Speak and my eyes failed…’
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain.’ There is that colour again - lilac - and the same toxic, intoxicating mix of ‘Memory and desire’ which can be found in Gatsby’s feelings for Daisy. Eliot goes on in the same poem to introduce us to a voice who remembers that: ‘They called me the hyacinth girl. - Yet when we came back, late, from the hyacinth garden, Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
And there is that colour again - this time hyacinth and it’s been raining. So, is Gatsby’s Daisy his own version of Eliot’s hyacinth girl? A girl that mixes the palette of purple with rain and dreams? (I’ve suddenly realised that Prince may have got in on this act too.) Of course, Fitzgerald knew Eliot’s poem well and there is no doubt that he was paying homage to the latter’s work. The admiration seems to have been mutual. On New Year’s Eve in 1925, Eliot sat down to write to Fitzgerald to thank him for sending him a copy of his novel. According to Eliot, Fitzgerald had signed the copy with ‘a charming and overpowering inscription’ (Fitzgerald was rather gushy according to Hemingway) but of more importance to Eliot was that the novel had ‘interested and excited me more than any new novel I have seen, either English or American, for a number of years.’ Wow. When I offer such musings in lessons, most boys invariably enquire whether the writers in question ‘really meant to do that’. The tone accompanying the question is always rather withering, as if I am frankly insane to make such obviously spurious connections between writers, let alone to suggest that writers actually make conscious decisions about the words they use. For many of the boys I teach, the world of literature is a bit of mystery. Often happier learning facts, it all feels rather an effort to piece together meanings (yes, there might be more than one of them) from patterns of words. Hector, from Alan Bennett’s play The History Boys, can help them here. He describes the moment when ‘you come across something - a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things - which you had thought special and particular to you. Now here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours’. We had a lilac tree in front of my childhood home (the Ribena tree my brother and I called it) and we were told the story of my father arriving at my birth holding hyacinths. Strangely enough my husband brought hyacinths to the birth of one of our children and my father-in-law tells of watching the young woman who would become his wife climb the stairs with violets in her hair. The same palette, the same mix of memory and desire. Oh, and by the way, The Great Gatsby was published in April… spooky. sherborne.org sherbornetimes.co.uk | 41