The Man Without a Past

On the Sublimity of Jay Gatsby

Elliott Nugent, The Great Gatsby, 1949, via Getty Images

On this day, exactly one hundred years ago, Charles Scribner’s Sons published F. Scott Fitzgerald’s third novel, The Great Gatsby. Unlike Fitzgerald’s debut, it was not a smashing commercial success. It sold less copies, too, than his second book. The slow, sad, alcohol-soaked slide of Fitzgerald’s life, at just twenty-eight, had already begun. When the writer died in 1940, he believed himself a failure, and the public had largely moved on from him. Critics didn’t take him very seriously. If only he could know what was in store for his afterlife — immortality like few authors in history, absent Shakespeare or perhaps Tolstoy. Today, The Great Gatsby can lay claim to being the Great American Novel, that single work of literature which binds generations and tells us far more about our country than maybe we’d like. But we return, again and again, because there is beauty in such damage — and love pulsing in the abyss. Today, we close out Gatsby Week at The Metropolitan Review, which brought you two outstanding essays, from John Pistelli and Emma Heath, on the legacy of this masterpiece. Our final essay is from a striking young writer, George Monaghan, who is proof that one need not be American to wonderfully apprehend American greatness. We hope you enjoy.

—The Editors

I.

Early in The Great Gatsby, a nightingale is spotted on the lawn outside the Buchanans’. There aren’t nightingales in America. Daisy calls it “romantic” and wonders which ship it might have crossed the Atlantic on. Asked to write about The Great Gatsby, which has left the English thanking Americans and the Americans thanking English for a century now, I took my copy to the spot where that nightingale fledged. There is a small pub garden by London’s Hampstead Heath where F. Scott Fitzgerald’s hero, the Romantic princeling John Keats, composed his “Ode to a Nightingale.”

Here, as in America, you first meet the book in school, and you take your personal clutch of gorgeous, fleet-footed lyrics; for me, that the city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is “always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world,” and that Gatsby’s smile “understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself.” Those treasures are precious, but in some way you feel they are so for what they will reveal. Everyone says you must reach a certain age to “really get” Gatsby.

We might locate that age. Keats died at twenty-five, and Romanticism might be called the vaunting of imagination over reason. Nick calls twenty-five the last age before one is “too old to lie to [one]self and call it honor.” There is a twenty-eight month span between the ages at which Keats died and Fitzgerald commenced Gatsby. It occurs between twenty-five and twenty-seven years old. What you notice in that period, I think, is that you have your first lot of the past. The vista that opened when you were asked what you wanted to be when you grew up is no longer quite infinite. Some limits have appeared at the edges. The first transmutations of open possibility into set history have occurred. Some questions are answers, some petals have fallen, some tinder is ash.

I want to contend, against the dominant interpretation, that Gatsby is not trying to recover a past but pastlessness, because it is only with no past that you can have every future.

II.

Very wrong was the novelist who told Fitzgerald that “to make Gatsby really great, you ought to have given us his early career.” Gatsby needs, at first, to be pastless. Fitzgerald wrote and then deliberately excised the story of Gatsby’s early days — it was later released, with different names, as the short story “Absolution.” Fitzgerald instead dazzles us with the early swirl of fantastic rumors about Gatsby’s past in order to convey its unknowability. When we first see him on the dock, we know nothing of him, and he might be aspiring to anything. The scene vibrates with possibility:

I didn’t call to him, for he gave a sudden intimation that he was content to be alone — he stretched out his arms toward the dark water in a curious way, and, far as I was from him, I could have sworn he was trembling. Involuntarily I glanced seaward — and distinguished nothing except a single green light, minute and far away, that might have been the end of a dock.

The timing of our eventual acquaintance with Gatsby’s past is twice deliberate: Fitzgerald chooses to have his narrator choose to relate it out of the story’s chronology. Daisy tours the house and, for Gatsby, “the colossal significance of that light had now just vanished forever . . . Now it was again a green light on a dock. His count of enchanted objects had diminished by one.” After this moment Nick sees a photograph of an intimate from Gatsby’s youth, and he uses the next chapter to tell that past. Totally free self-creation demands emancipation from the past, which bequeaths some identity, and makes some demand of continuity. The fact of the past and the loss of creation are one. Gatsby’s past comes with the realization of his project’s limits, because it is the limit on his project.

Mind that Daisy’s visit is not a failure. Critics who mistake this find themselves overworking the inappropriateness of the piano music or the inconvenience of the phone call. Actually, when Nick leaves them, Gatsby and Daisy are close. The disappointment is not that their reunion is a bad one, but that it is only one, a single event of a single set of qualities, in the way that anything that really happens is. In fact, it seems likely that Fitzgerald had it go as well as could in reality be expected so as to show that what Gatsby wants is something outside of reality.

Pains are taken to establish that Daisy is not the object of Gatsby’s desires, only their appointed vessel, and that no “incarnation” can hold the ideas of his dreams. She “tumble[s] short” of them, the “colossal vitality of his illusion” having gone “beyond her, beyond everything.” Near the end of the book, she cries at him: “Oh, you want too much!”

The sole aspect of her that “couldn’t be over-dreamed” is her voice. We know what her voice is; it is “full of money.” And as time is money, money is time. Both are pure potential: both can be anything but are until then nothing. You wonder what you might buy when you are very rich, you wonder what you might be when you are very young. Each offers dreams of lustrous futures. The “fluctuating, feverish warmth” of Daisy’s voice gives new access to that dream, to the “constant, turbulent riot.” Gatsby enjoyed inventing futures as a seventeen-year-old boy at night, before any history, when imagination was realer than reality:

The most grotesque and fantastic conceits haunted him in his bed at night. A universe of ineffable gaudiness spun itself out in his brain while the clock ticked on the wash-stand and the moon soaked with wet light his tangled clothes upon the floor. Each night he added to the pattern of his fancies until drowsiness closed down upon some vivid scene with an oblivious embrace. For a while these reveries provided an outlet for his imagination; they were a satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy’s wing.

Why do we hate Gatsby? Because while he is so generous in one way, he is in another a miser. We feel morally that you must spend money, that hoarding it with no intention of turning it into something more real is wrong. Gatsby spends money but is a hoarder of time, “watching over nothing.” And love, the wise fool cautions, “is not hereafter.” No one attends Gatsby’s funeral. He who refuses history refuses to grow up. Maturing means committing, means mourning the infinite loss of possibility which is all our burden, but which Gatsby abdicates. He does not even wish his dream will come true, he just wishes to dream, to glory, and suffer alone. Bluntly, he is a wanker, stimulating everything and creating nothing. A huge, incoherent failure.

To see the Queensboro Bridge “always” for the “first” time is to knowingly choose the impossible. A smile that “believes in you as you would like to believe in yourself” just gives you what you want, disregarding truth, encouraging lies and loneliness.

III.

As I have myself passed through the Keats-Gatsby twilight, I noticed the starts of ends. Grandparents have died, friend’s parents have died, injuries don’t recover automatically, stars are younger than me, I have a salary, I have a past. I am in one of my childhood’s futures and not in the rest. Some friends are dreamless because of their work, others are workless because of their dreams. One will marry a partner not his ideal, another lost a love for knowing too well how she differed from his. For what they’re worth, here are the nine lines of verse I checked most in this time.

These, from Radiohead’s Nude. The Buchanans, Bakers and Carraways are always described as “white.” Gatsby gets almost every color except it:

Don’t get any big ideas

They're not gonna happen

You paint yourself white

And fill up with noise

But there'll be something missing

And this, by the minor poet Frances Cornford, about Rupert Brooke, who like Gatsby fought in the First World War:

A young Apollo, golden-haired,

Stands dreaming on the verge of strife,

Magnificently unprepared

For the long littleness of life.

IV.

Gatsby’s project — to recover pastlessness and restore total possibility — is only finally ruined in the seventh of nine chapters. It is an assertion of an immovable past that seems “to bite physically into Gatsby.” Tom says there are things between him and Daisy that neither can ever forget. Gatsby wanted Daisy to tell Tom it was “all wiped out forever,” but she cannot. Tom, who has all his eggs in the past, triumphs over Gatsby, who has all his in the future.

Curiously, it is only after Gatsby loses that Nick’s admiration for him gets full, emotional release. Just as Nick is leaving for the last time he “remember[s] something” and turns to shout the only compliment he ever gives Gatsby: “They’re a rotten crowd. You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.”

Maybe he can prefer the loser because he knows the “rotten” winners. He can know that how you play is what matters, because he knows how the winners play. Tom draws worth from real events of the past, and Jordan is “too wise ever to carry well-forgotten dreams from age to age.” But Tom’s past glory is an “acute limited excellence” and Jordan is a “clean, hard, limited person.” We have had it confirmed that Gatsby is not unlimited, but that seems better than these two, who have been limited from the start, even if it is really the same thing.

Why do we love Gatsby? Because it is not the residents of the Valley of Ashes alone who pass from “nothing to nothing,” but all of us. We are all to die, and everything stops mattering. Though Gatsby “watches over nothing,” there is a small way he eludes, or at least improves, or at least illuminates, that nothingness. There is something noble, magnificent, and true in the way he stands up to the dark night, aspiring instead to a false green light. Beyond twenty-five might seem too old to dream, but remember the famous quote attributed to Benjamin Franklin, whose daily routine Gatsby imitated: “Most men die at 25, we just bury them at 75.” Fitzgerald has cars — automobiles, self-mobiles, American dreams, dreams — that crash throughout the book. Gatsby crashes. His car crashes. But whatever its sad end, Nick is “glad that the sight of Gatsby’s splendid car was included in [the] somber holiday.”

It would be too easy to see the Queensboro Bridge as new only once, and never to see people for what they might be. Sustaining a “romantic readiness,” as Gatsby does, involves a noble effort to live up to life. His “gift for hope” is a gift for all.

V.

For the rest of the book, Nick’s sentiment flickers between love and hatred of Gatsby. As we near the end, the alternations become frequent, then frenetic, and the pressure gets tighter. At last the two sentiments are forced into one, in a fusion so stressful that the sentences, though they hold, are ready to break:

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter — tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms further . . . And one fine morning — So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

Keats, with whom we started, said a work is great when “capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” Is Gatsby great or not? Are we to love him or hate him? There are no facts. We can reach no answer. It will always be a question. The book loves and hates Gatsby, and both sentiments have their fullest expression. It accommodates us, wherever we are. My first editor said he had read it at least ten times. Writing about really great art, the danger is overstating the joyous findings of your most recent encounter to the exclusion of past and future ones. You have never understood The Great Gatsby; you have just been understood by it. We are always within this book and we will never be without it. Gatsby forever.

George Monaghan is an editorial assistant at the New Statesman and writes the Substack

Peaceable Land

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