The
Great Gatsby
1925
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940)
Read an excerpt from The Great Gatsby
The
Great Gatsby
1925
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940)
Read an excerpt from The Great Gatsby
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Under the dripping bare lilac trees a large open car wascoming up the drive. It stopped. Daisy's face, tipped side-
ways beneath a three-cornered lavender hat, looked out at
me with a bright ecstatic smile.
"Is this absolutely where you live, my dearest one?"
The exhilarating ripple of her voice was a wild tonic inthe rain. I had to follow the sound of it for am moment, up
and down, with my ear alone before any words came
through. A damp streak of hair lay like a dash of blue paint
across her cheek and her hand was wet with glistening drops
as I took it to help her from the car.
"Are you in love with me?" she said low in my ear. "Or
why did I have to come alone?"
"That's the secret of Castle Rackrent. Tell your chauffeurto go far away and spend an hour."
"Come back in an hour, Ferdie." Then in a grave mur-mur, "His name is Ferdie."
"Does the gasoline affect his nose?"
"I don't think so," she said innocently. "Why?"
We went in. To my overwhelming surprise the living
room was deserted.
"Well, that's funny!" I exclaimed.
"What's funny?"
She turned her head as there was a light, dignified knock-
ing at the front door. I went out and opened it. Gatsby, pale
as death, with his hands plunged like weights in his coat
pockets, was standing in a puddle of water glaring tragically
into my eyes.
With his hands still in his coat pockets he stalked by me
into the hall, turned sharply as if he were on a wire and
disappeared into the living room. It wasn't a bit funny.
Aware of the loud beating of my own heart I pulled to door
to against the increasing rain.
For half a minute there wasn't a sound. Then from the
living room I heard a sort of choking murmur and part of
a laugh followed by Daisy's voice on a clear artificial note.
"I certainly am awfully glad to see you again."
A pause; it endured horribly. I had nothing to do in thehall so I went into the room.
Gatsby, his hands still in his pockets, was reclining against
the mantelpiece in a strained counterfeit of perfect ease, even
of boredom. His head leaned back so far that is rested against
the face of a defunct mantelpiece clock and from this position
his distraught eyes stared down at Daisy who was sitting
frightened but graceful on the edge of a stiff chair.
"We've met before," muttered Gatsby. His eyes glanced
momentarily at me and his lips parted with an abortive
attempt at a laugh. Luckily the clock took this moment to
tilt dangerously at the pressure of his head, whereupon he
turned and caught it with trembling fingers and set it back
in place. Then he sat down, rigidly, his elbow on the arm
of the sofa and his chin in his hand.
"I'm sorry about the clock," he said.
My own face had now assumed a deep tropical burn. I
couldn't muster up a single commonplace out of the thou-
sand in my head.
"It's an old clock," I told them idiotically.
I think we all believed for a moment that it had smashed
in pieces on the floor.
"We haven't met for many years," said Daisy, her voice
as matter-of-fact as it could ever be.
"Five years next November."
The automatic quality of Gatsby's answer set us all back
at least another minute. I had them both on their feet with
the desperate suggestion that they help me make tea in the
kitchen when the demoniac Finn brought it in on a tray.
Amid the welcome confusion of cups and cakes a certain
physical decency established itself. Gatsby got himself into
a shadow while and while Daisy and I talked looked conscien-
tiously from one to the other of us with tense unhappy eyes.
However, as calmness wasn't an end in itself I made an
excuse at the first possible moment and got to my feet.
"Where are you going?" demanded Gatsby in immediate
alarm.
"I'll be back."
"I've got to speak with you about something before yougo."
He followed me wildly into the kitchen, closed the doorand whispered "Oh, God!" in a miserable way.
"What's the matter?"
"This is a terrible mistake," he said, shaking his head
from side to side, "a terrible, terrible mistake."
"You're just embarrassed, that's all," and luckily I added:
"Daisy's embarrassed too."
"She's embarrassed?" he repeated incredulously.
"Just as much as you are."
"Don't talk so loud.""You're acting like a little boy," I broke out impatiently.
"Not only that but you're rude. Daisy's sitting in there all
alone."
He raised his had to stop my words, looked at me withunforgettable reproach and opening the door cautiously
went back into the other room.
I walked out the back way-just as Gastby had when he
had made his nervous circuit of the house half an hour
before-and ran for a huge black knotted tree whose
massed leaves made a fabric against the rain. Once more it
was pouring and my irregular lawn, well-shaved by
Gatsby's gardener, abounded in small muddy swamps and
prehistoric marshes. There was nothing to look at from
under the tree except Gatsby's enormous house so I stared
at it, like Kant at his church steeple, for half an hour. A
brewer had built it early in the "period" craze, a decade
before, and there was a story that he'd agreed to pay five
years' taxes on all the neighboring cottages if the owners
would have their roofs thatched with straw. Perhaps their
refusal took the heart out of his plan to Found a Family-he
went into an immediate decline. His children sold his house
with the black wreath still on the door. Americans, while
occasionally willing to be serfs, have always been obstinate
about being peasantry.
After half an hour the sun shone again, and the grocer's
automobile rounded Gatsby's drive with the raw material
for his servants' dinner-I felt sure he wouldn't eat a spoon-
ful. A maid began opening the upper windows of his house,
appeared momentarily in each and, leaning from a large
central bay, spat meditatively into the garden. It was time I
went back. While the rain continued it had seemed like the
murmur of their voices, rising and swelling a little, now and
then, with gusts of emotion. But in the new silence I felt that
silence had fallen within the house too.
I went in-after making every possible noise in the
kitchen short of pushing over the stove-but I don't believe
they heard a sound. They were sitting at either end of the
couch looking at each other as if some question had been
asked or was in the air, and every vestige of embarrassment
was gone. Daisy's face was smeared with tears and when I
came in she jumped up and began wiping at it with her
handkerchief before a mirror. But there was a change in
Gatsby that was simply confounding. He literally glowed;
without a word or a gesture of exultation a new well-being
radiated from him and filled the little room.
"Oh, hello, old sport," he said, as if he hadn't seen me for
years. I thought for a moment he was going to shake hands.
"It's stopped raining."
"Has it?" When he realized what I was talking about,
that there were twinkle-bells of sunshine in the room, he
smiled like a weather man, like an ecstatic patron of recur-
rent light, and repeated the news to Daisy. "What do you
think of that? It's stopped raining."
"I'm glad, Jay." Her throat, full of aching, grieving
beauty, told only of her unexpected joy.
"I want you and Daisy to come over to my house," he
said. "I'd like to show her around."
"You're sure you want me to come?"
"Absolutely, old sport."Daisy went upstairs to wash her face-too late I thought
with humiliation of my towels-while Gatsby and I waited
on the lawn.
"My house looks well, doesn't it?" he demanded. "See
how the whole front of it catches the light."
I agreed that it was splendid.
"Yes." His eyes went over it, every arched door and
square tower. "It took me just three years to earn the money
that bought it."
"I thought you inherited your money.""I did, old sport," he said automatically, "but I lost most
of it in the big panic-the panic of the war."
I think he hardly knew what he was saying, for when I
asked him what business he was in he answered "That's my
affair," before he realized that it wasn't an appropriate
reply.
"Oh, I've been in several things," he corrected himself. "I
was in the drug business and then I was in the oil business.
But I'm not in either one now." He looked at me with more
attention. "Do you mean you've been thinking over what I
proposed the other night?"
Before I could answer, Daisy came out of the house andtwo rows of brass buttons on her dress gleamed in the
sunlight.
"That huge place there?" she cried pointing.
"Do you like it?"
"I love it, but I don't see how you live there all alone."
"I keep it always full of interesting people, night and day.
People who do interesting things. Celebrated people."
Instead of taking the short cut along the Sound we wentdown to the road and entered by the big postern. With
enchanting murmurs Daisy admired this aspect or that of
the feudal silhouette against the sky, admired the gardens,
the sparkling odor of jonquils and the frothy odor of haw-
thorn and plum blossoms and the pale gold odor of kiss-me-
at-the-gate. It was strange to reach the marble steps and find
no stir of bright dresses in and out the door and hear no
sound but bird voices in the trees.
And inside as we wandered through Marie Antoinette
music rooms and Restoration salons I felt that there were
guests concealed behind every couch and table, under orders
to be breathlessly silent until we had passed through. As
Gatsby closed the door of "the Merton College Library" I
could have sworn I heard the owl-eyed man break into
ghostly laughter.
We went upstairs, through period bedrooms swathed in
rose and lavender silk and vivid with new flowers, through
dressing rooms and poolrooms, and bathrooms with sunken
baths-including into one chamber where a dishevelled
man in pajamas was doing liver exercises on the floor. It was
Mr. Klipspringer, the "boarder." I had seen him wandering
hungrily about the beach that morning. Finally we came to
Gatsby's own apartment, a bedroom and a bath and an
Adam study, where we sat down and drank a glass of some
Chartreuse he took from a cupboard in the wall.
He hadn't once ceased looking at Daisy and I think he
revalued everything in the house according to the measure of
response it drew from her well-loved eyes. Sometimes, too,
he stared around at his possessions in a dazed way as though
in her actual and astounding presence none of it was any
longer real. Once he nearly toppled down a flight of stairs.
His bedroom was the simplest room of all-except where
the dresser was garnished with a toilet set of pure dull gold.
Daisy took the brush with delight and smoothed her hair,
whereupon Gatsby sat down and shaded his eyes and began
to laugh.
"It's the funniest thing, old sport," he said hilariously. "I
can't-when I try to-"
He had passed visibly through two states and was enter-
ing upon a third. After his embarrassment at his unreason-
ing joy he was consumed with wonder at her presence. He
had been so full of the idea so long, dreamed it right through
to the end, waited with his teeth set, so to speak, at an
inconceivable pitch of intensity. Now, in the reaction, he
was running down like and overwound clock.
Recovering himself in a minute he opened for us two
hulking patent cabinets which held his massed suits and
dressing gowns and ties, and his shirts piled like bricks in
stacks a dozen high.
"I've got a man in England who buys me clothes. He
sends over a selection of things at the beginning of each
season, spring and fall."
He took out a pile of shirts and began throwing them one
by one before us, shirts of sheer linen and thick silk and fine
flannel which lost their folds as they fell and covered the
table in many-colored disarray. While we admired he
brought more and the soft rich heap mounted higher-
shirts with stripes and scrolls and plaids in coral and apple
green and lavender and faint orange with monograms of
Indian blue. Suddenly with a strained sound Daisy bent her
head into the shirts and began to cry stormily.
"They're such beautiful shirts," she sobbed, her voice
muffled in the thick folds. "It makes me sad because I've
never seen such-such beautiful shirts before."
After the house we were to see the grounds and the
swimming pool and the hydroplane and the midsummer
flowers-but outside Gatsby's window it began to rain
again so we stood in a row looking at the corrugated surface
of the Sound.
"If it wasn't for that mist we could see your home across
the bay," said Gatsby, "You always have a green light that
burns all night at the end of your dock."
Daisy put her arm through his abruptly but he seemed
absorbed in what he had just said. Possibly it had occurred
to him that the colossal significance of that light had now
vanished forever. Compared to the great distance that had
separated him from Daisy it had seemed very near to her,
almost touching her. It had seemed as close as a star to the
moon. Now it was again a green light on a dock. His count
of enchanted objects had diminished by one.
I began to walk about the room, examining various in-
definite objects in the half darkness. A large photograph of
an elderly man in a yachting costume attracted me, hung on
the wall over his desk.
"Who's this?"
"That? That's Mr. Dan Cody, old sport."
The name sounded faintly familiar.
"He's dead now. He used to be my best friend years ago."
There was a small picture of Gatsby, also in yachting
costume, on the bureau-Gatsby with his head thrown back
defiantly-taken apparently when he was about eighteen.
"I adore it!" exclaimed Daisy. "The pompadour! You
never told me you had a pompadour-or a yacht."
"Look at this," said Gatsby quickly. "Here's a lot of
clippings-about you."
"They stood side by side examining it. I was going to ask
to see the rubies when the phone rang and Gatsby took up
the receiver.
"Yes.. Well, I can't talk now.. I can't talk now, old
sport.. I said a small town.. He must know what a
small town is.. Well, he's no use to us if Detroit is his idea
of a small town.."
He rang off.
"Come here quick!" cried Daisy at the window.
The rain was still falling, but the darkness had parted in
the west, and there was a pink and golden billow of foamy
clouds above the sea.
"Look at that," she whispered, and then after a moment:
"I'd like to just get one of those pink clouds and put you in
it and push you around."
I tried to go then, but they wouldn't hear of it; perhaps
my presence made them feel more satisfactorily alone.
"I know what we'll do," said Gatsby. "We'll have Klip-
springer play the piano."
He went out of the room calling "Ewing!" and returned
in a few minutes accompanied by an embarrassed, slightly
worn young man with shell-rimmed glasses and scanty
blonde hair. He was now decently clothed in a "sport shirt"
open at the neck, sneakers and duck trousers of a nebulous
hue.
"Did we interrupt your exercise?" inquired Daisy po-
litely.
"I was asleep," cried Mr. Klipspringer, in a spasm of
embarrassment. "That is, I'd been asleep. Then I got
up.."
"Klipspringer plays the piano," said Gatsby, cutting him
off. "Don't you, Ewing, old sport?"
"I don't play well. I don't-I hardly play at all. I'm all out
of prac-"
"We'll go downstairs," interrupted Gatsby. He flipped a
switch. The grey windows disappeared as the house glowed
full of light.
In the music room Gatsby turned on a solitary lampbeside the piano. He lit Daisy's cigarette from a trembling
match and sat down with her on a couch far across the room
where there was no light save what the gleaming floor
bounced in from the hall.
When Klipspringer had played "The Love Nest" he
turned around on the bench and searched unhappily for
Gatsby in the gloom.
"I'm all out of practice, you see. I told you I couldn't play.
I'm all out of prac-"
"Don't talk so much, old sport," commanded Gatsby.
"Play!"
In the morning,
In the evening,
Ain't we got fun?
Outside the wind was loud and there was a faint flow of
thunder along the Sound. All the lights were going on in
West Egg now; the electric trains, men-carrying, were
plunging home through the rain from New York. It was the
hour of a profound human change and excitement was
generating on the air.
One thing's sure and nothing's surer
The rich get richer and the poor get-children
In the meantime,
In between time?
As I went over to say goodbye I saw that the expression
of bewilderment had come back into Gatsby's face, as
though a faint doubt had occurred to him as to the quality
of his happiness. Almost five years! There must have
been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled
short of his dreams-not through her own fault but because
of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond
her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with
a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out
with every bright feather that drifted his way. No amount
of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up
in his ghostly heart.
As I watched him he adjusted himself a little, visibly. His
hand took hold of hers and as she said something low in his
ear he turned toward her with a rush of emotion. I think
that voice held him most with its fluctuating, feverish
warmth because it couldn't be over-dreamed-that voice
was a deathless song.
They had forgotten me but Daisy glanced up and held out
her hand; Gatsby didn't know me now at all. I looked once
more at them and they looked back at me, remotely, pos-
sessed by intense life. Then I went out of the room and
down the marble steps into the rain, leaving them there
together.
About this time an ambitious young reporter from New
York arrived one morning at Gatsby's door and asked him
if he had anything to say.
"Anything to say about what?" inquired Gatsby politely.
"Why, ?any statement to give out."
It transpired after a confused five minutes that the man
Had heard Gatsby's name around his office in connection
which he either couldn't reveal or didn't fully understand.
This was his day off and with laudable initiative he had
hurried out "to see."
It was a random shot, and yet the reporter's instinct was
right. Gatsby's notoriety, spread about by the hundreds
who had accepted his hospitality and had so become authorities
upon his past, had increased all summer long until he fell just
short of being news. Contemporary legends such as the
"underground pipe-line to Canada" attached themselves to
him, and there was one persistent story that he didn't live in
a house at all, but in a boat that looked like a house and was
moved secretly up and down the Long Island shore. Just
why these inventions were source of satisfaction to James
Gatz of North Dakota, wasn't easy to say.
James Gatz-that was really, or at least legally, his name.
He had changed it at the age of seventeen and at the specific
moment that witnessed the beginning of his career-when
he saw Dan Cody's yacht drop anchor over the most insidi-
ous flat on Lake Superior. It was James Gatz who had been
loafing along the beach that afternoon in a torn green jersey
and a pair of canvas pants, but it was already Jay Gatsby
who borrowed a row-boat, pulled out to the Tuolomee and
informed Cody that a wind might catch him and break him
up in half an hour.
I supposed he'd had the name ready for a long time, even
then. His parents were shiftless and unsuccessful farm peo-
ple-his imagination had never really accepted them as his
parents at all. The truth was that jay Gatsby, of West Egg,
Long Island, 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 Busi-
ness, the service of a vast, vulgar and meretricious beauty.
So he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen
year old boy would be likely to invent, and to this concep-
tion he was faithful to the end.
For over a year he had been beating his way along the
south shore of Lake Superior as a clam digger and a salmon
fisher or in any other capacity that brought him food and
bed. His brown, hardening body lived naturally through the
half fierce, half lazy work of the bracing days. He knew
women early and since they spoiled him he became con-
temptuous of them, of young virgins because they were
ignorant, of the others because they were hysterical about
things which in his overwhelming self-absorption he took
for granted.
But his heart was in a constant, turbulent riot. The most
grotesque and fantastic conceits haunted him in his bed at
night. A universe of ineffable gaudiness spun itself out in his
brain while the clock ticked on the wash-stand and the
moon soaked with wet light his tangled clothes upon the
floor. Each night he added to the pattern of his fancies until
drowsiness closed down upon some vivid scene with an
oblivious embrace. For a while these reveries provided an
outlet for his imagination; they were a satisfactory hint of
the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world
was founded securely on a fairy's wing.
An instinct toward his future glory had led him, some
months before, to the small Lutheran college of St. Olaf in
southern Minnesota. He stayed there two weeks, dismayed
at its ferocious indifference to the drums of his destiny, to
destiny itself, and despising the janitor's work with which
he was to pay his way through. Then he drifted back to
Lake Superior, and he was still searching for something to
do on the day that Dan Cody's yacht dropped anchor in the
shallows along the shore.
Cody was fifty years old then, a product of the Nevada
silver fields, of the Yukon, of every rush for metal since
Seventy-five.
The transactions in Montana copper thatmade him many times a millionaire found him physically
robust but on the verge of softmindedness, and suspecting
this an infinite number of women tried to separate him from
his money. The none too savory ramifications by which Ella
Kaye, the newspaper woman, played Madame de Mainte-
non
to his weakness and sent him to sea in a yacht, werecommon knowledge to the turgid journalism of 1902. He
had been coasting along all too hospitable shores for five
years when he turned up as James Gatz's destiny in Little
Girl Bay.
To young Gatz, resting on his oars and looking up at the
railed deck, that yacht represented all the beauty and
glamor in the world. I suppose he smiled at Cody-he had
probably discovered that people liked him when he smiled.
At any rate Cody asked him a few questions (one of them
elicited the brand new name) and found that he was quick,
and extravagantly ambitious. A few days later he took him
to Duluth and bought him a blue coat, six pair of white
duck trousers and a yachting cap. And when the Tuolomee
left for the West Indies and the Barbary Coast Gatsby left
too.
He was employed in a vague personal capacity-while he
remained with Cody he was in turn steward, mate, skipper,
secretary and even jailor, for Dan Cody sober knew what
lavish doings Dan Cody drunk might soon be about and he
provided for such contingencies by reposing more and more
trust in Gatsby. The arrangement lasted five years during
which the boat went three times around the continent. It
might have lasted indefinitely except for the fact that Ella
Kaye came on board one night in Boston and a week later
Dan Cody inhospitably died.
I remember the portrait of him up in Gatsby's bedroom,
a grey, florid man with a hard empty face-the pioneer
debauchee who during one phase of American life brought
back to the eastern seaboard the savage violence of the
frontier brothel and saloon. It was indirectly due to Cody
that Gatsby drank so little. Sometimes in the course of gay
parties women used to rub champagne into his hair; for
himself he formed the habit of letting liquor alone.
And it was from Cody that he inherited money-a legacy
of twenty-five thousand dollars. He didn't get it. He never
understood the legal device that was used against him but
what remained of the millions went intact to Ella Kaye. He
was left with his singularly appropriate education; the
vague contour of Jay Gatsby had filled out to the substan-
tiality of a man.
An allusion to the novel by Maria Edgeworth (1767-1849) published in 1801.
"Does the gasoline affect his nose?"
On pp. 18 of the novel, Daisy excitedly gossips to Nick about her butler's nose: "Do you want to hear about the butler's nose?.he used to be the silver polisher for some people in New York that had a silver service for two hundred people. He had to polish it from morning till night until finally it began to affect his nose."
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli
Before Daisy married Tom Buchanan, she and Gatsby had a love affair in the fall of 1917.
Refers to the narrator's housekeeper: "I had a dog, at least I had him for a few days until he ran away, and an old Dodge and a Finnish woman who made my bed and cooked breakfast and muttered Finnish wisdom to herself over the electric stove."
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, Matthew J. Bruccoli, ed. pp. 8.
The German philospher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) was said to have been in the habit of looking at a steeple when he was thinking.
"I thought you inherited your money."
Gatsy's fortune likely came from his shady business dealings with Meyer Wolfsheim, most likely bootlegging.
Gatsby owned drugstores; he did not deal in hard drugs. Between 1919 and 1933 the Eighteenth Amendment prohibited sale of alcoholic beverages. However, drugstores were permitted to sell whiskey by prescription, and some of them were fronts for bootlegging.
".what I proposed the other night"
Gatsby, a suspected bootlegger, had asked Nick to work for him: "Well, this would interest you. It wouldn't take up much of your time and you might pick up a nice bit of money. It happens to be a confidential sort of thing."
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli. pp. 88.
Gatsby chose the ostentatious, sprawling home just across the bay from Daisy; its lavishness was specifically intended to impress her. Nick describes the manse thusly: "The (house) on my right was a colossal affair by any standard-it was a factual imitation of some Hôtel de Ville in Normandy, with a tower on one side, spanking new under a thin beard of raw ivy, and a marble swimming pool and more than forty acres of lawn and garden." F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli. pp. 9.
The Long Island Sound, just off of Manhasset Neck, which Fitzgerald refers to as "East Egg" in the novel. Daisy lives in East Egg, a more upscale enclave than West Egg (Great Neck).
A reference to Gatsby's dubious claim to be an "Oxford Man." One of the university's colleges, Merton is named after its founder, Walter of Merton.
One of Gatsby's party guests: "A stout, middle-aged man with enormous owl-eye spectacles was sitting somewhat drunk on the edge of a great table, staring with unsteady concentration at the shelves of books." Owl Eyes seems to sense that Gatsby's identity and surroundings are fabricated rather than genuine, for he is amazed that the books in Gatsby's library are real: "See!.It's a bona fide piece of printed material."
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli. pp. 49-50
It is likely that rather than simply being a boarder of Gatsby's, Klipspringer was a business connection of dubious legitimacy.
Daisy and her husband, Tom, kept a green light burning all night at the end of their dock. The proximity of the light to Daisy made it a symbol of Gatsby' dreams: "Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us."
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli. pp. 189
"underground pipe-line to Canada" *
One of the myths of Prohibition was that alcohol was being piped into the United States from Canada.
informed Cody that a wind might catch him
The meeting between Gatsby and Cody was based on the boyhood experience of Fitzgerald's Great Neck friend Robert Kerr. Fitzgerald wrote to Kerr from France in 1924: "The part of what you told me which I am including in my novel is the ship, yacht I mean, + the mysterious yachtsman whose mistress was Nellie Bly. I have my hero occupy the same position you did + obtain it in the same way." See Joseph Corso, "One Not-Forgotten Summer Night: Sources for Fictional Symbols of American Characters in The Great Gatsby," Fitzgerald/Hemingway Annual 1976, pp. 8-33.
Gatsby is seeking to meet the standard of the beautiful and best. Philosopher Plato (427-347 B.C.) refers to these forms, or ideas, as the "most beautiful": The concept of beauty, or what Plato calls "the beautiful itself" or "Beauty," provides a standard with which to judge individual objects as being more or less beautiful." Gatsby aspires to nothing less than perfection.
The Barbary Coast is the area of North Africa from Egypt to the Atlantic; but it is uncertain whether Cody's yacht was capable of transatlantic voyages. During the nineteenth century the San Francisco honky-tonk district was called the Barbary Coast; it is possible that Fitzgerald was referring to this destination.
* Taken from Matthew J. Bruccoli's annotated version of The Great Gatsby. Collier Books, 1992.