Trimalchio: An Early Version of The Great Gatsby

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him,

one of those men that reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty that everything afterwards savours of anti-climax.

On the contrary, Jordan seemed to drift along in an arrested physical adolescence, and her greatest promise was to such men as me, who seek no love in a woman save what they have aroused deliberately and with difficulty themselves.

and yet there’s something in that voice of hers. . . .

His count of enchanted objects had diminished by one.

“Women are funny people,” he exclaimed, as we reached the Plaza. “By God, they’ll do anything for a little excitement.”

I hesitated whether to tell him the truth, that Gatsby hadn’t even been driving the car, but I was afraid to excite him any more.

I can’t play tennis or anything.

one low dog to

Gatsby’s life seemed to have had the same accidental quality as his death.

and what else it included. I kept wondering until last winter, when Wolfshiem was tried (but not convicted) on ten charges ranging from simple bribery to dealing in stolen bonds.

For a moment I thought she was talking about Daisy’s accident, but she wasn’t.

Kant at his church steeple: The German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) was said to gaze at a church steeple that was visible from his writing room while he contemplated the mysteries of metaphysics. Kant’s

insistence that knowledge is limited to the world of phenomena, and that attempts to know things in themselves will fail, is a theme of this novel.

“The compensation of a very early success is a conviction that life is a romantic matter,” he later wrote. “In the best sense one stays young.”