On Fitzgerald and Brooks
One of the reasons I think people like The Great Gatsby so much is because F. Scott Fitzgerald was good writing about parties and social conversation. From the text:
[As Tom and Daisy Buchannan enter a party at Gatsby’s house with Nick Carraway]: [Daisy]: “These things excite me so. If you want to kiss me any time during the evening, Nick, just let me know and I’ll be glad to arrange it for you.” [Host]: “Look around.”
The passage from the novel brings to mind one of my favorite poems called “Piano after War” by Gwendolyn Brooks. In the novel, Gatsby hosts wild parties but remains mostly aloof; he is supposed to have tried to kill himself in World War I because he did not want to live without Daisy. The Brooks poem is similar in that it describes wanting to get away from happy social interaction because of trauma or past difficulty. Here it is:
On a snug evening I shall watch her fingers,
Cleverly ringed, declining to clever pink,
Beg glory from the willing keys. Old hungers
Will break their coffins, rise to eat and thank.
And music, warily, like the golden rose
That sometimes after sunset warms the west,
Will warm that room, persuasively suffuse
That room and me, rejuvenate a past.
But suddenly, across my climbing fever
Of proud delight— a multiplying cry.
A cry of bitter dead men who will never
Attend a gentle maker of musical joy.
Then my thawed eye will go again to ice.
And stone will shove the softness from my face.