Osler's Razor

This past weekend I was out East. I finished the Great Gatsby on the plane ride home, and was shocked by what jumped out at me at the end. Every school paper (and the notes scrawled in the back of the version I had) about that book seems to go the same way—green light at the end of the dock, hope, America, etc., etc.

But then there was this: “I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all—Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life.”

The stock answer, of course, is that the book is about the decadent Eastern life of the 20’s, but that doesn’t run very deep as a truth. The key characters, who created that decadent life (Gatsby and Tom Buchanan, principally), are from the Midwest. The New Yorkers in the story, the Wilsons for example, seem much more down-to-earth and real. The Midwesterners, of course, utterly fail in every way that matters. They don’t find love, or meaning, or success in any worthwhile way. They are fish out of water, and they all return to ground eventually, one way or another.

Part of the book is set in New York’s Yale Club, where Nick goes to eat dinner and study bonds in the library. I am a member of that club, and I write in that library. I don’t go there for a social life, but to accomplish something real and meaningful, something you can hold in your hands and read (and now find in the shelves of that library). Yet, sometimes… I am a bit lost in the same way as Nick.

I don’t doubt that Nick was better off back in St. Paul, and Gatsby would have been in Duluth, Tom in Chicago, the women in Louisville; but they all went to see what was East. Is that restlessness American? What drove them from St. Paul and Lake Forest and Louisville? Here is what Fitzgerald said:

“That’s my Middle West—not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede towns, but the thrilling returning trains of my youth, and the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of holly wreaths thrown by a lighted windows on the snow. I am part of that, a little solemn with the feel of those long winters, a little complacent from growing up in the Carraway house where dwellings are still called through decades by a family’s name.”

There is a word there—“complacent.” Do we become that way too easily in the comfortable Midwest? Is that why we are a little thrown by New York, too easily wooed and discarded?

Maybe, but they need us, and we need them. Frederick Brathwaite came from the South Bronx, and we needed him; the deep house music New Yorkers dance to still came from Detroit to Chicago to the world. I am happier with Fitzgerald’s view of New York as challenging and bright and hard (remember—it is the Midwesterners who brought the decadence) than I am with Faulkner’s view of that same city as dark and tricky and cruel. There is a place for me in the first, if only for bits at a time, while the latter offers only suffering at the hands of others. I will put my name on the list, take that chance, and forge my way in now and then from the cusp of those long winters.