第1天 ! 与富翁盖茨比为邻

In myyounger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've beenturning over in my mind ever since.

"Wheneveryou feel like criticizing any one," he told me, "just remember thatall the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had."

Hedidn't say any more but we've always been unusually communicative in a reservedway, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequenceI'm inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curiousnatures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. Theabnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when itappears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustlyaccused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs ofwild, unknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought--frequently I havefeigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by someunmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon--forthe intimate revelations of young men or at least the terms in which theyexpress them are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions.Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid ofmissing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and Isnobbishly repeat a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled outunequally at birth.

And,after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has alimit. Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes but after acertain point I don't care what it's founded on.

WhenI came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be inuniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotousexcursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart. Only Gatsby, the manwho gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction--Gatsby whorepresented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn. If personality isan unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeousabout him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he wererelated to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes tenthousand miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabbyimpressionability which is dignified under the name of the "creativetemperament"--it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readinesssuch as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely Ishall ever find again. No--Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is whatpreyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams thattemporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-windedelations of men.

Myfamily have been prominent, well-to-do people in this middle-western city forthree generations. The Carraways are something of a clan and we have atradition that we're descended from the Dukes of Buccleuch, but the actualfounder of my line was my grandfather's brother who came here in fifty-one,sent a substitute to the Civil War and started the wholesale hardware businessthat my father carries on today.

Inever saw this great-uncle but I'm supposed to look like him--with specialreference to the rather hard-boiled painting that hangs in Father's office. Igraduated from New Haven in 1915, just a quarter of a century after my father,and a little later I participated in that delayed Teutonic migration known asthe Great War. I enjoyed the counter-raid so thoroughly that I came back restless.Instead of being the warm center of the world the middle-west now seemed likethe ragged edge of the universe--so I decided to go east and learn the bondbusiness. Everybody I knew was in the bond business so I supposed it couldsupport one more single man. All my aunts and uncles talked it over as if theywere choosing a prep-school for me and finally said, "Why--yees" withvery grave, hesitant faces. Father agreed to finance me for a year and aftervarious delays I came east, permanently, I thought, in the spring oftwenty-two.

Thepractical thing was to find rooms in the city but it was a warm season and Ihad just left a country of wide lawns and friendly trees, so when a young manat the office suggested that we take a house together in a commuting town itsounded like a great idea. He found the house, a weather beaten cardboardbungalow at eighty a month, but at the last minute the firm ordered him toWashington and I went out to the country alone. I had a dog, at least I had himfor a few days until he ran away, and an old Dodge and a Finnish woman who mademy bed and cooked breakfast and muttered Finnish wisdom to herself over theelectric stove.

Itwas lonely for a day or so until one morning some man, more recently arrivedthan I, stopped me on the road.

"Howdo you get to West Egg village?" he asked helplessly.

Itold him. And as I walked on I was lonely no longer. I was a guide, apathfinder, an original settler. He had casually conferred on me the freedom ofthe neighborhood.

Andso with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees--justas things grow in fast movies--I had that familiar conviction that life wasbeginning over again with the summer.

Therewas so much to read for one thing and so much fine health to be pulled down outof the young breath-giving air. I bought a dozen volumes on banking and creditand investment securities and they stood on my shelf in red and gold like newmoney from the mint, promising to unfold the shining secrets that only Midasand Morgan and Maecenas knew. And I had the high intention of reading manyother books besides.

I wasrather literary in college--one year I wrote a series of very solemn andobvious editorials for the "Yale News"--and now I was going to bringback all such things into my life and become again that most limited of allspecialists, the "well-rounded man." This isn't just an epigram--lifeis much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all.

Itwas a matter of chance that I should have rented a house in one of thestrangest communities in North America. It was on that slender riotous islandwhich extends itself due east of New York and where there are, among othernatural curiosities, two unusual formations of land. Twenty miles from the citya pair of enormous eggs, identical in contour and separated only by a courtesybay, jut out into the most domesticated body of salt water in the WesternHemisphere, the great wet barnyard of Long Island Sound. They are not perfectovals--like the egg in the Columbus story they are both crushed flat at thecontact end--but their physical resemblance must be a source of perpetualconfusion to the gulls that fly overhead. To the wingless a more arrestingphenomenon is their dissimilarity in every particular except shape and size.

Ilived at West Egg, the--well, the less fashionable of the two, though this is amost superficial tag to express the bizarre and not a little sinister contrastbetween them. My house was at the very tip of the egg, only fifty yards fromthe Sound, and squeezed between two huge places that rented for twelve orfifteen thousand a season. The one on my right was a colossal affair by anystandard--it was a factual imitation of some H?tel de Ville in Normandy, with atower on one side, spanking new under a thin beard of raw ivy, and a marbleswimming pool and more than forty acres of lawn and garden. It was Gatsby'smansion.

Orrather, as I didn't know Mr. Gatsby it was a mansion inhabited by a gentlemanof that name. My own house was an eye-sore, but it was a small eye-sore, and ithad been overlooked, so I had a view of the water, a partial view of myneighbor's lawn, and the consoling proximity of millionaires--all for eightydollars a month.

Acrossthe courtesy bay the white palaces of fashionable East Egg glittered along thewater, and the history of the summer really begins on the evening I drove overthere to have dinner with the Tom Buchanans. Daisy was my second cousin onceremoved and I'd known Tom in college. And just after the war I spent two dayswith them in Chicago.

Herhusband, among various physical accomplishments, had been one of the mostpowerful ends that ever played football at New Haven--a national figure in away, one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-onethat everything afterward savors of anti-climax. His family were enormouslywealthy--even in college his freedom with money was a matter for reproach--butnow he'd left Chicago and come east in a fashion that rather took your breathaway: for instance he'd brought down a string of polo ponies from Lake Forest.

Itwas hard to realize that a man in my own generation was wealthy enough to dothat.

Whythey came east I don't know. They had spent a year in France, for no particularreason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played poloand were rich together. This was a permanent move, said Daisy over thetelephone, but I didn't believe it--I had no sight into Daisy's heart but Ifelt that Tom would drift on forever seeking a little wistfully for thedramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game.

Andso it happened that on a warm windy evening I drove over to East Egg to see twoold friends whom I scarcely knew at all. Their house was even more elaboratethan I expected, a cheerful red and white Georgian Colonial mansion overlookingthe bay. The lawn started at the beach and ran toward the front door for aquarter of a mile, jumping over sun-dials and brick walks and burninggardens--finally when it reached the house drifting up the side in bright vinesas though from the momentum of its run. The front was broken by a line ofFrench windows, glowing now with reflected gold, and wide open to the warmwindy afternoon, and Tom Buchanan in riding clothes was standing with his legs aparton the front porch.

Hehad changed since his New Haven years. Now he was a sturdy, straw haired man ofthirty with a rather hard mouth and a supercilious manner.

Twoshining, arrogant eyes had established dominance over his face and gave him theappearance of always leaning aggressively forward. Not even the effeminateswank of his riding clothes could hide the enormous power of that body--heseemed to fill those glistening boots until he strained the top lacing and youcould see a great pack of muscle shifting when his shoulder moved under histhin coat. It was a body capable of enormous leverage--a cruel body.