What’s it going to be folks, Great Neck or Westport? We’re talking about the setting of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.
In the decades following its publication in 1925 – to mixed reviews, it should be said – this now celebrated, adored and elegantly written tale of money, romance and identity in the Jazz Age, was understood to have taken place in fictional stand-ins for towns on the North Shore of Long Island. However, in a 1996 article in The New Yorker, scholar and journalist Barbara Probst Solomon made a strong case for Westport, where Scott and Zelda spent a roaring honeymoon summer in 1920. His career was taking off, he had money, it was, he said, the happiest period of his life.
Solomon’s argument seems not to have gone anywhere in the literary or academic community. It was dismissed by a leading (and possessive?) Fitzgerald scholar, Matthew Bruccoli, who saw himself as in charge of Fitzgerald’s legend. But it did resonate with Westport historian and educator Richard Webb Jr. who, along with author and indie filmmaker Robert Steven Williams, took up Solomon’s thesis, with passion and persistence. Despite being smitten with their subject they come across as modest, reasonable, and likeable. Together, they created and produced a short documentary about Fitzgerald in Westport called Gatsby in Connecticut: The Untold Story, five years in the making. And now, they’re out with a print companion to the film, a handsome text and picture book called Boats Against the Current: The honeymoon summer of Scott and Zelda.
The book’s title, of course, comes from the famous and enigmatic last line of Gatsby: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne ceaselessly into the past.” The cover, a beautiful shot of the good-looking young flappers in Scott’s car, also shows the Grey House where they lived for five months in Westport, a cottage that may have served as a model for narrator Nick Carraway’s residence. The house was down the road from where Webb lived and not far from where Solomon grew up. In fact, as she noted in her 1996 article, across the water from her was the spectacular estate of a reclusive, mysterious multi-millionaire Frederick E. Lewis, who threw extravagant drunken parties that may well have inspired Gatsby’s.
Both movie and book reflect the authors’ all-consuming docu-journey for all things Fitzgerald. They consulted national archives, local historical records, met scholars, distant relatives. They spoke to anyone who might have had the slightest anecdote or memory to share. The sense is almost of a crusade to put Gatsby on the Westport map.
But even Webb kind of fudges at the end, suggesting that the novel’s setting was probably a “beachy blend” of Great Neck and Westport, though more Westport, he believes, citing geographical evidence. He also, charmingly, confesses to “an overactive imagination.” And so a reader is left wondering finally to what purpose this obsessive pursuit, albeit beautifully detailed with lovely images. Tourism? Enhancing or updating Fitzgerald’s reputation by giving it a jolt of local color? But does suggesting location as inspiration change the way the novel is regarded? The Great Gatsby is great not because of its setting but because of its heartbreaking ironies and silken style and capture of a culture era, at once seductive and doomed, that memorably once informed character and class in America.
