ginsudo

p. 63:

‘It takes two to make an accident.’

Here is the page where we really get to know Jordan Baker, the other woman at the center of the novel.  Daisy is the one who has become legend, the unforgettable golden girl for whom all was dreamt and all was lost.  But I always liked Jordan better, not least because she is revealed here to be an incurable liar.

When Nick scolds her for being a careless driver, she first lies that she is careful, then lightly insists that she doesn’t have to be careful since other people are.  Nick points out that she’ll be in trouble if she meets someone as careless as herself, and she deftly turns the conversation to their relationship, declaring her affection for solid, careful Nick.

Nick knows this lovely girl is a liar, but ‘Dishonesty in a woman is a thing you never blame deeply – I was casually sorry, and then I forgot.’ Is a thing truly forgotten if it’s remembered well enough to write down later?  Jordan’s not the only one with a loose concept of the truth.  It takes two.

p. 62:

most affectations conceal something eventually, even though they don’t in the beginning

Here’s another casually sharp insight into human nature.  From time to time, everyone pretends to be something they’re not.  And sometimes this pretense is just a costume, worn as if for a holiday party, to be discarded and forgotten after the festivities of the moment expire.  But sometimes the pretense is aspiration in disguise; the costume turns out to be not a drapery over skin, but a layer emerging from underneath.

p. 61:

I even had a short affair with a girl who lived in Jersey City and worked in the accounting department but her brother began throwing mean looks in my direction so when she went on her vacation in July I let it blow quietly away.

Nick reveals a lot about himself by how little he explains about his life outside his own definition of the story.  On this page, he’s trying to convince us that his summer in New York wasn’t dominated by all things Gatsby.  A short “affair” (whatever that means, in his day) might be cause for several pages or even a chapter in a more conventional account of Nick’s life.  But this sentence is all he says about the girl, because he isn’t here to tell you about himself, the ostensible story is supposed to belong to Gatsby.

But I’m curious.  Just what does an affair mean to Nick?  What sense of honor or cowardice allows a “mean look” to alter his pleasurable pursuits, whether frivolous or serious?  Is the description “blow quietly away” an accurate account from the perspective of our Jersey girl?

None of this gets any exploration.  Instead, later down the page Nick devotes a substantial narrative to an aimless fantasy of following a romantic woman in his mind’s eye.  She’s a New Yorker – he begins his account with a statement familiar to all transplants to the big city:  ’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.‘

As he goes on to imagine what it would be like to spot a woman in the crowd on Fifth Avenue and follow her home for nothing more than a smile, we realize that this romantic fantasy captures the essence of what he wants but didn’t get from Ms. Jersey City.  He gave the real “girl” a cursory sentence, and devoted a fulsome paragraph to a fantasy woman – and in that contrast told us more about himself with omission than he could have with description.

p. 60:

A sudden emptiness seemed to flow now from the windows and the great doors, endowing with complete isolation the figure of the host who stood on the porch, his hand up in a formal gesture of farewell.

I love the energy ascribed here to emptiness, a concept that is ordinarily quiet and passive.  Here the emptiness is a kinetic force that fills the house and overflows out the windows and doors, so powerful that it blankets Gatsby in a protective cocoon.

Another wild party is over, and the host stands in the doorway alone, with his true mission still incomplete – the girl of his fevered dreams didn’t come.  He’s chased her across years without seeing her, other than in his boundless imagination.  Now she’s just across the bay, and surely she must see his mansion alight with festivity, night after night, a beacon calling to her to come and join him at last.  But she doesn’t come this night, and all the people and music and laughter that evening have only fed the emptiness which now fills the house and his heart.

p. 59:

‘But I wasn’t even trying,’ he explained indignantly.  ’I wasn’t even trying.’

The character ‘Owl Eyes’ has two odd little interludes in the novel.  In the first, Nick and Jordan encounter him as a drunken visitor to Gatsby’s library during a party.  After that same party, departing guests come upon a car gone off the road, wrecked in a ditch.  As the crowd gathers, Owl Eyes stumbles out of the car, and the bystanders begin to berate him for his wreckless driving.  But he wasn’t even trying – he wasn’t trying because he wasn’t driving.  The crowd gasps as the actual driver stumbles out of the car.

As the narrator, Nick must be the eyes of us, the readers.  But he’s not us – he is his own complex character, a famously unreliable narrator.  Owl Eyes is us.  He’s a nameless party guest, stumbling around the library, surprised to find that the books are real but cynically concluding that they are still a facade.  He’s careening around the property, but he’s not even driving, he doesn’t even know how to drive.  That’s us readers, we’re just along for the ride.

p. 58:

He smiled – and suddenly there seemed to be a pleasant significance in having been among the last to go, as if he had desired it so all the time.

Have you ever met someone with this degree of charisma?  You’d know it if you had.  The magnetic pull that a person like this can exert upon you is mesmerizing, lulling you into a warm fuzz of contentment, willing you to believe whatever is in the moment.  This is much more subtle than the shock and awe of a motivational speaker for desperate losers; it’s a slow, singular seduction from which no one can claim full immunity.  It’s more pleasant than powerful and therefore less resistable.

p. 57:

‘It was – simply amazing,’ she repeated abstractedly.

What’s amazing to me is that every time I’ve read that sentence before today, I read ‘abstractedly‘ as ‘distractedly‘ – thinking that Jordan was distracted by the hour-long conversation she’s just had with Gatsby.

And what’s really amazing is that Fitzgerald never has an imprecise paragraph or sentence or phrase or even a single slightly improper word choice.  He used ‘abstractedly’ because that’s precisely what he meant.  Jordan wasn’t distracted by some diversion or emotion; she was abstracted, lost in thought.  I’ve read the word wrong every time and never noticed until I took the time to find the artistry on every line.

A mild note of interest on this page is Jordan’s reference to her aunt, Sigourney.  The actress Sigourney Weaver, star of the Alien movies, was born Susan and changed her name after this character, who is only mentioned this once in passing.

p. 56:

One of the men was talking with curious intensity to a young actress, and his wife after attempting to laugh at the situation in a dignified and indifferent way broke down entirely and resorted to flank attacks – at intervals she appeared suddenly at his side like an angry diamond and hissed ‘You promised!’ into his ear.

Gatsby revolves around young couples in relatively early, fragile relationships.  Here is a rare, flashing view at an older couple, in an old relationship with fragility that age has not dissipated, but crystallized into a frozen spiderweb.  Fitzgerald is known as a chronicler of the young and carefree, but this is a pitch-perfect snapshot of a couples’ argument that has developed through many years of betrayal.

In truth Fitzgerald’s heroines were never carefree, regardless of their age.  Though often misunderstood as shallow, these young female characters were engaged in poignant struggle to define a new womanhood in a time before feminism.  Those who lost – or worse, missed – the struggle could do nothing but harden their pains into an angry diamond.

p. 55:

I noticed that she wore her evening dress, all her dresses, like sports clothes – there was a jauntiness about her movements as if she had first learned to walk upon golf courses on clean, crisp mornings.

A great way to enjoy this sentence is to think of all the worse ways to describe just such a woman.  It wouldn’t be enough to just say that she has natural athletic grace.  It would be pale cliché to call her a swan, a ballerina, a long tall drink of water.  It’s not just that she’s sporty, that she grew up with money, that her cool physicality glows through an evening dress.

She moves “as if she had first learned to walk upon golf courses on clean, crisp mornings.” The magic of this phrase is that it also captures the observer’s social standing, as a man who regards the patrician pastime of golf as a subject of aspiration if not envy.  He knows that the only girls who grow up on golf courses are those who have their cares in the world filtered through a fine inheritance.

p. 54:

‘Anyhow he gives large parties,’ said Jordan, changing the subject with an urban distaste for the concrete.

Among the class distinctions that haunt Fitzgerald, and therefore this novel, is the divide between the straightforward mien of the Midwest and the slick sophistication of the Eastern cities.  Saying exactly what you mean is looked down upon by the city elite, precisely because it is a sign of naivete.  They’d like to think that those with fast minds and agile imaginations prefer to deal in subtleties, inferences and innuendo.  By their logic, only a simpleton prefers the simple truth.

But beneath the distaste for truth is the fear that an honest opinion is unpopular, or that plain words would reveal their own ignorance.  For they were all newcomers to the city once, and they escaped the mark of the rube by hiding in obfuscations, hedging their way through false sophistication.  Urbanity is just a mask to hide your true face.

A rarity here, possibly unintentional, is the wordplay in “an urban distaste for the concrete.” Cities are made from concrete, couldn’t be built without it – just as society couldn’t survive without the hard facts, however unfashionable they may be.

All that said, the generalization that Jordan proceeds into is a classic:  ‘And I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.’