Careless People (55 page)

A
s he prepares to leave the East, Nick finds that he can't shake off his dreams of Gatsby's revels: “those gleaming, dazzling parties of his were with me so vividly that I could still hear the music and the laughter faint and incessant from his garden and the cars going up and down his drive. One night I did hear a material car there and saw its lights stop at his front steps. But I didn't investigate. Probably it was some final guest who had been away at the ends of the earth and didn't know that the party was over.”

After seeing the final material trace of Gatsby's accidental parties, Nick walks over to Gatsby's house on his last night, looking “at that huge incoherent failure of a house once more.” He erases some obscene graffiti scrawled on the steps (hinting perhaps at Nick's persistent need to idealize) and walks down to the beach for his last view of Long Island Sound. And then Fitzgerald offers his great meditation on the lost paradise of America:

Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes—a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby's house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby's wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy's dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his
dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther . . . And one fine morning—

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

The ninth chapter of
The Great Gatsby
is Fitzgerald's ninth symphony, his ode to lost joy. Before he died, Fitzgerald wrote to Scottie about what it meant to appreciate beauty: “
The Grecian Urn
is unbearably beautiful with every syllable as inevitable as the notes in Beethoven's Ninth Symphony or it's just something you don't understand. It is what it is because an extraordinary genius paused at that point in history and touched it. I suppose I've read it a hundred times. About the tenth time I began to know what it was about, and caught the chime in it and the exquisite inner mechanics.” In the novel's final words, the deep-focus economy of Fitzgerald's prose and characterization suddenly widens from the particular details of the people we have been watching, and gathers a generalizing force that sweeps all of America before it.

Originally Fitzgerald had written this valedictory passage to end Chapter One, when Nick stands on the edge of his lawn and watches Gatsby measure the heavens. Reading the modulations of the edited draft is like hearing a familiar song in a different key: “And as I sat there brooding on the old unknown world I too held my breath and waited, until I could feel the
very
motion of
the continent
America as it turned through the
dark
hours—my own blue lawn and the tall incandescent city on the water and beyond that the dark fields of the republic rolling on under the night.” The original first chapter finished there, until Fitzgerald moved the passage to the end of the novel, erased the towering incandescent city in the distance,
and added in his first draft the idea that Gatsby had lost his dream “
long before, not here but westward, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.” Having left the dream of hope and progress behind him in the West, Gatsby finds himself stranded on the wrong side of Eden, disinherited from the promise of America.

Ultimately Fitzgerald chose not to use the word “America” at all in the novel's concluding passage. America remains an emblem—not quite a metaphor, but a symbol, a figure, the fact as colossal as a continent—and what it represents is not a specific nation but a human capacity, our capacity for hope, for wonder, for discovery. It represents the corruption of that capacity into a faith in the material world, rather than the ideal one. And it reminds us, too, of our careless habit of losing our paradises.

Gatsby's destiny is manifest, but he is also subject to the amnesias and ignorances that destroy the American experiment. Murder happens casually and is forgotten, the story of America told through tokens of forgotten violence. Gatsby does not understand that the American romance with the West is over. The nation's hope has been exhausted, its promise glimpsed and left forever unrealized. There will be no triumph of hope any more than there will be a triumph of the will. The great Emersonian dream of self-reliance does not survive its encounter with the forces of society and destiny in the shape of the carelessness of the rich. The disillusionment of this novel lies not in its disappointment in romantic love, but in the outcome of our romance with America.

America, too, is a blend of fact and fiction, a story told out of the chaotic facts of an uncertain land, in which the question of who is guilty will never be determined. We never find out who did it, because no one and everyone is to blame, everyone is equally guilty. The rich did it, the poor did it, it's been a case of mistaken identity all along, America mistaking itself for something it may not be—or hasn't yet become.

The future continues to recede before us, as we are borne back into the past to find there, awaiting us, our present: recklessness and greed, waste and profligacy, trial by newspaper and manipulative media moguls, irresponsible bankers and bad investments, cronyism and corruption, media
scandals and Ponzi schemes, invented celebrities and frauds, violence and cynicism, epidemic materialism and a frantic search for the values we keep losing.

Clairvoyance does not mean prophecy: it means seeing clear. Trying to see America clear, we stand amidst the debris, looking at the old hopes of the vagrant dead as they scatter across our tattered Eden.

ENVOI:
THE ORGASTIC FUTURE

A
fter Scott Fitzgerald's sudden death, Edmund Wilson, who by 1940 had become one of America's most influential literary critics, decided that although Fitzgerald had not lived long enough to finish
The Last Tycoon
, it merited publication, and took on the task of editing it. To add length and gravitas to his 1941 volume, he included
The Great Gatsby
, and a reassessment began.

Four years later, Wilson published
The Crack-Up and Other Essays
, a collection of Fitzgerald's essays, letters, and selections from his notebooks. Other eminent critics began arguing for Fitzgerald's significance.
The Great Gatsby
, declared the critic Lionel Trilling, remained “as fresh as when it first appeared; it has even gained in weight and relevance, which can be said of very few American books of its time.” Although it was a “record of contemporary manners,” this had not dated the novel, thanks to the “specifically intellectual courage” that Fitzgerald brought to it. Trilling compared Fitzgerald to the French novelists of the nineteenth century, to the English Romantic poets, and to Goethe, comparisons he insisted were legitimate, although he knew they would surprise his readers. Most important was Fitzgerald's voice, in which could be heard, said Trilling, “the tenderness toward human desire that modifies a true firmness of moral judgment. It is,” he added, the “ideal voice of the novelist.”

In 1945 Malcolm Cowley wrote, “Fitzgerald had the sense of living in history,” trying to “catch the color of every passing year”; he cultivated a “double vision,” that let him simultaneously celebrate glamor and view it from the outside, a “little Midwestern boy with his nose to the glass.” “It is a difficult technical problem to tell the truth in fiction,” Cowley added, but
Fitzgerald “had both the technique and the need for being honest.” A year later John Berryman called
Gatsby
a masterpiece, and Trilling published his introduction to a new edition of
Gatsby
, declaring, “Fitzgerald is now beginning to take his place in our literary tradition.” A renaissance had begun.

“
I always feel that Daddy was the key-note and prophet of his generation and deserves remembrance as such,” Zelda told Scottie. In 1941 she published a formal tribute to Scott, lamenting that their era had been “
lost in its platonic sources.” Scott had bestowed upon their years a dignity and grace that rescued it from gaudiness and imprudence, and when life became more desperate he uplifted them all with his instinctive gift for appreciation. As always, her memories were awash in music: life now seemed orchestrated in “waltz time,” as people sought the consolation of fairy tales. Looking back, she thought that perhaps their gleaming youth had not been dominated by the waltz after all, but rather by “march time,” a martial beat that produced something more tragic, more vital, and more spiritual than the sentimental, nostalgic sounds she now heard. Fitzgerald's writing had wistfully registered the loss of their golden aspirations, the hopes of an age more valiant and more defiant than the one she now saw.

“
In retrospect,” she wrote to Harold Ober, “it seems as if he was always planning happinesses for Scottie, and for me. Books to read—places to go. Life seemed so promissory when he was around.” Over the years after Scott's death, Zelda continued to move in and out of Highland Hospital, trying to live at home with her mother in Montgomery and then returning to the medical support of the hospital. She worked intermittently on an autobiographical novel she never finished,
Caesar's Things
, and painted. Her religious zeal intensified, and she wrote letters to old friends hoping for their salvation.

In March 1948 Zelda was in her room on the top floor of Highland Hospital, locked in at night with the other patients. A fire began in the kitchen below, and blazed through the whole building, killing nine women who
could not be rescued in time. Zelda's body was burned beyond recognition, identified only by a slipper that survived the flames. She was forty-seven years old.

Over the years several “true crime” books about the murders of Hall and Mills were published. One book argued that the Ku Klux Klan committed the murders; another that the culprit was Willie Stevens, protecting the honor of his family, and that his sister was covering up for him. A former judge told a
New York Times
reporter in 1992 that he was “confident that the Stevens family were responsible for the murders” of Hall and Mills. “The reason the prosecution couldn't win the trial was because the case wasn't well tried. They had lousy witnesses and the defense was excellent.” The New Brunswick district attorney's office continues to give talks about the case, suggesting that the Stevens family committed the crimes. But no new evidence has ever come to light and the mystery of who murdered Eleanor Mills and Edward Hall was never solved.

“Fitzgerald was a better just plain writer than all of us put together. Just words writing,” John O'Hara told John Steinbeck. The first biography of Fitzgerald, Arthur Mizener's
The Far Side of Paradise
, appeared in the same year as the first full-length critical study, Alfred Kazin's
F. Scott Fitzgerald: The
Man and His Work
, and just after Budd Schulberg's roman à clef about his time with Fitzgerald in Hollywood at the end of his life,
The Disenchanted
(1950). In 1949 Hollywood released a film version of
Gatsby
starring Alan Ladd, a film noir in which Jordan Baker reforms and marries Nick, Tom Buchanan has a change of heart and tries to warn Gatsby that Wilson is on his way to shoot him, and Gatsby delivers a remarkably incoherent speech before he is shot, saying that he's going to turn himself in as a moral exemplum for lost young men: “What's going to happen to kids like Jimmy Gatz if guys like me don't tell them we're wrong?”

Scottie Fitzgerald donated all of her parents' papers in her possession,
which she had steadfastly refused to sell or scatter, to Princeton University in 1950. The following year Malcolm Cowley edited a revised
Tender Is the Night
, rearranging the novel's three sections into chronological order, a decision prompted by some tinkering Fitzgerald had been doing with the novel before he died, trying to account for its critical failure. Cowley also published a new edition of Fitzgerald's stories, including some that had never been collected before.
The Great Gatsby
had by now become required reading in many American schools, and the subject of theses, dissertations, and journal articles; as early as 1952, readers were seeing in
Gatsby
a study of carelessness. The legend of Scott Fitzgerald continued to grow, entangling itself with ideas about
Gatsby
and with another idea that was taking root over the same period, called the American Dream, an idea that America grabbed hold of in 1931, the same year that it named “The Star-Spangled Banner” its national anthem.

Before 1931, the phrase “American Dream” as we know it did not exist, but that year a popular historian named James Truslow Adams wrote a book called
The Epic of America
, which spoke of “the American dream of a better, richer and happier life for all our citizens of every rank, which is the greatest contribution we have made to the thought and welfare of the world. That dream or hope has been present from the start. Ever since we became an independent nation, each generation has seen an uprising of ordinary Americans to save that dream from the forces that appear to be overwhelming it.” Adams's book sparked a great national debate in the early years of the Great Depression about the promise of America, and the idea of the American Dream has become as familiar as the novel that is held to exemplify it, but actually helped prophesy it into existence.

It is not a coincidence that
The Great Gatsby
began to be widely hailed as a masterpiece in America during the 1950s, as the American dream took hold once more, and the nation was once again absorbed in chasing the green light of economic and material success.

The Great Gatsby
is a stranger novel than some of the bromides about it admit. Dig deep and you will not find the perfection that some sigh about—but you will find a nearly incorruptible style purifying and controlling the
incoherence of Fitzgerald's raw material. The novel's small imperfections do not disappoint for long: it is so rich and unexpected, so slight and so unfathomable, so much a story of its moment and yet so much a story of ours.

It is a reckoning of the nation's hopes and its failures, and Scott Fitzgerald has long been hailed as one of America's most important, and best-loved, writers. In addition to that remarkable voice, his uncanny prescience has been recognized and celebrated. But there are still aspects of his faculty for guessing right that we have yet to see, such as that in his 1929 story “The Swimmers,” Fitzgerald predicted the metaphor of the “99 percent” that has so dominated recent conversations about economic inequality. Two years earlier Fitzgerald told a
World
reporter that America would face a great “national testing” in the near future: “
The idea that we're the greatest people in the world because we have the most money in the world is ridiculous. Wait until this wave of prosperity is over! Wait ten or fifteen years! Wait until the next war on the Pacific, or against some European combination! . . . The next fifteen years will show how much resistance there is in the American race.” It was 1927, and he was right again. “There has never been an American tragedy,” Fitzgerald ended. “There have only been great failures.”

What Fitzgerald once called “the opportunistic memory” of Americans abounds in popular readings of
The Great Gatsby
. Fitzgerald's first readers could see only one half of the meaning of the book, its entanglement with the facts and contexts of the day, and were blind to its transcendent meanings. We tend now to focus on those universal meanings, letting our myths and misapprehensions about the 1920s take the place of facts about Fitzgerald's world. Each moment mistakes the part for the whole, seeing only one side of his book, the other side obscured by the darkness of the era's own blind spots, the luster of the moon half-hidden by the shadows of the earth.

But Fitzgerald's genius was in seeing it whole, in having it both ways, which is what fiction is for: the eternal
as if
, the world suspended in a conditional mood, awaiting its intricate and indeterminate destiny.