The Charm of the Great Gatsby
‘Genuine Charm is the deepest thing in the world.’ – Henry James.
Part One
Is The Great Gatsby ‘deep’?
That’s probably not the right word; there’s something about its surface lightness, something that keeps it buoyant, despite the sorrows it touches on and sustains, that makes ‘deep’ seem top-heavy, slightly wrong.
But it’s certainly not superficial, thought the Raven, practising a few Jazz Age moves in the mirror, though the world it documents is hell-bent on superficiality.
Here, for instance, is the party-world, the world of the Lost Generation that Daisy re-enters after losing Jay Gatsby to the War and before she meets and marries Tom Buchanan. It’s a sad world, all the joys of youth woven through and through with a kind of elegy for something that has gone, something that no one ever quite manages to define (though Nick Carraway, gets very close as he witnesses the final stage of Gatsby’s dreams), an
‘artificial world…redolent of orchids and pleasant, cheerful snobbery and orchestras which set the rhythm of the year, summing up the sadness and suggestiveness of life in new tunes. All night the saxophones wailed the hopeless comment of the Beale Street Blues while a hundred pairs of golden and silver slippers shuffled the shining dust.’
It reminds the Raven of the song in old man Shakespeare’s late play, Cymbeline. Does anyone even read Cymbeline any more, he asks as he shuffles his own golden slippers in the shining dust (metaphorically speaking)
‘Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust’
he sings.
Everything in Gatsby’s dream turns to dust, he thinks, staring out his front window. There is the road, with the same old white line running down the middle; the same old dusty trees. Here, there, everywhere, the same: all turns to dust. In The Great Gatsby the dust from the Valley of Ashes hangs over the whole novel and it’s what gets Gatsby in the end. The whole crowd Gatsby draws in so that he can get Daisy into his world again are no more, says Nick, (after it’s all over, after he’s gone back West and left the flimsy, cruel world of the East and New York behind) than a ‘foul dust’ that blew in the wake of Gatsby’s dreams.
Only the reader shares Nick’s final judgement:
No, Gatsby turned out all right in the end. It was what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows…of men.
In the spirit of Nick Carraway, then, the Raven returns to his desk and begins to examine the world of The Great Gatsby, the simultaneous beauty and fraudulence of its charms, New York and Long Island, still names to conjure with.
They certainly take hold of everyone’s imagination, then as now, Long Island and New York. In a moment we will get to Nick’s evocation of his first season, as a young blow-in from the West, in the metropolis: New York, with its white chasms, the enchanted city.
As he writes of it he enters the ranks of those great American artists, novelists and poets who have brought the extraordinarily tough world of urban America before us –early naturalists like Dreiser, whose 1900 novel, Sister Carrieput Chicago on the world’s literary landscape, realists like Howells (Boston). By the way, notes the Raven, make sure you use these terms precisely: Strindberg is a Naturalist, Ibsen is not. Like Edith Wharton, Ibsen is a Realist writer (Zola is a Naturalist. Look it up and sort it out!) Wharton’s two great New York novels, The House of Mirth (1905) and The Age of Innocence, (1920, Pulitzer Prize in 1921, but dealing with the New York of the 1870s) show the bitter side, the destruction of unconventional lives in a city driven by greed, hypocrisy and sexual double standards. Even the mild-mannered Henry James speaks in forceful terms (in Washington Square, 1879) of ‘the relentless tide of commercial development rolling inexorably up Manhattan’ (like the waters of the recent Hurricane Sandy disaster, an image that haunts the American imagination in films like Deep Impact and The Day After Tomorrow) But hang on, the Raven admonished himself, I’m starting to lose focus here. The Great Gatsby is not epic in this way – ALTHOUGH there is the famous closing paragraph where Nick’s mind goes back to that very first Island that the Native Americans called Manhattan. In a moment of vision, after the tragic events surrounding Gatsby’s death have played out, he stands entranced by a dream of the past:
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 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…face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder…
This is Nick in his final state. He has woken up; there is now something of the visionary about him. His consciousness has developed over the course of events, and it is this development in Nick along with the drive of the story that gives the novel its dynamic. Nick’s framing, retrospective, elegiac narrative chronicles his disillusion. As he first embarks on the life of the City (not yet known as The Big Apple) he is in a condition of enchantment. Here he is in town, uninitiated, an innocent, more or less, abroad:
I began to like New York, the racy, adventurous feel of it at night…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 a 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…
This is the voice of displacement, the voice of poetry in the metropolitan century. He’s rather self-consciously ’poetic’ here. Under the impact of what he witnesses as he watches the disintegration of Gatsby’s dream Nick’s own vision strengthens and becomes far more crystalline. Rather imitative than original – Nick’s sensibility is closer to that of T.S.Eliot’s Prufrock (1917) than it is to, say, Bukowski (Los Angeles, caught in all Bukowski’s tough, plug-ugly edginess) or Jim Jarmusch, who blew in from Akron , Ohio, aged 17, in 1970, to go to film school and then make Stranger Than Paradise (New York) and Ghost Dog (Jersey City).
But Jarmusch and Bukowski are on the horizon here, despite their very different voices, in the white chasms of lower New York, working in the same area of urban saga as Nick, as the earth lurches away from the sun, and…the orchestra is playing yellow cocktail music, and the opera of voices pitches a key higher.”
New York is a composite of dreams – dreams that are barely grasped, solitudes that vanish before they quite form. And, apart from Nick, no one notices, nobody cares. All the dreams vanish. Everything turns to ashes and disappears. All the denizens of that world, the endless party-goers, the dancers and the talkers, all vanish. Just as at Gatsby’s funeral there is only witness, apart from Nick, even at his lavish parties no one really seems to notice Gatsby, or have the slightest inkling of his Fantastic dream.
Part Two
THE AMERICAN DREAM = THE AMERICAN LIE
Hardly an original point; hardly unique to The Great Gatsby. But Fitzgerald does give it an interesting twist. There he is, a lover of Keats and other Romantic poets, totally drawn to their longing for something to take them out of the prosaic world (the Twilight series takes its origins from the same place).
But Fitzgerald is also a realist. He looks at contemporary America with an ironic understanding of how pervious it is to fraudulence and lies, how easily they soak their way into the world of dreams. Fraudsters and predators abound. Consider Meyer Wolfsheim, who has ‘fixed’ the World Cup – if that series were not the focus of the dreams and aspirations of so many he would have no ground for his corruptions.
Fitzgerald is not saying that in themselves dreams are fraudulent. But they are where waste and contamination find their way into human life. At the very end of Gatsby’s life Nick speculates on his last moments of understanding, how it must have changed as he saw the man who was about to kill him, that ‘ashen fantastic figure gliding towards him through the amorphous trees’, so that what Nick has seen before as ‘the colossal vitality of his illusion’ would have collapsed:
He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world…where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about…
Yes, everything collapses into horror and treachery. Yes, his dream turns out to be the ‘colossal illusion’ that Nick sees it as in retrospect. But when all is said and done – and in this novel all IS said and done – what we go away with, what rises up above the horrible clumsy mess of lives that the main story turns into, such terrible acts of selfish carelessness and dishonesty, is the beauty of that dream, the figure of Gatsby standing under the stars looking for the green light at the end of the Buchanan’s dock.
Ultimately we don’t care that Gatsby is dishonest; we might be shocked, for a while, that he himself is one of the fraudsters, that he is entwined with Wolfsheim and co. We are relieved to find that he wasn’t lying about being what Wolfsheim calls ‘an Oggsford man’ (plenty of people DO lie about that these days. The Raven knows someone, quite eminent in the Pentagon, who falsely claims to have been educated at what Wolfsheim calls ‘Oggsford College’).
Fitzgerald is quite hard-boiled about this – much more so than is Arthur Miller in Death of a Salesman. For him the falsity of people’s behaviour is consistently a source of comedy. He’s very funny about aspirations – for instance when Myrtle, Tom’s amazingly hilarious mistress, the wife of the local mechanic, Wilson, responds with what she considers to be classy hauteur to a compliment on her dress, (the classic ‘Oh, this old thing’ might have originated with her as she comes out in an elaborate tea-gown). Oh, she says,
‘It’s just a crazy old thing,.. I just slip it on sometimes when I don’t care what I look like.’
Fraudsters, parasites, social climbers, pretty girls at parties, groups of men called Mr. Mumble – that’s the comic panorama here. And clearly Fitzgerald relaxes into it. Fitzgerald, not Nick Carraway? It’s not quite Nick’s tone, is it? Not quite in character ? It marks the ease of the Author with his material, rather than the unease of Nick’s response? Or is this to drive to clumsy a wedge between writer and character here? Maybe the humour can be ascribed to Nick. Certainly he seems delighted by the drunken antics of the owl-faced man with his disabled car at the end of one of Gatsby’s parties. And it’s an important moment because it is the prelude to the greatest single image in the whole novel, the thing that gives it its depth (remember the opening question of this essay).
It’s the thing that makes us realize that, for all the sorrow and disillusion that attend it and that mark the unraveling of all his hopes, what rises above the rest of the novel is the beauty of Gatsby’s dream. (Some of you might think about Marlow’s changing understanding of Kurtz’ vision – an understanding that wrecks his life – in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. It’s an interesting comparison.)
The dream makes the dreamer, Gatsby, into something wonderful, for a moment, here. It’s only a moment, you could say. But a moment can be Infinite, and profound. It is deeper than the passing world, the world that disintegrates into a mess of killings and lies at the end. And here it is: (Fitzgerald knows that it’s good; he knows that he’s writing well here– he knows that he has found the exact form of the words that he needs to express his dream-vision of a character – for what IS envisioned writing, after all, but a kind of a dream?)
You can feel the power of this, every word, every sequence and cadence of words. This is the epicentre of the book.
The caterwauling of horns had reached a crescendo and I turned away and out across the lawn towards home. I glanced back once. A wafer of moon was shining over Gatsby’s house, making the night fine as before, and surviving the laughter and the sound of his still glowing garden. A sudden emptiness seemed to flow now from the windows and the great doors, endowing with complete isolation the figure of the host, his hand up in a formal gesture of farewell.
In this suddenly empty, fabulous space, beneath and above the noisy clattering vacuousness of the social world, Gatsby becomes epic, timeless. His figure takes its place amongst those vastly outnumbered who set forth from Athens to fight the battle of Marathon, their hands up raised in farewell. Or, in the later Latin:
Avatque Vale: Hail and Farewell.
The Ephebe of Antikythera: the heroic loneliness, beauty departs the world.
It is this heroic beauty that endows the figure of Gatsby in this moment. It is what rises above all the lies and fraudulences and illusions of his world. And it is Nick who sees it and who, in seeing it, transfixes the moment and himself and Gatsby together in it. It is the great lock and bond of the novel. The final salute from the living brother to the dead.
Hail and Farewell.