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Editors' Note

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

10.5325/fscotfitzrevi.16.1.vii

1755-6333

Kirk Curnutt,

American Literature and Culture

After a tumultuous 2017, the first half of this year felt blessedly low key. Exactly twelve months ago we were hemorrhaging from the double-barrel blast of Amazon.com cancelling not one but two F. Scott Fitzgerald-related television shows after only a single season of thirteen episodes each: the Zelda Fitzgerald “bioseries” Z and the elaborately expanded, handsomely designed adaptation of The Last Tycoon. As one sure sign of just how traumatic this bad news was, we speculated about what the abrupt plug-pulling might mean for Fitzgerald's reputation in both the Editors' Note to last year's F. Scott Fitzgerald Review and in the F. Scott Fitzgerald Society Newsletter. As 2018 began, it seemed as if we would nurse this wound until the dull roots bred lilacs out of the dead land (thanks to spring rain, of course), perpetuating that haunting, nostalgic mixture of memory and desire. By mid-January, though, in the grip of an unusually bitter and frosty winter—three separate holiday snowfalls in Zelda's hometown of Montgomery, Alabama—the mourning cauterized, and the leafless landscape gave us some cold, stoic clarity. Our next conference was in the works, set for Toulouse, France; new studies of Fitzgerald were forthcoming; and rumors of the latest TV adaptation—of Tender Is the Night, no less (!)—were swirling like snowflakes in the Southern air (White). There was still plenty of life yet in the old dried tubers.By July, however, we began to wonder if Fitzgerald-related news had not gone a little too quiet. Google Alerts reported occasional bursts of activity: the Fitzgerald Museum in Montgomery had converted an upstairs apartment into an Airbnb, garnering national notices (Trombetta); Society member Richard “Deej” Webb's book on the Fitzgeralds in Connecticut, Boats Against the Current: The Honeymoon Summer of Scott and Zelda: Westport, Connecticut 1920—reviewed in this issue by Steven Goldleaf—was inspiring debates in the New York Times over Westport's influence on The Great Gatsby (Barron); and the bedding manufacturer Siscovers announced a deal with the Fitzgerald estate to market a branded line of sheets, duvets, coverlets, and pillows featuring some fifty different fabrics that promised to bring the Roaring Twenties back to the bedroom (“Siscovers Unveiling F. Scott Fitzgerald Bedding”). Yet no matter how exciting these stories, a vague sensation remained that something was missing. We did not put a name to that absence until a colleague mentioned in passing Zelda's approaching birthday on 24 July—her 118th birthday. The mere mention of “eighteen” struck a note on a tuning fork of familiarity, and suddenly we realized with not a little professional chagrin what we had overlooked:The centennial of Scott and Zelda meeting.Literary anniversaries are funny things. Something inexorably fly-in-amber about them seems counterintuitive to the pressing need in an age of diminishing literacy to revivify our reading and rediscover in works that have been around a long time both their cultural importance and the formal beauty of their words. Nearly a decade ago, the Los Angeles Times paused in a commemoration of Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) to reflect on why we are so compelled to observe the birthdays of artistic landmarks: “It's a perfect time to reconsider [Twain's] importance, not because of these anniversaries but in spite of them. Such occasions, after all, often obscure our ability to engage with a writer; they become mausoleums built around the life and work” (Ulin). As a sign of how impenetrable to facts these walls can be, the occasion was the 125th anniversary of Twain's most famous novel, but the Times mistakenly declared 2010 the 175th, which will not happen until 2060. It was, rather, the 175th anniversary of Twain's birth—or, rather, of the birth of Samuel Clemens. Given that Clemens first employed his soon-to-be-famous nom-de-plume in 1863 (Twain, “Letter from Carson City”), the actual 175th birthday of “Mark Twain” is not technically until 2038. Such complexities dramatize why tracking anniversaries can be so confusing, but the point remains: rather than resuscitate a writer or work from history with a new breath of relevance, celebrating literary anniversaries often risks stuffing them full of straw and displaying them in a hermetically sealed Plexiglas casket of reverence.Nearly missing the 100th anniversary of Scott and Zelda's meeting was easy for a number of reasons. For fans of modernist literature, July 1918 was a month of constant milestones. It was on 8 July of that year that eighteen-year-old Ernest Hemingway took shrapnel from an Austrian mortar shell outside of Fossalta di Piave on the Italian front (Reynolds 236). The following day, twenty-year-old William Faulkner reported for pilot training in Toronto as a cadet with the British Royal Air Force (Blotner 207). On 17 July (a Wednesday), a shy young woman named Winifred Ellerman who called herself “Bryher” introduced herself to the poet Hilda Doolittle, or “H.D.,” in London for the first time, initiating one of the longer running relationships among modernist authors (Guest 110). From 19 to 22 July Marine private Thomas Boyd, who had turned twenty earlier that month, displayed exemplary valor during the Battle of Soissons, surviving an offensive that wiped out nearly half of his battalion, a brutal experience later memorialized in his Through the Wheat (1923) (Bruce 18). On 30 July, a sniper's bullet killed thirty-one-year-old poet Joyce Kilmer during the Second Battle of the Marne (Cargas 119).These are only a few of the important dates that were on our mind that month. One suspects the July calendars of other modernist scholars were likewise chockablock with anniversaries. One reason celebrating Scott and Zelda's first meeting could slip our mind, though, is that the exact day that they danced together at the Montgomery Country Club has gone unrecorded—that is, if they really did meet at the country club (where a Sonic hamburger stand is now located), and not, as urban legend in Alabama claims, at an afternoon tea at the Civil War-era mansion called Winter Place that still stands next to Zelda's childhood church only two blocks from Pleasant Avenue, site of the Sayre family home (Seebohm 280). Most biographers simply report July as the month of their introduction, but no one has attempted to pin down the date. Zelda's name does not even appear in Fitzgerald's ledger until 7 September (Ledger 136)—which is why we held off beginning to write this note until 7 September 2018, so we could at least commemorate some centennial. Even so, it felt strange as July gave way to August and then September that the anniversary of an event that is a veritable primal scene in both Fitzgeralds' fiction—with country-club dances as central to This Side of Paradise (170–71) as to the more expressly roman-à-clef Save Me the Waltz (37)—had generated nary a mention in the press.The lost opportunity is a reminder of our basic duty to keep the Fitzgerald name front and center in American popular culture. We are roughly a year and a half away from the 100th anniversary of This Side of Paradise and the Fitzgeralds' marriage, at which point we enter a five-year window of celebration that will culminate on 10 April 2025 with the centennial of The Great Gatsby. What are some initiatives the Fitzgerald Society might undertake that would help build up interest in recognizing the centenary of the Fitzgeralds' heyday specifically, and of the Jazz Age in general? Surveying other modernists' online presence yields some tantalizing if labor-heavy possibilities: The University of Virginia's Digital Yoknapatawpha web site (http://faulkner.iath.virginia.edu/), developed with the assistance of a National Endowment for the Humanities grant, is a major resource for both beginning and seasoned Faulkner readers. It provides maps, cross-referenced lists of characters, and key explications of works set in Faulkner's Jefferson, Mississippi, and its outlying hamlets. Granted, the site might not do us much good if we are examining The Wild Palms (1939), A Fable (1954), or other efforts not set in northcentral Mississippi; but for readers wanting to track Bayard Sartoris II or Gavin Stevens from work to work, it is a huge convenience. How great would it be to have a Fitzgerald site that provides basic information on the background of each novel but, more important, the 160+ short stories, the vast bulk of which remain neglected? Such a platform might finally satisfy the begging we have done throughout the entirety of the Review's existence for more submissions on, say, “The Lees of Happiness” (1920; TJA 239–60) or “Six of One—” (1932; CC 58–72) than on Gatsby or Tender Is the Night, without making any claims that these commercial stories are anywhere near equal in quality to those classic novels.Twitter feeds such as @MobyDickatSea and @UlyssesReader tweet Melville's and Joyce's magum opuses in all their line-by-line glory, effectively turning these novels into 280-character serials that carve encyclopedic novels down to their building-block sentences, thereby emphasizing the poetic imagery and aphoristic insights of individual turns of phrase. A similar Twitter account doing this for The Beautiful and Damned or any of the pre-1923 stories (which are conveniently in the public domain) might snag future Fitzgerald fans by highlighting the intricacy and cadenced beauty of his language.Although it ended in December 2015 after its fiftieth episode, the Dead Authors Podcast (http://thedeadauthorspodcast.libsyn.com/) was a hilarious faux history interview show in which “H. G. Wells” (actually comedian Paul F. Tompkins) interviewed an eclectic array of famous—and famously deceased—writers (actually Tompkins's fellow Los Angeles comedians), from Abbie Hoffman to the Marquis de Sade. Fitzgerald made an appearance with James Joyce in the 5 December 2014 broadcast (“Appendix F”). The humor might not be to everyone's taste, but the podcast dramatized the inventive ways canonical literature might interface with podcasting, a suddenly popular outlet that lends itself to both narrative storytelling and Q&As. More serious literary podcasts can seem a little dry and improvisational, but a podcast on the unfolding centenary of Fitzgerald's greatest works could be an inventive mode of outreach, mixing readings with interviews and background on the composition, reception, and legacy of the texts.Readers may not be aware of it, but a Fitzgerald “app”—those tools we download on our phones—already exists. Called We Love Fitzgerald, it is available both for iPhones and Android; one can learn about it at https://www.literarycityguide.com/fitzgerald. At the moment, its content features walking-tour guides to Hollywood, Long Island, London, Paris, and the South of France, along with quizzes and interviews with Jay McInerney and Anne Margaret Daniel. Eleanor Lanahan had a hand in its design (Adams), and the accuracy of the information is vetted. The app is an especially useful tool for travelers, and some of its elements are available for download in e-book form. We met developer Frances O'Neill at the Hemingway Conference in Paris in July and were exhilarated by her enthusiasm; we plan to interview her more in depth for our next Newsletter. There is room on the market for more Fitzgerald apps, though. Specifically, a downloadable aid to Fitzgerald's novels and stories would promote the link between his settings and the geographies we navigate in researching him.Finally, there are abundant Instagram accounts celebrating Fitzgerald. We are fans in particular of an account called Fitzpiration (https://www.instagram.com/fitzpiration/), which posts memorable quotes as a sort of daily affirmation of the Romantic Fitzability, the Fitzessence, we might say, of how to enjoy the glamorous life like a modern-day Amory Blaine or Anson Hunter. As is true of many social media platforms, there is not a lot of room for interpretation in such accounts—they tend to be image-centric rather than text-heavy, more visually appealing than ponder-worthy. Still, even more than Twitter, Instagram is a great platform for promoting bite-sized nuggets of Fitzgeraldiana. In particular, we would enjoy an “On This Day in Fitzgerald History” account that would celebrate daily milestones from 1920 to 1925.These platforms and tools no doubt strike traditional readers as faddish and, perhaps, silly and time consuming. For better or worse, though, maintaining an “online presence” is crucial to the continued growth of literary societies; as our younger Society members will attest, new readers more commonly discover Fitzgerald on the Internet than in the classroom. Producing content for these conduits might not count as a publication that will win a faculty member tenure, but they do offer entrepreneurial opportunities for outreach. They create that vital link between a narrative bound in a book or periodical and the everyday reader who discovers them far from the confines of a library or lecture hall. We need to reach that reader every bit as much as we do the ones we think of as “professional” interpreters.We shall end the sermon here and conclude simply by noting how grateful we are that we do not have to worry yet about the quasquicentennials and dodransbicentennials that confused the Los Angeles Times when commenting on the anniversary of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. As Great War scholars who have spent the past four years marking the 100th anniversaries of that conflagration's horrific battles well know, commemoration is arduous work; it requires not only a lot of research but perspective. The Fitzgerald Society faces the unique complicating problem that the era whose centenary we will soon celebrate stereotyped our author, making him feel like a has-been after the Roaring Twenties gave way to the Great Depression. In celebrating the milestones of Fitzgerald's career then, we must make room for insisting that he connotes so much more than Prohibition and Flaming Youth—something we take as an article of faith, and a point we make on a daily basis, but not necessarily one that general audiences are prone to accept. The reality is that platforms like those discussed above have a tendency to simplify complexities in favor of online immediacy.As a first step toward kicking off these commemorations, we should note that by the time you read this note, our newly designed website will be up and running. We have commissioned its design so we can update it ourselves, without needing an outside webmaster. The site will have the same URL (www.fscottfitzgeraldsociety.org). Please check it for updates on next summer's Toulouse conference. We include the call for papers in this issue of the Review (along with the 2018–19 membership renewal form) as a reminder that 1 January 2019 is the deadline for submissions. We have a lot of exciting events in the works for Southwest France.Until next June, then, we thank you for another exciting, educational year—one we are happy to say that Amazon.com with its itchy trigger finger on the cancellation button could not ruin for us.