It’s mainly the Republicans’ fault but politics is boring me at the moment, so I thought I would share a favorite bit of prose from Chapter Three of the The Great Gatsby, wherein narrator Nick Carraway introduces us to his brief fling with his cousin Daisy Buchanan’s friend, Jordan Baker.
For a while I lost sight of Jordan Baker, and then in midsummer I found her again. At first I was flattered to go places with her, because she was a golf champion, and every one knew her name. Then it was something more. I wasn’t actually in love, but I felt a sort of tender curiosity. The bored haughty face that she turned to the world concealed something—most affectations conceal something eventually, even though they don’t in the beginning—and one day I found what it was. When we were on a house-party together up in Warwick, she left a borrowed car out in the rain with the top down, and then lied about it—and suddenly I remembered the story about her that had eluded me that night at Daisy’s. At her first big golf tournament there was a row that nearly reached the newspapers—a suggestion that she had moved her ball from a bad lie in the semi-final round. The thing approached the proportions of a scandal—then died away. A caddy retracted his statement, and the only other witness admitted that he might have been mistaken. The incident and the name had remained together in my mind.
Jordan Baker instinctively avoided clever, shrewd men, and now I saw that this was because she felt safer on a plane where any divergence from a code would be thought impossible. She was incurably dishonest. She wasn’t able to endure being at a disadvantage and, given this unwillingness, I suppose she had begun dealing in subterfuges when she was very young in order to keep that cool, insolent smile turned to the world and yet satisfy the demands of her hard, jaunty body.
It made no difference to me. Dishonesty in a woman is a thing you never blame deeply—I was casually sorry, and then I forgot.
It was on that same house party that we had a curious conversation about driving a car. It started because she passed so close to some workmen that our fender flicked a button on one man’s coat.“You’re a rotten driver,” I protested. “Either you ought to be more careful, or you oughtn’t to drive at all.”
“I am careful.”
“No, you’re not.”
“Well, other people are,” she said lightly.
“What’s that got to do with it?”
“They’ll keep out of my way,” she insisted. “It takes two to make an accident.”
“Suppose you met somebody just as careless as yourself.”
“I hope I never will,” she answered. “I hate careless people. That’s why I like you.”Her gray, sun-strained eyes stared straight ahead, but she had deliberately shifted our relations, and for a moment I thought I loved her.
I like Fitzgerald’s conciseness and his ambiguity. They seem to blend perfectly in this book. Jordan Baker was an instinctive liar due to her pride, but at the same time she thought living outside of a code was impossible. And isn’t the narrator in some ways a clever and shrewd man? Yet, here she is going out on dates with him.
And then there’s Carraway’s unique form of generosity, where he is never quick to judge but never hesitant to damn with faint praise. What kind of generosity is it that forgives dishonesty in a woman because honesty isn’t considered one of their primary virtues in the first place?
Fitzgerald was a wonderful author. The careless woman who hates careless people. Priceless.
