It is at this point of silence that Nick names his world’s malaise: “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.” But again Nick keeps his judgments to himself, complicit in the lies and corruption he has just identified. He shakes Tom’s hand, saying it seems silly not to, and watches Tom go into a jewelry store to buy a pearl necklace, perhaps for Daisy, or perhaps for some other woman to dangle off a funeral bier as she’s carried drunkenly into the wrong house.
Nick has already discreetly planned Gatsby’s funeral: “I didn’t want it to be in the papers and draw a sightseeing crowd.” He succeeds in avoiding publicity so well that when the day of the funeral arrives, neither do any mourners. Jay Gatsby, the man who was defined by his guests, has no one to grieve over him but his father, his neighbor, and the one man who appears at Nick’s side by the grave, Owl-Eyes, who stares, amazed that no one has come: “‘Why, my God! they used to go there by the hundreds.’ He took off his glasses and wiped them again outside and in. ‘The poor son-of-a-bitch,’ he said.”
El Greco’s distorted vision presides over the novel’s ending, as Fitzgerald invokes the old master who painted because the spirits whispered madly in his head, seeing in the stars God’s careless splatters.
“I left my capacity for hoping on the little roads that led to Zelda’s sanitarium,” Fitzgerald wrote in his notebooks, but in 1938 he started trying to recapture it. That summer he sent a letter to Beatrice Dance, a woman with whom he’d had a brief affair in 1935, during the worst days of the crack-up. He was currently living on Malibu Beach, he told her:
I have a cottage on the Pacific which I gaze at morning and night with a not too wild surmise—my capacity for wonder has greatly diminished. And anyway it automatically stops whenever I cross the Mississippi River. I have a grand novel up my sleeve and I’d love to go to France and write it this summer. It would be short like “Gatsby” but the same in that it will have the transcendental approach, an attempt to show a man’s life through some passionately regarded segment of it. This letter was to have been about you but there is only the old you that I knew—knew very well I think—yet I always enjoyed the thrill of surprise when you made some new romantic gesture. Almost you always made all your dreams plausible—so often they quivered on the edge of fulfillment, but there were ranges of mountains higher than the Rockies in the way.
The letter could be addressed to young Jimmy Gatz from North Dakota, so reverberant is it with the language and sensibility of The Great Gatsby. The working title for the new transcendental book was The Last Tycoon, which Fitzgerald told Zelda would be “a novel à la Flaubert without ‘ideas’ but only people moved singly and in mass through what I hope are authentic moods. The resemblance is rather to Gatsby than to anything else I’ve written.”
And to Scottie he wrote: “I wish now I’d never relaxed or looked back—but said at the end of The Great Gatsby: ‘I’ve found my line—from now on this comes first. This is my immediate duty—without this I am nothing.’” To find his line again, he would return to the ground of his greatest work, the book that he knew was a masterpiece, even if no one else did, and wrest out of his “expiring talent” another magnificent novel.
For a year or more, Fitzgerald had been hearing echoes, trying to recapture his once-perfect pitch. He was reading constantly, piling up recently published books: Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’s The Yearling (it “fascinated me . . . just simply flows”), Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men (“praised all out of proportion to its merits”), John O’Hara’s Hope of Heaven (“he didn’t bite off anything to chew on. He just began chewing with nothing in his mouth”), and a new book, published in the United States for the first time the previous year, called The Trial, which he described to his friend John Biggs as “a fantastic novel by the Czech Franz Kafka which you may have to wait for but it is worth it.”
Fitzgerald had also read André Malraux’s Man’s Hope, an eyewitness account of the Spanish Civil War. He didn’t much care for it, preferring Malraux’s Man’s Fate, which he considered “the best individual novel of the last five years.” Man’s Hope was just “hasty journalism,” he said, “about as good as Ernest’s Spanish stuff.” (His erstwhile friend Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls was a novel Fitzgerald judged to have been written for the movies, “with all the profundity of Rebecca.”)
But one day between 1938 and 1940 it was Man’s Hope that Fitzgerald picked up: perhaps he liked what its title suggested. Maybe, with memory and imagination, he could recapture the past and there find again his art, “a delicate thing—mine is so scarred and buffeted that I am amazed that at times it still runs clear.” He opened the book at the back cover, and on the last flyleaf he printed a schedule, without a date. And underneath:
It is a schedule for self-improvement, a short autobiography, a love letter to the past. It is a programmatic attempt to recover the self-made man who had been unmade by fate, a to-do list for retrieving all he had lost by the man who loved lists. He did not write it on the last flyleaf of Hopalong Cassidy, but on the last flyleaf of Man’s Hope. Sometimes life provides better images than imagination, and Fitzgerald’s life had always been magically graced by symbols. “I come across this book by accident,” as Henry Gatz told Nick. “It just shows you, don’t it?” We come across this book by accident, and it just shows us—without explaining to us what we should think about what it shows.
In 1939 Fitzgerald began work on The Last Tycoon in earnest. In late 1940 he would say that he had not had a drink in over a year, but his past was strewn with false claims and false starts. As late as February 1939 he had been hospitalized for what he still called going on a bat, but he was doing his best, fighting to resurrect his art. The past was all around him: “We were the great believers,” he wrote in his 1939 essay, “My Generation.” Ginevra King came to Hollywood; predictably Fitzgerald got drunk in order to brave the reunion and it did not go well. In October he wrote to Zelda about a party he’d attended: “A lot of the past came into that party. Fay Wray, whose husband John Monk Saunders committed suicide two months ago; Deems Taylor whom I haven’t seen twice since the days of the Swopes . . .”
By the autumn of 1940 he was telling Zelda, “I am deep in the novel, living in it, and it makes me happy.” The Last Tycoon would be a “constructed novel like Gatsby, with passages of poetic prose when it fits the action, but no ruminations or side-shows like Tender. Everything must contribute to the dramatic movement. It’s odd that my old talent for the short story vanished. It was partly that times changed, editors changed, but part of it was tied up somehow with you and me—the happy ending.”
The happy ending had dissipated into the vanished past, but tragedy was well within Scott Fitzgerald’s expertise, and now perhaps he could bring to his writing a hard-earned wisdom; if the glitter had worn off his bright cleverness, it was showing the steel of his intelligence beneath. “Twenty years ago ‘This Side of Paradise’ was a best seller,” he wrote Zelda in 1940. “Ten years ago Paris was having almost its last great American season but we had quit the gay parade and you were gone to Switzerland. Five years ago I had my first bad stroke of illness and went to Asheville. Cards began falling badly for us much too early,” he concluded, but “the world has certainly caught up in the last four weeks.” He hoped she was not too surrounded by the “war talk” that was engulfing America.
The novel was coming, slowly but surely. “I am digging it out of myself like uranium—one ounce to the cubic ton of rejected ideas.” In late November he told Bunny Wilson: “I think my novel is good. I’ve written it with difficulty . . . I am trying a little harder than I ever have to be exact and honest emotionally.” In December 1940 he wrote to Zelda: “Everything is my novel now—it has become of absorbing inte
rest. I hope I’ll be able to finish it by February.”
On December 15 Fitzgerald sent a letter to Scottie explaining that he had recently had heart trouble, thanks to twenty-five years of cigarettes. “You have got two beautiful bad examples of parents. Just do everything we didn’t do and you will be perfectly safe.” He had, in fact, had a minor heart attack and was in bed recuperating. He urged her to be “sweet” to Zelda over Christmas, “despite her early Chaldean rune-worship which she will undoubtedly inflict on you. Her letters are tragically brilliant on all matters except those of central importance,” he added. “How strange to have failed as a social creature—even criminals do not fail that way—they are the law’s ‘Loyal Opposition,’ so to speak. But the insane are always mere guests on earth, eternal strangers carrying around broken decalogues that they cannot read.”
It was the last letter he would write to his daughter. On December 21, 1940, Scott Fitzgerald died suddenly of occlusive coronary arteriosclerosis in California, while sitting in an armchair at Sheilah Graham’s apartment, reading about the Princeton football team and commenting on the reporter’s prose in the margins. He was forty-four years old. In August Fitzgerald had received what would be his last royalty statement, reporting the sale of nine copies of Tender Is the Night and seven copies of The Great Gatsby. The Great Gatsby had earned a total of $2.10 in royalties that year; Fitzgerald had not sold a single book outside the United States in the last twelve months of his life, and all of his books combined had earned him an unlucky total of $13.13. Life continued to shower him with symbols, right up to the bitter end.
Fitzgerald’s body was put on view at a mortuary in a seedy Los Angeles neighborhood, in the William Wordsworth Room. “Except for one bouquet of flowers and a few empty chairs, there was nothing to keep him company,” wrote one of the few reporters who went. “I never saw a sadder [scene] than the end of the father of all the sad young men.” John O’Hara declared, “Scott should have been killed in a Bugatti in the south of France, and not to have died of neglect in Hollywood, a prematurely old little man haunting bookstores unrecognized.” Gerald Murphy wrote of his shock: “I thought of him as imperishable, somehow.” The New York Times regarded Fitzgerald as such a minor writer that they didn’t bother getting the facts right, describing The Beautiful and Damned as a short story. “With the skill of a reporter and ability of an artist he captured the essence of a period when flappers and gin and ‘the beautiful and damned’ were the symbols of the carefree madness of an age,” the Times’s obituary said, before concluding that “the promise of his brilliant career was never fulfilled.” The next day a brief editorial agreed: The Great Gatsby “was not a book for the ages, but it caught superbly the spirit of a decade . . . here was real talent which never fully bloomed.”
Notified of Scott’s sudden death, Zelda gave confused instructions and collapsed. Nineteen-year-old Scottie, “tragic and bewildered,” said she had “thought for so long that every day he would die for some reason.” Fitzgerald’s original will, written during the days of grand extravagance, had left the seigneurial instructions that he be buried “in accordance with my station.” Later, he’d amended the request to “the cheapest funeral . . . without undue ostentation or unnecessary expense.”
Fitzgerald’s body was sent east, to be buried with his father in Rockville, Maryland, but St. Mary’s Church refused him burial. Scottie believed it was because his books were on a proscribed list at the time of his death, but in fact it was because he hadn’t received last rites. One of the mourners was Andrew Turnbull, a Maryland friend who would later write Fitzgerald’s biography and edit the first collection of his letters. Turnbull described the funeral as “a meaningless occasion, having no apparent connection with the man, save as one of life’s grim jokes . . . It was the sort of envoi a great dramatist might attach to the end of a play.” “Afterward,” he finished, “we drove to the cemetery in the rain.”
The whole day, in fact, uncannily echoed the funeral Fitzgerald had invented in 1924: “About five o’clock our procession of three cars reached the cemetery and stopped in a thick drizzle beside the gate—first a motor hearse, horribly black and wet, then Mr. Gatz and the minister and I in the limousine, and, a little later, four or five servants and the postman from West Egg in Gatsby’s station wagon, all wet to the skin. As we started through the gate into the cemetery I heard a car stop and then the sound of someone splashing after us over the soggy ground,” coming to offer an elegy.
Fitzgerald’s old friend and drinking companion Dorothy Parker had been one of the few people to view his body in Los Angeles; she supposedly echoed the epitaph he bestowed upon his most famous character: “The poor son of a bitch.” If she had gone east for the funeral, Parker might well also have repeated Owl-Eyes’s other exclamation, “Why, my God! they used to go there by the hundreds.” Fitzgerald’s burial service was attended by about twenty people; Zelda was not permitted by her doctors to go, and only a few of the old crowd of friends made it. Gerald and Sara Murphy, Max Perkins and his wife, the Obers, Ludlow Fowler, Fitzgerald’s cousin Cecilia Taylor, John Biggs, and a few other friends were the only mourners. Fitzgerald was buried at Rockville Union Cemetery on December 27, 1940, eulogized by an Episcopalian rector who made the extraordinary (and rarely reported) decision to make public his disgust for the man he was burying: “The only reason I agreed to give the service, was to get the body in the ground. He was a no-good, drunken bum, and the world was well rid of him.”
Zelda wrote to Max Perkins of her grief at realizing they wouldn’t “share again the happy possibility aspirational promise that he always seemed buoyed with,” their mutual loss of Fitzgerald’s courage and faith and devotion. A year earlier, she had unwittingly offered her own elegy to Scott, only slightly premature. “Dearest: I am always grateful to all the loyalties you gave me, and I am always loyal to the concepts that held us together so long: the belief that life is tragic, that man’s spiritual reward is the keeping of his faith: that we shouldn’t hurt each other. And I love, always your fine writing talent, your tolerance and generosity; and all your happy endowments. Nothing could have survived our life.”
As he prepares to leave the East, Nick finds that he can’t shake off his dreams of Gatsby’s revels: “those gleaming, dazzling parties of his were with me so vividly that I could still hear the music and the laughter faint and incessant from his garden and the cars going up and down his drive. One night I did hear a material car there and saw its lights stop at his front steps. But I didn’t investigate. Probably it was some final guest who had been away at the ends of the earth and didn’t know that the party was over.”
After seeing the final material trace of Gatsby’s accidental parties, Nick walks over to Gatsby’s house on his last night, looking “at that huge incoherent failure of a house once more.” He erases some obscene graffiti scrawled on the steps (hinting perhaps at Nick’s persistent need to idealize) and walks down to the beach for his last view of Long Island Sound. And then Fitzgerald offers his great meditation on the lost paradise of America:
Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes—a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.
And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this
blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther . . . And one fine morning—
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
The ninth chapter of The Great Gatsby is Fitzgerald’s ninth symphony, his ode to lost joy. Before he died, Fitzgerald wrote to Scottie about what it meant to appreciate beauty: “The Grecian Urn is unbearably beautiful with every syllable as inevitable as the notes in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony or it’s just something you don’t understand. It is what it is because an extraordinary genius paused at that point in history and touched it. I suppose I’ve read it a hundred times. About the tenth time I began to know what it was about, and caught the chime in it and the exquisite inner mechanics.” In the novel’s final words, the deep-focus economy of Fitzgerald’s prose and characterization suddenly widens from the particular details of the people we have been watching, and gathers a generalizing force that sweeps all of America before it.
Originally Fitzgerald had written this valedictory passage to end Chapter One, when Nick stands on the edge of his lawn and watches Gatsby measure the heavens. Reading the modulations of the edited draft is like hearing a familiar song in a different key: “And as I sat there brooding on the old unknown world I too held my breath and waited, until I could feel the very motion of the continent America as it turned through the dark hours—my own blue lawn and the tall incandescent city on the water and beyond that the dark fields of the republic rolling on under the night.” The original first chapter finished there, until Fitzgerald moved the passage to the end of the novel, erased the towering incandescent city in the distance, and added in his first draft the idea that Gatsby had lost his dream “long before, not here but westward, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.” Having left the dream of hope and progress behind him in the West, Gatsby finds himself stranded on the wrong side of Eden, disinherited from the promise of America.
Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of The Great Gatsby Page 35