Two weeks later Carl Van Vechten went to a literary party at Theodore Dreiser’s with Ernest Boyd; Burton Rascoe was there too. The gathering became legendary, recorded by many of those present and repeated in biographies ever since. Its fame, Rascoe said, arose because of its “abject failure”: Dreiser neglected to provide his guests with alcohol. As they all sat in a semicircle, “gazing with disconsolate incredulity at a table covered with bottles of near-beer,” Boyd reported, Scott Fitzgerald suddenly walked in, a trifle “dazed,” clutching bottles of champagne in either hand. He was late, he explained, because it had been difficult to locate the champagne: “it had taken him much time, going from speakeasy to speakeasy, and in his colloquies with the bartenders in each as to where he might pick up a good bottle of vintage wine, he acquired quite an edge.” Fitzgerald presented his tribute to the older writer, who took the champagne from Fitzgerald and carefully put it in his refrigerator, to the outrage of all his guests.
Although Gatsby’s dead dream fights on as the story draws to an end, even he must confront the dismal truth that Daisy and Tom will stay together. Every other couple will be destroyed or divided, but old money survives intact, untouched and untouchable. Trying to hang on to the shreds of his illusions, Gatsby tells Nick the morning after Myrtle dies of his romance with Daisy, and we begin to understand that Daisy represents more than a love affair: Gatsby’s romance is with a way of life. Daisy’s house enchants Gatsby first, and he knows he is in it “by a colossal accident.” This is presumably why he is so determined for her to see his house in West Egg. He wants to fix the accidental into destiny, make the material transcendent: “There was a ripe mystery about it, a hint of bedrooms upstairs more beautiful and cool than other bedrooms, of gay and radiant activities taking place through its corridors and of romances that were not musty and laid away already in lavender but fresh and breathing and redolent of this year’s shining motor cars and of dances whose flowers were scarcely withered.”
A few months later, the Times would note that “Scott Fitzgerald and his contemporaries” thought they inhabited a world in which “passion is the fashion.” That may be true, remarked the journalist, “but it is fashionable only as Rolls-Royces and ermine coats are fashionable. Aspiration is general, capacity is limited.”
Sometime in the future, looking back on his twenty-sixth year as it stretched from his birthday in September 1922 to August 1923, Fitzgerald scribbled a summary on the top of his ledger page: “The repression breaks out. A comfortable but dangerous and deteriorating year at Great Neck. No ground under our feet.”
The series of parties strewn across December 1922 would dissipate rapidly into a longer series of parties across 1923, recorded in Fitzgerald’s ledger, interspersed with many brief hops onto the wagon and long falls off it, and punctuated by brawls: “February: Still drunk . . . March: Kalmans in New York. Party with the Boyds. Bunny marries. April: Third anniversary. On the wagon. Joined club here. Party with Barthelmess—another fight. Tearing drunk. May: Met Mrs. Rumsey & Tommy Hitchcock & went to parties there . . . Fight with Helen Buck’s brother-in-law. June: Party at Clarence Mackays. Began my novel. Squabble at Ring’s. Party in New York with Mencken and Nathan.” Drunkenness floated across the months, making it harder for Fitz to date his memories accurately: still drunk, tearing drunk, roaring drunk.
He began to feel, too, as if his popularity were waning. In New York, he suddenly found, “we were no longer important. The flapper, upon whose activities the popularity of my first books was based, had become passé by 1923—anyhow in the East.” He was accused of racketeering his signature, as they called it. In March, Town Topics sniped, “As a boy and youth Fitzgerald was always ready to give to those that were older than himself the full benefit of his inexperience, and as a grown-up he has not changed his spots, they say. The only difference seems to be that instead of talking gratuitously, he now sells his opinions for many shekels.” Scott was probably annoyed by the criticism—but not annoyed enough to keep from preserving it, unattributed, in his scrapbook.
Their epic drinking sprees meant that over these months he was on average writing only about a hundred words a day, he would realize with horror at the end of the year. One Thursday in June, Zelda sent a letter to the Kalmans, who had visited New York, apologizing for missing their friends: she and Scott had been drunk for an entire week, like Owl-Eyes without a library to sober him up. “Dearest and Most Colossal Eggs (as my husband would say),” Zelda wrote. “First of all I feel perfectly awful about not seeing you on Monday—or whatever day it was. Everything beginning Friday and ending today has lost itself in the dimness and shadiness of my past and the Gregorian Calendar has lost all significance to me.” After a weekend in “regions unmentionable because unknown,” Zelda had received a message to call the Kalmans at the Ritz. She “had some faint difficulty with the clerk,” because she was so drunk: “I’m not sure that I told my right name but if I did, did you get word?” She and Scott were berating themselves for missing their friends, she added: “but Scott now has a flash of clairvoyance and informs me that I rode out of your room in a laundry wagon—and that Sandy became very high hat about it—so maybe you hope you will never see us again.” The letter concludes with twenty-two-year-old Zelda’s insouciant remark: “O well!—I was young once.”
A month later, Zelda told the Kalmans that they were turning over a new leaf, as Scott had started his third novel at last, “and retired into strict seclusion and celibacy. He’s horribly intent on it and has built up a beautiful legend about himself which corresponds somewhat to the old fable about the ant & the grasshopper. Me being the grasshopper.” Great Neck was “razzle-dazzling a hundred fold” in the heat of the summer: “all the pools and even the Sound reek of gin, whiskey and beer, to say nothing of light wines. I am afraid to say we have moved to a place of very ill repute.”
Before they knew it the summer of 1923 had drifted past, and Scott’s resolution to work on his novel in strict sobriety had gone the way of prior grand resolves. “It was an exquisite summer and it became a habit with many world-weary New Yorkers to pass their week-ends at the Fitzgerald house in the country. Along near the end of a balmy and insidious August I realized with a shock that only three chapters of my novel were done,” he said. “We drank always,” Zelda remembered, “and finally came to France because there were always too many people in the house.” Fitz told Ring Lardner that they left New York because people seemed to think their home in Great Neck was a roadhouse, a quip that Burton Rascoe repeated in his column, and which perhaps Scott was remembering when he had Nick initially dismiss Gatsby as “simply the proprietor of an elaborate roadhouse next door.”
At one of their Great Neck house parties that summer, a friend of Zelda’s found a large roll of cash casually stuffed in the door of their Rolls and forgotten. Anita Loos, whose Gentlemen Prefer Blondes would be a bestseller the year after Gatsby appeared, joined them one day at the Plaza, where Fitzgerald was so drunk the waiter refused to serve them. That seemed no reason for him not to drive home, however, so they piled into the car, waving bottles of warm champagne in the air as they wended their way back to Great Neck, where they ordered cocktails from the servants. A woman suddenly showed up at the door, who seemed to be making a play for Scott; he got rid of her, but Zelda made a remark and soon it deteriorated into a shouting match. Scott swept all the china off the table in a rage; the women daintily picked their way across the broken fragments on the floor and had coffee in the living room, while Scott passed out under a tree outside. When Anita Loos told the story years later she said they had run across to Ring Lardner’s house for safety, which would have been a long run. None of their stories were losing anything in the telling. At midnight on July 9, Scott and Zelda joined a party with Burton Rascoe, during which “Fitzgerald showed us some card tricks he had learned from Edmund Wilson, Jr.,” Rascoe reported, and “told us the plot of ‘the great American novel’ which he is just writi
ng (and asked me not to give it away).” If only Rascoe had given it away, we might know more about how Fitzgerald’s conception of the great American novel changed over the course of the fifteen months that he worked on it.
Reading Fitzgerald’s ledger, it is difficult to see how he completed as many as three chapter drafts that summer: “July: Tootsie [Zelda’s sister Rosalind] arrived. Intermittent work on novel. Constant drinking. Some golf. Baby begins to talk. Party at Allan Dwan’s. Gloria Swanson and the movie crowd. Our party for Tootsie. The Perkins arrive. I drive into the lake. August: Tootsie again. More drinking.” And so on, through the opening and disastrous tryout of The Vegetable in Atlantic City that November, to December: “Still on the wagon. Fell off Xmas. Party Goldberg. Deterioration.” In the wake of The Vegetable’s humiliating failure, Fitzgerald settled down at last to some serious work on short fiction to earn some money. Meanwhile, Zelda wrote to the Kalmans, “Ring is drinking himself to an embalmed state so he’ll be all ready for the grim reaper. I don’t think he’ll have long to wait, if he keeps on. His wife is worried sick. At Atlantic City he was certainly the man about town at Evelyn Nesbit’s café. She doesn’t take dope any more. Isn’t that too sweet of her?” In his “Short Autobiography” for The New Yorker in 1929, Scott wrote that 1923 consisted solely of “oceans of Canadian Ale with R. Lardner in Great Neck, Long Island.”
On December 14, Burton Rascoe correctly guessed that an anonymous Vanity Fair sketch he’d seen called “The Invasion of the Sanctuary” had been written by Scott Fitzgerald, and took the opportunity to accuse Fitzgerald of superficiality: “he has a saving quality of wit, malice and fantastic drollery,” Rascoe observed bitingly; “otherwise his books would be Robert W. Chambers all over again, only not so well written.”
Robert W. Chambers’s romances of the “delightful idle rich” epitomized vacuous, sentimental fictions of high society; Chambers was generally dismissed, said the New York Times, “as a creator of a cheap type of fiction, a sort of housemaid’s delight.” Fitzgerald’s earliest books had been compared to Chambers’s with infuriating regularity: This Side of Paradise, Flappers and Philosophers, and The Beautiful and Damned had all been likened to Chambers by various reviewers, often more than once. A book serialized in Cosmopolitan in the autumn of 1922 had been belittled by its reviewer as “Just one more great wealth-and-high-society novel. The Chambers formula, not the Fitzgerald one.” At least someone could tell the difference; Fitzgerald saved the clipping in his scrapbook. He would not have been pleased by Rascoe’s jibe.
The Fitzgeralds spent their last Christmas in Great Neck throwing another house party, which Bunny Wilson described to John Bishop: “Scott’s play went so badly on the road that it was taken off before it got to New York, thereby causing them a great deal of chagrin. Since then, Fitz has entered upon a period of sobriety of unexampled duration, writing great quantities of short stories for the popular magazines. He is also doing a new novel. Esther Murphy, [Gilbert] Seldes, Dos Passos, Mary [Blair Wilson] and I had Christmas dinner with them at Great Neck. I like Zelda better and better every year and they are among the only people now that I’m always glad to see.”
One Wednesday afternoon in late January 1924, Carl Van Vechten was home working (“not very hard”), when Scott phoned up. He was at Ernest Boyd’s apartment: “I went over there,” wrote Van Vechten, “& found him & Zelda with Ernest, later Madeleine. Cocktails . . .” The midweek afternoon deliquesces into an ellipsis that says it all.
Their months in Great Neck began to melt away behind them. “There were many changing friends,” wrote Zelda of Long Island, “and the same old drinks and glamor and story swept their lives up into the dim vaults of lobbies and stations until, as one said, evenements accumulated. It might have been Nemesis incubating.” They thought Bacchus was presiding over the festivities, until Nemesis appeared—the retributive goddess whom the Romans aptly called Invidia. Nothing would survive but the stories, the tales of a quest for lasting pleasure, which left a trace of beauty: the disarray of falling stars didn’t come to naught after all.
As 1923 passed, the murders of Hall and Mills drifted away from America’s collective attention. Memory is as unreliable as narration, and there was always a new story. But every now and then the ghosts returned to haunt the nation’s press and its readers, a spectral reminder that justice was being undone.
In April 1923 the New York Times reviewed the story of the Hall–Mills murders in the context of several other recent, unsolved homicides, including Joseph Browne Elwell, who was found shot in a locked room without a gun, and William Desmond Taylor. “No detective story ever written,” the article declared, “had more to excite the imagination than such cases as the Elwell and the Hall–Mills mysteries. Day after day for months on end they appeared on the front pages of the newspapers. They were read as detective stories are read—the thrills outweighing the horror. But the concluding chapters are missing.” Before it finished, the article brought readers up to date on Jane Gibson: the “picturesque pig woman” was appearing “with Jenny her mule in a circus, profiting by the publicity the Hall–Mills case brought her.” A month later, the investigation showed faint signs of life, as detectives turned their attention to a “certain man who was questioned early in the case and who at the time gave what was then considered a satisfactory alibi. His manner, too, convinced us he was clear.” Now they were less convinced. But Mrs. Gibson had been thoroughly discredited: “it is probable,” surmised an investigator brilliantly, that the Pig Woman had been “inspired by a desire to make some money out of the murders. She sold her story to newspapers, received money for posing for photographs, and lately capitalized her alleged connection with the case by appearing with her mule at a carnival in New York.”
James Mills swiftly responded to these reports, “bitterly” complaining “I know who they’re driving at when they talk about alibis.” Feeling that suspicion was shifting to him, he reiterated his story: “My wife left the house that night at 7:30, refusing to tell me where she was going and saying that I’d have to follow her if I wanted to find out her destination.” He stayed home until “late at night,” he said, “not leaving the house until I went to the church to look for my wife in the early morning. The murder hour has been placed at around 9:30. At that time I was in the house and I can prove it by two witnesses, a man I work with and a woman neighbor. The man saw me in the house at 8 o’clock. The woman told the detectives the last time she saw me was 10 o’clock and I was in the house.” She also saw him in the house at 8:30, he claimed. “And if anybody had come to the door after that they would have found me in.” Only they hadn’t.
Four months later, the first anniversary of the murders was noted, but there was little to report. Mrs. Hall had gone abroad; her brother Willie had recently returned to the Hall home from a sojourn in Florida and spent his days running from fire station to fire station, hoping for a conflagration. Louise Geist, the Hall’s servant “and an attractive figure in the case,” had married. Charlotte Mills had graduated from high school and was eager to turn eighteen, complaining of her father’s refusal to allow her to accept a vaudeville agent’s offer for $750 a week, “just to show yourself on the stage without singing or saying a word.” She would go on stage as soon as she was legally independent, if the offer still stood, she said.
All tragedy, Fitzgerald had written in This Side of Paradise, has that strain of the grotesque and squalid—so useless, so futile.
After Myrtle’s death, Nick and Gatsby talk as dawn arrives in his strangely dusty mansion. It seems even emptier than usual, as if it is hollowing out from the inside, like the dreams it symbolizes. Images of ghosts drift in: Nick stumbles on the keys of a “ghostly” piano, and as the sun rises “ghostly birds” begin to sing among the blue leaves. Gatsby is “clutching at some last hope,” Nick realizes, but “I couldn’t bear to shake him free.” It is at this point that Gatsby finally tells Nick the truth about his humb
le origins.
Much of Gatsby’s masquerade had come about by accident. Although he believed that life should be a splendid pageant, he had not started out with claims of “phantom millions.” When he met Daisy he thought only to deceive her in the most commonplace way, letting her believe that he came from the same social stratum as she, so that he could seduce her. He had intended, “unscrupulously,” to take what he could from her under false pretenses and leave. But then the story turns, and it is Gatsby who feels betrayed and abandoned when she vanishes back into her rich life after they sleep together. He feels married to her, and his intense fidelity means that such a spiritual union can never be dissolved.
Gatsby hangs suspended between chasing the future and longing for the past: the present means nothing to him. But Daisy is defined by the present. She needs immediacy, for she dwells in the shallows of time, drifting unrestfully and without purpose from moment to moment. And Daisy is very young: she was eighteen when they fell in love, twenty-three when the action of Gatsby takes place. As she was trying to wait for Gatsby to return from Europe after the war, Tom Buchanan arrived in Louisville, a present force “of love, of money, of unquestionable practicality”: “doubtless there was a certain struggle and a certain relief.” Daisy marries Tom; the choice is made. Gatsby will spend the rest of his life in the futile effort to unmake it, to reverse time and put himself in Tom’s place. And so upon returning to America after the war he built a fortune unscrupulously, to win Daisy back, to make a fresh start.
Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of The Great Gatsby Page 28