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| The paperback cover of The Lost Summer, by Tony Buttitta. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor) |
When is the most awkward time to meet someone? If you’re a man, you might say, “while I’m urinating.” Yet it was at precisely this moment that Tony Buttitta recognized F. Scott Fitzgerald. They had met a few moments earlier, in the bookstore that Buttitta ran, when Fitzgerald entered to ask where he could find a bathroom, as the one downstairs was locked. Buttitta then took Fitzgerald outside to a garden to pee. Buttitta said to Fitzgerald, “I know your profile from that photo in Living Authors. I see it like a silhouette. That’s how I recognized you.” (p.5)
This odd scene sets the stage for Buttitta’s 1974 memoir, After the Good Gay Times, which was republished in paperback in 1987 as The Lost Summer: A Personal Memoir of F. Scott Fitzgerald. The book details Buttitta’s friendship with Fitzgerald during the summer of 1935, when Fitzgerald was living in Asheville, North Carolina. Buttitta was an aspiring writer, and he and Fitzgerald often discussed writing and literature.
Buttitta presents the reader with a fascinating portrait of Fitzgerald at one of the lowest points of his life. Fitzgerald’s fourth novel Tender Is the Night had been published in 1934 to good reviews but unspectacular sales. He was also coming to terms with the fact that his wife Zelda might never be “cured” of her mental illness, and he was struggling to write short stories. Some of Fitzgerald’s most recent short stories were one written from the point of view of a dog, and another about a count in ninth-century France. Clearly, he was grasping at straws for material.
During the summer of 1935, Fitzgerald was trying to cope with his alcoholism by sticking to only beer and no hard liquor. This did not prove to be a success, as Fitzgerald would sometimes consume as many as 30 beers in a day. He was clearly going through a terrible time.
There is much dirt to be dished in The Lost Summer, and many fascinating tidbits emerge about Fitzgerald’s personality. I was surprised by how often politics comes up in The Lost Summer. Early in the book Fitzgerald says “I’ve been a radical as long I can remember. A Marxist socialist since I started thinking. Wells and Shaw nudged me along those days. But I’m no joiner.” (p.36) Fitzgerald’s political inclinations have often been overlooked, which begs the question, how often does Fitzgerald need to proclaim himself a socialist before we take him seriously? In interviews, he often proclaimed himself a socialist. Amory Blaine espoused socialist ideas at the end of This Side of Paradise, Fitzgerald’s first novel, and Fitzgerald called himself a socialist in his 1921 Who’s Who entry. Fitzgerald not being a joiner fits, he was usually disdainful of organized groups, and I think considered himself apart from many of the institutions of American life. Church, government, the military, business—these held no appeal for Fitzgerald.
The Lost Summer also features some of Fitzgerald’s most direct comments about race in America. Buttitta was very liberal on race and civil rights, whereas Fitzgerald was not, despite his liberalism on other issues. But Fitzgerald said to Buttitta, “The North pays lip service to the principle of racial equality and scorns Negros as individuals.” (p.61) Fitzgerald was very perceptive in describing the North in those terms.
Fitzgerald and the author Thomas Wolfe had met several times by 1935: they shared a publisher, Scribners, and an editor, Maxwell Perkins. The connection between Fitzgerald and Wolfe deepened in The Lost Summer, as Buttitta took Fitzgerald to “the Old Kentucky Home,” the boardinghouse that Wolfe’s mother Julia ran. Fitzgerald was looking for a room, and although “the Old Kentucky Home” was below Fitzgerald’s usual luxurious standards, the novelty of renting from Wolfe’s mother was too interesting to pass up. During their tour of the house, Julia Wolfe hardly stopped for a breath, prattling on about Tom, and so she never learned that Fitzgerald was an author who shared a publisher and an editor with her son. Ultimately, Fitzgerald didn’t rent a room there. As he left the boardinghouse, he exclaimed to Buttitta “Poor Tom! Poor bastard! She’s a worse peasant than my mother!” (p.69)
Fitzgerald loved getting other people to talk about themselves. As Buttitta writes, “In getting others to reveal themselves, Fitzgerald said that he entered into their lives and thoughts, instead of their entering his, and that he identified himself with them and faced the problems of their world. His own problems faded as someone else’s took on a personal meaning for him.” (p.99) This is what I have long suspected about Fitzgerald, that his empathy allowed him to enter into other people’s heads and helped in that magical alchemy of transference that is so crucial to writers as they create characters.
Buttitta introduced Fitzgerald to a high-class call girl, who Buttitta refers to as “Lottie.” Fitzgerald and Lottie began an affair, which she thoughtfully kept Buttitta fully informed on.
I wonder if Lottie was a real person, or a product of Buttitta’s imagination. The information she tells Buttitta generally matches up with other accounts of Fitzgerald’s personality. But it feels too neat: Buttitta has the masculine conversations with Fitzgerald about art and politics, and then through Lottie he has access to the side of Fitzgerald that only women would have seen. Fitzgerald was generally more at ease with women than men, and I suspect a male friend of his would not have had access to the full range of Fitzgerald’s personality. Buttitta writes of Fitzgerald, “He always found women more manageable, sympathetic, and appealing to his nature than men, and he made no secret of preferring their company.” (p.132) I’m not surprised at all by Buttitta’s assessment of Fitzgerald.
Laura Guthrie worked as Fitzgerald’s secretary during the summer of 1935. Her diary of this time was published in Esquire magazine in 1964 as “Tales Beyond the Jazz Age: A Summer with F. Scott Fitzgerald,” and it is a fascinating glimpse at Fitzgerald during this “lost summer.” The key piece of evidence that makes me suspect Lottie is an invention of Buttitta’s imagination is that Laura Guthrie never mentions Lottie in her diary, or even anyone who would fit Lottie’s description. Guthrie’s diary is full of details about Fitzgerald’s affair with Beatrice Dance, so it would have been difficult for Fitzgerald to squeeze Lottie in as well. Laura Guthrie Hearne died in the fall of 1973. Tony Buttitta’s memoir was published in 1974. Coincidence? Or was Buttitta waiting for Hearne’s passing to publish his own version of the summer of 1935? When Buttitta published his book, there was no one alive who could contradict his version of the events of the summer of 1935.
Whether true or not, the scenes between Fitzgerald and Lottie are quite sexy, like something out of one of Fitzgerald’s own short stories or novels. “He caressed her feet, the toes, instep, and heel, and got an odd pleasure out of it.” (p.112) Lottie says, “Then he pulled off my silk stockings so I wouldn’t get a run. He was very sweet the way he peeled them off. When he finished he got up, offered me his hand in a gallant way, and whirled me around the room in a slow waltz. There wasn’t any music, but it was playing, I guess, in his head because he didn’t miss a beat.” (p.112) Lottie then reveals the dirt: “It seems that the sight of women’s feet has excited him since he first started thinking about sex.” (p.113) F. Scott Fitzgerald had a foot fetish!
Okay, did F. Scott Fitzgerald actually have a foot fetish? The short answer is, of course we don’t know. But, if he did have a foot fetish, it would go some way towards explaining his contradictory attitudes about sex. He obviously admired and desired women, but also felt some guilt about his desires. If he had sexual desires that were outside of the “normal” desires for his era, like say, a foot fetish, this would explain some of his feelings of guilt surrounding sex and desire. Fitzgerald’s Catholic upbringing no doubt added another layer to his guilt surrounding sexuality. There’s a scene in This Side of Paradise where Amory Blaine (the main character, who is quite similar to Fitzgerald) is about to have an amorous encounter with a chorus girl, when he suddenly has a vivid vision of the devil sitting in an armchair. Amory flees in terror without consummating anything with the chorus girl.
There’s some evidence for Fitzgerald being interested in feet. Fitzgerald’s short story “Cyclone in Silent Land,” which dates from the mid-1930's, is set in a hospital and features a male patient who doesn’t want to take his socks off. It turns out that the man has an extra toe. Fitzgerald also hated to reveal his bare feet. He wrote in his ledger about a neighbor boy who “went barefoot in his yard and peeled plums. Scott’s Freudian shame about his feet kept him from joining in.” (Fool for Love, by Scott Donaldson, p.179) Fitzgerald’s last girlfriend Sheilah Graham wrote, “All the time I knew him he always refused to take off his shoes and socks on the beach.” (The Real F. Scott Fitzgerald Thirty-Five Years Later, p.33) Graham’s memory would seem to be contradicted by the numerous photos of Scott in the water in his scrapbooks, as I doubt that he was swimming in the Mediterranean Sea in his socks and shoes. But whatever, the point is that Fitzgerald perhaps had odd feelings about his feet. Buttitta even mentions Fitzgerald’s “stubby and unattractive feet.” (p.41)
There’s a poignant part in The Lost Summer where Fitzgerald talked about Ted Coy, one of the great college athletes of his era, who just died at the age of 47. Fitzgerald was frustrated that Buttitta had no idea who Ted Coy was, and he ranted: “That’s the trouble with you radicals. You know about art and literature, cuckoo magazines, anarchism, communism, Sacco and Vanzetti, Mooney and Billings, the Five Year Plan, Dada, and the coming revolution, but you don’t know a God-damned thing about football!” (p.142) That’s such a fantastic sentence, funny and touching at the same time.
Palm-reading is a theme in The Lost Summer. It’s how Fitzgerald met Laura Guthrie, as she was working at the Grove Park Inn as a palm reader. Buttitta was also a palm reader, and a climax of The Lost Summer occurs when he finally reads Fitzgerald’s palm. Buttitta writes “I remember his hands as the most perfect example of the Intuitive type.” (p.146) Of course. It fits perfectly that Fitzgerald would be a perfect intuitive.
Fitzgerald talked to Buttitta a lot about communism, and how his sympathies were with radicals, but ultimately his individualism kept him from joining the Communist Party. “A writer must find his own grain, way, bent. Like all artists he is by nature and temperament an individual and a rebel. Against society, tradition, restrictions. He aspires to create new and original works. His way is alone. If he succumbs to ideologies, he turns into a mouthpiece.” (p.158) I think this statement is key to understanding Fitzgerald. He rejected the Catholic faith he was raised in, just as he rejected most organized political activity. He was a party of one, content to make his own way in the world.
The Lost Summer ended on a bitter note, as Fitzgerald and Buttitta quarreled about race. And then comes the ultimate shocker: Lottie reveals to Fitzgerald that she is one-quarter Black. Gasp, shock! As Lottie retells the tale to Buttitta, Fitzgerald was stunned and horrified by this revelation. The sensationalistic conclusion of The Lost Summer begs the question: how much of this book can we trust? It’s a valid question, and one that is hard to answer. Buttitta supposedly took notes at the time of his conversations with Fitzgerald, scribbling down notes on the flyleaves of books in his store. This would be difficult to fact check, but it might be possible. Buttitta’s archives are held at the University of South Carolina. If his archives do include books with notes about conversations with Fitzgerald, this would help to establish Buttitta’s veracity. Fitzgerald biographer Robert R. Garnett dismisses Buttitta, saying in a recent interview published in the F. Scott Fitzgerald Society Newsletter “His tale of Fitzgerald’s relationship with a flamboyant prostitute he calls Lottie, for example, is almost certainly pure fiction...Buttitta’s book seems to me largely a con job.” I’m inclined to agree with Garnett that the parts of the book about Lottie might be fiction. But if The Lost Summer is a partial fiction, it’s at least an artfully constructed fiction. Buttitta’s description of Fitzgerald’s personality has the ring of truth about it, whether that’s from his own personal observations or canny readings of the Fitzgerald biographies that were then available to him.
Buttitta was recollecting conversations with Fitzgerald that had happened almost forty years in the past. Even working from notes Buttitta took at the time, that would be a difficult, if not impossible task. It might be that we should group The Lost Summer with Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast as a book that contains some truths, but also some fiction as well. In the preface of A Moveable Feast, Hemingway wrote, “If the reader prefers, this book may be regarded as fiction.” An interesting claim for a purported memoir. Whatever the truth of the matter, The Lost Summer is still an entertaining read for Fitzgerald fans.
