The American Dream in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” (Re-Release for 100th Anniversary)

[Music] We all know this story, in part because it captures a period that will always have a special place in the American imagination. Prosperous and boozy, the jazz age seemed like one great party, held to celebrate the end of a terrible world war, deliberating promise of newly ubiquitous technologies, including electricity, the telephone, and the automobile. And a certain image of success is carefree, inexhaustibly gratifying, and available to all who try. And yet perhaps this fantasy is rooted in disillusionment, and a denial of inescapable social realities, including the impossibility of genuine social mobility. What do we mean when we talk about the American dream? Is it realistic? The subject for today's discussion is F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. This is Wes All-One. And this is Aaron Alonic. And you're listening to Subtext. So before we begin, I just wanted to say that if you're listening to this on the feed for the partially examined life, we won't always be here, and not all episodes of Subtext will appear here. If you're enjoying the show, you can subscribe to us on the podcast app of your choice, either by going to subtextpodcast.com/subscribe, or by searching for us within the app itself. So Aaron, I feel really sorry for anyone who's tried to adapt this book into a film. I do too. Well, I feel sorry for Bozlerman anyway, but yeah. Well, what do you? What do you? I didn't realize he you're going to say I do too. No, because I agree. I think it's unfilmable. Well, I was going to say you think it would be the perfect book to turn into a film, because it's so spectacular. In a way, there's lots of spectacle in it. There's a big mansion and a rich guy and all these big parties. But in the end, Jay Gatsby is not the protagonist exactly. I think we treat Nick the narrator as the protagonist, but Gatsby, in a way, is the center of the book. He's the central subject of the book, and unfortunately he's a really boring guy. And I think that's part of the problem. Yeah, I agree. Also the dreamlike quality of all of the characters really contributes to its sort of essential unfilmability. I mean, it's very difficult to pin down anyone in particular. I mean, even Daisy, who's maybe the most described or, I don't know, maybe Tom is described even more than Daisy, but Daisy, it seems, you know, is constantly given these loving descriptions or at least partly loving descriptions by Nick. And yet it's very difficult to say what she actually looks like. In fact, the only thing that is described is her voice. That's a rather difficult thing to imagine. I guess you could say, having a voice filled with money, it's a great idea, but you can't quite picture it or whatever the auditory version of picturing is. He's a very boring guy. That's true. I think if I had to pick a character who was the most fleshed out, I think that probably would be Tom. He's so well characterized, the sort of sportiness and brutishness of his physique to be himself is not fleshed out. And I think that's a conscious decision on Fitzgerald's part. He's meant to be kind of a boring blank Midwestern character who is trapping himself in the trappings of luxury and being high class, but can't really fit into that role ultimately. Mertel too maybe is a bit fleshed out, but she and Tom are both the fleshiest of all the characters and she puts that flesh to good use. Yeah. So I think he's a boring character, but what's arresting about him is his hopefulness and his desire and his love for Daisy and the persistence of that, which is something we learned about early on. So this is actually the first page, which is an interesting way to begin the novel. It's a very winning way, I think. Nick gives this account of his father's advice and the fact that because of his father, he kind of learned to be someone who's very tolerant and reserve all his judgments about people, but that's just made him kind of a pushover to be their amateur therapist, right? They're willing to spill their guts to him, especially when they're drunk. He's gotten to a point in life where he's no longer as tolerant actually as the point here, except in the case of Gatsby, despite the fact that Gatsby represents everything he hates. So 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 10,000 miles away. Despite the boringness of Gatsby on some sort of abstract level, there's something quite, a learning about him or a learning about, again, not him as a personality exactly, but him as his desire or personality as it's recast by Fitzgerald here as an unbroken series of successful gestures. Maybe we should say a bit more about what that means exactly. Well, that reminds me of Daisy's characterization of Gatsby as looking like an advertisement of a man, which I think is really perfect and summarizes him in the way that, you know, his voice sounding full of money maybe symbolizes her in a great way. I mean, there's something I suppose every man about him or maybe even Anadine about the idea of looking like an advertisement of a man. He must be, I suppose, a good-looking guy, but only in a sort of inoffensive way. And that inoffensiveness is surprising considering the lavishness of his car or the fact that he wears pink suits. There's something in one's ability to project onto Gatsby. I mean, everyone throughout the book projects all of these strange theories about where he comes from and who he is because nobody seems to know because he is so blank in a way and those successful gestures. So Gatsby is a fake, right? He's a man acting apart, although maybe he's no longer making that distinction. And he's, I feel reluctant to mention Donald Trump in any podcast like this, but I think if Donald Trump is someone who had created this persona that's over the top persona, and then forgot that it was just a persona and became that Gatsby's persona in a way is not over the top in the sense that he's a strong personality, right? He's got a few upper class affectations like the use of old sport, saying old sport to everyone and the way he dresses. Every surface level attempt at fitting into upper class society and pretending that he's come from that society, that he has those roots even though he's new money, which is why of course he lives in West egg and not East egg. That's the geographical division in the novel between the old money people and the people who are newly come to money and therefore don't have the same status. There's a certain point in the novel around page 43 in my edition where Gatsby is giving an account of himself and Nick is thinking himself, you know, I know Jordan Baker thinks he's lying about all this, the stuff about him going to Oxford. He tells a story about living like a young Raja and all the capitals of Europe. And so the way neck puts it on page 43 so you talked about Montenegros for instance and he says the smile comprehended Montenegro's troubled history and sympathized with the brave struggles of the Montenegro people it appreciated fully the chain of national circumstances which had listed the tribute from Montenegro's warm little heart by incredulity was submerged in fascination now it was like skimming hastily through a dozen magazines. So that's the way I think of Gatsby's character skimming through a bunch of magazines he's assembled it from basically his surface impressions of what upper class life is like it's as if a poor person looked at a magazine that's designed for rich people and said okay that's what it's like I'm going to get enough money to recreate that and recreate that and then this is the result. I've heard that said about Trump to Trump is like a poor man's idea of what a rich man is right so on the one hand I love this section where he gives this account of himself my favorite part of course is when Nick asked him what part of the Midwest he's from and he says San Francisco. So you know on the one hand I mean he's kind of dumb so for instance he says my family all died and I came into a good deal of money his voice was solemn as if the memory of that sudden extinction of a clan still haunted him for a moment I suspected that he was pulling my leg but a glance at him convinced me otherwise so Nick is suspicious of him and yet there seems to be some sort of fundamental truth behind all of these lies that he's saying because I mean in fact he did leave his family behind or they did die to him in a sense and then when he says that thing about the magazines which is very true about how ridiculous and made up and boyish all of this is he then produces the metal from Montenegro he produces the picture of himself at Oxford which you know at least that Oxford bit does also turn out to be true and then Nick reflects then it was a very important thing to do. So Nick reflects then it was all true I saw the skins of tigers flaming in his palace on the grand canal I saw him opening a chest of rubies to ease with their crimson lighted depths the no wings of his broken heart there is something extremely attractive about those magazine articles that you know kind of boyish appeal which as soon as you know the reason to believe it or a little bit of evidence that Nick is completely on board the fact that Gatsby on the one hand doesn't know where San Francisco is and on the other hand is capable of inspiring belief in people and having this grand sort of anodyne appeal where you can hoist this grand past on him and have it seem true is really testament to that earthquake detecting as a ability he has maybe to give people what they want or to understand what people have lying in their own depths maybe. Yeah, well you were reminding me of towards the end of the novel where Nick is reminiscing. This is just after he said to Gatsby in order to comfort him. "They're rotten crowd. I shouted across the lawn. You're worth the whole damn bunch put together." Despite the fact that he disapproves of him from quote-unquote "beginnings to end." And then Gatsby's face breaks into this radiant and understanding smile. There's sort of this or about him of I don't know how you put it, but it's kind of like he's the ultimate host in a way. You see some of this at his parties too. He's this gracious and accepting person. But the way this paragraph ends, the lawn and drive had been crowded with the faces of those who guessed this is corruption and he had stood on those steps, concealing his incorruptible dream as he waived them goodbye. What's interesting in Gatsby's character is this stark contradiction between his idealism, his extreme idealism and the corrupt means by which he's going to serve that idealism. So this love of Daisy, his idealization of her and the way in which he's going to become a bootleger, if that's what's required or an engage in criminal activity, if that's what's going to get him to his dream. There's the question of class, what makes him so hollow in a way? The suggestion I've kind of given is that it has something to do with this uncultured or less cultured person, even though he'd actually want to talk to her, by the standards of a Tom and Daisy, someone who doesn't belong to their class and they can see that somehow instinctually, or at least Tom can instinctually know that, they can see through the facade. And then the question is how much is he just hollowed out by his idealism, by the type of desire that inhabits him? He's entirely directed outside of himself in a way. It's like Gatsby largely forgets himself and who he is because he's so focused on his object of desire. So we're meant to wonder whether his flatness has something to do with him faking a higher status or whether it's more about the nature of his idealizing desire. That's good. I think this is still in the same wheelhouse, but what about Gatsby represents what Nick scorned? That's a really good question. Because in fact, I think that Daisy and Tom give Nick much more reason to be scornful. A part I find particularly compelling, which is actually a great contrast now that I think of it to this untruthful story that Gatsby gives of himself. It's page 17 in my paperback, which I think I have different page numbers from years. But mine is the Simon and Schuster paperback. This is the first scene when Nick goes to Tom and Daisy's house for the dinner party and Tom has taken the phone call from Mertel and Daisy and Nick get away for a second and Daisy's confiding in him saying, "You see, I think everything's terrible anyhow. She went on in a convinced way. Everybody thinks so. The most advanced people and I know I've been everywhere and seen everything and done everything. Her eyes flashed around her in a defiant way rather like Tom's and she laughed with thrilling scorn. Sophisticated, God, I'm sophisticated." The instant her voice broke off, ceasing to compel my attention, my belief. I felt the basic insincereity of what she had said. It made me uneasy as though the whole evening had been a trick of some sort to exact a contributory emotion from me. I waited and sure enough in a moment she looked at me with an absolute smirk on her lovely face as if she had asserted her membership in a rather distinguished secret society to which she and Tom belonged. Here she sang something that maybe is fundamentally true unlike the fundamental falsehoods of Gatsby's account. And yet when he looks at her face to sort of confirm the words that she's saying because he thinks that they have a hint of insincereity of him, he doesn't find any evidence of sincerity on her face. Whereas Gatsby is telling lies, he looks at Gatsby's face and it really is true to him in a way. Certain slivers of his story are in fact true, but the vast majority is false. And yet through this assumption of a false narrative and this whole self-made identity, it has in a sense become far truer than the real stale life that Daisy is clinging to and which she and Jordan and even Tom to a certain extent can treat with a kind of flippancy even as they're aware that everyone else is trying to struggle to get to their position. Yeah. It's like how I feel about front porches. Like if you ever notice all the houses with front porches, nobody's ever sitting on them and I really want to house for the front porch because I think if I got a house with a front porch, then I would sit on the front porch, you know, anyway, Daisy and Tom are like a house with a front porch that no one sits in. Wow, there's so much to say about them. That's really great because you have me thinking now about how I could be so in a way deceived by this and concentrating on Gatsby's falseness when in a way he's the most sincere person of all of them. Absolutely. Even though Nick says he's the only honest person he's ever known, but yeah, well, I love that, you know, like we're supposed to trust that statement. I mean, Daisy and Tom are unfaithful to each other. Nick's doing his own little round of shallow womanizing even though he comes across and is on narrative as the good guy. So and the other part of that is what is it about status? Why can't money buy you status? Why is it a big deal? Anything even if it hadn't been bootlegging, right? Even if he had been someone who came into new money because he was a film star or something, there would have been the same sort of class condescension towards someone like that. So what is it that Daisy and Tom actually have? Because obviously, there's no real depth to that, but they understand a kind of language and it's like a culture that they have that outsiders can't really understand. So if Gatsby could be trained in that language so that he spoke it fluently and without an accent, so to speak, then everything would be fine. But unless you've grown up in that culture, then you don't really know it and can't belong to it. And I've experienced this because I didn't grow up in such, I would say high class circumstances and I ended up at a school where there are a lot of preps school people and you feel that in your bones, you feel the sort of class distinction. There's a sort of character to people who have grown up in a higher class, I think, even in America where that sort of thing is downplayed. I don't know how much we're supposed to take as a universal lesson from next particular prejudices towards Midwestern people or something, but I think it is fundamentally a culture of insincereity and that's why Gatsby really can't get along in it. I mean, the one time that he really brushes up against people of Tom's milieu is when the, I think that's the Sloan's, the couple riding their horses past Gatsby's and they invite him, first he invites them to die and they decline. And then they make the same gesture to him assuming that he is also going to decline and he takes them seriously, takes them up on it and they can't get over his ghostness to not understand that they were not issuing him a sincere invitation. And that I think is the great illustration of Gatsby's kind of idiocy about picking up on these social cues because he is in a strange way such a fundamentally sincere person. So there's this culture of insincereity that's happening in East Ag. Because in West Ag, I mean, you have these enormous houses, just as enormous as East Ag, and maybe even just as God-y. You know, we get descriptions of the two houses, but they don't really seem fundamentally different in many ways. It's not as though one of them is obviously a mcmanshen or something and the other isn't. Both halves of them still have the relative newness of being American constructions. It's not as if one of them lives in Oxford and then the other, you know, lives in Long Island. They both live on Long Island. The descriptions of the two houses, though I think there's something telling about the heritage, I suppose you could say, the two houses are relatively similar, one might say. So perhaps the only thing that really distinguishes them is the fact that the West Eggers are not, I don't know, a polygetic about that. They're more flashy. They are more honest about the fact that they have money. One of the things that characterizes American old money is the unwillingness to spend any of it, which maybe is how they still have old money in the first place. Even though it's gauche, even though it's rit-seeing kind of all the wrong ways, it is honest in a way that the East Eggers can't possibly be. Since you're bringing up the difference between the houses, this is an opportunity, first of all, to read a really incredible passage at the beginning of the novel. I'm sure you know what this passage is. The jumping lawn, I love it. And so it happens that on a warm windy evening, I drove over to East Egg to see two old friends who my scarcely knew at all. Their house was even more elaborate than I expected. A cheerful red and white, Georgian colonial mansion overlooking the bay. The lawn started at the beach and ran toward the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sundials and brick walls and burning gardens. Finally, when it reached the house, drifting up the side and bright vines as though from the momentum of its run. The front was broken by a line of French windows glowing now with reflected gold and wide open to the warm windy afternoon. And Tom Buchanan in riding clothes was standing with his legs apart on the front porch and then skipping a bit down. We walked through a high hallway into a bright rosy colored space, fragile bound into the house by French windows at either end. The windows were a jar and gleaming white against the fresh grass outside that seemed to grow a little way into the house. A breeze blew through the room, blue curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding cake of the ceiling, and then rippled over the wine-colored rug, making a shadow on it as windows on the sea. The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon. 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 house. I must have stood for a few moments listening to the whip and snap of the curtains and the groan of a picture on the wall. Then there was a boom as Tom Buchanan shut the rear windows and the caught wind died out about the room and the curtains and the rugs and the two young women ballooned slowly to the floor. That's really one of the most amazing things it's ever been written in one of the great passages of the novel. Part of of when interest me about that is when I think of Gatsby's house, I think of it as a party venue on the one hand. And it's almost like a suit of clothing that's too big for him, right? You have the allies character looking at the library and marveling that the books are real, not fake. And you have at various points, you get the sense when I think Gatsby and Daisy and Dick are kind of wandering around looking at the place and it's just you get the sense of it's kind of vastness and the way in which Gatsby doesn't really intimately know it very well. And so there's a sense of staticness to it. And what this passage gives us is something really dynamic. So this is not a place, it's not just a place, it's a place where the lawn right runs and jumps. And these passages about the dynamism of the house, of course, adjust opposed to some characterizations of Tom that we skipped and his physical power and arrogance and dominance and his cruel body, the one that's capable of enormous leverage, his paternal contempt. I'm saying I have a nice place here. The passage like this gives you, you know, what I called a language or a culture. And I think what you called right, the culture of insincereity to really understand that its passage is like this that help convey that. What it means to live in this world, to live with this status. It's not just about insincereity, but it's about a certain kind of appropriateness or aptness of appearances. One that Gatsby can't simply replicate. And it's also something about the nature of their desire, right? So Daisy is often bored. Basically, they're overgratified. They get bored easily. They have nothing to do. The fact that they can have anything they want at any time has created. It's a certain level of self-assuredness on the one hand, but a certain level of apathy on the other. So there's something about status and class and even the mannerisms of class that are meant to convey either an absence of desire or the fact that there's not too much desire, right? There's not too much aspiration. You're not needy. So you don't really mean to come to dinner. You're not trying to feed someone and you don't need to go. You don't need to be fed, whereas of course Gatsby is all about. Any new money person is all about being self-made and aspiration. And that's what doesn't fit. There's a huge difference between just having something that's there, that's part of your heritage that's been there and striving to attain it. And the striving is the thing that comes into conflict with class. So the dynamism in this scene is not about striving. It's a dynamism that's inherent to status, I think. Yeah. Well, it's very Roman. I think of with Tom and Jordan too being a professional golfer, I think of the Kennedys or the Houghton Hepburns. I know that Jackie Boeville when she first joined the Kennedy clan was rather put off by the fact that the siblings all played football with each other and literally tackled each other to the ground. And she wasn't used to that kind of thing or Catherine Hepburn running into the sound in the morning, an old seabuck, and in the middle of winter, because she thought that the best medicine was the worst tasting or something. So there's this Yankee sensibility of this energy or something. It's like the flip side of self-denial or it's like a mechanism of self-denial in a way. The idea of like training the body, giving you sort of something to do with your spare time, which is very particular to this certain kind of old money self-sufficiency. It's a very peculiar culture where you have these two opposite forces like a supreme laziness and a tremendous amount of time on your hands on one hand. And this kind of like you say the dynamism and energy on the other. But going to the section with allies, as you mentioned in the library, because I did want to talk about this is really great scene. When Jordan and Nick go into the library and that character allies is looking at his books, he says, "Zon page 45, absolutely real, have pages and everything." I thought they'd be a nice durable cardboard. Matter of fact, they're absolutely real. Pages and here, let me show you, taking our skepticism for granted, he rushed the bookcases and returned with volume one of the stuttered lectures. See, he cried triumphantly, it's a bonafide piece of printed matter. It fooled me. This fellow is a regular balasco. It's a triumph. What thoroughness, what realism. New went to stop too, didn't cut the pages. But what do you want? What do you expect? So, balasco, by the way, for those of you who don't know, is David Balasco. He's a theatrical impressario. He is the namesake of the balasco theater in Broadway. He produced a lot of plays. He launched the careers of many actors. Barbara Stanwick, among them, he gave her her name, as matter of fact. He was known for his elaborate sets, but he was the first to use what we can now consider to be modern stage lighting and colored lights. He's a producer and a theatrical guy, famous for, basically, scene setting, which is exactly the connection that we're supposed to make here. But I love the fact that Gatsby knew when to stop too. He didn't cut the pages. So he has all these amazing books, but he didn't cut them, which is something else that when I first read this book, when I was 13 or 14, I found out that used to be that when the books were found, the pages were folded. And part of the enjoyable process of reading through a book the first time was to take letter opener or something and to cut the pages open as you read. So if you ever go to, you know, really old bookshop or something occasionally, a couple times in Oxford, I was able to find uncut books. He has all the right books and they're all real, but he hasn't read any of them. But he's gone through the trouble of actually getting a library of some taste. And interestingly, too, it seems that the stuttered lectures that he mentions, and this is just kind of weird trivia. So looked it up, and these were by this guy named John Lawson stuttered, and they were essentially travelogue lectures. Then they were very popular in the States, and stuttered seems like an okay guy as far as it goes, but his son, Lothrip stuttered, believed in eugenics. He was a member of the KKK, and he wrote a book called The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy, which seems to be the book that Tom references, but he gets the name of the author wrong. He calls him Goddard instead of stuttered, which seems to be a theme with Tom that he keeps getting things wrong. The son is getting hotter. Oh, no, actually, it's getting colder, right? He can't remember. Right. So there's a strange sort of connection there, too. That reminds me that we should go back and mention that scene with Tom, because we read the beginnings of that where Nick is going to visit them, and then ultimately ends up having dinner with them. And there's the famous scene where what's happening in that scene is that Nick is observing the kind of coolness of the women. So Daisy, sometimes she and Miss Baker talked at once, unobstructively, and with a bantering and consequence that was never quite chatter, that was as cool as their white dresses and their impersonal eyes and the absence of all desire. And at some point he says, "You make me feel uncivilized, Daisy. Can't we talk about crops or something?" And so that's Tom's cue. He's expressing his own status anxiety, even though I think he's one of their people, but that's Tom's cue to say, "civilization's going to pieces." Broke out Tom's violently. I've gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read The Rise of the Colored Empires by this man gottered, and then this idea that the white race will be utterly submerged, and it's all scientific stuff that's been proved. Even though they're talking explicitly about race here, I think this gets us at some of the status stuff going on the book of the status anxiety. Hmm. I wanted to find that part where he says, yeah, Nick Glader says something like, "What worried me wasn't about Tom was something about his stale ideas. I want to say it was." Yeah. So this is on page 15 in my edition. So something was making him nibble at the edge of stale ideas as if his sturdy physical egoism no longer nourished his preemptory heart. Hmm. Yeah. So maybe he feels the encroaching Gatsby types as a real threat to his own status. But yeah, there was some joke too, which was really good that Nick made about how it seemed likely that he would be concerned about that, but what seemed unlikely is the fact that he would have actually read a book. So something like that, which was pretty funny. Actually, he says, "As for Tom, the fact that he had some woman in New York was really less surprising than that he had been depressed by a book." That's great, which is funny too, because it also implies maybe another parallel between him and Gatsby, which is that they tend not to read, or at least not take what they read too seriously. Actually, that's not true because actually Gatsby does take what he reads really seriously. So I was just running with a connection that you had made there. But did I kind of divert us? Did you have something else about that association and the to the book and the library? I can't find it. I wanted to find the part about the brewer and how. Yeah, page 57. There was nothing to look at from under the tree except Gatsby's enormous house, so I stared at it like Kant at his church steeple for half an hour. A brewer had built it early in the period craze a decade before, and there was a story that he'd agreed to pay five years taxes on all the neighboring cottages if the owners would have their roofs fatched with straw. Perhaps their refusal took the heart out of his plan to found a family. He went into an immediate decline. His children sold his house with the black wreaths still on the door. Americans, while occasionally willing to be surfs, have always been obstinate about being peasantry. Right. So there's this pedigree of the house as having been built by this brewer. And then I guess there's this English connection too. So it's part of the period craze. So again, I think there's a little bit of a connection to Blasco here and creating a set out of whole cloth maybe. But he wants to complete the picture. I mean, he wants to fill in the details of this brewer. So he wants all the neighboring houses to have fatched roofs like in an English countryside village so that he can be the lord of the manor and everyone else are the surfs on the feudal land. That connection to England, I think, is really important throughout the book. Gatsby tries to his best shot as sort of proving himself as being not just a scene dresser, like, Alaska and actually part of Tom and Daisy's society is the fact that he went to Oxford. The thing that Daisy cries over with joy more than anything else about Gatsby or his perfect English shirts. Right. I think there's something there. The connection with the Mayflower, obviously, with this American royalty and this idea that if you can trace yourself back to England somehow or you can have a connection with England, then that sort of legitimizes you in the quote-unquote American aristocracy. That connection is really what makes East egg the fact that it's further East than West egg, I think is really important to, you know, it's closer to England physically. Yeah, let's say something about that because there's some interesting passages that are evocative of the colonization of the United States and the way in which Gatsby's dream, which of course, you know, Gatsby's dream, which is to attain Daisy, is connected to the American dream, which is connected and turned to something having to do with the discovery and colonization of America. So one of these happens at the very end of the novel. Here's the final passage. Most of the big shoreplaces were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy moving below of a ferry boat across the sound. And as the moon rose higher, the essential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors eyes, a fresh green breast of the new world. Its vanish trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby's house, had once pandered in whispers the last and the greatest of all human dreams. For transitory and chanted moment, man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder. And as I sat there brooding on the old unknown world, I thought of Gatsby's wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy's dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He had not known that it was already behind him, somewhere back in the vast obscurity beyond the city where the dark fields of the Republic rolled on under the night. Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgasmic future that year by year recedes before us. It alluded us then, but that's no matter. Tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther, at one fine morning, so we beat on boats against the current, born back ceaselessly into the past. It's just like the best thing ever. Yeah. So what are we meant to make of this connection to the discovery of the new world and the American dream? He makes the connection here himself. Fitzgerald does the work for us, like telling us that everyone in the east, who's part of this story, they're all really westerners. And the fresh green breast of the new world and a paragraph later, the green light at the end of Daisy's dock. I think we're supposed to see those two things as being of a piece and therefore Gatsby is an original American or an authentic American or America itself, you know, always chasing after that fresh green thing. This relates to the idea of America as the new Eden as the John Winthrop's shining city on a hill and all that good stuff about how this is a place where you could go to just start fresh, forget your past, make yourself over again, and that hope and naivete, I think, is kind of what characterizes Americans and it's what makes us so obnoxious, maybe, to Europeans, especially who have seen it all before and have the evidence of it and the scars of it built into the landscape. So that freshness and that sense that even though we've now achieved manifest destiny and gone all the way to the middle west of San Francisco and hit the end of the road, there's still so many vast parts of the country that are wild and yellowstone and yosemite and all those great natural beauties, wonders of the American landscape. And the fact that it just kind of goes on and on and on with this fresh promise and there's always a place to move to where you can start over in a place where maybe to people whose feet haven't trotted on yet. It speaks to, I think, the kind of naivete that really characterizes Gatsby, this idea that, well, why, of course, you can repeat the past and there's something childish and stupid about it that can only come from a young country, I think. Yeah. So we are all, in a sense, Gatsby's in our own way as Americans, but I think one of the interesting things here is that there's a way in which Gatsby thinks he's looking into the future. That's what his incredible capacity for hope, that line near the very beginning of the novel. Let me just grab that because I think we're going to take that as characterizing, not just Gatsby, but kind of the American spirit, the heightened sensitivity to the promises of life. That's a particularly American thing. And seemingly that's very forward looking, right? And that goes along with the kinds of changes that have been taking place, right? The advent of the automobile and the phone, which are basically ubiquitous at this point in electricity, I think more than half of households have electricity at this point in the 1920s. But really, it seems to be forward looking, but it is at bottom a kind of nostalgia, a kind of looking into the past in the way that I think maybe there's some parallel to Gatsby. Gatsby, of course, is trying to recapture a past that cannot be recaptured, although him and Nick argue about whether this is possible, right? Whether he can turn back time five years and have daisy and get her to admit that she never loved Tom and just simply to abolish the last five years and start over. Or if that's all essentially gone. So something here about looking into the future, these sorts of aspirations having something could do with being stuck in the past. So he did not know that it was already behind him somewhere back in the vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the Republic rolled on under the night. I think we're meant to believe that what we're trying to attain is something that's been lost. All of us, it has something to do with the idealisms of childhood perhaps or staying in a kind of Eden. And it's something we can't have back. But because of the nature of the discovery and conquest of the New World, that American spirit is especially imbued with this idea that Eden can be reattained. I think there's something too about the fact that his past is behind him. It's out there. It's out west. The American movement east to west is just as much of a draw as it is from west to east, I think. So Gatsby's family coming across the ocean, they already moved to the west. They already tried to capture this American spirit of manifest destiny and the new Eden and everything else. And Gatsby is now, you know, and they all are moving west to east in order to sort of steal from the old stores of Europe by going to the east. So he left his past behind in the west. And the idea that this was already tried out in the west is very true. Any movement from west to east is going to be kind of retreading the ground that one's family took to get out west in the first place. There's that interesting comment in page 64 in my edition where Nick is looking at the portrait of Dan Cody, Gatsby sort of mentor, although the story turns out to be a bit of a red herring in a way, right? You initially think this is the guy who made Gatsby rich or something. It turns out, right. Not to be the case. But Cody is described as a gray, flawed man with a hard empty face, the pioneer Deb Ashe, who during one phase of American life brought back to the eastern seaboard, the savage violence of the frontier, Rothel and Saloon. It was indirectly due to Cody that Gatsby drank so little. So am I making the right connection here to what you're? Yeah, absolutely. So Cody, I think we're supposed to make the connection with any of these rugged guys like, you know, the Vanderbilt, for instance, who did actually buy their way successfully into American old money. Or, you know, Henry Gats, Jay Gatsby's real father at the end, says, "How do you live? He could have been a James J Hill, you know, the guy who took the railroad from Minnesota out to, I think it was San Francisco, who went over the Rocky Mountains and everything." And so this pioneer life of striving and making one's way across the country has a rugged American industrialist. That heritage would have actually instilled Gatsby with a certain currency among the eastern elite that he tries to ingratiate himself with because it worked for who besides the Vanderbilt to my thinking of the other big family-- Rockefellers. The Rockefellers, yeah. Having their houses in Newport and everything else, they were able to transfer that vitality into some cache in the east and became, you know, the old money. So this idea that Dan Cody could be, and Gatsby wants to probably advance this idea a little bit by having his picture up, this idea that he was brought up by Dan Cody and not Meyer Wolfshime is, I think, an important distinction to make. And when it turns out that he's actually in with the underground and the black market and bootlegging and everything else, that, I think, is what stinks at the core of Gatsby's earned fortune. Yeah. So it's one thing to think about the relationship of the American dream to the original discovery of the New World, also very violent, and the frontier started in the east and moved gradually towards the west and the legacy of those pioneer efforts, arguably with us as part of the American character to something extent. I don't know if the American dream is supposed to be infused with a certain amount of rapacity or some sort of sociopathic element, whatever the spirit of the pioneer is. Perhaps our aspirations are infused with that to some degree. Well, it's very Protestant, you know, the idea of the hard work inherent in taming that continent, which I think is what allows those early American industrialists to buy into that old money because that's very Protestant. But also the big ideals, the disjunction between the ideal and the means to the ideal. The big dream, you know, in Gatsby's case, it's daisy and then the willingness to do what it takes even something criminal to get her. And in the case of the United States, it's some kind of grand ideal having to do with a democratic ideals or a perfect union or a manifest destiny, all these various things, which have as the means to them was unsavory in many ways, as the means to nation-building and effectively are. I mean, every nation is built on something like this. It's just that in Europe, it's so much farther away in time. Right. And I think too, it's not just that you make the money the right kind of way or don't make the money and inherit it even better, but the idea that you don't make it with the wrong sort of people or that you're the right kind of person making it. And the, you know, the obvious immigrant, I mean, you know, Jewish background of Mayor Wolfshime and everything that he represents, you know, never going to be accepted by the East Coast elite. Even though it's quintessentially American. Right. Part of the paradox of having aspirations towards upward mobility is that high status, you know, as I mentioned before, it just is defined by not having such aspirations. Right. So to aspire to it is inherently self-contradictory. And that contradiction enters right into the immigrant fantasy as well of creating a new life for oneself. Unless there is something paradigmatically American about having those aspirations being an immigrant, being from elsewhere, and arguably that's the case. And part of that is now, by natural selection, it's built into our character, the fact that we got all the people from Europe who wanted to make over their lives. That means that that's going to be the kind of person that we create. But what's interesting, I think, about the novel and what's maybe sinister about its lessons, it's almost as though the lesson of the novel is not that it's impossible to recreate the past. It's not with money, but just with that status, can you successfully recreate the past? So for instance, Gatsby can't do it because he has new money and he's only using money. But Tom can do it. There's a kind of a throwaway line, which really stuck out to me during this reading, that Tom says about his stables and his garage. He says, "I know a lot of people who've made garages out of stables, but I think I'm the only one who's made a stable out of a garage." So Tom has successfully gone back in time. He even manages to successfully win Daisy back on the strength of the past and their past relationship. Coming in with the Sloan's to Gatsby's property on horseback, there's something about being the landed gentry of America or something that seems to allow Tom that mobility in terms of time that is not afforded to Gatsby despite all of his money. I don't know what the novel is saying about that and I find it to be pretty sinister because it is saying that recreating the past is possible if you have the right kind of past or something. Interesting. So I wanted to get at just speaking of the relationship between Gatsby's dream and the American dream and all this stuff. I think this is another one of the great passages from the novel. It's a characterization of Gatsby's feelings for Daisy. There are times in the novel when it feels like he's going to first person omniscient, right? Namely, he's characterizing something that someone else has told him, but it's so detailed and it's so in their heads that it's as if he's just a third person omniscient narrator at this point. This is on page 70 in my edition where Gatsby wants nothing less than that Daisy should say to Tom, I never loved you. And then we get that little exchange where Jay says, I wouldn't ask you much of her. I've answered, you can't repeat the past. And that's when Gatsby says, of course you can. And then he says, I'm going to fix everything just the way it was before. A line that to me is reminiscent of the fact that we'll shine and perhaps Gatsby as well have fixed the world series in the past. So is that kind of criminal element the idea of fixing things? I want to talk about that too, but yeah. So then we get this wonderful passage. This is the end of chapter six page 71 in my edition. He talked a lot about the past and I gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps that had gone into loving Daisy. His life had been confused and disordered since then, but if he could once return to a certain starting place and go over it all slowly, he could find out what that thing was. One autumn night, five years before they had been walking down the street when the leaves were falling and they came to a place where there were no trees and the sidewalk was white with moonlight. They stopped here and turned towards each other. Now it was a cool night with that mysterious excitement in it, which comes at the two changes of the year. The quiet lights in the houses were burning out into the darkness and there was a stir and bustle among the stars out of the corner of his eye. Gatsby saw that the blocks of the sidewalks really formed a ladder and mounted to a secret place above the trees. He could climb to it if he climbed alone and once there he could suck on the pap of life gop down the incomparable milk of wonder. His heartbeat faster and faster as Daisy's white face came up to his own. He knew that when he kissed this girl and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning fork that had been struck upon a star, then he kissed her. At his lips touch, she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete. Through all he said, even through his appalling sentimentality, I was reminded of something, an elusive rhythm, a fragment of lost words that I had heard somewhere a long time ago. For a moment, a phrase tried to take shape in my mouth and my lips parted like a dumb man's, as though there was more struggling upon them than a whisper of startled air. But they made no sound and what I had almost remembered was incommunicable forever. Yeah, that's one of several times when Nick is trying to think of something and he can't quite say it or think it, which is curious. Yeah. Well, here he's just given this account through Gatsby's perspective, things that he can't possibly know or even recreate from any plausible account of what Gatsby has set to him, right? These unnaturally visions and the idea of the sidewalk mounting into the stars and all that stuff. I love that though, his climbing into these different perspectives. He does that with Jordan once, I think, and then he also does that with Daisy as a younger one. I think really just wanted to point to the level of idealism in Gatsby's relation to Daisy and even the word sentimentality is used here. So through all he said, the very last paragraph, Nick is suggesting that all that purple prose that's just come before is not his, but it's still beautiful and poetic because it's sterile, but it is quite out there and then blames that on Gatsby as if Gatsby would write something like that. The blocks of the sidewalks forming a ladder to a secret place above the trees, all that stuff. And blames that sentimentality on Gatsby, but whatever we make of that, I think it just gives us further insight into the nature of this sort of dream. I don't know how to express it further right now. No, I think you just did. I think that was great. One of the things I wanted to get back to was you had mentioned early on Daisy's voice and it being money and her voice is another star character of the novel, right? We get lots and lots of recurrent passages before it's ever paid off with that climactic conclusion. That's kind of an epiphany on Nick's part, I think, right? The money part? Yeah. That's how Gatsby characterizes it. And the Nick says, oh, it's Gatsby. You're right. That is perfect. What's fine that passage? So it's Nick and Gatsby are talking and Nick says she's got an indiscreet voice. It's full of, I hesitated. Her voice is full of money, he said suddenly. That was it. I'd never understood before. It was full of money. That was the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it. The jingle of it, the symbol song of it, high in a white palace, the king's daughter, the golden girl. So that's the kind of climactic payoff, the realization of what her voice means. But we're introduced to her voice early on. So page eight, we're Daisy seeing Nick says, I'm paralyzed with happiness here over the top. Insects here, expressions. What's interesting is the way in which, and this is again part of the high status culture of insincereity, but the manipulative effect of these extreme expressions of affection, even though they're obviously affected and insincere. This is our introduction to Daisy's voice. I looked back at my cousin who began to ask me questions in her low thrilling voice. It was the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down. As if each is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again. Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth. But there was an excitement in her voice that men who had cared for her found difficult to forget, a singing compulsion, a whispering listen. A promise that she had done gay, exciting things just a while since, and that there were gay, exciting things hovering in the next hour. It's very difficult to imagine. So are the bright eyes and the bright passionate mouth. You know, it gives her this dreamlike, nebulous quality. And maybe that's the point. Maybe she's supposed to be as unattainable to her mind as this amount of wealth is part of that not being able to pin her down as part and parcel of Gatsby's not being able to pin her down or be able to pin down the status and the wealth that he so desires, the status anyway. Well, we only get that in one scene. So I always imagined her as blonde, but at one point he describes her hair as dark shining hair. Yeah, but she says that her daughter has the same hair as her and the daughter has blonde hair. Yeah, but it's that kind of nebulousness that is. That's interesting. Obviously not a mistake. Right. That's interesting. So hopefully this will be the last voice passage that I read even other several hours. There's a point where so Nick had arranged their get together at his house and they renewed their love for each other. And now they're wondering around Gatsby's mansion. And you get several scenes, so you've idealized this thing for so long, and now you have it. And then there's that inevitable moment of not disillusionment, but hints of the sense that this thing that I have now can never really live up to what it was as an idealization. So they're wondering around the house, and he's sort of looking at everything, re-valuing things through Daisy's eyes and the way she's reacting to the house. And then at a certain point, after his embarrassment and his unreasoning joy, he was consumed with wonder at her presence. He had been full of the idea so long, dreamed it right through to the end, waited with his teeth set, so to speak, at an inconceivable pitch of intensity. Now in the reaction, he was running down like an overwhelmed clock. And then Daisy cries because of all the beautiful shirts. She's never seen so many. And then possibly it had occurred to him that the colossal significance of that, so that then they're out on the grounds, and they look and see her place in the light across the bay. So he has to mourn now the fact that he's no longer gonna have the same relationship to that light. So the narrator possibly had occurred to him that the colossal significance of that light had now vanished forever compared to the great distance that had separated him from Daisy. It had seemed very near to her, almost touching her. It had seemed so close as a star to the moon. Now it was again a green light on a dock. His count of enchanted objects had diminished by one. And then finally, and Nick is saying goodbye. As I went over to say goodbye, I saw that the expression of bewilderment had come back into Gatsby's face as though a faint doubt had occurred to him as to the quality of his present happiness. Almost five years, there must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams, not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way, no amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man can store up in his ghostly heart. As I watched him, he adjusted himself a little visibly, his hand took hold of hers, and as she said something low in his ear, he turned towards her with a rush of emotion. I think that voice held him the most with its fluctuating feverish warmth because it couldn't be over dreamed that voice was a deathless song. Daisy's just a person. (laughing) He's not. As inevitably, Gatsby has gotten what he's wanted temporarily. Hopefully he was prepared for that moment when what he was gonna be confronted with was just a person. But I love these descriptions of the inevitable tension between idealizing someone for so long and then coming into contact with the reality and then what Daisy has to renew. And you see this early on with Nick as well. You almost think Nick's in love with her, right? In the beginning, the way he talks about her voice and the effect that her voice has on him. And here it's the alert, it's the charm that can reignite Gatsby's passion, even though predictably it's going to waver in the face of contact with reality. And then that voice ends up being money, right? And in a way, wonder if Daisy is the personification of money or it's unclear if she's the personification of money or of status or of something else in that realm. Whatever it is, what all the talk about her voice does is it gives you a sense of the insubstantiality of the object of this aspiration, the stream that Gatsby has. - And that malifluous musical quality to her voice. I love paid more attention this time to the music that runs through the whole book. That insubstantiality of money seems to be connected to music too. This is apropos of nothing, but this is maybe my favorite part in the whole book. It struck me this time how funny the book is. - Yeah. - And there's that part where Nick is at the party for the first time and at the end of the party when everything sort of breaks up and everyone starts getting hysterical because they're so drunk. And there's this one girl who's crying these big gobs of mascara down her face and they're making this trail with like black tears. Someone suggests that they should play the notes on her face. That's my absolute favorite moment. But anyway. - That's great. - The tears that Gatsby's extreme wealth produces are musical tears. - Yeah. - To switch gears here to something which is not ineffable at all, but very fleshy. We should probably go to Mertel and the Valley of Ashes, which is very much a real place. It's just flushing meadows if anyone's ever. - Oh, is that where it is? - Oh, yeah. - I thought it was a mythical realm. (laughing) - Is it between Queens and New York City? Is that, sorry, Long Island and-- - And Queens. Yeah. You go past it when you go to, if you could drive to JFK from points north. So you could see it and it does look, and now they've made it into a park and they've tried to make it nice and everything. But it really was. It is still a little creepy looking. - No more heaps of ashes. (laughing) - No, but that was a real thing. - That's amazing, yeah, 'cause it's hard to imagine the landscape. - It was a dumping ground. It was actually called Corona Park at one point, which is timely. But anyway, it really was a dumping ground and it really was made of ash heaps. And in fact, there was a topless train. So, you know, train with no, topless train. People went topless on this train. - No. - Train with no covering on top. And it was called the Talcom Express because you would get covered in this ash if you wrote on it, which is completely disgusting. There's a certain John Bunyan kind of quality. Like this is a place in pilgrim's progress that you have to go through, which also kind of makes it even more curiously like a parable. And of course, the eyes of God, the eyes of Dr. Eckelberg hovering over the ash heaps. It's a little terrifying. But Mertle, Tom's kept woman, Tom's mistress, is the only one in the Valley of ashes who wasn't covered in ashes. Which is interesting. She has this vitality about her, which it's difficult to say what about her, Tom is interested in except for the fact that she is probably the exact opposite of Daisy. - That's really interesting because there's that scene in the apartment where there are Nick and Tom and Mertle and Mertle sister Catherine and then the other couple are all getting drunk together. And Dix says he's only been a drunk a few times in his life. (laughing) - I don't believe that for a second. So unreliable narrator. So in my notes, I thought, wow, isn't it remarkable that Tom, Mr. Superior, Aryan, race guy wants to hang out with all these lower class people. What is he doing? What attracts him to them? - The pretension of Gatsby using old sport and then Mertle, another really, really funny scene. Mertle having these extreme pretensions in the apartment. The fact that the upholstery has these images of Versailles on it or girls on swings or something like that. She talks about that woman who comes by just to look at people's feet. - Yes. - All these random, health conscious people that she employs and her impureness to these incredibly awful people. Her sister Catherine, which I love, the description of the eyebrows that she had plucked and then drawn in again, but not quite successfully plucked and not quite heavily drawn in enough that gave a blurred quality to her face as Nick describes it. And Mr. and Mrs. McKee, who were really terrible. I love the smoky air and Mertle saying, "My dear," she told her sister in a high, mincing shout, "Most of these fellas will cheat you every time." I'm just imagining that she has this terrible. What in anyone else I would think is an adorable accent, but in her must be awful. All they think of is money. I had a woman up here last week to look at my feet and when she gave me the bill, the youth of thought she had my appendicitis out. - Yep, that's great. - She's just a total idiot. I mean, she's like Madame Bovery. If Madame Bovery wasn't beautiful and young. - The whole scene is really important because it establishes this relationship between status and love. I asked that question about Tom. At one point, Tom is yawning. He seems bored here, why is he here? And then you see Mertle, she changes dresses at one point, and that's when she gets even hotter. So she's affecting a higher status than she has, and she seems to be a large part of her relationship with Tom is the idea of borrowing his importance and borrowing his status and getting a big head over it, getting inflated by it. She'll say, "Avarona has been right. I married him because they thought he was a gentleman. I thought he knew something about breeding, but he wasn't fit to lick my shoe." And then her sister says, "You're crazy about him." And she says, "She wasn't," which is kind of a parallel to Gatsby's wanting Daisy to say that she was never crazy about Tom. It's something about Tom has this contempt for all these people who are below him that goes with his racial contempt. And yet he needs it. He kind of feeds off it and he enjoys being in proximity to it. I guess it feeds his sense of superiority. And at the same time, Mertle enjoys borrowing his contemptuousness. And that's what happens to her in this scene is she becomes Tom in a way. She acts out Tom's contemptuousness and he no longer has to put the energy into it. He can sit back and relax and yawn while she plays his sort of game. - Yeah, there are these two channels, I guess you could say, that are funneled into Tom. And one of them is this kind of airy, like I said before, ineffable money and high status and the others, his brutishness and his physicality. It seems like, as is usually the case with rich men and part of this culture of insincereity and it's also a culture of hypocrisy. So they want the money, high status woman who is frothy and then they have to have their animal needs satisfied by the more substantial and fleshy kept mistress. - Yeah, this is the other part of it, right? Because I've made the association between status and the height and class. And I think this goes down to the. mannerisms, like if you analyze what it means to have upper class mannerisms, it's all about conveying the idea that you do not have the same intensity of desire or passion that others do, right? So that's in a way what manners are about. You hide these passions to some extent, but you can do it even in the tone of voice. So sort of upper class accent, right, has less affect in it. It's more snooty. It displays less emotion, less variability in emotion. I always think you have Hitchcock's Vertigo where you get this nice juxtaposition because it's the same actress and the same character in the movie being two different people and the way she accomplishes conveying a low class Judy versus a high class Madeline. To do Judy, her face shows lots of different expressions. She wears her heart more on her sleeve. She's more volatile. She's more vulnerable. She's more reactive to her environment and the whole ethos of status is to be less reactive, more immune, more in control and less exhibitionistic about what's going on inside you, even as you do, it's sorts of things at least if you're a woman that Daisy does, which is to affect an incredible amount of passion. Oh, I'm paralyzed with happiness to see you so exaggerated and obviously false, and yet within this kind of culture, allowable, what Tom gets, what someone in Tom's class gets through his relationship to Mertle is a reconnection right to the instinctual, more vital part of himself that he can't connect to in Daisy. And I think the whole Valley of Ashes thing is related to this, right? So the way lower classes are represented often is as earthier or as closer to the earth. And the Ashes are a variation on that and they're the underside of prosperity, right? This is the consequence of industrialization, the very thing that's allowed the kind of prosperity that Gatsby and the Beacannins enjoy. That prosperity has its cost. So it turns the people of the earth into people of Ashes. It exploits them, it denatures them, it uses them up. That's some of the larger social significance, of course, of Tom's relationship to Mertle. Yeah, that's great. So Tom has allowed Mertle some of the magnificence of his own wealth and status. So he is seen with her in New York, and that is considered acceptable. And he's given her this apartment and everything else, which he won't give to Gatsby. Tom is disgusted by Gatsby's pretensions, but he's really tolerant of Mertles. So in a way, Tom has smiled on Mertle like a god and granted her a place in his life and granted her the cover of his wealth. So he allows her to go to these restaurants with him in New York City, and people see and everyone knows what's going on and knowing knowledge is it. But he can then destroy Gatsby, it will, for having those same types of pretensions, because even Gatsby's wealth is really not protection enough against Tom's disapproval. But there's a moment at which Mertle does cross the line, and that is when she says Daisy's name. And that Tom does not stand for, which is interesting. This one holy ideal for Tom is just, you know, not getting your wires cross. Mertle not infringing on the territory of Daisy by saying her name in this incantatory sense, summoning her up. There's kind of a Madonna whore thing going on here. Oh, absolutely. So she's his mistress, she's his sexual object, and his wife is the object of his respect, and he's even willing to continue to respect her, you know, of a sort, right? Even after she's had an affair with him. Right. He has a special relationship with her, but intimacy that Gatsby sees when he looks in on them and they're eating, are not eating together, but conversing, and she's not going to call him after all. So those are two different things. And the exploitative relationship to Mertle is part of what helps sustain the more significant longer term relationship that he's going to have, the more intimate relationship of a sword with Daisy. It just reminds me of the story that my grandmother always tells about one of the towns that she comes from back in Italy, where everyone in the town, all of the married couples in the town, there was an equal number of men and women, so there were all married couples, and every man had a wife, and every man had a mistress, and every man insisted that his wife was pure. The only towns maybe in the world where every wife was both a Madonna and a whore, but the moment that she does say this name of Daisy, she get that the violence of that moment where he then just breaks her nose. You realize the danger of crossing a line with Tom. There's so much foreshadowing in this book that it's almost ridiculous with all the car accidents and the flicking of buttons and the ripping off of the wheel and all this stuff, and the swift violence of breaking her nose and then cutting in with blood into the scene and destroying the scene with that evil christening or something is what Mertle receives when she puts her foot in it. The description in the book is making a short-depth movement. Tom Buchanan broke her nose with his open hand, a one sentence paragraph and just the short-depth movement of the pros just reaches in and breaks her nose and there were bloody towels upon the bathroom floor, women's voices, scolding and high over the confusion, a long broken whale of pain. This intrusion of death and injury on the scene is really, really violent. I don't know if we're supposed to feel sorry from Mertle at the end. This is mirrored by her body, the shocking moment which when I was a kid reading this for the first time, I could not believe the violence of this description. She'd been hit by the car. Her life violently extinguished. Her thick dark blood mingling with the dust. I'm so paraphrasing here. McAillus, the Greek coffee shop owner, reaches in and tears open her shirt waist, still damp with perspiration. They saw that her left breast was swinging loose like a flap and there was no need to listen for the heart beneath. The mouth was wide open and ripped at the corners, as though she had choked a little and giving up the tremendous vitality she had stored so long. This tremendous vitality I recognized just from you reading something about Tom's tremendous vitality a few minutes ago. So that same description. But yeah, I don't know what's more disgusting there. The left breast, which is great because it would have to be a breast, which is removed from her in this death blow because she's such a sexualized object. And then the corners of her mouth being ripped is, ooh, it's that's difficult to read, but that she had choked. Do you feel sorry for her? It's kind of a horrible, but I don't, I don't know. I don't feel this really connected either her or her husband and their plight. No, neither do I. I feel sorry for her husband. I don't feel sorry for her. Yeah. His wailing is really something and the way he wails at her death is very powerful, disturbing. When they're trying to console him and they're saying, you know, do you have a church? Do you go to a church? He says no. And they said, well, did you get married in a church? He says, yes, but that was a long time ago. And he has no avenue to salvation, you know, or even just what religion is that it's most basic level, which is something to consult yourself with. So that's when he looks out and he sees the eyes of Dr. Echoberg. That's a good segue. Yeah. So let's first talk about that scene and then let's try to say what that. When I told someone I was doing an episode on the Great Gatsby, they said, that's the first thing they asked me. Well, what do you think Dr. TJ Echoberg represents? So go for it. The fact that he looks out and sees those eyes, which have been compared in the book to the eyes of God. And I think maybe the idea is put in his head that he needs to get vengeance and find who did this to his wife. That's the message he's taking from it. But what I love about it is that God is an advertisement, just like Gatsby is an advertisement of a man here, the eyes of God are just an advertisement. And they can project just like you can project onto Gatsby any history and human feeling that you want to attribute to him and any background. Yeah. You can project onto the eyes of Dr. Echoberg, any kind of religion or motivation or any kind of words of God that you feel like hearing in that moment. What's interesting is that from what I've read, he was inspired to put that into the novel by the illustration. So the cover illustration of the novel was completed before the edits were. So that famous cover illustration that we all know, the blue sky with the eyes and lips of a woman. And in the eyes and the irises are images of naked women and then there's the city underneath. Fitzgerald really loved that. I don't think he quite realized that the author was inspired by a passage in the novel in which Nick says, unlike Gatsby and Tom Buchanan, I had no girl whose disembodied face floated along the dark cornices and blinding signs. And so I drew up the girl beside me tightening my arms. So that's Jordan Baker, sort of representative of cynicism and skepticism and reality and sportiness and jauntiness and all these other things as opposed to the idealized daisy type. The artist was inspired by that to create this image and then Fitzgerald saw that and said, I got to write that into the novel and created the TJ Echoberg billboard. So I hope I have that right. Listener can correct me if I'm wrong about that. That's really interesting. As a kid, I always thought that the cover art was supposed to be Echoberg, even though it took me a while to realize that the cover art isn't wearing any glasses and it's clearly a woman. But another weird piece of trivia, just that I learned is that Francis Cougat did the cover art for this, who is actually the brother of the band leader Xavier Cougat. He was really big. He was in movies as a band leader. Wow. Yeah, it's very cool. Really random. Yeah. And he was actually Xavier Cougat, actually pretty good cartoonist. He's in this great Fred Astaire re-da-haworth movie called You and Ever-Lovely or where he does cartoons of people that are pretty good or not cartoons, caricatures. Anyway, that's apropos of nothing. But I guess they were both artistically inclined. So those eyes, I guess related to allies to allies who seized everything. The idea that they're There's kind of solemn, brooding eyes that are watching. And not intervening, right? Yeah. The implication being that, you know, God sees and doesn't care about this age. God is no longer part of the goings on of the world. He's exiled to a billboard. I mean, the way I've seen this written about, if capitalism had a God, this would be, it's God, TJ Eckelberg. And he is kind of faded, abandoned advertisement billboard, watching over the kind of ruin of its own creation, right, if capitalism's creation is this sort of wasteland. Right. And the day is, you know, the American day is the laissez-faire God who doesn't intervene. You know, it's in a way Nick himself. Nick is also Dr. Eckelberg, I guess. It just now occurred to me. Even in that apartment scene, what strikes me is when Nick says that he is imagining what the outside windows of the apartment look like. And he says, this is the kept apartment of murder. He's drunk and he's in the room, but then he also imagines what the lights of the apartment must look like from outside the room. Just grabbing how he keeps wanting to leave, but each time I tried to go, I became entangled in some wild, strident argument which pulled me back as if with ropes into my chair. Yet high over the city, our line of yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening streets. And I was him too, looking up and wondering. I was within and without simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life. He's within and without and his moral ambivalence is similar to Eckelberg's just watching and of course not being able to intervene because it's just a billboard. But Nick watches all of these goings on and he doesn't say so much of a word to anybody. And with Tom too, being taken to Tom's mistress's apartment, Daisy is his cousin. And he is really not bothered and really doesn't make any kind of moral judgment about its implied in the descriptions, has that he thinks that the whole thing is vulgar, but he doesn't intervene on behalf of his cousin's honor or anything. Yeah, he's very passive. I mean, the only confrontation with Tom is in the end, right? When he refuses to shake Tom's hand initially because he thinks Tom got gaspy killed and then relents with a little explanation from Tom and does end up shaking his hands. This is the best Tom could do or something like that. Tom's explanation is lame too. It's something like that. This is what he thought was best. So yeah, Nick is quite passive. That's a good point. The way TJ Eckelberg is used in the end, and this is the lead up to Wilson's, what's Wilson's first name? George. Okay. I guess he's just called Wilson in the novel. So this is the lead up to Wilson murdering Gatsby. He's gone insane and he's looking out at the eyes of Dr. TJ Eckelberg, which had just emerged pale and enormous from the dissolving night as the way it's put. And then says, "God sees everything." That's an advertisement. Michaela's assured him. I'm trying to figure out if that works, if that thematically does what it needs to do, or if it's Gerald is just kind of inserted them. Oh, I think it absolutely does. It's a little easy in a way, you know, to have this billboard so perfectly placed over the murder scene, the death scene. And so I think the symbols that Fitzgerald is trucking in are, you know, it's what makes this book so well suited to a high school curriculum, which is not the greatest compliment you could give something. Well, also it's very plotty. The way things are so tied together thematically and how plotted it is. It's not dissimilar in its tightness of plot and theme to the way a screenwriter would try to write strangely enough since Fitzgerald tried to be a Hollywood screenwriter and didn't make it right. And I've seen that criticism of this. I think some people are offended just by the fact that it has a plot that anything with pretensions to being literary would dare to have a plot. I don't mind that. It's all like, you know, Shakespeare's plots are also quite absurd and it's not really the point they're scaffolding right for something else. Right. Maybe it's just because having read this book when I was really young and having it really affect me in a way, I'm recapturing the past every time I read it and looking at it with my young eyes. But when someone remarked to me that the plot was incredibly ridiculous, I just couldn't believe that. I was like, what do you mean it's ridiculous? Like I had never thought of that before that the whole thing is so unbelievable. It never occurred to me because it's just such a ubiquitous part of our culture and it's also, I mean, it could be a true story, really. So a guy becoming wealthy just to win over this woman. Maybe that's a little bit unreal. But I find everything in it to be extremely believable besides that. Well, it relies on coincidence, of course. And it's a kind of astonishing type of story that would make it perfect for a tabloid. And Fitzgerald was writing these more commercial stories. That's part of how he made a living. And I think he even compared, even in his letters, talked about this a little bit about literary aspiration versus more kind of baser just telling the story stuff. I mean, what makes this book so enjoyable is how beautiful it is and how fantastic it is. The same way that Nick is charmed by Gatsby's tales as a raja and everything else. So Fitzgerald is using that effect with us. And the blue lawn of Gatsby's party and the women like Ma of the Zahnit, you know, I mean, there's so many great images in this that are truly enjoyable and purely fantastical kind of sense. I mean, there's the element of the fantasy novel in it. But that being said, I mean, if Howard Hughes is a real guy and William Randolph Hearst is a real guy, then why is Gatsby so unbelievable? Yeah, it's interesting because this was not a novel that was popular. Fitzgerald had had some success to previous novels, but this novel did not do well while he was alive. And then of course, he died young in his 40s. And then of course, that's when your novel really takes off. It's when you're dead that you have to die first. And I think part of its popularity, they produced a lot of copies to give away the soldiers in World War II. And that was the beginning of its revival strangely enough. From other trivia, you know, when I was looking at some of the background for this, is the number of different titles for the book that he entertained. One of them is among Ash Heaps and Millionaires, Tremalchio and West Egg, under the red, white and blue, the gold-hatted Gatsby, the high-douncing lover. There's just a lot of really bad options. I think he's really lucky. I'm not sure the novel would have done well and ultimately, under some of those other titles. I think we might have had to change the name to the great Gatsby if he had named it something else. But I get to say that's really heartening to me because if there's one thing that my friends know that I struggle with its titles, titling poems, I'm absolutely terrible at them. So makes me feel better that Fitzgerald came up with such clams for great Gatsby. Let's just go with the one that illiterates. I mean, you know, you're dumb. That way, yeah. Yeah, that's very true. So in spite of his inability to come up with good titles, I mean, he's really a master of these beautiful descriptions. And I just, one of my favorites, which I don't think that we can end without me reading a little bit from, is right before that ending passage, which you already read with the fresh green breast of the New World, before that Nick makes up his mind to go back west. He talks about what that might mean. And it's an interesting segue, actually, because he's just at Gatsby's funeral. And he sees allies as the only guest besides himself and Gatsby's father calls Gatsby the poor son of a bitch. And then suddenly Nick makes this incredible turn. And he says, one of my most vivid memories is of coming back west from prep school and later from college at Christmas time. Those who went farther than Chicago would gather in the old Dim Union station at six o'clock of a December evening with a few Chicago friends already caught up into their own holiday gades to bid them a hasty goodbye. I remember the fur coats of the girls returning from this or that's in the chatter of frozen breath and the hands waving overhead as we caught sight of old acquaintances and the matchings of invitations. Are you going to the Ordways, the Herseys, the Shultzes, and the long green tickets class tight in our clubed hands? And last, the murky yellow cars of the Chicago Milwaukee and St. Paul Railroad looking cheerful as Christmas itself on the tracks beside the gate. When we pulled out into the winter night and the real snow, our snow began to stretch out beside us and twinkle against the windows and the dim lights of small, Wisconsin stations moved by a sharp wild brace came suddenly into the air. We drew in deep breaths of it as we walked back from dinner through the cold vestibules, unutterably aware of our identity with this country for one strange hour before we melted indistinguishably into it again. This my middle west, not the wheat or the prairies or the lost sweet towns, but the thrilling returning trains of my youth at the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of holly wreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow. I am part of that, a little solemn with a feel of those long winters, a little complacent from growing up in the caraway house in a city where dwellings are still called through decades by a family's name. I see now that this has been a story of the west after all, Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I were all westerners. And perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common, which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life. Yes, I love this passage as well. I was surprised to find out that it was a story about the west. Right. Yeah. It's so convenient that Fitzgerald tells you that, but in a way, he's helping to write all those jaced or articles that probably exist about to. Oh, yeah. Yes. Gatsby. It's important to create your own critical commentary embedded in the book. Right. The scene reminds me of the sleigh ride in the magnificent Ambersons. I was think of parts of this. I mean, I know Orson Wells. I'm sure had a flagged copy of Great Gatsby next to him when he was making a citizen cane and magnificent. and the early 40s. But that bracing air and what I love about that, of course, is the green tickets in their hands. I mean, Nick ends the novel by going out west and returning to what he thinks is the truer, the more pure, the better American way of life, where there seems to be some kind of European stability, old world stability of having an ancestral home, a house that has a name attached to it over the generations. A firmness and he says, admittedly, some complacency, which is maybe where he gets it from. But he too is going with his green ticket back out to where things are better. He's making kind of the same mistake that everybody makes in America, I guess. And the realization that eventually you're going to run out of new chances and you're going to run out of continent and land somewhere in the Pacific. But for now, anyway, it seems that Minnesota is the place he would rather be. Yeah, it's an interesting way to book and that introduction that he gives us, that famous introduction about his father's advice about reserving judgment and all that. I wondered if that had really paid off. And the way it ends is kind of, it's an obvious return in tone to the way the book begins. So it gives a sense of completion. But I haven't been able to figure out in what way post-2 passages are, the beginning and the ending are related. Mm. Well, you know, I think that this is the book and I mean, part of Nick, the character's motivation for, quote unquote, writing this book is that he extolls the virtues of tolerance at the beginning and then he finally comes to the end of tolerance. (laughs) When real life comes in, tolerance eventually has only so much sway over us or even the most tolerant among us have our limits. What Nick is willing to ambivalently put up with and entertain, it allows for the events of the book to happen, but then maybe that end point of his tolerance then allows for the book to actually be written to put a pin on things at the end in order to have some ironic distance from the events of the novel, from these events in Nick's quote unquote life. And I'm acting as though Nick is a real person writing this. But I mean, in a way, I think this is very much Fitzgerald, originally coming from Minnesota, moving to New York and experiencing many of the events of the novel. The writerly inclination comes, you know, as you've often pointed out, Wes, in that depressive moment after the manic and we can't really accuse Nick of mania at any point. Maybe he has a mania for tolerance and ultimately where that ends is where he's able to get some ironic distance and to write about what he's seen and that allows the events to be transcribed. - Okay, very good. I think that is a good way for us to wrap it up. - Great. - So thank you. - Thank you. (upbeat music) - And thank you to everyone who listened to this episode. I just wanted to remind you again that if you're listening to this on the Feet of the Partial Exam in Life, you're not yet subscribed. You should subscribe to us directly by searching for us on the podcast app of your choice. 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