CHAPTER SIX
BOB KERR’S STORY. THE 2ND PARTY
About this time an ambitious young reporter from New York arrived one morning at Gatsby’s door and asked him if he had anything to say. . . . Contemporary legends such as the “underground pipe-line to Canada” attached themselves to him, and there was one persistent story that he didn’t live in a house at all, but in a boat that looked like a house and was moved secretly up and down the Long Island shore. Just why these inventions were a source of satisfaction to James Gatz of North Dakota, isn’t easy to say.
The Great Gatsby, Chapter 6
Although Nick Carraway is not a journalist, he is a reporter, as well as Gatsby’s biographer and publicist. The other reporter in The Great Gatsby, who tries to interview Jay Gatsby at the beginning of Chapter Six, seems incidental, but when he comes rushing in following his instincts, Gatsby’s story takes a decided turn for the worse. The reporter doesn’t know quite what he’s looking for, so he asks his quarry if he has anything to say. Gatsby responds, politely and logically, “Anything to say about what?” But Nick tells us that Gatsby, too, likes being talked about. He may not be a “publicity hound”—he needs secrecy to protect his illicit activities—but he finds the inventions about himself a source of obscure satisfaction.
Perhaps one reason he enjoys these inventions is that they echo his own self-creation: the pleasure of an impresario finding an audience. But Gatsby never says; he gives the reporter no statement. Or, rather, Nick gives us no statement. This is one of Nick’s most characteristic lapses, his occasional bouts of silence and aphasia. At key moments Nick is liable to declare himself at a loss for words, and announce that Gatsby’s visions are “unutterable” or that his own memories are “uncommunicable.” Some might consider this rather unhelpful on the part of a reporter, and Nick has certainly become one of literature’s better-known unreliable narrators. The problem is less that the accuracy of Nick’s narration cannot be relied upon than the fact that he cannot always be relied upon to narrate. On the nights when he is a flaneur strolling through the enchanted metropolitan twilight, Nick tells us of his pleasure in hearing laughter from unheard jokes, joy imagined in unintelligible gestures. Nick is a romantic in the Keatsian sense: he thinks untold stories are lovelier.
This is a conjuring trick, enabling Fitzgerald to have it both ways. The insufficiency of language becomes, in his hands, not a tragedy of human inarticulacy, but a romance of possibility. Most of The Great Gatsby remains forever fixed in a single, gorgeous moment of potential, ideas that are described as “unheard,” “unintelligible,” “uncommunicable,” “unutterable,” “unfathomable,” “indefinite,” “ineffable,” “incalculable”—and yet hover in the margins. The characters, too, are suggestions rather than declarations: they have strong physical presences, and yet they are strangely featureless. Fitzgerald offers only impressions: Buchanan’s bulk and power, Gatsby’s charm and ecstatic smile, Daisy’s thrilling voice. By no coincidence, Jordan is the most physically defined (she has hair the color of a yellow autumn leaf, is small, athletic, a trifle androgynous, with tanned skin and gray, sun-strained eyes); she is also the person Nick calls “limited.” The rest of them are limited only by our imaginations, and by Fitzgerald’s evocative, bold strokes of color and form.
As Nick begins to ponder the pleasure to be derived from invention, he shares with us the secret of Gatsby’s origins, the tale of how young James Gatz created his ideal personality through an act of sheer will. Part of the mystery is solved, just as more mysteries begin to accumulate. Gatsby has the imagination of an artist, but his desires have been shaped by a country that channeled those desires into climbing social ladders rather than imaginative ones. “The thing which sets off the American from all other men,” wrote Mencken in 1922, “and gives peculiar color not only to the pattern of his daily life but also adds to the play of his inner ideas, is what, for want of a more exact term, may be called social aspiration.” But Fitzgerald also recognized that social aspiration could involve an aesthetic process: the invention of the self as work of art.
There were only two things left for a genuine artist in America to do, Burton Rascoe observed in the summer of 1922—stay drunk or commit suicide.
On the cold, bright Thursday of November 16, Carl Van Vechten lunched at the Algonquin with Tom Smith, Horace Liveright, and Tallulah Bankhead. Van Vechten was preparing to attend the premiere of John Barrymore’s Hamlet, the theatrical event of the season; a writer named Thomas Beer had asked him “some time ago,” Van Vechten noted in his diary irritatedly, “but he is unable to get seats & calls it off today. Very Tom Beerish!” Tom Beer had published his first novel in 1922, The Fair Rewards, about a naive young dreamer from the provinces who idealizes a deceitful woman. Beer inscribed a copy of the novel in Greek: “For Scott Fitzgerald from Thomas Beer 
,” which translates as “reaching forward to what lies ahead.” It comes from the Bible, ending a passage that reads: “Brethren, I do not regard myself as having laid hold of it yet; but one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and reaching forward to what lies ahead.” When Fitzgerald came to write his own novel of an idealist in 1922, who persistently reaches forward to what lies ahead, he would make his hero unable to forget what lies behind. Jay Gatsby remains convinced that what he has lost is always lurking nearby, “just out of reach of his hand.”
Four days after Beer stood him up, Van Vechten invited around a poet named Wallace Stevens, who brought the manuscript for Harmonium, his first collection of poems, which Van Vechten had helped persuade Alfred Knopf to publish; it would come out in early 1923 and become one of the defining events of American modernism, including such now-classic poems as “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” and “Anecdote of the Jar.” “I do not know which to prefer,” Stevens famously wrote in Harmonium, “the beauty of inflections or the beauty of innuendoes.”
In life, however, it seemed that Stevens had less difficulty identifying his preferences. After drinking “half a quart of my best bourbon,” Van Vechten reported, “Wallace told me he didn’t like me” and left. So much for the beauty of innuendoes.
The Fitzgeralds traveled with Gene and Helen Buck to New Jersey on Saturday, November 18, a journey of a few hours by train, to watch the Yale–Princeton football game. Swope’s World was Fitzgerald’s preferred paper for sports in those days, and he faithfully followed the Princeton Tigers throughout his life. On that November Saturday the World put the Princeton game on its front page.
Immediately to the left of the big game was the latest update on the Hall–Mills investigation in New Brunswick. “SURE STRONG CASE IS BUILT UP FOR HALL GRAND JURY,” ran the headline. “Investigators Hint Mystery of Double Killing Is Near Solution.” As it happens, the last stop before Princeton on the commuter train from New York is New Brunswick: they had to travel right past the scene of the year’s most notorious crime to get to their football game.
The game, as Zelda told the Kalmans, who had not made it east, “was very spectacular and very dull,” and all she remembered was the score: Princeton won 3–0. Afterward they went round to the university’s clubs to drink with the undergraduates, which made her feel like Methuselah; it was “a sad experience.” But generally life in Great Neck was like “Times Square at the theater hour. It is fun here.” Scott and Ring stayed up all night drinking together, and wrote Kalman another letter about their excursion, undated, but timed: it was 5:30 A.M. and they were “not so much up already as up still.” Although the game was “punk” the Kalmans would still have been amused: “This is a very drunken town full of intoxicated people and retired debauches & actresses so I know that you and she to who you laughingly refer to as the missus would enjoy it . . . Everything is in its usual muddle.”
Zelda added a tidbit of gossip to her letter that she was sure would amuse the Kalmans: a girl they knew had visited the Fitzgeralds recently and “lured John Dos Passos back to New York when he was expected to stay overnight” with them in Great Neck. “This was astonishing as he looks like an elongated squirrel.” Zelda’s surprise was primarily because the girl was “so partial to the arrow collar brand”; Dos “is attractive tho,” Zelda admitted.
The day after the Princeton game, Marcel Proust died in Paris (which would not be reported in America for some weeks). If the Fitzgeralds read the Sunday New York Times on their train journey home to Great Neck, they would have seen an article in the book section by the English writer John Cournos, whose novel Babel was enjoying a vigorous marketing campaign, complete with an endorsement from Scott Fitzgerald: “Beautifully written . . . The author’s graphic atmospheres in London and Paris and New York are flawless.”
In his Times article that Sunday, “Biography as Fiction,” Cournos argued that the best art was produced when “realities themselves are used as symbols.” In fact, Cournos was prepared to go further and say that the only fiction that deserved to be called art was “fact in the light of imagination.” This is the difference between art and documentary reportage, being debated in the pages of the New York Times that rainy mild Sunday in November as the Fitzgeralds trained back to Long Island, trailing a hangover.
Over the weekend, as the Fitzgeralds and Bucks traveled to Princeton, the papers discussed the forthcoming grand jury trial in the Hall–Mills case, which was finally going to be convened on Monday. Witnesses would include the hapless Pearl Bahmer and Raymond Schneider, still awaiting trial for the misdemeanors that followed their finding the bodies; the maids in the Hall residence; the doctors and detectives who’d been at the scene when the bodies were discovered; and, of course, Jane Gibson. Mr. Mott intended to argue that Mrs. Hall was behind the crimes: “The motive accepted by Mr. Mott for proof before the grand jury was that Mrs. Hall’s intense desire for the preservation of the conventions, outraged by the furtive spooning of her husband and the singer, led up to anger which caused the situation which got beyond her control and brought about the murders,” explained the World, in what was possibly the first and last instance of “furtive spooning” being cited as a motive for murder.
The Hall–Mills story was beginning to be defined by women, a novel and somewhat disturbing development, said the Tribune. “A jury will decide between the two women—one throughout her life a symbol of exclusive respectability in New Brunswick; the other a turbulent character, who in recent years has made a living transmuting New Brunswick’s garbage into pork”—and its swinishness into garbage. Charlotte Mills was reported to be “aggrieved” at not having been called to testify, complaining that Prosecutor Beekman had cut her off when he deigned to question her at all, saying, “That’s all right, little girl. That’s all we want to know.”
American women had finally won the vote two years earlier, in a constitutional amendment that followed hard on the heels of the Volstead Act. The question of women’s role in public and professional life was now urgent, and much debated: suddenly something called the “woman’s vote” was taken into account in elections and treated as very different from the normal vote made by people who were not women. Equally concerning was the idea that women were beginning to sit on juries, a development much discussed that autumn. The women who would join the Hall–Mills grand jury were named by the press, which speculated on their likely attitudes toward the case. That October the American ambassador to Britain had given a talk asking if women had souls; if they did, he said, they would need their own set of commandments. The speech caused a small storm in America: asked for comment, Ring Lardner said there was no point in writing new commandments for women, as they would only break them. He recommended that all the women in the world be killed or sent to New Jersey.
On November 18, as the Fitzgeralds and Bucks made their merry way to Princeton, the Saturday Evening Post featured a woman golfer on the cover, viewing her club with a certain amount of dismay—or confusion.
As America waited with mounting anticipation for the New Brunswick grand jury to convene, two new witnesses came forward, strengthening the state’s case. Another hog farmer, named George Sipel—promptly dubbed the “Pig Man”—was said to have corroborated Mrs. Gibson’s statement, claiming he was the owner of the truck that drove past the crime scene, illuminating the murder with its headlights just in time for Mrs. Gibson to witness it. Another witness was claiming to have been the confidante of Edward Hall. Paul Hamborszky was a Hungarian minister in New Brunswick who had recently been relieved of his ministerial duties after complaints of his drinking, and had since become a used-car salesman. Although Hamborszky’s statement was hearsay, vague, and did not actually deal with the crime, and thus could not be put before the grand jury, “the authorities do not consider this a fatal defect in the Hamborszky story.”
In the meantime, an enterprising local had opened a “murder museum” at the Phillips Farm, charging admission and serving “soda water, sandwiches, peanuts, and pop corn as refreshments.” The crab apple tree had disappeared, torn down by souvenir-seekers, so sightseers brought shovels and dug up earth from the crime scene; those who had forgotten containers could purchase paper bags to carry their dirt home.
The Tribune sardonically suggested a route for Sunday drives. Given the rise of tourism as a pastime, the crowds that “burned up New Jersey roads to the scene of the Hall–Mills murder . . . [and the] bits of houses, trees and furniture” that now “have a wide distribution on mantles and bureaus in homes,” perhaps America should consider organizing “Ideal Crime Tours”: “On left, turf field in which motorists may search for new evidence or souvenirs . . . Large excavation dead ahead. On that spot the crime was committed. Entire spot has been carried away by souvenir hunters. Drive on.”
One woman wrote to the World, describing such an excursion: “having read much about the Hall–Mills murder, we decided to visit the Phillips farm. We drove along till we came to a sign reading: ‘This is the way to the tragedy.’ Then we came upon another sign, reading: ‘This is the spot.’ But the crab apple tree has disappeared, taken away by souvenir hunters. However, there is a stick with a black string tied about it to show where it was.”
What is the difference between the historian and the souvenir hunter? Both are in search of relics, of sacred objects; both tend to linger over scenes of carnage and tragedy. Ideally, historians do less damage to the source material, but this cannot always be guaranteed. The same is true of their search for meaning. The tour guide is not morally superior to the tourist, only more familiar with the route.
This is the way to the tragedy. But when you get there, instead of a historical relic, a sacred object, the totemic tree itself, all you may find is a stick with a black string tied to it by someone who got there first. History makes rubberneckers of us all.
On their journey home that Sunday, the Fitzgeralds would have had time to read a large illustrated feature in the New York Times on the “romance” of “Border Rum Runners.” Although there’s no evidence that they did, there is a reason for us to read it, as it explains something that the Fitzgeralds knew but is now largely forgotten. For the previous three years, outlaws had been running whiskey on the border states between Canada and the American Middle West: rum-running was America’s last frontier romance. By 1922 such romance was already doomed: alcohol was beginning to make its way across the country by means of rapidly organizing crime, “from Chicago by the dirty channels of bribed politicians and ‘fixed’ garages.” What would become the National Crime Syndicate was gathering force. Soon rapacious men like Arnold Rothstein would be obliterated in the public memory by celebrity gangsters such as Al Capone—who in 1922 was manager and part owner of a speakeasy and brothel in Chicago, and looking for bigger things.
Although the “dashing rascals of the romantic novel type” who first ran the whiskey trail were already disappearing, said the Times, “the spirit of adventure still lingers in the lake lands of Northern Minnesota,” where “the whiskey was running” from Canada across Lake Superior, or in a “four-hour dash across the border” to Minot, North Dakota, the gangster capital of the west in the 1920s. The crossing from the Canadian border to North Dakota was called “Whiskey Gap.” North Dakota became the pipeline for bootleg alcohol traveling to the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul—which Scott and Zelda had just left. At first, public sentiment in North Dakota had been disposed toward bootleggers: any business was welcome in a state that had gone bankrupt before prohibition was enacted. But now, in 1922, rum-running in North Dakota had become déclassé: “there are too many common people who have managed to climb into it . . . There’s taint in the blood of the people who have fallen to the lure of the easy money of the bootleg industry.”
After the reporter comes calling on Jay Gatsby, Nick Carraway reveals that he is really—or at least originally—James Gatz, the son of shiftless farm people in North Dakota, who grew up convinced that he was destined for greater things. Although seventeen-year-old James Gatz’s departure from North Dakota in 1907 predates prohibition, Gatsby is constantly associated with images suggesting bootlegging—including the state from which he hails. The investigative reporter is drawn to Gatsby by “contemporary legends such as the ‘underground pipe-line to Canada,’ [which] attached themselves to him, and there was one persistent story that he didn’t live in a house at all, but in a boat that looked like a house and was moved secretly up and down the Long Island shore,” like a boat in Rum Row. The truth, we are about to learn, is that Gatsby got his start from a “yachtsman”—another common euphemism for bootlegger, because of the flotilla of boats running rum up from the West Indies.
After leaving North Dakota, Gatz drifted to Minnesota, where he spent a year wandering along the south shore of Lake Superior. One day he saw a yacht drop anchor in a dangerous part of the great lake and rowed out to warn the owner. Recognizing the young man’s “extravagant ambition” and his promise, the yachtsman Dan Cody brings him on board as a general factotum. James Gatz, meanwhile, has availed himself of the opportunity to become the more aristocratic-sounding Jay Gatsby. His climb up America’s social ladder has begun.
Dan Cody, Gatsby’s mentor, is a self-made man, a millionaire whose fortune came from the West: “the pioneer debauchee, who during one phase of American life, brought back to the eastern seaboard the savage violence of the frontier brothel and saloon.” He was produced, Nick tells us, by the Nevada silver fields, Yukon gold, Montana copper, “every rush for metal” since 1875. His name suggests American folk heroes of westward expansion: Daniel Boone, Buffalo Bill Cody. But it also suggests Daniel Drew, known as “Uncle Dan Drew,” a nineteenth-century robber baron who teamed up with Jay Gould and Jim Fisk to try to outmaneuver Cornelius Vanderbilt for control of the Erie Railroad in 1866. Together, the three are said to have milked the Erie line for as much as nine million dollars; when a warrant was issued for Drew’s arrest, they retreated to Jersey City and began systematically plundering Wall Street. Banks nearly collapsed and America’s national credit was jeopardized. Drew himself was finally hoisted with his own petard, ruined in the Panic of 1873. Years later Fitzgerald included The Book of Daniel Drew, an “imaginative memoir” by Bouck White, on a long list of books he recommended.
Dan Cody had a clearer model than Dan Drew, however. Another of the Fitzgeralds’ neighbors in Great Neck during their fateful sojourn there was a man named Robert C. Kerr, who told Fitzgerald a story in the summer of 1923 (when “Scott and I were ‘buzzing’ one evening,” Kerr told the Great Neck News in 1929). As a fourteen-year-old boy living in Brooklyn in 1907, Kerr had been in Sheepshead Bay one day and seen an expensive yacht drop anchor where it would be damaged when the tide ran out. He had rowed out to warn the owner, a man named Edward Robinson Gilman, who hired the young Kerr to join his staff for twenty-five dollars a week. The Great Neck News reported that it was “regular Horatio Alger stuff . . . ‘From Rags to Riches’ for fair.”
Edward Gilman, the yacht’s owner, was the general manager of the Iron Clad Manufacturing Company, owned by Robert L. Seaman, an elderly millionaire. Seaman had married Nellie Bly, the most famous female reporter in America, in 1895, when he was seventy and she was thirty-one. Within a few years of the wedding, rumors that Bly and Gilman had begun an affair were being reported in the tabloids. In 1905 Seaman died and Bly inherited his companies. Gilman died in 1911, at which point it was discovered that he and others had embezzled almost half a million dollars from Iron Clad; one of the purchases he’d charged to the company was the twenty-five-thousand-dollar yacht that Robert Kerr had seen drop anchor in dangerous shallows. Nellie Bly lived another ten years; her death in January 1922 was reported in all the national papers. Her old paper the World placed Bly in the “front rank of women journalists,” in part because of her trip around the world in seventy-two days back in 1889; she had stopped in France to meet Jules Verne. Bly had first become famous for her courage in feigning insanity and being admitted to Blackwell’s insane asylum in New York in order to expose abuses there, in what remained her most celebrated piece of investigative journalism. When Robert Kerr had told Fitzgerald about Edward Gilman, he’d implied that Nellie Bly was not only his mistress, but also grasping and acquisitive.
In the summer of 1924, while writing The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald sent a letter to Kerr, headed “Great Neck—I mean St. Raphaël, France, Villa Marie,” telling Kerr that his stories were figuring in the novel: “The part of what you told me which I am including in my novel is the ship, yacht I mean, & the mysterious yachtsman whose mistress was Nellie Bly. I have my hero occupy the same position you did & obtain it in the same way. I am calling him Robert B. Kerr instead of Robert C. Kerr to conceal his identity. (This is a joke—I wanted to give you a scare. His name is Gatsby.)” After the book came out, Fitzgerald sent a copy of Gatsby to Kerr with the inscription: “Dear Bob, Keep reading and you’ll finally come to your own adventures which you told to me one not-forgotten summer night.”
Being imported wholesale into a work of fiction would give anyone a scare; as soon as Bob Kerr’s name is changed, however, it becomes a simple case of mistaken identity, a funny joke to play on a friend. It also, as an added bonus, provided a way for Fitzgerald to get even with Nellie Bly, whom he had reason to dislike. In his scrapbook, Fitzgerald clipped an article Bly wrote in 1922 urging that readers “not praise a book like that beautiful and damned thing just because a smart and undesirable lot of young nobodies call it literature. It is a pitiful thing to see a young man like Fitzgerald, with a wonderful talent, going as he has, but it is not too late for him, and here is hoping that he will do the great thing which he can and write a book which people would not fear to read aloud to their mothers and other decent folk.” Fitzgerald had his revenge, writing Bly into literary history as the unscrupulous, greedy Ella Kaye, who takes up with Dan Cody after years of riotous living.
Nellie Bly didn’t live long enough to read The Great Gatsby, although it isn’t clear that she would have recommended it to decent folk and their mothers, either. Bly was not alone in her distaste. In March 1922 the editor and critic Constance Lindsay Skinner wrote to the historian Frederick Jackson Turner, the man famous for recognizing the “significance of the American frontier,” thanking him for permission to reprint his landmark essay, in which he celebrated the self-made pioneer individualist as the great product of American life. Skinner apologized for not being able to secure two columns for a review of Turner’s new book: “If an author wants 2 cols. he must write some such hectic twaddle as ‘The Beautiful and the Damned’ [sic] on the principle that midnight supper parties are ‘American Life’—and history isn’t!”
The significance of the American frontier was becoming clearer to Americans in the early 1920s; as the country began to write the story of its life, divisions between east and west started to overtake the nineteenth century’s preoccupation with divisions between north and south. On November 12 the Tribune noted the commonplace understanding that prohibition had divided America between the “dry West” and the “wet East.” In the spring of 1922, in “The Wild West’s Own New York,” the New York Times asked whether the Midwest’s ideas about New York were any more accurate than New York’s ideas about the Midwest. The article ended with prescience and some elegance:
New York is megalomaniac; so is America. New York is rushing, restless, formless, strident, sensational, credulous, vulgar. What American city is not? It is cluttered with ugliness, the irretrievable ugliness of the temporary in decay. It has impulses of beauty, sudden and splendid, intimations of its power, its imagination, its hurried and interrupted dreams. It is friendly and valiant and generous, careless and young, sure of its capacities, unsure of its judgments. It is a little like the New Poetry, difficult to scan, unamenable to reason and tradition, trailing off indifferently into the baldest and most jerry-built prose, but with a robust and magnificent intention, sometimes justified by clear new images and by occasional vivid evocations of beauty and of truth. And that, also, is it not America?
“I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all—Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life,” Nick muses at the end of The Great Gatsby. The perspective of all the characters is shaped, in different ways, by vagabonds and pioneers; by bringing in Dan Cody, the last tycoon who made a fortune from mining, Fitzgerald begins to pull the history of the frontier into his account of modern American life, which until then had seemed to consist primarily of frivolous “midnight supper parties” in the Wild West of New York. A story about careless, young America begins to emerge: its sudden and splendid intimations of power, its hurried and interrupted dreams of magnificent intention.
After an unseasonably warm weekend, dramatic thunderstorms broke in New York on Monday, November 20, bringing heavy downpours as the grand jury finally convened in New Brunswick to consider evidence from the Hall–Mills murders. The nation’s front pages went into overdrive: “GRAND JURY IN SESSION,” “PIG WOMAN’S STORY IS STATE’S HIGH CARD.” The World reported that the courthouse was crowned with a statue of justice, blindfolded. No one remarked on the irony of how blind justice in New Jersey was proving.
The press could see other ironies in the saga, however. Announcing “FICTION PUT TO SHAME BY GROUP OF WOMEN TANGLED IN HALL CASE,” the Tribune presented the six women in paired types, some more familiar than others: “Widow With Fierce Pride Of Family And Slain Singer Of Romantic Mind; ‘Mule Woman’ And Negress; Salamander Flapper And Slum Waif.” Their “stories are stranger than fiction”; the six women were “not like the normal people of everyday life.” Some might think this begs a question about what defines normal people, or everyday life: unlike fiction, reality has no obligation to be realistic.
All six women were symbolized by their homes, said the article. Against Eleanor Mills was pitched the rich widow, described as “the cold, proud woman of Southern blood,” reminding readers that Mrs. Hall came originally from South Carolina. Eleanor Mills had been “sickened by sordid surroundings and a colorless life,” but her “deeply implanted instinct for self-development” had “found expression in her romantic attachment” to Hall, and in her home, where one room revealed her desire for splendor, its furnishings “indicating her pathetic strivings for some of the finer things of life.” After enjoying some comedy at the expense of Jane Gibson and Nellie Lo Russell, both pictured as poor and grotesque, the article ended with Charlotte Mills and Pearl Bahmer. Pearl was “dazed and stupid and uncomprehending,” while Charlotte was “a pathetic little salamander who has emerged from her chrysalis since her mother died.” “Salamander” was slang for a flirt: The Gilded Lily, a 1922 film, was billed as the tale of “a glittering salamander,” while a magazine story published that June explained that some women can, “like the salamander,” “pass unscathed through the fire that would destroy” more “sensitive” women. The salamander liked “perilous adventures” and “new excitements,” playing with men “for the sheer fun of it.”
Ten years later Zelda Fitzgerald looked back on her life and remarked that in the early 1920s she had “believed I was a Salamander.” The term confused her earlier biographers: Nancy Milford speculated that perhaps Zelda was referring to the mythical salamander, which could survive fire. This was evidently the source of the slang, probably originating with a 1914 novel, but it was more specifically a Jazz Age image of glittering, powerful, careless women.
As the Hall–Mills grand jury convened that Monday, the Evening World printed a parodic notice of a new play they had invented: “Seats selling eight weeks in advance for Hall–Mills murder mystery. Management claims farce will run for full year.” It would run longer than that.
The first woman senator in American history was sworn into office on Tuesday, November 21, 1922. Her name was Rebecca Felton, she was eighty-seven years old, and she served the state of Georgia for only one day: the appointment was an honorary one. Whether she deserved the honor is another question. Although Felton was a prominent supporter of women’s suffrage, she was an equally prominent supporter of lynching. A former slave-owner (holding the dubious distinction of being the last slave-owner on the floor of the U.S. Senate), Felton was an avowed white supremacist who defended the 1899 lynching of Sam Hose, a black man accused of raping a white woman. After lynching Hose, his murderers carved up his body and sold the pieces as souvenirs. Felton said any decent man would have done the same.
Two weeks before Felton’s appointment to the Senate, New York police had to rescue a black man from a mob of two thousand white people in Manhattan. The mob had beaten the man senseless and was preparing to lynch him for having allegedly kissed a white woman.
Immediately after Mrs. Felton was sworn in and out, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People bought a full-page advertisement in the New York Times, seeking support for the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, which was debated throughout 1922, and disputing several canards about lynching that persist to this day. The first was that lynching was restricted to the South, when the threat was alive and kicking on the streets of Manhattan. The second was that “lynching” always, or usually, meant hanging: more often it meant burning at the stake and other modes of torture including dismemberment. The ad also challenged the white supremacist myth that revenging rape was the motivation behind lynching, accurately reporting: “Of 3,436 people murdered by mobs in our country, only 571, or less than 17 percent, were even accused of the crime of rape. Eighty-three women have been lynched in the United States: do lynchers maintain that they were lynched for ‘the usual crime?’” (In fact, history has shown that more often than not black people were lynched for economic competition against whites, rather than supposed sexual crimes; the ad lists some of the other excuses and ostensible reasons, including “jumping a labor contract” and “being a relative of a person who was lynched.”)
The NAACP advertisement didn’t work: the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill failed again that autumn, and would continue to fail until it disappeared altogether.
The same day that Felton took her seat in the Senate, the New York Times front page reported a new “popular idol” on the rise in Europe, its first mention of a man it said the Germans referred to as “Der Hitler” and whose followers they called “Hakenkreuzlers”—swastika-wearers. There is nothing socialist about the “National Socialism” being preached in Bavaria, warned the Times reporter; indeed, Hitler “probably does not know himself just what he wants to accomplish.” However “the keynote of his propaganda” is “violent anti-Semitism.”
If Mrs. Felton shows the dangers of idealizing the past, it is also wise to avoid patronizing it. Despite the era’s widespread anti-Semitism, the New York Times recognized Hitler’s threat from its first mention of him. The next day the paper followed up with a report that “sophisticated politicians” in Germany believed Hitler’s anti-Semitism might have been a mere ploy to manipulate the ignorant masses. Because the general population can never be expected to appreciate the “finer real aims” of statesmen, said one German politician, “you must feed the masses with cruder morsels and ideas like anti-Semitism” rather than the higher “truth about where you are really leading them.”
Alas for sophisticated politicians and where they really lead people: similar arguments had led latter-day Puritans in America to drag the nation back into a state of counterfeit innocence by banishing the demon liquor. Empty promises and national myths would continue to mislead people, including those convincing themselves that they were leading their nation toward higher truths rather than toward cataclysm.
In January 1923 Scott Fitzgerald wrote a story that begins: “Parts of New Jersey, as you know, are under water, and other parts are under continual surveillance by the authorities.” He sold it to Hearst’s Metropolitan magazine, which published it under the heading “A Typical Fitzgerald Story.” “Dice, Brassknuckles & Guitar” is another tale of an outsider, a young man named Jim Powell, who falls in love with a debutante. Attired in the outlandish costume of bell-bottom trousers that were a fad among very young men in the early 1920s, he hits on a scheme for teaching society girls how to protect themselves using brass knuckles, how to play jazz guitar, and how to shoot craps (“I protect pocketbook as well as person”). Shooting craps had become a popular pastime at high society parties, as part of the decadent, modern metropolitan world: Alec Woollcott and Margaret Swope shot craps at the Paris Ritz, and the party scenes in DeMille’s Manslaughter feature satin-gowned sophisticates crouched on marble steps shooting craps.
Fitzgerald’s story begins by describing the “last-century landmarks” that could still be found in the New Jersey countryside, including gracious old Victorian homes, which the modern tourist driving past would lack the taste to appreciate: “He drives on to his Elizabethan villa of pressed cardboard or his early Norman meat-market or his medieval Italian pigeon-coop—because this is the twentieth century.” Jay Gatsby is a son of the twentieth century, confident that the early Norman meat-market he has purchased will impress—but Scott Fitzgerald was less convinced.
Jim Powell’s “Jazz School” is a great success, but he remains excluded from Long Island high society: “he lay awake many nights in his hotel bed and heard the music drifting into his window from the Katzbys’ house or the Beach Club, and turned over restlessly and wondered what was the matter. In the early days of his success he had bought himself a dress-suit, thinking that he would soon have a chance to wear it—but it still lay untouched in the box in which it had come from the tailor’s. Perhaps, he thought, there was some real gap which separated him from the rest.” When he confronts the rich, snobbish villain of the tale, Jim is informed, “Ronald here’d no more think of asking you to his party than he would his bootlegger.”
Unlike many of Fitzgerald’s heroines, the debutante in this tale loves the hero; she informs him, “You’re better than all of them put together, Jim.” But Jimmy Powell remains an outcast. At the story’s end he hits the road in his jalopy (with his black “body-servant” Hugo—it is one of the most carelessly racist of Fitzgerald’s works), as the girl returns to the aristocratic world of the Katzbys. Less than two years later, Fitzgerald would have Nick Carraway tell Jay Gatsby virtually the same thing: “You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.” As it happens, both Jim Powell and the girl he loves pretend to be people they aren’t: masquerade may be the favorite game of romantic comedy, but it is also at the heart of the game of fiction, whether your name is Katzby or Gatz or Gatsby.
As the grand jury hearings progressed, “the number of feminine witnesses called” made for “lively” days in court, reported the Tribune. James Mills also took the stand, “a thin, emaciated drooping man, with a perpetually apologetic expression on his face,” wearing “a cheap suit of clothes.” He’d spent the morning wandering the streets in front of the courthouse, eating doughnuts. In the afternoon, “James Mills sat stonily across the hall, his face as white and set as marble, his hands twitching nervously with his hat . . . He had a hangdog air, and such dejection that he was noticeable among all the witnesses.” There was no mention of the lingering question of his alibi. As soon as Mills finished testifying, he requested his witness fee. Four days later the Tribune reported that Mills was “as lugubrious as usual, pitying himself for his sad domestic state.” A few pictures of Jim Mills survived the media circus, including one of him praying beside his dead wife’s freshly dug grave, in which he appears to be smiling.
Meanwhile, said the World, “the ‘woman in gray’ and one man may be charged with the crime,” but no evidence had been found against a third person. Instead, Mott’s “whole case will have to stand or fall on the story of Mrs. Jane Gibson,” who had identified “the woman in gray” as Mrs. Hall but had named three different men as the “man with the bushy hair” whom she claimed to have seen. At least two of these men were understood to have strong alibis, which was awkward for the prosecution.
James Mills at his wife’s grave.
Throwing themselves on the mercy of the killer, Mott and the other state officials announced that they were “hoping for a ‘break’ in the form of a confession.” A confession is certainly one kind of a break—and possibly nothing less than having the solution handed to them on a silver platter would have enabled the New Brunswick authorities to make any progress at this point. No wonder they wanted to believe the killer had a tender heart.
It should not be surprising that Gatsby’s second party does not go as well as the first—and the first ended in mayhem. Having grown perturbed by the idea of his wife running around alone, although unaware that she’s begun an affair with Gatsby, Tom decides to accompany Daisy one night to Gatsby’s house. For the first time, Nick doesn’t enjoy himself at one of Gatsby’s revels. Despite the “same profusion of champagne, the same many-colored, many-keyed commotion,” Nick feels “an unpleasantness in the air.” Perhaps, he thinks, the change comes from his suddenly looking at West Egg “through Daisy’s eyes,” instead of through Gatsby’s. Nick has become accustomed to West Egg “as a world complete in itself,” which has no idea of being inferior to anywhere else, because it is unconscious of its own crassness—but its vulgarity becomes clear in Tom and Daisy’s affronted reaction to it.
Covering her discomfort with brittle gaiety, Daisy offers to hand out green cards to young men who might want to kiss her, her card color-coded by Fitzgerald to match Gatsby’s green light. Daisy spends the party protesting too much but abandoning her protests (“I’m having a marvelous—”), while Tom makes cutting remarks that Gatsby misunderstands. He innocently tells Tom that he will see many celebrated people, people he’s heard about, and Tom replies, underscoring the Buchanans’ social exclusivity, that they “don’t go around very much . . . In fact I was just thinking I don’t know a soul here.”
It is at this point that they see another of Gatsby’s enduring images, the gorgeous, scarcely human orchid of a woman, a movie star sitting in state under a white plum tree, with her director bending over her. “Tom and Daisy stared, with that peculiarly unreal feeling that accompanies the recognition of a hitherto ghostly celebrity of the movies.” The movie star and her director remain in this tableau for the rest of the party, as Fitzgerald offers an Art Deco update of Keats’s lovers on the Grecian urn, forever young, forever beautiful, frozen in time. In the Trimalchio drafts Daisy draws the line at sharing her hairdresser with the movie star, although Gatsby tells her “impressively” that it will make her “the originator of a new vogue all over the country.” Daisy responds, “Do you think I want that person to go around with her hair cut exactly like mine? It’d spoil it for me.” In the final version Fitzgerald has eliminated this exchange, allowing the aristocrat to stand silently bewitched by the star.
When Daisy and Gatsby dance, they do no wild Charleston, but instead “a graceful, conservative fox-trot” that Nick finds as surprising as will readers whose expectations have been created by film adaptations. Meanwhile, Tom amuses himself with a young woman whom Daisy dismisses as “common but pretty,” as she mockingly offers Tom a “little gold pencil” to take down phone numbers of the women he picks up. Nick and Gatsby both realize that Daisy is not having fun; they are at a “particularly tipsy table,” with people whose company Nick had recently found amusing. But now these people’s behavior has turned “septic”—the tawdriness is showing: “When she’s had five or six cocktails she always starts screaming like that.” Doc Civet has stuck a drunken girl’s head in the pool to sober her up, and gotten her dress all wet. “Anything I hate is to get my head stuck in a pool,” Miss Baedeker says, and begins to mumble about death in New Jersey.
Daisy is offended by this “place” so unlike hers that it must be marked by skeptical quotation marks, so appalled by a society that has liberated itself from any constraints of decorum that Fitzgerald repeats the offense to her pride: “But the rest offended her—and inarguably, because it wasn’t a gesture but an emotion. She was appalled by West Egg, this unprecedented ‘place’ that Broadway had begotten upon a Long Island fishing village—appalled by its raw vigor that chafed under the old euphemisms and by the too obtrusive fate that herded its inhabitants along a short cut from nothing to nothing. She saw something awful in the very simplicity she failed to understand.” Daisy is playing at love—she offers only gestures, not emotions. She was raised among the same aristocracy that Edith Wharton described as a world in which people with emotions were not visited, sharing Jordan Baker’s urbane distaste for the concrete. The raw vigor of West Egg is also the raw vigor of Gatsby—and, indeed, of the Jazz Age.
Daisy’s banter reveals her distaste for it all. “I’ve never met so many celebrities!” she exclaims. “I liked that man—what was his name?—with the sort of blue nose.” When she insists that she found Gatsby’s guests “interesting,” Tom laughs and asks Nick, “Did you notice Daisy’s face when that girl asked her to put her under a cold shower?” Tom is no more impressed than Daisy by “this menagerie,” demanding suddenly who Gatsby is: “Some big bootlegger? . . . A lot of these newly rich people are just big bootleggers, you know.” Both Daisy and Nick are indignant at the slur. Daisy declares that Gatsby earned his money from a chain of drugstores, adding suddenly, as it occurs to her, that all of these vulgar people must be gate-crashers, not his friends: “That girl hadn’t been invited. They simply force their way in and he’s too polite to object.” She’s right, in one sense: they are not his friends, for Gatsby has no friends—just uninvited guests.
As the party unravels to its disillusioning end, “a neat, sad little waltz of that year” called “Three O’clock in the Morning” is playing, one of the biggest hits in recent memory. The song was recorded by Paul Whiteman, whom Scott and Zelda often heard play at the Palais Royal on Broadway.
Palais Royal, 1920.
Zelda tended to hear the ripple of music throughout life; her memories were often washed deep in musical images. “Paul Whiteman played the significance of amusement on his violin,” she said later. “Three O’clock in the Morning” was recorded at least once more that year, and advertised in the pages of the New York Times on Saturday, November 18, 1922, as the Fitzgeralds took the train through New Brunswick to the football game.
“In the real dark night of the Soul,” Fitzgerald wrote much later, “it is always three o’clock in the morning.” Perhaps this is the waltz Zelda was asking him to save: she found her novel’s title, she said, in the Victor Record Catalogue. Music measured life into beats: “Listen,” David tells Alabama, “you’re not keeping time.”
An American industrialist was asked by a woman’s college to consider making a donation to support women’s education. He responded that he thought that all women’s colleges should be burned, and those studying there sentenced to hard labor. The story made the front pages on November 23; Americans could peruse it at their leisure, for it was Thanksgiving Day. If they kept browsing the Times, they would also have seen the story of a seventy-year-old “spinster” who had been released from police custody after threatening to shower eggs upon a young woman selling birth-control pamphlets outside Grand Central Terminal.
Neither Scott nor Zelda left any record of how they spent the day, or what cooking—if any—was attempted, but some years later Fitzgerald offered some useful thoughts on what to do with leftover Thanksgiving turkey. A recipe for a turkey cocktail was his first suggestion: “To one large turkey add one gallon of vermouth and a demijohn of angostura bitters. Shake.”
The day after Thanksgiving, the New York Times reported the indictment of a “Bootleg King” named Mannie Kessler. He was only the latest in a long line of Bootleg Kings crowned by the press in 1922. Far and away the most notorious bootleg king of 1922 was a lawyer from Cincinnati named George Remus, who had begun selling alcohol from drugstores as soon as the Volstead Act came into force; some credit Remus with singlehandedly transforming drugstores into a byword for bootlegging. In just two years Remus became fabulously rich, building a lavish mansion with a marble pool and a solid-gold piano. For the previous New Year’s Eve he had thrown a party at which it was reported that champagne “flowed like the Rhine,” and a hundred girls, “garbed in Grecian robes of flowing white,” served a midnight banquet graced by “water nymphs” who gave a diving exhibition. Remus was arrested in May 1922. Over the summer the papers were filled with tales of the flamboyant parties he was supposed to have thrown. Swope’s World ran a full-page story saying Remus “Ruled Like a King, Lived in A Palace, Scattered Huge ‘Overnight’ Fortune in Revelry and Largess.” The story was accompanied by novelistic illustrations of Remus’s revels.
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.
Two 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.
As 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.”
As the grand jury hearing continued through late November, Mrs. Hall’s maid, Louise Geist, was called as an unwilling witness. On the stand the “pretty maid” suddenly corroborated Mrs. Hall’s alibi for the time of the murders: “until today her movements had been accounted for only until 9:30,” but Geist said Mrs. Hall was at home during the hours the murders were thought to have taken place. A married vestryman and choir singer took the stand; several witnesses had seen his green car parked on De Russey’s Lane that night, a car that was destroyed by fire not long after the murders. He claimed it was just a coincidence. Eleanor Mills’s sister Elsie Barnhardt also testified, insisting that her sister had not been in any trouble. The final witness on the final day was the prosecutor’s trump card, Mrs. Gibson, who testified for almost two hours on November 28. She told once more the story that had been repeated so often in the press, of the woman in the gray polo coat, the man with the bushy hair, the shouts of “Henry!” and Eleanor Mills dragged through the undergrowth and returning to the scene hours later to find the woman in the polo coat weeping by the body of the rector. The grand jury withdrew in midafternoon, returning in less than an hour, as wild rumors began to race around the courthouse.
The jury brought back no indictments, a result that was an anticlimax but not a surprise. If the authorities acquired new evidence within the month they could present it to the same grand jury and seek a new indictment. But public opinion was veering strongly toward dropping the investigation, to avoid “the expense of a trial that might end in easy acquittal.” Mott told reporters that for the time being investigators would remain “in suspended animation”—which wouldn’t, on the evidence, have made much of a change.
The case had become such a debacle, said the World, that it had found its way into the debate over the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill on Capitol Hill. It was clear to the entire nation that vigilante justice was being condoned in New Brunswick: even if the grand jury had indicted Mrs. Hall and her relatives, “there was not the remotest possibility of a conviction by a petit jury which would always see the unwritten law inscribed on the wall of the courtroom.” Gleefully attacking the New Jersey senator who was attempting to build a case against lynching, a Southern senator “razzed” his colleague “for the failure of the State of New Jersey to take action in the Hall–Mills case.”
The prosecution had entirely failed to construct a plausible explanation for the events of September 14. The jury rejected the consoling, corrupted fictions offered by Jane Gibson and applauded when the vote was announced. Someone was going to have to improve the story, to lie better than the truth.
At the end of Chapter Six, Nick and Jay Gatsby walk out among the debris, a “desolate path” of fruit rinds and discarded party favors and crushed flowers, exposing the waste and decay. Gatsby admits that Daisy didn’t enjoy herself and Nick warns him against asking too much of her. “You can’t repeat the past,” he tells Gatsby. “Can’t repeat the past?” Gatsby cries incredulously. “Why of course you can!”
Nick concludes that what Gatsby wanted to recover was “some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy.” As the waste begins to show, so does the projection, the solipsism of Gatsby’s great devotion. It is single-minded, determined, in its way hugely creative; but it is also colossally self-absorbed. The chapter ends with Nick’s first meditation on Gatsby’s dream of Daisy, his feeling that he could climb to the top of the world, finding a Jacob’s ladder to heaven (or a social ladder to riches) on the streets of Louisville “if he climbed alone.” But Daisy is with him, and Gatsby succumbs to temptation, although he knows it will limit his dreams and possibilities: “He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God.” He hears a sound as if a tuning fork has been struck against a star and kisses Daisy Fay, at which point “the incarnation was complete.” He has entered the tender night, where, says Keats, the Queen-Moon is on her throne clustered around “by all her starry Fays.”
Nick distances himself from this “appalling sentimentality,” but finds that he too is reminded of something by Gatsby’s words, “an elusive rhythm, a fragment of lost words, that I had heard somewhere a long time ago. For a moment a phrase tried to take shape in my mouth and my lips parted like a dumb man’s, as though there was more struggling upon them than a wisp of startled air. But they made no sound and what I had almost remembered was uncommunicable forever.”
Five days after The Great Gatsby came out, Carl Van Vechten reviewed it for The Nation. What defined the novel, he felt, was the character of Jay Gatsby, “who invented an entirely fictitious career for himself out of material derived from inferior romances . . . His doglike fidelity not only to his ideal but to his fictions, his incredibly cheap and curiously imitative imagination, awaken for him not only our interest and suffrage, but also a certain liking.” Van Vechten also singled out the novel’s “gargantuan drinking-party, conceived in a rowdy, hilarious, and highly titillating spirit.”
Van Vechten began his own novel about gargantuan drinking parties a few years later: Parties centers on the mutually destructive love of a couple named David and Rilda Westlake, who bear a striking resemblance to Scott and Zelda. He is the golden boy, a talented painter who charms everyone while he drinks himself into oblivion; she is his beautiful, desperate wife, alternately driving him to jealous rages and clinging to him. They constantly threaten each other with murder and suicide. The novel opens with David drunkenly arriving at a friend’s apartment, announcing, “I’ve killed a man or he’s killed me.” Rilda soon rings, shouting that she has committed suicide. Before long she is sending telegrams declaring that she murdered her lover and so did their bootlegger. David goes to bed with various women, but tends to say venomous things like, “I’ll be too drunk to do you any good.” The story ends in a tale of violent stabbing and accidental death, but the Westlakes and their friends “‘fix’ the police,” “the newspapers with thin copy to go ahead on growled for a few days about ‘imminent investigations’” and “the inquest was a farce.” Everyone gets off scot-free. When Parties came out in August 1930, it was met with “filthy notices,” recorded Van Vechten in his diaries. Even his devoted wife, Fania Marinoff, hated it.
In 1922, Fitz drew up a household budget that allotted eighty dollars a month to “House Liquor” and one hundred to “Wild Parties.” Not all parties were wild, of course. Rascoe wrote in 1924 of a story he’d heard from John Bishop, lately returned from two years in Europe. Bishop had attended a “literary and artistic tea party” thrown in London by Lady Rothermere, to which she’d invited T. S. Eliot as guest of honor. An American guest, much impressed, asked Eliot if he didn’t find the party extremely interesting. “Yes,” he’d replied, “if you concentrate on the essential horror of the thing.”
There is a reason why the word “decadence” comes from the Latin for “falling down.” All the sad young men were going to pieces, as Fitzgerald had told Rascoe that warm autumn night in 1922. Even in the midst of paradise, loss assumes a shape. Et in Arcadia ego: beauty is not alone in the garden. Death is waiting there too.