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The Great Gatsby: A Variorum EditionSave Me the WaltzGatsby's Oxford: Scott, Zelda, and the Jazz Age Invasion of Britain: 1904–1929F. Scott Fitzgerald's Short Fiction: From Ragtime to Swing Time

2019; Penn State University Press; Volume: 17; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/fscotfitzrevi.17.1.0248

1755-6333

Kirk Curnutt,

American Sports and Literature

With James L. W. West III's The Great Gatsby: A Variorum Edition, the Cambridge Edition of the Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald officially comes to a close after eighteen volumes across twenty-eight years. As scholars well know, the Herculean effort that has gone into the series has standardized texts whose original book and/or periodical appearances were riddled with typos and spelling errors; provided illuminating annotations of the more obscure references Fitzgerald sowed into his texts; made conveniently available essays and short stories relegated to out-of-print sources; and clarified composition histories whose details are scattered all too often among a horizon-wide variety of correspondence, drafts, tear sheets, and galleys. Although the Cambridge Edition does not claim to gather every scrap of ephemera known to exist—as West acknowledges elsewhere, the estate continues to decline to reprint five stories deemed inferior (LK xviii; Curnutt 247)—the series nevertheless demonstrates the continued importance of textual scholarship and editing. Considering that efforts are under way only now for establishing similarly reliable texts for Ernest Hemingway as Robert W. Trogdon edits an edition of The Sun Also Rises (1926) for the Library of America, the past three decades seem to have put Fitzgerald ahead of many of his fellow modernists. As the editor of the series since 1994—his first volume was This Side of Paradise in 1995—West deserves immense appreciation and gratitude; his closing reflections on the challenges the series has posed to him professionally and personally for roughly half of his prestigious career appear in this issue of the Fitzgerald Review and offer quite an education for those who have no clue why we worry whether Wolfshiem is i before e or whether we can quantify what Fitzgerald simply “polished” in collaborative efforts with his wife, Zelda Fitzgerald, in pieces with shared bylines such as “Show Mr. and Mrs. F. to Number—'” (1934; MLC 116–29) or “Auction—Model 1934” (1934; MLC 157–62).As West notes, four out of the eighteen volumes of the Cambridge Edition offer different versions of Gatsby: Matthew J. Bruccoli's 1991 series kickoff, which controversially argued for correcting factual inaccuracies Fitzgerald mistakenly slipped into the text (more on that below); the version Scribner's typeset in late 1924 before Fitzgerald performed a transformative revision at the suggestion of Maxwell Perkins who elevated the storyline from a “novel of manners” into a “near-perfect work of art” (xiii), which West published in 2000 under the title Trimalchio after a character in Petronius's Satyricon; the earliest-known manuscript version of the text that is perhaps most remarkable for including a scene in which Jay Gatsby breaks out into song (GGMs 92), published in 2018 as The Great Gatsby: An Edition of the Manuscript and assessed in detail in last year's Fitzgerald Review (Curnutt); and this edition, which, apropos of the definition of the Latin phrase “cum notis variorum” (literally, “with various notes”) collates textual differences both large and small that have crept into the text throughout the nearly ninety-five years it has been in print. “The aim of the variorum is twofold,” West writes in his characteristically straightforward introduction, “to set forth the textual history of The Great Gatsby after its first publication, and to provide an authoritative text for teachers, scholars, critics, and readers” (xi).There is a widespread feeling throughout Fitzgerald studies that, while no one would seriously argue that Gatsby is not the author's masterpiece, its cultural prominence overshadows other novels, stories, and nonfiction worthy of critical attention. Accordingly, it is worth asking whether the field is really crying out for yet another version of James Gatz's tragic rise and fall. As West insists, though, the need to catalogue and measure the impact of emendations, variants, accidentals, and substantives (all precise technical terms in the world of textual studies) to establish an “authoritative text” is vital for a very simple reason: “Since 1941 editors have attempted to improve the text of The Great Gatsby. The result has been mixed. It has been my intention to give control of the text back to Fitzgerald” (xi). Yet as West acknowledges, no author completely controls his or her text—especially not one who has been dead for just shy of eighty years. Creating even the semblance of an “intentionalist edition” meant to “capture Fitzgerald's intentions and expectations for the novel” (xiv) requires a great deal of principled reasoning, a good dose of common sense, some noninvasive guesswork, and even a little luck. At all points throughout the introduction, West defends the rationale behind his editorial approach and makes a persuasive case for the judiciousness of his decisions.The perception still lingers in literary studies that among all the existing schools of analysis textual scholarship ranks as the least sexy (to use a decidedly nontechnical term). Continental theorists can become adjectival eponyms (Derridean, Lacanian, and de Manian) by riffing through long, circuitous labyrinths of rumination on weighty topics such as “the death of meaning,” the formidable gravity of their theories often indistinguishable from the funhouse-mirror reflection of their intellectual charisma. New Historicists like the late Sacvan Bercovitch achieve fame by fixating on facts in obscure documents and upending whole centuries of conventional wisdom. Even the now largely dismissed formalists could dissect patterns of imagery or symbolism with the athleticism of trapeze artists and attain rock-star levels of notoriety for their vigor and creativity.Textual scholars, meanwhile, remain as misunderstood as accountants, often dismissed as bean counters and abacus users. Yet any lover of literature still harboring such prejudices would do well to read Fredson Bowers's classic essay “Textual Criticism” (1963), in which he famously dismantled a portentous reading of a line in Herman Melville's White-Jacket (1849) by the sage F. O. Matthiessen in the text often considered the Holy Scripture of formalism, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (1941). Matthiessen had waxed eloquently on the “discordia concors” that Melville achieved by describing a “soiled fish of the sea” (329), only to have Bowers point out that the phrase was actually “coiled fish of the sea,” and that the typo soiled was committed by a hapless, anonymous typesetter, not a literary genius (24; see Melville 393, 449–50). Bowers was not the first critic to point out this gaffe in American Renaissance (see Nichol, which predates by a year Matthiessen's 1950 suicide), but his stern chiding of the critic became the classic example of how flawed texts invite laughably erroneous readings. Generations of textual scholars have since justified their existence on the basis of this one slip—and rightly so. Although no Fitzgerald scholar appears to have committed any mistake cited as often as Matthiessen's—it was not as if every edition of White Jacket mistook soiled for coiled—West's introduction testifies to the need for a version of Gatsby that reassures the reader of its reliability, no matter if big-picture audiences are apt to dismiss the itemizing of errata as splitting hairs or counting angels on the head of a pin.As he also notes, derivations are not always the product of typos or misprints. Shortly after Fitzgerald died in 1940, the man he described as his “intellectual conscience” (MLC 148), Edmund Wilson, edited Gatsby to include it alongside the author's final, uncompleted novel The Last Tycoon and a handful of stories (1941). Many of Wilson's “corrections” were ill-informed: it was thanks to his interventionist handiwork that “Wolfshiem” became “Wolfsheim” and “orgastic” in the novel's final, euphoric paragraph was transformed into “orgiastic.” As West notes, only years later, in 1965, did Wilson admit that this latter tweak was the product of his rather condescending assumption that his deceased friend, never a conscientious speller, must have dropped the i (xxviii). In fact, Fitzgerald had specifically lectured Maxwell Perkins when proofing the novel via correspondence that “orgastic” is the adjectival form of “orgasm” and to leave the word be (Life in Letters 94).Equally egregiously, Wilson's The Last Tycoon, An Unfinished Novel, Together with The Great Gatsby and Selected Stories excised from Gatsby its dedication and epigraph, two paratextual frames that since the book's 1925 publication have enjoyed their own renown as some of the most famous examples of these devices (xxxvi–xxxvii). Fitzgerald took the unusual initiative of writing his own epigraph under a pseudonym, crediting with a curious metafictional flair its poetic stanza about a “gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover” to Thomas Parke D'Invilliers, a character in his debut novel, This Side of Paradise. No less than Gertrude Stein, meanwhile, had praised the dedication to Fitzgerald's wife (“Once Again/to Zelda”) as demonstrating that the writer possessed “a background of beauty and tenderness and that is a comfort” in a letter that Wilson himself would shortly include in his 1945 edition of The Crack-Up, published by New Directions (308). Exactly who ordered the axing of the epigraph and dedication remains a mystery—whether Wilson or someone at Scribner's is lost to history—but the consequences were long-running. As West reports, “Seven subsequent editions of The Great Gatsby, all of which derive from the 1941 [Wilson-edited] Scribner edition, omit the epigraph. These seven editions, and two more that derive from the 1941 text, omit the dedication” (xxxvii). The deletions ineluctably changed the reading experience for generations as much as changing “orgastic” to “orgiastic.”The other edition controversial for advocating for “correcting” Fitzgerald is the white elephant in the introduction. The apparatus to Bruccoli's 1991 edition, as West deferentially puts it, “devotes much attention to readings that involve external fact” (xlviii). Fitzgerald used the word “retinas” while describing the giant, billboard eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg when he should have said “irises” (retinas “are at the back of the eyeball” and “would not be visible in the painted rendering on the billboard,” West explains [xvii]); the author also described a journey across the Queensboro Bridge as commencing in Astoria instead of Long Island City, its actual starting point, a discrepancy that his friend and fellow writer Ring Lardner pointed out to Scribner's upon reading the page proofs (xvii–xviii). Bruccoli wanted to correct these errors, but his fellow trustees of the Fitzgerald Estate vetoed his proposal. As a result, as The Chronicle of Higher Education reported in 1994 with all the gossipy verve of The New York Post's Page Six, “a man whose name is inseparable from Fitzgerald studies, whose friendship with the writer's late daughter he counts as among the most precious of his life,” announced his “unwelcome departure” from the Cambridge Edition with at what the time felt like all the seismic repercussions of “Jeffrey Katzenberg quitting Disney” (Heller A10–A11). Sides were taken, collegial relationships were severed, and any hope that Bruccoli would even from a distance lend his significant stature and charisma to helping grow the F. Scott Fitzgerald Society (he had already declined an invitation to serve as president when the group was founded in 1991) shrunk to infinitesimal. West is both discreet and generous in not rehashing the contretemps, even though it is regularly cited in textual-studies textbooks as indicative of the field's high stakes and simmering tensions. A footnote directs readers to Bruccoli's gauntlet-throwing essay “Getting It Right: The Publishing Process and the Correction of Factual Errors—with Reference to The Great Gatsby” (1991), and West points out that as of February 2017 the 1991 Cambridge Edition is “in its sixteenth impression” (xlix), no small testament to its influence, especially for a book that retails for $118 in hardback. As West's essay in this issue of the Review states, Bruccoli's edition “will remain available” alongside this variorum.The discussion of the 1991 Cambridge Edition flashes through so many details—including the fact that “the base text [the original 1925 edition] has been emended more than 1,600 times” (xlviii)—that it is easy to pass over an intriguing passage on the factual surgery Bruccoli campaigned to make: “None of these readings [irises, Long Island City] is emended in the text of the first six impressions of the Cambridge 1991. The seventh and eight impressions, both published in 1998, contain silent emendations. … These alterations … were later removed and are no longer present in the text” (xlix). West does not explain how these changes crept into these impressions of the 1991 Cambridge Edition some four years after Bruccoli's resignation. One senses a mystery that highlights a greater point that makes textual studies a practice straight out of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle or Raymond Chandler: tracing emendations back from their printed appearance to the hand that made those changes is a form of detective work. Not for nothing are the sources that a textual scholar consults for clues called “witnesses” (xix). They include any available version of the work, from a holograph manuscript to corrections/alterations an author may pencil into his or her own copy of a final product. (In case an enterprising creative writer is suddenly inspired to develop a series of murder mysteries starring some such team of textual sleuths—say, Bruccolock Holmes and his sidekick, Dr. Westson—we should note that it has been done: William of Baskerville and Adso of Melk in Umberto Eco's Il nome della rosa [1980; translated as The Name of the Rose in 1983] are probably the duo set in the earliest historical period, their fourteenth-century interrogations of scriptorium copyists in Italy predating the Gutenberg era by a century.)West has indeed assembled an impressive witness list. Most aficionados have likely heard about the 1934 Modern Library edition (xxxiv) even if they have never actually handled a copy. They have probably read, too, about the 1945 Armed Services Edition whose print run of 154,663 was roughly five times bigger than the number of copies printed during Fitzgerald's lifetime (xxxix). But even hard-core fans may not know about Modern Standard Authors: Three Novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald (1953), a “greatest hits” compilation that packages a Malcolm Cowley–edited version of Gatsby with the reordered version of Tender Is the Night that Cowley published in 1951 (the novel was originally published in 1934, of course) and The Last Tycoon (xxxvii–xxxviii), or about Jeffrey Meyers's edition for the British publisher Dent in 1993, one year before his biography of Fitzgerald appeared (xlix).Throughout a ten-year period from 2007 to 2017, West assiduously compared two dozen different versions of the book, line by line, using the first impression of the original 1925 Gatsby as the “control text” (xxxi). The project seems almost superhuman in discipline considering West's description: “The two texts have been set alongside one another; the collator has compared the words and punctuation marks (the substantives and accidentals); the variants have been recorded” (xxx). And while West explains his approach with the utmost clarity by helpfully defining for the reader important publishing terms such as edition, subedition, and impression, he also inadvertently reveals that not all descriptors in the field are technical: for different editions or copies produced by separate typesettings, he compared every word, punctuation mark, and section break through what in the profession is known as the “‘head-wagging’ method” (xxx). At least for different impressions of the same edition (copies made from the same typesetting plates, or, in the case of a subedition, of a copy of those plates) he allowed himself the use of a machine known as the Lindstrand Comparator, which sounds like the title of a Robert Ludlum novel. Instead, this “lightweight optical device … allows the operator visually to superimpose the image of a page from one impression upon the image of the same page from another impression” to look for differences, including stray markings known as “type batter” (xxxi).Again, nonspecialists may wonder whether all this effort is worthwhile given West's report in his third paragraph that “[t]his investigation has uncovered no variants upon which the interpretation of the novel pivots” (xi). Yet textual gaffes do not need to be glaring to be significant. All of the changes remind us that texts are human products and therefore subject both to polar extremes of overthinking and whim in the production process. One wonders, for example, what editorial hand at Bantam, which issued a mass commercial paperback in 1945, decided in sometime before March 1951 as it printed its fourth impression of the text that allowing Mrs. McKee to refer to her almost marrying a “kike” (or “kyke” in the Scribner 1925 [41]) was inappropriate and softened her racism to a laughable “guy” (Gatsby [1945] 41). Or what anonymous blue pencil at Penguin in 1950 corrected one instance of Wolfshiem saying “sid” (Fitzgerald's approximation of a Yiddish accent) to “said”—as was done consistently in Wilson's 1941 edition (xxxviii; Last Tycoon 83, 205)—yet let the second instance stand (xliii; Gatsby [1950] 83, 205). Or how these changes were effectively reversed in Scribner's 2000 edition of the novel, where “the first ‘sid’ is preserved, but the second ‘sid’ has become ‘said’” (l, Gatsby [2000] 69, 171). Never mind that Fitzgerald clarified to Scribner's he wanted Wolfshiem to say “sid” (Life in Letters 94). The inconsistencies reveal that eyes are unreliable if not untrustworthy—though whether that is the fault of irises or retinas is perhaps best left unasked, considering the controversy they have already sparked.In outlining his editorial principles, West also offers ten “cruxes” or test cases of potential changes for readers to test where on the scale of textual intervention they, too, might land. Some of the possibilities, if acted upon, would seem heretical indeed. Would any edition of The Great Gatsby really retitle it “Under the Red, White, and Blue,” as Fitzgerald proposed in a 19 March 1925 cable to Maxwell Perkins, only three weeks before his third novel's publication? (Life in Letters 98). Let us hope not—although Bruccoli did hint at such a possibility in 1974 when he kicked off a short-lived series called South Carolina Apparatus for Definitive Editions (SCADE) with the University of South Carolina Press with an installment called Apparatus for F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (Under the Red, White, and Blue) (xlvi–xlvii). West is emphatic: “There is no reason to contemplate a change for the title of the novel for the variorum” (xxxiii).He does, however, change Fitzgerald's reference to the “Sealbach Hotel” to its proper spelling, the “Seelbach,” a correction made doubly tricky because impressions of the novel from the first edition cite the hotel where Tom and Daisy marry as the “Muhlbach,” itself a misprision of the Muehlebac Hotel, which is located in Kansas City, not Louisville (Gatsby [1925] 91). One may wonder whether an editor should correct this factual error given West's opposition to Bruccoli's changes on the grounds that “Fitzgerald was a romantic fabulist, not a realist,” and that “his writings do not need to be absolutely congruent with reality” (xvii). The difference in this case is that Fitzgerald corrected the erroneous reference to the “Muhlbach” to “Sealbach” in pencil in his personal copy of the novel (xxiv), although the change did not make it into print (with the spelling corrected) for upwards of six decades until the 1991 Cambridge Edition (Gatsby [1991] 60). Cowley incorporated several of Fitzgerald's personal changes into his version of the text in Three Novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald, but, strangely, let the reference to the “Muhlbach” stand (58). In keeping with his intentionalist aim, West argues a change is merited. That is good news for both Louisville and Kentucky in general, which heavily promote the connection between Fitzgerald and the Seelbach—even though Gatsby is not the only text in which he confused the two hotels. (The typescript of his 1929 New Yorker essay “A Short Autobiography” also transplants the “Muhlbach” to Daisy Buchanan's hometown [MLC 249].) As West implies, had the writer added “irises” and “Long Island City” in pencil to his copy of the novel, he would support those changes as well (xviii).One might pose an even more pressing hypothetical. As is well known, Fitzgerald parodies Lothrop Stoddard's racist screed The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy (1920) when in chapter 1 of Gatsby the lunkheaded Tom Buchanan touts “‘The Rise of the Colored Empires’ by this man Goddard” (16). With our own era's alarming increase in white-supremacist terrorism, Stoddard has become a hot topic. His influence on baleful notions of the United States as a devoutly “white” country is discussed in depth in the recent riveting account in The New Yorker of a debate between the race theorist and W. E. B. DuBois in which Stoddard “was more or less laughed off the stage” (Frazier); more relevantly, his arguments are also dissected by Sarah Churchwell in her excellent book Behold America: The Entangled History of “America First” and the American Dream (2018) and her September 2019 follow-up takedown of nativism in The New York Review of Books (“American Immigration”). No contemporary discussion of Stoddard like Churchwell's can fail to note the Fitzgerald connection (Behold America 130–32)—or the fact that The Rising Tide of Color was also published by Scribner's and that The Saturday Evening Post heartily endorsed its crackpot claims (Gidley 172).Given Stoddard's prominence in the 1920s, it has never been clear why Fitzgerald rather transparently dubbed him “Goddard.” Did he believe his publisher would never sanction a direct attack on a writer whose tract, however noxious, had generated more profits than any Fitzgerald book? Or did he confuse Stoddard with the somewhat less notorious eugenicist Henry H. Goddard, as some critics suggest? (Decker 65). Given the importance of historicizing the current immigration debate within the long history of American nativism—the goal of Churchwell's study—would “correcting” the reference not help debunk festering presumptions of racial superiority used to justify border walls and blanket dismissals of “shithole countries”? Perhaps, but most textual scholars would argue that doing so falls outside of the purview of the discipline. As West states, changes to a text “should be likened to the stabilization, cleaning, and restoration of a work of art that has deteriorated over time, not to a full-scale intervention that alters that work in a significant way” (xi). As much as we might want to foreground the role of Gatsby in consigning The Rising Tide of Color to the dustbin of history, such activism cannot be done at the expense of the text's integrity.As West concludes, stabilizing the textual history of Gatsby is a pressing concern for one major reason: in just about a year's time, on 1 January 2021, the novel will enter the public domain. “From that date forward,” he writes, “any American publisher will be free to issue an edition of the novel; any editor will be free to examine the extant evidence and construct a text” (li). Whether publishers take the time and effort to construct a reliable edition is a worrisome prospect. If the textual histories of Fitzgerald's 1920–1922 writings since they entered the public domain in the late 1990s are any indication, we are about to be deluged with corrupted versions, whether print, digital, or some future medium. The variorum is thus a propitious addition to scholarship that ensures scholarly security during what will inevitably become a bumpy time of proliferation.As central as the variorum will prove to Fitzgerald studies, West's final Cambridge entry is not the only significant new edition this past year. In the United Kingdom, the upstart publisher Handheld Books has produced a new paperback version of Save Me the Waltz that is both handsomely designed and conveniently priced for classroom purposes. The 2019 F. Scott Fitzgerald Society Newsletter includes an essay by Handheld founder Kate McDonald who details the imprimatur's one-woman rise while explaining how Zelda Fitzgerald's 1932 novel could be reprinted in the United Kingdom now that the author has been deceased for seventy years. Of course, Bruccoli in 1992 published Zelda Fitzgerald: The Collected Writings, which includes Waltz (1–196), and ebooks of the novel have been available since 2013. Yet none of these editions includes explanatory notes, which are particularly helpful for a novel laden with literary allusions, flora and fauna, and ballet terminology. McDonald's back matter defines the type of rose known as “the Dorothy Perkins” (254), offers capsule biographies of forgotten figures such as Lillian Lorraine (255) and Raquel Meller (261), and distinguishes “jetés” from “pas de chat” (261–62). The notes are illuminating but not invasive to the reading experience, again making the text ideal for students.The real attraction in this edition, however, is the introduction by Erin E. Templeton. A recent addition to the ranks of Fitzgerald scholars—her paper on transatlantic feminism in Save Me the Waltz was one of the highlights of the 2019 Toulouse conference—she brings a fresh perspective to the book informed by recent developments in modernist studies. (Templeton is also a former student of West's, and it shows in both her rigor and clarity.) Since Mary Gordon wrote the preface to Collected Writings thirty years ago, a great deal of scholarship has emerged on Zelda Fitzgerald's semiautobiographical story of an Alabama belle (named Alabama, of course) who rebels against the confines of marriage to become, briefly, a ballet dancer. Templeton updates Gordon's comments by acknowledging more recent work by The New Yorker's Meryl Cates, Susan Castillo, and Deborah Pike, whose book-length study, The Subversive Art of Zelda Fitzgerald (2017), demonstrates that a market exists for monographs on Zelda Fitzgerald. She does so, too, while maintaining an accessible voice for the general reader: her explanation of how schizophrenia became the diagnosis du jour for women “whose symptoms might include disordered thinking, blunted affect, ambivalence and the preoccupation with one's own thoughts” recognizes the gender bias in the psychoanalytic concept of the “split mind” without belaboring the obvious sexism (xii). The great challenge of discussing Save Me the Waltz, of course, is balancing the necessary acknowledgment of its biographical genesis and the marital tensions it sparked between the Fitzgeralds with a useful close reading of its themes and style. To ignore the former is to allow an insufficiently prepared reader to wander into a text notoriously dense with metaphors and images that are usually politely dismissed as “idiosyncratic,” a code word, frankly, that implies the novel's peculiarity can be traced directly to its author's fragile mental state. To ignore the latter, though, is to deny Save Me the Waltz its own aesthetic integrity, subjugating it to the Fitzgerald legend and rendering it a novelty, a sort of lesser companion to Tender Is the Night. Templeton gives equal attention to these twin imperatives, resulting in an introduction that accomplishes just what such prefatory matter should: it sets a context for what follows.The commentary is especially helpful with genre classification. Templeton notes that the novel has traditionally been read as a roman à clef, though several core details depart significantly from the biographical record: “David Knight is a painter while F. Scott Fitzgerald was a writer, and Alabama must stop dancing because of blood poisoning, while Zelda's dancing career ended because of mental illness” (xviii). As Catherine Delesalle-Nancey also notes in her essay in this issue of the Review, Zelda declined an opportunity to perform a solo role in the San Carlo Opera Ballet Company's production of Aida in 1929, unlike Alabama Beggs, who dances in Faust (202–3). Even more important than the “novel with a key,” Templeton distinguishes the Bildungsroman (the “novel of maturation” [xviii]) from the kuntslerroman (the “novel about the maturation of an artist” [xix]). As she details, Gordon dubbed the novel a “kind of jazz Bildungsroman” (Collected Writings xxi), an invented term summarized by Templeton as “focus[ing] on the sensual details over psychological speculation” (xviii). But that designation, Templeton notes, undervalues the heroine's “struggle for self-expression and self-realization” through her chosen medium, as well as the “means to an end” it provides for economic independence (xx). Similarly, classifying Save Me the Waltz as a kuntslerroman best captures Zelda's own hope in writing the book of establishing artistic and financial independence from her famous husband—a hope that was short-lived when her 1,392 copies sold earned her a paltry $120.73 (xvii).Additionally, Templeton provides a sterling explanation of the dense style, noting how Zelda's traditionally derided “lush descriptions” are a viable tool for conveying the “emotional tenor” of scenes (xxi). Most modernists avoided feeling by employing techniques that depersonalized their prose and poetry; many of these authors even socialized in the Fitzgeralds' circle. Significantly, F. Scott Fitzgerald, so c