The Great Gatsby & the Dog

So- What Happened to the Dog?…and other questions in “The Great Gatsby.”

As we read “The Great Gatsby”, we eventually suspect that F Scott Fitzgerald’s word-puzzle is, ultimately, best explained by acknowledging the pervasive energies of modernism, with all its inherent ambiguities; we delight in the unravelling, not the solution itself. We are presented with a multi-layered, complex, Russian-doll of a novel. Yet as the layers are peeled away, the central characters and the world in which they live are exposed, and displayed as superficial and, ultimately, empty.

There are so many tantalising questions that lie unanswered. Some must remain so; for example, would Tom ever have sold Wilson a car? Who was Owl-eyes? Whose teeth are on Wolfsheim’s cuffs? What was that “fragment of lost words” that Nick can’t quite recall? And what DID happen to that dog? But many others can be tackled with relish.

Firstly, what was Gatsby really like? Nick’s gloss, presenting him as a “gorgeous” dreamer in a pink suit, stretches the imagination a bit too much; Tom Buchanan’s barbed moniker, “Mr Nobody from Nowhere” is paradoxically both over-simple and a little too existential to be taken seriously. Nick finds him “sinister”, and the fact that Gatsby takes his Montenegro medal and Oxford photo on the trip to New York, just to convince Nick to trust him, hints that he might have deeper, darker intentions. Perhaps the simple idea of an earnestly parvenu “roughneck” with a winning smile, a potential gentile patsy for Wolfsheim, is more fitting; somehow, luckily, keeping a step or two ahead of the law. Maybe he simply doesn’t know his geography. But at the denouement, we’re disappointed with his death and unmasking; what’s “Great” about The Great Gatsby is, of course, the puzzle. Just like his childish dream of reliving the past, when it arrives, when it’s re-solved- it’s a let-down.

So is that it? The notion that, inherent in all dreaming lies ultimate disappointment? Is this the conundrum that it’s so much fun to grapple with? I suggest not. The real joy comes in engaging with all those other little issues that shout out to be clarified.

For a start, did Jordan cheat at golf? We like to think so. She’s far less appealing as an honest woman. In fact, she’s incorrigible; she won’t even tell her best friend what everyone else knows. Leaving the roof open on the car in the rain was bad enough, but pretending to like Nick to keep in with the Buchanans is beyond the pale; she, too, remember, is a hit and run driver. And then, after the fatal crash, she wants to stay over at East Egg. Why, for goodness sake? To be nosy. Nick rightly refuses the invitation to join her, not from any sense of propriety, but because, admiring Gatsby in his pink suit, he realises, in a rare moment of self awareness, he doesn’t belong; being both “within and without”, he’s mostly “without”.

Was Gatsby involved in fixing the 1919 World Series? It’s likely; Fitzgerald has been uncannily precise with the timings of his return from Europe, and his hiring by Wolsheim is a little too coincidental. His Oxford stint would have taken him to the late spring of 1919; the baseball scam was in the September. It’s fraud on a huge scale, a curtain raiser for the criminal excesses of prohibition and Wall Street, and a perfect modernist setting for Gatsby’s relentless rise.

Another unanswered riddle is Tom’s war record, or lack of it. Nick and Gatsby swell with an understated and quietly shared pride when discussing grey little French villages- but Tom is strangely silent- the only cavalry charges he takes part in are on the polo field. Clearly he chickened out of the war, sneakily stealing Daisy in the process. This hulking brute is therefore a shrinking violet; but why doesn’t Fitzgerald explore this fruitful area a bit more? Maybe in some earlier version he did.

And what of Tom’s racism, or “Nordicism”, as it may have been known at the time? Does this indicate some dubious attitudes towards ethnicity on Fitzgerald’s part? Daisy mocks her husband’s enthusiasm for a racist text, and Nick’s use of the adjective “pathetic” when describing him, suggests that Fitzgerald, in giving such views to an unsympathetic character, could not be racist. When Tom attacks interracial marriage, Nick describes his views as “impassioned gibberish”. Tom exploits everyone, including minorities; racism is clearly the voice of a fool. Stoddard’s book on white supremacy, found by Owl-eyes in Gatsby’s library, is “real” enough; yet it lies ignored and unread, only of value when it’s stuck away on the shelf, gathering dust, only the spine exposed. The library, like the façade that Gatsby’s image represents, might collapse if the contents are examined too closely. Furthermore, does the mention of the three chauffeured “modish negroes” on Blackwell’s Island represent a positive acknowledgement that northern, urban social mores are on the move in 1922, or does Nick’s sense of “haughty rivalry” suggest future racial tension? Does the juxtaposition of these African-Americans, the “south-eastern Europeans” and the “dead man” in the hearse represent Fitzgerald’s view of the future? “Anything can happen…” Even for the times, his stereotype of Wolfsheim is particularly anti- semitic. Part werewolf, part cartoon character, his existence in the novel serves to exacerbate our unease with the author’s intentions.

And then, it seems amazing that Wilson is so poor. He’s surrounded by rich folk with cars and, apparently, has cornered the market with his garage; and while Nick suggests that there are other “wayside garages” with red petrol-pumps”, Wilson has the prime location at the junction of the Eggs, by which all the mobile rich must pass, and, seemingly, by which all must park if they catch the train to town. But this virtual monopoly offers a poor return as Wilson seems almost bankrupt. His emotional destitution is strangely echoed by his more tangible financial hardship. Yet it seems unnecessary, almost too obvious, for Wilson to be an unshaven, “anaemic”, grubby loser, “wiping his hands on a piece of waste”. Today, of course, he’d join forces with Michaelis to open a franchise of some sort to maximise the passing trade, and make a fortune.

The much-aired debate over the meaning of the T.J. Eckleberg hoarding is strange, in that only Wilson takes much notice of it, and only then when he’s crazy with grief. In this godless world, no-one any longer worships this idol. No-one other than Wilson, who’s told he “ought to have a church”, is interested in the shabby sign, or what it represents; but this surely is the greatest metaphor of all- that advertising has very little effect, except upon the deranged. Nick’s constant awareness of it as our narrator, then, seems to be the most forced of all Fitzgerald’s first-person contrivances.

And isn’t it an unbelievable coincidence that Daisy should run down Myrtle? Why would Myrtle dash headlong into the path of Tom’s car? She rushed outside, seemingly in a temper, “a moment” after telling her husband he was a “dirty little coward”; she would have had to run across the forecourt, past the petrol pumps, before she reached the road, yet still, implausibly, failed to notice the approaching yellow car, on a road with hardly any traffic or noise. J.S. Westbrook argues in favour of “ocular confusion”; that “Myrtle thinks that the yellow car is Tom’s and runs out to stop it”, but he is surely mistaken. It impossiblethat she could have known what was on the road. Victor Doyno is more plausible when he calls the incident “highly improbable plot manipulation”; indeed, the whole episode, involving the two-car drive to New York with subsequent vehicle/driver switching, seems to be a major plot contrivance so that this “accident” can happen. As Doyno explains, we’ve long been prepared for this crash; Jordan and Nick have discussed bad driving in depth, while Tom’s earlier wheel-losing crash and Daisy’s button-flicking episode created the dramatic irony. Myrtle’s killing finally signifies the death of Gatsby’s dream, but the relationship was dead way before the fateful crash.

Does Daisy have blonde or dark hair? Repeated white and gold imagery points to the former; as she states, she shares the “yellowy” hair of her daughter. The “dash of blue paint across her cheek” suggests otherwise, however, and her “dark shining hair” is a prominent feature when she finally kisses Gatsby in Louisville. Blonde hair might signify “purity and innocence”, according to Joan Korenman, but for a feminist reader to ignore the silent screen iconography suggested by the blonde starlets who had to fight their way through Hollywood casting seems somewhat naïve and disingenuous. After all, Anita Loos’ novel “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” was first published in 1925. The changing colour of Daisy’s hair seems to be another ambiguous modernist device to draw us into Fitzgerald’s web.

Then, what of Nick’s homoerotic encounters with the photographer McKee? After a brief attraction to the “young cadet” Jordan, and having spent his college days dealing with the “intimate revelations” of many young men, he ends up in McKee’s bedroom. How on earth did he get there? Why on earth is he there? He certainly wasn’t forced. After the bizarre lever-touching lift episode, we are whisked into a boudoir where McKee sits with his “great portfolio” in his hands. Does he need to be in bed, half naked, to show tipsy Nick his pride and joy? What has gone on? Nick’s attraction to the “mustache” of sweat on his mid-west girlfriend’s top lip, and to Jordan’s “erect carriage”, suggests that his hero-worship of the Gatsby myth at the end of the novel is more complex than it appears.

After all these conundrums, the whereabouts of the dog, with its questionable lineage, seems not to matter. Gatsby himself is the greatest enigma of them all. Hating his poverty and shabbiness, he gladly reinvents himself as a cabin boy-cum-beneficiary, an Oxford-educated war hero and, finally, as a millionaire aristocrat, his self-loathing growing with his fortune. Daisy is not his dream; doesn’t he simply want to go back to a time, epitomised by Daisy, when he was truly a “Platonic version of himself”, in control, with all the world before him, to “recover something, some idea of himself, perhaps”? In any case, it was just personal.

Patterns in “The Great Gatsby”; Modern Fiction Studies Victor A. Doyno (1969)

“Only Her Hairdresser…Another Look at Daisy Buchanan” Joan S Korenman, American Literature 46 (1975)

“…Looking up at the Stars”; how the writings of romantics and aesthetes inspired F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.

When studying F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, one challenge facing the reader is to explore the ideas behind the novel- the influences that combined and prevailed to enable Fitzgerald to create his masterpiece.

His own frenetic life, and his desperate attempt to write a book successful enough to keep the demanding Zelda in the luxury to which she felt she should be accustomed, has been well documented. There are many parallels in the text with his own life; these too have been equally well explored. The Great Gatsby is his “spiritual biography”, says biographer Nicholas Le Vot. Living the Gatsby lifestyle (without the funding, initially) gave him plenty of material. Arthur Mizener’s claims, in his 1951 account, that Fitzgerald is an “Original Genius- almost nobody at all influenced the Very Bright Boy” as he was “hardly aware of his literary sources”. Yet Fitzgerald was well read, and it seems reasonable to suggest that his favourite authors must have played their part in providing him with themes and ideas. According to Le Vot, Fitzgerald read “feverishly” as a student, “plunging” with particular enthusiasm into the work of the great “English aesthetes.” (Writing a letter in 1939, Fitzgerald admits “the point where the personal note emerges can come very young… long before twenty”). Comparisons with Henry James have been thoroughly drawn; Gatsby’s “pathetic” appeal through his “passionate idealism”, finds specific resonance in Daisy Miller (1880), particularly through the “eyes of a spectator” narrative technique, while later critics, such as R.W. Stallman note “numerous” cadences borrowed from Joseph Conrad; Marlow’s imaginative narrative in Lord Jim (1899) and his obsession with the enigmatic Kurtz in Heart of Darkness (1902) suggest obvious similarities. T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) has invited many comparisons, through the barren aridity of Fitzgerald’s valley of ashes and the general modernistic lack of narrative continuity.

Keats’ & Wordsworth

Then, it is well known that Fitzgerald’s favourite poet was John Keats. As well as using the line, “Tender is the Night” as a later title, echoes of Keats’ romanticism surface in Gatsby, particularly in Daisy’s remarkable nightingale, which seemingly crossed from Europe by ship. Keats is transported by his nightingale’s timeless song and hesitates to accept its mortality while Nick wants his Gatsby not to kiss Daisy as, for him, the dreaming supercedes reality, and the wondrous illusion might disappear in a flash.

Arthur Mizener cites Keats’ letter to Benjamin Bailey, in which he states that he sought a life of “Sensations”—that is, the felt understanding of the imagination—rather than “Thoughts”—the logical conclusions of consecutive reasoning, leading to Keats’ claim that “what the imagination seizes as beauty—that is, experienced knowledge—must be true.” This is at the heart of Fitzgerald’s passion for Keats’ romanticism, but, importantly, it has been filtered through his more recent admiration of Rupert Brooke, whose war poetry, now deemed hopelessly naïve, also struck a chord with Fitzgerald.

And what of the other romantic poets? Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey explains how the poet has dealt with “Five years!” away from the beauty of the Wye Valley, which, despite being physically absent, he “felt in the blood, and felt along the heart.” Perhaps it’s no coincidence that it’s five years that Gatsby has been separated from Daisy. With his exclamation, “Almost five years!” Nick creates a powerful connection between Gatsby’s dream and the way Wordsworth deals with keeping the past alive. Gatsby doubts his “present happiness” and seems to prefer the “colossal vitality of his illusion”; like Wordsworth, Gatsby’s memories seem to propel and inspire him more powerfully than what he has in front of him; his idealised love for what Daisy encapsulated on that balmy evening in Louisville is an embodiment of Wordsworth’s “sense sublime…something far more deeply interfused”- which sustained Gatsby “mid the din” of the trenches. In comparison to the power of what the past represents, the reality of the present pales. Wordsworth, then, of all the romantics, would have agreed with Gatsby about being able to somehow recreate the past, although his way was largely cerebral; with an “eye made quiet by the power of harmony”, as opposed to Gatsby’s more tangible shirts and cars. Nick, however, over-romanticises Gatsby’s scheme into a sensual, dreamlike, existential obsession with Daisy’s voice, the “deathless song”, calling him back to 1917.

The Influence of Oscar Wilde

There are other claimants with convincing cases. Fitzgerald’s chosen milieu- the decadent lives of rich, indolent high society acolytes- places Fitzgerald squarely alongside one writer in particular- Oscar Wilde. This is underlined by the dilemma faced by both writers; their evident fascination for- and, seemingly, disgust at- the excesses of the idle rich. Both Fitzgerald and Wilde feed off “society”, and cannot do without it, being drawn inexorably to its lack of ordinariness, its moral self-justification, its decadence. Both men found themselves just outside the aristocratic circles that they aspired to yet were excluded from. But the comparison goes deeper than that.

Like Wilde, Fitzgerald drew from the Faust legend to create a protagonist so in love with the potential of his own Platonic creation that considerations of integrity and morality are willingly jettisoned to gain the ultimate dream. While the reminder of Dorian Gray’s unholy pact is a constant presence whispering from the attic (a subterranean cellar would surely have been more satanic), Gatsby’s deal is with Wolfsheim, a Jewish anti-Christ, who, at dinner, tries to tempt Nick and Gatsby “over the road”- where it’s “hot and small- and full of memories”. (If Gatsby is later likened to Christ, his refusal to be tempted here is telling). Wolsfheim sends his own Mephistopheles and Beelzebub in Owl-eyes and Klipspringer to ensure all goes to plan. The Wildean aphorism “What does it profit a man to gain the whole world but to lose his own soul?” is applicable equally to both Dorian Gray and Jay Gatsby. Dorian Gray dies when he ultimately come face to face with the ghoulish spectre of the painting; Gatsby is killed by the ghostly Wilson, an “ashen, fantastic figure, gliding towards him through the amorphous trees”.

“To become the spectator of one’s own life,” states Lord Henry Wootton, a clear cipher for Wilde himself in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), “is to escape the sufferings of life.” Nick, in a nutshell. Tony Tanner describes him as “a spectator in search of a performer.” He opts out of conscious involvement in the business of others so that he can avoid the exposure of his own lack of substance. When Wilde retorted to Yeats that “a man must invent his own myth”, Fitzgerald was presented with the basis for Gatsby, and when Wilde, in defending Dorian Gray, stated that “of all men I am the one who requires least advertisement… I am tired to death of being advertised,” Fitzgerald seized the blueprint for Daisy’s telling denouncement of her old love in the hotel heat of Chapter 5.

The Morality of Aestheticism

Wilde’s first great passion, before Bosie, was for John Gray, who signed his letters to Wilde “Dorian”; Wilde wrote to him, “The world is changed because you are made of ivory and gold. The curves of your lips rewrite history”. Gatsby’s love for Daisy, the “golden girl” in immaculate white, reflects a similar, hopelessly romantic but ultimately self-obsessed desire to “repeat the past” and to regain the “real” man, a noble savage that existed before the need for any “Platonic conception”. Gatsby and Daisy later travel in a yellow car; the colour of eroticism, referencing the “Yellow Book”, a thinly veiled reference to Huysman’s decadent novel “Au Rebours”, the erotic inspiration of both Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley. Colour symbolism permeates Gatsby; it’s an “intimate part …of the book’s substance”, writes Le Vot, with yellow having special meaning.

Gatsby’s pink-suited gorgeousness is the ultimate aesthetic beauty of immorality, an idealised “Platonic” creation, deeply flawed yet, for Nick, rising above its corruption, and epitomising Wilde’s typically paradoxical and epigrammatic ideal of beauty separated from moral considerations. As Richard Ellmann so forcefully puts it in his biography of Wilde, referencing the “poisonous” “Au Rebours”, “aestheticism is fundamentally an aspiration towards an ideal”; neatly encapsulating both Gatsby’s dream and Nick’s longing. It is upon his return to West Egg from his first visit to the Buchanans that Nick initially reaches out for Gatsby, who is standing at night (in a spiritual gutter, but looking up at the “peppery” stars), scanning the sound and seeking, if we accept Nick’s implication, the green light of Daisy’s jetty, “A dreamer … who can only find his way by moonlight”. Like Wilde, Gatsby represents to Nick " all the sins you have never had the courage to commit."

Gatsby himself is no aesthete; his desires are more earthbound. He recognises quickly and enthusiastically that Daisy’s voice is “full of money”, just like his attempts to be with self- conscious phrases such as “old sport”. Yet Nick loves the idea of the man more than the man himself, much, as for Wilde, art was more real than life itself. Gatsby only “comes alive” when Nick realises that his mansion was a magnificent illusion constructed solely to entice Daisy. Oscar might have approved. To the aesthete, to those worshipping gorgeousness, according to Wilde, there is no distinction between moral and immoral acts, only between those that increase or decrease one’s happiness. Nick, in his love of Gatsby’s dream, reinforces this position. His decision to reject the offer of quick (probably illegal) profit in chapter 5 gives him a temporary morality later to be swept away by his more powerful attraction to Gatsby’s useless, immoral quest. Gatsby himself exemplifies the Wildean notion that “the true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible...." Nick’s admiration here is confusing; clearly, Gatsby uses then dumps Nick. But it’s too late- Nick is hooked. In looking for Gatsby’s depths, Nick misses the key point – there aren’t any. At the end of Chapter 1, Nick sees Gatsby, arms “stretched” towards Daisy, standing on his dock in the moonlight; then, like the shadowy cat, he is gone. Nick wants more; he seeks the visible, tangible Gatsby that he believes promises so much. In creating Gatsby’s Platonic identity, Fitzgerald is diving deep into the very exploration of aesthetics that lies at the heart of Wilde’s most successful work.

Fitzgerald was in tune with Wilde’s own development. For both The Great Gatsby and Dorian Gray ultimately refute the idea that art transcends responsibility. Reflecting Wilde’s philosophical volte-face, and presenting a strong case for the inherent immorality of purely aesthetic lives, Gatsby’s death seems to restore a natural order. When Daisy finally deserts him again, he realises that his dream has dissolved; all the artifices of his life have been stripped away to reveal a world where roses are “grotesque” and leaves, until then growing wildly in blue bursts, are “frightening”. There is even beauty in Gatsby’s death, with the glorious description of the pool and its “little ripples that were hardly the shadows of waves”. This is release. In his creation of Gatsby, Fitzgerald assiduously sticks to Wilde’s revised template of the aesthetic ideal.

The Great Gatsby is, of course, about dreaming, the final emptiness of the American Dream, and the hollow materialism of the age. But Fitzgerald’s masterpiece can also be read as an acknowledgement of the debate over aestheticism, inspired by Walter Pater, developed by Whistler and made famous by Wilde. Fitzgerald has Nick present us with Gatsby, who becomes the perfect aesthetic creation; art and morality are kept separate as Nick’s love requires that he distances himself from Gatsby’s immorality. He tells Gatsby, gushingly, “You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together”, while having paradoxically “disapproved of him from beginning to end”.

Both Oscar Wilde and Jay Gatsby pay the ultimate price for the dream of a love that dare not speak its name; they are plaintiffs found guilty at kangaroo courts of their own making. If he accepts that “society often forgives the criminal but never forgives the dreamer”, Fitzgerald also takes from Wilde the notion that the dreamer’s punishment is that he sees “the (reality) of the dawn before the rest of the world”- yet is unable or unwilling to act upon it.

F Scott Fitzgerald: Nicholas Le Vot Allen Lane 1979

John Keats: Letter to Benjamin Bailey, (1817)

Scott Fitzgerald and the 1920’s: Arthur Mizener Minnesota Review, I (Winter 1961).

“Conrad and The Great Gatsby” R W Stallman Twentieth Century Literature Vol. 1, No. 1, Apr.,  1955 Hofstra University

Introduction to The Great Gatsby: Tony Tanner Penguin 1990

Oscar Wilde: Richard Ellman XXX 199x

American Dreams, American Nightmares, ed. by David Madden, 1970.

“Cadences” Gilbert Seldes “Spring Flight” The Dial (1925)

F. Scott Fitzgerald: Letter to Morton Kroll, August 9, 1939.

William Wordswoth Tintern Abbey 180?

Nature and Optics in “The Great Gatsby”, J.S. Westbrook, American Literature (1960/61)