A new documentary develops in poignant detail the story of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald’s wild summer of 1920.Photograph from Minnesota Historical Society / Getty It
takes a cinematic and academic outsider to leap into the deep waters of
scholarly disputes with impetuous verve, as Robert Steven Williams does
in the documentary “Gatsby in Connecticut: The Untold Story” (which is
streaming on Amazon). The film is rooted in the same theory that Barbara
Probst Solomon (who’s the main interview subject in the film; she died
in 2019) put forth in a remarkable 1996 piece in The New Yorker:
that F. Scott Fitzgerald’s prime model for Jay Gatsby’s West Egg estate
and the cottage on his property that Nick Carraway rents isn’t Great
Neck, Long Island, but, rather, Westport, Connecticut. For Williams, as
for Solomon, who was a Westport native, the matter was as much personal
as historical. Williams, a music-industry executive, moved to Westport in 1992
and became interested in local history. He heard gleanings of
Fitzgerald’s Westport connection and eventually, after Solomon’s article
appeared, joined forces with the local historian Richard (Deej) Webb to
investigate further. It’s said that the stakes in academic disputes are
low, but Williams enthusiastically shows, in the course of the film,
that the geographical reference is more than a footnote—it’s a key to an
apt appreciation of both Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald’s literary
artistry.
The
case presented both by Williams and by Solomon begins with the
geography of the Westport property where the newlywed Fitzgeralds lived,
for five months, spanning the summer of 1920, soon after the
publication and acclaim of Scott’s first novel, “This Side of Paradise.”
The young couple (Scott was twenty-three; Zelda, nineteen) lived in a
cottage at the edge of a rich man’s estate, similar to the one that Nick
inhabited in West Egg; the shore at the edge of that waterfront
property provided a view across the bay to a magnificent dock (the one
that belonged to the palatial home in which Solomon was raised), akin to
the one celebrated in “Gatsby.” What’s more, the secretive and wealthy
baron of industry, Frederick E. Lewis, from whom the Fitzgeralds rented
and whose mansion was on the seaside part of the estate, gave parties of
colossal frolic and frenzy, with circus animals and Broadway stars and
Harry Houdini and John Philip Sousa hired to perform. (Lewis’s pool also
had a tower akin to the one from which Gatsby’s guests dove.) The
Fitzgeralds attended at least one of his parties—and behaved
scandalously enough to be barred from any of his future ones, though he
still let them have access to his private beach.
The diligent and
energetic research leading to the identification of the novel’s prime
site is only one of “Gatsby in Connecticut” ’s many virtues, which all
arise from Williams’s role as a cinematic newcomer. When he started work
on the project, in 2013, having never made a film before, he planned to
make a short for local use, but its scope expanded along the way. As an
enthusiast who came to scholarship by chance, he approaches the details
of the Fitzgeralds’ life and work with a fresh eye and an unjaded sense
of wonder. He develops in rapt and poignant detail the story of the
Fitzgeralds’ wild summer of 1920, emphasizing the rush of wealth and
fame that went to their heads when “This Side of Paradise” became a
widely acclaimed critical success and an instant best-seller. Interview
subjects and archival citations (including one from Dorothy Parker)
detail their glamour, their fame, their allure; Williams calls them
“America’s first rock stars.” In particular, Solomon’s insights pinpoint
the very year 1920 as a critical moment of transition from tradition to
modernity—and the very celebrity of the Fitzgeralds, their youth, and
their uninhibited freedom along with their artistic cachet, as both an
emblem and an engine of that change.
The
film quotes from Zelda’s novel “Save Me the Waltz,” from 1932, which
includes details of that wild summer from a decade’s remove—and also
devotes extended consideration to Scott’s second novel, “The Beautiful
and Damned,” from 1922, which he wrote in the heat of the spectacular
romantic flameout that is itself the story of the novel. Williams
matches the action of “The Beautiful and Damned” to a map of the town
and photographs of the period and quotes a letter in which Scott wishes
that the novel had been more “mature” because it has the distinctive
virtue of being “all true.” This, too, is among the virtues of “Gatsby
in Connecticut”: its rehabilitation of “The Beautiful and Damned,” which
I consider Fitzgerald’s most moving, thrilling, and emotionally flaying
novel. It’s not a cut gem like “Gatsby,” it’s not an epic tragedy like
“Tender Is the Night,” but it’s Fitzgerald’s most convincing and least
inhibited elaboration of scenes from a marriage, an unsparing and
agonized portrait of a couple, as he wrote, “wrecked on the shoals of
dissipation”; as Fitzgerald himself asserts, they didn’t do it to each
other: they did it to themselves. (In saying so, Scott may have been
going easy on himself: Williams also unfolds Scott’s dependence on—and
appropriation of—Zelda’s inspiration and artistry, and traces out the
twisted strands of anguish that resulted from his use of her diaries and
letters in the novel, and the brazen control that he exerted over her
life and her art alike.)
Williams
evokes the Fitzgeralds and their era with voice-over narration
(performed by the actor Keir Dullea) joined to illustrative film clips
and stills, archival publications and illustrations, maps and
current-day footage, all bound together by recordings of music from
roughly (sometimes very roughly) the same period. It’s a familiar, even
conventional, format, but Williams goes at it as enthusiastically as if
he’d discovered it himself, energetically reanimating the Fitzgeralds
and their times. His sense of astonishment and joy in discovery carries
over to his way with scholarly research, too, as when he does some
remarkable detective work to locate the diaries of Alexander McKaig,
Fitzgerald’s college friend, who was on hand to observe with detailed
dismay the couple’s riotous behavior. The research is integrated into
the film with a spontaneous cinematic inventiveness and a cheerful
reflexivity, as Williams films himself and Webb in the company of a
variety of scholars, in classrooms and also in the Fitzgeralds’ onetime
house in Westport—along with Charles Scribner III (the grandson of F.
Scott Fitzgerald’s publisher) and Sam Waterston, who portrayed Nick
Carraway in the 1974 film of “The Great Gatsby.” They also film a moving
interview with Bobbie Lanahan, the Fitzgeralds’ granddaughter and a
biographer in her own right, who shares the findings of her own
research, and do some revealing local research among neighbors in
Westport.
The academic controversy that Williams unfolds was
sparked by the publication of Solomon’s article. After it appeared,
Matthew Bruccoli, the longtime leading Fitzgerald scholar (who died in
2008), rejected her findings high-handedly. In “Gatsby in Connecticut,”
several participants take him to task for his proprietary approach to
Fitzgerald’s life story and even to his texts. Apart from the specific
ideas it details, the movie considers the very notion of literary
scholarship and what it’s for. Though “Gatsby in Connecticut”
illuminates mysterious corners of “The Great Gatsby,” it does far
more—in wrenching scholarship into life and rendering the process of
research personal and passionate, it shows that the stakes of such
disputes are surprisingly and enduringly high. In the process, the film
both exposes and corrects the peculiar processes by which canons and
hierarchies are established and perpetuated. In its hearty and
individualistic vigor, “Gatsby in Connecticut” is a valuable work of
literary criticism in cinematic form.
