Scott carefully pasted the two pages of Taylor’s letter into his scrapbook. He did not keep Rascoe’s clipping, which is one of the reasons why it was lost for so long.
The final chapter is a nocturne, Fitzgerald’s American Rhapsody. It is a tribute to what America promises, and a denunciation of what it delivered: not people discovering their finest selves, but blind hedonists racing along a shortcut from nothing to nothing.
One of the many patterns to which its first readers were blind, aptly enough, is Fitzgerald’s careful linking of vision to the meanings of America. From T. J. Eckleburg’s gigantic eyes to Nick’s “eyesore” of a cottage next to Gatsby’s mansion, from Owl-Eyes to Myrtle Wilson’s little dog who views the party with “blind eyes through the smoke,” vision is distorted, obscured; appearance comes to substitute for the truth. At the story’s end Nick calls the newspaper reports of the car accident and double shooting “a nightmare—grotesque, circumstantial, eager and untrue. When Michaelis’s testimony at the inquest brought to light Wilson’s suspicions of his wife I thought the whole tale would shortly be served up in racy pasquinade.”
But instead of telling the truth, to control the nightmare Nick connives in lying about it. At the inquest, Myrtle’s sister Catherine “looked at the coroner with determined eyes under that corrected brow of hers and swore that her sister had never seen Gatsby, that her sister was completely happy with her husband, that her sister had been into no mischief whatever. She convinced herself of it and cried into her handkerchief as if the very suggestion was more than she could endure.” Nick declares that Catherine “showed a surprising amount of character” in lying to the coroner—one of the moments that makes readers doubt Nick’s pious claims of honesty. But Nick is adhering to the patrician code that says aristocrats are above the law and must keep out of newspapers at all costs. And so “Wilson was reduced to a man ‘deranged by grief’ in order that the case might remain in its simplest form.” If Daisy and Tom looked like they were conspiring after Myrtle’s death, Nick colludes with that conspiracy, withholding evidence to keep the story from becoming a scandal. Given that Daisy is his second cousin, some might think that Nick chose to protect the honor of his family in covering up a double murder.
When Nick returns to West Egg he tries to locate Gatsby’s family to inform them of his death, but the only antecedent he can find is “the picture of Dan Cody, a token of forgotten violence staring down from the wall.” Gatsby’s father has seen the story in the newspapers, however, and soon Henry C. Gatz arrives at the house, bringing with him other forgotten tokens of pioneer violence, including a ragged old copy of Hopalong Cassidy that Gatsby had loved when he was a boy.
In the back of the book, the importance of time culminates: on the last flyleaf of the Western is printed the word “Schedule,” and the date “September 12th, 1906.” And underneath:
Rise from bed.....6:00 A.M.
Dumbbell exercise and wall-scaling.....6:15–6:30 "
Study electricity, etc.....7:15–8:15 "
Work.....8:30–4:30 P.M.
Baseball and sports.....4:30–5:00 "
Practice elocution, poise and how to attain it.....5:00–6:00 "
Study needed inventions.....7:00–9:00 "
GENERAL RESOLVES
No wasting time at Shafters or [a name, indecipherable]
No more smokeing or chewing
Bath every other day
Read one improving book or magazine per week
Save $5.00 [crossed out] $3.00 per week
Be better to parents
Gatsby’s schedule has garnered nearly as much attention as his green light. His determination to improve himself unites two favorite American mythologies, the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin and a dime-novel Western. Together they define ideals of American individualism. Fitzgerald carefully parallels Gatsby’s schedule for self-improvement with Franklin’s famous “scheme of employment” from his autobiography: Gatsby, too, awakens early, reminding himself to wash, to read, to work. But he does not try to improve the inner man; he forgets to ask Franklin’s daily questions: “What good shall I do this day?” and “What good have I done today?” The moral of the story is that there must be morals in the story. Nick, the man who prides himself on reserving all judgment, begins to see that judgments must be made.
“I come across this book by accident,” Gatz tells Nick, as he shows him the schedule. “It just shows you, don’t it?” Accidents keep showing us what we need to see, if we pay attention. Gatz is so impressed by his son’s industry that he “was reluctant to close the book, reading each item aloud and then looking eagerly at me. I think he rather expected me to copy down the list for my own use,” Nick remarks. “Gatsby’s life seemed to have had the same accidental quality as his death,” he adds in the Trimalchio drafts, suggesting that anyone who is self-made can be unmade too. Gatsby is a modern Faust, who makes a fortune and in the process loses what once would have been called his soul.
The distortion is not just of vision, but of visionaries. America was inventing a country that would be unable to distinguish wonder from wealth, while telling itself that every day, in every way, it was growing better and better.
In the end, initial reviews of The Great Gatsby were not so much negative as unseeing: Fitzgerald’s novel that had undone the facts also appeared to have been undone by them. Fitzgerald was left defensive and uncertain by the novel’s commercial failure and often obtuse reviews, although he was cheered by praise from writers he admired, including T. S. Eliot, Edith Wharton, and Gertrude Stein, who was one of the most acute of the novel’s early readers, telling Fitzgerald that he was “creating the contemporary world.” A few months after The Great Gatsby appeared, The New Yorker published a “suggested bookplate” for the library of F. Scott Fitzgerald: like William Rose Benét, the cartoonist Herb Roth also saw Fitzgerald scrawling skeletons across the New York sky.
The day after Gatsby appeared, Bunny Wilson wrote to Fitzgerald that the novel was “full of all sorts of happy touches,” but objecting to the “unpleasant” characters. They made the story “rather a bitter dose . . . Not that I don’t admire Gatsby and see the point of the whole thing, but you will admit that it keeps us inside the hyena cage.” John Bishop also concentrated on the novel’s resemblance to life: “Gatsby is a new character in fiction, and, as everyone is now saying, a most familiar one in life.” Edith Wharton focused on the role of tabloid news, writing to Fitzgerald that she admired the novel, but adding: “My present quarrel with you is only this: that to make Gatsby really Great, you ought to have given us his early career . . . instead of a short résumé of it. That would have situated him, & made his final tragedy a tragedy instead of a ‘fait divers’ for the morning papers.” Within a month of its publication, Fitzgerald was writing: “Gatsby was far from perfect in many ways but all in all it contains such prose as has never been written in America before. From that I take heart. From that I take heart and hope that some day I can combine the verve of Paradise, the unity of The Beautiful & Damned and the lyric quality of Gatsby, its esthetic soundness, into something worthy of [ . . . ] admiration.”
In May, Scott and Zelda returned to Paris, where Fitzgerald made the acquaintance of an aspiring young writer named Ernest Hemingway. Fitzgerald urged Perkins to publish Hemingway, and over the next months helped him edit The Sun Also Rises while also acting as his unofficial agent with Scribner’s, with whom Hemingway soon signed. Fitz and Hemingway went to Lyons to recover a broken-down car that the Fitzgeralds had abandoned on their journey back to Paris from Capri; the episode became one of the anecdotes in Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, written more than thirty years later, in which Fitzgerald is rendered as a pathetic drunk, a ridiculous hypochondriac, and a fool. At the time, however, Hemingway cheerfully wrote to Perkins of their excursion: “We had a great trip together . . . I’ve read his The Great Gatsby and I think it is an a
bsolutely first-rate book.” Hemingway’s memoir also seems to notice only when Fitzgerald was drinking, but Hemingway told Ezra Pound at the time that they had both drunk enormous quantities of wine, which is far more likely.
That Paris summer, Fitzgerald wrote in his ledger, consisted of “1000 parties and no work.” Later in the summer the Fitzgeralds returned to the Riviera with the Murphys and Dos Passos for a visit, after which Gerald Murphy wrote that they were much missed: “Most people are dull, without distinction and without value [ . . . but] you two belong so irrevocably to that rare race of people who are valuable.” Zelda wrote to Madeleine Boyd: “We went to Antibes to recuperate but all we recooped was drinking hours. Now, once again, the straight and narrow path goes winding and wobbling before us and Scott is working.” Back in Paris, they took a family picture holding hands with Scottie under their Christmas tree, smiling in a chorus kickline. Fitzgerald was toying with ideas for his next novel, about a boy who murders his mother, based on the Leopold–Loeb case. But what work he completed was commercial magazine fiction to pay the bills.
“The Rich Boy,” one of his finest stories, was finished in late 1925. It contains one of Fitzgerald’s most famous, and most misquoted, passages: “Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves.” These are not the words of a man in thrall to riches, but of one making a study of power and corruption.
The following year Gatsby was staged, to Fitzgerald’s pleasure (its success partially compensated for the failure of The Vegetable), and it was adapted into the first of four Hollywood film versions to date. The Fitzgeralds lived off the income from those adaptations and he made little progress on his new novel. He published another story collection, All the Sad Young Men, in February 1926, and dedicated it to the Lardners; it included “The Rich Boy” and three other classic stories that emerged from the gestation of Gatsby, “Winter Dreams,” “Absolution,” and “The Sensible Thing.” Around this time, twenty-six-year-old Zelda began to express an interest in resuming the ballet dancing she had loved as a girl. That spring they went to Juan-les-Pins, on the Riviera, where the usual Murphy ménage at Antibes was joined by Ernest Hemingway, his first wife Hadley, and Pauline Pfeiffer, who was well on her way to becoming his second wife. It was a summer, Zelda wrote to Max Perkins at the time, colored by a “sense of carnival and impending disaster.” Fitz wasn’t the only one who could make predictions.
The antics that had once been amusing, if sophomoric, were acquiring a vicious edge. One evening with the Murphys they met the dancer Isadora Duncan, who began flattering Scott; Zelda responded by flinging herself silently down the wide stone steps of the terrace. The Murphys thought it a miracle she wasn’t killed; Zelda rose a moment later, wiping blood from her knees and her dress. The year was, wrote Fitzgerald in his ledger, “Futile, shameful useless but the $30,000 rewards of 1924 work. Self disgust. Health gone.” Europe was not saving them. Fitzgerald’s drinking was accelerating as fast as their spending, and dissipation was becoming frighteningly literal: “he suddenly realized the meaning of the word ‘dissipate,’” Fitzgerald wrote in “Babylon Revisited” a few years later—“to dissipate into thin air; to make nothing out of something.”
On December 10, 1926, the Fitzgeralds sailed back to America to put the temptations of the Old World behind them. On board the SS Biancamano were Ludlow Fowler and his new wife, who came from Winnetka, Illinois, a few miles south of Lake Forest, the home of real Ginevra King and fictional Tom Buchanan, the place Fitzgerald had once thought “the most glamorous place in the world.” Zelda told their friend: “Now Ludlow, take it from an old souse like me—don’t let drinking get you in the position it’s gotten Scott if you want your marriage to be any good.” They sat at an uproarious table every night. Scott demanded, “Is there any man present who can honestly say he has never hit his wife in anger?” and then led a jocular discussion about the precise definition of anger. When they landed, Fowler provided his friend with a recommendation for a speakeasy, scrawling on his calling card, “Dear Adolph, Please let Mr. Fitzgerald have the privileges of your establishment.”
They found themselves, said Zelda, “back in America—further apart than ever before,” returning to a country that was falling into the vortex as fast as they were. The America they rediscovered was consumed by a restlessness that “approached hysteria,” wrote Fitzgerald. “The parties were bigger . . . The pace was faster . . . the shows were broader, the buildings were higher, the morals were looser, and the liquor was cheaper; but all these benefits did not really minister to much delight.” Everything was intensified, but the perpetual party was growing strained and frantic.
They arrived home just in time to catch the final chapter of an unfinished story. The previous year, America had been reminded of the Hall–Mills murders by a popular film called The Goose Woman, about a famous former opera singer who lost her singing voice while giving birth to an illegitimate son (why this medical mystery occurred is not explained). Bitter and resentful, she descends into alcoholism and a life of squalid poverty. When a murder is committed next door, she decides to put herself back in the spotlight; all the goose woman cares about is “seeing my name in print again.” The film was a big hit, its marketing campaign and reviews all depending on its use of the Hall–Mills case.
A year later a man named Arthur Riehl filed to annul his marriage to Louise Geist on the grounds of misrepresentation. Although such requests frequently graced the nation’s papers, this one was attention grabbing: Louise Geist had been the Halls’ maid, testifying before the 1922 grand jury, and her husband’s justification for requesting the annulment was his claim that Louise lied to him about her role in the murders. The story might have disappeared, but William Randolph Hearst had recently purchased the New York Daily Mirror, starting a circulation war with the Daily News. He had been searching for a headline-creating campaign, preferably an unsolved murder. Now, thanks to Riehl, Hearst had his story.
According to Riehl, Geist had told him that she warned Mrs. Hall that the rector intended to elope with Eleanor Mills. Geist and the Halls’ chauffeur had driven Mrs. Hall and her brother Willie to Buccleuch Park to confront the pair. The two servants had been paid five thousand dollars to keep quiet, Riehl alleged, adding that Geist had claimed Willie Stevens was a fine shot and kept a pistol in the Hall library. The Mirror ran the story for all it was worth, driving the national headlines for weeks. Louise Geist insisted Riehl’s story was nonsense, but the New Jersey governor ordered a review, and in July 1926 Frances Stevens Hall was arrested for the murders of her husband and Eleanor Mills. No one doubted the cynicism of Hearst’s motives, The New Yorker reporting that it was obvious Hearst had reopened the case only “to increase his paper’s circulation.”
In the four years since the botched investigation, most of what little evidence the state had acquired had been lost or damaged, but the new grand jury was made of sterner—or more imaginative—stuff than the last. They voted to indict Mrs. Hall, both her brothers, and their cousin Henry Carpender. All four pled not guilty and the papers went wild. The carnival mood rapidly returned to New Brunswick; locals again sold refreshments and souvenirs. The township brought in a special switchboard for the journalists wiring copy across America. More than three hundred reporters descended, including one named Damon Runyon, who would become famous for his stories of the New York underworld, featuring a gangster named “The Brain,” modeled closely on Arnold Rothstein. The trial lasted just under a month, during which time twelve million words went out over the wires, enough to fill 960 pages of newspapers, or make a shelf of books twenty-two feet long.
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her autopsy was ordered, and the abused corpses of Eleanor Mills and Edward Hall were exhumed once more. A further surprise awaited: Eleanor’s tongue and larynx had been cut out, which no one had noticed during any of the previous autopsies. The trial of Mrs. Hall and her two brothers began on November 3, 1926; Henry Carpender successfully petitioned to be tried separately at a later date. The evidence was circumstantial at best: Willie’s smudged fingerprint, which may have been found on the rector’s calling card (expert witnesses on both sides argued that it was and wasn’t his fingerprint), was no more persuasive than Riehl’s hearsay report of Mrs. Hall allegedly bribing his soon-to-be ex-wife.
The prosecution’s star witness, however, was none other than Mrs. Jane Gibson, Pig Woman. The whole story would be invented once more. Suffering from terminal cancer, Mrs. Gibson was carried into the courtroom on a hospital bed. She would not die until 1930, however, and was strong enough to testify; some say she melodramatically exaggerated her illness. Whatever the true state of her health, the redoubtable Pig Woman put on quite a show. Photographed by reporters from the gallery, she might have been a drunken woman on a stretcher, covered all in white with one hand dangling by her side. The whole country knew the woman’s name—it was the wrong name, but no one cared.
Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of The Great Gatsby Page 32