heir social practice — could affirm that, in some bedrock ontological sense, the real was the radiant and the radiant was the real. The substance of joyous and visionary beauty was not the delusion of a youthful libido or abnormal temperament but rather possessed the stature of noesis: it was, that is to say, the momentary experience of authentic insight into the ultimate nature of reality as ineffably glorious. Against this, we have the society of Daisy and Tom, whose crabbed credo is "I've been everywhere and seen everything and done everything. . . . Sophisticated — God, I'm sophisticated!" (18). Fitzgerald's novel thus stands as a locus classicus of the affective impoverishment, the crippled cynical sensibility, of the twentieth-century West, which has shriveled and discredited the ideal, peripheralizing the human faculty of wonder to the misfit status of the merely "aesthetic." At the age of twenty-three, however, Fitzgerald had written to a Catholic friend: "I can quite sympathize with your desire to be a Carthusian. . . . [I am] nearly sure that I will become a priest" (quoted in Bruccoli 109-10). The Catholicism of his upbringing, in which Monsignor Fay had confirmed him as a teenager, was subjected to gnawing doubt in his Princeton years and finally rejected the year after leaving: the sublime cravings of Catholic mysticism had been routed by one for the freshly encountered Zelda; but a form of religious sensibility never left him. Indeed three stories ("The Ordeal," "Benediction," and that section on the early life of Gatsby which was to become excised from the novel and form an independent story, "Absolution") center on the pain, fervor and self-consecration of visionary religious experience. Fitzgerald had been attracted to Catholicism in the first place by the way that Fay had revealed in the "church a dazzling, golden thing," and by the fact that Fay "loved the idea of God enough to be a celibate." He was drawn...
