Month: May 2008

sensibilities of those East Eggers

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p. 31:

Tom deferred that much to the sensibilities of those East Eggers who might be on the train.

This describes the practice of Tom’s mistress sitting discreetly in another car while they take the train together into New York, despite their frequenting of popular restaurants in the city, where he would leave her at the table and saunter about chatting with whomsoever he knew.

Once I took the train from West to East Berlin, not long after the Berlin Wall fell with the end of Soviet Communism. Getting on the train in West Berlin, I noticed a young couple, a bland German youth and his girlfriend, a dark Arabic girl. They stood with arms about each other as the journey started, frequently leaning in to exercise their new love in a kiss, but their public affection became more and more subtle as we headed East. Finally, by the time we crossed over into the formerly Communist, and still very conservative, part of the city, they stood at opposite ends of the train car, connected only by their longing glances into each others eyes.

Terribly romantic and quite unlike Tom and Myrtle, but that’s what I think of each time I read this passage; the burden of deferring passion for the sensibilities of others.

no facet or gleam of beauty

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p. 30:

Her face, above a spotted dress of dark blue crepe-de-chine, contained no facet or gleam of beauty but there was an immediately perceptible vitality about her as if the nerves of her body were continually smouldering.

There’s something sophomorically prudish about Fitzgerald’s refusal to describe Mrs. Wilson as beautiful. As if to find beauty in her obvious sexuality would diminish the refined sensibility required to appreciate the charms of the dewy southern flowers he idolizes.

as some women can

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p. 29:

She was in the middle thirties, and faintly stout, but she carried her surplus flesh sensuously as some women can.

Mrs. Wilson isn’t like the other women in this book, or most other women in Fitzgerald’s work. She’s a full-grown woman, not a dewy debutante or rare orchid in first flower. The idea of sensuous surplus flesh stuck in my head on first reading like a description of a far-off land I’d never heard about before and might never visit. I must have read this book for a decade or more before I understood what kind of woman can carry herself as Mrs. Wilson does.

because of this

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p. 28:

There is always a halt there of at least a minute and it was because of this that I first met Tom Buchanan’s mistress.

For some reason the routine pause turns chance into inevitability – there’s something I always liked about this. Reminds me of one of the persistent themes of Paul Auster‘s writings, that life is formed by chance, and in a sense chance is the illusory veil of fate.