Careless People (19 page)

Zelda was something of a reckless driver herself, as (by no coincidence) is Gloria in
The Beautiful and Damned
, whom Fitzgerald describes as “
a driver of many eccentricities and of infinite carelessness.”
Zelda later wrote of their sojourn in Westchester in 1921 that everyone drove up and down the major thoroughfares while they were drunk, running into trucks and stone walls and other natural hazards. The police didn't bother to arrest them: everyone was too busy thinking everything would be fine to worry. Despite their unconcern, Zelda still somehow managed to get arrested once as “the Bob-haired Bandit” while crossing the Queensboro Bridge, said Fitzgerald. Before long he was
driving Max Perkins into a pond on Long Island, a story that lost nothing in the telling.

Jordan was also the name of a popular model of cars in America in the early 1920s. On October 15, 1922, Sherwood Automobiles took out a large advertisement in the
New York Times
, selling “The Blue Boy in Blue Devil Blue.” A young man races along in a Jordan, “like some wonderful somebody who has an account with Abercrombie and Fitch.” Shop at the right stores, drive the right car, and you might be transformed into some wonderful somebody. That casual indifference to specifics admits infinite possibilities. Advertising was selling the hope of becoming a wonderful anybody.

As fate—or as it's also known, history—would have it, New York City declared the week of October 8–15, 1922, its first ever Safety Week, sponsored by the newly formed and optimistically named Society for the Prevention of Accidents.
Posters and badges had been organized with slogans including, “How many of the people killed by automobiles last year were pedestrians?” and “How many motorists have been convicted of manslaughter?” That week the papers reported that
out of more than four hundred deaths in New York caused by reckless driving over the previous year not a single one of the culprits had been jailed and few licenses had been revoked. Automobile dealer associations were teaming up with the
New York
Times
to demand an investigation into “the carelessness and negligence” of so many drivers.

Meanwhile, on that same unlucky Friday, a motorist in New Jersey was killed, smashing his car into a telegraph pole an hour after he'd been pulled over and fined for reckless driving. The papers reported that he had won the Croix de Guerre and the Distinguished Service Medal during the war. We shouldn't be surprised if we begin to see the ghost of some wonderful somebody hovering in the margins of the newspaper reports, for Jay Gatsby, Daisy tells us, “resembles the advertisement of the man . . . You know the advertisement of the man.”

That day the
Times
announced the arrival of a new play by Luigi Pirandello called
Six Characters in Search of an Author
, about reality and illusion, incest and murder. By the end of the month one of Pirandello's characters had told American audiences for the first time, “Life is full of infinite absurdities, which, strangely enough, do not even need to appear plausible, since they are true.”

A. VEGETABLE DAYS IN NEW YORK
B. MEMORY OF GINEVRA'S WEDDING

Once I wrote down on the empty spaces of a time-table the names of those who came to Gatsby's house that summer. It is an old time-table now, disintegrating at its folds and headed “This schedule in effect July 5th, 1922.” But I can still read the grey names and they will give you a better impression than my generalities of those who accepted Gatsby's hospitality and paid him the subtle tribute of knowing nothing whatever about him.

The Great Gatsby,
Chapter 4

E
dmund Wilson jotted a fragment in his notebooks:
a skeleton in a taxicab rides through the streets of New York, from Rutgers Place to Riverside Drive. Wilson did not identify his destination, but if he was looking for a speakeasy, the skeleton might have enjoyed the Furnace Room (“the hottest place in town”), or—if he had a dinner jacket—perhaps he startled the other patrons of the Paradise Roof on Eighth Avenue at Fifty-eighth Street. But presumably the skeleton would have been most at home in the city morgue, communing with some corpses.

Although the skeleton in the taxi was Wilson's idea, spending a night at
the morgue was Scott Fitzgerald's. One night of partying with Scott and Zelda is said to have begun at a Broadway nightclub and progressed to a Washington Square speakeasy, before ending uptown at a Harlem cabaret. At five in the morning, their hilarious party arrived back at Fifth Avenue and Fifty-seventh Street, two blocks from the Plaza, where they breakfasted at Child's, one of America's first chain restaurants. As dawn broke Fitzgerald led his party back out into another taxicab, and drove off to Bellevue, where
they ended their festivities at the morgue, convincing the sleepy clerk to let them look at cadavers.

Sightseeing was on the rise in the 1920s and Fitzgerald was always exemplary: he was hardly the only one to indulge in a bit of necro-tourism. Motorists were coming in from all over the country to gawk at the crab apple tree where the bodies of Hall and Mills had been found. Topping off one's evening in a morgue, however, was probably less common—or at least less voluntary.

W
hen he was thirty, Fitzgerald gave an interview claiming that Nietzsche's
The Genealogy of Morals
had been “the greatest influence on my mind” at the age of twenty-four; at twenty-six, his first year in Great Neck, it was Dostoevsky's
The Brothers Karamazov
. (His favorite teacher at Princeton would say that Scott Fitzgerald reminded him of all the brothers Karamazov at once.) Art, said Nietzsche, is a question of necessary lies and voluntary lies, while Dostoevsky urged, “believe to the end, even if all men went astray and you were left the only one faithful.” Perhaps it is no coincidence that Fitzgerald came to believe that the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still be able to function.

When Jay Gatsby collects Nick to drive him into New York for lunch, Gatsby tells Nick a series of absurd lies about his background: that he is an
Oxford-educated aristocrat from the “Middle West” of San Francisco; that he lived like a young rajah in the capitals of Europe collecting jewels—“chiefly rubies”—and hunting big game, trying to forget an unspecified tragedy. Nick restrains incredulous laughter with difficulty and wonders whether Gatsby is pulling his leg: listening to these trite fictions “was like skimming hastily through a dozen magazines.” But Gatsby is not joking (he has many virtues, but it must be admitted that a sense of humor is not prominent among them).

Then Gatsby shows Nick a picture of himself at Oxford, as well as some authentic medals from the war, and Nick suddenly believes it is all true. “I saw the skins of tigers flaming in his palace on the Grand Canal; I saw him opening a chest of rubies to ease, with their crimson-lighted depths, the gnawings of his broken heart.” Nick continually loses faith in Gatsby only to regain it: “I had one of those renewals of complete faith in him that I'd experienced before.” But Gatsby's faith is a constant: he believes to the end although everyone else goes astray.

As they drive toward the white glacier of Manhattan, Nick thinks that in New York anything could happen, anything at all. “Even Gatsby could happen, without any particular wonder.”

I
n the autumn of 1922, Fitzgerald wrote his cousin Cecilia a name-dropping letter, listing all the celebrities he and Zelda knew in Great Neck:

We are established in the above town very comfortably and having a winter of hard work. I'm writing a play which I hope will go on about the 1st of Jan. I wish you could arrange to come up for the opening. Great Neck is a great place for celebrities—it being the habitat of Mae Murray, Frank Craven, Herbert Swope, Arthur Hopkins, Jane Cowl, Joseph Santley, Samuel Goldwyn, Ring Lardner, Fontaine Fox, “Tad,” Gene Buck, Donald Bryan, Tom Wise, Jack Hazard, General Pershing. It is most amusing after the dull healthy Middle West. For instance at a party last night where we went were John McCormick, Hugh Walpole, F.P.A., Neysa McMein, Arthur William Brown, Rudolf Friml & Deems Taylor. They have no mock-modesty & all perform their various stunts upon the faintest request so it's like a sustained concert.

Fitzgerald's list reads like a feuilleton; gossip magazines and newspapers often shared similar roll calls of people attending parties or events. The first half of every issue of
Town Topics
was a catalog of prominent names, and Myrtle Wilson, the avid reader of
Town Tattle
, also keeps lists. Not lists of people she's met, as she still only aspires to enter society, but rather of the things she's “got to get,” which are the same as the things she's got to do. For people on the make, like Myrtle, getting was becoming the only thing worth doing.

Bunny Wilson was also a careful maker of lists. In February 1922, he
solemnly recorded a list of current slang: ratty, crocko, squiffy, boiled to the ears. Dumbbell, upstage, lousy, high-hat, rat-fuck. What's the dirt? Spill the dirt? “He's always doin' his stuff.” Razz: the Royal Spanish raspberry. Bozo. Cuckoo. Flop. Everyone was always doing their stuff, upstaging each other, spilling the dirt—not to mention getting crocko, squiffy, and boiled to the ears.

A few years later, he compiled “
A Lexicon of Prohibition,” contemporary terms for drunkenness in order of “degrees of intensity” and “beginning with the mildest stages,” including:

lit

squiffy

oiled

lubricated

owled

edged

jingled

piffed

half-screwed

half-shot

half-crocked

fried

stewed

boiled

zozzled

sprung

scrooched

jazzed

jagged

canned

corked

corned

potted

hooted

slopped

tanked

stinko

blind

stiff

tight

pickled

spifflicated

primed

organized

featured

pie-eyed

cock-eyed

wall-eyed

over the Bay

four sheets in the wind

crocked

loaded

leaping

lathered

plastered

soused

bloated

polluted

saturated

paralyzed

ossified

embalmed

buried

blotto

lit up like the sky

lit up like a church

fried to the hat

slopped to the ears

stewed to the gills

boiled as an owl

to have a slant on

to have a skate on

to have a snootful

to have a skinful

to pull a Daniel Boone

to have the heeby-jeebies

to have the screaming- meemies

to have the whoops and jingles

to burn with a low blue flame

The Great Gatsby
offers its own famous catalog: on a timetable dated July 5, 1922, a day suggesting that dreams of America's future are in its past, Nick
Carraway writes down a list of all the people who came to Gatsby's house that summer despite knowing nothing about him. They are politicians and movie stars, racketeers and tycoons, chorus girls and plutocrats, and none of them come to any good.

Gatsby's guests have burlesque names, suggesting tastelessness, violence, bathos. There is the unctuous Doctor Civet, and fishy people including the Leeches, Hammerheads, Fishguards, and Beluga, the tobacco importer. There are the more aristocratic-sounding Willie Voltaires, Smirkes, and a snobbish clan Fitzgerald calls “Blackbuck” in a bit of passing racism that seems aimed to cut the elitists down to size. There are men whose homosexuality is hinted at by their floral names, such as Ernest Lilly and Newton Orchid, the film producer. Many of the guests meet violent ends: one man's brother “afterward strangled his wife”; another killed himself by jumping in front of a subway train; Doc Civet will drown. Bootleggers, recognizable by their nicknames (James B. “Rot-Gut” Ferret), are mingling with the guests, and a woman comes with a man “reputed to be her chauffeur,” as well as “a prince of something whom we called Duke.” This is café society, the promiscuous mingling of old and new money, aristocracy and industry, debauchery and criminality, comedy and death.

After
Gatsby
was published, Ring Lardner sent the Fitzgeralds a letter about a Great Neck celebrity party they'd missed: “
On the Fourth of July, Ed Wynn gave a fireworks party at his new estate . . . After the children had been sent home, everybody got pie-eyed and I never enjoyed a night so much. All the Great Neck professionals did their stuff, the former chorus girls danced . . . the imitations were all the same, consisting of an aesthetic dance which ended with an unaesthetic fall onto the tennis court.” Fitzgerald had already invented his own Fourth of July party in West Egg by the time he received this letter, but it was clear that imitations were becoming a way of life.

F
our weeks after the murders of Hall and Mills, the
World
condemned the “
Tragedy of LIES” in “this grim New Brunswick drama of passion, jealousy, hatred, envy, murder.” All of New Brunswick “seems to have been lying about the Hall–Mills murder since it was first discovered . . . It is a whole town of Babbitts.”