Spectator Competition: Big bash

In Comp. 3387, for the centenary of the publication of The Great Gatsby and Mrs Dalloway, you were invited to submit a passage in which one goes to the other’s party. It was especially hard to whittle this one down. Deserving a mention: Mrs D.’s West Egg dream by Brian Murdoch (‘“Sod the temporal perspective and narrative shifts,” she thought, “I need a nap”’) and Basil Ransome-Davies’s rendering of stream of consciousness (‘newspaper vendors at Piccadilly Circus, pigeons marooned in roof space, university architects, pistachio ice cream in a Viennese café… What made her wonder if Mr Carraway was Mr Gatsby’s petit ami like that mad young French poet?’); also Sue Pickard, Sylvia Fairley, Joseph Houlihan and others. The £25 vouchers go to those below.

‘Mrs Dalloway, old boy.’ Thus addressed, Clarissa wondered why she had ever invited Gatsby to her party. He exhibited the lethal innocence of all Americans, standing by and almost disappearing into her voluminous yellow curtains in a suit more appropriate to the Riviera, drinking Tokay as if it were root beer and seeming constantly on the verge of saying ‘Gee willikers’ to the Prime Minister. His conversation proved gauche, its dual preoccupations money, most of which he seemed proud to have amassed, and a girl named Daisy, the apparent toast of somewhere named East Egg. Lady Bruton, shooting Clarissa the sort of desperate and critical look a stricken battleship might direct to its fleet, declared herself charmed. It would have been better, Clarissa reflected regretfully, if there had been dancing.

     ‘I wanted to say how much I admire your flowers,’ Gatsby said. Reassuring flattery, Clarissa remembered, invariably justified an invitation.

Adrian Fry

What a lark! What a plunge! Clarissa Dalloway, suspended in Westminster most of her life, found America, Mr Gatsby, his companions – and, heavens, those motor cars! – positively charming.