At the end of October Sir Basil Thomson, the former chief of Scotland Yard who was visiting New York, was asked to comment on the Hall–Mills investigation, as they “had never seen so much publicity given to any crime nor so much interest taken all over the United States as there was in this celebrated case.” Thomson declined to discuss the case in detail, but offered a helpful suggestion that was widely shared in the press: “I have found that there are many persons who seem to take delight in the publicity of being an identifier,” he pointedly observed.
Meanwhile the press suddenly announced that James Mills’s accounts of his movements the night that his wife was murdered were, in fact, uncorroborated. But New Brunswick’s officials were untroubled, for his claim that he was home all night, except when he went to the church to look for his wife, had not been disproven either. Although they had only his word for his actions during the hours when the murders had most likely taken place, between approximately 8:30 and 11:00 P.M., and having “commented on the lack of corroboration for Mills’s account of his movement,” they also “pointed out, however, that there was no proof that he was not telling the truth. If there was no one to corroborate, they said, there was no one to deny what he said was true. The same was said of Mrs. Hall’s accounts of her movements.”
Unfortunately, the inability to disprove something is not a very good justification for believing it. By that line of reasoning, the law of New Brunswick admitted almost limitless imaginative possibility—a “hint of the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy’s wing,” as Nick says of Gatsby’s dreams.
For the first time the press was permitted to see the victims’ clothing: Eleanor Mills had been wearing a blue velvet hat, which now had a three-inch blood stain; her dress, dark blue with red polka dots, was edged with cheerful red ribbon and “saturated with blood.” The Times noted that “the clergyman’s expensive garments contrasted sharply with the cheap material of which Mrs. Mills’s garments was made.”
“Mrs. Mills’s home was on the second floor of this house.”
The papers were making much of “the contrast between the social status of the rector and Mrs. Mills.” Witnesses thought Eleanor’s adultery was motivated, at least in part, by aspiration, her “dissatisfaction” with life in her “drab apartment.” Eleanor Mills had tried to seize the day, to find something more romantic in life than an unprosperous existence with a gray, inadequate husband on the second floor of a dreary frame house at the edge of town.
When Nick Carraway meets Myrtle Wilson she is wearing “a spotted dress of dark blue crepe-de-chine”; he senses an “immediately perceptible vitality about her as if the nerves of her body were continually smoldering. She smiled slowly and walking through her husband as if he were a ghost, shook hands with Tom, looking him flush in the eye. Then she wet her lips and without turning around spoke to her husband in a soft, coarse voice.” Myrtle knows that you can’t live forever; Eleanor Mills found in romance her only possibility for escape, and would die trying to leave her origins behind.
At the end of October, a young woman from the Midwest made the nation’s front pages when she was acquitted of murdering her “sheik lover.” Although her defense was temporary insanity, this was recognized as a euphemism for the so-called unwritten law, which held that juries would condone violence provoked by sexual infidelity: “ACQUITTAL OF PEGGY BEAL FOR SLAYING ‘SHEIK LOVER’ INVOKES NEW UNWRITTEN LAW,” shouted the World. Peggy Beal had been lured by the “professional sheik” to a hotel room with promises of marriage, but after he had seduced her Frank Anderson told her he had no intention of marrying her, adding that he had lied “because I am a devil.” Beal shot Anderson dead before shooting herself in the heart. The papers did not explain why she had brought a gun to a romantic tryst, or how she survived, but they did explain her inspiration: Beal “had been reading a passage in a romantic novel in which a woman killed her lover.” Books kept leading women astray, it seemed.
As Jordan tells Nick the story of Daisy’s romance with Gatsby at the end of Chapter Four, they are driving through Central Park in a Victoria cab. Floating past the apartments of the movie stars in the West Fifties comes the sound of a hit song in the twilight:
I’m the Sheik of Araby,
Your love belongs to me.
At night when you’re asleep,
Into your tent I’ll creep—
“Sheik”—after Rudolph Valentino’s immensely popular film character—was one of the most popular American slang terms of the early 1920s for a playboy or “gigolo” (a word first introduced to English in 1922). Listening to the song, Nick feels relieved that he has “no girl whose disembodied face floated along the dark cornices and blinding signs” to haunt him: without any inconvenient promises or illusions curbing his behavior, he kisses Jordan.
Nick is not oleaginous enough to be called a sheik, but his treatment of women is certainly opportunistic. There is a girl in the Midwest under the illusion that they might be engaged, and that summer he has an “affair” with a girl in Jersey City whose brother makes it clear he thinks Nick is treating her badly. Jordan’s aunt considers Nick “an ill-intentioned young man,” and she may be right. Nick is with Jordan that night from sunset until 2:00 A.M., which is when he tells us he returned to Great Neck at the beginning of the next chapter. Cabs had been famous ever since Madame Bovary for the privacy they afforded for what Jordan calls “amour”; perhaps Nick seized his chance. Fitzgerald doesn’t say.
According to the Man’s Hope outline, the inspiration for Jordan’s story of her “white girlhood” with Daisy in Louisville that ends this chapter was a wedding Fitzgerald never attended. In his scrapbook he preserved a wedding invitation, captioned “THE END OF A ONCE POIGNANT STORY.” It came from his first love, Ginevra King, a wealthy young woman from Lake Forest, outside Chicago, and a famous debutante whose father owned a string of polo ponies. Tom Buchanan will hail from the same affluent town, his string of polo ponies measuring his vast wealth. Ginevra rejected Fitzgerald before he met Zelda; his conviction that she’d discarded him because he was poor was later confirmed, he thought, by her engagement to an equally wealthy young man from her own circle. Ginevra married on September 4, 1918. Three days later Fitzgerald noted in his journal, “Fell in love on the 7th,” with Zelda.
Ginevra King had been known as one of the “Big Four” debutantes in prewar Chicago. One of the other four was her close friend Edith Cummings, who was becoming a famous golfer; her matches had made headlines by the summer of 1922 and she won the U.S. Women’s Amateur title in 1923. Dubbed “The Fairway Flapper” by the press, Cummings would be the first sportswoman on the cover of Time magazine in the summer of 1924—just as Fitzgerald was creating her copy. In a letter to Max Perkins as he finished Gatsby, Fitzgerald explained: “Jordan of course was a great idea (perhaps you know it’s Edith Cummings) but she fades out.” And Ginevra King became one of the prototypes for Daisy Buchanan.
Gatsby thinks that Daisy rejected him because he was poor—and perhaps he’s right: the $350,000 strand of pearls that Tom gives Daisy as a wedding gift is not an incidental detail. Jordan tells Nick enough to make it clear that Daisy did care, in her careless way, for Gatsby. Her wild plans to elope and drunkenness just before her wedding show that she was not indifferent to him. But in the end she marries Tom “without so much as a shiver,” and when Nick talks with her three years later in her garden he registers her “basic insincerity”: “I waited, and sure enough, in a moment she looked at me with an absolute smirk on her lovely face as if she had asserted her membership in a rather distinguished secret society to which she and Tom belonged.”
Before she inspired Daisy, Ginevra King had inspired another flapper belle dame sans merci in Fitzgerald’s fiction. Just as he and Zelda left St. Paul in September 1922, Scott finished “Winter Dreams,” which would be published that December. Fitzgerald woul
d later call this story a “sort of 1st draft of the Gatsby idea”; it shows his deepening understanding of the poignancy of loss and its artistic power, a personal loss that becomes an aesthetic gain.
A poor young man, Dexter Green, who is casually working on a golf course as a caddy, falls in love with a beautiful, wealthy, hollow young woman named Judy Jones. Resenting her assumption of superiority, he is spurred to ambition. Dexter grows prosperous from a specialist cleaning service for the wealthy, symbolically hinting that he takes care of their dirty laundry, a legal business anticipating Gatsby’s shadier underworld dealings. Hardworking Dexter understands that “carelessness was for his children,” for carelessness “required more confidence than to be careful.” Judy toys with Dexter before rejecting him to marry a richer man; years later he hears that her husband drinks and is unfaithful, and she has lost her looks. For Dexter, Judy’s degradation means the world has lost its promise of beauty and glory.
In the story Judy’s waning appeal is Dexter’s tragedy, not her own. Her squandered promise symbolizes Dexter’s lost illusions, and his frightening revelation that he will never feel so intensely again. “Winter Dreams” closes with Dexter’s realization that the loss of love is much easier to bear than the loss of illusions: “Even the grief he could have borne was left behind in the country of illusion, of youth, of the richness of life, where his winter dreams had flourished.”
A dozen years later, in his lovely Jazz Age reminiscence “My Lost City,” Fitzgerald wrote of the moment of shocking recognition that a dream realized is a dream destroyed: only deferral and frustration can keep it alive. He dates the realization between “trying to disrobe” at the Scandals in 1921 and punching a policeman in 1923. Sometime in that period of trafficking in scandal, he discovered that he would never be so happy again, that, as Zelda said, you can’t be swept off your feet indefinitely. “At last we were one with New York, pulling it after us through every portal,” Fitzgerald wrote:
Even now I go into many flats with the sense that I have been there before or in the one above or below—was it the night I tried to disrobe in the Scandals, or the night when (as I read with astonishment in the paper next morning) “Fitzgerald Knocks Officer This Side of Paradise?” Successful scrapping not being among my accomplishments, I tried in vain to reconstruct the sequence of events which led up to this denouement in Webster Hall. And lastly from that period I remember riding in a taxi one afternoon between very tall buildings under a mauve and rosy sky; I began to bawl because I had everything I wanted and knew I would never be so happy again.
He was right: happiness was no sooner grasped than it began to dissolve. He would never recover it fully again. Fitzgerald was driven by desire, he came to see, “because as a restless and ambitious man, I was never disposed to accept the present but always striving to change it, better it, or even sometimes destroy it.” “The Sensible Thing,” a story written in the summer of 1924 and that Fitzgerald told Perkins was “about Zelda & me. All true,” also ends with the recognition that even gaining what one desires is itself a loss, the loss of the sustaining, driving desire itself. “She was something desirable and rare that he had fought for and made his own—but never again an intangible whisper in the dusk, or on the breeze of night . . . Well, let it pass, he thought; April is over, April is over. There are all kinds of love in the world, but never the same love twice.”
The New York Times reviewed Tales of the Jazz Age on October 29, 1922, declaring Fitzgerald “a writer whom it is a joy to read,” and defending his right to “paint with startling vividness and virility the jazz aspect of the American scene,” valuable if only because it was so “astonishingly sincere and unselfconscious.” As a collection, the reviewer found the book patchy and uneven, but filled with “hints, promise and portents” of Fitzgerald’s genius: “there are flashes of wings and sounds of trumpets mingled with the tramp of feet and casual laughter.” The main question the book prompted was: “What will this man do next?”
The answer to the reviewer’s question was that next Fitzgerald would write his greatest failure, The Vegetable, and then he would write his masterpiece, the book that imagined angels’ wings and trumpets in the very midst of tramping feet and casual laughter.
After The Great Gatsby was published, Fitzgerald wrote to John Bishop, saying he feared that perhaps it was a flaw in the book that he hadn’t defined Gatsby more clearly: “You are right about Gatsby being blurred and patchy. I never at any one time saw him clear myself—for he started as one man I knew and then changed into myself—the amalgam was never complete in my mind.” But to which man that he knew is he referring: Max Gerlach, or someone else? We will probably never know. Gatsby borrows many qualities from many people, including Scott Fitzgerald’s romantic aspirations, boundless hope, and charm—but he is no more Scott Fitzgerald than he is Max Gerlach or any of a collage of other bootleggers.
“Desire just cheats you,” laments Anthony Patch in The Beautiful and Damned. “It’s like a sunbeam skipping here and there about a room. It stops and gilds some inconsequential object, and we poor fools try to grasp it—but when we do the sunbeam moves on to something else, and you’ve got the inconsequential part, but the glitter that made you want it is gone.” There is no real Jay Gatsby to grasp behind the glittering one we love: history may help us understand the world he inhabits, but it was fiction that produced him.
The artist, wrote Joseph Conrad, “speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives.” That was the art that Scott Fitzgerald would find, reminding us that a mirage may be more marvelous in its way than an oasis in the desert. Gatsby’s great error is his belief in the reality of the mirage; Fitzgerald’s great gift was his belief in the mirage as a mirage. “Splendor,” Fitzgerald came to understand, “was something in the heart.”
NOVEMBER
1922
It was the hour of a profound human change, and excitement was generating on the air.
CHAPTER FIVE
THE MEETING ALL AN INVENTION. MARY
When I came home to West Egg that night I was afraid for a moment that my house was on fire. . . . Turning a corner I saw that it was Gatsby’s house, lit from tower to cellar. At first I thought it was another party, a wild rout that had resolved itself into “hide-and-go-seek” or “sardines-in-the-box” with all the house thrown open to the game.
The Great Gatsby, Chapter 5
“The tendency of intelligent men is to approach nearer and nearer the truth, by the processes of rejection, revision and invention,” wrote H. L. Mencken in his 1908 book The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, a work that greatly influenced the young Scott Fitzgerald. The processes of rejection and revision were sometimes invisible, but inventions accumulated in the Man’s Hope outline as Fitzgerald mused on the origins of his novel: “the meeting all an invention,” he said of the central scene in Chapter Five, the reunion of Gatsby and Daisy. But this need not imply that the novel begins at this point to leave history behind. Invention, after all, means literally to “come upon,” and in its earliest English uses invention was synonymous with discovery, before it came to mean contrivance or fabrication.
When Gatsby and Daisy meet again, it is the result of much contrivance and fabrication—and a heroic effort at self-invention. Gatsby spent five years turning himself into the person he thought Daisy wanted, sustaining his beautiful illusions, and then bought a house as close to her as he could get. At the end of the previous chapter, after Jordan tells Nick that Gatsby and Daisy had once been in love, Nick finds it “a strange coincidence” that Gatsby should have ended up so near to the woman he had known five years earlier in Louisville. “But it wasn’t a coincidence at all,” Jordan explains. “Gatsby bought that house so that Daisy would be just across the bay.” This conversation is a sleight of hand, distracting our attention from the real coincidence: that the house next door to Gatsby’s had earl
ier chanced to be rented by Daisy’s cousin. That is an authorial manipulation, which is what we mean by “coincidence” in fiction, and why coincidences in fiction are far less beautiful than coincidences in fact.
Facts can be beautiful, and illusions can be ugly. Scott Fitzgerald loved Keats more than any other writer, and learned a great deal from him—much of the best writing in Gatsby riffs on Keats—but by 1922 he had decided that a romantic intoxication with life’s beauty could only be sustained through chemical intoxication. Faith in the truth of beauty was a necessary illusion, but an illusion all the same, he wrote in The Beautiful and Damned:
There was a kindliness about intoxication—there was that indescribable gloss and glamour it gave, like the memories of ephemeral and faded evenings. After a few high-balls there was magic in the tall glowing Arabian night of the Bush Terminal Building—its summit a peak of sheer grandeur, gold and dreaming against the inaccessible sky. And Wall Street, the crass, the banal—again it was the triumph of gold, a gorgeous sentient spectacle; it was where the great kings kept the money for their wars . . . The fruit of youth or of the grape, the transitory magic of the brief passage from darkness to darkness—the old illusion that truth and beauty were in some way entwined.
Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of The Great Gatsby Page 16