Sangria in the Sangreal: "The Great Gatsby" as Grail Quest Author(s): D. G. Kehl and Allene Cooper Source: Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature, Vol. 47, No. 4 (1993), pp. 203- 217 Published by: Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1348307 Accessed: 30-05-2016 22:16 UTC Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://about.jstor.org/terms JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature This content downloaded from 128.82.252.58 on Mon, 30 May 2016 22:16:55 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Sangria in the Sangreal: The Great Gatsby as Grail Quest D. G. Kehl Arizona State University Allene Cooper Boise State University Near the end of Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise, Amory Blaine, returning to Princeton after his disillusioning sojourn in Atlantic City, concludes that he knows one thing: "If living isn't a seeking for the grail it may be a damned amusing game" (278). For Fitzgerald, by the time he wrote The Great Gatsby five years later, living had become both a quest for the grail and "a damned amusing game," with emphasis sometimes on the quest and sometimes on the game. It took Fitzgerald another eleven years and a "crack-up" to verbalize the paradox: "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function" (The Crack Up 69). Jay Gatsby "found that he had committed himself to the following of a grail" (149). The grail, personified in Daisy Buchanan, is paradoxically beautiful and romantic but also, like the cut-glass bowl in Fitzgerald's 1920 story with that title, hard, empty, and, at least for Nick, "easy to see through" (Flappers and Philosophers 97). Fitzgerald's interest in the quest tale has been noted. For exam- ple, James E. Miller has discussed This Side of Paradise as a "quest book" (16-22), and Edwin M. Moseley has commented on Gatsby as "a prose 'Waste Land'" with Nick as "modern quester" (31). Several other studies have made passing references to the grail motif in Gatsby, perhaps the most pertinent being K. G. Probert's limited discussion in "Nick Carraway and the Romance of Art." Probert, however, failing to grasp Fitzgerald's paradox, faults both Gatsby and Nick, the former for transforming "highminded romance im- pulses into mere gangsterism" and the latter for voyeuristically "dis- tort[ing] the story of Gatsby in order to affirm his own unrealistic and childish nostalgia" (204, 206). Fitzgerald's early and lasting fas- cination with the Arthurian romance, perhaps surpassed among modern American writers only by that of John Steinbeck, is little recognized, nor has the ambivalent function of the grail quest in The Great Gatsby been examined. "Did you ever read The Passing of Arthur?" Josephine asks Mr. Bailey in Fitzgerald's "A Snobbish Story" (The Basil and Josephine 203 This content downloaded from 128.82.252.58 on Mon, 30 May 2016 22:16:55 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 204 Rocky Mountain Review Stories, 253). The reference to Idylls of the King, in which Tennyson first included the Grail story in 1869, is perhaps the best clue to Fitzgerald's source of the Grail Quest story. Of the many versions composed between the 8th and early 20th centuries, those most fa- miliar include Chretien de Troyes's story of Perceval in Li Contes del Grail (1160-1185), Malory's The Tale of the Sankgreal (1460-1470), and Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival (1200-1207). Other possible sources include those versions made available by the resurgence of interest in medieval lore in the 19th century that prompted Tennyson and Wagner to write their works on the Grail (Loomis 3). It is unlikely that Fitzgerald was familiar with Chretien de Troyes because his Perceval was not available in English until 1952 (Linker vii). Although Vinaver's 1954 edition of Caxton's Malory is the definitive text today, it is most likely that Fitzgerald knew one of the popular editions of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Larry Benson, in his review of Malory editions, holds that Pollard's abridged 1900 edition was probably the most popular version from 1900 to 1947 and that "for the last third of the nineteenth century [the reader] will have to consult Strachey's bowdlerized version" (89- 90). Wolfram's German grail legend may have been available to Fitzgerald in the only English translation at the time, Jessie L. Weston's 1894 edition (Zeydel vii). Fitzgerald may also have been ac- quainted with Wagner's Parsifal, his last opera, completed in 1882. Most likely, though, Fitzgerald knew the grail quest story from Tennyson's Idylls, likely reading material for him as a student. He may have been introduced to the story by The Boy's King Arthur, edited by Sidney Lanier, published in 1880. That Fitzgerald himself identified with the grail quest knights is clear in a Notebook entry: "As a novelist I reach out to the end of all man's variance, all man's villainy-as a man I do not go that far. I cannot claim honor-but even the knights of the Holy Grail were only striving for it, as I remember" (Bruccoli 324). In reaching out, in questing, for the extremities of the human condition-both the negative, villainy, and the positive, honor-Fitzgerald identified with the quest knights and manifested his ability "to hold two op- posed ideas in his mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function." For him, striving, questing, is all. In addition to the polarities of striving/achieving and negative/ positive, the entry presents those of person/artist in worlds of mun- dane reality/romantic magic. These dichotomies appear in a 1921 story that anticipates Gatsby in significant ways-"'O Russet Witch,' " Fitzgerald's second fictional work (after This Side of This content downloaded from 128.82.252.58 on Mon, 30 May 2016 22:16:55 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms D. G. Kehl and Allene Cooper 205 Paradise) to allude to the Arthurian romance. In its reference to the Arthurian tale and its other parallels, this story relates to Gatsby in ways perhaps as striking as those noted between "Absolution" and the novel. Appearing originally as "His Russet Witch" in Metro- politan Magazine and included the following year in Tales of the Jazz Age, the story is about a young man employed by the Moonlight Quill Bookshop in Manhattan, Merlin Grainger, and his "romantic yearning" for the Daisyesque femme fatale, Alicia Dare, whose luxu- rious apartment faces the single window of Merlin's single room. Captivated by her beauty, Merlin watches her through the window, like the prototypical Midwestern boy outside the ballroom with his nose to the glass, and constructs an elaborate romance. One day when she walks into the bookshop, he has "the sense of a breathless second hanging suspended in Time" (Six Tales 94). If Daisy's voice was "indiscreet" and "full of money" (Gatsby 120) it also conveyed a "warm human magic" (109), a point usually overlooked. Similarly, Alicia's "voice was rich and full of sorcery" (94). As Gatsby watches the green light across the bay, Merlin draws from Alicia's presence a "dazzling essence of light" (96). Then for a week after her visit "her lights failed to go on" (100), in the same way that "when curiosity about Gatsby was at its highest . the lights in his house failed to go on" (Gatsby 113). Unlike Gatsby, Merlin settles for the plain, mundane Olive Masters, marries her, and fathers a son, fittingly named Arthur. Six years later, in a crowd of people exiting churches on "a radiant, flowerful Easter morning" (108), Merlin catches a glimpse of Alicia, no daisy but "an orchid rising from the black bou- quet" of her surroundings (108). Some thirty years later, at sixty- five, he sees her one last time in the Moonlight Quill-"an old woman remarkably preserved, unusually handsome, unusually erect, but still an old woman" (114)-"her voice no more than the echo of a forgotten dream" (116). Unlike Gatsby, Merlin accepts that he cannot repeat the past: "He had angered Providence by resisting too many temptations. There was nothing left but heaven, where he would meet only those who, like him, had wasted earth" (119). Merlin, unlike Gatsby, seeks the magic of romance in books; rather than pursuing the elusive grail, he settles for what Fitzgerald else- where calls "the cracked plate" ("Handle with Care," The Crack Up 75). Merlin begets Arthur, but Arthur, too, is "a cracked plate." "Young Arthur was gone into Wall Street to sell bonds [a profession for which Fitzgerald had special disdain], as all young men seemed to be doing in that day. This, of course, was as it should be. Let old Merlin get what magic he could from his books-the place of young This content downloaded from 128.82.252.58 on Mon, 30 May 2016 22:16:55 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 206 Rocky Mountain Review King Arthur was in the countinghouse" (Six Tales 111).