The Diary: Sarah Churchwell

On Thursday, I arrive at the annual conference of the F Scott Fitzgerald Society, which this year is taking place in Ireland, in order to celebrate and explore Fitzgerald’s roots — otherwise known as a cheerfully transparent pretext for going somewhere fun and drinking Guinness while we talk about our favourite writer. Only PhD students pretend to believe that Fitzgerald’s Irish heritage is why we’re gathered in Waterford, and they go along with it only because they’re afraid it will hurt our feelings if they point out the truth.

On Twitter, the film journalist Scott Jordan Harris describes this gathering as “Fitzstock”, and suggests we should honour our subject by waking up collectively at 5am on a lawn in front of someone’s house. But even Fitzgerald generally indulged in such shenanigans only while enjoying summers that were not in Ireland. If we had tried sleeping on a lawn in Waterford this week, the world’s entire stockpile of F Scott Fitzgerald experts would have been wiped out in one fell swoop by pleurisy.

The next day I deliver a talk about the book I wrote on Fitzgerald, alongside the sweetest nonagenarian German Fitzgerald expert in the world. He tells me in front of the audience that he very much admired my book, except for the parts he didn’t admire, which he delineates carefully. His wife didn’t like those parts, either. But he is genuinely delightful, as are the rest of the world’s greatest Fitzgerald experts, from the nonagenarians all the way down to the octogenarians.

I’m sorry to report that there was no academic sniping, no one-upmanship, no brinkmanship, although the old cliché about academic battles being so vicious because the stakes are so low was invoked by one professor, only to be dismissed with contempt. He also revealed that it was said not by Henry Kissinger, as I always heard, but by a professor called Sayre, which was gratifying. This is why it can be worth hanging out with academics: some of them actually know stuff. I asked him for the source, and he told me he always thought it was Norman Mailer. He found the answer on Wikipedia.

. . .

Turning on the Wimbledon final on Sunday, I desperately want Federer to win, with the result that he doesn’t. (My magical thinking has serious mojo: stay back.) Usually I would be having a Wimbledon final party, consoling myself with pink champagne, but today I must remain unconsoled, as I am interviewing the author Judy Blume later this evening in London, and it wouldn’t do to turn up squiffy. (Some people think that turning up squiffy is de rigueur for academics, writers and Scott Fitzgerald experts alike — a triple threat — but such thinking is pretty much why Fitzgerald died at 44.)

As for Judy Blume, again I must report that she is astonishingly nice. I know reading this must be, as someone once said of working with Julie Andrews, like being smothered by a marshmallow, but I can’t help that none of these people had the decency to give me a good story by behaving badly. I have had a week full of bonhomie and good cheer. (Except, that is, for the Thameslink employee who charged a customer for a new fare when the customer missed his booked service because he had involuntarily witnessed a suicide.)

Judy tells me that she had feared I would be very academic, until she spoke to some mutual friends, and they assured her I could be as stupid as anyone. We demonstrate the truth of this by doing “junior birdmen” faces for the audience; Judy ups the ante by doing bust-increasing exercises (these go with the rhyme: “I must, I must, I must increase my bust”). It is all very highbrow. She is also the first author I have ever known to give the person who interviewed her on stage a gift: she brought me a gorgeous vintage Volupté compact mirror, a detail that features in her new novel. Note to future interviewees: the bar has been raised.

. . .

It’s been a peculiar week, culminating in the news that, after 16 years of commuting on the worst train service in Britain (a race to the bottom if ever there was one), I have left my former university and accepted a new position as chair of public understanding of the humanities at the School of Advanced Study, University of London. The news goes out on Twitter, prompting another journalist, David Aaronovitch, to inform his nearly 78,000 followers that if they are members of the public and don’t understand the humanities, I have arrived to help. I assure him that I will continue to research American literature, too, in addition to my supererogatory efforts at explaining the humanities. This feeble attempt at humour is promptly spiked by Autocorrect, which changes “supererogatory” to the infinitely funnier “superhero gators.” Autocorrect knows best: that’s why it’s called Autocorrect.

Illustration by Luke Waller