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Here Was One
No. 26
Grant Hodges
June 11, 2024
The Great Gatsby
Dear Reader,
On any list of contenders for the Great American Novel, you will find The Great Gatsby. It remains required reading in virtually every high school across the country, and its author, F. Scott Fitzerald, remains a figure of public interest.
At around 47,000 words and 180 pages, the novel is less than one-tenth the size of Infinite Jest. It’s half the size of The Scarlet Letter. A quarter the size of Moby Dick. But within that slim volume, Fitzgerald engages with perennial American topics like class, race, gender, and opportunity, while simultaneously grappling with the universal themes of star-crossed love, a longing for the past, and our need for hope—even in the clear face of futility.
Background
Fitzgerald wrote The Great Gatsby between June 1922 and February 1925. He expected the novel to be a commercial success, but despite favorable reviews, it sold poorly and seemed destined for obscurity. After Fitzgerald’s death in 1940, however, the book underwent a commercial and critical revival. By 1960, The Great Gatsby was selling 100,000 copies a year. Today, it’s still Scribner’s most popular title.
The novel follows the narrator, Nick Carraway, as he moves to Long Island to work as a bond trader in nearby New York. Nick lives just down the road from his wealthy cousin, Daisy Buchanan, and her husband, Tom; and, in time, he meets an enigmatic neighbor named Jay Gatsby, who is known to the other New Yorkers mainly for his considerable wealth and opulent parties.
Ultimately, it’s revealed that Gatsby was once Daisy’s lover; but, due to his poor circumstances, he had to enlist and fight in World War I, during which time Daisy met and married Tom. After returning to the States, Gatsby then made a fortune as a bootlegger, bought a giant mansion across the bay from Daisy’s home, and began throwing extravagant parties—all in the hopes that she might attend one and fall in love with him again.
I’m sure most people know how the story ends. But, without giving too much away, Gatsby is unsuccessful in his efforts to woo Daisy away from Tom, and the novel closes with this passage from Nick, as he sits on the Long Island shore, looking out into the water.
From The Great Gatsby
By F. Scott Fitzgerald
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 gradually 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 moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity 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 orgastic 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.
What It Offers
In 1630, shortly before setting sail across the Atlantic with the first major wave of English settlers, John Winthrop addressed his fellow Puritans, telling them that their new colony in America “shall be as a city upon a hill—the eyes of all people are upon us.”
Gatsby has narrower ambitions, seeking not to establish a colony on a new continent, but rather to convince a woman who once loved him that she can love him again. In both struggles, however, there is the same spirit of optimism: that in America, you can achieve your dreams.
Fitzgerald—through the thin veil of Nick Carraway—is fully aware that this “American Dream” is a fiction. Nick knows that Daisy won’t leave Tom for Gatsby. Tom is old money. He’s safe and secure and simple. Gatsby is none of those things, and Daisy, as a woman in 1920s America, is in no position to risk it.
Nick even tries to warn Gatsby in an earlier exchange:
“…she doesn’t understand,” [Gatsby] said. “She used to be able to understand. We’d sit for hours——”
He broke off and began to walk up and down a desolate path of fruit rinds and discarded favors and crushed flowers.
“I wouldn’t ask too much of her,” I ventured. “You can’t repeat the past.”
“Can’t repeat the past?” he cried incredulously. “Why of course you can!”
There’s a version of this story where Gatsby’s fervent dream comes off as funny, or painfully misguided, or maybe even a little pathetic. But Fitzgerald didn’t write that book. At every turn he takes pains to portray Gatsby—a bootlegging, wife-stealing, wannabe intellectual—as a hero. At their last encounter, Nick remarks that Gatsby is “worth the whole damn bunch [i.e., Tom, Daisy, and their crowd] put together.”
The greatest crime, in Fitzgerald’s view, is not believing in impossibilities or following pipe dreams or acting foolishly. It’s losing that capacity for wonder. It’s becoming Tom and Daisy—the sort of self-involved, careless people who Nick describes as “smash[ing] up things and creatures and then retreat[ing] back into their money or their vast carelessness[.]”
Fitzgerald thinks that we all should have a green light: a belief that tomorrow will be better, that we can repeat the past, that we can impose, however briefly, some order and love on the chaos and indifference that surrounds us. I agree.
I’ll close this issue and the newsletter with a quote from Henry Miller, a wonderful American writer who was born just a few years before Fitzgerald, which I think best sums up this enterprise:
If you can fall in love again and again . . . if you can forgive as well as forget, if you can keep from growing sour, surly, bitter and cynical, man you’ve got it half licked.
*****
What is the meaning of life? That was all—a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years, the great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead, there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one.