“One of my most vivid memories is of coming back
West from prep school and later from college at Christmas time….
“When we pulled out into the winter night and the
real snow, our snow, began to stretch out beside us and twinkle against the
windows, and the dim lights of small Wisconsin stations moved by, a sharp wild
brace came suddenly into the air. We drew in deep breaths of it as we walked
back from dinner through the cold vestibules, unutterably aware of our identity
with this country for one strange hour, before we melted indistinguishably into
it again.
“That’s my Middle West—not the wheat or the prairies
or the lost Swede towns, but the thrilling 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.”—F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)
Since my twenties, every year around this time, my
mind drifts to and fastens on this passage near the conclusion of The
Great Gatsby, just before the rhapsodic, better-known last few
paragraphs on the Dutch ships discovering the “fresh green breast of
the New World” for the first time.
In the postwar period, and particularly since the
deregulation of the airlines that made plane travel more affordable starting in
the late 1970s, countless college kids have taken to the air to make their way
home. It’s certainly convenient, but high above the earth, they miss so much
that Fitzgerald would have seen right outside his window on the train.
In the 1910s, F. Scott Fitzgerald would have taken this
holiday trip probably about a half-dozen times—first, while at Newman Prep in
Hackensack, NJ, a suburb of New York City, and then at the conclusion of the
semester at Princeton University. He would have had a great deal to do that
could have distracted him on those trips—reading, jotting down something in his journal,
or, Fitzgerald being Fitzgerald, catching his breath at the sight of a pretty
girl walking down the aisle of his train.
But these were long trips, and those activities, no
matter how consuming, could only occupy his mind for so long. So inevitably, the landscape made its vivid impression on him, and his
imagination would freeze-frame the moments.
Transportation in the forms already evolving in the 1920s—the
automobile and the airplane—meant not only the annihilation of distance but the
annihilation of individuals in Fitzgerald’s fiction: Jay Gatsby is in a car
involved in a fatal hit-and-run accident, while in Fitzgerald’s uncompleted The Last Tycoon, movie producer Monroe
Stahr dies in a plane crash.
In contrast, railroads were a mature industry by
this point, but they remained functional and provided (certainly for Fitzgerald) an element of nostalgia
that the two forms that have largely supplanted it have never been able to
adequately provide.
In an article for The Atlantic four years ago,
author and Midwestern Susan Choi told interviewer Joe Fassler that she regarded
this as among the most beautiful and mysterious in the entire novel: “When I'm
reading the book, I look forward to the arrival of this passage like one of
those trains. I know it's going to give me chills, and it always does.”
Read it again. I’m sure you’ll agree.
(The image accompanying this post is of the Minneapolis,
St. Paul and Sault Ste. Marie Railroad, a subsidiary of the Canadian Pacific
Railway, arriving in Almena, Wisc., sometime in the 1920s.)
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