The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Jim and I were in Cedar City, Utah, a few weeks ago for their annual summer Shakespeare festival. We saw productions of Twelfth Night and Troilus and Cressida, and the musical She Loves Me. We’ve gone nearly every summer now for several years and always have a good time. One of our traditions is breakfast at a local diner followed by a walk up the block to a bookstore. On this visit, I bought a “collectible” copy of a book I remembered reading as a child (Mr. Mysterious and Company by Sid Fleischman) and this novel, which I’ve been meaning to re-read for some time now. It’s one of my all time favorites and it was a notable absence on my reading list because the last time I read it was before I started this book diary.

I had the book with me as I visited the doctor yesterday for an annual physical. The doctor asked me what I was reading and when I told him, his response was not a knowing comment like, “A classic” or a question like, “How is it?” but, “How many times have you read it?” I loved that he just assumed a middle-aged man wouldn’t be reading The Great Gatsby for the first time. I told him I thought I must have read it at least four times prior plus I saw a performance of Gatz by the Elevator Repair Company where the entire text is read out loud over the course of an afternoon and evening (with a dinner break) and dramatized by the performers – one of the best theatrical experiences I’ve ever enjoyed.

After the doctor’s exam, the phlebotomist who drew my blood for the blood tests also asked what I was reading. He had also read it, asked me if I’d seen any of the movie versions (I haven’t) and then recommended a favorite book of his called Last Call, a non-fiction book about Prohibition. I always try to honor book recommendations so I’ll probably read that soon. It sounds interesting. It turns out it was the basis for a Ken Burns documentary which I did see.

The Great Gatsby is perfect. It’s a gem of a novel. I understood as I read it this time why it worked so well for the Elevator Repair Company as a performance text. There is nothing superfluous where a theater audience would get bored. It’s tight. There are no meanderings or indulgences, which doesn’t mean it’s spare, I mean that every part is necessary and exactly what it should be, including the details. It’s funny, and heart-breaking, and shocking in a few places, and a bit of a thriller at the end, and just a thorough pleasure on every page.

What I experienced new for this reading is how much the novel is a love story. Gatsby’s love for Daisy, his missed chance, her materialism and his idealism, his simplicity and her snobbery are really the story. You root for Gatsby in the part of the novel where his love for Daisy is introduced while he’s stationed at Camp Taylor in Louisville and she’s a local rich girl. You sympathize with him as he’s shipped out and loses her. She waits for awhile and they write letters but when the war ends and he doesn’t return immediately, because he’s spending a few months at Oxford, she moves on and marries Tom Buchanan, the rich guy from Chicago. And then, before you know all this in the novel, you smile at Gatsby’s terrified attempts to reconnect with Daisy after Gatsby has made himself into the man he thinks she would love, and his euphoria when it turns out she actually does love him, at least as far as she is capable, and his despair where he loses her again.

That’s really the story but it’s told in a more complicated way than I remembered as the narrator, Nick Carraway, who knows Tom Buchanan from school (they were at Yale together), and is a “second cousin once removed” to Daisy, and who just happens to rent the house next door to Gatsby, who is otherwise a stranger to Nick, slowly involves himself in their three lives and pieces together their relationships and Gatsby’s mysterious past.

Chapter One is Nick establishing himself in New York and renting the house in a fictional community on Long Island Sound called “West Egg”. Here’s another new learning for me from this re-reading. West Egg and its counterpart East Egg across the bay, are not on the east end of Long Island where I had pictured them, but on the north side of the island close in toward Manhattan. Nick, like many of Fitzgerald’s characters from his other novels, and including also in this novel Tom, Daisy, and Gatsby, is an east coast transfer from the mid-west. Nick, again like many of Fitzgerald’s men, is an ivy-league graduate: it’s Yale for Nick Carraway, Harvard for Anthony Patch in The Beautiful and Damned, Princeton (Fitzgerald’s actual alma mater) for Amory Blaine in This Side of Paradise, and both Nick and Gatsby are war veterans, as is Amory Blaine, but not, in fact, Fitzgerald himself.

Nick arrives in New York in June, 1922 and takes up a job as a bond salesman. The novel takes place over that summer ending in October. A few pages in, Nick drives over to East Egg to visit Tom and Daisy (his school mate and cousin). He meets there, also, Jordan Baker, a professional golfer who Nick will have an inconsequential and short-lived affair with.

Chapter Two is Tom driving Nick into the city. They stop mid-way to pick up Tom’s girlfriend, Myrtle Wilson, at an automobile repair shop owned by her husband George Wilson in a desolate section of Long Island Nick describes as the Valley of Ashes, overseen by the watchful eyes of the optometrist Dr. T. J. Eckleberg on a billboard. Nick attends an uncomfortable party in the apartment that Tom rents as a love nest for he and Myrtle on the Upper (way upper) West Side at 158th Street. Also attending are Myrtle’s sister who is the cover for Myrtle’s frequent visits to the city, and the downstairs neighbors Mr. and Mrs. McKee and a dog that Myrtle buys on a whim.

Chapter Three is a fabulous party at Gatsby’s. A mistaken view of this novel is that the entire novel is fabulous parties at Gatsby’s, in fact, this is the only one. There’s one more party, which comes off as a dud, and that’s it. Here, Nick wanders over to his neighbor’s house. He’s one of the few persons at the party who’s actually invited, but hasn’t yet met Gatsby. Nick finally meets him, the title character, on page 46, nearly a third of the way into the novel. The chapter ends, after the party ends, with a nice little paragraph where Nick, “Reading over what I’ve written so far” (p. 53) corrects the reader’s forgivable impression that his whole summer is consumed by Gatsby, Tom, and Daisy. Actually, he’s working long hours trying to make it in the bond business, though that isn’t the story he wants to tell.

Chapter Four, Gatsby drives Nick into town. They have lunch with an (ahem) business acquaintance of Gatsby’s named Meyer Wolfsheim, an organized crime, con-man type. We learn later that this “gonegtion” (in Wolfsheim’s pronunciation) is how Gatsby from a poor family in North Dakota made his fortune. Gatsby wants to prepare Nick to hear a proposal that Miss Baker is going to make to him on Gatsby’s behalf later that afternoon. The convoluted communication reflects Gatsby’s timidity about a supremely consequential event for him. That afternoon, at tea, Jordan she tells Nick that she was there, in 1917, when Lieutenant Gatsby met Daisy in Louisville, Kentucky, then goes on to tell the rest of that story: Gatsby gone away, Daisy marries Tom, they have a daughter together (now three years old) and they end up in their mansion in East Egg where, from Nick’s visit, Daisy learned for the first time that Gatsby had taken the house across the bay from them. Gatsby’s proposal, given through Jordan, is that Nick should invite Daisy to tea at Nick’s house so that Gatsby can “coincidentally” drop-in and reconnect with her.

Chapter Five is the tea at Nick’s: charming and sweet, followed by Gatsby taking Daisy and Nick on a tour of Gatsby’s house. The reunited lovers re-ignite their love. Gatsby is ecstatic.

Chapter Six. First we get a little of Gatsby’s origin story. His legal name is James Gatz. Filled with ambition he determines to re-make himself: educated, worldly, wealthy. He gets a start by running into a role model in the person of Dan Cody sailing a yacht on Lake Superior. Gatz, now calling himself Jay Gatsby, attaches himself to Dan Cody and they sail the world until Cody dies leaving Gatsby money that he’s then cheated out of. The rest of the chapter is the second party at Gatsby’s. Tom and Daisy attend this one. Daisy doesn’t enjoy herself so that’s the end of Gatsby’s parties. This is both the high point of Gatsby and Daisy’s affair and the beginning of the end.

Chapter Seven. Disaster. It begins with lunch at Tom and Daisy’s. Nick is there. Gatsby is there. Jordan Baker is there. The five decide to drive into town. They take two cars: Tom’s blue coupe, Gatsby’s yellow roadster. Tom, driving Gatsby’s car with Nick and Jordan stops at George Wilson’s repair shop for gas. George has figured out that Myrtle is having an affair, but he doesn’t know who with. He plans to sell the shop and take her away. In Manhattan, the five rent a suite at the Plaza hotel and the whole mess comes out. Gatsby berates Daisy into telling Tom that she never loved him. Everyone’s upset with everyone. They drive back home. As Gatsby and Daisy drive past Wilson’s shop, now driving his own yellow roadster, Myrtle runs out into the road to confront them (thinking this is Tom in the car he was driving earlier). With a second car coming the other way, Daisy, driving, can’t swerve to the left or stop in time so she hits Myrtle, killing her, and drives away. Tom, Nick, and Jordan, come across the scene a little later as a crowd is already gathering. Gatsby drives home, hides his car in his garage and then takes Daisy home in a taxi. Nick finds him there later. He’s standing outside all night to make sure Tom doesn’t harm her. Nick learns that it was Daisy driving the car that killed Myrtle.

Chapter Eight. Now, finally, later that night and into the next day, back at Gatsby’s house, Nick learns the full story of James Gatz from the man Gatz became: Jay Gatsby. Nick goes into town to do some work. And then, and here’s another complication in the way Fitzgerald plots his story, Nick goes back and tells us what happened at George’s shop after Myrtle died. This is the only part of the story that Nick didn’t observe directly. George becomes convinced that “the man in the car” was the man having the affair with his wife and that he killed Myrtle deliberately to cover it up. George decides to take revenge. He tracks down the car, shoots Gatsby, then kills himself.

Chapter Nine. Two years later (the book was published in 1925), Nick narrates the rest of that day from the summer of 1922. Gatsby is laid out in his house. Tom and Daisy have gone away. Nick tries to get folks to come to a funeral but all of Gatsby’s friends abandon him, showing how superficial the whole thing was. Nick goes into town to find Wolfsheim, thinking that was a real relationship. Wolfsheim won’t come either, but we do get a final confirmation of the illegal ways that Gatsby made his fortune. Finally, Gatsby’s father shows up, proud of his son, amazed at the house. Nick, haunted by the events of the summer, decides to move back west. He breaks things off with Jordan Baker, who tells him she’s engaged to someone else. And, at the very last, in late October, Nick runs into Tom and learns that George Wilson had first come to Tom and Daisy’s house that final day and it was Tom that told George that it was Gatsby that had killed Myrtle and where George could find him, although Nick knows and maybe Tom doesn’t, that Daisy had been the one driving. The novel ends with a beautiful, famous, coda meditating on the tragedy of Gatsby and all of us who have had happiness once, in the past, and think that we can have it again but when we move forward it only recedes further from our grasp.

An absolutely gorgeous book. I read it twice in college, for two different classes. I remember one professor making Gatsby a Jesus figure. He’s actually called “a son of God” in one place (p. 89) and that “he must be about His Father’s business, the service of a vast, vulgar and meretricious beauty.” The line before that is the famous, “Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself,” which gives him a kind of virgin birth. He’s a few years over thirty that summer, like Jesus at his death. And Gatsby’s death scene is narrated like the crucifixion. He hoists an air mattress on his shoulders (he’s going to the pool). He shifts it once and the chauffeur offers to help, like the fifth station of the cross. George shoots Gatsby and then kills himself, as Judas does. Gatsby dies for the sins of others: Tom’s affair with and Daisy’s killing of Myrtle.

The same professor pointed out a strange homosexual reference, too, which I’ve always remembered. It comes early in the novel, at the end of chapter two, when Nick is attending the party at Tom and Myrtle’s apartment in town. The evening ends when Tom breaks Myrtle’s nose. Nick follows the neighbor, the photographer Mr. McKee out the door, while Mrs. McKee stays behind. In the elevator, Mr. McKee invites Nick to lunch, solicitously, one could imagine, and Nick agrees. They ride down together and the elevator boy snaps, “Keep your hands off the lever,” again, suggestive of something, if you squint a bit. And then, instead of Nick simply leaving the building to go home, after three dots: “…I was standing beside his bed and he was sitting up between the sheets, clad in his underwear, with a great portfolio in his hands” (pp. 37-38). McKee is showing Nick his photographs, and maybe something else. Hmm… For the rest of the novel Nick pursues an affair with Jordan Baker, and yes, she has a man’s name, and yes, she’s a golfer, but there’s nothing else to make a reader suspicious of Nick’s sexuality, not that it matters.

I realize now that there is yet one more Fitzgerald novel that doesn’t yet appear on my reading list. I read Tender is the Night years ago, after I got interested in Gerald and Sara Murphy. But that was before I started this diary. I should probably read that again, too, sometime.

Anyway, a great book, one of the best, worth several re-readings.

I write a diary entry like this after every book I read, mostly novels, mostly the best of nineteenth and twentieth century literature.  To see other entires on my reading list click here.