But just as he thinks he has achieved his dream of Daisy and the aristocratic life she represents, his hopes are brought crashing down by the real aristocrat, her husband. The illusion of “Jay Gatsby” shatters like glass against Tom’s hard malice, arrogance, and social power, his insistence that Gatsby will remain Mr. Nobody from Nowhere. And so “the long secret extravaganza was played out.”
Gatsby’s tale ends with a journey he took back to Louisville while Daisy was on her honeymoon, his attempt to relocate the past in the place where it was located, the magical thinking of relativity that space and time are conjoined after all: “He stretched out his hand desperately as if to snatch only a wisp of air, to save a fragment of the spot that she had made lovely for him. But it was all going by too fast now for his blurred eyes and he knew that he had lost that part of it, the freshest and the best, forever.” He will never recover it, but he will never stop trying.
In May 1924 the Fitzgeralds sailed for Europe, to put the temptations of the New World behind them, with the conviction that they had left their old selves behind forever. Along with their seventeen pieces of luggage and Encyclopedia Britannica, the Fitzgeralds carried with them the true dream of America: that if you go to a different place, you can become a different person, that identity is just an accident.
Their voyage was “a weird trip,” Zelda said, haunted by tunes including “Horsey, Keep Your Tail Up, Keep the Sun Out of My Eyes.” Fitzgerald sent a telegram from the ship to Max Perkins, introducing him to a young English actor named Leslie Howard, whom they had befriended in Great Neck and who would become world-famous when he played Ashley Wilkes in Gone with the Wind. Howard was a “great friend of mine,” Fitzgerald told his editor, and “has a considerable writing talent.” On board there was “nearly a scandal about Bunny Burgess,” Zelda recalled, an incident memorable enough that both Scott and Zelda continued to refer to it, without ever explaining it. In his ledger for May Scott noted: “Sailed. Bunny Burgess. The Captain’s table”; later, in his notebooks, he remembered “Bunny Burgess episode of glass and wife.” It’s not clear who the wife in the episode was: the passenger list for the Minnewaska suggests that Frederick Burgess, a Long Island stockbroker, sailed alone, perhaps to join his wife Olive, who was in Paris that summer. The wife in the near scandal on board the Minnewaska may well have been Scott’s.
At Cherbourg they caught a boat train promising to carry them to Paris in around seven hours. They stayed at the Hôtel des Deux Mondes, where they hired a nurse for Scottie at twenty-six dollars a month (“my God!” Fitzgerald told a friend, “we paid $90 in New York”). They bathed Scottie in the bidet, and when she drank a gin fizz thinking it was lemonade, the two-year-old “ruined the luncheon table next day.” Nevertheless, Zelda wrote Perkins triumphantly that their stay in Paris was “a complete success”: they’d “found a good nurse and resisted the varied temptations that beset our path—to some extent—”
While in Paris they saw some old friends including John Peale Bishop, and probably met Sara and Gerald Murphy, whose sister Esther they’d partied with during the previous Christmas at Great Neck. The Murphys planned to summer on the Côte d’Azur; the Fitzgeralds decided to go there too. In Paris they “boarded the train for the Riviera, the hot, sweet South of France,” meandering down through a profusion of color, blending hues, and shadows to Provence, where vision seemed only a question of searching for nightingales.
They stopped first at Hyères, the oldest resort on the Riviera, “the loveliest piece of earth I’ve ever seen without excepting Oxford or Venice or Princeton or anywhere,” Fitzgerald wrote to a friend. “Zelda and I are sitting in the cafe l’Universe writing letters (it is 10:30 P.M.) and the moon is an absolutely au fait Mediterranean moon with a blurred silver linen cap & we’re both a little tight and very happily drunk.” They were “going to look at a villa that has a butler & cook with it for the summer & fall . . . on the whole it looks like a gorgeous working summer.”
Zelda said that Scott was revealing “the most romantic proclivities” on the Riviera, reading nothing but lives of Byron and Shelley. She feared he might even drown in the Mediterranean, she joked: “I shall be obligated to snatch a heart from a burning body—which I should hate.” The villas they saw at Hyères were unsuitable—too impractical for Zelda to run (she said), too unromantic for Scott to write (he said), or too expensive, and the aptly named Grimm’s Park Hotel appeared to have nothing but goat on the menu.
So they made their way to St. Raphaël, where they rented the Villa Marie, and Scott finally settled down into writing his novel. For Zelda, whiling away curving Provençal hours as Scott remembered jazzy New York, the afternoons grew long and hushed, filled with an awareness of the coming night before the sun even began to set. Days began to stretch in front of her, hot and empty. In Save Me the Waltz, Alabama wonders restlessly what to do with herself on the Riviera and soon resents her artist husband for leaving her with only passing hours to keep her company.
In the nearby town of Fréjus was an air base, and Zelda befriended a group of young French aviators. They danced, gambled, and drank in a beach casino; as evening fell the Fitzgeralds would wander through the dusty pink twilight to join the flyers. René Silvé and Bobbé Croirier were “very nice boys,” Zelda wrote, perhaps hinting that they were more interested in each other than in her. They “protruded insistently from their white beach clothes and talked in undertones of Arthur Rimbaud.” René had eyes of “cold fire,” as if painted by Tintoretto. An officer named Edouard Jozan had the “head of the gold of a Christmas coin,” with “broad bronze hands” and “convex shoulders”; he was “slim and strong and rigid” in his dazzling white uniform.
During the days Zelda relaxed with her aviators on canvas mats stretched over the sand. Scott was pleased that Zelda was occupied; Zelda was pleased that she was the center of attention again. The flyers flirted with her, flattered her, and kept her company while her husband brooded over his memories of Long Island. On the beach “we warmed our sunburned backs and invented new cocktails,” she recalled; their avant-garde cocktails do not survive.
In July, Scott took a quick break from his novel to compose “How to Live on Practically Nothing A Year,” which earned some fast money from the Saturday Evening Post. Describing expatriate life in France, he wrote of keeping up with the news from home by means of the New York Times. “It is twilight as I write this,” he ended; as the sun set, the people around him, “like the heavy roses and the nightingales in the pines, will seem to take an essential and indivisible part in the beauty of this proud gay land.” Becoming a stranger had prompted Fitzgerald to think more consciously about national identity, what it meant to be from one land or another, as he watched people melt indistinguishably into the background that absorbed them.
As his novel progressed, Fitzgerald had changed its title, but not its theme. It would still concern the arrivistes among New York’s ash heaps and millionaires, but now he thought he would call it “Trimalchio.” Zelda didn’t like the new title, but Scott’s confidence in the book was growing; his prose was deepening, tightening, stretching.
They swam in hope like the midnight-dark sea, buoyed by good fortune. It seemed that life was a simple affair after all. They were not just happy once, he wrote; they were happy a thousand times.
America’s front pages were consumed that summer with the sensational story of two intelligent, well-educated young men from Chicago named Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, who murdered a boy they knew merely “for the thrill of it,” convinced that their high IQs would enable them to commit the perfect crime. They were mistaken: having left a trail of evidence implicating themselves, they quickly confessed. Leopold and Loeb demonstrated the “perils of precocity,” it was felt: intelligence testing had been much debated for several years, and Leopold and Loeb reminded experts that precocity “often leads to perversion.” The prosecution charged that the pair’s murderous “phantasies” came from a
book. Loeb reportedly announced: “I have money; my people have money; don’t you suppose we will have a smart lawyer to get us out?” Leopold and Loeb had overweening confidence in their own brilliance, but perhaps they also had reason to doubt the intelligence of those who would be assigned to investigate their crimes.
Fitzgerald followed the story avidly; a year later he was writing to Perkins that, after Gatsby, his next novel would be about “several things, one of which is an intellectual murder on the Leopold–Loeb idea. Incidentally it is about Zelda and me and the hysteria of last May and June [1924] in Paris.” If not about Leopold and Loeb, he told Harold Ober, his next novel might concern “such a case” as Dorothy Ellingson, “that girl who shot her mother on the Pacific coast last year.” The novel that would eventually become Tender Is the Night went through many permutations, but for some years it was about a headline murder case. As he continued to mull over tabloid murders, Fitzgerald wrote a story called “Jacob’s Ladder” that would feed into Tender Is the Night. It opens with “a particularly sordid and degraded murder trial,” a case that makes the protagonist feel “he had childishly gobbled something without being hungry, simply because it was there. The newspapers had humanized the case, made a cheap, neat problem play out of an affair of the jungle.”
In late June headlines blared that Leopold and Loeb had been found guilty of murder; turning the pages of the New York Times, a reader would also have been confronted with a reminder of another brutal murder that had recently dominated the nation’s news.
Mrs. Jane Gibson, “the ‘pig woman’ in the Hall–Mills murder mystery at New Brunswick,” had been found “badly beaten,” and Nellie Russell, “the negro woman who contradicted Mrs. Gibson’s story” at the time of the murder investigation, had been arrested and charged with “atrocious assault.” “The two women have quarreled many times since the murder case made them widely known characters”; this time, in a dispute over a horse, Russell “attacked” Mrs. Gibson, throwing her to the ground and knocking out four teeth. “HALL–MILLS CASE RECALLED,” noted the small headline. It didn’t take much to recall the case for anyone who had lived through its grotesquerie.
The summer burned on as Fitzgerald wrote. Keeping it brief, condensed, lyrical, he forced the novel through draft after draft. He was reading Byron and Milton, a biography of Shelley in French, and he was always reading Keats. Poetry mingled in his head with the cynical slang of modern America. That spring, just before they sailed, Fitzgerald had explained to a magazine editor that The Beautiful and Damned had been led astray by the literary theories of H. L. Mencken: “I am so anxious for people to see my new novel which is a new thinking out of the idea of illusion (an idea which I suppose will dominate my more serious stuff) much more mature and much more romantic than This Side of Paradise. The B&D was a better book than the first but it was a false lead . . . a concession to Mencken . . . The business of creating illusion is much more to my taste and my talent.”
While Scott consorted with the New York ghosts who haunted him, Zelda concentrated on the present. Alone with his manuscript over the phantom wash of the Mediterranean, Scott did not notice that Zelda and the aviator Edouard Jozan were becoming closer, but everyone else on the Riviera did. Rumor began to quicken and race, as her oblivious husband remained lost in the pages of his novel.
But oblivion, like love, can’t be trusted to last forever. “The Big Crisis” came on July 13, Scott wrote in his ledger. Two weeks after the papers recalled the Hall–Mills case, matters appear to have come to a head over Zelda’s feelings for Jozan. Stories differ, as they always do. Some say that Zelda asked Fitzgerald for a divorce, telling him that she wanted to chase her chance for happiness; others that Scott confronted her and demanded that she end whatever was happening. Gossip has been speculating about what exactly that was ever since. Zelda’s romance with Jozan may have been a serious affair, or as insubstantial as a flirtation and a moonlight kiss. But it is clear that for Scott and Zelda, the affair, whatever its particulars, was deeply damaging; Zelda genuinely cared for Jozan, it seems, and Scott did not forgive easily.
But it’s also true that the Fitzgeralds enjoyed being protagonists in a melodrama, still preferring the role of the observed to the observer. Zelda wrote to Bunny Wilson that summer that she felt “picturesque,” and her pleasure would only be complete if it gave rise to gossip back home: “Everything would be perfect if there was somebody here who would be sure to spread the tale of our idyllic existence around New York.” By the end of the summer, she’d shown that Scott wasn’t the only one who could create a story. They both told others later that Fitzgerald had locked Zelda in her room over the Jozan affair, in some versions for as long as a month.
After the “Big Crisis,” Fitzgerald’s ledger notes a “sad trip to Monte Carlo” in July. He also recorded, cryptically, “Wire Olive Burgess,” but whether the wire was to her or from her, or why it was worth remembering, he doesn’t say. He kept an undated letter from Olive Burgess, written on Paris hotel stationery, among his papers. “Dear Mr. Fitzgerald,” she wrote, “Can you come to see me tomorrow at my hotel? I can arrange any time that suits you. Please don’t mention even to the members of your household that you are calling on ‘Bunny Burgess’ wife’—I sound exactly like a shilling shocker—I’m sorry. It’s rather important to you. Would you telephone or send me a line today, so I can know when you’re coming? Cordially, Olive Moore Burgess.” The nature of the clandestine matter that was so important to Scott Fitzgerald was as lost as what Bunny Burgess did with a glass and someone’s wife, but it’s tempting to guess.
Meanwhile, Scott continued to note trips and parties over the summer of 1924 in his ledger. The Fitzgeralds went to Monte Carlo, gave at least one dinner, and went down the coast to Sainte-Maxime more than once. “Zelda swimming every day. Getting brown,” he observed prosaically later in July. They went often to Antibes to visit the Murphys, and Fitzgerald read drafts of his work in progress to John Dos Passos, Donald Ogden Stewart, and Gilbert Seldes, who were all on the Riviera. Scott lists more dinner parties—it’s not easy to see when they might have fit the month of Zelda’s incarceration into their busy social schedules.
Looking back, Fitzgerald remembered “the going to the Riviera” in his notebooks. “The table at Villa Marie . . . The aviation field. The garden in the morning. The Seldes. Night in St. Maxime. Feeling of proxy in passion strange encouragement. He was sorry, knowing how she would pay. Bunny Burgess episode.” Adultery seems to be the line that connects the dots: in May 1926 Olive would divorce Bunny Burgess in Paris, and remarry within months. Fitzgerald’s entry is so gnomic that we can only guess what he meant, but it is at least possible that what he felt as a proxy in passion was a strange encouragement to translate his feelings into the proxy characters of fiction.
“I’ve been unhappy but my work hasn’t suffered from it,” Fitzgerald wrote Perkins when his novel was finished. It was true: he had suffered, but the book hadn’t. Indeed, his suffering probably improved it. The flippancy that had jarred in his first two novels was entirely in abeyance in the third: it is threaded throughout with satirical, wry humor, but there is nothing light-hearted in the novel concerned with the tragic consequences of misplaced fidelity, about a man who is destroyed by the colossal vitality of the illusion that has sustained him.
Life is always there waiting to be transfigured into a splendid fiction, however sad or sordid its origins. A story of adultery ends in the violent extinction of a woman of tremendous vitality. A dreamer keeps faith with the faithless, and a double shooting draws closer in the cooling twilight, as the writer tries to determine whether what he holds in his hand is the past, or the future.
As Nick returns to Long Island after an abortive day trying to sell stocks on Wall Street, and an even more abortive conversation with Jordan Baker, who tells him that she’s left the Buchanans’ house and complains that Nick wasn’t nice to her after Myrtle was run over, the co
mmuter train takes him past the ash heaps. The accident is already being turned into a story for gawkers and thrill-seekers, he imagines: “there’d be a curious crowd around there all day with little boys searching for dark spots in the dust and some garrulous man telling over and over what had happened until it became less and less real even to him and he could tell it no longer and Myrtle Wilson’s tragic achievement was forgotten.”
Then Nick returns to his reconstruction, from the newspapers, of the actions of Michaelis and George Wilson the night before. As Michaelis kept him company, Wilson grew distracted and began to mutter that he had ways of tracing the owner of the yellow car that killed his wife, in which he had seen Tom Buchanan driving to town that afternoon. Dawn approaches and the two men are still talking among the ash heaps, mirror images of Nick and Gatsby talking at the same moment in Gatsby’s dusty mansion. Both pairs of men are discussing parallel cases of unfaithful women. One unfaithful woman is a killer, the other is killed; the men sit amid the ashes and the dust to which they will all return.
Wilson leaves the garage in late morning, while Nick sleeps uneasily in his chair on Wall Street; Wilson begins to make his way toward West Egg, searching for the owner of the car that ran down his wife. The police concluded that Wilson must have walked from garage to garage, inquiring after a yellow car, but as Nick points out, no garage men reported seeing him, and Wilson had an “easier, surer way of finding out what he wanted to know.” Wilson knows Tom Buchanan by name, after all; he just doesn’t suspect that Buchanan is the man who was having an affair with his wife. “By half past two he was in West Egg where he asked someone the way to Gatsby’s house. So by that time he knew Gatsby’s name.”
The “mistaken identity” that will kill Gatsby—that is, George Wilson’s blaming Gatsby for the crimes of Tom and Daisy Buchanan—is set in motion by Gatsby’s own desire. Gatsby’s aspiration to Tom’s life could be said to be the story’s original sin, the first case of mistaken identity: he is a usurper, a pretender in both senses of the word. When Tom realizes that Gatsby wants to supplant him, he gives Gatsby precisely what he thought he wanted: Gatsby is put in Tom’s place, taking the fall for both Buchanans’ crimes, Daisy’s careless driving and Tom’s affair with Myrtle. But although Gatsby’s death is often described as George Wilson’s mistake in identity, it is actually Tom Buchanan’s lie. He turns Gatsby into his and Daisy’s proxy, much as Nick Carraway’s great-uncle sent a substitute to the Civil War to die for him. Wilson holds the gun that shoots Gatsby, but it is Tom Buchanan who pulls the trigger—or so we believe until the novel’s final pages, when Fitzgerald turns the screw one last time.
Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of The Great Gatsby Page 29