In Gatsby's Shadow: The Story of Charles Macomb Flandrau

2. Travels with Rebecca

2 TRAVELS WITH REBECCA Willa Cather once said the formative years of a writer’s life are between eight and fifteen — the years when one’s values, attitude, and point of view gain focus. For Charles Flandrau, those years were 1880 to 1888. Fitzgerald and Lewis spent their “Cather years” as middle-class outsiders, nose to the window, performing for attention, with unempathetic parents who had little or no understanding of their sons’ passion for literary success. Their only path to success was the truly American one, the meritocracy. Their currency had to be hard work, no fear of failure, resiliency, boundless optimism, resolute selfcon fidence. They carried their own luggage. Young Charlie had valets, stewards, servants, and waiters; he learned how to tell if the caviar was fresh or salted. During a gilded era of transatlantic travel, his view of the world was shaped from the promenade deck: passenger manifests eagerly scanned, leatherbound luggage trunks packed with wardrobes , staterooms of porcelain and polished brass, waved good-byes as the liner slides from the pier, the thin pencil line of land finally disappearing as the floating hotel begins its solitary passage. Charlie absorbed it all: the salt smell of ocean spray, the moan of wind in the funnels, the heave and pitch and roll of the ship. And, of course, the solicitous stewards and pursers. May I be of some assistance, Mr. To pack, the curse of my young life, — packing. Charlie Flandrau’s diary, Europe, 1890 Flandrau? Rebecca directed him down this privileged path, trod by the lorgnette and monocle set, languid European aristocrats of the leisure class. Perspiration and effort were signs of weakness. Let someone else do the heavy lifting. In compensation — as a humanist and believer in the power of the intellect — she took an active, imaginative role in shaping his world. She channeled her intellectual energy into her three sons. “I have always found them much more interesting than girls,” she said of John, Charlie, and Blair. “Whatever other things I feel may not have been just in life, I will always sing a loud anthem of praise and hallelujia that mine were ‘three boys.’” Nothing was good enough for them, including periodic change of climate she believed had restorative powers. That was why she came to Minnesota in the first place. In late July 1880 she looked to Europe for the same reason. Sixteen-year-old John suffered from a severe respiratory ailment. Rebecca, frail herself but just as strong willed, decided to have him treated at the Continent’s fashionable health spas. That was, at least, a practical reason she could offer her husband, who had no taste for travel abroad and was preoccupied with the judiciary, civic affairs, and the family bank account in a male-dominated frontier society. Rebecca was among the procession of upper-middle-class women of leisure and means whose heads were filled with the alluring images and elegant phrasing of Henry James’s sophisticated European travel essays published in magazines such as the Nation in the 1870s. To tour Europe, as James offered it, was to earn a cultural badge of distinction . (He not only advised on what to see but how to see it: “I should perhaps do the reader a service by telling him just how a week in Perugia should be spent. His first care must be to ignore the very dream of haste, walking everywhere very slowly and very much at random.”) For Rebecca, however, Europe had deeper meaning. It was a way to bestow on her sons an ability to think independently and critically, to appreciate the finest in art and architecture that Europe had to offer, to prepare them for important things. So, she set out Jamesian style on a demanding six-month Grand Tour through Europe with John, eightyear -old Charlie, and five-year-old Blair in tow. They sailed on Cunard’s newest “floating palace,” the sleek Gallia, the “Ocean Greyhound ,” which could cross the perilous North Atlantic in only ten to fifteen days. Many years later Charlie vividly recalled the darkness and light — the steamship’s illuminated salons, the overhanging lamps that “swayed and stank,” the staterooms lit only by fat candles, T R AV E L S W I T H R E B E C CA 37 and after 10 P.M., when all candles were extinguished, total darkness on the rolling sea, “a...