The Great Gatsby, Chapter 1
This is a book about possibility.
In the spring of 1922, Nick Carraway moved from the Middle West to Manhattan, having consulted with his family, who deliberated the decision as if they were choosing his prep school. At last they agreed, and he moved east to work for a brokerage firm with a name that might not worry the naive: Probity Trust. Nick found a cottage fifteen miles from New York City, amid the mushrooming mansions built by newfound wealth, surrounding himself for about eighty dollars a month with the consoling proximity of millionaires. He would study finance, learning the secrets of Midas and Morgan and Maecenas. In an era of booming stock market fortunes everyone was making money: why shouldn’t he? America was embarking on a spree; the world was rich with promise and there was always more money to be made: “Bonds were the thing now. Young men sold them who had nothing else to go into.” Nick was ready for a fresh start, enjoying “that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.” He didn’t yet know that fresh starts can become false starts: it all depends on the ending.
In the autumn of 1922 another young man moved from the Middle West to Manhattan, arriving four days before his twenty-sixth birthday. Unlike Nick Carraway, F. Scott Fitzgerald was not his own fictional creation—at least, nowhere near to the same degree—and he really did move to New York City in late September 1922. He was not in finance; indeed, he was usually in financial difficulties. He, too, was young, optimistic, fairly pleased with himself, but his own artistic aspirations far exceeded his character’s modest admission that he was “rather literary in college.” Unlike the alter ego he created to tell the story of his novel about greatness, Scott Fitzgerald wanted to be one of the greatest writers who ever lived. His ambitions, he wrote later, “once so nearly achieved,” were to be “a part of English literature,” a part of our inheritance.
Although later readers would persistently confuse them, the similarities between Scott Fitzgerald and Nick Carraway are mostly superficial. Both came from middle-class Midwestern families and acquired Ivy League educations—although Fitzgerald sent Nick to Yale, a university for which, as a loyal Princeton man, he had some competitive contempt. Both Fitzgerald and Carraway tended toward judgmentalism, but also, correlatively, toward idolatry. Both were susceptible to glamor, and both were anxious about its capacity to corrupt. Both enjoyed material luxury but were also moralists who worried about its spiritual poverty.
And both moved to Long Island in 1922, where they would live through an extraordinary sequence of events. They were not exactly the same events, not identical, but their symmetry tilts toward the feeling of a design. For those who could sense the design as well as Fitzgerald, symmetry begins to shade toward prophecy. Art cannot, perhaps, impose order on life—but it teaches us to admire even the unruliest of revelations.
Scott Fitzgerald wired Max Perkins on Monday, September 18, that he and Zelda were coming to Manhattan after a year’s sojourn in the bored, sprawling Middle West. They were keeping their return a secret: “Arrive Wednesday tell no one.” He also requested that Perkins wire a thousand dollars to his account, to pay for their trip and for establishing themselves in New York. The next day Scott and Zelda left Scottie with her nanny in St. Paul and boarded the train for the two-day journey to New York.
The bard of the Jazz Age, Fitzgerald heralded its arrival two years earlier with the publication of his first novel, This Side of Paradise, and his marriage to Zelda Sayre exactly a week later. The Jazz Age “bore him up, flattered him and gave him more money than he had dreamed of, simply for telling people that he felt as they did, that something had to be done with all the nervous energy stored up and unexpended in the War,” he wrote later. “A whole race going hedonistic, deciding on pleasure,” it was all part “of the general decision to be amused that began with the cocktail parties of 1921.” In early 1922 he had published his second novel, The Beautiful and Damned, and they had spent an uproarious summer at the Minnesota resort of White Bear Lake, before they were asked to leave and take their uproar with them. Wearied of such provincialism, they decided to head back to the white chasms of Manhattan, taking a suite at the Plaza Hotel while they searched for a house near the city. On the train going back to New York they had a violent quarrel, Zelda said later, although by then she had forgotten why.
Of their long train journeys, Zelda remembered pale green compartments that moved like luminous hyphens through the rolling dark night. The dining car glinted and shone just as modern life promised, and the compact limitations of train life captivated them both, until their cigarettes and whiskey were infiltrated by the metallic taste of their surroundings. In the morning, in preparation for arrival, a porter was available to steam and press traveling suits, and the Twentieth Century employed a professional barber, who could give a man a close shave with a straight razor while hurtling along at seventy miles an hour.
About to turn twenty-six, Francis Scott Fitzgerald was a slender young man, with dark golden hair and glittering “hard and emerald eyes.” With his “sophomore face and troubadour heart,” he was “such a sunny man,” friends remembered; another recalled, “Fitzgerald was pert and fresh and blond, and looked, as someone said, like a jonquil.” Pencil sketches and medallion-sized cameo photographs of his classic profile were regularly printed in the new gossip magazines and Sunday supplements. Just the week before, on September 10, the New York World ran a large feature naming Fitzgerald one of America’s Dozen Handsomest Male Authors.
Fitzgerald was so tall and straight and attractive, remembered H. L. Mencken, “that he might even have been called beautiful.” At five feet eight inches (his passport added another half inch), Scott Fitzgerald was not tall, but he was dapper, and exuberant with early success. “Fitzgerald is romantic,” his friend Edmund Wilson had written earlier that year, “but also cynical about romance; he is bitter as well as ecstatic; astringent as well as lyrical. He casts himself in the role of playboy, yet at the playboy he incessantly mocks. He is vain, a little malicious, of quick intelligence and wit, and has an Irish gift for turning language into something iridescent and surprising.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1921
His good looks and charm had helped propel Fitzgerald to instant fame when This Side of Paradise sold out its first printing in twenty-four hours; the novel “haunted [their] generation like a song, popular but perfect.” It was so popular that a newspaper reported the story of a schoolboy who was asked to name the author of Paradise Lost and replied unhesitatingly, “F. Scott Fitzgerald.” Fitzgerald clipped the item and pasted it in his scrapbook.
Zelda Fitzgerald, 1922
His wife, chic, provocative Zelda, was considered a great beauty, a woman of “astonishing prettiness,” although it is agreed that photographs never did her justice, failing to convey “any real sense of what she looked like . . . A camera recorded the imperfections of her face, missing the coloring and vitality that transcended them so absolutely.” Zelda’s honey-gold hair seemed to give her a burnished glow and her éclat was soon legendary.
Her greatest art may have been her carefully cultivated air of artlessness; Zelda understood the aesthetics of self-invention. The flapper was an artist of existence, Zelda said, a woman who turned herself into her own work of art, a young and lovely object of admiration. Her behavior was calculated to shock. Meeting Zelda for the first time nine days after her marriage to Scott, his friend Alec McKaig wrote in his diary, “Called on Scott Fitz and his bride. Latter temperamental small town, Southern Belle. Chews gum—shows knees. I do not think marriage can succeed. Both drinking heavily. Think they will be divorced in 3 years. Scott write something big—then die in a garret at 32.”
Zelda’s intelligence was unquestionably acute and she had a singular way with words, a gift for inventive and surprising turns of phrase, said Edmund Wilson. “She talked with so spontaneous a color and wit�
��almost exactly in the way she wrote—that I very soon ceased to be troubled by the fact that the conversation was in the nature of free association of ideas and one could never follow up anything. I have rarely known a woman who expressed herself so delightfully and so freshly; she had no ready-made phrases on the one hand and made no straining for effect on the other.” Her conversation was “full of felicitous phrases and unexpected fancies, especially if you yourself had absorbed a few Fitzgerald highballs.”
On the cloudy, cool morning of Wednesday, September 20, 1922, as their train pulled from the gray-turning light into the cavernous gloom of Grand Central terminal, disembarking passengers were greeted by the sensations of the nation’s busiest train station: motor-driven baggage trucks, glaring arclights, red-capped porters, steam whistles, shouting conductors, hurrying passengers, and the high-pitched cries of the “newsies.” Every front page in New York that morning was still headlining the story that had broken three days earlier.
Across the Hudson River in New Jersey, a double murder had stunned the small town of New Brunswick. If the headline weren’t enough to catch the Fitzgeralds’ attention that morning, the location of the crime scene would have: New Brunswick was only a few miles up the recently completed Lincoln Highway from Princeton, which the Fitzgeralds still visited regularly to attend football games and cocktail parties.
The initial details were gruesome, and the press was doing everything it could to sensationalize them. Within four years America learned to call this process “hype,” but in 1922 they called it “ballyhoo,” or “jazz journalism.”
Edward W. Hall, the well-to-do Episcopal minister of St. John the Evangelist church in New Brunswick, had been found dead in a field outside of town on Saturday, September 16. Beside him was the body of Eleanor Reinhardt Mills, a woman who sang in the choir in the rector’s church. Both victims were married to other people, but they “had long been friendly,” the New York Times insinuatingly reported, and both had disappeared from their homes on the previous Thursday evening. There were two wounds in the back of the rector’s head, said the Times, and one in Eleanor Mills’s forehead; the rector’s watch and wallet had been stolen.
The dead bodies were found in an artful tableau: his arm was cradling her head; her hand rested intimately on his thigh. “Their clothing was arranged as if for burial,” said the Times: his panama hat was over his face and a brown silk scarf covered hers. The bodies were found beneath a crab apple tree near the abandoned Phillips Farm on De Russey’s Lane, popular with locals for lovers’ rendezvous. Love letters were scattered around their bodies, and the killer had added the piquant, theatrical touch of propping the rector’s own calling card against his shoe.
The scandalous murders of Hall and Mills were impossible to miss. They would be front-page news across the country for the rest of 1922 and become one of the most famous murder mysteries of a murderous decade.
From Grand Central Terminal, the Fitzgeralds took a taxi that Wednesday morning up Fifth Avenue to the elegant alabaster Plaza, their favorite hotel in New York: “an etched hotel, dainty and subdued,” Zelda called it, which means it was the wrong place for the Fitzgeralds. Their cab might have been yellow, but probably wasn’t. The Yellow Taxi Company had just been incorporated at the beginning of 1922, and would not achieve a monopoly of New York cabs for decades. In the 1920s, New York taxis came in harlequin colors: moonlight-blue taxicabs, “discreetly hooded,” appealed to those seeking “a degree of privacy in pairs”; there were gray cabs, green ones, and black-and-white ones; Fitzgerald put a lavender taxi into The Great Gatsby. Elegant open roadsters in varying styles and colors were marketed at chic women like Zelda, who were encouraged to think of them as accessories: a car in “Sultan red” was promised to suit “the florid color of the Latin type of woman,” while various shades of blue and gray were recommended for blondes.
In 1922, Fifth Avenue, like all of New York City, was far less thickly forested with buildings than it would become; the old island of Manhattan that had once welcomed Dutch sailors was not hard to imagine. The new beaux arts buildings were creamy and unblemished, the city’s wide avenues offering “all the iridescence of the beginning of the world,” Scott recalled. New York City then was still crisp and white, as if freshly laundered. The city air was salted by the ocean; rivers flowed fast on either side. “New York was more full of reflections than of itself,” wrote Zelda a decade later in her autobiographical novel, Save Me the Waltz. “New York is a good place to be on the upgrade.” The Fitzgeralds, glowing and celebrated, were riding the prow of America like the spirit of ecstasy on the hood of a red Rolls-Royce. “America was going on the greatest, gaudiest spree in history,” Fitzgerald wrote: a spree that peaked, he said, in 1922.
The old world was deliquescing; the new world was delirious. Pleasure had become a principle and a promise—Dr. Freud, whom everyone was quoting, said so. Four years after the end of the Great War, two years into prohibition (usually spelled with a small p in the 1920s), America was learning to party.
The old patrician rules still bonded high society together, but social barriers were proving soluble in alcohol. The Volstead Act, prohibiting the production, sale, and transport of “intoxicating liquors,” became law on January 17, 1920. Prohibition didn’t prohibit much, and incited a great deal. By September 1922 it was already obvious that prohibition, known with varying degrees of irony as the Great Experiment, was experimenting mostly with the laws of unintended consequences. Its greatest success was in loosening the nation’s inhibitions with bathtub gin—what they called “synthetic” liquor.
Bootlegging was rapidly becoming a national joke, if a disreputable one. A popular wisecrack said that the safest way to get three sheets to the wind was to go to sea, because in the early days of prohibition you could drink in international waters. The day after Eleanor Mills and Edward Hall disappeared, the Tribune printed a comical piece about an “Old Soak” lamenting how much more he drinks during prohibition, and requesting the repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment so that he can return to his more temperate ways. The punch line is that although the Old Soak drinks far too much now, at least he doesn’t drink as much as one of Scott Fitzgerald’s heroines. By 1922 a flotilla of boats, known as “Rum Row,” was anchored three miles off Long Island Sound, safely in international waters, with holds full of liquor brought up from the West Indies. Under cover of night, bootleggers would chug out in motorboats and make their purchases from what was effectively a floating liquor store. Some men wait for their ships to come in, it was said—and others meet them beyond the three-mile limit.
Looking back from deep within the Depression, Fitzgerald remembered “a gala in the air.” Life was a “gay parade,” a carnival of bright colors, lavish and exuberant. Around the same time, he jotted a recollection in his notebooks: “Laughed with a sudden memory of Hopkins where going to a party he had once tried taking gin by rectum, and the great success it had been until the agony of passing great masses of burned intestine.”
On this side of paradise, sins needed to feel original. That autumn a girl attracted crowds in Manhattan by strolling along Fifth Avenue in transparent pajamas, walking four cats on leads. The cats were also wearing pajamas. A crowd gathered; the police were called. Eventually an observant policeman worked out that the girl was enacting a current bit of slang, putting on a show of “the cat’s pajamas.” The police dismissed it as an example of that unsettling new phenomenon, a “publicity scheme,” and made the girl go home.
There was no sign of someone trying to be “the cat’s meow” or “the bee’s knees,” other popular superlatives of the decade. In early February, Fitzgerald noted the “adjectives of the year—‘hectic,’ ‘marvelous,’ and ‘slick.’” Zelda later offered her own current adjectives from those years: hectic, delirious, killing. “And how!” exclaimed the young men, as they announced they were becoming slaves to highballs; young women advised each other of “the new and
really swagger things” to do in the city. “It was slick to have seen you,” Fitzgerald told Max Perkins that autumn, while Zelda wrote a magazine editor, “Thank you again for the slick party,” apologizing for her behavior at it: “But you know how it is to be a drinking woman!”
In 1921 H. L. Mencken published a revised version of his groundbreaking American Language, with a whole section devoted to slang and a separate chapter for war slang, including words like “slacker,” which originally meant draft dodger. In 1925 Virginia Woolf would remark in her essay “American Fiction”: “The Americans are doing what the Elizabethans did—they are coining new words. They are instinctively making the language adapt itself to their needs . . . Nor does it need much foresight to predict that when words are being made, a literature will be made out of them.”
A list of the words first recorded in English between 1918 and 1923 reads like a JazzAge divination of the century to come, a catalog of the origins of our life:
cool (1918)
motherfucker (1918)
teenage (1921)
wimp (1920)
debunk (1923)
encode (1919)
hypermodern (1923)
multi-purpose (1920)
power play (1921)
existentialism (1919)
columnist (1920)
cartwheel (1920)
extrovert (1918)
fantasist (1923)
Fascist (1921)
publicized (1920)
Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of The Great Gatsby Page 3