Acts of Madness or Despair: A Note on The Secret Agent and The Great Gatsby

ACTS OF MADNESS OR DESPAIR: A NOTE ON THE SECRET AGENT AND THE GREAT GATSBY Ted Billy University of Delaware Joseph Conrad, as many critics have documented, exerted a strong influence on the mature works of F. Scott Fitzgerald.1 The Great Gatsby, in particular, owes a great deal to the narrative technique Conrad developed in Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness.2 In "The Great Gatsby and The Secret Agent," Andrew Crosland offers a detailed comparison of Fitzgerald's masterpiece and Conrad's tale of bungled sabotage.3 Because of some distinct similarities, Crosland speculates that Fitzgerald may have used The SecretAgent as a source for Gatsby. Crosland builds his case largely on the coincidence of names. Both novels feature humanitarian characters named Michaelis. Both feature reprehensible characters named Tom. In Conrad's novel, Vladimir is a foreign diplomat who conceives the absurd project of destroying time; in Gatsby, the orchestra plays Vladimir Tostoffs "Jazz History of the World" at one of the orgiastic parties. Crosland sees another set of parallel characters in Stevie and Gatsby. The weak-minded Stevie "longs for an ideal world free of suffering" and idolizes Mr. Verloc as an exponent of goodness.4 Gatsby, the romantic idealist, "takes Daisy as the incarnation of what he sees as good in life, much as Stevie does Mr. Verloc. Stevie is betrayed by his ideals and his idol."5 Gatsby meets a similar fate. Conrad and Fitzgerald also coincide in their ironic treatment of the police (ideally, upholders of justice, but in actuality, blind to the truth). Additionally, Mrs. Verloc and Daisy share the same lethargy, the same incurious attitude toward life. Moreover, most of the major characters in Fitzgerald's novel engage in some form of subterfuge: "Wilson as murderer, Myrtle as mistress, -Nick as gobetween , Gatsby as lover, Daisy and Tom in their 'secret society" are all secret agents in some sense."* In summary, Crosland conjectures that although no external evidence exists to prove Fitzgerald's familiarity with The Secret Agent, it is possible that he used some of its material in writing Gatsby. Crosland's argument is speculative, but the case for Fitzgerald's use of The Secret Agent grows more convincing with a careful comparison of the last three chapters of both novels. Here the apparent coincidences of plot become very distinctive. The final three chapters of The SecretAgent relate the murder of Mr. Verloc by his wife (avenging the death of her brother, Stevie), her subsequent suicide, and the remorse felt by Ossipon (also known as Tom), the man who deserted 102Notes her. Fitzgerald's last chapters concern Wilson's murder of Gatsby (in the mistaken belief that Gatsby killed Myrtle), Wilson's subsequent suicide, and Nick's lament at the end of the holocaust. Beyond these similarities, however, is an even more conspicuous parallel—the lunacy motif, which pervades the final chapters of both novels. Crosland briefly alludes to this when he compares Vladimir's "mad" plan to blow up the Greenwich Observatory to Wolfsheim's belief that Gatsby's murder was a "mad act."7 But madness plays a greater role in both novels than Crosland suggests; moreover, the lunacy motif serves a similar function in reinforcing the themes of both novels. In The Secret Agent, the catastrophe begins when Mr. Verloc attempts to reason with his wife, who is stunned by "the mental disorder of passionate sorrow."8 His exhortations for cool rationality are consistently answered by Mrs. Verloc's emotional outbursts. She can think of nothing but the idea that her trusted husband took Stevie away from her in order to kill him: "Mrs. Verloc's whole being was racked by that inconclusive and maddening thought" (p. 203). As a victim of cathexis, she begins to look and act like her simple-minded brother: "Mrs. Verloc's mental condition had the merit of simplicity; but it was not sound. It was governed too much by a fixed idea" (p. 205). Operating under the influence of "insane logic," she searches for a practical solution to her problem. When Mr. Verloc sees her brandishing a carving knife, he finally understands the peril of his predicament: "His wife had gone raving...