‘Anything can happen now that we’ve slid over this bridge,’ I thought; ‘anything at all ….’

Race plays no significant role in The Great Gatsby, unless you adopt the ludicrous assertion that Gatsby was black. Here is the only page with a meaningful composition involving black characters. Nick sees three black passengers in a limousine with a white chauffeur, and this observation is enough to inspire wonderment at the limitless possibilities beyond the border into New York City.

Fitzgerald was only three generations removed from the Civil War, so the upheaval in the social order that he saw in the roles of the limousine riders is understandable. But there’s something he considered more improbable than that: ‘Even Gatsby could happen, without any particular wonder.’ What was so fantastic about Gatsby that we should compare his existence to the reversal of centuries of slavery?

Gatsby was a bootlegger, a scammer, a fixer, a criminal through and through. And yet he was a successful social climber, welcomed in high society and regarded as mysterious rather than despicable. But this deception isn’t enough to rate the idea of Gatsby as improbable.

What’s improbable is Gatsby’s desire, particularly his desire in juxtaposition to his contemptible reality. His dream of lost love is a desire for purity and innocence that he’ll never have – not because the time has passed, but because of the person he is. He is a criminal and no matter how wealthy or charming or famous he may become, in his actions and in his heart, he is an evildoer.

It may be that every bad man desires to have some part of his life that is unsullied by his participation – the robber who gives to the poor, the gangster that supports the neighborhood, the vigilante that protects the weak. But no action ever redeems the sinner who can’t reform his own twisted soul. Gatsby’s problem wasn’t that he couldn’t repeat the past, but that he wouldn’t have done anything differently even if he could. The idea that you can be bad and join your rotting heart to something good is the most improbable conceit of all.

I was sure the request would be something utterly fantastic and for a moment I was sorry I’d ever set foot on his overpopulated lawn.

Gatsby warns Nick he’s “going to make a big request of you today,” but he won’t ask him directly, leaving it up to Jordan Baker to ask Nick at lunch later in the day. Nick claims to be more annoyed than interested, but this can’t possibly be true. It’s another example of Nick lying to himself and lying to us as readers.

Nick already knows Gatsby as the most mysterious figure he’s ever met, and surely the elaborate setup for the request must pique his curiosity. From a certain point of view, Nick’s right to treat the request as unworthy of the anticipation, and wrong to think it would be utterly fantastic. Instead, it’s a modest demand of impossible proportions – Gatsby only wants Nick to invite his cousin Daisy to tea, and have Gatsby drop by for a casually non-coincidental reunion. Gatsby only wants to recreate the past, to renew the idealized romance of his youth.

Fitzgerald believed that the great and small can share the same prosaic longings. He would have approved of the notion that somebody like Citizen Kane would spend his last breath on the name of a sled. In his day, some critics felt that Fitzgerald should be slightly regarded because his concerns weren’t sufficiently serious – he didn’t write about racism or poverty or bullfighting or war or incest. Almost a decade after the publication of The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald complained, “I had recently been kidded half hay-wire by critics who felt that my material was such as to preclude all dealing with mature persons in a mature world. But, my God! it was my material, and it was all I had to deal with.”

All he had to deal with was the problem of the past as both anchor and engine for an unattainable future. Orchestrating a chance meeting is a small request, but reviving lost love would really be something utterly fantastic.

I saw him opening a chest of rubies to ease, with their crimson-lighted depths, the gnawings of his broken heart.

Gatsby carries around a couple of souvenirs to support the stories of his fantastic past: a war medal from Montenegro, a picture in an Oxford quad. These trinkets provide a tangible base to solidify his gauzy stories in the listener’s imagination; their production in conversation acts as a talisman that makes the stories real. But in the end these physical objects are signifiers for false tales – like building a castle in the air on a base of lily pads.

Gatsby’s use of his souvenirs seems childish and manipulative, but they’re only a more unique and imaginative application of a universal technique. In anyone’s life, what are the stories supported by driving a certain kind of car, or wearing a particular watch, or a wedding ring? These things are not manifestations of the truth; they are symbols of a story, objects we use to paint the brushstrokes of the picture we present to the world.

There’s truth only in action and emotion, not objects, and at the end Gatsby sums up, ‘You see I usually find myself among strangers because I drift here and there trying to forget the sad thing that happened to me.‘ The truth is, he is alone in the world, without friends and without a home, unable to escape from the traveling prison of his own regrets.

He lifted the words up and nodded at them – with his smile.

The Great Gatsby contains very little physical description of the man named Gatsby. Instead there is a careful magic enchanting the narrative, where Gatsby’s effect on others is described through the dark whispers of his reputation. Even when we do get a treatment of a physical feature – in this case, Gatsby’s smile – we do not see the whiteness of his teeth, whether his lips are thin or full, where the creases of past humor line his face. There’s no imagery here, only effect. We see the effect of his smile on the words that pass through his mouth, and we understand the effect of his personality on the listener. We get a sense of his controlling charisma, his ability to invest the most outlandish story with something pure from his heart.

He’s describing a romantic fantasy in which he travels the earth in riches, ‘trying to forget something very sad that had happened to me long ago.‘ The story is ludicrous. Nick says, ‘The very phrases were worn so threadbare that they evoked no image except that of a turbaned “character” leaking sawdust at every pore …‘ But by the end, with his smile, Gatsby makes it all true.

So my first impression, that he was a person of some undefined consequence, had gradually faded and he had become simply the proprietor of an elaborate roadhouse next door.

Here’s another fine example of Fitzgerald’s ability to compress a complicated series of human behavior into a seemingly innocent and simple sentence.  Nick’s next door neighbor lives in a mansion so grand that it makes the surrounding houses look like serfs’ huts.  Gatsby is famed for his extravagant parties and mysterious background, his reputation redolent with hints of bootlegging and murder.

But you can’t remain in awe of your immediate surroundings for very long.  Humans have an enormous capacity to adapt to the most unnatural conditions.  Living next to a man with extreme wealth and fascinating identity, Nick simply packs all strangeness away into a corner of his mind where a mansion becomes a roadhouse and a living cypher is just another neighbor.

Your first impression is so often right, you’ve got to learn how to listen to your instincts.  You may lack the time, energy or desire to push your senses beyond the facade the world presents to you – but everything really worth finding out is on the other side.

Also on this page, Gatsby blurts out an uncomfortable question to Nick, “What’s your opinion of me anyhow?” Fitzgerald doesn’t answer in dialogue, but has his narrator describe, ‘A little overwhelmed I began the generalized evasions which that question deserves.‘ I love the meta-descriptive quality here: the question is so baldly inept that Nick can’t and won’t answer in detail, and the exchange itself is crucially irrelevant, so the narrator’s description of his answer is itself a generalization and evasion, which is the what the reader deserves, if only because the writer constructed this tiny trap. Gatsby seems like a simple story, but it’s these little land mines of writerly genius that make the work endure.

He was balancing himself on the dashboard of his car with that resourcefulness of movement that is so peculiarly American – that comes, I suppose, with the absence of lifting work or rigid sitting in youth and, even more, with the formless grace of our nervous, sporadic games.

The Great Gatsby is a candidate for the spurious crown of “the great American novel,” so it’s interesting to consider this passage, the only sentence in the novel that seriously applies the term “American” to mannerisms that amount to a description of national character.  (There’s one other sentence, more famous, but less serious, in the next chapter: “Americans, while occasionally willing to be serfs, have always been obstinate about being peasantry.“)  Of course, the entire novel is about America and Americanness, but in this sentence the term is explicit.

Fitzgerald doesn’t pick an idea, an opinion or political view.  He doesn’t pick an ethnicity, race, color or class. Instead, he focuses on an inchoate mark of physicality – resourcefulness of movement – as the mark of an American.  This may seem odd, but if you’re American and have ever traveled in a foreign land where you should appear ethnically similar to the natives, you may have noticed what he’s talking about here.  Though you may wear the clothes of their country and make every attempt to appear at home, you are routinely marked by the locals as an American, just at a mere glance and before you even open your mouth.  How did they know?

Maybe “resourcefulness of movement” is the best way to describe it.  In this country, most of us grow up far from the farm, aspirations run away from manual labor, our schooling lacks what other countries consider discipline, we glorify play and try to weave it into both school and work.  These are deep sociological differences from many other nations, too complex to explain briefly, and too restlessly ingrained to avoid vibrating through your body and into the very air around you.

They were never quite the same ones in physical person but they were so identical one with another that it inevitably seemed they had been there before.

This is Fitzgerald’s description of the rotating retinue of “four girls” who always accompanied one of the revelers at Gatsby’s parties.  The narrator admits “I have forgotten their names . . . the melodious names of flowers and months or the sterner ones of the great American capitalists whose cousins, if pressed, they would confess themselves to be.”  The girls are objects of art, objects of desire, signifiers of sex and wealth.  A feminist critique of Gatsby would deplore the nameless characters and the “girl” terminology.

But Fitzgerald’s gift is observation, not social commentary – and observation stands up better over time than commentary ever could.  The objectification he describes continues today, with different meaning and different dynamics.  These days a man can travel like Robert Palmer only as satire; making a habit of it just looks silly.  So we read this novel of the past with the feelings and morals of the present, which only enriches our understanding of how these crowded parties were filled with empty people.

Snell was there three days before he went to the penitentiary, so drunk out on the gravel drive that Mrs. Ulysses Swett’s automobile ran over his right hand.

We are in the midst of two full pages in which Fitzgerald does nothing but reel off the guest list for Gatsby’s summer parties.  The first few times I read the novel, I barely skimmed these pages, not understanding the impact Fitzgerald was delivering with the sheer volume and baroque detail of the list.  Sprinkled throughout the fanciful names, there are these phrases that contain whole worlds, stories within stories, mysteries, comedies and crimes.  Why would a man’s hair turn “cotton-white one winter afternoon for no good reason at all“?  A man came “only once, in white knickerbockers, and had a fight with a bum named Etty in the garden” – did he come just to fight? What was a bum doing at this fancy estate party? How does it feel to have a brother so notorious that you can only be referenced as “brother to that Muldoon who afterwards strangled his wife“?

But of course, my featured one-sentence story here involves jail, drunkenness, and maiming.  There is something very subtle here that shows Fitzgerald knows about passing out drunk:  writers without experience in this matter would describe what the man was doing just before he passed out.  Fitzgerald, being an unrepentant drunk himself, knew that a drunk never knows what he was doing in those moments.  He only knows the next day about the consequences, and only knows that because he was told by witnesses who are only barely more reliable than himself.

the subtle tribute of knowing nothing whatever about him

Nick reels off a list of over 70 names of people who came to Gatsby’s house that summer.  Both narrator and author sense that the sheer volume of names will give more color than any generalities of crowd description.  These visitors descended upon Gatsby’s lawns and gossiped about their host while getting drunk on his hospitality, they came to be part of the scene, they paid him a subtle and damning and damnable tribute in caring more about the idea of Gatsby than about the actual person.

Everyone suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine:  I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known.

There are so many reasons why Nick’s ‘suspicion’ here is probably false, even though it is an assertion about himself.  He’s an unreliable narrator:  self-admittedly distracted, occasionally drunk, absorbed in his own career and love life and ego.  His statement is boastful no matter how mild the language, and immodest claims of high character are usually false.

But of all the reasons to doubt Nick’s self-assessment, I’ll highlight this one:  He’s only a few days shy of his 30th birthday.  That’s too small a percentage of an expected lifespan to judge one’s own possession of a cardinal virtue.  Think about the changes that people make in the years after 30:  wild partiers become sedate homemakers, stable careerists become out-of-control addicts, atheists find a higher power while the devout renounce their gods.

We can’t know yet whether Nick deserves to stand with the few honest people in the world. We don’t have any reason to believe that he’s ever been tested, and we have every reason to believe that the final judgment of his character will take many more years to make.

Finally (and pedantically), honesty isn’t even one of the cardinal virtues . . . which I suppose should have been the first thing to tip us off to Nick’s (self-)deception.

‘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.

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.

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.

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.

‘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.

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.

‘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.

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.

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.

‘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.’

He’s just a man named Gatsby.

Jordan tells this untruth when Nick, fresh off the surprise of an unexpected introduction, demands to know who this mysterious host is.  Is Jordan lying?  She’s known Gatsby long enough and well enough that she knows “just a man” is an inadequate description.  Likely she doesn’t have anything to add to the fevered speculation that winds through his nightly bacchanalia, and she’d rather Nick want to talk about something else.

More about Gatsby’s extraordinary smile carries over to this page:  “It understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.“  I’m telling you, that’s not a natural smile, that smile has to be practiced with a focus on effect rather than on feeling.

This page has almost that all Fitzgerald ever gives us in terms of a physical description of Gatsby, “an elegant young rough-neck, a year or two over thirty.“  We don’t really know how tall he is, what color his eyes are, the shape of his nose or lips.  It’s an intentional cypher on which you can write your own imaginings.  And yet, the impression of Gatsby is enduring because of the description of his effect on those around him.

It faced – or seemed to face – the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor.

Most of this paragraph is taken with a description of Gatsby’s smile.  That smile is a wonderful piece of work, and Gatsby must have truly worked at it – you can picture him spending hours in front of the mirror perfecting the radiant character of that smile.  He started with natural material, the handsome face, a wide mouth around even white teeth.  His ambition to become a man of the world required an openness to experience beyond his small beginnings, and that open heart can fill a smile with good will.  He continually nurtured his ability to appreciate and reflect joy, if not always to generate it.  All of that could be genuine.

What could not be genuine, what does require that practice in the mirror, is the way that smile turns to just you, no longer the natural sun hanging in the sky buy a spotlight made and tailored just for you.  You have to remember, that’s how he smiles to everyone, it’s not just for you.  There’s a particular technique in this, a conscious effort required to give you that irresistible prejudice.  He has to lean into you a degree or two more, focus both of his eyes into your dominant eye, hold the gaze a fraction of a second longer than normal.  That smile is a work of art, not a work of nature.

I had taken two finger bowls of champagne and the scene had changed before my eyes into something significant, elemental and profound.

After midnight the party is starting to crest and even the studiously detached observer falls into the flow. The champagne helps more than a little.

I also like on this page the ‘old men pushing young girls backward in eternal graceless circles.’

‘I’ve been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library.’

If you find yourself in a similar condition, you should try this, it works surprisingly well.

a persistent undergraduate given to violent innuendo and obviously under the impression that sooner or later Jordan was going to yield him up her person to a greater or lesser degree.

Something about this description assures us that the violence is ultimately impotent, befitting of the stunted ambition sure to envelop the undegrad later that night.