I have only three of these in mind (and few will agree with me on the next one), but perhaps I’ll think of more. The ending of The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940), is an obvious choice. Fitzgerald is, to me, a strange case. He couldn’t spell worth a damn, and it’s simply not clear where his capacity for such deep feeling came from. Nevertheless, he was capable of cranking out the most gorgeous prose when he wasn’t in the bag. No doubt his friendship with Edmund Wilson and Tom Boyd at Princeton helped.
Anyway, Gatsby is one of my choices for The Great American Novel—perhaps the first choice. This Side of Pardise, his first novel, was a remarkable achievement for a 24-year-old; and Tender is the Night has some beautiful writing, but suffers from an annoying bifurcation of plot and a forced ending. But Fitzgerald wrote one perfect novel, and Gatsby is it. This is the ending, when Nick closes up Gatsby’s house after he’s been killed, and ponders the symbolic green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. The paragraph about the Dutch finding the new world is amazing. And of course the boats beating on against the current has almost become a cliché.
On the last night, with my trunk packed and my car sold to the grocer, I went over and looked at that huge incoherent failure of a house once more. On the white steps an obscene word, scrawled by some boy with a piece of brick, stood out clearly in the moonlight, and I erased it, drawing my shoe raspingly along the stone. Then I wandered down to the beach and sprawled out on the sand.
Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes — a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.
And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.
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 — to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning ——
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
If you ever get a chance, read Fitzgerald’s collected letters to his daughter Scottie. You might think it boring, but it’s fantastic. I have an old edition, but I see that it’s out of print and way pricey. If you can get it from the library, do: it’s one of the finest collections of letters I’ve ever read, and you’ll admire Fitzgerald no end (and understand him a lot better) when you finish it.
Thank you for reminding me of this ending. Truly one of the finest and most moving endings to a novel of all time! I’m a huge fan, but that seems to be rare over here in Australia (perhaps because some of us get bashed over the head with this book as part of English classes at school. I for one, however, was richer for that experience!)
That is my fav ending too! I’ve loved it and remembered it ever since we read it at high school. My other most memorable piece of prose is the part in ‘to kill a mockingbird’ where Jem and Scout realise what they owe Boo Radley: “Neighbors bring food with death and flowers with sickness and little things in between. Boo was our neighbor. He gave us two soap dolls, a broken watch and chain, a pair of good-luck pennies, and our lives. But neighbors give in return. We never put back into the tree what we took out of it: we had given him nothing, and it made me sad.”
Jerry, I’m a great FSF fan, the letters sound interesting, would you sell your edition?
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The aesthetics of literature should not be discussed on a gnu blog. Scientists are supposed to be perennially immune to emotional and artistic content. Please stop.
I know, this must be rattling the idle prejudices of many a Gnu hater!
This is really exactly the way I was thinking, as well.
If Dr. Coyne is better at the thing I thought I was better at–to say nothing of you things, who are better even than he is, where does this leave me?
Life everyday is an exercise in humility, without even trying.
At least I can console myself with the thought that I have superior taste in music.
My favorite song ending: Arf, she said.
@Sasquatch.
Hey, superior to mine? I doubt it. 😉
arf, arf, arf, arf… 😉
one of the finest ending … loving it
I feel compelled to pass on the Kate Beaton version of the novel. It adds a certain flavour to the proceedings.
http://www.harkavagrant.com/index.php?id=259
When you compare the gorgeous and profound writing of Fitzgerald with the workman-like prose of Justin Cronin (The Passage), Franzen, and other darlings of the literary elite, you must wonder if what is considered good writing has changed so much in the last 50-100 years.
I find Franzen, Cronin, et al. virtually unreadable. I try to read them, but end up being hammered senseless by the ordinariness of both the writing style and the stories.
I know these and other current authors have huge fan bases, but I just don’t see why.
Fitzgerald does Proust better than Proust–cleaner, sharper with totally interconnected thoughts, memories, images, etc. A brilliantly gifted writer.
I wonder if the Great Global Novel has been written?
“I wonder if the Great Global Novel has been written?”
yes, Middlemarch.
Recently I revisited TGG by listening to Tim Robbins’ excellent narration of the audiobook (I’m preparing to fight my way into GATZ at the Public Theater next weekend). Almost at the end of the audiobook, after the gorgeous ending of the book, Robert Sean Leonard reads an hour’s worth of letters from FSF to his editor and friends about Gatsby. Worth getting the audiobook just to hear those letters . .
Picking nits: How does this hang together logically?
It’s like saying “Dr. Coyne can’t hold a pipette correctly, but he’s still capable of creating the most elegant research designs.”
Two authors of Irish descent. Is there any chauvinism at work here? 😉
Too early to tell (N=2). I bet he picks Faulkner, then Hemingway next — underscoring his true chauvinism: a preference for heavy drinkers.
Damn. He picked Hemingway next.
OK, so I got the order wrong.
It’s early. I need me a little something to get up and go to school with…
It is interesting how eloquently Fitzgerald critiqued the lifestyle for which Gatsby was an exemplar, and yet, how arduously he struggled to live the life Gatsby lived.
I’m loving these literature posts, Jerry.
Gatsby gets better every time I read it.
Not perhaps ‘literature’ but can I put in a word for one of my favourite natural history stories as a child, Panther (also Ki-Yu; a story of panthers & vancouver) by the Canadian writer/conservationist Roderick Haig-Brown? It was written in 1934 & depicts the life of a cougar & a man who hunts him. Haig-Brown was criticised for the savage depiction of life & death in the animal world. The book impressed me no end when I was 10/11. I always remember the violent end of the book as well. Never thought of this but interestingly another influential book when I was a child was Bichu the Jaguar by Alan Caillou, pen-name of Alan Samuel Lyle-Smythe [who wrote Rampage filmed with Robert Mitchum as a hunter]. In it the jaguar is shot & chased by a hunter. It starts arrestingly “Bichu was wounded, & she was going home to die”, & keeps up the tension all the way through.
It ends with the human element –
“There were just the two of them walking back to the river, just the two in a land so vast that a man could walk for all his life & see nothing but the trees, & the rivers, & the mountains, & all the beauties of the splendid jungle.”
I had to read The Great Gatsby in high school and like all books they force you to read (well at least this happens to me) I hated it. Then I ran accross this essay by Hitch
http://www.vanityfair.com/culture
/features/2000/05/hitchens200005
Which prompted me to give it another go and I cannot believe what a difference it made. Perhaps it’s because I know more about the history of that period and can now see the symbolism in the book.
Thanks for the link–I enjoyed reading Hitch on Gatsby as much as reading Gatsby itself:))
I’m having trouble understanding what parts of this passage mean. This one, for example: ‘man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.’
Why is it ‘the last time in history’?
North America came pretty late in the game. He considers Australia, Amazonia less aesthetic and Africa and Asia already well-trammeled.
(That’s what it seems like to me from that quote anyway. Perhaps more than just a bit of Chauvinism in there …)
I think you’re right about the chauvinism. He reference to ‘man’ could only possibly be a reference to ‘white’ man.
If he really is suggesting that the Dutch settlement of North America was the last time white man discovered a vast, ‘aesthetic’ continent then he’s very wrong.
The only time white men discovered a vast land was when the Irish & Norse discovered Iceland, which is no continent. Everywhere else was as you say already full up!
Dominic, I didn’t say or imply that everywhere else was already full up. And Iceland is the opposite of vast!
I’ve taught the novel enough times to know that I don’t know for certain. Fitzgerald’s figurative moves are often open-ended: you can read the passage different ways and still be “getting” something like what he’s trying to communicate.
That said, I think Nick’s pondering of the “discovery” of the continent is to some extent mirroring his coming from the midwest to discover Jay Gatsby, this mythic, enigmatic Long Islander. Maybe Nick—who had survived fighting in WWI—fears that Gatsby, in his early, supernova-like death, has gotten the better deal. Does Nick think that his experience knowing Gatsby was him (Nick) coming “face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder”? (Gatsby, I think, both desperately yearned for and embodies such wonder.) Something like that.
[Apologies for the repeated post; but I thought might be of interest]
I watched Creation [terrible title] last night, the BBC film about Charles Darwin’s writing of On the Origin of Species.
It was … OK. It’s a good movie, such as it is. Paul Bettany (once again) deserves an award of some kind at least for his efforts.
The movie is not an autobiography, touches only briefly on the voyage of the Beagle, and has little on his interactions with other scientists or naturalists aside from the well-played Hooker and Huxley.
The movie is mainly a hand-wringer about his conflict with his wife about her belief and his non-belief. However it leaves one with the impression that Darwin had a serious soft-spot for religion, which I think wasn’t the case, at least by the time of OTOOS. It also dwells intensely on his feelings for and feelings of loss over his daughter Annie.
It’s pretty good as far as it goes; but dwelling so hard on his conflict over religion, his waiting to write The Origin and the death of Annie make it a very slender slice of his life. Interesting but narrow and perhaps a bit over the top.
I expected more breadth, more science, more other scientists, and rounder portrait of Darwin.
3, maybe 3.5, stars out of 5.
I thought it was a very good film myself – you have to see it as a product of the book by Randal Keynes, intitially entitled Annie’s Box. A short film is no vehicle for a life story – that is not what the medium does. The story intended to engage the viewer on the relationships between Darwin, his wife & his favourite child, & relate that to his thinking & how he changed. In that I think it succeeds admirably. (I confess I know Paul Bettany’s mum a little as she lives in the same village my parents lived in!) The BBC did a brilliant biopic seriwes on Darwin back in the 1970s, sadly not available anymore ‘for copyright & contractual reasons’ – perhaps some of the people in it did not agree to its re-release?
http://www.aboutdarwin.com/literature/Video.html
To me it was the definitive Darwin on screen.
eek! Series – no idea what a seriwes is…
Dr. Coyne: Not having another venue for this, I’ll ask it here for now (might make an interesting thread …)
My family is planning a brief trip (probably 4 full days’ worth) to Chicago in the undefined near future. I would like to ask you a couple of things, regarding what to see and do in Chicago, and when to visit:
1. Best time to visit in your opinion? (we hate crowds and try to avoid them; we live in an even colder clime, so winter doesn’t worry us except for transport.)
2. Best museums to see (both science and arts …)
3. Best places to eat (I like your Brooklyn holes-in-wall. We won’t be going to the top/expensive places in town. Small local/ethnic places usually please us best; but I do like good French cooking (e.g. La Belle Vie in Minneapolis)).
4. Bars to visit and why they are worth it.
That’s plenty. Thanks in advance!
I do of course have opinions on all of these. Best to email me privately since most people here aren’t interested in the answers; my email is easily found by Googling. I’ll be glad to help. I myself favor the small ethnic places and have a huge list.
I hope you like ribs, though. . .
Love ribs. Email incoming shortly. Thanks!
Given my handle, I have to put in a good word here for Albert Camus, a writer (and an outspokenly atheist one, FWIW) who consistently ended his books and major essays with a slam-bang timpani roll.
I took my username from The Plague, Camus’s novel about the human struggle to extract meaning from an indifferent and frequently punishing universe. Gotta love the very end:
I imagine it’s better in the original French, but the above translation is the one I know.
La Peste is one of my favorites. Brilliant in every way — even in translation. (My French is functional but not good enough for literature.)
As for me, this is the best ending in world literature (from Albert Camus’s The Stranger):
“I had been shouting so much that I’d lost my breath, and just then the jailers rushed in and started trying to release the chaplain from my grip. One of them made as if to strike me. The chaplain quietened them down, then gazed at me for a moment without speaking. I could see tears in his eyes. Then he turned and left the cell.
Once he’d gone, I felt calm again. But all this excitement had exhausted me and I dropped heavily on to my sleeping plank. I must have had a longish sleep, for, when I woke, the stars were shining down on my face. Sounds of the countryside came faintly in, and the cool night air, veined with smells’ of earth and salt, fanned my cheeks. The marvelous peace of the sleepbound summer night flooded through me like a tide. Then, just on the edge of daybreak, I heard a steamer’s siren. People were starting on a voyage to a world which had ceased to concern me forever. Almost for the first time in many months I thought of my mother. And now, it seemed to me, I understood why at her life’s end she had taken on a “fiancé”; why she’d played at
making a fresh start. There, too, in that Home where lives were flickering out, the dusk came as a mournful solace. With death so near, Mother must have felt like someone on the brink of freedom, ready to start life all over again. No one, no one in
the world had any right to weep for her. And I, too, felt ready to start life all over again. It was as if that great rush of anger had washed me clean, emptied me of hope, and, gazing up at the dark sky spangled with its signs and stars, for the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe. To feel it so like
myself, indeed, so brotherly, made me realize that I’d been happy, and that I was happy still. For all to be accomplished, for me to feel less lonely, all that remained to hope was that on the day of my execution there should be a huge crowd of spectators and that they should greet me with howls of execration.”
As I said, slam-bang timpani roll.