Careless People (29 page)

Gene Buck and his wife Helen, a former showgirl, became friends with the Fitzgeralds, although at some point friction developed between Scott and Zelda over Helen. In one of her first letters urging the Kalmans to come
east for the Princeton–Yale game in November, Zelda had described life in Great Neck. “
We have been having a hell of a time,” she wrote. “We have been gotten drunk with three times by the Ring Lardners and various others.” Lardner was “a typical newspaperman,” whom at first she didn't “find particularly amusing,” although her opinion of Ring would quickly improve. “His wife is common but I like her. He is six feet tall and goes on periodical sprees lasting from one to X weeks. He is on one now, which is probably the reason he called on us. He plays the saxophone and takes us to Mr. Gene Buck's house—Mr. Gene Buck originates Ziegfeld's Follies and lives in a house designed by Joseph Urban. It looks like a lot of old scenery glued together—Mr. Buck says ‘seen' where he should say ‘saw' and is probably a millionaire . . . I like Mr. Buck,” she added, explaining that he'd married a “chorus girl who has lovely legs and consequently a baby.” Fitzgerald may have admired Helen Buck rather more; such, at any rate, was Zelda's eventual accusation: “
in Great Neck there was always disorder and quarrels . . . about Helen Buck, about everything.”

But at least some of the time, Zelda and Helen were also drinking companions. Bruccoli reports a story of Zelda and Helen Buck drinking a pitcher of orange blossoms during a lunch at Gateway Drive, before heading off with a thermos of cocktails to the golf club, “
where Zelda and Helen became drunk on the course, with Zelda singing, ‘You can throw a silver dollar down upon the ground, And it'll roll, because it's round . . .'” Eventually Ring Lardner helped them get home.

Whatever their quarrels, the Fitzgeralds and the Bucks were frequent companions during the months at Great Neck. Scott inscribed several books to them: a 1922 edition of
This Side of Paradise
is signed “
For Helen and Jean [
sic
]—whose courtesy and kindness to the pilgrims, the Fitz will never forget. From theirs, The Bowing Fitz” (most of the inscription is in such a drunken scrawl that it is illegible), and he gave a copy of
The Vegetable
to “
Helen—not of Troy but of Great Neck—a lovely girl who is so sweet as to sing for us, now and then—F. Scott Fitzgerald.”

He also inscribed a copy of Joseph Conrad's
Youth
, “For Gene Buck from Joseph Conrad,” adding “F. Scott Fitzgerald, middle-man,” below. Some
readers have concluded that Conrad must have given Fitzgerald the copy to present to Buck, but this is missing the joke with a vengeance. In fact, Fitzgerald never met Conrad, much to his disappointment, although he and Lardner did drop by during Conrad's stay at the nearby Doubleday estate in May 1923, paying homage to their idol by singing and dancing on the lawn outside the mansion in the middle of the night. Some say the dance they chose was the hornpipe, in honor of the old sea captain; everyone says they were drunk. The only people who saw the tribute performance were the night watchmen who forcibly removed the pair from the Doubleday grounds.

Perhaps Fitzgerald's manifold literary gifts to the Bucks were a hint that they might benefit from some culture. In 1926 Ring Lardner published a story called “The Love Nest,” lampooning the Bucks, in which a journalist named Bartlett drives through “an arc de triomphe of a gateway” to a “white house that might have been mistaken for the Yale Bowl,” where he interviews a publicity-seeking film director. The director's wife, a former showgirl, joins them as the husband leaves for an appointment. The wife, it emerges, spends her life bitterly drunk, exclaiming “I never did love him! . . . He wanted a beautiful wife and beautiful children for his beautiful home. Just to show us off . . . I'm part of his chattels . . . like his big diamond or his cars or his horses.” The next morning she pretends again to be a happy housewife, a pose as fraudulent as the director's insistence that his grandiose mansion is just a “love nest.” When the story was published, Lardner wrote Fitzgerald in Paris: “
Gene didn't make any comment on ‘The Love Nest,' but evidently had no suspicion. Anyway, we are still pals.”

After Gatsby achieves his dream of impressing Daisy with his lavish house that looks like a lot of scenery glued together, he ushers Daisy and Nick into the music room. Klipspringer, the eternal boarder, plays the piano, beginning with “The Love Nest,” a popular song from 1920. Fitzgerald doesn't reprint the lyrics, but his audience would have known them:

Just a love nest

Cozy with charm,

Like a dove nest

Down on a farm . . .

Better than a palace with a gilded dome,

Is a love nest

You can call home.

The other song Klipspringer plays is no less ironically chosen, no less sharply pointed: “Ain't We Got Fun,” with its chorus emphasizing the ruthless passage of time—“morning,” “evening,” “meantime,” and “between time”—and its verse joking about the class divide: “the rich get rich and the poor get . . . children.”

Knowing that life can provide the same grace notes as art, Fitzgerald might well have used another chorus from a Gene Buck tune as a refrain in
Gatsby
: “Wasn't it nice? Wasn't it sweet? Wasn't it good?”

T
he artist, wrote Conrad, shines “the light of magic suggestiveness” on “the commonplace surface of words: of the old, old words, worn thin, defaced by ages of careless usage.”
Beauty fires us with the faith to search for hidden meanings; old words burn through stories like new gold.

In June 1924, as he settled down on the Riviera into serious work on
The Great Gatsby
, Fitzgerald decided to cut a long section delineating Jay Gatsby's backstory, “
because it interfered with the neatness of the plan” for his novel. Thriftily, he revised that section into an independent short story, called it “Absolution” and sent it to the magazines. One of Fitzgerald's finest stories, “Absolution” tells of an eleven-year-old boy's avowal of beauty and rejection of religion. Young Rudolph Miller is sent to the family priest for a routine confession; as he is confessing to sins of pride (he believes his parents are too inferior to him to be his real parents), disobedience, and his emerging erotic desires, he ends up lying during confession, a mortal sin. But the priest is even more at sea than the boy: Fitzgerald implies that he is
breaking down from sexual repression. Listening to the child confess, the priest suddenly “cries wildly”: “You look as if things went glimmering . . . Did you ever go to a party? . . . My theory is that when a whole lot of people get together in the best places things go glimmering all the time.”

The priest recommends abruptly that Rudolph go to an amusement park: “It's a thing like a fair, only much more glittering . . . A band playing somewhere, and a smell of peanuts—and everything will twinkle . . . But don't get up close,” he warned Rudolph, “because if you do you'll only feel the heat and the sweat and the life.” The unnerving experience confirms the boy's faith in beauty: “Underneath his terror he felt that his own inner convictions were confirmed. There was something ineffably gorgeous somewhere that had nothing to do with God.” This was to have been Jay Gatsby's prelude, the origins of his quest for something ineffably gorgeous in life and his faith in enchanted objects. Most of the “catholic element” that Fitzgerald initially thought would characterize his novel didn't survive into the final draft, but Gatsby's faith in the meaning of symbols remains Catholic, and he chooses a catholic array of symbols to represent his secular faith. He is particularly fond of symbolic light: when it stops raining during his reunion with Daisy, Gatsby smiles “like a weather man, like an ecstatic patron of recurrent light.”

Only in the imagination does every truth find an undeniable existence, Conrad also said. “
Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master of art as of life.”

O
n Thursday, November 9, 1922, Albert Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize for his theories about space, time, and recurrent light. The idea of relativity began, Einstein famously said, with a metaphor: he imagined himself riding on a beam of light, and wondered what he would be able to see. If light were a wave, one could imagine sweeping along its peaks and valleys. But if he were simultaneous with light, would the light stand
still? Would time halt? Could he ride that beam of light forever, a frozen moment that could never fade? If he traveled faster than light, perhaps he could even repeat the past. Eventually, Einstein would explain relativity using symbolic clocks positioned at every point in the universe, each one running at a different speed.

When Daisy comes to Nick's house and finds her old flame waiting for her, Fitzgerald offers a symbol to suggest the awkwardness of the reunion: a small “defunct mantelpiece clock” that Gatsby nearly knocks over and then puts back on the mantel. Some readers think the defunct clock is too contrived a symbol—Gatsby wants time to stand still, to start over again with Daisy—but it also suggests that things are not synchronized, and that Gatsby is trying desperately to keep time, as literally as he can. Gatsby knows exactly how long it's been since he and Daisy last met (“Five years next November”), a response so reflexive that it is a dead giveaway of how carefully he's kept track. “The automatic quality of Gatsby's answer set us all back at least another minute,” Nick wryly observes, keeping time himself; he has already jotted his list of Gatsby's party guests on a timetable. Even Gatsby's green light might have suggested time-keeping in the New York of 1922: the traffic towers being built that autumn on Fifth Avenue were also equipped with “
synchronized clocks on the north and south faces and 350-pound bronze bells” that tolled the hours. It has been said that Fitzgerald, “
haunted by time,” wrote as if he were surrounded by clocks and calendars; maybe he was.

Gatsby's longed-for meeting with Daisy ends with a hint of the disillusionment to come. Reality could not possibly live up to his overwrought expectations: “He had been full of the idea so long, dreamed it right through to the end, waited with his teeth set, so to speak, at an inconceivable pitch of intensity. Now, in the reaction, he was running down like an overwound clock.” As they tour through Gatsby's house they pass through a pastiche of history, like a diorama in a museum, including a Marie Antoinette music room, an upscale echo of Myrtle Wilson's Versailles sofas. “I think he revalued everything in his house,” Nick observes, “according to the measure of response it drew from her well-loved eyes.”

But before the chapter closes, the beat of Gatsby's disappointment
begins to shift away from time and toward light, an anticipation of the failures in relativity that await. He shows Daisy the green light at the end of her dock, visible across the bay from his gilded “love nest,” and then pauses. “Possibly,” Nick thinks, “it had occurred to him that the colossal significance of that light had now vanished forever . . . Now it was again a green light on a dock. His count of enchanted objects had diminished by one.”

A scholar once counted how often time is referred to in
The Great Gatsby
(nearly five hundred times: once every hundred words); mention time, and people start counting. So here's another enumeration: if you subtract title, numbered chapter headings and epigraph,
The Great Gatsby
is 48,885 words long. The magic of modern computers counts for us, making it easy to pinpoint the center of a novel that Fitzgerald wrote in longhand. The sentence at the novel's precise midpoint, its fulcrum (words 24,434 to 24,457, while we're counting), is a description of Nick, Daisy, and Gatsby passing through Gatsby's facsimile of a library as they take their tour of his proud, gilt-domed mansion: “As Gatsby closed the door of ‘the Merton College Library' I could have sworn I heard the owl-eyed man break into ghostly laughter.”