The Cry for Myth (15 page)
Authors: Rollo May
We see Scott experiencing puppy love with his partners at dancing school but already as a boy writing. We see him later at Princeton, writing a brilliant college musical, but then being dropped from school because he flunked math and chemistry.
We see him drunk in New York, fighting with bouncers and getting badly beaten up, but recovering and still writing. We see him going back for his fraternity reunion at Princeton, getting into another fight in which both his eyes were blackened, being expelled forthwith by his fraternity for unseemly conduct, and then trying to crawl back in through the window.
Fitzgerald wrote directly out of the center of the Jazz Age with all its turmoil and all its romance. He produced, along with a great number of mediocre stories in a mad struggle to get out of debt, several good books and one work of genius,
The Great Gatsby
. This novel gave readers a “touch of infinity,” so said its editor, Maxwell Perkins. It is the most poignant account of the conflicted, self-pitying, but tragic soul of the Jazz Age. This novel presents the tragedy of the American myth which had so successfully guided America since the landing on Plymouth Rock.
At a certain point in his career, Fitzgerald withdrew from his alcoholism and his playboy activities, withdrew his splendid imagination—which Edna St. Vincent Millay was later to describe as a great diamond possessed by an old woman—and sought, in solitude, to write a book that would do justice to his great talent. Such had been his promise to Maxwell Perkins, his editor. Like Gatsby in his book, he sought now to find out what had caused the chaos in his life. The “thing” for Gatsby was what had happened in his falling in love with Daisy. The blocks of Gatsby’s (and Fitzgerald’s) life,
formed a ladder to a secret place above the trees—he could climb to it, if he climbed alone, and once there he could suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder … listening for a moment to the tuning fork that had been struck upon a star.
*
The Great Gatsby
is Fitzgerald’s spiritual autobiography. He uses the word “forever” often in this book; Maxwell Perkins wrote him, “You are able with an occasional glance at the sky
to impart a sense of eternity.” It is a book which deals with the myths of the day; it has “the symbolic truth of a global vision.”
The son of shiftless and unsuccessful farm people of North Dakota, Jim Gatz reflected the American myth of Proteus, in one form. He believed he could recreate himself, deny his parentage and his roots and build a new identity. In his imagination he had never really accepted them as his parents at all.
Already as a boy Gatsby had written in the back of a comic book the self-improving rules to make himself a great success, his own Horatio Alger story. “The truth was,” Fitzgerald writes, “that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his … Platonic conception of himself…. So he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen-year-old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end.”
*
As his biographer, Andrew Le Vot writes, Fitzgerald in this book “reflects better than all his autobiographical writing the heart of the problems he and his generation faced. … In
Gatsby
, haunted as
it
is by a sense of Sin and Fall, Fitzgerald assumed to himself all the weakness and depravity of human nature.”
†
Like Luke Larkin in the Horatio Alger myth, Gatsby is first befriended by the rich owner of a yacht, Mr. Dan Cody, when he swims out to warn Cody of an unseen rock on which the anchored yacht would founder.
**
Cody hires him and gives him a blue yachtsman’s uniform, the first of Gatsby’s line of uniforms—the army uniform in which he courts Daisy, the white suit when he later entertains lavishly in his mansion
(“You always look so cool,” Daisy was later to remark).
Sent to Louisville for his military training, Gatsby falls in love with the heiress, Daisy. They consummate their love beneath the blossoming lilacs of spring. They promise to wait for each other till the war is over. But he does not count on her conformist nature, her lack of character, her devotion to “the dancing feet, the fortunes behind everything.” When in Europe hearing that she has married Tom Buchanan, a monied society man from Chicago, Gatsby vows he will regain her. Committing his whole self to this dream, he changes his name, his manner of dress, attends Oxford for five months, where he acquires a new accent, and comes back to America to become rich, to buy the new mansion with the “blue lawn” on Long Island Sound. All is concentrated on one purpose, to win back Daisy, who with Tom now summers across Long Island Sound.
He has complete faith, in typical American fashion, that he can transform his dreams into action. Nick, the interlocutor who has rented the ordinary house next door for the summer, has his own views about life—conformist, moralistic, Puritanical, coming as he did from the midwest followed by Yale—which are exactly opposite to Gatsby’s views. But Nick is forced to admit about Gatsby, “there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life.” Gatsby had an “extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again.”
*
Gatsby believed unconditionally in the powerful American myth of the “Green Light,” a symbol which comes up often in this novel. The green light was on the end of Daisy’s dock, as though enticing Gatsby. The first glimpse Nick got of his neighbor was one evening when Gatsby stood out on his lawn looking across the sound at this green light, raising his arms in a yearning gesture, “and I swear I saw him tremble,” says Nick.
This eternal Green Light is a revealing myth of America, for
it means new potentialities, new frontiers, new life around the corner. There is no destiny, or if there is we construct it ourselves. Everything is ahead; we make anything we choose of life. The Green Light beckons us onward and upward with a promise of bigger and better things in higher and higher skyscrapers, interminably rising into infinity. The Green Light turns into our greatest illusion, covering over our difficulties, permitting us to take evil steps with no guilt, hiding our daimonic capacities and our problems by its profligate promises, and destroying our values en route. The Green Light is the Promised Land myth siring Horatio Alger.
Gatsby certainly was a success in the Horatio Alger sense; he had become literally rich, and though probably unconscious of it, he was completely committed to that myth we inherited from the nineteenth century. His half-literate father, who has, we will see later, come from North Dakota when he read his son’s death notice in the Chicago paper, overcomes his grief at seeing his son in the coffin by his elation at the proofs all about the house of Gatsby’s great success: “He had a big future before him. … If he’d of lived, he’d of been a great man. A man like James J. Hill. He’d of helped build up the country.”
*
Obviously Gatsby had money galore—even though the money was gotten illicitly, the way many people in the Jazz Age got theirs. There has been in America no clear-cut differentiation between right and wrong ways to get rich. Playing the stock market? Finding oil under your shack in Texas? Deforesting vast areas of Douglas fir in the state of Washington? Amassing piles of money for lectures after getting out of prison as a Watergate crook? The important thing in the American dream has been to
get
rich, and then
those very riches give a sanction to your situation
. The fact of your being successful is proof that God smiles on you and that you are among the saved. It is not hard to see how this, in true Calvinistic tradition, drifted into getting rich as the eleventh commandment.
If money could buy everything, Gatsby would have been the most fortunate of men. But the success and the money all went to flesh out the vast dream which held Gatsby in its thrall and which he took as the reality of his life. Money could buy the vast parties, the great glitter of the mansion, the freely flowing liquor, the jazz music which floated from the orchestras as the hundreds of people flocked to the lights like moths at night. But all were important only because sooner or later these accoutrements of Babylon would draw in Daisy. True to his myth, Gatsby was successful at this also—Daisy came out and they gradually rehearsed the lines so dear to Gatsby’s heart.
Gatsby’s tragic flaw was that he took his dream—the American dream—for reality. He had complete faith in it and never doubted that his transformation and his ultimate success were assured. Nick speaks of “the colossal vitality of his illusion.” If Kierkegaard is right that “purity of heart is to will one thing,” Gatsby was indeed pure of heart. Strangely, he is the one person in the book who possesses complete integrity. When he tells Nick of his goal to have Daisy confess that she loved and loves only him, and to marry him in the great house in Louisville just as they had originally planned, Nick remonstrates, “You can’t re-live the past.” Gatsby responds, “Can’t re-live the past? Of course you can.”
*
Nick overcomes his abhorrence of Gatsby’s way of life—his having made his money through his connections with bootleggers and his serving as the front for gangsters. The corrupt means Gatsby uses to achieve his ends have not altered his fundamental integrity, his spiritual intactness, writes Le Vot. His means reflect the corruption of the times, they are the only ones available to an indigent cavalier seeking his fortune. True corruption, Nick discovered, lies in the hearts of those who despise Gatsby, especially in Tom’s. Gatsby’s integrity consisted of his daring to dream and to be faithful to his dream; it never even occurred to him to tell that it was Daisy, not he,
who was driving his car when it killed Myrtle Wilson. It was not Gatsby who was to go wrong, says Nick, “it was the foul dust that floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.” In the same sense, it is not the American myth in itself that leads us astray; it is the “foul dust that floats in the wake” of this dream. It is hanging onto the Horatio Alger myth when it no longer applies; it is using the past myths to rationalize the poverty and hunger in the world; it is the increasing of paranoia out of recourse to a past long since dead.
But Gatsby’s dream was too insistent. “You demand too much,” Daisy was to whimper in the grand showdown in the Plaza Hotel, when Gatsby insists she say to Tom that she never loved him. Fitzgerald goes on, “Only the dead dream fought on as the afternoon slipped away, trying to touch what was no longer tangible, struggling unhappily, undespairingly.”
*
We note that Fitzgerald writes undespairingly.
True despair is a constructive emotion capable of eliciting creative solutions to a situation
. This was just what the Jazz Age was incapable of feeling. Nick mused, as Gatsby lay in his coffin and not a word came from Daisy, that perhaps Gatsby “no longer cared. If that was true he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream.”
†
In the Jazz Age, writes Fitzgerald, and behind our loneliness was the lack of authentic caring. His compatriots felt that caring threatens our independence and our freedom to pull up stakes on a whim and move to some other place. Gatsby’s dream founders, speaking concretely, on the rocks of the inability of people to care. This is specifically presented by Fitzgerald
as the carelessness of Tom and Daisy. “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smash up things and creatures and then retreat back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they made.”
*
Fitzgerald uses the word “careless” on almost every page. Near the end, after Gatsby has been killed, Nick tells us of a fantastic repetitive dream he has.
I see it as a night scene by El Greco: a hundred houses, at once conventional and grotesque, crouching under a sullen, overhanging sky and a lustreless moon. In the foreground four solemn men in dress suits are walking along the sidewalk with a stretcher on which lies a drunken woman in a white evening dress. Her hand, which dangles over the side, sparkles cold with jewels. Gravely the men turn in at a house—the wrong house. But no one knows the woman’s name, and no one cares.
†
This recurring dream—which can be taken as his own dream since it emerges from his fantasy—casts light on Fitzgerald’s own compulsive, and hence anxious, drunken brawls. He has no house of himself, the dream is saying; he will be homeless and lonely forever. But more than that, he is being carried by men who do not care, and perhaps under the surface, we don’t care either. This is why this book is haunted by a sense of the myth of sin and fall.
The word “care” should be taken in its literal meaning: the ability of people to have compassion, to communicate on deeper levels and to love each other. It has some relation to Freud’s myth of Eros. Tom and Daisy had no sense of mercy, which expresses care and usually can be counted on to mitigate human cruelty.
Heidegger made care
(sorge)
the basis of being: without care our selves shrink up, we lose our capacity to will as well as our
own selfhood.
*
Sometimes there is a hint in Fitzgerald that the lack of care represents original sin, one’s incapacity to sense and to communicate with the heart of another; and he even implies that it is impossible to escape doing violence to another person’s deepest feelings and needs. Fitzgerald often uses the terms “unutterable,” “inexpressible,” “incommunicable,” as though he is struggling hard to communicate something which in fact cannot be spoken, struggling to explain that we were set upon this tiny whirling planet with a passionate need to love each other, but we can do it only partially. The last day at that weird breakfast just an hour before Gatsby is shot in his own swimming pool, Nick and Gatsby are trying to get some perspective on the tragic events of the previous day. Gatsby tries to persuade himself that Daisy may have loved Tom “just for a minute, when they were married—and she loved me more even then, do you see?”
†
He was in reality waiting with one ear to the phone—would Daisy call or send some token? None came.
