Careless People (6 page)

 

Dresses in 1922 were not as short as received knowledge holds: in fact, that year hemlines lengthened considerably, to much comment. That Sunday, the
New York Times
ran a feature called “
The Long and Short of New York,” remarking on the surprising fact that skirts had lengthened so much, and virtually overnight.

Working away at
Gatsby
across the summer and through the autumn of 1924, Fitzgerald looked out at a world in which fashion had only briefly flirted with hemlines as high as most people today picture them; in the bold days of 1920 and early 1921, hemlines had suddenly flown up to the knees, in what Fitzgerald later called “
the first abortive shortening of the skirts”—but not beyond, for any but the most daring. And then skirts dropped again. In 1922, they were nearly down to the ankles, and stayed that long through 1923.

And that summer, dresses were white. On June 11, 1922, the
New York Times
reported that white was “
the smartest summer color”: “the vogue for [white] this year is much more than a natural [summer] tendency. It is a passion. It is a fad. It is a necessity . . . This Summer the evening dresses are white, the afternoon dresses are white, the morning dresses are white, the suits are white, the coats are white, the capes are white.”

June 11, 1922

As
Gatsby
opens, Nick Carraway tells us that his story begins one evening in June 1922, when he visited his cousin Daisy Buchanan and her husband Tom at their stately home on Long Island, ten days before the longest day of the year. Nick finds Daisy and her friend Jordan Baker both dressed all in white, with their skirts fluttering around them in the breeze. It is one of the most evocative passages in American fiction, a setpiece that flirts with the surreal, a lingering picture of a claret-colored room and the two women floating on a sofa in the center of it.

Jordan is a golf champion, we soon learn, but Nick can't place her, and finds it surprising to discover that she's “in training,” which means she is not wearing a sportif
little golfing number. What one wore mattered in a world that still judged character by conduct and appearance. In “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” Fitzgerald remarked that “
gentlemen's clothes” were a “symbol of ‘the power that man must hold that passes from race to race.'” Clothes may make the man, but he has to know which clothes to buy; the mark of aristocracy is the assurance of knowing the rules. For the less certain, there were manuals like Mrs. Post's bestselling
Etiquette
,
first published that July, offering instructions for arrivistes trying desperately to arrive, including the useful suggestion that gentlemen keep an old tuxedo suit for informal dining at home.
Etiquette
is a shopping catalog of silverware, napkins, wineglasses, and stationery, talismans of the good life. Fitzgerald once “
looked into Emily Post and [was] inspired with the idea of a play in which
all of the motivations should consist of trying to do the right thing”—and failing.

Not knowing the rules is a dead giveaway. Tom Buchanan will recognize Jay Gatsby as an impostor because of the gauche way he dresses: “An Oxford man! . . . Like hell he is! He wears a pink suit.” When Gatsby comes to woo Daisy, he wears a silver shirt and a gold tie: his clothes are as gaudy as his dreams.

I
n September 1922
American
magazine had just published Fitzgerald's facetious “autobiographical” essay, “What I Think and Feel at 25,” in which he said that,
placing “one hand on the Eighteenth Amendment and one hand on the serious part of the Constitution,” he would offer his own articles of faith. They included such essentials as whether to have your front teeth filled with gold (no), and an injunction to “dislike old people” because “most of them go on making the same mistakes at fifty and believing in the same white list of approved twenty-carat lies they did at seventeen.” What he feared most in life, Fitzgerald said, was “conventionality, dullness, sameness, predictability.” The most important lesson he'd learned was to have faith that he knew more about his own work than anyone else.

Over the summer, Scott had been mulling over an offer to star, with Zelda, in a film adaptation of
This Side of Paradise—
the first, and perhaps last, time in history a celebrity author was asked to star as a fictionalized version of himself in the film adaptation of his own autobiographical novel. The new “mass media” meant that clippings provided an easy way to calibrate a person's significance. Scott carefully collected every magazine and newspaper account about them in
what Zelda described as four scrapbooks bursting with evidence of why other people envied them. Gatsby also keeps clippings about Daisy and shows them to her as a tribute to his faithfulness when they
reunite at last. If you are “Mr. Nobody from Nowhere,” as Tom dismissively calls Gatsby, then you must compensate for your exclusion from the old order: being original might substitute for a lack of origins.

Gatsby later fears that people will think he is just some “cheap sharper,” but in fact Gatsby also resembles a stalker, an idea that would have been available to the novel's characters, although Fitzgerald never uses it: a 1923 article referred to a young woman who enjoyed rubbing shoulders with the rich and famous as a “celebrity stalker.” Similarly, Gatsby cannot extricate his relentless desire for Daisy from her glamor and her wealth. Her voice was “full of money,” he tells Nick. “That was it,” Nick agrees. “I'd never understood before. It was full of money—that was the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it, the cymbals' song of it . . . High in a white palace the king's daughter, the golden girl . . .”

In her scrapbook Zelda kept a clipping noting the novelty of rumors about the Fitzgeralds: “
We are accustomed enough to this kind of rumor in regard to stage stars, but it is fairly new in relation to authors. The great drinking bouts, the petting may be what the public expects of Fitzgerald whose books told so much of this kind of life.” From the beginning, Fitzgerald's books were inspiring public interest in his life, an interest that could be traded upon.

Gossip was beginning to acquire a life of its own. When Nick comes to dinner at the Buchanans' that night in mid-June, Daisy asks him about rumors of his engagement back home, insisting, “We heard it three times, so it must be true.” Nick protests that he had “no intention of being rumored into marriage.” Rumors aren't just active and abroad: they're coercive, prophets of self-fulfillment, and any phantom suspicion can be rumored into fact. Gatsby himself consists only of a patchwork of rumors and myths for much of the novel. Rumor is an act of interpretation, however incomplete or inaccurate: gossip is careless fiction for careless people, and it fueled the celebrity culture driving through America.

In 1922 Zelda began writing for the first time, publishing a few magazine pieces that traded on her celebrity name, including a tongue-in-cheek review of
The Beautiful and Damned
and an article in June called “Eulogy
on the Flapper,” which was also a lament for beauty and youth,
a carpe diem arguing that flappers were smart enough to recognize the forces of mutability and transience and were simply being businesslike about life by getting their money's worth from being young.

Zelda understood early that fame was something that could be sold. In her 1934 autobiographical novel
Save Me the Waltz
, when the heroine Alabama learns from the newspapers that she and her husband are famous,
she dances around the house all morning, pondering the various ways that money can be spent. In fact, Zelda was breathtakingly extravagant, “
as proudly careless about money as an eighteenth-century nobleman's heir,”
and her reckless improvidence worried all of Scott's friends. Women tended to be held accountable for such things: in fact Scott was spendthrift too. Their heedless profligacy was their trademark and their bond: as Edmund Wilson remarked, “
If ever there was a pair whose fantasies matched it was Zelda Sayre and Scott Fitzgerald.” A note Fitzgerald once made about drinks could serve as a sketch of the shape of things to come: “
You can order it in four sizes; demi (half a litre), distingué (one litre), formidable (three litres), and catastrophe (five litres).” From distingué to catastrophe was only a matter of measurements.

Earlier in the year, the New York
World
had run a filmstrip montage of photos to headline an interview with Scott Fitzgerald, in a regular feature they called “Evening World Ten-Second News Movies.” Beneath each picture were memorable quotations extracted from the piece: the sound bite had arrived.

“New York is crazy!” the interview began. Drinking had become a status symbol, Fitzgerald observed, while young people no longer “believe in the old standards and authorities, and they're not intelligent enough, many of them, to put a code of morals and conduct in place of the sanctions that have been destroyed for them.” After he read the piece, Fitzgerald politely wrote to the reporter, Marguerite Mooers Marshall: “
I liked your interview immensely. Thank you for the publicity which it gave to me.”

For almost two years, the papers had been declaring Fitzgerald “
the recognized spokesman of the younger generation—the dancing, flirting, frivoling, lightly philosophizing young America,” who would soon be dubbed “Flaming Youth” after Warner Fabian's 1923 bestseller. One clipping that Fitzgerald kept asked: “Does the ‘younger generation' mean, perhaps, F. Scott Fitzgerald alone, with his attendant flappers, male and female?” On the same scrapbook page a review of
The Beautiful and Damned
observed: “for a man of imagination young Fitzgerald is strangely lacking in ideas outside his own as yet rather uneventful life. Every scene he writes seems to be personal experience; and one who knows him recognizes in certain minor characters acquaintances of his that he has dared to transfer to the printed page just as they are . . . He invents little.” The New York
World
agreed: “
Yes,
The Beautiful and Damned
is true . . . Some day, when he has outgrown the temptation to be flippant, Mr. Fitzgerald will sit up and write a book that will give us a long breath of wonder.”

It was clear to everyone that Fitzgerald invented little, according to their definitions of invention, although being original is not simply a matter of making people up. They were continually recording their impressions of Fitzgerald's sources; one of the most frequently invoked models was Zelda, consistently identified as her husband's muse and inspiration, the model for all of his women. In 1923 a Louisville paper interviewed Zelda, and asked her to name her favorite of her husband's characters. “
I like the ones that are like me!” she responded. “That's why I love Rosalind in
This Side of Paradise . . .
I like girls like that . . . I like their courage, their recklessness and spendthriftness. Rosalind was the original American flapper.” “Is She His Model?” asked the article breathlessly. “Is Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, wife of Scott Fitzgerald, author of flapper fiction stories, the heroine of her husband's books? . . . If so, is she the living prototype of that species of femininity known as the American flapper? If so, what is a flapper like in real life?”
They saved the clipping in their scrapbook: soon Zelda would help inspire another of her husband's heroines, Daisy Fay Buchanan, who hails from Louisville.