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The Greatness of "Gatsby" Author(s): Charles Thomas Samuels Source: The Massachusetts Review, Vol. 7, No. 4 (Autumn, 1966), pp. 783-794Published by: The Massachusetts Review, Inc.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25087514Accessed: 17-05-2015 19:17 UTC

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Charles Thomas Samuels

The Greatness of "Gatsby"

The

Great Gatsby's excellence was immediately seen, but soon

the carping began. Mencken wrote "a most enthusiastic letter" to

Fitzgerald, in which he complained that "the central story was trivial

and a sort of anecdote. . . ." In a characteristic blend of modesty, temer

ity, and odd spelling, Fitzgerald replied: "Without making any invidious

comparisons between Class A and Class C, if my novel is an anecdote so is The Brothers Karamazoff."

Nevertheless, Fitzgerald granted Mencken's point and agreed that it

had been a mistake to becloud the relationship between Gatsby and

Daisy from the time of their reunion until Gatsby's death. Yet Fitz

gerald's error was his triumph. Had he dramatized that relationship he would have been validating a sham. There could be no fulfillment of

Gatsby's tragic dream. Fitzgerald shows all that happens or could have

happened: Daisy joyfully crying into Gatsby's shirts; Gatsby realizing, at

last, that her siren's voice was merely full of money; Daisy's failure in

the hotel room and in the accident; Myrtle's mangled body and

Gatsby's on the float, turned from its "accidental course" by the "touch

of a cluster of leaves."

Fitzgerald gave his critics more than their due, and some such im

balance has always marred appraisal of his work. What Owl-eyes de

clared at Gatsby's grave and Dorothy Parker so affectingly repeated over

Fitzgerald's has sounded a flat note in the chorus of praise: "the

poor son of a bitch." However great the work, the man's life was a

fiasco?perhaps the work is not so great

as we thought. Can we

ignore the life in the writing? Surely Fitzgerald is Gatsby, as he admitted.

What else is Nick but a shield against the blinding rays of too easy, too

complete resemblance? If Fitzgerald was, in the words of an early and

sensitive critic, "the Authority of Failure," can he ever have succeeded?

Isn't there some softness at the heart of his masterpiece just as there was,

notoriously, the glaring sentimentalism in his life?the liquor, the mad

wife? Could so bad a risk be a great writer?

783



The Massachusetts Review

We have not been willing to leave his life alone. The current monu

ment in Fitzgerald studies, The Far Side of Paradisey contains page after page of Scott and Zelda in Paris and New York but only eight on the art in Gats by. It sees Nick as a structural device and an author's

therapy. The novel's meaning is reduced to a neat dichotomy between

East and West. We are told that the book's relevance was limited by Fitzgerald's total commitment to romantic ideals and that the Eyes of Dr. Eckleburg are merely an accidental gift from Max Perkins' pre mature dust jacket. Such are the uses of scholarship.

Since Mizener's biography, criticism has shot nearer the mark. Nick's

importance has been, at least, recognized; and the neat dichotomy be

tween East and West has been qualified so that the novel's profound criticism of American life seems, at last, clear. We need to show now

that Fitzgerald's most successful book is a great novel.

2

Its fundamental achievement is a triumph of language. I do not speak merely of the "flowers," the famous passages: Nick's

description of Gatsby yearning toward the green light on Daisy's dock,

Gatsby's remark that the Buchanans' love is "only personal," the book's last page. Throughout, The Great Gatsby has the precision and splendor of a

lyric poem, yet well-wrought prose is merely one of its triumphs.

Fitzgerald's distinction in this novel is to have made language celebrate itself. Among other things, The Great Gatsby is about the power of art.

This celebration of literary art is inseparable from the novel's second

great achievement?its management of point of view, the creation of

Nick. With his persona, Fitzgerald obtained more than objectivity and concentration of effect. Nick describes more than the experience which

he witnesses; he describes the act and consequences of telling about it.

The persona is?as critics have been seeing?a character, but he is more

than that: he is a character engaged in a significant action.

Nick is writing a book. He is recording Gatsby's experience ; in the act

of recording Gatsby's experience he discovers himself.

Though his prose has all along been creating for us Gatsby's "ro mantic readiness," almost until the very end Nick insists that he deplores

Gatsby's "appalling sentimentality." This is not a reasoned judgment. Nick disapproves because he cannot yet affirm. He is a Jamesian specta tor, a fastidious intelligence ill-suited to profound engagement of life.

But writing does profoundly engage life. In writing about Gatsby, Nick

alters his attitude toward his subject and ultimately toward his own life.

784



The Greatness of "Gatsby

As his book nears completion his identification with Gatsby grows. His final affirmation is his sympathetic understanding of Gatsby and the book

which gives his sympathy form: both are a celebration of life; each is a gift of language. This refinement on James's use of the persona might be the cause of Eliot's assertion that The Great Gatsby represented the

first advance which the American novel had made since James. In Nick's opening words we find an uncompleted personality. There

are contradictions and perplexities which (when we first read the passage) are easily ignored, because of the characteristic suavity of his prose. He

begins the chronicle, whose purpose is an act of judgment and whose title is an evaluation, by declaring an inclination "to reserve all judg

ments." The words are scarcely digested when we find him judging:

The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality [toler

ance] when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in col

lege I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was

privy to the

secret griefs of wild, unknown men.

The tone is unmistakable?a combination of moral censure, self-pro

tectiveness, and final saving sympathy that marks Nick as an outsider who is nonetheless drawn to the life he is afraid to enter. So when he

tells us a little later in the passage that "Reserving judgments is a

matter of infinite hope," we know that this and not the noblesse

oblige he earlier advanced explains his fear of judging. Nick cannot help

judging, but he fears a world in which he is constantly beset by objects

worthy of rejection. He is "a little afraid of missing something" ; that is

why he hears the promise in Daisy's voice, half-heartedly entertains the

idea of loving Jordan Baker, and becomes involved with the infinite

hope of Jay Gatsby?"Gatsby, who represented everything for which

[Nick had] an unaffected scorn."

When Nick begins the book he feels the same ambivalence toward

Gatsby that characterizes his attitude toward life: a simultaneous en

chantment and revulsion which places him "within and without." When

he has finished, he has become united with Gatsby, and he judges

Gatsby great. Finally he has something to admire ; contemplating Gatsby redeems him from the "foul dust [which had] temporarily closed out

[his] interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded dations of men."

The economy with which Fitzgerald presents those sorrows and short

winded dations is another of the book's major achievements. In The

Great Gatsby Fitzgerald contrived to develop a story by means of

symbols while at the same time investing those symbols with vivid

785




actuality. Everything in the book is symbolic, from Gatsby's ersatz

mansion to the wild and aimless parties which he gives there, yet every

thing seems so "true to life" that some critics continue to see that novel

primarily as a recreation of the 20's. The Great Gatsby is about the

20's only in the sense that Moby Dick is about whaling or that The

Scarlet Letter is about Puritan Boston. Comparing the liveliness of Fitz

gerald's book with Melville's or, better still, with Hawthorne's (which resembles its tight dramatic structure and concentration), you have a

good indication of the peculiar distinction in Fitzgerald's work.

Of the novel's symbols, only the setting exists without regard to

verisimilitude, purely to project meaning. The Great Gatsby has four

locales: East Egg, home of the rich Buchanans and their ultra-tradi

tional Georgian Colonial mansion; West Egg where the once-rich and

the parvenus live and where Gatsby apes the splendor of the Old

World; the wasteland of the average man; and New York, where Nick

labors, ironically, at the "Probity Trust." East and West Egg are

"crushed flat at the contact end"; they represent the collision of dream

and dreamer which is dramatized when Gatsby tries to establish his

"universe of ineffable gaudiness" through the crass materials of the real

world. The wasteland is a valley of ashes in which George Wilson dis

penses gasoline to the irresponsible drivers from East and West Egg,

eventually yielding his wife to their casual lust and cowardly violence.

Fitzgerald's world represents iconographically a sterile, immoral

society. Over this world brood the blind eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg: the sign for an oculist's business which was never

opened, the symbol of

a blindness which can never be corrected. Like other objects in the book

to which value might be attached, the eyes of Dr. Eckleburg are a

cheat. They are not a

sign of God, as Wilson thinks, but only an ad

vertisement?like the false promise of Daisy's moneyed voice, or the

green light on her dock, which is invisible in the mist.

These monstrous eyes are the novel's major symbol. The book's chief

characters are blind, and they behave blindly. Gatsby does not see

Daisy's vicious emptiness, and Daisy, deluded, thinks she will reward her

gold-hatted lover until he tries to force from her an affirmation she is

too weak to make. Tom is blind to his hypocrisy; with "a short deft

movement" he breaks Myrtle's nose for daring

to mention the name

of the wife she is helping him to deceive. Before her death, Myrtle mistakes Jordan for Daisy. Just as she had always mistaken Tom for

salvation from the ash-heap, she blindly rushes for his car in her need

to escape her lately informed husband, and is struck down. Moreover,

786




Daisy is driving the car ; and the man with her is Gatsby, not Tom. The

final act of blindness is specifically associated with Dr. Eckleburg's eyes. Wilson sees them as a sign of righteous judgment and righteously pro

ceeds to work God's judgment on earth. He kills Gatsby, but Gatsby is

the wrong man. In the whole novel, only Nick sees. And his vision

comes slowly, in the act of writing the book.

The act of writing the book is, as I have said, an act of judgment. Nick wants to know why Gatsby "turned out all right in the end,"

despite all the phoniness and crime which fill his story, and why Gatsby was the only one who turned out all right. For, in writing about the

others, Nick discovers the near ubiquity of folly and despair. The novel's people are exemplary types of the debasement of life

which is Fitzgerald's subject. Daisy, Tom, and Jordan lack the inner

resources to enjoy what their wealth can

give them. They show the

peculiar folly of the American dream. At the pinnacle, life palls.

Daisy is almost unreal. When Nick first sees her she seems to be floating in midair. Her famous protestation of grief ("I'm sophisticated. God, I'm

sophisticated") is accompanied by an "absolute smirk." Her extravagant

love for Gatsby is a sham, less real than the unhappy but fleshly bond

with Tom which finally turns them into "conspirators." Her beauty is a

snare. Like Tom's physical prowess, it neither pleases her nor insures her

pleasure in others. Tom forsakes Daisy for Myrtle and both for "stale

ideas." Jordan's balancing act is a trick; like her sporting reputation,

a

precarious lie. They are all rich and beautiful?and unhappy.

Yearning toward them are Myrtle and Gatsby. Like Gatsby, Myrtle desires "the youth and mystery that wealth imprisons and preserves.

. .

gleaming . . . above the hot struggles of the poor." Unlike him, her

"panting vitality" is wholly physical, merely pathetic; whereas Gatsby's quest is spiritual and tragic. Myrtle is maimed and victimized by Daisy's selfish fear of injury (Daisy could have crashed into another car but, at

the last minute, loses heart and runs Myrtle down) ; Gatsby's death is

but the final stage of disillusionment, and he suffers voluntarily.

Gatsby is, of course, one of the major achievements I have been not

ing. Although we see little of him and scarcely ever hear him speak, his

presence is continually with us; and he exists, as characters in fiction

seldom do, as a life force. He recalls the everlasting yea of Carlyle, as

well as the metaphysical rebellion of Camus. His "heightened sensitivity to

the promise of life" is but one half of his energy; the other being a pas sionate denial of life's limitations. Gatsby's devotion to Daisy is an im

plicit assault on the human condition. His passion would defy time and

787




decay to make the glorious first moment of wonder, which is past, eternally

present. His passion is supra-sexual, even

super-personal. In his famous

remark to Nick about Daisy's love for Tom, he is making two asser

tions: that the "things between Daisy and Tom [which Tom insists] he'll never know" are merely mundane and that the Daisy which he loves is not the Daisy which Tom had carried down from the Punch

Bowl but the Daisy who "blossomed for him like a flower," incarnating his dream, the moment he kissed her. Gatsby's love for life is finally an

indictment of the life he loves. Life does not reward such devotion, nor, for that reason, does it deserve it. Gatsby is great for having paid life the

compliment of believing its promise. When Hamlet dies amidst the carnage of his bloody quest for

justice, he takes with him the promise that seeming will coincide with

being and the hope that man can strike a blow for truth and save a

remnant of the universe. When Ahab dies a victim to his own harpoon,

he kills the promise that man may know his life and the hope that

knowledge will absolve him. When Gatsby dies, more innocently than

they (since, though a "criminal," he lacks utterly their taste for

destruction), he kills a promise

more poignant and perhaps

more

precious, certainly more inclusive than theirs: Gatsby kills the promise

that desire can ever be gratified.

In addition to the story of Gatsby and Daisy and the parable of

America which that story suggests and which finds its marvelous adum

bration in Nick's last words, The Great Gatsby tells another tale: a

tale of the blindness of desire and of the rock-like indifference of the

universe. Nothing lives up to your image of it. This romantic agony,

formerly expressed by Fitzgerald's beloved Keats, is the major theme

which animates Fitzgerald's masterpiece. In the uneven novel which im

mediately preceded Gatsbyy Fitzgerald clearly articulated what had al

ways been his tragic sense of life. The epigraph to The Beautiful and the

Damnedy "written" by its hero, dourly observes that "the Victor belongs to the spoils." Midway in the fable which exemplifies this sad moral, its

author, Anthony Patch, cries out:

. . . desire just cheats you. It's like a sunbeam skipping here and there about a

room. It stops and gilds some inconsequential object, and we poor fools try to grasp it?but when we do the sunbeam moves on to something else, and

you've got the inconsequential part, but the glitter that made you want it is

gone.

Anthony's observation is the donn?e of Fitzgerald's fiction. The

Great Gatsbyys characters respond in one of three ways to this un

788



The Greatness of "Gatsby9

fortunate truth. The Buchanans and Jordan avoid deep attachments

( Daisy thinks to make Nick fall in love with Jordan by accidentally locking them in linen closets), and drift "unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together." Wilson and Nick escape the

phantom of desire by not desiring. Myrtle, stupidly, and Gatsby, grandly, take life's gambit, are cheated, and destroyed. Whatever their

modus vwendiy all of these people are

unhappy. Hamlet is a tragedy of the moral sense. Moby Dick is a tragedy of

the intelligence. The Great Gatsby is a tragedy of the will.

Intensity of will makes Gatsby a great man. Despite the barrenness of his beginnings, despite the evil world of Dan Cody which was his first reward, despite Daisy's selfish denial and final treason, Gatsby believes in the promise of life. He will believe?this is his tragedy and vin

dication?despite his knowledge that life cannot repay his devotion.

Gatsby knows that desire is a cheat, yet he persists in his aspirations? I do not think that this fact has been properly appreciated. In the

magnificent passage which ends the sixth chapter and which forms a

climactic stage in Nick's growing comprehension of Gatsby, Nick

imagines the scene in which Gatsby first kisses the girl of his dreams. The night is suitably bathed in moonlight. (In The Beautiful and Damned Fitzgerald concludes Anthony's rumination on the nature of

desire by remarking how "the moon, at its perennial labor of covering the bad complexion of the world, showered its illicit honey over the

drowsy street."). The entire universe seems to participate in Gatsby's

passion. There is "a stir and bustle among the stars;" there is the

equinox with its "

mysterious excitement." Then Gatsby imagines

that the blocks of the sidewalks really formed a ladder and mounted to a secret

place above the trees?he could climb to it, if he climbed alone, and once there

he could suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder.

If Gatsby remained unattached, if he had not grown up to adult

sexuality, he could have gained the mystical ecstasy which his imagina tion sought. "He knew that when he kissed [Daisy], and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never

romp again like the mind of God." Despite this knowledge, Gatsby chooses life. He hesitates, "listening for a moment longer to the

tuning-fork that had struck upon a star." Finally, he renounces the

innocent, pre-sexual, other-worldliness which alone brings one in

contact with ideality to marry the temporal, perishable, sexual world. Like God, he renounces unlimited promise for love of humanity. He

789




permits the incarnation, and from that moment he is weaned from the

"milk of wonder" and born into the world of sex, cash, and ashes.

Gatsby's choice is made in the fullness of knowledge. Moreover, he

comprehends his subsequent ordeal. On the book's second page, Nick

compares Gatsby to a

seismograph, a

wonderfully responsive machine.

When Daisy comes to the mansion which Gatsby purchased only for her, he has become another machine?a clock. But since Gatsby's desire to

confound time and return to the source of wonder has reached "an in

conceivable pitch of intensity," the clock is running down. When Daisy puts her arm

through Gatsby's, she loses the enchantment of distance,

and Nick notes that her green light is no longer a star to Gatsby but

merely "a green light on a dock." Throughout the novel, Nick hears

promise in Daisy's voice; Gatsby realizes that it is full only of money.

Gatsby knows the desperate game he is playing, and his fervent pas sion is controlled by form (for all his vulgarity, Gatsby is elegant, a

figure in a ritual). He represents, in short, a formed attempt to reorder

reality, to wrest for the will a hitherto impossible victory. Gatsby is also a kind of artist; but whereas Nick works with words, Gatsby works

with life. Life is the more recalcitrant.

Through a special discipline, Gatsby ignores what he knows in order to pursue his quest. Only before he dies can he understand that "he

had lost the old warm world; "

only then will he look at the sky "through

frightening leaves" and see "what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass."

Through the greater discipline of art, Nick is able to see the real

landscape and affirm the glory of life. He can see Gatsby's vulgarity as well as his greatness. Words save Nick from Gatsby's catastrophe

for they hold life at bay and permit contemplation, but Gatsby gives Nick a life worth celebrating in language and therefore the will to write as

well as the will to live.

Which brings me back where I started. Nick. Nick and Gatsby.

They are the novel's subject. Their relationship. We follow Nick's

development in the novel?Gatsby is static?and we reach the first

stage in his growth when he meets Gatsby. Writing the first chapter, Nick is still a divided, deluded man. He writes not out of knowledge pos

sessed, conclusions reached, but in an attempt to know and to conclude.

This, more even than the superb prose, gives the book its air of happen

ing now. Though Nick tells us he reserves judgments, though he brags about his tolerance, he is quickly revolted by Tom Buchanan. Before

Tom even speaks, Nick recalls that "there were men at New Haven

790




who had hated [Tom's] guts." Though Nick comes ultimately to un

derstand Daisy's moral squalor, he is initially taken in. He sees her in

sincerity, but he expects her to run from the house, baby in arms, and

ask him to take her away from Tom. His reaction to Buchanan's steril

ity is naive. He wants to flee Tom's love nest with its middle class

pretension (Myrtle's furniture tapestried with scenes of ladies swinging in the gardens of Versailles, her "impressive hauteur" which results

from a change of costume). After seeing that, he can

only get drunk.

The sophistication he came East to attain has begun to produce inner

deadening. When Nick meets Gatsby, everything changes. Gatsby in

volves him in fife. Gatsby wins his admiration. Gatsby dies, and Nick lives.

From the first, Gatsby is contrasted with Daisy. Daisy's voice is cal

culated to make you lean toward her. Her grief is "a trick of some sort

to exact a contributory emotion." Gatsby "faced?or seemed to face?

the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you

with an irresistible prejudice in your favor." Totally self-absorbed as he

is, Gatsby nevertheless brings life to others. He is the incarnating God.

He fails with Daisy; but, by the way and without plan, he succeeds in

bringing life to Nick. When once Gatsby is "delivered [to Nick] from

the womb of his purposeless splendor," Nick finds a raison acetre.

Nick had not been reserving judgment; he had been denying life.

He came East to flee home and the girl who was to help him settle

down there. After the war, the Mid-West bored him. Unable to find a place where he belongs, he comes East to find a new life, but finds

only a wasteland. Gatsby

saves him from cynical withdrawal, and, suit

ably, at the end of the book Nick goes home once more; not because

home is better but because it is home. Gatsby enables Nick to accept his own imperfect life.

But before that final acceptance Nick has to tell himself the truth.

Throughout the novel, Nick half-heartedly courts Jordan Baker, ex

plaining his indecisiveness with a characteristic bit of self-justification:

... I am slow-thinking and full of interior rules that act as brakes on my

desires, and I knew that first I had to get myself definitely out of that tangle

back home.

However, when Jordan calls Nick after Myrtle's death, he refuses to

see her because he is more interested in Gatsby than in the woman he

thinks he might love. Before the end of the book Jordan tells Nick that

he never loved her and that his whole treatment of her had been, de

spite his protestations, dishonest. Tauntingly, she accuses him :

791




". . . I thought you were rather an honest, straightforward person. I thought it was your secret pride."

"I'm thirty," [Nick replies] "I'm five years too old to lie to myself and

call it honor."

This is the measure of Nick's growth. Discovering Gatsby in the act of

writing about him, Nick discovers that he had deluded himself, that he had been dishonest, and that he had better go back and start all over.

Like everything else in this great novel, Nick's spiritual growth is

symbolically represented rather than discussed. In the last chapter the

stages in his identification with Gatsby are clearly depicted. After the

murder, Nick stands by Gatsby simply because "no one else was inter

ested?interested, I mean, with that intense personal interest to which

everyone has some vague right at the end." But when the others refuse

to come to Gatsby's funeral, Nick begins to feel "defiance, scornful

solidarity between Gatsby and me against them all." When Gatsby's father arrives, Nick admits that he and Gatsby "were close friends." In the famous last scene Nick affirms Gatsby's greatness by seeing him as

the prototype of the dreamers who established the new world.

This famous passage shows the greatness of Gatsby. It is richer and more beautiful than has been remarked.

Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any

lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And

as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradu

ally I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch

sailors' eyes?a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the

trees that had made way for Gatsby's house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a

transitory enchanted mo

ment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, com

pelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face

to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capac

ity for wonder.

And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of

Gatsby's wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy's

dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have

seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it

was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast

obscurity beyond the

city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter?tomorrow we will

run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning? So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

792



The Greatness of "Gatsby

Nick's final vision carefully parallels his other sympathetic vision of

Gatsby in chapter six. Taken together they figuratively combine all of the novel's themes. Gatsby and Daisy pass beyond the trees into a moon

lit scene where wonder lurked ; Nick sees through the "inessential"

world of Long Island to the trees which were cleared away to make a

place for that world. Like Gatsby who saw "the secret place above the

trees" where he could suck the pap of life, Nick sees the "green breast of the world" which "pandered in whispers" to the Dutch sailors who

sailed to find the promised land of America. But Nick also sees that the

promised land had been a cheat. Its greenness became Daisy's green

light ; not the fecund green of the forest but the green of machines and the money which buys them. Like the sailors, Gatsby tried to return to

the source of life, to imbibe wonder at its breast. But man ages, time

goes on, and life is a slow dying. Renouncing the secret place above the

trees, Gatsby embraces the flower Daisy; but daisies die. When Gatsby loved Daisy he lost his dream; when the sailors took the new world

they began the degradation of America's promise; when God saw what he had incarnated he went back to Heaven leaving only a blind sign of

the business he would not now open. The past is our future. We have come to the end of possibility.

3

The theme of Fitzgerald's novel is more inclusive and more shocking than we have known. Its subject is atrophy; the wasting away of the

self as one grows into the world of sex and money and time ; the wasting away of America as it grows from wilderness to civilization, of the uni

verse as it grows by its impossible plan.

Humanly, the novel reflects the disillusionment and the failure of

youthful dreams which is so marked a feature of man's lot. Culturally, it dramatizes, perhaps

more cogently than any other American novel,

the cause and cost of America's identification with eternal beginnings. Cosmically, it suggests the apocalyptic vision with which we have be come familiar in our literature, our intellectuals, and our newspapers.

It is the novel's greatest achievement to have painted this bleak pic ture with the brightest of colors. Never has the dying swan sung so

sweetly or so surely.

What gives the book its vitality, these words about death which are

not dead (surely, in our time, at once the greatest and the most diffi

cult of literary effects) ? First, there is the style. In it, everything is

heightened; by sheer audacity, sheer refusal to be tight-lipped about a

793




world that sets one's teeth on edge (what Hemingway, the brave,

lacked the courage to do), Fitzgerald is able to color the face of death, to turn the death agony into a gorgeous dance.

Then there is Nick, who is more than just a clever manipulation of

point of view. When we finish the last page we have no certainty that

Nick will escape the blind desire which drives the others, but we are sure

that he has, at least, seen life and glory. And that, surely, is no small

achievement, for he has made us see it too.

Finally, there is the incredible tightness in plotting, characterization

and detail. In Joyce's sense of the word, The Great Gatsby is one of

the few novels written in our language. In concentration of meaning,

nuance, and effect, there are few books in any language with which to

compare it. In haunting scenes, there are few literary works which live so

long in one's memory: Jordan and Daisy floating through the air on

a stationary couch ; the overturned auto with Owl-Eyes slowly climbing

out to proclaim that he does not know how it happened, that he doesn't

drive, and that he wasn't trying to drive; the director endlessly bending to kiss the starlet at Gatsby's party, thrilling Daisy with arrested sexu

ality; Daisy crying into Gatsby's shirts; the scene in the hotel room

where Daisy can only say that she "loved [Gatsby] too."

Fitzgerald's life, indeed we know by now, was wasteful. He cracked

up in the full glare of publicity in the pages of Esquire. His wife went

mad, and he drank quantities of liquor. Moreover, he died young, and

left one unfinished, not very interesting novel, and more trash than any

author of equal gifts. His work was fragmentary, frequently self-indul

gent, too often frivolous. He was the "authority of failure"; but that is, after all, not so small a portion of reality. When he had learned enough about his subject, he had the craft to make a

masterpiece of it.

The Great Gatsby is a novel for which a writer might give his life.

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The Massachusetts Review, Inc.

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