Sarah Churchwell. Careless People. Penguin, 2014.
No serious book is written in America nowadays which does not carry its implied or direct criticism of our ideals, our scheme of life, our cultural attainments.
—Burton Rascoe 1922 (40)
He is intensely preoccupied with the eternal verities and insoluble problems of this world. To discuss them while waiting for supper with Miss Gilda Gray is his privilege and his weakness.
—Ernest Boyd 1924 on F. Scott Fitzgerald (228)
(Gilda Gray was the star of Ziegfeld Follies at the time and known for dancing the shimmy, which she apparently started in 1920. Her understudy is a guest at one of Jay Gatsby’s parties.)
Careless People gets its title from a term near the end of The Great Gatsby:
They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together and let other people clean up the mess they had made. (328)
The true careless people in Careless People are Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. Careless People is a fascinating and cleverly organized book that analyzes The Great Gatsby while telling about the lives of Mr. and Mrs. Fitzgerald, especially in 1922, the year that Gatsby is set, and 1924, the year that Fitzgerald wrote most of the book.
Careless People also tells us a few things that were going on in the world that would have been in the newspapers that the Fitzgeralds read. We learn a few things about Arnold Rothstein, for example, on whom the character of Meyer Wolfshiem is based. (N.B.: Churchwell points out that different editions and revisions of the novel spell Meyer’s family name two different ways: Wolfsheim and Wolfshiem. I wondered about this since I have seen critics spell it both ways, but the edition of Gatsby we own spells it Wolfsheim. Churchwell prefers the other way,)
However, the event that ran through the news for most of 1922 that Careless People focuses on was a double murder in Brunswick, New Jersey, a New York suburb. The victims were a married Episcopal priest and the wife of a parishoner that he was apparently having an affair with. The town was inundated with tourists for months viewing the houses, church, and park associated with the murder. The police did a poor job of investigating the evidence, witnesses often contradicted themselves and each other, and some alleged witnesses were probably mere publicity seekers. The murderer’s motive was probably the adultery, and the murderer or murderers were never caught. The priest’s wife was independently wealthy, and some people thought she may have gotten away with killing them because of her status.
This book came out in 2014, so it does not use the currently popular term fake news, but a lot of the news reporting was slanted and sensational back them. Some of the news stories were clearly made up or just plain wrong. Things have not changed all that much.
Readers know that The Great Gatsby contains many allusions to events going on at the time the novel is set. It refers to many songs that were popular. The murder of Rosy Rosenthal really happened pretty much the way Meyer Wolfsheim describes it. Nick Carraway tells us that his family was related to the Dukes of Buccleuch. The bodies of the murdered couple from New Jersey were found in Buccleuch Park. For what it is worth, the novelist Sir Walter Scott really was a relative of the Dukes (their family name was Scott).
Some readers may feel that the book spends far too much time on the murder story, but apart from that, there are many excellent observations about The Great Gatsby. The book is organized in nine chapters parllelling the nine chapters of Gatsby based on an outline of the book written by Fitzgerald. Each chapter contains at least three or four threads: (1) What the Fitzgeralds were doing especially from 1922 to 1924, (2) the progress of the New Jersey murder investigation and its press coverage, (3) observations on what is going on in the corresponding chapter of The Great Gatsby, and (4) what was going on in the relevant world of literature.
Of the fourth, we have many critics quoted. Especially the book notes that 1922 held the publication of two seminal twentieth century works that not only influenced Fitzgerald but many would say were the two greatest literary works of the century: Joyce’s Ulysses and Eliot’s The Waste Land.
On the very first page the author says that Fitzgerald would say that The Great Gatsby had Catholic elements. She thinks he dropped them, but they are there as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Odyssey points out. Indeed, later in Careless People the author notes how Fitzgerald uses the word accident. It deliberately suggests the Latin root accidens, which is a key term in Catholic theology—the “merely material, once its mystical promises have been abandoned.” (223) If the spirit and the soul are missing (as in Gatsby’s lost dreams) what, if anything, is left?
Careless People reminds us that a novel at Myrtle’s apartment, Simon Called Peter, was about an Anglican priest who had an affair like the Brunswick murder victim. However, the book does not mention that the priest in the novel finds redemption through converting to Catholicism. That might be another of those subtle Catholic elements Fitzgerald was talking about. Unlike the priest in that novel, no one in Gatsby finds redemption.
There are many insights into The Great Gatsby in Careless People. Most of the remainder of this review will be simply sharing some of them with the reader. I hope readers can glean a few grains or mine a few gems from this approach.
What is the significance, if any, of the color of the Buchanan dock light? Does it stand for envy, hope, spring, the color of money? Does it mean “go”?
Careless People explains the Valley of the Ashes. There was a spot just outside the inhabited areas of New York City where the city began dumping ashes in 1895. In those days most buildings and homes were heated by coal; the ash had to be dumped somewhere. This region really did appear like a black desert. In the thirties, construction crews began dismantling the ash heaps, using the ash in asphalt and other products.
At Myrtle’s party in the city, we note also the use of ash or dust imagery and ash trays. We also see similar imagery at the scene of Myrtle’s death: not just that it happens in the Valley of Ashes but we see parallels of two men talking in the dust both at the party and after Myrtle’s demise.
The Eckleberg billboard takes on the image of God, this is well known and explicitly stated in the book. But what god is it? Perhaps, says Churchwell, it is “the false god of advertising.” Daisy and money are not all they appear to be.
Myrtle is to Daisy as Gatsby is to Tom.
In spite of what the film versions suggest, the Charleston did not become popular until 1925, not 1922 when the novel is set. The one dance specifically mentioned in the novel is the more sedate foxtrot. (Though Gilda Gray’s understudy may have danced the shimmy at Gatsby’s party.)
The big party at Gatsby’s takes place on July 5, or at least associated with that date because of the railroad schedule. Perhaps this suggests, as does that quotation above from critic Burton Rascoe, that America’s greatness, or at least Gatsby’s “greatness,” is in the past. (N.B.: July 5, 1922, was a Wednesday—not a day for a party, but it might well be the date a new rail schedule would be issued since the trains probably had a very different timetable on the Independence Day holiday.)
Another book we reviewed tells us that Daisy may have been based on an early flame of Scott Fitzgerald’s, Ginevra King, a beautiful debutante from the Midwest. One of her close friends and sister debutante was Edith Cummings, who became a professional golfer. She would become the first female athlete portrayed on the cover of Time magazine. In fairness, unlike Jordan Baker, Cummings was never suspected of cheating.
The book notes that Jordan and Nick are both “bad drivers.” Jordan admits her mistake in connecting with Nick. Daisy, on the other hand, apparently never tells Tom that she was driving the car when Myrtle was hit. She sacrificed Gatsby. (328) Tanner would say that Daisy was the Judas of the tale.
Is Nick an unreliable narrator? Perhaps, but according to Churchwell, not because he is factually wrong, but that “he cannot always be relied on to narrate.” He presents many things in vague or unexplained terms. (186)
Nick keeps silent, for example, about what he knows when he attends the inquest. He is impressed with the way Myrtle’s sister Catherine lies at the inquest. “Given that Daisy is his second cousin, some might think Nick chose to protect the honor of his family in covering up a double murder” (303).
“Daisy and Tom will stay together. Every other couple will be destroyed or divided, but old money survives intact, untouched and untouchable” (264).
The clock at Nick’s tea becomes a symbol. Gatsby bumps it and tries to catch it, as if he is attempting to go back in time or hold onto time. But he can’t (175).
Before 1931, the phrase “American Dream” as we know it did not exist, but in 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…” Adams’ 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. (344)
Young Gatsby’s Schedule and Resolves do remind us of the list from Franklin’s Autobiography. But Franklin also included things to improve his character like truth, humility, and asking What Good shall I do today? “Gatsby does not try to improve the inner man…Gatsby is a modern Faust, who makes a fortune and loses what once would have been called his soul.” (304)
The loss of illusion is harder to bear than the loss of love. (142)
Even more than Joyce and Eliot, Fitzgerald loved Keats. He would say:
“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 have read it a hundred times. About the tenth time I began to know what it was about, and caught the chime in it and exquisite inner mechanics.” (337)
So it is with Gatsby. There are thousands of stories about those whom we would call the rich and the rotten. Fitzgerald himself wrote many others. Careless People shows us why The Great Gatsby still stands out.