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Penguin Red Classics
0141023430
£5.99
There are virtues of writing, perhaps even the most important ones, which have nothing to do with the balance and velocity of sentences or nothing obvious; perhaps the virtue, in some instances, makes the sentence.
Here's a paragraph from The Great Gatsby; not one of the famous paragraphs (like the opening, the closing, and the one about the beautiful shirts):
'I began to like New York, the racy, adventurous feel of it at night, and the satisfaction that the constant flicker of men and women and machines gives to the restless eye. I liked to walk up Fifth Avenue and pick out romantic women from the crowd and imagine that in a few minutes I was going to enter into their lives, and no one would ever know or disapprove. Sometimes, in my mind, I followed them to their apartments on the corners of hidden streets, and they turned and smiled back at me before they faded through a door into warm darkness. At the enchanted metropolitan twilight I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others – poor young clerks who loitered in front of windows waiting until it was time for a solitary restaurant dinner – young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.'
The last sentence, it seems to me, is made not by its word-choices – 'enchanted metropolitan twilight' is on many levels awful – but by the virtue of liking: a virtue that pervades the paragraph and is its stated subject: not New York but liking New York.
Liking cities is difficult; it is much easier to love them. But reread the paragraph inserting 'love' for 'like' and you'll see how the stronger word weakens.
Liking people is easier, though truly liking them is still immensely hard. Yet it is clear that Fitzgerald does. Compare his 'young clerks in the dusk' of 1926 with Eliot's 'young man carbuncular' (from 'The Waste Land') of 1922:
'A small house agent's clerk
One of the low on whom assurance sits
As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire.'
That is an expression of unadulterated social disgust.
Yet there is very little difference between the two types. Eliot's clerk is engaged in a tepid seduction which may or may not be a rape. Fitzgerald's narrator, Nick Carraway, thinks about following women home and entering into their lives. The women (who obviously like being followed home by strange men) smile invitingly, just as a rapist would wish. The lonely clerks are romantically wasting. But what are they going to do about it?
Now is probably the moment to quote the first of those famous sentences, from the book's opening.
'In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.
Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone, he told me, just remember that all the people in the world haven't had the advantages you've had.
He didn't say any more, but we've always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence, I'm inclined to reserve all judgements.'
If this is Nick Carraway's credo then he is true to it. When, later in the novel, he remembers that Jordan Baker, with whom he is about to start an affair, was rumoured to have cheated during a golf championship, his reaction is this:
'It made no difference to me. Dishonesty in a woman is a thing you never blame deeply. I was casually sorry, and then I forgot.'
And if liking is a difficult virtue to maintain (without the fillip of forgetting) then praising, one of its offshoots, is almost impossible. But Fitzgerald, through Nick, is able to praise Gatsby as few men have ever been or could ever be praised:
'If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life. 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.'
The Great Gatsby, like Nick's New York reverie, is a fantasy of welcomed pursuit. The young Gatsby falls in love with the rich and beautiful Daisy, but can't keep her. (Money.) She marries, has a child. And all the time, Gatsby is making himself magnificent so as to win her back. But she is fickle. (What do we do with daisies? We pull the petals off them, all the time saying, 'She loves me. She loves me not.') The welcomed pursuit is hobbled; the fantasy is revealed as just that.
Fitzgerald is often treated as something akin to an idiot savant. That was Hemingway's attitude, and perhaps this critical tendency began with him.
Fitzgerald's prose style, from Hemingway's point of view, is less a matter of technique than of grace. The main technique, if any, is in protecting the state of grace, or even, in protecting it without allowing oneself to realise any protection is required.
It may seem as if there is very little difference between this and my opening statement. But virtues are very different from grace; they are struggled for, often in a quite desperate way.
Which inevitably brings that famous final sentence:
'So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.'
NOTE:
The Great Gatsby is, I realise, not a cult book. It often comes near the top of BEST 100 NOVELS EVER lists. But I thought it worth looking at, in this context, because so much writing since, particularly American writing, has been an attempt to redo, outdo or undo Gatsby.
No British book has had such influence. Brideshead Revisited, which probably comes closest, makes too much of its particular Catholicism to approach the status of myth.
America is addicted to tales of innocence, and Gatsby, as well as being perhaps the greatest product of this, is one of the most powerful motors of its perpetuation.
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald is published by Penguin Red Classics
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