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

by Churchwell, Sarah

  In 1922, Fitz drew up a household budget that allotted eighty dollars a month to “House Liquor” and one hundred to “Wild Parties.” Not all parties were wild, of course. Rascoe wrote in 1924 of a story he’d heard from John Bishop, lately returned from two years in Europe. Bishop had attended a “literary and artistic tea party” thrown in London by Lady Rothermere, to which she’d invited T. S. Eliot as guest of honor. An American guest, much impressed, asked Eliot if he didn’t find the party extremely interesting. “Yes,” he’d replied, “if you concentrate on the essential horror of the thing.”

  There is a reason why the word “decadence” comes from the Latin for “falling down.” All the sad young men were going to pieces, as Fitzgerald had told Rascoe that warm autumn night in 1922. Even in the midst of paradise, loss assumes a shape. Et in Arcadia ego: beauty is not alone in the garden. Death is waiting there too.

  DECEMBER

  1922

  Only the dead dream fought on as the afternoon slipped away, trying to touch what was no longer tangible.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  THE DAY IN NEW YORK

  It was when curiosity about Gatsby was at its highest that the lights in his house failed to go on one Saturday night—and, as obscurely as it had begun, his career as Trimalchio was over.

  The Great Gatsby, Chapter 7

  Meaning can be salvaged from the wreckage of experience: accidents may reveal a pattern, a composition of sorts, if we look closely enough. It is only since the advent of cars that one meaning of the word “accident” has pushed itself to the front of the conversation so violently; accident has not lost its ability to mean chance, of course, although it tends now to mean mischance. But because the accidental also means the contingent, Catholic theologians used the word “accidental” to describe the inessential bread and wine left behind after the ritual of communion had turned them into mystical symbols. At story’s end, Gatsby finds himself left only with accidentals, the inessential objects that once had glittered for him, disenchanted things made ordinary again. The accidental is the merely material, once its mystical promises have been abandoned. It is no accident that Fitzgerald uses an accident—and the word “accident,” repeatedly—to bring about this turn in a carefully composed final three chapters about accidents and disenchantment, for the accidental is all that we are left with once we have lost our illusions.

  The December 1922 entry in Fitzgerald’s ledger reads: “A series of parties—the Boyds, Mary Blair, Chas & Kaly. Charlie Towne.” It is likely another of his retrospective entries, a hazy sense of parties blending one into another. His memory of that December stretched out into a steady silvered roar, a catalog of parties as a list of names. After a while no one even knew whose party it was. The revels went on for weeks: people came and went, but the party survived. If you surrendered to the need for sleep, you returned to find that others had sacrificed themselves on the altar of keeping it alive, Zelda wrote later. She took a picture of their Great Neck house in the snow and decorated it with spring flowers.

  Scott and Zelda drew up a list of “Rules For Guests At the Fitzgerald House”:

  1. Visitors may park their cars and children in the garage.

  2. Visitors are requested not to break down doors in search of liquor, even when authorized to do so by their host and hostess.

  3. Week-end guests are respectfully notified that the invitations to stay over Monday, issued by the host and hostess during the small hours of Sunday morning, must not be taken seriously.

  Once the guests had arrived the rules of the Fitzgerald house were invoked. Everyone slept till noon—including the baby, whom, it was said, they used to slip some gin so she would sleep through the racket. Guests would pass out in the hammock in the backyard, or on the sofas and the floors; others wrote of hiding in the cellar to get away from the noise. More than once their houseman found both Fitzgeralds asleep on the front lawn when he awoke in the morning: by the time they left Long Island, Scott was said to have slept on every lawn from Great Neck to Port Washington. Zelda told an interviewer in 1923 that their meals at Gateway Drive were “extremely moveable feasts,” which sometimes seemed to mean moving away from the idea of providing food at all.

  “The remarkable thing about the Fitzgeralds,” Bunny Wilson later explained, “was their capacity for carrying things off and carrying people away by their spontaneity, charm and good looks. They had a genius for imaginative improvisations.” Like Gatsby’s ostentatious parties, the Fitzgeralds’ parties were theatrical and spectacular—and it’s no good being theatrical without an audience. A decade later Scott reminded Zelda that they had been “the most envied couple” in America in the early 1920s. She replied, “I guess so. We were awfully good showmen.” For Gatsby, the cost of being a showman is that audiences are indistinguishable from witnesses; he must end his career as Trimalchio when he needs to protect the secret of his affair with Daisy, to keep the servants from gossiping. As for the Fitzgeralds, Scott later wrote, “we had retained an almost theatrical innocence by preferring the role of the observed to the observer.” Gatsby’s ostentation is similarly innocent, although he prefers to observe its effects from the margins.

  Zelda so enjoyed being observed that she continued to punctuate their parties with “exhibitionism,” to use the new psychoanalytic term. George Jean Nathan wrote in his memoirs years later of instances of Zelda “divesting herself” of her clothes, once in the middle of Grand Central Station, he claimed, and another time standing on the railroad tracks in Birmingham, Alabama. According to Nathan, Scott told him that Zelda stood naked on the tracks, waving a lantern and bringing the train to a halt; “Scott loved to recount the episode in a tone of rapturous admiration.” Nathan sounded testy when he wrote this account, but in the golden years he had written Zelda several notes in flirtatious admiration: “Nothing about you ever fades,” he told her in April 1922, after seeing her in New York that March.

  Nathan also claimed that during the planning of Gatsby Fitzgerald asked for his help in meeting various bootleggers upon whom he could model his “fabulously rich Prohibition operator who lived luxuriously on Long Island.” And so, Nathan recalled, “I accordingly took him to a house party on Long Island at which were gathered some of the more notorious speakeasy operators and their decorative girl friends.” One might have thought that Fitzgerald didn’t require Nathan’s assistance in meeting bootleggers and their clients on Long Island, but perhaps Nathan had his own underground pipeline. Or perhaps his memory was deceiving him.

  Others were convinced that Fitzgerald’s fondness for bourgeois revels was symptomatic of a more fundamental philistinism. Edmund Wilson’s 1923 essay “The Delegate from Great Neck” imagines Scott as a fledgling Rockefeller enthusiastically preaching the gospel of wealth:

  Can’t you imagine a man like [E. H.] Harriman or [James J.] Hill feeling a certain creative ecstasy as he piled up all that power? Think of being able to buy anything you wanted—houses, railroads, enormous industries!—dinners, automobiles, stunning clothes for your wife—clothes like nobody else in the world could wear!—all the finest paintings in Europe, all the books that had ever been written, in the most magnificent editions! Think of being able to give a stupendous house party that would go on for days and days, with everything that anybody could want to drink and a medical staff in attendance and the biggest jazz orchestras in the city alternating night and day! I must confess that I get a big kick out of all the glittering expensive things.

  Wilson can’t have been paying attention to such stories as “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz,” in which Fitzgerald had already shown his contempt for tycoons who clutched at glittering expensive things—even if he admired the glittering things themselves.

  Wilson uses (an equally ventriloquized) Van Wyck Brooks in the essay to voice an older, more puritanical tradition in American letters; Wilson’s Brooks fears that Fitzgerald and his generation
are permitting “art to become a business,” surrendering to “the competitive anarchy of American commercial enterprise,” which would create only “money and hollow popular reputations,” bringing “nothing but disillusion and despair.”

  The fictional Fitz ends the dialog by urging Brooks to come to a Great Neck party:

  Maybe it would bore you to death—but we’re having some people down who ought to be pretty amusing. Gloria Swanson’s coming. And Sherwood Anderson and Dos Passos. And Marc Connelly and Dorothy Parker. And Rube Goldberg. And Ring Lardner will be there. You probably think some of those people are pretty lowbrow, but Ring Lardner, for instance, is really a very interesting fellow: he’s really not just a popular writer: he’s pretty morose about things. I’d like to have you meet him. There are going to be some dumb-bell friends of mine from the West but I don’t believe you’d mind them—they’re really darn nice. And then there’s a man who sings a song called, Who’ll Bite your Neck When my Teeth are Gone? Neither my wife nor I knows his name—but his song is one of the funniest things we’ve ever heard!

  Wilson’s portrait is deeply patronizing, his Fitzgerald little more than a buffoon, but it also suggests the cheerful exuberance with which his friend greeted the lunatic energy of the world around him. Wilson did not understand until much later—until it was, in a sense, too late—that another part of Fitzgerald was always standing aside, holding tight to a devout faith in art and viewing their debauchery with hard, cold eyes. Fitzgerald could see that materialism led to disillusion and despair, and debased ideals, as clearly as Wilson or Brooks. When he conceived of his fourth novelistic alter ego, Dick Diver in Tender Is the Night, Fitzgerald called him a “natural idealist, a spoiled priest”—not an indulged priest but a corrupted one, ruined by the glittering expensive things, the heat and the sweat and the life of the carnival he is running.

  As it happens, Van Wyck Brooks offered his own memory of the Fitzgeralds, far less censorious than Wilson’s imaginary debate. Brooks wrote of a dinner party at Ernest Boyd’s apartment on East Nineteenth Street, to which both Fitzgeralds arrived an hour late, after everyone had finished eating. Sitting at the dinner table, they “fell asleep over the soup that was brought in, for they had spent the two previous nights at parties. So Scott Fitzgerald said as he awoke for a moment, while someone gathered Zelda up, with her bright cropped hair and diaphanous gown, and dropped her on a bed in a room near by. There she lay curled and asleep like a silky kitten. Scott slumbered in the living-room, waking up suddenly again to telephone an order for two cases of champagne, together with a fleet of taxis to take us to a night-club.”

  At least one contemporary could see that Fitzgerald’s gift for pleasure was not incommensurate with his gift for art. In 1924 Ernest Boyd wrote a book called Portraits, which included a depiction of Scott and Zelda. Fitzgerald told John Bishop that he rather liked Boyd’s portrait of “what I might ironically call our ‘private’ life.” Scott Fitzgerald was “a character out of his own fiction, and his life a series of chapters out of his own novels,” Boyd declared. “Zelda Fitzgerald is the blonde flapper and her husband the blonde philosopher of the Jazz Age.” Here was a man who “combines the most intellectual discussion with all the superficial appearances of the wildest conviviality . . . He is intensely preoccupied with the eternal verities and the insoluble problems of this world. To discuss them while waiting for supper with Miss Gilda Gray is his privilege and his weakness.” Boyd may have seen Fitzgerald’s love of glamor as a weakness, but it did not tempt him into underestimating the shrewdness of his views: Fitzgerald “is one of the few frivolous people with whom one can be sure of having a serious conversation.” (In fact, history would prove, Fitzgerald was one of the few serious people who was capable of so much frivolity.) In particular, “upon the theme of marital fidelity his eloquence has moved me to tears,” said Boyd, “and his stern condemnation of the mores of bohemia would almost persuade a radical to become monogamous. There are still venial and mortal sins in his calendar.”

  Fitzgerald’s natural milieu was on Broadway, in the “Roaring Forties” or in Harlem cabarets, Boyd continued; a typical night consisted of “music by George Gershwin, under the baton and rhythmically swinging foot of Paul Whiteman; wines and spirits by special arrangement with the Revenue Department,” followed by a wild drive back to Long Island in their secondhand red Rolls-Royce, “the most autonomous automobile in New York.” After a night during which they wandered from cabarets like the Palais Royal to the Plantation Club, from the Rendezvous to Club Gallant, with many a detour en route, finally would commence a miraculous departure for Great Neck. Scott would pull out his checkbook “for the writing of inexplicable autographs in the tragic moments immediately preceding his flight through the weary wastes of Long Island,” and a madcap drive home would ensue. “By an apparently magic, and certainly unexpected, turn of the hand,” the car would suddenly swing round, “dislodging various friends who have been chatting confidently to the occupants,” while standing on the running boards. After summarily dispensing with extra passengers, Scott would begin the erratic journey back to Long Island. “When it is a moral certainty that one is miles off the true course,” Fitz would suddenly turn over the wheel to some passenger who had never driven a car before and climb into the back to join the sleeping party, confident that they’d be carried home. Eventually, after “consulting” with various policemen who were willing to overlook the Volstead Act when presented with evidence of a fiduciary trust, the car would glide graciously to their front door in Great Neck.

  Boyd ended his portrait of the Fitzgeralds by noting that after rising at midday, and finding some party to while away the afternoon, “the evening mood gradually envelops Scott Fitzgerald.” Another “party must be arranged. By the time dinner is over, the nostalgia of town is upon us once more. Zelda will drive the car.”

  Glowing lights scintillate and vanish into the darkness. We are trying to find what Henry James called “the visitable past,” to revisit Babylon—but it isn’t easy to discern the route to the lost city.

  Charlotte Mills announced on Friday, December 1, that she was “disgusted” by the prosecution’s failure to bring anyone to trial for her mother’s murder. A resourceful girl, she had decided to solve the mystery herself—by speaking to her mother’s ghost. She had been inspired by recent press reports of Arthur Conan Doyle’s experiments with séances and his well-publicized insistence that science supported his investigations. “If what I read is true,” Charlotte explained, “I shall certainly be able to communicate with my mother and learn the truth.” Unfortunately for Charlotte, what she read wasn’t true, but she insisted that she would continue to “fight for a real investigation.” A week later Conan Doyle wrote to the New York Times to protest about a large reward recently offered by Scientific American magazine for any proof of the claims made by Spiritualists. Such a reward, Conan Doyle argued, would “stir up every rascal in the country,” inciting fakers, frauds, and publicity seekers.

  That Sunday, a New Jersey minister preached about the Hall–Mills “fiasco,” inveighing against the widely held opinion that local citizens had “put the question of expense ahead that of justice and the protection of society.” “There is a trend,” the minister observed, “toward a luxurious and vicious form of life, exceedingly wicked and corrupt, and the use of violent power to obtain advancement. This constitutes our modern Babylon and it will assuredly be destroyed as was the Babylon of old, not leaving a vestige of its greatness behind.” Their Babylon would disappear, it is true—but another would rise in its stead.

  If revisiting Babylon is difficult, even visiting Babylon was a dangerous enterprise. On Tuesday, December 5, 1922, the Tribune reported with palpable amusement that a monkey had been killed in the town of Babylon, Long Island, for “hugging the postmaster’s wife”: a small monkey, which might have been the “bootlegger’s baboon” that had escaped and terrorized Babylon a few weeks earlier (“tho
ugh those who saw the latter animal emphatically deny it”), was shot when it leaped into the open horse-drawn surrey of Mrs. Samuel Powell. She was on her way to buy a goat when the monkey “dropped right into Mrs. Powell’s lap and embraced her fervently.” Her passenger, Henry Kingsman, was an expert on goats, the reporter noted, but knew nothing about monkeys; however, as Mrs. Powell screamed at Kingsman to help her he “obediently detached the monkey and flung it to the road.” A hunter emerged from the side of the road, as if in a modern fairy tale. The hunter’s “specialty” was neither goats nor monkeys, but rabbits; however, “being a somewhat less ethical savant than Mr. Kingsman,” the hunter aimed his gun and “blazed away” at the monkey. “The charge struck the monkey, and the monkey bit the dust.” The hunter refused to give his name to Mrs. Powell, but he “presented the defunct monkey to her,” which it seems she kept as a souvenir. Mrs. Powell drove home “with a dead monkey and a live goat and an anecdote that will brighten the winter for Babylon.” The World was also amused enough to share the story, hinting that the monkey might have been a victim of the unwritten law: “A monkey was shot near Babylon, L.I. for hugging a married woman. Monkey business of this kind is always dangerous,” as the murders of Hall and Mills had shown.

  Murder mysteries creep into Chapter Seven almost immediately. When Nick and Gatsby arrive together for lunch at the Buchanans’ on the last day of the summer, Nick imagines that the butler roars at them from the pages of a detective novel: “The master’s body! . . . I’m sorry Madame but we can’t furnish it—it’s far too hot to touch this noon!”