The Cruise of the Rolling Junk E-Book

F.Scott Fitzgerald

• Herausgeber: Hesperus Press Ltd.
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Seitenzahl: 127

Beschreibung

In an early series of journalistic pieces for an American magazine, Motor, F. Scott Fitzgerald described a journey he took with his wife Zelda from Connecticut to Alabama in a clapped-out automobile which he called the 'Rolling Junk'. It is a piece of writing whose style, in free-ranging alternation of fact and fiction, has been compared with Jerome K. Jerome's Three Men in a Boat. This book collects together the articles as one text, illustrated with the original illustrations of Fitzgerald, Zelda and the 'Junk'. It features a foreword by acclaimed American travel writer Paul Theroux and a critical introduction by Julian Evans, who has written and broadcast about Fitzgerald's life and work for the Guardian and BBC Radio 3, among others.

Leseprobe

The Cruise of the Rolling Junk

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Published by Hesperus Press Limited

167-169 Great Portland Street

London W1W 7RD

www.hesperus.press

Copyright 1924 by International Magazine Company.

Copyright renewed 1952 by Frances Scott Fitzgerald Lanahan.

© 1924 Eleanor Lanahan, Thomas P. Roche and Christopher T. Byne Trustees under agreement dated 3 July 1975 by Frances Scott Fitzgerald Smith.

First published by Hesperus Press in 2011

This electric edition was first published in 2024

The right of F. Scott Fitzgerald to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Foreword © 2011 Paul Theroux Introduction

© 2011 Julian Evans

Designed and typeset by Fraser Muggeridge studio

Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon cr0 4yy

ISBN (paperback): 978-1-84391-462-4

ISBN (ebook): 978-1-84391-629-1

All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not be resold, lent, hired out or otherwise circulated without the express prior consent of the publisher.

Contents

Foreword

Introduction

The Cruise of the Rolling Junk

Part I

I

II

III

IV

Part II

V

VI

VII

Part III

VIII

IX

Notes

Biographical note

Foreword

This jaunt, an eight-day trip by car from Connecticut to Alabama, seems the merest merry footnote to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s history, and yet...

Both literary and personal, it is a telling footnote, for what it reveals of his character, and the way it shows how he converted his life into his fictions. He believed this travel piece to be important; he rewrote it extensively, and had hopes for it. He also needed the money. The trip occurred at perhaps the happiest period in a life that was hectic, often sad, and at times tragic. It is, among other things, the excursion of two reckless, posturing and self-conscious people, ‘possibly’, as one biographer wrote, ‘as a holiday from their honeymoon’. Scott and Zelda got married in April 1920. They set out on this trip three months later. They were a golden couple. For Fitzgerald it was a period of elation; his first book had recently been published and was a success; he was newly married to a lively southern girl – he was twenty-three, she was nineteen.

‘We were about the most envied couple in America around 1921,’ Scott said, in a conversation that was recorded in the 1930s.1

‘I guess so – we were awfully good showmen,’ Zelda replied. ‘We were awfully happy,’ Scott said.

Ten years after the trip described in ‘The Cruise of the Rolling Junk’, writing from a clinic in Switzerland where she was recovering from a nervous breakdown, Zelda reminisced in a tone of melancholy sweetness about the long-ago pleasure.

‘We bought the Marmon with Harvey Firestone and went South through the haunted swamps of Virginia, the red clay hills of Georgia, the sweet rutted creek bottoms of Alabama. We drank corn on the wings of an aeroplane in the moonlight and danced at the country club and came back, I had a pink dress that floated and a very theatrical silver one...’2 But at the time of the trip she had written to a friend saying that ‘The joys of motoring are more or less fictional.’

Although ‘The Cruise’ is not a long piece, it is composed of many different tones and uneven in its elements, fact mingled with fiction – and the fiction is not half so memorable as the fact. In its bravado and occasional silliness, it is an attempt to capture the spirit of the age that Fitzgerald defined in his novels and stories of the period – impulsive, foolhardy, bibulous and free-spending. It is, as well, an oblique portrait of America, mostly rural and homely, wounded by war.

Fitzgerald depicts the car they used for the trip as a character with a distinct personality: handsome, lovable, unreliable, fast one minute, stalled the next. Fitzgerald’s own pose is that of a klutz who has no mechanical aptitude, as well as a reputation (borne out by this piece) as a very poor driver. He revelled in his amateurishness. His car, a 1918 Marmon, was built by the Nordyke Marmon Company in Indianapolis. He had bought it second-hand at the time of his marriage. It was a model known as Speedster, accommodating two passengers, with six cylinders, spoked wheels, and capable (as Fitzgerald proves) of travelling at 70 mph. In ‘The Cruise’ he calls it an ‘Expenso’, and for its defects, ‘The Rolling Junk’.

The piece is one of the first in that most American of narratives – a tradition in American travelling and travel writing – the long road trip by car. It is now so familiar a subject as to be hackneyed or old hat for the holiday pages of a newspaper, but for anyone who has ever driven through America, even today, it is an unfolding delight. Twenty-five years after Fitzgerald, Henry Miller crossed the country in his old Packard for The Air Conditioned Nightmare. In 1960, John Steinbeck rode around the U.S. in a converted pick-up truck for Travels with Charley, and in the same spirit, William Least-Heat Moon sought out back roads in Blue Highways in a van he called ‘Ghost Dancing’. In each of these trips, the car is a character, more meaningful and lovable to the writer, perhaps, than to the reader, to whom this anthropomorphism cannot but feel cute.

The conceit of Fitzgerald’s trip is that it is a quest, in this frivolous case for the biscuits and peaches that were unobtainable to the southerner Zelda in her new home in the north. No sooner has Zelda expressed a craving for them than Scott says they must leave immediately: ‘Seating ourselves in the front seat we will drive from here to Montgomery Alabama, where we will eat biscuits and peaches.’

They are soon on the road. It’s a happy idea, but like much in the piece it was probably prettified for the sake of exuberance. They did not leave from their home in Westport, but from New York. This is a quibble, though. ‘The Cruise’ is specific when it refers to the overnight stops they made, which after New York were: Princeton; Washington, DC; Richmond, Virginia; Clarksville, Virginia; Greensboro, North Carolina; Spartansburg, South Carolina; Athens, Georgia; and finally Montgomery, Alabama, 1,200 miles in eight days.

The piece deploys what became standard effects in road trip literature, the shifting gears of high hopes, disappointing reverses, sudden landscapes, brief encounters, breakdowns, and changes in tone. Fitzgerald is on familiar ground in the north, especially in the stop at Princeton, where he had been a student only a few years earlier. He does not let on that he has been this way before, many times, as a soldier stationed in Alabama (where he first met Zelda), and on numerous train journeys from New York to Montgomery over several years when he was courting her. Zelda is better able to judge the south, and, as a southern coquette, knows how to appear helpless and to flirt in order to get help. The prevailing theme of the piece is that they are innocents, and a bit too stylishly dressed for this region; victims of the road and its perils, of the car’s eccentricities, of weather and delay and the shortage of money. This last item, at any rate, was a serious obstacle. Fitzgerald, a spender, who was in debt for most of his life, wired his friend Edmund Wilson for money while he was on the road: ‘Touring South. Shy of money.’

In 1920, the Civil War was still a powerful memory. Many of the older people whom the Fitzgeralds encountered would have had hideous recollections of the bloody battles, either from family history or direct experience. This Fitzgerald makes clear after Fredericksburg where ‘a garrulous gasoline dispenser told us that his father had participated in the battle’. And later that day: ‘At sunset we plunged into the Wilderness – the Wilderness where slain boys from Illinois and Tennessee and the cities of the gulf still slept in the marshes and the wooded swamps – but over the bloody ground there was only the drone of the cicadas now and the sway of the lush vines.’

But, epitomising the egotism of the age, instead of listening to any eyewitnesses to the war, Fitzgerald saw himself and his own exploits as central to his trip. He was not travelling to listen but rather in the thrust of exhibitionism. This is the chief weakness of ‘The Cruise’. The south was still wounded, still bleeding. Some of his most heartfelt descriptions in the piece concern the war and the landscape but there are too few of them. Even his mentions of the Great War, two years in the past, are mere throwaways, as of a fleeting glimpse of a veteran in Washington: ‘He was a young man, a returned soldier, still wearing part of his uniform.’

Fitzgerald was a perfectionist in his work, one of the most serious and dedicated of writers; and he could be brilliant, as he shows in The Great Gatsby and Tender is the Night and many stories. Though he did not live long – he died at the age of forty-four – at the end of his life he had learned to be sober, uxorious, and punctual. This was a side he did not show to his public until 1936 when he wrote the magazine pieces gathered together as The Crack-Up. Until that melancholy and powerful confession he had always been known as breezy. Breeziness was his mode of living, as well as his journalistic style.

What is apparent, and painful, in ‘The Cruise’ is that Fitzgerald’s attitude towards black Americans is unforgivably breezy to the point of pure ignorance. There are a number of demeaning references in this piece to blacks. One of Fitzgerald’s biographers, Jeffrey Meyers, has shown how Fitzgerald’s attitude changed from fashionable anti-Semitism in the 1920s to sympathy with Jews during the rise of Nazism, as evidenced in his portrayal of Monroe Stahr in The Last Tycoon.3 But Fitzgerald never corrected his negative bias against blacks. It is obvious from his work and his life that he did not know any blacks, and as Meyers shows in his biography, Fitzgerald was himself déclassé and socially insecure. Meyers says, ‘Princeton intensified his comforting sense of superiority, and he confirmed the beliefs of readers of popular magazines.’

The trip, taken on impulse, took two years for Fitzgerald to process. In 1922, he set to work, and wrote ‘The Cruise of the Rolling Junk’ from notes he had made. He left out the longueurs, he brightened it with afterthoughts, he coloured it with fictions. It is not entirely accurate, yet it is full of wonderful touches, as when they arrive at the outskirts of Montgomery:

We spoke little now. When automobiles passed we craned our necks looking for familiar faces. Suddenly Zelda was crying because things were the same and yet were not the same. It was for her faithlessness she wept and for the faithlessness of time. Then into the ever-changing picture swam the little city crouching under its trees for shelter from the heat...

At the end of ‘The Cruise’ the couple find Zelda’s house in Montgomery empty – irony of ironies, her parents have left to visit her in the north. This wasn’t true. In fact, they were away, but not far away, and the Fitzgeralds lived it up (as Zelda wrote from the clinic) until they returned.

It was two years after taking the trip, in June 1922, that Fitzgerald wrote to his agent Harold Ober, ‘I’ve sent you... a 25,000 word touring serial, humorous throughout, for the [Saturday Evening] Post. I think they could run it as a 3 part thing in which case it’d be nice to get $2500 for it...’4 But the Post turned it down. Fitzgerald offered to cut it to fit the magazine. They remained uninterested. Fitzgerald wrote to his agent: ‘It was quite a blow...’ He suggested sending it to Scribner’s Magazine, but guessed he might not earn more than $500 for such a sale. He mentions the possibility of other magazines, and months later, ‘What has become of The Rolling Junk?’ Still later, ‘Any dope on The Rolling Junk?’; ‘I spent a month of The Rolling Junk + while I realize that technicccally [sic] it isn’t a success still I should hate to let it go for two hundred dollars.’

Four years after the trip, ‘The Cruise of the Rolling Junk’ appeared in three instalments in the monthly magazine, Motoring. In a serious examination of ‘The Cruise’, the Canadian scholar Janet Lewis writes that it is ‘prophetic not only of the fiction that Fitzgerald was to write, but of the direction the Fitzgeralds’ loves would take. The spontaneous actions, the inability to cope with practical matters, the eccentric behaviour so amusing in [The Cruise] and so much a part of the Fitzgeralds’ personal charm would lead to their future unhappiness.’5

– Paul Theroux, 2011

Introduction

I first came across ‘The Cruise of the Rolling Junk’ when I was researching a radio programme for the BBC in 1996. It was the year of its author’s centenary. Remarkably, given that he was the author of The Great Gatsby, a book that belongs as much to American mythology as American literature, that radio show was, as I remember, the only marking of the anniversary in the British media. Its title was ‘The Authority of Failure’: the phrase was F. Scott Fitzgerald’s, contrasting himself with his friend Ernest Hemingway in one of his Notebooks – Ernest, who always spoke ‘with the authority of success. We could never sit across the table again.’ Then again, perhaps that title reveals one of the reasons for Fitzgerald’s neglect. It is somehow appropriate that a writer whose life has accumulated at least as much mythical status as his best-known novel should at the same time be ignored, on account of his wholesale embrace of failure. Such is the present’s permanent nervousness about the lasting quality of its own success.

What did Fitzgerald’s failure consist of? ‘All in three days I got married and the presses were pounding out This Side of Paradise like they pound out extras in the movies,’ he wrote. Two years earlier, in 1918, he had fallen in love with the baby-faced Zelda Sayre; a year later she had ditched him. This sort of reverse was familiar to his adolescent, confused, aspirational and over-eager personality: through school, Princeton and the army he had become habituated to disappointment. Then abruptly, in the autumn of 1919, the New York publisher Scribner’s reversed his fortunes again by accepting his first novel. On the strength of it he got the girl back, and in April 1920, at the age of twenty-three, he was published and married. His dreams had come true.