Book Review: The Cruise of the Rolling Junk, by F. Scott Fitzgerald (Originally published 1924, Hesperus Press edition 2011)

The rather boring book cover of The Cruise of the Rolling Junk, by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Originally published in 1924, this edition published in 2011. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor)

F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald in their Marmon, otherwise known as "the Rolling Junk," or "the Expenso."

Going on a cross-country road trip in 1920 would have been a rather harrowing proposition. Cars were unreliable, roads were often unpaved, and travel at night was not very safe. Nevertheless, despite these obstacles, in July of 1920 F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald struck out on a road trip from their home in Connecticut to Zelda’s parents’ house in Alabama. Ostensibly the reason for the trip was so Zelda could taste peaches and biscuits again. Thus began an eight day journey, complete with flat tires, an encounter with a bandit on the road, and an ending borrowed straight from O. Henry. 

The piece of writing that emerged out of this trip was a long article titled “The Cruise of the Rolling Junk.” Fitzgerald wrote it in 1922, but wasn’t able to find a publisher for it until 1924, when it appeared in Motoring magazine. It’s not Fitzgerald’s best piece of writing, but it’s interesting to read a non-fiction piece of his where the main characters are him and Zelda. 

The Cruise of the Rolling Junk was issued as a book in 2011 by Hesperus Press, a British publisher. It features an excellent foreword by Paul Theroux, acclaimed novelist and travel writer. It also features an introduction by Julian Evans that is good, but simply too long, as Evans quotes from many of the best parts of the piece. It’s perhaps a bit much to have The Cruise of the Rolling Junk as a standalone book, as the piece itself is only about 60 pages long. However, it has never been included in any other collection of Fitzgerald’s non-fiction, so it’s good that it’s finally available. 

The “rolling junk” that Scott and Zelda were driving was a Marmon, a very luxurious automobile brand, referred to throughout the text by Fitzgerald as an “Expenso.” This is just one example of Fitzgerald’s humor, which comes across quite strongly in “Rolling Junk” and other pieces of his non-fiction. Fitzgerald smartly casts himself as someone who is befuddled by anything mechanical, which was probably very close to the truth, and a lot of his humor is self-deprecating. 

There are, of course, some beautiful passages sprinkled throughout “The Cruise of the Rolling Junk.” This was one of my favorite sentences: “South we went—over little rivers and long gray bridges to placid Havre de Grace, a proud old lady with folded hands who whispered in faded dignity that she had once been under consideration for capital of the nation.” (p.43) 

On the following page there’s this gorgeous passage: “We rested only five minutes—there was sunshine all around us now—we must make haste to go on, go down, into the warmth, into the dusky mellow softness, into the green heart of the South to the Alabama town where Zelda was born.” (p.44) 

Unfortunately, “Rolling Junk” shows off Fitzgerald’s casual racism at its worst. In most of his writing, African Americans just don’t exist, or are merely servants with a line or two here or there. In “Rolling Junk” he writes of entering a store in Virginia: “But this I know—that the room was simply jammed with negroes and that the moral and physical aura which they cast off was to me oppressive and obscene.” (p.59-60) It doesn’t seem like such a sentence could have come from the pen of the same author who would cleverly satirize Tom Buchanan’s racism in The Great Gatsby just two years after writing “Rolling Junk.” 

Fitzgerald seems pretty out of touch with the racism of the South throughout “Rolling Junk.” Fitzgerald’s father was from Maryland, a border state that retained slavery while remaining in the Union during the Civil War. Fitzgerald’s father told him stories of troops marching through towns, and romantic stories of Southern spies. Scott absorbed the romanticism of the Southern “lost cause” without fully acknowledging that the “lost cause” was really about slavery. 

Fitzgerald must have kept this lovely sentence in his files: “After noon the humidity became oppressive sultriness, and the scattered curlicues of clouds began to solve a great jigsaw puzzle in the sky.” (p.62) He later used a very similar phrase in the short story “I’d Die for You (The Legend of Lake Lure)” written in 1935-36 and used as the title story for 2017’s collection of Fitzgerald short stories. That sentence reads: “She sat with Delannux on the side of a beached raft while the sunset broke into pink picture puzzle pieces that solved themselves in the dark west.” (I’d Die for You and Other Lost Stories, p.93) 

“The Cruise of the Rolling Junk” is an interesting piece of work for fans of Scott and Zelda, but it’s best taken with a large grain of salt, as I doubt everything that Fitzgerald wrote down actually happened. But no matter, it’s still a nice piece of writing from F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Book Review: Deep South: Four Seasons on Back Roads, by Paul Theroux, with photos by Steve McCurry (2015)

The cover of Deep South: Four Seasons on Back Roads, by Paul Theroux, 2015. The photo shows an old movie theater in Warren, Arkansas, by Steve McCurry.

Author Paul Theroux, photo by Steve McCurry. Theroux has written about 50 books.

Abandoned gas station on Route 301, Allendale, South Carolina. Photo by Steve McCurry.

Paul Theroux’s 2015 travel book Deep South: Four Seasons on Back Roads, marks the first time that Theroux has written a travel book about the United States. Theroux has some specific criteria for his book: he stays away from the big cities of the South and only examines the tiny towns. He finds poverty that reminds him of Africa, but also friendly people who welcome him in and quickly pour out the stories of their lives to him.

Deep South has an interesting structure, as traveling in his own country and journeying on his own timetable allows Theroux to revisit some of the same people and places in different seasons. While this sometimes leads to a deeper and richer sense of place, it also makes for some inevitable repetition. 

At the start of the book, Theroux writes, “I was to discover that America is accessible, but Americans in general are not; they are harder to know than any people I’ve traveled among.” (p.10) Theroux explains further, writing that in contrast to other cultures, in America “One is more often greeted with suspicion, hostility, or indifference. In this way Americans could be more challenging, more difficult to get acquainted with, more secretive and suspicious and in many respects more foreign, than any people I have ever met.” (p.23) I found this to be an interesting observation from a traveler as seasoned as Theroux. I wonder if American’s attitudes toward a traveler would change if the traveler is from another country? Is Theroux sometimes greeted with suspicion because he is an American asking questions about America? An advantage to being a traveler is that you are an outsider, and therefore get to ask questions that no one else would.

Deep South fascinated me because the South is an area of America that I haven’t explored much. When I was 15, my Dad and I took a road trip from Minneapolis down the Mississippi to Memphis. Just like the Paul Simon song, we went to see Graceland. We drove into Mississippi to see Elvis Presley’s birthplace in Tupelo, but that’s as far south as we went. I still haven’t been to Texas, Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, or South Carolina. I’ve been to Florida, but Florida is really in its own special category. 

As someone who has spent most of my life in Minnesota, I haven’t encountered that many Southerners. (Why would anyone move from the South to a place known for cold and snowy winters?) When I spent a semester in Washington, DC during college, I had a friend in my dorm from Tennessee. As smart as he was, I remember him once insisting to me that Abraham Lincoln had owned slaves. (No, he didn’t.) One of my college history classes was “The Civil War,” and we had one guy in the class who was from the South. He ended up dropping the class, shortly after attempting to argue that Robert E. Lee was more liberal on slavery than Abraham Lincoln. I still don’t know many people from the South, but I'm good friends with a co-worker who grew up in Alabama. She’s reading Deep South now as well, and it’s been interesting to compare our notes on it. 

The urban-rural divide in America really fascinates me, so I was eager to learn more about the rural areas of the South that Theroux focused on. Theroux sometimes repeats himself, which is perhaps understandable over the course of a 440 page book. He constantly reminds the reader that various Southern towns remind him of ones he’s seen in Africa. This is perhaps justified as something that all travelers do-we compare things we are seeing for the first time to things we have seen before. Theroux also wonders many times why more isn’t being invested in the South-either by the state and federal governments or by private foundations, like Bill Clinton’s Clinton Foundation.

Throughout the book we see towns like Greensboro, Alabama and Allendale, South Carolina that have been devastated by the loss of manufacturing jobs.  An officer in a bank in Greenville says to Theroux, “Things are worse than they look.” (p.118) I couldn’t help but wonder if Theroux had traveled through rural towns in the North, what would he have found? Would he have encountered the same mixture of poverty and decaying small towns where industry has moved on? 

Theroux encounters his share of stereotypical southern tropes, such as when he attends gun shows. Religion also surfaces as a theme, as Theroux attends several different churches where the congregation is largely African American. After quoting a long list of signs that we are in the Last Days from an evangelical radio show, Theroux sums up his feelings towards those prognosticators: “Last Days? Don’t they know? These traits are the traits of all days, every day, everywhere.” (p.305) 

Theroux’s writing is sharp and incisive, and people instinctively trust him, as they open up to him and reveal their thoughts and worries. One of the most interesting people Theroux runs across is Randall Curb, a book lover who has now gone blind, living on his own in Greensboro, Alabama. Randall could surely be a character in a book of Southern fiction, an intelligent man who is very sensitive and also suffers from depression. 

In an interview with the Chicago Tribune, Theroux said that one of the differences between the North and the South is how friendly people are: “I have a new policy of always saying hello in the post office now, and I get very strange reactions. You say hello to a stranger in the North and they think you're drunk. Or if it's a woman, she might think you're a stalker. They might think you're insane. Why? Because you said hello. But in the South, it's a normal interaction. And for me, it's a very great advantage if people are approachable.” 

Steve McCurry’s photos at the back of the book are all excellent, but they seem almost like something of an afterthought. His photo for the cover, of an old movie theater in Warren, Arkansas, with the evocative name of “Pastime,” is just perfect. Pastime, so close to “past time,” bringing to mind the image of a South in a state of perpetual elegant decay. 

Deep South is a fascinating look at a part of America that doesn’t get much media attention, and although the book has its flaws, it’s well worth your time.