Dan Cody
The mining millionaire who took Gatsby onto his yacht at seventeen. He died years before the novel begins.
Another silver or copper strike, and someone to keep him off the drink. He had followed every metal rush since 1875, and took the young Gatsby on partly to manage him when he was drinking.
The book
At a glance
- Dan Cody — mining millionaire, fifty when he anchors off Little Girl Bay; dead long before the novel opens
- Nevada silver, the Yukon, and Montana copper — every rush for metal since seventy-five
- The Tuolomee — the West Indies, the Barbary Coast, three times around the continent
- Steward, mate, skipper, secretary, and jailor
- Twenty-five thousand dollars, which Gatsby never received
- Gatsby's bedroom — a portrait of a grey, florid man with a hard, empty face
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeDan Cody made his fortune in the Nevada silver fields, the Yukon, and Montana copper, and by fifty he was many times a millionaire, physically robust, and — Nick's phrase — on the verge of soft-mindedness. He spent his last five years coasting the American shoreline in a yacht, and one afternoon he anchored in the shallows of Little Girl Bay on Lake Superior, where a seventeen-year-old farm boy rowed out to warn him off a shoal.
Cody asked the boy a few questions, one of which elicited the brand new name, found him quick and extravagantly ambitious, took him to Duluth, and bought him a blue coat, six pairs of white duck trousers, and a yachting cap. Gatsby stayed five years. Everything he later performed as an inheritance — the manner, the boat, the clothes, the money that comes from nowhere — he learned on board.
How the book draws them
- The yacht in the shallowsTo young Gatz, resting on his oars and looking up at the railed deck, that yacht represented all the beauty and glamour in the world. Nick supposes he smiled at Cody, having probably discovered by then that people liked him when he smiled.
- Where the money came fromA product of the Nevada silver fields, of the Yukon, of every rush for metal since seventy-five. It was the Montana copper transactions that made him rich.
- What the money attractedNick's account is blunt: the copper found him robust but going soft in the head, and, suspecting it, an infinite number of women tried to separate him from it.
- Ella KayeThe newspaper woman who, in Nick's phrasing, played Madame de Maintenon to his weakness and sent him to sea in a yacht — ramifications that were common property of the turgid journalism of 1902. She came on board one night in Boston, and a week later Dan Cody inhospitably died.
- The job Gatsby heldSteward, mate, skipper, secretary, and even jailor, because Dan Cody sober knew what lavish doings Dan Cody drunk might soon be about, and provided for it by trusting Gatsby more and more. Five years, and three times around the continent.
- Why Gatsby doesn't drinkNick attributes it to Cody directly. Women at the parties used to rub champagne into the boy's hair; he formed the habit of letting liquor alone, and keeps it through his own parties twenty years later.
Cody left Gatsby twenty-five thousand dollars, and Gatsby never got it: he never understood the legal device used against him, and what remained of the millions went intact to Ella Kaye. What he did keep, Nick says, was a singularly appropriate education. The portrait stays on the bedroom wall to the end — and when Nick goes through the house looking for somebody to notify, it is nearly all he finds there, a token of forgotten violence.
No single real person is documented behind Cody. The type is: the mining and rush millionaires of the 1870s and after, rich in a decade and unfit for it by the next, and the name puts Buffalo Bill Cody in earshot without the novel ever making the claim. Nick calls him the pioneer debauchee, who during one phase of American life brought the savage violence of the frontier saloon back to the Eastern seaboard, which is the closest the book comes to explaining where Gatsby's money learned its manners.