Charlottesville Words

All right, let’s do this thing. I’m nothing if not a conformist. I’m just so happy we weren’t asked to read Cannery Row! So if you care to, read along with me:

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.

Here’s a hint that, whatever else this book may be about, it’s going to be about Nick Carraway’s growing up. One clue that his maturation involved a certain degree of acquired cynicism is revealed by the content of his father’s advice:

“Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”

Good advice, even if it does sound like something Polonius would have passed along to Laertes. But look at how this advice is transformed just a few paragraphs later:

I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.

Here we have one of the major themes of The Great Gatsby — the things that are parcelled out unequally at birth.

Nick’s a bit of a blowhard — “I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men” — but balances his bragging with self-mockery. After returning from WWI, he has no more patience with “privileged glimpses into the human heart.” Only one man was exempt — “Gatsby, who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn.” Gatsby is characterized by Nick in terms of promise, hope, dreams, “a romantic readiness.” And he tells us that “Gatsby turned out all right in the end.”

Yet Nick himself was once full of hope. As he sets out to make his fortune in the East, he says, “And so with the sunshine and the great burst of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.” I like that Jazz Age touch of “just as things grow in fast movies.”

East Egg and West Egg are described, compared, and contrasted, and then we are introduced to “the Tom Buchanans,” i.e., Tom and Daisy. Tom, the former football hero, is described in physical terms and bears a strong resemblance to his stable of polo ponies:

Two shining arrogant eyes had established dominance over his face and gave him the appearance of always leaning aggressively forward. Not even the effeminate swank of his riding clothes could hide the enormous power of that body — he seemed to fill those glistening boots until he strained the top lacing, and you could see a great pack of muscle shifting when his shoulder moved under his thin coat. It was a body capable of enormous leverage — a cruel body.

Daisy, in contrast to her brutish husband, flutters, floats, murmurs, ripples, glides, flutters. She is absurd, “sophisticated,” and basically insincere. She has a child; her husband has a woman in New York. She seems not to be entirely aware of either.

The great man himself makes his appearance at last, at the end of the chapter, as a shadowy, yearning figure, who, characteristically, disappears.

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