The Great Gatsby - Chapter 9

Most of those reports were a nightmare--grotesque, circumstantial, eager and untrue.

When Michaelis's testimony at the inquest brought to light Wilson's suspicions of his wife I thought the whole tale would shortly be served up in racy pasquinade--but Catherine, who might have said anything, didn't say a word.

So Wilson was reduced to a man "deranged by grief" in order that the case might remain in its simplest form.

That request seemed superfluous when I wrote it.

MEYER WOLFSHIEM and then hasty addenda beneath:

I think it was on the third day that a telegram signed Henry C. Gatz arrived from a town in Minnesota.

However, that was my fault, for he was one of those who used to sneer most bitterly at Gatsby on the courage of Gatsby's liquor and I should have known better than to call him.

But when I'd shouted "Hello" several times in vain an argument broke out behind a partition and presently a lovely Jewess appeared at an interior door and scrutinized me with black hostile eyes.

He drew me into his office, remarking in a reverent voice that it was a sad time for all of us, and offered me a cigar.

Practice elocution, poise and how to attain it 5.00-6.00

No wasting time at Shafters or [a name, indecipherable]

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 see now that this has been a story of the West, after all--Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life.

Even when the East excited me most, even when I was most keenly aware of its superiority to the bored, sprawling, swollen towns beyond the Ohio, with their interminable inquisitions which spared only the children and the very old--even then it had always for me a quality of distortion.

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.

But I wanted to leave things in order and not just trust that obliging and indifferent sea to sweep my refuse away.

Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby's house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby's house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us.

It eluded us then, but that's no matter--tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther.