February 14, 2025, 1:57pm
The great F. Scott Fitzgerald has been stolen. Lifted. Carried away.
I should clarify; not the man himself. For all we know, the novelist’s cremains are still safe and sound at his final resting place in a Rockville cemetery. It’s a simulacrum we have to worry about.
A statue of the Long Island Jazz Bard (trademark pending) was “removed from outside a Minnesota building” where the author once attended school—a place formerly known as the St. Paul Academy.
The building’s current owner commissioned Aaron Dysart, a mixed media artist “fascinated with the intersection of the built and non-built environment,” to design the sculpture. I think it’s a fittingly placed tribute, given that Fitzgerald published some of his earliest work at St. Paul’s. But evidently, the town did not agree.
Runaway F. Scott was first reported missing two weeks back, on February 3rd. But the political will to find him did not reach fever pitch until a few days later.
And per a local police report, the perp apparently fetched the bolt-cutters. “The statue is believed to have been cut free.”
So we have the how, the who, the where. But—and picture a Columbo finger raised here—the why evades us. For what kind of fandom motivates someone to free a statue? I’m picturing the late great novelist perched in a bookstore’s back room, perhaps on a plinth of his own out-of-print lesser works.
Or maybe he’s made it into the custody of whatever diehards are responsible for the Jazz Age Lawn Party.
Then again, F. Scott, like his own bespoke Gatsby, had many enemies in life. Could this theft be the work of a Hemingway freak? Perhaps the midwestern branch of this society has a hazing ritual?
The artist is in the dark along with the rest of us.
“I’m still kind of processing, it just kind of comes as a shock that it’s gone,” Dysart told MPR. “I don’t even know what to think about it. So, on the one hand as a joke, I’m like, ‘Wow, somebody liked it as much enough to steal it.’ But who knows what happened to it?”
The building owner estimates that the statue, which is bronze, will cost about $40,000 to replace. (“The metal could fetch several hundred dollars at a scrap yard,” police suggest.) Though in a last poetic twist, one piece of the original lingers. Fitzgerald’s red right hand.
The thieves failed to free Fitzgerald’s HAND.
It’s a little beautiful. And a little damned.
Images via
