Careless People (46 page)

Mrs. Jane Gibson, “the ‘pig woman' in the Hall–Mills murder mystery at New Brunswick,” had been found “badly beaten,” and Nellie Russell, “the negro woman who contradicted Mrs. Gibson's story” at the time of the murder investigation, had been arrested and charged with “atrocious assault.” “The two women have quarreled many times since the murder case made them widely known characters”; this time, in a dispute over a horse, Russell “attacked” Mrs. Gibson, throwing her to the ground and knocking out four teeth. “
HALL–MILLS CASE RECALLED
,” noted the small headline. It didn't take much to recall the case for anyone who had lived through its grotesquerie.

T
he summer burned on as Fitzgerald wrote. Keeping it brief, condensed, lyrical, he forced the novel through draft after draft. He was reading Byron and Milton, a biography of Shelley in French, and he was always reading Keats. Poetry mingled in his head with the cynical slang of modern America. That spring, just before they sailed, Fitzgerald had explained to a magazine editor that
The Beautiful and Damned
had been led astray by the literary theories of H. L. Mencken: “
I am so anxious for people to see my new novel which is a new thinking out of the idea of illusion (an idea which I suppose will dominate my more serious stuff) much more mature and much more romantic than This Side of Paradise. The B&D was a better book than the first but it was a false lead . . . a concession to Mencken . . . The business of creating illusion is much more to my taste and my talent.”

While Scott consorted with the New York ghosts who haunted him, Zelda concentrated on the present. Alone with his manuscript over the phantom wash of the Mediterranean, Scott did not notice that Zelda and the aviator Edouard Jozan were becoming closer, but everyone else on the Riviera did. Rumor began to quicken and race, as her oblivious husband remained lost in the pages of his novel.

But oblivion, like love, can't be trusted to last forever. “The Big Crisis” came on July 13, Scott wrote in his ledger. Two weeks after the papers recalled the Hall–Mills case, matters appear to have come to a head over Zelda's feelings for Jozan. Stories differ, as they always do. Some say that Zelda asked Fitzgerald for a divorce, telling him that she wanted to chase her chance for happiness; others that Scott confronted her and demanded that she end whatever was happening. Gossip has been speculating about what exactly that was ever since. Zelda's romance with Jozan may have been a serious affair, or as insubstantial as a flirtation and a moonlight kiss. But it is clear that for Scott and Zelda, the affair, whatever its particulars, was deeply damaging; Zelda genuinely cared for Jozan, it seems, and Scott did not forgive easily.

But it's also true that the Fitzgeralds enjoyed being protagonists in a melodrama, still preferring the role of the observed to the observer. Zelda wrote to Bunny Wilson that summer that she felt “picturesque,” and her pleasure would only be complete if it gave rise to gossip back home: “
Everything would be perfect if there was somebody here who would be sure to spread the tale of our idyllic existence around New York.” By the end of the summer, she'd shown that Scott wasn't the only one who could create a story. They both told others later that Fitzgerald had locked Zelda in her room over the Jozan affair, in some versions for as long as a month.

After the “Big Crisis,” Fitzgerald's ledger notes a “sad trip to Monte Carlo” in July. He also recorded, cryptically, “Wire Olive Burgess,” but whether the wire was to her or from her, or why it was worth remembering, he doesn't say. He kept
an undated letter from Olive Burgess, written on Paris hotel stationery, among his papers. “Dear Mr. Fitzgerald,” she wrote, “Can you come to see me tomorrow at my hotel? I can arrange any time that suits you. Please don't mention even to the members of your household that you are calling on ‘Bunny Burgess' wife'—I sound exactly like a shilling shocker—I'm sorry. It's rather important to you. Would you telephone or send me a line today, so I can know when you're coming? Cordially, Olive Moore Burgess.” The nature of the clandestine matter that was so important to Scott Fitzgerald was as lost as what Bunny Burgess did with a glass and someone's wife, but it's tempting to guess.

Meanwhile, Scott continued to note trips and parties over the summer of 1924 in his ledger. The Fitzgeralds went to Monte Carlo, gave at least one dinner, and went down the coast to Sainte-Maxime more than once. “
Zelda swimming every day. Getting brown,” he observed prosaically later in July. They went often to Antibes to visit the Murphys, and Fitzgerald read drafts of his work in progress to John Dos Passos, Donald Ogden Stewart, and Gilbert Seldes, who were all on the Riviera. Scott lists more dinner parties—it's not easy to see when they might have fit the month of Zelda's incarceration into their busy social schedules.

Looking back, Fitzgerald remembered “the going to the Riviera” in his notebooks. “
The table at Villa Marie . . . The aviation field. The garden in
the morning. The Seldes. Night in St. Maxime. Feeling of proxy in passion strange encouragement. He was sorry, knowing how she would pay. Bunny Burgess episode.” Adultery seems to be the line that connects the dots: in May 1926
Olive would divorce Bunny Burgess in Paris, and remarry within months. Fitzgerald's entry is so gnomic that we can only guess what he meant, but it is at least possible that what he felt as a proxy in passion was a strange encouragement to translate his feelings into the proxy characters of fiction.

“
I've been unhappy but my work hasn't suffered from it,” Fitzgerald wrote Perkins when his novel was finished. It was true: he had suffered, but the book hadn't. Indeed, his suffering probably improved it. The flippancy that had jarred in his first two novels was entirely in abeyance in the third: it is threaded throughout with satirical, wry humor, but there is nothing light-hearted in the novel concerned with the tragic consequences of misplaced fidelity, about a man who is destroyed by the colossal vitality of the illusion that has sustained him.

Life is always there waiting to be transfigured into a splendid fiction, however sad or sordid its origins. A story of adultery ends in the violent extinction of a woman of tremendous vitality. A dreamer keeps faith with the faithless, and a double shooting draws closer in the cooling twilight, as the writer tries to determine whether what he holds in his hand is the past, or the future.

A
s Nick returns to Long Island after an abortive day trying to sell stocks on Wall Street, and an even more abortive conversation with Jordan Baker, who tells him that she's left the Buchanans' house and complains that Nick wasn't nice to her after Myrtle was run over, the commuter train takes him past the ash heaps. The accident is already being turned into a
story for gawkers and thrill-seekers, he imagines: “there'd be a curious crowd around there all day with little boys searching for dark spots in the dust and some garrulous man telling over and over what had happened until it became less and less real even to him and he could tell it no longer and Myrtle Wilson's tragic achievement was forgotten.”

Then Nick returns to his reconstruction, from the newspapers, of the actions of Michaelis and George Wilson the night before. As Michaelis kept him company, Wilson grew distracted and began to mutter that he had ways of tracing the owner of the yellow car that killed his wife, in which he had seen Tom Buchanan driving to town that afternoon. Dawn approaches and the two men are still talking among the ash heaps, mirror images of Nick and Gatsby talking at the same moment in Gatsby's dusty mansion. Both pairs of men are discussing parallel cases of unfaithful women. One unfaithful woman is a killer, the other is killed; the men sit amid the ashes and the dust to which they will all return.

Wilson leaves the garage in late morning, while Nick sleeps uneasily in his chair on Wall Street; Wilson begins to make his way toward West Egg, searching for the owner of the car that ran down his wife. The police concluded that Wilson must have walked from garage to garage, inquiring after a yellow car, but as Nick points out, no garage men reported seeing him, and Wilson had an “easier, surer way of finding out what he wanted to know.” Wilson knows Tom Buchanan by name, after all; he just doesn't suspect that Buchanan is the man who was having an affair with his wife. “By half past two he was in West Egg where he asked someone the way to Gatsby's house. So by that time he knew Gatsby's name.”

The “mistaken identity” that will kill Gatsby—that is, George Wilson's blaming Gatsby for the crimes of Tom and Daisy Buchanan—is set in motion by Gatsby's own desire. Gatsby's aspiration to Tom's life could be said to be the story's original sin, the first case of mistaken identity: he is a usurper, a pretender in both senses of the word. When Tom realizes that Gatsby wants to supplant him, he gives Gatsby precisely what he thought he wanted: Gatsby is put in Tom's place, taking the fall for both Buchanans' crimes,
Daisy's careless driving and Tom's affair with Myrtle. But although Gatsby's death is often described as George Wilson's mistake in identity, it is actually Tom Buchanan's lie. He turns Gatsby into his and Daisy's proxy, much as Nick Carraway's great-uncle sent a substitute to the Civil War to die for him. Wilson holds the gun that shoots Gatsby, but it is Tom Buchanan who pulls the trigger—or so we believe until the novel's final pages, when Fitzgerald turns the screw one last time.

W
hen Fitzgerald had finished drafting his novel and was completing his final revisions, he wrote to Ludlow Fowler. “
We've had a quiet summer and are moving in the fall either to Paris or Italy,” he said. “I remember our last conversation and it makes me sad. I feel old, too, this summer—I have ever since the failure of my play a year ago. That's the whole burden of this novel—the loss of those illusions that give such color to the world that you don't care whether things are true or false as long as they partake of the magical glory.”