The Massachusetts Review, Inc.

The Greatness of "Gatsby"

Author(s): Charles Thomas Samuels
Source: The Massachusetts Review, Vol. 7, No. 4 (Autumn, 1966), pp. 783-794
Published by: The Massachusetts Review, Inc.
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 Charles Thomas Samuels

The Greatness of "Gatsby"

Great Gatsby's excellence was immediately seen, but soon

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

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

and a sort of anecdote. . . ." In a characteristic blend of temer
modesty,
ity, and odd spelling, Fitzgerald replied: "Without making any invidious
comparisons between Class A and Class C, if my novel is an anecdote
so isThe 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
on the float, turned from its "accidental course" the "touch
Gatsby's by
of a cluster of leaves."
his critics more than their due, and some such im
Fitzgerald gave
balance has marred of his work. What de
always appraisal Owl-eyes
clared at Gatsby's grave and Dorothy Parker so affectingly repeated
over has sounded a flat note in the chorus of "the
Fitzgerald's praise:
poor son of a bitch." However the work, the man's life was a
great
the work is not so as we Can we
fiasco?perhaps great thought. ignore
the life in the writing? Surely Fitzgerald is Gatsby, as he admitted.
What else isNick 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 as there was,
masterpiece just

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

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

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 The Massachusetts Review
We have not been to leave his life alone. The current monu
willing
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 It sees Nick as a structural device and an author's
by.
therapy. The novel's is reduced to a neat between
meaning dichotomy
East and West.
We are told that the book's relevance was limited
by
total commitment to romantic ideals and that the
Fitzgerald's Eyes of
Dr. Eckleburg are merely an accidental
gift from Max Perkins' pre
mature dust Such are the uses of
jacket. scholarship.
Since Mizener's criticism has shot nearer the mark. Nick's
biography,
importance has been, at least, and the neat be
recognized; dichotomy
tween East and West has been qualified so that the novel's profound
criticism of American life seems, at clear. We need to show now
last,
that most successful book is a novel.
Fitzgerald's great

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 is merely one of its
lyric poem, yet well-wrought prose triumphs.
Fitzgerald's distinction in this novel is to have made language celebrate
itself. other The Great is about the power of art.
Among things, Gatsby
This celebration of art is inseparable from the novel's second
literary
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 which
experience
he witnesses; he describes the act and consequences of about it.
telling
The persona is?as critics have been seeing?a character, but he is more
than that: he is a character in a action.
engaged significant
Nick iswriting 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.

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 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 the
Gatsby represented
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] whenit appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in col

lege I was accused of being a because I was to the

unjustly politician, privy
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
he hears the promise in Daisy's voice, entertains the
why half-heartedly
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
that characterizes his attitude toward life: a simultaneous en
Gatsby
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

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 The Massachusetts Review

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

mansion to the wild and aimless which he there, every
parties gives yet
seems so "true to life" that some critics continue to see that novel
thing
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 dramatic structure and have a
tight concentration), you

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"; represent the collision of dream
they
and dreamer which is dramatized when Gatsby tries to establish his
"universe of ineffable the crass materials of the real
gaudiness" through
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 the of
opened, symbol
a blindness which can never be corrected. Like other in the book
objects
to which value be the of Dr. are a
might attached, eyes Eckleburg
cheat. are not a of God, as Wilson thinks, but an ad
They sign only
vertisement?like the false of voice, or the
promise Daisy's moneyed
green light on her dock, which is invisible in the mist.
These monstrous eyes are the novel's The book's chief
major symbol.
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 nose for to mention the name
Myrtle's daring
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,

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 The Greatness of "Gatsby"

Daisy is driving the car ; and the man with her isGatsby, 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 man. In the whole novel, Nick sees. And his vision
wrong only
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 what their wealth can them. show the
enjoy give They

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
inmidair. Her famous protestation of grief ("I'm sophisticated. God, I'm
is accompanied an "absolute smirk." Her
sophisticated") by 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." act is a trick; like her a
Jordan's balancing sporting reputation,
precarious lie. They are all rich and beautiful?and unhappy.
Yearning toward them are Myrtle and Gatsby. Like Gatsby, Myrtle
desires "the and that wealth and . .
youth mystery imprisons preserves.
. . . above the hot of the Unlike her
gleaming struggles poor." him,

"panting vitality" iswholly physical, merely pathetic; whereas Gatsby's

quest is spiritual and tragic. Myrtle ismaimed 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.
one of the major achievements I have not
Gatsby is, of course, been

ing. Although see little of him and scarcely ever hear him speak, his
we
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
on the human condition. His passion would defy time and
plicit assault

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 The Massachusetts Review

to make the first moment of wonder, which is past,

decay glorious eternally
present. His is even In his famous
passion supra-sexual, super-personal.
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
he kills a more and more
destruction), promise poignant perhaps
more inclusive than theirs: kills the
precious, certainly Gatsby 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. lives up to your of it. This romantic
Nothing image agony,

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

which animates In the uneven novel which im
Fitzgerald's masterpiece.
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, Patch, cries out:
Anthony

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

just you. skipping
room. It and some and we poor fools
stops gilds inconsequential object, try
to grasp it?but when we do the sunbeam moves on to else, and
something
got the part, but the glitter that made you want it is
you've inconsequential
gone.

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

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

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 The Greatness of "Gatsby9
fortunate truth. The Buchanans and avoid attachments
Jordan deep
(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,
take life's are cheated, and Whatever their
grandly, gambit, destroyed.
modus all of these are
vwendiy people 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 concludes rumination on the nature of
Fitzgerald Anthony's
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 The entire universe seems to in
street."). participate Gatsby's
passion. There is "a stir and bustle among the stars;" there is the
"
equinox with its excitement." Then
mysterious Gatsby imagines

that the blocks of the sidewalks formed a ladder and mounted to a secret
really
place above the trees?he could climb to it, if he climbed alone, and once there
he could suck on the pap of life, down the milk of wonder.
gulp incomparable

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
that had struck a star." he renounces the
tuning-fork upon Finally,
innocent, pre-sexual, other-worldliness which alone one in
brings
contact with ideality to marry the temporal, perishable, sexual world.
Like God, he renounces unlimited promise for love of humanity. He

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 The Massachusetts Review

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 ismade in the fullness of knowledge. Moreover, he

comprehends his ordeal. On the book's second page, Nick
subsequent
compares to a a machine.
Gatsby seismograph, wonderfully responsive
When Daisy comes to the mansion which Gatsby purchased only for her,
he has become another machine?a clock. But since desire to
Gatsby's
confound time and return to the source of wonder has reached "an in
conceivable pitch of intensity," the clock is running down. When Daisy
her arm she loses the enchantment of
puts through Gatsby's, 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
in a He in short, a formed to reorder
figure ritual). represents, attempt

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
a rose is and how
frightening leaves" and see "what a grotesque thing
raw the was upon the created
sunlight scarcely 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 Words save Nick from
greatness. 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
in the is static?and we reach the first
development novel?Gatsby

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.
more even than the the book its air of
This, superb prose, gives 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 Nick recalls that "there were men at New Haven
speaks,

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 The Greatness of "Gatsby"
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
but he her to run from the house, in arms, and
sincerity, expects baby
ask him to take her from Tom. His reaction to Buchanan's steril
away
is naive. He wants to flee Tom's love nest with its middle class
ity
pretension (Myrtle's furniture tapestried with scenes of ladies swinging
in the of Versailles, her hauteur" which results
gardens "impressive
from a of After that, he can drunk.
change costume). seeing only get
The he came East to attain has to inner
sophistication begun produce

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 emotion." "faced?or seemed to face?
contributory Gatsby
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 Nick finds a raison acetre.
purposeless splendor,"
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
a wasteland. saves him from withdrawal, and, suit
only Gatsby cynical
at the end of the book Nick home once more; not because
ably, goes
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.
the novel, Nick courts Baker, ex
Throughout half-heartedly Jordan
plaining his indecisiveness with a characteristic bit of self-justification:
... I am and full of interior rules that act as brakes on
slow-thinking my
desires, and I knew that first I had to get out of that
myself definitely 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
his protestations, dishonest. she accuses him :
spite Tauntingly,

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 The Massachusetts Review
. . I
". thought you were rather an honest,
straightforward person. I thought
it was your secret
pride."
"I'm thirty," "I'm five years too old to lie to and
[Nick replies] myself
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 interest to which
personal
everyone has some at the end." But when the others refuse
vague right
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 were

shore closed now and there were
big places hardly any
lights except the moving
shadowy, glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And
as the moon rose higher the inessential houses to melt
began away until gradu
I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch
ally
sailors' eyes?a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the
trees that had made way for house, had once in whispers
Gatsby's pandered
to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted mo
ment man must have held his breath in the of this continent, com
presence
pelled into an aesthetic he neither understood nor desired, face
contemplation
to face for the last time in history with commensurate to his
something capac
ity for wonder.
And as I sat there on the old, unknown world, I thought of
brooding
out the green
Gatsby's wonder he first picked
when light at the end of Daisy's
dock. He had come a to this blue lawn, and his dream must have
long way
seemed so close that he could fail to grasp it. He did not know that it
hardly
was behind him, somewhere back in that vast the
already obscurity beyond
on under
city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled the night.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year year
by
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.

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 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. and pass the trees into a moon
Gatsby Daisy beyond
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 time
ages,
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 ismore 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
dreams which is so marked a feature of man's lot.
youthful Culturally,
it dramatizes, more than any other American
perhaps cogently 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
or so
sweetly 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

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 The Massachusetts Review

world that sets one's teeth on the

edge (what Hemingway, brave,
lacked the courage to do), Fitzgerald is able to color the face of death,
to turn the death into a gorgeous dance.
agony
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
for he has made us see it too.
achievement,

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
it. In haunting scenes, there are few works which live so
compare literary
in one's memory: Jordan and Daisy floating through the air on
long
a couch ; the overturned auto with climbing
stationary Owl-Eyes slowly
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."
indeed we know now, was wasteful. He cracked
Fitzgerald's life, by

up in the full glare of publicity in the pages of Esquire. His wife went
and he drank of Moreover, he died young, and
mad, quantities liquor.
left one not very and more trash than any
unfinished, interesting novel,
author of His work was self-indul
equal gifts. fragmentary, frequently
was the "authority of failure"; but that is,
gent, too often frivolous. He
after all, not so small a portion of reality. When he had learned enough
about his he had the craft to make a of it.
subject, masterpiece
The Great Gatsby is a novel for which a writer might give his life.

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