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

Chapter I

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind since then.

“Whenever you want to criticize 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 understood each other without words, and I knew that he meant much more than that. As a result, I’m inclined to reserve all judgments¹, that’s why many curious natures have opened their secrets to me; but also I became the victim of many experienced bores. In college I was unjustly accused of being a politician², because I could keep the secret grieves of unknown men. I didn’t want most of the confidences – often I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that somebody wants to reveal an intimate secret.

And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I decided that it has a limit. When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I didn’t want to look into the human heart anymore. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was an exception – Gatsby, who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn³. If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there wassomething gorgeous about him; some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life. He had an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person. No – Gatsby turned out all right at the end.

My family has been well-known, rich people in this Middle Western city for three generations. The Carraways are something of a clan, and we have a tradition that we come from the Dukes of Buccleuch⁴, but the actual founder of my line was my grandfather’s brother. I never saw this great-uncle, but everybody says I look like him because of his portrait that hangs in father’s office. I graduated from New Haven⁵ in 1915 and a little later I participated in the Great War. I enjoyed the counter-raid so thoroughly that I came back restless⁶.

The Middle West now seemed like the edge of the universe – so I decided to go East and learn the bond business. All my aunts and uncles talked it and finally said, “Why – ye-es,” with very serious, unsure faces. Father agreed to finance me for a year, and after all I came East, forever, I thought, in the spring of twenty-two.

The practical thing was to find rooms in the city. A young man at the office suggested that we take a house together in a nearby town. He found the house, a weather-beaten bungalow at eighty a month, but at the last minute the firm sent him to Washington, and I went out to the country alone. I had an old Dodge⁷ and a Finnish woman, who made my bed and cooked breakfast and muttered Finnish wisdom⁸ to herself over the electric stove.

It was lonely for a day or so until one morning some man asked helplessly the way. I told him. And as I walked on I was lonely no longer. I was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler. And so with the sunshine I had that familiar feeling that life was beginning over again with the summer.

It was by chance that I have rented a house in one of the strangest communities in North America. Twenty miles from the city a pair of enormous eggs, identical in contour, were separated only by a bay. They are not perfect ovals but their physical alikeness, I think, is very confusing to the gulls that fly overhead.

I lived at West Egg, the – well, the less fashionable of the two. My house was at the very tip of the egg, and squeezed between two huge places. The one on my right was a colossal thing by any standard with a tower on one side, a marble swimming pool, and more than forty acres of lawn and garden. It was Gatsby’s mansion. My own house was an eyesore, but it was a small eyesore, and it had been overlooked, so I had a view of the water and a partial view of my neighbor’s lawn – all for eighty dollars a month.

Across the bay the white palaces of fashionable East Egg shone along the water, and the history of the summer really begins on the evening I drove over there to have dinner with the Tom Buchanans⁹. Daisy was my second cousin and I’d known Tom in college. And just after the war I spent two days with them in Chicago.

Her husband had been one of the most powerful fellows that ever played football at New Haven – a national figure in a way. His family were enormously rich – even in college his freedom with money was criticized – but now he’d left Chicago and come East in a fashion that rather took your breath away; for example, he’d brought down a string of polo ponies¹⁰ from Lake Forest.

Why they came East I don’t know. They had spent a year in France and then moved here. And so it happened that on a warm windy evening I drove over to East Egg to see two old friends whom I hardly knew at all. Their house was 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. There was a line of French windows in front and Tom Buchanan in riding clothes was standing with his legs apart on the front porch.

He had changed since his New Haven years. Now he was a strong straw-haired man of thirty with a rather hard mouth and a supercilious manner¹¹. Two shining arrogant eyes dominated on his face and gave him the appearance of always leaning aggressively forward. His riding clothes couldn’t hide the enormous power of that body and you could see a great pack of muscle shifting when his shoulder moved. It was a body capable of enormous strength – a cruel body.

His speaking voice added to the impression of irritation. There was a touch of paternal contempt¹² in it, even toward people he liked – and there were men at New Haven who had hated his character. We were never intimate, I always had the impression that he approved of me and wanted me to like him.

We talked for a few minutes on the sunny porch. Then he turned me around, politely and abruptly. “We’ll go inside.”

We walked into a bright rosy-colored room. The windows were shining white against the fresh grass outside. A breeze blew through the room, curtains were flying in and out like pale flags, twisting up toward the ceiling, and then falling over the wine-colored rug, making a shadow on it.

The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were lying as though upon a shaky balloon. They were both in white, and their dresses were rippling and fluttering¹³. Tom Buchanan shut the back 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.

The younger of the two was a stranger to me. She was lying full length at her end of the divan, completely motionless, and with her chin raised a little, as if she were balancing something on it, which could fall. If she saw me out of the corner of her eyes she didn’t show it – indeed, I was so surprised that I wanted to apologize for my coming in.

The other girl, Daisy, tried to rise then she laughed, an absurd, charming little laugh, and I laughed too and came forward into the room.

“I’m p-paralyzed with happiness.”

She laughed again, as if she said something very witty, and looked up into my face, and it seemed that I was the only one in the world she so much wanted to see. That was a way she had. She murmured that the surname of the balancing girl was Baker. (I’ve heard it said that Daisy’s murmur was only to make people lean toward her; an irrelevant criticism that made it no less charming.)

At any rate, Miss Baker’s lips moved a little, she nodded at me with exhibition of complete self-suf-ficiency¹⁴. I looked back at my cousin, who began to ask me questions in her low, thrilling voice. Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth.

I told her how I had stopped off in Chicago for a day on my way East, and how a dozen people had sent their love through me.

“Do they miss me?” she cried ecstatically.

“The whole town is desolate. All the cars have the left rear wheel painted black as a mourning wreath, and there’s a persistent wail all night along the north shore.¹⁵”

“How gorgeous! Let’s go back, Tom. Tomorrow!” Then she added irrelevantly: “You ought to see the baby.”

“I’d like to.”

“She’s asleep. She’s three years old. You ought to see her. She’s —”

Tom Buchanan, who had been walking restlessly about the room, stopped and put his hand on my shoulder.

“What you doing, Nick?”

“I’m a bond man¹⁶.”

“Who with?”

I told him.

“Never heard of them,” he remarked decisively.

This annoyed me.

“You will,” I answered shortly. “You will if you stay in the East.”

“Oh, I’ll stay in the East, don’t you worry,” he said, glancing at Daisy. “I’d be a God damned fool to live anywhere else.”

At this point Miss Baker said: “Absolutely!” with such suddenness that I started¹⁷ – it was the first word she had said since I came into the room. I think it surprised her as much as it did me because she yawned and stood up into the room.

“I’m stiff,” she complained, “I’ve been lying on that sofa for as long as I can remember.”

I looked at Miss Baker. I enjoyed looking at her. She was a slim, small-breasted girl. Her gray sun-strained eyes looked back at me with polite curiosity out of a charming, discontented face.¹⁸ It seemed to me now that I had seen her, or a picture of her, somewhere before.

“You live in West Egg,” she remarked contemptuously. “You must know Gatsby.”

“Gatsby?” asked Daisy. “What Gatsby?”

Before I could answer that he was my neighbor dinner was announced. The two young women showed us the way onto a rosy-colored porch, open toward the sunset, where four candles were lit on the table.

“Why candles?” objected Daisy, frowning. She snapped them out with her fingers. “In two weeks it’ll be the longest day in the year.”

“We ought to plan something,” yawned Miss Baker, sitting down at the table as if she were getting into bed.

“All right,” said Daisy. “What’ll we plan?” She turned to me helplessly: “What do people plan?”

Before I could answer her eyes focused on her little finger.

“Look!” she complained; “I hurt it. You did it, Tom,” she said accusingly. “I know you didn’t want to, but you did do it. That’s what I get for marrying a brute of a man, a great, big, hulking physical specimen¹⁹ of a —”

“I hate that word hulking,” objected Tom angrily, “even in kidding.”

“Hulking,” insisted Daisy.

Sometimes she and Miss Baker talked at once, but that was never quite chatter, that was as cool as their white dresses and their impersonal eyes in the absence of all desire. They were here, and they accepted Tom and me, making only a polite pleasant effort to entertain or to be entertained²⁰.

“You make me feel uncivilized, Daisy,” I confessed on my second glass of impressive wine. “Can’t you talk about crops or something?” I meant nothing special by this phrase, but the reaction was unexpected.

“Civilization’s going to pieces,” said Tom violently. “I’ve gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. If we don’t look out the white race will be – will be completely underwater. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved.”

“Tom’s getting a very deep thinker,” said Daisy, with an expression of unthoughtful sadness. “He reads deep books with long words in them.”

“Well, these books are all scientific,” insisted Tom, glancing at her impatiently. “This fellow has worked out the whole thing. It’s up to us²¹, who are the dominant race, to watch out or these other races will have control of things.”

“We’ve got to beat them down,” whispered Daisy, winking ferociously toward the fervent sun²². Suddenly, the telephone rang inside and the butler left the porch. Daisy leaned toward me.

“I’ll tell you a family secret,” she whispered enthusiastically. “It’s about the butler’s nose. Do you want to hear about the butler’s nose?”

“That’s why I came over tonight.”

“Well, he wasn’t always a butler; he used to be the silver polisher for some people in New York that had a silver service for two hundred people. He had to polish it from morning till night, until finally it began to affect his nose. Things went from bad to worse, until finally he had to give up his position.”

The butler came back and murmured something close to Tom’s ear; Tom frowned, pushed back his chair, and without a word went inside. As if his absence quickened something within her, Daisy leaned forward again, her voice enthusiastic and singing.

“I love to see you at my table, Nick. You remind me of a – of a rose, an absolute rose. Doesn’t he?” She turned to Miss Baker for confirmation: “An absolute rose?”

This was untrue. I am not even faintly like a rose. She was only improvising. Then suddenly she threw her napkin on the table, excused herself and went into the house.