[Music] the great gatsby chapter one in my younger 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 anyone he told me just remember that all the people in the world haven't had the same 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 inclined 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 boars 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 the wild unknown men most of the confidences were unsought frequently i feigned sleep preoccupation or hostile levity when i realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering 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 parceled 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 had a sort of moral attention forever i wanted 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 you were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes 10 000 miles away this responsiveness had nothing to do with the flabby impressionability that is dignified under the name of creative temperament it was an extraordinary gift for hope a romantic readiness such as i have never found in any other person and which is not likely i shall ever find again no gatsby turned out all right in 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 absorptive sorrows and short-winded elations of men my family have been prominent well-to-do people in this middle western city for three generations the caraways are something of a clan and we have a tradition that we're descended from the dukes of buklu but the actual founder of my line was my grandfather's brother who came here in 51 sent a substitute to the civil war and started a wholesale hardware business that my father carries on today i never saw this great uncle but i'm supposed to look like him with special reference to the rather hard-boiled painting that hangs in father's office i graduated from new haven in 1915 just a quarter of a century after my father and a little later i participated in that delayed teutonic migration known as the great war i enjoyed the counter raid so thoroughly that i came back restless instead of being the warm center of the world the middle west now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe so i decided to go east and learn the bond business everybody i knew was in the bond business so i suppose it could support one more single man all my aunts and uncles talked it over as if they were choosing a prep school for me and finally said why yes with very grave hesitant faces father agreed to finance me for a year and after various delays i came east permanently i thought in the spring of 22 the practical thing was to find rooms in the city but it was a warm season and i had just left a country of wide lawns and friendly trees so when a young man at the office suggested that we take a house together in a commuting town it sounded like a great idea he found the house a weather beaten cardboard bungalow at 80 a month but at the last minute the firm ordered him to washington and i went out to the country alone i had a dog at least i had him for a few days until he ran away and an old dodge and a finnish woman who made my bed and cooked breakfast and mother finished wisdom to herself over the electric stove it was lonely for a day or so until one morning some man more recently arrived than i stopped me on the road how do you get to west egg village he asked helplessly i told him and as i walked on i was lonely no longer i was a guide a pathfinder an original settler he had casually conferred on me the freedom of the neighborhood and so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees just as things grow in fast movies i had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer there was so much to read for one thing and so much fine health to be pulled down out of the young breath giving air i bought a dozen volumes on banking and credit and investment securities and they stood on my shelf in red and gold like new money from the mint promising to unfold the shining secrets that only midas and morgan and makeness knew and i had the high intention of reading many other books besides i was rather literally in college one year i wrote a very solemn and obvious editorial from the yale news and now i was going to bring back all such things into my life and become again that most limited of all specialists the well-rounded man this isn't just an epigram life is more successfully looked at from a single window after all it was a matter of chance that i should have rented a house in one of the strangest communities in north america it was on that slender riotous island which extends itself due east of new york and where there are among other natural curiosities two unusual formations of land twenty miles from the city a pair of enormous eggs identical in contour and separated only by a courtesy bay jut out onto the most domesticated body of salt water in the western hemisphere the great wet barnyard of long island sound they are not perfect ovals like the eggs in the columbus story they are both crushed flat at the contact end but their physical resemblance must be a source of perpetual confusion to the gulls that fly overhead to the wingless a more arresting phenomenon is that dissimilarity in every particular except shape and size i lived a west egg the well the less fashionable of the two though this is the most superficial flag to express the bizarre and not a little sinister contrast between them my house was at the very tip of the egg only 15 yards from the sound and squeezed between two huge places that rented for 12 or 15 000 a season the one on my right was a colossal affair by any standard it was some factual imitation of some hotel de ville in normandy spanking under a new thin beard of roar ivy and the marble swimming pool and more than 40 acres of lawn and garden it was gaspy's mansion or rather as i didn't know mr gaspy it was a mansion inhabited by a gentleman of that name my own house was an eyesore but it was a small eyesore and it had been overlooked so i had a view of the water a partial view of my neighbor's lawn and the consoling proximity of millionaires all for 80 dollars a month across the courtesy bay the white palaces of fashionable east egg glittered across the water and the history of the summer really begins on the evening i drove over there to have dinner with the tom buchanans daisy was my second cousin once removed and i'd known tom in college and just after the war i spent two days with them in chicago her husband among various physical accomplishments has been one of our most powerful ends that ever played football at new haven a national figure in a way one of those men who reached such an acute limited excellence at 21 that everything afterwards savors an anti-climax his family were enormously wealthy even in college his freedom with money was a matter for reproach but now he'd left chicago and come east in a fashion that rather took your breath away for instance he'd brought down a string of polo ponies from lake forest it was hard to realize that a man in my own generation was wealthy enough to do that why they came east i don't know they'd spent a year in france for no particular reason and then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together this was a permanent move said daisy over the telephone but i didn't believe it i had no sight into daisy's heart but i felt tom would drift on forever seeking a little wistfully for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game and so it happened that on a warm windy evening i drove over to the east egg to see two friends who might scarcely knew it all their house was even more elaborate than i expected a general red and white georgian colonial mansion overlooking the bay the lawn started at the beach and ran towards the front door for a quarter mile jumping over sundials and brick walls and burning gardens finally when it reached the house drifting up the side in bright vines as though from the momentum of its run the front was broken by a line of french windows glowing now with the reflected gold and wide open with the warm windy afternoon and tom buchanan in riding clothes was standing with his legs apart on the front porch he had changed since his new haven years now he was a sturdy straw-haired man of 30 with a rather hard mouth and a supercilious manner two shining arrogant eyes had established dominance over his face and gave him the appearance of always leaning aggressively forward not even the effeminate swank of his writing clothes could hide the enormous power of that body he seemed to fill those glistening boots until he strained at the top leasing and you could see a great pack of muscles shifting when his shoulder moved under its thin coat it was the body capable of enormous leverage a cruel body his speaking voice a gruff tenor added to the impression of fractitiousness that he conveyed there was a touch of paternal contempt in it even towards people he liked and there were men at new haven who hated his guts now don't think my opinion on these matters is final he seemed to say just because i am stronger and more of a man than you are we were in the same senior society and while we were never intimate i always had the impression that he approved of me and wanted me to like him with some harsh defiant wistfulness of his own we talked for a few minutes on the sunny porch i've got a nice place here he said his eyes flashing about restlessly turning me around by one arm he moved a broad flat hand along the front vista including in its sweep a sunken italian garden a half acre of deep pungent roses and a snub-nosed motorboat that bumped in the tide offshore it belongs to domain the oil man he turned me around again politely and abruptly we'll go inside we walked through a hallway into a bright rosy colored space fragilly bound into the house by french windows at either end the windows were ajar and gleaming white against the fresh grass outside that seemed to grow a little way into the house a breeze blew through the room blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags twisting them up towards the frosted wedding cake in the ceiling and then rippling over the wine-colored rug making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea the only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though on an anchored balloon they were both in white and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight round the house i must have stood for a few moments listening to the whip and the snap of the curtains and the groan of a picture on the wall then there was a boom as tom buchanan shut the rear window and the caught wind died out about the room and the curtains and the rugs and the two young women ballooned slowly to the floor the younger of the two was a stranger to me she was extended at full length at the end of the dive in completely motionless and with her chin raised a little as if she were balancing something on it which was quite likely to fall if she saw me out of the corner of her eyes she gave no hint of it indeed i was almost surprised into murmuring an apology for having disturbed her by coming in the other girl daisy made an attempt to rise she leaned slightly forward with a conscientious expression then she laughed an absurd charming little laugh and i left too and came forward into the room i'm paralyzed with happiness she laughed again as if she'd said something very witty and held my hand for a moment looking up into my face promising that there was no one in the world that she so much wanted to see that was the way she had she hinted in a murmur that the surname of the balancing girl was baker i've heard it said that daisy's murmur was only a way to make people lean towards her an irrelevant criticism that made it no less charming at any rate miss baker's lips fluttered she nodded at me almost imperceptibly and then quickly tipped her head back again the object she was balancing had obviously tottered a little and given her something of a fright again a sort of apology rose to my lips almost any exhibition of complete self-sufficiency draws a stunned tribute from me i looked back at my cousin who began to ask me questions in her low thrilling voice it was the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down as if each speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it bright eyes and bright passionate mouth but there was an excitement in her voice that men who had cared for her found difficult to forget a singing compulsion a whispered listen a promise that she had done gay exciting things just a while since and that there were gay exciting things hovering in the next hour i told her how i stopped off in chicago for a day on my way east and how a dozen people had sent their love through me did they miss me she cried ecstatically the whole town is desolate all the cars have the left rear wheel painted black as a morning wreath and there's a persistent whale all night along the north shore how gorgeous let's go back tom tomorrow then she added irrelevantly you ought to see the baby i'd like to she's asleep two years old haven't you ever seen her never well you ought to see her she's tom buchanan who had been hovering restlessly about the room stopped and rested his hand on my shoulder what you doing nick i'm a bond man who with i told him never heard of them he remarked decisively this annoyed me you will i answered shortly you will if you stay in the east oh i'll stay in the east don't you worry he said glancing at daisy and then back at me as if he were alert for something more i'd be a god damn fool to live anywhere else at this point mrs baker said absolutely with such a suddenness that i started it was the first word she uttered since i came to the room evidently surprised her as much as it did me for she yawned and with a series of rapid death movements stood up into the room i'm stiff she complained i've been lying on that sofa for as long as i can remember don't look at me daisy retorted i've been trying to get you to new york all afternoon no thanks said mrs baker to the four cocktails just in from the pantry i'm absolutely in training her host looked at her incredulously you are he took down his drink as if it were a drop in the bottom of a glass how you ever get anything done is beyond me i looked at miss baker wondering what it was she got done i enjoyed looking at her she was a slender small breasted girl with an erect carriage which she extenuated by throwing her body backwards at the shoulders like a youth cadet her gray sunstrained eyes looked back at me with polite reciprocal curiosity out of a wan charming discontented face it occurred to me now that i had seen her or a picture of her somewhere before you live in west egg she remarked contemptuously i know somebody there i don't know a single you must know gatsby gatsby demanded daisy what gatsby before i could reply that he was my neighbor dinner was announced wedging his tense arm imperatively undermined tom buchanan compelled me from the room as though we were moving a checker to another square slenderly languidly their hands set lightly on their hips the two young women preceded us out into a rosy colored porch open towards the sunset where four candles flickered on the table in the diminished wind why candles objected daisy frowning she snapped them out with her finger in two weeks it'll be the longest day in the year she looked at us all radiantly do you always watch for the longest day in the year and then miss it i always watch for the longest day in the year and then miss it well to plan something youn't miss baker sitting down at the table as if she were getting into bed right said daisy what do we plan she turned to me helplessly what do people plan before i could answer her eyes fastened with an odd expression on her little finger look she complained i heard it we all looked the knuckle was black and blue you did it tom she said accusingly i know you didn't mean to but you did do it that's what i get for marrying a brood of a man a great big hulking physical specimen of a i hate that word hulking objected tom crossley even in kidding hulk king insisted daisy sometimes she and miss baker talked at once unobtrusively with bantering inconsequence that was never quite chatter that was as cool as their white dresses and their impersonal eyes in the absence of all desire they were here and they accepted tom and me making only polite pleasant effort to entertain or to be entertained they knew that presently dinner would be over and a little later the evening two would be over and casually put away it was sharply different from the west where an evening was hurried from face to face towards its clothes in a continually disappointed anticipation or else in sheer nervous dread of the moment itself you make me feel uncivilized daisy i confess on my second glass of corky but rather impressive claret can't you talk about crops or something i meant nothing in particular by this remark but it was taken up in an unexpected way civilizations going to pieces broke out tom violently i've gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things have you read the rise of the colored empires by this man goddard why no i answered rather surprised by his tone well it's a fine book and everybody ought to read it the idea is if we don't look out the white waist will be will be utterly submerged it's all scientific stuff it's been proved tom is getting very profound said daisy with an expression of unthoughtful sadness he reads deep books with long words in them what was that word we well these books are all scientific insisted tom glancing at her impatiently this fellow has worked out the whole thing it's up to us who had the dominant race to watch out or these other races will have control of things we've got to beat them down whispered daisy winking ferociously towards the fervent sun you ought to live in california began miss baker but tom interrupted her by shifting heavily in his chair this idea is that we're nordics i am and you are and you are and after an infinitesimal hesitation he cluttered daisy with a slight nod and she winked at me again and we've produced all the things that make civilization oh science and art and all that jesse there was something pathetic in his concentration as if his complacency more acute than of old was not enough to him anymore when almost immediately the telephone rang inside and the butler left the porch daisy seized upon the momentary interruption and leaned towards me i'll tell you a family secret she whispered enthusiastically it's about the butler's nose do you want to hear about the butler's nose that's why i came tonight well he wasn't always a butler he used to be the silver polisher for some people in new york that had a silver service for 200 people he had to polish it from morning till night until finally it began to affect his nose things went from bad to worse suggested miss baker yes things went from bad to worse until he finally had to give up his position for a moment the last sunshine fell with romantic effect upon her glowing face her voice compelled me forward breathlessly as i listened then the glow faded each light deserting her with lingering regret like children leaving a pleasant street at dusk the butler came back and murmured something close to tom's ear whereupon tom frowned pushed back his chair and without a word went inside as if his absence quickened something within her daisy leaned forward again her voice glowing and singing i love to see you at my table nick you remind me of a rose an absolute rose doesn't he she turns to miss baker for confirmation an absolute rose this was untrue i'm not even faintly like a rose she was only exemplarizing but a stirring warmth flowed from her as if her heart was trying to come out you concealed in one of those breathless thrilling words then suddenly she threw her napkin on the table and excused herself and went into the home miss baker and i exchanged a short glance consciously devoid of meaning i was about to speak when she sat up alertly and said shh in a warning voice a subdued impassioned murmur was audible in the room beyond and miss baker leaned forward unashamed trying to hear the murmur trembled on the verge of coherence sacked down mounted excitedly and then ceased altogether this mr gatsby you spoke of is my neighbor i said don't talk i want to hear what happens is something happening i inquired innocently you mean to say you don't know said miss baker honestly surprise i thought everybody knew i don't why she said hesitantly tom's got some woman in new york got some woman i repeated blankly miss baker nodded she might have the decency not to telephone him at dinner time don't you think almost before i had grasped her meaning there was a flutter of a dress and a crunch of leather boots and tom and daisy were back at the table it couldn't be helped cried daisy with intense gayety she sat down glanced searchingly at miss baker and then at me and continued i looked outdoors for a minute and it's very romantic outdoors there's a bird on the lawn i think it must be a nightingale come over on the cutter the white star line he's singing away her voice sang it's romantic isn't it tom very romantic he said and then miserably to me if it's light enough after dinner i want to take you down to the stables the telephone rang inside startingly and as daisy shook her head decisively at tom the subject of the stables in fact all subjects vanished into air among the broken fragments of the last five minutes of the table i remember the candles being lit again pointlessly and i was conscious of wanting to look squarely at everyone and yet to avoid all eyes i couldn't guess what daisy and tom were thinking but i doubt even miss baker who seemed to have mastered a certain hearty skepticism was able utterly to put this fifth guest shrill metallic urgency out of her mind to a certain temperament the situation might have seemed intriguing my own instinct was to telephone immediately for the police the horses needless to say were not mentioned again tom and miss baker with several feet of twilight between them strolled back into the library as if to a vigil besides a perfectly tangible body while trying to look pleasantly interested and little deaf i followed daisy around a chain of connecting verandas to the porch in front in its gloom we sat down side by side on a wicker city daisy took her face in her hands as of feeling its lovely shape and her eyes moved gradually out to the velvet dusk i saw that turbulent emotions possessed her so i asked what i thought would be some sedative questions about her little girl we don't know each other very well nick she said suddenly even if we are cousins you didn't come to my wedding i wasn't back from the war that's true she hesitated well i've had a pretty bad time nick and i'm pretty cynical about everything evidently she had reason to be i waited but she didn't say anymore and after a moment i returned rather feebly to the subject of her daughter i suppose she talks and eats and everything oh yes she looked at me absolutely listen nick let me tell you what i said when she was born would you like to hear very much it'll show you how i've gotten to feel about things well she was less than an hour old and tom was god knows where i woke up out of the ether with an ugly abandoned feeling and asked the nurse right away if it was a boy or a girl she told me it was a girl and so i turned my head away and wept alright i said i'm glad it's a girl and i hope she'll be a fool that's the best thing a girl can be in this world a beautiful little fool you see i think everything's terrible anyhow she went on in a convinced way everybody thinks so the most advanced people and i know i've been everywhere and seen everything and done everything her eyes flashed around in a deviant way rather like tom's and she laughed with a thrilling scorn sophisticated god i'm sophisticated the instant her voice broke off ceasing to compel my attention my belief i felt the basic insincerity of what she had said it made me uneasy as though the whole evening had been a trick of some sort to exact a contributory emotion from me i waited and sure enough in a moment she looked at me with an absolute smirk on her lovely face as if she had asserted her membership in a rather distinguished secret society to which she and tom belonged inside the crimson room bloomed with light tom and miss baker sat at either end of the long couch as she read aloud to him from the saturday evening post the words murmurous and uninflected running together in a soothing tone the lamplight bright on his boots and dull on the autumn leaf yellow of her hair glinted along the paper as she turned a page with a flutter of slender muscle in her arms when we came in she held a silent for a moment with a lifted hand to be continued she said tossing the magazine on the table in our very next issue her body asserted herself with a relentless movement of her knee and she stood up ten o'clock she remarked apparently finding the time on the ceiling time for this good girl to go to bed jordan's going to play in the tournament tomorrow explained daisy over at westchester oh you're jordan baker i knew now why her face was familiar its pleasing contemptuous expression and looked out at me from many retrogravier pictures of the sporting life at asheville and hot springs in palm beach i had heard some story of her too a critical unpleasant story but what it was i had forgotten long ago good night she said softly wake me at eight won't you if you'll get up i will good night mr caraway see you in on of course you will confirmed daisy in fact i think i'll arrange a marriage come off a nick and i'll sort of oh flingy together you know lock you up accidentally in linen closets and push you out to sea in a boat and all that sort of thing good night called mrs baker from the stairs i haven't heard a word she's a nice girl said tom after a moment they often let her run around the country this way who aren't too inquired daisy coldly her family her family is one aunt about a thousand years old besides nick's going to look after her aren't you nick she's going to spend lots of weekends out here this summer i think the home influence will be good for her daisy and tom looked at each other for a moment in silence is she from new york i asked quickly from lewisville our white girlhood was passed together there our beautiful white did you give nick a little heart-to-heart talk on the veranda demanded tom suddenly did i she looked at me i can't seem to remember but i think we talked about the nordic race yes i'm sure we did it sort of crept up on us and first thing you know don't believe everything you hear nick he advised me i said lightly that i had heard nothing at all and a few minutes later i got up to go home they came to the door with me and stood side by side in a cheerful square of light as i started my motor daisy preemptively called wait i've got to ask you something and it's important we heard you were engaged to a girl out west that's right corroborated tom kindly we heard that you were engaged it's liable i'm too poor but we heard it insisted daisy surprisingly by opening up again in a flower light way we heard it from three people so it must be true of course i knew what they were referring to but i wasn't even vaguely engaged the fact that gossip had published the bans was one of the reasons i had come east you can't stop going with an old friend on account of rumors and on the other hand i had no intention of being rumored into marriage their interest rather touched me and made them less remotely rich nevertheless i was confused and a little disgusted as i drove away it seemed to me that the thing for daisy to do was to rush out of the house child in arms but apparently there was no such intention in her head as for tom the fact that he had some woman in new york was really less surprising than that he had been depressed by a book something was making him nibble at the edge of stale ideas as if his sturdy physical legatism no longer nourished his preemptory heart already it was deep summer on roadhouse roofs and in front of wayside garages where new red gas pumps sat out in pools of light and when i reached my estate a west egg i ran the car under its shed and sat for a while on an abandoned grass roller in the yard the wind had blown off leaving a loud bright night with wings beating in the trees and a persistent organ sounded as the full bellows of the earth blew the frogs full of life the silhouette of a moving cat wavered across the moonlight and turning my head to watch it i saw it was not alone 50 feet away a figure had emerged from the shadow of my neighbor's mansion and was standing with his hands in his pockets regarding the silver pepper of the stairs something in his leisurely movement and the secure position of his feet upon the lawn suggested that it was mr gatsby himself come out to determine what share was his of our local heavens i decided to call to him miss baker had mentioned him at dinner and that would do for an introduction but i didn't call to him for he gave me a sudden intimation that he was content to be alone he stretched his arms out towards the dark water in a curious way and far as i was from him i could have sworn he was trembling involuntarily i glanced seaward and distinguished nothing except for a single green light minut and far away that might have been the end of a dark when i looked once more for gatsby he had vanished and i was alone again in the unquiet darkness thank you so much for listening if you enjoyed please like comment subscribe share all that jazz the next chapter shall be coming out on the following wednesday um yeah thank you very very much and um until next time bye