Beautiful and tragic – “…A deathless song”

There are many wonderful love stories. There are fewer love stories that are also tragedies. Here are the words, written by Scott Fitzgerald, that caught – with acute observation – a moment of fatal passion in his 1926 novel, The Great Gatsby. People often forget that the novel, which has been filmed and adapted so often, is the love story of “Jay Gatsby” and “Daisy Buchanan”, and also a tragedy. Any moment of happiness and beauty is fleeting. But, my word, how skillfully and evocatively Fitzgerald describes the particular moment that I’m quoting below.

“As I watched him he adjusted himself a little, visibly. His hand took hold of hers, and as she said something low in his ear he turned towards her with a rush of emotion. I think that voice held him most, with its fluctuating, feverish warmth, because it couldn’t be over-dreamed – that voice was a deathless song.

They had forgotten me, but Daisy glanced up and held out her hand; Gatsby didn’t know me now at all. I looked once more at them and they looked back at me, remotely, possessed by intense life. Then I went out of the room and down the marble steps into the rain, leaving them there together.”

The Great Gatsby, by Scott Fitzgerald, p. 103 (Penguin Books, 1974 ed., paperback)

I have a dog-eared, well-read second-hand copy of The Great Gatsby, in which the previous owner had underlined random sentences. But even that unknown reader had noticed the significance of this moment, and the last line.

Fitzgerald describes them as two people alone in the world, obsessed by each other. It feels as if the rain that falls on the narrator as he leaves the house is meant for Jay and Daisy. He describes Daisy’s voice as that of a siren, like the Lorelei, who draws men fatally to her with her mesmerizing call; “a deathless song”.

But of course, her song is not deathless, and it is the beginning of the end for Gatsby. Whenever I re-read it, I am surprised again that Fitzgerald’s economic (almost detached) writing style can conjure up such deep emotion.

This is just one of many memorable, beautiful moments in the novel, which is very short. My copy is only 188 pages. The writer, T.S. Eliot, had good reason to say about The Great Gatsby, in 1925: “It has interested me and excited me more than any new novel I have seen, either English or American, for a number of years.”