The Great Gatsby Page #13

The Great Gatsby is a 1925 novel by American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. Set in the Jazz Age on Long Island, near New York City, the novel depicts first-person narrator Nick Carraway's interactions with mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby and Gatsby's obsession to reunite with his former lover, Daisy Buchanan. The novel was inspired by a youthful romance Fitzgerald had with socialite Ginevra King, and the riotous parties he attended on Long Island's North Shore in 1922

• Fiction
• Novel

								

impression that the events of three nights several weeks apart were
all that absorbed me. On the contrary, they were merely casual events
in a crowded summer, and, until much later, they absorbed me
infinitely less than my personal affairs.

Most of the time I worked. In the early morning the sun threw my
shadow westward as I hurried down the white chasms of lower New York
to the Probity Trust. I knew the other clerks and young bond-salesmen
by their first names, and lunched with them in dark, crowded
restaurants on little pig sausages and mashed potatoes and coffee. 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.

I took dinner usually at the Yale Club—for some reason it was the
gloomiest event of my day—and then I went upstairs to the library and
studied investments and securities for a conscientious hour. There
were generally a few rioters around, but they never came into the
library, so it was a good place to work. After that, if the night was
mellow, I strolled down Madison Avenue past the old Murray Hill Hotel,
and over 33rd Street to the Pennsylvania Station.

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. I liked to walk up Fifth Avenue
and pick out romantic women from the crowd and imagine that in a few
minutes I was going to enter into their lives, and no one would ever
know or disapprove. Sometimes, in my mind, I followed them to their
apartments on the corners of hidden streets, and they turned and
smiled back at me before they faded through a door into warm
darkness. At the enchanted metropolitan twilight I felt a haunting
loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others—poor young clerks who
loitered in front of windows waiting until it was time for a solitary
restaurant dinner—young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant
moments of night and life.

Again at eight o’clock, when the dark lanes of the Forties were lined
five deep with throbbing taxicabs, bound for the theatre district, I
felt a sinking in my heart. Forms leaned together in the taxis as they
waited, and voices sang, and there was laughter from unheard jokes,
and lighted cigarettes made unintelligible circles inside. Imagining
that I, too, was hurrying towards gaiety and sharing their intimate
excitement, I wished them well.

For a while I lost sight of Jordan Baker, and then in midsummer I
found her again. At first I was flattered to go places with her,
because she was a golf champion, and everyone knew her name. Then it
was something more. I wasn’t actually in love, but I felt a sort of
tender curiosity. The bored haughty face that she turned to the world
concealed something—most affectations conceal something eventually,
even though they don’t in the beginning—and one day I found what it
was. When we were on a house-party together up in Warwick, she left a
borrowed car out in the rain with the top down, and then lied about
it—and suddenly I remembered the story about her that had eluded me
that night at Daisy’s. At her first big golf tournament there was a
row that nearly reached the newspapers—a suggestion that she had moved
her ball from a bad lie in the semifinal round. The thing approached
the proportions of a scandal—then died away. A caddy retracted his
statement, and the only other witness admitted that he might have been
mistaken. The incident and the name had remained together in my mind.

Jordan Baker instinctively avoided clever, shrewd men, and now I saw
that this was because she felt safer on a plane where any divergence
from a code would be thought impossible. She was incurably dishonest.
She wasn’t able to endure being at a disadvantage and, given this
unwillingness, I suppose she had begun dealing in subterfuges when she
was very young in order to keep that cool, insolent smile turned to
the world and yet satisfy the demands of her hard, jaunty body.

It made no difference to me. Dishonesty in a woman is a thing you
never blame deeply—I was casually sorry, and then I forgot. It was on
that same house-party that we had a curious conversation about driving
a car. It started because she passed so close to some workmen that our
fender flicked a button on one man’s coat.

“You’re a rotten driver,” I protested. “Either you ought to be more
careful, or you oughtn’t to drive at all.”

“I am careful.”

“No, you’re not.”

“Well, other people are,” she said lightly.

“What’s that got to do with it?”

“They’ll keep out of my way,” she insisted. “It takes two to make an
accident.”

“Suppose you met somebody just as careless as yourself.”

“I hope I never will,” she answered. “I hate careless people. That’s
why I like you.”

Her grey, sun-strained eyes stared straight ahead, but she had
deliberately shifted our relations, and for a moment I thought I loved
her. But 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. I’d been writing letters once
a week and signing them: “Love, Nick,” and all I could think of was
how, when that certain girl played tennis, a faint moustache of
perspiration appeared on her upper lip. Nevertheless there was a vague
understanding that had to be tactfully broken off before I was free.

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.


                                  IV

On Sunday morning while church bells rang in the villages alongshore,
the world and its mistress returned to Gatsby’s house and twinkled
hilariously on his lawn.

“He’s a bootlegger,” said the young ladies, moving somewhere between
his cocktails and his flowers. “One time he killed a man who had found
out that he was nephew to Von Hindenburg and second cousin to the
devil. Reach me a rose, honey, and pour me a last drop into that there
crystal glass.”

Once I wrote down on the empty spaces of a timetable the names of
those who came to Gatsby’s house that summer. It is an old timetable
now, disintegrating at its folds, and headed “This schedule in effect
July 5th, 1922.” But I can still read the grey names, and they will
give you a better impression than my generalities of those who
accepted Gatsby’s hospitality and paid him the subtle tribute of
knowing nothing whatever about him.

From East Egg, then, came the Chester Beckers and the Leeches, and a
man named Bunsen, whom I knew at Yale, and Doctor Webster Civet, who
was drowned last summer up in Maine. And the Hornbeams and the Willie
Voltaires, and a whole clan named Blackbuck, who always gathered in a
corner and flipped up their noses like goats at whosoever came
near. And the Ismays and the Chrysties (or rather Hubert Auerbach and
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