How Not to Summer: The Great Gatsby Revisited
" 'The thing to do is forget about the heat,' said Tom impatiently. 'You make it ten times worse by crabbing about it.' " ~ F. Scott Fitgerald, The Great Gatsby
When I was in high school, my English class did not read The Great Gatsby. The other English class read it, and I heard some of the kids complaining about the book.
I have always loved reading, and doing my own thinking. Determined to decide for myself what the fuss was about -- was Gatsby the Great American Novel, or old-fashioned nonsense? Was it on so many reading lists because it deserved to be, or out of bad habit? -- I read it myself.
I fell in love with the novel's beauty of language and construction, with its portrayal of interesting and sometimes deceptive characters, and of fascinating and also symbolic settings, with its Shakespearean or Homerian -- or, later, Morrisonian -- layering of the abstract and the concrete, and with its powerful themes such as the lie of social class mobility and the lie of the American Dream.
I have re-read Gatsby just about every year since, finding more in the book each time as one always does with true classic art in any form, and also finding interesting gaps which do not make me love the work less but which let more light shine in.
If you scroll down a bit, you'll find several pertinent do's and don'ts (in bold) that I've uncovered in The Great Gatsby about how to summer, and how not to summer, when it comes to staying cool -- or not! -- in the heat!
How this came about:
I brought my old paperback copy of the book to the house I'm renting this summer, my Summer Serenity Cottage, with about ten dozen other books -- including J.D. Salinger's Nine Stories which I also re-read just about every year. Choosing books for the cottage was fun and generally systematic, and you can read about my process and see my selections in my Choosing Books post if you wish!
(The Great Gatsby as a Great American Novel at the cottage I'm furnishing and decorating in Great Lakes style: it's all connected!)
I'm renting the cottage because I needed to get offsite from my regular beloved place, and decided not simply to run from the negative but to create something positive, to embark upon a summer project of contemplation, relaxation, and decoration, as a way to dream toward existence the Golden Age of empathy and equality, courage and compassion, liberty and love!
The reason I needed to step away from my regular place now -- when problems from a poorly designed and installed new roof have been ongoing for almost two years (!) -- actually ties specifically into the theme of this post: complications during a hot summer.
Imagine removing a pretty good old multi-layered and soundproof roof from a solid and charming brick-and-timber 1903 building in downtown Chicago, replacing it insecurely with non-soundproofed synthetic and evidently flimsy roof-esque material, and, with no notice, embedding neighbors' air conditioning condenser lines into this impostor roof in such a way that every time a neighbor turns on an air conditioner, my roof literally growls and shakes, vibrating and humming discordantly in various places throughout the space, making sleep, work, and life inside perfectly impossible.
That's just the latest roof problem, and it's the one that sent me over the edge and off the premises until it is solved.
A fiercely hot summer of 1922 is a vehement presence in The Great Gatsby, and the novel also shows us many types of living quarters, including a beautiful mansion and a tacky mansion and an inexpensive "cardboard" cottage that yet has class, sad spaces in the "valley of ashes" between the mansions and Manhattan, an apartment in the city where classes collide violently, and an overheated Plaza Hotel.
This current summer of 2021 -- almost 100 years later! -- is fiercely hot, and humid, in real life, and I am dealing with two shall we say semi-inhabitable homes, or spaces that are variously inhabitable depending on circumstances.
So when I moved from the condo to escape the noise and vibration caused by ac lines in the roof, into a 1906 rental house -- a "fixer" that feels adorably like a cottage in Michigan or Wisconsin and, crucially, is filled with the beautiful sound of birdsong instead of detestable machine noise, yet is still within Chicago city limits on the far north side -- which was supposed to have an air conditioning unit but didn't, of course I turned to a novel written in the 1920s and set in a blazingly hot summer for ideas on coping with heat without air conditioning.
When faced with any challenge, you turn to classic literature for practical ideas too, right?
Right?
Haha!
Don't worry: I took some "sensible" steps, too, to lessen the discomfort at the cottage during the days in the 90s with 100% humidity that we started having in June, two months earlier than usual, and are still having in July, as well as during the seasonably hot and humid days in the 80s.
For example, I bought fans, and my amazing mother sent a marvelous portable air conditioner -- which a neighbor at my regular place gave me a tip on maximizing: a portable air conditioner automatically shuts off when it fills with water it pulls from the air, and this can happen in a few hours on a humid day, so stand it in a plastic bin so that the water can drain out and it can run longer at a time. (That same neighbor also said that if the condo board president or his pals lived in the units that are suffering the roof issues, those issues would have been fixed immediately. One more reason we need the Golden Age of empathy and equality.)
Of course, staying cool in a non-air-conditioned (and barely electrified : ) house during an extremely muggy summer in the Great Lakes region is ultimately rather impossible, and you can read my survival tips and tricks, such as they are, in my post entitled Tech Wreck!
What does all of this have to do exactly with one of the most read novels in American literature? (Most read after a slow start in its time, that is; cf. Van Gogh.)
While suffering one early June night in the high heat and saturated humidity, before the fans and portable air conditioner arrived at the cottage, I remembered the vivid descriptions of the summer heat in The Great Gatsby and that the characters variously discussed it, fought it, succumbed to it, complained about it, grew confused in it, grew enraged in it, or were otherwise directly or indirectly affected by it. Fitzgerald started writing the novel in 1922, the year in which it is set, and it was published in 1925, all after electricity but before air conditioning. The very state of my cottage!
Specifically, the white dresses of the story popped into my mind.
I remembered the parallel scenes in Gatsby in which Daisy and Jordan are trying to stay cool. In one, toward the beginning of the novel, on what is said twice (Fitzgerald uses repetition as an effective emphasis technique in the novel) to be a "warm windy evening" -- as the novel progresses, warm turns to hot, and hot escalates further to broiling, in terms of the weather and the characters' feelings and actions -- the young women are described as wearing white dresses while stretched out on opposite ends of an "enormous couch," with a breeze through the room "rippling and fluttering" their dresses as though they had just "blown back in after a short flight around the house."
I thought that this sounded nice and refreshing and that I might like to try it, so I opened the book to page 8 to see how it was done, and to see what summer heat survival tips I could glean by re-reading the book with an eye to staying cool.
Mostly I found how *not* to stay cool, as the book is set very pointedly during a violently hot summer which not only symbolizes and reflects but also drives and inflames violently hot action, tempers, and drama.
As I re-read, I also found myself thinking about the houses and other living spaces in Gatsby from a new perspective, as most of the characters -- who are from the Midwest and have gone East -- are in temporary summer housing like I am, whether they at first realize it or not, and they have moved house for some really interesting or as Jordan Baker says in the book "amazing" reasons. These living spaces are described in explicit detail and, like the hot weather in the novel, the houses and other spaces both symbolize and drive the themes and the action.
If you're wondering whether you're reading an interior decoration blog post or notes for what could be a literature dissertation, yes : )
Here are some do's and don'ts I've derived from The Great Gatsby to cope with summer heat and summer housing:
* Do set up cross-ventilation at home with awning-covered windows open at both ends of the house.
This is how Daisy and Jordan accomplished their fluttering white dress moments at Daisy and Tom's mansion on "East Egg." This is also easier said than done at the cottage, due to the fact that the ground-floor back windows of the house are not conducive to opening because the landlord stores paint, tools, and all manner of pungent whatnot in a covered porch behind the kitchen, and due to the fact that I had quite a time getting the front windows open at all! Also: no awnings. Workaround: through a series of steps I did get the front windows open (see Windows: Worry to Wow), got a bit of cross-ventilation moving with a kitchen fan, and got a bit of east-west cross-ventilation flowing too, on the ground floor and on the second floor, also with the help of fans.
* Don't let your landlord into the story.
I hope that doesn't sound unfriendly, but if you have been following this blog and read Break-In / Breakdown, you know why I wish my landlord were not in the story, the way Gatsby narrator Nick Carraway's landlord is not in the story. (In short, the cottage owner has behaved in a much too familiar and even alarming manner, dropping by, peeking in, and even breaking in. He has fallen into fits of crying and sobbing while trying to start too-personal conversations or while speaking disrespectfully to me and insulting me for no apparent reason at all, not that there would ever be a reason to speak disrespectfully or to insult. As I say: alarming. I've posted details at the link above and in follow-up posts here in Break-In part 2, and here in Windows part 2, outlining my security measures which include new interior locks and curtains. I've told his son, who is about my age and who seemed unconcerned. I have compassion for all, including myself, and I cannot let the landlord's problem be my problem. Let's hope this character is no longer a recurring character.)
Back to the book, we learn from Nick at the start of the book that he came East from the Midwest due to restlessness after having "enjoyed the counter-raid" of World War One as a recent college grad. (Enjoyable is not the typical way we think of war, is it, and whether we take Nick at his word or not, we know from the start that this is not going to be a typical book.) Nick tells us he decided to go into finance in New York, and commutes from a dilapidated cottage on "West Egg" that he rents by himself after his co-worker and would-be housemate was transferred to DC. We learn that his "small eyesore" of a place is next to Gatsby's "colossal" (and, to be inferred from the rest of the description, tacky, architecturally out of place, and ostentatious) copy of a French mansion. (We later learn that Jay Gatsby and Nick were in the same Division in the war, and that Gatsby remembers Nick from then; at least that's what Gatsby says.)
Indeed, we never hear one word about Nick's landlord, who must be neither peeper nor creeper, nor about anyone else's landlord troubles, or condo board troubles, though we do learn what old money East Eggers think of new money West Eggers (they condescend), why Tom and Daisy came East from Chicago (scandal over one of Tom's affairs), and why Gatsby chose the house right across the water from theirs (to win back Daisy, whom he knew when he was poor and for whom he (illegally?) made a fortune, and re-write the past).
Everyone is on the move for unusual or unexpected reasons, myself included.
Side note: Nick tells us that his rent is $80 a month, which in 2021 dollars would be $1,204.50, and that the huge places on either side rent for "twelve or fifteen thousand a season," which would be $180,676 or $225,845 today; a season is of course a summer. Which in the book turns out to be the summer of all summers. We seem to learn later that Gatsby is not renting but purchased his place, and we hear Tom say at another point that he and Daisy are in their place permanently too. But at the end of the summer of 1922, everyone is gone, one way or another, and mainly tragically. They were summer people in their homes after all, too.
* Do wear white.
I love wearing white in the summer anyway -- and in the winter too as old rules about that don't seem relevant anymore -- for its fresh brightness. Daisy and Jordan wear white, Nick comes to Jay Gatsby's party in white flannels, and white of course does reflect rather than absorb light, thus keeping us cooler.
* Don't wear synthetic fibers.
Synthetic fibers are usually non-breathable, holding in air rather than letting it flow. Daisy and Jordan are said to be wearing, along with their white dresses, "small tight hats of metallic cloth" on a day that is "broiling, almost the last, certainly the warmest, of the summer." A day so warm Nick says the straw seats on his commuter train "hovered on the edge of combustion." The story at this point is on the edge of combustion, too. These hats sound hot. Small tight metallic hats representing and encouraging hot-headedness?
I have always avoided and quite frankly abhorred synthetic fibers (and synthetic anything) winter or summer, for clothing and for home decor (e.g. cotton shower curtains only; see Before/After: Bathrooms!) though I made an exception for expedience in choosing anti-peeper-creeper curtains that would ship quickly to the cottage at summer's mid-point (see Serenity Curtains).
As for hats, I like my straw Ecuador hat, which definitely has a cooling effect!
* Do enjoy darkened rooms when appropriate.
Tom and Daisy's mansion is kept darkened and cooler with awnings and curtains. I am a fresh air and sunshine fanatic, but to keep the cottage as cool as possible (which sometimes means 83 degrees instead of 85 degrees) I sometimes keep some rooms like the kitchen, dining room, and guest room dark. Sweet Jorji the cat is a pro at finding the coolest darkest spots possible when she wants to!
I also avoid using the dishwasher and oven; in fact, I have not used them once while I've been at the cottage. I've been washing by hand the delightful vintage Spode dishes I bought for the cottage -- and drying them immediately by hand, so as not to contribute to the humidity in the air with evaporation! Instead of cooking, I make refreshing cold salads or bring in food from favorite restaurants or cook when back at the condo and bring food to the cottage. I'd purchased a set of stainless steel cookware for the cottage, hadn't opened the box by the middle of summer, and will use the cookware back at the condo where I needed a new set anyway.
I also stopped using my beloved sunny yellow Le Creuset teapot, because it and the stovetop generated too much heat! I bought a cute electric kettle in cobalt blue instead and find it generates less heat. Why am I boiling water on boiling summer days, you might ask? This takes us to our next point:
* Don't drink ice-cold drinks. Do drink room temperature water, or hot tea (or hot chocolate!) instead.
This one is controversial, I know! In the novel's "showdown scene" back at Tom and Daisy's mansion, on this hottest broiling day of the summer, Tom, Daisy, Jay, and Nick drink "gin rickeys that clicked full of ice," gulping them "in long, greedy swallows," and, at lunch a little bit later, "cold ale." (Jordan is there too, and it is unclear whether she drinks; she didn't in a previous scene because she is a golfer and in training for competitions.)
In any case, cold drinks on a hot day can sound enticing, but the cold drinks in the novel certainly didn't cool down anyone's temperature or temper. Cold drinks on a hot day can be jarring, and hot drinks on a hot day can increase sweating, which cools the body down. (Though if it is so humid that sweat can't evaporate, I like a room-temperature beverage.)
* Do think positive thoughts.
I hung photographs I've taken at Chicago's beaches, to add to the Great Lakes beach house feel I've emphasized throughout the cottage. Does looking at them make me feel cooler? Conversely, does getting angry about the weather make us suffer more?
In Gatsby, Tom complains at his wife Daisy for complaining about the too-hot weather, yet his complaint at her seems mean-spirited and heats things up more, while hers was an attempt at lightheartedness or cooling hot tempers down. (She wants another window opened at the Plaza, but there aren't any more windows, so she says "Well, we'd better telephone for an axe--" at which point her husband replies "impatiently" with the zingy though mathematically imprecise words that I used as the opening quotation to this post.) Things go from bad to worse, to use another phrase used in the novel. Anger can inspire positive action in life, though in the novel it assuredly does not.
I find the cooling photos to be somehow cooling, or at least distracting in a healthy and relaxing way -- honoring our Great Lakes and other planetary waters is always healthy! -- and I find dreaming the Golden Age into existence to be truly exciting.
The book has more to say on the subjects of heat and housing -- e.g. what happens if, in your mansion, in front of your unfaithful husband, on the hottest day of the year, you tell your lover he looks so cool (combustion happens); what happens if in the confusion of the heat and the boiling emotions you and your party intentionally drive away from the Sound and into the city and take a suite at the Plaza Hotel (it gets hotter, weather-wise and temper-wise); and what else powder covers up and what else fans blow away -- and all I will add on those subjects for now is that I love that even after multiple readings of The Great Gatsby, a book written almost 100 years ago, the novel still invites fresh exploration and interpretation, and offers fresh connection to contemporary situations, including situations of heat and housing, how to summer, and how not to summer.
Truly, who would have imagined that the white dress scene on the warm windy evening at the beginning of the novel would inspire life at the Summer Serenity Cottage almost a century later?
Or that the Summer Serenity Cottage, built over a century ago, would be enjoying its fresh renaissance as a Great Lakes-themed getaway, with reading nooks I've set up throughout, and in dialogue with a Great American Novel from the Jazz Age?
It's all connected, and we are purifying the past -- Jay Gatsby would have loved that, as that was his dream -- and we are moving onward and upward into a positive future: the Golden Age!
[Update: yesterday during another week of 90+ degree heat and 100% humidity, a dear friend helped me turn the guest room here at the cottage into a sealed air conditioned space, using my portable ac, the window tray it came with, and some packing tape I had on hand.
The good news: this fun little room got really cool with this powerful portable ac! I slept in the guest room, and while it wasn't an easy night, it wasn't the hardest....
The bad news: ventilating the room is tricky because the house has no ducts or vents - which can also be a good thing as having no forced air means more silence. If the guest room door is closed, there is no fresh air, just exhalations. If the door is open, some cool air escapes and not that much fresh air enters. And, the ac is loud and I couldn't sleep with it on, so turned on the fan, then got hot and sticky and couldn't sleep, so turned on the ac, but couldn't sleep with the noise, and round and round.
Monsoon moments. I suspect that if it had been this humid during Gatsby's summer of 1922, no one would have had any energy for mayhem. The heat in the novel led to hot tempers; humidity would have led to soggy fainting?
Jorji the cat continues to hold up quite well, resting in various splayed-out positions.
The Great Catsby.]
Your friend in decorating,
Valerie
Feel free to say hi via email as well: valerie.beck@post.harvard.edu.
Thank you!
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