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.

《了不起的蓋茨比》是最為知名的美國小說之一，可它對(duì)蓋茨比本人的描寫卻十分古怪，這位小說主人公是人們最不了解的人物之一。巴茲·魯爾曼導(dǎo)演倍受期待的新版電影《了不起的蓋茨比》于2013年在美國上映，正如最新預(yù)告片提醒我們的那樣，這部小說和蓋茨比一樣在“保守秘密。”

在小說里，當(dāng)然還有新版電影中，我們發(fā)現(xiàn)了蓋茨比隱藏的事情：不光是非法販賣私酒，還有他的姓氏“蓋茨”和他貧窮的、少數(shù)族裔美國人的出身，他也因此在故事的最后被排除在他希望進(jìn)入的英裔美國人上層社交圈之外。我們理解他破滅的美國夢(mèng)，也理解他為什么要為自己編造一個(gè)貴族家庭的身世，外加一個(gè)英國味兒的姓氏：蓋茨比。

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.

我們都被教導(dǎo)這部小說是關(guān)于消失的美國夢(mèng)的，但那只是故事的一部分，戰(zhàn)后的部分。另一部分，即發(fā)生在一戰(zhàn)期間的“前傳”，則是關(guān)于美國夢(mèng)突然而戲劇性地興起：蓋茨比，這個(gè)“不知出處的無名之輩”（戴茜的丈夫湯姆就是這樣稱呼他的），在同等地位下遇見了英裔美國人千金小姐戴茜，因此她才愛上了他。如果湯姆看到蓋茨比是如何“除了把雜貨送到后門”還能“出現(xiàn)在戴茜周圍一英里之內(nèi)”的話，他會(huì)吃驚地罵娘的。

當(dāng)然，蓋茨比能夠在戰(zhàn)爭期間站在戴茜家前門是因?yàn)樗能姽偕矸荩骸八チ怂?，最初是和泰勒營的其他軍官一起去的。”小說清楚地揭示出，當(dāng)戰(zhàn)爭讓蓋茨比成為一名軍官時(shí)，它是如何使蓋茨比獲得新的社會(huì)地位的。當(dāng)他披上“軍裝這件隱形斗蓬”時(shí)，他越過了階級(jí)之間“看不見的鐵絲網(wǎng)”。

小說沒有回答的問題是：蓋茨比，這個(gè)北達(dá)科他州的農(nóng)場(chǎng)窮小子，顯然一個(gè)德裔美國人，是如何在與德國敵對(duì)的情況下，成為美國軍隊(duì)中的一名軍官的。小說肯定在這一點(diǎn)上“保守了秘密”。蓋茨比是否憑借他優(yōu)雅的舉止、虛假的姓名和憑空編造的家庭背景，用欺瞞小說中大多數(shù)人的方法，向軍隊(duì)欺瞞了自己的真實(shí)情況？小說敘述者尼克·卡拉韋很自然地對(duì)蓋茨比的軍事任命狀產(chǎn)生了懷疑，覺得它可能是根據(jù)虛構(gòu)的上層社會(huì)背景而頒發(fā)的。

那么蓋茨比到底是怎么當(dāng)上軍官的？小說對(duì)此有兩個(gè)暗示，但大多數(shù)評(píng)論家都忽視了它們，大多數(shù)讀者接受評(píng)論的說法，也在閱讀時(shí)錯(cuò)過了。其實(shí)，作為一名大學(xué)教授，我教過的很多學(xué)生自認(rèn)為從高中時(shí)代起就對(duì)該小說爛熟于心，卻忘記了蓋茨比曾經(jīng)是一名軍人。

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.

尼克最終糾正了蓋茨比在美國軍隊(duì)中步步高升（因在前線英勇作戰(zhàn)而從中尉晉升為少校）的浪漫主義傳奇；他還寫道：“在去前線之前他是一名上尉?！边@是第一個(gè)暗示。第二個(gè)暗示是：菲茨杰拉德把蓋茨比安排在泰勒營，盡管這位作者是在阿拉巴馬州蒙哥馬利附近的謝里丹營遇到了他未來的妻子珊爾達(dá)——不少評(píng)論家認(rèn)為，她顯然就是戴茜這個(gè)人物的靈感源泉。帶著這些微不足道、看似毫無意義的暗示走進(jìn)圖書館和檔案館，你就能揭開其中的秘密。一戰(zhàn)時(shí)期美國軍隊(duì)不得不迅速且?guī)缀醢资制鸺业亟M建一個(gè)20萬人的軍官部隊(duì)，這就需要一些快速的方法，用以挑選可能的軍官人才，尤其是那些可能成為優(yōu)秀上尉的人。于是，一些前所未有的計(jì)劃應(yīng)運(yùn)而生，比如挑選上尉的評(píng)價(jià)體系，以及挑選潛在普通軍官和高級(jí)軍官的智力測(cè)驗(yàn)。軍隊(duì)甚至采用過一種更為激進(jìn)的舉措——它對(duì)信奉傳統(tǒng)等級(jí)，支持民族歧視并享有特權(quán)的年輕人（如菲茨杰拉德）而言是令人震驚的——即不再把移民和少數(shù)族裔美國人排除在軍官選拔范圍之外。（誠然，軍隊(duì)的初衷是取消種族歧視并向黑人開放晉升機(jī)會(huì)，但是政府在南方文職官員的壓力下拒絕了最初這一完全稱得上是選賢任能的最初想法。）1917年底，軍方指定在四個(gè)訓(xùn)練營中率先實(shí)行智力測(cè)驗(yàn)，泰勒營就是其中之一。

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].

菲茨杰拉德應(yīng)該知道這件事，因?yàn)?917年他就在泰勒營，而小說中，他讓蓋茨比通過測(cè)驗(yàn)也恰在此時(shí)。像蓋茨比這樣的人——生于美國、高中畢業(yè)，又適逢白人男性接受學(xué)校教育普遍不足七年的時(shí)代——應(yīng)該會(huì)在智力測(cè)驗(yàn)中表現(xiàn)出色；因?yàn)閾?jù)我們所知，當(dāng)時(shí)的智力測(cè)驗(yàn)考的是受教育水平和文化素養(yǎng)，而非先天智力。

關(guān)于泰勒營還有另一件事需要知道：那里有大量的德國裔男性，一戰(zhàn)結(jié)束時(shí)人數(shù)接近1,500人。毫無疑問，盡管美國在和德國打仗，可美國軍隊(duì)里卻擁有為數(shù)眾多的德裔美國軍官。一名法國士兵曾在1917年吃驚地寫道：“你無法想象還有比美國軍隊(duì)更奇怪的集體，那里什么人都有，希臘人、意大利人、土耳其人、印度人、西班牙人，還有人數(shù)可觀的德國佬。說真的，幾乎一半軍官都有德國血統(tǒng)。”

為什么菲茨杰拉德會(huì)對(duì)蓋茨比如何成為上尉如此在意——確切地說——為什么他要對(duì)這一信息諱莫如深呢？要知道，菲茨杰拉德自己的軍事雄心遭到了挫敗，他的從軍記錄令他感到難堪。雖然他通過了面向大學(xué)生的入門考試，接受了軍官訓(xùn)練，卻從未被派往歐洲戰(zhàn)場(chǎng)。上尉軍銜正是他渴望、幻想?yún)s未能實(shí)現(xiàn)的目標(biāo)。他最高只做到中尉，比上尉低一級(jí)。這些都發(fā)生在緊張的戰(zhàn)爭時(shí)期，一個(gè)男子氣概等同于參軍服役和軍銜高低的時(shí)期。更糟糕的是，他眼睜睜地看著那些他認(rèn)為社會(huì)地位低于他的人成了上尉，并對(duì)他不理不睬。

菲茨杰拉德不太可能設(shè)想蓋茨比是憑借編造謊言而進(jìn)入軍官訓(xùn)練營的，因?yàn)榫幵熘e言和軍隊(duì)的人事錄用毫無關(guān)聯(lián)。智力測(cè)驗(yàn)盡管存在缺陷，但軍方如此喜歡它的原因之一，就是它避免了根據(jù)士兵可能偽造的教育和技能證明來挑選軍官的問題。正如戰(zhàn)時(shí)心理委員會(huì)在一份備忘錄中寫的那樣，它消除了“騙子的危險(xiǎn) ”。

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.

簡而言之，美國為一戰(zhàn)而進(jìn)行的特別軍事動(dòng)員采用了特殊的新方法選拔軍官，這意味著蓋茨比這類無名之輩有可能被選中參加軍官訓(xùn)練，甚至在訓(xùn)練營時(shí)就能被提升為上尉。小說反映了這一時(shí)刻——這個(gè)蓋茨比為“重溫過去”而不顧一切想要努力找回的時(shí)刻。

小說還反映了一戰(zhàn)后美國白人精英（盎格魯-撒克遜裔白人新教徒，簡稱WASP）權(quán)勢(shì)集團(tuán)對(duì)蓋茨比這類自命不凡的“戰(zhàn)爭英雄”的抵觸態(tài)度。此外，對(duì)美國軍隊(duì)鮮為人知的歷史的不熟悉，對(duì)我們現(xiàn)在這個(gè)擇才錄用的世界想當(dāng)然的態(tài)度，都是我們從這部小說中意識(shí)到的事情。

新電影揭開蓋茨比的秘密了嗎？恐怕沒有。不過，至少我很高興地看到，其中一則官方預(yù)告片把重點(diǎn)放在了蓋茨比發(fā)跡之謎和他的一戰(zhàn)軍旅生涯上。