F. Scott Fitzgerald Slept Here

Literary legend F. Scott Fitzgerald (no relation to this columnist) spent the summer of 1920 in a rented house in Westport working on his second novel, "The Beautiful and Damned."

As announced in the June 4, 1920 edition of the Westporter-Herald, "F. Scott Fitzgerald, a writer, has leased the Wakeman Cottage near Compo Beach."

At the time, 23-year-old Fitzgerald was a hot new name on the literary scene. His first novel, "This Side of Paradise" had just been published with great success by Charles Scribner's Sons. He and his bride, Zelda Sayre, a mere 19, had decamped New York City after their planned honeymoon was cut short when they were asked to leave the Biltmore. According to Fitzgerald biographer Andrew Turnbull, the management suggested that they move on because, "the continuing hilarity of their presence [was] considered prejudicial to good order and restful nights" for the other guests of the hotel.

In Westport, the newlyweds were attracted to the rental property at 244 Compo Road South, now a private home. Situated close to Long Island Sound, it afforded Zelda the chance to swim as much as she liked, and was a classic Colonial. 

In "The Beautiful and Damned," Fitzgerald described the main character's house this way: "The gray house had been there when women who kept cats were probably witches. ... Since those days the house had been bolstered up in a feeble corner, considerably repartitioned and newly plastered inside, amplified by kitchen and added to by a side-porch but, save for where some jovial oaf had roofed the new kitchen with red tin, Colonial it defiantly remained."

There was nothing colonial about the young Fitzgeralds, however, who rented the Compo Beach house. F. Scott and Zelda kept up their partying ways even after leaving the big city. Not surprising, considering that the new literary lion had recently acquired money, along with notoriety and the energy of youth. And apparently, the Westport of 1920 was a hotbed of activity both artistic and otherwise.

Fellow Westporter and painter Guy Pene du Bois observed in his 1940 autobiography "Artists Say The Silliest Things," that Westport had "grace, friendliness, gaiety and tolerance," and that, "in this prohibition period the summers at Westport, Connecticut, exceeded the riotousness of New York. There gin and orange juice ruled the days and nights. Talk was an extravaganza. Work was an effort made between parties."

Fitzgerald biographer James Mellow wrote that the Fitzgeralds attended "wild beach parties," at Hendricks Point near Compo Beach when they became members of the Westport Beach Club. Mellow also described the writer and his wife as being fond of "mad rides along Post Road with abrupt stops at roadhouses to replenish the supply of gin."

One old friend of Fitzgerald's, editor and critic Edmund Wilson, wrote that he found the couple "reveling nude in the orgies of Westport."

Nude orgies in Westport? One blushes to imagine it.

"The Great Gatsby," the undisputed magnum opus of Fitzgerald's oeuvre, published in 1926, is often described as being inspired by the author's two years in Great Neck on Long Island between 1922 and 1924. But novelist Barbara Probst Solomon, who grew up in a house nearby the Compo Beach area once occupied by the Fitzgeralds, set forth a different theory in a 1996 article in The New Yorker written in connection with the Fitzgerald centennial.  Solomon maintained that the eponymous protagonist Jay Gatsby was in fact based on an eccentric millionaire who lived in Westport during the same time as F. Scott and Zelda.

Westporter Richard "Deej" Webb, currently head of the history department at New Canaan High School, agrees with Solomon's theory that the mansion and grounds, which are now the Inn at Longshore and the Longshore Golf Course, were the model for the Gatsby mansion, and that the E. T. Bedford estate – which included the grounds of what is now Greens Farms Academy at 35 Beachside Avenue, directly across the road from Burying Hill Beach — was the inspiration for the home of Gatsby's beloved Daisy Buchanan. 

"The summer [the Fitzgeralds] lived here was a very formative summer in his life," Webb said in an interview Thursday. "He was straight out of the Midwest and had been very poor. If you read 'Gatsby' and walk Longshore, the narrator Nick is right next door to a great mansion. Basically the core of the story, the idea of a young man being the neighbor of a wealthy man, perfectly mirrors the chronology and the geography of the book."

Webb maintains that Fitzgerald himself probably stood in Westport looking across the water, watching the lights and imagining "Gatsby's wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy's dock."

We can't be sure that these local spots were the inspiration for their famous literary equivalents, but it's fun to imagine so. In October of 1920, the Fitzgeralds moved to New York City, and their brief stay in Westport was over. But the town we love was forever etched into F. Scott's memory, and very likely memorialized in his writings. 

In fact, savvy Patch readers may note that the protagonist in "The Beautiful and Damned" is named Anthony Patch.

A mere coincidence… or literary prescience?