Review of Sarah Churchwell's "Careless People"

Careless People:  Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of The Great Gatsby

By Sarah Churchwell

Penguin Press, 2014.

Sarah Churchwell is Professor of Literature and Public Understanding of the Humanities at the University of East Anglia, which I assume means that part of her academic mission is to write for that endangered species, the “general reader.”  If so, her new book—a highly readable study of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby that combines biography, literary analysis, and what might be called “contextualization"-- fulfills that mission admirably.  It will also appeal, in particular, to historians.  By placing the author and his “invention” in their time and place, she demonstrates the importance of historical context—and also the interpretive limits of that context when trying to explain artistic creativity.

After publishing, in short order, two novels--This Side of Paradise (1920) and The Beautiful and Damned (1922)—and two collections of short stories, Fitzgerald had already become the public personification of “The Jazz Age,” a promotional coup that he and his wife, Zelda, did nothing to discourage.  Indeed, as Churchwell’s close examination of the Fitzgeralds’ scrapbooks shows, they watched the press as closely as it watched them.

In the fall of 1922, while Scott waited for the ideas and inspiration for his next project—the one that would eventually become Gatsby—the Fitzgeralds rented an impressive home in Great Neck, Long Island, where they could “party” (a word that, appropriately for the “Roaring Twenties,” was about to become a verb).   Churchwell begins her own project here:  “Using newspaper reports, biography, correspondence, the Fitzgeralds’ scrapbooks, and other archival material, I piece together a collage of the Fitzgeralds’ world….a kind of two-part invention in which fact and fiction are in contrapuntal relation.”  She is appropriately restrained about what she might achieve:  “Instead of trying to be definitive, what follows mixes explication with intimation, trying to suggest how inspiration might have worked.” 

Gatsby is set in 1922, and Churchwell thoroughly and ingeniously sorts through the swirl of events public and private to show how extensively Fitzgerald used them as material for his novel.  She is especially interested in the Hall-Mills murder case that dominated the headlines in the autumn of 1922 and beyond, and how it may have provided some grist for Fitzgerald’s authorial mill.  (In case you’ve forgotten:  the bodies of the Rev. Edward Hall, an Episcopal rector, and Eleanor Mills, who sang in his church’s choir, were found, carefully arranged, beneath a crabapple tree in a field near East Brunswick, NJ, with love letters scattered around them.  Tragedy was followed by farce, as over the coming weeks the crime scene, never secured, was trampled by tourists—even the crabapple tree was eventually chipped into nothingness by souvenir-hunters.  Police, journalists, and coroners vied in incompetence; supposed “witnesses,” including the famous “Pig Woman,” came forward, were discredited, revised their stories, and tried again.  Nobody was ever convicted of the crime.)

Previous critics have noted connections between the Hall-Mills case and the fates of Jay Gatsby and Myrtle Wilson in the novel, but Churchwell pushes the argument harder, perhaps harder than the evidence will bear.  But the real strength of her analysis comes from its resourceful and creative weaving together of the warp of  a wide range of real events and the woof of Fitzgerald’s masterpiece.   The book’s appeal lies in Churchwell’s ability to identify the myriad details—from phrases in books and informal notes, to traffic signals and speed limits and chaos on the roads of New York, to bootleggers and prohibition, to a new edition of Petronius’ Satyricon—that seem to have caught Fitzgerald’s eye, however briefly, and were later somehow transformed and transported into his fiction.

Readers today may be surprised to learn that when Gatsby appeared in 1925, it was greeted more than a little rudely.  The World’s review was headed, “F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Latest a Dud,” and H.L. Mencken dismissed it as “a glorified anecdote.”  (Such a reception had been foreshadowed by an earlier review of The Beautiful and Damned, which sniped snidely that the Fitzgerald’s were simply “plagiarizing their existence.”)  Gatsby was treated as just one more proof that the Fitzgeralds were yesterday’s celebrity news.  Very few saw it as it is viewed today, as a mysteriously moving meditation on what invariably is termed “the American dream” (a phrase that, in any case, was only coined in 1931).

As is well known, Fitzgerald’s career, fueled by disappointment and alcohol, hit the skids soon after that, ending in a frustrating stint as a Hollywood scriptwriter.  He died of a heart attack in 1940, a year in which Gatsby earned $2.10 in royalties.  But times changed and perspectives deepened.  Critics, notably Malcolm Cowley and Lionel Trilling looked at Gatsby again, and, its reputation resuscitated, it is now generally regarded as a classic, perhaps the greatest American novel.  (If my students are any indication, it is the most-read American novel, surpassing even Huckleberry Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird.)  And despite or because or regardless of Gatsby, for more than half a century the Fitzgeralds have also been the all-purpose, instantly understood symbols of ‘20s glamour and dissipation.  (From a 1964 Woody Allen nightclub monologue about the Lost Generation:  “Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald came home from their wild New Year’s Eve party. It was April.”)

Churchwell sums up the trajectory of the book’s reputation well:  “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….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.”  To paraphrase another iconic American text, Gatsby was of the ‘20s and by the ‘20s, but it was for much more.  Snatching at wisps of the zeitgeist, Fitzgerald turned the quotidian into art.