Careless People (37 page)

A
s the grand jury hearing continued through late November, Mrs. Hall's maid, Louise Geist, was called as an unwilling witness. On the stand the “pretty maid” suddenly corroborated Mrs. Hall's alibi for the time of the murders: “
until today her movements had been accounted for only until 9:30,” but Geist said Mrs. Hall was at home during the hours the murders were thought to have taken place. A married vestryman and choir singer took the stand; several witnesses had seen his green car parked on De Russey's Lane that night, a car that was destroyed by fire not long after the murders.
He claimed it was just a coincidence. Eleanor Mills's sister Elsie Barnhardt also testified, insisting that her sister had not been in any trouble. The final witness on the final day was the prosecutor's trump card, Mrs. Gibson, who testified for almost two hours on November 28. She told once more the story that had been repeated so often in the press, of the woman in the gray polo coat, the man with the bushy hair, the shouts of “Henry!” and Eleanor Mills dragged through the undergrowth and returning to the scene hours later to find the woman in the polo coat weeping by the body of the rector. The
grand jury withdrew in midafternoon, returning in less than an hour, as wild rumors began to race around the courthouse.

The jury brought back no indictments, a result that was an anticlimax but not a surprise. If the authorities acquired new evidence within the month they could present it to the same grand jury and seek a new indictment. But public opinion was veering strongly toward dropping the investigation, to
avoid “
the expense of a trial that might end in easy acquittal.” Mott told reporters that for the time being investigators would remain “in suspended animation”—which wouldn't, on the evidence, have made much of a change.

The case had become such a debacle, said the
World
, that it had found its way into the debate over the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill on Capitol Hill. It was clear to the entire nation that vigilante justice was being condoned in New Brunswick: even if the grand jury had indicted Mrs. Hall and her relatives, “
there was not the remotest possibility of a conviction by a petit jury which would always see the unwritten law inscribed on the wall of the courtroom.” Gleefully attacking the New Jersey senator who was attempting to build a case against lynching, a Southern senator “razzed” his colleague “for the failure of the State of New Jersey to take action in the Hall–Mills case.”

The prosecution had entirely failed to construct a plausible explanation for the events of September 14. The jury rejected the consoling, corrupted fictions offered by Jane Gibson and applauded when the vote was announced. Someone was going to have to improve the story, to lie better than the truth.

A
t the end of Chapter Six, Nick and Jay Gatsby walk out among the debris, a “desolate path” of fruit rinds and discarded party favors and crushed flowers, exposing the waste and decay. Gatsby admits that Daisy didn't enjoy herself and Nick warns him against asking too much of her. “You can't repeat the past,” he tells Gatsby. “Can't repeat the past?” Gatsby cries incredulously. “Why of course you can!”

Nick concludes that what Gatsby wanted to recover was “some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy.” As the waste begins to show, so does the projection, the solipsism of Gatsby's great devotion. It is single-minded, determined, in its way hugely creative; but it is also colossally self-absorbed. The chapter ends with Nick's first meditation on Gatsby's dream of Daisy, his feeling that he could climb to the top of the world, finding a Jacob's ladder to heaven (or a social ladder to riches) on the streets of Louisville “if he climbed alone.” But Daisy is with him, and Gatsby succumbs to temptation, although he knows it will limit his dreams and possibilities: “He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God.” He hears a sound as if a tuning fork has been struck against a star and kisses Daisy Fay, at which point “the incarnation was complete.” He has entered the tender night, where, says Keats, the Queen-Moon is on her throne clustered around “by all her starry Fays.”

Nick distances himself from this “appalling sentimentality,” but finds that he too is reminded of something by Gatsby's words, “an elusive rhythm, a fragment of lost words, that I had heard somewhere a long time ago. For a moment a phrase tried to take shape in my mouth and my lips parted like a dumb man's, as though there was more struggling upon them than a wisp of startled air. But they made no sound and what I had almost remembered was uncommunicable forever.”

Five days after
The Great Gatsby
came out, Carl Van Vechten reviewed it for
The Nation
. What defined the novel, he felt, was the character of Jay Gatsby, “
who invented an entirely fictitious career for himself out of material derived from inferior romances . . . His doglike fidelity not only to his ideal but to his fictions, his incredibly cheap and curiously imitative imagination, awaken for him not only our interest and suffrage, but also a certain liking.” Van Vechten also singled out the novel's “gargantuan drinking-party, conceived in a rowdy, hilarious, and highly titillating spirit.”

Van Vechten began his own novel about gargantuan drinking parties a few years later:
Parties
centers on the mutually destructive love of a couple named David and Rilda Westlake, who bear a striking resemblance to Scott
and Zelda. He is the golden boy, a talented painter who charms everyone while he drinks himself into oblivion; she is his beautiful, desperate wife, alternately driving him to jealous rages and clinging to him. They constantly threaten each other with murder and suicide. The novel opens with David drunkenly arriving at a friend's apartment, announcing, “I've killed a man or he's killed me.” Rilda soon rings, shouting that she has committed suicide. Before long she is sending telegrams declaring that she murdered her lover and so did their bootlegger. David goes to bed with various women, but tends to say venomous things like, “I'll be too drunk to do
you
any good.” The story ends in a tale of violent stabbing and accidental death, but the Westlakes and their friends “‘fix' the police,” “
the newspapers with thin copy to go ahead on growled for a few days about ‘imminent investigations'” and “the inquest was a farce.” Everyone gets off scot-free. When
Parties
came out in August 1930, it was met with “filthy notices,” recorded Van Vechten in his diaries. Even his devoted wife,
Fania Marinoff, hated it.

In 1922,
Fitz drew up a household budget that allotted eighty dollars a month to “House Liquor” and one hundred to “Wild Parties.” Not all parties were wild, of course. Rascoe wrote in 1924 of a story he'd heard from John Bishop, lately returned from two years in Europe. Bishop had attended a “
literary and artistic tea party” thrown in London by Lady Rothermere, to which she'd invited T. S. Eliot as guest of honor. An American guest, much impressed, asked Eliot if he didn't find the party extremely interesting. “Yes,” he'd replied, “if you concentrate on the essential horror of the thing.”

There is a reason why the word “decadence” comes from the Latin for “falling down.” All the sad young men were going to pieces, as Fitzgerald had told Rascoe that warm autumn night in 1922. Even in the midst of paradise, loss assumes a shape.
Et in Arcadia ego:
beauty is not alone in the garden. Death is waiting there too.

THE DAY IN NEW YORK

It was when curiosity about Gatsby was at its highest that the lights in his house failed to go on one Saturday night—and, as obscurely as it had begun, his career as Trimalchio was over.

The Great Gatsby,
Chapter 7

M
eaning can be salvaged from the wreckage of experience: accidents may reveal a pattern, a composition of sorts, if we look closely enough. It is only since the advent of cars that one meaning of the word “accident” has pushed itself to the front of the conversation so violently; accident has not lost its ability to mean chance, of course, although it tends now to mean mischance. But because the accidental also means the contingent, Catholic theologians used the word “accidental” to describe the inessential bread and wine left behind after the ritual of communion had turned them into mystical symbols. At story's end, Gatsby finds himself left only with accidentals, the inessential objects that once had glittered for him, disenchanted things made ordinary again. The accidental is the merely material, once its mystical promises have been abandoned. It is no accident that Fitzgerald uses an accident—and the word “accident,” repeatedly—to bring about this turn in a carefully composed final three chapters about accidents and disenchantment, for the accidental is all that we are left with once we have lost our illusions.

T
he December 1922 entry in Fitzgerald's ledger reads: “A series of parties—the Boyds, Mary Blair, Chas & Kaly. Charlie Towne.” It is likely another of his retrospective entries, a hazy sense of parties blending one into another. His memory of that December stretched out into a steady silvered roar, a catalog of parties as a list of names. After a while no one even knew whose party it was.
The revels went on for weeks: people came and went, but the party survived. If you surrendered to the need for sleep, you returned to find that others had sacrificed themselves on the altar of keeping it alive, Zelda wrote later. She took a picture of their Great Neck house in the snow and decorated it with spring flowers.

Scott and Zelda drew up a list of “
Rules For Guests At the Fitzgerald House”:

1. Visitors may park their cars and children in the garage.

2. Visitors are requested not to break down doors in search of liquor, even when authorized to do so by their host and hostess.

3. Week-end guests are respectfully notified that the invitations to stay over Monday, issued by the host and hostess during the small hours of Sunday morning, must not be taken seriously.

Once the guests had arrived the rules of the Fitzgerald house were invoked. Everyone slept till noon—including the baby, whom, it was said, they used to slip some gin so she would sleep through the racket. Guests would pass out in the hammock in the backyard, or on the sofas and the floors; others wrote of hiding in the cellar to get away from the noise. More than once their houseman found both Fitzgeralds asleep on the front lawn when he awoke in the morning: by the time they left Long Island, Scott was said to have slept on every lawn from Great Neck to Port Washington. Zelda told an interviewer in 1923 that their meals at Gateway Drive were “extremely moveable feasts,” which sometimes seemed to mean
moving away from the idea of providing food at all.

“
The remarkable thing about the Fitzgeralds,” Bunny Wilson later explained, “was their capacity for carrying things off and carrying people away by their spontaneity, charm and good looks. They had a genius for imaginative improvisations.” Like Gatsby's ostentatious parties, the Fitzgeralds' parties were theatrical and spectacular—and it's no good being theatrical without an audience. A decade later Scott reminded Zelda that they had been “the most envied couple” in America in the early 1920s. She replied, “
I guess so. We were awfully good showmen.” For Gatsby, the cost of being a showman is that audiences are indistinguishable from witnesses; he must end his career as Trimalchio when he needs to protect the secret of his affair with Daisy, to keep the servants from gossiping. As for the Fitzgeralds, Scott later wrote, “
we had retained an almost theatrical innocence by preferring the role of the observed to the observer.” Gatsby's ostentation is similarly innocent, although he prefers to observe its effects from the margins.

Zelda so enjoyed being observed that she continued to punctuate their parties with “exhibitionism,” to use the new psychoanalytic term. George Jean Nathan wrote in his memoirs years later of instances of Zelda “divesting herself” of her clothes, once in the middle of Grand Central Station, he claimed, and another time standing on the railroad tracks in Birmingham, Alabama. According to Nathan, Scott told him that Zelda stood naked on the tracks, waving a lantern and bringing the train to a halt; “
Scott loved to recount the episode in a tone of rapturous admiration.” Nathan sounded testy when he wrote this account, but in the golden years he had written Zelda several notes in flirtatious admiration: “
Nothing about you ever fades,” he told her in April 1922, after seeing her in New York that March.

Nathan also claimed that during the planning of
Gatsby
Fitzgerald
asked for his help in meeting various bootleggers upon whom he could model his “fabulously rich Prohibition operator who lived luxuriously on Long Island.” And so, Nathan recalled, “
I accordingly took him to a house party on Long Island at which were gathered some of the more notorious speakeasy operators and their decorative girl friends.” One might have thought that Fitzgerald didn't require Nathan's assistance in meeting bootleggers and their clients on Long Island, but perhaps Nathan had his own underground pipeline. Or perhaps his memory was deceiving him.

Others were convinced that Fitzgerald's fondness for bourgeois revels was symptomatic of a more fundamental philistinism.
Edmund Wilson's 1923 essay “The Delegate from Great Neck” imagines Scott as a fledgling Rockefeller enthusiastically preaching the gospel of wealth:

Can't you imagine a man like [E. H.] Harriman or [James J.] Hill feeling a certain creative ecstasy as he piled up all that power? Think of being able to buy anything you wanted—houses, railroads, enormous industries!—dinners, automobiles, stunning clothes for your wife—clothes like nobody else in the world could wear!—all the finest paintings in Europe, all the books that had ever been written, in the most magnificent editions! Think of being able to give a stupendous house party that would go on for days and days, with everything that anybody could want to drink and a medical staff in attendance and the biggest jazz orchestras in the city alternating night and day! I must confess that I get a big kick out of all the glittering expensive things.

Wilson can't have been paying attention to such stories as “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz,” in which Fitzgerald had already shown his contempt for tycoons who clutched at glittering expensive things—even if he admired the glittering things themselves.

Wilson uses (an equally ventriloquized) Van Wyck Brooks in the essay to voice an older, more puritanical tradition in American letters; Wilson's Brooks fears that Fitzgerald and his generation are permitting “art to
become a business,” surrendering to “the competitive anarchy of American commercial enterprise,” which would create only “money and hollow popular reputations,” bringing “nothing but disillusion and despair.”

The fictional Fitz ends the dialog by urging Brooks to come to a Great Neck party:

Maybe it would bore you to death—but we're having some people down who ought to be pretty amusing. Gloria Swanson's coming. And Sherwood Anderson and Dos Passos. And Marc Connelly and Dorothy Parker. And Rube Goldberg. And Ring Lardner will be there. You probably think some of those people are pretty lowbrow, but Ring Lardner, for instance, is really a very interesting fellow: he's really not just a popular writer: he's pretty morose about things. I'd like to have you meet him. There are going to be some dumb-bell friends of mine from the West but I don't believe you'd mind them—they're really darn nice. And then there's a man who sings a song called,
Who'll Bite your Neck When my Teeth are Gone?
Neither my wife nor I knows his name—but his song is one of the funniest things we've ever heard!

Wilson's portrait is deeply patronizing, his Fitzgerald little more than a buffoon, but it also suggests the cheerful exuberance with which his friend greeted the lunatic energy of the world around him. Wilson did not understand until much later—until it was, in a sense, too late—that another part of Fitzgerald was always standing aside, holding tight to a devout faith in art and viewing their debauchery with hard, cold eyes. Fitzgerald could see that materialism led to disillusion and despair, and debased ideals, as clearly as Wilson or Brooks. When he conceived of his fourth novelistic alter ego, Dick Diver in
Tender Is the Night
, Fitzgerald called him a “
natural idealist, a spoiled priest”—not an indulged priest but a corrupted one, ruined by the glittering expensive things, the heat and the sweat and the life of the carnival he is running.

As it happens, Van Wyck Brooks offered his own memory of the
Fitzgeralds, far less censorious than Wilson's imaginary debate. Brooks wrote of a dinner party at Ernest Boyd's apartment on East Nineteenth Street, to which both Fitzgeralds arrived an hour late, after everyone had finished eating. Sitting at the dinner table, they “
fell asleep over the soup that was brought in, for they had spent the two previous nights at parties. So Scott Fitzgerald said as he awoke for a moment, while someone gathered Zelda up, with her bright cropped hair and diaphanous gown, and dropped her on a bed in a room near by. There she lay curled and asleep like a silky kitten. Scott slumbered in the living-room, waking up suddenly again to telephone an order for two cases of champagne, together with a fleet of taxis to take us to a night-club.”

At least one contemporary could see that Fitzgerald's gift for pleasure was not incommensurate with his gift for art. In 1924 Ernest Boyd wrote a book called
Portraits
, which included a depiction of Scott and Zelda. Fitzgerald told John Bishop that he rather liked Boyd's portrait of “
what I might ironically call our ‘private' life.” Scott Fitzgerald was “a character out of his own fiction, and his life a series of chapters out of his own novels,” Boyd declared. “Zelda Fitzgerald is the blonde flapper and her husband the blonde philosopher of the Jazz Age.” Here was a man who “combines the most intellectual discussion with all the superficial appearances of the wildest conviviality . . . He is intensely preoccupied with the eternal verities and the insoluble problems of this world. To discuss them while waiting for supper with Miss Gilda Gray is his privilege and his weakness.” Boyd may have seen Fitzgerald's love of glamor as a weakness, but it did not tempt him into underestimating the shrewdness of his views: Fitzgerald “is one of the few frivolous people with whom one can be sure of having a serious conversation.” (In fact, history would prove, Fitzgerald was one of the few serious people who was capable of so much frivolity.) In particular, “upon the theme of marital fidelity his eloquence has moved me to tears,” said Boyd, “and his stern condemnation of the
mores
of bohemia would almost persuade a radical to become monogamous. There are still venial and mortal sins in his calendar.”