The Real Secret Behind Gatsby

By Keith Gandal

T he Great Gatsby is one of the best-known American novels, but weirdly, and strangely reflective of Gatsby himself, one of the least understood. The much-awaited Baz Lurhmann version of The Great Gatsby opened in the United States in 2013, and like Gatsby himself—as a new trailer reminds us—the novel is “guarding secrets”.In the course of the novel, and no doubt the new film version, we find out what Gatsby is hiding: not only his criminal bootlegging, but also his family name, Gatz, and his poor, ethnic-American roots,which in the end exclude him from the upper-class Anglo-American social circles he hoped to enter. We understand his frustrated American dream, and we understand too why he felt the need to fabricate for himself the pedigree of a patrician family with the Anglo-sounding surname Gatsby.

《了不起的盖茨比》是最为知名的美国小说之一，可它对盖茨比本人的描写却十分古怪，这位小说主人公是人们最不了解的人物之一。巴兹·鲁尔曼导演倍受期待的新版电影《了不起的盖茨比》于2013年在美国上映，正如最新预告片提醒我们的那样，这部小说和盖茨比一样在“保守秘密。”

在小说里，当然还有新版电影中，我们发现了盖茨比隐藏的事情：不光是非法贩卖私酒，还有他的姓氏“盖茨”和他贫穷的、少数族裔美国人的出身，他也因此在故事的最后被排除在他希望进入的英裔美国人上层社交圈之外。我们理解他破灭的美国梦，也理解他为什么要为自己编造一个贵族家庭的身世，外加一个英国味儿的姓氏：盖茨比。

We’ve all been taught the novel is about the disappearing American dream, but that’s only part of the story, the postwar part. The other part, the “back story” set during World War I, is about the American dream suddenly and dramatically on the rise: how Gatsby, this “Nobody from Nowhere,” as Daisy’s husband Tom calls him, gets to meet Anglo-American princess Daisy on equal terms, so she can fall in love with him. Tom will be “damned” if he sees how Gatsby “got within a mile of [Daisy] unless [he]brought groceries to the back door.”

Of course, what got Gatsby in the front door of her house during the war was his officer status: “he went to her house, at first with other officers from Camp Taylor.”The novel makes clear how the war gave Gatsby a new social status when it made him an officer. He crossed the“indiscernible barbed wire” between classes when he put on the “invisible cloak of his uniform.”

What the novel doesn’t answer is how Gatsby, a poor farm boy from North Dakota and apparently a German-American to boot, got to be an officer in the US Army when Germany was the enemy. The novel definitely “guards secrets” on this point. Did Gatsby fool the army the way he fools most of the people in the novel about himself, with his polished manner, his false name, and his invented family background? The novel’s narrator Nick Carraway naturally comes to doubt Gatsby’s account of a military commission that was supposed to have been issued out of a made-up upper-class background.

Then how does Gatsby make officer? The novel gives two hints on the subject, which most critics have ignored and most readers, informed by the criticism, read right past.In fact, as a college professor, I’ve taught many students who think they remember the novel pretty well from high school but have forgotten that Gatsby was even a soldier.

我们都被教导这部小说是关于消失的美国梦的，但那只是故事的一部分，战后的部分。另一部分，即发生在一战期间的“前传”，则是关于美国梦突然而戏剧性地兴起：盖茨比，这个“不知出处的无名之辈”（戴茜的丈夫汤姆就是这样称呼他的），在同等地位下遇见了英裔美国人千金小姐戴茜，因此她才爱上了他。如果汤姆看到盖茨比是如何“除了把杂货送到后门”还能“出现在戴茜周围一英里之内”的话，他会吃惊地骂娘的。

当然，盖茨比能够在战争期间站在戴茜家前门是因为他的军官身份：“他去了她家，最初是和泰勒营的其他军官一起去的。”小说清楚地揭示出，当战争让盖茨比成为一名军官时，它是如何使盖茨比获得新的社会地位的。当他披上“军装这件隐形斗蓬”时，他越过了阶级之间“看不见的铁丝网”。

小说没有回答的问题是：盖茨比，这个北达科他州的农场穷小子，显然一个德裔美国人，是如何在与德国敌对的情况下，成为美国军队中的一名军官的。小说肯定在这一点上“保守了秘密”。盖茨比是否凭借他优雅的举止、虚假的姓名和凭空编造的家庭背景，用欺瞒小说中大多数人的方法，向军队欺瞒了自己的真实情况？小说叙述者尼克·卡拉韦很自然地对盖茨比的军事任命状产生了怀疑，觉得它可能是根据虚构的上层社会背景而颁发的。

那么盖茨比到底是怎么当上军官的？小说对此有两个暗示，但大多数评论家都忽视了它们，大多数读者接受评论的说法，也在阅读时错过了。其实，作为一名大学教授，我教过的很多学生自认为从高中时代起就对该小说烂熟于心，却忘记了盖茨比曾经是一名军人。

Nick eventually corrects Gatsby’s romantic saga of his promotion in the American Army, from lieutenant to major at the front as a result of his combat heroics, and notes, “He was a captain before he went to the front.” That’s the first hint.The second is that Fitzgerald put Gatsby at Camp Taylor though it was at Camp Sheridan near Montgomery, Alabama that he met his future wife Zelda—for many critics, the obvious inspiration for Daisy.

Take these tiny, seemingly meaningless hints to the library and the archive, and here’s what you discover. The World War I American army, which had to build an officers’ corps of 200,000 rapidly and almost from scratch, needed some quick methods for identifying men who might be officer material, and specifically those who might make good captains. It developed a couple of unprecedented programs to do so: a rating system for identifying captains, and an intelligence test that identified potential officers and superior officers. The even more radical move that the army made—shocking to privileged young men,such as Fitzgerald, who expected traditional class and ethnic discrimination—was not to exclude immigrants and ethnic Americans from consideration for officer. (Indeed, the army’s initial plan was to have no racial prejudice and to open up such promotions to blacks as well, but the government under pressure from Southern civilian officials nixed the original idea of a complete meritocracy.) The army designated four training camps at which to pioneer the intelligence tests in late 1917 and Camp Taylor was one of them.

尼克最终纠正了盖茨比在美国军队中步步高升（因在前线英勇作战而从中尉晋升为少校）的浪漫主义传奇；他还写道：“在去前线之前他是一名上尉。”这是第一个暗示。第二个暗示是：菲茨杰拉德把盖茨比安排在泰勒营，尽管这位作者是在阿拉巴马州蒙哥马利附近的谢里丹营遇到了他未来的妻子珊尔达——不少评论家认为，她显然就是戴茜这个人物的灵感源泉。带着这些微不足道、看似毫无意义的暗示走进图书馆和档案馆，你就能揭开其中的秘密。一战时期美国军队不得不迅速且几乎白手起家地组建一个20万人的军官部队，这就需要一些快速的方法，用以挑选可能的军官人才，尤其是那些可能成为优秀上尉的人。于是，一些前所未有的计划应运而生，比如挑选上尉的评价体系，以及挑选潜在普通军官和高级军官的智力测验。军队甚至采用过一种更为激进的举措——它对信奉传统等级，支持民族歧视并享有特权的年轻人（如菲茨杰拉德）而言是令人震惊的——即不再把移民和少数族裔美国人排除在军官选拔范围之外。（诚然，军队的初衷是取消种族歧视并向黑人开放晋升机会，但是政府在南方文职官员的压力下拒绝了最初这一完全称得上是选贤任能的最初想法。）1917年底，军方指定在四个训练营中率先实行智力测验，泰勒营就是其中之一。

Fitzgerald would have known about this because he was at Camp Taylor in 1917, which is when, in the novel,he has Gatsby pass through. Someone like Gatsby — that is, someone born in America and a high-school graduate in an era when the average white man completed less than seven years of schooling — would have aced the intelligence tests, which, as we know, tested for education and cultural literacy, not native intelligence.

The other thing to know about Camp Taylor is that there were a large number of men of German descent there;by end of the war, they numbered nearly 1,500. There is no doubt that the American army, though it was fighting Germany, had plenty of German-American officers. A French soldier reported with shock in 1917: “You could not imagine a more extraordinary gathering than this American [sic]army, there is a bit of everything, Greeks, Italians, Turks,Indians, Spanish, also a sizable number of boches [Germans].Truthfully, almost half of the officers have German origins.”

Why would Fitzgerald have cared about how Gatsby made captain—and more to the point—why would he have been secretive about this information? Here it helps to know that Fitzgerald was frustrated in his own military ambitions and his army record was an embarrassment to him. Though he made it into officer training by taking an entrance exam open to college students, he never got sent to Europe, and captain was precisely the rank he desired and had fantasies about, but never achieved. He stalled at first lieutenant, the rank below. And this was at a charged wartime moment when masculinity was being equated with combat service and army rank. To make matters worse for him, he watched men who he considered his social inferiors make that rank of captain and pass him by.

It is unlikely that Fitzgerald imagined Gatsby making it into officers’ training on the basis of fabrications because fabrications were irrelevant to the army’s personnel processes. One of the reasons the army liked the intelligence tests so much, flawed though they were, was because they got around the problem of relying on soldiers’possibly false accounts of their own education and skills. As the wartime Committee on Psychology put it in a memorandum, they eliminated “the danger of charletans” [sic].

菲茨杰拉德应该知道这件事，因为1917年他就在泰勒营，而小说中，他让盖茨比通过测验也恰在此时。像盖茨比这样的人——生于美国、高中毕业，又适逢白人男性接受学校教育普遍不足七年的时代——应该会在智力测验中表现出色；因为据我们所知，当时的智力测验考的是受教育水平和文化素养，而非先天智力。

关于泰勒营还有另一件事需要知道：那里有大量的德国裔男性，一战结束时人数接近1,500人。毫无疑问，尽管美国在和德国打仗，可美国军队里却拥有为数众多的德裔美国军官。一名法国士兵曾在1917年吃惊地写道：“你无法想象还有比美国军队更奇怪的集体，那里什么人都有，希腊人、意大利人、土耳其人、印度人、西班牙人，还有人数可观的德国佬。说真的，几乎一半军官都有德国血统。”

为什么菲茨杰拉德会对盖茨比如何成为上尉如此在意——确切地说——为什么他要对这一信息讳莫如深呢？要知道，菲茨杰拉德自己的军事雄心遭到了挫败，他的从军记录令他感到难堪。虽然他通过了面向大学生的入门考试，接受了军官训练，却从未被派往欧洲战场。上尉军衔正是他渴望、幻想却未能实现的目标。他最高只做到中尉，比上尉低一级。这些都发生在紧张的战争时期，一个男子气概等同于参军服役和军衔高低的时期。更糟糕的是，他眼睁睁地看着那些他认为社会地位低于他的人成了上尉，并对他不理不睬。

菲茨杰拉德不太可能设想盖茨比是凭借编造谎言而进入军官训练营的，因为编造谎言和军队的人事录用毫无关联。智力测验尽管存在缺陷，但军方如此喜欢它的原因之一，就是它避免了根据士兵可能伪造的教育和技能证明来挑选军官的问题。正如战时心理委员会在一份备忘录中写的那样，它消除了“骗子的危险 ”。

In short, the particular American mobilization for the World War I, with its new and very particular methods for selecting officers meant that a nobody like Gatsby could be chosen for officer training and specifically promoted to captain while still at camp.The novel reflects this moment—the moment Gatsby wants to recover,in his desperate effort to “repeat the past.”

It also reflects the backlash of the WASP establishment against upstart“war heroes” like Gatsby after the war. And, unfamiliar with obscure US Army history and taking our current world of meritocratic promotion for granted, that’s all that strikes us about the novel.

Does the new movie reveal Gatsby’s secret? Probably not. But I was happy at least to see that one of the official trailers put emphasis on the mystery of Gatsby’s rise as well as his soldiering in World War I.

简而言之，美国为一战而进行的特别军事动员采用了特殊的新方法选拔军官，这意味着盖茨比这类无名之辈有可能被选中参加军官训练，甚至在训练营时就能被提升为上尉。小说反映了这一时刻——这个盖茨比为“重温过去”而不顾一切想要努力找回的时刻。

小说还反映了一战后美国白人精英（盎格鲁-撒克逊裔白人新教徒，简称WASP）权势集团对盖茨比这类自命不凡的“战争英雄”的抵触态度。此外，对美国军队鲜为人知的历史的不熟悉，对我们现在这个择才录用的世界想当然的态度，都是我们从这部小说中意识到的事情。

新电影揭开盖茨比的秘密了吗？恐怕没有。不过，至少我很高兴地看到，其中一则官方预告片把重点放在了盖茨比发迹之谜和他的一战军旅生涯上。