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

by Churchwell, Sarah

  When Fitzgerald had finished drafting his novel and was completing his final revisions, he wrote to Ludlow Fowler. “We’ve had a quiet summer and are moving in the fall either to Paris or Italy,” he said. “I remember our last conversation and it makes me sad. I feel old, too, this summer—I have ever since the failure of my play a year ago. That’s the whole burden of this novel—the loss of those illusions that give such color to the world that you don’t care whether things are true or false as long as they partake of the magical glory.”

  He was nevertheless recording in his ledger that August, “Zelda and I close together,” and in September, “The novel finished . . . Trouble clearing away.” He told Perkins that the novel wouldn’t reach America before October: “Zelda and I are contemplating a careful revision after a week’s complete rest.” After a few notes about business, he added, “I think my novel is about the best American novel ever written.” In early September, he wrote Perkins that the novel was nearly finished and “It is like nothing I’ve read before.” His letters throughout September remained cheerful, and he was proud of what he had accomplished, confident that his novel was marvelous. But the disintegration that had begun could not be stopped so easily. He would write in his notebooks later, “That September 1924, I knew something had happened that could never be repaired.” It was exactly two years since the Fitzgeralds had returned to New York as the murders of Eleanor Mills and Edward Hall began to consume America.

  On October 27, 1924, Scott Fitzgerald wrote to Max Perkins: “Under separate cover I am sending you my third novel, The Great Gatsby.” He was certain that “at last I’ve done something really my own,” although “how good ‘my own’ is remains to be seen.” (He also scrawled a postscript down the right-hand side of the letter’s margin, asking Perkins to send him the New York World for its accounts of the Princeton games against Harvard and Yale.) Ten days after sending Perkins the manuscript, Fitzgerald sent him a letter from the Hotel Continental in St. Raphaël, oscillating between different possible titles and saying he’d like to add a new scene. “I have now decided to stick to the title I put on the book. Trimalchio in West Egg. The only other titles that seem to fit it are Trimalchio and On the Road to West Egg. I had two others, Gold-hatted Gatsby and the High-bouncing Lover but they seemed too light.” He and Zelda were leaving St. Raphaël in two days to spend the winter in Rome, as soon as he finished “Love in the Night,” his story based on Val Engalitcheff.

  In November, they said good-bye to René Silvé and traveled to Rome, where there was “ill feeling with Zelda,” he noted in his ledger. They stayed at the Hôtel des Princes, in the Piazza di Spagna, across the golden square from where John Keats had lived his final months, dying at the age of twenty-six—the age Fitzgerald had been when he had begun thinking about the novel he had just finished. Looking at the Spanish Steps, he wrote, his spirit soared before the flower stalls and the house where Keats had died. But the Fitzgeralds both hated Rome, and they spent a captious winter there as he corresponded with Perkins about revising the manuscript. Zelda had an “operation to enable [her] to become pregnant” which led to a lingering infection. “Dr. Gros said there was no use trying to save my ovaries,” she remembered. “I was always sick and having picqures” (injections). They kept quarreling, and Fitzgerald got so drunk that he picked a fight with a plainclothes policeman and was badly beaten and jailed, a traumatic experience that he would write into Tender Is the Night.

  Perkins read the manuscript immediately, responding quickly and with characteristic insight: “I think the novel is a wonder . . . It has vitality to an extraordinary degree, and glamour, and a great deal of underlying thought of unusual quality. It has a kind of mystic atmosphere at times . . . It is a marvelous fusion, into a unity of presentation, of the extraordinary incongruities of life today. And as for sheer writing, it’s astonishing.” However, he added that his colleagues didn’t like the title “Trimalchio in West Egg,” although Perkins himself felt that “the strange incongruity of the words in it sound the note of the book.” But he feared the Trimalchio title would not help them sell the novel, and Fitzgerald continued to vacillate over the title right up to publication, frantically cabling Perkins at the last minute: “Crazy about title under the red white and blue what would the delay be.” Possibly Perkins was less crazy about the title “Under the Red, White and Blue,” although it might have helped its first readers understand that this was a novel about all of America. But it was too late. For better or worse, Fitzgerald’s novel would be called The Great Gatsby.

  Perkins especially admired Fitzgerald’s handling of Carraway: “In no other way could your irony have been so immensely effective, nor the reader have been enabled so strongly to feel at times the strangeness of human circumstance in a vast heedless universe.” His main criticism of the Trimalchio draft was that he felt Gatsby was too vague a character; other readers at Scribner’s had agreed. Suggesting that Fitzgerald amplify his protagonist’s biography, Perkins wrote: “He was supposed to be a bootlegger, wasn’t he, at least in part, and I should think a little touch here and there would give the reader the suspicion that this was so.” Fitzgerald agreed, but decided that the problem was not Gatsby’s vagueness on the page, which was deliberate, but his vagueness in Fitzgerald’s head:

  I myself didn’t know what Gatsby looked like or was engaged in & you felt it. If I’d known & kept it from you you’d have been too impressed with my knowledge to protest. This is a complicated idea but I’m sure you’ll understand. But I know now—and as a penalty for not having known first, in other words to make sure I’m going to tell more. It seems of almost mystical significance to me that you thought he was older—the man I had in mind, half unconsciously, was older (a specific individual) and evidently, without so much as a definite word, I conveyed the fact.

  Or rather, he immediately corrected himself, “I conveyed it without a word that I can at present and for the life of me, trace.”

  In order to define Gatsby better in his own mind, so as to withhold that knowledge convincingly from the reader, he had spent much time in “careful searching of the files (of a man’s mind here) for the Fuller McGee case & after having had Zelda draw pictures until her fingers ache I know Gatsby better than I know my own child. My first instinct after your letter was to let him go & have Tom Buchanan dominate the book (I suppose he’s the best character I’ve ever done . . .) but Gatsby sticks in my heart. I had him for a while then lost him & now I have him again.”

  On December 20 he wrote to Perkins again, outlining some of his worries about the novel: “I’m a bit (not very—not dangerously) stewed tonight & I’ll probably write you a long letter.” He did, explaining that he had some more changes planned, although they were already getting to the stage of page proofs, which would make it pricey: “I can now make it perfect but the proof . . . will be one of the most expensive affairs since Madame Bovary.” The comparison is not inapt: Flaubert’s novel also concerns a protagonist whose dreams are distorted by the books she reads, and who is driven by a desire that never quite distinguishes status from sex. In particular, Fitzgerald had lingering doubts about the confrontation between Tom and Gatsby at the Plaza, the scene leading to the accident that kills Myrtle. But by January 1925 he had resolved them: “The Plaza Hotel scene (Chap VII) is now wonderful and that makes the book wonderful,” he told Perkins, before writing Ober that he’d spent three further weeks on the novel, “clearing up that bum Plaza Hotel scene and now it’s really almost perfect of its kind.” He remained convinced, however, that the novel’s “title is bad,” and feared that “it may hurt the book’s popularity that it’s a man’s book. Anyhow I think (for the first time since The Vegetable failed) that I’m a wonderful writer.”

  Two months later the Fitzgeralds left Rome for Capri to await publication of The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald wrote to Bishop from the bright white sunshine of the Mediterranean, heading the letter: “I am quite drunk I am told that
this is Capri, though as I remember Capri was quieter,” and then merrily hailing his friend’s latest missive as proof that an authentic American literature was finally emerging:

  I am glad that at last Americans are producing letters of their own. The climax was wonderful and the exquisite irony of the “sincerely yours” has only been equaled in the work of those two masters Flaubert and Ferber . . . Oh Christ! I’m sobering up! Write me the opinion you may be pleased to form of my chef d’oeuvre & others’ opinion. Please! I think it’s great but because it deals with much debauched materials, quick-deciders like Rascoe may mistake it for Chambers. To me it’s fascinating. I never get tired of it . . . PS I am quite drunk again . . .

  The fear that his new novel would once again be classified with Chambers was continuing to grow.

  That spring he wrote to Ernest Boyd as well, telling him of his novel. It “represents about a year’s work,” Fitzgerald said, “and I think it’s about ten years better than anything I’ve done. All my harsh smartness has been kept ruthlessly out of it—it’s the greatest weakness in my work, distracting and disfiguring it even when it calls up an isolated sardonic laugh. I don’t think this has a touch left. I wanted to call it Trimalchio (it’s laid on Long Island) but I was voted down by Zelda and everybody else.”

  And he wrote to Bishop once more, as the book was about to come out, asking for news. In jokey Franglais, he commended his friend for “cherching” (seeking) the past:

  I read your article (very nice too) in Van. Fair about cherching the past. But you disappointed me with the quality of some of it (the news)—for instance that Bunny’s play [The Crime in the Whistler Room] failed . . . I’ve done about ten pieces of horrible junk in the last year though that I can never republish or bear to look at—cheap and without the spontaneity of my first work. But the novel I’m sure of. It’s marvelous . . . Is Dos Passos’s novel any good? And what’s become of Cummings’s work . . . Do you still think Dos Passos a genius? My faith in him is somehow weakened. There’s so little time for faith these days.

  Still he mustered up some more cheer and more chat. “Is Harlock (no connection) dead, or was that Leopold and Loeb,” he asked, thinking about newspaper murder mysteries. “The cheerfulest things in my life are first Zelda and second the hope that my book has something extraordinary about it. I want to be extravagantly admired again. Zelda and I sometimes indulge in terrible four day rows that always start with a drinking party but we’re still enormously in love and about the only truly happily married people I know.” It is possible that Scott was putting on a brave face for John Bishop, married to a woman whom none of his friends liked; or perhaps Fitzgerald’s novel had become so tangled with his feelings about marriage that hope in the one brought a resurgence of hope and faith in the other—that the two had become adulterated.

  “Like Gatsby I have only hope,” Fitzgerald wrote to Gertrude Stein, as he waited to learn if the world would share his sense of wonder at the book he had created. Fact and fiction so easily become adulterated too, especially when we are cherching the past.

  He sometimes thought, Keats once said, that the value of poetry was created only by “the ardor of the pursuer—being in itself a nothing.” Even such nothings, however, can become magnificent when they are “dignified by an ardent pursuit.”

  As he tells of his love affair with Daisy, Gatsby confesses that “it excited him too that many men had already loved Daisy,” for “it increased her value in his eyes.” But as Gatsby finishes telling Nick the story of his ardent pursuit of Daisy, even he has to concede that Daisy might have loved Tom: “just for a minute, when they were first married—and loved me more even then, do you see?” Presumably Nick does not see, but then Gatsby adds “a curious remark”: “In any case,” he says, “it was just personal.” Nick does not know what to make of this, except “to suspect some intensity in his conception of the affair that couldn’t be measured.” Intensity is what transforms romance into ardor: Gatsby’s love for Daisy is as symbolic for him as it is for readers, a universal dream of love that exceeds the merely personal. This is what makes Gatsby’s side of the affair transcendent, giving it the mystical cast, the sense of glorious destiny whose current pulls him forward. “Premature success,” wrote Fitzgerald later, “gives one an almost mystical conception of destiny as opposed to will-power—at its worst the Napoleonic delusion. The man who arrives young believes that he exercises his will because his star is shining.” The ardent pursuit is all.

  When they have finished talking, Nick leaves for work, bestowing upon Gatsby his valediction: “They’re a rotten crowd,” he shouts. “You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.” Nick tells us he’s glad he said this: “it was the only compliment I ever gave him, because I disapproved of him from beginning to end.” Gatsby’s face breaks into his radiant smile, “as if we’d been in ecstatic cahoots on that fact all the time.” He’s still in his luminous, “gorgeous pink rag of a suit,” and Nick leaves the house remembering the first time he’d met Gatsby three months before, when his lawn “had been crowded with the faces of those who guessed at his corruption—and he had stood on those steps, concealing his incorruptible dream.”

  Some read Nick as priggish for insisting upon his disapproval, but Fitzgerald needs the censure to undercut Gatsby’s romantic heroism, to remind us that he is a crook: the kind of crook that built America. His dream may be incorruptible, but Fitzgerald thought he had made Gatsby’s material corruption quite plain. He wrote to Perkins as the novel was in its final revisions: “This is very important. Be sure not to give away any of the plot in the blurb. Don’t give away that Gatsby dies or is a parvenu or crook or anything. It’s part of the suspense of the book that all these things are in doubt until the end.” Which presumably means that Fitzgerald considered these things no longer in doubt by the end, that readers would finish the novel with no illusions left about Gatsby, just as Gatsby finishes with no illusions left about life.

  When Gatsby realizes that Daisy will not come to him, his disillusionment is complete: he sees reality for the first time. The truth isn’t pretty, thinks Nick: Gatsby “must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream. He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about . . . like that ashen, fantastic figure gliding toward him through the amorphous trees.” All the old symbols of romance and hope—roses, sunlight, fresh grass—are turned into symbols of horror. They are the merely material, the accidental stuff of life that doesn’t matter.

  When Nick returns home that afternoon, he has a premonition that something is wrong and runs up the steps of Gatsby’s house. “With scarcely a word said,” he rushes with three servants to the pool, where Gatsby has gone for a swim. Looking in the pool Nick describes what he sees: a body revolving slowly in the water, “tracing, like the leg of a compass, a thin red circle in the water.” When Fitzgerald first submitted his manuscript to Perkins he had written that Gatsby’s body on the pneumatic raft was like “the leg of a transept,” the cross-section of a church floor. Perkins queried the word, and Fitzgerald changed it, saying that what he really meant was the leg of a compass, like Donne’s faithful lover in “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning.” This is Gatsby’s valediction and mourning is required, but the religious metaphor of the transept was not inapt, for Gatsby dies when he loses his faith.

  “A small gust of wind that scarcely corrugated the surface was enough to disturb its accidental course with its accidental burden.” Gatsby has been snapped out, made doubly accidental, material without being real—like the poor gray ghost, the secret sharer who floated toward him out of the ashes and shot him dead.

  This is a story in which everyone is guilty. />
  “VIII. The Murder (inv.)” jotted Fitzgerald at the end of Man’s Hope. The murder that ends Chapter Eight is, indeed, Scott Fitzgerald’s invention. Under the triple misapprehension that Jay Gatsby was driving the car that killed his wife, that Gatsby was his wife’s lover, and that these two untruths were causally related, George Wilson shoots Gatsby at the end of the chapter, as he’s floating in the swimming pool he never used, and then Wilson shoots himself. “The holocaust was complete,” Nick tells us, although few remember anymore that holocaust has not always meant genocide, or even massacre: in the 1920s, its primary meaning was a sacrificial offering. This is the climax of The Great Gatsby: Myrtle run over by a careless driver; Gatsby shot in error, in what is often described as a case of mistaken identity; and Wilson’s suicide to cheat the electric chair, in the expression of the day. The rest will be denouement.

  However, the story’s end can also be described, no less accurately, in slightly different terms. It is a double shooting in September 1922. The person who pulls the trigger is a little, gray, ineffectual man, anemic and apparently pusillanimous, who lives in a ramshackle structure on the edge of town; he works at menial jobs and generally is known as his wife’s man and not his own. His wife was called pushy, officious, and vulgar; she aspired to finer things in life and was trying to acquire them by having an affair with a man who came from a higher social stratum. She wore a spotted dark-blue crepe de chine dress and loved the novel Simon Called Peter. Class-consciousness and envy run through the story: people are symbolized by the homes in which they live, from poverty to grandeur. One of the suspects feels enjoined by the honor of his family to silence; another of the culprits may be a rich, aloof wife from the South. Mistakes in identity thread through the tale: they live in a world of fabulists and frauds, gossip and violence, romantics who invented the kind of past they believed they ought to have had—not just the impostor Jay Gatsby, but also the sad pretensions of Myrtle Wilson and her friends, and even the “honest” Carraways, whose family line starts with a deception, a mythical ducal ancestry that shares a name with the place where the real woman was killed. Indeed, one synthetic name (Jay Gatsby) sounds much like another (Jane Gibson).