The book

As my students were reading The Great Gatsby this year, we kept coming back to the intensity of Nick Carraway feelings for the titular Jay Gatsby. Again and again, Carraway’s narration gets lost in his adoration for Gatsby. There’s plenty of evidence that Carraway has romantic love for Gatsby (his hazy depiction of a night spent with McKee, his devotion for Gatsby even after death, his inclination to write an entire book about this enigma of a man). Even if you don’t buy that reading, Nick’s descriptions of Gatsby are, to say the least, effusive. Take, for instance, the first time that Nick ever sees Gatsby:

He smiled understandingly—much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced—or seemed to face—the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey. Precisely at that point it vanished—and I was looking at an elegant young rough-neck, a year or two over thirty, whose elaborate formality of speech just missed being absurd. (48)

Fitzgerald’s prose makes Nick seem pleasantly confounded by the impact of Gatsby’s presence. Those multiple em dashes mimic a constant self-correction; as he goes along, Carraway is trying to pin down the spell that Gatsby casts over him. He can’t contain his immediate, overflowing response to that smile, as evidenced by his reliance on hyperbole (“eternal reassurance,” “in life,” “the whole external world,” “irresistible,” “at your best”). As he finally settles on just how Gatsby’s smile makes him feel, he relies on parallel syntax that anchors three clauses in “understood you,” “believe in you,” and “assured you.” By the end of the sentence, we’ve also read the word “you” a whopping eight times, and this repetition, on top of the the piling clauses, echoes just how much Gatsby’s mere smile makes Nick feel. Fitzgerald even manages to get his reader to experience a ghost of that feeling by shifting, oddly, to the second-person “you” for just the sentences in which Gatsby is smiling. As soon as his smile extinguishes, it’s back to the first-person, as if Nick has regained control of his senses. For Nick, that smile and connection brings Gatsby to life; without it, he’s just an “absurd” “rough-neck.”

To me, this sounds a lot like that singular capacity that love has to transform and transmute one’s beloved, I think. (Need more evidence of Nick’s love for Gatsby and the thrall of Gatsby’s smile? Here’s a tongue-in-cheek ranking of every time Nick responds to Gatsby’s smile, ranked in order of Nick’s thirst.)

The beer

The name of this Berliner Weisse from D.C.’s own Right Proper Brewing Company is obviously a perfect match for the decadence of the Jazz Age: “Diamonds, Fur Coat, Champagne” could be printed on the “surprisingly formal” party invitation that Gatsby sends to Nick by chauffeur. Here’s a random pic from Baz Luhrmann’s 2013 The Great Gatsby that happens to include all three of those luxurious items:

But as much as its name suits the novel, so does the beer’s style. It clocks in at 3.6% ABV, about as light and shallow as Daisy Buchanan. Because it’s a Berliner Weisse, it’s super zippy on the tongue, not only because of its very high carbonation but also because of the tart zing that it sends down the back of your jaw on first sip. Those bubbles and speed are perfect for a novel of motorcars and never-ending champagne. (In fact, in 1809 Napoleon’s troops called Berliner Weisse “the Champagne of the North.”) Right Proper has chosen to brew this style with grapefruit peel and elderflower, both of which appear at key moments in The Great Gatsby. (As one example, Fitzgerald uses both to symbolize Gatsby’s immense disappointment that Daisy does not enjoy his lavish parties, which he’s thrown for years the sole purpose of luring Daisy to one. “She doesn’t understand,” Gatsby says to Nick after the party. “She used to be able to understand. We’d sit for hours—-”. Fitzgerald continues, “He broke off and began to walk up and down a desolate path of fruit rinds and discarded favors and crushed flowers” (109). This occurs just before what I read as the single most significant passage in the novel, in which Gatsby remembers the night he fell in love with Daisy but is unable to vocalize what it is about that love that he’s so desperate to recapture…)

There’s an essential sourness under this beer’s levity, though, the result of the lactobacillus that creates the clean lactic tartness that goes a long way in defining this style. So, too, is there a sourness that underlies the champagne and conspicuous consumption of Gatsby. The Valley of Ashes (which I wrote a post on years ago) is a constant reminder of the dirty underbelly of this indulgence, as is the character of Meyer Wolfsheim, and, ultimately, Myrtle Wilson’s gruesome death, which leads to what Carraway refers to as a “holocaust” (162).

The contrast of effervescent exuberance and sour bitterness are as central to “Champagne, Fur Coat, Diamonds” as they are to the dichotomy of fun and tragedy that is essential to Fitzgerald’s pointed social critique in The Great Gatsby. So, as Gatsby would say:

** All page numbers from the Scribner 2018 edition, edited by James West, with an introduction by Jesmyn Ward.