2. Sentences, sentences, sentences. We hear much about Fitzgerald ushering in “The Jazz Age,” and about the misfortunes of his personal life. But what about his luminous sentences? Writers know that an admirable career goal is to write a handful of truly beautiful sentences in one’s lifetime. Hunter S. Thompson was dead-on in making a writing exercise of retyping the entirety of Gatsby. My pencil moved almost as furiously as my eyes while I read:
Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope.
Two o’clock and the whole corner of the peninsula was blazing with light, which fell unreal on the shrubbery and made thin elongating glints upon the roadside wires.
He came alive to me, delivered suddenly from the womb of his purposeless splendor.
All the lights were going on in West Egg now; the electric trains, men-carrying, were plunging home through the rain from New York. It was the hour of a profound human change.
No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.
He was a son of God – a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that – and he must be about His Father’s business, the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty.
She was appalled by West Egg, this unprecedented “place” that Broadway had begotten upon a Long Island fishing village – appalled by its raw vigor that chafed under the old euphemisms and by the too obtrusive fate that herded its inhabitants along a short-cut from nothing to nothing.
But there was Jordan beside me, who, unlike Daisy, was too wise ever to carry well-forgotten dreams from age to age.
Describing why a sentence is beautiful is a little like trying to describe what chocolate tastes like. For me, Fitzgerald’s sentences are somehow both profoundly weighted and soaring, confident in their matter-of-factness and indulgent in their romanticism. How? How?
