Gatsby

Michael Spindler

Description

Towards the close of F. Scott Fitzgerald's 'The Great Gatsby' the narrator believes Gatsby to be dead, but in fact his death and funeral were faked, and now, from Havana, Gatsby tells his side of the story, throwing a completely new perspective on events and revealing an engaging, complex character.

Informations

• Publié par: eBookPartnership.com
• Date de parution: 15 mars 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783010370
• Langue: English

Extrait

GATSBY: MY STORY
Michael Spindler
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© 2013 Michael Spindler
Michael Spindler has asserted his rights in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
Published by eBookPartnership.com First published in eBook format in 2013 eISBN: 978-1-78301-037-0
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the Publisher.
All names, characters, places, organisations, businesses and events are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
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‘Believe me! The secret of reaping the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment from life is to live dangerously .’
Friedrich Nietzsche
‘Ay, in the very temple of Delight Veiled Melancholy has her Sovran shrine, Though seen of none save him whose strenuous Tongue Can burst Joy’s grape against his palate fine.’
John Keats
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER ONE
‘Never believe everything you read in the ‘papers,’ my pa always used to say, and when I came across the announcement of my death in the New York World obit column, I thought how wise those words were. It was all Rothstein’s doing, of course. A man who can fix the World’s Series can fix most anything. One of his many fronts was an undertaking business in Brooklyn and so he arranged that a John Doe on the way to Potter’s Field be diverted to my place, and the rest is history, as they say, or at least ‘story’, Carraway’s story. Everybody was fooled, especially him. But then he was so jejune he was easy to fool. He even nearly got snared by gold-digging Jordan Baker. But I’m jumping ahead.
Anyway, when I told a friend of mine down here in Havana that now I could I was going to publish my story, he asked what I was going to call it. I gave it some thought, and almost picked on Confessions of a Coffin-Dodger . Nice title, very apt, very tempting, but I’ve kept it simple. And though so-called ‘Carraway’ used pseudonyms in his roman-à-clef to protect the guilty, I’ve retained the same names, largely, again, for the sake of simplicity. For the three who have died I’ve used their real identities. So, ‘Tom’, ‘Jordan’, and ‘Daisy’ all live again in these pages. But ‘Daisy’! What a wince-making name he invented for her! She deserved better than that. I would never have fallen for a ‘Daisy’ any more than I would have fallen for an ‘Edith’ or a ‘Harriet.’ It’s too girlish and innocent, plain and uninspiring too. After we had made love, I had a much richer, more redolent name, a Southern name, to utter. I would lean in close to the exquisite whorl of her left ear, where a stud pearl earring gleamed in the dusk like a miniature moon, and whisper, ‘My ----,’ in wonder and triumph. I could see why he had to protect the reputation of the socialite golfer, but, again, ‘Jordan’ deserved better than the name of a river in the Middle East. I was wary of her at first, but in the end we got closer than I anticipated and I grew fond of her real name.
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I must forewarn you, though, mon hypocrite lecteur , that there is a considerable contrast of perspective between that narrative and this ‘counter-narrative’ as I like to think of it. For I have an argument with that book. Yessiree! I feel an animus against it. But for years all I could do was jot down reminiscences and opinions and seethe with impatience. I’ve waited a long time to have my say, and now, freed at last, dear World, I am going to have it.
You see, Carraway, ‘Carriedaway,’ old sport, what a sap of a romantic fool, a naïf, you were! From the first encounter, I knew that you – with your large, dreamy brown eyes with the diffident look and the tendency to blink rapidly behind those round, tortoise-shell glasses, your wistful, apologetic smile, your lick of brown hair hanging over your forehead like a Spaniel’s tongue, your weak chin – you deserved to be paid in three-dollar notes, to be sold out-of-date encyclopaedias, to buy a case of Dr Quackfire’s Patent Medicine . Your complexion, too, bespoke inexperience and lack of exposure. No Chicago back-of-the-Yards grit or grime or soot-laden drizzle had ever blocked those pores or dulled that healthful and moneyful New Haven sheen. You should have been on a billboard for milk!
After the War, it was easy to distinguish between those who had seen it and those who had not, those who had had the experience, the sights seared on their retinas and the indelible memories, and those who still had that New World innocence and faith. And I could tell with you, old sport. You claimed in your book that you’d been there, and indeed you had, but not in the sense most people use that phrase. Yeah, you got drafted by lottery like the rest of us two million schmucks , and you had basic training and got shipped to France, but with your business degree you snaffled yourself a posting in the AEF’s Services of Supply Bureau. There, you drew up army accounts, organized shipments and checked invoices. Sure, it was important work and had to be done, but adding up figures in a Tours chateau with all the other pen-pushers isn’t exactly as heroic as being shelled on the front line or charging enemy machine-gun nests; nor does it impress the girls or the readers as much either.
So, I could see why you invented that implausible little exchange in my garden about a quarter the way through. You know the one, where I’m supposed to have said, ‘Weren’t you in the First Division during the war?’ And you’re supposed to have said, ‘Why, yes. I was in the Twenty-eighth Infantry.’ Number one, it enabled you to claim some military credentials for yourself, made you seem a more serious, more authoritative guy, but the fact that you never elaborated on where you were sent or what action you saw reveals how hollow your claim was. And number two, it provided some basis for a kind of rapport between us. Two old soldier buddies swapping war stories – what could be better to cement a friendship?
To tell the truth, I laughed out loud when I read those words you’d put into my mouth. A US Army Division was twenty-eight thousand men and I was supposed to have recognized you! I would not have recognized most of the men in my own Company after two years for there were two hundred and thirty in that. Besides, you were so ignorant you didn’t even know the First Division was composed of regular soldiers, the regiments hand-picked by Pershing himself, and not of rookie draftees like you and me. Just you all over, wasn’t it – passing off fake authority as genuine experience? And the crazy thing is, hardly anyone has ever questioned what you wrote, pure hokum though some of it was. Like a wizard you wove a magic web of prose that hid all the lies, mistakes and illusions.
You embellished everything, and what didn’t happen you made up. And you got so much wrong! For all that expensive Ivy League education paid for by your dad, you were still a mid-western hayseed, an innocent abroad, ignorant of the devious ways of a wicked world. You even got the colour of the light at the end of Daisy’s dock wrong; it was a red light, not a green. You put on that full, confessional testimony mask, ‘In my younger and more vulnerable years, etc. etc….’ as if swearing ‘I shall tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God!’ when what you were doing was constructing a myth, a twentieth-century myth. You wanted to be a Homer, to indulge in some heropoesis, and you saw me, little ole me from the boondocks, as the raw substrate on whom you could work your verbal alchemy, around whom you could spin that exquisite, but ultimately fraudulent, style. But the trouble with making myths is that you lose sight of the truth, and the truth, dirty and messy and contradictory and many-layered though it may be, is usually a damn sight more interesting.
And afterwards, after your so-called ‘holocaust,’ you snuck back to the safe, flat, boring Midwest, to Turner’s promised land of renewal and moral purity, far from the fleshpots of Egypt, its pharaohs, pyramids, and dancing girls, and casual loves, and even more casual deaths. It had all been too much for you. There, in St. Paul, or wherever it was you went after the trauma, you began to write, as a kind of talking cure, trying to make sense of it all, and because you cannot face too much reality, old sport, you slid away from it, slid into the refuge of the romantic imagination and fine language. You were generous-spirited in your portrait, sure, even called me ‘great,’ but I didn’t deserve it.
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Now, here, in the aromatic, accommodating home of cigars and rum and music, it’s my turn, and you’ll say you don’t deserve my portrait of you. I haven’t been that kind I confess, but then I’ve never been a kind person. I’m no altruist; I’m a realist. I just want to get it all done, fair or unfair, kind or unkind. And when it’s all done I can throw the notebooks and pencils away and get on with my life, move on, free of the ghosts and memories.
So, there you were in the summer of Twenty-two fresh from the Midwest, living in Babylon, working in downtown Manhattan and renting on fashionable Long Island. You, a New Haven alumnus, you thought you were so clever and sophisticated and smart when you did not know the half of it, not the half ! But,