kipling's story gadsbys possible source fitzgerald(plath)
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Journal
of Modern Literature
by's
initials
?
J.R
?
allude to financier
J.R
Morgan
and
help
"define the
boundaries of
his
new
name and
personality.
Thus,
James Gatz
became
'J.
Gatz
P'
For
ease of
articulation,
Fitzgerald
rendered the name Jay Gatsby."5 Crim and Houston, meanwhile, suggest that Jay, the name Gatsby
takes as an
adult,
derives from
James,
which
in turn
derives from the biblical
name
Jacob,
mean?
ing
"the
supplanter,"
and that
Gatsby "attempts
to
supplant
Tom for the life
and love of
Daisy."6
Alexander R. Tamke
sees in
"Gatsby"
the
1920s
slang
term for
revolver,
"gat,"7
while
Horst Kruse
suggests
that
"Gatsby"
derives
from
"Gadsby,"
the
name of
a
Washington,
D.C.,
hotel
mentioned
in Mark
Twain's A
Tramp
Abroad,
the
significance
of the
name
reinforcing
the
sense of
Gatsby's
mansion
functioning
as
a
hotel for
way
ward
guests.8
Kruse
may
be
right
about the
"Gadsby"
connection,
but
Ernest
Hemingway points
the
way
to
a
more
convincing
source.
"East
is East
and
West is
West,"
Rudyard
Kipling
wrote,
"and never
the
twain shall meet."9 Nor, apparently, East Egg and West Egg. Two years after The Great
Gatsby
was
published,
Hemingway
wrote Scott
Fitzgerald
that
he was
titling
his
new
collection of
stories
Men
Without Women.
Kipling,
Hemingway
explained,
"had
been there
before me and
swiped
all
the
good
[titles]
so
I
called the
book Men
Without
Women
hoping
it
would
have a
large
sale
among
the fairies and
old
Vassar
girls."10
This is
vintage
Hemingway
?
the
hurtful,
yet playful jabs
at
Fitzgerald's Ivy
League
background
and
paranoia
over his
manhood,
as well
as the
unabashed
rep?
etition of a
word Robert
McAlmon had
been
using
to
spread
rumors
about
Fitzgerald
and
Heming?
way.11
But what
stands
out most and
invites
further
consideration is
Hemingway's
pointedly
sarcastic
reference to
Kipling
and
"swiping"
titles
?
especially
if we
bear in
mind
Hemingway's
earlier
veiled
attacks
on
Fitzgerald
in
print
and in
letters.12 A
Kipling
connection
is
not
as
remote
as it
might
seem,
since
one critic
already
has
observed a
common
denominator:
that
"Kipling's
'The
Finest
Story
in
the
World'
seems
one of
the
key
texts
behind
Eliot's
most
famous
poem,"
The
Waste
Land,13
an
"oft-debated
topic"
of
affinity
with
Fitzgerald's
novel.14
Something
inspired
Fitzgerald
to
change
The
Great
Gatsby
from a
novel
set
in
Victorian-era New
York
and the
Mid?
west15 to a
Modernist
fable on
love
in
the Lost
Generation,
and it
may
well
have
been
Kipling's
1888
play,
The
Story
ofthe
Gadsbys.
Hemingway
owned
twenty-two
volumes
by
Kipling,
and,
according
to
his
siblings,
he
"par?
ticularly admired Kipling's effective titles."16 It is not difficult to imagine that Hemingway may
have been
more
than a
little
annoyed
at
the
similarity
between
Fitzgerald's
latest
novel and
one
of
5.
Bellenir,
p.
111.
6. Crim
and
Houston,
pp.
114-15.
7.
AlexanderR.
Tamke,
"The Gat' n
Gatsby:
Neglected
Aspect
of a
Novel,"
Modern
Fiction
StudiesXIV
(1968-69),
p.
443.
8. Horst
H.
Kruse,
"'Gatsby'
nd
'Gadsby,'"
Modern
Fiction
StudiesXV
(1969-70),
p.
540.
9.
Rudyard
Kipling,
"The
Ballad of
East and
West,"
Departmental
Ditties and
Ballads and
BarrackRoom
Ballads
(Doubleday,
Page
&
Co.,
1917),
p.
3.
10. ErnestHemingway,ErnestHemingway:SelectedLetters,1917-1961,ed. CarlosBaker(CharlesScribner'sSons,
1981),
p.
260.
11.
Matthew
.
Bruccoli,
Fitzgerald
and
Hemingway:
A
Dangerous
Friendship
Carroll
and
Graf,
1994),
pp.
144-45.
12. See
my essay,
"The
Sun
Also
Rises as 'a
Greater
Gatsby,'"
n
French
Connections:
Hemingway
and
Fitzgerald
Abroad,
ed. J.
Gerald
Kennedy
and
JacksonR.
Bryer
St.
Martin's,
1998),
pp.
257-75.
13.
Robert
Crawford,
Rudyard
Kipling
n
The
Waste
Land"
Essays
in
Criticism
XXXVI
(1986),
p.
36.
14.
JacksonR.
Bryer,
"Style
as
Meaning
n The
Great
Gatsby:
Notes
Toward New
Approach,"
n
Critical
Essays
on F.
Scott
Fitzgerald's
The
Great
Gatsby,
d. Scott
Donaldson
G.K.
Hall,
1984),
p.
123.
15.
Matthew .
Bruccoli,
Apparatusor
F.
Scott
Fitzgerald's
The
Great
Gatsby
Under
the
Red, White,
nd
Blue]
(Uni?
versity
of
South
Carolina
Press,
1974),
pp.
3-4.
16.
JeffreyMeyers,
"Kipling
and
Hemingway:
The
Lesson ofthe
Master,"
American
LiteratureLVI
(1984),
p.
92.
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Kipling
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Fitzgerald
133
Kipling's
least
imaginative
titles. After
all,
he
knew
the
play
The
Story ofthe
Gadsbys
well
enough
to remind Max Perkins
years
afterwards,
in
suggesting
that
his
own
play,
The
Fifth
Column,
be published along with his short fiction, that Kipling had successfully combined genres
in
that
volume,
"one
of
his best."17
Fitzgerald
himself made
no
revealing
remarks
about
Kipling
and included
no
Kipling
titles
on
his "10 Best
Books
I
Have Read" list.18
However,
as
Andre
Le Vot
notes,
young
Fitzgerald,
during
his
Catholic
prep-school years
at
Newman,
was
enough
influenced
by
the author to write
a
bitter
"thirty-six
stanza
poem
in the
Kipling
manner that more or less
duplicated
the
theme
of
'Reade,
Substitute
Right
Half,'
a breathless celebration of a lone
hero
who wins
for his
side"
after
Fitzger?
ald
is
falsely
accused
of
cowardice on
the football field.19
"Gadsby"
and
"Gatsby"
are
too
tantalizingly
alike not
to
wonder
about another
Kipling
con?
nection, especially when there are so many curious thematic, structural, and idiosyncratic simi-
larities. We
are told
early,
for
example,
that
Kipling's
"Gaddy
has
money,"20
as does
Fitzgerald's
hero.21
Although
stationed
in
India,
Gadsby
has
a
"place
at
home,"
in
the West
(p.
22),
just
as
Gatsby
lives
across
the
bay
from
Daisy
in
West
Egg (pp.
22,75).
Nick
concludes
that
"[Gatsby]
has
been a
story
of the
West,
after
all
?
Tom and
Gatsby, Daisy
and Jordan and
I,
were
all
Westerners"
(p.
151),
living,
somewhat
out-of-place,
in
the
East;
so too
is
Kipling's play
about Western soldiers
and
colonials
living
equally out-of-place
in the
East. Both
stories center on a
captivated
hero's
enthrallment
with
a
captivating
female,
with
a
quasi-sidekick
admirer ofthe
hero
(Nick
Carraway/
Captain
Mafflin),
who,
himself
spared
the smitten
state,
fears the
worst for his
friend.
Much
has
been made of Nick's
occasional direct
addresses to the reader in
The Great
Gatsby,
and in
The
Story ofthe Gadsbys
Kipling's
characters
frequently speak
in
asides to the
audience. In
fact,
both
narratives
begin
with
authorial
self-consciousness. In The
Story
ofthe
Gadsbys,
Kipling
addresses
a
particular
reader: one
of
the
play's
characters,
Captain
J.
Mafflin, who,
like the
hero
of
the sad fable which
he
says
will
follow,
succumbs
to
a
woman's charms and
leaves his
bachelor
days
behind.
Kipling
reminds his
reader that he
wrote The
Story
of
the
Gadsbys
as "an
Awful
Warning":
"It is
your
kismet,
as
it was
Gaddy's,
and his
kismet
who
can
avoid?"
(p.
3).
The Great
Gatsby,
meanwhile,
opens
with a
narrative
persona
addressing
readers
directly
and
speaking
of
"Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book" (p. 20). Carraway discusses his own attitudes
in
relation to
the
story
of
Gatsby,
whom
he describes as a
parabolic
representation
of
"heightened
sensitivity
to the
promises
of
life"
(p.
20).
The
opening
chapter
deals with
honesty
?
how
honest
people
should
be,
and
how
honest the
narrator
believes he is
?
just
as The
Story
ofthe Gadsbys
deals with
the
question
of how honest
one
should
be,
especially
how
honest men and
women
should be with
each
other. Like
Kipling,
Fitzgerald's
narrative
persona
immediately
attributes
the
sad
fate of
his character
not to a
tragic
flaw,
but
to forces
beyond
the
character's
control,
address?
ing
the
"kismet"
that
proved
Jay Gatsby's
undoing:
"No,
Gatsby
turned
out all
right
at the
end;
it
is
what
preyed
on
Gatsby,
what foul dust
floated in
the
wake of
his dreams" that
ruined
him,
and
17.
Hemingway, .
466.
18.
F.
Scott
Fitzgerald,
.
Scott
Fitzgerald
on
Authorship,
d. Matthew
.
Bruccoli,
with
JudithS.
Baughman
University
of
South
Carolina
Press,
1996),
p.
86.
19. AndreLe
Vot,
F.
Scott
Fitzgerald:
A
Biography,
rans.
William
Byron
Doubleday,
983),
p.
23.
20.
Rudyard
Kipling,
The
Story
ofthe Gadsbys
and
Other
Stories
(ArcadiaHouse,
1950),
p.
22. All
subsequent
uota?
tions
fromthis
edition
will
be
included
parenthetically
n the
text.
21.
F. Scott
Fitzgerald,
The Great
Gatsby,
1925,
Seventy-Fifth
Anniversary
Edition,
ed.
MatthewJ.
Bruccoli
Scribner
Classics,
1992),
p.
22.
All
subsequent
uotations
romthis
editionwill
be
included
parenthetically
n
the
text.
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134
Journal
of Modern
Literature
disillusioned
the narrator
as well
(20).
And
just
as
Kipling
in
his
preface
calls
Captain
Mafflin
a
"hypocrite" (p.
4),
Carraway imposes
the
same
judgment
on
most
of the characters in
Gatsby,
concluding,
with
equal sanctimoniousness,
"I am
one
of
the
few honest
people
that
I
have
ever
known"
(p.
61).
The first
section of
Kipling's play,
"Poor
Dear Mama"
?
an
obvious source
for
Hemingway's
playful referencing
of P.O.M.
(for
"Poor Old
Mama")
in
Green Hills
of Africa
?
exposes
the audi?
ence to
attitudes about the
title character before he ever makes an
entrance.
The
Story ofthe
Gads?
bys
opens
with a
discussion about
a
mysterious Captain
Gadsby,
between Miss Minnie
Threegan
and Miss
Deercourt,
who are
lounging
in
bodices
of
ballroom frocks on
a
hot
May
afternoon:
Miss D: "Who is this
Captain Gadsby?
I
don't
think
Fve met him."
Miss T: "You must have. He belongs to the Harrar set. Fve danced with him, but Fve
never talked
to
him.
He's
a
big
yellow
man,
just
like a
newly-hatched
chicken,
with an
e-normous moustache."
(p.
110)
In
the
first scene of
Gatsby,
in which the
narrator
Carraway begins
interacting
with
other char?
acters,
two women
?
Daisy
Buchanan and Jordan Baker
?
also
provide
the
dominant visual
image,
wearing
white
"rippling
and
fluttering"
dresses and
reclining
on "an enormous couch . .
.
buoyed
up
as
though upon
an
anchored
balloon"
(p.
24)
as the hero's
name
is
raised,
but
not discussed in
anything
more than
casual,
curiosity-piquing
detail.
Fitzgerald
obviously
used
the
technique
to
much
better
effect than
Kipling,
making
his readers wait even
longer
for the title
character's first
entrance and
having
them
listen
to all
manner of
hyperbolic speculation
and evaluation.
Like
Captain
Gadsby,
Jay Gatsby
was
"a
captain
before he went to the front"
(131).
Just as
the
soldier's
lot
is a
dirty
one,
with details that
the
women cannot
know about the
business
?
"you
never do
tell me
anything
about
yourself,
or what
you
do,
or
what
you
take an
interest
in,"
Mrs.
Gadsby
later
complains (p.
81)
?
so
too
is
Gatsby
involved in
business matters that
are
'"a
rather
confidential
sort
of
thing'"
(p.
80).
Gatsby's
past,
like
Gadsby's,
carries
roguish
implications,
with
a certain
bad-boy
air still
lingering.
Gadsby
is
linked to
the
dark-skinned Harrar
through
rumor
and then to the rough-and-tumble Hussar Indian regiment by actuality, just as Gatsby is linked to
shadowy
figures
first
by
rumors
?
as the
Kaiser's
nephew
and
a
German
spy (pp.
42,
50)
?
then
later
by
association with
such dark underworld
figures
as
Meyer
Wolfsheim,
the man
supposedly
responsible
for the Black
Sox scandal
(p.
72).
In
Kipling's
version,
when Miss T.
remarks,
'Tm
not afraid
of
Captain Gadsby"
(p.
111),
it
implies,
of
course,
that others are.
In
Gatsby,
Myrtle
Wilson's sister
confesses,
"Tm
scared
of
him. Fd hate to have
him
get anything
on me'"
(p.
42),
while
shocking
rumors
persist
that
Gatsby
"killed
a man"
(pp.
50,
54)
?
just
as
killing
is
a
part
of
Gadsby's
past,
as Miss
T. learns
after
marrying
him and
noticing
a
long
knife-scar
(pp.
80-81).
The
running joke throughout
the
opening
scene
is an
egg
?
which,
in
curious
fashion,
is echoed
by
Fitzgerald's naming
of East and West
Eggs.
The
second
scene of
Kipling's play,
"The World
Without,"
finds
soldiers
chatting
in
the
smoking
room
of the
Deychi
Club
?
again,
about
Gadsby.
'"The talk is that
"Gaddy's
hooked
at
last '""
(p.
20).
He is
engaged
to Minnie
Threegan,
the
daughter
of a
colonel. But
someone asks
about
Gadsby's
other woman
?
isn't it
bigamy? Gadsby
had
become
engaged
to
the
widow
of an
officer,
an
older
woman
named
Mrs.
Herriott. She serves as
the woman
of
his
past,
as
Miss T. is
his
younger
dream
girl,
the
one he calls his
"angel";
in
Gatsby,
Fitzgerald
apparently
reversed
the
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Kipling
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135
poles
and
combined the
women,
so
that
Daisy
fuctions as both
Gatsby's
dream
girl
and
his
girl
of the
past
?
while
Tom Buchanan is involved with two women.
In
Gatsby,
too,
the action shifts
from an opening scene featuring women talking to one with men only, with Nick and Tom chatting
alone en
route to what
will
become a
rendezvous with Tom's mistress.
As Kenneth
Eble
observes,
it is
"[t]he
'old
sport'
phrase
which fixes
Gatsby
as
precisely
as his
gorgeous pink rag
of
a suit."22 A
comparative
reading
with
The
Story ofthe
Gadsbys
yields
a
pos?
sible
source for both
distinctive features.
Gadsby
was one of
the
Pink
Hussars
(p.
22),
an Indian
cavalry
unit
known for
its
flamboyant
uniforms
(pp.
110,
134),
while
the men's
talk is
sprinkled
throughout
with
such
masculine
terms
of endearment as
"old
man,"
"old
horse,"
"old
fellow,"
and
"old
pal."
At
some
point
in
both
narratives,
someone
challenges
the main
character's use of such
"sporting" language.
A
week
into
his
marriage, Gadsby
(breaking etiquette by
using
slang
with
a woman) calls his new bride "Little Featherweight," and she protests, "T won't be called those
sporting pet
names,
bad
boy'" (pp.
63-64).
In
Gatsby,
it's
Tom
who
cries,
at
one
point,
'"Don't
you
call
me "old
sport '""
(p.
119)
and who
mocks,
'"That's a
great expression
of
yours,
isn't it?
All
this "old
sport"
business.
Where'd
you
pick
that
up?'"
(p.
113).
As
it turns
out,
from
Kipling,
perhaps.
In
addition
to the
sporting
talk,
there
is
also
talk
of
"ponies"
?
a
logical topic
for
cavalry
men
which,
again,
finds an
interesting
echo
in
Gatsby
with
Tom Buchanan and his
polo ponies.
A
Gadsbys/Gatsby
comparison
also
helps
to
explain
the
otherwise
curious Indian
references:
Gatsby,
who
wears shirts
"with
monograms
of Indian
blue"
(p.
87)
and
who
"live[s]
like a
young
rajah
in all the
capitals
of
Europe
...
collecting jewels,
chiefly
rubies,
hunting big
game, painting
a
little"
(p.
66),
shows Nick a
photograph
of himself as a
young
man "with a
cricket bat in his
hand,"
after which
Nick
can
visualize it
all: "T saw the
skins of
tigers
flaming
in
his
palace
on the Grand
Canal;
I saw him
opening
a
chest of
rubies
to
ease,
with
their
crimson-lighted
depths,
the
gnawings
of
his
broken
heart'"
(p.
67).
The
third
section of
Story
of
the
Gadsbys,
"The Tents
of
Kedar,"
takes
place
at a
Naini Tal
dinner
for
thirty-four
?
the
equivalent
of
Gatsby's party
(pp.
133-44).
Gadsby
uses
the
party
for
the
explicit
purpose
of
repelling
Mrs.
Herriott,
of
finally breaking
it
off with her and
tell?
ing
her
about his
impending engagement
to
Minnie.
Gatsby's parties,
ironically,
are
designed
for
the explicit purpose of attracting a woman. Much has been made of Gatsby's "dream girl," and
Gadsby
is
so hooked on
his own
dream
girl
that
he refers
to Her with
a
capital
H
and calls her
"the
sweetest little
angel
that
ever came
down from
the
sky" (p.
53).
He talks
about
wanting
to
marry
her and all
but
swoons,
"Sweet
state I'm in "
(p.
54);
when he
does
finally
marry,
his former
fiancee,
Mrs.
Herriott
writes,
in a
letter of
veiled
congratulations,
"And
so
the moth has
come
too
near
the
candle
at
last"
(p.
89).
In
addition to the
shared moth
image
of
attraction/destruction
?
in
Gatsby's
"blue
gardens
men
and
girls
came and
went like
moths
among
the
whisperings
and the
champagne
and
the stars"
(p.
47)
?
when
Gadsby,
on the
night
before his
wedding,
is
offered a
four-finger
drink and
protests,
"O bus
bus It'll
make me
as drunk as an
owl"
(p.
55),
one
cannot
help but think of Owl
Eyes
and his drunkenness at
Gatsby's
party. Fitzgerald
thought
the
parties
at
Gatsby's
mansion central
enough
to the
story
that he had
considered
titling
his
novel
Trimalchio,
after
the Petronius
tale of
a
rich
freedman who
hosts a
banquet
which
becomes
progressively
more
22. KennethE.
Eble,
"TheCraftof
Revision:The Great
Gatsby"
n
Critical
Essays
on F.
Scott
Fitzgerald's
The
Great
Gatsby,
d.
Scott Donaldson
G.K.
Hall,
1984),
p.
90.
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Journal
of Modern Literature
Bacchanalian.23
Thematically,
Gadsby's party
scene
is
important
because it sets
up
the
wedding
scene and
juxtaposes
the
cool
Gadsby
?
the
one who
turns
away
women
?
against
the
gelatinous
Gadsby, turned rubber-kneed by one particular woman.
Despite
their
tough
reputations,
around their dream
girls,
both men
act
comically spineless,
particularly
in
scenes that function
as fulcrums for the action.
On
the
day
of
his
wedding,
in
sec?
tion
four,
"With
Any
Amazement,"
Gadsby
is
so
"paralyzed
with fear" that
he
forgets
his name
and
goes
"Ha-Hmmm
deep
down
in his
throat when
he
can't think
of
anything
to
say," although
his bride-to-be is
cool
and
composed (pp.
7,
58-59).
Jay
Gatsby
is
just
as
tongue-tied
and awk-
ward in the
pivotal
scene
when he faces
Daisy
alone for the first
time,
at Nick's
house.
He needs
Nick
to
act
as
go-between
and arrives
looking pale
and
sleepless
(p.
81),
bolting
before
Daisy
makes her
entrance,
then
reappearing,
"pale
as death"
(p.
82).
Swooning,
he
almost
knocks over
Nick's mantelpiece clock, and thinking about her afterwards, he nearly topples "down a flight
of stairs"
(p.
86).
Just as
best man Mafflin has to
push
Gadsby
during every
step
of
the
wedding
ceremony
?
saying,
at
one
point,
"Look like a
man "
(p.
57),
and
then,
"(In
a
piercing
rattle meant
to be a
whisper.)
Kneel,
you
stiff-necked ruffian
Kneel "
(p.
59)
?
Nick has to
push Gatsby,
and,
when the
latter tries to
leave,
scolds,'"
You're
acting
like
a
little
boy.
Not
only
that,
but
you're
rude.
Daisy's
sitting
in
there all
alone'"
(p.
84).
In
both
crucial
episodes,
clocks
and time
factor
prominently. Waking
on
the
morning
of
his
wedding, Gadsby
is
teased
by
his best
man
that
he
is his "own
master
for the
next twelve hours"
and
given
ten minutes to
dress;
this sets the
tone for
Gadsby's
overwound
tension. "What time
is
it?"
he
asks,
and
hearing
the
answer
mutters,
"Five hours more. O Lord "
(p.
50).
Twice more the
panicked Gadsby
asks
what time
it
is,
until
finally
the church
clock strikes three
and
the
ceremony
begins
(pp.
53-56).
Gatsby
too
is an
"overwound clock"
(p.
87),
and
before his
big
meeting
with
Daisy
(and
his
nearly
breaking
Nick's
already
broken
clock),
he is
just
as
preoccupied
with
time,
looking
"at his watch as
if there was some
pressing
demand on his
time
elsewhere"
(pp.
81-82).
"This
is
Hades,"
Gadsby
says
(p.
60),
just
as
Gatsby grouses,
"'This
is
a
terrible mistake'"
(p.
84).
Even
as
Gatsby
cannot
stop thinking
of
Daisy
frozen
in time
as
the first "nice
girl"
whom he knew
(p.
130)
and is
shocked
by
the
appearance
of her
child,
a
reminder of
her
age (p.
106),
Gadsby
is
taken aback when he notices during the wedding ceremony, apparently for the first time, "Little
Featherweight's
a
woman
?
a
woman
And I
thought
she was a
girl" (p.
58).
Lyrics
sprinkled
judiciously throughout
The
Great
Gatsby
add a
countermelodic
texture and
resonance which has
fascinated critics
?
particularly
lines
from
"The Sheik of
Araby"
?
and
in
The
Story
ofthe Gadsbys,
lyrics
also
appear
in
strategic
places throughout.
In the
wedding
section,
the most
thematically important
lyric
follows the knell
of
church bells that
signal
the start
of the
ceremony:
"We
honor the
King/
And
Bride's
joy
do
bring
?
/
Good
tidings
we
tell/
And
ring
the
Dead's
knell"
(p.
57).
When
the
ceremony
is
completed, Gadsby
"winces as
if
shot,"
and the
Mendelssohn
wedding
march plays (p. 60). Marriage in Story ofthe Gadsbys ? at least for the men ? is
equated
with
death,
with
going
to
the
gallows (p.
55).
In
the
Deychi
Club,
a
cavalryman
asks,
"Who's dead
now?" and
another
responds,
"No one that
I
know
of;
but
Gaddy's
hooked
[engaged]
at
last"
(p.
20).
After
the
wedding,
Mafflin
mourns,
"Fve
lost old
Gaddy,"
then
sings
to
himself,
"You
may
23.
F. Scott
Fitzgerald,
Trimalchiho: n
Early
Version
fThe
Great
Gatsby,
d. James
L.
W. West
III
(Cambridge
Uni?
versity
Press,
2000),
p.
190.
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Kipling
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Fitzgerald
137
carve it
on
his
tombstone,
you may
cut it
on
his
card,
That
a
young
man
married
is a
young
man
marred "
In
an
aside
to
the
audience,
Mafflin
laments,
"They say marriage
is like
cholera.
Wonder
who'll be
the
next victim?" (p. 62).
A
comparative reading suggests Jay Gatsby, who ironically
wishes
desperately
to
marry
his own dream
girl
but
is
denied
that
metaphoric
death,
but, instead,
is
literally
shot to death because
of
Daisy
and
her reckless
driving.
Gatsby
"knew that when he
kissed
[Daisy],
and forever wed his unutterable visions to her
perishable
breath,
his mind would
never
romp again
like
the mind
of
God"
(p.
101).
Yet,
still,
he kisses
her,
entering
into
a
marriage-
fixation that would
pull
him,
five
years
later,
like
a moth into the flame. In
Gatsby,
as in
Story
of
the
Gadsbys,
Mendelssohn's
Wedding
March
plays,
but
off-stage. During
a
confrontational scene
between Tom and
Gatsby,
the
march
resounds from
a
ballroom below and
momentarily
breaks
the
tension,
with
Jordan
crying, '"Imagine
marrying anybody
in this heat '"
(p.
113).
Fitzgerald
sets the stage for a wedding theme relatively early in the novel, describing a "frosted wedding-
cake"
ceiling
in the
opening
scene
(p.
24)
and Nick
bristling
at
being
"rumored into
marriage"
(pp.
32-33).
Within
marriages
and
prior
to
them,
the
women
in
both
narratives
are
treated as if
they
were
girls.
In an
aside to the
audience,
Gadsby says,
of
his
soon-to-be-fiancee,
"little
girls
shouldn't
understand these
things" (p.
12).
After
the
marriage
he
persists,
calling
her
"child" and
remarking
as
she reaches for a
trooper's
saddle,
"Little
girls
aren't
expected
to
handle
numdahs"
(p.
80),
and
she
complains,
"Will
you always
treat me like a child?"
(p.
87).
"They
train us women
well,
don't
they,
Pip?"
Mrs.
Herriott
says
(p.
38),
a
comment which has
an echo
in
Daisy's
remarks,
upon
hearing
that
she
has
given
birth
to
a
daughter:
"T
hope
she'll be a
fool
?
that's the best
thing
a
girl
can
be
in
this
world,
a
beautiful little fool'"
(p.
30).
With its
largely
male
perspective
and a central
thesis
claiming
that
marriage
ruins
males,
The
Story
ofthe Gadsbys
is,
at its
core,
more than a
little sexist
?
a
man's book
about the world of
men.
Fitzgerald
likewise
thought
of his
novel as "a
man's book" and
wondered if that
would hurt the
book's
popularity.24
No ideal
marriages
exist in
either
Kipling's
play
or
Fitzgerald's
novel.
In
the
latter,
Catherine
whispers,
of
her
sister,
Myrtle,
and
Tom,
'"Neither
of them can
stand the
person
they're
married to'"
(p.
42),
and most of
the
women
at
Gatsby's
party
have
"fights
with men
said
to
be their husbands"
(p. 56). In Story ofthe Gadsbys, marriage and unhappiness go hand-in-hand,
with
Gadsby
reminding
the
unattached
Mafflin,
"A man
has a
right
to live his
life
as
happily
as
he
can. You
aren't married"
(p.
113).
In both
texts,
marriage
is
also
equated
with
madness: "Are
you
mad?"
Mafflin asks
Gadsby.
"No
?only
married,"
the
hero
responds
(p.
111),
while
in
Gatsby,
Myrtle
screams,
'"The
only crazy
I was
was
when I
married him'"
(p.
43).
Section five
of
the
play,
"The Garden
of Eden"
?
again,
shades of
Hemingway
?
is set
out-
doors and
sets
up
the
all-important
next section.
Gadsby,
a
husband
of
three
weeks,
"smokes a
pipe
of
peace
on
a
rug
in
the sunshine"
during
a
temporary
truce
in the
battle
of
the
sexes
(p.
63).
As
Gadsby
prepares
for
a
ride,
his wife
says
that she is
lonely,
and
Gadsby
suggests,
"Why
don't
you ask some nice people in to dinner?" She responds, "Nice people Where am I to find them?
Horrid
frumps
And if I
did,
I
shouldn't
be
amused"
(p.
82).
Neither,
Nick
observes,
are
any
of
the
freeloading party
crowd at
Gatsby's
mansion
amusing
(p.
134).
Bored,
Mrs.
Gadsby begins
to
prod
her
husband for
details
about his
past
love,
Mrs.
Herriott
?
gearing
up
to
sample
the
forbid?
den fruit.
The section's
epigraph,
"And
ye
shall
be
as
?
Gods "
comes,
of
course,
from the
story
24. F.
Scott
Fitzgerald,
The
Letters
ofF.
Scott
Fitzgerald,
d. Andrew
Turnbull
Charles
Scribner's
ons,
1963),
p.
173.
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138
Journal
of
Modern
Literature
of
Eve's
temptation
in
the Garden of
Eden,
after
which she coaxes
Adam to sin with
her. And in a
burst of
emotion
that calls to
mind
Nick's own
cry
to
Gatsby
that he was '"worth
the
whole
damn
bunch
put together'" (p. 134),
Mrs.
Gadsby cries,
"You're
so much too
good
for
me. So much too
good " (p.
65)
Section six of
Story of
the
Gadsbys,
"Fatima,"
begins
with a related secular
epigraph
from
The
Story ofBlue
Beard:
"And
you may go
into
every
room of
the house and see
everything
that
is
there,
but into the blue room
you
must
not
go."
In
choosing
Blue
Beard,
a
fairy
tale wherein
the seventh
wife
of
the title character
ignores
the Eden-like edict not to enter
the "blue"
room
and
discovers the bodies of her
husband's former
spouses,
Kipling
finds a
perfect
allegory
for one
of
the
play's
main themes: that
past
loves have
the inherent
capacity
to
destroy present
ones
and
that,
as a
result,
men and
women
may
not be wise to be
totally
honest
with
each other.
Mrs. Gadsby is disturbed by the scar which she notices in this episode and by the sordid story
behind it. More
importantly,
she discovers a
letter
from Mrs. Herriott to
Gadsby
and,
in
reading
it,
despite
Gadsby's
exhortations to leave
matters
alone,
she enters the blue
room
and
exhumes
Gadsby's past
love.
Upon learning
some of the
details,
she becomes
instantly
insecure and seeks
reassurrance.
Even
when
he offers
it,
she is still so tormented
by
the
thought
of
his
ever
having
loved another
that she
presses
for an assurance of his love
beyond
the
present, sighing, "Only you
and
I
?
I and
you
?
in
the whole
wide,
wide world until the end"
(p.
67).
By
contrast,
Gadsby
is
not bothered
at all
by
her
past.
When
he
asks out
of
near-conversational
politeness
if
she
has
"ever
been mixed
up
in
any
dark and dismal
tragedy" (p.
70)
and hears the
story
of
a
man she was
previ?
ously
involved
with,
he
is
absolutely
unaffected
(pp.
70-71).
In
Gatsby,
Daisy
is
the forbidden:
she arrives for
her clandestine
meeting
with
Gatsby
with
a
"damp
streak of hair"
laying
like "a dash of blue
paint
across
her
cheek"
(p.
82).
In
Gatsby,
letters
also
play
a
prominent
role,
with
Gatsby receiving
the
devastating
news
of
Daisy
and Tom while at
Oxford
(p.
132)
and
Daisy clutching
one, drunk,
on the
day
she is to wed Tom
(p.
74).
Gatsby
is
as
insistent as Mrs.
Gadsby
that the
love
be
exclusive,
all-encompassing,
and
guaranteed. Although
Tom is
perfectly happy
to
accept
Daisy
in
the
present,
as
unconcerned about her
past
as
Gadsby
is,
Gatsby
insists
upon entering
the
forbidden room
of
Daisy's past
loves,
seeking
to
extract
a reassur-
ing
confirmation
from
her
(pp. 117-18). Although
it never
comes,
he still tells
himself, speaking
aloud
in
front
of
Nick,
"1 don't think she ever loved
[Tom]'"
(p.
132).
Hovering
about
in
section seven of
Story
of
the
Gadsbys,
"The
Valley
of the
Shadow,"
is a
doctor who attends the
gravely
ill Mrs.
Gadsby,
with
Gadsby
himself
looking
"the color
of
good
cigar-ash" (p.
95)
?
an
image
echoed
in
Gatsby
by
the
"valley
of ashes"
and another
hovering
medical
presence,
the
gigantic
blue
billboard
eyes
of
Doctor
T. J.
Eckleburg
(p.
35).
Subtitled
"Knowing
Good and
Evil,"
this section
of
Story
of
the
Gadsbys
picks up
the Garden of Eden
theme,
with a
post-euphoric, post-honeymoon Gadsby agonizing
as his wife
almost dies.
Mafflin,
who has himself been
considering marriage,
remarks,
"What
am
I
let in
for?
Gaddy
has
aged
ten
years in the night" (p. 105). In Kipling's version, taking a bite of the forbidden fruit means leav-
ing
the
garden,
which
means
facing
the
day-to-day drudgery
and
turmoils of
marriage
and
the
death of
freedom.
In
both
Story
of
the
Gadsbys
and The Great
Gatsby,
for
characters to
leave
the
garden
and
know
good
and evil also means to
know death
?
either as a
close
contact,
as with
Story ofthe Gadsbys,
or with
Myrtle's
death in
Gatsby,
another
accident which
once more forces
Tom and
Daisy
to relocate.
In
the world of
Fitzgerald's
lost
and careless
generation,
the
sinning
and
leaving
the
garden
episode
is
repeated
over
and
over,
with no
compunction
and
no
apparent
lesson learned.
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139
The
final
Story
ofthe
Gadsbys
section,
"The
Swelling
of
Jordan,"
takes
place
in
January
in the
Gadsby bungalow,
where
Gadsby
and Mafflin talk. More
than
conversation,
this has the
feel of
a
post-mortem. Gadsby, who once "left his sword .
.
. in an Utmanzai's head"
and who
had
sworn
that "he'd stick
by
[Mafflin]
and
the
Pinks as
long
as
he
lived,"
has
just
announced that he
will no
longer
serve in
the
army (p.
112).
To
Mafflin,
the
old
Gadsby
is dead.
Just
as
Gatsby
was burdened
with the
kryptonite
of
romance,
attracted
to one
who
ultimately
destroyed
him,
in Mafflin's
eyes
marriage
has reduced
Gadsby
to
rubble,
turning
him
away
from his friends and
rendering
him
absolutely
spineless
and
paranoid,
a mere
shadow
of his former self.
Gadsby
protests
that Mafflin
does not "know what it
is
to
go
into
your
own
room and see
your
wife's
head on the
pillow,
and
when
everything
else is safe
and
the house shut
up
for the
night,
to
wonder whether
the
roof-beams
won't
give
and kill her"
(p.
113).
Moments
later,
though, Gadsby
admits
that "even as
good
a mar?
riage as mine . . . hampers a man's work, it cripples his sword arm, and oh, it plays Hell with his
notions
of
duty "
(p.
121).
As one
critic
reminds,
"Gatsby's pursuit
of
Daisy's
love
is
Fitzgerald's quest
for Zelda's
hand"
as
a
young
lieutenant from
Camp
Sheridan, Alabama,
competing
for
the debutante's attention.25
But
in
the
summer
of
1924,
Fitzgerald
suffered
through
an
emotionally
crippling
time
with
Zelda.
As he was
working
on the first draft
of
The
Great
Gatsby,
their
marriage
was in
trouble.
Zelda,
"bored
and
restless,"
had
an
affair with "a
handsome
French
naval
aviator,
Edouard
Jozan,"
and
the
"crisis
peaked
on
July
13 when
Zelda told Scott that she loved Jozan
and asked for
a
divorce."26
If ever
Fitzgerald
was
ripe
for
writing
about the
pitfalls
of
marriage
and the
ways
in which a
woman could
destroy
any
man
who
was drawn
to
her,
it was then.
In
Story ofthe
Gadsbys,
one
ofthe men at the
Deychi
Club
remarks,
"Curious
thing
how some
women
carry
a
Fate with them"
(p.
31),
and the
play
indeed shows the
power
that
a fateful
woman
can exert over a
man who
is
attracted to
her
beyond
all
reason
and
control.
As
Kipling's
play
is
pur-
posefully
illustrative,
so too
is
Fitzgerald's
novel. Kenneth Eble has
observed that
while
"a
writer
ordinarily
reworks to more
sharply
delineate
a
character,"
that is
not
"Fitzgerald's
extraordinary
intention.
Daisy
moves
away
from
actuality
into
an idea
existing
in
Gatsby's
mind
and
ultimately
to
a kind of
abstract
beauty
corrupted
and
corrupting
in
taking
on
material form"27
?
an illustra?
tion of what can happen when she is overvalued on the gauge of Gatsby's "appalling sentimen-
tality" (pp.
86,
101).
Daisy,
like
Tom,
is
a
careless driver
whose
fate
it is
to leave victims in her
accidental
wake:
"they
smashed
up things
and
creatures and
then
retreated back into
their
money
or
their
vast
carelessness,
or
whatever it was that
kept
them
together,
and
let
other
people
clean
up
the mess
they
had made"
(p.
153).
In
our last view of
them,
"Daisy
and Tom were
sitting opposite
each
other at
the kitchen
table,"
where,
from
Nick's
vantage point,
there
is
an
"unmistakable air
of natural
intimacy"
between
these
two,
who
are
"conspiring
together"
(p.
127).
The
Story of
the
Gadsbys
ends in
a
curiously
similar
way,
with
Captain
Mafflin
remarking,
after
the
Gadsbys
"little
villain" has
broken
his
watch,
"Everything's
made
to
be
played
with
and
broken,
isn't
it,
young 'un?" Then, "Oh Diamond, Diamond, thou little knowest the mischief that thou hast done"
(p.
122).
After
Mafflin
leaves,
the audience's
last view of
Gadsby
and his wife
is of his
telling
her to
"Bring
a
chair
out
here,
dear.
Fve
got
something
to talk
over with
you"
?
an
open-ended
25. Tim
Sherer,
"Midwestern
nfluences
n
F. Scott
Fitzgerald's
The
Great
Gatsby?
Society or
the
Study
of
Midwestern
Literature
Newsletter
XI,
2
(1981),
p.
15.
26.
Jeffrey
Meyers,
Scott
Fitzgerald:
A
Biography HarperCollins,
994),
pp.
115-16.
27.
Eble,
p.
92.
This content downloaded from 193.54.110.35 on Sat, 30 Jan 2016 17:35:11 UTCAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
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7/25/2019 Kipling's Story Gadsbys Possible Source Fitzgerald(Plath)
11/11
140 Journal
of
Modern
Literature
remark,
inviting
the audience to
speculate
on what
they
are
talking
about,
just
as
we are invited at
the
beginning
of
the
play
to
speculate
on
the nature
of
the
title character.
Ronald Berman astutely observes that "there are certain silent scenes" in The Great Gatsby
that
are
"openly
cinematic,
as in the
theater view
that
we
get
of Tom and
Daisy through
the
pantry
window in which
they
are
on
stage
in
the
light
and
we
see them from
the dark. Such scenes can
be
reminiscent of film
staging,"
Berman
concludes.28 Such
a
leap
is
easily
made,
given Fitzgerald's
involvement with
Hollywood.
But the
many
structural and
elemental similarities
between
The
Great
Gatsby
and
Kipling's
The
Story of
the
Gadsbys
more
likely suggest
that,
in this
case,
the
stage
?
not
the
screen
?
inspired
Fitzgerald
to treat his
novel
in an
unnovelistic
way,
so
that,
like a
script
with its
minimal
details,
even the
"conventional
language
of
description
seems
not
to
matter
to the
narrator."29
If
Kipling's
play
can indeed be added to the
long
list of
"influences,"
then it
appears
to be a
key
influence: it
contributes
to
the
novel's
theatrieal
style
and
partially
accounts for
what Eble
called
"the
tight
inevitability
of its
construction."30
Further,
it
suggests origins
for
some of the
novel's more
quirky
details
?
including Gatsby's
"old
sport" jauntiness
and odd
pink
suits.
More
than
anything,
Kipling's play
was a
play
about
marriage
and
the
symbolic
"death" it
occasions in
males.
Given the
turmoil of
Fitzgerald's
own
marriage during
the
novel's
composition,
perhaps
the
American
Dream in
Gatsby
is more
a dream
of
wife, house,
children
and
two-car
garage
?
that
is,
marriage
?
than
it
is
a dream
of
financial success or an
unattainable
dream
girl.
Part
of the
problem,
as
audiences
learn from
Kipling's
play,
is
that
men fall in
love with
girls
who
then sur-
prise
them
by growing
up,
while
the men still
see them and
treat
them as
girls
?
a
conflict
between
expectations
and
reality,
between the
past
and the
present
or future
?
so that
any
dream
of
mar?
riage
is
doomed
from the
start.
Moreover,
as Berman
notes,
"For most
of his
professional
life,
F.
Scott
Fitzgerald
was
deeply
aware of
the
conflict
between modern
times and
what he
called,
in
1937,
'the
old America' . .
. a
world
of
excess
and
pretense."31
A
reading
of the
novel with
Kipling's
play
in
mind
?
especially
considering
the
otherwise
strange,
metaphorical
comparisons
of
Gatsby
to
an
Indian
rajah
?
sug?
gests
a
world
in which
privileged
old-money
colonials dominate
and
people
such as the
Wilsons
will forever be small and unimportant, victims of class and its limitations, in a novel in which East
and
West can
take on
significant
colonial
overtones for
its
ill-fated
hero. And
allusions
to Dutch
sailors,
those
early
New
World
explorers (p.
154),
suddenly
seem
to take
on
an
even
greater
reso-
nance for
Gatsby.
Or
Gadsby.
But
what's in a
name,
Old
Sport?
28.
Ronald
Berman,
The
Great
Gatsby
and
Modern
Times
University
f
Illinois
Press,
1994),
p.
10.
29.
Ronald
Berman,
The
Great
Gatsby
and
Fitzgerald's
World
f
Ideas
(University
f
Alabama
Press,
1997),
p.
22.
30.
Eble,
p.
7.
31.
Berman,
The
Great
Gatsby
and
Fitzgerald's
World
f
Ideas,
p.
1.