‘In his blue gardens…’

Looking through some old fabric that I once possessed, I was immediately transported back in time to the days of jazz, flapper girls and the roaring 20s! Indeed, it was F.Scott Fitzgerald, one of my favourite writers, who coined the phrase, ‘The Jazz Age’, to describe the flamboyant culture that existed in the 1920s U.S.

And if there is anything that highlights the decadence of the Jazz age, then the beginning of chapter 3 of ‘The Great Gatsby’, does just that!

I used this extract on many occasions, when I was teaching GCSE English; it oozes wealth and glamorises the nouveau riche. Fitzgerald’s use of language is superb and I never tire of reading this! Whether or not one agrees with Jay Gatsby’s way of life and lavish lifestyle, the book is a wonderful portrait of the wealthier part of American society at that time. As well as the class theme, the book also covers themes such as gender roles, violence, honesty and not forgetting WW1. 

Here is the extract that is jam packed with language techniques, which Fitzgerald uses to full effect in order to highlight to the reader the obscene lavishness of Gatsby’s regular parties:

‘There was music from my neighbour’s house through the summer nights. In his blue gardens, men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars. At high tide in the afternoon I watched his guests diving from the tower of his raft, or taking the sun on the hot sand of his beach while his two motorboats slit the waters of the Sound, drawing aquaplanes over cataracts of foam. On weekends his Rolls-Royce became an omnibus, bearing parties to and from the city between nine in the morning and long past midnight, while his station wagon scampered like a brisk yellow bug to meet all trains. And on Mondays eight servants, including an extra gardener, toiled all day with mops and scrubbing-brushes and hammers and garden-shears, repairing the ravages of the night before.

Every Friday five crates of oranges and lemons arrived from a fruiterer in New York—every Monday these same oranges and lemons left his back door in a pyramid of pulpless halves. There was a machine in the kitchen which could extract the juice of two hundred oranges in half an hour if a little button was pressed two hundred times by a butler’s thumb.

At least once a fortnight a corps of caterers came down with several hundred feet of canvas and enough coloured lights to make a Christmas tree of Gatsby’s enormous garden. On buffet tables, garnished with glistening hors-d’oeuvre, spiced baked hams crowded against salads of harlequin designs and pastry pigs and turkeys bewitched to a dark gold. In the main hall a bar with a real brass rail was set up, and stocked with gins and liquors and with cordials so long forgotten that most of his female guests were too young to know one from another.’

F.Scott Fitzgerald has written in such a way to appeal to the senses, making it all very easy to imagine! I think that’s the mark of a great writer!