The Great Gatsby: The Authentic Edition from Fitzgeraldâs Original Publisher by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Author:F. Scott Fitzgerald [F. Scott Fitzgerald]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2013-05-09T16:00:00+00:00
CHAPTER VI
ABOUT THIS TIME an ambitious young reporter from New York arrived one morning at Gatsbyâs door and asked him if he had anything to say.
âAnything to say about what?â inquired Gatsby politely.
âWhyâany statement to give out.â
It transpired after a confused five minutes that the man had heard Gatsbyâs name around his office in a connection which he either wouldnât reveal or didnât fully understand. This was his day off and with laudable initiative he had hurried out âto see.â
It was a random shot, and yet the reporterâs instinct was right. Gatsbyâs notoriety, spread about by the hundreds who had accepted his hospitality and so become authorities upon his past, had increased all summer until he fell just short of being news. Contemporary legends such as the âunderground pipe-line to Canadaâ attached themselves to him, and there was one persistent story that he didnât 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 isnât easy to say.
James Gatzâthat 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 careerâwhen he saw Dan Codyâs yacht drop anchor over the most insidious flat on Lake Superior. It was James Gatz who had been loafing along the beach that afternoon in a torn green jersey 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 heâd had the name ready for a long time, even then. His parents were shiftless and unsuccessful farm peopleâhis 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 Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of Godâa phrase which, if it means anything, means just thatâand he must be about His Fatherâs business, the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious 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 bracing days. He knew women early, and since they spoiled him he became contemptuous of them, of young virgins because they were ignorant, of the others because they were hysterical about things which in his overwhelming self-absorption he took for granted.
But his heart was in a constant, turbulent riot. The most grotesque and fantastic conceits haunted him in his bed at night.
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