Close to the beginning of Edith Wharton’s 1917 novel, Summer, readers will find a passing reference to “an illustrated lecture on the Holy Land” attended by the novel’s main character, Charity Royall:
What, she wondered, did North Dormer look like to people from other parts of the world? She herself had lived there since the age of five, and had long supposed it to be a place of some importance. But about a year before, Mr. Miles, the new Episcopal clergyman at Hepburn, who drove over every other Sunday—when the roads were not ploughed up by hauling—to hold a service in the North Dormer Church, had proposed, in a fit of missionary zeal, to take the young people down to Nettleton to hear an illustrated lecture on the Holy Land.…11xEdith Wharton, Summer (New York, NY: D. Appleton and Company, 1917), 9.
A few pages later, Charity remarks that she liked the pictures but that the big words the lecturer used confused her, making the outing less fun than it might otherwise have been.
Here, as she often did, Wharton pulled an incidental slice of reality into her novel to add a light touch of ready-made verisimilitude to her fiction. Through a serendipitous entwining of accident and happenstance, I know the identity of the lecturer, the once very popular John Lawson Stoddard, whom she did not see fit to name.
Does knowing the identity of this flesh-and-blood lecturer aid an understanding of Summer, a book that looms with tenebrous plot-line possibilities the more one ponders it? Not really. Does it shed much light on the inner fictive life of Charity Royall that Wharton was just beginning to paint? Hardly. The most one may reasonably claim is that mentioning an illustrated Holy Land lecture added cultural background to Wharton’s literary portrait by alluding to a rich and familiar theme in nineteenth-century British and American fiction. That theme, Christian proto-Zionism, plays in a major key in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876) and Benjamin Disraeli’s Tancred (1847) and in a satirical arpeggio in Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad (1869), to name just a few instances.
Identifying the “Holy Land” lecturer who Wharton popped into Summer, despite that man’s once-outsized and still-lingering fame in 1917, would fail to rate more than a discursive footnote were it not for the fact that this lecturer had a son who, like his father, became a household name, a son who, it happens, would appear in the opening pages of a later novel: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald inserted the son as Wharton had eight years earlier inserted the father, although with a slight twist. While Wharton chose a wholly anonymous approach, Fitzgerald employed a lightly disguised pseudonym in his novel. Soon into the story, one of Fitzgerald’s several ignoble characters, Tom Buchanan, declares:
“Civilization’s going to pieces,” broke out Tom violently. “I’ve gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read ‘The Rise of the Colored Empires’ by this man Goddard?
“Why, no,” I answered, rather surprised by his tone.
“Well, it’s a fine book, and everybody ought to read it. The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be—will be utterly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved.”
The insertions of this father-son duo into American literature by two of the greatest modern American novelists floats somewhere between the salutary and the sublime. It is salutary because the weaving of history and literature bears witness to the truth that only in fiction can some of the deeper patterns of human history and nature be wholly expressed.
It is sublime for two reasons, the first by way of irony. Wharton and Fitzgerald were harbingers and, in a way, prophets of what twentieth-century American modernity would look and feel like. Each made cryptic reference to a man of Brahmin New England stock, the father, John Stoddard, thirty-three years older than the son, Theodore Lothrop Stoddard—appropriately coincidental, since Wharton (1862–1937) was thirty-four years older than Fitzgerald (1896–1940)—who, to understate the matter, were not in the least admirers of the developing qualities of that modernity.
The second reason functions as the third side of the historical-literary triangle here taking shape: Fitzgerald probably did not know or have any reason to care about the identity of Wharton’s “Holy Land” lecturer in Summer, assuming he had read it, when he was writing Gatsby; but Wharton, having received and read a warmly inscribed copy of Gatsby from Fitzgerald on publication, in the spring of 1925, may well have realized that Fitzgerald’s “Goddard” was her lecturer’s son. Wharton answered Fitzgerald with some comments, a few laudatory, one critical, about the book, but the Stoddards, being such a peripheral part of the Wharton-Fitzgerald story, rated no mention. So we cannot know for sure. In that same letter, Wharton used a postscript to invite the Fitzgeralds to tea.22xThe Letters of Edith Wharton, ed. R.W.B. Lewis and Nancy Lewis (New York, NY: Collier, 1988), 481–482. The text of the June 8, 1925, letter is also reprinted in full in R.W.B. Lewis, “‘We Can Still Save Fiction in America,’” New York Times Book Review, April 24, 1988; https://www.nytimes.com/1988/04/24/books/we-can-still-save-fiction-in-america.html.
In any event their personal relationship did not blossom. The tea was captured well by the late Nancy Caldwell Sorel, who noted that two years earlier, when the two writers had been coincidentally visiting the Charles Scribner’s Sons publishing house at the same time, Fitzgerald barged into an office where Wharton was engaged in conversation “and knelt in obeisance at her feet.”33xNancy Caldwell Sorel, “When F. Scott Fitzgerald Met Edith Wharton,” The Independent, December 8, 1995; https://www.the-independent.com/life-style/when-f-scott-fitzgerald-met-edith-wharton-1524911.html. By so doing, Fitzgerald revealed how much he revered Wharton’s art, fame (Wharton became, in 1921, the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for literature), and high social connections. Some have surmised that Fitzgerald was particularly influenced by Wharton’s novel The Spark (published in 1924) as he wrote Gatsby.44xSee Michael A. Peterman, “A Neglected Source for The Great Gatsby: The Influence of Edith Wharton’s The Spark,” The Canadian Review of American Studies vol. 8, no. 1 (Spring 1977). So when Wharton invited him to tea at Le Pavillon Colombe, her estate outside of Paris, just after Gatsby was released into the wild, he was both charmed and apprehensive.
Alas, Fitzgerald prepared poorly. After Zelda refused to go lest she be made to “feel provincial,” Fitzgerald took a Wharton family friend, Teddy Chanler, with him. On the drive to Wharton’s residence Fitzgerald forgot to take his own sage advice: “First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, and then the drink takes you.” He got hammered, and on arrival started blabbering about a naive American couple in Paris who for three days supposedly mistook a bordello for a hotel. Fitzgerald counted on audacity to charm Wharton, but she expressed only irritation at the lack of narrative granularity—just as she had in her letter of June 8—thus overtrumping Fitzgerald’s attempt at audacity by replying playfully, “But Mr. Fitzgerald, you haven’t told us what they did in the bordello.” As Sorel concluded, so will we: “We are left with Edith Wharton’s version, summed up in her diary: ‘To tea, Teddy Chanler and Scott Fitzgerald, the novelist—awful.’”55xNancy Caldwell Sorel, “When F. Scott Fitzgerald Met Edith Wharton.” In their Letters of Edith Wharton, the editors relate the story of the ill-fated tea, which is mostly likely where Sorel learned of it