In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave
me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my
mind ever since.
‘Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,’ he told
me, ‘just remember that all the people in this world
haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.’
He didn’t say any more but we’ve always been
unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I
understood that he meant a great deal more than
that. In consequence I’m in clined to reserve all
judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious
natures to me and also made me the victim of not a
few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to
detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears
in a normal person, and so it came about that in
college I was unjustly accused of being a politician,
because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild,
unknown men. Most of the con
fidences were unsought—frequently I have feigned
sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I
realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate
revelation was quiver ing on the horizon—for the
intimate revelations of young men or at least the
terms in which they express them are usually
plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions.
Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I am
still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that,
as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat a
sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out
unequally at birth.
And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come
to the admission that it has a limit. Conduct may be
founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes but after
a certain point I don’t care what it’s founded on. When
I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I
wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of
moral attention forever; I want
ed no more riotous excursions with privileged
glimpses into the human heart. Only Gatsby, the man
who gives his name to this book, was exempt from
my reaction—Gatsby who represented everything for
which I have an unaffected scorn.
If personality is an unbroken series of
successful gestures, then there was something
gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to
the promises of life, as if he were related to one of
those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten
thousand miles away. This responsiveness had
nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which
is dignified under the name of the ‘creative
temperament’— it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a
romantic readiness such as I have never found in any
other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find
again. No—Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is
what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the
wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my
interest in the abortive sorrows and short winded
elations of men.