In Gatsby’s Shadow: The Story of Charles Macomb Flandrau
by Larry Haeg
University of Iowa Press
273 pages, $29.95
THIS IS the first published biography of Charles Flandrau, a novelist, critic, and short story writer for the Saturday Evening Post, called “the best essayist in America” by New Yorker drama critic Alexander Woollcott in 1935. Yet Flandrau is virtually forgotten today. He was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1871, and the shadow to which the author alludes in the book’s title is that of fellow Minnesotan F. Scott Fitzgerald. Other than a minor guest appearance in The Beautiful and the Damned, there is little, other than geography, to tie the two together.
Flandrau’s Harvard Episodes, published by Copeland and Day in 1897, two years after Oscar Wilde’s trial, is arguably the first “gay” novel about Harvard. And its style is archly Wildean, to wit: “‘What means this ghastly pomp and circumstance?’ ‘It means, my dear, that I have been to see two women whom I never met before,’ answered Tommy, daintily gathering his skirts about him and sitting down.” Harvard Episodes is full of alcohol-fueled adventures, drunken carousing, callous behavior (for which he was denounced by a number of reviewers), mean Cantabridgian landladies, sly digs at Boston Brahmins, and a noticeable lack of young, marriageable women. The novel, dedicated to his classmate Winthrop Ames, took shape when Flandrau was a staffer at the popular Youth’s Companion magazine, where he met Philip Henry Savage, who in turn introduced him to publishers Herbert Copeland and F. Holland Day. Each of these men merits much more than the few words of explanation that Haeg provides, and while he summarizes Harvard Episodes, a more detailed background would have been helpful. Ames became a well-known Broadway producer and director and, according to The New York Times of October 24, 1909, “is the arbiter of an American Comédie Française.” Savage (whose poetry was published by Copeland and Day) figures in James Gifford’s Dayneford’s Library: American Homosexual Writing, 1900–1913 (1995) as a member of Harvard’s homosexual circle. Copeland and Day are famous as major players in the early 20th century world of gay arts and letters. Gifford states that Harvard professor George Santayana—no stranger to gay circles himself—was slyly satirized in Harvard Episodes, but Haeg says that the portrayal was “fiendishly” unflattering. Douglass Shand-Tucci states in The Crimson Letter (2003) that Santayana recommended Harvard Episodes to those who wanted “to absorb the Harvard ambience of the 1890’s.” Flandrau came from a very wealthy family, and Haeg writes revealingly about it—the distant, uninvolved father, the all-too-close mother, and the various escapades in which Flandrau and his two brothers were involved. He began traveling as a child, first-class on ocean liners with innumerable trunks, and he continued to do so almost compulsively until a few years before his death. When he purchased an automobile, he added a chauffeur, William Clark, to his staff of servants. Haeg makes much of Flandrau’s “rumored homosexuality that made him a social outcast,” and says unequivocally that “Flandrau did not appear to be a practicing homosexual. … He remained a lifelong bachelor and, to all appearances, celibate and chaste.” One might ask how Haeg is so certain of this. For example, following his mother’s death after World War I, “he found a new, young companion … fresh out of Harvard [who appeared]at Flandrau’s doorstep”; and Flandrau and his chauffeur Clark were “never apart a single day” during the chauffeur’s first two-and-a-half-years. In fact, he and Clark (who later married and had a child) sometimes picked up hitchhiking sailors. Flandrau himself is quoted, after hearing about D. H. Lawrence’s rumored homosexuality, “What difference does it make, and who on earth nowadays gives a damn one way or the other?” Flandrau was a man of many prejudices and extreme misogyny, and was for much of his life a barely functioning alcoholic. Before his death in 1938, he managed to produce several more works, including collections of his essays, newspaper criticism, and the very well-received Viva Mexico! (1908), based on visits to his brother Blair’s vast coffee plantation and reprinted over a dozen times throughout the subsequent decades. In 1935 he published Sophomores Abroad. In a review on September 29, 1935, the Times quoted from Flandrau’s preface, in which he said that Harvard Episodes “enjoyed a succès de scandale,” because “it did not deal with Young Love and Athletics but stuck close to the truth … and called forth coldly reproving letters in the press.” Many of the facts in this biography come from the Flandrau family papers, which are housed at the Minnesota and Arizona historical societies. It appears, unfortunately, that Haeg did not consult any Harvard holdings. Harvard Episodes was turned into a two-act play called Fair Harvard by one Sam Brattle, and there are also letters to his friend, novelist Thomas Boyd, written during one of his ocean voyages. According to Haeg, Flandrau himself had burned a trunk of letters that he’d sent to his mother, and Flandrau’s brother John “for some reason destroyed all his family correspondence.” However, Haeg excels at describing Flandrau’s family and life at Harvard in general in the late 19th century. What’s missing is a sense of conviction on the author’s part that Flandrau is a figure who deserves to be remembered as an accomplished American writer who happened to be gay.
