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

by Churchwell, Sarah

  Ultimately Fitzgerald chose not to use the word “America” at all in the novel’s concluding passage. America remains an emblem—not quite a metaphor, but a symbol, a figure, the fact as colossal as a continent—and what it represents is not a specific nation but a human capacity, our capacity for hope, for wonder, for discovery. It represents the corruption of that capacity into a faith in the material world, rather than the ideal one. And it reminds us, too, of our careless habit of losing our paradises.

  Gatsby’s destiny is manifest, but he is also subject to the amnesias and ignorances that destroy the American experiment. Murder happens casually and is forgotten, the story of America told through tokens of forgotten violence. Gatsby does not understand that the American romance with the West is over. The nation’s hope has been exhausted, its promise glimpsed and left forever unrealized. There will be no triumph of hope any more than there will be a triumph of the will. The great Emersonian dream of self-reliance does not survive its encounter with the forces of society and destiny in the shape of the carelessness of the rich. The disillusionment of this novel lies not in its disappointment in romantic love, but in the outcome of our romance with America.

  America, too, is a blend of fact and fiction, a story told out of the chaotic facts of an uncertain land, in which the question of who is guilty will never be determined. We never find out who did it, because no one and everyone is to blame, everyone is equally guilty. The rich did it, the poor did it, it’s been a case of mistaken identity all along, America mistaking itself for something it may not be—or hasn’t yet become.

  The future continues to recede before us, as we are borne back into the past to find there, awaiting us, our present: recklessness and greed, waste and profligacy, trial by newspaper and manipulative media moguls, irresponsible bankers and bad investments, cronyism and corruption, media scandals and Ponzi schemes, invented celebrities and frauds, violence and cynicism, epidemic materialism and a frantic search for the values we keep losing.

  Clairvoyance does not mean prophecy: it means seeing clear. Trying to see America clear, we stand amidst the debris, looking at the old hopes of the vagrant dead as they scatter across our tattered Eden.

  ENVOI:

  THE ORGASTIC FUTURE

  After Scott Fitzgerald’s sudden death, Edmund Wilson, who by 1940 had become one of America’s most influential literary critics, decided that although Fitzgerald had not lived long enough to finish The Last Tycoon, it merited publication, and took on the task of editing it. To add length and gravitas to his 1941 volume, he included The Great Gatsby, and a reassessment began.

  Four years later, Wilson published The Crack-Up and Other Essays, a collection of Fitzgerald’s essays, letters, and selections from his notebooks. Other eminent critics began arguing for Fitzgerald’s significance. The Great Gatsby, declared the critic Lionel Trilling, remained “as fresh as when it first appeared; it has even gained in weight and relevance, which can be said of very few American books of its time.” Although it was a “record of contemporary manners,” this had not dated the novel, thanks to the “specifically intellectual courage” that Fitzgerald brought to it. Trilling compared Fitzgerald to the French novelists of the nineteenth century, to the English Romantic poets, and to Goethe, comparisons he insisted were legitimate, although he knew they would surprise his readers. Most important was Fitzgerald’s voice, in which could be heard, said Trilling, “the tenderness toward human desire that modifies a true firmness of moral judgment. It is,” he added, the “ideal voice of the novelist.”

  In 1945 Malcolm Cowley wrote, “Fitzgerald had the sense of living in history,” trying to “catch the color of every passing year”; he cultivated a “double vision,” that let him simultaneously celebrate glamor and view it from the outside, a “little Midwestern boy with his nose to the glass.” “It is a difficult technical problem to tell the truth in fiction,” Cowley added, but Fitzgerald “had both the technique and the need for being honest.” A year later John Berryman called Gatsby a masterpiece, and Trilling published his introduction to a new edition of Gatsby, declaring, “Fitzgerald is now beginning to take his place in our literary tradition.” A renaissance had begun.

  “I always feel that Daddy was the key-note and prophet of his generation and deserves remembrance as such,” Zelda told Scottie. In 1941 she published a formal tribute to Scott, lamenting that their era had been “lost in its platonic sources.” Scott had bestowed upon their years a dignity and grace that rescued it from gaudiness and imprudence, and when life became more desperate he uplifted them all with his instinctive gift for appreciation. As always, her memories were awash in music: life now seemed orchestrated in “waltz time,” as people sought the consolation of fairy tales. Looking back, she thought that perhaps their gleaming youth had not been dominated by the waltz after all, but rather by “march time,” a martial beat that produced something more tragic, more vital, and more spiritual than the sentimental, nostalgic sounds she now heard. Fitzgerald’s writing had wistfully registered the loss of their golden aspirations, the hopes of an age more valiant and more defiant than the one she now saw.

  “In retrospect,” she wrote to Harold Ober, “it seems as if he was always planning happinesses for Scottie, and for me. Books to read—places to go. Life seemed so promissory when he was around.” Over the years after Scott’s death, Zelda continued to move in and out of Highland Hospital, trying to live at home with her mother in Montgomery and then returning to the medical support of the hospital. She worked intermittently on an autobiographical novel she never finished, Caesar’s Things, and painted. Her religious zeal intensified, and she wrote letters to old friends hoping for their salvation.

  In March 1948 Zelda was in her room on the top floor of Highland Hospital, locked in at night with the other patients. A fire began in the kitchen below, and blazed through the whole building, killing nine women who could not be rescued in time. Zelda’s body was burned beyond recognition, identified only by a slipper that survived the flames. She was forty-seven years old.

  Over the years several “true crime” books about the murders of Hall and Mills were published. One book argued that the Ku Klux Klan committed the murders; another that the culprit was Willie Stevens, protecting the honor of his family, and that his sister was covering up for him. A former judge told a New York Times reporter in 1992 that he was “confident that the Stevens family were responsible for the murders” of Hall and Mills. “The reason the prosecution couldn’t win the trial was because the case wasn’t well tried. They had lousy witnesses and the defense was excellent.” The New Brunswick district attorney’s office continues to give talks about the case, suggesting that the Stevens family committed the crimes. But no new evidence has ever come to light and the mystery of who murdered Eleanor Mills and Edward Hall was never solved.

  “Fitzgerald was a better just plain writer than all of us put together. Just words writing,” John O’Hara told John Steinbeck. The first biography of Fitzgerald, Arthur Mizener’s The Far Side of Paradise, appeared in the same year as the first full-length critical study, Alfred Kazin’s F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Man and His Work, and just after Budd Schulberg’s roman à clef about his time with Fitzgerald in Hollywood at the end of his life, The Disenchanted (1950). In 1949 Hollywood released a film version of Gatsby starring Alan Ladd, a film noir in which Jordan Baker reforms and marries Nick, Tom Buchanan has a change of heart and tries to warn Gatsby that Wilson is on his way to shoot him, and Gatsby delivers a remarkably incoherent speech before he is shot, saying that he’s going to turn himself in as a moral exemplum for lost young men: “What’s going to happen to kids like Jimmy Gatz if guys like me don’t tell them we’re wrong?”

  Scottie Fitzgerald donated all of her parents’ papers in her possession, which she had steadfastly refused to sell or scatter, to Princeton University in 1950. The following year Malcolm Cowley edited a revised Tender Is the Night, rearranging the novel’s thr
ee sections into chronological order, a decision prompted by some tinkering Fitzgerald had been doing with the novel before he died, trying to account for its critical failure. Cowley also published a new edition of Fitzgerald’s stories, including some that had never been collected before. The Great Gatsby had by now become required reading in many American schools, and the subject of theses, dissertations, and journal articles; as early as 1952, readers were seeing in Gatsby a study of carelessness. The legend of Scott Fitzgerald continued to grow, entangling itself with ideas about Gatsby and with another idea that was taking root over the same period, called the American Dream, an idea that America grabbed hold of in 1931, the same year that it named “The Star-Spangled Banner” its national anthem.

  Before 1931, the phrase “American Dream” as we know it did not exist, but that year a popular historian named James Truslow Adams wrote a book called The Epic of America, which spoke of “the American dream of a better, richer and happier life for all our citizens of every rank, which is the greatest contribution we have made to the thought and welfare of the world. That dream or hope has been present from the start. Ever since we became an independent nation, each generation has seen an uprising of ordinary Americans to save that dream from the forces that appear to be overwhelming it.” Adams’s book sparked a great national debate in the early years of the Great Depression about the promise of America, and the idea of the American Dream has become as familiar as the novel that is held to exemplify it, but actually helped prophesy it into existence.

  It is not a coincidence that The Great Gatsby began to be widely hailed as a masterpiece in America during the 1950s, as the American dream took hold once more, and the nation was once again absorbed in chasing the green light of economic and material success.

  The Great Gatsby is a stranger novel than some of the bromides about it admit. Dig deep and you will not find the perfection that some sigh about—but you will find a nearly incorruptible style purifying and controlling the incoherence of Fitzgerald’s raw material. The novel’s small imperfections do not disappoint for long: it is so rich and unexpected, so slight and so unfathomable, so much a story of its moment and yet so much a story of ours.

  It is a reckoning of the nation’s hopes and its failures, and Scott Fitzgerald has long been hailed as one of America’s most important, and best-loved, writers. In addition to that remarkable voice, his uncanny prescience has been recognized and celebrated. But there are still aspects of his faculty for guessing right that we have yet to see, such as that in his 1929 story “The Swimmers,” Fitzgerald predicted the metaphor of the “99 percent” that has so dominated recent conversations about economic inequality. Two years earlier Fitzgerald told a World reporter that America would face a great “national testing” in the near future: “The idea that we’re the greatest people in the world because we have the most money in the world is ridiculous. Wait until this wave of prosperity is over! Wait ten or fifteen years! Wait until the next war on the Pacific, or against some European combination! . . . The next fifteen years will show how much resistance there is in the American race.” It was 1927, and he was right again. “There has never been an American tragedy,” Fitzgerald ended. “There have only been great failures.”

  What Fitzgerald once called “the opportunistic memory” of Americans abounds in popular readings of The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald’s first readers could see only one half of the meaning of the book, its entanglement with the facts and contexts of the day, and were blind to its transcendent meanings. We tend now to focus on those universal meanings, letting our myths and misapprehensions about the 1920s take the place of facts about Fitzgerald’s world. Each moment mistakes the part for the whole, seeing only one side of his book, the other side obscured by the darkness of the era’s own blind spots, the luster of the moon half-hidden by the shadows of the earth.

  But Fitzgerald’s genius was in seeing it whole, in having it both ways, which is what fiction is for: the eternal as if, the world suspended in a conditional mood, awaiting its intricate and indeterminate destiny.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book began in 2009, when I told my agent, Peter Robinson, that I wanted to write about Scott Fitzgerald and The Great Gatsby, and that I thought there was more to say about its relation to a crazy, unsolved murder mystery from 1922. It is largely thanks to Peter that an actual book has emerged, many entertaining and searching conversations later, from that amorphous concept, and I am deeply grateful for his unwavering belief in this idea, his material assistance in bringing it to life, and his friendship.

  This was not a straightforward book to write, or to research, and I have been extremely fortunate in the support I have had during the years I worked on it. In addition to Peter’s insights and suggestions, the book benefited tremendously from not one but two brilliant editors. Lennie Goodings at Virago in London and Ann Godoff at The Penguin Press in New York both understood from the outset what I was trying to do, and offered wise, perceptive counsel that helped immensely in shaping my resistant material into something that more closely resembled the apparition I’d had in my head. If I have done something better than I am capable of, it is largely thanks to these three. My thanks to Zoe Gullen at Virago and Benjamin Platt at The Penguin Press for their unstinting help with extremely complicated permissions and copy editing, and to everyone at Virago and The Penguin Press for their intelligence and enthusiasm in helping us produce the book we all wanted to publish. Special thanks are also due to Melanie Jackson for representing the book so superbly in the United States.

  Many friends also offered brilliance, energy, and that most precious commodity of all, their time, in reading drafts and talking ideas over. I am immensely grateful to Heather Brooke, Tamsin Todd Defriez, Natalie Haynes, David Miller, John Mitchinson, Lyndsey Stonebridge, and Dana Wildman, for reading so carefully and for so many sparkling conversations, and especially to Helen Brocklebank, who read draft after draft, talked over every detail with me, and never once threw a chapter at my head: our conversations solved many thorny problems, and always raised flagging spirits. Special thanks to Nicholas Pierpan, who gave the book a ruthlessly painstaking reading from which it benefitted greatly, and to Anne Margaret Daniel, who unsparingly offered not only her time, but also her considerable expertise on the Fitzgeralds and Gatsby, as well as detailed notes on an enormous first draft—not to mention a home in the Village for my many research trips to Princeton and New York, and an always interested ear at the end of a long day in the archives. James Pethica offered the suggestions of an experienced biographer, and helped me track down the answers to several difficult questions. Thanks to Nancy Allen, for chauffeuring me around Great Neck one beautiful July day while I took photographs, and to Ellen and Bill Allen for their hospitality on Long Island, and for sharing stories about prohibition. Professor Steven Goldleaf generously shared his research into the topography of Gatsby, while offering me an expert guided tour around Queens and Great Neck, while I took more photographs. David Miller read an early draft with the working title “The Dying Fall,” and suggested the infinitely superior Careless People, which has been the name of this book ever since. Thanks to Sadaf Fahim-Hashemi for her astute, scrupulous help compiling and fact-checking the bibliography, endnotes, and images. Thanks also to the staff and librarians at the University of Pennsylvania, which houses the Burton Rascoe papers, and the staff at the Huntington Library, particularly to Molly Gipson for her help in tracking down Fitzgerald references. Every Fitzgerald scholar relies especially upon the wonderful librarians who care for the Fitzgerald archive at Princeton University; I am particularly grateful to AnnaLee Pauls for her help with reproductions and other tricky aspects of long-distance research, and to Charles E. Greene and Ben Primer for their help and generosity with permissions. I am grateful to the Fitzgerald Estate, Princeton University, the University of Pennsylvania, the Huntington Library, Judith Rascoe, and the Dorothy Parker Estate for permission to reproduce the var
ious images and quotations in these pages. The New-York Historical Society has a fascinating collection of speakeasy and bootleggers’ cards, as well as restaurant and hotel menus from the 1920s, and the New York Public Library’s collection of Town Topics was a treasure trove. Many newspapers from 1922 are now available digitally, including via the New York Times archive and the wonderful Library of Congress Web site, Chronicling America, both of which were immensely helpful in researching this book. Some alterations have been made between the U.S. and the UK editions in order to comply with U.S. copyright restrictions.

  I was fortunate to be invited to share my research and developing ideas at numerous lectures, seminars, and conferences around the UK, United States, and Europe while I was writing. My thanks for their enthusiastic support especially to the brilliant guests at Julia Hobsbawm’s annual Names Not Numbers conference, who made me trust that this might indeed be more than a book about Gatsby, and to Bruno Giussani for the invitation to speak at a TED Salon in London in 2010. Thanks also to audiences at Birkbeck, Birmingham, Cambridge, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Liverpool, Nottingham, St. Anne’s College Oxford, Plymouth, Portsmouth, Sheffield, Southbank Centre London, Southampton, UEA Norwich and UEA London, the University of Southern California, Wymondham College, and John Cabot University, Rome. I am grateful to UEA for the financial support it provided for research trips, and to the friends there who have supported my work on the book in other ways, especially John, Lyndsey, Yvonne, and Jenni. This book is for Wyndham, who heartened me, and it, every day, and who will see how the blue of Arcadia found its way into these pages.