A Plea for Eros

makes money. And money has built Gatsby’s castle, a place as unreal as a theater set erected from bills or bonds or “cardboard,” as the owl-eyed man suggests. It is a blur of excess and anonymity as vague as Gatsby’s rumored past—a past we learn in bits and pieces but which is never whole, for he is a man interrupted, a man who has broken from his old life and his parents to become not somebody else so much as “Nobody,” a brilliant cipher. “Mr. Nobody from Nowhere” is Tom Buchanan’s contemptuous expression. Gatsby’s connections to others are tenuous or fabricated. He misrepresents himself to Daisy when he first meets her in Louisville, by implying that he comes from her world. Again the image of wind appears in Fitzgerald’s prose: “As a matter of fact, he had no comfortable family standing behind him, and he was liable at the whim of an impersonal government to be blown anywhere about the world.”
    But in this ephemeral weightlessness of Gatsby’s there is beauty, real beauty, and on this the whole story turns. The man’s monstrous accumulation of
things
is nothing if not vulgar, a grotesque display as pitiful as it is absurd. But what Nick understands, as nobody else does, is that this mountain of things is the vehicle of a man’s passion, and as objects they are nearly drained of material reality. The afternoon when Gatsby takes Daisy through his house, we are told that he “stares at his possessions in a dazed way, as though in her actual and astounding presence, none of it was any longer real.” His nerves running high, the owner of the property begins pulling shirts from his closet, one gauzy, gorgeous article after another, “in coral and apple-green and lavender and faint orange, with monograms of Indian blue,” piling them high before Nick and his beloved. Then Daisy bends her lovely head and weeps into the shirts: “It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such—such beautiful shirts before.” I marveled again at the power of this passage, which is at once tender and ridiculous. But Fitzgerald lets neither feeling get the upper hand. Daisy pours out the grief of her young love for Gatsby into a heap of his splendid shirts without understanding her own feelings. But she recovers quickly. Sometime later the same afternoon, she stares out the window at pink clouds in a western sky and says to Gatsby, “I’d just like to get one of those pink clouds and put you in it and push you around.” The shirts, the clouds, the dream are colored like a fading rainbow. Gatsby stands at the edge of his lawn and watches the green light across the water from Daisy’s house. The last suit Nick sees him wearing is pink. If your feet are rooted to the ground, you can’t be blown willy-nilly, but you can’t fly up to those rosy clouds either. It’s as simple as that.
    Things and nothings. Bodies and nobodies. The ground and the air. The tangible and the intangible. The novel moves restlessly between these dichotomies. Surely Fitzgerald was right when he said that
The Great Gatsby
was “a new thinking out of the idea of illusion.” Illusion is generally coupled with its opposite, reality, but where is the real? Is reality found in the tangible and illusion in the intangible? Besides the nuts and bolts of hardware out west, there is
ground
in the novel, the soil of ashes in West Egg, the ground that Eckleburg un-blinkingly surveys, but it is here that Fitzgerald lavishes a prose that could have been taken straight from Dickens, a prose of fantasy, not realism.
    This is the valley of ashes—a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke, and finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air.
    With its crumbling men, the valley of ashes plainly evokes that other biblical valley of death, and this miserable stretch of land borders the road where Myrtle Wilson will die under the wheels of the car driven by Daisy. But like the pink clouds, it lacks solidity and dissolves. The difference between the vision of Gatsby’s mansion and this earth is that money does not disguise mortality here. The gaping cracks of poverty are fully visible.
    Nevertheless, among the residents of this ashen valley is Myrtle Wilson, the only person in the novel to whom Fitzgerald assigns “vitality.” The word is used three times in reference to Mrs.