Theme Of Pride In The Great Gatsby

Sunday, December 5, 2021 8:40:29 AM

Theme Of Pride In The Great Gatsby



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Flat-powder blues, greens, and seem perfectly at home with outdoor decor and an abundance of florals. Wear the wedding gown of your dreams with a half-up-half-down hairdo and subtle accessories. In our opinion, a pastel looks beautiful while staying politely in the background and let you command the spotlight! POP is an art style that wowed Western society in that latter part of the s and could be tailor-made for your wedding day. With a distinctive style of glamourizing everyday objects, you can celebrate your big day by celebrating drastic colors, crisp lines, entertaining patterns, and a passion for the simple things in life — like love.

What kind of shoes are you planning on wearing? Flower tiaras, long flowing gowns, and barefoot processions are hallmarks of this style, and we love it! Just make sure to supply your guests with hand fans to keep that summer heat at bay. Handmade macrame is a keystone of the Boho style, and for good reason. Adorn your entire wedding with heavy-textured backdrops, table runners, and hanging potted plants to create a unified look to your big day.

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Fly your freak flag high and embrace the embarrassing things that make you YOU and inseparable to the one you love. Hang some glow in the dark lightsabers from the ceiling, walk down to the imperial march, and dance the night away to the Cantina Song. Have your ushers direct your guests to the Dark Side or the Light Side, and have the time of your life. Be a nerd! Celebrate your passion for incessant learning and worldly culture by displaying it for the world to see on your big day. The simplest way to describe Kawaii is a love for Japanese Pop culture. Hello Kitty, Studio Ghibli, Pink and blue hair, and babydoll dresses with oversized bows can make their way into your table toppers, desserts, and J-pop playlists.

A school was when life was full of potential and the world was your oyster. It was full of friends, socializing, and learning who you really are. Recapture this essence by setting up desks instead of chairs, writing your wedding wishes on a chalkboard, and adorning your venue with pencils and teachers-pet apples. Interrupt the proceedings with a POP-quiz about the couple and decorate the bridal table with notebook-style love letters: TL4E. Intelligence is right up there with humor when it comes to attraction, and a healthy passion for the literary arts shows this off in stunning fashion.

Swap the standard table runner for pages from your fave books. For those couples that believe a wedding should be a true EVENT, this is a huge step in planning a wedding! This is something that your guests will look forward to. Guests should be well-prepared for an event like this. Anchor your wedding to a rock concert theme and expect a lot of leather, loud music, dancing, and light show.

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But, instead of oxfords and high heels, rubber boots are in order. The best thing of all? Bring the destination to you! Certain cities have a personality of their own, and some of these make for very cool wedding themes. This is your personal choice. If you get carried away with Tokyo fill your space with futuristic lights or a zen garden. Up next are some fan favorites. Las Vegas is one of the most recognizable cities in the world and a great way to spend your wedding day. Dressed in black tie, your guests can gamble the night away and listen to a lineup of Rat Pack crooners. Step it up by arranging a burlesque performance and circulate the cigar girls.

The Big Apple, and the inspiration for so many of our favorite songs. NYC is the destination for many lavish wedding ceremonies, so why not bring it home? The skyline, yellow cabs, and Statue of Liberty will have no trouble finding their way into your decorations. NYC is also the city of high-fashion, so make sure you and your guests bring your A-Game. Home to centuries of culture, history, art, and…pastries! Add the wine, the champagne, the fashion, and you have a wedding theme that no one can resist. Hands up: Who out there sees their wedding as Happily Ever After? We all did at one time, and those of us lucky enough to hold onto that feeling is in for the night of their life.

Frozen is one of the more modern and highly popular! Disney princesses, and pure joy to pull off. Set the stage with soft blues, sheers, and icicle ornamentation. Serve up cool treats like snow cones, and maintain Happily Ever After ambiance all night long with a frost dry ice machine. Take the ordinary and make it extraordinary. Overdo your use of plants and nature. Oversize your flowers and balloons. Over-indulge in your sense of reality, and live life the way you deserve. Gradient pinks and blues are the calling card of a unicorn theme. Make sure that this is consistent through your event decor and bridal party attire to tie the evening together. Add some unicorn figurines as table toppers, and maybe a horn sticking out from the cupcakes.

Most importantly, rent a white horse for the day. Apply a convincing horn and have the best photoshoot of your life. This can be simple and classy with stark whites accented with gold. Or, it can make King Midas jealous with gold draped from ceiling to floor. You decide how much to sparkle. Citrus makes a beautiful color scheme. Lemon yellow, tangerine orange, and lime green look at home next to each other, and create a soft look that conjures a smile and sense of wellbeing. Carry this sentiment throughout your ceremony and reception to start your happily ever after off on a peaceful yet vivacious foot. Gather your group of zombies; summon the spirits of your ancestors, or rock your best steampunk goggles.

Whatever you choose, dive in with a whole heart and refuse to be anyone but you. Great big hairsprayed hair, way too much makeup, and tight leather pants. Spray Paint the backdrop neon, and bust out the bandanas and leopard print. Punk rock is an unmistakable style that fits amazingly well into a wedding theme and photo shoot. Goth is romantic by nature.

Take any measure of both definitions and embrace the different. For the love of nature, and everything about the planet, an organic themed wedding could be a divine choice. A couple who hold eco-friendliness and saving the planet close to their heart, this would be a very apt theme to go with. A really interesting theme to work with for a wedding, an organic themed event will naturally be filled with greenery as well as energy-saving appliances and biodegradable products. While all of this might not sound like much fun, an organic theme could be really interesting to plan for all types of wedding.

Couples in love with natural elements or even toying with the idea of Indian wedding themes would enjoy some greenery at their wedding. This could be incorporated into an indoor or an outdoor wedding. Botanical details and monofloral arrangements, green and fresh natural elements to create a simple elegance. This new trend introduces the long feathery plumes of the pampas grass in all its golden and pink glory to the wedding decorations themes.

A corrupt profiteer who assists Gatsby's bootlegging operations and who fixed the World Series , he appears only twice in the novel, the second time refusing to attend Gatsby's funeral. Fitzgerald describes Wolfsheim as "a small, flat-nosed Jew", with "tiny eyes" and "two fine growths of hair" in his nostrils. Wolfsheim has been interpreted as representing the Jewish miser stereotype. He notes the accounts of Frances Kroll , a Jewish woman and secretary to Fitzgerald, who claimed that Fitzgerald was hurt by accusations of antisemitism and responded to critiques of Wolfsheim by claiming he merely "fulfilled a function in the story and had nothing to do with race or religion". Gatsby has been adapted for the stage multiple times since its publication. The first known stage adaptation was by American dramatist Owen Davis, [] which subsequently became the film version.

The play, directed by George Cukor , opened on Broadway on February 2, , and had curtain calls. A successful tour later in the year included performances in Chicago, August 1 through October 2. The work, called The Great Gatsby , premiered on December 20, The show received an encore run the following year. The first movie version of the novel debuted in It is a famous example of a lost film. Reviews suggest it may have been the most faithful adaptation of the novel, but a trailer of the film at the National Archives is all that is known to exist. Zelda wrote to an acquaintance that the film was "rotten".

She and Scott left the cinema midway through the film. Gatsby has been recast multiple times as a short-form television movie. The episode was directed by Alvin Sapinsley. The novel has been adapted in other media formats such as radio episodes and video games. It was created by dramatist Robert Forrest. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. This article is about the novel. Scott Fitzgerald 's romance and life-long obsession with socialite Ginevra King informed the plot of the novel.

The now-demolished Beacon Towers partly served as an inspiration for Gatsby's home. Oheka Castle was another North Shore inspiration for the novel's setting. Drafts of the cover by artist Francis Cugat juxtaposed with the final version. In one draft first , a single eye loomed over Long Island Sound. In a subsequent draft second , Cugat expanded upon this concept to feature two eyes gazing over the New York cityscape. In the final cover third , the shadowy cityscape was replaced by carnival lights evoking Coney Island.

Novels portal s portal. Scott Fitzgerald as the poet laureate of the Jazz Age , "the most raucous, gaudy era in U. Living in poverty, he attempted suicide by shooting himself in the head in Fitzgerald enclosed them with a letter to Willa Cather in They are now in the Fitzgerald Papers at Princeton University. Paul hospital. I am half feminine—at least my mind is". This was the generation whose girls dramatized themselves as flappers ". At first petting was a desperate adventure even under such favorable conditions, but presently confidences were exchanged and the old commandment broke down ". Afterward he wrote in his ledger foreboding words, spoken to him perhaps by Ginevra's father, 'Poor boys shouldn't think of marrying rich girls'".

Fitzgerald wished to be killed in battle, and he hoped that his novel would become a great success in the wake of his death. Sketchy about ordering meals, she completely ignored the laundry". Consequently, he harbored "the smouldering hatred of a peasant" towards the wealthy and their milieu. Flushing Meadows was drained and became the location of the World's Fair. Near the end of her life Zelda Fitzgerald said that Gatsby was based on 'a neighbor named Von Guerlach or something who was said to be General Pershing 's nephew and was in trouble over bootlegging'".

Her pictorial counterpart was drawn by the American cartoonist John Held Jr. Editor Matthew J. Bruccoli notes: "This name combines two automobile makes: The sporty Jordan and the conservative Baker electric ". While reflecting upon the wild parties held during the Jazz Age on "that slender riotous island", Fitzgerald wrote the early story fragments which would become The Great Gatsby. Naturally, it fascinated him as all splendor did". Unfortunately, it was too late to change". It had a garish dust jacket and I remember being embarrassed by the violence, bad taste, and slippery look of it. It looked like the book jacket for a book of bad science fiction. Scot told me not to be put off by it, that it had to do with a billboard along a highway in Long Island that was important in the story.

He said he had liked the jacket and now he didn't like it. I took it off to read the book". The story for all its basic triviality has a fine texture; a careful and brilliant finish What gives the story distinction is something quite different from the management of the action or the handling of the characters; it is the charm and beauty of the writing". Scott Fitzgerald died in , he thought he was a failure". When it was published in this ironic tale of life on Long Island, at a time when gin was the national drink and sex the national obsession, it received critical acclaim. In it, Mr. Fitzgerald was at his best".

One soldier said that books with 'racy' passages were as popular as 'pin-up girls'". She is the green light that signals him into the heart of his ultimate vision Thus the American dream, whose superstitious valuation of the future began in the past, gives the green light through which alone the American returns to his traditional roots, paradoxically retreating into the pattern of history while endeavoring to exploit the possibilities of the future". The 's, the time of the reborn Ku Klux Klan , immigration restriction legislation , and the pseudo-scientific racism of Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard was one of the periods when concern about ethnicity was most evident on the surface of national life".

Bruccoli, author Robert McAlmon and other contemporaries in Paris publicly asserted that Fitzgerald was a homosexual, and Hemingway later avoided Fitzgerald due to these rumors. He spent the evening casually asking for cigarettes in the middle of the dance floor and absent-mindedly drawing a small vanity case from the top of a blue stocking". Paulson remarked in that "the novel is about identity, about leaving home and venturing into a world of adults, about choosing a profession, about choosing a sexual role to play as well as a partner to love, it is a novel that surely appeals on several deep levels to the problems of adolescent readers".

Batchelor, Bob November ISBN Retrieved July 15, Berman, Ronald August The Great Gatsby and Modern Times. Champaign, Illinois : University of Illinois Press. Bewley, Marius Spring The Sewanee Review. Johns Hopkins University Press. JSTOR Retrieved June 20, The New York Post. New York City. May 5, Bruccoli, Matthew Joseph Spring Princeton University Library Chronicle. Princeton University. Scott Fitzgerald 2nd rev.

Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Retrieved February 25, Burt, Daniel S. New York: Checkmark Books. Churchwell, Sarah a. London: Little, Brown Book Group. Coghlan, Ralph April 25, Scott Fitzgerald". Louis Post-Dispatch. Louis, Missouri. Retrieved January 2, Cole, John Y. Washington, D. Retrieved May 22, — via Internet Archive. Conor, Liz June 22, Bloomington, Indiana : Indiana University Press. Corrigan, Maureen September 9, Little, Brown and Company. Retrieved June 4, Curnutt, Kirk October A Historical Guide to F. Oxford, England : Oxford University Press. Retrieved October 11, Drudzina, Douglas January Teaching F. Clayton, Delaware : Prestwick House. Eagleton, Harvey May 10, The Dallas Morning News. Dallas , Texas.

Eble, Kenneth November American Literature. Retrieved May 27, ISSN Fessenden, Tracy Scott Fitzgerald's Catholic Closet". Catholic Historian. Fitzgerald, F. Scott ; Perkins, Maxwell Kuehl, John; Bryer, Jackson R. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. Bryer, Jackson R. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. New York: St. Martin's Press. Wilson, Edmund ed. The Crack-Up.

New York: New Directions. Bruccoli, Matthew J. The Great Gatsby. The Cambridge Edition of the Works of F. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bloom, Harold ed. New York: Chelsea House Publishers. Tanner, Tony ed. London: Penguin Books. Turnbull, Andrew ed. The Letters of F. Tredell, Nicolas ed. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby. Columbia Critical Guides. New York: Columbia University Press. Friedrich, Otto Summer Scott Fitzgerald: Money, Money, Money". The American Scholar. Funda, Evelyn I. Fall Great Plains Quarterly. Gross, Dalton October Literature in Context. Westport, Connecticut : Greenwood Press. Harvey, Sally Peltier United Kingdom : Fairleigh Dickinson University. Hemingway, Ernest A Moveable Feast. New York: Scribner.

Hill, W. Speed; Burns, Edward M. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Hischak, Thomas S. Retrieved January 1, Hyatt, Wesley Kazin, Alfred , ed. World Publishing Company — via Internet Archive. CS1 maint: postscript link Keeler, Kyle The F. Scott Fitzgerald Review. S2CID 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 and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees—just as things grow in fast movies—I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer. There was so much to read for one thing and so much fine health to be pulled down out of the young breath-giving air.

I bought a dozen volumes on banking and credit and investment securities and they stood on my shelf in red and gold like new money from the mint, promising to unfold the shining secrets that only Midas and Morgan and Maecenas knew. And I had the high intention of reading many other books besides. I was rather literary in college—one year I wrote a series of very solemn and obvious editorials for the "Yale News"—and now I was going to bring back all such things into my life and become again that most limited of all specialists, the "well-rounded man.

It was a matter of chance that I should have rented a house in one of the strangest communities in North America. It was on that slender riotous island which extends itself due east of New York and where there are, among other natural curiosities, two unusual formations of land. Twenty miles from the city a pair of enormous eggs, identical in contour and separated only by a courtesy bay, jut out into the most domesticated body of salt water in the Western Hemisphere, the great wet barnyard of Long Island Sound.

They are not perfect ovals—like the egg in the Columbus story they are both crushed flat at the contact end—but their physical resemblance must be a source of perpetual confusion to the gulls that fly overhead. To the wingless a more arresting phenomenon is their dissimilarity in every particular except shape and size. I lived at West Egg, the—well, the less fashionable of the two, though this is a most superficial tag to express the bizarre and not a little sinister contrast between them. My house was at the very tip of the egg, only fifty yards from the Sound, and squeezed between two huge places that rented for twelve or fifteen thousand a season.

It was Gatsby's mansion. Or rather, as I didn't know Mr. Gatsby it was a mansion inhabited by a gentleman of that name. My own house was an eye-sore, but it was a small eye-sore, and it had been overlooked, so I had a view of the water, a partial view of my neighbor's lawn, and the consoling proximity of millionaires—all for eighty dollars a month. Across the courtesy bay the white palaces of fashionable East Egg glittered along the water, and the history of the summer really begins on the evening I drove over there to have dinner with the Tom Buchanans.

Daisy was my second cousin once removed and I'd known Tom in college. And just after the war I spent two days with them in Chicago. Her husband, among various physical accomplishments, had been one of the most powerful ends that ever played football at New Haven—a national figure in a way, one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savors of anti-climax. His family were enormously wealthy—even in college his freedom with money was a matter for reproach—but now he'd left Chicago and come east in a fashion that rather took your breath away: for instance he'd brought down a string of polo ponies from Lake Forest. It was hard to realize that a man in my own generation was wealthy enough to do that.

Why they came east I don't know. They had spent a year in France, for no particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together. This was a permanent move, said Daisy over the telephone, but I didn't believe it—I had no sight into Daisy's heart but I felt that Tom would drift on forever seeking a little wistfully for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game. And so it happened that on a warm windy evening I drove over to East Egg to see two old friends whom I scarcely knew at all. Their house was even more elaborate than I expected, 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, jumping over sun-dials and brick walks and burning gardens—finally when it reached the house drifting up the side in bright vines as though from the momentum of its run.

The front was broken by a line of French windows, glowing now with reflected gold, and wide open to the warm windy afternoon, 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 sturdy, straw haired man of thirty with a rather hard mouth and a supercilious manner. Two shining, arrogant eyes had established dominance over his face and gave him the appearance of always leaning aggressively forward.

Not even the effeminate swank of his riding clothes could hide the enormous power of that body—he seemed to fill those glistening boots until he strained the top lacing and you could see a great pack of muscle shifting when his shoulder moved under his thin coat. It was a body capable of enormous leverage—a cruel body. His speaking voice, a gruff husky tenor, added to the impression of fractiousness he conveyed. There was a touch of paternal contempt in it, even toward people he liked—and there were men at New Haven who had hated his guts. Turning me around by one arm he moved a broad flat hand along the front vista, including in its sweep a sunken Italian garden, a half acre of deep pungent roses and a snub-nosed motor boat that bumped the tide off shore.

We walked through a high hallway into a bright rosy-colored space, fragilely bound into the house by French windows at either end. The windows were ajar and gleaming white against the fresh grass outside that seemed to grow a little way into the house. A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding cake of the ceiling—and then rippled over the wine-colored rug, making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea. The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon. They were both in white and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house.

I must have stood for a few moments listening to the whip and snap of the curtains and the groan of a picture on the wall. Then there was a boom as Tom Buchanan shut the rear 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 extended 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 was quite likely to fall. If she saw me out of the corner of her eyes she gave no hint of it—indeed, I was almost surprised into murmuring an apology for having disturbed her by coming in. The other girl, Daisy, made an attempt to rise—she leaned slightly forward with a conscientious expression—then she laughed, an absurd, charming little laugh, and I laughed too and came forward into the room.

She laughed again, as if she said something very witty, and held my hand for a moment, looking up into my face, promising that there was no one in the world she so much wanted to see. That was a way she had. She hinted in a murmur 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 fluttered, she nodded at me almost imperceptibly and then quickly tipped her head back again—the object she was balancing had obviously tottered a little and given her something of a fright. Again a sort of apology arose to my lips. Almost any exhibition of complete self sufficiency draws a stunned tribute from me. I looked back at my cousin who began to ask me questions in her low, thrilling voice. It was the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down as if each speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again. Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth—but there was an excitement in her voice that men who had cared for her found difficult to forget: a singing compulsion, a whispered "Listen," a promise that she had done gay, exciting things just a while since and that there were gay, exciting things hovering in the next hour.

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. 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. Let's go back, Tom. Tom Buchanan who had been hovering restlessly about the room stopped and rested his hand on my shoulder. At this point Miss Baker said "Absolutely! Evidently it surprised her as much as it did me, for she yawned and with a series of rapid, deft movements stood up into the room. I looked at Miss Baker wondering what it was she "got done. She was a slender, small-breasted girl, with an erect carriage which she accentuated by throwing her body backward at the shoulders like a young cadet.

Her grey sun-strained eyes looked back at me with polite reciprocal curiosity out of a wan, charming discontented face. It occurred to me now that I had seen her, or a picture of her, somewhere before. Before I could reply that he was my neighbor dinner was announced; wedging his tense arm imperatively under mine Tom Buchanan compelled me from the room as though he were moving a checker to another square. Slenderly, languidly, their hands set lightly on their hips the two young women preceded us out onto a rosy-colored porch open toward the sunset where four candles flickered on the table in the diminished wind.

She snapped them out with her fingers. I always watch for the longest day in the year and then miss it. That's what I get for marrying a brute of a man, a great big hulking physical specimen of a—". Sometimes she and Miss Baker talked at once, unobtrusively and with a bantering inconsequence 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 entertained.

They knew that presently dinner would be over and a little later the evening too would be over and casually put away. It was sharply different from the West where an evening was hurried from phase to phase toward its close in a continually disappointed anticipation or else in sheer nervous dread of the moment itself. The idea is if we don't look out the white race will be—will be utterly submerged. It's all scientific stuff; it's been proved. What was that word we—". It's up to us who are the dominant race to watch out or these other races will have control of things. I am, and you are and you are and—" After an infinitesimal hesitation he included Daisy with a slight nod and she winked at me again.

Do you see? There was something pathetic in his concentration as if his complacency, more acute than of old, was not enough to him any more. When, almost immediately, the telephone rang inside and the butler left the porch Daisy seized upon the momentary interruption and leaned toward me. Do you want to hear about the butler's nose? He had to polish it from morning till night until finally it began to affect his nose—". For a moment the last sunshine fell with romantic affection upon her glowing face; her voice compelled me forward breathlessly as I listened—then the glow faded, each light deserting her with lingering regret like children leaving a pleasant street at dusk.

The butler came back and murmured something close to Tom's ear whereupon 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 glowing and singing. You remind me of a—of a rose, an absolute rose. Doesn't he? This was untrue. I am not even faintly like a rose. She was only extemporizing but a stirring warmth flowed from her as if her heart was trying to come out to you concealed in one of those breathless, thrilling words. Then suddenly she threw her napkin on the table and excused herself and went into the house.

Miss Baker and I exchanged a short glance consciously devoid of meaning. I was about to speak when she sat up alertly and said "Sh! A subdued impassioned murmur was audible in the room beyond and Miss Baker leaned forward, unashamed, trying to hear. The murmur trembled on the verge of coherence, sank down, mounted excitedly, and then ceased altogether. Almost before I had grasped her meaning there was the flutter of a dress and the crunch of leather boots and Tom and Daisy were back at the table.

She sat down, glanced searchingly at Miss Baker and then at me and continued: "I looked outdoors for a minute and it's very romantic outdoors. There's a bird on the lawn that I think must be a nightingale come over on the Cunard or White Star Line. He's singing away—" her voice sang "—It's romantic, isn't it, Tom? The telephone rang inside, startlingly, and as Daisy shook her head decisively at Tom the subject of the stables, in fact all subjects, vanished into air.

Among the broken fragments of the last five minutes at table I remember the candles being lit again, pointlessly, and I was conscious of wanting to look squarely at every one and yet to avoid all eyes. I couldn't guess what Daisy and Tom were thinking but I doubt if even Miss Baker who seemed to have mastered a certain hardy skepticism was able utterly to put this fifth guest's shrill metallic urgency out of mind. To a certain temperament the situation might have seemed intriguing—my own instinct was to telephone immediately for the police.

The horses, needless to say, were not mentioned again. Tom and Miss Baker, with several feet of twilight between them strolled back into the library, as if to a vigil beside a perfectly tangible body, while trying to look pleasantly interested and a little deaf I followed Daisy around a chain of connecting verandas to the porch in front. In its deep gloom we sat down side by side on a wicker settee.

Daisy took her face in her hands, as if feeling its lovely shape, and her eyes moved gradually out into the velvet dusk. I saw that turbulent emotions possessed her, so I asked what I thought would be some sedative questions about her little girl. You didn't come to my wedding. Evidently she had reason to be. I waited but she didn't say any more, and after a moment I returned rather feebly to the subject of her daughter. Would you like to hear? Well, she was less than an hour old and Tom was God knows where. I woke up out of the ether with an utterly abandoned feeling and asked the nurse right away if it was a boy or a girl. She told me it was a girl, and so I turned my head away and wept. And I hope she'll be a fool—that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.

And I know. I've been everywhere and seen everything and done everything. The instant her voice broke off, ceasing to compel my attention, my belief, I felt the basic insincerity of what she had said. It made me uneasy, as though the whole evening had been a trick of some sort to exact a contributory emotion from me. I waited, and sure enough, in a moment she looked at me with an absolute smirk on her lovely face as if she had asserted her membership in a rather distinguished secret society to which she and Tom belonged. Inside, the crimson room bloomed with light.

Tom and Miss Baker sat at either end of the long couch and she read aloud to him from the "Saturday Evening Post"—the words, murmurous and uninflected, running together in a soothing tune. The lamp-light, bright on his boots and dull on the autumn-leaf yellow of her hair, glinted along the paper as she turned a page with a flutter of slender muscles in her arms. I knew now why her face was familiar—its pleasing contemptuous expression had looked out at me from many rotogravure pictures of the sporting life at Asheville and Hot Springs and Palm Beach. I had heard some story of her too, a critical, unpleasant story, but what it was I had forgotten long ago. Come over often, Nick, and I'll sort of—oh—fling you together.

You know—lock you up accidentally in linen closets and push you out to sea in a boat, and all that sort of thing—". Besides, Nick's going to look after her, aren't you, Nick? She's going to spend lots of week-ends out here this summer. I think the home influence will be very good for her. Yes, I'm sure we did. It sort of crept up on us and first thing you know—". I said lightly that I had heard nothing at all, and a few minutes later I got up to go home. They came to the door with me and stood side by side in a cheerful square of light.

As I started my motor Daisy peremptorily called "Wait! We heard you were engaged to a girl out West. Of course I knew what they were referring to, but I wasn't even vaguely engaged. The fact that gossip had published the banns was one of the reasons I had come east. You can't stop going with an old friend on account of rumors and on the other hand I had no intention of being rumored into marriage. Their interest rather touched me and made them less remotely rich—nevertheless, I was confused and a little disgusted as I drove away. It seemed to me that the thing for Daisy to do was to rush out of the house, child in arms—but apparently there were no such intentions in her head.

As for Tom, the fact that he "had some woman in New York" was really less surprising than that he had been depressed by a book. Something was making him nibble at the edge of stale ideas as if his sturdy physical egotism no longer nourished his peremptory heart. Already it was deep summer on roadhouse roofs and in front of wayside garages, where new red gas-pumps sat out in pools of light, and when I reached my estate at West Egg I ran the car under its shed and sat for a while on an abandoned grass roller in the yard. The wind had blown off, leaving a loud bright night with wings beating in the trees and a persistent organ sound as the full bellows of the earth blew the frogs full of life. The silhouette of a moving cat wavered across the moonlight and turning my head to watch it I saw that I was not alone—fifty feet away a figure had emerged from the shadow of my neighbor's mansion and was standing with his hands in his pockets regarding the silver pepper of the stars.

Something in his leisurely movements and the secure position of his feet upon the lawn suggested that it was Mr. Gatsby himself, come out to determine what share was his of our local heavens. I decided to call to him. Miss Baker had mentioned him at dinner, and that would do for an introduction. But I didn't call to him for he gave a sudden intimation that he was content to be alone—he stretched out his arms toward the dark water in a curious way, and far as I was from him I could have sworn he was trembling.

Involuntarily I glanced seaward—and distinguished nothing except a single green light, minute and far away, that might have been the end of a dock. When I looked once more for Gatsby he had vanished, and I was alone again in the unquiet darkness. About half way between West Egg and New York the motor-road hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land. This is a valley of ashes—a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air.

Occasionally a line of grey cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-grey men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud which screens their obscure operations from your sight. But above the grey land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T. The eyes of Doctor T. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic—their retinas are one yard high. They look out of no face but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a nonexistent nose.

Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set them there to fatten his practice in the borough of Queens, and then sank down himself into eternal blindness or forgot them and moved away. But his eyes, dimmed a little by many paintless days under sun and rain, brood on over the solemn dumping ground. The valley of ashes is bounded on one side by a small foul river, and when the drawbridge is up to let barges through, the passengers on waiting trains can stare at the dismal scene for as long as half an hour.

There is always a halt there of at least a minute and it was because of this that I first met Tom Buchanan's mistress. The fact that he had one was insisted upon wherever he was known. His acquaintances resented the fact that he turned up in popular restaurants with her and, leaving her at a table, sauntered about, chatting with whomsoever he knew. Though I was curious to see her I had no desire to meet her—but I did. I went up to New York with Tom on the train one afternoon and when we stopped by the ashheaps he jumped to his feet and taking hold of my elbow literally forced me from the car. I think he'd tanked up a good deal at luncheon and his determination to have my company bordered on violence.

The supercilious assumption was that on Sunday afternoon I had nothing better to do. I followed him over a low white-washed railroad fence and we walked back a hundred yards along the road under Doctor Eckleburg's persistent stare. The only building in sight was a small block of yellow brick sitting on the edge of the waste land, a sort of compact Main Street ministering to it and contiguous to absolutely nothing. One of the three shops it contained was for rent and another was an all-night restaurant approached by a trail of ashes; the third was a garage—Repairs. Cars Bought and Sold—and I followed Tom inside. The interior was unprosperous and bare; the only car visible was the dust-covered wreck of a Ford which crouched in a dim corner.

It had occurred to me that this shadow of a garage must be a blind and that sumptuous and romantic apartments were concealed overhead when the proprietor himself appeared in the door of an office, wiping his hands on a piece of waste. He was a blonde, spiritless man, anaemic, and faintly handsome. When he saw us a damp gleam of hope sprang into his light blue eyes. His voice faded off and Tom glanced impatiently around the garage. Then I heard footsteps on a stairs and in a moment the thickish figure of a woman blocked out the light from the office door. She was in the middle thirties, and faintly stout, but she carried her surplus flesh sensuously as some women can.

Her face, above a spotted dress of dark blue crepe-de-chine, contained no facet or gleam of beauty but there was an immediately perceptible vitality about her as if the nerves of her body were continually smouldering. She smiled slowly and walking through her husband as if he were a ghost shook hands with Tom, looking him flush in the eye. Then she wet her lips and without turning around spoke to her husband in a soft, coarse voice:. A white ashen dust veiled his dark suit and his pale hair as it veiled everything in the vicinity—except his wife, who moved close to Tom. She nodded and moved away from him just as George Wilson emerged with two chairs from his office door.

We waited for her down the road and out of sight. It was a few days before the Fourth of July, and a grey, scrawny Italian child was setting torpedoes in a row along the railroad track. He thinks she goes to see her sister in New York. He's so dumb he doesn't know he's alive. Wilson sat discreetly in another car. Tom deferred that much to the sensibilities of those East Eggers who might be on the train. She had changed her dress to a brown figured muslin which stretched tight over her rather wide hips as Tom helped her to the platform in New York.

At the news-stand she bought a copy of "Town Tattle" and a moving-picture magazine and, in the station drug store, some cold cream and a small flask of perfume. Upstairs, in the solemn echoing drive she let four taxi cabs drive away before she selected a new one, lavender-colored with grey upholstery, and in this we slid out from the mass of the station into the glowing sunshine. But immediately she turned sharply from the window and leaning forward tapped on the front glass. They're nice to have—a dog. We backed up to a grey old man who bore an absurd resemblance to John D. In a basket, swung from his neck, cowered a dozen very recent puppies of an indeterminate breed. The man peered doubtfully into the basket, plunged in his hand and drew one up, wriggling, by the back of the neck.

Some coat. That's a dog that'll never bother you with catching cold. The airedale—undoubtedly there was an airedale concerned in it somewhere though its feet were startlingly white—changed hands and settled down into Mrs. Wilson's lap, where she fondled the weather-proof coat with rapture. We drove over to Fifth Avenue, so warm and soft, almost pastoral, on the summer Sunday afternoon that I wouldn't have been surprised to see a great flock of white sheep turn the corner. Won't you, Myrtle? She's said to be very beautiful by people who ought to know. We went on, cutting back again over the Park toward the West Hundreds.

At th Street the cab stopped at one slice in a long white cake of apartment houses. Throwing a regal homecoming glance around the neighborhood, Mrs. Wilson gathered up her dog and her other purchases and went haughtily in. The apartment was on the top floor—a small living room, a small dining room, a small bedroom and a bath. The living room was crowded to the doors with a set of tapestried furniture entirely too large for it so that to move about was to stumble continually over scenes of ladies swinging in the gardens of Versailles.

The only picture was an over-enlarged photograph, apparently a hen sitting on a blurred rock. Looked at from a distance however the hen resolved itself into a bonnet and the countenance of a stout old lady beamed down into the room. Several old copies of "Town Tattle" lay on the table together with a copy of "Simon Called Peter" and some of the small scandal magazines of Broadway. Wilson was first concerned with the dog. A reluctant elevator boy went for a box full of straw and some milk to which he added on his own initiative a tin of large hard dog biscuits—one of which decomposed apathetically in the saucer of milk all afternoon. Meanwhile Tom brought out a bottle of whiskey from a locked bureau door. I have been drunk just twice in my life and the second time was that afternoon so everything that happened has a dim hazy cast over it although until after eight o'clock the apartment was full of cheerful sun.

Sitting on Tom's lap Mrs. Wilson called up several people on the telephone; then there were no cigarettes and I went out to buy some at the drug store on the corner. When I came back they had disappeared so I sat down discreetly in the living room and read a chapter of "Simon Called Peter"—either it was terrible stuff or the whiskey distorted things because it didn't make any sense to me.

Just as Tom and Myrtle—after the first drink Mrs. Wilson and I called each other by our first names—reappeared, company commenced to arrive at the apartment door. The sister, Catherine, was a slender, worldly girl of about thirty with a solid sticky bob of red hair and a complexion powdered milky white. Her eyebrows had been plucked and then drawn on again at a more rakish angle but the efforts of nature toward the restoration of the old alignment gave a blurred air to her face.

When she moved about there was an incessant clicking as innumerable pottery bracelets jingled up and down upon her arms. She came in with such a proprietary haste and looked around so possessively at the furniture that I wondered if she lived here. But when I asked her she laughed immoderately, repeated my question aloud and told me she lived with a girl friend at a hotel. McKee was a pale feminine man from the flat below. He had just shaved for there was a white spot of lather on his cheekbone and he was most respectful in his greeting to everyone in the room.

He informed me that he was in the "artistic game" and I gathered later that he was a photographer and had made the dim enlargement of Mrs. Wilson's mother which hovered like an ectoplasm on the wall. His wife was shrill, languid, handsome and horrible. She told me with pride that her husband had photographed her a hundred and twenty-seven times since they had been married. Wilson had changed her costume some time before and was now attired in an elaborate afternoon dress of cream colored chiffon, which gave out a continual rustle as she swept about the room. With the influence of the dress her personality had also undergone a change. The intense vitality that had been so remarkable in the garage was converted into impressive hauteur.

Her laughter, her gestures, her assertions became more violently affected moment by moment and as she expanded the room grew smaller around her until she seemed to be revolving on a noisy, creaking pivot through the smoky air. All they think of is money. I had a woman up here last week to look at my feet and when she gave me the bill you'd of thought she had my appendicitus out. We all looked in silence at Mrs. Wilson who removed a strand of hair from over her eyes and looked back at us with a brilliant smile. McKee regarded her intently with his head on one side and then moved his hand back and forth slowly in front of his face. And I'd try to get hold of all the back hair. Her husband said " Sh! You have to keep after them all the time.

She looked at me and laughed pointlessly. Then she flounced over to the dog, kissed it with ecstasy and swept into the kitchen, implying that a dozen chefs awaited her orders there. I was down there at a party about a month ago. At a man named Gatsby's. Do you know him? That's where all his money comes from. This absorbing information about my neighbor was interrupted by Mrs. McKee's pointing suddenly at Catherine:.

McKee only nodded in a bored way and turned his attention to Tom. All I ask is that they should give me a start. Wilson entered with a tray. Wilson at the Gasoline Pump,' or something like that. Catherine leaned close to me and whispered in my ear: "Neither of them can stand the person they're married to. If I was them I'd get a divorce and get married to each other right away. The answer to this was unexpected. It came from Myrtle who had overheard the question and it was violent and obscene. She lowered her voice again. She's a Catholic and they don't believe in divorce. We went by way of Marseilles. We had over twelve hundred dollars when we started but we got gypped out of it all in two days in the private rooms. We had an awful time getting back, I can tell you.

God, how I hated that town! The late afternoon sky bloomed in the window for a moment like the blue honey of the Mediterranean—then the shrill voice of Mrs. McKee called me back into the room. I knew he was below me. Everybody kept saying to me: 'Lucille, that man's way below you! I never was any more crazy about him than I was about that man there. She pointed suddenly at me, and every one looked at me accusingly. I tried to show by my expression that I had played no part in her past. I knew right away I made a mistake. He borrowed somebody's best suit to get married in and never even told me about it, and the man came after it one day when he was out.

She looked around to see who was listening: " 'Oh , is that your suit? And Tom's the first sweetie she ever had. The bottle of whiskey—a second one—was now in constant demand by all present, excepting Catherine who "felt just as good on nothing at all. I wanted to get out and walk eastward toward the park through the soft twilight but each time I tried to go I became entangled in some wild strident argument which pulled me back, as if with ropes, into my chair. Yet high over the city our line of yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening streets, and I was him too, looking up and wondering.

I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life. Myrtle pulled her chair close to mine, and suddenly her warm breath poured over me the story of her first meeting with Tom. I was going up to New York to see my sister and spend the night. He had on a dress suit and patent leather shoes and I couldn't keep my eyes off him but every time he looked at me I had to pretend to be looking at the advertisement over his head. When we came into the station he was next to me and his white shirt-front pressed against my arm—and so I told him I'd have to call a policeman, but he knew I lied. I was so excited that when I got into a taxi with him I didn't hardly know I wasn't getting into a subway train.

All I kept thinking about, over and over, was 'You can't live forever, you can't live forever. I've got to get another one tomorrow. I'm going to make a list of all the things I've got to get. A massage and a wave and a collar for the dog and one of those cute little ash-trays where you touch a spring, and a wreath with a black silk bow for mother's grave that'll last all summer. I got to write down a list so I won't forget all the things I got to do. It was nine o'clock—almost immediately afterward I looked at my watch and found it was ten.

McKee was asleep on a chair with his fists clenched in his lap, like a photograph of a man of action. Taking out my handkerchief I wiped from his cheek the remains of the spot of dried lather that had worried me all the afternoon.

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