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

by Churchwell, Sarah

  Playing “Who Am I?” like one of Swope’s party guests, we may be stumped by Fitzgerald’s uncommunicative note of “Mary” in the Man’s Hope outline as one of the imaginative sources for the reunion scene. Who is the Mary about whom Fitzgerald remembers thinking as he tried to invoke the “fire and freshness” of Daisy? Some have conjectured that Mary may refer to an actress named Mary Hay, who lived in Great Neck with her husband, the matinée idol Richard Barthelmess.

  In February 1921 the World published a tribute to Mary Hay from a reader who felt she “deserved immortalization in rhyme”:

  Look at the style of her,

  Gaze all the while at her,

  At that sweet smile of her,

  Miss Mary Hay!

  My, how real sweet she is!

  And how petite she is!

  What a real treat she is!

  Miss Mary Hay!

  It goes on, but it doesn’t improve.

  Fitzgerald made various observations about Mary Hay over the years—if this is the Mary to whom his note refers. In his 1935 essay “My Lost City,” he said that in New York in the early 1920s “You danced elbow to elbow with Marion Davies and perhaps picked out the vivacious Mary Hay in the pony chorus.” Envisioning Rosemary in Tender Is the Night, Fitzgerald described her as being like “Mary Hay—that is, she differs from most actresses by being a lady, simply reeking of vitality, health, sensuality.”

  In April 1930 Zelda published a sketch called “The Girl With Talent,” which Fitzgerald said was based on Mary Hay. It’s the story of a young dancer with what would later be called sex appeal (in the early 1920s they called it “hot stuff”) who drinks too much gin and avoids her young husband and small child, until eventually she sails for Paris without them. When a friend asks if her husband knows that she’s raising hell in Europe, the dancer responds incredulously that she is living so chastely as to make a nun look like a nymphomaniac. A week later she runs off with a man, and the narrator doesn’t see her again until after the dancer’s divorce, by which point she is about to run off with someone else. By the time Zelda wrote this sketch, Mary Hay had left Richard Barthelmess and their daughter for another man.

  But “Mary” may not be Mary Hay at all. Deems Taylor’s wife was named Mary, and in May 1923 Fitzgerald noted in his ledger a visit with a Mary Armstrong, who may have been the same Mary Armstrong who was married to Ben Hecht. Even Mrs. Rumsey was named Mary, although it’s unlikely that the Fitzgeralds were on a first-name basis with her (Fitzgerald and his agent, Harold Ober, worked together for seven years before they used each other’s first names in correspondence, and Nick Carraway thinks it is worth remarking that after their first drinks he and Myrtle Wilson called each other by their first names). Someone the Fitzgeralds knew better was Mary Blair, whom Edmund Wilson married in February 1923.

  Just before the Fitzgeralds returned to Manhattan in September 1922, a Tribune article used Mary Hay as an example of the versatility of New York, “the skyscraper city,” contrasting her against a well-known suffragist with a very similar name: “imagine the divergent New Yorks,” it suggested, of “Mary Hay, and Mary Garrett Hay.” Together, the two Mary Hays symbolized the impossibility of ever comprehending reality: “New York is like The Truth—an absolute concern in theory, yet so intricate and extensive as to be comprehended by no one . . . This Manhattan scope, this versatility, this enswirling of the individual is part of the city’s peculiar charm.”

  And The Great Gatsby is a novel that considers it a subtle tribute to be interested in someone whose origins you don’t know. Fitzgerald’s note of “Mary” is everything we can’t know, this divergence, this scope, this versatility, these enswirled individuals who laugh, flicker, and vanish.

  Over the first weeks of November, the press continued to wonder whether Mrs. Gibson’s “statements and romantic stories of a past adventure, culture and refinement” might give Inspector Mott pause. But as New York and New Jersey went to the polls, and the papers reported the failure of a proposed mandatory equal wage for women (the court ruled that “no greater calamity could befall workers than to have pay fixed by law”), headlines announced that an indictment of “one woman and two men” was expected in the Hall–Mills murder case.

  Just as a grand jury was finally summoned, however, sentiment in New Brunswick was turning away from a trial. The community, reported the World, had already judged the killers “in the court of public opinion and have acquitted them out of regard for the ‘unwritten law,’” which held that violence was a justifiable response to adultery. The citizens of New Brunswick regarded “a formal court trial as a rank extravagance,” one which they were beginning to mutter against paying for.

  On Saturday, November 11, Mott announced that Mrs. Gibson had identified the murderer of Hall and Mills. She had selected Henry de la Bruyère Carpender, a stockbroker who was Mrs. Hall’s first cousin and lived two doors down from the Hall mansion in New Brunswick. The Carpenders had frequently been mentioned in the coverage of the case, and Henry de la Bruyère Carpender shared a first name with Mrs. Hall’s brother. It was during the papers’ initial discussion of Henry Stevens’s whereabouts on the day of the murder that Mrs. Gibson had suddenly appeared, announcing she’d heard a woman cry out “Henry! Henry!” as shots rang out. Unfortunately for Mrs. Gibson, Henry Stevens had an alibi his lawyer described as “copper-riveted,” but then it turned out there was another Stevens relative named Henry. Mistakes in identity can sometimes be extremely convenient, a fact Tom Buchanan will ruthlessly exploit at Gatsby’s end. In the case of the Henrys, Mrs. Gibson could keep changing her mind about which Henry she had seen.

  Meanwhile a “negress” named Nellie Lo Russell, who lived near Mrs. Gibson and frequently quarreled with her, came forward saying that Mrs. Gibson had been with her on the night of the murder, “at the hour the pig-raising Amazon says she was astride her mule watching the double killing.” But Mott decided once again to ignore questions about Mrs. Gibson’s credibility, focusing this time on Mrs. Russell’s credibility. A farmer who lived nearby claimed Mrs. Russell “talks in bunches. I don’t think she’s reliable.” She wouldn’t be the only unreliable narrator in the story, but Mott defended Mrs. Gibson: “Why should any woman tell a story like that unless she had some real foundation for it?” Clearly, Mr. Mott was not au fait with current slang: the phrase “publicity hound” was first recorded in 1920, and “publicity-driven” would appear in 1925.

  The question of whether there was anyone to corroborate James Mills’s alibi for the period of the murder had, it seems, been entirely lost amid the narrative mayhem.

  On Sunday, November 12, 1922, a bright autumnal day, as the Tribune printed a story on the new science of quantum mechanics and its “Quest for the Atom,” Burton Rascoe declared that American literature was, for the first time, “being treated with seriousness and respect by English critics,” who were praising modern novelists including Scott Fitzgerald; Fitzgerald saved the mention in his scrapbook. The same day, the New York Times published an article on “‘Americanism’ in Literature” (“when American writers come before us, it is only natural that we should ask what it is that they have which is peculiar to themselves”), and the Morning Telegraph printed a long interview with F. Scott Fitzgerald with the overblown headline “JUVENILE JUVENAL OF THE JEUNESSE JAZZ.”

  The article began by noting that Fitzgerald was named for his “ancestor” (in fact a distant cousin) Francis Scott Key, author of the poem “The Star-Spangled Banner.” In 1922 America did not have a national anthem, but had begun to debate the possibility of adopting one. “The Star-Spangled Banner” was a candidate, but was meeting with violent opposition. Earlier in the year an advertisement in the Tribune insisted “the Star-Spangled Banner can never become our national anthem,” as its “violent, unsingable cadences” could never express “the spiritual ideals upon which the nation was based.” The music had not been comp
osed by an American; worse, it was “a ribald, sensual drinking song.” “Never has Congress, and never will Congress, legalize an anthem which sprang from the lowest qualities of human sentiment,” declared the advertisement. “God forbids it.” Congress would make the “The Star-Spangled Banner” America’s national anthem in 1931, two years after the market crashed, when Americans needed a renewal of faith.

  But as the debate over the anthem continued in 1922, Francis Scott Key’s relation, no stranger to drinking songs, was reading about himself in the Morning Telegraph: “The critics, one and all, from Mencken to Broun and from Burton Rascoe to Hildegarde Hawthorne, have acclaimed F. Scott Fitzgerald as a genius.” Fitzgerald observed humorously to the interviewer that most of his readers were convinced his “novels of jazzing young America” were “biographical”—that he was drawing on life for his art. Nor did Fitzgerald deny that he was. Although some readers deplored the fact that most of Fitzgerald’s characters “are rotters or weaklings, base or mean,” remarked the interviewer, this also seemed a perfectly valid representation of their modern Babylon.

  The article ended with a list of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s favorite things: he “prefers piquant hors d’oeuvres to a hearty meal. He is also fond of Charlie Chaplin, Booth Tarkington, real Scotch, old-fashioned hansom cab riding in Central Park and the ‘Ziegfeld Follies.’” A loyal New Yorker, he “prefers Fifth Avenue to Piccadilly and the Champs Elysees.” And then Fitzgerald closed the interview by offering a jocose list of famous couples he also admired: “Mencken and Nathan, Park & Tilford [whiskey], Lord & Taylor, Lea & Perrins, the Smith Brothers, and Mrs. Gibson, the pig lady, and her Jenny mule.”

  Fitzgerald cut out the interview and saved it in his scrapbook. Behind us, the owl-eyed man laughs, ghostily.

  CHAPTER SIX

  BOB KERR’S STORY. THE 2ND PARTY

  About this time an ambitious young reporter from New York arrived one morning at Gatsby’s door and asked him if he had anything to say. . . . Contemporary legends such as the “underground pipe-line to Canada” attached themselves to him, and there was one persistent story that he didn’t live in a house at all, but in a boat that looked like a house and was moved secretly up and down the Long Island shore. Just why these inventions were a source of satisfaction to James Gatz of North Dakota, isn’t easy to say.

  The Great Gatsby, Chapter 6

  Although Nick Carraway is not a journalist, he is a reporter, as well as Gatsby’s biographer and publicist. The other reporter in The Great Gatsby, who tries to interview Jay Gatsby at the beginning of Chapter Six, seems incidental, but when he comes rushing in following his instincts, Gatsby’s story takes a decided turn for the worse. The reporter doesn’t know quite what he’s looking for, so he asks his quarry if he has anything to say. Gatsby responds, politely and logically, “Anything to say about what?” But Nick tells us that Gatsby, too, likes being talked about. He may not be a “publicity hound”—he needs secrecy to protect his illicit activities—but he finds the inventions about himself a source of obscure satisfaction.

  Perhaps one reason he enjoys these inventions is that they echo his own self-creation: the pleasure of an impresario finding an audience. But Gatsby never says; he gives the reporter no statement. Or, rather, Nick gives us no statement. This is one of Nick’s most characteristic lapses, his occasional bouts of silence and aphasia. At key moments Nick is liable to declare himself at a loss for words, and announce that Gatsby’s visions are “unutterable” or that his own memories are “uncommunicable.” Some might consider this rather unhelpful on the part of a reporter, and Nick has certainly become one of literature’s better-known unreliable narrators. The problem is less that the accuracy of Nick’s narration cannot be relied upon than the fact that he cannot always be relied upon to narrate. On the nights when he is a flaneur strolling through the enchanted metropolitan twilight, Nick tells us of his pleasure in hearing laughter from unheard jokes, joy imagined in unintelligible gestures. Nick is a romantic in the Keatsian sense: he thinks untold stories are lovelier.

  This is a conjuring trick, enabling Fitzgerald to have it both ways. The insufficiency of language becomes, in his hands, not a tragedy of human inarticulacy, but a romance of possibility. Most of The Great Gatsby remains forever fixed in a single, gorgeous moment of potential, ideas that are described as “unheard,” “unintelligible,” “uncommunicable,” “unutterable,” “unfathomable,” “indefinite,” “ineffable,” “incalculable”—and yet hover in the margins. The characters, too, are suggestions rather than declarations: they have strong physical presences, and yet they are strangely featureless. Fitzgerald offers only impressions: Buchanan’s bulk and power, Gatsby’s charm and ecstatic smile, Daisy’s thrilling voice. By no coincidence, Jordan is the most physically defined (she has hair the color of a yellow autumn leaf, is small, athletic, a trifle androgynous, with tanned skin and gray, sun-strained eyes); she is also the person Nick calls “limited.” The rest of them are limited only by our imaginations, and by Fitzgerald’s evocative, bold strokes of color and form.

  As Nick begins to ponder the pleasure to be derived from invention, he shares with us the secret of Gatsby’s origins, the tale of how young James Gatz created his ideal personality through an act of sheer will. Part of the mystery is solved, just as more mysteries begin to accumulate. Gatsby has the imagination of an artist, but his desires have been shaped by a country that channeled those desires into climbing social ladders rather than imaginative ones. “The thing which sets off the American from all other men,” wrote Mencken in 1922, “and gives peculiar color not only to the pattern of his daily life but also adds to the play of his inner ideas, is what, for want of a more exact term, may be called social aspiration.” But Fitzgerald also recognized that social aspiration could involve an aesthetic process: the invention of the self as work of art.

  There were only two things left for a genuine artist in America to do, Burton Rascoe observed in the summer of 1922—stay drunk or commit suicide.

  On the cold, bright Thursday of November 16, Carl Van Vechten lunched at the Algonquin with Tom Smith, Horace Liveright, and Tallulah Bankhead. Van Vechten was preparing to attend the premiere of John Barrymore’s Hamlet, the theatrical event of the season; a writer named Thomas Beer had asked him “some time ago,” Van Vechten noted in his diary irritatedly, “but he is unable to get seats & calls it off today. Very Tom Beerish!” Tom Beer had published his first novel in 1922, The Fair Rewards, about a naive young dreamer from the provinces who idealizes a deceitful woman. Beer inscribed a copy of the novel in Greek: “For Scott Fitzgerald from Thomas Beer ,” which translates as “reaching forward to what lies ahead.” It comes from the Bible, ending a passage that reads: “Brethren, I do not regard myself as having laid hold of it yet; but one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and reaching forward to what lies ahead.” When Fitzgerald came to write his own novel of an idealist in 1922, who persistently reaches forward to what lies ahead, he would make his hero unable to forget what lies behind. Jay Gatsby remains convinced that what he has lost is always lurking nearby, “just out of reach of his hand.”

  Four days after Beer stood him up, Van Vechten invited around a poet named Wallace Stevens, who brought the manuscript for Harmonium, his first collection of poems, which Van Vechten had helped persuade Alfred Knopf to publish; it would come out in early 1923 and become one of the defining events of American modernism, including such now-classic poems as “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” and “Anecdote of the Jar.” “I do not know which to prefer,” Stevens famously wrote in Harmonium, “the beauty of inflections or the beauty of innuendoes.”

  In life, however, it seemed that Stevens had less difficulty identifying his preferences. After drinking “half a quart of my best bourbon,” Van Vechten reported, “Wallace told me he didn’t like me” and left. So much for the beauty of innuendoes.

  The Fitzgeralds traveled with Gene and Helen
Buck to New Jersey on Saturday, November 18, a journey of a few hours by train, to watch the Yale–Princeton football game. Swope’s World was Fitzgerald’s preferred paper for sports in those days, and he faithfully followed the Princeton Tigers throughout his life. On that November Saturday the World put the Princeton game on its front page.

  Immediately to the left of the big game was the latest update on the Hall–Mills investigation in New Brunswick. “SURE STRONG CASE IS BUILT UP FOR HALL GRAND JURY,” ran the headline. “Investigators Hint Mystery of Double Killing Is Near Solution.” As it happens, the last stop before Princeton on the commuter train from New York is New Brunswick: they had to travel right past the scene of the year’s most notorious crime to get to their football game.

  The game, as Zelda told the Kalmans, who had not made it east, “was very spectacular and very dull,” and all she remembered was the score: Princeton won 3–0. Afterward they went round to the university’s clubs to drink with the undergraduates, which made her feel like Methuselah; it was “a sad experience.” But generally life in Great Neck was like “Times Square at the theater hour. It is fun here.” Scott and Ring stayed up all night drinking together, and wrote Kalman another letter about their excursion, undated, but timed: it was 5:30 A.M. and they were “not so much up already as up still.” Although the game was “punk” the Kalmans would still have been amused: “This is a very drunken town full of intoxicated people and retired debauches & actresses so I know that you and she to who you laughingly refer to as the missus would enjoy it . . . Everything is in its usual muddle.”

  Zelda added a tidbit of gossip to her letter that she was sure would amuse the Kalmans: a girl they knew had visited the Fitzgeralds recently and “lured John Dos Passos back to New York when he was expected to stay overnight” with them in Great Neck. “This was astonishing as he looks like an elongated squirrel.” Zelda’s surprise was primarily because the girl was “so partial to the arrow collar brand”; Dos “is attractive tho,” Zelda admitted.