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Boats Against the Current: The Honeymoon Summer of Scott and Zelda: Westport, Connecticut, 1920

2018; Penn State University Press; Volume: 16; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/fscotfitzrevi.16.1.0258

1755-6333

Steven Goldleaf,

Literature, Film, and Journalism Analysis

A high school teacher from Westport, Connecticut, comes across a New Yorker article that argues boldly for Westport's unlikely importance as an inspiration for The Great Gatsby, and he sets out to make a film about F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald's five-month honeymoon in Westport in the summer of 1920. To do so, he enlists the aid of a friend, better acquainted than he in the cinematic arts, and the two of them begin filming a documentary on what that summer almost ninety-nine years ago means for Fitzgerald fans and scholars.Boats Against the Current by Richard Webb Jr. tells that lively story. The documentary, called “Gatsby in Connecticut: The Untold Story,” is still searching for a mass distributor (several rough cuts have been seen in public), but this book traces how Webb, trained in teaching history, and his friend Robert Steven Williams (who wrote the foreword to Boats) went about interviewing Fitzgerald scholars, Connecticut historians, Westport natives, descendants of the Fitzgeralds, and anyone else with insight into their thesis, which might be summarized as “Gatsby was inspired in 1920 when Fitzgerald lived near millionaires on the northern coast of Long Island Sound, rather than exclusively by his nearness to millionaires from 1922–24 when he was living on Long Island itself.” As one of the first academics contacted by Webb and Williams, I can attest to the method they employed in pursuing the truth: “Do you think we're crazy?” they asked me.This is the question that Webb and Williams put to many people, and it has a certain charm. Is anyone, with or without psychiatric training, willing to diagnose two total strangers on the spot? Like many of their subjects, I suspect, I thought “Yes” but politely answered, “No, of course not. Please, share your thoughts with me.” The most outspoken person they contacted was Charles Scribner III, the grandson of Fitzgerald's publisher, who bluntly assessed their work as “poppycock” (63) but later came around to endorsing their belief that Westport's pivotal role in the formation of Fitzgerald's body of work has been sadly neglected.Westport does not leap to mind when we consider the formative places in Fitzgerald lore—St. Paul, Princeton, Montgomery, Long Island, the Riviera, Maryland, Los Angeles, and dozens of other locales that the peripatetic author and his wife briefly called home come to mind far more readily than Westport does. So in this, Webb and Williams perform a great service in describing the still-standing seaside cottage the Fitzgeralds rented in Connecticut shortly after their marriage in 1920 and in exploring its significance. How could we neglect the celebrated couple's romantic honeymoon cottage? (“Cottage,” of course, understates the size and substance of this multistory house, which realtors now list for many multiples of both Fitzgeralds' lifetime earnings.) The Gray House, as it is known, ought to be on any Fitzgeraldian's list of must-see venues, no less important than still-extant sites like 6 Gateway Drive in Great Neck, room 441 of Asheville's Grove Park Inn, 919 Felder Avenue in Montgomery (home of the F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald Museum), and Sheilah Graham's apartment on Hayworth Avenue in West Hollywood. The Beautiful and Damned is, of course, partly set in Westport. (Given the fictional name of “Marietta,” the town is, in all other geographical and biographical respects, unmistakably Westport.) Certain incidents in the novel, such as the heroine's late-night flight from their cottage for the nearby train station, are paralleled perfectly by real-life incidents. Zelda Fitzgerald's path from cottage to railroad still stands undisturbed today, and her followers can, with paperback in hand, if they wish, trace the post-spat route she took to the Westport train station. Not too long ago, I and my Pace University colleague Walter Raubicheck (who plays a significant role in the documentary), along with Fitzgerald Society Vice President Kirk Curnutt, joined Webb and Williams in walking Zelda and Gloria Patch's path (B&D 205–8), and we were all surprised to discover how accurate Fitzgerald's description remains a century later.The centrality of Westport to The Beautiful and Damned is indisputable, and the documentation Boats Against the Current provides, particularly the numerous photographs and reproduced documents from the early twentieth century, is helpful for anyone wishing to conjure up that time and place. The book itself is a handsome volume of coffee-table proportions if not quite coffee-table size: laid out in landscape rather than portrait orientation, it measures 12” by 9”. It is printed on glossy paper, suitable for its many photographs, including a spectacular shot of the newlywed Fitzgeralds in their Marmon, with Fitzgerald behind the wheel, his wife perched behind him, posing in front of the Gray House, that graces the book's front dust jacket.As an extended photo-essay extolling the literary history and virtues of Westport, Boats Against the Current is a valuable car in the long train that is Fitzgerald literature. Where it goes off the rails, however, or never quite gets on them, is in its central assertion. Did Westport actually inspire the setting or theme of The Great Gatsby? That possibility can be granted only so far: certainly, any place that Fitzgerald lived in, overlooking the water, surrounded by “malefactors of great wealth,” prior to writing The Great Gatsby must have contributed to the planting of the novel's seeds. How could it not? But Fitzgerald lived in many, many places before moving to Great Neck in 1922, where and when he began his earliest drafting of Gatsby, surrounded by mansions and estates and rolling plush green lawns of the great American plutocrats whose opulence provides the basis for Jay Gatsby's mysterious fortune. The James J. Hill mansion on Summit Avenue in St. Paul, or the fabulous homes of young Fitzgerald's wealthier schoolmates at the Newman School or at Princeton, as well as the grand estates dotting the whole of Long Island's Gold Coast, filled the toujours-pauvre Fitzgerald (or after 1920, the nouveau-riche Fitzgerald) with continuous inspiring envy. So to make the case for Westport's vital part in the creation of Gatsby requires Webb to omit or suppress all contradictory evidence, instead of presenting that evidence and, wherever possible, refuting it.In part, he is blameless in the presentation and mis-presentation of his evidence, much of which relies very heavily on the work of Barbara P. Solomon, whose 1996 New Yorker article “Westport Wildlife” initiated Webb's quest to find Gatsby in Connecticut. Solomon's polemic, which derives from her girlhood memories of growing up on the Westport shore, is a quirky subgenre—half-literary history, half-memoir—in which she finds herself doing battle against the literary establishment, personified by the prolific and authoritative Fitzgerald scholar Matthew J. Bruccoli, who swatted down Solomon's thesis when she presented it to him in the 1990s. The late Professor Bruccoli firmly dismissed the causal connection she drew between Westport and Gatsby, and so emerges as the overbearing villain (one might say “the hulking brute”) of her article and, consequently, of Webb's narrative (21–22).Bruccoli's editorial principles also come under fire here. In the documentary film and in this printed narrative, Webb and Williams make a pilgrimage to Burlington, Vermont, paying homage to the Fitzgeralds' granddaughter, Eleanor “Bobbie” Lanahan, who lives there. As an executor of the Fitzgeralds' literary estate, Lanahan had famously tangled with Bruccoli over the propriety of a heavier editorial thumb than she wished to be placed on certain points in the texts. “You don't go around correcting Van Gogh's irises,” she tells Webb and Williams (60–61), who in the film promptly nod their agreement (Gatsby in Connecticut). But after Gatsby enters the public domain, its future editors may emend the text, especially in places they feel best reflect Fitzgerald's intention and his artistry, despite his descendants' objections, however vehement. A better phrasing might be “You don't go around straightening Shakespeare's punctuation,” to which a few centuries' worth of editors might reply, “Uh, yeah. That's what we do, present the text clearly and accurately.” But here the question of editorial oversight is ridiculed as the whim of one particularly overbearing, influential Fitzgerald scholar.The narrative's most enjoyable aspect is the detective work, by two confessed amateur sleuths, into the back story behind Fitzgerald's work. Part Hardy Boys, part Abbott and Costello, part Crosby and Hope on the Road to Westport (complete with a song-and-dance number at the Fitzgeralds' grave [77]), Webb and Williams venture down many a danger-strewn path, often blithely unaware of the pitfalls and missteps lurking before them, smacking into many a dead end at full speed in their pursuit of solid and irrefutable evidence that their beloved author had Westport firmly in mind when he first jotted down, “In my younger and more vulnerable years, my father gave me some advice” (GG 5). A scholarly approach would have omitted these dead ends––the sources who stood them up in diners, the academics who rejected their version of facts and chronologies, and the yellowing newspapers pored over, yielding not a shred of supportive evidence. The vast majority of leads will lead nowhere but to researchers' trashcans, and most enticing possibilities will prove impossible, but Webb regales his readers with tales of all the futile efforts he and Williams made in seeking an airtight nexus between Westport and Gatsby. The futility creates a comical narrative effect, forcing readers to root for our heroes to find some way out of all of these literary blind alleys.Like Solomon's approach, theirs mashes up literary history with personal memoir. Having grown up down the road from the Gray House, Webb gives us a lot of personal anecdotes that, again, do not exactly support his main thesis but that do juxtapose critical argument against his lifelong memories of the Gray House. The low-comical effect of nonacademics seeking to set scholarship on its ear sometimes comes across as charming, endearing, but mainly boisterously enthusiastic, although the lack of grounding in Fitzgerald studies allows Webb to commit avoidable errors along the way, such as asserting that Fitzgerald graduated from college or that the college he attended was Yale (150). For all of its grousing about Bruccoli's textual obtrusiveness, Boats Against the Current could have made good use of a rigorous copyeditor: among other lapses, it manages to misspell names like Edgar Allan Poe, T. J. Eckleburg, Jeffrey Meyers, Ludlow Fowler, and several other figures in Fitzgerald's life, works, and scholarship. The more fundamental, systematic error Boats Against the Current makes, however, lies in omitting the half of the discussion they wish to refute. Academics holding the standard view that West Egg is plainly and simply Great Neck (including me) are quoted throughout as endorsing Webb's Westport assertions, when some of these interview subjects would be more fairly characterized as encouraging all sincere research into the formation of Gatsby, and as finding the ongoing interest in the novel close to a century after its conception pleasing.The argument-by-omission, however, is not pleasing. Webb argues that the Gray House, within sight of millionaires' estates along Long Island Sound, is analogous to Nick Carraway's cottage next door to Gatsby's palatial grounds. He points out, correctly, that the house Fitzgerald rented in Great Neck was far from the shoreline, so therefore, he reasons, Westport's Gray House is a closer model for Carraway's modest cottage than 6 Gateway Drive (25). Approvingly, Webb quotes Charles Scribner III's observation that the “house that Fitzgerald lived in has nothing to do with Nick Carraway. Nothing. Zero. Didn't look out over the water and it was hardly a little cottage on the edge of a millionaire's estate” as the Gray House was (65). What Scribner does not touch on, and Webb does not correct, not even for a syllable, is that no one has actually made the case that 6 Gateway Drive was in any way Fitzgerald's model for Nick's cottage. More importantly, a house that has been often cited as the model for Nick's and Gatsby's vantage point, the Great Neck home of Fitzgerald's friend Ring Lardner, directly overlooks the bay, in clear sight of the older-money mansions of Manhasset to the east. Just north of Lardner's house stood another house whose omission is even more significant, the spacious home of newspaper tycoon Herbert Bayard Swope, “where weekend activity fell [only] a whit short of Gatsby's,” according to Lardner Jr.'s memoirs: “My father and Scott spent a good deal of drinking time on our north porch watching this activity, and I believe this led to the concept of Gatsby” (163).Instead, Webb presents the case that Gatsby's parties were modeled on those of one F. E. Lewis of Westport, based on very little other than the Lewis mansion being within sight of the Gray House. He cites the fabulous parties thrown by Lewis, but glosses over the fact that these parties, as far as he can tell, took place exclusively before the Fitzgeralds set foot on Connecticut soil. “In the summer of 1917, Lewis threw what might still be considered the greatest party in the history of Connecticut. It was Gatsby-esque in so many ways,” Webb says, adding “you can be sure Scott and Zelda heard all about it. After all, we found articles about it a century later” (36–37). It is difficult to picture the Fitzgeralds spending their spare time poring over three-year-old local newspapers for a mention of parties that took place while he was serving in the army and she was finishing high school in Alabama. A far likelier explanation of the fabulous, celebrity-packed parties is, again, documented by eyewitness Lardner Jr., whose father once described Swope's “almost continuous house party,” where celebrities of the 1920s such as George M. Cohan, Irving Berlin, and Noel Coward arrived by limousine, making it “almost impossible [for Lardner Sr.] to work at times and still more difficult to sleep,” all of which Fitzgerald not only heard about from Lardner but could see from Lardner's porch next door with his own eyes, when he was not gazing at the mansions across Manhasset Bay (163).That “greatest party in the history of Connecticut” that Webb claims “was Gatsby-esque in so many ways” turns out, upon a cursory look at the 1917 newspaper article reproduced in full, to be not so Gatsby-esque: the headline screams “COUNTY FETE BIGGEST SUCCESS EVER ATTEMPTED” (37). The party, in other words, far from a Prohibition bacchanalia thrown by a man desperately hoping to lure his former lover into wandering in some evening is, instead, an official function of the local government, and (according to the article) staged during daylight hours, featuring “[f]or the children … a circus with camels, elephants and clowns.” The Lewis estate, which raised over $10,000 at this county fete for “the cause,” the World War I effort, featured “places where one could purchase anything from hot dogs and peanuts to beautiful sweaters, gowns, etc.” This one-time, public, fund-raising, daytime, civic-minded, teetotalling, child-friendly party, in other words, hardly resembled Gatsby's year-round, private, fund-expending, night-time, illicit, boozy, adults-only parties in any way.That 1917 news article's final line undercuts the similarities Webb longs to find between F. E. Lewis and Jay Gatsby: Lewis, it says, “took part in the Wild West Show…. The horsemanship displayed by Mr. Lewis was wonderful” (37). Elsewhere, Webb had pointed out the large and bustling stable of Arabian horses Lewis kept in Westport, citing Lewis's horsemanship as a supposed point of connection with Gatsby. But the novel, to characterize Gatsby's modernity, pointedly asserts his refusal to own or ride a horse (GG 80).Solomon's original article makes a chronological argument, which Webb takes up here, that uses vexing logic: “Scott and Zelda had lived in Long Island for a year and a half,” she correctly noted, “from 1922 to 1924 before moving to the Riviera, where he completed The Great Gatsby in the fall of '24. But the time that had elapsed between his Great Neck life and the actual writing of the book struck me as too short for a novel as evocative and finished as Gatsby” (83). Her case—that Gatsby must have been started (all textual evidence to the contrary aside) in Westport or soon afterward—contradicts itself. Apart from Fitzgerald's revisions of Gatsby well into 1925, The Beautiful and Damned was published within the precise two-year gestation period that she finds “too short” for the composition of Gatsby. If he could conceive one four-hundred-page novel in 1920 and publish it in 1922, it seems only reasonable that he could conceive a much shorter novel in 1922 and publish it by 1925. In setting strict limits on the composition-time Fitzgerald's novels required of him, Solomon and Webb unwittingly undercut the one indisputable connection between Fitzgerald and Westport that they can be very proud of, his setting of large sections of The Beautiful and Damned in Westport.And that is the true appeal of Boats Against the Current: Westport is underappreciated, misunderstood, slighted, even unjustly ignored as an important venue in The Beautiful and Damned specifically and in Fitzgerald studies generally. Friends of the Connecticut shore, of the Fitzgeralds' life and work, and of imaginative literary conjectures can all adorn their coffee tables with this attractive book.