Dan Cody

Dan Cody was a product of the Nevada silver fields, the Yukon, and every rush for metal since 1875. The transactions in Montana copper that made him many times a millionaire found him physically robust but on the verge of soft-mindedness, and, suspecting this, an infinite number of women tried to separate him from his money. The none too savory ramifications by which Ella Kaye, the newspaper woman, played Madame de Maintenon to his weakness and sent him to sea in a yacht, were common knowledge to the turgid sub-journalism of 1902. He had been coasting along all too hospitable shores for five years when he turned up as James Gatz's destiny at Little Girls Point.

The Meeting That Changed Everything

It was James Gatz, loafing along the beach that afternoon in a torn green jersey and a pair of canvas pants, who saw Dan Cody's yacht drop anchor over the most insidious flat on Lake Superior. At that specific moment, which witnessed the beginning of his career, Gatz had already changed his name to Jay Gatsby. He borrowed a rowboat, pulled out to the TUOLOMEE, and informed Cody that a wind might catch him and break him up in half an hour. To the young Gatz, resting on his oars and looking up at the railed deck, the yacht represented all the beauty and glamour in the world. Cody asked him a few questions—one of them elicited the brand new name—and found that he was quick and extravagantly ambitious. A few days later he took him to Duluth and bought him a blue coat, six pair of white duck trousers, and a yachting cap. When the TUOLOMEE left for the West Indies and the Barbary Coast, Gatsby left too.

The Five-Year Apprenticeship

Gatsby was employed in a vague personal capacity—while he remained with Cody he was in turn steward, mate, skipper, secretary, and even jailor, for Dan Cody sober knew what lavish doings Dan Cody drunk might soon be about, and he provided for such contingencies by reposing more and more trust in Gatsby. The arrangement lasted five years, during which the boat went three times around the Continent. It might have lasted indefinitely except for the fact that Ella Kaye came on board one night in Boston and a week later Dan Cody inhospitably died. The portrait of him up in Gatsby's bedroom showed a gray, florid man with a hard, empty face—the pioneer debauchee, who during one phase of American life brought back to the Eastern seaboard the savage violence of the frontier brothel and saloon. It was indirectly due to Cody that Gatsby drank so little; sometimes in the course of gay parties women used to rub champagne into his hair, but for himself he formed the habit of letting liquor alone.

The Legacy That Never Arrived

It was from Cody that Gatsby inherited money—a legacy of twenty-five thousand dollars. He never got it. He never understood the legal device that was used against him, but what remained of the millions went intact to Ella Kaye. He was left with his singularly appropriate education; the vague contour of Jay Gatsby had filled out to the substantiality of a man. The photograph of Dan Cody in yachting costume hung on the wall over Gatsby's desk, a token of forgotten violence, staring down from the wall. Gatsby told Nick Carraway the strange story of his youth with Dan Cody during the night after Myrtle Wilson's death, because "Jay Gatsby" had broken up like glass against Tom Buchanan's hard malice, and the long secret extravaganza was played out.

Thematic Significance

Cody represented the first and most formative influence on Gatsby's life, embodying the raw, frontier wealth that Gatsby would spend his life trying to replicate and refine. The mentorship gave Gatsby not only his education in the ways of the rich but also the model of a self-made man whose fortune came from the earth and whose end came through the machinations of those who sought to separate him from it. The twenty-five-thousand-dollar legacy that Gatsby never received foreshadowed the larger inheritance—Daisy herself—that would also slip through his fingers. Cody's photograph remained in Gatsby's bedroom as a silent witness to the origins of the dream that would ultimately destroy him.