The Eyes and the Ashes
What watches over Gatsby's plane
"God sees everything," repeated Wilson. "That's an advertisement," Michaelis assured him. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
The clearest figure in The Great Gatsby is the one that is missing. So far this cycle has found its figure by presence: a sword standing at a gate, a letter holding an apex, a coin nailed to a mast. This essay finds it by absence. Gatsby is the cycle’s control experiment, the book that shows what the geometry looks like when the vertical is removed, and the demonstration is so thorough that the absence becomes the most legible structure in the novel. Take away the plumb line and watch what the plane does. Fitzgerald watched, and wrote it down, and the book has been mourned ever since by readers who feel the missing line without naming it.
Begin where the book hangs its one remaining sign. Halfway between West Egg and New York the motor road runs beside a valley of ashes, and above the grey land and the spasms of bleak dust there stand, on a billboard, the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg. They are blue and gigantic, their retinas one yard high. They look out of no face; the nose is nonexistent; the eyes regard the valley through a pair of enormous yellow spectacles and nothing more. Fitzgerald supplies the provenance like a curator: some wild wag of an oculist set them there to fatten his practice in the borough of Queens, and then sank down himself into eternal blindness, or forgot them and moved away. The eyes, dimmed a little by many paintless days under sun and rain, brood on over the solemn dumping ground.
Count what that paragraph contains. A watcher with no face. An eye, enlarged past the human scale, installed at height over the place where everything ends up. A maker who is gone, gone specifically into blindness or forgetting, the two ways a god can be absent. And a purpose on file at the county clerk: the eye was erected to sell. The cycle has stood under an eye like this before, distributed across the gold of a Brussels dining room, and there the eye was the artist’s confession, the watcher who put himself in the work. Eckleburg is the same station with the tenant gone. The eye over this valley confesses nothing, watches nothing, wants nothing but custom, and its maker did not even stay to collect. It is the watcher position, vacated, leased to commerce, and left out in the rain. The vertical post survives in this book as real estate.
The Plane
Now the geography, because Fitzgerald drew it flat on purpose.
Everything in the novel happens on the horizontal, and the book’s great image of desire is horizontal by construction. Gatsby’s first appearance is at night, alone on his lawn, stretching out his arms toward the dark water in a curious way, trembling, toward a single green light, minute and far away, at the end of a dock. Across the bay. Across the water. The green light burns at Daisy’s dock all novel long, and the longing that organizes Gatsby’s whole created self runs along the surface of the Sound toward it: a reach on the plane, to a point on the plane, with no up in it anywhere. The cycle’s other reachers reached along an axis or were taken up one. Gatsby’s arms extend at sea level toward a navigation light, which is what a green lamp on a dock is, an instrument for finding position on the water. He has the posture of prayer and the bearing of a sailor taking a fix.
The same flatness governs the book’s whole map. East Egg faces West Egg across courtesy bay; New York lies west along the road; the valley of ashes lies between; and the traffic of the novel is commuting, the back and forth of cars and trains along the level, the plot itself advanced by who drives which car in which direction on one straight road. The houses sort their occupants by longitude, old money east and new money west, distinction laid out entirely on the plane, position as address. And when Nick reaches for the largest possible frame in the last paragraphs, the frame is still horizontal: the fresh green breast of the new world, the continent flowering before Dutch sailors’ eyes, the last time in history that man stood face to face with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder. Face to face. Even wonder, at continental scale, is an encounter on the level, eye to shore. The book remembers the new world as the greatest of all horizontal sightings, and mourns it the same way.
In a world built like this, the second great commandment has devoured the first. There is no line to the source; there are only neighbors, and the whole apparatus of the novel, the parties, the guest lists, the rumors, the voice full of money, is the plane organizing itself by proximity in the absence of any up. The green light is what longing looks like when the vertical is gone: infinite in feeling, level in fact, aimed at a fixture on somebody’s dock.
The Ladder
Gatsby had a vertical once, and the book records the night he spent it. This is the passage the whole reading turns on, and it is not my geometry. It is Fitzgerald’s, image for image.
Five years before the novel opens, walking with Daisy on an autumn night, Gatsby saw that the blocks of the sidewalk really formed a ladder and mounted to a secret place above the trees. He could climb to it, if he climbed alone, and once there he could suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder. A ladder, rising from the pavement, to a place above; the climb conditional on climbing alone; and at the top, nourishment, the source itself, milk and wonder. The book hands its hero the plumb line, explicitly, with the rungs drawn in. And then it records the transaction. He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips’ touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete.
Incarnation. Fitzgerald’s word, placed at the period of the sentence. The unutterable poured into the perishable, the vision wed to breath, the vertical spent into a single point on the plane. The cycle knows an incarnation that came down the axis and returned by it; the resurrection is what makes that descent rescue rather than expenditure. Gatsby’s is the other kind. He climbs down the ladder to the kiss and the ladder is gone in the morning, the entire upward capacity of the man converted, at one touch, into Daisy. Fitzgerald says this too, earlier, in the vocabulary that proves he knew exactly which story he was inverting: the boy James Gatz sprang from his Platonic conception of himself; he was a son of God, a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that; and he must be about His Father’s business, the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty. Luke’s child in the temple, quoted and reassigned. The Father’s business, conducted on behalf of a counterfeit. And once more, with the object named: he found that he had committed himself to the following of a grail. The sacred vocabulary is all present and all redirected, sonship, vocation, incarnation, grail, every vertical word in the lexicon bent ninety degrees and aimed across the bay.
Here is the concession, made once, in the open. Fitzgerald need not have believed the vocabulary to deploy it as diagnosis: the lapsed Catholic’s exact ear for the grammar of worship laid over a man who worships wrongly. The faith is not required of the author, and the instrument does not require it either. What the essay claims is not that Fitzgerald smuggled a gospel into West Egg but that he measured his hero with the gospel’s own ruler and recorded the deficit in its units: son of God, grail, incarnation, each term flagging the place where a vertical word is doing horizontal work. The geometry is the book’s. The reading of the geometry is mine.
The Prayer
The novel contains one prayer, and it is addressed to the billboard.
George Wilson, the ash grey man of the ash valley, has discovered his wife’s unfaithfulness, and the night after she is killed on the road he stands at the window of his garage with Michaelis beside him, and he tells what he told her. I took her to the window, and I said, God knows what you’ve been doing, everything you’ve been doing. You may fool me, but you can’t fool God. And Michaelis, standing behind him, sees with a shock that he is looking at the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg, which had just emerged, pale and enormous, from the dissolving night. God sees everything, repeated Wilson. That’s an advertisement, Michaelis assured him. But Wilson stands there a long time, his face close to the windowpane, nodding into the twilight.
The scene is the whole essay performed by the text itself, and it should be read slowly, because both men are right. Wilson is right that the valley needs a watcher, that everything you’ve been doing wants an eye over it, that the moral plane is unintelligible without a vertical to refer it to; his theology is sound and his despair is the sound part. And Michaelis is right about the object: it is an advertisement, erected to sell spectacles, abandoned by an oculist who went blind or forgot. The tragedy is not that Wilson prays. It is that the position his prayer requires has exactly one occupant on the horizon, and the occupant is signage. The plane kept the post and lost the tenant, and the difference between a watching God and a weathered billboard is the difference the next morning measures: Wilson walks out of the valley with a revolver, deputized by an advertisement, and does the one thing the eyes over the ashes can inspire, which is enforcement without mercy, judgment with no door in it. A guard, the cycle has learned, can be a wall or a way through. An advertisement can only be a wall. There is nothing behind it to pass to.
The Ash Field
The valley itself has been waiting for this cycle since the rye.
Fitzgerald introduces it as a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens, where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and of ash grey men, who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Ashes grow like wheat. The simile is the book’s own, and it is exact: the valley is the grain field run in negative. Holden’s rye was the resurrection crop, the grain that goes down into the ground and rises, the field whose whole nature is burial and return. The valley of ashes grows the crop that has already been through the fire and will not be going anywhere: combustion’s residue, planted in ridges, harvested by no one, the form of agriculture with the life subtracted. Fire, in this cycle’s grammar, holds its form by consuming and points up the plumb line as it burns; it refines what passes through it; it is dissolution wearing the shape of order. Ash is what remains when the pointing is over. It does not rise, does not burn, does not shape; it drifts and settles and greys what it lands on. The valley of ashes is the world after the flame has gone out of the sword: all the consumption with none of the ascent, the refining fire’s exhaust laid out in a landscape, and over it, where the flame should stand, a billboard. The grey land is not wicked. It is spent. It is what a plane looks like downstream of a fire that no longer refines anything, the fourth axis made visible as a county.
The men of the valley crumble accordingly. Wilson is described again and again in the grey: mingling immediately with the cement color of the walls, a white ashen dust veiling everything in the vicinity except his wife. Except his wife. Myrtle alone carries color and heat, vitality the book calls it, and her one direction is out, across the road, along the plane toward the bright side of the bay, and the road kills her on the asphalt in front of the ash heaps. The single flame in the valley goes out horizontally, struck by traffic, under the eyes.
The Clock
The plane has one more dimension to fail in, and Gatsby fails in it on schedule.
Can’t repeat the past, Nick warns him. Why of course you can, Gatsby cries, incredulously. Of course you can. He is going to fix everything just the way it was before; he wants Daisy to say she never loved Tom, to obliterate four years, to restore a point on the fourth axis as if time were a lawn that could be replanted. The cycle has stood at this exact spot before. The turning gains the vertical or it only returns; the up cannot be bought by spinning faster; and the past is the one bearing on the fourth axis that no amount of horizontal wealth can steam toward, because the current runs the other way. Gatsby’s program is to run the wheel backward, and the book gives its verdict on the program in a single piece of stage business so good it should be framed. At the reunion in Nick’s cottage, nervous beyond bearing, Gatsby leans his head back against the mantelpiece and against the clock that sits on it, and the clock tilts dangerously, and he turns and catches it with trembling fingers and sets it back in place. A defunct clock, Nick has already told us. Stopped. The only catch in this cycle’s whole shelf of books, Holden’s profession actually performed, and what the catcher catches is a dead clock, time already stopped, rescued from a fall it had no life left to suffer. Gatsby apologizes. I think we all believed for a moment, Nick says, that it had smashed in pieces on the floor. It had. The scene is the novel in one gesture: a man with trembling hands catching stopped time and putting it carefully back on the shelf, certain he has saved it.
The Gold
The cycle’s standing rule about gold was written for this book, which announces it on the cover. The epigraph Fitzgerald chose, attributed to a poet who exists only inside his own earlier novel, is courtship advice: then wear the gold hat, if that will move her; if you can bounce high, bounce for her too, till she cry, lover, gold hatted, high bouncing lover, I must have you. Gold as instrument, worn to move her; even the bouncing, the book’s one vertical motion, is performed horizontally, for an audience, to be cried out at. And the novel obeys its epigraph: Daisy is the golden girl whose voice, in the book’s most famous diagnosis, is full of money; Gatsby’s car is a rich cream gold; his shirts pile up in apple green and coral until Daisy bends her head into them and cries, because she has never seen such beautiful shirts. The cover working at full power: she weeps at the wardrobe of a man whose actual name she does not know.
Because under the gold there is the usual ledger. James Gatz, of North Dakota, parents shiftless and unsuccessful farm people, a name changed at seventeen on the day the yacht came; a fortune from Wolfsheim, from drugstores and bonds the book lets Tom unwrap at the Plaza; a mansion bought to face a dock light. The cycle has now seen gold thread over a sentence, gold leaf over a program, gold coin over glass, and a gold hat over a boy from the lake country of Minnesota who invented himself at the age most boys are inventing less durable lies. And one guest, exactly one, looks under the cover and reports. The owl eyed man in the library, drunk for a week, has discovered that the books are real. Absolutely real, have pages and everything; he expected durable cardboard; it’s a bona fide piece of printed matter; it fooled me; this fella’s a regular Belasco; what thoroughness, what realism, knew when to stop too, didn’t cut the pages. There it is, delivered by the book’s licensed wearer of spectacles. The library is real and unread. The pages exist and have never been opened. Gatsby’s cover is so thorough that it includes genuine contents, and the genuineness is itself part of the staging, truth bound and shelved and uncut, which is the gold rule’s final refinement: the perfect cover does not hide the real thing. It owns it, displays it, and never cuts the pages.
The Pool and the Rain
The end runs entirely on the geometry, which by now needs no commentary, only narration.
Gatsby, waiting for a phone call that will not come, goes to his pool for the first time all summer and floats on a pneumatic mattress: the body laid out level on the water, the man at last fully horizontal, sustained by air. Wilson comes out of the ash valley with the billboard’s commission. The chauffeur hears the shots. The mattress moves irregularly down the pool, and the touch of a cluster of leaves revolves it slowly, tracing, like the leg of transit, a thin red circle in the water. A transit: the surveyor’s instrument, the device that measures angles from a fixed vertical. Fitzgerald reaches into the toolbag of the plumb line for his simile, and what the instrument draws, in blood, is a circle, the turning with no axis left, one slow revolution on the surface of the water and done. The holocaust, Nick says, was complete; and holocaust means the offering wholly burned, the sacrifice with nothing held back, the fire vocabulary surfacing one last time over a body the fire of which went out years ago, the night the ladder was spent. Wilson’s body is found in the grass a little way off, and the valley reclaims its own.
Then the plane finishes the account. Nobody comes. The parties are over, the hundreds of guests evaporate, Daisy and Tom are gone with no address, Wolfsheim cannot get mixed up in it, and the funeral gathers a half dozen people in a thick drizzle. One car arrives late at the cemetery, and it is the man with owl eyed glasses, the one who found the books real. He takes off his spectacles in the rain and wipes them, and says the only eulogy the novel allows: the poor son of a bitch. The wearer of the book’s honest spectacles, bareheaded in the rain at the grave of the man under the gold, while three miles away the other spectacles, the giant pair over the ashes, brood on dry under their billboard, watching nothing. Two sets of eyes close the book. The pair that was mistaken for God stays out of the rain. The pair that saw through the cover stands in it and gets wet, which the cycle has learned to read: the rain falls on the open plane, and the ones it soaks are the ones who came out to meet something.
Borne Back
The famous last lines are the cycle’s grammar lesson run in reverse, and they should be read against the page they answer.
Ishmael, at the end of the other American book about water, was lifted, was borne, was buoyed up, was found: the passive voice at the axis, rescue rising from the vertical center of the wheel. Fitzgerald ends in the same voice and the opposite vector. Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter; tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. Borne back. The passive voice again, the being carried again, but with no axis under it: the bearing is the current’s, and the current runs along the fourth axis the wrong way, and the boats supply the book’s last geometry, oars, thrust, beating, the purest image in American literature of horizontal effort attempting to purchase headway against time. The cycle wrote this sentence in advance without knowing it had an address: the up cannot be bought by spinning faster. Tomorrow we will run faster is the plane’s entire eschatology, and the current answers it ceaselessly.
That is the finding, and it is an absence, so the finding must pass the cycle’s own test before it stands. An essay that discovers a missing vertical could be a mirror like any other; absence is cheap to find if absence is what you bring. But the book did the work, not the reading. It is the novel that built a ladder above the trees and spent it on a kiss; the novel that put the word incarnation at the end of the sentence and the word holocaust at the end of the life; the novel that grew ashes like wheat, stopped the clock, leased the watcher’s post to an oculist, and sent its one praying man to a billboard. The measure, consulted, gave the same answer at every station: the post is here and the tenant is gone. And the book’s permanent ache, the thing readers feel for a hundred years without naming, is the shape of the tenant. Gatsby is mourned the way an amputation is felt. The plane misses its line, the longing runs level because level is all that is left to it, and the green light burns on at the end of the dock, year by year, an advertisement for the direction nobody in the book can point.