The great gatsby - 1

2

My family have been prominent, well-to-do people in this middle-western

city for three generations. The Carraways are something of a clan and we

have a tradition that we're descended from the Dukes of Buccleuch, but the

actual founder of my line was my grandfather's brother who came here in

fifty-one, sent a substitute to the Civil War and started the wholesale

hardware business that my father carries on today.

I never saw this great-uncle but I'm supposed to look like him--with

special reference to the rather hard-boiled painting that hangs in

Father's office. I graduated from New Haven in 1915, just a quarter of a

century after my father, and a little later I participated in that

delayed Teutonic migration known as the Great War. I enjoyed the

counter-raid so thoroughly that I came back restless. Instead of being

the warm center of the world the middle-west now seemed like the

ragged edge of the universe--so I decided to go east and learn the bond

business. Everybody I knew was in the bond business so I supposed it

could support one more single man. All my aunts and uncles talked it

over as if they were choosing a prep-school for me and finally said,

"Why--ye-es" with very grave, hesitant faces. Father agreed to finance

me for a year and after various delays I came east, permanently, I

thought, in the spring of twenty-two.

The practical thing was to find rooms in the city but it was a warm

season and I had just left a country of wide lawns and friendly trees,

so when a young man at the office suggested that we take a house

together in a commuting town it sounded like a great idea. He found

the house, a weather beaten cardboard bungalow at eighty a month, but

at the last minute the firm ordered him to Washington and I went out

to the country alone. I had a dog, at least I had him for a few days

until he ran away, and an old Dodge and a Finnish woman who made my bed

and cooked breakfast and muttered Finnish wisdom to herself over the

electric stove.

It was lonely for a day or so until one morning some man, more recently

arrived than I, stopped me on the road.

"How do you get to West Egg village?" he asked helplessly.

I told him. And as I walked on I was lonely no longer. I was a guide, a

pathfinder, an original settler. He had casually conferred on me the

freedom of the neighborhood.

And so with the sunshine and the great bursts 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.

There was so much to read for one thing and so much fine health to be

pulled down out of the young breath-giving air. I bought a dozen

volumes on banking and credit and investment securities and they stood

on my shelf in red and gold like new money from the mint, promising to

unfold the shining secrets that only Midas and Morgan and Maecenas

knew. And I had the high intention of reading many other books besides.

I was rather literary in college--one year I wrote a series of very

solemn and obvious editorials for the "Yale News"--and now I was going

to bring back all such things into my life and become again that most

limited of all specialists, the "well-rounded man." This isn't just an

epigram--life is much more successfully looked at from a single window,

after all.

The great gatsby - 1

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice
that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.
 
"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."
 
He didn't say any more but we've always been unusually communicative
in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more
than that. In consequence I'm inclined to reserve all judgments,
a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also
made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind
is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it
appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I
was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the
secret griefs of wild, unknown men. 
Most of the confidences were
unsought--frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile
levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate
revelation was quivering on the horizon--for the intimate revelations
of young men or at least the terms in which they express them are
usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions. 
 
Reserving
judgments is a matter of infinite hope. 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.
 
And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission
that it has a limit. Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet
marshes but after a certain point I don't care what it's founded on.
 
 
When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the
world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I
wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the
human heart. 
Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was
exempt from my reaction--Gatsby who represented everything for which I
have an unaffected scorn. If personality is an unbroken series of
successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some
heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related
to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten
thousand miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that
flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the
"creative temperament"--it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic
readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it
is not likely I shall ever find again. No--Gatsby turned out all right
at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the
wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the
abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.