【有声英语文学名著】了不起的盖茨比 第6章（1）

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by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Chapter 6 - Part 1

 

  About this time an ambitious young reporter from New York arrived one morning at Gatsby’s door and asked him if he had anything to say.

“Anything to say about what?” inquired Gatsby politely.

“Why—any statement to give out.”

It transpired¹ after a confused five minutes that the man had heard Gatsby’s name around his office in a connection which he either wouldn’t reveal or didn’t fully² understand. This was his day off and with laudable initiative he had hurried out “to see.”

It was a random³ shot, and yet the reporter’s instinct was right. Gatsby’s notoriety, spread about by the hundreds who had accepted his hospitality and so become authorities on his past, had increased all summer until he fell just short of being news. Contemporary legends such as the “underground pipe-line to Canada.” attached themselves to him, and there was one persistent⁴ story that he didn’t live in a house at all, but in a boat that looked like a house and was moved secretly up and down the Long Island shore. Just why these inventions were a source of satisfaction to James Gatz of North Dakota, isn’t easy to say.

James Gatz—that was really, or at least legally, his name. He had changed it at the age of seventeen and at the specific moment that witnessed the beginning of his career—when he saw Dan Cody’s yacht drop anchor over the most insidious⁵ flat on Lake Superior. It was James Gatz who had been loafing along the beach that afternoon in a torn green jersey⁶ and a pair of canvas pants, but it was already Jay Gatsby who borrowed a rowboat, pulled out to the TUOLOMEE, and informed Cody that a wind might catch him and break him up in half an hour.

I suppose he’d had the name ready for a long time, even then. His parents were shiftless and unsuccessful farm people—his imagination had never really accepted them as his parents at all. The truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic⁷ conception of himself. He was a son of God—a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that—and he must be about His Father’s business, the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious⁸ beauty. So he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen-year-old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end.

For over a year he had been beating his way along the south shore of Lake Superior as a clam-digger and a salmon-fisher or in any other capacity that brought him food and bed. His brown, hardening body lived naturally through the half-fierce, half-lazy work of the bracing⁹ days. He knew women early, and since they spoiled him he became contemptuous of them, of young virgins¹⁰ because they were ignorant, of the others because they were hysterical¹¹ about things which in his overwhelming self-absorbtion he took for granted.

But his heart was in a constant, turbulent riot. The most grotesque¹² and fantastic conceits¹³ haunted him in his bed at night. A universe of ineffable¹⁴ gaudiness¹⁵ spun¹⁶ itself out in his brain while the clock ticked on the wash-stand and the moon soaked with wet light his tangled¹⁷ clothes upon the floor. Each night he added to the pattern of his fancies until drowsiness¹⁸ closed down upon some vivid scene with an oblivious¹⁹ embrace. For a while these reveries provided an outlet²⁰ for his imagination; they were a satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy’s wing.

An instinct toward his future glory had led him, some months before, to the small Lutheran college of St. Olaf in southern Minnesota. He stayed there two weeks, dismayed at its ferocious²¹ indifference²² to the drums of his destiny, to destiny itself, and despising the janitor’s work with which he was to pay his way through. Then he drifted back to Lake Superior, and he was still searching for something to do on the day that Dan Cody’s yacht dropped anchor in the shallows alongshore.

Cody was fifty years old then, a product of the Nevada silver fields, of the Yukon, of every rush for metal since seventy-five. The transactions in Montana copper²³ that made him many times a millionaire found him physically²⁴ robust²⁵ but on the verge²⁶ of soft-mindedness, and, suspecting this, an infinite number of women tried to separate him from his money. The none too savory²⁷ ramifications²⁸ by which Ella Kaye, the newspaper woman, played Madame de Maintenon to his weakness and sent him to sea in a yacht, were common knowledge to the turgid sub-journalism of 1902. He had been coasting along all too hospitable²⁹ shores for five years when he turned up as James Gatz’s destiny at Little Girls Point.

To the young Gatz, resting on his oars³⁰ and looking up at the railed deck, the yacht represented all the beauty and glamour³¹ in the world. I suppose he smiled at Cody—he had probably discovered that people liked him when he smiled. At any rate Cody asked him a few questions (one of them elicited³² the brand new name) and found that he was quick and extravagantly³³ ambitious. A few days later he took him to Duluth and bought him a blue coat, six pair of white duck trousers, and a yachting cap. And when the TUOLOMEE left for the West Indies and the Barbary Coast Gatsby left too.

He was employed in a vague personal capacity—while he remained with Cody he was in turn steward³⁴, mate, skipper, secretary, and even jailor, for Dan Cody sober knew what lavish³⁵ doings Dan Cody drunk might soon be about, and he provided for such contingencies³⁶ by reposing³⁷ more and more trust in Gatsby. The arrangement lasted five years, during which the boat went three times around the Continent. It might have lasted indefinitely except for the fact that Ella Kaye came on board one night in Boston and a week later Dan Cody inhospitably died.

I remember the portrait of him up in Gatsby’s bedroom, a gray, florid man with a hard, empty face—the pioneer debauchee, who during one phase of American life brought back to the Eastern seaboard the savage³⁸ violence of the frontier brothel and saloon. It was indirectly³⁹ due to Cody that Gatsby drank so little. Sometimes in the course of gay parties women used to rub champagne⁴⁰ into his hair; for himself he formed the habit of letting liquor alone.

And it was from Cody that he inherited money—a legacy⁴¹ of twenty-five thousand dollars. He didn’t get it. He never understood the legal device that was used against him, but what remained of the millions went intact to Ella Kaye. He was left with his singularly appropriate education; the vague contour of Jay Gatsby had filled out to the substantiality of a man.

He told me all this very much later, but I’ve put it down here with the idea of exploding those first wild rumors⁴² about his antecedents, which weren’t even faintly true. Moreover he told it to me at a time of confusion, when I had reached the point of believing everything and nothing about him. So I take advantage of this short halt, while Gatsby, so to speak, caught his breath, to clear this set of misconceptions away.

It was a halt, too, in my association with his affairs. For several weeks I didn’t see him or hear his voice on the phone—mostly I was in New York, trotting⁴³ around with Jordan and trying to ingratiate myself with her senile aunt—but finally I went over to his house one Sunday afternoon. I hadn’t been there two minutes when somebody brought Tom Buchanan in for a drink. I was startled, naturally, but the really surprising thing was that it hadn’t happened before.

They were a party of three on horseback—Tom and a man named Sloane and a pretty woman in a brown riding-habit, who had been there previously⁴⁴.

“I’m delighted to see you,” said Gatsby, standing⁴⁵ on his porch. “I’m delighted that you dropped in.”

As though they cared!

“Sit right down. Have a cigarette or a cigar.” He walked around the room quickly, ringing bells. “I’ll have something to drink for you in just a minute.”

He was profoundly affected⁴⁶ by the fact that Tom was there. But he would be uneasy anyhow until he had given them something, realizing in a vague way that that was all they came for. Mr. Sloane wanted nothing. A lemonade? No, thanks. A little champagne? Nothing at all, thanks. . . . I’m sorry——

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