I'm so glad that you requested Gatsby. Gatsby is actually one of my all-time
favorite books. It's counted honestly among my greatest influences. It's one
of the books that made me want to write, so masturbating to it shouldn't be a
challenge at all, yeah? I guess let me get started.
Chapter one. 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 all the people in this 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
judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made
me the victim of not a few veteran boars. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and
attach itself to this quality when it appears 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 confidences
were unsought. Frequently, I feigned sleep, preoccupation, or hostile levity when I
was realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was
quivering on the horizon. For the intimate revelations of young men, or at
least the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and mowed
by obvious oppressions. Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope,
and I'm still afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father
snobbishly suggested. And I snobbishly repeat, a sense of fundamental
decencies is parceled 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, the last
autumn, I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and had a sort of moral
attention forever. I wanted more riotous extinctions with privileged glimpses into
the human heart. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt
from my reaction. Gatsby, who represented everything for which I have an
unaffected scorn. If personality is an unbroken series of 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, this
responsiveness has nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is
dignified under the name of creative temperament. It was an extraordinary gift
for hope, a romantic readiness such that I've never found in any other person, and
which is not likely I shall ever find again. No, Gatsby turned out all right at
the end. It was what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his
dreams, that temporarily closed out my interest in the abhorrent 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 Caraways are somewhat of
a clan, we have a tradition and we're descended from the Dukes of Bocla, but
the actual founder of my line is my grandfather's brother, who came here in
51, sent a substitute to the Civil War and started a wholesale hardware business
that is my fate to carries on to this, my father carries on to this day. I never
saw this great uncle, but I'm supposed to look like him, which special reference
to the rather hard-boiled painting that hangs in father's office. I graduated
from New Haven in 1915, just a quarter of a century after my father, and a little
later I participated in that delayed Teutonic migration known as the Great
War. I enjoyed the counter-raid so thoroughly that I came back restless.
Instead of being the warm center of the world, the Middle West now seems like the
ragged edge of the universe, so I decided to go east and learn the bond business.
Everything I knew was in the bond business, or everyone I knew was in the
bond business. So I supposed it could support one move. Oh god, sorry. I
supposed that it could support one more single man. All my aunts and
uncles talked over it as though they were choosing a prep school for me, and
finally said why, yes. With a very gray, hesitant faces, father agreed to finance
me for a year, and after various delays I came east permanently, though in the
spring of, I thought, in the spring of 22. The practical thing was to find rooms in
the city, but it was a warm season and I had just left a country of wide lawns and
friendly trees, so when a young man at the office suggested that we take a
house together in a commuting town, it sounded like a great idea. He found the
house a minute from the firm, ordered him, the minute the firm ordered him to
Washington, and I went to the country alone. I had a dog, at least I had him for a few days
until he ran away, and old Dodge and a Finnish woman who made my bed and cooked
breakfast and mudded and finished wisdom to herself over the electric stove. He
was lonely for a day or so until one morning some man more recently arrived
than I, stopped me on the road. How do you get to West Egg Village? he asked
helplessly. I told him, and as I walked on I was lonely no longer. I was a guide,
a pathfinder, an original settler. He had casually conferred on me the freedom of the
neighborhood. And so, with the sunshine...
I got my way through it anyway. I hope you enjoyed it.