2 weeks Ago By Jay Gabler
DULUTH — Like readers across the country, Duluthians will be celebrating the 100th anniversary of F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby" on Thursday, April 10. Unlike most places, though, Duluth has a concrete link to the classic novel: Our city is mentioned in the text.
It's in Duluth where the character James Gatz, newly rechristened Jay Gatsby by his own volition, gets outfitted with his first proper society attire: "a blue coat, six pairs of white duck trousers, and a yachting cap." ADVERTISEMENT In the early 20th century, Fitzgerald scholar Deborah Schlacks pointed out, Duluth would have been "considered a place of wealth, where you would go to get outfitted in a whole new, expensive wardrobe." In the novel, Gatsby and his mentor, Dan Cody, arrive in Duluth by yacht from "Little Girl Bay," a name possibly inspired by the real-life Little Girls Point on Michigan's Upper Peninsula just east of the Wisconsin border.
After Gatz-turned-Gatsby alerts Cody to a coming storm, the multimillionaire takes the young man under his wing. Gatsby had been "beating his way along the south shore of Lake Superior as a clam-digger and a salmon-fisher or in any other capacity that brought him food and bed" after leaving his native North Dakota, Fitzgerald informs us by way of narrator Nick Carraway. Salmon fishing, OK.
Clam digging? "I did kind of wonder about that," said Jennifer Jubenville, manager of The Bookstore at Fitger's. "I don't know that I've ever heard of people going clamming on Lake Superior." "The point is he's not making much money on those things," said Schlacks.
"James Gatz is just picking up odd jobs, and he's poor." Jay Gatsby, now one of the most iconic characters in American literature, goes on to acquire fabulous wealth and settle on Long Island, where "The Great Gatsby" is set. The character's pivotal Lake Superior sojourn still helps endear the book to local readers — when they discover it.
ADVERTISEMENT "I think that a lot of people have kind of forgotten about the Lake Superior connection," said Jubenville. However, "Minnesotans, in general, my experience has been, feel a possessiveness about Fitzgerald." Fitzgerald was born in St.
Paul in 1896, and though most of his life took him elsewhere, the author did spend a meaningful amount of time in Minnesota and set numerous stories among the state capital's moneyed elite. One likely inspiration for the fictional Dan Cody was the real-life Thomas F. Cole, whose 214-foot yacht Alvina was anchored in the Duluth Harbor when the 12-year-old Fitzgerald visited in 1909.
The yacht must have seemed particularly glamorous at the Duluth Boat Club's "Venetian Night," an event that took place while Fitzgerald was in town and would have been impossible to miss. "Over 140 boats were elaborately decorated for the occasion," reported the News Tribune, "and when they were led out into the bay and around Thomas F. Cole's yacht, the Alvina, brightly lighted from stem to stern for the occasion, they not faintly reproduced in the mind the pictures and descriptions of the luxuriously equipped craft with which the beautiful Cleopatra was wont to travel the Nile.
" It was a more glamorous era in Duluth, and a lingering nostalgia for the city's boom years may be one reason "Great Gatsby" themed parties remain common on the city's social scene. Jubenville is planning an April 10 event at The Boat Club, celebrating "Gatsby" with a menu fit for the novel's Roaring '20s setting. "We're going to have oysters, Rockefeller wedge salad, whiskey-glazed pork with duchess potatoes, which were big in 1920s dishes," said Jubenville, "and then 'death by chocolate.
'" There will also be "Gatsby" trivia and a costume contest. Meanwhile, the University of Wisconsin-Superior will host an April 10 discussion of the novel featuring Schlacks (professor emeritus of English) and Joel Sipress (professor of history). "I'm going to talk about some of the details on the reception of 'The Great Gatsby' through the years," said Schlacks, "and then emphasize how it relates to today.
" ADVERTISEMENT Schlacks elaborated. "The social issues of 100 years ago are still being replayed today. In some cases, we have the villain of the piece, Tom Buchanan, spouting lots of nationalist rhetoric.
And of course, we see a resurgence of that sort of thing today." Then there's the novel's more personal theme, that of self-invention. "I know that there's experts that say that it's about the American dream, or about how shallow money and possessions are," said Jubenville, "but I think it's more just the idea that (Gatsby) had that longing to reinvent himself.
" And where better to do so than the Zenith City of the Unsalted Seas? Duluth seems to have made an impression on the young Fitzgerald, although the author's understanding of the finer points of Great Lakes life remained a little fuzzy. Signs that the author conflated the Atlantic coast with the Superior shore include that odd mention of clam-digging, as well as the fact that an early draft of "Gatsby" had the title character saving Cody's yacht from a dangerous tide rather than the sudden wind cited in the book's final draft. ("A watchful editor" caught that slip, according to Dave Page and John Koblas in their book "F.
Scott Fitzgerald in Minnesota: Toward the Summit." Similarly watchful editors are now overseeing multiple different centennial editions of "Gatsby," including a lavish limited edition from The Folio Society.) Lake Superior even appeared in Baz Luhrmann's 2013 film adaptation of "The Great Gatsby," although the yacht incident takes on a somewhat more dramatic flavor there.
Instead of "resting on his oars and looking up at the (yacht's) railed deck" along the South Shore, as James Gatz does in the novel, Luhrmann has the future Gatsby rescuing Cody from a raging storm in view of what appears to be Split Rock Lighthouse on the North Shore. The fictional Gatsby was followed by a real character who came out of the Northland and reimagined his own identity: Bob Dylan, known around here as Bobby Zimmerman. Dylanologists were quick to take notice when, in 2001, Dylan released a song ("Summer Days") that borrows one of Gatsby's most memorable exclamations from the novel.
ADVERTISEMENT "She says, 'You can’t repeat the past,'" sings Dylan. "I say, 'You can’t? What do you mean, you can’t? Of course you can.'".
