The Death of Gatsby and the Scene
The Death of Gatsby and the Scene
November 29, 2022, 7:45 pm
Filed under: art, Art Scenes, community, feminism, Gen X, grief | Tags: 90s, Believe Her, Charlottesville, cloche hat, Cool, Cool Chicks, Criminalized Survivorship, Dawn Powell, F Scott Fitzgerald, Gatsby, Gen X, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Remedios Varo, scene, Steve Keene, The Great Gatsby, True Crime, vintage clothes
Around about the time I was coming of age, my hometown was becoming a scene. Our hometown band was about to hit the mainstream and art was seeping out of every corner of the place. There were plays in bars, on the street, in art galleries. There was an artist who sold his paintings for $3 and also painted the walls and restrooms of restaurants all over town. His work was everywhere. It was a heady moment.
Into that heady moment, stepped a man who my friends and I called Gatsby, because he was always dressed up like a 1920s gentleman. He had an air about him — a man out of time. I live in New York City now, and here you’d never notice this guy. He’d slip into some faux speakeasy and you’d just think — oh sure, one of those — but then, there, in my hometown, this guy was highly visible. It was a scene then and Gatsby quickly took his place at the center of it.
I was part of the scene, too. I was in a play at the art gallery with the man who a couple years later became a rock star. I was in the play in the writer’s apartment. I was in the legendary production of Hair that happened in the ROTC building. I hung out at the restaurants where the cool hung out and I was in the Three Penny Opera featuring the hip alt bluegrass band as the orchestra. I played the old mother, at age 19 — but still. I was in it. I was there. But somehow I wasn’t really included most of the time. And it wasn’t just that I was young. Many girls much younger than me were seen on the arms of the cool guys, at the cool parties, on cool guys’ retro motorcycles. They were cool chicks.
Then, I didn’t understand why I wasn’t more IN the scene. I mean. I wrote poems, too, just like all the fellas. I played guitar. I was ALSO obsessed with the Beat poets. I also wore vintage clothes. (Hats especially! I was the one in cloches and such. I had a hot pink feathered one for special occasions.) I was doing so many of the things the cool guys were doing — not because I was trying to be cool but because that’s just where I was at. And yet…Gatsby never spoke to me. He probably didn’t know my name.
Decades later, in this era, I heard that Gatsby has been shot and killed by his girlfriend. The community heaved in grief. Many people I care about were devastated. There was a great mourning for the man and also the scene of which he once was a big part. It is beautiful and awful and nostalgic and odd and endlessly captivating.
I want to be clear that the facts of this case are more or less in and they are tragic and sad but I’m not here to talk about the facts of this case. What I feel the need to unpack is my own journey with both the news and the history of the scene and how they intersect.
My first response to this dramatic circumstance was to mourn with those who were close to him, to mourn the symbol and the past he took with him. I immediately assumed that the dominant perception that his girlfriend was crazy was correct and that that was the whole story, because that’s what those closest to him thought.
But then the podcast I’d just finished listening to ( Believe Her) came to mind, in which a young woman had shot her abuser, an outwardly gentle man who none of his friends could imagine hurting a fly but who routinely assaulted his girlfriend and posted his assaults to Porn Hub. I didn’t want to assume Gatsby was somehow involved in his own murder but I also could easily imagine how he could be. I didn’t really know him after all.
And once I’d thought it, I couldn’t help searching for evidence in one direction or another. I looked first at my own experience with him — one wherein I was invisible, one where he spoke to my friends who looked like models but not to me and I recognized a pattern of behavior I have seen over the years in other people. Those who don’t see women as people are historically the most dangerous. I just read this article about the court case around the Shitty Media Men list and writer Claire Vaye Watkins says, “I am saying a sexist negation, a refusal to acknowledge a female writer as a writer, as a peer, as a person, is of a piece with sexual entitlement.” This is what raised my antennae.
Gatsby had a reputation for dating a lot of young waitresses. In a small city, dating young waitresses is like dating models in a big one. It reflects an interest in aesthetics beyond other characteristics. And again, I want to be clear. I did not know this man but it was easy to extrapolate, to guess, to wonder.
Approximately 30% of the women in prison for murder are criminalized survivors — that is they defended themselves and the state locked them up. Not a lot of women kill for no reason. The latest news suggest that this woman did. But I couldn’t help noting other factors that made me nervous about just assuming things were as they seemed. Gatsby’s girlfriend was a 38 year old circus performer. He was a 53 year old finance professional. There was a disparity of age, finances and experience that suggested a power differential. Gatsby had a gun collection — one of the guns was the murder weapon. So, I guess he had a loaded gun collection? Or at least a bullet collection alongside the gun collection? Maybe lots of kind gentle men you know own a lot of guns — but in my experience, a man with a lot of guns is a man to be wary of. So — Gatsby’s crazy girlfriend murdered him with one of his many guns.
And it is awful. It is. But it was wild to watch a community of people — many of whom I used to know — unravel around the situation.
Apparently other women had noticed that it was mostly men who were openly grieving his loss. Other women wondered, aloud — un-like me, if there could be more to this story than “crazy girlfriend kills partner.” One woman leapt to the defense of the grieving men saying they were probably more feminist than a lot of women she knew. And probably that is true for her and I’m sorry she knows so few feminists but sorry, no, this would not be true for me. A lot of these dudes, though I have a lot of affection for them, aren’t demonstrably feminist. They’re maybe not actively sexist but I’ve not seen much feminism from them. Granted, I hang out with mostly feminists these days so my bar is high. Just being a mostly nice guy doesn’t qualify you in my book. These guys were the scene back then and despite being a lifelong and active feminist, I would never have made the mistake of mentioning it to this crew at that time. Maybe things are different now. I hope so.
The community — the one from the past and the one of the moment — were sort of running into each other and from my distant post in NYC, far away from this, from my hometown, from my own nostalgia for that bygone Gatsby era, I felt as though I were watching a community car wreck in slow motion. There were a lot of heartbroken Gen X and Gen Jones men in incredible wrenching mourning for their friend and a lot of Millennial women trying to sort through the mess — some loudly making assumptions, some defending, some grieving, too.
Was Gatsby a gentle man or a closet abuser?
The man was cool and very visible. So a lot of people had opinions. In the True Crime podcast version of this story, we’d hear from all of them and decide for ourselves what we think. Having not had any contact with this guy in decades, I have no idea. He was an icon in a small community. That comes with some baggage, I imagine.
This is the thing, though, that I keep returning to. I hung out with some of these guys in the apex of this heady movement in the 90s. Some of them saw me and some saw past me. They didn’t think I was cool but women weren’t really at the forefront of this scene. They were barely in it at all.
There were some cool chicks around though. The cool chicks then were a different sort of girl. A lot of them were very vulnerable in some way. I went to the house of one of these guys one time and when we got there, there was a girl in his bed. He told me she’d just run away from home and had nowhere to go. She was in high school. He was in his 20s. There was a lot of this sort of thing in those days. The cool chicks drank a lot and smoked like chimneys and now I realize that they were likely also processing an abundance of previous trauma. A girl like that might finally go “crazy” in her 30s. A lot of these guys wanted to “help” these girls. But they also wanted to have sex with them and I’m going to guess that sometimes these things did not sensibly go together.
Where do I fit these memories in the True Crime podcast version of this story?
What I keep returning to was how uncool I felt myself to be among a lot of fellas who were into a lot of the stuff I was into. As a young woman, I was not IN the scene. But now I know what it feels like to be seen as an equal, to be genuinely cool to my fellow artists — to have a mutual artistic experience. The scene was a boy’s club. In those days only cool chicks were allowed. I literally cannot recall a single identifiable woman from this scene. This is not to say that they weren’t there. I don’t remember everything. I didn’t know everyone. But I was on the look out. If there’d been a woman to look to in this movement, I’d have locked on like a lobster. My sense is that women just weren’t really included as visibly as the men. If you were a woman in this scene then, I’m sorry I didn’t see you either.
This has happened throughout history in arts scenes. Remedios Varo was a surrealist. She was at the salons. You can see her included in Exquisite Corpses. You can see her work on their themes. She was in it. But read a book on Surrealism and she might only get a passing mention as Benjamin Péret’s lover. She was IN that scene but never seen as an equal part of it.
She and Leonora Carrington made their own scene in Mexico City, I think. They may not get a chapter in the Art History textbooks like the male Surrealists do — but they built their own world, where they weren’t the girlfriends of the cool guys — but the center of a magical realist world.
It feels like, scenes are for men and the cool chicks who hung around them. Being part of a scene that was once a genuine SCENE was exciting. I do have tremendous nostalgia for that moment in time but it is accompanied by a strange lacuna. On reading the newspaper article about Gatsby and the scene, I had the strange sensation of having been there but always just out of frame. The play in the writer’s apartment that Gatsby sent a typewritten note about? I was in that play. I was kind of the center of it. The band that Gatsby promoted? I was in those audiences a lot and I was in that musical where they were the orchestra. I’m there but not there. That’s what it was like to be in the scene then. I could stand, center stage, sing my heart out and still be entirely invisible.
It turns out that the crazy girlfriend shot Gatsby in his sleep. She shot him with his gun, called the police and began livestreaming. It’s an awful situation. The end of the True Crime podcast is just sad. It’s just really sad. All it is is sad. But ultimately this is not about Gatsby. Just like The Great Gatsby is not really about Gatsby, is it? It’s the world around him. It’s the scene.
And you know something? F Scott Fitzgerald was in a scene. Maybe he WAS the scene. But my favorite writer of the period, Dawn Powell, was born the exact same year and wrote truly remarkable novels and plays that were well received at the time and never felt herself part of the scene. Not Fitzgerald’s scene and not the theatre scene, which Powell longed to be a part of, as well. (Read her diaries for lots of these sorts of moments.) She was so much not a part of scenes that her work went out of print for a very long time. Meanwhile, no one gave a damn about The Great Gatsby when it first came out but the scene grew in retrospect and now few American students can escape reading it.
Of course, I long to be a part of a scene again but I want it to be one where women are full artistic participants and not just the cool chicks at home in an artist’s bed. Thinking about Gatsby sent me down a lot of paths I haven’t visited in a while and I see them a lot differently than I did decades ago. A scene shifts in the rearview mirror — it gets both a glow and a sharper focus.
I learned about Gatsby’s death a few hours after I wrote about meeting Lawrence Ferlinghetti. I’d been thinking about one of the most famous art scenes in American history and about what it was like to be a woman trying to just be seen by someone from it for a moment. I was patronized by a man who hung out with the Beats but was so confident in his position in a scene that he preferred not to be called a Beat poet. There was a chiming quality of these two things for me. These were highly visible men in artistically exciting times and just out of the frame, just a little blurry and off to the side, I’m sure there were many women who longed to be seen, to be heard, to be in the scene for real and not just there and out of focus.
Good night Gatsby. Good night Ferlinghetti. Rest well gentlemen. I’m so sorry for the loss of your loved ones. You made an enormous impact on a lot of people.
Now -
Ladies? Y’all want to start a scene with me?
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Originally published at http://artiststruggle.wordpress.com on November 30, 2022.
