"What's in a Name, Old Sport?

": Kipling's "The Story of the Gadsbys" as a Possible Source for

Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby"
Author(s): James Plath
Source: Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 25, No. 2 (Winter, 2001-2002), pp. 131-140
Published by: Indiana University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3831640
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R? ^obert Roulston wryly observed that in three decades of scholarly attention, the "catalog of
the authors whose writings have supposedly left traces on The Great Gatsby is as full of bizarre
incongruities as Nick Carraway's list of guests at Gatsby's parties. Flaubert is there with Stephen
Leacock and Dreiser with Edith Wharton. There too are Charles Dickens and Ford Madox Ford,
Joseph Conrad and Anthony Hope, Coleridge and Clarence E. Mulford, Thackeray and Harold
Bell Wright, T.S. Eliot and George Eliot, Petronius and Stendhal, Mark Twain and Emily Bronte,
Herman Melville and Horatio Alger, Oswald Spengler and Willa Cather, John Keats and the
anonymous creator of Diamond Dick, H.G. Wells and his nemesis Henry James, and poor John
Lawson Stoddard, who finds himself confused with the racist Theodore Lothrop Stoddard. And
not far from the center, as conspicuous as he would have wished, is the sage of Baltimore, H.L.
Mencken."1 And, more recently, Elinor Glyn.2 It is almost with a sense of apology, then, that I offer
yet another possible influence to this lengthy list.
Karen Bellenir writes that "when Fitzgerald has young James Gatz christen himself 'Gatsby,'
he gives his readers a riddle to ponder,"3 a "difficult puzzle to solve."4 Bellenir speculates that Gats-

1. Robert Roulston, "SomethingBorrowed,SomethingNew: A Discussion of LiteraryInfluenceson The Great

Gatsby,"in CriticalEssays on F. ScottFitzgerald'sTheGreatGatsby,ed. ScottDonaldson(G.K.Hall, 1984),p. 54.
2. See Nigel Brooks,"Fitzgerald'sTheGreatGatsbyandGlyn'sThreeWeeks,"ExplicatorLIV (1996),pp. 233-36.
3. KarenBellenir,"J.P.MorganandGatsby'sName,"Studiesin AmericanFiction XXI (1993),p. 111.
4. Lottie R. Crimand Neal B. Houston,"TheCatalogueof Names in The Great Gatsby,"ResearchStudiesXXXVI
(1968),p. 114.
JamesPlath,'"What'sin a Name,OldSport?':Kipling'sTheStoryofthe Gadsbysas a PossibleSourceforFitzgerald'sThe
GreatGatsby,"Journalof ModernLiteratureXXV, 2 (Winter2001-2002), pp. 131-140.?IndianaUniversityPress,2002.

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132

Journal of Modern Literature

by's initials ? J.R ? allude to financier J.R Morgan and help "define the boundaries of his new
name and personality. Thus, James Gatz became 'J. Gatz P' For ease of articulation, Fitzgerald
rendered the name Jay Gatsby."5 Crim and Houston, meanwhile, suggest that Jay, the name Gatsby
takes as an adult, derives from James, which in turn derives from the biblical name Jacob, mean?
ing "the supplanter," and that Gatsby "attempts to supplant Tom for the life and love of Daisy."6
Alexander R. Tamke sees in "Gatsby" the 1920s slang term for revolver, "gat,"7 while Horst Kruse
suggests that "Gatsby" derives from "Gadsby," the name of a Washington, D.C., hotel mentioned
in Mark Twain's A Tramp Abroad, the significance of the name reinforcing the sense of Gatsby's
mansion functioning as a hotel for way ward guests.8
Kruse may be right about the "Gadsby" connection, but Ernest Hemingway points the way to
a more convincing source. "East is East and West is West," Rudyard Kipling wrote, "and never the
twain shall meet."9 Nor, apparently, East Egg and West Egg. Two years after The Great Gatsby
was published, Hemingway wrote Scott Fitzgerald that he was titling his new collection of stories
Men Without Women. Kipling, Hemingway explained, "had been there before me and swiped all
the good [titles] so I called the book Men Without Women hoping it would have a large sale among
the fairies and old Vassar girls."10 This is vintage Hemingway ? the hurtful, yet playful jabs at
Fitzgerald's Ivy League background and paranoia over his manhood, as well as the unabashed rep?
etition of a word Robert McAlmon had been using to spread rumors about Fitzgerald and Heming?
way.11 But what stands out most and invites further consideration is Hemingway's pointedly
sarcastic reference to Kipling and "swiping" titles ? especially if we bear in mind Hemingway's
earlier veiled attacks on Fitzgerald in print and in letters.12 A Kipling connection is not as remote
as it might seem, since one critic already has observed a common denominator: that "Kipling's
'The Finest Story in the World' seems one of the key texts behind Eliot's most famous poem,"
The Waste Land,13 an "oft-debated topic" of affinity with Fitzgerald's novel.14 Something inspired
Fitzgerald to change The Great Gatsby from a novel set in Victorian-era New York and the Mid?
west15 to a Modernist fable on love in the Lost Generation, and it may well have been Kipling's
1888 play, The Story ofthe Gadsbys.
Hemingway owned twenty-two volumes by Kipling, and, according to his siblings, he "par?
ticularly admired Kipling's effective titles."16 It is not difficult to imagine that Hemingway may
have been more than a little annoyed at the similarity between Fitzgerald's latest novel and one of

5. Bellenir,p. 111.
6. CrimandHouston,pp. 114-15.
7. AlexanderR. Tamke,"The'Gat'in Gatsby:NeglectedAspectof a Novel,"ModernFiction StudiesXIV (1968-69),
p. 443.
8. HorstH. Kruse,"'Gatsby'and 'Gadsby,'"ModernFiction StudiesXV (1969-70), p. 540.
9. RudyardKipling,"TheBallad of East and West,"DepartmentalDitties and Ballads and BarrackRoomBallads
(Doubleday,Page& Co., 1917),p. 3.
10. ErnestHemingway,Ernest Hemingway:SelectedLetters, 1917-1961,ed. CarlosBaker(CharlesScribner'sSons,
1981),p. 260.
11. MatthewJ. Bruccoli,Fitzgeraldand Hemingway:A DangerousFriendship(CarrollandGraf, 1994),pp. 144-45.
12. See my essay, "TheSun Also Rises as 'a GreaterGatsby,'"in French Connections:Hemingwayand Fitzgerald
Abroad,ed. J. GeraldKennedyandJacksonR. Bryer(St. Martin's,1998),pp. 257-75.
13. RobertCrawford,"RudyardKiplingin The WasteLand" Essays in CriticismXXXVI (1986),p. 36.
14. JacksonR. Bryer,"Styleas Meaningin TheGreatGatsby:Notes Towarda New Approach,"in CriticalEssays on F.
ScottFitzgerald'sTheGreatGatsby,ed. ScottDonaldson(G.K.Hall, 1984),p. 123.
15. MatthewJ. Bruccoli,Apparatusfor F. ScottFitzgerald'sTheGreatGatsby[Underthe Red, White,and Blue] (Uni?
versityof SouthCarolinaPress, 1974),pp. 3-4.
16. JeffreyMeyers,"KiplingandHemingway:The Lessonofthe Master,"AmericanLiteratureLVI(1984),p. 92.

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Plath: Kipling and Fitzgerald

133

Kipling's least imaginative titles. After all, he knew the play The Story ofthe Gadsbys well enough
to remind Max Perkins years afterwards, in suggesting that his own play, The Fifth Column,
be published along with his short fiction, that Kipling had successfully combined genres in that
volume, "one of his best."17
Fitzgerald himself made no revealing remarks about Kipling and included no Kipling titles on
his "10 Best Books I Have Read" list.18 However, as Andre Le Vot notes, young Fitzgerald, during
his Catholic prep-school years at Newman, was enough influenced by the author to write a bitter
"thirty-six stanza poem in the Kipling manner that more or less duplicated the theme of 'Reade,
Substitute Right Half,' a breathless celebration of a lone hero who wins for his side" after Fitzger?
ald is falsely accused of cowardice on the football field.19
"Gadsby" and "Gatsby" are too tantalizingly alike not to wonder about another Kipling con?
nection, especially when there are so many curious thematic, structural, and idiosyncratic similarities. We are told early, for example, that Kipling's "Gaddy has money,"20 as does Fitzgerald's
hero.21 Although stationed in India, Gadsby has a "place at home," in the West (p. 22), just as
Gatsby lives across the bay from Daisy in West Egg (pp. 22,75). Nick concludes that "[Gatsby] has
been a story of the West, after all ? Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners"
(p. 151), living, somewhat out-of-place, in the East; so too is Kipling's play about Western soldiers
and colonials living equally out-of-place in the East. Both stories center on a captivated hero's
enthrallment with a captivating female, with a quasi-sidekick admirer ofthe hero (Nick Carraway/
Captain Mafflin), who, himself spared the smitten state, fears the worst for his friend.
Much has been made of Nick's occasional direct addresses to the reader in The Great Gatsby,
and in The Story ofthe Gadsbys Kipling's characters frequently speak in asides to the audience. In
fact, both narratives begin with authorial self-consciousness. In The Story ofthe Gadsbys, Kipling
addresses a particular reader: one of the play's characters, Captain J. Mafflin, who, like the hero
of the sad fable which he says will follow, succumbs to a woman's charms and leaves his bachelor
days behind. Kipling reminds his reader that he wrote The Story of the Gadsbys as "an Awful
Warning": "It is your kismet, as it was Gaddy's, and his kismet who can avoid?" (p. 3). The Great
Gatsby, meanwhile, opens with a narrative persona addressing readers directly and speaking of
"Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book" (p. 20). Carraway discusses his own attitudes
in relation to the story of Gatsby, whom he describes as a parabolic representation of "heightened
sensitivity to the promises of life" (p. 20). The opening chapter deals with honesty ? how honest
people should be, and how honest the narrator believes he is ? just as The Story ofthe Gadsbys
deals with the question of how honest one should be, especially how honest men and women
should be with each other. Like Kipling, Fitzgerald's narrative persona immediately attributes the
sad fate of his character not to a tragic flaw, but to forces beyond the character's control, address?
ing the "kismet" that proved Jay Gatsby's undoing: "No, Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it
is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams" that ruined him, and

17. Hemingway,p. 466.

18. F. ScottFitzgerald,F. ScottFitzgeraldon Authorship,ed. MatthewJ. Bruccoli,withJudithS. Baughman(University
of SouthCarolinaPress, 1996),p. 86.
19. AndreLe Vot,F. ScottFitzgerald:A Biography,trans.WilliamByron(Doubleday,1983),p. 23.
20. RudyardKipling,TheStoryofthe Gadsbysand OtherStories(ArcadiaHouse, 1950),p. 22. All subsequentquota?
tions fromthis editionwill be includedparentheticallyin the text.
21. F. Scott Fitzgerald,The GreatGatsby,1925,Seventy-FifthAnniversaryEdition,ed. MatthewJ. Bruccoli(Scribner
Classics, 1992),p. 22. All subsequentquotationsfromthis editionwill be includedparentheticallyin the text.

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Journal of Modern Literature

134

disillusioned

the narrator as well (20). And just as Kipling in his preface calls Captain Mafflin
a "hypocrite" (p. 4), Carraway imposes the same judgment on most of the characters in Gatsby,
"I am one of the few honest people that I have ever
concluding, with equal sanctimoniousness,
known" (p. 61).
The first section of Kipling's play, "Poor Dear Mama" ? an obvious source for Hemingway's
playful referencing of P.O.M. (for "Poor Old Mama") in Green Hills of Africa ? exposes the audi?
ence to attitudes about the title character before he ever makes an entrance. The Story ofthe Gads?
bys opens with a discussion about a mysterious Captain Gadsby, between Miss Minnie Threegan
and Miss Deercourt, who are lounging in bodices of ballroom frocks on a hot May afternoon:
Miss D: "Who is this Captain Gadsby? I don't think Fve met him."
Miss T: "You must have. He belongs to the Harrar set. Fve danced with him, but Fve
never talked to him. He's a big yellow man, just like a newly-hatched chicken, with an
e-normous moustache." (p. 110)
In the first scene of Gatsby, in which the narrator Carraway begins interacting with other char?
acters, two women ? Daisy Buchanan and Jordan Baker ? also provide the dominant visual image,
wearing white "rippling and fluttering" dresses and reclining on "an enormous couch . . . buoyed
up as though upon an anchored balloon" (p. 24) as the hero's name is raised, but not discussed in
anything more than casual, curiosity-piquing detail. Fitzgerald obviously used the technique to
much better effect than Kipling, making his readers wait even longer for the title character's first
entrance and having them listen to all manner of hyperbolic speculation and evaluation.
Like Captain Gadsby, Jay Gatsby was "a captain before he went to the front" (131). Just as the
soldier's lot is a dirty one, with details that the women cannot know about the business ? "you
never do tell me anything about yourself, or what you do, or what you take an interest in," Mrs.
Gadsby later complains (p. 81) ? so too is Gatsby involved in business matters that are '"a rather
confidential sort of thing'" (p. 80). Gatsby's past, like Gadsby's, carries roguish implications, with
a certain bad-boy air still lingering. Gadsby is linked to the dark-skinned Harrar through rumor
and then to the rough-and-tumble Hussar Indian regiment by actuality, just as Gatsby is linked to
shadowy figures first by rumors ? as the Kaiser's nephew and a German spy (pp. 42, 50) ? then
later by association with such dark underworld figures as Meyer Wolfsheim, the man supposedly
responsible for the Black Sox scandal (p. 72). In Kipling's version, when Miss T. remarks, 'Tm
not afraid of Captain Gadsby" (p. 111), it implies, of course, that others are. In Gatsby, Myrtle
Wilson's sister confesses, "Tm scared of him. Fd hate to have him get anything on me'" (p. 42),
while shocking rumors persist that Gatsby "killed a man" (pp. 50, 54) ? just as killing is a part of
Gadsby's past, as Miss T. learns after marrying him and noticing a long knife-scar (pp. 80-81).
The running joke throughout the opening scene is an egg ? which, in curious fashion, is echoed
by Fitzgerald's naming of East and West Eggs.
The second scene of Kipling's play, "The World Without," finds soldiers chatting in the
smoking room of the Deychi Club ? again, about Gadsby. '"The talk is that "Gaddy's hooked at
last!'"" (p. 20). He is engaged to Minnie Threegan, the daughter of a colonel. But someone asks
about Gadsby's other woman ? isn't it bigamy? Gadsby had become engaged to the widow of an
officer, an older woman named Mrs. Herriott. She serves as the woman of his past, as Miss T. is
his younger dream girl, the one he calls his "angel"; in Gatsby, Fitzgerald apparently reversed the

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Plath: Kipling and Fitzgerald

135

poles and combined the women, so that Daisy fuctions as both Gatsby's dream girl and his girl
of the past ? while Tom Buchanan is involved with two women. In Gatsby, too, the action shifts
from an opening scene featuring women talking to one with men only, with Nick and Tom chatting
alone en route to what will become a rendezvous with Tom's mistress.
As Kenneth Eble observes, it is "[t]he 'old sport' phrase which fixes Gatsby as precisely as his
gorgeous pink rag of a suit."22 A comparative reading with The Story ofthe Gadsbys yields a pos?
sible source for both distinctive features. Gadsby was one of the Pink Hussars (p. 22), an Indian
cavalry unit known for its flamboyant uniforms (pp. 110, 134), while the men's talk is sprinkled
throughout with such masculine terms of endearment as "old man," "old horse," "old fellow," and
"old pal." At some point in both narratives, someone challenges the main character's use of such
"sporting" language. A week into his marriage, Gadsby (breaking etiquette by using slang with
a woman) calls his new bride "Little Featherweight," and she protests, "T won't be called those
sporting pet names, bad boy'" (pp. 63-64). In Gatsby, it's Tom who cries, at one point, '"Don't
you call me "old sport!'"" (p. 119) and who mocks, '"That's a great expression of yours, isn't it?
All this "old sport" business. Where'd you pick that up?'" (p. 113). As it turns out, from Kipling,
perhaps. In addition to the sporting talk, there is also talk of "ponies" ? a logical topic for cavalry
men which, again, finds an interesting echo in Gatsby with Tom Buchanan and his polo ponies.
A Gadsbys/Gatsby
comparison also helps to explain the otherwise curious Indian references:
who
"with monograms of Indian blue" (p. 87) and who "live[s] like a young
wears
shirts
Gatsby,
rajah in all the capitals of Europe ... collecting jewels, chiefly rubies, hunting big game, painting a
little" (p. 66), shows Nick a photograph of himself as a young man "with a cricket bat in his hand,"
after which Nick can visualize it all: "T saw the skins of tigers flaming in his palace on the Grand
Canal; I saw him opening a chest of rubies to ease, with their crimson-lighted depths, the gnawings
of his broken heart'" (p. 67).
The third section of Story of the Gadsbys, "The Tents of Kedar," takes place at a Naini Tal
dinner for thirty-four ? the equivalent of Gatsby's party (pp. 133-44). Gadsby uses the party
for the explicit purpose of repelling Mrs. Herriott, of finally breaking it off with her and tell?
ing her about his impending engagement to Minnie. Gatsby's parties, ironically, are designed for
the explicit purpose of attracting a woman. Much has been made of Gatsby's "dream girl," and
Gadsby is so hooked on his own dream girl that he refers to Her with a capital H and calls her
"the sweetest little angel that ever came down from the sky" (p. 53). He talks about wanting to
marry her and all but swoons, "Sweet state I'm in!" (p. 54); when he does finally marry, his former
fiancee, Mrs. Herriott writes, in a letter of veiled congratulations, "And so the moth has come too
near the candle at last" (p. 89). In addition to the shared moth image of attraction/destruction ? in
Gatsby's "blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the
champagne and the stars" (p. 47) ? when Gadsby, on the night before his wedding, is offered a
four-finger drink and protests, "O bus! bus! It'll make me as drunk as an owl" (p. 55), one cannot
help but think of Owl Eyes and his drunkenness at Gatsby's party. Fitzgerald thought the parties at
Gatsby's mansion central enough to the story that he had considered titling his novel Trimalchio,
after the Petronius tale of a rich freedman who hosts a banquet which becomes progressively more

22. KennethE. Eble, "TheCraftof Revision:TheGreatGatsby"in CriticalEssays on F. Scott Fitzgerald'sTheGreat

Gatsby,ed. ScottDonaldson(G.K.Hall, 1984),p. 90.

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Journal of Modern Literature

Bacchanalian.23 Thematically, Gadsby's party scene is important because it sets up the wedding
scene and juxtaposes the cool Gadsby ? the one who turns away women ? against the gelatinous
Gadsby, turned rubber-kneed by one particular woman.
Despite their tough reputations, around their dream girls, both men act comically spineless,
particularly in scenes that function as fulcrums for the action. On the day of his wedding, in sec?
tion four, "With Any Amazement," Gadsby is so "paralyzed with fear" that he forgets his name
and goes "Ha-Hmmm deep down in his throat when he can't think of anything to say," although
his bride-to-be is cool and composed (pp. 7, 58-59). Jay Gatsby is just as tongue-tied and awkward in the pivotal scene when he faces Daisy alone for the first time, at Nick's house. He needs
Nick to act as go-between and arrives looking pale and sleepless (p. 81), bolting before Daisy
makes her entrance, then reappearing, "pale as death" (p. 82). Swooning, he almost knocks over
Nick's mantelpiece clock, and thinking about her afterwards, he nearly topples "down a flight
of stairs" (p. 86). Just as best man Mafflin has to push Gadsby during every step of the wedding
ceremony ? saying, at one point, "Look like a man!" (p. 57), and then, "(In a piercing rattle meant
to be a whisper.) Kneel, you stiff-necked ruffian! Kneel!" (p. 59) ? Nick has to push Gatsby, and,
when the latter tries to leave, scolds,'" You're acting like a little boy. Not only that, but you're rude.
Daisy's sitting in there all alone'" (p. 84).
In both crucial episodes, clocks and time factor prominently. Waking on the morning of his
wedding, Gadsby is teased by his best man that he is his "own master for the next twelve hours"
and given ten minutes to dress; this sets the tone for Gadsby's overwound tension. "What time is
it?" he asks, and hearing the answer mutters, "Five hours more. O Lord!" (p. 50). Twice more the
panicked Gadsby asks what time it is, until finally the church clock strikes three and the ceremony
begins (pp. 53-56). Gatsby too is an "overwound clock" (p. 87), and before his big meeting with
Daisy (and his nearly breaking Nick's already broken clock), he is just as preoccupied with time,
looking "at his watch as if there was some pressing demand on his time elsewhere" (pp. 81-82).
"This is Hades," Gadsby says (p. 60), just as Gatsby grouses, "'This is a terrible mistake'" (p. 84).
Even as Gatsby cannot stop thinking of Daisy frozen in time as the first "nice girl" whom he knew
(p. 130) and is shocked by the appearance of her child, a reminder of her age (p. 106), Gadsby is
taken aback when he notices during the wedding ceremony, apparently for the first time, "Little
Featherweight's a woman ? a woman! And I thought she was a girl" (p. 58).
Lyrics sprinkled judiciously throughout The Great Gatsby add a countermelodic texture and
resonance which has fascinated critics ? particularly lines from "The Sheik of Araby" ? and in
The Story ofthe Gadsbys, lyrics also appear in strategic places throughout. In the wedding section,
the most thematically important lyric follows the knell of church bells that signal the start of the
ceremony: "We honor the King/ And Bride's joy do bring ? / Good tidings we tell/ And ring the
Dead's knell" (p. 57).
When the ceremony is completed, Gadsby "winces as if shot," and the Mendelssohn wedding
march plays (p. 60). Marriage in Story ofthe Gadsbys ? at least for the men ? is equated with
death, with going to the gallows (p. 55). In the Deychi Club, a cavalryman asks, "Who's dead
now?" and another responds, "No one that I know of; but Gaddy's hooked [engaged] at last"
(p. 20). After the wedding, Mafflin mourns, "Fve lost old Gaddy," then sings to himself, "You may

23. F. Scott Fitzgerald,Trimalchiho:An Early VersionofThe GreatGatsby,ed. JamesL. W. WestIII (CambridgeUni?

versityPress,2000), p. 190.

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Plath: Kipling and Fitzgerald

137

carve it on his tombstone, you may cut it on his card, That a young man married is a young man
marred!" In an aside to the audience, Mafflin laments, "They say marriage is like cholera. Wonder
who'll be the next victim?" (p. 62). A comparative reading suggests Jay Gatsby, who ironically
wishes desperately to marry his own dream girl but is denied that metaphoric death, but, instead,
is literally shot to death because of Daisy and her reckless driving. Gatsby "knew that when he
kissed [Daisy], and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would
never romp again like the mind of God" (p. 101). Yet, still, he kisses her, entering into a marriagefixation that would pull him, five years later, like a moth into the flame. In Gatsby, as in Story of
the Gadsbys, Mendelssohn's Wedding March plays, but off-stage. During a confrontational scene
between Tom and Gatsby, the march resounds from a ballroom below and momentarily breaks
the tension, with Jordan crying, '"Imagine marrying anybody in this heat!'" (p. 113). Fitzgerald
sets the stage for a wedding theme relatively early in the novel, describing a "frosted weddingcake" ceiling in the opening scene (p. 24) and Nick bristling at being "rumored into marriage"
(pp. 32-33).
Within marriages and prior to them, the women in both narratives are treated as if they were
"little girls shouldn't
girls. In an aside to the audience, Gadsby says, of his soon-to-be-fiancee,
understand these things" (p. 12). After the marriage he persists, calling her "child" and remarking
as she reaches for a trooper's saddle, "Little girls aren't expected to handle numdahs" (p. 80), and
she complains, "Will you always treat me like a child?" (p. 87). "They train us women well, don't
they, Pip?" Mrs. Herriott says (p. 38), a comment which has an echo in Daisy's remarks, upon
hearing that she has given birth to a daughter: "T hope she'll be a fool ? that's the best thing a girl
can be in this world, a beautiful little fool'" (p. 30).
With its largely male perspective and a central thesis claiming that marriage ruins males, The
Story ofthe Gadsbys is, at its core, more than a little sexist ? a man's book about the world of men.
Fitzgerald likewise thought of his novel as "a man's book" and wondered if that would hurt the
book's popularity.24 No ideal marriages exist in either Kipling's play or Fitzgerald's novel. In the
latter, Catherine whispers, of her sister, Myrtle, and Tom, '"Neither of them can stand the person
they're married to'" (p. 42), and most of the women at Gatsby's party have "fights with men said
to be their husbands" (p. 56). In Story ofthe Gadsbys, marriage and unhappiness go hand-in-hand,
with Gadsby reminding the unattached Mafflin, "A man has a right to live his life as happily as he
can. You aren't married" (p. 113). In both texts, marriage is also equated with madness: "Are you
mad?" Mafflin asks Gadsby. "No ?only married," the hero responds (p. 111), while in Gatsby,
Myrtle screams, '"The only crazy I was was when I married him'" (p. 43).
Section five of the play, "The Garden of Eden" ? again, shades of Hemingway ? is set outdoors and sets up the all-important next section. Gadsby, a husband of three weeks, "smokes a
pipe of peace on a rug in the sunshine" during a temporary truce in the battle of the sexes (p. 63).
As Gadsby prepares for a ride, his wife says that she is lonely, and Gadsby suggests, "Why don't
you ask some nice people in to dinner?" She responds, "Nice people! Where am I to find them?
Horrid frumps! And if I did, I shouldn't be amused" (p. 82). Neither, Nick observes, are any of
the freeloading party crowd at Gatsby's mansion amusing (p. 134). Bored, Mrs. Gadsby begins to
prod her husband for details about his past love, Mrs. Herriott ? gearing up to sample the forbid?
den fruit. The section's epigraph, "And ye shall be as ? Gods!" comes, of course, from the story

24. F. ScottFitzgerald,TheLettersofF. ScottFitzgerald,ed. AndrewTurnbull(CharlesScribner'sSons, 1963),p. 173.

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Journal of Modern Literature

138

of Eve's temptation in the Garden of Eden, after which she coaxes Adam to sin with her. And in a
burst of emotion that calls to mind Nick's own cry to Gatsby that he was '"worth the whole damn
bunch put together'" (p. 134), Mrs. Gadsby cries, "You're so much too good for me. So much too
good!" (p. 65)
Section six of Story of the Gadsbys, "Fatima," begins with a related secular epigraph from
The Story ofBlue Beard: "And you may go into every room of the house and see everything that
is there, but into the blue room you must not go." In choosing Blue Beard, a fairy tale wherein
the seventh wife of the title character ignores the Eden-like edict not to enter the "blue" room and
discovers the bodies of her husband's former spouses, Kipling finds a perfect allegory for one of
the play's main themes: that past loves have the inherent capacity to destroy present ones and that,
as a result, men and women may not be wise to be totally honest with each other.
Mrs. Gadsby is disturbed by the scar which she notices in this episode and by the sordid story
behind it. More importantly, she discovers a letter from Mrs. Herriott to Gadsby and, in reading
it, despite Gadsby's exhortations to leave matters alone, she enters the blue room and exhumes
Gadsby's past love. Upon learning some of the details, she becomes instantly insecure and seeks
reassurrance. Even when he offers it, she is still so tormented by the thought of his ever having
loved another that she presses for an assurance of his love beyond the present, sighing, "Only you
and I ? I and you ? in the whole wide, wide world until the end" (p. 67). By contrast, Gadsby is
not bothered at all by her past. When he asks out of near-conversational politeness if she has "ever
been mixed up in any dark and dismal tragedy" (p. 70) and hears the story of a man she was previ?
ously involved with, he is absolutely unaffected (pp. 70-71).
In Gatsby, Daisy is the forbidden: she arrives for her clandestine meeting with Gatsby with a
"damp streak of hair" laying like "a dash of blue paint across her cheek" (p. 82). In Gatsby, letters
also play a prominent role, with Gatsby receiving the devastating news of Daisy and Tom while at
Oxford (p. 132) and Daisy clutching one, drunk, on the day she is to wed Tom (p. 74). Gatsby is as
insistent as Mrs. Gadsby that the love be exclusive, all-encompassing, and guaranteed. Although
Tom is perfectly happy to accept Daisy in the present, as unconcerned about her past as Gadsby is,
Gatsby insists upon entering the forbidden room of Daisy's past loves, seeking to extract a reassuring confirmation from her (pp. 117-18). Although it never comes, he still tells himself, speaking
aloud in front of Nick, "1 don't think she ever loved [Tom]'" (p. 132).
Hovering about in section
doctor who attends the gravely
cigar-ash" (p. 95) ? an image
medical presence, the gigantic

seven of Story of the Gadsbys, "The Valley of the Shadow," is a

ill Mrs. Gadsby, with Gadsby himself looking "the color of good
echoed in Gatsby by the "valley of ashes" and another hovering

blue billboard eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg (p. 35). Subtitled

"Knowing Good and Evil," this section of Story of the Gadsbys picks up the Garden of Eden
theme, with a post-euphoric, post-honeymoon Gadsby agonizing as his wife almost dies. Mafflin,
who has himself been considering marriage, remarks, "What am I let in for? Gaddy has aged ten
years in the night" (p. 105). In Kipling's version, taking a bite of the forbidden fruit means leav-

ing the garden, which means facing the day-to-day drudgery and turmoils of marriage and the
death of freedom. In both Story of the Gadsbys and The Great Gatsby, for characters to leave
the garden and know good and evil also means to know death ? either as a close contact, as with
Story ofthe Gadsbys, or with Myrtle's death in Gatsby, another accident which once more forces
Tom and Daisy to relocate. In the world of Fitzgerald's lost and careless generation, the sinning
and leaving the garden episode is repeated over and over, with no compunction and no apparent
lesson learned.

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Plath: Kipling and Fitzgerald

139

The final Story ofthe Gadsbys section, "The Swelling of Jordan," takes place in January in the
Gadsby bungalow, where Gadsby and Mafflin talk. More than conversation, this has the feel of a
post-mortem. Gadsby, who once "left his sword . . . in an Utmanzai's head" and who had sworn
that "he'd stick by [Mafflin] and the Pinks as long as he lived," has just announced that he will no
longer serve in the army (p. 112). To Mafflin, the old Gadsby is dead. Just as Gatsby was burdened
with the kryptonite of romance, attracted to one who ultimately destroyed him, in Mafflin's eyes
marriage has reduced Gadsby to rubble, turning him away from his friends and rendering him
absolutely spineless and paranoid, a mere shadow of his former self. Gadsby protests that Mafflin
does not "know what it is to go into your own room and see your wife's head on the pillow, and
when everything else is safe and the house shut up for the night, to wonder whether the roof-beams
won't give and kill her" (p. 113). Moments later, though, Gadsby admits that "even as good a mar?
riage as mine . . . hampers a man's work, it cripples his sword arm, and oh, it plays Hell with his
notions of duty!" (p. 121).
As one critic reminds, "Gatsby's pursuit of Daisy's love is Fitzgerald's quest for Zelda's hand"
as a young lieutenant from Camp Sheridan, Alabama, competing for the debutante's attention.25
But in the summer of 1924, Fitzgerald suffered through an emotionally crippling time with Zelda.
As he was working on the first draft of The Great Gatsby, their marriage was in trouble. Zelda,
"bored and restless," had an affair with "a handsome French naval aviator, Edouard Jozan," and
the "crisis peaked on July 13 when Zelda told Scott that she loved Jozan and asked for a divorce."26
If ever Fitzgerald was ripe for writing about the pitfalls of marriage and the ways in which a
woman could destroy any man who was drawn to her, it was then.
In Story ofthe Gadsbys, one ofthe men at the Deychi Club remarks, "Curious thing how some
women carry a Fate with them" (p. 31), and the play indeed shows the power that a fateful woman
can exert over a man who is attracted to her beyond all reason and control. As Kipling's play is purposefully illustrative, so too is Fitzgerald's novel. Kenneth Eble has observed that while "a writer
ordinarily reworks to more sharply delineate a character," that is not "Fitzgerald's extraordinary
intention. Daisy moves away from actuality into an idea existing in Gatsby's mind and ultimately
to a kind of abstract beauty corrupted and corrupting in taking on material form"27 ? an illustra?
tion of what can happen when she is overvalued on the gauge of Gatsby's "appalling sentimentality" (pp. 86, 101). Daisy, like Tom, is a careless driver whose fate it is to leave victims in her
accidental wake: "they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money
or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up
the mess they had made" (p. 153). In our last view of them, "Daisy and Tom were sitting opposite
each other at the kitchen table," where, from Nick's vantage point, there is an "unmistakable air
of natural intimacy" between these two, who are "conspiring together" (p. 127). The Story of
the Gadsbys ends in a curiously similar way, with Captain Mafflin remarking, after the Gadsbys
"little villain" has broken his watch, "Everything's made to be played with and broken, isn't it,
young 'un?" Then, "Oh Diamond, Diamond, thou little knowest the mischief that thou hast done"
(p. 122). After Mafflin leaves, the audience's last view of Gadsby and his wife is of his telling
her to "Bring a chair out here, dear. Fve got something to talk over with you" ? an open-ended

25. Tim Sherer,"MidwesternInfluencesin F. ScottFitzgerald'sTheGreatGatsby?Societyfor the Studyof Midwestern

LiteratureNewsletterXI, 2 (1981),p. 15.
26. JeffreyMeyers,ScottFitzgerald:A Biography(HarperCollins,1994),pp. 115-16.
27. Eble,p. 92.

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Journal of Modern Literature

140

remark, inviting the audience to speculate on what they are talking about, just as we are invited at
the beginning of the play to speculate on the nature of the title character.
Ronald Berman astutely observes that "there are certain silent scenes" in The Great Gatsby
that are "openly cinematic, as in the theater view that we get of Tom and Daisy through the pantry
window in which they are on stage in the light and we see them from the dark. Such scenes can be
reminiscent
involvement

of film staging," Berman concludes.28 Such a leap is easily made, given Fitzgerald's
with Hollywood. But the many structural and elemental similarities between The

Great Gatsby and Kipling's The Story of the Gadsbys more likely suggest that, in this case, the
stage ? not the screen ? inspired Fitzgerald to treat his novel in an unnovelistic way, so that, like a
script with its minimal details, even the "conventional language of description seems not to matter
to the narrator."29
If Kipling's play can indeed be added to the long list of "influences," then it appears to be a
key influence: it contributes to the novel's theatrieal style and partially accounts for what Eble
called "the tight inevitability of its construction."30 Further, it suggests origins for some of the
novel's more quirky details ? including Gatsby's "old sport" jauntiness and odd pink suits. More
than anything, Kipling's play was a play about marriage and the symbolic "death" it occasions in
males. Given the turmoil of Fitzgerald's own marriage during the novel's composition, perhaps the
American Dream in Gatsby is more a dream of wife, house, children and two-car garage ? that
is, marriage ? than it is a dream of financial success or an unattainable dream girl. Part of the
problem, as audiences learn from Kipling's play, is that men fall in love with girls who then surprise them by growing up, while the men still see them and treat them as girls ? a conflict between
expectations and reality, between the past and the present or future ? so that any dream of mar?
riage is doomed from the start.
Moreover, as Berman notes, "For most of his professional life, F. Scott Fitzgerald was deeply
aware of the conflict between modern times and what he called, in 1937, 'the old America' . . . a
world of excess and pretense."31 A reading of the novel with Kipling's play in mind ? especially
considering the otherwise strange, metaphorical comparisons of Gatsby to an Indian rajah ? sug?
gests a world in which privileged old-money colonials dominate and people such as the Wilsons
will forever be small and unimportant, victims of class and its limitations, in a novel in which East
and West can take on significant colonial overtones for its ill-fated hero. And allusions to Dutch
sailors, those early New World explorers (p. 154), suddenly seem to take on an even greater resonance for Gatsby. Or Gadsby. But what's in a name, Old Sport?

28. RonaldBerman,TheGreatGatsbyand ModernTimes(Universityof Illinois Press, 1994),p. 10.

29. RonaldBerman,TheGreatGatsbyand Fitzgerald'sWorldof Ideas (Universityof AlabamaPress, 1997),p. 22.
30. Eble,p. 7.
31. Berman,TheGreatGatsbyand Fitzgerald'sWorldof Ideas,p. 1.

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