Careless People (45 page)

A
fter Myrtle's death, Nick and Gatsby talk as dawn arrives in his strangely dusty mansion. It seems even emptier than usual, as if it is hollowing out from the inside, like the dreams it symbolizes. Images of ghosts drift in: Nick stumbles on the keys of a “ghostly” piano, and as the sun rises “ghostly birds” begin to sing among the blue leaves. Gatsby is “clutching at some last hope,” Nick realizes, but “I couldn't bear to shake him free.” It is at this point that Gatsby finally tells Nick the truth about his humble origins.

Much of Gatsby's masquerade had come about by accident. Although he believed that life should be a splendid pageant, he had not started out with claims of “phantom millions.” When he met Daisy he thought only to deceive her in the most commonplace way, letting her believe that he came from the same social stratum as she, so that he could seduce her. He had intended, “unscrupulously,” to take what he could from her under false pretenses and leave. But then the story turns, and it is Gatsby who feels betrayed and abandoned when she vanishes back into her rich life after they
sleep together. He feels married to her, and his intense fidelity means that such a spiritual union can never be dissolved.

Gatsby hangs suspended between chasing the future and longing for the past: the present means nothing to him. But Daisy is defined by the present. She needs immediacy, for she dwells in the shallows of time, drifting unrestfully and without purpose from moment to moment. And Daisy is very young: she was eighteen when they fell in love, twenty-three when the action of
Gatsby
takes place. As she was trying to wait for Gatsby to return from Europe after the war, Tom Buchanan arrived in Louisville, a present force “of love, of money, of unquestionable practicality”: “doubtless there was a certain struggle and a certain relief.” Daisy marries Tom; the choice is made. Gatsby will spend the rest of his life in the futile effort to unmake it, to reverse time and put himself in Tom's place. And so upon returning to America after the war he built a fortune unscrupulously, to win Daisy back, to make a fresh start.

But just as he thinks he has achieved his dream of Daisy and the aristocratic life she represents, his hopes are brought crashing down by the real aristocrat, her husband. The illusion of “Jay Gatsby” shatters like glass against Tom's hard malice, arrogance, and social power, his insistence that Gatsby will remain Mr. Nobody from Nowhere. And so “the long secret extravaganza was played out.”

Gatsby's tale ends with a journey he took back to Louisville while Daisy was on her honeymoon, his attempt to relocate the past in the place where it was located, the magical thinking of relativity that space and time are conjoined after all: “He stretched out his hand desperately as if to snatch only a wisp of air, to save a fragment of the spot that she had made lovely for him. But it was all going by too fast now for his blurred eyes and he knew that he had lost that part of it, the freshest and the best, forever.” He will never recover it, but he will never stop trying.

I
n May 1924 the Fitzgeralds sailed for Europe, to
put the temptations of the New World behind them, with the conviction that they had left their old selves behind forever. Along with their seventeen pieces of luggage and
Encyclopedia Britannica
, the Fitzgeralds carried with them the true dream of America: that if you go to a different place, you can become a different person, that identity is just an accident.

Their voyage was “a weird trip,” Zelda said, haunted by tunes including “
Horsey, Keep Your Tail Up, Keep the Sun Out of My Eyes.” Fitzgerald
sent a telegram from the ship to Max Perkins, introducing him to a young English actor named Leslie Howard, whom they had befriended in Great Neck and who would become world-famous when he played Ashley Wilkes in
Gone with the Wind
. Howard was a “great friend of mine,” Fitzgerald told his editor, and “has a considerable writing talent.” On board there was “
nearly a scandal about Bunny Burgess,” Zelda recalled, an incident memorable enough that both Scott and Zelda continued to refer to it, without ever explaining it. In his ledger for May Scott noted: “Sailed. Bunny Burgess. The Captain's table”; later, in his notebooks, he remembered “Bunny Burgess episode of glass and wife.” It's not clear who the wife in the episode was: the
passenger list for the
Minnewaska
suggests that Frederick Burgess, a Long Island stockbroker, sailed alone, perhaps to join his wife Olive, who was in Paris that summer. The wife in the near scandal on board the
Minnewaska
may well have been Scott's.

At Cherbourg they caught a boat train promising to carry them to Paris in around seven hours. They stayed at the Hôtel des Deux Mondes, where they hired a nurse for Scottie at twenty-six dollars a month (“my God!” Fitzgerald told a friend, “we paid $90 in New York”). They bathed Scottie in the bidet, and when she drank a gin fizz thinking it was lemonade, the two-year-old “ruined the luncheon table next day.” Nevertheless, Zelda wrote Perkins triumphantly that their stay in Paris was “a complete success”: they'd
“
found a good nurse and resisted the varied temptations that beset our path—to some extent—”

While in Paris they saw some old friends including John Peale Bishop, and probably met Sara and Gerald Murphy, whose sister Esther they'd partied with during the previous Christmas at Great Neck. The Murphys planned to summer on the Côte d'Azur; the Fitzgeralds decided to go there too. In Paris they “
boarded the train for the Riviera, the hot, sweet South of France,” meandering down through a profusion of color, blending hues, and shadows to Provence,
where vision seemed only a question of searching for nightingales.

They stopped first at Hyères, the oldest resort on the Riviera, “
the loveliest piece of earth I've ever seen without excepting Oxford or Venice or Princeton or anywhere,” Fitzgerald wrote to a friend. “Zelda and I are sitting in the cafe l'Universe writing letters (it is 10:30
P.M.
) and the moon is an absolutely
au fait
Mediterranean moon with a blurred silver linen cap & we're both a little tight and very happily drunk.” They were “going to look at a villa that has a butler & cook with it for the summer & fall . . . on the whole it looks like a gorgeous working summer.”

Zelda said that Scott was revealing “the most romantic proclivities” on the Riviera, reading nothing but lives of Byron and Shelley. She feared he might even drown in the Mediterranean, she joked: “
I shall be obligated to snatch a heart from a burning body—which I should hate.”
The villas they saw at Hyères were unsuitable—too impractical for Zelda to run (she said), too unromantic for Scott to write (he said), or too expensive, and the aptly named Grimm's Park Hotel appeared to have nothing but goat on the menu.

So they made their way to St. Raphaël, where they rented the Villa Marie, and Scott finally settled down into writing his novel. For Zelda, whiling away curving Provençal hours as Scott remembered jazzy New York, the afternoons grew long and hushed, filled with an awareness of the coming night before the sun even began to set. Days began to stretch in front of her, hot and empty.
In
Save Me the Waltz
, Alabama wonders restlessly what to
do with herself on the Riviera and soon resents her artist husband for leaving her with only passing hours to keep her company.

In the nearby town of Fréjus was an air base, and Zelda befriended a group of young French aviators. They danced, gambled, and drank in a beach casino; as evening fell the Fitzgeralds would wander through the dusty pink twilight to join the flyers. René Silvé and Bobbé Croirier were “very nice boys,” Zelda wrote, perhaps hinting that they were more interested in each other than in her. They “
protruded insistently from their white beach clothes and talked in undertones of Arthur Rimbaud.” René had eyes of “cold fire,” as if painted by Tintoretto. An officer named Edouard Jozan had the “head of the gold of a Christmas coin,” with “broad bronze hands” and “convex shoulders”; he was “slim and strong and rigid” in his dazzling white uniform.

During the days Zelda relaxed with her aviators on canvas mats stretched over the sand. Scott was pleased that Zelda was occupied; Zelda was pleased that she was the center of attention again. The flyers flirted with her, flattered her, and kept her company while her husband brooded over his memories of Long Island. On the beach “
we warmed our sunburned backs and invented new cocktails,” she recalled; their avant-garde cocktails do not survive.

In July, Scott took a quick break from his novel to compose “How to Live on Practically Nothing A Year,” which earned some fast money from the
Saturday Evening Post
. Describing expatriate life in France, he wrote of keeping up with the news from home by means of the
New York Times
. “
It is twilight as I write this,” he ended; as the sun set, the people around him, “like the heavy roses and the nightingales in the pines, will seem to take an essential and indivisible part in the beauty of this proud gay land.” Becoming a stranger had prompted Fitzgerald to think more consciously about national identity, what it meant to be from one land or another, as he watched people melt indistinguishably into the background that absorbed them.

As his novel progressed, Fitzgerald had changed its title, but not its
theme. It would still concern the arrivistes among New York's ash heaps and millionaires, but now he thought he would call it “Trimalchio.” Zelda didn't like the new title, but Scott's confidence in the book was growing; his prose was deepening, tightening, stretching.

They swam in hope like the midnight-dark sea, buoyed by good fortune. It seemed that life was a simple affair after all. They were not just happy once, he wrote; they were happy a thousand times.

A
merica's front pages were consumed that summer with the sensational story of two intelligent, well-educated young men from Chicago named Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, who murdered a boy they knew merely “for the thrill of it,” convinced that their high IQs would enable them to commit the perfect crime. They were mistaken: having left a trail of evidence implicating themselves, they quickly confessed. Leopold and Loeb demonstrated the “perils of precocity,” it was felt: intelligence testing had been much debated for several years, and Leopold and Loeb reminded experts that precocity “
often leads to perversion.” The prosecution charged that the pair's murderous “phantasies” came from a book. Loeb reportedly announced: “I have money; my people have money; don't you suppose we will have a smart lawyer to get us out?” Leopold and Loeb had overweening confidence in their own brilliance, but perhaps they also had reason to doubt the intelligence of those who would be assigned to investigate their crimes.

Fitzgerald followed the story avidly; a year later he was writing to Perkins that, after
Gatsby
, his next novel would be about “
several things, one of which is an intellectual murder on the Leopold–Loeb idea. Incidentally it is
about Zelda and me and the hysteria of last May and June [1924] in Paris.” If not about Leopold and Loeb, he told Harold Ober, his next novel might concern “such a case” as Dorothy Ellingson, “
that girl who shot her mother on the Pacific coast last year.” The novel that would eventually become
Tender Is the Night
went through many permutations, but for some years it was about a headline murder case. As he continued to mull over tabloid murders, Fitzgerald wrote a story called “Jacob's Ladder” that would feed into
Tender Is the Night
. It opens with “
a particularly sordid and degraded murder trial,” a case that makes the protagonist feel “he had childishly gobbled something without being hungry, simply because it was there. The newspapers had humanized the case, made a cheap, neat problem play out of an affair of the jungle.”

In late June headlines blared that Leopold and Loeb had been found guilty of murder; turning the pages of the
New York Times
, a reader would also have been confronted with a reminder of another brutal murder that had recently dominated the nation's news.