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

by Churchwell, Sarah

  The Mackays were an immensely wealthy family with an estate in nearby Roslyn, Long Island. Fitzgerald’s ledger records a party there in June 1923; Zelda saved an invitation from the Mackays for Sunday, July 8, 1923. Clarence H. Mackay’s daughter Ellin was a famous heiress who rejected her debutante lifestyle, and in 1926 shocked the nation and her family by marrying a Jewish immigrant, fifteen years her senior, named Irving Berlin, the most famous composer in America. Her Catholic father threatened to disinherit Ellin, but they were reconciled some years later; as fate would have it, Irving Berlin would bail out his father-in-law during the Great Depression. Within twenty years, people in “the show business” were buying up the older American aristocracy.

  In “My Lost City,” Fitzgerald uses Ellin Mackay’s marriage as a milestone that defined the twenties’ union of high and low culture. By 1920, “there was already the tall white city of today, already the feverish activity of the boom,” he wrote, but “society and the native arts had not mingled—Ellin Mackay was not yet married to Irving Berlin.” But then over the next two years, “just for a moment, the ‘younger generation’ idea became a fusion of many elements in New York life . . . The blending of the bright, gay, vigorous elements began then . . . If this society produced the cocktail party, it also evolved Park Avenue wit, and for the first time an educated European could envisage a trip to New York as something more amusing than a gold trek into a formalized Australian bush.”

  Why Ring Lardner hid in the cloakroom at the Mackays’ estate one summer night has been lost to history, however.

  Five years later, Lardner sent the Fitzgeralds another Christmas poem:

  We combed Fifth Avenue this last month

  A hundred times if we combed it onth,

  In search of something we thought would do

  To give to a person as nice as you.

  We had no trouble selecting gifts

  For the Ogden Armors and Louie Sifts,

  The Otto Kahns and the George E. Bakers,

  The Munns and the Rodman Wanamakers

  It’s a simple matter to pick things out

  For people one isn’t wild about,

  But you, you wonderful pal and friend, you!

  We couldn’t find anything fit to send you.

  The following Christmas, Scott responded in kind:

  You combed Third Avenue last year

  For some small gift that was not too dear,

  —Like a candy cane or a worn out truss—

  To give to a loving friend like us

  You’d found gold eggs for such wealthy hicks

  As the Edsell Fords and the Pittsburgh Fricks,

  The Andy Mellons, the Teddy Shonts,

  The Coleman T. and Pierre duPonts.

  But not one gift to brighten our hoem

  —So I’m sending you back your Goddamn poem.

  It seems the Fitzgeralds spent Christmas Day 1922 in Great Neck; Zelda wrote to Xandra Kalman in early January saying they’d had “astounding holidays” which began “about a week before Christmas” and didn’t end until January 5, when she was writing her letter.

  If Fitzgerald managed to read the book section of the New York Times that Christmas weekend, he would have seen an editorial on fiction writing and the facts, as he mused over his new novel: although “fiction writers have emancipated themselves from many restraints, as to both form and content,” they still had to come up with their own plots. “They are, of course, at liberty to use so much material from real life as can be incorporated without danger of libel; but such material needs so much working over before it can become plausible fiction that it entails about as much effort as inventing plots offhand.”

  What if invention is not a question of effort, however, but of meaning? When The Great Gatsby was reissued in 1934, Fitzgerald wrote a preface, saying that he had never tried to “keep his artistic conscience as pure” as during the ten months he spent writing the novel in 1924. “Reading it over one can see how it could have been improved—yet without feeling guilty of any discrepancy from the truth, as far as I saw it; truth or rather equivalent of the truth, the attempt at honesty of imagination. I had just re-read Conrad’s preface to The Nigger [of the “Narcissus”], and I had recently been kidded half hay-wire by critics who felt that my material was such as to preclude all dealing with mature persons in a mature world. But, my God! it was my material, and it was all I had to deal with.”

  The aim of art, wrote Conrad in the preface, is “by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see . . . If I succeed, you shall find there according to your deserts: encouragement, consolation, fear, charm—all you demand; and, perhaps, also that glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask.”

  Fitzgerald often had this passage in mind as he wrote; in 1923, he quoted it in a letter: “As Conrad says in his famous preface, ‘to make you hear, to make you feel, above all to make you see . . .’” He had reread the preface again as he wrote Gatsby. Fitzgerald was thinking about his materials, what he had to work with, as he tried to offer a glimpse of the truth for which his audience had forgotten to ask. Critics told him that his material was inessential, scarcely created—but facts are always merely material, until someone shines what Conrad called a light of magic suggestiveness on them. When he sailed for France in 1924, Fitzgerald had decided that his project would be to “take the Long Island atmosphere that I had familiarly breathed and materialize it beneath unfamiliar skies.” He materialized it, made it material, and made it real—and then he made it matter.

  By the time he wrote “How to Waste Material—A Note on My Generation” in 1926, Fitzgerald had begun to think of a writer’s material as capital; later he said that he’d made “strong draughts on Zelda’s and my common store of material.” Their life together was like a joint bank account, upon which only one of them could afford to draw. But thinking about his life as capital for art proved a dangerous business. As Fitzgerald, of all people, should have understood, Mammon is a treacherous god. “There is no materialist like the artist,” wrote Zelda later, “asking back from life the double and the wastage and the cost on what he puts out in emotional usury. People were banking in gods those years.”

  The sculptor Théophile Gautier once said that his sculptures became more beautiful if he used a material that resists being sculpted—marble, onyx, or enamel. The same may be true for writers, sculpting their own resistant material, struggling to release the angel from the rock. Near the end of his life, Fitzgerald wrote that once he had believed that his writing should “dig up the relevant, the essential, and especially the dramatic and glamorous from whatever life is around. I used to think that my sensory impression of the world came from outside. I used to believe that it was as objective as blue skies or a piece of music. Now I know it was within, and emphatically cherish what little is left.” He no longer thought that his material was capital, but that his artistry was—and he had wasted it.

  Christmas over, the New York Times reported in late December 1922 that “the puzzling death” of Phillip Carberry, a car salesman “whose bruised body was found on the road near the Clarence H. Mackay estate,” was solved the day after Christmas. A man named Lester J. Gillen admitted “he had run down a man standing in the road, presumably Carberry, in the belief that he was a robber who was trying to hold him up.” So he had accelerated and deliberately run him over. The district attorney “indicated his satisfaction” with the story, reported the Times. Gillen explained that he and his passenger “did not stop, because we believed our lives in danger,” and that seemed to be sufficient justification for running Carberry over.

  In March 1924 Fitzgerald published an article about young people in America, in which he noted that a rich young American “thinks that when he is arrested for running his car 60 miles an hour he can always get out of trouble by handing his c
aptor a large enough bill—and he knows that even if he has the bad luck to run over someone when he’s drunk, his father will buy off the family and keep him out of jail.” He seems to have had good reason for making this generalization.

  When George Wilson begins to mutter that his wife was deliberately run down in the road by the gaudy yellow Rolls-Royce, Michaelis tells him, “You’re morbid, George . . . This has been a strain to you and you don’t know what you’re saying.” George repeats, “He murdered her.”

  “It was an accident, George.”

  Wilson shook his head. His eyes narrowed and his mouth widened slightly with the ghost of a superior “Hm!”

  “I know,” he said definitely, “I’m one of these trusting fellas and I don’t think any harm to nobody, but when I get to know a thing I know it. It was the man in that car. She ran out to speak to him and he wouldn’t stop.”

  Michaelis had seen this too but it hadn’t occurred to him that there was any special significance in it.

  Maybe George isn’t nourishing morbid pleasures, or deluded, after all. Perhaps he has just been reading the papers, and begins to see special significance where others don’t.

  Wilson tells Michaelis that when he got “wised up” to Myrtle’s affair, he’d marched her over to the window, where they could see the pale, enormous eyes of T. J. Eckleburg staring down at them, and confronted her with her guilt: “I told her she might fool me but she couldn’t fool God. I took her to the window . . . I said, ‘God knows what you’ve been doing, everything you’ve been doing. You may fool me but you can’t fool God!’” “God sees everything,” Wilson adds.

  “That’s an advertisement,” Michaelis assures him.

  Burton Rascoe declared in December 1922 that nostalgia “is one of the oldest of fallacies.” Even Aristotle, he pointed out, was lamenting that “the theater is no longer what it used to be, that standards are being trodden upon, that the rabble is being catered to.” And so, in forty more years, Rascoe predicted, perhaps “Scott Fitzgerald will be flooding his whiskers with tears of sorrow over the decline of morals since the Jazz Age.” Such a prospect was not so “chimerical” as some might think, he insisted. The Fitzgeralds had already begun their holiday celebrations by the time the article appeared, which may account for Fitzgerald missing this mention: it is not in his scrapbooks.

  As The Great Gatsby draws to a close, Nick Carraway remembers returning home to the Midwest for Christmas from his schools in the east. In Chicago, he changed trains for St. Paul. “When we pulled out into the winter night and the real snow, our snow, began to stretch out beside us and twinkle against the windows, and the dim lights of small Wisconsin stations moved by, a sharp wild brace came suddenly into the air. We drew in deep breaths of it as we walked back from dinner through the cold vestibules, unutterably aware of our identity with this country for one strange hour before we melted indistinguishably into it again.”

  “That’s my Middle West,” Nick says, “not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede towns but the thrilling, returning trains of my youth and the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of holly wreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow.” The thrill is in the return. This requiem to the dark fields of the snowy republic is the moment when The Great Gatsby begins to converge with the emotion that drives the great Gatsby and destroys him: nostalgia, the wistful longing to recapture the past, the expelled Adam seeking a route back into Paradise. A nation so fixed on progress will always be pulled, Nick begins to see, back into nostalgia, reaching for what lies ahead yet longing for what lies behind. This is what it means to be American, Nick concludes: to sense our identity with this country even as we lose our place in it. Before we even grasp it, it is gone, leaving us buffeted by a deep wave of nostalgia, rippling through us like the cold night air. If its faith in progress represents America’s hope in the future, then nostalgia is its hope in the past.

  For all its sparkling modernism, The Great Gatsby is colored with nostalgia, peopled with characters carrying well-forgotten dreams from age to age. Although Gatsby is more driven by nostalgia than anyone else, he is by no means the novel’s only nostalgic character. Even Tom wistfully seeks “the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game.” Only thoroughly modern Jordan is immune to it.

  Fitzgerald never became a whiskered old man, although he certainly managed some pungent remarks on the decline of standards as he grew older. In 1940 he sternly wrote to his daughter about her projected course of study at Vassar. He hated to see her spend tuition fees “on a course like ‘English Prose since 1800,’” he told her. “Anybody that can’t read modern English prose by themselves is subnormal—and you know it.”

  To Scott Fitzgerald’s contemporaries he was the voice of the eternal present, but now he is the voice of nostalgic glamor: lost hope, lost possibility, lost paradise. Rascoe guessed right, but for all the wrong reasons: Fitzgerald would become the American twentieth century’s greatest elegist. Nostalgia is a species of faith. “Like all your stories there was something haunting to remember,” Zelda told Scott later, “about the loneliness of keeping Faiths.”

  Gatsby is left at the end of the chapter, watching over nothing. Dawn breaks jaggedly, like a crack in a plate.

  JANUARY 1923–

  DECEMBER 1924

  One night I did hear a material car there and saw its lights stop at his front steps. But I didn’t investigate. Probably it was some final guest who had been away at the ends of the earth and didn’t know that the party was over.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  THE MURDER (INV.)

  I couldn’t sleep all night. . . . Toward dawn I heard a taxi go up Gatsby’s drive and immediately I jumped out of bed and began to dress . . . It was this night that he told me the strange story of his youth with Dan Cody—told it to me because “Jay Gatsby” had broken up like glass against Tom’s hard malice and the long secret extravaganza was played out.

  The Great Gatsby, Chapter 8

  It was most likely at the end of 1922 that Fitzgerald found a newspaper offering him a “Flappy New Year”: “To Scott Fitzgerald, flapper king / A Flappy New Year do I sing.” He preserved the tiny clipping in his scrapbook, but as usual didn’t bother to note its origins—and yet it mattered enough to save the floating scrap, yellowed now and darkening like old champagne.

  Fitzgerald wrote to his agent on the last working day of the year that he didn’t think his new novel, still unnamed, would be suitable for serialization, which suggests it was starting to take shape in his mind, if not yet on the page. Meanwhile Zelda saved two snapshots of herself in the snow at Gateway Drive, sitting down and laughing, and then, standing in her ankle-length dress, dissolving into the past.

  Burton Rascoe observed on New Year’s Eve: “Life is not dramatic; only art is that. Life is melodramatic, with elements of low comedy relief; and to be a good journalist, a good reporter, one must recognize this truth.” A good reporter was one who could “see events in a cynical, cool light as a spectacle, amusing, pathetic, ephemeral—as ephemeral as last year’s great murder mystery.” Fitzgerald saw the melodramatic, amusing, pathetic spectacle around him, but he bathed it in the warm glow of lost ideals, rather than in a cool, cynical light. Last year’s murder mystery proved ephemeral, but the art in which it entangled itself would endure.

  A long article about the end of 1922 by the renowned writer and progressive William Allen White appeared in the Tribune just after Rascoe’s review. Famous for an 1896 editorial entitled “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” White was widely perceived by the early 1920s as a spokesman for Middle America; he would win the Pulitzer Prize in 1923. “For America,” White began, 1922 “has produced prosperity, which, according to our outward religion, is the chief aim of man.” But White was among those who were unconvinced that its faith in business, the religion of success, would take America forward. As for faith in progress, “it
may be a great delusion,” the great progressive spokesman admitted. “Perhaps all this fidgeting that we call change is circular, and not forward; maybe the twilight’s purple rim toward which we are going is only a vicious circle and we are getting nowhere.” He had a point.

  White’s faith in progress was not quite as shaken as he thought, however, for he did have one confident prediction for 1923: “we realize now that we have been asleep while the grafters and boodlers and amiable agents of special privilege have been taking the shingles off the roof and the stones out of the foundation of the Republic.” But America had awakened to the ways it was being dismantled, and that was one change White was certain would come: the nation would no longer acquiesce to special interests. In the brave new world of the twentieth century, Americans would unite against entitlement and crony capitalism; special privilege would be stamped out, corruption halted.

  Instead, the Teapot Dome Scandal was about to burst forth, bringing down the Harding administration as widespread graft, bribery, and fraud were revealed. Within eight months Harding would be dead and the vicious circle would continue spinning. “The new world couldn’t possibly be presented without bumping the old out of the way,” wrote Fitzgerald later—but the new world tends to look peculiarly like the old.

  Scott and Zelda spent that New Year’s Eve at what she considered a “dull party”; Zelda livened it up “by throwing everybody’s hat into a center bowl-shaped light. It was very exhilarating.” On January 3 John Dos Passos held an exhibition of his paintings in Greenwich Village, jotting on his invitation to the Fitzgeralds: “Come and bring a lot of drunks.” Two days later, the beaming Fitz pitched up at Famous Players Studios, in Astoria, to watch the filming of Edith Wharton’s Glimpses of the Moon, directed by Allan Dwan. Scott had been paid five hundred dollars to write film titles that were never used; he saved a clipping that said the titles had been rejected for being “too flippant.” As the year turned, Zelda was amazed to find that they had been in Great Neck for only three months: “it seems so much longer.”