Once when I was attending a panel discussion on the fate or the state of “the novel” at the 92nd Street Y, because my husband had been roped into moderating this discussion, I listened to a novelist, an intelligent and good writer, berate Kafka for his depictions of women. They were bad, she said, wrongheaded. But in Kafka’s world of dreams and claustrophobia, a world of irreducible images so powerful that they shake me every time I remember them, what does it mean to second-guess its genius, to edit out the women who lift their skirts for the wandering K.? When I read Kafka, I am not that housemaid who presents herself to the tormented hero anyway. I am the hero, the one who takes the pleasure offered, as we all do when we sleep.
This is my call for eros, a plea that we not forget ambiguity and mystery, that in matters of the heart we acknowledge an abiding uncertainty. I honestly think that when we are possessed by erotic magic we don’t feel like censoring Kafka or much else, because we are living a story of exciting thresholds and irrational feeling. We are living in a secret place we make between us, a place where the real and unreal commingle. That’s where the young philosopher took the woman with the belligerent question. He brought her into a realm of the imagination and of memory, where lovers are alone speaking to each other, saying yes or no or “perhaps tomorrow,” where they play at who they are, inventing and reinventing themselves as subjects and objects; and when the woman with the question found herself there, she was silent. Maybe, just maybe, she was remembering a passionate story of her own.
1996
Gatsby’s Glasses
I FIRST READ THE GREAT GATSBY WHEN I WAS SIXTEEN YEARS old, a high school student in Northfield, Minnesota. I read it again when I was twenty-three and living in New York City, and now again at the advanced age of forty-two. I have carried the book’s magic around with me ever since that first reading, and its memory is distinct in my mind, because unlike many books that return to me chiefly as a series of images, The Great Gatsby has also left its trace in ray ear — as enchanted music, whispering, laughter, and as the voice of storytelling itself.
The book begins with the narrator’s memory of something his father told him years before: “Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone, remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.” As an adage for life, the quotation is anticlimactic — restrained words I imagine being uttered by a restrained man, perhaps over the top of his newspaper, and yet without this watered-down American version of noblesse oblige, there could be no story of Gatsby. The father’s words are the story’s seed, its origin. The man who we come to know as Nick Carraway tells us that his father “meant a great deal more” than what the words denote, and I believe him. Hidden in the comment is a way of living and an entire moral world. Its resonance is double: first, we know that the narrator’s words are bound to his father’s words, that he comes from somewhere he can identify, and that he has not severed that connection; and second, we know that these paternal words have shaped him into who he is, a man “inclined to reserve all judgements”—in short, the ideal narrator, a man who doesn’t leap into the action but stays on the sidelines. Nick is not an actor but a voyeur, and in every art, including the art of fiction, there’s always somebody watching.
Taking little more than his father’s advice, the young man goes east. The American story has changed direction: the frontier is flip-flopped from west to east, but the urge to leave home and seek your fortune is as old as fairy tales. Fitzgerald’s Middle West was not the same as mine. I did not come from the stolid advantages of Summit Avenue in St. Paul. I remember those large, beautiful houses on that street as beacons of wealth and privilege to which I had no access. I grew up in the open spaces of southern Minnesota in one of the “lost Swede towns” Fitzgerald mentions late in the book, only we were mostly Norwegians, not Swedes. It was to my hometown that Fitzgerald sent Gatsby to college for two weeks. The unnamed town is Northfield. The named college is St. Olaf, where my father taught for thirty years and where I was a student for four. Gatsby’s ghost may have haunted me, because even in high school I knew that promise lay in the East, particularly in New York City, and ever so vaguely, I began to dream of what I had never seen and where I had never been.
Nick Carraway hops a train and finds himself in the bond trade and living next door to Gatsby’s huge mansion: a house built of wishes. All wishes, however wrongheaded, however great or noble or ephemeral, must have an object, and that object is usually more ideal than real. The nature of Gatsby’s wish is fully articulated in the book. Gatsby is great, because his dream is all-consuming and every bit of his strength and breath is in it. He is a creature of will, and the beauty of his will overreaches the tawdriness of his real object: Daisy. But the secret of the story is that there is no great Gatsby without Nick Carraway, only Gatsby, because Nick is the only one who is able to see the greatness of Gatsby’s wish.
Reading the book again, I was struck by the strangeness of a single sentence that seemed to glitter like a golden key to the story. It occurs when a dazed Gatsby finds his wish granted and he is showing Daisy around the West Egg mansion. Nick is, as always, the third wheel. “I tried to go then,” he says, “but they wouldn’t hear of it; perhaps my presence made them feel more satisfactorily alone.” The question is: In what way are two people more satisfactorily alone when somebody else is present? What on earth does this mean? I have always felt that there is a triangular quality to every love affair. There are two lovers and a third element — the idea of being in love itself. I wonder if it is possible to fall in love without this third presence, an imaginary witness to love as a thing of wonder, cast in the glow of our deepest stories about ourselves. It is as if Nick’s eyes satisfy this third element, as if he embodies for the lovers the essential self-consciousness of love — a third-person account. When I read Charles Scribner Ill’s introduction to my paperback edition, I was not at all surprised that an early draft of the novel was written by Fitzgerald in the third person. Lowering the narration into the voice of a character inside the story allows the writer to inhabit more fully the interstices of narrative itself.
The role of the onlooker is given quasi-supernatural status in the book in the form of the bespectacled eyes of T. J. Eckle-burg, and it is to this faded billboard of an oculist in Queens that the grieving Wilson addresses his prayer: “You can’t hide from God.” When his friend tells him, “That’s an advertisement,” Wilson doesn’t answer. The man needs an omniscient third person, and he finds it in Eckleburg, with his huge staring eyes. This speech occurs when Nick is not present, and yet the quality of the narration does not change. It is as if he were present. Nick’s stand-in is a neighbor of Wilson’s, Michaelis, who has presumably reported the scene to the narrator, but the reader isn’t told this directly. Together, Michaelis and Nick Carraway form a complementary narration that finds transcendence in the image of Eckleburg’s all-seeing, all-knowing eyes, a figure very like the third-person narrator of nineteenth-century novels who looks down on his creatures and their follies.
There is only one other noticeable pair of spectacles in the novel, those worn by “the owl-eyed man.” One of Gatsby’s hundreds of anonymous guests, he is first seen in the “Gothic library,” a drunken fellow muttering excitedly that the books “are absolutely real.” He had expected cardboard, he tells Nick and Jordan, and cannot get over his astonishment at the reality of these volumes. The owl-eyed man returns near the end of the book as Gatsby’s only mourner besides the dead man’s father and Nick. Like the image of Eckleburg, the owl-eyed man is both thoroughly mysterious and thoroughly banal. He tells Nick and Jordan that he’s been drunk for a week and that he thought the books might help “sober” him up. Nameless, the man is associated exclusively with the library and his large glasses. Nick does not ask the owl-eyed man to attend the funeral. He has kept the day and place a secret to avoid gawkers and the press, but, out of nowhere, the man makes his appearance in the rain, and during that time he removes his glasses twice. The second time, he wipes them, “outside and in.” I can see him doing it. For me the gesture is intimate, and although no handkerchief is mentioned, I see a white handkerchief, too, moving over the rain-spattered lenses. The cleaning of the glasses is ordinary and magical. The strange man is a second, specifically literary incarnation of Eckleburg, a witness to the problem of what’s real and what isn’t, a problem that is turned inside out through the idea of seeing through special glasses—the glasses of fiction.