The Great Gatsby | Page 2

for three generations. The Car-

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raways are something of a clan and we have a tradition that
we’re descended from the Dukes of Buccleuch, but the ac-
tual founder of my line was my grandfather’s brother who
came here in fi?fy-one, sent a substitute to the Civil War and
started the wholesale hardware business that my father car-
ries 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 o?bce. I graduated from New
Haven in 1915, just a quarter of a century a?fer my father,
and a little later I participated in that delayed Teutonic mi-
gration 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 supposed 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—ye-
es’ with very grave, hesitant faces. Father agreed to finance
me for a year and a?fer various delays I came east, perma-
nently, I thought, in the spring of twenty-two.
The practical thing was to find rooms in the city but it was
a warm season and I had just le?f a country of wide lawns
and friendly trees, so when a young man at the o?bce sug-
gested 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 eighty a month, but at the
last minute the firm ordered him to Washington and I went

The Great Gatsby

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 mut-
tered Finnish 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 helpless-
ly.
I told him. And as I walked on I was lonely no longer. I
was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler. He had casu-
ally 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-giv-
ing 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 Mae-
cenas knew. And I had the high intention of reading many
other books besides. I was rather literary in college—one
year I wrote a series of very solemn and obvious editorials
for 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 much more successfully looked at from a
single window, a?fer all.

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It was a matter of chance that I should have rented a
house in one of the strangest communities in North Ameri-
ca. It was