«The Great Gatsby», F. Scott Fitzgerald“Old sport” 43 times, and never to Daisy

“Old sport” first, then a name

Gatsby takes his time. The story is told by Nick Carraway, his neighbour, and for two chapters we only hear gossip about the man in the huge house, and see him once, from far off, at night on his lawn. Gatsby doesn’t say a word until chapter III, when a quarter of the book is already behind us.

Nick is at a party, and a man of about his own age is at his table. They talk about the war, and the man invites him to try out his new hydroplane in the morning: “Want to go with me, old sport?” Nick admits he hasn’t met the host yet; the invitation came with the man’s chauffeur. “I’m Gatsby,” the man says suddenly. Between the “old sport” and the name there are 103 words.

And that same night Nick learns what the phrase is worth. Gatsby is seeing off the last guests, Nick apologizes for not having known him in the garden, and gets: “Don’t give it another thought, old sport.” Gatsby’s hand brushes his shoulder as he says it, and Nick finds no more familiarity in the phrase than in the hand. All told, the book says “old sport” forty-five times.

Who gets called “old sport”

The promised count. I wrote down all forty-five “old sport”s and worked out, for each, who says it and to whom. Twice it’s Tom, mocking; the other 43 are Gatsby’s. And thirty-four of them go to Nick, the neighbour who tells us the whole story.

The other nine are scattered. Five go to Tom Buchanan, Daisy’s husband, all of them in one chapter, the seventh. Two go to Klipspringer, who lives in Gatsby’s house and plays his piano. One goes to a motorcycle policeman who pulls up alongside their car: Gatsby waves a white card before his eyes, and the man apologizes, “Know you next time, Mr. Gatsby.” And one goes to someone on the phone, right in the middle of showing Daisy round the house.

And Daisy gets none. The woman he bought a house across the bay for never once hears “old sport” from him. Jordan Baker tells Nick that Gatsby bought the house so that Daisy would be just across the bay, and half expected her to wander into one of his parties some night. She never did.

Twelve times in one chapter

“Old sport” is thickest in chapter V, where Gatsby sees Daisy for the first time in almost five years: twelve times in 4,251 words, nearly twice as often as in chapter VII. The meeting is tea at Nick’s, and Gatsby is so nervous the phrase comes out on its own. He and Nick look over the twelve lemon cakes from the delicatessen; asked “Will they do?”, he says “Of course, of course! They’re fine!” and adds hollowly, “… old sport.”

Then he shows Daisy round his house. In one room a dishevelled man in pyjamas is doing exercises on the floor: Klipspringer. Later Gatsby has him play the piano, and when after the first song he’s still protesting that he’s out of practice, Gatsby commands: “Don’t talk so much, old sport… Play!”

But nine of the chapter’s twelve go to Nick. Even with Daisy in his bedroom, smoothing her hair with his gold brush while he sits shading his eyes and laughing, he can’t finish a sentence, and the phrase goes to Nick again: “It’s the funniest thing, old sport… I can’t—When I try to—” And at the window he tells Daisy that if it weren’t for the mist they could see her home across the bay, and the green light that burns all night at the end of her dock.

“Where’d you pick that up?”

Chapter VII, the longest in the book: a stifling suite at the Plaza Hotel in New York. Here Gatsby first calls Tom, Daisy’s husband, “old sport”: “Why not let her alone, old sport? … You’re the one that wanted to come to town.” A moment later Tom pounces: “All this ‘old sport’ business. Where’d you pick that up?”

He gets no answer: Daisy tells him to stop making personal remarks. Instead Tom asks about Oxford, which Gatsby once told Nick about in the car, and Gatsby admits he went there in 1919 and “only stayed five months. That’s why I can’t really call myself an Oxford man.” Then he tells Tom straight out: “both of us loved each other all that time, old sport, and you didn’t know.”

The fifth time he calls Tom “old sport”, it’s over Tom’s friend Walter Chase, and Tom snaps. Gatsby says nothing. And he never calls Tom “old sport” again: after that scene, every one of them goes back to Nick.

The last “old sport”

The last “old sport” Gatsby says aloud comes the morning after the Plaza. Nick can’t bring himself to leave, misses one train and then another, and finally says, “I’ll call you up.” “Do, old sport.” Just before the hedge Nick turns round and shouts across the lawn: “They’re a rotten crowd… You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.” It was, he writes, the only compliment he ever gave him.

From the office Nick rings Gatsby’s house four times, and the line is busy. That same day Gatsby is killed. Nick calls Daisy, but she and Tom have gone away without leaving an address. And then he hears Gatsby’s voice in his head: the forty-fifth and last “old sport” in the book, and Gatsby is no longer the one saying it.

Hardly anyone came to the funeral. Klipspringer, who got two “old sport”s, called the night before about his tennis shoes. There were Gatsby’s father, the minister, the servants, the postman and the man with owl-eyed glasses Nick had once found in Gatsby’s library. And Daisy, Nick writes, hadn’t sent a message or a flower.

Verdict

Read it. Not for the parties, everyone remembers those already, but for the way a phrase for everybody ends up as a word for a friend. And for the last page, where Nick sits on the beach at night thinking of the green light Gatsby believed in.

In school this novel gets taught as a story about the American Dream and about love that money can’t buy. That’s true, but to me it’s also about what you say to whom. Gatsby handed out forty-three “old sport”s, and I think only Nick took the phrase seriously. One point off because the book is so short: I was just getting into it, and the old sports ran out.