Some Notes on The Great Gatsby

Now would be a perfectly fine time to hit delete.

I have started Tillie Olsen’s Silences many times but never finished it. In fact, I started it again just now until I remembered that I was going to write something about The Great Gatsby, that I had, in fact, started writing it and then abandoned it, as with so much else. What follows is not so much the thing I was going to write about Gatsby as some notes toward it. I publish them in such a state because I shall never finish.

Me with my copy of Silences

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Reader, be warned: I am about to talk at some length about The Great Gatsby. (If you have not yet had the opportunity to hit delete, by all means do so now.) I am, I should note, in no way qualified to speak about Fitzgerald’s book except insofar as I a human being with eyeballs who has read it on more than one occasion since the summer of 1996, when according to both the inscription in my copy and my memory, I first read it after picking it up at a used bookstore in San Francisco, where I lived between my sophomore and junior years of college. Does the length and slightly odd cadence of my sentence suggest to you that I have been reading it again? You would be correct.

Last week someone mentioned on the internet that they were planning to read it and what did people think, and if anyone liked it, why? Reviews were mixed, but after pummeling the original poster with the questions below, and then making several other observations, I realized perhaps I should stop taking up her space and start taking up mine. So here we are.

I did not read the book in high school, nor was it ever assigned to me. I am unclear on why anyone would assign it to a high school class, except, I suppose, that it is short—but in the year of our Lord 2025 with so many possible books to assign to high school students, a largely unrelatable one full of casual and not-so-casual racism (however accurate to the time) is not one I’d pick. But as noted, I was never required to read it—I picked it up at a used bookstore in San Francisco in 1996, probably because it was a Famous Book I thought I should read.

I thought it was okay. But in conversations with my two smartest college friends, and in rereading it over the years, I’ve come to see so much in it. Is that the same as loving it? Perhaps not—probably not—but it is, for me, a form of love.

So. My notes.

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So much leads up to Gatsby, and so much comes from it. But to start with the lead up: if you’ve read the book, you know the ending:

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 orgiastic 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 further … And one fine morning—

That green light haunts Gatsby, it haunts the narrator (and a question for you—who is the protagonist of this novel?), it haunts the reader. And when, some years ago, I came across this, it began to haunt me a new:

It were a vain endeavour,
Though I should gaze for ever
On that green light that lingers in the west:
I may not hope from outward forms to win
The passion and the life, whose fountains are within.

That? That’s Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a poet Fitzgerald surely read and knew. Whether Gatsby’s green light, that orgiastic future, was directly remembered from Coleridge’s green light of passion and life we can’t know, but there it is—receding before us, yet we gaze, even in vain, toward that dream, never recognizing its true source.

And what about what came after Gatsby? So much—more than I can count, far more than I am qualified to say. There would be no J.D. Salinger without Gatsby, I thought as I read it again last week. And there would be no Kerouac. Look at the ending of Gatsby again (I’ll wait) and then read this most beautiful (to me) of sentences in all of American literature:

So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, and all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars'll be out, and don't you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all the rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what's going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty.

There they are, the dark fields of the republic rolling on under the night, on toward some distant, illusive, barely graspable future.

Me with my copy of The Crack Up, which Tillie Olsen wrote about and which I did read once, long long ago

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I should note before we go that Gatsby is often very, very funny. Take this scene at a party at Gatsby’s house, where Jordan Baker and Nick Carraway have just entered Gatsby’s “high Gothic library”:

“What do you think?” he demanded impetuously.

“About what?”

He waved his hand toward the bookshelves.

“About that. As a matter of fact you needn’t bother to ascertain. I ascertained. They’re real.”

“The books?”

He nodded.

“Absolutely real⁠—have pages and everything. I thought they’d be a nice durable cardboard. Matter of fact, they’re absolutely real. Pages and⁠—Here! Lemme show you.”

…

“See!” he cried triumphantly. “It’s a bona-fide piece of printed matter. It fooled me. This fella’s a regular Belasco. It’s a triumph. What thoroughness! What realism! Knew when to stop, too⁠—didn’t cut the pages. But what do you want? What do you expect?”

Every book its reader; every reader their book, said the late great S.R. Ranganathan. This one may not be for you. But trhere's something about the mixture of misplaced romantic longing, misplaced ambition, and misplaced admiration in Gatsby that gets me every time, and while it tends toward the overly descriptive, there are few scenes in literature as vivid in my mind as that of the mint juleps in the sweltering awful heat of a New York City hotel so long ago.