Careless People (31 page)

The question of whether there was anyone to corroborate James Mills's alibi for the period of the murder had, it seems, been entirely lost amid the narrative mayhem.

O
n Sunday, November 12, 1922, a bright autumnal day, as the
Tribune
printed a story on the new science of quantum mechanics and its “Quest for the Atom,” Burton Rascoe declared that American literature was, for the first time, “
being treated with seriousness and respect by English critics,” who were praising modern novelists including Scott Fitzgerald; Fitzgerald saved the mention in his scrapbook. The same day, the
New York Times
published an article on “‘Americanism' in Literature” (“
when American writers come before us, it is only natural that we should ask what it is that they have which is peculiar to themselves”), and the
Morning Telegraph
printed a long interview with F. Scott Fitzgerald with the overblown headline “
JUVENILE
JUVENAL
OF
THE
JEUNESSE
JAZZ
.”

The article began by noting that Fitzgerald was named for his “ancestor” (in fact a distant cousin) Francis Scott Key, author of the poem “The Star-Spangled Banner.” In 1922 America did not have a national anthem, but had begun to debate the possibility of adopting one. “The Star-Spangled Banner” was a candidate, but was meeting with violent opposition. Earlier in the year an advertisement in the
Tribune
insisted “
the Star-Spangled Banner can never become our national anthem,” as its “violent, unsingable cadences” could never express “the spiritual ideals upon which the nation was based.” The music had not been composed by an American; worse, it was “a
ribald, sensual drinking song.” “Never has Congress, and never will Congress, legalize an anthem which sprang from the lowest qualities of human sentiment,” declared the advertisement. “God forbids it.” Congress would make the “The Star-Spangled Banner” America's national anthem in 1931, two years after the market crashed, when Americans needed a renewal of faith.

But as the debate over the anthem continued in 1922, Francis Scott Key's relation, no stranger to drinking songs, was reading about himself in the
Morning Telegraph
: “
The critics, one and all, from Mencken to Broun and from Burton Rascoe to Hildegarde Hawthorne, have acclaimed F. Scott Fitzgerald as a genius.” Fitzgerald observed humorously to the interviewer that most of his readers were convinced his “novels of jazzing young America” were “biographical”—that he was drawing on life for his art. Nor did Fitzgerald deny that he was. Although some readers deplored the fact that most of Fitzgerald's characters “are rotters or weaklings, base or mean,” remarked the interviewer, this also seemed a perfectly valid representation of their modern Babylon.

The article ended with a list of F. Scott Fitzgerald's favorite things: he “
prefers piquant hors d'oeuvres to a hearty meal. He is also fond of Charlie Chaplin, Booth Tarkington, real Scotch, old-fashioned hansom cab riding in Central Park and the ‘Ziegfeld Follies.'” A loyal New Yorker, he “prefers Fifth Avenue to Piccadilly and the Champs Elysees.” And then Fitzgerald closed the interview by offering a jocose list of famous couples he also admired: “Mencken and Nathan, Park & Tilford [whiskey], Lord & Taylor, Lea & Perrins, the Smith Brothers, and Mrs. Gibson, the pig lady, and her Jenny mule.”

Fitzgerald cut out the interview and saved it in his scrapbook. Behind us, the owl-eyed man laughs, ghostily.

BOB KERR'S STORY. THE 2ND PARTY

About this time an ambitious young reporter from New York arrived one morning at Gatsby's door and asked him if he had anything to say. . . . Contemporary legends such as the “underground pipe-line to Canada” attached themselves to him, and there was one persistent story that he didn't live in a house at all, but in a boat that looked like a house and was moved secretly up and down the Long Island shore. Just why these inventions were a source of satisfaction to James Gatz of North Dakota, isn't easy to say.

The Great Gatsby,
Chapter 6

A
lthough Nick Carraway is not a journalist, he is a reporter, as well as Gatsby's biographer and publicist. The other reporter in
The Great Gatsby
, who tries to interview Jay Gatsby at the beginning of Chapter Six, seems incidental, but when he comes rushing in following his instincts, Gatsby's story takes a decided turn for the worse. The reporter doesn't know quite what he's looking for, so he asks his quarry if he has anything to say. Gatsby responds, politely and logically, “Anything to say about what?” But Nick tells us that Gatsby, too, likes being talked about. He may not be a “publicity hound”—he needs secrecy to protect his illicit activities—but he finds the inventions about himself a source of obscure satisfaction.

Perhaps one reason he enjoys these inventions is that they echo his own self-creation: the pleasure of an impresario finding an audience. But Gatsby
never says; he gives the reporter no statement. Or, rather, Nick gives us no statement. This is one of Nick's most characteristic lapses, his occasional bouts of silence and aphasia. At key moments Nick is liable to declare himself at a loss for words, and announce that Gatsby's visions are “unutterable” or that his own memories are “uncommunicable.” Some might consider this rather unhelpful on the part of a reporter, and Nick has certainly become one of literature's better-known unreliable narrators. The problem is less that the accuracy of Nick's narration cannot be relied upon than the fact that he cannot always be relied upon to narrate. On the nights when he is a flaneur strolling through the enchanted metropolitan twilight, Nick tells us of his pleasure in hearing laughter from unheard jokes, joy imagined in unintelligible gestures. Nick is a romantic in the Keatsian sense: he thinks untold stories are lovelier.

This is a conjuring trick, enabling Fitzgerald to have it both ways. The insufficiency of language becomes, in his hands, not a tragedy of human inarticulacy, but a romance of possibility. Most of
The Great Gatsby
remains forever fixed in a single, gorgeous moment of potential, ideas that are described as “unheard,” “unintelligible,” “uncommunicable,” “unutterable,” “unfathomable,” “indefinite,” “ineffable,” “incalculable”—and yet hover in the margins. The characters, too, are suggestions rather than declarations: they have strong physical presences, and yet they are strangely featureless. Fitzgerald offers only impressions: Buchanan's bulk and power, Gatsby's charm and ecstatic smile, Daisy's thrilling voice. By no coincidence, Jordan is the most physically defined (she has hair the color of a yellow autumn leaf, is small, athletic, a trifle androgynous, with tanned skin and gray, sun-strained eyes); she is also the person Nick calls “limited.” The rest of them are limited only by our imaginations, and by Fitzgerald's evocative, bold strokes of color and form.

As Nick begins to ponder the pleasure to be derived from invention, he shares with us the secret of Gatsby's origins, the tale of how young James Gatz created his ideal personality through an act of sheer will. Part of the mystery is solved, just as more mysteries begin to accumulate. Gatsby has the imagination of an artist, but his desires have been shaped by a country
that channeled those desires into climbing social ladders rather than imaginative ones. “
The thing which sets off the American from all other men,” wrote Mencken in 1922, “and gives peculiar color not only to the pattern of his daily life but also adds to the play of his inner ideas, is what, for want of a more exact term, may be called social aspiration.” But Fitzgerald also recognized that social aspiration could involve an aesthetic process: the invention of the self as work of art.

There were only two things left for a genuine artist in America to do, Burton Rascoe observed in the summer of 1922—stay drunk or commit suicide.

O
n the cold, bright Thursday of November 16, Carl Van Vechten lunched at the Algonquin with Tom Smith, Horace Liveright, and Tallulah Bankhead. Van Vechten was preparing to attend the premiere of John Barrymore's
Hamlet
, the theatrical event of the season; a writer named Thomas Beer had asked him “some time ago,” Van Vechten noted in his diary irritatedly, “
but he is unable to get seats & calls it off today. Very Tom Beerish!” Tom Beer had published his first novel in 1922,
The Fair Rewards
, about a naive young dreamer from the provinces who idealizes a deceitful woman. Beer inscribed a copy of the novel in Greek: “For Scott Fitzgerald from Thomas Beer
,” which translates as “reaching forward to what lies ahead.” It comes from the Bible, ending a passage that reads: “Brethren, I do not regard myself as having laid hold of it yet; but one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and reaching forward to what lies ahead.” When Fitzgerald came to write his own novel of an idealist in 1922, who persistently reaches forward to what lies ahead, he would make his hero unable to forget what lies behind. Jay Gatsby remains convinced that what he has lost is always lurking nearby, “just out of reach of his hand.”

Four days after Beer stood him up, Van Vechten invited around a poet
named Wallace Stevens, who brought the manuscript for
Harmonium
, his first collection of poems, which Van Vechten had helped persuade Alfred Knopf to publish; it would come out in early 1923 and become one of the defining events of American modernism, including such now-classic poems as “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” and “Anecdote of the Jar.” “I do not know which to prefer,” Stevens famously wrote in
Harmonium
, “the beauty of inflections or the beauty of innuendoes.”

In life, however, it seemed that Stevens had less difficulty identifying his preferences. After drinking “
half a quart of my best bourbon,” Van Vechten reported, “Wallace told me he didn't like me” and left. So much for the beauty of innuendoes.

T
he Fitzgeralds traveled with Gene and Helen Buck to New Jersey on Saturday, November 18, a journey of a few hours by train, to watch the Yale–Princeton football game. Swope's
World
was Fitzgerald's preferred paper for sports in those days, and he faithfully followed the Princeton Tigers throughout his life. On that November Saturday the
World
put the Princeton game on its front page.

Immediately to the left of the big game was the latest update on the Hall–Mills investigation in New Brunswick.
“SURE STRONG CASE IS BUILT UP FOR HALL GRAND JURY
,” ran the headline. “Investigators Hint Mystery of Double Killing Is Near Solution.” As it happens, the last stop before Princeton on the commuter train from New York is New Brunswick: they had to travel right past the scene of the year's most notorious crime to get to their football game.

The game, as Zelda told the Kalmans, who had not made it east, “
was very spectacular and very dull,” and all she remembered was the score: Princeton won 3–0. Afterward they went round to the university's clubs to drink with the undergraduates, which made her feel like Methuselah; it was “a sad experience.” But generally life in Great Neck was like “Times Square at the theater hour. It is fun here.” Scott and Ring stayed up all night drinking together, and wrote Kalman another letter about their excursion, undated, but timed: it was 5:30
A.M.
and they were “not so much up already as up still.” Although the game was “punk” the Kalmans would still have been amused: “
This is a very drunken town full of intoxicated people and retired debauches & actresses so I know that you and she to who you laughingly refer to as the missus would enjoy it . . . Everything is in its usual muddle.”

Zelda added a tidbit of gossip to her letter that she was sure would amuse the Kalmans: a girl they knew had visited the Fitzgeralds recently and “
lured John Dos Passos back to New York when he was expected to stay overnight” with them in Great Neck. “This was astonishing as he looks like an elongated squirrel.” Zelda's surprise was primarily because the girl was “so partial to the arrow collar brand”; Dos “is attractive tho,” Zelda admitted.

The day after the Princeton game, Marcel Proust died in Paris (which
would not be reported in America for some weeks). If the Fitzgeralds read the Sunday
New York Times
on their train journey home to Great Neck, they would have seen an article in the book section by the English writer John Cournos, whose novel
Babel
was enjoying a vigorous marketing campaign, complete with an endorsement from Scott Fitzgerald: “Beautifully written . . . The author's graphic atmospheres in London and Paris and New York are flawless.”