by Dave Odegard
In the fall of 1922, F. Scott
Fitzgerald, along with his notorious better-half Zelda, triumphantly returned
to New York to celebrate the publication of his short story collection Tales of
the Jazz Age. For the next year and half, the two would be a fixture in the New
York literary scene, experiencing and often leading the revelry that would come
to define the times – first at the Plaza Hotel and then at a rented house among
the then-burgeoning upper-class scene on Long Island. It was a period from
which Fitzgerald, who at the time was riding high as the literary voice of his
young generation, would draw greatly when writing his most arguably famous
book, The Great Gatsby.
At the same time, America’s
newspapers (and thus the general public) were obsessed with the brutal double
murder in New Brunswick, New Jersey, of Episcopal minister Edward Hall and his
married mistress Eleanor Mills. The two were discovered together, both shot,
with Mills’ throat slashed. The case would go on to become a media spectacle
with theatrical witnesses (including Mills’ own teenage daughter and a local
eccentric dubbed “the pig woman”), a bungled investigation, and a mystery for
which everyone in America had a theory.
According to writer and
literary critic Sarah Churchwell, who teaches American literature at the
University of East Anglia, in the United Kingdom, the now nearly forgotten
Hall-Mills case played an instrumental part in Fitzgerald’s creation of Gatsby.
In her new book, Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of the
Great Gatsby, Churchwell examines Fitzgerald’s time in New York, what the
influence of the city in 1922-1923 had on him, and how the murder of two lovers
in New Jersey helped create one of the great works of American literature.
Word and Film recently got the
chance to talk with Churchwell about her book, the deeper connection between
the Hall-Mills murders and The Great Gatsby, how Fitzgerald’s most known novel
is like a literary masterpiece about the Kardashians, and the various attempts
to adapt The Great Gatsby for the screen.
Word & Film: How did
Careless People come about?
Sarah Churchwell: I started to
get interested in this question of “What did things actually mean in 1922?” as
opposed to our myths about The Great Gatsby or our broad sense of what we think
the jazz age was like. … So I was just rooting around and then I ran across the
Hall-Mills murders and I started reading up on that. And I just thought, “Wait
a minute this is just uncanny.” … The more I looked into it, the more I
realized the details are echoed in Gatsby and that was where the real genesis
of this book came about – the feeling that here’s this year … that Fitzgerald
sets Gatsby, then it’s the year that he and Zelda move back to New York and
start the parties that inspire Gatsby, then to realize that there’s this murder
mystery that has these crazy parallels with the novel – I just thought, “Okay
there’s got to be something in this and a way to think about Gatsby in a
slightly different way.”
W&F: You explore it
thoroughly in your book, but to a lot of people the Hall-Mills case doesn’t at
first glance seem to share details with the killings in The Great Gatsby. How
do you make the connection?
SC: It’s interesting the way
that some people don’t see the Hall-Mills case as paralleling Gatsby very
satisfactorily because the details don’t match up, but for me … the underlying
themes are there. And so one of the things I was hoping was to suggest that all
of the themes from Gatsby were in the air as Fitzgerald was writing. Not
necessarily that it was a one-one correspondence with Hall-Mills, but
Hall-Mills is representative of the kinds of stories that were around.
It’s not that I think that
Fitzgerald was transcribing this case into his novel – that would be foolish –
but rather that the case has these echoes of the deep themes of Gatsby. So for
example, class resentment and social climbing … that there’s actually a
character in both stories who makes up a romantic past and a more aristocratic
past. That this story about social climbing and class resentment is
specifically about a woman who is seen as using an affair as a way to gain
access to a better quality of life.
W&F: It is fascinating,
because you’re tracking an idea back from the page through the writer to its
inspiration. Does that require you to be like a detective and psychologist
rolled into one?
SC: And literary critic. You
have to have a feel or some conscious sense of what you think those themes or
ideas that are worth tracing are, because I could have spent a lot of time
tacking down details that at least to me would have seemed immaterial, so to
try to get at things that resonate with readers of Gatsby and try to find
echoes of those in the world of 1922 … I thought, “Actually, okay. I want to
see how many of these have some kind of exterior life, that are exterior of the
novel, that are not just figments of Fitzgerald’s imagination, but are things
that he’s reworking from the material around him.”
And … as I started to see how much of the novel’s
material could have looked familiar to people who were reading the papers in
1922 or 1925, when the novel came out, it started to make it clear … why the
novel had not done well and why people had dismissed it. Because it was the
equivalent of tabloid fiction. They thought it was ephemeral trash.
And so then I could also sort
of work backward from what they said about the novel and go, “Okay, well which
parts are they responding to that feel too familiar?”
W&F: Do you think that was
part of reason the novel was recognized decades later as being such great piece
of literature? Because its references were no longer part of the current
culture?
SC: Absolutely. I think the contemporary readers
were distracted by the superficial resemblance of the story to superficial
details of their own lives, but also to the sense that the characters in the
novel were familiar to them and not taken seriously.
Imagine if somebody today wrote
a really great work of art, I mean a masterpiece for the ages, about the
Kardashians. Nobody would take it seriously! Because the Kardashians are by
definition trivial and vulgar subjects. So it just wouldn’t occur to us that
this novel was a great work of art.
W&F: Your book really
showcases that grittiness of the jazz age, as opposed to just the fun and
exciting image that we’re used to. Is that intentional? To kind of pull the
veil back and expose the reader to that?
SC: That’s exactly what I’m
trying to do. We now think of Gatsby as our kind of preeminent novel of glamour
and romance and it’s this novel of elegiac poetry about hope and about the
human condition. It’s not that those things aren’t true. I think it’s only half
the story of the novel and we’ve let that half obscure, as the other half of
the novel. And so what I wanted to do was reframe the novel so that we would
see the darkness of it better … to bring that darkness and that chaos back into
the story.
W&F: There have been
numerous “Great Gatsby” movies. Have any of them gotten close to what
Fitzgerald was aiming for?
SC: None that get close to what
Fitzgerald was aiming for … And I think there’s a reason for that, which is
that it’s a novel about disillusionment. It’s a novel about disappointment. And
particularly, it’s a novel about reality not being able to live up to our
dreams and our imaginations. So we read the novel and we all have this
wonderful imagined version of what Jay Gatsby is like and what the parties are
like and what the house are like. And our imagination doesn’t have to get
pinned down to anything as concrete and disappointing as real people and real places.
Film by definition has to do just that.
That said, I think there are
different films that capture different aspects of it. We don’t know anything
about the lost film version [from 1926].
W&F: So that leaves the
1949 version with Alan Ladd.
SC: I think that’s an
interesting film because it was made by people who remember the 1920s. So it
has that darkness that I tried to get at in my book … and I think that’s quite
telling. I think Alan Ladd is a pretty good Gatsby because he gets the gangster
side of Gatsby, but it’s a crazy movie in a lot of ways and makes nonsense of
what Fitzgerald was doing, not least that Jordan repents and marries Nick …
it’s bonkers.
W&F: What about the one
from the 1970s?
SC: I go against a lot of
popular opinion in really disliking the 1974 Jack Clayton version. I know a lot
of people really like it.
W&F: Really? Why?
SC: My problem is that it
really centers on Mia Farrow and Robert Redford, Bruce Dern for that matter
too. I think they’re all hopelessly miscast. And I adore Robert Redford. And
that’s exactly the problem. Robert Redford in 1974 is Robert Redford.
W&F: [Laughing]
SC: He’s perfect. He’s
absolutely perfect in every way. Then [Farrow as Daisy] has absolutely no
reason to leave him. Who leaves Robert Redford for Bruce Dern?! [Laughing]
W&F: That brings us to the
version by Baz Luhrmann from last summer.
SC: I think the Luhrmann is,
and I’ve said this before, I think it’s the film that Jay Gatsby would have
made of his own story. It’s not the film that Fitzgerald would have made … in
that it’s enthralled to the vulgarity. In a sense, I think the Baz Luhrmann is
a triumph of Fitzgerald’s prediction. It shows that we have so much enthrall to
that kind of material, opulence, and ostentation, that we can’t see the difference
between an indictment and a celebration of it.