Careless People (2 page)

The problem with guessing ahead of everyone else is that events have yet to prove you right, and this is the wall of incomprehension into which Fitzgerald would run headlong when
The Great Gatsby
was published. Review after review called the book “superficial.” Blinded by the novel's resemblance to their moment, its first readers remained lost on the surface of Fitzgerald's tale, unable to fathom how deeply he had seen into the heart of his nation. Fitzgerald could sense that America was poised on the edge of a vast transformation, and wrote a novel bridging his moment and ours.
The Great Gatsby
made manifest precisely what Fitzgerald's contemporaries couldn't bear to see, and thus it is not only the Jazz Age novel par excellence, but also the harbinger of its decline and fall. The exuberant year of 1922, for all its fun and frolic, was in an important way the beginning of the end—almost before the Jazz Age got going in earnest. It was a season of changes, a time of turmoil and reinvention for all the participants. Their story would prove that if you make yourself up, you can be undone, as well: being self-made risks unraveling. “
Evenements
accumulated,” Zelda wrote later, looking back on their Great Neck days. “It might have been Nemesis incubating.”

The Fitzgeralds liked to be at the center of things, but when the center cannot hold, as Yeats observed in 1921, things fall apart. At the end of 1923 the play upon which Fitzgerald had been pinning his financial hopes flopped disastrously at its Atlantic City tryout; surveying the professional detritus of the previous twelve months, Fitzgerald realized “with a shock” how little he'd achieved amid all the fun. Just before they sailed for France,
he wrote Perkins confessing “how much I've—well, almost
deteriorated
in the three years since I finished
The Beautiful and Damned
.” Over the course of 1922 and 1923, he lamented, “I produced exactly
one
play,
half a dozen
short stories and three or four articles—an average of about
one hundred
words a day. If I'd spent this time reading or traveling or doing anything—even staying healthy—it'd be different but I spent it uselessly, neither in study nor in contemplation but only in drinking and raising hell generally.” Looking back on his twenty-sixth year, the year this book documents, Fitzgerald summarized their time on Long Island as “a comfortable but dangerous and deteriorating year at Great Neck. No ground under our feet.”

Going abroad was intended to ground them: Fitzgerald was bent on serious work at last, so they went to France to get away from the circus that their lives had become in New York, “because there were always too many people in the house,” as Zelda recalled. But while Fitzgerald was hard at work on the novel that meant so much to him, Zelda drifted toward someone else. Feeling neglected and bored, she became deeply attracted to a handsome French aviator named Edouard Jozan.

What Fitzgerald would call a “big crisis” in their marriage arrived in the midst of his work on the novel, a crisis that almost certainly found a way into its pages.
The Great Gatsby
began as a story of illusions and ended as a novel about disillusionment. “The novel finished,” Fitzgerald wrote in his ledger for September 1924. “Trouble passing away.” That may have been wishful thinking, however, for many years later he would write, “That September 1924, I knew something had happened that could never be repaired.” But September 1924 was also the month Fitzgerald finished the novel in which he believed passionately, a book he called “a wonder.” Critics have long discussed the role that Zelda's rumored adultery may have played in the novel's genesis, but that story, too, acquires new inflections when considered within the context of the various stories about faith, fidelity, and cheating that were everywhere around, and especially against the murders of the adulterous Hall and Mills.

Careless People
is an
histoire trouvé
about what was in the air as Fitzgerald wrote
The Great Gatsby
, including the unfolding of a remarkable tale of
murder, adultery, class resentment, mistaken identity, and the invention of romantic pasts. In telling the story of the autumn of 1922,
Careless People
also tells the story of an extended party, what Fitzgerald called their “Bacchic diversions, mild or fantastic.” In June 1922, a
New York Times
article condemned a worrying new phenomenon known as the cocktail party, at which “
inebriate” persons of both sexes gathered; soon “animosities develop, quarrels arise, and not infrequently the end of the ‘party' is some sorry form of the tragical. Somebody gets shot or stabbed, or private disgraces become public because of a death over which the Coroner's jury ponder long in an effort to determine whether it was ‘natural' or a murder.” Jazz Age parties reached their literary apotheosis with the publication of
The Great Gatsby
, which predicted the party would come crashing to an end.

But despite the fact that the party inevitably ends with violence, private disgrace, or even murder,
Gatsby
made us all desperate to be invited. And so this book becomes a detective story, too, looking for what's been left behind, the evidence of history. We are searching for the clues dropped by careless people.

One crucial clue that Fitzgerald left to
The Great Gatsby
was an outline list he scribbled in the back of a 1938 book by André Malraux called
Man's Hope
.
It is an old list now, barely legible, but we can still read the gray names, lightly scrawled in hard pencil. Spelled with Fitzgerald's usual approximation, it says:

I. Glamor of Rumsies + Hitchcoks

II. Ash Heaps. Memory of 125th. Gt Neck

III. Goddards. Dwanns Swopes

IV. A. Vegetable days in N.Y.
B. Memory of Ginevras Wedding

V. The meeting all an invention. Mary

VI. Bob Kerr's story. The 2nd Party.

VII. The Day in New York

VIII. The Murder (inv.)

IX. Funeral an invention

The outline at the back of
Man's Hope
recollects a few key sources for each of
Gatsby
's
nine chapters, and has been known to Fitzgerald scholars for decades, but it is never more than a footnote to discussions about the documentary sources for
Gatsby
,
offering a catalog of people and places that Fitzgerald knew.

In order to piece together the chaotic and inchoate world behind
Gatsby
,
I have taken the
Man's Hope
outline as my starting point, a springboard from which to dive into history.
Each of my nine chapters begins with Fitzgerald's corresponding note as its title; while explaining the meanings of the listed references, each of my chapters also draws on the chronological events of the Fitzgeralds' lives beginning on September 18, 1922, and is in conversation with its parallel chapter in
The Great Gatsby
. Over the years after
Gatsby
's publication, Fitzgerald cheerfully admitted many of his historical sources for the novel, including the real people upon whom he'd modeled Gatsby's gangster boss Meyer Wolfshiem, Daisy's golfing friend Jordan Baker, and Jay Gatsby himself, who borrowed some of the mannerisms and histories of actual people, including at least one bootlegger, whom Fitzgerald knew. None of these are included in the
Man's Hope
outline, but they needed to make their way into my story; and it will become clearer as my story progresses that, important as it is, the
Man's Hope
outline is also enigmatic and incomplete.

Nor did Fitzgerald ever suggest, in any documentary source, that the murders of Hall and Mills had anything to do with
The Great Gatsby
, and in the
Man's Hope
outline he might even seem to deny it. This is doubtless why the few scholars who noticed some compelling parallels between
The Great
Gatsby
and the Hall–Mills case didn't pursue those correspondences very far. The
Man's Hope
outline declares that the murder in
Gatsby
's
eighth chapter was “(inv.)”: invented. The meanings of “invention,” and its relationship to discovery, will be considered more closely throughout, especially in my eighth chapter. For now, suffice to say that a notorious double
murder might well have worked its way into Fitzgerald's mind, its details and themes resonating with his novel, without his even being aware of it. Nor did Fitzgerald necessarily believe that an artist ever fully apprehended his own material: “What one expresses in a work of art is the dark tragic destiny of being an instrument of something uncomprehended, incomprehensible, unknown,” he wrote later.

The problem with trying to think intelligently about the relationship between life and art is that it is so easy to think unintelligently about it, to make literal-minded, simplistic equations between fiction and reality. Such literalism is reductive and unimaginative, can be deeply tiresome, and often misses the point of fiction entirely. But nor can we simply eliminate life and history from the tale, as if they have nothing to do with the genesis of fiction. If at its best fiction can transform reality, that doesn't mean that its history has nothing left to teach us. Art does not shrink when it comes into contact with reality: it expands.

And most readers also remain stubbornly as interested in the facts about great authors as in their great books. The eminent critic H. L. Mencken would call
The Great Gatsby
“a glorified anecdote,” but it was Dr. Johnson who famously said, “Sir, the biographical part of literature is what I love most. Give us as many anecdotes as you can.”

When
The Great Gatsby
was published, Fitzgerald's friend Deems Taylor, the composer and journalist, wrote a letter at four o'clock in the morning saying he'd just finished
Gatsby
and was “dazzled” by it: “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.” Fitzgerald's art was so successful that its beauty has increasingly concealed the facts behind it. Some of them are lost to the passage of time, but there is another story to be told, about careless people in the autumn of 1922.

A
t 10:00
A.M.
on May 3, 1924, armed with seventeen pieces of luggage and a full set of
Encyclopedia Britannica
, F. Scott Fitzgerald, his wife Zelda, and their two-year-old daughter Scottie departed from Pier 58 on the North River in New York for Cherbourg, France,
on board the SS
Minnewaska
. The ship's brochure promised “richly decorated public rooms and staterooms” and a full orchestra; some cabins came with private sitting room and bath. There was no steerage; the
Minnewaska
was entirely first-class, which is how the Fitzgeralds preferred things. After four years, off and on, in New York, Scott and Zelda had tired of dissipating across Manhattan and Long Island Sound. They would leave that side of paradise for France, where Americans were rumored to live well on the strength of the postwar dollar.

When they boarded the
Minnewaska
,
Fitzgerald had with him a few draft chapters of his third novel. In the summer of 1922 he had written his editor, Max Perkins, his initial ideas about his next book: “Its locale will be the middle west and New York of 1885 I think. It will concern less superlative beauties than I run to usually & will be centered on a smaller period of time. It will have a catholic element.” But he was also working on a play and the high-paying magazine stories that (almost) supported his family in their luxurious lifestyle. And then there were the parties: an art deco world of kaleidoscopic cocktails in basement dives, rooftop nightclubs, and estates in the forested hills of Long Island.

In April 1924 Fitzgerald told Perkins: “much of what I wrote last summer was good but it was so interrupted that it was ragged & in approaching it from a new angle I've had to discard a lot of it.” The new angle most likely involved abandoning 1885 and the “catholic element,” and shifting to a
modern setting. It was time to put the devil and temptation behind him, and get back to work. He'd spent four months writing enough magazine stories to save seven thousand dollars, and he and Zelda were sailing for Europe, where he was going to write his new novel; it would be “purely creative work—not trashy imaginings as in my stories but the sustained imagination of a sincere yet radiant world,” “a consciously artistic achievement.” Leaving for Europe meant they'd “escaped from extravagance and clamor and from all the wild extremes among which we had dwelled for five hectic years,” he said later that year. “
We were going to the Old World to find a new rhythm for our lives, with a true conviction that we had left our old selves behind forever.” Their old selves still seemed in fine fettle on board the
Minnewaska
, however:
they drank champagne cocktails and had to apologize to an old lady they kept awake.

When they landed, they made their way south to the Riviera, ending up at St. Raphaël, which Scott described as “a red little town built close to the sea, with gay red-roofed houses and an air of repressed carnival about it; carnival that would venture forth into the streets before night.” They bought a car that they were assured was six horsepower—although “the age of the horses was not stated”—and in nearby Valescure found Villa Marie, clean and cool, on a hill overlooking the town. “It was what we had been looking for all along. There was a summerhouse and a sand pile and two bathrooms and roses for breakfast and a gardener,” who called Fitzgerald “milord.”

His existence having acquired this gratifyingly seigneurial tone for the bargain price of about eighty dollars a month, Fitzgerald settled down to serious work on his novel. With his neat stack of loose white paper in front of him on the table, a pile of freshly sharpened pencils ready, he began to remember the Long Island atmosphere of two years before—to bring its familiar material to life under unfamiliar azure skies.

At the Villa Marie, the breeze floated up from the blue-drenched sea, while her husband's artistic sensibilities “
rose in wild stimulation on the barbaric juxtapositions of the Mediterranean morning,” Zelda wrote later. Serrated terra-cotta cliffs stretched down to the water; twisted silver trees made pointed gestures among the dusty roses. A winding gravel drive
extended back out into the world, and a terrace of blue-and-white Moroccan tiles overlooked the sea. Lemon, olive, and pine trees mingled with the scent of roses in the air. They
drank Graves Kressmann at lunch, and got into political arguments with the English nurse.

While he composed, Fitzgerald tended to pace around the room, trying words and phrases aloud, impelled by the urgency of putting language into motion, as if the ideal words lurked in the corners, awaiting discovery. Most of the novel's earliest drafts have been lost, and Fitzgerald didn't date the subsequent ones, but the novel appears to have been composed roughly in sequence. As Fitzgerald imagined its opening scenes, he would not have found it difficult to summon the swampy heat of a New York summer two years earlier, while staring out over the baked-clay cliff tops of southern France.

Fitzgerald had always been a fast, extravagant writer, propelled by humor and his zest for words into shooting off in all directions. Now he was writing more carefully than ever before, sculpting prose out of a past so recent it was hardly past at all. “
My novel grows more and more extraordinary,” Scott wrote a friend. “I feel absolutely self-sufficient & I have a perfect hollow craving for loneliness, that has increased for three years in some arithmetical progression & I'm going to satisfy it at last.” His fierce appetite for the gorgeous was being nourished by his romantic surroundings; white palaces glittered over the water and glass doors opened over terraces to which they were loosely bound by a breeze blowing through, as he evoked the mansions of Long Island. Blue after blue stretched into the sea of the happy future. He would call his novel, he thought, “Among the Ash Heaps and Millionaires.”