Back West: Time and Place in The Great Gatsby Barry Gross

Western American Literature, Volume 8, Number 1&2, Spring and Summer1973, pp. 3-13 (Article)

Published by University of Nebraska PressDOI:

For additional information about this article

Access provided by Calif State Univ @ Northridge (9 Feb 2018 01:53 GMT)

https://doi.org/10.1353/wal.1973.0018

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/529063/summary

B A R R Y G R O S SMichigan State University

Back West: Tim e and Place in The Great Gatsby

“I see now,” says Nick Carraway, “that this has been the story o f the West, after all — T om and Gatsby, Daisy and Jo rd an and I, were all W esterners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in com m on which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life.” W hatever can he mean? If by “Eastern life” Nick means m oral indifference, chaos and corruption, dishonesty and decadence, the Buchanans and Jo rd an Baker are right at home. T rue, Gatsby is sufficiently rem oved from Eastern life to keep his dream “in­corruptib le,” but he does exploit and function in it. Nick is the only really unsu ccessfu l tra n sp la n t th o u g h even he has his m om ents o f adaptability.

Nick’s statem ent has provided incontrovertible evidence for those who in te rp re t The Great Gatsby as a “tragic pastoral.” Accord­ing to this in terpretation , Fitzgerald posits a corrupt, materialistic East against a sim pler and, hence, morally superior West. But T om ’s Lake Forest, Daisy and Jo rd a n ’s Louisville, Nick’s St. Paul are hardly fron tier towns and certainly not pastoral. N or do their products m anifest a moral superiority to the Easterners with whom they come in contact. Nick explicitly denies tha t the w heat and the prairies constitute his Middle West. Jim m y Gatz is raised on a N orth Dakota farm but he leaves it. Indeed, the novel’s only ru ra l W esterner is H enry C. Gatz and it would seem that if Fitz­gerald w anted to suggest the W est’s moral superiority he would have invested it in him. But H enry C. Gatz is ju s t a sad old m an as dazzled by the splendors o f the East as his son ever was; he is gifted with no special insight o r moral sensitivity. Fitzgerald wrote Maxwell Perkins on Ju n e 1, 1925, two m onths after Gatsby was published:

As a matter o f fact the American peasant as “real” material scarcely exists. He is scarcely 10% o f the population, isn’t bound to the soil at all as the English and Russian peasants were — and, if he has any sensitivity whatsoever . . . , he is in the towns before he’s twenty. Either Lewis, Lardner and myself have been badly fooled, or else using him as typical American material is simply a stubborn seeking

4 Western A merican Literature

fo r the static in a world that fo r almost a hundred years had simply notbeen static.

It would seem that literary critics, at least those who subscribe to the “tragic pastoral” thesis, are not im m une to the desire to repeat the past.

T he statem ent could be dismissed if Nick had m ade it earlier in the novel'as ju s t ano ther exam ple o f his faulty perception, along with his assum ption that the squalor o f Wilson’s garage cannot be all there is but “m ust be a blind” for “sum ptuous and rom antic apartm ents . . . overhead” and his guess that Gatsby bought his house across from Daisy’s by “a strange coincidence.” But Nick declares this the story o f the West now , now that he has been educated, now that he has learned to look behind the pink suits and the frantic parties and the unbelievable house, now that he has perceived that the essential Gatsby is “w orth the whole dam n bunch pu t together.” We m ust take the statem ent seriously.

T he statem ent makes sense to me — and, m ore im portant, illuminates the novel for me — if I regard East and West in The Great Gatsby not so m uch as places but as times, not so m uch as geographic locales but as states o f mind — and at a specific historical m om ent in the history o f the Am erican im agination, that m om ent when the country suddenly reverses itself, turns in on itself, when m anifest destiny makes an about-face, as if a cultural hourglass were suddenly tipped over and the grains o f sand pursued a new course as irresistibly as they had pursued the old one. I f this were a n ineteenth century novel, if the au thor were a W hitm an o r T horeau , West would be the geographical and psychological direction o f the future, East the past. But in The Great Gatsby West is the past, East the fu ture. And it is in this respect that T om and Gatsby, Daisy and Jo rd an and Nick are all W esterners, subtly unadaptable to Eastern life. T he defi­ciency they possess in com m on is an inability to live in the future. W hat they seek does not lie ahead o f them but behind them . W hat they seek is the past.

A nd that lies West. T hat the West can no longer represent the fu tu re is m ade ab u n d an tly c lear by D an Cody, “ p io n ee r debauchee.” Daniel Boone, Buffalo Bill Cody — he evokes the West that once, at least mythologically, was. Prospector par excel­lence, he was involved in “every rush for metal since seventy-five.”

Barry Gross 5

But at a price: only fifty and still “physically robust,” Cody is “on the verge o f soft-m indedness,” relic o f a dead time, the bad aftertaste o f a myth gone sour. T he West is closed, the past has passed, and Cody has no reason to go East because he has no future. Homeless, directionless, he can only circle the continent, perm anently and purposelessly adrift. All that the fu tu re can possi­bly hold for him is death which he eventually encounters, sig­nificantly, in Boston, in the inevitable East.

For a very few West is still the fu ture, those who have no past o r want to forget it: Meyer Wolfsheim, who m ade the trek west from some East European ghetto to the frontier o f Broadway but for whom “m em ories” o f his recent past, o f “the old Met- ropole . . . filled with faces dead and gone, . . . friends gone now forever,” are m ore real than the present; the Englishmen at Gatsby’s party, “all looking a little hungry ,” all “agonizingly aware o f the easy money in the vicinity”; most especially Myrtle Wilson, who has “been talking about [going West] for ten years,” who, like young Jim m y Gatz, makes lists to plan and shape a future, lists “o f all the things [she’s] got to get, . . . got to do”— g e t T o m B u c h a n a n , m a r r y T o m B u c h a n a n , a n d “go . . . West” — Myrtle Wilson, in frantic pursu it o f her fu tu re to the last, hands “waving.”

But for the others, for T om and Gatsby, for Daisy and Jo rd an and Nick, there is only the past. We know very little about Jo rd an Baker bu t we may presum e that once, somewhere back in her “white girlhood” in Louisville, before she created “that cool, insol­en t smile” with which to m eet the faces that she meets, before “her hard , jaun ty body” dem anded satisfaction, that once, “when she was very young,” she did not lie.

A bout Tom we know m ore (Fitzgerald wrote Perkins at the end o f ’24, “I suppose he’s the best character I ’ve ever done”). It is clear that T om ’s “perm anen t move” East — “I’ll stay in the East,” he assures anyone who will listen, “I’d be a God dam ned fool to live anywhere else” — is not perm anent, not if East means fu ture. A head T om can only foresee “civilization . . . going to pieces,” the black race subm erging the white, the earth falling into the sun. For Tom Buchanan, as for all those “who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one tha t everything afterw ard savors o f anti-climax,” there can be no future. For Tom there is only the repeated attem pt to recapture what it felt like at twenty-one, to relive “the dram atic turbulence o f some irrecover­

6 Western American Literature

able football gam e.” Such dram atic turbulence the white Daisy, so “cool . . . in the absence o f all desire,” cannot possibly provide, not even on their honeym oon. Hence, the cham berm aid from the Santa B arbara Hotel. A nd hence Myrtle Wilson, the vulgarity and vitality, the “dram atic turbulence” that presum ably resides in females o f the lower orders. Myrtle provides the outlet his “cruel body” needs. Atop the “sensuously . . . stout” Myrtle Tom m ight be twenty-one again. T heir bed is a football field on which T om has his fifty-yard ru n and makes his orgastic touchdown, that perhaps peculiarly Am erican m ixture o f sex and sport that N orm an Mailer details so well in An American Dream and that Dave Meggyesy verifies in Out of Their League. We don’t see Tom and Myrtle in bed but we do see them doing battle, toe to toe. She is a worthy adversary and it is no doubt as satisfying to his “ physical eg o tism ” to b re a k h e r nose w ith o ne “ sh o rt d e f t m ovem ent” o f “his open h an d ” and draw rich, red blood as it will later be to break “ ‘Jay Gatsby’ . . . like glass” with his “hard malice.” With Daisy he m ust stop far short and content him self with a bruised knuckle.

Som ething o f the same sort is going on in Daisy’s affair with Gatsby. In choosing Tom B uchanan for the “wholesome bulkiness about his person and his position,” Daisy chooses security, that hothouse w herein the flower can rem ain safe and proud above all the hot struggles. At Gatsby’s party she likes only a “gorgeous, scarcely hum an orchid o f a w om an” — infinitely ra re r than a m ere daisy though o f the same species — who spends the whole evening in perm anent “state under a white plum tree” and the m an who spends the whole evening worshipfully adoring her. This is som ething Daisy understands and responds to, a tableau o f frozen gesture. The rest o f West Egg, its “raw vigor” with its suggestion o f hot struggle that is so inimical to a flower’s fragile beauty, appalls her, “and inarguably,” Nick concludes, “because it wasn’t a gesture but an em otion.” Yet Daisy lingers and Daisy is attracted and Daisy has her affair because at West Egg th^re are “rom antic possibilities totally absent from h e r w orld ,” her hothouse world o f gestures, not emotions. T he hothouse, and the wealth it takes to maintain it, not only “preserves . . . youth and mystery” but “im prisons” them . H er affair with Gatsby is an affirm ation o f those rom antic yearnings which Nick detects in her voice but which cannot be realized at East Egg. It is an attem pt to feel the em otion her world o f gestures has stifled, to feel what she felt before Tom ran o ff with the cham berm aid,

Barry Gross 1

before she had “been everywhere and seen everything and done everything,” before she got “sophisticated.” For this she goes West to West Egg, but she needs to go much farther West, all the way back to Louisville and her “beautiful white girlhood” and that b rief m om ent when she was able to invest herself in the fu tu re o f Gatsby’s re tu rn , that m om ent o f fidelity and hope that ended when she began to feel “the pressure o f the world outside” and “began to move again with the season.” W hat she seeks at West Egg she cannot find because it is behind her. She, too, seeks to repeat the past because for her, too, there is no future. “W hat do people plan?” she asks helplessly, “what will we do with o u r­selves this afternoon and the day after that, and the next thirty years?” For the fragile flower the fu ture is a death — the death o f freshness, o f beauty, the harsh mortality that is inevitably the flowers’ lot. I f Daisy “always lookfs] for the longest day o f the year and then miss[es] it,” it is because for her the fu tu re is not tha t orgastic consum m ation devoutly to be wished.

It is difficult to know to what extent Tom and Daisy know that all they seek is to repeat the past, bu t their compulsive behavior— Daisy always and still dressed in white, the pattern o f T om ’s affairs — suggests that some self-awareness has surfaced. W hen Nick, however, notes that the Buchanans’ move East is probably not perm anent, when he notes that Gatsby talks a lot about the past, he does not see that neither is his own move perm anent and that he, too, talks a lot about the past. “You can’t repeat the past,” he tells Gatsby smugly, not realizing that that is precisely what he wants to do. This is ano ther exam ple o f Nick’s failure to perceive him self — he can see Jo rd an ’s dishonesty but not his own and Gatsby’s love for Daisy but not his own; he can con­dem n the “young clerks in the dusk” for “wasting the most poign­ant m om ents o f night and life” but not see that he is one o f the young clerks.

By the time Nick comes East he has presumably learned that “you can’t repeat the past.” W hen he re tu rned hom e from the ultim ate East, the European war, the West was no longer “the warm center o f the world” it once was but “the ragged edge o f the universe.” Nick is apparently one o f those the W ar has ren d ­ered subtly unadaptable. “Restless,” he can no longer locate “the warm center” o f which he was once a part, the security he felt “growing up in the Carraway house in a city where dwellings are still called th rough decades by a family’s nam e,” the identity

8 Western American Literature

furnished him by a “family” that “have been prom inent, well-to-do people” in the same “city for three generations.” I t’s not the same; that “delayed Teutonic invasion,” as he flippantly calls the War, has done som ething to him. No, he discovers, you can’t repeat the past. So he left it all behind and “came East, perm anently ,” he is sure, as sure as T om Buchanan.

But Nick does not want to make a clean break with the past that has eluded him. Instead o f finding “rooms in the city,” which he knows is “the practical th ing” to do, he lives on Long Island because it rem inds him o f the “country” he has “ju s t left,” “a country o f wide lawns and friendly trees.” Nick can never relocate because his fram e o f reference rem ains stubbornly W estern: he sees the urban “waste land” as “a fantastic farm ,” the “ashes” as “wheat,” the “small block o f yellow brick” as a “com pact Main S treet.” Fifth Avenue o f a Sunday afternoon seems to him “warm and soft, almost pastoral,” and he is only half-kidding in his claim tha t he “w ouldn’t have been surprised to see a great flock of white sheep tu rn the corner.” Nick is aware that the “m orning . . . sun” throws his “shadow westward” as he hurries to work “down the white chasms o f lower New York,” but he is not aware o f the extent to which he always tends westward, pastward. A lthough “one o f the reasons” he has “come East” is to escape an unw anted entanglem ent with a girl “out W est,” he never extricates him self from “that tangle back hom e.” He con­tinues to write “letters once a week,” “signing them : ‘Love, Nick.’ ”

T he tru th is that Nick does not want to break with the girl o r the past. A tide has carried him East to “learn the bond business”— “everybody I knew was in the bond business” — but his real inclination is to stay put. He is, he tells us, “full o f in terior rules tha t act as brakes upon [his] desires.” In a novel full o f reckless drivers — T om runs “into a wagon on the V entura road ,” rips “a front wheel o ff his car,” and breaks the cham berm aid’s arm ; Jo rd an , another “ro tten driver,” passes “so close to some workm en that [the] fen d er flick[s] a button on one m an’s coat”; Gatsby’s first party ends with “a new coupe . . . in the ditch beside the road, right side up, . . . violently shorn o f one wheel” ; Daisy runs down Myrtle — the way one drives becomes, for the 1920’s, a wholly appropria te m etaphor for the way one lives. From a m oral point o f view, too many brakes are clearly preferable to too few. But, to extend the m etaphor to its logical end, if your foot rem ains on the brake the car does not move — one gets

Barry Gross 9

nowhere. Nick is excited by New York but he cannot participate in it: he can only imagine that he, too, is “hurry ing toward gayety,” he can only “im agine tha t” he is “going to en ter into” the “lives” o f the “rom antic wom en” he picks “out . . . from the crow d.” Only in his “m ind” does he follow “them to their apartm ents on the corners o f hidden streets” and even in his mind he does not follow them all the way but watches them fade “th rough a door into warm darkness.”

It is when Nick perceives that he is thirty, that his twenties, all the twenties, are over — “I wish I were twenty-two again with only my dram atic and feverishly enjoyed m iseries,” Fitzgerald wrote Perkins in 1925; “I used to say I w anted to die at thirty— well, I’m now twenty-nine and the prospect is still welcome”— that he decides to go back West. W hat lies ahead for him in the fu tu re is “the portentous, menacing road o f a new decade,” “a decade o f loneliness, a th inning list o f single m en to know, a th inning briefcase o f enthusiasm , th inning hair,” the price Nick, like Prufrock, pays for m easuring out his life in coffee-spoons. Perhaps “that certain girl” back West will alleviate the loneliness. And even if his lot should tu rn out to be similar to that o f the d runken woman who is deposited at “the wrong house,” his even­tual fate will be different. Down East “no one knows the w om an’s nam e and no one cares” but that mistake could never be made back West “where dwellings are still called th rough the decades by a family’s nam e.”

In re tu rn ing to his M iddle West Nick is not re tu rn ing — or even trying to re tu rn — to a place. His Middle West is “not the wheat or the prairies o f the lost Swede towns” or even the town in which he grew up. His Middle West exists only on the m ap o f his memories. His Middle West is a time, “the thrilling, re tu rn ing trains o f [his] youth.” (my italics). His Middle West is the way it felt “com ing back West from p rep school and later from college at Christm as.” T he snow and the sleigh bells, the holly wreaths and the girls in their fu r coats and the party invitations — tha t’s Nick’s Middle West and, like those thrilling trains, o f his youth, gone forever. So, too, is the feeling o f being “unutterably a- ware,” if only “fo r one strange hour,” o f an “identity with this country,” an identity based on p rep schools and fu r coats and Christm as parties. N or can “the w orld” ever be “in uniform and at a sort o f moral attention” again, the way it m ust have been when he was able to accept his fa ther’s snobbish class prejudice

10 Western American Literature

as gospel, when it was possible to distinguish the good people from the bad people on the basis o f com parative and quantita­tive advantages.

O f all those who want to repeat the past, only Gatsby is aware that that is what life is all about. Perhaps that is why Fitzgerald d idn’t “let him go and have Tom Buchanan dom inate the book” after Perkins pointed ou t that Gatsby was awfully patchy for the m ajor character. “Gatsby,” Fitzgerald confessed to Perkins, “sticks in my heart,” for Fitzgerald knew while he was w riting The Great Gatsby tha t he really w anted to be “twenty-two again.”

Like the crazy brew er who built his house “early in the ‘period’ craze” and w anted all his neighbors to “have their roofs thatched with straw,” Gatsby wants to “fix everything ju s t the way it was.” He is sure that all Daisy need do to “obliterate four years” is tell Tom she never loved him and then they can “go back to Louisville and be m arried from her house — ju s t as if it were five years ago.” For four years Gatsby has, as it were, held his b rea th , w aiting fo r th a t “single g lorious m o m en t” F itzgerald describes in “Early Success” when “the fulfilled fu tu re and the wistful past” will be one. Like Nick’s “mantlepiece clock” which Gatsby so deftly juggles, Gatsby’s time-sense has been “defunct.” In Gatsby’s wholly im aginary world time has stood still and Daisy is still waiting for him to re tu rn , faithful and pure despite all the evidence to the contrary. T hat is the “incorruptible d ream ” he keeps “concealed” from those who have “guessed at his cor­rup tion .” But as soon as he submits his d ream to a real world, to “her actual and astounding presence,” time begins to tick again, and with a vengeance. In the world where time has never stood still, Gatsby begins “ru nn ing down like [the] overw ound clock” he in fact is. In the real world time marches on, irrevocably, inex­orably. All the while the past has year by year receded ou t o f reach and Gatsby has not realized that. T h a t is why he stares at Daisy’s daugh ter with such “surprise” — she is indisputable p roo f that four years have indeed passed and cannot be so easily obliterated. “I can’t help w hat’s past,” Daisy laments, and finally, to his unutterab le confusion, neither can Gatsby. T hat is the “too m uch” Gatsby wants — he wants to help what’s past, he wants to fix everything the way it was, intact, unaltered, and no one, not even the great Gatsby, can do that.

H enry C. Gatz decides not to take his son’s “body W est” because his “Jim m y always liked it better down East.” For someone

Barry Gross 11

who was always “bound to get ahead,” someone who “had a big fu tu re in front o f him ,” East was the direction, East was the place. “An instinct tow ard his fu tu re glory” led him to em ulate Ben Franklin, that prototypical Easterner, and desecrate a copy o f Hopalong Cassidy with his schedule and resolves. Some m anifest destiny drew him from the farm , to the college. As the city attracts Carrie, so Jim m y Gatz was pulled irresistibly to that yacht, objective correlative for all those “grotesque and fantastic conceits,” for that “universe o f ineffable gaudiness.” Rowing purposefully out to the yacht, Gatz left his past where it belonged — behind him, on the shore. Jim m y Gatz is dead, long live Jay Gatsby!

But som ething happened. Gatsby talks “a lot about the past” and Nick senses “that he wanted to recover som ething, some idea o f him self perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy. His life had been confused and disordered since then, but if he could re tu rn to a certain starting place and go over it all slowly, he could find out what that th ing was.” Somewhere he changed directions, stop­ped going figuratively East. At some crucial point he picked one road ra th e r than ano ther and lost “some idea o f himself.” I f he could go back, repeat that m om ent, think about the choices ju st a little while longer . . .

It is a transition point, a n ight that balances on “the two changes o f the year.” It is the m om ent when Gatsby sees “that the blocks o f the sidewalk really form ed a ladder and m ounted to a secret place above the trees,” when Gatsby knows that he can “climb to it, if he climbed alone, and once there suck on the pap o f life, gulp down the incom parable milk o f w onder,” an experience so transcendent it can be com pared only to “the m ind o f God.” This is the idea o f him self that has gone into loving Daisy, “his Platonic conception o f himself.” He can climb to the secret place but only if he climbs alone, only if he commits him self completely to it. But on the o ther hand — literally — there is this girl. He m ust choose between her and the climb, between a flower and the pap o f life, the milk o f wonder. And he knows those are the term s o f the choice, he knows “that when he kisses[es] this girl, and forever wed[s] his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never rom p again like the m ind o f G od.” He waits, listening for the last time “to the tuning-fork that had been struck upon a star,” and then he kisses her — he will never hear such heavenly music again, not even in Daisy’s voice, the music money makes.

12 Western American Literature

So it is not only his dream o f Daisy that is “behind him, some­where back in that vast obscurity.” It is also his d ream o f self, the climb he m ight have m ade, the place he m ight have reached, the m an he m ight have been — conqueror o f Everest, solo pilot across the Atlantic, and, yes, artist. W hen it became clear a few weeks after publication that The Great Gatsby was not going to make money, Fitzgerald wrote Perkins.

In all events I have a book o f good stories for the fall. Now I shall write some cheap ones until I’ve accumulated enough [money] for my next novel. When that is finished and published I’ll wait and see. If it will support me with no more intervals o f trash I’ll go on as a novelist. If not, I’m going to quit, come home, go to Hollywood and learn the movie business. I can’t reduce our scale o f living and I can’t stand this financial insecurity. Anyhow there’s no point in trying to be an artist if you can’t do your best. I had my chance back in 1920 to start my life on a sensible scale and I lost it, and so I ’ll have to pay the penalty, (my italics)

T he chance lost, the road not taken.

This is the essential difference between Gatsby and the Dutch sailor to whom Nick com pares him at the end. Like Gatsby, the Dutch sailor envisioned a secret place, not above the trees but beyond the seas, where one could suck on the pap o f life, gulp down the milk o f wonder. But the Dutch sailor undertook the journey , left everything behind, went West into the future. A nd he found it; “for a transitory enchanted m om ent” he stood “face to face . . . with som ething com m ensurate to his capacity for w onder.” For the last time in history, Nick insists. In the age o f Gatsby H opalong Cassidy, already history, has long since ridden into his last sunset, the West is won — or lost — the frontier is closed. In place o f a new world, American culture offers a yacht to w onder at, in place o f a new frontier a Southern girl dressed in white and her two-story house. Yet m an’s capacity for w onder is undim inished so he m ust com pensate for the inadequacy o f the objects offered him by overdream ing them , a great expendi­tu re o f “colossal vitality” and “creative passion” that m ight have been better expended climbing to the secret place, rom ping like the m ind o f God.

O f course Gatsby believed in “the orgastic fu tu re” (on January 24, 1975 fifty years will have passed since Scott Fitzgerald told Maxwell Perkins that “ ‘orgastic’ is the adjective for ‘orgasm ’ and it expresses exactly the in tended ecstasy” and Scribner’s will p rob­ably come out with a new cover to com m em orate the Golden

Barry Gross 13

Jubilee but the word will certainly still read “orgiastic,” as it has since the first printing) — the orgastic fu ture that promises con­sum m ation and fulfillment. But it isn’t the fu tu re we “ru n faster” toward, “stretch out ou r arm s farthe r” toward — it is the past we want, the past “that year by year recedes before us.” “We beat on ,” purposefully, but “the cu rren t” knows better — it bears us “back ceaselessly into the past” where we really w ant to be but cannot be.

T he critics who reviewed it in 1925 did not understand The Great Gatsby so Fitzgerald was particularly pleased by the response o f Roger Burlingam e an ed itor at Scribner’s. T he novel made Mr. Burlingam e “want to be back somewhere so m uch” and that, Fitzgerald assured him, is a fine description o f “whatever unifying em otion the book has, either in regard to the tem pera­m ent o f Gatsby o r in my own m ood while w riting it.” Back West, back when.