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 n 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 t 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
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