Careless People (27 page)

At the end of 1923, Fitzgerald met Max Perkins for lunch at the Hotel
Chatham, on Vanderbilt Avenue in Manhattan, to discuss publishing a collection of Ring Lardner's stories. Lardner, always self-deprecating, was hesitant, so Fitzgerald and Perkins were taking matters into their own hands. Fitzgerald jotted down ideas for titles on the back of a menu, which he saved. In the early 1920s, food in New York was Francophilic, as a symbol of cultural cosmopolitanism, and not only in expensive establishments; speakeasies, too, featured “chicken fricassee, family style” or “bouillabaisse marseillaise.” On November 9, 1922, American caterers called for menus to be written in “
One hundred percent Americanism.” Demands for one hundred percent Americanism would only grow louder as the century progressed.

The menu Fitzgerald saved is valuable not because of what it teaches us about food, however, but because it is a relic, a trace of the past. A love of enchanted objects often leads us astray, as Jay Gatsby will learn; but it is also instinctive, clutching at the palpable for evidence of a life before us that otherwise is only storied. Without the things that survive us, there would be no history.

On Sunday, November 5, Carl Van Vechten attended a cocktail party that appeared to be hosting “
all the kept women & brokers in New York.” One of the other guests was twenty-four-year-old George Gershwin, who entertained the party by playing his hit song from
The Scandals of 1922
, “I'll Build A Stairway to Paradise.” It could have been the theme song of Jay Gatsby, who would see a stairway to paradise on the streets of Louisville as he kissed Daisy Fay for the first time. The bandleader Paul Whiteman, who recorded “Stairway to Paradise” in 1922, would commission Gershwin two years later to compose a serious, full-length jazz composition; the result was “Rhapsody in Blue,” which premiered in February 1924, two months before the Fitzgeralds quit New York for the blue Mediterranean.

Gershwin's invention was inspired, he said, by the daily rhythms and noises of urban life, sounds of modern America being born: “
It was on the train, with its steely rhythms, its rattle-ty bang, that is so often so stimulating to a composer—I frequently hear music in the very heart of the noise . . . I heard it as a sort of musical kaleidoscope of America, of our vast melting pot, of our unduplicated national pep, of our metropolitan madness.” Gershwin's original title for the composition about metropolitan madness was “American Rhapsody,” until his brother Ira suggested that he model himself on the titles of James McNeil Whistler's paintings, such as
Nocturne in Black and Gold
.

At Gatsby's first party, as the mothlike women flutter through whisperings with yellow cocktail music rising above them, they are entertained by a performance of the “Jazz History of the World.” In the
Trimalchio
drafts, Fitzgerald wrote a long description of the musical kaleidoscope played for Gatsby's guests, before he decided to leave it to the reader's imagination. Nick's description is a meditation on cyclicality and coherence:

It started out with a weird, spinning sound, mostly from the cornets. Then there would be a series of interruptive notes which colored
everything that came after them until before you knew it they became the theme and new discords were opposed outside. But just as you'd get used to the new discord one of the old themes would drop back in, this time as a discord, until you'd get a weird sense that it was a preposterous cycle after all. Long after the piece was over it went on and on in my head—whenever I think of that summer I can hear it yet.

Let the preposterous cycle be a symbol, then, for the weird sense that all of the spinning themes and discordant interruptions are connected after all. It is worth listening for the music in the very heart of the noise.

A
s Gershwin was building a stairway to paradise for all the kept women in New York and their brokers, the
New York Times
reported on November 5 that Mrs. Gibson had admitted telling different versions of her tale:
“‘
The story I told the authorities and the story I told you reporters are two different things,' she said. ‘And when I get on the stand, I will give you a better story than you have had yet.'” The reporter pointedly observed that Mrs. Gibson held “stacks of newspapers” as she spoke, but special prosecutor Mott remained marvelously untroubled by his star witness's admission that she was making up her story as she went.

Arrests were being postponed until after the governor's election in three days, leading to increased murmurs of corruption and carelessness in New Jersey. Rumors spread that the authorities planned to drop the whole case after the election; Mott was alleged to have said he was a “good waiter” and was biding his time for the papers to lose interest in the story.

Meanwhile, Mrs. Gibson continued telling the story of her life to avid listeners. She claimed to have an aristocratic background, her ancestors came over on the
Mayflower
, and she was a college graduate. She was raised on a horse farm in Kentucky, where she rode to hounds (“
which accounts for her agility at midnight on the back of her saddle mule”). After that, she was for a time a bareback rider in a circus and then she'd married her husband, a minister who had drowned seventeen years before.

Only not a word of it was true. Even the Pig Woman's name was an invention: “
It has been established to the satisfaction even of the officials,” noted the press sardonically, that she had adopted the name Gibson from the previous owner of her farm. There was no romantically perished minister, she had not gone to college, her family was not
Mayflower
stock. Her current husband was a local factory worker named Easton; asked to comment on his estranged wife's tale, he remarked, “
It's an amazing story . . . She has a brilliant mind.” But local authorities insisted that Gibson's story of the murders was not made less credible by “
romantic inaccuracies in her story of her past life.”

Mrs. Gibson with her son William and two pigs.

Asked to explain herself, Gibson grew increasingly pugnacious: “I know they say I was a figure in the Piper murder case some years ago. I know everyone wonders why I said I was the widow of a clergyman named Gibson who died seventeen years ago, and why I have not revealed the full story of my life.” She did not answer any of these questions. The Piper case was a five-year-old unsolved murder near New Brunswick; a student named John Piper had disappeared and a witness, described as “an elderly woman,” and whose name no one could now remember, “
gave a vivid account of hearing a man's voice cry, ‘My God! Don't shoot me!'” No one commented publicly on the stories' pronounced resemblance.

“Well I don't care,” Mrs. Gibson declared defiantly. “
What difference does it make whether I have had a past or not? My past is my own business.”

When Nick asks Gatsby “what business he was in,” Gatsby answers abruptly, “That's
my affair,” before realizing “that it wasn't the appropriate reply” in the circles to which he aspires. Romantic inventors of new and improved selves remained convinced that their past was their own business: “What better right does a man possess than to invent his own antecedents?” asks Nick in the drafts of
Gatsby
.
The inventive Jane Gibson would doubtless have endorsed this sentiment, even as her story might seem to suggest that some antecedents are not invented, but discovered.

O
n the chilly, rainy Monday evening of November 6, most of the writers of the Algonquin Round Table gathered at the premiere of a musical revue they had written with Ring Lardner.
The '49ers
played for a grand total of fifteen performances, until November 18, when it fell flat on its face.

Otherwise known as “The Vicious Circle,” the Algonquinites were among the most famous writers in America in the 1920s, renowned equally for their repartee and self-promotion, using their journalism to publicize one another's—and their own—witticisms. Most of them would end up writing for
The
New Yorker
when Harold Ross launched it in February 1925, where Dorothy Parker reviewed books as “Constant Reader,” Alec Woollcott invented the Shouts and Murmurs column, and all of them contributed reviews, fiction, and comic sketches. By 1922 the Algonquinites were already writing freelance for the same magazines (
Vanity Fair
,
The New Republic
), as well as for Swope's
World
, which would publish Dorothy Parker's most famous poem, “Résumé,” in 1925. One of the peripheral members of the group was Deems Taylor, Swope's music critic, as was Swope himself. Another was Scott Fitzgerald.

All of the Algonquinites frequented Swope's house parties, frolicking for long weekends on Long Island. Swope's wife Margaret called their Great Neck home “an absolutely seething bordello of interesting people.” Deems
Taylor's wife recorded in her journal that Swope “
filled his house at this time with everybody who was talked about or working on important jobs. To be left out of Swope's list was to argue yourself unknown. He was fond of us. Deems was his direct antithesis—quiet, shy, small voiced, but always standing up to him and giving him what he adored, a chance for intelligent conversation.” She called Swope “
one of the most forceful men I have ever met . . . a loud talkative man with a mop of red hair and a big, active body. He was inexhaustible and . . . stored in his big frame the loudest vocal sounds ever exploded by any human being.”