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The Great Gatsby |
By F. Scott Fitzgerald |
Then wear the gold hat, if that will move her; |
If you can bounce high, bounce for her too, |
Till she cry ‘Lover, gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover, |
I must have you!’ |
—THOMAS PARKE D’INVILLIERS |
The Great Gatsby |
Chapter 1 |
I n my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave |
me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind |
ever since. |
‘Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,’ he told me, |
‘just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had |
the advantages that you’ve had.’ |
He didn’t say any more but we’ve always been unusually |
communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he |
meant a great deal more than that. In consequence I’m in- |
clined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up |
many curious natures to me and also made me the victim |
of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to |
detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a |
normal person, and so it came about that in college I was |
unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy |
to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the con- |
fidences were unsought—frequently I have feigned sleep, |
preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some |
unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quiver- |
ing 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 fa- |
Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com |
ther snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat a sense |
of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at |
birth. |
And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to |
the admission that it has a limit. Conduct may be founded |
on the hard rock or the wet marshes but after a certain point |
I don’t care what it’s founded on. When I came back from |
the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in |
uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I want- |
ed 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 unaffect- |
ed 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 Car- |
The Great Gatsby |
raways are something of a clan and we have a tradition that |
we’re descended from the Dukes of Buccleuch, but the ac- |
tual 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 car- |
ries 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 mi- |
gration known as the Great War. I enjoyed the counter-raid |
so thoroughly that I came back restless. Instead of being the |
warm center of the world the middle-west now seemed like |
the ragged edge of the universe—so I decided to go east and |
learn the bond business. Everybody I knew was in the bond |
business so I supposed it could support one more single |
man. All my aunts and uncles talked it over as if they were |
choosing a prep-school for me and finally said, ‘Why—ye- |
es’ with very grave, hesitant faces. Father agreed to finance |
me for a year and after various delays I came east, perma- |
nently, 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 sug- |
gested 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 |
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