[Ahead of my annual
trip to Charlottesville with my sons, a trip that always features a good
deal of swimming
pool action, a series on pools and swimming in American history and
culture. Leading up to a special weekend post highlighting one of my favorite
pieces I’ve had the chance to write in the last year!]
On the tragic dip that’s as difficult to pin down as the man taking it.
Jay Gatsby spends his final moments relaxing in his home’s luxurious swimming pool. As Nick
Carraway is about to leave his neighbor for what turns out to be the last time,
Gatsby’s gardener arrives to drain the pool; fall is arriving and he’s worried
that “leaves’ll start falling pretty soon and then there’s always trouble with the
pipes.” But Gatsby asks him to hold off for one more day, noting to Nick, “you
know, old sport, I’ve never used that pool all summer.” And so it is during
Gatsby’s first and only dip in his own swimming pool, lying on “a pneumatic
mattress that had amused his guests during the summer,” that the grieving
George Wilson arrives, an “ashen, fantastic figure gliding toward him through
the amorphous trees.” Wilson is armed and crazed, seeking vengeance for the
death of his wife Myrtle, and kills both Gatsby and himself.
It’s a striking and evocative image and moment, as so many of Fitzgerald’s
are. And like so many others in the novel, it seems clearly symbolic—but of
what, exactly? The imminent shift in seasons feels significant—Gatsby is a novel of summer, and here
the season has ended but Gatsby is not willing to let it go, not least because
he has not yet had a chance to enjoy it. Or perhaps the pool is simply a
microcosm of Gatsby’s palatial home—the height of luxury and excess, of the Roaring 20s and their
decadent atmosphere, but offering those thrills less for its actual owner (who
barely makes use of it as anything other than a host for visitors) and more for
all those guests who come to bathe in its excesses. Or maybe it’s just the
final irony in a novel full of them—Gatsby finally takes a moment to relax, for
what feels like the first time in years, and looks what it gets him.
All of those interpretations hold water (sorry), but I would also note a historical
context that it’s easy for us 21st century readers to forget: like
so many of the novel’s crucial social and technological features (cars, Hollywood
films, recorded music), an in-ground swimming pool in the early 1920s
represented a striking innovation. The first such pools in America had been open
for less than two decades, and were generally public or communal spaces; it was
not until more than two decades later, after World War II, that they would
become part of the typical imagery of the ideal American home. So as with every aspect of Gatsby’s success, here too
he would seem to have been ahead of the curve, helping to embody the American Dream—as well as its dark and
violent undersides—as it would continue to develop for the rest of the American
Century, and into our own.
Next pool
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think?
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