Sunday Fitzgerald Blogging
Went to St. Mary's Church in Rockville, Maryland -- about four miles from my Garrett Park house -- hoping to meet up with a bunch of literary types from GW who'd planned a pilgrimage to F. Scott Fitzgerald's grave there.
However, the event didn't come off, and I was just sort of standing there at the grave, reading his dates and Zelda's and Scottie's, when a young man approached me.
He was a GW alum who'd heard about the planned outing, and he'd brought along three boys from the Catholic school where he teaches. "I was hoping to talk about Fitzgerald with the GW students. You're a professor. Would you be willing to talk to the boys about him?"
So I talked about Gatsby, and the way its last line was engraved on the stone at our feet... How Fitzgerald had died a wreck in Los Angeles and been brought back here, where he had family (there are lots of Fitzgerald graves around his)... His wild ride in Paris with Hemingway and Stein and everybody...
"Is his body actually in there?" asked one of the boys. Well, his remains. "How do they get a body from L.A. all the way here?" I guess you dig up the casket and put it on a plane, or put it in a train or a car or something...
I liked the way their interest was mainly in the macabre. Wonderfully thirteen-year-old of them.
"And what's the word 'Gatsby' mean in the title?" Oh, that's his main character, Jay Gatsby... Though his real name wasn't Jay Gatsby...
If you know UD, you know she enjoyed this unexpected interlude very, very much.
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