Sightseeing was on the rise in the 1920s and Fitzgerald was always exemplary: he was hardly the only one to indulge in a bit of necro-tourism. Motorists were coming in from all over the country to gawk at the crab apple tree where the bodies of Hall and Mills had been found. Topping off one’s evening in a morgue, however, was probably less common—or at least less voluntary.
When he was thirty, Fitzgerald gave an interview claiming that Nietzsche’s The Genealogy of Morals had been “the greatest influence on my mind” at the age of twenty-four; at twenty-six, his first year in Great Neck, it was Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. (His favorite teacher at Princeton would say that Scott Fitzgerald reminded him of all the brothers Karamazov at once.) Art, said Nietzsche, is a question of necessary lies and voluntary lies, while Dostoevsky urged, “believe to the end, even if all men went astray and you were left the only one faithful.” Perhaps it is no coincidence that Fitzgerald came to believe that the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still be able to function.
When Jay Gatsby collects Nick to drive him into New York for lunch, Gatsby tells Nick a series of absurd lies about his background: that he is an Oxford-educated aristocrat from the “Middle West” of San Francisco; that he lived like a young rajah in the capitals of Europe collecting jewels—“chiefly rubies”—and hunting big game, trying to forget an unspecified tragedy. Nick restrains incredulous laughter with difficulty and wonders whether Gatsby is pulling his leg: listening to these trite fictions “was like skimming hastily through a dozen magazines.” But Gatsby is not joking (he has many virtues, but it must be admitted that a sense of humor is not prominent among them).
Then Gatsby shows Nick a picture of himself at Oxford, as well as some authentic medals from the war, and Nick suddenly believes it is all true. “I saw the skins of tigers flaming in his palace on the Grand Canal; I saw him opening a chest of rubies to ease, with their crimson-lighted depths, the gnawings of his broken heart.” Nick continually loses faith in Gatsby only to regain it: “I had one of those renewals of complete faith in him that I’d experienced before.” But Gatsby’s faith is a constant: he believes to the end although everyone else goes astray.
As they drive toward the white glacier of Manhattan, Nick thinks that in New York anything could happen, anything at all. “Even Gatsby could happen, without any particular wonder.”
In the autumn of 1922, Fitzgerald wrote his cousin Cecilia a name-dropping letter, listing all the celebrities he and Zelda knew in Great Neck:
We are established in the above town very comfortably and having a winter of hard work. I’m writing a play which I hope will go on about the 1st of Jan. I wish you could arrange to come up for the opening. Great Neck is a great place for celebrities—it being the habitat of Mae Murray, Frank Craven, Herbert Swope, Arthur Hopkins, Jane Cowl, Joseph Santley, Samuel Goldwyn, Ring Lardner, Fontaine Fox, “Tad,” Gene Buck, Donald Bryan, Tom Wise, Jack Hazard, General Pershing. It is most amusing after the dull healthy Middle West. For instance at a party last night where we went were John McCormick, Hugh Walpole, F.P.A., Neysa McMein, Arthur William Brown, Rudolf Friml & Deems Taylor. They have no mock-modesty & all perform their various stunts upon the faintest request so it’s like a sustained concert.
Fitzgerald’s list reads like a feuilleton; gossip magazines and newspapers often shared similar roll calls of people attending parties or events. The first half of every issue of Town Topics was a catalog of prominent names, and Myrtle Wilson, the avid reader of Town Tattle, also keeps lists. Not lists of people she’s met, as she still only aspires to enter society, but rather of the things she’s “got to get,” which are the same as the things she’s got to do. For people on the make, like Myrtle, getting was becoming the only thing worth doing.
Bunny Wilson was also a careful maker of lists. In February 1922, he solemnly recorded a list of current slang: ratty, crocko, squiffy, boiled to the ears. Dumbbell, upstage, lousy, high-hat, rat-fuck. What’s the dirt? Spill the dirt? “He’s always doin’ his stuff.” Razz: the Royal Spanish raspberry. Bozo. Cuckoo. Flop. Everyone was always doing their stuff, upstaging each other, spilling the dirt—not to mention getting crocko, squiffy, and boiled to the ears.
A few years later, he compiled “A Lexicon of Prohibition,” contemporary terms for drunkenness in order of “degrees of intensity” and “beginning with the mildest stages,” including:
lit
squiffy
oiled
lubricated
owled
edged
jingled
piffed
half-screwed
half-shot
half-crocked
fried
stewed
boiled
zozzled
sprung
scrooched
jazzed
jagged
canned
corked
corned
potted
hooted
slopped
tanked
stinko
blind
stiff
tight
pickled
spifflicated
primed
organized
featured
pie-eyed
cock-eyed
wall-eyed
over the Bay
four sheets in the wind
crocked
loaded
leaping
lathered
plastered
soused
bloated
polluted
saturated
paralyzed
ossified
embalmed
buried
blotto
lit up like the sky
lit up like a church
fried to the hat
slopped to the ears
stewed to the gills
boiled as an owl
to have a slant on
to have a skate on
to have a snootful
to have a skinful
to pull a Daniel Boone
to have the heeby-jeebies
to have the screaming- meemies
to have the whoops and jingles
to burn with a low blue flame
The Great Gatsby offers its own famous catalog: on a timetable dated July 5, 1922, a day suggesting that dreams of America’s future are in its past, Nick Carraway writes down a list of all the people who came to Gatsby’s house that summer despite knowing nothing about him. They are politicians and movie stars, racketeers and tycoons, chorus girls and plutocrats, and none of them come to any good.
Gatsby’s guests have burlesque names, suggesting tastelessness, violence, bathos. There is the unctuous Doctor Civet, and fishy people including the Leeches, Hammerheads, Fishguards, and Beluga, the tobacco importer. There are the more aristocratic-sounding Willie Voltaires, Smirkes, and a snobbish clan Fitzgerald calls “Blackbuck” in a bit of passing racism that seems aimed to cut the elitists down to size. There are men whose homosexuality is hinted at by their floral names, such as Ernest Lilly and Newton Orchid, the film producer. Many of the guests meet violent ends: one man’s brother “afterward strangled his wife”; another killed himself by jumping in front of a subway train; Doc Civet will drown. Bootleggers, recognizable by their nicknames (James B. “Rot-Gut” Ferret), are mingling with the guests, and a woman comes with a man “reputed to be her chauffeur,” as well as “a prince of something whom we called Duke.” This is café society, the promiscuous mingling of old and new money, aristocracy and industry, debauchery and criminality, comedy and death.
After Gatsby was published, Ring Lardner sent the Fitzgeralds a letter about a Great Neck
celebrity party they’d missed: “On the Fourth of July, Ed Wynn gave a fireworks party at his new estate . . . After the children had been sent home, everybody got pie-eyed and I never enjoyed a night so much. All the Great Neck professionals did their stuff, the former chorus girls danced . . . the imitations were all the same, consisting of an aesthetic dance which ended with an unaesthetic fall onto the tennis court.” Fitzgerald had already invented his own Fourth of July party in West Egg by the time he received this letter, but it was clear that imitations were becoming a way of life.
Four weeks after the murders of Hall and Mills, the World condemned the “Tragedy of LIES” in “this grim New Brunswick drama of passion, jealousy, hatred, envy, murder.” All of New Brunswick “seems to have been lying about the Hall–Mills murder since it was first discovered . . . It is a whole town of Babbitts.”
The papers had begun to reveal the contents of the love letters exchanged by Edward Hall and Eleanor Mills. On the last day of her life Eleanor had written to the rector about two bestselling novels he’d given her, Simon Called Peter and The Mother of All Living, both by Robert Keable, also an Episcopalian minister. Simon Called Peter, one of the most sensational books of the year, tells of an upright British minister, engaged to a proper young woman, who encounters an experienced “woman of the world” in France during the First World War. They fall desperately in love and embark upon an illicit affair that makes him question both his engagement and his spiritual calling.
An enormous bestseller in 1922, Simon Called Peter is the book that Nick Carraway reads in Myrtle Wilson’s flat while she sneaks off for some quick sex with Tom Buchanan. Nick is unimpressed: “Either it was terrible stuff or the whiskey distorted things, because it didn’t make any sense to me,” he complains. Simon Called Peter does seem terrible stuff now, nearly unreadable. Fitzgerald loathed it (in 1923 he called it a “really immoral book”), but maybe Myrtle Wilson isn’t entirely to blame for her bad taste. As Nick caustically notes of Tom Buchanan, “the fact that he ‘had some woman in New York’ was really less surprising than that he had been depressed by a book.” Perhaps Tom found books less depressing when they were titillating—as evidently did the not-very Reverend Hall.
On the day of Eleanor Mills’s murder she finished reading Keable’s latest, The Mother of All Living. Another story of adulterous love, it tells of an unhappily married woman and her passionate affair with a better-educated, sophisticated man who reveals to her life’s romantic possibilities. After she finished it, Eleanor wrote to her lover about searching for a more romantic mode of life. Like Edward, she said, Keable was a man of the cloth who understood that true spiritual connections must be physically expressed. Their affair was no sordid liaison, she implied; it was a pure expression of God’s love. “I don’t want to read such books again ever,” she ended. “They make me dream. Yearning for what perhaps I miss in this life . . . I hate to come back to realities—as I always have to. Reading books (oh, I love them) makes me yearn.” The press ridiculed these letters “from a woman in humble life who looks up to the man above her,” mocking Eleanor’s penmanship, her stationery, and her heartfelt response to the novels she loved, jeering that she was trying to become a literary critic.
“SLAIN RECTOR AND CHOIR SINGER FOUND ILLICIT LOVE PROTOTYPES IN NOVEL ‘SIMON CALLED PETER’” declared the World, headlining an article by Marguerite Mooers Marshall, who had interviewed Fitzgerald earlier that year. The similarities between the affair of Hall and Mills and the fictional one in Simon Called Peter were striking. The novel offered a clear “parallel to the passion which finally led to a double crime in New Brunswick.” The rectors’ churches even had the same name in fact and fiction: both were called St. John’s.
Marshall wrote several articles detailing the symmetries between Keable’s novels and the Hall–Mills affair. In The Mother of All Living, the heroine is persuaded into adultery by a man who insists that her marriage is “a mocking sham.” Marshall demanded: “Was this the logic which the Rev. Edward Hall of New Brunswick, NJ, used?” The heroine’s lover continually demands that she admit to never having loved her husband: “You don’t love Hugh at all, you know you don’t . . . You’re mine, not his . . . It only remains for us to take our destiny in both hands and step out upon it.” Jay Gatsby is also a reader of sentimental novels, and makes a remarkably similar casuistical argument about his love for Daisy. “Of course she might have loved him, just for a minute, when they were first married—and loved me more even then, do you see?” he says, before adding that in any case, “it was just personal.” “I don’t think she ever loved him,” Gatsby insists, after trying unsuccessfully to get Daisy to repudiate her husband. “He wanted nothing less of Daisy,” Nick realizes, “than that she should go to Tom and say: ‘I never loved you.’”
The connection of Simon Called Peter to the Hall–Mills case made headlines throughout the autumn, as John Sumner decided the novel should be proscribed:
Simon Called Peter “is the kind of book that certain men present with a smug expression in the hope that it will open up a field of conversation which is ordinarily forbidden,” Sumner charged. Such books were “aids to seduction”; their dangers were amplified by the apparent role Simon Called Peter had played in inspiring, or justifying, the affair that had provoked a double homicide. Sumner warned that the novel’s link to the Hall–Mills murders “may lead to a further effort to prosecute the book.” If the book had led to murder then it, too, should be prosecuted—an accessory after the fact.
After he submitted his manuscript of Gatsby, Fitzgerald asked Max Perkins, “In Chap II of my book when Tom & Myrtle go into the bedroom while Carraway reads Simon Called Peter—is that raw? Let me know. I think it’s pretty necessary.” He had good reason to fear that censors might consider this scene too coarse, not least because the allusions to Simon Called Peter would remove any doubts about the activities of Tom and Myrtle in the bedroom. For men like John Sumner, merely reading Simon Called Peter was to be caught in flagrante delicto.
Throughout 1922, while he contemplated his third novel and wrote short stories to support his family, Scott Fitzgerald had also been writing a play, which he was confident would be such a hit that it could easily subsidize his serious novels. At Princeton, Fitzgerald’s work on the annual Triangle show contributed greatly to the university’s polite suggestion that he withdraw before he flunked out, but he had not given up on the idea of theater. One of the first stories in Tales of the Jazz Age, “Porcelain and Pink,” is written in play form and was staged in New York in April 1923, while both This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and Damned incorporate long sections written as plays (Joyce would later use the same technique in Ulysses).
Having first titled his play Gabriel’s Trombone, Fitzgerald decided to name it The Vegetable—an inauspicious choice. He attributed the title to a quotation from an unnamed “current magazine”: “Any man who doesn’t want to get on in the world, to make a million dollars, and maybe even park his toothbrush in the White House hasn’t got as much to him as a good dog has—he’s nothing more or less than a vegetable.” It appears to have been a half-remembered quotation from a 1922 Mencken essay called “On Being an American”: “Here is a country in which it is an axiom that a businessman shall be a member of the Chamber of Commerce, an admirer of Charles M. Schwab, a reader of the Saturday Evening Post, a golfer—in brief, a vegetable.” Moving to Great Neck was meant to help Fitzgerald meet Broadway producers so that he could stage the satire he was certain would make his fortune.
These were the “Vegetable Days in New York” that Fitzgerald remembered in his outline in Man’s Hope, a year of meeting producers and actors, lunches in speakeasies and dinners on rooftop cafés, of keeping a sharp eye out for the satirical potential and ironies of the world around him. An irony that Fitzgerald seems to have been less alert to—or less willing to admit—was that the play he was writing to mock America’s faith in ambition also con
stituted his own get-rich-quick scheme, a dream that was just as doomed as that of any of his characters.
The Vegetable is a political satire centering on Jerry Frost, a railway clerk who dreams of being a postman but is nagged by a dissatisfied wife to aspire to greater things. After an encounter with a bootlegger who offers him a bottle marked “Wood Alcohol! Poison!” Frost spends the second act in an alcoholic delirium during which he is elected president and nearly destroys America, bringing the nation to the brink of war and bankruptcy with cronyism, corruption, and incompetence. As sobriety returns with the end of the play, he renounces any desire to be president; he will aspire to nothing more than being a postman. “Art invariably grows out of a period when in general the artist admires his own nation and wants to win its approval,” Fitzgerald remarked later. “This fact is not altered by the circumstances that his work may take the form of satire for satire is the subtle flattery of a certain minority in a nation. The greatest artists grow out of these periods as the tall head of the crop.” While mocking American politics in general, Fitzgerald also took aim at some sacred cows. He even poked fun at the beloved tale of Abraham Lincoln’s journey from log cabin to White House.
Edmund Wilson was uncharacteristically enthusiastic about The Vegetable; he declared it “no doubt, the best American comedy ever written,” and wondered whether Fitzgerald’s alcoholic fantasy sequence had been inspired by the similar hallucinatory scene at the end of Joyce’s Ulysses. If not, the resemblance “must take its place as one of the great coincidences in literature.” It was indeed a coincidence, but few producers shared Wilson’s view of its greatness. Over the next year, Fitzgerald continued to revise the play, finally deciding to arouse interest, and make some money, by publishing it as a book. Indeed, he told Max Perkins, it was more like “a book of humor . . . than like a play—because of course it is written to be read.” The Vegetable certainly reads better as a book than as a play: Fitzgerald put most of his writing energy into the stage directions, for one thing. When the bootlegger enters Fitzgerald tells the reader “I wish I could introduce you to the original from whom I have taken Mr. Snooks.” If his audience had heard this aside, perhaps they might have appreciated the copy more.
Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of The Great Gatsby Page 13