Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of The Great Gatsby

by Churchwell, Sarah

  It was much remarked at the time that prohibition parties were breaking down old barriers: men and women were suddenly getting drunk together, with predictable results. Different social classes were also mingling, but what Myrtle Wilson’s sordid little evening shows is that this was hardly the same thing as social equality. The fraternizing of rich and poor may, after all, simply serve to highlight economic disparity, underscoring the power of the wealthy. Dissatisfaction was the result; Myrtle is dissembling, but she isn’t fooled. She wants what Daisy has. Myrtle is the mirror image of Gatsby, who wants what Tom has. They are both upstarts, trying to foist themselves upon high society, poseurs who lead double lives. But Myrtle, according to the code of the novel, lacks Gatsby’s greatness, while her party, although cheaper than Gatsby’s, shares (and foreshadows) the crassness and violence that will come at the end of his.

  It is at this typical prohibition party that Nick offers his famous image of being a vicarious participant, both within and without the gathering simultaneously, enjoying the party but listening to the secret priest within who disapproves: “Yet high over the city our line of yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening streets, and I was him too, looking up and wondering. I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.” Before long, Tom has broken Myrtle’s nose with the flat of his hand for saying Daisy’s name; they stanch the blood with copies of Town Tattle to keep it from ruining the pretentious toile de Jouy of her upholstery.

  Myrtle informs Nick that when she first began her affair with Tom all that ran through her head was a modernist carpe diem: “You can’t live forever . . . you can’t live forever.” When she makes a list at the party of all the things she’s got to get, they end with ashes and death, “one of those cute little ashtrays where you touch a spring, and a wreath with a black silk bow for Mother’s grave.” Ashes open the chapter and they close it too: ashes mingling with dust.

  Parties were a form of suicide and yet, after talking for a few hours with James Drawbell that late September night in 1922, and getting drunker, Fitzgerald “looked round mockingly. The party was over. His path lay elsewhere. He was off to the bright lights, purged. The lushest party in the world would still see him. A little late, perhaps, but that was his usual way of arriving. He would soon catch up.”

  OCTOBER

  1922

  Suddenly one of these gypsies in trembling opal, seizes a cocktail out of the air, dumps it down for courage and moving her hands like Frisco dances out alone on the canvas platform. A momentary hush; the orchestra leader varies his rhythm obligingly for her and there is a burst of chatter as the erroneous news goes around that she is Gilda Gray’s understudy from the “Follies.” The party has begun.

  CHAPTER THREE

  GODDARDS. DWANS SWOPES

  There was music from my neighbor’s house through the summer nights. In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars . . . On Mondays eight servants including an extra gardener toiled all day with mops and scrubbing-brushes and hammers and garden-shears, repairing the ravages of the night before . . .

  The Great Gatsby, Chapter 3

  How do you tell the story of a party? A guest list is one way to start. But as Americans invented “partying,” they found that the uninvited kept turning up. A new phrase was needed: crashing the gate, first recorded in 1922. If your party’s gate is crashed, the guest list is retrospective, recording those who came rather than those who were expected. History resembles a guest list, in that sense, of the invited and the gate-crashers, the people for whom we have been waiting, and those whose presence takes us unawares. Sometimes the gate-crashers prove to be the life of the party.

  In the case of the parties that inspired The Great Gatsby, the revelries Fitzgerald exalted in fiction but recorded at the back of Man’s Hope as “Goddards. Dwanns Swopes,” the guests have grown fugitive with time and we’re still awaiting an introduction to some of our hosts. Goddard, for example, may have been Great Neck resident and playwright Charles W. Goddard, or perhaps it was Charles H. Goddard, a real estate broker—we can’t be sure. History is prone to mistakes in identity, and facts are not always solid things. The Goddards must be dispensed with, but they served their purpose.

  The servants have been at work, and Fitzgerald has reminded us to mark their labor in repairing the ravages of the previous night’s festivities. But his notice of workers as he begins to describe Gatsby’s parties does not mean Fitzgerald was more compassionate or egalitarian than his contemporaries. He might only have been thinking of how expensive servants were: they just couldn’t get good help, he and Zelda kept finding, although being hopeless with money and drunk all the time might have had something to do with the problem.

  Meanwhile, the bootleggers, having delivered their crates of smuggled champagne, vanished into the whispering trees, hotfooting it away from the authoritative record.

  If history starts as a guest list, it has a tendency to end like the memory of a drunken party: misheard, blurred, fragmentary. We’re not always sure what happened, or who was there. We have some dropped hints and our own tacit—often mistaken—assumptions. Sometimes history appears to have been so inebriated that it blacked out completely, and we have no idea what a mysterious trace means at all.

  But the vicarious pleasure of Fitzgerald’s words and images remains: the ornate rooms, glowing to receive a thousand guests; the nightingale singing in the garden above the floating rounds of cocktails and which must have come over from Europe on the Cunard or the White Star Line because America doesn’t have nightingales. (Unless it flew in from Keats’s tender night, or Milton’s paradise.) The silver jazz trumpets play a song that sounds plaintive now: “In the morning, in the evening, ain’t we got fun?” If they sing it often enough, perhaps they can convince themselves.

  Gatsby delights so many readers in part because it is a book of symbolic senses, carefully designed to make the pleasure we imagine palpable. Food is drenched in music, lights burn in deep jewel colors, people drink mint juleps or luminescent champagne. Enchanted objects defy the laws of physics: houses and women alike tend to float, while cocktails glide, disembodied, through gardens. When Daisy arrives at Nick’s house in the rain her hair is like a smear of blue paint across her face, and when Gatsby sits with her in Louisville he kisses her “dark hair,” but Fitzgerald also implies that Daisy is blond, for she says her daughter inherited her “yellow” hair. Scholars have debated the meanings of this discrepancy, but whether deliberate or not, the inconsistency adds to the mystical quality of the novel. Daisy’s hair is both colors, for she is a figment of universal beauty, living in a world of spectroscopic gaiety, in which colors refract and shift. Fitzgerald merges different sensory experiences to create prose that is rich with synesthesia. Voices in this novel don’t speak, they are “glowing” with sound. Colors nearly always suggest scents or tastes as well: Gatsby’s house is decorated in rose and lavender silk; his tear-jerking shirts are in coral and apple-green and lavender and faint orange. Music has a tendency to liquefy: silver scales float over a body of water called the Sound while banjoes “drip” their tinny tunes.

  There’s just enough reality in Gatsby’s parties to keep them from being entirely surreal, but they are phantasmagoric, a night scene from El Greco, who imperiously decreed that only the masters should be permitted to use color. Gatsby is washed in color: leaves are blue, shirts are silver, cocktail music is yellow. Prodigal laughter fills the gardens; champagne glasses are as big as finger bowls; women wear trembling opal. Even turkeys are bewitched to a dark gold. Changing the world’s color alters its potential, as color makes Gatsby’s romance with possibility perceptible to the reader: anything can happen now.

  Nick says the story of Gatsby begins the night he first went to the Buchanans’, bu
t for many readers it begins the night he dresses up in white flannels and strolls across to his neighbor’s crowded lawns, complacent in the knowledge that he’s one of the few guests who was actually invited to the party. When Nick is finally introduced to Gatsby three chapters into the novel that bears his name, he tells us that Gatsby is not what he expected. Mistakes about identity continue to be made: Nick thought “Mr. Gatsby would be a florid and corpulent person in his middle years”; instead he’s an attractive man of Nick’s age, with a sudden, magical smile. But he is also obviously a tough attempting to appear cultivated, who could have sprung from the slums of New York’s Lower East Side, or from the backwaters of Louisiana. “I was looking,” Nick says, “at an elegant young rough-neck, a year or two over thirty, whose elaborate formality of speech just missed being absurd. Some time before he introduced himself I’d got a strong impression that he was picking his words with care.” Carefulness is a suspect trait among careless people; it means you’re trying too hard.

  Nick expects Gatsby to be a pompously successful tycoon. We expect someone great, because we know the book’s title. Fitzgerald toys with great expectations, leaving the reader like Owl-Eyes, the stout man in glasses Nick and Jordan encounter in the library later that evening who has been drunk for a week, and thought it might sober him up to sit in a library. Owl-Eyes is marveling over the realism of Gatsby’s books: “as a matter of fact you needn’t bother to ascertain. I ascertained. They’re real,” he announces. “It’s a bona fide piece of printed matter. It fooled me. This fella’s a regular Belasco. It’s a triumph.” Even Owl-Eyes can see through Gatsby’s flimsy charade: they all know he’s a fake. “What thoroughness! What realism! Knew when to stop too—didn’t cut the pages. But what do you want? What do you expect?”

  What we expect helps shape what we will find; through fictions of self we create fact. “If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures,” Nick says of Gatsby, “then there was something gorgeous about him.” Mark the doubt of that “if,” however: Gatsby lives in the conditional mood, as aspirants must. The plot may hinge on bad faith, but the book is bona fide: that much has been ascertained.

  According to Burton Rascoe, on the night of Saturday, September 30 the Fitzgeralds were partying at Sew Collins’s apartment with Bunny Wilson, Mary Blair, and John Dos Passos and his piano lamp, after signing a lease in Great Neck. The next day the New York Times ran a book review about modern college life with the large, misspelled headline: “A Century Before Scott FitzGerald.” Alec Woollcott, an Algonquin regular (who looked, Max Perkins once remarked, “like a petulant owl”), took the time to mock the possibility that the “well-advertised gin-swigging finale-hopping” college boys of 1922 “could be sent to any American college as it was a century before the Scott FitzGerald age,” for it was obvious to anyone that these modern young men “could not possibly pass the entrance examinations” of a century earlier.

  Scott may have been “apathetic” and “going to pieces” in the small hours of the previous night, but as he and Zelda read the New York Times the next morning, perhaps he was enlivened to discover that he had made literary headlines again. If it was irritating to be held to symbolize the flippancy and ignorance of the younger generation, it was also bewildering, he later said. Fitzgerald clipped the headline “A Century Before Scott FitzGerald” and put it in his scrapbook—twice. He must have discovered himself in syndication.

  Eight days later, the Fitzgeralds moved into a cottage at 6 Gateway Drive, in Great Neck, where they would live, tumultuously, until they set sail for Cherbourg in May 1924. The house they settled into was a recently built suburban cottage, part of a new development just outside Great Neck village. It has since been expanded; when the Fitzgeralds lived there it was a modest bungalow and, they and their friends agreed, amusingly bourgeois. They paid $300 a month rent, bought a secondhand Rolls-Royce, and hired servants: a live-in couple at $160 a month, a nurse for Scottie at $90 a month, and a part-time laundress for $36 a month. All this, and the consoling proximity of millionaires.

  Zelda called the Gateway Drive house their “nifty little Babbitt-home at Great Neck,” a nod to Sinclair Lewis’s bestselling new novel, published on September 14, the day that Edward Hall and Eleanor Mills were murdered. Zelda wrote a letter urging the Kalmans, good friends in St. Paul, to come for an autumn visit: “Think of the ride through the dusty blue twilight to New York and the chrysanthemums and the sort of burned smell in the air—and the liquor.” Soon Bunny Wilson was writing to John Bishop: “Fitz and Zelda have struck their perfect milieu in the jazz society of Great Neck, where they inhabit a brand-new suburban house. Zelda plays golf, and Fitz is already acquiring pompous overtones of the successful American householder.” This impression of suburban conventionality was largely tongue-in-cheek, and Wilson added, “They are still one of the most refreshing elements at large, however, and it would take me pages to do justice to their pranks.”

  Zelda took a train back to St. Paul to collect their daughter, in time for her first birthday. “I brought Scottie to New York. She was round and funny in a pink coat and bonnet and you met us at the station,” she wrote to Scott years later, reminiscing. Zelda fired the nurse Scott had hired, “and since then I have had the Baby myself. Now I have another one (nurse, not baby),” she told the Kalmans. With the rigors of several days of full-time parenting out of the way they could resume their fun.

  The family settled in—but they did not settle down. Keeping house was neither Zelda’s forte nor her aspiration, and Scott loudly objected to her failure to keep his shirts clean. Asked in 1925 to contribute to a collection of “Favorite Recipes of Famous Women,” Zelda explained how to make breakfast: “See if there is any bacon, and if there is, ask the cook which pan to fry it in. Then ask if there are any eggs, and if so try and persuade the cook to poach two of them. It is better not to attempt toast, as it burns very easily.”

  Zelda had no intention of being a self-sacrificing helpmeet and she was already contributing to Scott’s art more than she may have liked: a few celebrated passages in both This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and Damned were lifted almost straight from her letters and diaries, and Scott often put many of Zelda’s wittier or more memorable lines in the mouths of his female characters. A practice he would continue through Tender Is the Night, it would eventually lead to great acrimony. For now, Zelda’s response was flippant. In her review of The Beautiful and Damned for Burton Rascoe earlier that year, she had facetiously accused her husband of believing that plagiarism, like charity, should begin at home.

  Soon after the Fitzgeralds’ marriage, Alec McKaig noted in his diary: “Went to Fitzgeralds. Usual problem there. What shall Zelda do? I think she might do a little housework—apartment looks like a pig-sty. If she’s there Fitz can’t work—she bothers him—if she’s not there he can’t work—worried what she might do . . . Zelda increasingly restless—says frankly she simply wants to be amused and is only good for useless, pleasure-giving pursuits; great problem—what is she to do?” Zelda was only twenty when he wrote this; perhaps she had no more idea what she wanted to do than many twenty-year-olds. In Save Me the Waltz, Alabama is left alone on the Riviera, drifting with ennui, while her husband pursues artistic greatness. “What’ll we do, David,” she asks, “with ourselves?” He never answers the question. Fitzgerald had given the same question to Daisy Buchanan ten years earlier: “‘What’ll we do with ourselves this afternoon,’ cried Daisy, ‘and the day after that, and the next thirty years?’”

  Does the artist have to invent, or is discovering a fugitive theme original enough? Such invidious questions were for the future. For now, it was hard to take anything very seriously. Scott would say later that in those years he thought life was something you dominated if you were any good. Zelda thought life was simply to be enjoyed. She couldn’t understand why Scott wasn’t satisfied writing high-paying stories for the Saturday Evening Post. “I always felt a story
in the Post was tops; a goal worth seeking. It really meant something, you know—they only took stories of real craftsmanship. But Scott couldn’t stand to write them.” When they’d visited New York earlier that year for the publication of The Beautiful and Damned, Mencken had written to a friend: “Fitzgerald blew into New York last week. He has written a play, and [George Jean] Nathan says that it has very good chances. But it seems to me that his wife talks too much about money. His danger lies in trying to get it too rapidly. A very amiable pair, innocent and charming.”

  Success in 1922 was beginning to be measured in what advertisers would later teach us to call “lifestyle.” It was also measured in time, defining the leisure class; if you couldn’t make time, you just borrowed it. Edmund Wilson lamented how few of his compatriots believed they “had something left to live for beside a high standard of living.” Teaching its citizens to fashion themselves through emulation, and passing it off as a theory of moral sentiment, America was settling down to the serious business of selling pleasure.

  Scott now placed the Fitzgeralds squarely and ironically among the “newly rich”: “That is to say, five years ago we had no money at all, and what we now do away with would have seemed like inestimable riches to us then. I have at times suspected that we are the only newly rich people in America, that in fact we are the very couple at whom all the articles about the newly rich were aimed.” Their money may have been new, but there wasn’t, in truth, enough to warrant it being termed riches, as Fitzgerald admitted in 1923: “Thirty-six-thousand [a year] is not very wealthy—not yacht-and-Palm-Beach wealthy—but it sounds to me as though it should buy a roomy house full of furniture, a trip to Europe once a year, and a bond or two besides. But our $36,000 . . . bought nothing at all.” No matter: money seemed to blow in on the trade winds off Long Island Sound. “Even when you were broke, you didn’t worry about money,” he said later, “because it was in such profusion around you.” They paid for fun with a promissory note, “checks written in disappearing ink,” confident that the world would never collect on the debt.