After the Good Gay Times: Asheville-Summer of ’35 — A Season with F. Scott Fitzgerald

In the summer of 1935, Tony Buttitta was a young man crazy about authors, and he went to Asheville, North Carolina to open The Intimate Bookshop so he could be in Thomas Wolfe’s home town. One evening when he was working late, somebody from the hotel upstairs knocked on the glass door of the arcade shop; it was F. Scott Fitzgerald, awash with beer and looking for the men’s room. Buttitta recognized him from a photograph in Living Authors. The men’s room was locked, so he took his caller into the rose garden, where Fitzgerald talked and talked; then Fitzgerald invited him up to the ballroom and introduced him to his secretary, his “Dollar Woman”, while continuing the lecture. Later that evening Buttitta tried to set everything down, and in a fitting place: the blank end pages of Living Authors.

It was the time of Fitzgerald’s crack-up, “after the good gay times,” when he was lonely, despondent, and consumed with a desire to talk. All summer Buttitta listened Fitzgerald’s boasts and confessions, to tales of his life with Zelda, to lectures on writing and diatribes against the proletarian novelists. He followed the course of two Fitzgerald love affairs, one of them truly outlandish and recorded here for the first time. He made notes on what he head and saw – usually on the flyleaves of books from his personal collection – so that when he came to retell the story nearly forty years later, it all came vividly to mind.

After the Good Gay Times is a fascinating and touching book, not only for what it contributes to the Fitzgerald saga, but also for its picture of Asheville in a forgotten time and for its sidelong revelation of Tony Buttitta, the eager, honest young Sicilian from Louisiana who admired authors and wanted to be one himself.