of a century after my father, and a little later I participated in that delayed Teutonic migration known
as the Great War. I enjoyed the counter-raid so thoroughly that I came back restless. Instead of being
the warm centre of the world, the Middle West now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe—so I
decided to go East and learn the bond business. Everybody I knew was in the bond business, so I
supposed it could support one more single man. All my aunts and uncles talked it over as if they were
choosing a prep school for me, and finally said, “Why—ye-es,” with very grave, hesitant faces. Father
agreed to finance me for a year, and after various delays I came East, permanently, I thought, in the
spring of twenty-two.
The practical thing was to find rooms in the city, but it was a warm season, and I had just left a
country of wide lawns and friendly trees, so when a young man at the office suggested that we take a
house together in a commuting town, it sounded like a great idea. He found the house, a weather-
beaten cardboard bungalow at eighty a month, but at the last minute the firm ordered him to
Washington, and I went out to the country alone. 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.
It was lonely for a day or so until one morning some man, more recently arrived than I, stopped me
on the road.
“How do you get to West Egg village?” he asked helplessly.
I told him. And as I walked on I was lonely no longer. I was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler.
He had casually conferred on me the freedom of the neighbourhood.
And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in
fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.
There was so much to read, for one thing, and so much fine health to be pulled down out of the
young breath-giving air. I bought a dozen volumes on banking and credit and investment securities,
and they stood on my shelf in red and gold like new money from the mint, promising to unfold the
shining secrets that only Midas and Morgan and Maecenas knew. And I had the high intention of
reading many other books besides. I was rather literary in college—one year I wrote a series of very
solemn and obvious editorials for the Yale News—and now I was going to bring back all such things
into my life and become again that most limited of all specialists, the “well-rounded man.” This isn’t
just an epigram—life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all.
It was a matter of chance that I should have rented a house in one of the strangest communities in
North America. It was on that slender riotous island which extends itself due east of New York—and
where there are, among other natural curiosities, two unusual formations of land. Twenty miles from
the city a pair of enormous eggs, identical in contour and separated only by a courtesy bay, jut out into
the most domesticated body of salt water in the Western hemisphere, the great wet barnyard of Long
Island Sound. They are not perfect ovals—like the egg in the Columbus story, they are both crushed
flat at the contact end—but their physical resemblance must be a source of perpetual wonder to the
gulls that fly overhead. To the wingless a more interesting phenomenon is their dissimilarity in every
particular except shape and size.
I lived at West Egg, the—well, the less fashionable of the two, though this is a most superficial tag
to express the bizarre and not a little sinister contrast between them. My house was at the very tip of
the egg, only fifty yards from the Sound, and squeezed between two huge places that rented for twelve
or fifteen thousand a season. The one 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. It
was Gatsby’s mansion. Or, rather, as I didn’t know Mr. Gatsby, it was a mansion inhabited by a
gentleman of that name. My own house was an eyesore, but it was a small eyesore, and it had been
overlooked, so I had a view of the water, a partial view of my neighbour’s lawn, and the consoling
proximity of millionaires—all for eighty dollars a month.
