Careless People (25 page)

“Sheik”—after Rudolph Valentino's immensely popular film character—was one of the most popular American slang terms of the early 1920s for a playboy or “gigolo” (a word first introduced to English in 1922). Listening to the song, Nick feels relieved that he has “no girl whose disembodied face floated along the dark cornices and blinding signs” to haunt him: without any inconvenient promises or illusions curbing his behavior, he kisses Jordan.

Nick is not oleaginous enough to be called a sheik, but his treatment of women is certainly opportunistic. There is a girl in the Midwest under the illusion that they might be engaged, and that summer he has an “affair” with a girl in Jersey City whose brother makes it clear he thinks Nick is treating her badly. Jordan's aunt considers Nick “an ill-intentioned young man,” and she may be right. Nick is with Jordan that night from sunset until 2:00
A.M.
, which is when he tells us he returned to Great Neck at the beginning of the next chapter. Cabs had been famous ever since
Madame Bovary
for
the privacy they afforded for what Jordan calls “amour”; perhaps Nick seized his chance. Fitzgerald doesn't say.

According to the
Man's Hope
outline, the inspiration for Jordan's story of her “white girlhood” with Daisy in Louisville that ends this chapter was a wedding Fitzgerald never attended. In his scrapbook he preserved a wedding invitation, captioned “
THE END OF A ONCE POIGNANT STORY
.” It came from his first love, Ginevra King, a wealthy young woman from Lake Forest, outside Chicago, and a famous debutante whose father owned a string of polo ponies. Tom Buchanan will hail from the same affluent town, his string of polo ponies measuring his vast wealth. Ginevra rejected Fitzgerald before he met Zelda; his conviction that she'd discarded him because he was poor was later confirmed, he thought, by her engagement to an equally wealthy young man from her own circle. Ginevra married on September 4, 1918. Three days later Fitzgerald noted in his journal, “
Fell in love on the 7th,” with Zelda.

Ginevra King had been known as one of the “Big Four” debutantes in prewar Chicago. One of the other four was her close friend Edith Cummings, who was becoming a famous golfer; her matches had made headlines by the summer of 1922 and she won the U.S. Women's Amateur title in 1923. Dubbed “The Fairway Flapper” by the press, Cummings would be the first sportswoman on the cover of
Time
magazine in the summer of 1924—just as Fitzgerald was creating her copy. In a letter to Max Perkins as he finished
Gatsby
, Fitzgerald explained: “
Jordan of course was a great idea (perhaps you know it's Edith Cummings) but she fades out.” And Ginevra King became one of the prototypes for Daisy Buchanan.

Gatsby thinks that Daisy rejected him because he was poor—and perhaps he's right: the $350,000 strand of pearls that Tom gives Daisy as a wedding gift is not an incidental detail. Jordan tells Nick enough to make it clear that Daisy did care, in her careless way, for Gatsby. Her wild plans to elope and drunkenness just before her wedding show that she was not indifferent to him. But in the end she marries Tom “without so much as a shiver,” and when Nick talks with her three years later in her garden he registers her
“basic insincerity”: “I waited, and sure enough, in a moment she looked at me with an absolute smirk on her lovely face as if she had asserted her membership in a rather distinguished secret society to which she and Tom belonged.”

Before she inspired Daisy, Ginevra King had inspired another flapper
belle dame sans merci
in Fitzgerald's fiction. Just as he and Zelda left St. Paul in September 1922, Scott finished “Winter Dreams,” which would be published that December. Fitzgerald would later call this story a “sort of 1st draft of the Gatsby idea”; it shows his deepening understanding of the poignancy of loss and its artistic power, a personal loss that becomes an aesthetic gain.

A poor young man, Dexter Green, who is casually working on a golf course as a caddy, falls in love with a beautiful, wealthy, hollow young woman named Judy Jones. Resenting her assumption of superiority, he is spurred to ambition. Dexter grows prosperous from a specialist cleaning service for the wealthy, symbolically hinting that he takes care of their dirty laundry, a legal business anticipating Gatsby's shadier underworld dealings. Hardworking Dexter understands that “carelessness was for his children,” for carelessness “required more confidence than to be careful.” Judy toys with Dexter before rejecting him to marry a richer man; years later he hears that her husband drinks and is unfaithful, and she has lost her looks. For Dexter, Judy's degradation means the world has lost its promise of beauty and glory.

In the story Judy's waning appeal is Dexter's tragedy, not her own. Her squandered promise symbolizes Dexter's lost illusions, and his frightening revelation that he will never feel so intensely again. “Winter Dreams” closes with Dexter's realization that the loss of love is much easier to bear than the loss of illusions: “
Even the grief he could have borne was left behind in the country of illusion, of youth, of the richness of life, where his winter dreams had flourished.”

A dozen years later, in his lovely Jazz Age reminiscence “My Lost City,” Fitzgerald wrote of the moment of shocking recognition that a dream
realized is a dream destroyed: only deferral and frustration can keep it alive. He dates the realization between “trying to disrobe” at the
Scandals
in 1921 and punching a policeman in 1923. Sometime in that period of trafficking in scandal, he discovered that he would never be so happy again, that, as Zelda said, you can't be swept off your feet indefinitely. “
At last we were one with New York, pulling it after us through every portal,” Fitzgerald wrote:

Even now I go into many flats with the sense that I have been there before or in the one above or below—was it the night I tried to disrobe in the Scandals, or the night when (as I read with astonishment in the paper next morning) “Fitzgerald Knocks Officer This Side of Paradise?” Successful scrapping not being among my accomplishments, I tried in vain to reconstruct the sequence of events which led up to this denouement in Webster Hall. And lastly from that period I remember riding in a taxi one afternoon between very tall buildings under a mauve and rosy sky; I began to bawl because I had everything I wanted and knew I would never be so happy again.

He was right: happiness was no sooner grasped than it began to dissolve. He would never recover it fully again. Fitzgerald was driven by desire, he came to see, “
because as a restless and ambitious man, I was never disposed to accept the present but always striving to change it, better it, or even sometimes destroy it.” “The Sensible Thing,” a story written in the summer of 1924 and that Fitzgerald told Perkins was “
about Zelda & me. All true,” also ends with the recognition that even gaining what one desires is itself a loss, the loss of the sustaining, driving desire itself. “
She was something desirable and rare that he had fought for and made his own—but never again an intangible whisper in the dusk, or on the breeze of night . . . Well, let it pass, he thought; April is over, April is over. There are all kinds of love in the world, but never the same love twice.”

T
he
New York Times
reviewed
Tales of the Jazz Age
on October 29, 1922, declaring Fitzgerald “
a writer whom it is a joy to read,” and defending his right to “paint with startling vividness and virility the jazz aspect of the American scene,” valuable if only because it was so “astonishingly sincere and unselfconscious.” As a collection, the reviewer found the book patchy and uneven, but filled with “hints, promise and portents” of Fitzgerald's genius: “there are flashes of wings and sounds of trumpets mingled with the tramp of feet and casual laughter.” The main question the book prompted was: “What will this man do next?”

The answer to the reviewer's question was that next Fitzgerald would write his greatest failure,
The Vegetable
, and then he would write his masterpiece, the book that imagined angels' wings and trumpets in the very midst of tramping feet and casual laughter.

After
The Great Gatsby
was published, Fitzgerald wrote to John Bishop, saying he feared that perhaps it was a flaw in the book that he hadn't defined Gatsby more clearly: “
You are right about Gatsby being blurred and patchy. I never at any one time saw him clear myself—for he started as one man I knew and then changed into myself—the amalgam was never complete in my mind.” But to which man that he knew is he referring: Max Gerlach, or someone else? We will probably never know. Gatsby borrows many qualities from many people, including Scott Fitzgerald's romantic aspirations, boundless hope, and charm—but he is no more Scott Fitzgerald than he is Max Gerlach or any of a collage of other bootleggers.

“Desire just cheats you,” laments Anthony Patch in
The Beautiful and Damned
. “It's like a sunbeam skipping here and there about a room. It stops and gilds some inconsequential object, and we poor fools try to grasp it—but when we do the sunbeam moves on to something else, and you've got the inconsequential part, but the glitter that made you want it is gone.” There is no real Jay Gatsby to grasp behind the glittering one we love: history may
help us understand the world he inhabits, but it was fiction that produced him.

The artist, wrote Joseph Conrad, “speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives.” That was the art that Scott Fitzgerald would find, reminding us that a mirage may be more marvelous in its way than an oasis in the desert. Gatsby's great error is his belief in the reality of the mirage; Fitzgerald's great gift was his belief in the mirage as a mirage. “
Splendor,” Fitzgerald came to understand, “was something in the heart.”

THE MEETING ALL AN INVENTION. MARY

When I came home to West Egg that night I was afraid for a moment that my house was on fire. . . . Turning a corner I saw that it was Gatsby's house, lit from tower to cellar. At first I thought it was another party, a wild rout that had resolved itself into “hide-and-go-seek” or “sardines-in-the-box” with all the house thrown open to the game.

The Great Gatsby,
Chapter 5

“T
he tendency of intelligent men is to approach nearer and nearer the truth, by the processes of rejection, revision and invention,” wrote H. L. Mencken in his 1908 book
The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche
, a work that greatly influenced the young Scott Fitzgerald. The processes of rejection and revision were sometimes invisible, but inventions accumulated in the
Man's Hope
outline as Fitzgerald mused on the origins of his novel: “the meeting all an invention,” he said of the central scene in Chapter Five, the reunion of Gatsby and Daisy. But this need not imply that the novel begins at this point to leave history behind. Invention, after all, means literally to “come upon,” and in its earliest English uses invention was synonymous with discovery, before it came to mean contrivance or fabrication.

When Gatsby and Daisy meet again, it is the result of much contrivance and fabrication—and a heroic effort at self-invention. Gatsby spent five years turning himself into the person he thought Daisy wanted, sustaining his
beautiful illusions, and then bought a house as close to her as he could get. At the end of the previous chapter, after Jordan tells Nick that Gatsby and Daisy had once been in love, Nick finds it “a strange coincidence” that Gatsby should have ended up so near to the woman he had known five years earlier in Louisville. “But it wasn't a coincidence at all,” Jordan explains. “Gatsby bought that house so that Daisy would be just across the bay.” This conversation is a sleight of hand, distracting our attention from the real coincidence: that the house next door to Gatsby's had earlier chanced to be rented by Daisy's cousin. That is an authorial manipulation, which is what we mean by “coincidence” in fiction, and why coincidences in fiction are far less beautiful than coincidences in fact.

Facts can be beautiful, and illusions can be ugly. Scott Fitzgerald loved Keats more than any other writer, and learned a great deal from him—much of the best writing in
Gatsby
riffs on Keats—but by 1922 he had decided that a romantic intoxication with life's beauty could only be sustained through chemical intoxication. Faith in the truth of beauty was a necessary illusion, but an illusion all the same, he wrote in
The Beautiful and Damned
:

There was a kindliness about intoxication—there was that indescribable gloss and glamour it gave, like the memories of ephemeral and faded evenings. After a few high-balls there was magic in the tall glowing Arabian night of the Bush Terminal Building—its summit a peak of sheer grandeur, gold and dreaming against the inaccessible sky. And Wall Street, the crass, the banal—again it was the triumph of gold, a gorgeous sentient spectacle; it was where the great kings kept the money for their wars . . . The fruit of youth or of the grape, the transitory magic of the brief passage from darkness to darkness—the old illusion that truth and beauty were in some way entwined.

Fitzgerald may have loved the Romantic poets more, but like the rest of his generation he grew up reading Symbolist poets, Rimbaud, Verlaine,
Mallarmé. Beauty, said the Symbolist Remy de Gourmont, does not exist in itself. There are only beautiful things, waiting to be invented or discovered.

N
ext to headlines reporting that Mussolini's Black Shirts had seized power in Rome, with “
ITALY
FIRMLY
IN
GRIP
” of the Fascisti, America's front pages announced on Wednesday, November 1: “
MRS
.
GIBSON
'
S
STORY
WILL
STAND
FIRE
,
PROSECUTOR
SAYS
.
” Special prosecutor Wilbur Mott told reporters “
in an offhand manner that the case eventually would go to the grand jury, as all murder cases do sooner or later.” Mrs. Gibson had given another affidavit, an “
astonishing, rambling statement.” Mott didn't believe some of what Mrs. Gibson now claimed, but felt that he was “
forced to believe [her] in other aspects,” namely the parts of her story in which he already believed: the gray-coated woman, the bushy-haired man, the marks on Eleanor Mills's wrists. In fact Mott had not been forced to believe anything: the willing lies of fiction depend upon willing believers. Like love, belief is an act of volition.

Mrs. Gibson had already sold her life story to the papers and was repeating her tale to anyone who would listen, all the while loudly deploring the publicity she was receiving. Her tale grew ever more literary as she embellished it: now a woman at the murder scene screamed “in a towering rage” at Mr. Hall, “Explain! Explain! You must explain these letters!” An abrupt pistol shot burst out. From “the stillness which followed, came the poignant, remorseful, frightened scream of a woman crying in protest. ‘Oh Henry! Please—please—please!'” This touching appeal was answered by “four more shots”—one shot too many, but no one seemed to care. Meanwhile,
local officials started looking for fingerprints and photographing the murder scene, seven weeks after the killings. Their efforts were somewhat hampered by all the sightseers milling about.

That Mrs. Gibson was finding inspiration for her fictions in the newspapers was obvious to everyone but the investigators. On November 2
Town Topics
printed a satiric comment on “
the disgusting Hall–Mills affair”: having “sold the story of her life for a tidy sum” and with her obvious talent for publicity, Mrs. Gibson and her mule (“yclept Jenny”) should seek greener pastures in Hollywood, now that America was “consumed with interest in everything she has to say.” Thanks to her facility for invention, Mrs. Gibson could “tell a new and entirely different story every day in the week”; the article ended by caustically observing that her “latent literary taste” was disclosed by the “quantities of newspapers piled high near her favorite window, from which she viewed her vast estates and watched her pigs at play.”

Her facility for invention was not the only entertainment Mrs. Gibson provided. Much satire was directed at her poverty, as the papers described the tumbledown “shack” in which she lived surrounded by farm animals. Against Mrs. Gibson's indigence and the Mills family's “humble dwelling” was pitted the growing local belief that the Halls' wealth was enabling them to evade justice. The homes of the principals in the case offered a simple, graphic way to convey the economic divide: papers across America printed pictures of the Halls' house, described as “The Palatial Home,” next to drawings of the Millses' clapboard apartment, captioned “
Embittered by poverty.”

As the
World
announced that Inspector Mott “
SEEKS FLAWS IN MRS. HALL'S STORY”
—rather than in the more obviously flawed stories of Mrs. Gibson—the rector's widow reluctantly agreed to be interviewed, hoping that if she gave reporters what they wanted, they would stop besieging her house. She was calm, controlled, unforthcoming—a demeanor that completely backfired. The press decided that such “
poise” and “perfect self-control” were unnerving, “an inexplicable phenomenon” that deserved study in “medical annals for some time to come.” Comparing Mrs. Hall to Boadicea and “murderous queens” of ancient lore, the
Tribune
insisted that her “extraordinary” composure could not be accounted for by her patrician upbringing: “
Not even the tutoring of a lifetime in that strata of society, where to betray the feelings is to indulge an unpardonable faux pas, can
satisfactorily explain away Mrs. Hall's stoical composure.” She was like a matron of ancient Rome, they felt, ready to kill to protect her pride.

Although it was clear to everyone that the press was trying the Hall–Mills case, without any evidence at all, that didn't stop them. The media commented on their own prejudicial practices even as they kept loading the dice.
Town Topics
declared itself speechless at media bias and in the same breath implied that Mrs. Hall was a sociopath: “
There has been so much criticism here, and especially abroad, about our alleged practice of trying criminal cases in the newspapers . . . that one scarcely knows what to say of the extraordinary [interview with] Mrs. Hall, the widow of the murdered clergyman.” This pious protest was immediately followed by a description of Mrs. Hall in the stock terms of a dime-novel killer: “the principal impression which she made upon the inquisitors of the press was that of cleverness, coolness and unemotional poise, astonishing on the part of one who has been a central figure in the tragedy.”

Before it finished,
Town Topics
returned to
Simon Called Peter
, pointing out that although it “
has been called all sorts of names” and “placed upon the Index of Public Libraries,” the novel “only tells much the same story in fiction which the daily papers have been relating every day
ad nauseam
and as fact.” The
New Republic
(for which Edmund Wilson was writing) similarly linked the Hall–Mills murders to Sumner's efforts to proscribe the
Satyricon
: “
Petronius is Sunday School literature as compared with the press reports of the Hall–Mills murder case, so far as its command over the imagination is concerned.” The difference was that in the press reports of the murder “illicit words” were not used, although “the illicit meanings are adequately conveyed”; but Sumner was “after words, not meanings.”

Telling the same story in fiction that the papers have been relating daily as fact might be a sign of the meretriciousness of a bad novel like
Simon Called Peter
, or it might be the start of a masterpiece, one as interested in meanings as in words.

F
itzgerald's ledger entry for November 1922 begins: “More Ring Lardner.” Lardner would come over to the Gateway Drive cottage, and the two writers would sit up all night talking (and drinking). Still talking (and drinking) as the sun rose, they would wander into the kitchen and order some breakfast (and possibly a drink); at which point, the story goes, Lardner would stretch and announce: “
Well, I guess the children have left for school by now—I might as well go home.”

On November 2 Zelda wrote to Ludlow Fowler, who had been best man at their wedding, offering an extravagant apology for what she, at least, felt had been their recent boorish behavior. “
Dearest Lud—I'm running wild in sackcloth and ashes because Scott and I acted like two such drunks the other night. Aside from the fact that you were horribly bored, I am sorry because we saw nothing of you. It's been years since we three spent a satisfactory evening together—so won't you please come back Sat or Sunday or whenever you will so we can astound you with our brilliant conversation and splendid example of what is known as tee-totalers?”