Careless People (7 page)

The Fitzgeralds were “
plagiarizing their existence,” one critic said. In search of originals and prototypes, readers were finding their models in fiction and writers were finding their models in life. Jay Gatsby sprang from his Platonic conception of himself, says Nick: people reinventing themselves need a prototype, an ideal toward which they aspire.

A
s the days passed, the murder of Edward Hall and Eleanor Mills continued to dominate the nation's headlines, but the investigation was making no headway at all. Reporters were scouring the crime scene, as were the curious, all of whom were wandering around at will. Sightseers arrived
by the carload. On the day the bodies were discovered, the authorities had made no effort to cordon off the scene or protect it from reporters and gawkers, who picked up the rector's calling card and dropped it again, and read the letters before scattering them on the ground; it was impossible to know whether any letters had been taken or lost. The forensic validity of the relatively new technique of fingerprinting was still disputed. Whether because of uncertainty or carelessness, no effort was made to preserve fingerprints, nor were any photographs or notes taken. The funeral of the rector had been held two days after the bodies were found; the Mills family held a service for Eleanor the next day in an undertaker's shop.

The prosecutor's office announced that police were searching for a light green car in connection with the murder. “This case is a cinch,” a detective said breezily, “but we have not enough evidence on which to act.” Meanwhile the county coroner's physician firmly refuted a growing rumor about how many bullets had been found in the bodies: “
Mrs. Mills was slain by a bullet which entered her head above the right eye and not by four bullets, as has been reported by a physician in New Brunswick,” he told the
New York Times
.

At the end of
The Great Gatsby
,
the police will also be told to look for a light green car in connection with a homicide. A tiny detail, too small to qualify as circumstantial evidence, it is probably just another coincidence, but coincidence has its own beauties. Even such small historical symmetries can suggest there are patterns all around us, reminders of how expansive the possibilities truly are.

T
he night after they returned to New York, Edmund Wilson visited the Fitzgeralds at their suite at the Plaza Hotel. Universally known by his childhood nickname of Bunny, Wilson had been working at
Vanity Fair
and the
New Republic
,
and was rapidly becoming one of America's most
influential critics. He was also enjoying the hectic gaiety of the age of jazz as much as anyone. Recovering from a painful affair with Edna St. Vincent Millay, Wilson was now seeing the actress Mary Blair and writing in his notebooks analytic descriptions of his many sexual encounters with other women. Not yet inclined to corpulence, and still a handsome young man with red hair and large, intent eyes, Wilson had his own ideas about his success with women: he said he talked them into bed.

He was learning a great deal about the art of persuasion from the handsome, rakish Ted Paramore, with whom he shared an apartment. Paramore spent most of his time drinking and “wenching” and regaled Wilson with the raunchy stories he gleefully recorded in his diaries, such as a room littered with partygoers who were out cold: there were so many people passed out on the floor that the place “
looked like Flanders Field.” The Yale Club was constantly trying to throw Paramore out, Wilson said: “
the room was always swimming in gin and garlanded with condoms.” When a previous roommate asked Wilson to send on a few things he had left behind, as a joke Wilson included an old box of condoms and the friend quipped, “I wonder you can spare them.” Another friend received a package of condoms for his birthday: “
he was tickled to death,” said Wilson, “and went around showing them to everybody at the Harvard Club” by blowing them up. Of one man he particularly admired that year, Paramore reported, “
You couldn't have him in the room with a girl fifteen minutes but you'd find a condom behind the clock.” They were all getting wise, as they said: modern young women wore “
wishbone” diaphragms, which were no more reliable than their name suggests. That winter, the scandal sheet
Town Topics
ran a story featuring an ultramodern young flapper who pertly informs her mother, “
I suppose I'd be a nicer girl if I thought that birth control had something to do with the Pullman Company.”

Paramore's own favorite stratagem for seduction was to deploy the new
fad for sex manuals, which were promoting what sociologists in 1924 termed “companionate marriage,” a new vision of marriage as a partnership based on egalitarian ideals including mutual pleasure and the novel possibility of a female orgasm. During the Great War, the U.S. government had launched a national sex-education campaign to combat the spread of venereal disease, which, combined with modern theories about marriage and the increasing popularity of Freud's ideas, meant that anyone who wanted to be cool was talking about sex. “
One of Ted's principal pastimes,” Wilson wrote, “was seducing his more inexperienced girlfriends. His principal instrument for this was a pioneer guidebook to sex . . . by a certain Dr. Robey, which aimed to remove inhibitions by giving you permission to do anything you liked. He would put ‘old Dr. Robey' into the hands of the girls and count upon their yielding reactions.”

The first time Edmund Wilson had met Zelda had been just after she married Scott; they drank Orange Blossoms and he found her “
very pretty and languid.” She told Wilson that hotel rooms excited her “erotically.” Although he was deeply unimpressed by this Freudian pose and was at first inclined to view Zelda with suspicion—he wrote John Bishop saying he hoped she'd run off with a bellhop—Wilson soon appreciated her vivacious charm and sharp wit, not to mention her beauty.

On Thursday, September 21, the three friends sat high in their white tower as the early evening clouds bloomed red above New York, with what Wilson called “
the rumorous hum of summer” coming up through the windows, and talked about their plans for the future. “
Fitz goes about soberly transacting his business and in the evenings writes at his room in the hotel,” Wilson wrote John Bishop the next day, with some astonishment. “I had a long conversation with him last night and found him full of serious ideas about regulating his life.” The Fitzgeralds had even stopped drinking, a temporary state of grace that Wilson predicted would prove a “brief interregnum” in their quest to make life an eternal party.
You could only tell the story of the Fitzgeralds, Wilson wrote later, if you somehow did justice to the exhilaration of these days.

T
he next day the Fitzgeralds prepared to celebrate the publication of Scott's fourth book and second collection of short stories.
Tales of the Jazz Age
collected the magazine fiction that was enabling the Fitzgeralds to pursue life as extravagants, and it was obvious to its first readers that here was a chronicle of their era. One farsighted reviewer predicted that if “
any scholar of the future shall seek to learn the habits and conditions of this age and its people in something of the way that a scholar of to-day might study the stone age, let this advice be recorded for him now: in F. Scott Fitzgerald's ‘Tales of the Jazz Age' he will find an invaluable source for his researches.” Another clipping said that Fitzgerald's “
fiction will be the treasure trove of the antiquarian of the future, when the flapper, like les precieuses, is imbedded in the amber of time, so graphically does it reproduce the eccentricities of a perverse, hysterical, pleasure-crazed age.”

In June Fitzgerald had sent Perkins a few suggested blurbs (themselves a new advertising concept, not yet ten years old) to market
Tales of the Jazz Age
: “
In this book Mr. F has developed his gifts as a satiric humorist to a point rivaled by few if any living American writers. The lazy meanderings of a brilliant and powerful imagination.” If that didn't suit, how about: “Satyre upon a Saxophone by the most brilliant of the younger novelists”? Fitzgerald concluded: “That's probably pretty much bunk but I'm all for advertising it as a cheerful book.” It was only six years since Henry Ford had declared in the
New York Times
that history was bunk, so why shouldn't a young man of ambition write himself into it? The reason for the great popularity of Fitzgerald's work, said another clipping he kept, was its portrait of “
a certain phase of life that has not been portrayed before. In other words, what we are looking for is news. We want to know, as accurately as possible, what is going on.”

Fitzgerald was always excited by a new publication, which is presumably why they arrived in New York in time to celebrate
Tales of the Jazz Age
. Wilson had been taken aback when Fitzgerald ingenuously announced during
their undergraduate days: “
I want to be one of the greatest writers who have ever lived, don't you?” Their friend John Peale Bishop was also amused by Fitzgerald's ambition: “
even then he was determined to be a genius, and since one of the most obvious characteristics of genius was precocity, he must produce from an early age. He did, but wanted through vanity to make it even earlier.” Fitzgerald may have been prone to posing, but his aspirations were also serious, and none of his friends yet fully appreciated that those ambitions were as artistic as they were commercial. It was during this time that Wilson jotted in his notebooks something that Fitzgerald had told him: