April 7, 2025: A Great Gatsby Centennial: Gatsby’s Pool

[On April 10th,1925, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby was publishedby Charles Scribner’s Sons. While I havemy problems with Gatsby, it remains one of our most influential and importantnovels, and one that opens up so many AmericanStudies contexts. So this week I’llhighlight a handful of them, leading up to a weekend post featuring fellowGatsbyStudiers!]

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 NickCarraway 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 the gardeneris worried that “leaves’ll start falling pretty soon and then there’s alwaystrouble 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.” Andso 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 thegrieving George Wilson arrives, an “ashen, fantastic figure gliding toward himthrough the amorphous trees.” Wilson is armed and crazed, seeking vengeance forthe tragic 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’sare. And like so many others in the novel, it seems clearly symbolic—but ofwhat, exactly? The imminent shift in seasons feels significant—Gatsby is a novel of summer, and herethe season has ended but Gatsby is not willing to let it go, not least becausehe has not yet had a chance to enjoy it. Or perhaps the pool is simply amicrocosm of Gatsby’s palatial home—the height of luxury and excess, of the Roaring 20s and theirdecadent atmosphere, but offering those thrills less for its actual owner (whobarely makes use of it as anything other than a host for visitors) and more forall those guests who come to bathe in its excesses. Or maybe it’s just thefinal irony in a novel full of them—Gatsby finally takes a moment to relax, forwhat 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 historicalcontext that it’s easy for us 21st century readers to forget: likeso many of the novel’s crucial social and technological features (cars, Hollywoodfilms, recorded music), an in-ground swimming pool in the early 1920srepresented a striking innovation. The first such pools in America had been openfor less than two decades, and were generally public or communal spaces; it wasnot until more than two decades later, after World War II, that they wouldbecome part of the typical imagery of the ideal American home. So as with every aspect of Gatsby’s success, here toohe would seem to have been ahead of the curve, helping to embody the American Dream—as well as its dark andviolent undersides—as it would continue to develop for the rest of the AmericanCentury, and into our own.

NextGatsbyStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What doyou think? Takes on Fitzgerald’s novel or its contexts?