I
When I was younger and more easily hurt, my father gave me some advice. I have been thinking about it ever since.
“Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone,” 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 in our family we have always understood each other well without many words. So I knew that he meant a lot more than that. Because of this, I usually try not to judge people. This habit has opened up many strange characters to me. It has also made me the victim of quite a few terrible bores. People with unusual minds are quick to notice this quality in a normal person, and they hold on to him. So in college I was unfairly called a politician, because wild, unknown men told me their secret troubles. Most of the time I did not ask for these secrets. Often I saw clearly that a private confession was coming. Then I pretended to sleep, or I pretended to be busy, or I made unfriendly jokes. The private confessions of young men are usually copied from other people. And they usually hide important things. Not judging people is a matter of endless hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget one thing. My father said it like a snob, and I repeat it like a snob. People are not all born with the same sense of basic decency.
After boasting like this about my tolerance, I must admit that it has a limit. People’s behaviour may be built on hard rock or on wet marshes. But after a certain point I don’t care what it is built on. When I came back from the East last autumn, I wanted the world to be in uniform. I wanted it to stand at a kind of moral attention forever. I wanted no more wild trips with special looks into the human heart. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was free from my reaction. Gatsby represented everything that I truly hate. If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something wonderful about him. He was very sensitive to the promises of life. It was as if he were related to one of those complicated machines that record earthquakes ten thousand miles away. This had nothing to do with the weak, easily moved feeling that people proudly call the “creative temperament.” It was an extraordinary gift for hope. It was a romantic readiness that I have never found in any other person. And I will probably never find it again. No—Gatsby turned out all right at the end. The problem was the things that fed on Gatsby, the foul dust that floated behind his dreams. Because of them, I lost interest for a while in men’s useless sorrows and short-lived joys.
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My family have been important, well-off people in this Middle Western city for three generations. The Carraways are something of a clan. We have a family tradition that we come from the Dukes of Buccleuch. But the real founder of my line was my grandfather’s brother. He came here in fifty-one and sent a substitute to fight for him in the Civil War. Then he started the wholesale hardware business that my father runs today.
I never saw this great-uncle, but people say I look like him. They say this especially about the rather tough-looking painting of him that hangs in father’s office. I graduated from New Haven in 1915, exactly a quarter of a century after my father. A little later I took part in that late Teutonic migration known as the Great War. I enjoyed the counter-raid so much that I came back restless. Before, the Middle West had seemed like the warm centre of the world. Now it seemed like the ragged edge of the universe. So I decided to go East and learn the bond business. Everybody I knew was in the bond business, so I thought it could support one more single man. All my aunts and uncles talked it over as if they were choosing a prep school for me. Finally they said, “Why—ye-es,” with very serious, unsure faces. Father agreed to pay for me for a year. After various delays I came East in the spring of twenty-two. I thought I was coming for good.
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, an old, weather-damaged little bungalow as thin as cardboard, at eighty a month. But at the last minute the firm ordered him to Washington, and I went out to the country alone. I had a dog—at least I had him for a few days, until he ran away. I also had an old Dodge and a Finnish woman. She made my bed and cooked breakfast, and she muttered Finnish wisdom to herself over the electric stove.
It was lonely for a day or so. Then one morning a man stopped me on the road. He had arrived even more recently than I had.
“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, one of the first settlers. Without thinking about it, he had given me the freedom of the neighbourhood.
And so came the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves on the trees. They grew as fast as things grow in fast movies. I had that familiar feeling that life was beginning again with the summer.