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 criticising anyone,’ 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 judgements, 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 grief
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 for ever; 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.
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 centre 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 neighbourhood.
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