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The El Greco Scene |
| That's my middle-west--not the wheat or the prairies or
the lost Swede towns but the thrillingly, returning trains of my youth
and the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows
of holly wreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow. I am a
part of that, a little solemn with the feel of those long winters, a
little complacent from growing up in the Carraway house in a city where
dwellings are still called through decades by a family's name. I
see now that this has been a story of the west, after all--Tom and
Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we
possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to
Eastern life
Even when the East excited me the most, even when I was most keenly aware of its superiority to the bored, sprawling, swollen towns beyond the Ohio, with their interminable inquisitions which spared only the children and the very old--even then it had always for me a quality of distortion. West Egg especially still figures in my more fantastic dreams. I see it as a night scene by El Greco: a hundred houses, at once conventional and grotesque, crouching under a sullen, overhanging sky and a lusterless moon. In the foreground four solemn men in dress suits are walking along the sidewalk with a stretcher on which lies a drunken woman in a white evening dress. Her hand, which dangles over the side, sparkles cold with the jewels. Gravely the man turn in at a house-- the wrong house. But no one knows the woman's name, and no one cares. Poetry |