Gatsby and Dan Cody's mentorship

The mentorship between Jay Gatsby and Dan Cody was the single most important relationship of Gatsby's young life, the crucible in which James Gatz of North Dakota was forged into the figure who would later pursue Daisy Buchanan across the bay. It was Cody who gave Gatsby his first glimpse of the beauty and glamour of the world, who provided him with a singular education in the ways of wealth and its perils, and who left him, ultimately, with nothing but the shape of a dream.

Origins and the Transformation of James Gatz

James Gatz—that was really, or at least legally, his name—changed it at the age of seventeen, at the specific moment that witnessed the beginning of his career. He was loafing along the beach of Lake Superior in a torn green jersey and a pair of canvas pants when he saw Dan Cody's yacht drop anchor over the most insidious flat on the lake. It was already Jay Gatsby who 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. Gatsby had probably had the name ready for a long time; his parents were shiftless and unsuccessful farm people, and his imagination had never really accepted them as his parents at all. The truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God—a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that—and he must be about His Father's business, the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty. So he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen-year-old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end.

The Five-Year Apprenticeship

Cody was fifty years old when he met Gatsby, a product of the Nevada silver fields, of the Yukon, of 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. 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. Gatsby smiled at Cody—he had probably discovered that people liked him when he smiled—and Cody 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. He 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 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 portrait of Cody that hung in Gatsby's bedroom—a gray, florid man with a hard, empty face—was a token of forgotten violence, 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. Gatsby told Nick Carraway the strange story of his youth with Dan Cody during the night after Myrtle Wilson's death, when "Jay Gatsby" had broken up like glass against Tom Buchanan's hard malice and the long secret extravaganza was played out. The mentorship had given him everything except the money itself: the name, the manners, the education in the world's dangers, and the permanent, unfulfilled hunger for the green light.