“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.”
— The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
The first draft of Fitzgerald’s novel would be completed in a villa in Valescure, near St. Raphael in France during the summer and fall of 1924. In the last week of October 1924, Scott, positively glowing with satisfaction, mailed a copy of his novel to his literary agent Harold Ober and his editor Max Perkins in New York. Perkins wrote back on November 18th: “Dear Scott, I think the novel is a wonder.” The novel not only had “glamour” in abundance, it also had a magical “mystic atmosphere.” Max was going to read it a second time, and when he had, he was clearly no less thrilled: “It is an extraordinary book, suggestive of all sorts of thoughts and moods … It’s magnificent.” [1] Max did, however, have a few minor criticisms, some of which related to the censors.
One of those concerns was Myrtle’s death scene. When the locals arrive at the scene of the accident they see something truly shocking; Myrtle’s left breast is “swinging loose like a flap.” It had been “ripped” off by the car. Max wondered if it was a little too graphic. He also wondered if the word ‘orgastic’ — the word Scott used to describe the vision the young James Gaz had of his future — was the word he was looking for and if it was the word he was looking for, did he think it might be just a little too ‘dirty’? Scott, who had now moved on to Italy, had written back from Rome saying it was absolutely the word he’d intended and “not a bit dirty.” [2] It was the adjective form of ‘orgasm’ and described “the intended ecstasy” of his vision. In light of the court ruling over James Joyce’s Ulysses and Dreiser’s The Genius, his publisher Scribners couldn’t be too careful. They had no desire at all to fall foul of the censorship laws. Scott understood this but it was the one thing he held firm on. When Gatsby reaches put his hand toward the green light it is a moment of pure ecstasy both in the religious sense of the word and the sexual sense. It came from the Greek word ‘ekstasis’, which means ‘to stand outside of, or transcend’. Poets and priests had used it for years. It was in such a state that God could enter you. It was then that your thoughts would reach beyond the material world to another level of consciousness entirely. Writers like Oscar Wilde had always regarded romantic outcasts like Keats and Shelley as ‘princes of beauty’. Wilde would have had no problem using the word. It conveyed everything that was exuberant, erotic and far reaching about Gatsby’s vision. It was whilst Gatsby was in this state that his mind had been able to “romp” like “the mind of God” — a state in which he was able to have all these colossal, outlandish ideas. The poet W. B. Yeats had used a similar phrase — ‘orgiastic’ — in an essay he had written on John Millington Synge ten years before. Like Scott he had used it to describe the moment that life “outleaps its limits” — when a man either escapes or refuses to accept the triviality and the temporariness of an ordinary life. [3] Half a century later, the author Umberto Eco would write that the “step between ecstatic vision and sinful frenzy” was all too brief. The line between the religious ‘ecstatic vision’ and the Dionysian vision was thin indeed. Gatsby had built his dream in a state of heightened consciousness — when he was thinking not like a man, but like a god.
The early Romantic poet and sentimentalist, Thomas Campbell, had alluded to something similar. Writing of a beautiful mountain scene in his 1799 poem, The Pleasures of Hope, Campbell remarked that “distance lent enchantment to the view”. Get too close to the mountain and the spell would have been broken. It was the opinion of the poet that the brutal reality of life, the details of the rocks and the crevices, didn’t just destroy the view, it destroyed the hope — the divine or sublime presence that provided the ecstasy of the experience. The closer you got to the mountain, the more nature would be pictured “too severely true”. [4] When he kisses Daisy in Chapter Five of the novel, Scott writes that Gatsby’s count of “enchanted objects” had been reduced by one. It was the distance that had separated him from Daisy that had filled him with all those miraculous pleasures of hope and given him the drive to succeed. It was the dream of Daisy that he had sought for all that time, the light she had cast on his hopeless world. The mystery of the thing was everything. Without the mystery there was only ever disappointment, disillusionment.
Fitzgerald would later tell his friend Anthony Buttitta that this is why he had cut his short story, Absolution, as the first chapter in Gatsby. The story, about a young Catholic boy attending confession, had been intended as the novel’s prologue. It would have explained his origins, a clear cut view of the man he was. Cutting it had served to preserve the novel’s mystery and suspense. He believed that this was why The Great Gatsby had worked so well as a novel. [5] The ‘future’ — always so mysterious and undetermined — was the one thing in life you didn’t know, the one thing that was truly devoid of disappointment. The priest in Absolution had said the same thing of the amusement park: “don’t get up close .. if you do you’ll only feel the heat and the sweat and the life.” [6] As Campbell writes in his poem, the hills are only glittering because of the way the sunlight of the summit mingles with the sky. At a distance there was a “heavenly power” that overwhelmed the senses, filled the eye with rapture and the heart with hope. It’s an illusion, yes, but the pleasure that it gave was real. In February 1924 a Brooklyn newspaper was saying the same thing about Manhattan: its glamour and enchantment was more profound when experienced from the more dimly lit suburbs of Long Island and Queens. [7] Hearst journalist, David M. Church, went one further and used Campbell’s phrase to describe the reason for why so many American authors, including the author of Babbit, Sinclair Lewis, were now writing of America from Europe. In Paris, Rome and London, men like Lewis were able to write about America with more passion and more perspective. In Europe, there wasn’t the inconvenient truth of prohibition to take away the shine. [8]
Traditionally, it is the past that ‘recedes’, and the future that ‘approaches’. Scott had turned the whole thing on its head. It was the things that eluded us in life that got us up in the morning, the things that remained infinitely beyond our grasp — not the things that ‘approached’ but the things that ‘receded’. If only there was some way of turning the whole thing around and recapturing life’s mystery, of repeating the past as the future. As someone who was discovering that life only ever ended in disappointment, it was becoming clear that the fuel in life, was the future and not the past. That’s where life’s promise lay— in the unreachable. It was all part of an esoteric tradition that stretched back to ancient times.
Like the priest in Absolution, Gatsby’s view of reality has been altered. He’s spent the best part of five years in a euphoric state. The ‘green light’ at the end of the dock has catalysed his future. It’s been an instrument of divination, and through it he has been able to unlock all that wonderful potential. As the novel evolved, the strength and significance of that light had grown exponentially. Scott had seen it repeated in various contexts over the years — ‘the green light that lingers in the west’ that Coleridge had written about, the ‘green light of the soul’ that the Theosphists talked about, the light on top of the Seamen’s Church Institute in Manhattan that had gone out just as they were leaving for Europe, the little green lanterns of hope the Titanic survivors had spoken about. [9] And every time he saw it, that little green light would acquire a brand new layer of meaning, the image resonating like a note played in several different octaves, offering new insight and new direction, encoding itself into his own personal semiology.
In the first handwritten drafts of the novel, the image had originally been conceived as two green lights that burned all night at the end of Daisy’s dock but this anchored the symbol in matters than were too earthly, too practical. [10] Making it one single green light — The Green Light that burned at the end of the dock — elevated it to the level of poetry, the potency and singularity of the image making it all the more memorable and profound and giving us the nudge to read it both literally and figuratively. It was another of those power sources, a fuel. The word just had to be ‘orgastic’. There was no other way of describing it.
[1] ‘Dear Scott, November 18, November 20, 1924, A Life In Letters, F. Scott Fitzgerald, pp.86-87
[2] ‘Dear Max, January 24, 1925’, Dear Scott, Dear Max, pp.92-93
[3] ‘Synge and the Ireland of His Time’, W.B. Yeats, The Cutting of an Agate, Macmillan and Company, 1912, p.169
[4] The Pleasures of Hope with Other Poems, Thomas Campbell (1799), Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme , Brown, and Green, 1825.
[5] After the Gay Times, Tony Buttitta, Viking Press, 1974, p.61
[6] Absolution, F. Scott Fitzgerald, American Mercury, June 1923, p.149
[7] ‘Distance Lends Enchantment’, Brooklyn Life, February 2, 1924, p.23
[8] Daily News Letter, David M Church (International News Service), December 13, 1923, p.9
[9] ‘Astor Memorial Light Goes out on Titanic Anniversary’, New York Daily News, April 16, 1924, p.6. The Green Light stood on top of the Titanic Memorial Tower at the Seamen’s Church Institute. According to the newspapers a fire broke out at the institute and for the first time in eleven years the green light had gone out. The fire is said to have occurred twelve years to the day that Titanic sank. Two weeks later, Scott Fitzgerald sailed for Europe to complete Gatsby.
[10] The Great Gatsby: An Edition of the Manuscript, F. Scott Fitzgerald, ed. James L. W. West and Doc C. Skemer, Cambridge University Press, 2022, p.76. Scott changed “You always have two green lights that burn all night at the end of your dock” to read, “You always have a green light that burns all night at the end of your dock” (TGG, p.12). It paved the way for writing, “Gatsby believed in THE green light” at the end of the book. Things that are important tend be both singular and definitive.