Careless People (49 page)

I give you my word of honor this isn't a moral tale—nor has it any more resemblance to Chambers because it deals with the rich than has “The Twelve Little Peppers” to “My Antonia” because it deals with the poor. It happens to be extraordinarily difficult to write directly and simply about complex and indirect people. And I should prefer to fail at the job ridiculously as James often did than to succeed ignobly . . . Dostoyefski said that people's motives are much simpler than we think by [
sic
] any uncorrupted motive has an average life of six hours or less.

The “by” is presumably a typo for “but”—and Dostoevsky said that people's motives are usually more complicated than we think, an idea that is certainly borne out by the exchange between Fitzgerald and Rascoe. Although
Rascoe saved half a dozen letters from Fitzgerald, this one is not among his papers; Fitzgerald's letter may only survive as this abridged quotation in Rascoe's lost review.

What did Rascoe say about
Gatsby
that so enraged Fitzgerald? He'd shown “greater technical brilliance,” Rascoe felt, “than even his warmest champions knew him capable of,” but the novel

triumphs by technique rather than by theme . . . I must confess to a minority opinion that the novel is not as good in substance as it is in technique. There are some superbly drawn scenes, and the tragic overtones are managed with great economy and skill; but the point of view is wavering, the characters dissolve too readily, my feeling is that it is more a comment upon a situation than a statement of it, and that comment is not as well reasoned as it might be. But the novel shows that Fitzgerald is maturing in the right direction.

The review damns with faint praise, and shows that Fitzgerald's anxieties about being mistaken for Chambers were so great that he tried to preempt the comparison by introducing it into the conversation; Fitzgerald seems to have remained convinced that any reservations about the novel's “substance” were derived from its subject matter.

Some friends were more perceptive. In July 1925 Deems Taylor, still the music critic for Swope's
World
, wrote to Fitzgerald: “
It's just four o'clock in the morning, and I've got to be up at seven, and I've just finished ‘The Great Gatsby,' and it can't possibly be as good as I think it is. What knocks me particularly cold about the book is not so much the fact that it's a thoroughly adult novel—which it is, and which so few Americans seem to be able to write—as the much more important fact that it's such a glamorous and moving one. You've got [the] gift of going after the beauty that's concealed under the facts; and goddammit, that's all there is to art.” Everyone else was blinded by the facts, but Taylor could see that Fitzgerald had found in them a latent beauty. The art was in the discovery, and in shaping those facts into something more beautiful than their incongruous, natural chaos
would suggest to others, realizing that the beauty of the facts was an unheard melody waiting to be heard.

Scott carefully pasted the two pages of Taylor's letter into his scrapbook. He did not keep Rascoe's clipping, which is one of the reasons why it was lost for so long.

T
he final chapter is a nocturne, Fitzgerald's
American Rhapsody
. It is a tribute to what America promises, and a denunciation of what it delivered: not people discovering their finest selves, but blind hedonists racing along a shortcut from nothing to nothing.

One of the many patterns to which its first readers were blind, aptly enough, is Fitzgerald's careful linking of vision to the meanings of America. From T. J. Eckleburg's gigantic eyes to Nick's “eyesore” of a cottage next to Gatsby's mansion, from Owl-Eyes to Myrtle Wilson's little dog who views the party with “blind eyes through the smoke,” vision is distorted, obscured; appearance comes to substitute for the truth. At the story's end Nick calls the newspaper reports of the car accident and double shooting “a nightmare—grotesque, circumstantial, eager and untrue. When Michaelis's testimony at the inquest brought to light Wilson's suspicions of his wife I thought the whole tale would shortly be served up in racy pasquinade.”

But instead of telling the truth, to control the nightmare Nick connives in lying about it. At the inquest, Myrtle's sister Catherine “looked at the coroner with determined eyes under that corrected brow of hers and swore that her sister had never seen Gatsby, that her sister was completely happy with her husband, that her sister had been into no mischief whatever. She convinced herself of it and cried into her handkerchief as if the very suggestion was more than she could endure.” Nick declares that Catherine “showed
a surprising amount of character” in lying to the coroner—one of the moments that makes readers doubt Nick's pious claims of honesty. But Nick is adhering to the patrician code that says aristocrats are above the law and must keep out of newspapers at all costs. And so “Wilson was reduced to a man ‘deranged by grief' in order that the case might remain in its simplest form.” If Daisy and Tom looked like they were conspiring after Myrtle's death, Nick colludes with that conspiracy, withholding evidence to keep the story from becoming a scandal. Given that Daisy is his second cousin, some might think that Nick chose to protect the honor of his family in covering up a double murder.

When Nick returns to West Egg he tries to locate Gatsby's family to inform them of his death, but the only antecedent he can find is “the picture of Dan Cody, a token of forgotten violence staring down from the wall.” Gatsby's father has seen the story in the newspapers, however, and soon Henry C. Gatz arrives at the house, bringing with him other forgotten tokens of pioneer violence, including a ragged old copy of
Hopalong Cassidy
that Gatsby had loved when he was a boy.

In the back of the book, the importance of time culminates: on the last flyleaf of the Western is printed the word “Schedule,” and the date “September 12th, 1906.” And underneath:

Rise from bed.....6:00
A.M.

Dumbbell exercise and wall-scaling.....6:15–6:30 "

Study electricity, etc.....7:15–8:15 "

Work.....8:30–4:30
P.M.

Baseball and sports.....4:30–5:00 "

Practice elocution, poise and how to attain it.....5:00–6:00 "

Study needed inventions.....7:00–9:00 "

GENERAL RESOLVES

No wasting time at Shafters or [a name, indecipherable]

No more smokeing or chewing

Bath every other day

Read one improving book or magazine per week

Save $5.00 [crossed out] $3.00 per week

Be better to parents

Gatsby's schedule has garnered nearly as much attention as his green light. His determination to improve himself unites two favorite American mythologies, the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin and a dime-novel Western. Together they define ideals of American individualism. Fitzgerald carefully parallels Gatsby's schedule for self-improvement with Franklin's famous “scheme of employment” from his autobiography: Gatsby, too, awakens early, reminding himself to wash, to read, to work. But he does not try to improve the inner man; he forgets to ask Franklin's daily questions: “What good shall I do this day?” and “What good have I done today?” The moral of the story is that there must be morals in the story. Nick, the man who prides himself on reserving all judgment, begins to see that judgments must be made.

“I come across this book by accident,” Gatz tells Nick, as he shows him the schedule. “It just shows you, don't it?” Accidents keep showing us what we need to see, if we pay attention. Gatz is so impressed by his son's industry that he “was reluctant to close the book, reading each item aloud and then looking eagerly at me. I think he rather expected me to copy down the list for my own use,” Nick remarks. “
Gatsby's life seemed to have had the same accidental quality as his death,” he adds in the
Trimalchio
drafts, suggesting that anyone who is self-made can be unmade too. Gatsby is a modern Faust, who makes a fortune and in the process loses what once would have been called his soul.

The distortion is not just of vision, but of visionaries. America was inventing a country that would be unable to distinguish wonder from wealth, while telling itself that every day, in every way, it was growing better and better.

I
n the end, initial reviews of
The Great Gatsby
were not so much negative as unseeing: Fitzgerald's novel that had undone the facts also appeared to have been undone by them. Fitzgerald was left defensive and uncertain by the novel's commercial failure and often obtuse reviews, although he was cheered by praise from writers he admired, including T. S. Eliot, Edith Wharton, and Gertrude Stein, who was one of the most acute of the novel's early readers, telling Fitzgerald that he was “
creating the contemporary world.” A few months after
The Great Gatsby
appeared,
The
New Yorker
published a “suggested bookplate” for the library of F. Scott Fitzgerald: like William Rose Benét, the cartoonist Herb Roth also saw Fitzgerald scrawling skeletons across the New York sky.

The day after
Gatsby
appeared, Bunny Wilson wrote to Fitzgerald that the novel was “full of all sorts of happy touches,” but objecting to the “unpleasant” characters. They made the story “
rather a bitter dose . . . Not that I don't admire Gatsby and see the point of the whole thing, but you will admit that it keeps us inside the hyena cage.” John Bishop also concentrated on the novel's resemblance to life: “Gatsby is a new character in fiction, and, as everyone is now saying, a most familiar one in life.” Edith Wharton focused on the role of tabloid news, writing to Fitzgerald that she admired the novel, but adding: “
My present quarrel with you is only this: that to make Gatsby really Great, you ought to have given us his early career . . . instead of a short résumé of it. That would have situated him, & made his final tragedy a
tragedy instead of a ‘fait divers' for the morning papers.” Within a month of its publication, Fitzgerald was writing: “
Gatsby
was far from perfect in many ways but all in all it contains such prose as has never been written in America before. From that I take heart. From that I take heart and hope that some day I can combine the verve of
Paradise
, the unity of
The Beautiful & Damned
and the lyric quality of
Gatsby
, its esthetic soundness, into something worthy of [ . . . ] admiration.”

In May, Scott and Zelda returned to Paris, where Fitzgerald made the acquaintance of an aspiring young writer named Ernest Hemingway. Fitzgerald urged Perkins to publish Hemingway, and over the next months helped him edit
The Sun Also Rises
while also acting as his unofficial agent with Scribner's, with whom Hemingway soon signed. Fitz and Hemingway went to Lyons to recover a broken-down car that the Fitzgeralds had abandoned on their journey back to Paris from Capri; the episode became one of the anecdotes in Hemingway's
A Moveable Feast
, written more than thirty years later, in which Fitzgerald is rendered as a pathetic drunk, a ridiculous hypochondriac, and a fool. At the time, however, Hemingway cheerfully wrote to Perkins of their excursion: “
We had a great trip together . . . I've read his The Great Gatsby and I think it is an absolutely first-rate book.” Hemingway's memoir also seems to notice only when Fitzgerald was drinking, but
Hemingway told Ezra Pound at the time that they had both drunk enormous quantities of wine, which is far more likely.