Careless People (13 page)

The “drab room in the Bronx” where Fitzgerald lived during these months made a profound impression on him. In his admittedly autobiographical 1924 story “The Sensible Thing,” Fitzgerald described it as “
one room in a high, horrible apartment-house in the middle of nowhere.” The city had not yet expanded that far north; a few isolated apartment houses stood alone, surrounded by empty stretches of road. Fitzgerald always remembered that room “in the Bronx” as a recurring threat of what life could be if all were lost, so much so that a dingy apartment on Claremont Avenue is precisely the location to which he condemns Anthony Patch in
The Beautiful and Damned
, when he loses everything through dissipation. When Amory Blaine contemplates poverty in
This Side of Paradise
, he has a similar image: “
He pictured the rooms where these people lived—where the patterns of the blistered wall-papers were heavy reiterated sunflowers on green and yellow backgrounds, where there were tin bathtubs and gloomy hallways and verdureless, unnamable spaces in back of the buildings; where even love dressed as seduction—a sordid murder around the corner, illicit motherhood in the flat above.” As far as young Scott Fitzgerald was concerned, Claremont Avenue and 125th Street was where the damned ended up.

Fitzgerald's outline in
Man's Hope
makes it clear that he was thinking of this same “hole” when he endowed Myrtle Wilson with a “love nest” in Washington Heights paid for by Tom Buchanan for their trysts, a hole that for Fitzgerald always recalled his feelings of social exclusion, his fear of failure. Poor Myrtle Wilson, consigned to the same neighborhood, is also assigned the same anxieties, but without Fitzgerald's education, charm, or intelligence, let alone his genius.

Myrtle, Tom, and Nick have driven up to her apartment in a lavender-colored taxi with gray upholstery after she lets several less impressive vehicles pass them by. The lavender taxi helps signal Myrtle's pretension, as does the magazine she is clutching,
Town Tattle
, a burlesque of
Town Topics
, which called itself a “Journal of Society.” Fitzgerald had been likened to the magazine earlier that year,
derided as “
a male gossip, an artistic edition of
Town Topics
.” Gossip is in the air as they all head to Myrtle's apartment for the first, and seamiest, of
The Great Gatsby
's three great party scenes.

Town Topics
had been writing snidely about the Fitzgeralds for two years. That summer they had printed some unflattering gossip from St. Paul, and it wasn't the magazine's first (or last) uncomplimentary word on the couple. Scott kept grudges—years later he recorded a “snub list”—and he and Zelda also kept clippings of
Town Topics
's reports on their exploits. Neither Scott nor Zelda, said the magazine, had made “much of a hit” in Minnesota:

The women are jealous of Zelda's looks and of her soft voice . . . and both men and women fear lest Francis should lampoon them in some
a clef
novel. The elder men especially dislike Francis's outspoken socialism . . . The Fitzgeralds have not been at White Bear Yacht Club long nor do I think theirs will be a long stay there . . . Francis behaves in a patronizing way to people who have known him all his young life, and that does not add to his social popularity. To justify his airs his literary baggage should be far less frothy than it is.

If Fitzgerald was known for using life in his art, sometimes barely disguising his models, his books weren't really romans à clef. Fitzgerald's characters were frequently inspired by real people, but the story was always his, and many forms can be made out of originals. Whether in revenge for its continued critical remarks about him, or out of distaste for its social pretensions, Fitzgerald put an à clef version of
Town Topics
into vulgar Myrtle's hand for the taxi ride up to her apartment, where will be found more copies of the affected magazine whose hauteur she tries to adopt.

Myrtle's raucous gathering grounds the later glamor and magic of
Gatsby's festivities. Fitzgerald had been told that the destruction of his wealthy protagonists at the end of
The Beautiful and Damned
had not seemed authentically tragic: many readers thought the novel's ending was ironic, a flippant commentary from a writer known in 1922 as a satirist. To intensify the tragedy at the end of
Gatsby
, Fitzgerald brought another America into the story: the tawdry dreams of Myrtle Wilson as a counterpoint to the grandeur of Jay Gatsby's visions.

Myrtle's guests are pathetic facsimiles of the unrefined people who will frequent Gatsby's parties: Myrtle's sister Catherine, strident and ersatz, with a sticky bob of dyed red hair; Mrs. McKee, “shrill, languid, handsome, and horrible”; Mr. McKee, a photographer, who says he is in “the artistic game,” a phrase that Fitzgerald viewed as a category error (art is neither a game, nor a racket). Myrtle spends the party putting on airs, becoming “more violently affected moment by moment” as she minces, flounces, and raises her eyebrows at the shiftlessness of the lower orders. It is telling that Catherine was recently at West Egg attending the party of a man named Gatsby: anyone can get into his parties, even the tasteless Catherine.

It was much remarked at the time that prohibition parties were breaking down old barriers: men and women were suddenly getting drunk together, with predictable results. Different social classes were also mingling, but what Myrtle Wilson's sordid little evening shows is that this was hardly the same thing as social equality. The fraternizing of rich and poor may, after all, simply serve to highlight economic disparity, underscoring the power of the wealthy. Dissatisfaction was the result; Myrtle is dissembling, but she isn't fooled. She wants what Daisy has. Myrtle is the mirror image of Gatsby, who wants what Tom has. They are both upstarts, trying to foist themselves upon high society, poseurs who lead double lives. But Myrtle, according to the code of the novel, lacks Gatsby's greatness, while her party, although cheaper than Gatsby's, shares (and foreshadows) the crassness and violence that will come at the end of his.

It is at this typical prohibition party that Nick offers his famous image of being a vicarious participant, both within and without the gathering simultaneously, enjoying the party but listening to the secret priest within who
disapproves: “Yet high over the city our line of yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening streets, and I was him too, looking up and wondering. I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.” Before long, Tom has broken Myrtle's nose with the flat of his hand for saying Daisy's name; they stanch the blood with copies of
Town Tattle
to keep it from ruining the pretentious toile de Jouy of her upholstery.

Myrtle informs Nick that when she first began her affair with Tom all that ran through her head was a modernist carpe diem: “You can't live forever . . . you can't live forever.” When she makes a list at the party of all the things she's got to get, they end with ashes and death, “one of those cute little ashtrays where you touch a spring, and a wreath with a black silk bow for Mother's grave.” Ashes open the chapter and they close it too: ashes mingling with dust.

Parties were a form of suicide and yet, after talking for a few hours with James Drawbell that late September night in 1922, and getting drunker, Fitzgerald “
looked round mockingly. The party was over. His path lay elsewhere. He was off to the bright lights, purged. The lushest party in the world would still see him. A little late, perhaps, but that was his usual way of arriving. He would soon catch up.”

GODDARDS. DWANS SWOPES

There was music from my neighbor's house through the summer nights. In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars . . . On Mondays eight servants including an extra gardener toiled all day with mops and scrubbing-brushes and hammers and garden-shears, repairing the ravages of the night before . . .

The Great Gatsby,
Chapter 3

H
ow do you tell the story of a party? A guest list is one way to start. But as Americans invented “partying,” they found that the uninvited kept turning up. A new phrase was needed: crashing the gate, first recorded in 1922. If your party's gate is crashed, the guest list is retrospective, recording those who came rather than those who were expected. History resembles a guest list, in that sense, of the invited and the gate-crashers, the people for whom we have been waiting, and those whose presence takes us unawares. Sometimes the gate-crashers prove to be the life of the party.

In the case of the parties that inspired
The Great Gatsby
, the revelries Fitzgerald exalted in fiction but recorded at the back of
Man's Hope
as “Goddards. Dwanns Swopes,” the guests have grown fugitive with time and we're still awaiting an introduction to some of our hosts.
Goddard, for example, may have been Great Neck resident and playwright Charles W. Goddard, or perhaps it was Charles H. Goddard, a real estate broker—we can't be sure. History is prone to mistakes in identity, and facts are not always
solid things. The Goddards must be dispensed with, but they served their purpose.

The servants have been at work, and Fitzgerald has reminded us to mark their labor in repairing the ravages of the previous night's festivities. But his notice of workers as he begins to describe Gatsby's parties does not mean Fitzgerald was more compassionate or egalitarian than his contemporaries. He might only have been thinking of how expensive servants were: they just couldn't get good help, he and Zelda kept finding, although being hopeless with money and drunk all the time might have had something to do with the problem.

Meanwhile, the bootleggers, having delivered their crates of smuggled champagne, vanished into the whispering trees, hotfooting it away from the authoritative record.

If history starts as a guest list, it has a tendency to end like the memory of a drunken party: misheard, blurred, fragmentary. We're not always sure what happened, or who was there. We have some dropped hints and our own tacit—often mistaken—assumptions. Sometimes history appears to have been so inebriated that it blacked out completely, and we have no idea what a mysterious trace means at all.

But the vicarious pleasure of Fitzgerald's words and images remains: the ornate rooms, glowing to receive a thousand guests; the nightingale singing in the garden above the floating rounds of cocktails and which must have come over from Europe on the Cunard or the White Star Line because America doesn't have nightingales. (Unless it flew in from Keats's tender night, or Milton's paradise.) The silver jazz trumpets play a song that sounds plaintive now: “In the morning, in the evening, ain't we got fun?” If they sing it often enough, perhaps they can convince themselves.

Gatsby
delights so many readers in part because it is a book of symbolic senses, carefully designed to make the pleasure we imagine palpable. Food is drenched in music, lights burn in deep jewel colors, people drink mint juleps or luminescent champagne. Enchanted objects defy the laws of physics: houses and women alike tend to float, while cocktails glide, disembodied, through gardens. When Daisy arrives at Nick's house in the rain her
hair is like a smear of blue paint across her face, and when Gatsby sits with her in Louisville he kisses her “dark hair,” but Fitzgerald also implies that Daisy is blond, for she says her daughter inherited her “yellow” hair. Scholars have debated the meanings of this discrepancy, but whether deliberate or not, the inconsistency adds to the mystical quality of the novel. Daisy's hair is both colors, for she is a figment of universal beauty, living in a world of spectroscopic gaiety, in which colors refract and shift. Fitzgerald merges different sensory experiences to create prose that is rich with synesthesia. Voices in this novel don't speak, they are “glowing” with sound. Colors nearly always suggest scents or tastes as well: Gatsby's house is decorated in rose and lavender silk; his tear-jerking shirts are in coral and apple-green and lavender and faint orange. Music has a tendency to liquefy: silver scales float over a body of water called the Sound while banjoes “drip” their tinny tunes.

There's just enough reality in
Gatsby
's parties to keep them from being entirely surreal, but they are phantasmagoric, a night scene from El Greco, who imperiously decreed that only the masters should be permitted to use color.
Gatsby
is washed in color: leaves are blue, shirts are silver, cocktail music is yellow. Prodigal laughter fills the gardens; champagne glasses are as big as finger bowls; women wear trembling opal. Even turkeys are bewitched to a dark gold. Changing the world's color alters its potential, as color makes Gatsby's romance with possibility perceptible to the reader: anything can happen now.

Nick says the story of
Gatsby
begins the night he first went to the Buchanans', but for many readers it begins the night he dresses up in white flannels and strolls across to his neighbor's crowded lawns, complacent in the knowledge that he's one of the few guests who was actually invited to the party. When Nick is finally introduced to Gatsby three chapters into the novel that bears his name, he tells us that Gatsby is not what he expected. Mistakes about identity continue to be made: Nick thought “Mr. Gatsby would be a florid and corpulent person in his middle years”; instead he's an attractive man of Nick's age, with a sudden, magical smile. But he is also obviously a tough attempting to appear cultivated, who could have sprung
from the slums of New York's Lower East Side, or from the backwaters of Louisiana. “I was looking,” Nick says, “at an elegant young rough-neck, a year or two over thirty, whose elaborate formality of speech just missed being absurd. Some time before he introduced himself I'd got a strong impression that he was picking his words with care.” Carefulness is a suspect trait among careless people; it means you're trying too hard.

Nick expects Gatsby to be a pompously successful tycoon. We expect someone great, because we know the book's title. Fitzgerald toys with great expectations, leaving the reader like Owl-Eyes, the stout man in glasses Nick and Jordan encounter in the library later that evening who has been drunk for a week, and thought it might sober him up to sit in a library. Owl-Eyes is marveling over the realism of Gatsby's books: “as a matter of fact you needn't bother to ascertain. I ascertained. They're real,” he announces. “It's a bona fide piece of printed matter. It fooled me. This fella's a regular Belasco. It's a triumph.” Even Owl-Eyes can see through Gatsby's flimsy charade: they all know he's a fake. “What thoroughness! What realism! Knew when to stop too—didn't cut the pages. But what do you want? What do you expect?”

What we expect helps shape what we will find; through fictions of self we create fact. “If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures,” Nick says of Gatsby, “then there was something gorgeous about him.” Mark the doubt of that “if,” however: Gatsby lives in the conditional mood, as aspirants must. The plot may hinge on bad faith, but the book is bona fide: that much has been ascertained.

A
ccording to Burton Rascoe, on the night of Saturday, September 30 the Fitzgeralds were partying at Sew Collins's apartment with Bunny Wilson, Mary Blair, and John Dos Passos and his piano lamp, after signing a lease in Great Neck. The next day the
New York Times
ran a book review about modern college life with the large, misspelled headline: “A Century Before Scott FitzGerald.” Alec Woollcott, an Algonquin regular (who looked, Max Perkins once remarked, “like a petulant owl”), took the time to mock the possibility that the “
well-advertised gin-swigging finale-hopping” college boys of 1922 “could be sent to any American college as it was a century before the Scott FitzGerald age,” for it was obvious to anyone that these modern young men “could not possibly pass the entrance examinations” of a century earlier.

Scott may have been “apathetic” and “going to pieces” in the small hours of the previous night, but as he and Zelda read the
New York Times
the next morning, perhaps he was enlivened to discover that he had made literary headlines again. If it was irritating to be held to symbolize the flippancy and ignorance of the younger generation, it was also bewildering, he later said. Fitzgerald clipped the headline “A Century Before Scott FitzGerald” and put it in his scrapbook—twice. He must have discovered himself in syndication.

Eight days later, the Fitzgeralds moved into a cottage at 6 Gateway Drive, in Great Neck, where they would live, tumultuously, until they
set sail for Cherbourg in May 1924. The house they settled into was a recently built suburban cottage, part of a new development just outside Great Neck village. It has since been expanded; when the Fitzgeralds lived there it was a modest bungalow and, they and their friends agreed, amusingly bourgeois. They paid $300 a month rent, bought a secondhand Rolls-Royce, and hired servants: a live-in couple at $160 a month, a nurse for Scottie at $90 a month, and a part-time laundress for $36 a month. All this, and the consoling proximity of millionaires.

Zelda called the Gateway Drive house their “nifty little Babbitt-home at Great Neck,” a nod to Sinclair Lewis's bestselling new novel, published on September 14, the day that Edward Hall and Eleanor Mills were murdered. Zelda wrote a letter urging the Kalmans, good friends in St. Paul, to come for an autumn visit: “
Think of the ride through the dusty blue twilight to New York and the chrysanthemums and the sort of burned smell in the air—and the liquor.” Soon Bunny Wilson was writing to John Bishop: “
Fitz and Zelda have struck their perfect milieu in the jazz society of Great Neck, where they inhabit a brand-new suburban house. Zelda plays golf, and Fitz is already acquiring pompous overtones of the successful American householder.” This impression of suburban conventionality was largely tongue-in-cheek, and Wilson added, “They are still one of the most refreshing elements at large, however, and it would take me pages to do justice to their pranks.”