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

by Churchwell, Sarah

  At the end of The Great Gatsby, there are three explanations for the deaths that litter the Long Island stage, all motivated by adultery: the aristocratic Southern wife did it; the inadequate working-class husband did it; and it was a case of mistaken identity. These are also the three possible explanations that were offered for the murders of Eleanor Mills and Edward Hall. Fitzgerald’s story about possibility is capacious enough to grasp all three possibilities. The creative process pushes the murders of Hall and Mills into the background: the story has been set free to fly into fiction, transposed into a different key, but audible in echoes and harmonic shifts, transfigured from the wretched to the beautiful. Fiction is not a reassembling of concrete facts, a jigsaw puzzle to solve. It is a palimpsest country of inklings and hunches, echoes and traces. Impressions that Fitzgerald registered, with the seismic sensitivity to life’s vibrations that he attributes to Jay Gatsby, ripple through his story, shading it with waves of dark life.

  The murders of Hall and Mills are a story that can be detected behind the novel, a phantom double, not an exact correspondence: a nightmare version of grotesque reality, unrelieved by the consolations of art. The Great Gatsby is certainly not a true story, nor is it in any meaningful way based on a true story. It might better be regarded as an untrue story, one that took myriad facts and unmade them. The murder is invented, as Fitzgerald said, but it is also discovered—and once upon a time, these meant the same thing.

  The story of the murders of Edward Hall and Eleanor Mills reminds us that if The Great Gatsby has become our favorite book about what we now call the American dream, it is also a story about knowing your place. It is about the brutality of forcing people back into their places, the cruelty of being found out.

  The Great Gatsby is the great American novel of hope and longing, and it is one of the handful of novels in which American history finds its figurative form. Gatsby is history, and it is about history. But the sordid, sad tale of the murders of Edward Hall and Eleanor Mills is also a story of America: competing romantic fictions driven by envy and jealousy on both sides, riven by questions about money and status and power, erupting into a brutality that is met with incompetence and corruption. It is a story of violence triumphant, of chaos and disappointment. The story of Hall and Mills tells not of America’s romantic past, but of its invidious future.

  Fitzgerald always felt a strong sense of American history at his back: he was buoyed by it, as it streamed past him. “I look out at it,” he wrote in his notebooks near the end of his life, “and I think it is the most beautiful history in the world. It is the history of me and of my people. And if I came here yesterday,” he added, “I should still think so. It is the history of all aspiration—not just the American dream but the human dream and if I came at the end of it that too is a place in the line of the pioneers.” Aspiration is general, but capacity is limited. Fitzgerald’s tale of a fraudster and the shallow, careless woman he loves would become a story about all of America.

  1924–1940

  It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made . . .

  CHAPTER NINE

  FUNERAL AN INVENTION

  After two years I remember the rest of that day, and that night and the next day, only as an endless drill of police and photographers and newspaper men in and out of Gatsby’s front door. . . . Most of those reports were a nightmare—grotesque, circumstantial, eager and untrue.

  The Great Gatsby, Chapter 9

  Our faith in possibility may be glorious, but it’s easy to forget that one possibility is always failure.

  As he awaited the publication of The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald’s expectations were keyed even higher than usual. The book was marvelous: at last he had done something better than he was capable of. That spring he began work on “The Rich Boy,” a long story inspired by Ludlow Fowler, which opens, “Begin with an individual, and before you know it you find that you have created a type; begin with a type, and you find that you have created—nothing . . . When I hear a man proclaiming himself an ‘average, honest, open fellow,’ I feel pretty sure that he has some definite and perhaps terrible abnormality which he has agreed to conceal.” If any readers prefer to believe Nick Carraway when he proclaims his own honesty, “The Rich Boy,” begun only weeks after Gatsby was finished, should give them second thoughts.

  “The book comes out today,” Fitzgerald wrote to Perkins on April 10, 1925, “and I am overcome with fears and forebodings. Supposing women didn’t like it because it has no important woman in it, and critics didn’t like it because it dealt with the rich and contained no peasants borrowed out of Tess in it and set to work in Idaho? . . . In fact all my confidence is gone.” But the book’s now iconic cover art by Francis Cugat, the gas-blue night with a woman’s eyes dancing out over the jeweled red and yellow of carnival lights, was, he said, “a delight”; Zelda, too, was “mad about it.” Before long Perkins cabled the initial news: “Sales situation doubtful excellent reviews.” In fact, reviews would be decidedly mixed, and the first edition of twenty thousand sold slowly. Fitzgerald’s hopes of selling eighty thousand copies would prove wildly optimistic; in August Scribner’s printed another three thousand copies, which would never sell out in Fitzgerald’s lifetime. Nor was he able to serialize Gatsby in a respectable magazine. One editor explained: “It is too ripe for us . . . we could not publish this story with as many mistresses and as much adultery as there is in it.” On April 25 Scribner’s ran an advertisement for the novel captioned, “F. Scott Fitzgerald, Satirist,” which set the tone for much of what would follow. No one yet recognized the transformation Fitzgerald had achieved.

  The book gradually garnered qualified praise amid mostly uncomprehending responses. Swope’s World headlined an anonymous review “F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Latest A Dud,” declaring, “with the telling of the plot, The Great Gatsby is, in newspaper parlance, covered.” The review so infuriated Fitzgerald that he referred to it ten years later: “one woman, who could hardly have written a coherent letter in English, described it as a book that one read only as one goes to the movies around the corner.” But many critics could see in Gatsby merely a book that was covered in newspaper parlance, one that borrowed from reality in ways that obscured, for them, its deeper meanings.

  One review described it as “a strange mixture of fact and fancy”; another said Fitzgerald oddly blended “melodrama, a detective story, and a fantastic satire, with his usual jazz-age extravaganza adding his voice to the mental confusion . . . Altogether, it seems to us this book is a minor performance.” Heywood Broun’s wife, Ruth Hale, wrote that the jacket’s description, promising “magic, life, irony, romance and mysticism,” was either “completely mad” or a cynical exercise in marketing. (Fitzgerald later called this “a snotty [and withal ungrammatical]” review.) Another said that Gatsby was “most decidedly, not a great novel . . . neither profound nor imperishable . . . [but] timely and seasonable.” That emphasis on the book’s seasonality would linger. Another declared, “‘The Great Gatsby,’ certainly, is written in the style of 1925. [But] the 1925 model, in literature or automobile, is likely to be supplanted by a later model. Genuinely good writing . . . does not reflect the fads of the season’s conversation.”

  Even appreciative reviews glimpsed the novel’s meanings only peripherally: the New York Times called it “a curious book, a mystical, glamorous story of today.” Fitzgerald saved an undated clipping that defended Gatsby against accusations that its plot was implausible: “Fitzgerald has been criticized for the Hamlet ending, with three deaths. We cannot concur . . . The fact is that every newspaper recounts events as bizarre, as absurd and as tragic.” William Rose Benét also saw newspapers in Gatsby’s inception: writing “out of the mirage,�
�� Fitzgerald “surveys the Babylonian captivity of this era unblinded by the bright lights. He gives you the bright lights in full measure, the affluence, the waste, but also the nakedness of the scaffolding that scrawls skeletons upon the sky when the gold and blue and red and green have faded, the ugly passion, the spiritual meagerness, the empty shell of luxury . . . Gatsby is a mystery saliently characteristic of this age in America.” If the story had grown from the fertile ground of newspapers, it had flowered in unexpectedly beautiful ways, Benét realized: “As for the drama of the accident and Gatsby’s end, it is the kind of thing newspapers carry every day, except that here is a novelist who has gone behind the curt paragraphs and made the real people love and breathe in all their sordidness.”

  Fitzgerald was deeply disappointed and frustrated, but the critics did not change his assessment of the novel. They were oblivious to what he had achieved, but he would be vindicated eventually, he told Perkins: “Some day they’ll eat grass, by God! . . . I think now that I’m much better than any of the young Americans without exception.”

  Not until his friend Gilbert Seldes, who had heard Fitzgerald read drafts over the previous summer, gave the book a glowing review that August did anyone seem to grasp that Fitzgerald was saying something about America, about faith, illusions, and cupidity. With Gatsby, wrote Seldes, Fitzgerald had finally “mastered his talent and gone soaring in a beautiful flight, leaving behind him everything dubious and tricky in his earlier work, and leaving even farther behind all the men of his own generation and most of his elders.” Fitzgerald was conveying the “spirit” of American life, distilling the nation’s substance and insubstantiality: “Fitzgerald has ceased to content himself with a satiric report on the outside of American life and has with considerably irony attacked the spirit underneath.”

  But Seldes was in a minority. Mencken dismissed Gatsby as a “glorified anecdote,” a book in which “the story is obviously unimportant,” and peopled with “false” characters; it was “certainly not to be put on the same shelf with, say, This Side of Paradise.” Mencken, too, could see only present reality in the novel: “The Long Island [Fitzgerald] sets before us . . . actually exists. More, it is worth any social historian’s study, for its influence upon the rest of the country is immense and profound.” Fitzgerald responded angrily to Bunny Wilson: “Without making any invidious comparisons between Class A and Class C, if my novel is an anecdote so is The Brothers Karamazov. From one angle the latter could be reduced into a detective story . . . Of all the reviews, even the most enthusiastic, not one had the slightest idea what the book was about.”

  Burton Rascoe’s colleague Isabel Paterson reviewed Gatsby for the Tribune; her piece has become notorious, ranking with “HERMAN MELVILLE CRAZY” as one of literary history’s worst guesses. Because its subject was “the froth of society,” The Great Gatsby was “an imponderable and fascinating trifle,” which had not “gone below that glittering surface, except by a kind of happy accident.” One of Paterson’s pronouncements has become especially subject to retrospective ridicule: “What has never been alive cannot very well go on living; so this is a book of the season only, but so peculiarly of the season, that it is in its small way unique.” For Paterson, too, the ghosts of newspaper headlines drifted through the book: “He gets the exact tone, the note, the shade of the season and the place he is working on; he is more contemporary than any newspaper, and yet he is (by the present token) an artist.” They could only see Fitzgerald’s shimmering reproduction of their world’s surface, not the way he had also plunged past it, foretelling a nation that would be adulterated by success. Fitzgerald had shown that a belief they treasured (which in six years they would learn to call the American Dream) was a myth—but they were far too deep within the myth to hear him. Isabel Paterson would later champion Ayn Rand and become one of the founding voices of modern American libertarianism; she was the last person to appreciate a book warning against the corrupting force of wealth.

  Another depreciative review was written by Burton Rascoe himself, who had left the Tribune at the end of 1924 and gone into syndication. A clipping of his review had been sent to Fitzgerald, who wrote to Seldes about it, seething: “Burton Rascoe says The Great Gatsby is just Robert Chambers with overtones of Nedra by Harold Nigrath. So I think I’ll write a ‘serious’ novel about the Great Struggle the Great American Peasant has with the Soil. Everyone else seems to be doing it. Burton will be the hero as I’m going to try to go to ‘life’ for my material from now on.” Fitzgerald told Perkins that Rascoe’s “little tribute is a result of our having snubbed his quite common and cheaply promiscuous wife.”

  Still fuming, he wrote to Perkins again that Rascoe “has never been known to refuse an invitation from his social superiors—or to fail to pan them [ . . . ] when no invitations were forthcoming.” By 1927 his anger at Rascoe had become entrenched. He told Hemingway that “God will forgive everybody—even Robert McAlmon and Burton Rascoe.” God might, but it was evident that Fitzgerald had not: that year Fitzgerald also described him (adopting Hemingway’s favorite insult) as “that cocksucker Rascoe.” It was the same year that Bunny Wilson would leave bequests to Rascoe in his first will, but for Scott Fitzgerald, forgiveness would take much longer.

  Rascoe’s review of Gatsby was lost; when Matthew Bruccoli edited Fitzgerald’s Life in Letters in 1995 he added a footnote to this series of letters, explaining that Rascoe’s piece, which so infuriated Fitzgerald, has never been identified. Some scholars speculated that Fitzgerald confused it with

  Paterson’s review, but he saved Paterson’s review with her byline in his scrapbook, so he was perfectly clear about who authored which piece. It is perhaps natural to assume that after almost a century scholars must have found all the extant evidence pertaining to The Great Gatsby, but there are still missing pieces.

  The gap into which Rascoe’s Gatsby review had slipped, it turns out, is a small arts magazine, long forgotten. And hidden within Rascoe’s misplaced review is a tiny, heart-stopping treasure: a long-lost letter from Scott Fitzgerald about his intentions in Gatsby that has apparently never been read or reprinted since its publication in 1925. Rascoe’s review copy of Gatsby had arrived with a cover letter from Fitzgerald explaining his novel, and Rascoe opened his review by quoting from it—a letter that refers to Robert Chambers, and Fitzgerald’s persistent fear that he would always be compared to him.

  I give you my word of honor this isn’t a moral tale—nor has it any more resemblance to Chambers because it deals with the rich than has “The Twelve Little Peppers” to “My Antonia” because it deals with the poor. It happens to be extraordinarily difficult to write directly and simply about complex and indirect people. And I should prefer to fail at the job ridiculously as James often did than to succeed ignobly . . . Dostoyefski said that people’s motives are much simpler than we think by [sic] any uncorrupted motive has an average life of six hours or less.

  The “by” is presumably a typo for “but”—and Dostoevsky said that people’s motives are usually more complicated than we think, an idea that is certainly borne out by the exchange between Fitzgerald and Rascoe. Although Rascoe saved half a dozen letters from Fitzgerald, this one is not among his papers; Fitzgerald’s letter may only survive as this abridged quotation in Rascoe’s lost review.

  What did Rascoe say about Gatsby that so enraged Fitzgerald? He’d shown “greater technical brilliance,” Rascoe felt, “than even his warmest champions knew him capable of,” but the novel

  triumphs by technique rather than by theme . . . I must confess to a minority opinion that the novel is not as good in substance as it is in technique. There are some superbly drawn scenes, and the tragic overtones are managed with great economy and skill; but the point of view is wavering, the characters dissolve too readily, my feeling is that it is more a comment upon a situation than a statement of it, and that comment is not as well reasoned as it might be. But the novel shows that Fitzge
rald is maturing in the right direction.

  The review damns with faint praise, and shows that Fitzgerald’s anxieties about being mistaken for Chambers were so great that he tried to preempt the comparison by introducing it into the conversation; Fitzgerald seems to have remained convinced that any reservations about the novel’s “substance” were derived from its subject matter.

  Some friends were more perceptive. In July 1925 Deems Taylor, still the music critic for Swope’s World, wrote to Fitzgerald: “It’s just four o’clock in the morning, and I’ve got to be up at seven, and I’ve just finished ‘The Great Gatsby,’ and it can’t possibly be as good as I think it is. What knocks me particularly cold about the book is not so much the fact that it’s a thoroughly adult novel—which it is, and which so few Americans seem to be able to write—as the much more important fact that it’s such a glamorous and moving one. You’ve got [the] gift of going after the beauty that’s concealed under the facts; and goddammit, that’s all there is to art.” Everyone else was blinded by the facts, but Taylor could see that Fitzgerald had found in them a latent beauty. The art was in the discovery, and in shaping those facts into something more beautiful than their incongruous, natural chaos would suggest to others, realizing that the beauty of the facts was an unheard melody waiting to be heard.