TT 505: Gatsby Centennial
"This schedule in effect"
The novel was published 100 years ago yesterday.
A young brain cannot understand irony unless it is obvious, whereas a mature brain can comfortably see irony in a cup on a saucer. The Great Gatsby changes as you read it at 15, at 25, at 40.
Even the title The Great Gatsby is ironic, of course, but the ironies on every page deepen over time.
In the classic book of baseball reportage The Boys of Summer, young Roger Khan is working at a newspaper alongside an elder who had once been a secretary to James Joyce. According to the secretary, Joyce said, “When you write you must listen for sounds. And there is a sound that one word makes and there is the sound that one word makes upon another and there is the sound of silences between words.”
Chapter four of Gatsby includes an unexpected litany of proper names that shed indirect light on the themes of money and class. The names were written down by narrator Nick Carraway at the time of action and recollected in later wisdom.
Nick pleased himself in a humorous way, the list was already ironic (“this schedule in effect” is intentionally pompous). Hindsight allows for even more subtle absurdity.
The sounds are correct. Fitzgerald fought for every sound: the sound that one word makes, and the sound one word makes upon the other.
Once I wrote down on the empty spaces of a time-table the names of those who came to Gatsby’s house that summer. It is an old time-table now, disintegrating at its folds, and headed “This schedule in effect July 5th, 1922.” But I can still read the gray names, and they will give you a better impression than my generalities of those who accepted Gatsby’s hospitality and paid him the subtle tribute of knowing nothing whatever about him.
From East Egg, then, came the Chester Beckers and the Leeches, and a man named Bunsen, whom I knew at Yale, and Doctor Webster Civet, who was drowned last summer up in Maine. And the Hornbeams and the Willie Voltaires, and a whole clan named Blackbuck, who always gathered in a corner and flipped up their noses like goats at whosoever came near. And the Ismays and the Chrysties (or rather Hubert Auerbach and Mr. Chrystie’s wife), and Edgar Beaver, whose hair, they say, turned cotton-white one winter afternoon for no good reason at all.
Clarence Endive was from East Egg, as I remember. He came only once, in white knickerbockers, and had a fight with a bum named Etty in the garden. From farther out on the Island came the Cheadles and the O. R. P. Schraeders, and the Stonewall Jackson Abrams of Georgia, and the Fishguards and the Ripley Snells. Snell was there three days before he went to the penitentiary, so drunk out on the gravel drive that Mrs. Ulysses Swett’s automobile ran over his right hand. The Dancies came, too, and S. B. Whitebait, who was well over sixty, and Maurice A. Flink, and the Hammerheads, and Beluga the tobacco importer, and Beluga’s girls.
From West Egg came the Poles and the Mulreadys and Cecil Roebuck and Cecil Schoen and Gulick the state senator and Newton Orchid, who controlled Films Par Excellence, and Eckhaust and Clyde Cohen and Don S. Schwartze (the son) and Arthur McCarty, all connected with the movies in one way or another. And the Catlips and the Bembergs and G. Earl Muldoon, brother to that Muldoon who afterward strangled his wife. Da Fontano the promoter came there, and Ed Legros and James B. (“Rot-Gut”) Ferret and the De Jongs and Ernest Lilly — they came to gamble, and when Ferret wandered into the garden it meant he was cleaned out and Associated Traction would have to fluctuate profitably next day.
A man named Klipspringer was there so often and so long that he became known as “the boarder.”— I doubt if he had any other home. Of theatrical people there were Gus Waize and Horace O’Donavan and Lester Meyer and George Duckweed and Francis Bull. Also from New York were the Chromes and the Backhyssons and the Dennickers and Russel Betty and the Corrigans and the Kellehers and the Dewars and the Scullys and S. W. Belcher and the Smirkes and the young Quinns, divorced now, and Henry L. Palmetto, who killed himself by jumping in front of a subway train in Times Square.
Benny McClenahan arrived always with four girls. They were never quite the same ones in physical person, but they were so identical one with another that it inevitably seemed they had been there before. I have forgotten their names — Jaqueline, I think, or else Consuela, or Gloria or Judy or June, and their last names were either the melodious names of flowers and months or the sterner ones of the great American capitalists whose cousins, if pressed, they would confess themselves to be.
In addition to all these I can remember that Faustina O’Brien came there at least once and the Baedeker girls and young Brewer, who had his nose shot off in the war, and Mr. Albrucksburger and Miss Haag, his fiancee, and Ardita Fitz-Peters and Mr. P. Jewett, once head of the American Legion, and Miss Claudia Hip, with a man reputed to be her chauffeur, and a prince of something, whom we called Duke, and whose name, if I ever knew it, I have forgotten.
All these people came to Gatsby’s house in the summer.
Wonderful post and comments. I've read Gatsby 4 times, first in high school, when it meant not much to me. Next, as an adult, found it magical, then a decade or so later, meh, and finally stunned at its brilliance. Now, because of my research for a book, I'm drawn to references to people and music of the WWI through 1920s era. Reading the magnificent USA Trilogy by John Dos Passos, I hit a treasure of popular song references. And: in his notes to Handy's 1926 Blues An Anthology, Abbe Niles titles a section "Sad Horns" (Niles was friendly with, among other people, Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Carl Sandburg, and he gave a leg up to the very young composer Ruth Crawford, later the stepmother of Pete Seeger.) The Anthology prologue is called "Sad Horns" opening with this Gatsby quote: "... orchestras which set the rhythm of the year, summing up the sadness and suggestiveness of life in new tunes. All night long the saxophones wailed the hopeless comment of the "Beale Street Blues" while a hundred pairs of golden and silver slippers shuffled the shining dust. At the gray tea hour there were always rooms that throbbed incessantly with this low, sweet fever, while fresh faces drifted here and there like rose petals blown by the sad horns around the floor." "Beale Street" was a bigger Handy smash than "St. Louis Blues" in this era, with a massive hit for Earl Fuller's Novelty Orchestra in November 1918; I'm thinking it's 1919 in Gatsby, the Al Bernard vocal version was huge in August 1919, so it's the global hangover at war's end and the flu calamity has started. No one before me comments on this tip-off, but this is also exactly what Dos Passos does. You can mine both writers for historical references: in Gatsby there's the encounter with the gangster Meyer Wolfsheim, who mentions in passing that he was present at the murder in a NYC hotel of the gambler Herman "Beansie" Rosenthal, a notorious 1912 event that exposed corruption in high places and the 1915 execution of a police lieutenant for allegedly hiring the actual triggermen, an especially terrifying gang whose main members included Gyp the Blood and Dago Frank. Man, those were the days.
Gatsby's been on my mind recently, for reasons having to do with wealth, cruelty, and false representation; but I've been holding myself to finishing Pynchon's "Mason & Dixon" before revisiting it. Your post prompts me to notice how Pynchon's deliriously funny litanies of wacky names may themselves be grounded in Fitzgerald.