Free Careless People by Sarah Churchwell Page A

column, he went over to the house of Thomas R. Smith, editor in chief at Boni & Liveright and a friend of Scott Fitzgerald’s. Finding other literary friends there, he had a fine evening, but Smith soon “proved too generous a host,” and Rascoe’s wife Hazel had to help get him home. He was in bed by 9:00 P.M. ; then, “at 12:30 [ A.M. ] F. Scott Fitzgerald called up. He and Zelda, Mary Blair, and Edmund Wilson Jr. wanted to come out, or have us join them, I forget which, but I was too sleepy either to encourage the one or consent to the other.”
    Fitzgerald cut out Rascoe’s mention of their merrymaking that night, and saved it in his scrapbook. Undated and unattributed, the tiny piece of paper offers no hint that it was a birthday present from burgeoning celebrity culture—or that it might be a gift to the future, an inkling of how Scott Fitzgerald celebrated his twenty-sixth birthday.

    A s the first chapter ends, Nick returns home after dinner at the Buchanans’ and in the distance sees his neighbor for the first time, “Mr. Gatsby himself, come out to determine what share was his of our local heavens.” But just as Nick thinks he will call out and introduce himself he hesitates,watching Gatsby, “trembling,” stretch out his arms toward the dark water of Long Island Sound. Looking to see what he is reaching toward, Nick can “distinguish nothing except a single green light, minute and far away, that might have been the end of a dock.” The green light has become one of the most famous symbols in literature, as readers debate its various meanings: green for envy, for hope, for spring, for the color of money? Did green mean “go” in 1922?
    Having reached out to the green light that he couldn’t grasp, Gatsby vanishes, leaving Nick alone “in the unquiet darkness” as the tender night begins to fall.

CHAPTER TWO
    ASH HEAPS. MEMORY OF 125TH. GT NECK
    About half way between West Egg and New York the motor-road hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land. This is a valley of ashes—a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air.
    The Great Gatsby, Chapter 2

    A ccidents will prove decisive, and there is much about which we can’t be certain. But it’s also true that certainty isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. “It was a matter of chance,” Nick Carraway tells us, “that I should have rented a house in one of the strangest communities in North America.” But it was not a matter of chance that the Fitzgeralds went there. It was time to find somewhere to live and a coherent mode for living, and where else should the golden boy and his golden girl live but as near to the Gold Coast as they could get? They would mingle with the millionaires on Long Island’s North Shore, the better to calibrate their success. But first, maybe throw a party.
    A few days after Scott’s birthday, he and Zelda invited two writers he admired, John Dos Passos and Sherwood Anderson, to lunch in their suiteat the Plaza. With a certain lack of foresight, the Fitzgeralds also booked an appointment to go hunting for a house in Great Neck, about fifteen miles outside Manhattan and just west of the Gold Coast, later the same day. There may have seemed little reason to worry about sobriety when looking at a house, given that they wouldn’t often be sober when they were living in it. The brief interregnum was over, and cocktails were once again reigning supreme: the Fitzgeralds ordered champagne and the popular Bronx cocktail (equal parts gin, vermouth, and orange juice, said to be named for the zoo) from a good bootlegger, to be served