the way of ginsu
p. 36:
Then she flounced over to the dog, kissed it with ecstasy and swept into the kitchen, implying that a dozen chefs awaited her orders there.
Just another dart in the bullseye portrayal of poor, doomed Mrs. Wilson, trying to imagine herself into a life that she’d never get to live.
p. 35:
Her laughter, her gestures, her assertions became more violently affected moment by moment and as she expanded the room grew smaller around her until she seemed to be revolving on a noisy, creaking pivot through the smoky air.
Myrtle Wilson had put on a new dress (“changed her costume”) just before this point, and with the dress she put on a new personality: clothes make the woman . . . make her pretentious and vain. Though this is all just a little afternoon party, the sentence is fraught with danger, with “violent” affectation and the claustrophobic feel of the shrinking room, the oversize load on the fragile point of contact. Interesting choice to say the room “grew smaller” around her, but insert the word “shrank” and the sentence doesn’t seem to read right. Something about the pace of the sentence would be suddenly thrown off, it wouldn’t run the silky way that it does now.
On this page, I also like what Mrs. Wilson says when she gets complimented on her dress: “It’s just a crazy old thing . . . I just slip it on sometimes when I don’t care what I look like.“
p. 34:
Her eyebrows had been plucked and then drawn on again at a more rakish angle but the efforts of nature toward the restoration of the old alignment gave a blurred air to her face.
As the little coterie of Mrs. Wilson’s friends arrive at the apartment, Fitzgerald does a quick, cutting sketch of each. This is Catherine, Myrtle’s sister – we’ve all known someone like her. The would-be sophisticate, clanking around in her style that is as inimitable as she imagines, but not for the reasons she’s presumed. She’s lost whatever true self she has in the drastically plucked eyebrows, but the lack of character keeps emerging to smudge the image she tried to construct.
I also like the Hobbesian description of Mr. McKee’s photographic muse: “His wife was shrill, languid, handsome and horrible.”
p. 33:
The living room was crowded to the doors with a set of tapestried furniture entirely too large for it so that to move about was to stumble continually over scenes of ladies swinging in the gardens of Versailles.
In a single sentence, Fitzgerald executes a devastating critique of Mrs. Wilson’s errors in taste, style and self-regard. I’ve never really noticed this sentence before this reading, but it’s really quite brutal. Again, that’s the joy of this book; each reading brings a new revelation, freighted with the hard-won knowledge that the reader accumulates between readings.
A favorite sentence from prior readings: “I have been drunk just twice in my life and the second time was that afternoon, so everything that happened has a dim hazy cast over it although until after eight o’clock the apartment was full of cheerful sun.” In actuality, Fitzgerald knew more than most men what it was like to be drunk, and he captures the spastic scene in the apartment through the eyes of a careful and experienced lush. I wonder if we are supposed to believe Nick’s virtuous claim that he’s only been drunk twice. I don’t.
p. 32:
She’s said to be very beautiful by people who ought to know.
Mrs. Wilson describes her sister in the grandest terms she can. It’s amazing how some people value the opinions of others over their own senses. The kind of people who so willingly abdicate their own judgment deserve to live their lives under the judgment of others.
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.
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.
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.
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.
p. 27:
This is a valley of ashes – a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens, where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air.
This famous description of the bleak landscape between Manhattan and Kings Point is interesting to me in that I don’t know which is the metaphor, the ashes or the buildings and people. Today that stretch of land is surely overbuilt suburbia, but was it actually fields of ashes in the 1920s? Fitzgerald might be describing a desolate field of windswept ashes and noting the fanciful forms of humanity they take. Or he may be saying that he looks at the gray houses and gray men who live in this purgatory and thinks they have the substance and permanence of ashes swirling in the wind. I suppose the meaning is the same either way.
ginsudo 