Careless People (28 page)

Dorothy Parker was also a regular guest at the Swopes'; supposedly one of the perpetual games at their parties inspired one of her more often-repeated jokes. Told that some of the guests were ducking for apples, Parker quipped, “there, but for a typographical error, is the story of my life.” Like Fitzgerald offering the year 1922 as an “exhibit” of the Jazz Age, or Willa Cather declaring that “the world broke in two in 1922 or thereabouts,” Dorothy Parker also commemorated the spirit of their age, in poems such as “1922” and “The Flapper,” which ended:

All spotlights focus on her pranks.

All tongues her prowess herald.

For which she well may render thanks

To God and Scott Fitzgerald.

Parker became good friends with Scott, and seems to have been, at least in the beginning, slightly infatuated with him. She was “
beglamored by the idea of Scott Fitzgerald,” wrote Wilson, but Parker always thought “
there was something petulant” about Zelda, she later said. (It is decidedly possible that Zelda might have returned the compliment.) For most of 1922, Parker was having an affair with playboy playwright Charlie MacArthur, unaware for some time that this did not place her in as select company as she'd have liked. In late 1922 Parker became pregnant with MacArthur's child and had an abortion, describing the thirty dollars that MacArthur contributed to the operation as “Judas making a refund”; this is also supposed to have been the
experience that prompted her famous wisecrack, “Serves me right for putting all my eggs in one bastard.” The
New Yorker
columnist Lois Long wrote that she and her friends shared a woman doctor who would perform safe abortions; the doctor took holidays at Christmas to rest up for the “
rush after New Year's Eve.”

In March 1922, when Scott and Zelda came to New York to celebrate the publication of
The Beautiful and Damned
, Fitzgerald launched into what he called an “interminable party”: “
I couldn't seem to get sober enough to tolerate being sober,” he wrote. “In fact the whole trip was largely a failure.” Zelda had accompanied him, but her reason for making the trip may have been less festive than his. At least six biographies, beginning with Nancy Milford's influential
Zelda
in 1970, have repeated the story that, having just had Scottie four months earlier, Zelda had discovered she was pregnant again. They claim that on page 176 of Scott's ledger, in the entry for March 1922, he does not mention the publication of his second novel or their trip to New York, recording instead only four ominous words: “
Zelda and her abortionist.”

However, Scott's entry for March 1922, which is indeed on page 176 of his ledger (“Twenty-five Years Old”), doesn't say anything of the kind. After noting the publication of
The Beautiful and Damned
in February, it lists the trip to New York in March, partying with Engalitcheff, quarreling with Alec McKaig (which ended their friendship), meeting celebrities such as Constance Bennett and Marilyn Miller, and visiting Selznick's film studio (in New York), but nothing about Zelda or an abortionist.

Nowhere in Scott's ledger or published notebooks does he write “Zelda and her abortionist,” but the claim about the March 1922 entry has been repeated in almost every biography of the pair since Milford's. The only exception is Matthew J. Bruccoli's 1981
Some Sort of Epic Grandeur
(but he doesn't mention this recycled mistake, either).

This doesn't mean that Zelda couldn't have had an abortion during the March trip—just that there's no evidence that she did. She most likely did have at least one abortion during their marriage, probably in New York (
Scott wrote in his notebooks of a son being flushed down a toilet in a hotel, after “pills” were prescribed by an unnamed doctor), but it is not easy to date when it occurred. If Zelda did indeed have an abortion during this visit she may not have entirely sympathized with Scott's frailties while she coped with the most likely painful effects of pills given to her by one Dr. Lackin, a doctor to whom she alluded in a later letter to Scott, remembering these early years.

Regardless of whether they were dealing with a traumatic situation or just “Both sick. Drinking,” as Fitzgerald's February 1922 ledger entry actually does read, Scott spent the March trip to New York heroically drinking himself under the table. Bunny Wilson wrote to John Bishop: “
We find them both rather changed—particularly Zelda, who has become matronly and rather fat (about which she is very sensitive),” as well she might be, less than six months after giving birth; she had lost her baby weight by the time they returned to New York in September. “Much of her old jazz has evaporated,” Wilson continued, “and, as she becomes more mellowed, I like her better.” As for Scott, he looked “like John Barrymore on the brink of the grave . . . but also, somehow, more intelligent than he used to . . . He arrived this morning in a hansom, after an all-night party of some kind, and wanted to take me for a drive in the park.”

Around the same time, Wilson was finishing a long essay on Fitzgerald's writing, and sent Scott a draft that said the greatest influences on Fitzgerald's work were the Middle West, Irishness, and liquor; Fitzgerald responded by asking him to cut the public references to his drinking (it was perfectly true, Fitzgerald ingenuously admitted, but it would make him look bad). Scott added: “
Your catalog is not complete . . . the most enormous
influence on me in the four and a half years since I met her has been the complete, fine and full-hearted selfishness and chill-mindedness of Zelda.”

E
arly November brought big literary news, an epochal event that, combined with the publication of
Ulysses
, has continued to define 1922 as the annus mirabilis of modernist literature. T. S. Eliot's long-awaited poem,
The Waste Land
, appeared with much fanfare in the November issue of the
Dial
magazine, and would be published in book form by Horace Liveright that December. Its fragmentary, elliptical obscurity baffled most of its first readers, but a handful of astute critics, including Burton Rascoe and Edmund Wilson, could see the thematic unity behind the poem's apparently discordant themes and disjointed narratives.

It was a poem about the chaos of the present day, that much was clear, concerned with the relationship of modern life to historical origins, and the artist's search for sources of creativity and inspiration. The poem shows that meaning changes, dissipates, is lost, but it is also a quest for the origins of meaning and of art, and
The Waste Land
's influence on Fitzgerald's ideas about the novel he was mulling has long been acknowledged.

Burton Rascoe recorded his first impressions of
The Waste Land
—“
a thing of bitterness and beauty”—in his Day Book column on November 5, 1922. Interested in the poem's “erudite despair,” Rascoe listed some of Eliot's many sources, from the
Satyricon
to modern jazz songs. This “highly elliptical” poem played with “all the shining verbal toys, impressions and catch lines” of a poet who was endlessly alert to the life around him. The poem was an “etching of modern life.”

Later that month, Wilson published a joint review of
The Waste Land
and
Ulysses
, arguing that Joyce and Eliot were the writers who best “
reflect our present condition of disruption. We are all tumultuous fragments . . . And no one makes any attempt to pick up the scattered pieces.” In order to
make his point more explicit, Wilson added “a quotation from a more conventional author,” one whose conventionality did not prevent him from catching “something of the spirit of the time”: “‘I know myself but that is all,'” cries one of Scott Fitzgerald's heroes, who has ‘“grown up to find all gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in men shaken.'” And that is precisely the point of the modern novelist or poet: “I know myself but that is all.” Fitzgerald saved Wilson's mention.

“It will be said that [Eliot] depends too much upon books and borrows too much from other men,” Wilson correctly predicted.
The Waste Land
's first readers were unconvinced that a poem so dependent on familiar stories and external ideas could be an original work of art. Eliot seemed merely to quote other writers: wasn't this little better than plagiarism? The originality, argued Wilson, was in the composition: not in invention, but in discovery and order. In any event, “
Mr. Eliot's trivialities are more valuable than other people's epics,” Wilson concluded.

Fragments of meaning culled from past and present and then composed into something new was a modern kind of originality, and T. S. Eliot was not the only writer making art from what he saw around him. When Scott Fitzgerald published
The Great Gatsby
, he sent a copy to Eliot, inscribed to the “Greatest of Living Poets from his enthusiastic worshipper.” Fitzgerald had written a homage to Eliot's poem in one description of the ash heaps: “We walked back a hundred yards along the road under Doctor Eckleburg's persistent stare. The only building in sight was a small block of yellow brick sitting on the edge of the waste land, a sort of compact Main Street ministering to it and contiguous to absolutely nothing.” For some scholars, this lone allusion suffices to explain Fitzgerald's decision to set his book in 1922: the date is a tribute to the year of
The Waste Land
, signaling Fitzgerald's aspirations toward high modernism, they argue. Eliot's poem probably helped Fitzgerald discover what he was looking for, but the resonances of 1922 in
The Great Gatsby
far exceed this passing salute—and Fitzgerald's ambitions for his novel similarly exceeded merely translating into prose what Eliot had said in poetry.

After reading
The Great Gatsby
Eliot returned Fitzgerald's compliment.
He had read the novel three times: it “interested and excited me more than any new novel I have seen, either English or American, for a number of years,” he wrote to Fitzgerald. “
In fact, it seems to me the first step that American fiction has taken since Henry James.” The two writers had more in common than a shared metaphor for the sterility of modern life: both were playing with “shining verbal toys” redeemed from the ash heaps of history, searching for definitive beauty. But Fitzgerald could see more than Eliot's waste land. He could also see the delights of the gorgeous, riotous island next door.

O
ne of the modern jazz songs that
The Waste Land
plays is a burst of ragtime: “O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag / It's so elegant / So intelligent.” Many readers assume that T. S. Eliot invented this line, but the credit belongs to a team of songwriters who composed “That Shakespearian Rag” in 1912. It was a big hit, nearly forty years before Cole Porter's more famous “Brush Up Your Shakespeare.”

One of the composers of “That Shakespearian Rag” was Gene Buck, who had, by 1922, been writing songs and producing hits for the Ziegfeld Follies for years; he also promoted the dancer Joe Frisco, among other ventures. Buck was rich, successful, smiling, and vain. He was also one of the show business luminaries of Great Neck. He and his wife lived on Nassau Drive, around the corner from Ring Lardner, in a vast house of remarkable ostentation. Lardner, who collaborated with Buck on a few plays, described Buck's living room as “
the Yale Bowl, with lamps”; Buck also liked throwing extravagant parties. His Great Neck friends included his boss, Florenz Ziegfeld, and producer Sam Harris, who would stage
The Vegetable
.