There is only one other pair of noticeable spectacles in the novel, those worn by “the owl-eyed man.” One of Gatsby’s hundreds of anonymous guests, he is first seen in the “Gothic library,” a drunken fellow muttering excitedly that the books “are absolutely real.” He had expected cardboard, he tells Nick and Jordan, and cannot get over his astonishment at the reality of these volumes. The owl-eyed man returns near the end of the book as Gatsby’s only mourner besides the dead man’s father and Nick. Like the image of Eckleburg, the owl-eyed man is both thoroughly mysterious and thoroughly banal. He tells Nick and Jordan that he’s been drunk for a week and that he thought the books might help “sober” him up. Nameless, the man is associated exclusively with the library and his large glasses. Nick does not ask the owl-eyed man to attend the funeral. He has kept the day and place a secret to avoid gawkers and the press, but out of nowhere, the man makes his appearance in the rain, and during that time he removes his glasses twice. The second time, he wipes them, “outside and in.” I can see him doing it. For me the gesture is intimate, and although it is not mentioned, I see a white handkerchief, too, moving over the rain-spattered lenses. The cleaning of the glasses is ordinary and magical. The strange man is a second, specifically literary incarnation of Eckleburg, a witness to the problem of what’s real and what isn’t, a problem that is turned inside out by the idea of seeing through special glasses— the glasses of fiction.
The Great Gatsby is an oddly immaterial novel. In it there are only two characters with bodies that mean anything, bodies of vigor and appetite: Tom Buchanan and his mistress, Myrtle Wilson, whose alliance causes the book’s tragedy. The rest of them—Gatsby, the hordes of guests, Jordan and, above all, Daisy—seem to be curiously unanchored to the ground. They are pastel beings, beings of light and sound—creatures of the imagination. At Gatsby’s parties “men and girls” come and go “like moths,” accompanied by an orchestra as if they were characters in a play or a movie. When Nick first sees Daisy and Jordan in East Egg, they are reclining on a huge sofa. “They were both in white, and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the room.” They are as weightless as dollar bills, or maybe hundred-dollar bills, blown up in a wind before they settle again to the ground, and whether or not Fitzgerald intended this lightness as another image of money in his novel, money is the source of the charm that envelopes the ethereal creatures. Daisy’s music is her own “thrilling” voice, and it sounds, as Gatsby says, “like money.” But Nick is the one who elaborates on its timbre. In it he hears the jingle of coins and the rain of gold in fairy tales.
It may be that New York and its environs is the best place in the world to feel this particular bewitchment, which all the pieties about honest poverty cannot disperse. Fitzgerald is right. Money in the Midwest may be respectable and it may even be considerable, but it is nothing like New York money. There was no money where I grew up, no “real” money, that is. The turkey farmers did well, and the dentists in town had a certain affluent shine to them, but on the whole, status was measured in increments, a new economy car, unused skates, an automatic garage-door opener, and there was a feeling that it was wrong to have much more money than anybody else, and downright sinful to flaunt it if you had it. When I arrived in New York, the money I saw flabbergasted me. It sashayed on Fifth Avenue and giggled in galleries and generally showed itself off with such unabashed glee that it was impossible not to admire it or envy it, at least a little. And what I saw during my journeys through the city in the early eighties was no different from what Nick saw. Money casts a glow over things, a glow all the more powerful to people who haven’t got it. No matter how clean or morally upright, poverty has cracks of ugliness that nothing but money can close, and I remember the sense of relief and pleasure that would come over me when I sat in a good restaurant with white tablecloths and shining silver and flowers, and I knew that my date was a person who could afford to pay. And it happened during my lonely, impoverished student days that a man would lean across the table and invite me to an island or to another country or to a seaside resort, to an East Egg or a West Egg, and the truth was that the smell of money would waft over me, its scent like a torpor-inducing drug, and had there been no Middle West, no Northfield, Minnesota, no home with its strident Lutheran sanctions, no invisible parental eyes always watching me; in short: had I been somebody else, I might have been blown off to an Egg in a gust of wind and have floated across the beach and out into the sound to the strains of some foolish but melodic accompaniment.
F. Scott Fitzgerald. Late 1920s. The Granger Collection, New York.
Gravity is personal history. That is why Nick tells the reader about his family right away. The Carraways have been “prominent well-to-do people for three generations,” three generations founded on the rock of a hardware business, a business that trades in real things. In the East, Nick trades not in things as his father does but in paper, bonds that will generate more paper. Money that makes money. And money has built Gatsby’s castle, a place as unreal as a theater set erected from bills or bonds or “cardboard,” as the owl-eyed man suggests. It is a blur of excess and anonymity as vague as Gatsby’s rumored past—a past we learn in bits and pieces but which is never whole—for he is a man interrupted, a man who has broken from his old life and his parents to become not somebody else so much as “Nobody”—a brilliant cipher. “Mr. Nobody from Nowhere” is Tom Buchanan’s contemptuous expression. Gatsby’s connections to others are tenuous or fabricated. When he first meets Daisy in Louisville, he misrepresents himself to her by implying that he comes from her world. Again the image of wind appears in Fitzgerald’s prose. “As a matter of fact, he had no comfortable family standing behind him, and he was liable at the whim of an impersonal government to be blown anywhere about the world.”
Still, in this ephemeral weightlessness of Gatsby’s there is beauty, real beauty, and on this the whole story turns. The man’s monstrous accumulation of things is nothing if not vulgar, a grotesque display as pitiful as it is absurd. But what Nick understands, as nobody else does, is that this mountain of things is the vehicle of a man’s passion, and as objects they are nearly drained of material reality. The afternoon when Gatsby takes Daisy through his house, we are told that he “stares at his possessions in a dazed way, as though in her actual and astounding presence, none of it was any longer real.” His nerves running high, the owner of the property begins pulling shirts from his closet, one gauzy, gorgeous article after another, “in coral and apple-green and lavender and faint orange, with monograms of Indian blue,” piling them high before Nick and his beloved. Then Daisy bends her lovely head and weeps into the shirts. “It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such—such beautiful shirts before.” I marveled again at the power of this passage. At once tender and ridiculous, Fitzgerald lets neither feeling get the upper hand. Daisy pours out the grief of her young love for Gatsby into a heap of his splendid shirts without understanding her own feelings. But she recovers quickly. Some time later the same afternoon, she stares out the window at pink clouds in a western sky and says to Gatsby, “I’d just like to get one of those pink clouds and put you in it and push you around.” The shirts, the clouds, the dream are colored like a fading rainbow. Gatsby stands at the edge of his lawn and watches the green light from Daisy’s house across the water. The last suit Nick sees him wearing is pink. If your feet are rooted to the ground, you can’t be blown willy nilly, but you can’t fly up to those rosy clouds either. It’s as simple as that.
Things and nothings. Bodies and nobodies. The ground and the air. The tangible and the intangible. The novel moves restlessly between these dichotomies. Surely Fitzgerald was right when he said that The Great Gatsby was “a new thinking out of the idea of illusion.” Illusion is generally coupled with its opposite, reality, but where is the real? Is reality found in the tangible and illusion in the intangible? Besides the nuts and bolts of hardware out west, there is ground
in the novel, the soil of ashes in West Egg, the ground that Eckleburg unblinkingly surveys, but it is here that Fitzgerald lavishes a prose that could have been taken straight from Dickens, a prose of fantasy, not realism.
This is the 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 transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air.
With its crumbling men, the valley of ashes plainly evokes that other biblical valley of death, and this miserable stretch of land borders the road where Myrtle Wilson will die under the wheels of the car driven by Daisy. But like the pink clouds, the land lacks solidity and dissolves. The difference between the vision of Gatsby’s mansion and that of this earth is that money does not disguise mortality here. The gaping cracks of poverty are fully visible.
Nevertheless, among the residents of this ashen valley is Myrtle Wilson, the only person in the novel to whom Fitzgerald assigns “vitality.” The word is used three times in reference to Mrs. Wilson, Tom Buchanan’s working-class mistress. “There was an immediately perceptible vitality about her as if the nerves of her body were continually smoldering.” As Nick passes Wilson’s gas station in a car, he sees Myrtle “at the garage pump with panting vitality as we went by.” And in death: “The mouth was wide open and ripped at the corners, as though she had choked a little in giving up the tremendous vitality she had stored so long” (all emphasis mine). It is this vivid life, not her character, that makes Myrtle Wilson’s death tragic. A silly and coarse woman, she is nevertheless more sympathetic than her lover, Tom, who is worse: stupid and violent. Between them, however, there exists a real sexual energy that isn’t found elsewhere in the novel. The narrator’s attraction to Jordan is tepid at best, and Gatsby’s fantasies about Daisy seem curiously unerotic. The slender girl has no body to speak of. She seems to be made of her beautiful clothes and her beautiful voice. It is hard to imagine Gatsby actually having sex with Daisy. It’s like trying to imagine a man taking a butterfly. And although her marriage to Tom has produced a daughter, as a mother Daisy communicates detachment. She coos endearments at the child, Pammy, and then dismisses her. Only once in the novel is the reader reminded of Daisy as a creature of flesh and blood, and significantly, it is through a finger her husband has bruised. Daisy looks down at the little finger “with an awed expression.” “You didn’t mean to,” she says to Tom, “but you did do it.” The passage is not only a premonition of Tom’s brutality, which erupts horribly in New York when he breaks Myrtle’s nose, or of Myrtle’s bruised and opened body on the road. Daisy’s awe expresses her remote relation to her own body and to mortality itself, which her money will successfully hide—not forever, of course, but for now.
What Tom and Myrtle have that Jay and Daisy don’t is a personal relation with its attendant physicality and mess. That is why, after admitting to Nick that Daisy may have once loved Tom “for a minute,” Gatsby comforts himself by saying, “In any case, it was only personal.” What Gatsby has been chasing all these years is neither personal nor physical. Its transcendence may have been lodged in the person of Daisy, but it is not limited to her. Her very shallowness makes Gatsby’s dream possible. But Myrtle Wilson is not a simple incarnation of the flesh and its weaknesses. She harbors dreams as well. As it does for Gatsby, her intangible wish finds form in an object. In her drawer at home, wrapped in tissue paper, Mr. Wilson finds the expensive dog leash Tom once bought for her to go with the dog he also bought. The dog didn’t come home. The useless, beautiful thing is a sign of absence, a string of absences, in fact—the dog, the lover and the emptiness of desire itself. Just as the green light shining from Daisy’s house may be counted among Gatsby’s “enchanted objects,” one he loses when Daisy actually enters his life again, the dog leash possesses the same magic. It is the tissue paper that makes me want to cry, that sends this frivolous possession into another register altogether, that imbues the silver-and-leather dog leash with the quality of true pathos.
The tangible and the intangible collide to cast a spell. But can a person or thing ever be stripped naked? Can we ever discover reality hiding under the meanings we give to people and things? I don’t think so. And I don’t think Fitzgerald thought so either. His book meditates on the necessity of fiction, not only as lies but as truths. The play between the material and the immaterial in The Great Gatsby is riddled, not simple. The fairy tale contains the valley of ashes as well as the castle by the sea, the heavy weight of the corpse and the pretty bodies blown in the wind. And which one is more real than the other? Is death more true than life? Are not dreams as much a part of living as waking life is? The book goes to the heart of the problem of fiction itself by insisting that fiction is necessary to life—not only as books but as dreams, dreams that frame the world and give it meaning. Nick imagines Gatsby at the pool just before Wilson kills him. The man has understood that there will be no message from Daisy, that the great idea is dead.
He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about … like that ashen, fantastic figure gliding toward him through the amorphous trees.
This passage tells of dramatic change, but it is not a change from illusion to reality, from enchanted nature to real nature. This world may be new, but there are ghosts here, and they are fantastic. It is now a world made of matter, but that matter is no more real than the magic lights and music of the summer parties that went before it.
One can argue that nearly every word of dialogue uttered in the novel, every exchange and every event is ordinary. Tom Buchanan and the poor Wilsons are glaringly limited and unattractive. Gatsby’s business partner, Wolfsheim, is clever and dishonest without the grandeur of being satanic. Daisy’s charm is not revealed in anything she says. Gatsby converses in a stiff and clichéd manner that sets Nick back on his heels. Jordan is a cheat. These characters do not elevate themselves above the crowd. They are not remarkable people, and yet to read this novel is to feel as if you have taken a walk in a fairy wood, as if while you are reading, you glimpse the sublime.
The magic is in the book’s narration, in its shades of sunlight and darkness, its allusions to fairy tales, to music, to songs, to dusty dance slippers and bright voices. Better than any other writer I know, Fitzgerald captures the tipsy aura of parties, that slight glazing of the mind that dawns after two glasses of champagne. The ordinary world trembles with adjectival enchantment here—Fitzgerald’s prose is dense with surprising adjectives. Although some of his characters are glib, the narrator is not. The sorcery that infuses the book cannot be explained as the golden effect of money, although that is part of it, or even by youth. They are mostly very young, these people, and life still holds an unwrapped newness for them. Nick Carraway’s voice carries a deeper understanding of enchantment, which at once grounds and elevates the narration. It returns us to the beginning. The father’s words render up a world in which every human being, no matter how flawed, is granted an essential dignity. Remember, every person is a product of his own history, one that is not necessarily like yours. He or she has come out of a particular story and to judge that man or woman is not fair unless you know the story. The advice is a call to empathy the ultimate act of the imagination, and the true ground of all fiction. All characters are born of this effort to be another person. And its success is rooted in the grounded self. The “carelessness” of Tom and Daisy manifests itself in flightiness. Unballasted, they flit from one place to another, and their wealth only facilitates their disconnectedness. Yet we trust Nick, this man who speaks to us, and we believe him when he says, “I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known.” And we trust his imaginings, because the imaginary is crucial to his
tale. He did not witness Gatsby’s murder. He cannot be Gatsby, but he says, “He must have … ” Nick Carraway’s voice bears the conviction of his empathy.
Fitzgerald did not give part of Nick’s story to Michaelis because it was convenient. By seamlessly transferring Nick’s vision into Wilson’s Greek neighbor, Fitzgerald lifts the narration out of the “merely personal.” Nick sees beyond himself, and this second sight is reinforced by the eyes of Eckleburg and the owl eyes of the man in the library. Nick sees vicariously what Michaelis and another man actually witness: Myrtle’s dead body, the body Daisy will not see and cannot face. It is more than enough. The men undo Mrs. Wilson’s shirt “still wet with perspiration” and see “that her left breast was hanging loose like a flap, and there was no need to listen to the heart below.” Later Nick tells Gatsby, “She was ripped open.” He did not have to be there to see. For a moment, with Nick, the reader literally stares into the heart of being, and it has stopped. I see what I did not see. I experience that which is outside my own experience. This is the magic of reading novels. This is the working out of the problem of illusion. I take a book off the shelf. I open it up and begin to read, and what I discover in its pages is real.
Ralph Ellison. New York City, 1973. Photograph by Nancy Crampton.
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