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Babylon Revisited: When the money runs out

One of the finest short stories in the English language, 'Babylon Revisited’, written by F Scott Fitzgerald after the Great Crash, is an intensely personal portrait of a man who has squandered his life. It’s also a perfect tale for the times we live in .

 

Today, Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald may be one of America’s most celebrated novelists, but during his lifetime, he was best known as a writer of short stories. At the end of the Twenties, he was the highest-paid writer in America earning fees of $4,000 per story (about $50,000 today) and published in mainstream magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post. Over 20 years, he wrote almost 200 stories in addition to his four novels, publishing 164 of them in magazines.
When Ernest Hemingway first met Fitzgerald, in Paris in 1925, it was within weeks of the publication of The Great Gatsby; Hemingway later wrote that before reading Gatsby, he thought that Fitzgerald “wrote Saturday Evening Post stories that had been readable three years before but I never thought of him as a serious writer”.
Gatsby would change all that, of course, so thoroughly that now we may be in danger of forgetting Fitzgerald’s stories. The haste in which he wrote them, in order to pay for the luxurious lifestyle he enjoyed with his wife, Zelda, means that the stories are uneven in quality, but at their best they are among the finest stories in English. And “Babylon Revisited”, a Saturday Evening Post story first published exactly 80 years ago next month – and free inside next Saturday’s edition of the Telegraph – is probably the greatest. A tale of boom and bust, about the debts one has to pay when the party comes to an end, it is a story with particular relevance for the way we live now.
Fitzgerald’s fortunes uncannily mirrored the fortunes of the nation he wrote about: his first novel, This Side of Paradise, became a runaway bestseller in early 1921, just as America entered the boom period that Fitzgerald himself would name the Jazz Age. He and Zelda became celebrities and began living the high life. They were the golden couple of the Twenties, “beautiful and damned”, as the prophetic title of Fitzgerald’s 1922 novel suggested, treated like royalty in America’s burgeoning celebrity culture. Glamorous, reckless and profligate, the Fitzgeralds were spendthrift in every sense. Much later, Fitzgerald would have to take account of all they had squandered – not only wealth, but beauty, youth, health, and even his genius.
In early 1924, the Fitzgeralds sailed from New York with their three-year-old daughter, Scottie, for Europe, where they joined the growing crowd of American expatriates enjoying the comparatively cheap cost of living in post First World War Paris and the Riviera. There they became friends with Hemingway, as well as with other writers and artists of the day. Fitzgerald’s biographers record that while in Paris, Fitzgerald’s routine was to rise at 11am, and begin work at 5pm. He claimed to write most days until 3am, but the reality was that usually he and Zelda could be found among the cabarets and clubs of Montmartre and the Left Bank, where they drank, danced, flirted and fought into the small hours
When the Great Crash came at the end of 1929, the Fitzgeralds crashed also, just as they had roared along with the Roaring Twenties. In April 1930, Zelda had a nervous breakdown and was eventually diagnosed with schizophrenia; she would spend the rest of her life in and out of psychiatric hospitals.
And in the early Thirties, as America sank into Depression, Fitzgerald found himself battling depression. His alcoholism was spiralling out of control, his stories were now abruptly out of key with the mood of the nation, and he found it increasingly difficult to earn enough to pay for Zelda’s medical care and their daughter’s education.
Written in December 1930, just eight months after Zelda’s breakdown, the elegiac “Babylon Revisited” is Fitzgerald’s exquisitely painful meditation on what he had wasted, his recognition that the cost of living it large is not just financial but emotional, psychological and spiritual – and that one can’t live in arrears forever.
That Christmas, Fitzgerald brought Scottie to visit her mother in a Swiss sanatorium, but Zelda’s erratic behaviour frightened the nine-year-old girl; Scott took his daughter skiing for the rest of her school holiday.
“Babylon Revisited”, written just as Fitzgerald faced the prospect that Zelda might be lost to him for good, and in fear for his ability to care for his daughter, is itself a kind of reckoning of the price one has to pay. Financial debts, paying the price for past extravagance, becomes a metaphor for moral debts, the loss of one’s sense of character or one’s personal credit with the world.
The tale of a man who has lost everything but is fighting to redeem himself, “Babylon Revisited” concerns Charlie Wales, an American expatriate who lives a profligate life in Paris during the Twenties. One night during a bacchanalian spree, he quarrels with his wife, Helen, and she retaliates by kissing another man. Charlie storms home alone and Helen arrives home an hour later, too drunk and disoriented to find a taxi. She dies soon after; Charlie has a breakdown and is institutionalised before losing all his money in the crash.
Their daughter, Honoria, goes to live with Helen’s sister Marion. As the story opens three years later, Charlie has returned to Paris sober, financially successful again and determined to pull his life together. He has come to reclaim his symbolically named daughter: if honour is restored to him perhaps he can salvage something from the wreckage of his life.
“Babylon Revisited” clearly chimes with Fitzgerald’s own life in late 1930: the extravagant dissipation of life in Paris during the boom years; the wife lost to illness; a fortune frittered away in the confidence that “even when you were broke, you didn’t worry about money,” as Fitzgerald later wrote about the rampant spending in the Twenties, “because it was in such profusion around you.” And it is a story about a father’s recognition that, especially in the absence of her mother, his daughter needs him to face up to his responsibilities.
Fitzgerald carefully patterns the story so that it comes full circle, and Charlie ends where he began, in the Paris Ritz Bar. The setting is emblematically appropriate, suggesting Charlie’s twin crimes: his careless squandering of wealth and his drinking. But beginning and ending in the same location also hints at one of the story’s deeper themes: Charlie will end up where he began, borne back ceaselessly into the past, as Fitzgerald wrote at the end of The Great Gatsby. For Charlie Wales revisiting Babylon does not bring closure; coming full circle merely creates a spiralling sense of loss.
Throughout “Babylon Revisited”, Fitzgerald uses economic metaphors to underscore the idea that debts must be paid. The story reverberates with uncanny echoes – or rather, anticipations – of our own era, the way in which we trusted that living on credit could last forever. What Fitzgerald shows us is the effects that this mistake has not only on our economy, but on our characters: that money is the least of what we have to lose.
The poignancy of the story derives from its sense of injustice: a recovering alcoholic is trying to prove that he’s reformed and if we feel from the outset of the story a sense of impending doom, we might predict that Charlie will fall off the wagon. But Fitzgerald twists the knife by making Charlie’s reformation authentic: he has accepted his responsibilities by coming back to face the past, own up to his mistakes and remedy them by repairing what’s left of his family. But that may not be enough.
At one point during his stay in Paris, Charlie revisits his old haunts on the Left Bank and understands at last: “I spoiled this city for myself. I didn’t realise it, but the days came along one after another, and then two years were gone, and everything was gone, and I was gone.” He has got himself back but the question the story poses is whether everything is gone for good.
Wandering through Montmartre, Charlie suddenly realises the extent of his wastefulness in what is perhaps the most superb passage in this tale: “All the catering to vice and waste was on an utterly childish scale, and he suddenly realised the meaning of the word 'dissipate’ – to dissipate into thin air; to make nothing out of something. In the little hours of the night every move from place to place was an enormous human jump, an increase of paying for the privilege of slower and slower motion. He remembered thousand-franc notes given to an orchestra for playing a single number, hundred-franc notes tossed to a doorman for calling a cab. But it hadn’t been given for nothing. It had been given, even the most wildly squandered sum, as an offering to destiny that he might not remember the things most worth remembering, the things that now he would always remember – his child taken from his control, his wife escaped to a grave in Vermont.”
The idea of “dissipation” as an active loss is perhaps the story’s central insight, and it is one to which Fitzgerald would return again and again in his fiction of the Thirties. The passage evokes the sense of vanished and wasted time, the remorse that characterises the morning after the night before, the sense of everything being spent.
“Babylon Revisited” is at once timeless and startlingly modern in its evocation of a single father struggling with alcoholism and trying to care for his daughter, and coming to terms with the costs of extravagance. Part of the tale’s poignancy is Fitzgerald’s recognition that the tragedy is not just Charlie’s: it is also his daughter’s. When Charlie comes to ask Marion to return Honoria to him, he realises Marion is bitter, particularly because of Charlie’s easy acquisition of wealth.
Marion says she is “delighted” that Americans have deserted Paris following the crash: “Now at least you can go into a store without their assuming you’re a millionaire.” Charlie’s response is revealing: “But it was nice while it lasted… We were a sort of royalty, almost infallible, with a sort of magic around us.” Only it didn’t last long: they wasted their “sort of magic” in search of a life that could never be as magnificent as their hopes, just as surely as Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald did.
Nine years after the publication of “Babylon Revisited”, less than a year before he would die at 44, Fitzgerald wrote his daughter Scottie a letter about the story: “You have earned some money for me this week because I sold 'Babylon Revisited,’ in which you are a character, to the pictures (the sum received wasn’t worthy of the magnificent story – neither of you nor of me – however, I am accepting it).”
Like Charlie, Fitzgerald learnt the hard way that loss is remorseless, absolute; what has been wasted is irrecoverable. But as “Babylon Revisited” also shows, even out of the wreckage some things can be salvaged, if not everything: what Fitzgerald retrieved he bequeathed to us, the hard-won lessons of his life transformed into heartbreaking art.

Zelda

"Given her family's standing in the community, Zelda's frequent exploits were sure fodder for gossip. There was the day she climbed to the roof of her house, kicked away the ladder, and compelled the fire company to rescue her from certain injury and disgrace. Or the time she borrowed her friend's snappy little Stutz Bearcat to drive down to Boodler's Bend, a local lover's lane concealed by a thick orchard of pecan trees, and shone a spotlight on those of her schoolmates who were necking in the backseats of parked cars. Or those other occasions when she repeated the same trick, but at the front entrance to Madam Helen St. Clair's notorious city brothel.

"Most disturbing to Judge Sayre was Zelda's well-earned reputation for violating the time-honored codes of sexual propriety that seemed everywhere under attack by the time the opening shots were fired in World War I. Already a veritable legend among hundreds of well-heeled fraternity brothers as far and wide as the University of Alabama, Auburn University, and Georgia Tech, Zelda was 'the most popular girl at every dance,' as a would-be suitor remembered years later.

"Part of Zelda's renown surely was owed to her habit of sneaking out of country club dances - and sometimes her bedroom window - to join Montgomery's most eligible bachelors for a few hours of necking, petting, and drinking in secluded backseat venues. On more than a few occasions, the inviting aroma of pear trees, the dim glow of a half-moon, and the tentative sound of a boyfriend's car horn were all the inspiration Zelda needed to walk quietly across her plain whitewashed room, draw open the curtains, and creep down to the tin roof that protected the Sayre family's front porch.
"After that, she was gone into the night. ...

"When the entire senior class cut school on April 1, it was Zelda who pooled everyone's money and flirted with the nice agent at the Empire Theatre, who happily granted the students admission at a cut rate. And it was Zelda who triumphantly organized a group photo in front of the ticket box. ...

" 'Zelda would have been the last to deny that she danced cheek to cheek and did the Shimmy, the Charleston, and the Black Bottom," Sara Mayfield, her loyal childhood friend, admitted. But "if she gave a demonstration of the Hula at a midterm dance at the University of Alabama, had not Alice Roosevelt, the President's daughter, been similarly criticized for doing the same thing . . . ?"

"To be sure, Zelda 'rode behind her admirers ... on their motorcycles with her arms around them, raised her hemlines to the knee, bobbed her hair, smoked, tippled, and kissed the boys goodbye.' But this sort of 'flirtation' was an old Southern custom; 'going the limit' was not. Zelda was a reigning beauty and 'a knockout' in the paleolithic slang of the day, far too popular to have 'put out' for her beaux, far too shrewd in the tactics and strategy of popularity to grant her favors to one suitor and thereby alienate a regiment of them.

"Maybe so, maybe not. But Zelda did her best to cultivate a scandalous reputation. She encouraged reports of skinny-dipping excursions and multiple romantic entanglements. During the summer, when it got too hot, she slipped out of her underwear and asked her date to hold it for the evening in his coat pocket. And at a legendary Christmas bop, when a chaperone reproached her for dancing too closely and too wantonly with her date, Zelda retaliated by swiping a band of mistletoe and pinning it to her backside."

Joshua Zeitz, Flapper, Publisher: Three Rivers Press, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.

Montgomery Portraits: Zelda led exciting, sad life

Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald (1900-1948) must have confounded her father. Staid, formal Supreme Court Justice Anthony Sayre was the scion of an old and prominent Montgomery family. Zelda's mother, on the other hand, had confounded her own father with her unconventional behavior.
Perhaps Minnie Machen gave the youngest of her six children the genes or the rearing -- or both -- that allowed Zelda to become a founder of the Jazz Age. Zelda's antics shocked Montgomery's conventional, conservative society matrons. Of course she pleased society's young men. After all, Zelda's Sidney Lanier High School classmates had identified her as "prettiest and most graceful."
Zelda, however, was unwilling to commit to a lifelong engagement on the local stage, no matter how much the young men adored her. The large number of young men from the Middle West, temporarily in Montgomery for military training at Camp Sheridan, gave Zelda, and hundreds of other Montgomery girls a broadened perspective.
In 1918, Zelda met Lt. F. Scott Fitzgerald, but agreed to marry him only after he published his first novel. They were married in St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York City in 1920 after the publication of "This Side of Paradise."
Fitzgerald's increasing reputation as a novelist and short story writer led to Hollywood script writing. His income, however, could not support their extravagant living. Consequently, they moved to Europe, but even in Paris, Rome and on the Rivera, they could not live within their means.
More damaging, however, was the psychological strain of their lives. Zelda was extremely talented, but Fitzgerald thwarted her literary expression. She turned to ballet, studying in Paris under Madame Lubov Egorova. Although serious and dedicated, in her 20s she was too old to begin such a physically demanding art form. She also painted.
Although exhibited in New York in 1934, her paintings -- of dancers, fantasies, flowers, city scenes and religious subjects -- were relatively unheralded in her own time, and her mother burned many of the more disturbing ones. Zelda's paintings did not gain critical recognition until the late 20th century.
Zelda did continue with her writing. In the 1920s and early 1930s, she wrote short stories for several New York magazines. Fitzgerald not only discouraged his wife, but he also liberally appropriated her stories, ideas, experiences and used his name only on work that they wrote together. Zelda's "Save Me the Waltz" in 1932, her only novel, preceded Fitzgerald's "Tender is the Night" by two years. Fitzgerald, of course, was jealous since both novels were based on their rocky life together. Artistic rivalry increased the stress.
The Fitzgeralds epitomized the Jazz Age. When it was ended by the Great Depression, neither could adjust. Fitzgerald's subject matter evaporated; Zelda's mental problems resulted in her first breakdown in 1930. To reground themselves, and to rebuild their marriage, they returned to Montgomery from France in 1931.
His continued drinking and absences as he tried to re-establish himself through Hollywood script writing and her bouts with mental illness precluded significant change. Zelda's second breakdown occurred in 1932, following her father's death, and a third breakdown came two years later.
In 1940, Fitzgerald died in compromising circumstances in Hollywood. Zelda continued to suffer from schizophrenia until she was killed in an Asheville sanitarium fire in 1948.
Today Fitzgerald is recognized as one of our greatest American fiction writers, and Zelda is increasingly recognized for her painting, especially for her watercolors, as well as for her contributions to Fitzgerald's literary accomplishments.
Zelda did continue with her writing. In the 1920s and early 1930s, she wrote short stories for several New York magazines. Fitzgerald not only discouraged his wife, but he also liberally appropriated her stories, ideas, experiences and used his name only on work that they wrote together. Zelda's "Save Me the Waltz" in 1932, her only novel, preceded Fitzgerald's "Tender is the Night" by two years. Fitzgerald, of course, was jealous since both novels were based on their rocky life together. Artistic rivalry increased the stress.
The Fitzgeralds epitomized the Jazz Age. When it was ended by the Great Depression, neither could adjust. Fitzgerald's subject matter evaporated; Zelda's mental problems resulted in her first breakdown in 1930. To reground themselves, and to rebuild their marriage, they returned to Montgomery from France in 1931.
His continued drinking and absences as he tried to re-establish himself through Hollywood script writing and her bouts with mental illness precluded significant change. Zelda's second breakdown occurred in 1932, following her father's death, and a third breakdown came two years later.
In 1940, Fitzgerald died in compromising circumstances in Hollywood. Zelda continued to suffer from schizophrenia until she was killed in an Asheville sanitarium fire in 1948.
Today Fitzgerald is recognized as one of our greatest American fiction writers, and Zelda is increasingly recognized for her painting, especially for her watercolors, as well as for her contributions to Fitzgerald's literary accomplishments.

Celtic Scribes: F. Scott Fitzgerald


By Ray Cavanaugh
F. Scott Fitzgerald was born in 1896 in Minnesota. He had Irish blood from both sides and at least one grandparent who grew up in the old country. After a promising adolescence, he headed east seeking Ivy League glory. These grand ambitions, however, went on hiatus – he ignored his homework, boycotted his exams, and followed fellow Celtic Scribe Eugene O’Neill’s example by dropping out of Princeton with a G.P.A. lower than his blood-alcohol content.
Fearing dad’s half-Irish temper, Fitzgerald opted to enlist for service in WWI. Although future drinking pal Ernest Hemingway was submerged in a shrapnel bloodbath, Lieutenant Fitzgerald lucked out, seeing more girls than corpses. When back at camp, he would polish his gun and work on a semi-autobiographical novel, The Romantic Egoist. The book got a rejection slip, so Fitzgerald revised it and used a different title, This Side of Paradise.
The rewrite worked like a dream, bringing its writer critical acclaim, a few extra bucks and a meteoric rise in social status. Fitzgerald went to the hottest shindigs, drank the bubbliest wine, and married a celebrated belle named Zelda who, in spite of her drunkenness, disorderly conduct, incipient psychosis, habitual complaints and financial demands, was a splendid cocktail-party date.
The roaring 1920s were in full swing, and Fitzgerald roared with the best of them. Still, he found time to write The Great Gatsby, in which an enormously successful bootlegger throws huge parties to lure a past love – Gatsby gets his wish for two weeks, then ends up face down in his pool with slugs in the head and a mouthful of chlorine. Fitzgerald deserves full marks for making this extravagant crook one of the most eminent tragic heroes in American letters.
Fitzgerald and Hemingway comprised the backbone of the much-romanticized American ex-pat literary circle. Both friends and rivals, their relationship was complex and often turbulent, as the notoriously cantankerous Hemingway would ridicule his comparatively mild counterpart for a number of perceived offenses, especially Fitzgerald’s composition of certain stories for the primary purpose of monetary gain - an act which the eminently macho Ernest perceived as being akin to “whoring”.
As wife Zelda’s troubles intensified, Fitzgerald was compelled to earn more to cover her elaborate medical expenses. He moved to Hollywood and began scripting sitcoms, an undoubtedly reluctant career move which confirmed his status as beneficent spouse, but sent Hemingway into a prolonged “whoring” tirade. From her institution, Zelda accused the belligerent Hemingway and her husband of having together partaken in romantic relations.
Though most would agree that Fitzgerald peaked with Gatsby, the writer was good for at least one more full novel, Tender is the Night, in which a promising shrink falls for his dreamiest schizophrenic - a poignant romance ensues, one ultimately ruinous to the MD’s career, as the would-be Freud becomes a jaded caretaker. 
The book packed all the touching pathos of autobiography: Fitzgerald’s energies were spent on his ever-more-troubled wife, who met an appalling fate within a flame-engulfed psych ward. Distraught and weary, the once-brilliant writer tried to rediscover the muse…lurking ghostlike at the end of countless bottles and cigarettes. In time, his liver gave out, and he died at age forty-three. 
For a full anthology of Celtic Scribes, see celticscribes.com

St. Mary's Offers Link to F. Scott Fitzgerald, A Literary Legend


“Everyone suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known.”

Saint Mary’s Catholic Church in downtown Rockville has a small graveyard—a fenced patch with unassuming headstones. The cemetery has no grandiose statues of angels or saints to adorn the graves and draw attention. However, the graveyard does have one attraction, which brings in local visitors and tourists. In the cemetery rests F. Scott Fitzgerald, the famous American novelist who wrote "The Great Gatsby," a book about the Roaring 1920s, which is still taught in English classes today.
Born in 1896, Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald led a scandalous and tragic life. Alcoholism and general debauchery greatly contributed to his fatal heart attack at the age of 44. He lived the life that he wrote about in novels like "This Side of Paradise" and "Tender is the Night." Fitzgerald married Zelda Sayre in April 1920, a woman from Alabama who had an equally difficult life, spending many years in a sanitarium before dying there, at the age of 48, with eight other women in an accidental fire.
The Fitzgerald family has roots in Rockville, and F. Scott is buried on the family plot. But even the grave of F. Scott has a controversial history. In fact, there has been a fair amount of ink spilled over the grave of F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Montgomery County Historical Society archives state that Fitzgerald died in 1940 in Hollywood, Calif. in his lover’s apartment, a woman named Sheilah Graham. Because of his adulterous relationship and party lifestyle, the Catholic Church denied F. Scott the rite to be buried on consecrated ground in the family plot at Saint Mary’s. F. Scott had wanted to be buried with his parents, but instead he was buried in a small Protestant cemetery called Rockville Union Cemetery, located about two miles from Saint Mary’s. Zelda’s casket was later placed in the same grave, on top of her husband’s casket.
Many of the Historical Society members have F. Scott Fitzgerald stories. One lady said the original gravesite at the Rockville Union Cemetery had been a personal shrine of hers for years, which also attracted other visitors. 
In 1975, F. Scott and Zelda’s caskets were moved to Saint Mary’s, largely through the efforts of their only child, Scotti F. Smith, the women’s club of Rockville, and state legislator Jennie Forehand.
The Historical Society has a collection of archives that not only include newspaper and magazine clippings, but personal essays from local residents. Among the archives is a Gazette newspaper clipping from 1985 which quotes then-county official Russell Hamill, who called the reburial in Saint Mary’s “the longest Irish wake in history.”
Saint Mary’s parishioner Roger Langley wrote an article called “The Longest Irish Wake” for the Potomac Catholic Heritage in 2009. Langley explains F. Scott’s filial connection to Rockville, covers Fitzgerald’s life and literary work, and gives insight into the Catholic state-of-mind concerning a man also known as the “beloved infidel.”
According to Langley, the Fitzgerald family originally settled in the area in 1838, where a suburb of Rockville now exists. Two generations later, F. Scott spent some of his childhood visiting his Aunt Eliza Delihant on a farmhouse near Randolf Station. He also attended his father’s funeral at St. Mary’s in 1931.
At the time of his death, F. Scott had strayed away from his faith in the eyes of the Church, Langley suggests: “By all accounts Fitzgerald was a fallen-away Catholic, married to a Protestant, a college drop-out, a drunk, an irresponsible child all his life, an exhibitionist, who with his wife became the poster couple for a lawless, bawdy, free living, sexually prolific, selfish, gluttonous, crime-driven, and immoral time period he personally proclaimed to be the Jazz Age.”       
By all historical accounts, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s first funeral in 1940 was dark, wet, and lonely. According to Langley, six pallbearers had to be hired for the funeral.
Thirty-five years later, when the campaign was started to reinter F. Scott and Zelda into St. Mary’s, the Catholic Church had changed and the rigid rules had softened, stated Langely. However, the Church allowed the inclusion of F. Scott and Zelda’s graves mostly because of their daughter Scotti’s wishes. Scotti was the last of the Fitzgeralds buried at Saint Mary’s in 1986.
In addition, Langley stated certain Catholic rites have still been denied F. Scott such as a Rite of Committal with Final Commendation. In effect, F. Scott was permitted a space in the cemetery but without the spiritual benefits.
Monsignor Robert Amey has been with Saint Mary’s since August 2009 but was ordained in 1969. Amey said the Catholic Church relaxed a bit during the 1970s, as they began to learn more about the field of psychology, which may have contributed to the acceptance of F. Scott and Zelda into St Mary’s.
Amey said when it comes to matters of forgiveness, the Catholic Church has let go of its strict doctrine. Instead, they believe the judgment of our eternal souls rests with God, who is merciful.
Amey said every year a group visits the gravesite on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s birthday. He said he saw the visitors last September from his window as he was getting ready for bed one night. Amey smiled as he talked about the “anonymous group” who came to show respects and celebrate.
The grave continues to serve as a shrine for many fans and curiosity seekers, who leave behind tokens of their esteem. A recent visit discovered the grave covered in small change (mostly pennies and nickels), two one-shot bottles of Wild Turkey, and a pair of furry ladies gloves.
The epitaph on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s grave is the final line from "The Great Gatsby": “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”