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F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
THE
GREAT GATSBY
A Novel
Francis Scott Fitzgerald (1896—1940) was an outstanding American novelist
and short story writer. In his best works, Fitzgerald described convincingly the
tragedy of man in capitalist society. The lust for money, inherent in the so-
called "American Way of Life", proved a curse to many of his characters, and
sometimes they became victims of their own wealth — like Major Jay Gatsby
in this book.
The Great Gatsby
(1925), Fitzgerald's best novel, is rightly considered to be a
masterpiece of the 20th century American literature.
Other novels by Francis Scott Fitzgerald:
This Side of Paradise
(1920),
The Beautiful and Damned
(1922),
Tender Is the
Night
(1934),
The Last Tycoon
(uncompleted, published posthumously in
1941). His best collection of short stories:
Tales of the Jazz Age
(1922).
CHAPTER I
In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice
that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.
"Whenever you feel like criticizing any one," he told me, "just remember
that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had."
He didn't say any more, but we've always been unusually communicative in
a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In
consequence, I'm inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up
many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran
bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality
when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was
unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret grief’s
of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought— frequently I
have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some
unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon; for
the intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they
express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions.
Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of
missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I
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snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parceled out
unequally at birth.
And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it
has a limit. Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes, but
after a certain point I don't care what it's founded on. When I came back from
the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort
of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged
glimpses into the human heart. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to
this book, was exempt from my reaction — Gatsby, who represented
everything for which I have an unaffected scorn. If personality is an unbroken
series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him;
some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one
of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away.
This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which
is dignified under the name of the "creative temperament"— it was an
extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in
any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again. No —
Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul
dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest
in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.
My family has been prominent, well-to-do people in this Middle Western
city for three generations. The Carraways are something of a clan, and we
have a tradition that we're descended from the Dukes of Buccleuch, but the
actual founder of my line was my grandfather's brother, who came here in
fifty-one, ""sent a substitute to the Civil War, and started the 'J 'wholesale
hardware business that my father carries on to-day.
I never saw this great-uncle, but I'm supposed to look like him — with
special reference to the rather hardboiled painting that hangs in father's office. I
graduated from New Haven in 1915, just a quarter of a century after my father,
and a little later I participated in that delayed Teutonic migration known as the
Great War. I enjoyed the counter-raid so thoroughly that I came back restless.
Instead of being the warm center of the world, the Middle West now seemed
like the ragged edge of the universe — so I decided to go East and learn the
bond business. Everybody I knew was in the bond business, so I supposed it
could support one more single man. All my aunts and uncles talked it over as if
they were choosing a prep school for me, and finally said, "Why — ye-es,"
with very grave, hesitant faces. Father agreed to finance me for a year, and
after various delays I came East, permanently, I thought, in the spring of
twenty-two.
The practical thing was to find rooms in the city, but it was a warm season,
and I had just left a country of wide lawns and friendly trees, so when a
young man at the office suggested that we take a house together in a
commuting town, it sounded like a great idea. He found the house, a weather-
beaten cardboard bungalow at eighty a month, but at the last minute the firm
ordered him to Washington, and I went out to the country alone. I had a
dog— at least I had him for a few days until he ran away— and an old
Dodge and a Finnish woman, who made my bed and cooked breakfast and
muttered Finnish wisdom to herself over the electric stove.
It was lonely for a day or so until one morning some man, more recently
arrived than I, stopped me on the road.
"How do you get to West Egg village?" he asked helplessly.
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I told him. And as I walked on I was lonely no longer. I was a guide, a
pathfinder, an original settler. He had casually conferred on me the freedom of
the neighborhood.
And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees,
just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was
beginning over again with the summer.
There was so much to read, for one thing, and so much fine health to be
pulled down out of the young breath-giving air. I bought a dozen volumes on
banking and credit and investment securities, and they stood on my shelf in red
and gold like new money from the mint, promising to unfold the shining se-
crets that only Midas and Morgan and Maecenas knew. And I had the high
intention of reading many other books besides. I was rather literary in
college— one year I wrote a series of very solemn and obvious editorials for
the
Yale News —
and now I was going to bring back all such things into my life
and become again that most limited of all specialists, the "well-rounded man."
This isn't just an epigram — life is much more successfully looked at from a
single window, after all.
It was a matter of chance that I should have rented a house in one of the
strangest communities in North America. It was on that slender riotous island
which extends itself due east of New York— and where there are, among other
natural curiosities, two unusual formations of land. Twenty miles from the city
a pair of enormous eggs, identical in contour and separated only by a courtesy
bay, jut out into the most domesticated body of salt water in the Western
hemisphere, the great wet barnyard of Long Island Sound. They are not perfect
ovals — like the egg in the Columbus story, they are both crushed flat at the
contact end — but their physical resemblance must be a source of perpetual
confusion to the gulls that fly overhead. To the wingless a more arresting
phenomenon is their dissimilarity in every particular except shape and size.
I lived at West Egg, the—well, the less fashionable of the two, though this is
a most superficial tag to express the bizarre and not a little sinister contrast
between them. My house was at the very tip of the egg, only fifty yards from
the Sound, and squeezed between two huge places that rented for twelve or
fifteen thousand a season. The one on my right was a colossal affair by any
standard — it was a factual imitation of some Hotel de Ville in Normandy,
with a tower on one side, spanking new under a thin beard of raw ivy, and a
marble swimming pool, and more than forty acres of lawn and garden. It was
Gatsby's mansion. Or, rather, as I didn't know Mr. Gatsby, it was a mansion,
inhabited by a gentleman of that name. My own house was an eyesore, but it
was a small eyesore, and it had been overlooked, so I had a view of the water,
a partial view of my neighbor's lawn, and the consoling proximity of mil-
lionaires — all for eighty dollars a month.
Across the courtesy bay the white palaces of fashionable East Egg glittered
along the water, and the history of the summer really begins on the evening I
drove over there to have dinner with the Tom Buchahans. Daisy was my
second cousin once removed, and I'd known Tom in college. And just after the
war I spent two days with them in Chicago.
Her husband, among various physical accomplishments, had been one of the
most powerful ends that ever played football at New Haven — a national fi-
gure in a way, one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at
twenty-one that everything afterward savors of anticlimax. His family were
enormously wealthy — even in college his freedom with money was a matter
for reproach — but now he'd left Chicago and come East in a fashion that
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rather took your breath away; for instance, he'd brought down a string of polo
ponies from Lake Forest. It was hard to realize that a man in my own
generation was wealthy enough to do that.
Why they came East I don't know. They had spent a year in France for no
particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people
played polo and were rich together. This was a permanent move, said Daisy
over the telephone, but I didn't believe it — I had no sight into Daisy's heart,
but I felt that Tom would drift on forever seeking, a little wistfully, for the
dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game.
And so it happened that on a warm windy evening I drove over to East Egg
to see two old friends whom I scarcely knew at all. Their house was even more
elaborate than I expected, a cheerful red-and-white Georgian Colonial
mansion, overlooking the bay. The lawn started at the beach and ran toward the
front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sundials and brick walks and
burning gardens — finally when it reached the house drifting up the side in
bright vines as though from the momentum of its run. The front was broken by
a line of French windows, glowing now with reflected gold and wide open to
the warm windy afternoon, and Tom Buchanan in riding clothes was standing
with his legs apart on the front porch.
He had changed since his New Haven years. Now he was a sturdy straw-
haired man of thirty with a rather hard mouth and a supercilious manner. Two
shining arrogant eyes had established dominance over his face and gave him
the appearance of always leaning aggressively forward. Not even the effemi-
nate swank of his riding clothes could hide the enormous power of that body —
he seemed to fill those glistening boots until he strained the top lacing, and you
could see a great pack of muscle shifting when his shoulder moved under his
thin coat. It was a body capable of enormous leverage — a cruel body.
His speaking voice, a gruff husky tenor, added to the impression of
fractiousness he conveyed. There was a touch of paternal contempt in it, even
toward people he liked — and there were men at New Haven who had hated
his guts.
"Now, don't think my opinion on these matters is final," he seemed to say,
"just because I'm stronger and more of a man than you are." We were in the
same senior society, and while we were never intimate I always had the
impression that he approved of me and wanted me to like him with some harsh,
defiant wistfulness of his own.
We talked for a few minutes on the sunny porch.
"I've got a nice place here," he said, his eyes flashing about restlessly.
Turning me around by one arm, he moved a broad flat hand along the front
vista, including in its sweep a sunken Italian garden, a half acre of deep,
pungent roses, and a snub-nosed motorboat that bumped the tide offshore.
"It belonged to Demaine, the oil man." He turned me around again, politely
and abruptly. "We'll go inside."
We walked through a high hallway into a bright rosy-colored space, fragilely
bound into the house by French windows at either end. The windows were ajar
and gleaming white against the fresh grass outside that seemed to grow a little
way into the house. A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one
end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted
wedding-cake of the ceiling, and then rippled over the wine-colored rug,
making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea.
The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch
on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored
4
balloon. They were both in white, and their dresses were rippling and fluttering
as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house. I
must have stood for a few moments listening to the whip and snap of the
curtains and the groan of a picture on the wall. Then there was a boom as Tom
Buchanan shut the rear windows and the caught wind died out about the room,
and the curtains and the rugs and the two young women ballooned slowly to
the floor.
The younger of the two was a stranger to me. She was extended full length at
her end of the divan, completely motionless, and with her chin raised a little, as
if she were balancing something on it, which was quite likely to fall. If she saw
me out of the corner of her eyes she gave no hint of it — indeed, I was almost
surprised into murmuring an apology for having disturbed her by coming in.
The other girl, Daisy, made an attempt to rise — she leaned slightly forward
with a conscientious expression — then she laughed, an absurd, charming little
laugh, and I laughed too and came forward into the room.
"I'm p-paralyzed with happiness."
She laughed again, as if she said something very witty, and held my hand for
a moment, looking up into my face, promising that there was no one in the
world she so much wanted to see. That was a way she had. She hinted in a
murmur that the surname of the balancing girl was Baker. (I've heard it said
that Daisy's murmur was only to make people lean toward her; an irrelevant
criticism that made it no less charming.)
At any rate, Miss Baker's lips fluttered, she nodded at me almost
imperceptibly, and then quickly tipped her head back again—the object she
was balancing had obviously tottered a little and given her something of a
fright. Again a sort of apology arose to my lips. Almost any exhibition of
complete self-sufficiency draws a stunned tribute from me.
I looked back at my cousin, who began to ask me questions in her low,
thrilling voice. It was the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down, as if
each speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again. Her
face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright
passionate mouth, but there was an excitement in her voice that men who had
cared for her found difficult to forget: a singing compulsion, a whispered
"Listen," a promise that she had done gay, exciting things just a while since
and that there were gay, exciting things hovering in the next hour.
I told her how I had stopped off in Chicago for a day on my way East, and
how a dozen people had sent their love through me.
"Do they miss me?" she cried ecstatically.
"The whole town is desolate. All the cars have the left rear wheel painted
black as a mourning wreath, and there's a persistent wail all night along the
north shore."
"How gorgeous! Let's go back, Tom. To-morrow!" Then she added
irrelevantly: "You ought to see the baby."
"I'd like to."
"She's asleep. She's three years old. Haven't you ever seen her?"
"Never."
"Well, you ought to see her. She's——"
Tom Buchanan, who had been hovering restlessly about the room, stopped
and rested his hand on my shoulder.
"What you doing, Nick?"
"I'm a bond man."
"Who with?"
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