Careless People (53 page)

They were all clinging to the wreckage. “Me caring about no one nothing,” Fitzgerald wrote in his ledger for April 1936, as the last of the Crack-Up essays was published. Ring Lardner was dead, Zelda was lost. Hemingway had succumbed to his own myth; his drinking and depression would take longer to conquer him, but he would not escape either. Edmund Wilson was embarking on his third marriage, to Mary McCarthy; his alcoholism, while more functional than Fitzgerald's, was also gathering pace and victims. The Murphys lost two of their three children in less than two years, one to meningitis, the other to tuberculosis. When Fitzgerald heard about the death of their second son in 1937, he wrote to the Murphys: “
I can see another generation growing up around [their daughter] Honoria and an eventual peace somewhere, an occasional port of call as we all sail deathward. Fate can't have any more arrows in its quiver for you that will wound like these.” In 1936, Burton Rascoe's twenty-two-year-old son committed suicide at their home in upstate New York;
filling out a Guggenheim application three years later, Rascoe wrote that his permanent address was Ferncliff Cemetery, Scarsdale—where his son was buried. Six months before his son's suicide, Rascoe had written Fitzgerald a generous letter about the Crack-Up articles: “
it is a magnificent and salutary thing for you to have written them,” Rascoe said, not for Fitzgerald's readers but for the therapeutic value to Fitzgerald. They would surely inaugurate “a new period in which your enviable talents will flower into deeper and lovelier things than you have created hitherto.” Fitzgerald saved Rascoe's letter, replying: “
That was darn nice of you to write me that letter. Those kinds of gestures mean more to the recipient than he can well say. Best wishes always, Scott Fitz.”

Amid the sadness, Fitzgerald's markets continued to shrink, and he needed to pay for Zelda's care and for Scottie's education and living expenses; she would soon enroll at Vassar. In 1937, deeply in debt, Fitzgerald went to Hollywood to try to reverse his fortunes once more. “I feel a certain excitement,” he wrote Scottie from the train, remembering his first “Hollywood venture” exactly ten years earlier. “
Hollywood made a big fuss over us and the ladies all looked very beautiful to a man of thirty. I honestly believed that
with no effort on my part
I was a sort of magician with words—an
odd delusion on my part when I had worked so desperately hard to develop a hard, colorful prose style. Total result—a great time & no work.” This time would be different, that was clear—not least because no one was making a fuss over Scott Fitzgerald anymore; he was finding it difficult to get published at all. A train's movement had the rhythm, he wrote, of finding and losing, finding and losing.

In Hollywood Fitzgerald suddenly faced a ghost from the past. Ted Paramore had been working for some years as a screenwriter and was assigned to collaborate with Scott on an adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque's
Three Comrades
. The association was not happy. Fitzgerald would not give the dilettante he had known equal say; viewing Paramore as a hack, he was determined to retain control. “
I didn't write four out of four best sellers or a hundred and fifty top-price short stories out of the mind of a temperamental child without taste or judgment,” he told Paramore angrily.
Three Comrades
became one of the biggest hits of 1938 and would be Fitzgerald's only screen credit. When Zelda heard that they were working together after all those years, she told Scott, “
Give Paramour my regards and affectionate remembrances—Tell him how good looking he is—We used to have a lot of fun.”

In the summer of 1937, Fitzgerald met the twenty-eight-year-old Hollywood columnist Sheilah Graham. He was immediately struck by her resemblance to Zelda and would use the uncanny likeness in
The Last Tycoon
: “
Smiling faintly at him from not four feet away was the face of his dead wife, identical even to the expression. Across the four feet of moonlight, the eyes he knew looked back at him, a curl blew a little on a familiar forehead; the smile lingered, changed a little according to pattern; the lips parted—the same. An awful fear went over him, and he wanted to cry aloud.” Sheilah Graham was, as it happened, a self-invented woman, the platonic conception of Lily Shiel, a girl who had grown up in a slum in the East End of London before inventing an aristocratic background for herself as an upper-class English woman and moving to Hollywood.

Over the seven years since Zelda's breakdown, Scott had had a few brief affairs, but Sheilah Graham was the first with whom he entered a
comparatively stable relationship. She tried to help him stop drinking; in the beginning these attempts always ended in failure, and often in violence: he still turned nasty when drunk. Making it clear to Sheilah and others that divorce was not in question, Scott continued to support Zelda, who was lobbying to be released from Highland Hospital and go live with her mother in Montgomery, and to travel. Fitzgerald was wary, and frustrated by the expense this would entail. He wrote her a chastising letter explaining the dire state of their finances, which ended: “
Oh, Zelda, this was to have been such a cold letter, but I don't feel that way about you. Once we were one person and always it will be a little that way.” But Zelda was turning in her isolation and despair to God, embracing a religious zeal that would color the rest of her life.

On Christmas Eve 1938 Fitzgerald wrote to Max Perkins from California. His once-golden hair had faded to the ashy color of dying straw; his smile was deprecating, tremulous, uncertain, his eyes wilted and bloodshot. He would have been chain-smoking, as he always did those days, a filtered Raleigh providing the slight veil through which he now viewed the scene. He was not having a merry Christmas.

I have come to feel somewhat neglected. Isn't my reputation being allowed to slip away? I mean what's left of it. I am still a figure to many people and the number of times I still see my name in
Time
and
New Yorker
etc. make me wonder if it should be allowed to casually disappear—when there are memorial double-deckers to such fellows as Farrell and Steinbeck . . . The recession is over for awhile and I have the most natural ambition to see my stuff accessible to another generation . . . Unless you make some gesture of confidence I see my reputation dying on its feet from lack of nourishment . . . You can imagine how distasteful it is to blow my own horn like this but it comes from a deep feeling that something could be done if it is done at once, about my literary standing—always admitting that I have any at all.

What had prompted this protest was hearing that
This Side of Paradise
, which had launched his career with such verve almost twenty years earlier, had recently been allowed to go quietly out of print. “
My God I am a forgotten man,” he wrote to Zelda. “
Gatsby
had to be taken out of the Modern Library because it didn't sell, which was a blow.” Increasingly elegiac and wistful, he composed essays, letters, and stories memorializing his own life. “
We have our tombstones to chisel,” he told Zelda in a letter he probably never sent, “and can't blunt our tools stabbing you back, you ghosts, who can't either clearly remember or cleanly forget.”

Meanwhile the voices grow fainter and fainter, he added in his notebooks:
How is Zelda, how is Zelda—tell us—how is Zelda.

A
s
The Great Gatsby
draws to a close, Nick decides to leave the East, where he has discovered he doesn't belong, and return home to the Middle West. West Egg now seems warped and phantasmagoric to him: “I see it as a night scene by El Greco: a hundred houses, at once conventional and grotesque, crouching under a sullen, overhanging sky and a lustreless moon. In the foreground four solemn men in dress suits are walking along the sidewalk with a stretcher on which lies a drunken woman in a white evening dress. Her hand, which dangles over the side, sparkles cold with jewels. Gravely the men turn in at a house—the wrong house. But no one knows the woman's name, and no one cares.” The tableau resembles a bacchanalian morality play, the spirit of the age embodied in the beautifully dressed corpse on a funeral bier, carelessness personified. Nick finds the East “haunted for me like that, distorted beyond my eyes' power of correction.”

Before he leaves Nick feels bound to end things with Jordan, although he has not seen her since the night of the accident that killed Myrtle. He is
trying to be careful, he says, “and not just trust that obliging and indifferent sea to sweep my refuse away.” The ocean may sweep you toward a new destiny, but Nick is going back, not forward. When they meet, Jordan reminds him of a conversation they once had about driving a car: “You said a bad driver was only safe until she met another bad driver? Well, I met another bad driver, didn't I? I mean it was careless of me to make such a wrong guess. I thought you were rather an honest, straightforward person. I thought it was your secret pride.” Jordan thinks she was careless, but that they were both bad drivers. Nick won't accept the charge of having been dishonorable: “I'm thirty,” he says. “I'm five years too old to lie to myself and call it honor.” But Jordan may have a point: she certainly made a wrong guess.

The last person Nick sees before he leaves is Tom Buchanan. They bump into each other, and Nick asks Tom what he said to George Wilson the afternoon that Wilson shot Gatsby and then himself. Nick is just guessing, but Tom's expression shows him that he's guessed right. On the fatal day, George Wilson came to the Buchanans' house looking for the driver of the yellow car, and Tom gave him Gatsby's name. Tom says defiantly: “What if I did tell him? That fellow had it coming to him. He threw dust into your eyes just like he did in Daisy's but he was a tough one. He ran over Myrtle like you'd run over a dog and never even stopped his car.” Nick takes refuge in the incommunicable one final time: “There was nothing I could say, except the one unutterable fact that it wasn't true.” The final mistake in identity hovers, uncorrected: Daisy never told her husband that she was driving the car. Daisy was the person who truly sacrificed Gatsby, as she deceived even Tom.

It is at this point of silence that Nick names his world's malaise: “It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.” But again Nick keeps his judgments to himself, complicit in the lies and corruption he has just identified. He shakes Tom's hand, saying it seems silly not to, and watches Tom go into a jewelry store to buy a pearl necklace, perhaps for
Daisy, or perhaps for some other woman to dangle off a funeral bier as she's carried drunkenly into the wrong house.

Nick has already discreetly planned Gatsby's funeral: “I didn't want it to be in the papers and draw a sightseeing crowd.” He succeeds in avoiding publicity so well that when the day of the funeral arrives, neither do any mourners. Jay Gatsby, the man who was defined by his guests, has no one to grieve over him but his father, his neighbor, and the one man who appears at Nick's side by the grave, Owl-Eyes, who stares, amazed that no one has come: “‘Why, my God! they used to go there by the hundreds.' He took off his glasses and wiped them again outside and in. ‘The poor son-of-a-bitch,' he said.”

El Greco's distorted vision presides over the novel's ending, as Fitzgerald invokes the old master who painted because the spirits whispered madly in his head, seeing in the stars God's careless splatters.

“I
left my capacity for hoping on the little roads that led to Zelda's sanitarium,” Fitzgerald wrote in his notebooks, but in 1938 he started trying to recapture it. That summer he sent a letter to Beatrice Dance, a woman with whom he'd had a brief affair in 1935, during the worst days of the crack-up. He was currently living on Malibu Beach, he told her: