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The Great Gatsby
The Great Gatsby
By F. Scott Fitzgerald
A bout half way between West Egg and New York the
motor-road hastily joins the railroad and runs beside
it for a quarter of a mile, so as to shrink away from a certain
desolate area of land. This is a valley of ashes—a fantastic
farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and
grotesque gardens where ashes take the forms of houses and
chimneys and rising smoke and finally, with a transcen-
dent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling
through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of grey cars
crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak and
comes to rest, and immediately the ash-grey men swarm up
with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud which
screens their obscure operations from your sight.
But above the grey land and the spasms of bleak dust
which drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment,
the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg. The eyes of Doctor T. J.
Eckleburg are blue and gigantic—their retinas are one yard
high. They look out of no face but, instead, from a pair of
enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a nonexistent
nose. Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set them there
to fatten his practice in the borough of Queens, and then
sank down himself into eternal blindness or forgot them
and moved away. But his eyes, dimmed a little by many
paintless days under sun and rain, brood on over the sol-
IN THE MORNING,
IN THE EVENING,
AIN’T WE GOT FUN——
Outside the wind was loud and there was a faint flow
of thunder along the Sound. All the lights were going on
in West Egg now; the electric trains, men-carrying, were
plunging home through the rain from New York. It was the
hour of a profound human change, and excitement was gen-
erating on the air.
A fter two years I remember the rest of that day, and that
night and the next day, only as an endless drill of po-
lice and photographers and newspaper men in and out of
Gatsby’s front door. A rope stretched across the main gate
and a policeman by it kept out the curious, but little boys
soon discovered that they could enter through my yard and
there were always a few of them clustered open-mouthed
about the pool. Someone with a positive manner, perhaps
a detective, used the expression ‘mad man’ as he bent over
Wilson’s body that afternoon, and the adventitious author-
ity of his voice set the key for the newspaper reports next
morning.
Most of those reports were a nightmare—grotesque, cir-
cumstantial, eager and untrue. When Michaelis’s testimony
at the inquest brought to light Wilson’s suspicions of his wife
I thought the whole tale would shortly be served up in racy
pasquinade—but Catherine, who might have said anything,
didn’t say a word. She showed a surprising amount of char-
acter about it too—looked at the coroner with determined
eyes under that corrected brow of hers and swore that her
sister had never seen Gatsby, that her sister was completely
happy with her husband, that her sister had been into no
mischief whatever. She convinced herself of it and cried
into her handkerchief as if the very suggestion was more
Yours truly
MEYER WOLFSHIEM
and then hasty addenda beneath:
Let me know about the funeral etc do not know his family at
all.
GENERAL RESOLVES