Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of The Great Gatsby
“Taking care with these often careless writings is what this book best delivers.”
Lovers of The Great Gatsby will love this book. And that’s a lot of lovers. North American high schoolers, their English teachers, casual Americanists of all ages from all over the world . . . While Sarah Churchwell, also the author of The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe, was drawing near the completion of her manuscript of Careless People, her smile must have been broadening like the Mekong Delta—or at least the Hudson below Poughkeepsie.
The result of Churchwell’s diligent researches among contemporary popular media, private daybooks and letters, as well as a select smattering of secondary works, Careless People looks like a splendid and richly outfitted vade mecum for those who want to travel in the magic social circle of Fitz and Zelda/Gatsby and Daisy. Think of one of those deluxe, capacious trunks on the back of a rum-runner’s Rolls, loaded with guilty pleasures, stuff you know you're going to like a lot. She may push what she takes as connections, echoes and sources a bit far, a bit hard, but that’s what popularists and other purveyors of guilty pleasures are known quite naturally to do.
Rather doggedly interlaced in her book with the plot points of the novel (faithfully summarized in language that often rises to whatever height one can attribute to Fitzgerald himself) is a tawdry, incompetently prosecuted New Jersey murder, the Case That Wouldn’t Go Away, the Hall-Mills Murder of 1922.
Churchwell also profitably branches out at times into other tawdry current events, including a murder perpetrated by two bored, callow, callous sadists named Leopold and Loeb. What they’re doing in there is a little hard to tell, along with, in some detail, the story of the original Ponzi scheme. But we do learn the ways of bootleggers and how dangerous hooch could be.
One of the undeniably salutary effects of her giving us so much “deep background” is the likely onset of fellow feeling with people who lived in the twenties. She tells so much about the unsafe driving practices on Long Island that in your dreams if you see a Flivver coming, you’ll surely run very, very fast the other way. And the diaries are so crammed with awkward and inglorious debauch (the word is not too extreme), you might do the same with the approach of Fitz and Zelda up your dream’s driveway.
There’s sometimes a resemblance to Fitzgerald in Churchwell’s writing and thinking. How could there not be after four years of immersion? You notice it especially at the ends of chapters, a seemingly irresistible receptacle for profundities where Fitzgerald could always be counted on to go for it. "No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart." That kind of thing. She even may have caught his bad taste in book titles: The original title for this one was The Dying Fall, almost as regrettable as Fitzgerald’s worst: Trimalchio of West Egg.
Fitzgerald was famous for his writing mistakes, just as his faithful friend Max Perkins was for his heroic editing. Churchwell continues the homage with a few odd infelicities, like the misplacement of “only” (“Fitzgerald’s first readers could only see half of the meaning of the book, its entanglement with the facts and contexts of the day, and were blind to its transcendent meanings”), the odd subject/verb error (“ . . . the vicarious pleasure of Fitzgerald’s words and images remain. . . .”), or some half-cooked Latin (“. . . from just such an Irish strata . . .”), but all the same her poetic riffs can feel like veritable reanimations of her subject’s pen. “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.”
After they occur a couple of dozen times, those switchbacks from some Hall-Mills or Leopold-Loeb incident to a summary of a hunk of Gatsby may feel less and less welcome to Fitzgerald-lovers. We know the Gatsby story and don’t need it.
What most of us don’t know is all the other stuff: the newspaper accounts (she entertainingly includes photos of snippets kept by Fitzgerald), the daybook entries of friends and acquaintances like Burton Rascoe and John Peale Bishop, whole heretofore undiscovered but pertinent sections from Town Topics. Taking care with these often careless writings is what this book best delivers.
That and how its author cares deeply for Scott and Zelda. Some of Churchwell’s best writing covers their last days. “Zelda could only continue to eddy in her dark waters: often lucid, calm, unfathomably brave; and then suddenly withdrawn into depression, aural hallucinations, or hysteria.”