Careless People (20 page)

The papers had begun to reveal the contents of the love letters exchanged by Edward Hall and Eleanor Mills. On the last day of her life Eleanor had written to the rector about two bestselling novels he'd given her,
Simon Called Peter
and
The Mother of All Living
, both by Robert Keable, also an Episcopalian minister.
Simon Called Peter
, one of the most sensational books of the year, tells of an upright British minister, engaged to a proper young woman, who encounters an experienced “woman of the world” in France during the First World War. They fall desperately in love and embark upon an illicit affair that makes him question both his engagement and his spiritual calling.

An enormous bestseller in 1922,
Simon Called Peter
is the book that Nick Carraway reads in Myrtle Wilson's flat while she sneaks off for some quick sex with Tom Buchanan. Nick is unimpressed: “Either it was terrible stuff or the whiskey distorted things, because it didn't make any sense to me,” he complains.
Simon Called Peter
does seem terrible stuff now, nearly unreadable. Fitzgerald loathed it (in 1923 he called it a “
really immoral book”), but maybe Myrtle Wilson isn't entirely to blame for her bad taste. As Nick caustically notes of Tom Buchanan, “the fact that he ‘had some woman in New York' was really less surprising than that he had been depressed by a book.” Perhaps Tom found books less depressing when they were titillating—as evidently did the not-very Reverend Hall.

On the day of Eleanor Mills's murder she finished reading Keable's
latest,
The Mother of All Living
. Another story of adulterous love, it tells of an unhappily married woman and her passionate affair with a better-educated, sophisticated man who reveals to her life's romantic possibilities. After she finished it, Eleanor wrote to her lover about searching for a more romantic mode of life. Like Edward, she said, Keable was a man of the cloth who understood that true spiritual connections must be physically expressed. Their affair was no sordid liaison, she implied; it was a pure expression of God's love. “I don't want to read such books again ever,” she ended. “They make me dream. Yearning for what perhaps I miss in this life . . . I hate to come back to realities—as I always have to. Reading books (oh, I love them) makes me yearn.” The press ridiculed these letters “
from a woman in humble life who looks up to the man above her,”
mocking Eleanor's penmanship, her stationery, and her heartfelt response to the novels she loved, jeering that she was trying to become a literary critic.

“
SLAIN RECTOR AND CHOIR SINGER FOUND ILLICIT LOVE PROTOTYPES IN NOVEL ‘SIMON CALLED PETER
'” declared the
World
, headlining an article by Marguerite Mooers Marshall, who had interviewed Fitzgerald earlier that year. The similarities between the affair of Hall and Mills and the fictional one in
Simon Called Peter
were striking. The novel offered a clear “parallel to the passion which finally led to a double crime in New Brunswick.” The rectors' churches even had the same name in fact and fiction: both were called St. John's.

Marshall wrote several articles detailing the symmetries between Keable's novels and the Hall–Mills affair. In
The Mother of All Living
, the heroine is persuaded into adultery by a man who insists that her marriage is “a mocking sham.” Marshall demanded: “
Was this the logic which the Rev. Edward Hall of New Brunswick, NJ, used?” The heroine's lover continually demands that she admit to never having loved her husband: “You don't love Hugh at all, you know you don't . . . You're mine, not his . . . It only remains for us to take our destiny in both hands and step out upon it.” Jay Gatsby is also a reader of sentimental novels, and makes a remarkably similar casuistical argument about his love for Daisy. “Of course she might have loved him, just for a minute, when they were first married—and loved me more even then, do you see?” he says, before adding that in any case, “it was just personal.” “I don't think she ever loved him,” Gatsby insists, after trying unsuccessfully to get Daisy to repudiate her husband. “He wanted nothing less of Daisy,” Nick realizes, “than that she should go to Tom and say: ‘I never loved you.'”

The connection of
Simon Called Peter
to the Hall–Mills case made headlines throughout the autumn, as John Sumner decided the novel should be proscribed:

Simon Called Peter
“
is the kind of book that certain men present with a smug expression in the hope that it will open up a field of conversation which is ordinarily forbidden,” Sumner charged. Such books were “aids to seduction”; their dangers were amplified by the apparent role
Simon Called Peter
had played in inspiring, or justifying, the affair that had provoked a double homicide. Sumner warned that the novel's link to the Hall–Mills murders “
may lead to a further effort to prosecute the book.” If the book had led to murder then it, too, should be prosecuted—an accessory after the fact.

After he submitted his manuscript of
Gatsby
, Fitzgerald asked Max Perkins, “
In Chap II of my book when Tom & Myrtle go into the bedroom while Carraway reads Simon Called Peter—is that raw? Let me know. I think it's pretty necessary.” He had good reason to fear that censors might consider this scene too coarse, not least because the allusions to
Simon Called Peter
would remove any doubts about the activities of Tom and
Myrtle in the bedroom. For men like John Sumner, merely reading
Simon Called Peter
was to be caught in flagrante delicto.

T
hroughout 1922, while he contemplated his third novel and wrote short stories to support his family, Scott Fitzgerald had also been writing a play, which he was confident would be such a hit that it could easily subsidize his serious novels. At Princeton, Fitzgerald's work on the annual Triangle show contributed greatly to the university's polite suggestion that he withdraw before he flunked out, but he had not given up on the idea of theater. One of the first stories in
Tales of the Jazz Age
, “Porcelain and Pink,” is written in play form and was staged in New York in April 1923, while both
This Side of Paradise
and
The Beautiful and Damned
incorporate long sections written as plays (Joyce would later use the same technique in
Ulysses
).

Having first titled his play
Gabriel's Trombone
, Fitzgerald decided to name it
The Vegetable—
an inauspicious choice. He attributed the title to a quotation from an unnamed “current magazine”: “Any man who doesn't
want to get on in the world, to make a million dollars, and maybe even park his toothbrush in the White House hasn't got as much to him as a good dog has—he's nothing more or less than a vegetable.” It appears to have been a half-remembered quotation from a 1922 Mencken essay called “On Being an American”: “Here is a country in which it is an axiom that a businessman shall be a member of the Chamber of Commerce, an admirer of Charles M. Schwab, a reader of the
Saturday Evening Post
, a golfer—in brief, a vegetable.” Moving to Great Neck was meant to help Fitzgerald meet Broadway producers so that he could stage the satire he was certain would make his fortune.

These were the “Vegetable Days in New York” that Fitzgerald remembered in his outline in
Man's Hope
, a year of meeting producers and actors, lunches in speakeasies and dinners on rooftop cafés, of keeping a sharp eye out for the satirical potential and ironies of the world around him. An irony that Fitzgerald seems to have been less alert to—or less willing to admit—was that the play he was writing to mock America's faith in ambition also constituted his own get-rich-quick scheme, a dream that was just as doomed as that of any of his characters.

The Vegetable
is a political satire centering on Jerry Frost, a railway clerk who dreams of being a postman but is nagged by a dissatisfied wife to aspire to greater things. After an encounter with a bootlegger who offers him a bottle marked “Wood Alcohol! Poison!” Frost spends the second act in an alcoholic delirium during which he is elected president and nearly destroys America, bringing the nation to the brink of war and bankruptcy with cronyism, corruption, and incompetence. As sobriety returns with the end of the play, he renounces any desire to be president; he will aspire to nothing more than being a postman. “
Art invariably grows out of a period when in general the artist admires his own nation and wants to win its approval,” Fitzgerald remarked later. “This fact is not altered by the circumstances that his work may take the form of satire for satire is the subtle flattery of a certain minority in a nation. The greatest artists grow out of these periods as the tall head of the crop.” While mocking American politics in general, Fitzgerald also took aim at some sacred cows. He even poked fun at the beloved tale of Abraham Lincoln's journey from log cabin to White House.

Edmund Wilson was uncharacteristically enthusiastic about
The Vegetable
; he declared it “
no doubt, the best American comedy ever written,” and wondered whether Fitzgerald's alcoholic fantasy sequence had been inspired by the similar hallucinatory scene at the end of Joyce's
Ulysses
. If not, the resemblance “must take its place as one of the great coincidences in literature.” It was indeed a coincidence, but few producers shared Wilson's view of its greatness. Over the next year, Fitzgerald continued to revise the play, finally deciding to arouse interest, and make some money, by publishing it as a book. Indeed, he told Max Perkins, it was more like “a book of humor . . . than like a play—because of course it is written to be read.”
The Vegetable
certainly reads better as a book than as a play: Fitzgerald put most of his writing energy into the stage directions, for one thing. When the bootlegger enters Fitzgerald tells the reader “I wish I could introduce you to the original from whom I have taken Mr. Snooks.” If his audience had heard this aside, perhaps they might have appreciated the copy more.