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

by Churchwell, Sarah

  At the end of 1923, Fitzgerald met Max Perkins for lunch at the Hotel Chatham, on Vanderbilt Avenue in Manhattan, to discuss publishing a collection of Ring Lardner’s stories. Lardner, always self-deprecating, was hesitant, so Fitzgerald and Perkins were taking matters into their own hands. Fitzgerald jotted down ideas for titles on the back of a menu, which he saved. In the early 1920s, food in New York was Francophilic, as a symbol of cultural cosmopolitanism, and not only in expensive establishments; speakeasies, too, featured “chicken fricassee, family style” or “bouillabaisse marseillaise.” On November 9, 1922, American caterers called for menus to be written in “One hundred percent Americanism.” Demands for one hundred percent Americanism would only grow louder as the century progressed.

  The menu Fitzgerald saved is valuable not because of what it teaches us about food, however, but because it is a relic, a trace of the past. A love of enchanted objects often leads us astray, as Jay Gatsby will learn; but it is also instinctive, clutching at the palpable for evidence of a life before us that otherwise is only storied. Without the things that survive us, there would be no history.

  On Sunday, November 5, Carl Van Vechten attended a cocktail party that appeared to be hosting “all the kept women & brokers in New York.” One of the other guests was twenty-four-year-old George Gershwin, who entertained the party by playing his hit song from The Scandals of 1922, “I’ll Build A Stairway to Paradise.” It could have been the theme song of Jay Gatsby, who would see a stairway to paradise on the streets of Louisville as he kissed Daisy Fay for the first time. The bandleader Paul Whiteman, who recorded “Stairway to Paradise” in 1922, would commission Gershwin two years later to compose a serious, full-length jazz composition; the result was “Rhapsody in Blue,” which premiered in February 1924, two months before the Fitzgeralds quit New York for the blue Mediterranean.

  Gershwin’s invention was inspired, he said, by the daily rhythms and noises of urban life, sounds of modern America being born: “It was on the train, with its steely rhythms, its rattle-ty bang, that is so often so stimulating to a composer—I frequently hear music in the very heart of the noise . . . I heard it as a sort of musical kaleidoscope of America, of our vast melting pot, of our unduplicated national pep, of our metropolitan madness.” Gershwin’s original title for the composition about metropolitan madness was “American Rhapsody,” until his brother Ira suggested that he model himself on the titles of James McNeil Whistler’s paintings, such as Nocturne in Black and Gold.

  At Gatsby’s first party, as the mothlike women flutter through whisperings with yellow cocktail music rising above them, they are entertained by a performance of the “Jazz History of the World.” In the Trimalchio drafts, Fitzgerald wrote a long description of the musical kaleidoscope played for Gatsby’s guests, before he decided to leave it to the reader’s imagination. Nick’s description is a meditation on cyclicality and coherence:

  It started out with a weird, spinning sound, mostly from the cornets. Then there would be a series of interruptive notes which colored everything that came after them until before you knew it they became the theme and new discords were opposed outside. But just as you’d get used to the new discord one of the old themes would drop back in, this time as a discord, until you’d get a weird sense that it was a preposterous cycle after all. Long after the piece was over it went on and on in my head—whenever I think of that summer I can hear it yet.

  Let the preposterous cycle be a symbol, then, for the weird sense that all of the spinning themes and discordant interruptions are connected after all. It is worth listening for the music in the very heart of the noise.

  As Gershwin was building a stairway to paradise for all the kept women in New York and their brokers, the New York Times reported on November 5 that Mrs. Gibson had admitted telling different versions of her tale: “‘The story I told the authorities and the story I told you reporters are two different things,’ she said. ‘And when I get on the stand, I will give you a better story than you have had yet.’” The reporter pointedly observed that Mrs. Gibson held “stacks of newspapers” as she spoke, but special prosecutor Mott remained marvelously untroubled by his star witness’s admission that she was making up her story as she went.

  Arrests were being postponed until after the governor’s election in three days, leading to increased murmurs of corruption and carelessness in New Jersey. Rumors spread that the authorities planned to drop the whole case after the election; Mott was alleged to have said he was a “good waiter” and was biding his time for the papers to lose interest in the story.

  Meanwhile, Mrs. Gibson continued telling the story of her life to avid listeners. She claimed to have an aristocratic background, her ancestors came over on the Mayflower, and she was a college graduate. She was raised on a horse farm in Kentucky, where she rode to hounds (“which accounts for her agility at midnight on the back of her saddle mule”). After that, she was for a time a bareback rider in a circus and then she’d married her husband, a minister who had drowned seventeen years before.

  Only not a word of it was true. Even the Pig Woman’s name was an invention: “It has been established to the satisfaction even of the officials,” noted the press sardonically, that she had adopted the name Gibson from the previous owner of her farm. There was no romantically perished minister, she had not gone to college, her family was not Mayflower stock. Her current husband was a local factory worker named Easton; asked to comment on his estranged wife’s tale, he remarked, “It’s an amazing story . . . She has a brilliant mind.” But local authorities insisted that Gibson’s story of the murders was not made less credible by “romantic inaccuracies in her story of her past life.”

  Mrs. Gibson with her son William and two pigs.

  Asked to explain herself, Gibson grew increasingly pugnacious: “I know they say I was a figure in the Piper murder case some years ago. I know everyone wonders why I said I was the widow of a clergyman named Gibson who died seventeen years ago, and why I have not revealed the full story of my life.” She did not answer any of these questions. The Piper case was a five-year-old unsolved murder near New Brunswick; a student named John Piper had disappeared and a witness, described as “an elderly woman,” and whose name no one could now remember, “gave a vivid account of hearing a man’s voice cry, ‘My God! Don’t shoot me!’” No one commented publicly on the stories’ pronounced resemblance.

  “Well I don’t care,” Mrs. Gibson declared defiantly. “What difference does it make whether I have had a past or not? My past is my own business.”

  When Nick asks Gatsby “what business he was in,” Gatsby answers abruptly, “That’s my affair,” before realizing “that it wasn’t the appropriate reply” in the circles to which he aspires. Romantic inventors of new and improved selves remained convinced that their past was their own business: “What better right does a man possess than to invent his own antecedents?” asks Nick in the drafts of Gatsby. The inventive Jane Gibson would doubtless have endorsed this sentiment, even as her story might seem to suggest that some antecedents are not invented, but discovered.

  On the chilly, rainy Monday evening of November 6, most of the writers of the Algonquin Round Table gathered at the premiere of a musical revue they had written with Ring Lardner. The ’49ers played for a grand total of fifteen performances, until November 18, when it fell flat on its face.

  Otherwise known as “The Vicious Circle,” the Algonquinites were among the most famous writers in America in the 1920s, renowned equally for their repartee and self-promotion, using their journalism to publicize one another’s—and their own—witticisms. Most of them would end up writing for The New Yorker when Harold Ross launched it in February 1925, where Dorothy Parker reviewed books as “Constant Reader,” Alec Woollcott invented the Shouts and Murmurs column, and all of them contributed reviews, fiction, and comic sketches. By 1922 the Algonquinites were already writing freelance for the same mag
azines (Vanity Fair, The New Republic), as well as for Swope’s World, which would publish Dorothy Parker’s most famous poem, “Résumé,” in 1925. One of the peripheral members of the group was Deems Taylor, Swope’s music critic, as was Swope himself. Another was Scott Fitzgerald.

  All of the Algonquinites frequented Swope’s house parties, frolicking for long weekends on Long Island. Swope’s wife Margaret called their Great Neck home “an absolutely seething bordello of interesting people.” Deems Taylor’s wife recorded in her journal that Swope “filled his house at this time with everybody who was talked about or working on important jobs. To be left out of Swope’s list was to argue yourself unknown. He was fond of us. Deems was his direct antithesis—quiet, shy, small voiced, but always standing up to him and giving him what he adored, a chance for intelligent conversation.” She called Swope “one of the most forceful men I have ever met . . . a loud talkative man with a mop of red hair and a big, active body. He was inexhaustible and . . . stored in his big frame the loudest vocal sounds ever exploded by any human being.”

  Dorothy Parker was also a regular guest at the Swopes’; supposedly one of the perpetual games at their parties inspired one of her more often-repeated jokes. Told that some of the guests were ducking for apples, Parker quipped, “there, but for a typographical error, is the story of my life.” Like Fitzgerald offering the year 1922 as an “exhibit” of the Jazz Age, or Willa Cather declaring that “the world broke in two in 1922 or thereabouts,” Dorothy Parker also commemorated the spirit of their age, in poems such as “1922” and “The Flapper,” which ended:

  All spotlights focus on her pranks.

  All tongues her prowess herald.

  For which she well may render thanks

  To God and Scott Fitzgerald.

  Parker became good friends with Scott, and seems to have been, at least in the beginning, slightly infatuated with him. She was “beglamored by the idea of Scott Fitzgerald,” wrote Wilson, but Parker always thought “there was something petulant” about Zelda, she later said. (It is decidedly possible that Zelda might have returned the compliment.) For most of 1922, Parker was having an affair with playboy playwright Charlie MacArthur, unaware for some time that this did not place her in as select company as she’d have liked. In late 1922 Parker became pregnant with MacArthur’s child and had an abortion, describing the thirty dollars that MacArthur contributed to the operation as “Judas making a refund”; this is also supposed to have been the experience that prompted her famous wisecrack, “Serves me right for putting all my eggs in one bastard.” The New Yorker columnist Lois Long wrote that she and her friends shared a woman doctor who would perform safe abortions; the doctor took holidays at Christmas to rest up for the “rush after New Year’s Eve.”

  In March 1922, when Scott and Zelda came to New York to celebrate the publication of The Beautiful and Damned, Fitzgerald launched into what he called an “interminable party”: “I couldn’t seem to get sober enough to tolerate being sober,” he wrote. “In fact the whole trip was largely a failure.” Zelda had accompanied him, but her reason for making the trip may have been less festive than his. At least six biographies, beginning with Nancy Milford’s influential Zelda in 1970, have repeated the story that, having just had Scottie four months earlier, Zelda had discovered she was pregnant again. They claim that on page 176 of Scott’s ledger, in the entry for March 1922, he does not mention the publication of his second novel or their trip to New York, recording instead only four ominous words: “Zelda and her abortionist.”

  However, Scott’s entry for March 1922, which is indeed on page 176 of his ledger (“Twenty-five Years Old”), doesn’t say anything of the kind. After noting the publication of The Beautiful and Damned in February, it lists the trip to New York in March, partying with Engalitcheff, quarreling with Alec McKaig (which ended their friendship), meeting celebrities such as Constance Bennett and Marilyn Miller, and visiting Selznick’s film studio (in New York), but nothing about Zelda or an abortionist.

  Nowhere in Scott’s ledger or published notebooks does he write “Zelda and her abortionist,” but the claim about the March 1922 entry has been repeated in almost every biography of the pair since Milford’s. The only exception is Matthew J. Bruccoli’s 1981 Some Sort of Epic Grandeur (but he doesn’t mention this recycled mistake, either).

  This doesn’t mean that Zelda couldn’t have had an abortion during the March trip—just that there’s no evidence that she did. She most likely did have at least one abortion during their marriage, probably in New York (Scott wrote in his notebooks of a son being flushed down a toilet in a hotel, after “pills” were prescribed by an unnamed doctor), but it is not easy to date when it occurred. If Zelda did indeed have an abortion during this visit she may not have entirely sympathized with Scott’s frailties while she coped with the most likely painful effects of pills given to her by one Dr. Lackin, a doctor to whom she alluded in a later letter to Scott, remembering these early years.

  Regardless of whether they were dealing with a traumatic situation or just “Both sick. Drinking,” as Fitzgerald’s February 1922 ledger entry actually does read, Scott spent the March trip to New York heroically drinking himself under the table. Bunny Wilson wrote to John Bishop: “We find them both rather changed—particularly Zelda, who has become matronly and rather fat (about which she is very sensitive),” as well she might be, less than six months after giving birth; she had lost her baby weight by the time they returned to New York in September. “Much of her old jazz has evaporated,” Wilson continued, “and, as she becomes more mellowed, I like her better.” As for Scott, he looked “like John Barrymore on the brink of the grave . . . but also, somehow, more intelligent than he used to . . . He arrived this morning in a hansom, after an all-night party of some kind, and wanted to take me for a drive in the park.”

  Around the same time, Wilson was finishing a long essay on Fitzgerald’s writing, and sent Scott a draft that said the greatest influences on Fitzgerald’s work were the Middle West, Irishness, and liquor; Fitzgerald responded by asking him to cut the public references to his drinking (it was perfectly true, Fitzgerald ingenuously admitted, but it would make him look bad). Scott added: “Your catalog is not complete . . . the most enormous influence on me in the four and a half years since I met her has been the complete, fine and full-hearted selfishness and chill-mindedness of Zelda.”

  Early November brought big literary news, an epochal event that, combined with the publication of Ulysses, has continued to define 1922 as the annus mirabilis of modernist literature. T. S. Eliot’s long-awaited poem, The Waste Land, appeared with much fanfare in the November issue of the Dial magazine, and would be published in book form by Horace Liveright that December. Its fragmentary, elliptical obscurity baffled most of its first readers, but a handful of astute critics, including Burton Rascoe and Edmund Wilson, could see the thematic unity behind the poem’s apparently discordant themes and disjointed narratives.

  It was a poem about the chaos of the present day, that much was clear, concerned with the relationship of modern life to historical origins, and the artist’s search for sources of creativity and inspiration. The poem shows that meaning changes, dissipates, is lost, but it is also a quest for the origins of meaning and of art, and The Waste Land’s influence on Fitzgerald’s ideas about the novel he was mulling has long been acknowledged.

  Burton Rascoe recorded his first impressions of The Waste Land—“a thing of bitterness and beauty”—in his Day Book column on November 5, 1922. Interested in the poem’s “erudite despair,” Rascoe listed some of Eliot’s many sources, from the Satyricon to modern jazz songs. This “highly elliptical” poem played with “all the shining verbal toys, impressions and catch lines” of a poet who was endlessly alert to the life around him. The poem was an “etching of modern life.”

  Later that month, Wilson published a joint review of The Waste Land and Ulysses, arguing that Joyce and
Eliot were the writers who best “reflect our present condition of disruption. We are all tumultuous fragments . . . And no one makes any attempt to pick up the scattered pieces.” In order to make his point more explicit, Wilson added “a quotation from a more conventional author,” one whose conventionality did not prevent him from catching “something of the spirit of the time”: “‘I know myself but that is all,’” cries one of Scott Fitzgerald’s heroes, who has ‘“grown up to find all gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in men shaken.’” And that is precisely the point of the modern novelist or poet: “I know myself but that is all.” Fitzgerald saved Wilson’s mention.

  “It will be said that [Eliot] depends too much upon books and borrows too much from other men,” Wilson correctly predicted. The Waste Land’s first readers were unconvinced that a poem so dependent on familiar stories and external ideas could be an original work of art. Eliot seemed merely to quote other writers: wasn’t this little better than plagiarism? The originality, argued Wilson, was in the composition: not in invention, but in discovery and order. In any event, “Mr. Eliot’s trivialities are more valuable than other people’s epics,” Wilson concluded.

  Fragments of meaning culled from past and present and then composed into something new was a modern kind of originality, and T. S. Eliot was not the only writer making art from what he saw around him. When Scott Fitzgerald published The Great Gatsby, he sent a copy to Eliot, inscribed to the “Greatest of Living Poets from his enthusiastic worshipper.” Fitzgerald had written a homage to Eliot’s poem in one description of the ash heaps: “We walked back a hundred yards along the road under Doctor Eckleburg’s persistent stare. The only building in sight was a small block of yellow brick sitting on the edge of the waste land, a sort of compact Main Street ministering to it and contiguous to absolutely nothing.” For some scholars, this lone allusion suffices to explain Fitzgerald’s decision to set his book in 1922: the date is a tribute to the year of The Waste Land, signaling Fitzgerald’s aspirations toward high modernism, they argue. Eliot’s poem probably helped Fitzgerald discover what he was looking for, but the resonances of 1922 in The Great Gatsby far exceed this passing salute—and Fitzgerald’s ambitions for his novel similarly exceeded merely translating into prose what Eliot had said in poetry.