Careless People (42 page)

Why Ring Lardner hid in the cloakroom at the Mackays' estate one summer night has been lost to history, however.

Five years later, Lardner sent the Fitzgeralds another Christmas poem:

We combed Fifth Avenue this last month

A hundred times if we combed it onth,

In search of something we thought would do

To give to a person as nice as you.

We had no trouble selecting gifts

For the Ogden Armors and Louie Sifts,

The Otto Kahns and the George E. Bakers,

The Munns and the Rodman Wanamakers

It's a simple matter to pick things out

For people one isn't wild about,

But you, you wonderful pal and friend, you!

We couldn't find anything fit to send you.

The following Christmas, Scott responded in kind:

You combed Third Avenue last year

For some small gift that was not too dear,

—Like a candy cane or a worn out truss—

To give to a loving friend like us

You'd found gold eggs for such wealthy hicks

As the Edsell Fords and the Pittsburgh Fricks,

The Andy Mellons, the Teddy Shonts,

The Coleman T. and Pierre duPonts.

But not one gift to brighten our hoem

—So I'm sending you back your Goddamn poem.

It seems the Fitzgeralds spent Christmas Day 1922 in Great Neck; Zelda wrote to Xandra Kalman in early January saying they'd had “
astounding holidays” which began “about a week before Christmas” and didn't end until January 5, when she was writing her letter.

If Fitzgerald managed to read the book section of the
New York Times
that Christmas weekend, he would have seen an editorial on fiction writing and the facts, as he mused over his new novel: although “
fiction writers have emancipated themselves from many restraints, as to both form and content,” they still had to come up with their own plots. “They are, of course, at liberty to use so much material from real life as can be incorporated without danger of libel; but such material needs so much working over before it can become plausible fiction that it entails about as much effort as inventing plots offhand.”

What if invention is not a question of effort, however, but of meaning? When
The Great Gatsby
was reissued in 1934, Fitzgerald wrote a preface, saying that he had never tried to “keep his artistic conscience as pure” as during the ten months he spent writing the novel in 1924. “
Reading it over one can see how it could have been improved—yet without feeling guilty of any discrepancy from the truth, as far as I saw it; truth or rather
equivalent
of
the truth, the attempt at honesty of imagination. I had just re-read Conrad's preface to
The Nigger
[
of the “Narcissus”
], and I had recently been kidded half hay-wire by critics who felt that my material was such as to preclude all dealing with mature persons in a mature world. But, my God! it was my material, and it was all I had to deal with.”

The aim of art, wrote Conrad in the preface, is “
by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see . . . If I succeed, you shall find there according to your deserts: encouragement, consolation, fear, charm—all you demand; and, perhaps, also that glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask.”

Fitzgerald often had this passage in mind as he wrote; in 1923, he quoted it in a letter: “
As Conrad says in his famous preface, ‘to make you hear, to make you feel, above all to make you see . . .'” He had reread the preface again as he wrote
Gatsby
. Fitzgerald was thinking about his materials, what he had to work with, as he tried to offer a glimpse of the truth for which his audience had forgotten to ask. Critics told him that his material was inessential, scarcely created—but facts are always merely material, until someone shines what Conrad called a light of magic suggestiveness on them. When he sailed for France in 1924, Fitzgerald had decided that his project would be to “
take the Long Island atmosphere that I had familiarly breathed and materialize it beneath unfamiliar skies.” He materialized it, made it material, and made it real—and then he made it matter.

By the time he wrote “How to Waste Material—A Note on My Generation” in 1926, Fitzgerald had begun to think of a writer's material as capital; later he said that he'd made “
strong draughts on Zelda's and my common store of material.” Their life together was like a joint bank account, upon which only one of them could afford to draw. But thinking about his life as capital for art proved a dangerous business. As Fitzgerald, of all people, should have understood, Mammon is a treacherous god. “
There is no materialist like the artist,” wrote Zelda later, “asking back from life the double and the wastage and the cost on what he puts out in emotional usury. People were banking in gods those years.”

The sculptor Théophile Gautier once said that his sculptures became more beautiful if he used a material that resists being sculpted—marble, onyx, or enamel. The same may be true for writers, sculpting their own resistant material, struggling to release the angel from the rock. Near the end of his life, Fitzgerald wrote that once he had believed that his writing should “
dig up the relevant, the essential, and especially the dramatic and glamorous from whatever life is around. I used to think that my sensory impression of the world came from outside. I used to believe that it was as objective as blue skies or a piece of music. Now I know it was within, and emphatically cherish what little is left.” He no longer thought that his material was capital, but that his artistry was—and he had wasted it.

C
hristmas over, the
New York Times
reported in late December 1922 that “the puzzling death” of Phillip Carberry, a car salesman “whose bruised body was found on the road near the Clarence H. Mackay estate,” was solved the day after Christmas. A man named Lester J. Gillen admitted “he had run down a man standing in the road, presumably Carberry, in the belief that he was a robber who was trying to hold him up.” So he had
accelerated and deliberately run him over. The district attorney “indicated his satisfaction” with the story, reported the
Times
. Gillen explained that he and his passenger “
did not stop, because we believed our lives in danger,” and that seemed to be sufficient
justification for running Carberry over.

In March 1924 Fitzgerald published an article about young people in America, in which he noted that a rich young American “
thinks that when he is arrested for running his car 60 miles an hour he can always get out of trouble by handing his captor a large enough bill—and he knows that even if he has the bad luck to run over someone when he's drunk, his father will buy off the family and keep him out of jail.” He seems to have had good reason for making this generalization.

When George Wilson begins to mutter that his wife was deliberately run down in the road by the gaudy yellow Rolls-Royce, Michaelis tells him, “You're morbid, George . . . This has been a strain to you and you don't know what you're saying.” George repeats, “He murdered her.”

“It was an accident, George.”

Wilson shook his head. His eyes narrowed and his mouth widened slightly with the ghost of a superior “Hm!”

“I know,” he said definitely, “I'm one of these trusting fellas and I don't think any harm to
no
body, but when I get to know a thing I know it. It was the man in that car. She ran out to speak to him and he wouldn't stop.”

Michaelis had seen this too but it hadn't occurred to him that there was any special significance in it.

Maybe George isn't nourishing morbid pleasures, or deluded, after all. Perhaps he has just been reading the papers, and begins to see special significance where others don't.

Wilson tells Michaelis that when he got “wised up” to Myrtle's affair, he'd marched her over to the window, where they could see the pale, enormous eyes of T. J. Eckleburg staring down at them, and confronted her with her guilt: “I told her she might fool me but she couldn't fool God. I took her to
the window . . . I said, ‘God knows what you've been doing, everything you've been doing. You may fool me but you can't fool God!'” “God sees everything,” Wilson adds.

“That's an advertisement,” Michaelis assures him.

B
urton Rascoe declared in December 1922 that nostalgia “is one of the oldest of fallacies.” Even Aristotle, he pointed out, was lamenting that “
the theater is no longer what it used to be, that standards are being trodden upon, that the rabble is being catered to.”
And so, in forty more years, Rascoe predicted, perhaps “Scott Fitzgerald will be flooding his whiskers with tears of sorrow over the decline of morals since the Jazz Age.” Such a prospect was not so “chimerical” as some might think, he insisted. The Fitzgeralds had already begun their holiday celebrations by the time the article appeared, which may account for Fitzgerald missing this mention: it is not in his scrapbooks.

As
The Great Gatsby
draws to a close, Nick Carraway remembers returning home to the Midwest for Christmas from his schools in the east. In Chicago, he changed trains for St. Paul. “When we pulled out into the winter night and the real snow, our snow, began to stretch out beside us and twinkle against the windows, and the dim lights of small Wisconsin stations moved by, a sharp wild brace came suddenly into the air. We drew in deep breaths of it as we walked back from dinner through the cold vestibules, unutterably aware of our identity with this country for one strange hour before we melted indistinguishably into it again.”

“That's my Middle West,” Nick says, “not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede towns but the thrilling, returning trains of my youth and the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of holly wreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow.” The thrill is in the return. This requiem to the dark fields of the snowy republic is the moment when
The Great Gatsby
begins to converge with the emotion that drives the great Gatsby and destroys him: nostalgia, the wistful longing to recapture the past, the expelled Adam seeking a route back into Paradise. A nation so fixed on progress will always be pulled, Nick begins to see, back into nostalgia, reaching for what lies ahead yet longing for what lies behind. This is what it means to be American, Nick concludes: to sense our identity with this country even as we lose our place in it. Before we even grasp it, it is gone, leaving us buffeted by a deep wave of nostalgia, rippling through us like the cold night air. If its faith in progress represents America's hope in the future, then nostalgia is its hope in the past.

For all its sparkling modernism,
The Great Gatsby
is colored with nostalgia, peopled with characters carrying well-forgotten dreams from age to age. Although Gatsby is more driven by nostalgia than anyone else, he is by no means the novel's only nostalgic character. Even Tom wistfully seeks “the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game.” Only thoroughly modern Jordan is immune to it.

Fitzgerald never became a whiskered old man, although he certainly managed some pungent remarks on the decline of standards as he grew older. In 1940 he sternly wrote to his daughter about her projected course of study at Vassar. He hated to see her spend tuition fees “
on a course like ‘English Prose since 1800,'” he told her. “Anybody that can't read modern English prose by themselves is subnormal—and you know it.”

To Scott Fitzgerald's contemporaries he was the voice of the eternal present, but now he is the voice of nostalgic glamor: lost hope, lost possibility, lost paradise. Rascoe guessed right, but for all the wrong reasons: Fitzgerald would become the American twentieth century's greatest elegist. Nostalgia is a species of faith. “
Like all your stories there was something haunting to remember,” Zelda told Scott later, “about the loneliness of keeping Faiths.”