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

"My book, Careless People , is really the biography of a book. It’s the true story behind Gatsby, a mix of biography, social history and literary essay. So it tells the story of the parties and speakeasies and high life in New York and Long Island, what Scott and Zelda were doing, and weaves that in with a broader social history about what’s happening in the world at the time – fascism is on the rise, for example – and then ties that back to Gatsby, explaining how this helps us understand the novel better. My book takes place over four months in 1922, which is when The Great Gatsby is set. The Great Gatsby takes place from June to September 1922, and my book takes place from September to December 1922: September is when the Fitzgeralds returned to New York from the Midwest. They moved to Great Neck, Long Island, which Fitzgerald would transform into West Egg in Gatsby, in October 1922, and the parties that would inspire the novel kicked off. So Careless People is a reconstruction of the crucial months when the Fitzgeralds returned to New York in the autumn of 1922 – the parties, the drunken weekends at Great Neck, the drives back into the city to the jazz clubs and speakeasies, the intersection of high society and organised crime and the growth of celebrity culture – it’s about the relation of Gatsby to the chaotic world of 1922. I also argue that there is one major story that he used in Gatsby that no one has really talked about. What I’m trying to do is to reconstruct as closely as I can what it was like to be there, but without making anything up. It’s all non-fiction , but you find out what speakeasies were really like and how to get into one, recipes for prohibition cocktails, how wild the parties really were, what they really were wearing (not what you might think) and what they really were dancing, and where the ideas for Gatsby come from. Because I don’t think it’s necessary to pretend that just because a novel is great, it can’t be inspired by events and ideas in real life. Where else do ideas come from? I always like the answer Kurt Vonnegut gave to the standard question, “Where do you get your ideas?” He used to answer, “Cincinnati”. (Which is a bit like saying “Sheffield” in Britain, perhaps.) So my book is saying, a little less facetiously but hopefully with some humour, that Fitzgerald got his ideas from New York and Long Island and from what was happening around him. I hope it also suggests ways in which this can help us understand Gatsby better. If I had an image for what I’m doing it might be like an illuminated manuscript. I’m just trying to draw colourful pictures in the margin of Gatsby that might help bring some of it back to life. When Fitzgerald wrote it, his readers understood all his references, but now we’ve forgotten them. So to give just one example: Gatsby gets his money from “drug stores”, but during prohibition drug stores were a well-known blind for selling illegal liquor. So for a 1925 audience, this implies pretty strongly that he was probably a bootlegger, even before we find out for sure. Most readers today don’t know what that means without a footnote. But the thing is that the 1925 audience couldn’t see that Gatsby was more than a bootlegger – he was a romantic hero. They could only see the bootlegger and not the hero – we can only see the hero and not the bootlegger. I’m trying to bring both back. It seems to me, after reading scores of books about Fitzgerald and The Great Gatsby , that what none of the books really does is convey how much fun it is to read Gatsby and how much pleasure there is in the book. There’s something about literary criticism today that seems determined to deprive people of that pleasure. So I thought there must be a way to write a work of literary criticism that doesn’t suck all of the joy out of it. My ultimate goal is to let people have fun as they try to understand this novel that so many of us love a little better. Henry James said that criticism is the mind reaching out for reasons to understand its own interests. Millions of people love Gatsby and I hope my book can suggest why that is, and what really was remarkable about it, but also what was remarkable about these four months in 1922, which are quite extraordinary in their own right, quite apart from Gatsby. Ultimately, it’s about the relationship between art and life: Careless People is the story of the carelessness and the chaos of those four months and how Fitzgerald’s imagination shaped that chaos and gave it an order and a meaning. Fitzgerald saw that meaning long before anyone else."