Rereading “The Great Gatsby” During Lockdown in the Barn Behind My Parents’ House

by Billy Pepicelli

The Great Gatsby (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1925), which takes place in New York, on Long Island—“that slender riotous island”—in the summer of 1922, emerged on the heels of two seismic events in history: World War I, and what many people believe to have been the deadliest virus ever known—the Spanish flu of 1918. The war gets ten mentions (in which Gatsby is said to have fought “extraordinarily well”). But nowhere in the novel’s 180 pages does Fitzgerald hint at the world’s having just undergone a global pandemic. Which is astonishing, since, of those infected with the virus (an estimated one-third of the population), fifty million people died (compared with twenty million from the war)—675,000 of whom were from the United States. Instead we get lavish parties at Gatsby’s (PPE-free), Gin Rickeys, spouse swapping. A novel famous for depicting an era that’s so beloved in American history it has two nicknames: The Roaring Twenties, The Jazz Age. It was a period when, according to the New York Times blurb on the book-jacket of my edition, “gin was the national drink and sex the national obsession.” If the Spanish flu truly was all that devastating—and indeed it was—it seems in these pages to have been all but forgotten. What to make of this?

I, for one, felt relieved, reassured that things will return to “normal,” to “the way things were.” I’m talking about when such things as quarantining, Zoom parties, social distancing, and cough-shaming will be rid from our daily lives. Ah, yes, soon we’ll be blowing out birthday candles, sharing drinks (and lovers perhaps) inside cramped apartments, while respiratory droplets frolic freely on the air.  I can see it now.

O.K., maybe I’m being hyperbolic. But I can’t help wondering, while rereading Gatsby in the barn behind my parents’ house, where I’ve been quarantined for the last three months, what the world will look like post-COVID-19. Are we doomed? Are masks here to stay? Or will the virus snot-rocket us into an even louder-roaring roaring twenties? If history repeats itself, I suppose a Jazz Age redux wouldn’t be so bad. 

It’s not an actual barn, by the way. There are no horses or livestock living inside. No hay. We—my family and I—just like to call it that. It’s really just a big shed. But it is red. Quiet. Smells nice—of wood, whiskey, and work. And on one side—the side facing the street—it has white double doors. Sadly, these are always kept closed. It’s the single door—the one adjacent to the woods—that I like to leave open. I like the way the sun and the air mingle playfully in the doorway. I like to sit there and watch the squirrels and chipmunks creep past. Lately, on account of a refilled, leaky bird-feeder, the local wildlife has been awfully active. There’s a red-tailed squirrel—I think it’s the same one—that likes to come right up to the threshold. He pokes his nose in. Sees me (and those “Celestial Eyes” featured on the cover of my edition, by the artist Francis Cugat). And just when he’s about to jump in my lap I stomp my foot down and he scampers off. 

Reading Gatsby is something I do every few years. Aside from the joy in revisiting the grace and precision of Fitzgerald’s prose, it’s fun to go back and see what I’ve underlined, see what hit then that doesn’t quite hit now, and vice-versa. I think of it as a sort of mental-cleansing for my otherwise clunky literary brain, a reminder that this is what a real masterpiece looks like. This time around, though, my motives were less virtuous. I simply thought that it’d be nice to read about people going to parties, since I couldn’t actually attend any myself. 

If you’re a Leo-phile, or you’ve taken high school English and have a pulse, then you’ll likely remember “Old sport.” The green light. And Nick Carraway, cast, to my mind, as the most famous (infamous?) third-wheel in literature. You may also remember Daisy Buchanan’s voice being “full of money.” And her husband Tom’s touts of white nationalism. Or, if your memory is better than mine, lines like, “that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool”; or “the hot whips of panic”; and “the silver pepper of the stars.” And who could forget the story’s finish: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” 

But during this most recent read, I came across a sentence that, although not worthy of my attention before, now seems impossible to overlook. 124 pages in, Fitzgerald writes, “There was no difference between men, in intelligence or race, so profound as the difference between the sick and the well.” On its face, it’s one of those tidy, smart-sounding sentences on the human condition that is often found in most, if not all, novels. One could, I suppose, imagine Fitzgerald patting himself on the back after penning a line like that—“Well done, old sport.” And if so, who could blame him? After all, he was just twenty-nine when Gatsby was published, and already a well-known literary figure (mostly for his novel This Side of Paradise, published five years earlier, in 1920). Yet, renown writer or not, the line evokes the kind of wisdom and self-assurance that one might expect from someone twenty years Fitzgerald’s senior, someone who’s really seen the world, who’s been around. 

To Fitzgerald’s defense, by that time, he’d done his fair share of globetrotting. Born in St. Paul, Minnesota, he left home to enroll at Princeton. Then, before graduating, he joined the Army. It was while he was stationed at Camp Sheridan, near Montgomery, Alabama, that he met Zelda. Shortly after the war ended, they moved to New York. Got married. Drank. Returned to St. Paul. Drank some more. There was a road trip to Connecticut somewhere in between, a baby girl (“Scottie”), a birthday vacation in Europe. And after a two-year stint on Long Island, the couple eventually settled in France, where Fitzgerald would write The Great Gatsby. 

Still, the line gave me pause—not least because I read it in a time when the difference between the sick and the well has never been more scrutinized. It’s also the novel’s most explicit reference to illness. Now, whether or not Fitzgerald is right in stating that the most profound difference between men is the difference between the sick and the well I’m not sure. Nor am I here to argue one way or the other. But I couldn’t help wondering if the pandemic of 1918 had been on his mind when he wrote it. However, the way it’s written in context leads me to believe otherwise.  

It comes immediately before the novel’s climax, when George Wilson, owner of an auto body shop, discovers that “Myrtle [his wife] had some sort of life apart from him in another world, and the shock had made him physically sick.” By “another world” he means another man—that man being, unbeknownst to Wilson, the rich and “cruel-bodied” Tom Buchanan. And though Wilson’s sickness is described as a physical one (later he’s reported as being “really sick, pale as his own pale hair and shaking all over”) it’s borne of the mind—of the heart—as opposed to, say, something like a microscopic, spikey-haired invader of the lungs. Fitzgerald is wise, however, to keep his axiom simple, broad, because it doesn’t take living through a war and a pandemic for one to know that the effects from any form of sickness—from a deadly disease to a broken heart—can be equally tormenting, extreme, and fatal. And what happens next in the novel exemplifies his case. There’s murder. Suicide. A whole world—Gatsby’s world—gone to ruins.

Sheesh. What happened to this essay being uplifting? 

But how can it be, when, as I write this, in the year 2020, the overall death-toll for COVID-19 cases has surpassed 500,000, and Americans are still dying simply because of the color of their skin. Which is more unfathomable? Which of their “shock” makes you more physically sick? 

A couple months after Gatsby’s death, Nick sees Tom walking “along Fifth Avenue in his alert, aggressive way.” Unable to avoid him, he tells Tom what he thinks of him, to which he replies, “You’re crazy, Nick. Crazy as hell. I don’t know what’s the matter with you.” It’s revealed, as Nick expected, that it was Tom who told Wilson of Gatsby’s being responsible for Myrtle’s death, which led Wilson to murdering Gatsby, and, ultimately, to taking his own life. Tom then goes on to justify Gatsby’s being murdered, how he (Gatsby) “ran over Myrtle like you’d run over a dog and never stopped his car.” All of which, of course, is false. Gatsby wasn’t behind the wheel; it was Daisy—a fact which Nick knows but decides not to divulge. All he says instead is that it wasn’t true. 

To me, it’s one of the saddest moments in the book. Tom’s thinking is so far gone, so closeminded and inherently bigoted, that Nick feels telling him the truth wouldn’t change a thing. After all, “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—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 made . . .” (That ellipsis is Fitzgerald’s, not mine, indicating, to my mind, the tragic continuation of people like Tom and Daisy inhabiting the world.) When it’s clear neither one has anything more to say, Nick shakes Tom’s hand—because “it seemed silly not to,” feeling as though he “were talking to a child.” Then Tom goes into a jewelry store to buy something, and that’s the last we see of him.

It’s not surprising that Fitzgerald once thought of titling Gatsby “The Death of the Red White and Blue.” And it’s easy to see how today’s headlines, almost a century later, reflect that rather grim titular description. I can’t go grocery shopping or read the news without feeling those “hot whips of panic.” So, for respite, I go to the barn. To nature. To books. Sure, those things make me feel better. But only for a short while. Then it’s back to reality. Infections rising. A lying president. Another person of color being killed by law enforcement. Breonna Taylor. George Floyd. Rayshard Brooks . . . 

But then again, in the invented world of Gatsby, there’s not much to feel great about either. Pretty much everything goes bad. Not that things that go well make for a good story. They don’t. But if rotten drivers, murder, and Tom Buchanan aren’t enough, there’s also Meyer Wolfsheim, proprietor of “The Swastika Holding Company,” who boasts of his cufflinks being made of “the finest specimens of human molars.” Perhaps that’s why Fitzgerald left out the pandemic—no more room. 

Who knows? What I do know is, there are times when life feels like one big book. Briefly gorgeous (to use the words of poet Ocean Vuong). But mostly one conflict after another. Until— 

But that can’t be. Because, unlike the novel’s Nick Carraway, people here, now, are speaking out, confronting the Tom Buchanans of the world, beating back “against the current,” in the hopes that maybe, finally, how we treat one another, in one or two very simple yet fundamental ways, will not be “borne back ceaselessly into the past,” but rather be changed for a better, more wholesome future. That, to me, is a sign of hope. And if we are to admire anything in Jay Gatsby, it is exactly that—his “extraordinary gift for hope.” 

“Gatsby turned out all right at the end,” Nick tells us. And so will we. But for real this time, without irony. And for good.