F. Scott Fitzgerald at Work: The Making of "The Great Gatsby"

Chapter 3. The Great Gatsby: A View from Kant’s Window—Transatlantic Crosscurrents

3 The Great Gatsby AView from Kant’sWindow—Transatlantic Crosscurrents “There was nothing to look at from under the tree except Gatsby’s enormous house so I stared at it, like Kant at his church steeple, for half an hour” (GG 69). Nick Carraway’s reference to the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) appears to be the most extraneous as well as the most arcane among the many references to actual persons, places, and incidents that give resonance to the text of The Great Gatsby. It concerns an interesting detail in the life of this great man, the peculiarities of whose biography have often served to satisfy the curiosity of those who were unable to read and to understand his writings. His books and his arguments were difficult to follow , because he wrote for fellow philosophers rather than for the general reader and thus did not bother to provide examples for his theories.His contemporary biographers, Ludwig Ernst Borowski, Reinhold Bernhard Jachmann , and EhregottAndreas ChristophWasianski, in addition to describing other idiosyncrasies in the habits of the eccentric metaphysician, all touch on his domestic life in his small house located at No.2 Prinzessinstrasse in the city of Königsberg in East Prussia.It isWasianski to whom the account of Kant and his steeple in all its detail must be credited.According to his testimony , Kant would sit down at his desk, a simple table, about six in the evening , and read until dusk. He would then take his station, in winter as well as summer, at the stove, from where through the window, his view passing 98 chapter 3 along the north wing of the old city castle, he could see the steeple of the Löbenichtsche Kirche, the Löbenicht parish church. It was this steeple that “he would look at while he was thinking,—or actually, his eyes came to rest on it.Words never failed him to express how beneficent its distance was to his eyes.Through its daily observation in the twilight his eyes may have gotten used to it.”1 The detail,verifiable by means of additional information and documentation,became so much part of the lore surrounding the man that, even though there are biographies and critical studies that do not mention it, F. Scott Fitzgerald is likely to have encountered it as early as his Princeton days. It is known that his interest in philosophy goes back that far and that he received excellent grades in the philosophy courses he took in 1916 and 1917,2 and it is also true that he claimed that during the summer that he was completing The Great Gatsby he was busy reading Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of theWest (Letters 289–90).3 Altogether five references to Kant occur in his work prior to The Great Gatsby, one as early as 1915 in his short story “The Ordeal” (where Kant is mentioned along withThomas Henry Huxley, Nietzsche,and Zola as crying non serviam),another one in“Benediction,”developed out of the earlier story and published in 1920 (where the thick volumes of Kant are read along with those ofThomasAquinas,Henry James Sr., and Cardinal Mercier by the seminarians),and one in chapter 3 of This Side of Paradise (where, inAmory’s miniature satire “In a Lecture Room,” Kant and General Booth may be said to define the range of the “broad and beaming view of truth” held by the pedant professors).Two more occur in The Beautiful and Damned.One is an incidental mention of the Critique of Pure Reason as a work whose study demands particular concentration.The other (a part of Maury Noble’s nihilistic account of his futile quest for knowledge) is in fact a brief oblique allusion to the philosopher “infinitely removed from life staring at the tip of a steeple through the trees, trying to separate, definitely and for all time, the knowable from the unknowable” (BD 215). WhileFitzgerald’sfamiliaritywiththestoryofKantandhischurchsteeple, thus, may indeed go back to his early interest in philosophy, it was an event that occurred during the writing of The Great Gatsby that suggested Fitzgerald ’s use of the episode in the manuscript of his novel: the world-wide celebration , on April 22, 1924, of the bicentennial of Kant’s birthday. Notable Festschriften, several memorial medals, and the dedication of an impres- a View from kant’s window 99 sive open memorial hall built against the...