The Cruise of the Rolling Junk

Oh, but Fitzgerald could write. The Cruise of the Rolling Junk must be one of his lesser known works, unattainable but from a university library, discovered as a passing mention in Deep South, barely the length of a respectable short story, but fine writing on every page.

Young Zelda hankers for peaches and biscuits; F. Scott, in one of those fantastically spontaneous and crazy episodes that will mark their collective lives and demise, proposes driving from Connecticut south to Montgomery to obtain just that. And so they do. While some of the story has been dramatized for effect, much is true, particularly the myriad automotive disasters. In fact, it's rather amazing to think that driving cross-country was possible almost 100 years ago, particularly through the rural South that was still so marked by the Civil War.

The story, in and of itself, is fine. The writing, and particularly the writing of the south, is what makes it lovely. Many of the characters who people the pages can recount specific battles to the Fitzgeralds; when he writes that "we had added one more rattle to the ancient bridge over which the fugitives from Bull Run had streamed on an afternoon of panic and terror," one doesn't doubt that it was, in fact, the same ancient bridge. Likewise, Fitzgerald writes of "the Wilderness where slain boys from Illinois and Tennessee and the cities of the gulf still slept in the marshes and the wooded swamps," one understand this to be the literal truth - and that did they not, they might still number among the living. Even the imagery of the present (1922, mind you), harkens back to the war they are still fighting: "The for an hour we passed group after group of negroes bound singing for the cotton fields and the work of the hot hours." The war may have ended, and slavery officially, but the condition of "the negroes" is ever worse.

As both Julian Evans in the Introduction and Paul Theroux in the Foreward note, there's something, too, of a premonition about this book, of the way it all will end for Scott and Zelda, the bight shining future turned to frenzied rot. Still in his 20s when he wrote this, some two years after the adventure itself, it is as if Scott already understood that the best was behind him. For early in the story, he writes the story of his life: "To be young, to be bound for the far hills, to be going where happiness hung from a tree, a ring to be tilted for, a bright garland to be won - It still a realizable thing, we thought, still a harbor from the dullness and the tears and disillusion of all the stationary world."

May we all be young and bound for the hills and tilting at rings of happiness. And may we do it in so many beautiful words.