Careless People (15 page)

Fitzgerald's friend Tom Smith, Liveright's editor in chief, was also at the party. He had just commissioned a new translation of Petronius's
Satyricon
and John Sumner, secretary for New York's Society for the Suppression of Vice, had been trying to have the book banned for obscenity, with the result that the papers debated the literary value of the
Satyricon
throughout the autumn. (Sumner was not necessarily paranoid in fearing the seductive potential of books: men like Ted Paramore were deliberately using them to provide a respectable pretext for unrespectable conversations.) That year a number of “spicy” books faced obscenity charges, including James Joyce's
Ulysses
, published on February 2, which also alluded to the
Satyricon
. Throughout 1922
Ulysses
circulated in underground copies across literary America; Edmund Wilson told Fitzgerald where to buy one and in June Fitzgerald received his copy from the Brick Row Bookshop. He wished, Fitzgerald told Wilson as he read it, that
Ulysses
had been set in America: “
Half of my ancestors came from just such an Irish strata or perhaps a lower one. The book makes me feel appallingly naked.”

In late September, a magistrate dismissed the case against the
Satyricon
, observing that if it was obscene, so was the Bible: “
The
Satyricon
is a keen satire on the vulgarity of mere wealth, its vanity and its grossness.” Undeterred, on October 15 Sumner presented the book to the New York attorney general in yet another (futile) effort to have it proscribed. Later that month Tom Smith shared with Rascoe “
a prize remark” made by the prosecuting attorney in the censorship case, who had been told that the
Satyricon
had long been prized by scholars and historians as “a literary and documentary classic.” The lawyer responded, “Well, just because it was a classic two thousand years ago doesn't make it a classic now.”

At Liveright's literary dinner amid these court cases (Liveright also sued Sumner for libel), it seems hard to imagine that they would have failed to discuss this controversy. Most conversations were focusing on one of the
fragmentary
Satyricon
's most intact episodes: the opulent banquets of the former slave Trimalchio, a parvenu who amassed a fortune that he flaunts with eager vulgarity. Lavishly entertaining sybaritic friends and neighbors, he enjoys being the subject of their gossip. Comparisons between ancient decadence and Jazz Age America were already ubiquitous: New York was called the “Modern Babylon”; Zelda would soon be writing that they partied like “
ancient Rome
and
Nineveh.” Wilson likened one “
regular orgy” he heard about to “a Roman banquet or something,” while
Manslaughter
, DeMille's film about a society woman who runs over someone with her car, similarly underscored the debauchery of modern parties by cross-cutting them with Roman orgies.

More than one letter to the papers that October commented on the
Satyricon
's currency: “
Trimalchio's famous dinner party and the characters introduced by the author will interest the cultured reader . . . particularly by the resemblance with those well known types of our ripe civilization, the nouveau riche and the profiteer.” Fitzgerald had spent 1922 writing stories about the nouveau riche and the profiteer, including his great satire of monopoly capitalism, “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz.” Two years later, when Fitzgerald sent his novel about nouveaux riches and profiteers to Max Perkins, he was oscillating among several titles for it, including “Trimalchio at West Egg.” He was eventually persuaded to choose an alternate,
The Great Gatsby
, instead, but Trimalchio gave Fitzgerald an image for his heroic parvenu that survived in the final draft, although only as a signal that the party is over: “It was when curiosity about Gatsby was at its highest that the lights in his house failed to go on one Saturday night—and, as obscurely as it had begun, his career as Trimalchio was over.”

Trying to reinvent himself, Trimalchio is given to false claims. He tells boastful, self-aggrandizing tales of his life among the rich and powerful, and, in an ancient instance of name-dropping, claims to have spoken with the Cumaean Sibyl, mythical prophetess of the ancients. His banquets are adorned by tales of burnished gems and unfaithful women, roasted birds in gold plumage, a wife wearing a magnificent strand of pearls who “lifts adulterous legs,” insatiable luxury, a cauldron of gluttony, a chest of rubies
glowing with their crimson-lighted depths. Reflecting on the meaning of literature, Trimalchio quotes a favorite passage: “
The emerald green, the glass bauble, what mean they to thee? Or the fire of the ruby?” They are beautiful but insubstantial; Trimalchio repeats a refrain about infidelity and the meaninglessness of wealth. Reluctantly agreeing to call his novel
The Great Gatsby
, Fitzgerald wrote Perkins: “
It's O.K. but my heart tells me I should have named it
Trimalchio
.”

Fitzgerald was an indifferent classics scholar at best, flunking Latin three times at Princeton. His personal library contained a 1913 translation of the
Satyricon
, but Fitzgerald didn't need to read Latin to recognize the currency of Trimalchio in 1922: he only needed to read the
New York Times
.

In a few weeks T. S. Eliot would publish
The Waste Land,
which opens with an epigraph from the
Satyricon
. Drunkenly boasting at a party, competing with his guests amid grandstanding tales, Trimalchio claims: “
And then there's the Sibyl: with my own eyes I saw her, at Cumae, hanging up in a jar; and whenever the boys would say to her ‘Sibyl, Sibyl, what would you?' she would answer, ‘I would die.'”

Art, Eliot wrote, is a guide to perception. It shows us how to look—or where to look—and then leaves us, as Virgil left Dante, to go beyond where the guide can take us.

O
n Monday, October 9, the New Brunswick prosecutor's office triumphantly announced an arrest in the Hall–Mills case: a young man named Clifford Hayes had been taken into custody. The authorities remained certain that jealousy was central to the plot, but now they said the killer had shot Edward Hall and Eleanor Mills in a case of mistaken identity.

It made for a great day of selling newspapers, but no one outside the New
Brunswick police department believed in Hayes's guilt for a minute—and it seems unlikely that many within the department believed it either. Raymond Schneider, the young man who had been with Pearl Bahmer when they discovered the bodies of Hall and Mills, had been grilled for twenty-four hours over the weekend, at which point he accused his friend Clifford Hayes of the killings.

The story was this: Schneider had been loitering with Hayes and another friend on the night of the murders, when they saw Pearl Bahmer walking with a drunken man. Jealous of Pearl, Schneider convinced his friends to follow the couple to Buccleuch Park, only to discover that the drunk man was Pearl's bootlegger father. Schneider's friends concurred with his story up to this point, but then said they'd parted company. Under police pressure Schneider changed his account, claiming they'd all remained near the park, later coming across a couple near the Phillips farmhouse, whom they again took to be Pearl and her father. At this point, Schneider said, Clifford Hayes fired four shots at the pair, only to discover that it was the wrong couple and that he had murdered two strangers—who turned out to be Edward Hall and Eleanor Mills. The tale was preposterous, but
the police had a culprit at last.

The press immediately pointed out the gaping holes in this new “official theory.” It failed to explain why or when Eleanor Mills's throat was cut, why the bodies were staged together so carefully, why the rector's watch and wallet had been stolen, why their love letters were found scattered around the bodies, why Raymond Schneider would have returned to the dead bodies with Pearl Bahmer two days later and reported their murder to the police, or why Hayes would have murdered two people for his friend's sake. They were all good questions. Hayes indignantly protested his innocence, insisting that he wasn't stupid enough to have killed the wrong people and then hung around, awaiting arrest.

When Nick Carraway asks if George Wilson objects to his wife's frequent disappearances, Tom answers dismissively, “He thinks she goes to see her sister in New York. He's so dumb he doesn't know he's alive.” Tom is no genius himself, but he finds it a simple matter to manipulate Wilson into killing the wrong man. From Raymond Schneider's swapping of one man
for another, to the Carraway patriarch who sent a substitute to the Civil War to die for him, to George Wilson's killing Gatsby instead of Tom Buchanan, impersonations had a tendency to end in violence.

A
s they settled into Great Neck, Fitzgerald noted in his ledger the high points of October 1922: “Met Lardners, Bucks, Swopes.” Their new cottage in Great Neck was not far from Ring Lardner's gracious white house overlooking the narrow inlet in the bay and before long the two writers had become close friends and drinking companions. Lardner would inspire a character in
Tender Is the Night
, “the entirely liquid” Abe North. Lardner was older, more cynical and experienced than the frolicking young Fitzgerald, but they shared an acidic sense of humor, critical intelligence, and a serious commitment to the craft of writing, although Lardner always deprecated his efforts and Fitzgerald tended in the early years to boast. They also shared an undercurrent of satirical disapproval of the absurd place in which they found themselves; Lardner derisively called Great Neck “Wonder City.”

The false dawn of the Fitzgeralds' experiment with sobriety had made way for a roaring noon, and they were remaining well and truly lit. “
We seem to have achieved a state of comparative organization at last, and, having bought loads of very interesting flour sieves and cocktail-shakers, are in a position to make a bid for your patronage,” Zelda wrote to the Kalmans. “We have had the most terrible time—very alcoholic and chaotic. We behaved so long that eventually we looked up Engalichoff which, needless to say, started us on a week's festivity.” These were the revels she declared to have been “equaled only by ancient Rome
and
Nineveh!”

Behaving too long could only lead to revolution, this time with Prince Vladimir Engalitcheff, the son of a Russian prince who had escaped the Bolsheviks and married a Chicago heiress. Engalitcheff, known as Val, had
become friendly with the Fitzgeralds the previous year on a voyage to Europe. Engalitcheff would die less than six months later. Newspaper obituaries in March said the twenty-one-year-old's cause of death in his Fifth Avenue mansion was heart disease, but in his ledger for January 1923 Fitzgerald noted: “Val Engalitcheff kills himself.” Biographers have accepted this assertion, but Fitzgerald must have written it retrospectively, for his account places the death two months early, and he gives no reason for his belief that Engalitcheff committed suicide.
Engalitcheff's death certificate, dated March 6, 1923, names heart and kidney failure. Whatever Engalitcheff's illnesses may have been, the doomed young prince does not appear to have exercised a sobering influence, but he would inspire “Love in the Night,” the first story that Fitzgerald wrote after completing
Gatsby
. In the midst of their autumnal bacchanal, the Fitzgeralds moved into the house at Great Neck.

Instead of sharing their new address, Fitzgerald jotted a thank-you note offering only their new phone number: G.N. 740. “
Everybody said to everybody else,” Zelda later wrote, “‘We're having some people . . . and we want you to join us. We'll telephone.' All over New York people telephoned. They telephoned from one hotel to another to people on parties that they couldn't get there—that they were engaged.”

They went “on” parties, not to them: going on a party was like going on a voyage, an indefinite trip in search of eternal pleasure that tended to end on the rocks. That August, the
New York Times
reported that a woman who had married under the influence was able to have her marriage annulled: “
They went out on a party before the marriage and drank all night and next day and didn't sleep any. The cocktails, highballs and other mixtures, she said, deprived her of her mentality and she didn't know she was getting married.” The annulment was granted not on the grounds of intoxication, however, but of “fraud and misrepresentation” as her new husband had claimed he didn't drink. Earlier in the year, a woman from Great Neck also tried to divorce her husband for misrepresentation: he'd told her he was a writer, but he just drank all day long and was never published. On Scott Fitzgerald's birthday, the
New York Times
had reported that another woman divorced
her husband for “excessive drunkenness”—although no one had established how much drunkenness was reasonable in a husband.