On Sunday, October 1, as Scott Fitzgerald read about himself in the New York Times, headlines announced “STAR TROOPERS AID IN HUNT FOR SLAYER OF HALL AND WOMAN: STATE’S CRIME EXPERTS PUT TO WORK ON MYSTERY.” The New Jersey State Constabulary sent a trio of policemen with Dickensian names—Sergeant Lamb, Corporal Spearman, and Trooper Dickman—to New Brunswick to take over the investigation. Not only had local authorities missed a few bullet holes and a near decapitation; they had also failed to interview anyone in the vicinity of the crime scene. More than two weeks after the bodies were found, police finally began canvassing the area of Buccleuch Park and the Phillips Farm, searching for the weapons used to kill the minister and his lover. They were energetically assisted by the ever-growing crowds of thrill-seekers, who “tore down the front porch of the old house, while others ripped apart the platform at the rear.” Someone else “tore out a windowpane, entered, and opened the front door. Hundreds of persons went through the rooms, all furnished, and in the search for souvenirs, destroyed a quantity of furnishings.” Quite possibly they destroyed a quantity of evidence as well.
Questions continued to be asked about the bungled investigation. Defending his failure to demand an autopsy, Prosecutor Beekman explained: “Dr. Long notified me on Monday, September 18, that he had examined Eleanor Mills’s body and had found a single bullet had gone completely through the head. He declared also that he had cut open the abdomen, and I naturally assumed that he had made a full autopsy.” This small detail went unremarked: although Dr. Long had not performed a full autopsy and had missed two bullets in the face and a slit throat, he had not neglected to ascertain whether the female victim was pregnant. She wasn’t.
Charlotte Mills and Florence North,
October 11, 1922
Disgusted with the inept investigation, Charlotte Mills wrote to the governor demanding his help and retained “a woman lawyer,” Florence North, who understood publicity—before she became an attorney, Miss North had been a boxing promoter. Charlotte and her “good looking young, smartly dressed” lawyer sold the love letters her mother had kept from the rector for five hundred dollars to William Randolph Hearst’s American magazine rather than turning them over to the state as evidence.
The case was becoming scandalous enough to interest Town Topics, who declared that New Brunswick’s “authorities have shown themselves guilty of the most amazing neglect, their conduct being such as to create a widespread impression that they have been endeavoring to shield the perpetrators of this particularly brutal and unsavory double murder.” It seemed as if “the Hall–Mills double murder were destined to [a] process of hushing up.”
The following weekend, the front pages headlined a potentially salacious new angle to the story: “RECTOR HALL SENT SINGER ‘SPICY’ BOOKS.” Eleanor Mills’s letters to the rector revealed that “he had been in the habit of purchasing sensational books for her”; in one she had written, “I am sorry you bought me that spicy book. It fired my soul and wafted me into the spiritual world—Oh, goodness!” If you are having an illicit affair with a rector, it may be convenient to confuse the erotic and spiritual, and Eleanor Mills was clearly susceptible to vicarious pleasures.
On the mild evening of Friday, October 6, as clouds gathered over the New York night sky, Scott Fitzgerald attended a literary dinner party at the publisher Horace Liveright in Manhattan; wives were not invited. His friends the critics Ernest Boyd and George Jean Nathan were present, as was Carl Van Vechten, who would be remembered as the most prominent white patron of the Harlem Renaissance and whom Fitzgerald met for the first time that night. Van Vechten noted in his diary that the party included this memorable introduction, adding that during it Liveright “pushes me off a piano stool, & breaks my arm.” It didn’t break up the party.
Also on the job was Burton Rascoe, who described the dinner in his Day Book column, not neglecting the party’s nonchalant violence: “There were many mock speeches of the hands-across-the-sea variety . . . Liveright pushed Van Vechten off a chair and broke his collar-bone; Evans played the ‘Oh, My Gawd’ prelude by Rachmaninoff, to which I gave a terpsichorean interpretation, and Evans, Brackett and I bundled into a taxicab, declaring one another to be ‘the life of the party,’ and singing ‘God Save the King,’ and ‘Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean’ . . . It was a great day for literature.” Fitzgerald saved Rascoe’s notice in his scrapbook.
Rascoe’s facetiousness aside, it was a great day for modern literature, although he had no way of knowing it. Across the ocean in Sussex, Virginia Woolf had begun thinking about a novel that would use a magnificent summer party as a symbol of modern life. On October 6, 1922, she jotted down “Thoughts upon beginning a book to be called, perhaps, At Home: or the Party”; it would consist of “six or seven chapters, each complete separately . . . And all must converge upon the party at the end.” From November, Woolf kept a notebook for the novel, which began: “Suppose the idea of the book is the contrast between life and death. All must bear finally upon the party at the end; which expresses life, in every variety and full of conviction.” Woolf would publish Mrs. Dalloway in May 1925, exactly a month after Scott Fitzgerald published his own novel about parties that symbolize modern life and death. A simple chime, Mrs. Dalloway reflects at one point in her story, can remind us of the beauty in ordinary things: beauty is everywhere, even in the small chimes of history.
Fitzgerald’s friend Tom Smith, Liveright’s editor in chief, was also at the party. He had just commissioned a new translation of Petronius’s Satyricon and John Sumner, secretary for New York’s Society for the Suppression of Vice, had been trying to have the book banned for obscenity, with the result that the papers debated the literary value of the Satyricon throughout the autumn. (Sumner was not necessarily paranoid in fearing the seductive potential of books: men like Ted Paramore were deliberately using them to provide a respectable pretext for unrespectable conversations.) That year a number of “spicy” books faced obscenity charges, including James Joyce’s Ulysses, published on February 2, which also alluded to the Satyricon. Throughout 1922 Ulysses circulated in underground copies across literary America; Edmund Wilson told Fitzgerald where to buy one and in June Fitzgerald received his copy from the Brick Row Bookshop. He wished, Fitzgerald told Wilson as he read it, that Ulysses had been set in America: “Half of my ancestors came from just such an Irish strata or perhaps a lower one. The book makes me feel appallingly naked.”
In late September, a magistrate dismissed the case against the Satyricon, observing that if it was obscene, so was the Bible: “The Satyricon is a keen satire on the vulgarity of mere wealth, its vanity and its grossness.” Undeterred, on October 15 Sumner presented the book to the New York attorney general in yet another (futile) effort to have it proscribed. Later that month Tom Smith shared with Rascoe “a prize remark” made by the prosecuting attorney in the censorship case, who had been told that the Satyricon had long been prized by scholars and historians as “a literary and documentary classic.” The lawyer responded, “Well, just because it was a classic two thousand years ago doesn’t make it a classic now.”
At Liveright’s literary dinner amid these court cases (Liveright also sued Sumner for libel), it seems hard to imagine that they would have failed to discuss this controversy. Most conversations were focusing on one of the fragmentary Satyricon’s most intact episodes: the opulent banquets of the former slave Trimalchio, a parvenu who amassed a fortune that he flaunts with eager vulgarity. Lavishly entertaining sybaritic friends and neighbors, he enjoys being the subject of their gossip. Comparisons between ancient decadence and Jazz Age America were already ubiquitous: New York was called the “Modern Babylon”; Zelda would soon be writing that they partied like “ancient Rome and Nineveh.” Wilson likened one “regular orgy” he heard about to “a Roman banquet or something,” while Manslaughter, DeMille’s film about a society woman who runs over someone with her car, similarly underscored the
debauchery of modern parties by cross-cutting them with Roman orgies.
More than one letter to the papers that October commented on the Satyricon’s currency: “Trimalchio’s famous dinner party and the characters introduced by the author will interest the cultured reader . . . particularly by the resemblance with those well known types of our ripe civilization, the nouveau riche and the profiteer.” Fitzgerald had spent 1922 writing stories about the nouveau riche and the profiteer, including his great satire of monopoly capitalism, “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz.” Two years later, when Fitzgerald sent his novel about nouveaux riches and profiteers to Max Perkins, he was oscillating among several titles for it, including “Trimalchio at West Egg.” He was eventually persuaded to choose an alternate, The Great Gatsby, instead, but Trimalchio gave Fitzgerald an image for his heroic parvenu that survived in the final draft, although only as a signal that the party is over: “It was when curiosity about Gatsby was at its highest that the lights in his house failed to go on one Saturday night—and, as obscurely as it had begun, his career as Trimalchio was over.”
Trying to reinvent himself, Trimalchio is given to false claims. He tells boastful, self-aggrandizing tales of his life among the rich and powerful, and, in an ancient instance of name-dropping, claims to have spoken with the Cumaean Sibyl, mythical prophetess of the ancients. His banquets are adorned by tales of burnished gems and unfaithful women, roasted birds in gold plumage, a wife wearing a magnificent strand of pearls who “lifts adulterous legs,” insatiable luxury, a cauldron of gluttony, a chest of rubies glowing with their crimson-lighted depths. Reflecting on the meaning of literature, Trimalchio quotes a favorite passage: “The emerald green, the glass bauble, what mean they to thee? Or the fire of the ruby?” They are beautiful but insubstantial; Trimalchio repeats a refrain about infidelity and the meaninglessness of wealth. Reluctantly agreeing to call his novel The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald wrote Perkins: “It’s O.K. but my heart tells me I should have named it Trimalchio.”
Fitzgerald was an indifferent classics scholar at best, flunking Latin three times at Princeton. His personal library contained a 1913 translation of the Satyricon, but Fitzgerald didn’t need to read Latin to recognize the currency of Trimalchio in 1922: he only needed to read the New York Times.
In a few weeks T. S. Eliot would publish The Waste Land, which opens with an epigraph from the Satyricon. Drunkenly boasting at a party, competing with his guests amid grandstanding tales, Trimalchio claims: “And then there’s the Sibyl: with my own eyes I saw her, at Cumae, hanging up in a jar; and whenever the boys would say to her ‘Sibyl, Sibyl, what would you?’ she would answer, ‘I would die.’”
Art, Eliot wrote, is a guide to perception. It shows us how to look—or where to look—and then leaves us, as Virgil left Dante, to go beyond where the guide can take us.
On Monday, October 9, the New Brunswick prosecutor’s office triumphantly announced an arrest in the Hall–Mills case: a young man named Clifford Hayes had been taken into custody. The authorities remained certain that jealousy was central to the plot, but now they said the killer had shot Edward Hall and Eleanor Mills in a case of mistaken identity.
It made for a great day of selling newspapers, but no one outside the New Brunswick police department believed in Hayes’s guilt for a minute—and it seems unlikely that many within the department believed it either. Raymond Schneider, the young man who had been with Pearl Bahmer when they discovered the bodies of Hall and Mills, had been grilled for twenty-four hours over the weekend, at which point he accused his friend Clifford Hayes of the killings.
The story was this: Schneider had been loitering with Hayes and another friend on the night of the murders, when they saw Pearl Bahmer walking with a drunken man. Jealous of Pearl, Schneider convinced his friends to follow the couple to Buccleuch Park, only to discover that the drunk man was Pearl’s bootlegger father. Schneider’s friends concurred with his story up to this point, but then said they’d parted company. Under police pressure Schneider changed his account, claiming they’d all remained near the park, later coming across a couple near the Phillips farmhouse, whom they again took to be Pearl and her father. At this point, Schneider said, Clifford Hayes fired four shots at the pair, only to discover that it was the wrong couple and that he had murdered two strangers—who turned out to be Edward Hall and Eleanor Mills. The tale was preposterous, but the police had a culprit at last.
The press immediately pointed out the gaping holes in this new “official theory.” It failed to explain why or when Eleanor Mills’s throat was cut, why the bodies were staged together so carefully, why the rector’s watch and wallet had been stolen, why their love letters were found scattered around the bodies, why Raymond Schneider would have returned to the dead bodies with Pearl Bahmer two days later and reported their murder to the police, or why Hayes would have murdered two people for his friend’s sake. They were all good questions. Hayes indignantly protested his innocence, insisting that he wasn’t stupid enough to have killed the wrong people and then hung around, awaiting arrest.
When Nick Carraway asks if George Wilson objects to his wife’s frequent disappearances, Tom answers dismissively, “He thinks she goes to see her sister in New York. He’s so dumb he doesn’t know he’s alive.” Tom is no genius himself, but he finds it a simple matter to manipulate Wilson into killing the wrong man. From Raymond Schneider’s swapping of one man for another, to the Carraway patriarch who sent a substitute to the Civil War to die for him, to George Wilson’s killing Gatsby instead of Tom Buchanan, impersonations had a tendency to end in violence.
As they settled into Great Neck, Fitzgerald noted in his ledger the high points of October 1922: “Met Lardners, Bucks, Swopes.” Their new cottage in Great Neck was not far from Ring Lardner’s gracious white house overlooking the narrow inlet in the bay and before long the two writers had become close friends and drinking companions. Lardner would inspire a character in Tender Is the Night, “the entirely liquid” Abe North. Lardner was older, more cynical and experienced than the frolicking young Fitzgerald, but they shared an acidic sense of humor, critical intelligence, and a serious commitment to the craft of writing, although Lardner always deprecated his efforts and Fitzgerald tended in the early years to boast. They also shared an undercurrent of satirical disapproval of the absurd place in which they found themselves; Lardner derisively called Great Neck “Wonder City.”
The false dawn of the Fitzgeralds’ experiment with sobriety had made way for a roaring noon, and they were remaining well and truly lit. “We seem to have achieved a state of comparative organization at last, and, having bought loads of very interesting flour sieves and cocktail-shakers, are in a position to make a bid for your patronage,” Zelda wrote to the Kalmans. “We have had the most terrible time—very alcoholic and chaotic. We behaved so long that eventually we looked up Engalichoff which, needless to say, started us on a week’s festivity.” These were the revels she declared to have been “equaled only by ancient Rome and Nineveh!”
Behaving too long could only lead to revolution, this time with Prince Vladimir Engalitcheff, the son of a Russian prince who had escaped the Bolsheviks and married a Chicago heiress. Engalitcheff, known as Val, had become friendly with the Fitzgeralds the previous year on a voyage to Europe. Engalitcheff would die less than six months later. Newspaper obituaries in March said the twenty-one-year-old’s cause of death in his Fifth Avenue mansion was heart disease, but in his ledger for January 1923 Fitzgerald noted: “Val Engalitcheff kills himself.” Biographers have accepted this assertion, but Fitzgerald must have written it retrospectively, for his account places the death two months early, and he gives no reason for his belief that Engalitcheff committed suicide. Engalitcheff’s death certificate, dated March 6, 1923, names heart and kidney failure. Whatever Engalitcheff’s illnesses may have been, the doomed young prince does not appear to have exercised a sobering influence, but he would inspire “Love in the Night
,” the first story that Fitzgerald wrote after completing Gatsby. In the midst of their autumnal bacchanal, the Fitzgeralds moved into the house at Great Neck.
Instead of sharing their new address, Fitzgerald jotted a thank-you note offering only their new phone number: G.N. 740. “Everybody said to everybody else,” Zelda later wrote, “‘We’re having some people . . . and we want you to join us. We’ll telephone.’ All over New York people telephoned. They telephoned from one hotel to another to people on parties that they couldn’t get there—that they were engaged.”
They went “on” parties, not to them: going on a party was like going on a voyage, an indefinite trip in search of eternal pleasure that tended to end on the rocks. That August, the New York Times reported that a woman who had married under the influence was able to have her marriage annulled: “They went out on a party before the marriage and drank all night and next day and didn’t sleep any. The cocktails, highballs and other mixtures, she said, deprived her of her mentality and she didn’t know she was getting married.” The annulment was granted not on the grounds of intoxication, however, but of “fraud and misrepresentation” as her new husband had claimed he didn’t drink. Earlier in the year, a woman from Great Neck also tried to divorce her husband for misrepresentation: he’d told her he was a writer, but he just drank all day long and was never published. On Scott Fitzgerald’s birthday, the New York Times had reported that another woman divorced her husband for “excessive drunkenness”—although no one had established how much drunkenness was reasonable in a husband.
Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of The Great Gatsby Page 10