drive, and that he wasn't trying to drive; the director endlessly bending to kiss the starlet at Gatsby's party, thrilling Daisy with arrested sexu shirts; the scene in the hotel room ality; Daisy crying into Gatsby's where Daisy can only say that she "loved [Gatsby] too."Fitzgerald's and one he life, indeed we know by now, was wasteful. He cracked

up in the full glare of publicitymad, left drank unfinished, of equal gifts. quantities not very His work of

in the pages of Esquire.liquor. Moreover, novel, fragmentary, and he more

His wife wentdied young, than self-indul and any trash

author

interesting was

frequently

was the "authority gent, too often frivolous. He not so small a portion of reality. When after all,about his subject, he had the craft to make a

of failure"; but that is, he had learned enoughof it.

masterpiece

The

Great Gatsby

is a novel

for which

a writer might

give his life.

794