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Last Kiss The Great Gatsby The Great Gatsby: An Edition of the Manuscript

2018; Penn State University Press; Volume: 16; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/fscotfitzrevi.16.1.0234

1755-6333

Kirk Curnutt,

American Sports and Literature

After twenty-seven years and seventeen volumes to date, the Cambridge Edition of the Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald is coming to a close. Last Kiss and The Great Gatsby: An Edition of the Manuscript are the antepenultimate and penultimate entries, respectively. In 2019, there will be a concluding eighteenth volume, a variorum edition of Fitzgerald's most famous novel that receives a useful preview with this year's new trade edition from Scribner featuring a warm and embracing Introduction from two-time National Book Award-winner Jesmyn Ward, the author of Salvage the Bones (2011) and Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017). In something of a melancholy but inevitably controversial manner, the variorum edition will bring the Cambridge Edition full circle by superseding Matthew J. Bruccoli's polarizing 1991 edition as the standard or sanctioned version of the 1925 classic. The circumstances that led to James L. W. West III replacing Bruccoli as the editor of the Cambridge Series after The Love of the Last Tycoon in 1993 are well-known and often respectfully sidestepped by Fitzgerald fans out of respect for both scholars; we will revisit the contentious story one final time next year when The F. Scott Fitzgerald Review assesses the culminating Gatsby, but suffice it to say it remains a case study in ongoing debates about editorial principles and who has the right to decide the boundaries of "correcting" textual problems and determining authorial intent. For now, we focus on the value of Ward's introduction and on the contribution of the manuscript edition West and Princeton University's Don C. Skemer have made available this year both in print and online to our understanding of the novel. We also survey the contents of Last Kiss, which might paradoxically be described as a "crucial grab bag." It gathers some of the more ephemeral Fitzgerald works that completists have scampered to track down over the decades, sparing us having to comb the Internet or utilize Interlibrary Loan for obscure publications such as Motor or Interim.Ward is both a surprising and strategic choice for introducing the new trade edition. She joined the Scribner fold in 2016 with her edited essay collection The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks about Race, which features contributions from a leading array of multicultural writers, including Natasha Trethewey, Edwidge Danticat, and Honorée Fanonne Jeffers; so she is connected by imprimatur to the ghosts of Maxwell Perkins's "sons." As an African American woman, her advocacy is important to stressing the universal appeal of Gatsby and insulating it from the perception that it has no relevance to readers either of color or of other ethnic backgrounds. James Gatz, she writes, is a born outsider (read "Other") who will never achieve his dream because it is "predicated on exclusion": "Gatsby was doomed from the start. He'd been born on the outside; he would die on the outside" (ix). For readers who can see both sides of the debate over identity politics vs. universality—the issue of whether minority writers should spend their cultural capital speaking on behalf of their underrepresented cultures and promote undervalued texts, or whether they should exert the authority to address any canonized classic regardless of whether its authorship or content has overt racial relevance—Ward's point about the "outside" is useful. It first and foremost illustrates the need to recognize that exclusion in American society often has as much to do with economics as race, although it would be folly, of course, to argue that race has no effect on striations in American society, or to insinuate even that it has less effect than the "hot struggles of the poor" (GG [1991] 117). Race and class are and/both dualism rather than either/or dichotomy.As such, by not ever overtly connecting the idea of "the outsider" to race, Ward is not suggesting that the topic is irrelevant to discussions of Gatsby. Rather, race is implicit as one of the many reasons people are excluded from the "inside" world of competitive opportunity and equality, alongside birthright and money. This unspoken presence allows for a far more organic critique of the desire to assimilate by achieving the American dream of boundary-less self-making than by forcing the point as occasionally threatens to become a trend when critics, drawing on skimpy textual evidence, explicitly ask "Was Gatsby black?" (Manus; Savage), or when they posit that Daisy Buchanan is biracial and passing for white (Van Thompson 83). Instead, seeing Gatsby's outsider status as parallel to the cultural exile minorities face encourages the more nuanced comparisons achieved when critics draw analogies between the titular character's posing and African American passing (Goldsmith 443–68), or when Nella Larsen's Passing (1929) is analyzed "as a 'blackened' version of The Great Gatsby" (Moynihan 38) in which Clare Kendry's desire for whiteness leads to the same atrophied agency that Daisy Buchanan suffers by wanting her life "shaped … by some force—of love, of money, of unquestionable practicality" (GG [1991] 118).Surprisingly, though, the theme of the outsider is not the main point of the Introduction (whose importance as a cultural statement was bolstered in April 2018 when it appeared in abridged form as an essay in the New York Times Book Review). Instead, Ward reads Jay Gatsby less as a figure of exclusion than as a case of arrested adolescent development. That sounds like a negative judgment, but it is not—it is, rather, a canny way of pitching The Great Gatsby to the major audience this paperback will reach: those legions of high school and general studies students who will find Fitzgerald assigned on their syllabi for the first time. "One of the first great lessons of my adulthood was this: I change," writes Ward. "As I grow, my dreams change as do my ideas about who I can be and what I want during the short time I am alive. Gatsby has not learned this" (ix). Gatsby's fall is precipitated in part by his inability to allow his dream to mature and deepen after the incarnating kiss with Daisy Fay in 1917 (GG [1991] 87). In 1922 he still clings to his "greatest moment of possibility in his youth," and it has "fossilized him, sealed him in amber, turned him to stone" (ix). The argument is particularly important to encouraging empathy for Daisy, who is trapped as well in Gatsby's fervent assumption that over their half-decade apart she cannot possibly have changed or her love for him lessened: "When he sees Daisy again, he only sees the girl he fell in love with. He cannot understand that she isn't the same person she was because so much has occurred in her life" (x).Some readers accustomed to speaking of Gatsby's critique of the American Dream or the illusoriness of American self-fashioning may blanch at the abstract "WH"s of Ward's language ("who he is and what he wants and what he can become"), or take issue with the equation of Gatsby's quest with adolescence itself, that "one great flight" in which we yearn to reinvent ourselves outside of our circumstances (viii). Where, they may demand, is mention of Arnold Rothstein? Of "Absolution" (1924; ASYM 78–93) and "the Gatsby cluster"? Great Neck and Max Gerlach? Of the Fuller-McGee case? The symbolic centrality of the valley of ashes and Dr. Eckleburg's spectacles? Nary a mention of flappers, Prohibition, the Roaring Twenties, or—gasp—Zelda? Can The Great Gatsby be The Great Gatsby if there is no preliminary discussion of Zelda and the Fitzgeralds' mythic romance? Or of the specter of Edouard Jozan during the Riviera summer of its writing, which culminated in the ambiguous "Big Crisis" of 13 July 1924? (Ledger 178).Again, this introduction is not for those Ward politely refers to as "seasoned heart[s]" (x). The historical, biographical, and compositional background of the book can await discovery. What is important for novice readers less inclined to pick up a book than an iPhone is justification for delving into a text whose gossamer prose and aspirational theme at first glance may have little direct relevance to their lives. Reading Gatsby as a coming-of-age story (or, rather, a resisting coming-of-age story) is one way of breaking the wall of student indifference. It is not an act of pandering, however. Ward lets young audiences know that they will read the book differently down the road. Indeed, her commentary is an extended meditation on the fact that their responses must change over time, for if they do not, novice readers will have succumbed to Gatsby's own tragic flaw of denying mutability.In essence, the introduction is an allegory of interpretation meant to encourage classrooms to embrace textual analysis as a vehicle for carrying them beyond personal response or identification into the more nuanced complexities of deciphering meaning. "It is easy for young people to see themselves in Gatsby," Ward says. "His earnestness is familiar. His ambition, twinned with desperation, resonates with any teenager who wants to journey off to college or move states away for work, in a bid to escape the boundaries of their youthful life" (vii). Enjoying this identification with the character can be beneficial for developing readers as long as they recognize the dangers of Gatsby's naiveté and refuse to remain stuck in it as he does. And accomplishing that means not clinging to "immutability, this blindness to change" that cannot admit the fleetingness of infatuations and adolescent delusions of grandeur. "Adults understand this," she insists, "intrinsically, marked as they are by the years, time wreathing them in layers: an onion growing round and waxy in the earth." This moment is the sole one in which the author lets the figurative language run a little too wild and free. Yet even if we as elders do not particularly aspire to be pictured as rotund, pallid, and odiferous as a vegetable known for irritating eyes to the point of tears, the argument should be welcomed by teachers. Go ahead, the introduction says, think of Jay Gatsby as a beautiful dreamer, but remember: our dreams can become every bit as much of a prison house as our reality.In addition to Ward's introduction, this new edition features a brief foreword by Eleanor Lanahan that serves as a tribute to her late mother, Frances Scott Fitzgerald, or "Scottie." It also gives first-time readers some hint of what it was like to grow up as the granddaughter of a writer who, over the course of Lanahan's childhood and adolescence, was posthumously redeemed from obscurity into one of America's greatest, most famous writers. The moment in which Lanahan describes Life magazine photographing her and her siblings playing with her mother's ostrich feather and her father's toy soldiers in the family attic is particularly poignant (xvi). An equally succinct but more formal note from West on the text concludes the edition (181–84). It provides an overview of the novel's genesis while making a case for next year's variorum edition. For veteran audiences, its most important element is the argument for returning "Wolfsheim" to "Wolfshiem" and "orgiastic" to "orgastic" (183) as they appeared in the first edition, long before Edmund Wilson turned them into two of the most contested variants in American literary editing when he included The Great Gatsby in his 1941 edition of The Last Tycoon. Strikingly, while "orgastic" has long been corrected in most versions of the novel, Scribner let "Wolfsheim" stand in its previous 2004 trade paperback, even though Bruccoli's Cambridge Edition had corrected it some thirteen years earlier.Beyond such textual intrigues, the main benefit of the new trade edition, for now at least, is the convenient side-by-side contrast it provides to West and Skemer's manuscript edition. For readers who have a hard time keeping track of their many versions of Gatsby, this "diplomatic reading text of the holograph" is "the earliest full version of the novel that survives" (ix). Bruccoli published a facsimile edition of the manuscript in 1973; although available through several university libraries, it has long been a coveted collector's item, offered as we speak on Amazon.com from a mysterious outfit called Sora Sales for the low, low price of $2,179 (The New York Times recently did a fascinating piece on how second-party booksellers like this one have inflated used- and rare-book prices on Amazon to arbitrary prices, presumably hoping some sucker somewhere will shell out four figures rather than go through the hassle of requesting an interlibrary loan [Streitfeld]). Nearly twenty years ago an earlier Cambridge volume presented galleys of a heavily revised version of this manuscript under the title Trimalchio. The two versions are different enough to demonstrate that between the holograph and galleys Fitzgerald revised the novel's structure and, in several passages, its style. Unfortunately, these intermediary typescript drafts have been lost to history. As is well known, Fitzgerald made extensive changes to the Trimalchio galleys after Maxwell Perkins offered suggestions in late 1924 to strengthen the story, most of which centered on filling in more of Gatsby's background so he became less mysterious while still retaining his mystique.Fortunately, Skemer has done scholars and fans the immense favor of posting high-resolution scans of both the holograph and the Trimalchio galleys online in Princeton University's digital library, where they join other invaluable archival material, including the Fitzgeralds' scrapbooks and the manuscript of This Side of Paradise (1920 [Fitzgerald Digital Collection]). Also of great importance is the two-page "Ur-Gatsby," a circa-1923 fragment of Nick Carraway's first East Egg dinner with Tom and Daisy Buchanan, most notable for its use of third-person narration instead of first and for the original character names: Jordan Vance (instead of Baker), Ada (instead of Daisy), and Fay (as the Buchanans's surname instead of Daisy's maiden name). These sheets survived because Fitzgerald included them in a letter to Willa Cather shortly before the publication of Gatsby in April 1925 to prove he did not plagiarize a passage on feminine charms from Cather's A Lost Lady (1923). Had Cather not preserved her correspondence—she assured the younger writer she saw no pilfering in the pages—and had the letter and leaves not been discovered by Charles Scribner III at New York's Seven Gables Bookshop in the 1970s (Bruccoli, "An Instance"), we might have lost this important preliminary insight into the book, much as we have lost the typescripts that bridge the manuscript and Trimalchio. Now that all this material is online—and West reprints the two "Ur-Gatsby" leaves as well (175–76)—any interested lay reader can explore the gestation of the novel on his/her own, without having to rely on extant composition histories.West's introduction to the manuscript draft offers an excellent point of departure for that exploration. As he notes, this preliminary version is not a "continuous text or a fair copy" of the eventual novel, but "a conflation of at least two handwritten drafts" (xvi). While many of the characters appear here as they do in the finished product, Carraway is far from the beguiling, sympathetic presence he will eventually become, and Jordan seems little more than a whisper of Daisy. Not surprisingly, though, Gatsby is the vaguest presence at this point. The titular hero is "a shadowy figure" (xvii), less of a guilelessly unswayable romantic than an opportunist. His trademark affectation ("old sport") is present in the manuscript draft, but not until chapter 6 (101), and the famous paragraph about the solicitous smile that "understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood" (GG [1991] 40) is yet to come. There are also innumerable deletions and relocations that can make for a disconcerting experience perusing the holograph. As West notes (xix), the apartment scene with Myrtle Wilson and the McKees originally appeared in chapter 4 instead of chapter 2, delaying the introduction in the manuscript draft of the valley of ashes and Dr. Eckleburg motifs (54) until after Gatsby's first party. (Fitzgerald actually mislabeled the fourth chapter of this preliminary version "chapter 3," but the actual third chapter in the manuscript draft is the list of Gatsby's party attendees and the meeting with Wolfshiem [37–53], aka chapter 4 of the published book [GG (1991) 49–63]). The effect is to create suspense about the adulteress instead of the main character; in this preliminary version, Gatsby elbows into the action a little too eagerly.Not all of the changes made to the manuscript or, for that matter, to Trimalchio, were necessarily positive, though. West regrets that a germinal sequence in the holograph on celebrity that Fitzgerald expanded for the galleys did not survive into the published text. It occurs during the chapter 6 party that Tom Buchanan insists on attending to check up on his wife (GG [1991] 81), but in this preliminary treatment, the fête is a costume ball. Daisy arrives at it with a striking new hairdo that bedazzles the same Gloria Swanson-esque movie star, the "white orchard of a woman," that Nick and Daisy spy kissing her director under the white-plum tree (GG [1991] 82–83). On the actress's behalf, Gatsby asks in the manuscript draft for the name of her hairdresser, promising the star will copy the style and Daisy will have the satisfaction of becoming "the originator of a new vogue all over the country" (87). To his shock, she declines, not wanting any connection between her and "that person"—a harsher sign of how she is "appalled by West Egg, this unprecedented place that Broadway had begotten upon a Long Island fishing village" (GG [1991] 84). In Trimalchio, Fitzgerald has Daisy sense her lover's disappointment and reluctantly scribbles an address on the tablecloth, which Gatsby crosses out. The exchange hints at the gulf between Gatsby's and Daisy's worlds that will doom their reunion. In the holograph, without the tablecloth detail, the haircut conversation passes too quickly, but in the galleys, Gatsby's "obliterat[ing] her markings with his own" (Trimalchio 86) foreshadows the unlikelihood of their running away together a little too insistently. As West says, the moment has rich potential, leaving "one wish[ing] that Fitzgerald had found a way to keep it in his novel" (xx).Most deletions, by contrast, were judicious. Undoubtedly the wisest cut Fitzgerald made from the original manuscript occurs at the beginning of chapter 7 (which, never adept at counting, apparently, he named chapter 6, throwing off the ordering by giving the draft two chapter 6s). As Gatsby relates the memory of incarnating his dream in Daisy through a kiss—a passage moved upon editing the Trimalchio galleys to the end of the aforementioned party scene—he begins to sing. You read that right: at what may be one of the most crucial moments in the story, Jay Gatsby bursts into a "low unmusical baritone," warbling like a proto-Gordon MacRae in a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical—except that his song is not even as good as a Rodgers and Hammerstein standard. In the manuscript draft Fitzgerald accurately describes the song as "a vague compendium of all the tunes of twenty years ago": "We hear the tinkle of the gay guitarsWe see the shining Southern moon;Where the fire-flies flit;And the June bugs sitDrones the crickets single tune.We hear the lapping of the waveletsWhere the lonesome nightbirds singAnd the soft warm breezeTell the tall palm treesThe Dreamy Song of Spring." (92)I feel safe in saying that nobody wants to hear Jay Gatsby "tinkle" on about stars or drone about crickets. The episode is a shockingly ridiculous moment, downright risible. Yet its eventual excision testifies to Fitzgerald's ability while revising to recognize his susceptibility to emotional excess and admit how easily his prowess for lyricism could slip into "appalling sentimentality" (GG [1991] 87). By the time of the galley version, he salvaged Nick's response to what in the manuscript draft he calls "the doggerel of the song" (92) and attached it instead to the passage on the kiss. Although the time had not yet come to move the passage to the conclusion of the preceding chapter, cutting the song nevertheless elevated Nick's remembrance of "an elusive rhythm, a fragment of lost words … heard somewhere a long time ago" (GG [1991] 87) into a transcendently powerful benediction on the transience of desire and memory.Again, the pleasure of the manuscript is to discover how many of one's own favorite phrases or passages may have appeared first in a different formulation or in a different scene. Yet, honestly, no change seems too insubstantial. Michaelis, the Greek bystander who comforts George Wilson when Myrtle is mowed down, here goes by the tongue-twister name of Mavromichales (118). And no mysterious call from Slagle in Chicago interrupts Gatsby's wake to reveal Young Parke's arrest for phony bonds, hinting at the millionaire's shadier side (GG [1991] 129)—Fitzgerald's allusions to the Fuller-McGee case would not be added until Fitzgerald reworked the Trimalchio galleys. Even a seemingly insignificant detail like the date of the timetable on which Nick records the guests who attend Gatsby's parties inspires speculation. Both in the manuscript and in Trimalchio the date reads "July 5, 1921" (37; Trimalchio 51) instead of 1922 (GG [1991] 49), which shifts the historical timeframe out of what Michael North long ago (and Bill Goldstein more recently) reminded us was the landmark modernist year (4)—the year of Virginia Woolf's Jacob's Room, James Joyce's Ulysses, T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land—and into a less epochal moment.It also plays havoc with the compositional synchronicity that allows biographers to interpret Fitzgerald's critique of America as a reflection on his own temptation toward gaudiness and excess. Instead of taking place the same year that the Fitzgeralds moved to Long Island and began noticing the lavish soirees at the rented estate of Ring Lardner's neighbor Herbert Bayard Swope—not to mention enjoying numerous debauches of their own—the action is contemporaneous with the couple's far less uproarious first trip to Europe when Zelda was pregnant with Scottie. The concurrence with the published text is not exact; the Fitzgeralds did not rent the house at 6 Gateway Drive in Great Neck until October 1922, roughly around the same time that Nick would be encountering Tom Buchanan in New York and confirming his complicity in Gatsby's murder, which leads our narrator to realize what "careless people" Tom and Daisy truly are (GG [1991] 139). Even so, the very idea of Gatsby occurring in 1921—a date Nick specifies, too, in the manuscript's opening chapter (4)—somehow makes the plot seem less synonymous with the Jazz Age, less synonymous with modernity itself.West's and Skemer's introduction does not stop with a catalog of such changes. It also includes a fascinating discussion of the manuscript paper and watermark (Cascade Bond) and how it differs from the paper used in the "Ur-Gatsby" (Shamrock Typewriter Linen [xxxv–xliii]). Such technical details may seem physical minutiae about which only a fanboy could get excited, but Skemer explains how historians can clarify the composition process with them. He also explains how the chemical composition of the Cascade Bond meant that "acidity would over time turn the paper from white or off-white to yellow or brown and render it increasingly brittle by breaking covalent bonds in long-chain cellulose molecules" (xli), requiring major preservation efforts in the late 1990s. Additionally, Skemer explores how Fitzgerald's handwriting changed over the course of completing the first draft, with early pages penned in "a large cursive script" of approximately 200 words per page while later ones grew almost twice as dense, as if the author (who did not type) intensified his focus as the drama of the plot heated up (xxix). Intriguing as well are archeological traces of the characters' preliminary names. Six individual leaves scattered between chapters 1 and 3 include references to "Ada" instead of "Daisy," as in the "Ur-Gatsby" excerpt mailed to Cather. Some of these six leaves also reveal that Fitzgerald originally planned to call Carraway "Dud" (xxx). In the annals of goofy nicknames for men with aristocratic pretensions, this appellation may not be as silly as "Biff," "Scooter," or "Jock," but Fitzgerald smartly realized the sobriquet lived up to the meaning of the word itself and changed it.Finally, Skemer documents the long process Princeton went through in the late 1940s to acquire the Fitzgerald papers, including the Gatsby manuscript and Trimalchio galleys, negotiating first with executor Judge John Biggs Jr. and later Scottie Fitzgerald Smith (xliii–liv). The discussion marks a major effort to clear up the lingering urban legend that Princeton was at best lackadaisical and at worst ambivalent about the value of the collection to scholars and historians. Skemer may not exactly be the most unbiased source regarding Princeton's attitude, but he makes a credible case that this canard arose mainly from a single source, David A. Randall, the head of Scribner's rare book department, who consulted with Judge Biggs at Maxwell Perkins's recommendation. Two decades after the deal was brokered, Randall published a "self-serving" memoir, Dukedom Large Enough: Reminiscences of a Rare Book Dealer, 1929–1956 (1969), in which he portrayed Princeton's head librarian, Julian P. Boyd, as insufficiently enthusiastic about Fitzgerald's contributions to American literature. Twenty additional years later, Bruccoli fortified that perception with a 1988 essay for the Princeton University Library Chronicle that over-relied on Randall's account ("'Where They Belong'" 30–37). "Archival documentation tells a different story," Skemer curtly says (lii), before itemizing the financial impediments that Princeton suffered in the period—believe it or not—that put a bureaucratic damper on the acquisition process. In the end, the monetary hurdles Boyd patiently navigated proved unnecessary. In 1950, as the Fitzgerald revival provided the estate adequate income to ensure its future, Scottie Fitzgerald generously declined the $2,500 price that parties to the deal had settled upon the previous year (roughly $50,000 today) and instead gifted the papers to the university with which her father so identified (lii). Skemer's commentary is a reminder of the importance of preservation—as well as patience.If one practical impediment exists to tracking the changes to The Great Gatsby from the holograph through the galleys to the published text, it is the struggle of switching between the three different Cambridge Edition volumes. That challenge will compound by one-fourth with next year's variorum. In projecting the need to grow an additional limb by 2019 to address this problem I kept trying to imagine a format that would allow readers to place passages side-by-side for study. I was reminded of how in the music industry box sets designed for completists often include compact discs full of alternative takes and isolated tracks (such as vocals only) that allow audiences to peel away layers of the final product and immerse themselves in the development of the art from every imaginable angle. In trying to picture some comparable packaging that might exist in book publishing, I kept thinking of how twenty years ago we might have benefited from CD-ROMs that would offer line-by-line collations of the different versions. Now that CD-ROMs have joined the floppy disk in the junk pile of technological progress, I suppose an online platform would be the outlet; perhaps one day Cambridge will devise a format that will allow educators to examine each page of the variorum edition alongside its antecedents. Until then, one hopes they might at least gather the Gatsby quartet together in one bundle in a nice clamshell case—although given that the hardbacks of each Cambridge installment averages $120, the price would prove prohibitive to most Fitzgerald fans. It also seems inevitable that with the variorum the controversial 1991 edition will fall out of print, making such a package more unlikely. Hold onto your Bruccoli Gatsby: it will soon be a collector's item.Between the manuscript and the forthcoming variorum, it is easy to overlook the value of Last Kiss, which collects seven neglected short stories, twelve rare book reviews, seventeen public letters, twenty-eight short "miscellaneous" pieces, mostly autographical statements or testimonials/endorsements, along with six longer journalistic articles. A scan of the table of contents may suggest it is a mere "mopping up" of ephemera. Some pieces appeared previously in collections such as Matthew J. Bruccoli and Jackson R. Bryer's F. Scott Fitzgerald in His Own Time (1971) or Bruccoli and Baughman's F. Scott Fitzgerald on Authorship (1996), although there is no repetition from West's earlier edition of Fitzgerald nonfiction, My Lost City: Personal Essays, 1920–1940 (2005). Yet the suggestion that the texts gathered are of second-tier interest does a disservice to their scholarly value. First and foremost, Last Kiss grants us the most convenient access to The Vegetable (35–124) that we have had since Charles Scribner III made Fitzgerald's 1923 theatrical debacle his pet project in his 1976 edition. (That expanded version of the play is not, contrary to some recollections, the text that misspelled Edmund Wilson's name as Edmond. That mistake occurred on a contemporaneous paperback of Axel's Castle [Scribner 25].) While its appearance in the Cambridge Edition is unlikely to boost its reputation, The Vegetable is a work that should have, shall we say, renewed relevance to the present age, given that its