Careless People (36 page)

Remus was eventually sentenced to two years in a federal penitentiary. While he was serving time his wife began an affair with a prohibition agent. When he was released, his wife filed for divorce; Remus shot and killed her, claiming temporary insanity on the grounds of her adultery. The “unwritten law” was invoked and after deliberating for less than twenty minutes the jury found Remus not guilty of murder by reason of temporary insanity. He was committed to a mental hospital, but three months later the hospital discharged him because he was not insane. Temporary insanity, indeed.

A few months before Remus murdered his wife the first film version of
The Great Gatsby
was reviewed in the
New York Times
, headlined “
GOLD AND COCKTAILS
.” It described a few scenes from the film: Daisy is seen “assuaging her disappointment in life by drinking absinthe. She takes enough of this beverage to render the average person unconscious. Yet she appears only mildly intoxicated, and soon recovers.” Indeed, the review noted, “Cocktails are an important feature in this picture.” Even “the girls in a swimming pool [are] snatching at cocktails, while they are swimming.” Gatsby, a “man of sudden means,” displays his profligacy by carelessly tossing gold pieces into the water so his guests can dive for them.

This 1926 version of
Gatsby
has been lost; all that survive are a few such descriptions and the film's trailer, featuring party scenes that bear a striking resemblance to the newspapers' illustrations of the bash George Remus threw to welcome in 1922.

T
wo days before Thanksgiving in 1922 Burton Rascoe found himself in an embarrassing situation. Carl Van Vechten had presented to him (doubtless with some unholy glee) a copy of a Boston paper in which a well-known writer denied that she had lunched with Rascoe, as he had recently reported in his Day Book column. Rascoe was forced to admit that he had fabricated the encounter: “
My mentioning our having had lunch together last week was merely a wish-fulfillment on my part, for I have long wanted to meet her; but I haven't had that pleasure, I must confess.” Rascoe, however, hastened to deny that his entire column was an invention: “And let me on my part deny her flattering assumption that I invent the whole ‘Daybook' and actually see no one. That would be an ideal way, I suspect, to do the thing; but, except for this one instance, I have had to exercise only memory.” In fact, Rascoe was often accused of inaccuracy, especially in the way that he rendered conversation. Nonetheless, his defenders maintained, he usually didn't make things up. “
The substance of the conversation is generally characteristic,” said the
Bookman
; “he conveys the speaker's personality, though it be by means of an imaginary dialog.” Sometimes this technique is described as fiction.

The day before Van Vechten had confronted him with telltale evidence of unreliability, Rascoe had lunched with Edmund Wilson and discussed
The Waste Land
. (Unless, of course, we no longer believe him.) It seems the lunch signaled a rapprochement. Two months earlier, on the day that
Tales of the Jazz Age
came out, Wilson had written to John Bishop to tell him about visiting the Fitzgeralds at the Plaza the previous evening, adding as an aside that he'd stopped seeing Rascoe because he was so unreliable a narrator: “
he quoted me so much and so inaccurately that it finally got on my nerves and I ceased to see him at all (though other causes contributed to this, too) for almost a month . . . Everybody began to give him the laugh about it and it is true that he wrote some of the most exquisitely silly things I have ever seen.” A few months later, Edmund Wilson was writing to Fitzgerald with some amusement about Rascoe's report of Fitzgerald's “Dog, Dog, Dog” song. “
I enclose Burton Rascoe's report of a conversation with me, which speaks for itself. Ted Paramore and I have extracted almost as much amusement from it as from the initial pleasantries.”

Wilson didn't mention what the other reasons were that had led to his avoiding Rascoe, but Wilson admitted to having gone to bed with Burton's wife Hazel at least once. A former nightclub dancer with “the most obvious sex appeal of any woman I have known,” Wilson wrote in his journals, Hazel Rascoe had suddenly phoned Wilson up one night: “
I told her, full of hope, to come right around. But in spite of the fact that I performed the at that time for me heroic feat of carrying her into the bedroom, it turned out that she only wanted to tell me how worried she was about [Burton's] drinking.” She also wanted to talk about her “latest passion”: “when she felt an interest in someone, she would apparently simply go to bed with him till her appetite had worn off. It was no wonder her husband drank,” Wilson added.

At a party one night around this time Wilson and Rascoe got into a drunken fight, which neither of them remembered afterward. Bystanders offered different accounts. The fight may have occurred “at a gathering at Edmund Wilson's, in the course of which several of the guests fell to brawling in various corners of a rambling apartment he had in the Village,” which
he rented in late November 1922. Wilson became “
engaged in combat with Mr. Burton Rascoe and bit him in the calf.” Another witness, however, claimed that
Rascoe bit Bunny Wilson on the nose when he was “overadmirous” of Hazel. Despite this contretemps, and regardless of who was biting whom, the two men remained close enough friends that in 1927 Wilson's first will left bequests to Rascoe. Thirty years later Wilson wrote to Hazel Rascoe that her late husband “
never gets full credit now for all he did in the twenties and before. In his best days, he was worth a dozen of the so-called New Critics.”

The problem with unreliable narrators is that sometimes they tell the truth—it's just difficult to know when.

A
s the
Tribune
's literary editor was admitting his unreliability on November 26, the
New York Times
published a feature on the books that had come out in the course of a remarkable literary year, in which popular idols and shibboleths had fallen foul of the rage for the modern. The piece opened, as did the year, with the publication of Joyce's landmark
Ulysses
; the year had also brought the first English translation of Marcel Proust's
Swann's Way
(“another subjective rendering of a man's mind”), which the
Times
reviewed a few pages later. And then there was T. S. Eliot's
The Waste Land
, due to hit the local bookstores any day.

The “Books of the Year” feature made much of
Babbitt
, Willa Cather's
One of Ours
, Rebecca West's
The Judge
, and
Cytherea
by Joseph Hergsheimer. Buried in a long list of also-rans, nearly all forgotten today, was “Young Mr. Scott Fitzgerald,” who “continued his flippant mood in
The Beautiful and Damned
.” The article ignored
Tales of the Jazz Age
altogether, as well as Virginia Woolf's
Jacob's Room
, Katherine Mansfield's
The Garden Party and Other Stories
, Elizabeth von Arnim's
Enchanted April
,
Jean Toomer's
Cane
, Walter Lippmann's
Public Opinion
, D. H. Lawrence's
Studies in Classic American Literature
and
England, My England
, and the first of Ezra Pound's
Cantos
, all published that year. They also overlooked the less lofty but more influential first edition of
Reader's Digest
, as well as the auto-suggestion of the immensely popular Emile Coué, the father of self-help, who taught Americans that all ills could be cured by repeating the simple formula, “Every day, in every way, I'm growing better and better.” Self-improvement had never been easier.

A few months later, Fitzgerald contributed to a newspaper feature titled “10 Best Books I Have Read.” He cited Conrad's
Nostromo
as “
The great novel of the past fifty years, as ‘Ulysses' is the great novel of the future.” It was from Conrad's character Marlow, who narrates
Heart of Darkness
,
Lord Jim
, and
Youth
, among others, that Fitzgerald discovered how an unreliable narrator might improve his novel. For most storytellers, Conrad wrote, a tale “has a direct simplicity, the whole meaning of which lies within the shell of a cracked nut.” But when Marlow told a story, “
the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze.” Learning from Conrad, Fitzgerald would create in Nick Carraway a narrator who could discern lambent meaning in the haze surrounding his story.

Fitzgerald's appreciation of
Nostromo
put him ahead of his contemporaries, but they were all certain that
Ulysses
was the book of the future—and they were right, up to a point. None of them would have believed, however, that a hundred years later readers would consistently vote the two greatest novels in English of the twentieth century to be
Ulysses
and a novel that F. Scott Fitzgerald was about to write, called
The Great Gatsby
. The two novels have more in common than might at first appear, and not just their hinging, in their different ways, on the year 1922. The Irish critic Mary Colum told Rascoe that one eminent critic had lectured her on the meaning of a figure in
Ulysses
, a character whom the critic was confident was a symbolic invention. But in point of fact, she'd informed him, “
it is an exact portrayal of a very notorious, quaint man everybody knows” in Dublin.
Ulysses
contained, Colum said, “every resident of Dublin one would be likely
to encounter ten years ago in an afternoon's walk . . . There are satirical allusions in the book,” her husband added, “that no one outside of Dublin would recognize.”

“
Fiction is history, human history,” said Conrad, “or it is nothing.”