Careless People (43 page)

Gatsby is left at the end of the chapter, watching over nothing. Dawn breaks jaggedly, like a crack in a plate.

THE MURDER (INV.)

I couldn't sleep all night. . . . Toward dawn I heard a taxi go up Gatsby's drive and immediately I jumped out of bed and began to dress . . . It was this night that he told me the strange story of his youth with Dan Cody—told it to me because “Jay Gatsby” had broken up like glass against Tom's hard malice and the long secret extravaganza was played out.

The Great Gatsby,
Chapter 8

I
t was most likely at the end of 1922 that Fitzgerald found a newspaper offering him a “Flappy New Year”: “To Scott Fitzgerald, flapper king / A Flappy New Year do I sing.” He preserved the tiny clipping in his scrapbook, but as usual didn't bother to note its origins—and yet it mattered enough to save the floating scrap, yellowed now and darkening like old champagne.

Fitzgerald wrote to his agent on the last working day of the year that he didn't think his new novel, still unnamed, would be suitable for serialization, which suggests it was starting to take shape in his mind, if not yet on the page. Meanwhile Zelda saved two snapshots of herself in the snow at Gateway Drive, sitting down and laughing, and then, standing in her ankle-length dress, dissolving into the past.

Burton Rascoe observed on New Year's Eve: “
Life is not dramatic; only art is that. Life is melodramatic, with elements of low comedy relief; and to be a good journalist, a good reporter, one must recognize this truth.” A good reporter was one who could “see events in a cynical, cool light as a spectacle, amusing, pathetic, ephemeral—as ephemeral as last year's great murder mystery.” Fitzgerald saw the melodramatic, amusing, pathetic spectacle around him, but he bathed it in the warm glow of lost ideals, rather than in a cool, cynical light. Last year's murder mystery proved ephemeral, but the art in which it entangled itself would endure.

A long article about the end of 1922 by the renowned writer and progressive William Allen White appeared in the
Tribune
just after Rascoe's review. Famous for an 1896 editorial entitled “What's the Matter with Kansas?” White was widely perceived by the early 1920s as a spokesman for Middle America; he would win the Pulitzer Prize in 1923. “For America,” White began, 1922 “has produced prosperity, which, according to our outward religion, is the chief aim of man.” But White was among those who were unconvinced that its faith in business, the religion of success, would take America forward. As for faith in progress, “it may be a great delusion,” the great progressive spokesman admitted. “
Perhaps all this fidgeting that we call change is circular, and not forward; maybe the twilight's purple rim toward which we are going is only a vicious circle and we are getting nowhere.” He had a point.

White's faith in progress was not quite as shaken as he thought, however, for he did have one confident prediction for 1923: “we realize now that we have been asleep while the grafters and boodlers and amiable agents of special privilege have been taking the shingles off the roof and the stones out of the foundation of the Republic.” But America had awakened to the ways it was being dismantled, and that was one change White was certain would come: the nation would no longer acquiesce to special interests. In the brave new world of the twentieth century, Americans would unite against entitlement and crony capitalism; special privilege would be stamped out, corruption halted.

Instead, the Teapot Dome Scandal was about to burst forth, bringing down the Harding administration as widespread graft, bribery, and fraud were revealed. Within eight months Harding would be dead and the vicious circle would continue spinning. “
The new world couldn't possibly be presented without bumping the old out of the way,” wrote Fitzgerald later—but the new world tends to look peculiarly like the old.

Scott and Zelda spent that New Year's Eve at what she considered a “dull party”; Zelda livened it up “
by throwing everybody's hat into a center bowl-shaped light. It was very exhilarating.” On January 3 John Dos Passos held an exhibition of his paintings in Greenwich Village, jotting on his invitation to the Fitzgeralds: “
Come and bring a lot of drunks.” Two days later, the beaming Fitz pitched up at Famous Players Studios, in Astoria, to watch the filming of Edith Wharton's
Glimpses of the Moon
, directed by Allan Dwan. Scott had been paid five hundred dollars to write film titles that were never used; he saved a clipping that said
the titles had been rejected for being “too flippant.” As the year turned, Zelda was amazed to find that they had been in Great Neck for only three months: “
it seems so much longer.”

Two weeks later Carl Van Vechten went to a literary party at Theodore Dreiser's with Ernest Boyd; Burton Rascoe was there too. The gathering became legendary, recorded by many of those present and repeated in biographies ever since. Its fame, Rascoe said, arose because of its “abject failure”: Dreiser neglected to provide his guests with alcohol. As they all sat in a semicircle, “gazing with disconsolate incredulity at a table covered with
bottles of near-beer,” Boyd reported, Scott Fitzgerald suddenly walked in, a trifle “dazed,” clutching bottles of champagne in either hand. He was late, he explained, because it had been difficult to locate the champagne: “it had taken him much time, going from speakeasy to speakeasy, and in his colloquies with the bartenders in each as to where he might pick up a good bottle of vintage wine, he acquired quite an edge.” Fitzgerald presented his tribute to the older writer, who took the champagne from Fitzgerald and carefully put it in his refrigerator, to the outrage of all his guests.

A
lthough Gatsby's dead dream fights on as the story draws to an end, even he must confront the dismal truth that Daisy and Tom will stay together. Every other couple will be destroyed or divided, but old money survives intact, untouched and untouchable. Trying to hang on to the shreds of his illusions, Gatsby tells Nick the morning after Myrtle dies of his romance with Daisy, and we begin to understand that Daisy represents more than a love affair: Gatsby's romance is with a way of life. Daisy's house enchants Gatsby first, and he knows he is in it “by a colossal accident.” This is presumably why he is so determined for her to see his house in West Egg. He wants to fix the accidental into destiny, make the material transcendent: “There was a ripe mystery about it, a hint of bedrooms upstairs more beautiful and cool than other bedrooms, of gay and radiant activities taking place through its corridors and of romances that were not musty and laid away already in lavender but fresh and breathing and redolent of this year's shining motor cars and of dances whose flowers were scarcely withered.”

A few months later, the
Times
would note that “Scott Fitzgerald and his contemporaries” thought they inhabited a world in which “passion is the fashion.” That may be true, remarked the journalist, “
but it is fashionable only as Rolls-Royces and ermine coats are fashionable. Aspiration is general, capacity is limited.”

S
ometime in the future, looking back on his twenty-sixth year as it stretched from his birthday in September 1922 to August 1923, Fitzgerald scribbled a summary on the top of his ledger page: “The repression breaks out. A comfortable but dangerous and deteriorating year at Great Neck. No ground under our feet.”

The series of parties strewn across December 1922 would dissipate rapidly into a longer series of parties across 1923, recorded in Fitzgerald's ledger, interspersed with many brief hops onto the wagon and long falls off it, and punctuated by brawls: “
February: Still drunk . . . March: Kalmans in New York. Party with the Boyds. Bunny marries. April: Third anniversary. On the wagon. Joined club here. Party with Barthelmess—another fight. Tearing drunk. May: Met Mrs. Rumsey & Tommy Hitchcock & went to parties there . . . Fight with Helen Buck's brother-in-law. June: Party at Clarence Mackays. Began my novel. Squabble at Ring's. Party in New York with Mencken and Nathan.” Drunkenness floated across the months, making it harder for Fitz to date his memories accurately: still drunk, tearing drunk, roaring drunk.