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

by Churchwell, Sarah

  “In the real dark night of the Soul,” Fitzgerald wrote much later, “it is always three o’clock in the morning.” Perhaps this is the waltz Zelda was asking him to save: she found her novel’s title, she said, in the Victor Record Catalogue. Music measured life into beats: “Listen,” David tells Alabama, “you’re not keeping time.”

  An American industrialist was asked by a woman’s college to consider making a donation to support women’s education. He responded that he thought that all women’s colleges should be burned, and those studying there sentenced to hard labor. The story made the front pages on November 23; Americans could peruse it at their leisure, for it was Thanksgiving Day. If they kept browsing the Times, they would also have seen the story of a seventy-year-old “spinster” who had been released from police custody after threatening to shower eggs upon a young woman selling birth-control pamphlets outside Grand Central Terminal.

  Neither Scott nor Zelda left any record of how they spent the day, or what cooking—if any—was attempted, but some years later Fitzgerald offered some useful thoughts on what to do with leftover Thanksgiving turkey. A recipe for a turkey cocktail was his first suggestion: “To one large turkey add one gallon of vermouth and a demijohn of angostura bitters. Shake.”

  The day after Thanksgiving, the New York Times reported the indictment of a “Bootleg King” named Mannie Kessler. He was only the latest in a long line of Bootleg Kings crowned by the press in 1922. Far and away the most notorious bootleg king of 1922 was a lawyer from Cincinnati named George Remus, who had begun selling alcohol from drugstores as soon as the Volstead Act came into force; some credit Remus with singlehandedly transforming drugstores into a byword for bootlegging. In just two years Remus became fabulously rich, building a lavish mansion with a marble pool and a solid-gold piano. For the previous New Year’s Eve he had thrown a party at which it was reported that champagne “flowed like the Rhine,” and a hundred girls, “garbed in Grecian robes of flowing white,” served a midnight banquet graced by “water nymphs” who gave a diving exhibition. Remus was arrested in May 1922. Over the summer the papers were filled with tales of the flamboyant parties he was supposed to have thrown. Swope’s World ran a full-page story saying Remus “Ruled Like a King, Lived in A Palace, Scattered Huge ‘Overnight’ Fortune in Revelry and Largess.” The story was accompanied by novelistic illustrations of Remus’s revels.

  Remus was eventually sentenced to two years in a federal penitentiary. While he was serving time his wife began an affair with a prohibition agent. When he was released, his wife filed for divorce; Remus shot and killed her, claiming temporary insanity on the grounds of her adultery. The “unwritten law” was invoked and after deliberating for less than twenty minutes the jury found Remus not guilty of murder by reason of temporary insanity. He was committed to a mental hospital, but three months later the hospital discharged him because he was not insane. Temporary insanity, indeed.

  A few months before Remus murdered his wife the first film version of The Great Gatsby was reviewed in the New York Times, headlined “GOLD AND COCKTAILS.” It described a few scenes from the film: Daisy is seen “assuaging her disappointment in life by drinking absinthe. She takes enough of this beverage to render the average person unconscious. Yet she appears only mildly intoxicated, and soon recovers.” Indeed, the review noted, “Cocktails are an important feature in this picture.” Even “the girls in a swimming pool [are] snatching at cocktails, while they are swimming.” Gatsby, a “man of sudden means,” displays his profligacy by carelessly tossing gold pieces into the water so his guests can dive for them.

  This 1926 version of Gatsby has been lost; all that survive are a few such descriptions and the film’s trailer, featuring party scenes that bear a striking resemblance to the newspapers’ illustrations of the bash George Remus threw to welcome in 1922.

  Two days before Thanksgiving in 1922 Burton Rascoe found himself in an embarrassing situation. Carl Van Vechten had presented to him (doubtless with some unholy glee) a copy of a Boston paper in which a well-known writer denied that she had lunched with Rascoe, as he had recently reported in his Day Book column. Rascoe was forced to admit that he had fabricated the encounter: “My mentioning our having had lunch together last week was merely a wish-fulfillment on my part, for I have long wanted to meet her; but I haven’t had that pleasure, I must confess.” Rascoe, however, hastened to deny that his entire column was an invention: “And let me on my part deny her flattering assumption that I invent the whole ‘Daybook’ and actually see no one. That would be an ideal way, I suspect, to do the thing; but, except for this one instance, I have had to exercise only memory.” In fact, Rascoe was often accused of inaccuracy, especially in the way that he rendered conversation. Nonetheless, his defenders maintained, he usually didn’t make things up. “The substance of the conversation is generally characteristic,” said the Bookman; “he conveys the speaker’s personality, though it be by means of an imaginary dialog.” Sometimes this technique is described as fiction.

  The day before Van Vechten had confronted him with telltale evidence of unreliability, Rascoe had lunched with Edmund Wilson and discussed The Waste Land. (Unless, of course, we no longer believe him.) It seems the lunch signaled a rapprochement. Two months earlier, on the day that Tales of the Jazz Age came out, Wilson had written to John Bishop to tell him about visiting the Fitzgeralds at the Plaza the previous evening, adding as an aside that he’d stopped seeing Rascoe because he was so unreliable a narrator: “he quoted me so much and so inaccurately that it finally got on my nerves and I ceased to see him at all (though other causes contributed to this, too) for almost a month . . . Everybody began to give him the laugh about it and it is true that he wrote some of the most exquisitely silly things I have ever seen.” A few months later, Edmund Wilson was writing to Fitzgerald with some amusement about Rascoe’s report of Fitzgerald’s “Dog, Dog, Dog” song. “I enclose Burton Rascoe’s report of a conversation with me, which speaks for itself. Ted Paramore and I have extracted almost as much amusement from it as from the initial pleasantries.”

  Wilson didn’t mention what the other reasons were that had led to his avoiding Rascoe, but Wilson admitted to having gone to bed with Burton’s wife Hazel at least once. A former nightclub dancer with “the most obvious sex appeal of any woman I have known,” Wilson wrote in his journals, Hazel Rascoe had suddenly phoned Wilson up one night: “I told her, full of hope, to come right around. But in spite of the fact that I performed the at that time for me heroic feat of carrying her into the bedroom, it turned out that she only wanted to tell me how worried she was about [Burton’s] drinking.” She also wanted to talk about her “latest passion”: “when she felt an interest in someone, she would apparently simply go to bed with him till her appetite had worn off. It was no wonder her husband drank,” Wilson added.

  At a party one night around this time Wilson and Rascoe got into a drunken fight, which neither of them remembered afterward. Bystanders offered different accounts. The fight may have occurred “at a gathering at Edmund Wilson’s, in the course of which several of the guests fell to brawling in various corners of a rambling apartment he had in the Village,” which he rented in late November 1922. Wilson became “engaged in combat with Mr. Burton Rascoe and bit him in the calf.” Another witness, however, claimed that Rascoe bit Bunny Wilson on the nose when he was “overadmirous” of Hazel. Despite this contretemps, and regardless of who was biting whom, the two men remained close enough friends that in 1927 Wilson’s first will left bequests to Rascoe. Thirty years later Wilson wrote to Hazel Rascoe that her late husband “never gets full credit now for all he did in the twenties and before. In his best days, he was worth a dozen of the so-called New Critics.”

  The problem with unreliable narrators is that sometimes they tell the truth—it’s just difficult to know when.

  As the Tribune’s literary editor was admitting his unreliability on November 26, the N
ew York Times published a feature on the books that had come out in the course of a remarkable literary year, in which popular idols and shibboleths had fallen foul of the rage for the modern. The piece opened, as did the year, with the publication of Joyce’s landmark Ulysses; the year had also brought the first English translation of Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way (“another subjective rendering of a man’s mind”), which the Times reviewed a few pages later. And then there was T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, due to hit the local bookstores any day.

  The “Books of the Year” feature made much of Babbitt, Willa Cather’s One of Ours, Rebecca West’s The Judge, and Cytherea by Joseph Hergsheimer. Buried in a long list of also-rans, nearly all forgotten today, was “Young Mr. Scott Fitzgerald,” who “continued his flippant mood in The Beautiful and Damned.” The article ignored Tales of the Jazz Age altogether, as well as Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room, Katherine Mansfield’s The Garden Party and Other Stories, Elizabeth von Arnim’s Enchanted April, Jean Toomer’s Cane, Walter Lippmann’s Public Opinion, D. H. Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature and England, My England, and the first of Ezra Pound’s Cantos, all published that year. They also overlooked the less lofty but more influential first edition of Reader’s Digest, as well as the auto-suggestion of the immensely popular Emile Coué, the father of self-help, who taught Americans that all ills could be cured by repeating the simple formula, “Every day, in every way, I’m growing better and better.” Self-improvement had never been easier.

  A few months later, Fitzgerald contributed to a newspaper feature titled “10 Best Books I Have Read.” He cited Conrad’s Nostromo as “The great novel of the past fifty years, as ‘Ulysses’ is the great novel of the future.” It was from Conrad’s character Marlow, who narrates Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, and Youth, among others, that Fitzgerald discovered how an unreliable narrator might improve his novel. For most storytellers, Conrad wrote, a tale “has a direct simplicity, the whole meaning of which lies within the shell of a cracked nut.” But when Marlow told a story, “the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze.” Learning from Conrad, Fitzgerald would create in Nick Carraway a narrator who could discern lambent meaning in the haze surrounding his story.

  Fitzgerald’s appreciation of Nostromo put him ahead of his contemporaries, but they were all certain that Ulysses was the book of the future—and they were right, up to a point. None of them would have believed, however, that a hundred years later readers would consistently vote the two greatest novels in English of the twentieth century to be Ulysses and a novel that F. Scott Fitzgerald was about to write, called The Great Gatsby. The two novels have more in common than might at first appear, and not just their hinging, in their different ways, on the year 1922. The Irish critic Mary Colum told Rascoe that one eminent critic had lectured her on the meaning of a figure in Ulysses, a character whom the critic was confident was a symbolic invention. But in point of fact, she’d informed him, “it is an exact portrayal of a very notorious, quaint man everybody knows” in Dublin. Ulysses contained, Colum said, “every resident of Dublin one would be likely to encounter ten years ago in an afternoon’s walk . . . There are satirical allusions in the book,” her husband added, “that no one outside of Dublin would recognize.”

  “Fiction is history, human history,” said Conrad, “or it is nothing.”

  As the grand jury hearing continued through late November, Mrs. Hall’s maid, Louise Geist, was called as an unwilling witness. On the stand the “pretty maid” suddenly corroborated Mrs. Hall’s alibi for the time of the murders: “until today her movements had been accounted for only until 9:30,” but Geist said Mrs. Hall was at home during the hours the murders were thought to have taken place. A married vestryman and choir singer took the stand; several witnesses had seen his green car parked on De Russey’s Lane that night, a car that was destroyed by fire not long after the murders. He claimed it was just a coincidence. Eleanor Mills’s sister Elsie Barnhardt also testified, insisting that her sister had not been in any trouble. The final witness on the final day was the prosecutor’s trump card, Mrs. Gibson, who testified for almost two hours on November 28. She told once more the story that had been repeated so often in the press, of the woman in the gray polo coat, the man with the bushy hair, the shouts of “Henry!” and Eleanor Mills dragged through the undergrowth and returning to the scene hours later to find the woman in the polo coat weeping by the body of the rector. The grand jury withdrew in midafternoon, returning in less than an hour, as wild rumors began to race around the courthouse.

  The jury brought back no indictments, a result that was an anticlimax but not a surprise. If the authorities acquired new evidence within the month they could present it to the same grand jury and seek a new indictment. But public opinion was veering strongly toward dropping the investigation, to avoid “the expense of a trial that might end in easy acquittal.” Mott told reporters that for the time being investigators would remain “in suspended animation”—which wouldn’t, on the evidence, have made much of a change.

  The case had become such a debacle, said the World, that it had found its way into the debate over the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill on Capitol Hill. It was clear to the entire nation that vigilante justice was being condoned in New Brunswick: even if the grand jury had indicted Mrs. Hall and her relatives, “there was not the remotest possibility of a conviction by a petit jury which would always see the unwritten law inscribed on the wall of the courtroom.” Gleefully attacking the New Jersey senator who was attempting to build a case against lynching, a Southern senator “razzed” his colleague “for the failure of the State of New Jersey to take action in the Hall–Mills case.”

  The prosecution had entirely failed to construct a plausible explanation for the events of September 14. The jury rejected the consoling, corrupted fictions offered by Jane Gibson and applauded when the vote was announced. Someone was going to have to improve the story, to lie better than the truth.

  At the end of Chapter Six, Nick and Jay Gatsby walk out among the debris, a “desolate path” of fruit rinds and discarded party favors and crushed flowers, exposing the waste and decay. Gatsby admits that Daisy didn’t enjoy herself and Nick warns him against asking too much of her. “You can’t repeat the past,” he tells Gatsby. “Can’t repeat the past?” Gatsby cries incredulously. “Why of course you can!”

  Nick concludes that what Gatsby wanted to recover was “some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy.” As the waste begins to show, so does the projection, the solipsism of Gatsby’s great devotion. It is single-minded, determined, in its way hugely creative; but it is also colossally self-absorbed. The chapter ends with Nick’s first meditation on Gatsby’s dream of Daisy, his feeling that he could climb to the top of the world, finding a Jacob’s ladder to heaven (or a social ladder to riches) on the streets of Louisville “if he climbed alone.” But Daisy is with him, and Gatsby succumbs to temptation, although he knows it will limit his dreams and possibilities: “He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God.” He hears a sound as if a tuning fork has been struck against a star and kisses Daisy Fay, at which point “the incarnation was complete.” He has entered the tender night, where, says Keats, the Queen-Moon is on her throne clustered around “by all her starry Fays.”

  Nick distances himself from this “appalling sentimentality,” but finds that he too is reminded of something by Gatsby’s words, “an elusive rhythm, a fragment of lost words, that I had heard somewhere a long time ago. For a moment a phrase tried to take shape in my mouth and my lips parted like a dumb man’s, as though there was more struggling upon them than a wisp of startled air. But they made no sound and what I had almost remembered was uncommunicable forever.”

  Five days after The Great Gatsby came out, Ca
rl Van Vechten reviewed it for The Nation. What defined the novel, he felt, was the character of Jay Gatsby, “who invented an entirely fictitious career for himself out of material derived from inferior romances . . . His doglike fidelity not only to his ideal but to his fictions, his incredibly cheap and curiously imitative imagination, awaken for him not only our interest and suffrage, but also a certain liking.” Van Vechten also singled out the novel’s “gargantuan drinking-party, conceived in a rowdy, hilarious, and highly titillating spirit.”

  Van Vechten began his own novel about gargantuan drinking parties a few years later: Parties centers on the mutually destructive love of a couple named David and Rilda Westlake, who bear a striking resemblance to Scott and Zelda. He is the golden boy, a talented painter who charms everyone while he drinks himself into oblivion; she is his beautiful, desperate wife, alternately driving him to jealous rages and clinging to him. They constantly threaten each other with murder and suicide. The novel opens with David drunkenly arriving at a friend’s apartment, announcing, “I’ve killed a man or he’s killed me.” Rilda soon rings, shouting that she has committed suicide. Before long she is sending telegrams declaring that she murdered her lover and so did their bootlegger. David goes to bed with various women, but tends to say venomous things like, “I’ll be too drunk to do you any good.” The story ends in a tale of violent stabbing and accidental death, but the Westlakes and their friends “‘fix’ the police,” “the newspapers with thin copy to go ahead on growled for a few days about ‘imminent investigations’” and “the inquest was a farce.” Everyone gets off scot-free. When Parties came out in August 1930, it was met with “filthy notices,” recorded Van Vechten in his diaries. Even his devoted wife, Fania Marinoff, hated it.