The last orderly period of Gatsbys life, then, was the period before he was sent to fight in the war, when he was still in the process of self-creation. The period when he loved Daisy and when Daisy loved him preceded his period of fabulous wealth. In this respect, he fits the Alger stereotype. The period when his love becomes most intense, however, is precisely that in which he does not see Daisy. The love born in this period is therefore largely a function of his imagination. The kernel of his experience remains untouched because it is safely embedded in a previous time; the growth of the love is wild and luxuriant. it spurs him on, resulting in the glamorous world of parties and in the huge incoherent failure (p. 217) of his house. The romantic and fantastic nature of Gatsbys love seems extraordinary and absurd, looked at in worldy, practical terms. Why does he wait so long to arrange a meeting and then use Jordan Baker and Nick Carraway to bring it about? A man with Gatsbys resources would surely have a hundred easier ways to do what he does in the course of this story. The answer is that the love becomes more important than the object of it. Gatsby has already started down this path in Louisville when he asks himself, What would be the use of doing great things if I could have a better time telling her what I was going to do? (p. 180). If Gatsby himself is presented as curiously unreal, the connection between Daisy and Gatsby - the unobtainable and the insubstantial - is destined to founder in a world as insistently material as the one Fitzgerald details for us. In such a word, Gatsby cannot make love to Daisy. Even earlier, during the war, when Gatsby and Daisy did make love (took her [p. 178]), physical contact was a limitation of his love: He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God (p. 134). And the moments of greatest intimacy between them are those when they neither speak nor make love: They had never been closer in their month of love, nor communicated more profoundly one with another, than when she brushed silent lips against his coats shoulder or when he touched the end of her fingers, gently, as though she were asleep (p. 180). No wonder, then, that after the five-year hiatus, when Gatsbys love has had the chance to 49