After reading The Great Gatsby Eliot returned Fitzgerald’s compliment. He had read the novel three times: it “interested and excited me more than any new novel I have seen, either English or American, for a number of years,” he wrote to Fitzgerald. “In fact, it seems to me the first step that American fiction has taken since Henry James.” The two writers had more in common than a shared metaphor for the sterility of modern life: both were playing with “shining verbal toys” redeemed from the ash heaps of history, searching for definitive beauty. But Fitzgerald could see more than Eliot’s waste land. He could also see the delights of the gorgeous, riotous island next door.
One of the modern jazz songs that The Waste Land plays is a burst of ragtime: “O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag / It’s so elegant / So intelligent.” Many readers assume that T. S. Eliot invented this line, but the credit belongs to a team of songwriters who composed “That Shakespearian Rag” in 1912. It was a big hit, nearly forty years before Cole Porter’s more famous “Brush Up Your Shakespeare.”
One of the composers of “That Shakespearian Rag” was Gene Buck, who had, by 1922, been writing songs and producing hits for the Ziegfeld Follies for years; he also promoted the dancer Joe Frisco, among other ventures. Buck was rich, successful, smiling, and vain. He was also one of the show business luminaries of Great Neck. He and his wife lived on Nassau Drive, around the corner from Ring Lardner, in a vast house of remarkable ostentation. Lardner, who collaborated with Buck on a few plays, described Buck’s living room as “the Yale Bowl, with lamps”; Buck also liked throwing extravagant parties. His Great Neck friends included his boss, Florenz Ziegfeld, and producer Sam Harris, who would stage The Vegetable.
Gene Buck and his wife Helen, a former showgirl, became friends with the Fitzgeralds, although at some point friction developed between Scott and Zelda over Helen. In one of her first letters urging the Kalmans to come east for the Princeton–Yale game in November, Zelda had described life in Great Neck. “We have been having a hell of a time,” she wrote. “We have been gotten drunk with three times by the Ring Lardners and various others.” Lardner was “a typical newspaperman,” whom at first she didn’t “find particularly amusing,” although her opinion of Ring would quickly improve. “His wife is common but I like her. He is six feet tall and goes on periodical sprees lasting from one to X weeks. He is on one now, which is probably the reason he called on us. He plays the saxophone and takes us to Mr. Gene Buck’s house—Mr. Gene Buck originates Ziegfeld’s Follies and lives in a house designed by Joseph Urban. It looks like a lot of old scenery glued together—Mr. Buck says ‘seen’ where he should say ‘saw’ and is probably a millionaire . . . I like Mr. Buck,” she added, explaining that he’d married a “chorus girl who has lovely legs and consequently a baby.” Fitzgerald may have admired Helen Buck rather more; such, at any rate, was Zelda’s eventual accusation: “in Great Neck there was always disorder and quarrels . . . about Helen Buck, about everything.”
But at least some of the time, Zelda and Helen were also drinking companions. Bruccoli reports a story of Zelda and Helen Buck drinking a pitcher of orange blossoms during a lunch at Gateway Drive, before heading off with a thermos of cocktails to the golf club, “where Zelda and Helen became drunk on the course, with Zelda singing, ‘You can throw a silver dollar down upon the ground, And it’ll roll, because it’s round . . .’” Eventually Ring Lardner helped them get home.
Whatever their quarrels, the Fitzgeralds and the Bucks were frequent companions during the months at Great Neck. Scott inscribed several books to them: a 1922 edition of This Side of Paradise is signed “For Helen and Jean [sic]—whose courtesy and kindness to the pilgrims, the Fitz will never forget. From theirs, The Bowing Fitz” (most of the inscription is in such a drunken scrawl that it is illegible), and he gave a copy of The Vegetable to “Helen—not of Troy but of Great Neck—a lovely girl who is so sweet as to sing for us, now and then—F. Scott Fitzgerald.”
He also inscribed a copy of Joseph Conrad’s Youth, “For Gene Buck from Joseph Conrad,” adding “F. Scott Fitzgerald, middle-man,” below. Some readers have concluded that Conrad must have given Fitzgerald the copy to present to Buck, but this is missing the joke with a vengeance. In fact, Fitzgerald never met Conrad, much to his disappointment, although he and Lardner did drop by during Conrad’s stay at the nearby Doubleday estate in May 1923, paying homage to their idol by singing and dancing on the lawn outside the mansion in the middle of the night. Some say the dance they chose was the hornpipe, in honor of the old sea captain; everyone says they were drunk. The only people who saw the tribute performance were the night watchmen who forcibly removed the pair from the Doubleday grounds.
Perhaps Fitzgerald’s manifold literary gifts to the Bucks were a hint that they might benefit from some culture. In 1926 Ring Lardner published a story called “The Love Nest,” lampooning the Bucks, in which a journalist named Bartlett drives through “an arc de triomphe of a gateway” to a “white house that might have been mistaken for the Yale Bowl,” where he interviews a publicity-seeking film director. The director’s wife, a former showgirl, joins them as the husband leaves for an appointment. The wife, it emerges, spends her life bitterly drunk, exclaiming “I never did love him! . . . He wanted a beautiful wife and beautiful children for his beautiful home. Just to show us off . . . I’m part of his chattels . . . like his big diamond or his cars or his horses.” The next morning she pretends again to be a happy housewife, a pose as fraudulent as the director’s insistence that his grandiose mansion is just a “love nest.” When the story was published, Lardner wrote Fitzgerald in Paris: “Gene didn’t make any comment on ‘The Love Nest,’ but evidently had no suspicion. Anyway, we are still pals.”
After Gatsby achieves his dream of impressing Daisy with his lavish house that looks like a lot of scenery glued together, he ushers Daisy and Nick into the music room. Klipspringer, the eternal boarder, plays the piano, beginning with “The Love Nest,” a popular song from 1920. Fitzgerald doesn’t reprint the lyrics, but his audience would have known them:
Just a love nest
Cozy with charm,
Like a dove nest
Down on a farm . . .
Better than a palace with a gilded dome,
Is a love nest
You can call home.
The other song Klipspringer plays is no less ironically chosen, no less sharply pointed: “Ain’t We Got Fun,” with its chorus emphasizing the ruthless passage of time—“morning,” “evening,” “meantime,” and “between time”—and its verse joking about the class divide: “the rich get rich and the poor get . . . children.”
Knowing that life can provide the same grace notes as art, Fitzgerald might well have used another chorus from a Gene Buck tune as a refrain in Gatsby: “Wasn’t it nice? Wasn’t it sweet? Wasn’t it good?”
The artist, wrote Conrad, shines “the light of magic suggestiveness” on “the commonplace surface of words: of the old, old words, worn thin, defaced by ages of careless usage.” Beauty fires us with the faith to search for hidden meanings; old words burn through stories like new gold.
In June 1924, as he settled down on the Riviera into serious work on The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald decided to cut a long section delineating Jay Gatsby’s backstory, “because it interfered with the neatness of the plan” for his novel. Thriftily, he revised that section into an independent short story, called it “Absolution” and sent it to the magazines. One of Fitzgerald’s finest stories, “Absolution” tells of an eleven-year-old boy’s avowal of beauty and rejection of religion. Young Rudolph Miller is sent to the family priest for a routine confession; as he is confessing to sins of pride (he believes his parents are too inferior to him to be his real parents), disobedience, and his emerging erotic desires, he ends up lying during confession, a mortal sin. But the priest is even more at sea than the boy: Fitzgerald implies that he is breaking down from sexual repression. L
istening to the child confess, the priest suddenly “cries wildly”: “You look as if things went glimmering . . . Did you ever go to a party? . . . My theory is that when a whole lot of people get together in the best places things go glimmering all the time.”
The priest recommends abruptly that Rudolph go to an amusement park: “It’s a thing like a fair, only much more glittering . . . A band playing somewhere, and a smell of peanuts—and everything will twinkle . . . But don’t get up close,” he warned Rudolph, “because if you do you’ll only feel the heat and the sweat and the life.” The unnerving experience confirms the boy’s faith in beauty: “Underneath his terror he felt that his own inner convictions were confirmed. There was something ineffably gorgeous somewhere that had nothing to do with God.” This was to have been Jay Gatsby’s prelude, the origins of his quest for something ineffably gorgeous in life and his faith in enchanted objects. Most of the “catholic element” that Fitzgerald initially thought would characterize his novel didn’t survive into the final draft, but Gatsby’s faith in the meaning of symbols remains Catholic, and he chooses a catholic array of symbols to represent his secular faith. He is particularly fond of symbolic light: when it stops raining during his reunion with Daisy, Gatsby smiles “like a weather man, like an ecstatic patron of recurrent light.”
Only in the imagination does every truth find an undeniable existence, Conrad also said. “Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master of art as of life.”
On Thursday, November 9, 1922, Albert Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize for his theories about space, time, and recurrent light. The idea of relativity began, Einstein famously said, with a metaphor: he imagined himself riding on a beam of light, and wondered what he would be able to see. If light were a wave, one could imagine sweeping along its peaks and valleys. But if he were simultaneous with light, would the light stand still? Would time halt? Could he ride that beam of light forever, a frozen moment that could never fade? If he traveled faster than light, perhaps he could even repeat the past. Eventually, Einstein would explain relativity using symbolic clocks positioned at every point in the universe, each one running at a different speed.
When Daisy comes to Nick’s house and finds her old flame waiting for her, Fitzgerald offers a symbol to suggest the awkwardness of the reunion: a small “defunct mantelpiece clock” that Gatsby nearly knocks over and then puts back on the mantel. Some readers think the defunct clock is too contrived a symbol—Gatsby wants time to stand still, to start over again with Daisy—but it also suggests that things are not synchronized, and that Gatsby is trying desperately to keep time, as literally as he can. Gatsby knows exactly how long it’s been since he and Daisy last met (“Five years next November”), a response so reflexive that it is a dead giveaway of how carefully he’s kept track. “The automatic quality of Gatsby’s answer set us all back at least another minute,” Nick wryly observes, keeping time himself; he has already jotted his list of Gatsby’s party guests on a timetable. Even Gatsby’s green light might have suggested time-keeping in the New York of 1922: the traffic towers being built that autumn on Fifth Avenue were also equipped with “synchronized clocks on the north and south faces and 350-pound bronze bells” that tolled the hours. It has been said that Fitzgerald, “haunted by time,” wrote as if he were surrounded by clocks and calendars; maybe he was.
Gatsby’s longed-for meeting with Daisy ends with a hint of the disillusionment to come. Reality could not possibly live up to his overwrought expectations: “He had been full of the idea so long, dreamed it right through to the end, waited with his teeth set, so to speak, at an inconceivable pitch of intensity. Now, in the reaction, he was running down like an overwound clock.” As they tour through Gatsby’s house they pass through a pastiche of history, like a diorama in a museum, including a Marie Antoinette music room, an upscale echo of Myrtle Wilson’s Versailles sofas. “I think he revalued everything in his house,” Nick observes, “according to the measure of response it drew from her well-loved eyes.”
But before the chapter closes, the beat of Gatsby’s disappointment begins to shift away from time and toward light, an anticipation of the failures in relativity that await. He shows Daisy the green light at the end of her dock, visible across the bay from his gilded “love nest,” and then pauses. “Possibly,” Nick thinks, “it had occurred to him that the colossal significance of that light had now vanished forever . . . Now it was again a green light on a dock. His count of enchanted objects had diminished by one.”
A scholar once counted how often time is referred to in The Great Gatsby (nearly five hundred times: once every hundred words); mention time, and people start counting. So here’s another enumeration: if you subtract title, numbered chapter headings and epigraph, The Great Gatsby is 48,885 words long. The magic of modern computers counts for us, making it easy to pinpoint the center of a novel that Fitzgerald wrote in longhand. The sentence at the novel’s precise midpoint, its fulcrum (words 24,434 to 24,457, while we’re counting), is a description of Nick, Daisy, and Gatsby passing through Gatsby’s facsimile of a library as they take their tour of his proud, gilt-domed mansion: “As Gatsby closed the door of ‘the Merton College Library’ I could have sworn I heard the owl-eyed man break into ghostly laughter.”
The owl-eyed man haunts the dead center of the novel, a trace of life finding its way, ghostily, into fiction’s facsimile of a library. “We do love the center of things,” wrote Zelda eight years later. “You feel the motion so much less.”
Bunny Wilson invited Fitz to a party on Wednesday, November 8, at the Washington Square Book Shop on West Eighth Street, starting at 6:30: “Can’t you come? Dos Passos, Sew Collins, Elinor Wylie, and others are going to be there. The idea is to make Playboy [a literary magazine] a sort of mouthpiece for all the bizarre and scurrilous things which people can’t publish elsewhere.” History does not record whether Fitz attended, but it is hard to imagine him declining the offer to discuss the bizarre and scurrilous over drinks at a bookstore. As they partied, if they partied, and gossiped about the bizarre and scurrilous, the papers were reporting that the Swopes and Heywood Broun, the World’s dramatic critic, were in a car crash in Great Neck. Mrs. Swope’s injuries were “painful” but not serious; the two men and the Swopes’ chauffeur escaped unhurt. Swope told reporters that the worst part of the accident was that several oil paintings they were taking to New York from their Great Neck house had been damaged.
They were changing the channels of their avidity, Fitzgerald remarked later. When the word “class” came into common currency in the sixteenth century it largely superseded “order,” as in the lower and upper orders, from peasants to the ruling class. Musing on the relationship between wealth and taste in his notebooks, Fitzgerald observed that bad taste among the bourgeoisie is called vulgarity when found among the proletariat. The vagaries of such ideas about taste and money interested him, he added, “because it shows classes in movement.”
When Daisy and Gatsby meet at his cottage Nick beats a tactful retreat for half an hour (as he did during the parallel scene in Myrtle’s apartment, when he reads Simon Called Peter), occupying himself by staring at Gatsby’s house “like Kant at his church steeple.” Gatsby’s house becomes a symbol of inspiration, an object of worship, and an emblem of futility and death:
A brewer had built it early in the “period” craze, a decade before, and there was a story that he’d agreed to pay five years’ taxes on all the neighboring cottages if the owners would have their roofs thatched with straw. Perhaps their refusal took the heart out of his plan to Found a Family—he went into an immediate decline. His children sold his house with the black wreath still on the door. Americans, while occasionally willing to be serfs, have always been obstinate about being peasantry.
The brewer’s dreams of aristocratic grandeur are as vain as Gatsby’s. Nick lives in a tiny cottage that has not yet been razed by developers, a vestigial trace of the old fishing village th
at will soon disappear altogether in the rush to build ever more grandiose homes. “Like so many Americans,” Fitzgerald wrote a few years later, “he valued things rather than cared about them.”
To compensate Nick for arranging his reunion with Daisy, Gatsby clumsily offers remuneration: “You might pick up a nice bit of money. It happens to be a rather confidential sort of thing.” Nick understands that the opportunity, involving bonds, must be dishonest: “I realize now that under different circumstances that conversation might have been one of the crises of my life. But, because the offer was obviously and tactlessly for a service to be rendered, I had no choice except to cut him off there.”
In other words, Nick might have been tempted by financial inequality into contemplating a swindle, but he couldn’t consider payment for organizing an adulterous afternoon with his married cousin. Nick’s objection seems primarily focused on the fact that the offer is too “obvious” and “tactless”—perhaps he would have been open to a transaction less crass, less banal. So Nick arranges the rendezvous, but high-mindedly refuses compensation. He might occasionally be willing to be a panderer, but he is obstinate about being a pimp.
Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of The Great Gatsby Page 19