The Cry for Myth (16 page)
Authors: Rollo May
When Nick left he turned to shout across the lawn to Gatsby, “They’re a rotten crowd…. You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.”
**
Nick adds that he always was “glad I said that. It was the only compliment I ever gave him.” All this despite the fact, as Nick puts it, that Gatsby “represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn.”
†
These are the two sides of Fitzgerald in a Laocoön conflict, and he presents them in juxtaposition throughout the book. The struggle is between the ethos of the Jazz Age and Fitzgerald’s own integrity, his sensitive imagination which on one level saw with amazing clarity the sin and hell motif of the 1920s and on another level was seduced by the very things he hated. This is what makes the book so poignant.
A central theme in Fitzgerald’s novel is loneliness. At
Gatsby’s parties, amid the richest, most abandoned forms of music and dancing and drinking, there was no communication at all, only “enthusiastic meetings between people who never knew each other’s names.” And when Gatsby stood on his porch, “his hand up in formal gesture of farewell” to the departing guests, “a sudden emptiness seemed to flow now from the windows and the great doors, endowing with complete isolation the figure of the host.”
*
Nick himself is sensitive to the lonely atmosphere as he wanders about New York. “I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others—poor young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.”
†
After the showdown in the Plaza, Nick suddenly remembers that this day was his birthday. “Thirty—the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning brief-case of enthusiasm, thinning hair.”
**
But the most lonely figure of all in the book is Jay Gatsby, the host of these fantastic parties which he himself did not like. From the moment we first see him in the dusk standing alone on his front lawn yearning across Long Island Sound toward the green light on Daisy’s wharf, from that moment to his funeral, he is the prototype of loneliness.
The fact that Gatsby would not have recognized it as such makes it all the more telling; it was not for him an emotion which comes and goes but a character state, a state of being
. Nobody else in the world reached behind his driving purpose; he was in actuality a self-made person, and, like all self-made persons, he was cut off inwardly from any deep relationship. Everybody flowed in and out of his great house for a purpose which was completely separate from the parties—to bring Daisy to him.
As Gatsby’s body lay in his coffin in the house, Nick kept hearing as though Gatsby were imploring him, “Look here, old sport, you’ve got to get somebody for me....I can’t go through
this alone.” Nick reassures the dead Gatsby, “I’ll get somebody for you, Gatsby. Don’t worry. Just trust me and I’ll get somebody for you—”
*
But in spite of all Nick’s phoning, and though the funeral cortege of three cars waited an extra half hour, Gatsby’s final loneliness at his funeral is summed up in two words:
nobody came
. Not a word or a flower from Daisy. A drizzle added to the sad mood around the grave, as though nature itself were taking part in this inutterably bereft moment, when not just a man was being buried but also, most important, the American dream; the central myth of America was being placed in its grave.
There was one exception to the little group at the grave; oddly enough one of the men who had been drunk at Gatsby’s parties turned up at the funeral. Aghast, he cries, “Why, my God! they used to go there [to the parties] by the hundreds!” He adds the phrase the equivalent of which is present in every reader’s mind, “The poor son-of-a-bitch.” The funeral is like Willy Loman’s in
Death of a Salesman
, except there is not even the handful of people to discuss what really went wrong.
Fitzgerald himself felt this deep loneliness. Only as a self-defeating effort to break through his loneliness can we understand his panicky cavorting and compulsive drunkenness. Indeed the rootlessness was present throughout the whole Jazz Age; it was not till the crash in the 1930s that we were forced to look directly at our problem and ask whether there was something wrong in our alienation from each other, our isolation from the fountain of life.
Can this loneliness and carelessness be due to the fact that human beings have become estranged from God? This may
seem a queer question here, but it is implicit in
The Great Gatsby
. True, when people lose the capacity to experience myths, they also lose their gods. This question comes up in
The Great Gatsby
in a remarkable symbol, again a demonstration of Fitzgerald’s genius, that of the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg.
Halfway between New York and West Egg a wasteland confronts the commuter, a desolate landscape as barren as the moon. Fitzgerald calls this wasteland the “valley of ashes,” where ashes take the fantastic forms of houses and chimneys and “ash-gray men who move dimly … through the powdery air, swarming up an impenetrable cloud of ash dust and dismally gray surroundings.”
*
But above the gray land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg, … which 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 non-existent nose. Evidently some wild wag of an occulist set them there to fatten his practice in the borough of Queens, and then … forgot them and moved away.
†
The whole scene takes on a strange—and hell-like—religious aspect. George Wilson, half-crazed after his wife is killed by Gatsby’s car on the road in front of his garage, stands with his visitor Michaelis across the road from the valley of ashes. This young Greek neighbor has stayed beside George all night in his bereavement. But Wilson keeps staring at these gigantic eyes. Michaelis tries to console him, “In a time like this, George, a man needs a church.” But George mumbles,
“I spoke to her, I told her she might fool me but she couldn’t fool God.” And he repeats, “I said, You may fool me, but you can’t fool God!”
Standing beside him, Michaelis saw with a shock that he was looking
at the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg, which had just emerged, pale and enormous from the dissolving night.
“That’s an advertisement,” Michaelis assured him. Something made him turn away from the window and look back into the room. But Wilson stood there a long time, his face close to the window pane, nodding into the twilight.
*
During his adult life Fitzgerald had continuously wrestled with his Catholic upbringing. The struggle is obvious in this novel, and the undercurrent of sin and hell are present in his other works as well.
In his biography of Fitzgerald, Le Vot argues that it was a lesser god, like Lucifer, who created the world and then abandoned it. In any case, he believes Fitzgerald’s meaning is clear, “that it is not men who have abandoned God, but God who has deserted men in an uninhabitable, absurd material universe.”
†
It was the nostalgic, self-pitying aspect of the Jazz Age which led it to react with resentful rebellion against all restraints, which felt itself abandoned, a mood which comes out in Fitzgerald’s own self-pity. (Hemingway tried to get this across to him; in a letter to Fitzgerald he wrote, “We were all bitched at the start—we are not tragic characters.”) This was partially Fitzgerald’s inheritance from the overprotection and overconcern of his mother in his childhood days, when he lacked an image of a strong and successful father with which to identify. But more extensively, the “pampered child” psychology was a central part of the 1920s, when people believed in their rights for everything, when legal and other standards of justice were sneered at by persons high and low, and the eat-drink-and-be-merry philosophy seemed to hold everyone in its grip.
The most significant thing about Dr. T. J. Eckleburg’s billboard was the fact that it was a huge, blown-up
photograph
. Susan Sontag has pointed out that our modern age confuses
photographs with reality. Many people when traveling assume that if they can only take a photograph of a treasure in a distant land then they
have
it; they do not need genuinely to
look
at the statue until it becomes part of their imagination, until they have absorbed it into their being. With the “shot” taken in a jiffy, they have “captured” the scene. We note that both words—to shoot and to capture—are from the hunter’s or soldier’s vocabulary. The traveler has the “treasure” in its minute form in the camera roll which he can take home. It is filed away, only a name and a number to call it forth to show other people. This is the meaning of God-has-abandoned-man; the substitute God, filed away in these photographs, makes it impossible for the genuine God to return.
These gigantic eyes, which George Wilson worships as the eyes of God, are, as Michaelis has pointed out, an
advertisement
. Its purpose is to sell eyeglasses; it was put there with the hope of sprucing up an occulist’s business. Commercialism, the buying and selling, the rattling of silver dollars in one’s pocket, has usurped the role of God. The advertising man, the person who is skilled at making photographs of things in order to sell them, the triumph of profit making—these capacities were part and parcel of the 1920s, of the culture of Gatsby and Fitzgerald and the tragedy that is presented in this book. This triumph of advertising and commercialism ironically appears “in a place where ruin is the sole residue of industrial prosperity.”
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A prophecy made by Edmund Concourt, concerning the new deity in industrial societies, appeared in a Paris journal:
Sometimes I think that a day will come when modern peoples will be blessed with an American-style god … his image no longer elastic and adaptable to painters’ imaginations, no longer floating on Veronica’s veil, but caught in a photographic portrait…. Yes, I picture a god who will appear in photographs and who will wear glasses.
†
This god will not have the face of a Carnegie or a Rockefeller or a Whitney. Indeed, it will have no discernible face at all, only the man in the gray suit, anonymous, a mirror representation of the Advertising Man, who is not concerned about what he believes—indeed, beliefs are irrelevant—but only about how much he can sell. He knows that in the Jazz Age he must first of all sell himself. The man who worships this god of commercialism is a strangely robot-like type of person who fittingly is spawned by this wasteland, has no “up” or “down,” no “north” or “south,” and probably doesn’t even want any. This myth does not involve the pioneers of production or invention, but only of marketing. The new goal, what Le Vot calls the “new hero of daily life,” the myth that still is convincing, is the seller, the hustler, the “ad man.” The only real tragedy written by an American playwright, says Le Vot, “the one deeply rooted in the people’s mythology, is
Death of a Salesman.”
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Willy Loman is a salesman in the full meaning of the word. If you are selling yourself—a smile on your face and a shine on your shoes—you make yourself into an object, you then have no identity, and so it makes entire sense that they should say at his grave, “He never knew who he was.” We only know he “was the best liked.” This fits the way much of the technology has been moving in the West, and especially in America, to the extent that our chief goal, our sought-after myth, is to “keep our country one in which anyone can become rich.”
After Gatsby’s burial, Fitzgerald, through the person of Nick, muses about his own consciousness of America. In his musing the tragedy of Gatsby becomes explicitly identified with the loss of American myths and the demise of our American
dream. He recalls the long trips home from prep school at Christmastime, meeting with old friends in the Chicago station, the railroad trip across Wisconsin when he and the other young people were “unutterably aware of our identity with this country for one strange hour, before we melted indistinguishably into it again.”
That’s my Middle West—not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede towns, but the thrilling returning trains of my youth, and the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of holly wreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow. I am part of that.
*
He recognizes that this story has been about the west—Gatsby and Tom and Daisy and he himself are all from the middle west. Not the far west, whence came our myth of the lonely cowboy; nor the Horatio Alger myth, the collapse of which he is describing. But the middle west, which, however one may want to get away from it, is the birthplace of modern American morality and literature. Perhaps, Nick ponders, we people from the middle west “possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life.” For the east was Babylon, where one can only sit by the waters and weep. The real soul of the nation was beyond New York, “back where the dark fields of the Republic roll on under the night.”
“Gatsby’s whole story,” writes Andre Le Vot, “and, behind it, that of a grand dream gone awry center on this symbol of Contemporary America and its companion vision….
The collapse of Gatsby’s dream is implicitly paralleled … with the failure of the American dream
.”
†
With the genius of a great novelist, Fitzgerald is struggling to make clear the crisis in which America was and is existing. The novel bears a curious resemblance to another myth, beginning, in Genesis before the flood, with the crowd surrounding
the ark and jeering at Noah’s efforts to prepare to meet the holocaust toward which his world was sliding headlong.
Nick decides to leave the east and go back to his home. But before he leaves, he feels he
is
haunted by Gatsby’s house in those last days:
I could still hear the music and the laughter, faint and incessant….
One night I did hear a material car there, and saw its lights stop at his front steps. But I didn’t investigate. Probably it was some final guest who had been away at the ends of the earth and didn’t know that the party was over.”
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