Write a Gatsby's memoir about his past based on Chapter six.

 

My real name was James Gatz. I was born in North Dakota. I had my named legally changed at the age of seventeen. I changed my name into Jay Gatsby. My parents were shiftless and unsuccessful farm people—my imagination had never really accepted them as my parents at all.

I was consumed by fancies of what I might achieve. For over a year I had been beating my way along the south shore of Lake Superior as a clam digger and a salmon fisher or in any other capacity that brought me food and bed. I knew women early and since they spoiled me, I became contemptuous of them, of young virgins because they were ignorant, of the others they were hysterical about things, which in my overwhelming self-absorption I took for granted. But my heart was in a constant, turbulent riot. The most grotesque and fantastic conceits haunted me in my bed at night. An instinct toward my future glory had led me, some months before, to the small Lutheran college of St. Olaf in southern Minnesota. I stayed there two weeks, dismayed at its ferocious indifference to the drums of my destiny, to destiny itself, and despising the janitor's work with which I was to pay my way through. Then I drifted back to Lake Superior, and I was still searching for something to do on the day that Dan Cody's yacht dropped anchor in the shallows along shore. My life changed when I rowed out to Dan Cody's yacht on Lake Superior.

Cody was fifty years old then, a product of Nevada silver fields, of the Yukon and of every rush for metal since Seventy-five. The transactions in Montana copper that made him many times a millionaire and many women tried to separate him from his money. Eventually a woman named Ella Kaye played Madame de Maintenon to his weakness and sent him to sea in a yacht. He had been coasting along all too hospitable shores for five years when he turned up as my destiny in Little Girl Bay.

To me, resting on Dan Cody's oars and looking up at the railed deck, that yacht represented all the beauty and glamour in the world. At any rate Cody asked me a few questions and found that I was quick, and extravagantly ambitious. A few days later he took me to Duluth and bought me a blue coat, six pair of white duck trousers and a yachting cap. He took me in and brought me to the West Indies and the Barbary Coast as in turn steward, mate, skipper, secretary and even jailor. The arrangement lasted five years during which the boat went three times around the continent. One night Ella Kaye came on board one night in Boston and a week later Dan Cody inhospitably died. When he died I inherited money—a legacy of twenty-five thousand dollars. I didn't get it because Cody's mistress, Ella Kaye, claimed all of it.

When I was an officer in a military, I met Daisy. She was the first nice girl I had ever known. I found her excitingly desirable. I went to her house, at first with other officers from Camp Taylor, then alone. It amazed me—I had never been in such a beautiful house before. But gave it an air of breathless intensity was that Daisy lived there—it was as casual a thing to her as my tent out at camp was to me. There was a gay and radiant activities taking place through a beautiful bedroom's corridors and of romances that were not musty and laid away already in lavender but fresh and breathing and redolent of that year's shinning motor cars and of dances whose flowers were scarcely withered. It excited me too that many men had loved Daisy—it increased her value in my eyes.

I knew that I was in Daisy's house by a colossal accident. I might have despised myself, for I had certainly taken her under false pretenses. But I had deliberately given her a sense of security; I let her believe that I was a person from much the same strata as myself—which I was fully able to take care of her. I didn't despise myself and it didn't turn out as I had imagined. I knew that Daisy was extraordinary but I didn't realize just how extraordinary a nice girl could be. She vanished into her rich house, into her rich, full life, leaving me nothing. I felt married to her.

I did extraordinarily well in the war. I was a captain before I went to the front and following the Argonne battles I got my majority and the commands of the divisional machine guns. After the Armistice I tried frantically to get home but some complication or misunderstanding sent me to Oxford instead.

I was worried; there was a quality of nervous despair in Daisy's letters. She was feeling the pressure of the world outside. For Daisy was young and she artificial world was redolent of orchids and pleasant, cheerful snobbery and orchestras, which set the rhythm of the year, summing up the sadness and suggestiveness of life in new tunes. She wanted her life shaped now, but I couldn't give it to her. That force took shape in the middle of spring with the arrival of Tom Buchanan. I was still at Oxford when they got married.