I'd Die for You and Other Lost Stories
2017; Penn State University Press; Volume: 15; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5325/fscotfitzrevi.15.1.0203
ISSN1755-6333
Autores ResumoFans, regardless of their hero's field of endeavor, both love and loathe “the vault,” that magical repository of discards and ephemera where, if one delves deep enough into the detritus, a long-buried gem might be recovered. The particular item may be a misplaced painting, an unreleased song, or, for lovers of literature, a misfiled manuscript; but the mixture of excitement and trepidation that accompanies the search is largely the same. On the positive side, the quest promises the possibility of uncovering a work that is not simply previously unknown but one that will completely reframe perceptions of the artist—a revelation, in other words. Dampening the thrill of this pursuit, though, is the anxiety that comes from wondering whether the work has sunk to Mariana Trench depths for a reason. Maybe it does not deserve to see the light of day.As in life, the disappointments in art tend to outnumber the revelations. For every graduate student who unearths a never-before-read Claude McKay novel in the papers of a notorious New York City “smuthound” (Nathans-Kelly), there is the literary estate that, like Jack Kerouac's, will release a piece of “unfinished juvenilia” such as The Sea is My Brother (2012) that even completists regard as peripheral (Churchwell).1 In other cases, one wonders exactly what demand prompted the exhumation: so few readers know Pearl S. Buck these days that when The Eternal Wonder (2013) was discovered in a storage closet and published for the first time forty years after her death newspaper accounts had to educate general audiences on who she was and why they should care. (Hint: “the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize in literature” [Bosman].) Then there is the unsettling case of Harper Lee's Go Set a Watchman. Appearing in July 2015 amid serious questions about the management of the incapacitated Lee's affairs—the author died the following winter—this embryonic attempt at the narrative that grew into To Kill a Mockingbird (1961) was a triumph in hype but little else. The book may have sold 1.6 million copies, but Lee's less-than-heroic presentation of her earliest iteration of Atticus Finch, before she reinvented him as an icon of paternal nobility, confused readers and left many feeling betrayed. Watchman certainly has scholarly value, but selling it as an autonomous novel without even an editorial apparatus to clarify its germinal relationship to its predecessor was an insult to author and audience alike. Nearly three years later, the book stands as an unfortunate coda to a much-beloved classic, one whose handling is spoken about with either a grimace or an eye-roll (Giraldi).F. Scott Fitzgerald fans have been spared this sort of barrel scraping. Edmund Wilson's edition of The Last Tycoon (1941) raised some questions about the propriety of publishing an “unfinished” work, but the qualms died rapidly as the Fitzgerald revival of the 1940s took off. Today, Fitzgerald studies are unimaginable without Monroe Stahr as the capstone to his creator's fascination with personality and success, while the novel itself has become key to appreciating the writer's simultaneous attraction to/repulsion with Hollywood and the movies. The collections that scholars such as Matthew J. Bruccoli, John Kuehl, and Jackson R. Bryer edited in the 1970s—The Basil and Josephine Stories (1973), Bits of Paradise (1974), and The Price Was High (1979)—made available stories that had disappeared decades earlier in the fleeting periodical pages of Fitzgerald's short-fiction career. Occasional unpublished efforts like “On Your Own” (Price 323–38) or “A Full Life” found their way into a variety of academic journals and mass-market magazines; yet even when featured in Esquire instead of the Princeton University Library Chronicle their appearance was not promoted as an “event” manufactured out of proportion to their literary value, and they did not raise the defenses of reviewers.Then came August 6, 2012—admittedly late in the day. More than seventy years after Fitzgerald's death, the New Yorker debuted a story it had rejected in 1936 called “Thank You for the Light.” Unless one had lately perused the musty pages of the old Fitzgerald/Hemingway Annual for Jennifer McCabe Atkinson's “The Lost and Unpublished Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald” (1971), the title probably did not ring a bell. One might have been forgiven for confusing it with “Your Way and Mine” (1927; ASYM 312–32) or “At Your Age” (1929; TAR 207–22), two other stories with you/your in their titles already in print but rarely discussed. After all, with some 165 stories to Fitzgerald's credit, even devoted fans have difficulties keeping titles straight; the number of people who can distinguish “Family in the Wind” (1932; TAR 87–106) from “The Family Bus” (1933; Price 488–511) or “Two Wrongs” (1930; TAR 24–44) from “Six of One—” (1932; Price 369–81) without peeking at Mary Jo Tate's F. Scott Fitzgerald A to Z (1998) can probably be counted on two hands (I am not among them).Once one realized “Thank You for the Light” was indeed a “new” Fitzgerald story, the jolt it delivered sharpened and intensified. Although not a great story as “Babylon Revisited” (1931; TAR 157–77) or even the underrated “One Trip Abroad” (1930; TAR 263–84) are, it was nevertheless a reminder of how much remains to be said about the trajectory of Fitzgerald's short-fiction career in the changing literary marketplace of the 1930s. A brief, satirical sketch about corset-and-girdle saleswoman blessed with the answered prayer of a lighted cigarette in a cathedral, “Thank You” is structurally little more than an opportunity to deliver the title pun as a punchline to a joke. Yet in poking compact fun at religious devotion, the story serves as a counterpoint to youthful efforts such as “Benediction” (1920; F&P 134–50), offering a wizened if not ironic 1930s response to the romantic faith in emotional rhapsody and epiphany so central to the early 1920s fiction that made him famous. As such, the story demonstrated Fitzgerald's challenge as he lost his aptitude for Saturday Evening Post stories of winsome love to find a more austere, Depression-appropriate voice.At the same time, he also needed sympathetic, reliable venues for this tauter, drier short fiction. Arnold Gingrich of Esquire threw him a lifeline as he experimented with the style, leading to two important late-career works, “Financing Finnegan” (1938; LD 50–58) and “The Lost Decade” (1939; LD 65–69). Yet Esquire alone could not support Fitzgerald, not at only $200 per story (one-twentieth of his peak Post price). Agent Harold Ober tried to find a home for “Thank You” at several other periodicals, but Vogue, College Humor, Harper's Bazaar, and Vanity Fair all summarily rejected it as well (Atkinson 53). Why Ober did not try Harper's or The American Mercury, two venues that paid William Faulkner $400 for stories too dark for the Post, remains something of a mystery (Faulkner, Selected Letters 88, 90–91). Doing so probably seemed pointless.Among literary outlets of the 1930s, one might have expected the urbane, cosmopolitan New Yorker to have appreciated Fitzgerald's new vein. Yet in reality, the magazine's humor at the time was broader and far less arch than the cynicism that radiates from “Thank You for the Light.” (As proof, one need only read E. B. White's contemporaneous Hemingway parody, “The Law of the Jungle” (1934), whose spry use of doggerel is witty but far lighter in tone than the dour, downtrodden atmosphere of Fitzgerald's submission [31].) The author also faced the formidable challenge of literary stereotyping. Like many readers who cut their literary teeth on Flappers and Philosophers and Tales of the Jazz Age, Harold Ross's editors could not quite wrap their heads around the concept of sardonic or hardboiled F. Scott Fitzgerald stories. Rejecting “Thank You for the Light” as “all together out of the question,” the New Yorker was right when it said the story “seems … so curious and so unlike the kind of thing we associate with him.” The magazine erred in calling it “really too fantastic,” however (qtd. in Atkinson 53). Despite the story's subtly satirical take on miracles, we can see it as part of a continuum from “The Cut-Glass Bowl” (1920; F&P 87–107) through “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” (1922; TJA 169–95) and on to “A Short Trip Home” (1927; TAR 107–28) that reveals his interest in fantasy and the supernatural (Buell 23–38).For all of these reasons then, the appearance of “Thank You for the Light” nearly eighty years after its composition was both poignant and exciting. Like James Marshall discovering gold at Sutter's Mill in California in 1848, the Fitzgerald estate's willingness to make it available set off a veritable rush for buried treasure. Scholars bored deep into the archives at Princeton, the University of South Carolina, and other sites. In 2015, The Strand Magazine made a news splash publishing a piece called “Temperature” from 1939. Although Ober pointedly told Fitzgerald “I do not believe you think that it is anywhere one of your best stories” (qtd. in Atkinson 60), the reception was almost as positive as it was wide. “Temperature” even prompted Laura Miller in Slate to call for a reevaluation of Fitzgerald's stories as well as the art of the commercial short fiction before television replaced it as a mass entertainment: But what most strikes me about “Temperature” is the soundness of its construction. Any bit of business that figures late in the plot (the shoddiness of the bungalow's bannisters; Emmet's low tolerance for alcohol) is deftly established early on. The narrative is a little clockwork wonder that goes despite its creator's evident indifference to it, like the abandoned robot in [the 2008 animated children's movie] Wall-E. Countless modern-day Hollywood movies, productions tweaked and tinkered with by dozens of handsomely paid individuals, cannot hope to rival “Temperature” in coherence and simple competence. Fitzgerald was such a pro. If only he'd found it easier to appreciate that for the compliment it is. Nor was the post-“Thank You” interest in new material restricted to Fitzgerald himself. Shortly before the 2013 Fitzgerald Society Conference in Montgomery, a local bookseller, Thomas Upchurch, showed Sara Kosiba and me a ninety-five-year-old literary annual from Sidney Lanier High School passed down from his grandfather. Included in the publication was a story by seventeen-year-old Zelda Fitzgerald called “The Iceberg,” written several months before she met her future husband. We printed the tale as the end pages of the conference program, and thanks to Eleanor Lanahan and James L. W. West III, the New Yorker soon published it as well (albeit only on its website, not in the print edition).The major payoff to this scramble for undiscovered Fitzgerald has now, finally and conclusively, arrived in the form of Anne Margaret Daniel's collection I'd Die for You and Other Lost Stories. Authorized by the Fitzgerald estate and published by Scribner's, it is first and foremost a handsomely produced volume. Illustrating the pages are several rare photographs, including one of Daniel's subject mugging in a photo booth that reminds us the man was not all melancholy and moonlight (57). Another, more serious portrait finds him glaring into the camera with such charismatic intensity he could be posing for an advertisement for the manufacturer of the leather gloves he wears (229). Daniel's introduction and explanatory notes are also excellent—neither too intrusive nor too scholarly, with just the right amount of biography and critical analysis to set a context for understanding the various points Fitzgerald was at in his career when he wrote the eighteen different titles included. Daniel has obviously learned a thing or two from West, perhaps from his 2000 American Scholar essay “Annotating Mr. Fitzgerald,” about the art of informative and entertaining note writing (83–91). Readers who have never heard of “Dundreary whiskers” (327) or Karl Vollmöller's 1911 play Das Mirakel (The Miracle), which “Thank You for the Light” lightly satirizes (356), prepare to be enlightened—and to smile while doing so.As for the stories themselves—where to begin? Readers will not be surprised to discover that fully three quarters of the material dates from that painful 1934–37 period bordered by the disappointing reception of Tender Is the Night on one end and Fitzgerald's final departure for Hollywood on the other. Accordingly, the themes channel Fitzgerald's awareness that the days when he could crank out even a tepid story such as “Indecision” (1931; TAR 310–27) and sell it quickly to the Post were at an end. No longer are the stories simply about loss. Instead, they reflect a sense of resignation and defeat, tinged with a contempt for the romantic situations on which the author could once almost effortlessly spin variations. The titles alone express this downbeat attitude: “What to Do About It” (39–56), “Day Off from Love” (113–18), and “Love is a Pain” (277–90) are just three examples. The style likewise feels enervated, as if the mere act of putting pen to paper anymore exhausted Fitzgerald. The settings, too, bespeak the failing health and rootlessness of these years: we are inside hospitals, in the mountains of North Carolina, in automobiles or on trains, passing through empty tourist towns or, as in “Thank You for the Light,” stuck on a sales route in Kansas City. Drugs are present, lives end in suicidal leaps from mountains, and human interactions have coarsened: whereas Fitzgerald once sidestepped crass or vulgar language with polite euphemisms like “obstetrical conversation” (GG 42), we now hear the pushy type of undergraduate boys who crashed Gatsby's parties or who drew the curtains of Rosemary Hoyt's train compartment (TITN 102, 103) spew locker-room talk: “Did you G. the L. or is she still pulling that one about being a Catholic and doesn't believe in Birth Control[?]” reads a letter one Yale roommate writes another (270).According to Daniel, this line was “hot” enough to keep Esquire from buying “Salute to Lucy and Elsie” (267–68). One presumes readers back then did not need an editorial note (as I did) explaining that “G. the L.” (270) means “Get the Lay” (353). Such expressions are a long way even from the vicious formality of “I never did go in for making love to dry loins” (TITN 346). Still, this is F. Scott Fitzgerald: it bears keeping in mind that as jarring as “if it hadn't been me it would have been someone else” (270) is from a writer known for ladders of starlight leading to secret places above the trees (GG 86), the late 1930s was the period when Ernest Hemingway slipped his first unexpurgated F-word into To Have and Have Not (1937) (225), and William Faulkner snuck a C-bomb past Random House editors in The Wild Palms (1939) (52). That said, those books were novels, not stories written for magazines delivered by a postal system that was still heavily monitored for obscenities. Interestingly, Daniel implies that Fitzgerald was resistant to toning down “hot” moments in his 1930s stories, noting he “changed nothing” when Gingrich asked for alterations (268). Yet his uncharacteristic refusal to edit to seal a deal with an editor when he badly needed money occurs only five years after Fitzgerald blue-penciled profanity in private correspondence with John O'Hara, one of the more famous examples of his fastidiousness (Bruccoli 101). The somewhat sudden willingness to speak frankly in “Salute to Lucy and Elsie” raises questions about what exactly changed for him between 1934 and 1939. It is tempting to see in his use of the impolite “G. the L.” and the still-taboo words “birth control” a hostility toward the short story itself, as if, having learned the hard way his old manner was passé, he would force the marketplace to take him or leave him on his own terms. As we know, the market mostly chose to leave him.Inevitably, reading the stories encourages connections to long-adored favorites. The title story—one of the best—opens with a description of setting that seems like a more somber, toned-down uncle to the beginning of “The Ice Palace” (1920; F&P 36–60). If that story kicked off with a vibrant depiction of Tarleton, Georgia's humid and languid atmosphere (“The sunlight dripped over the house like golden paint over an art jar, and the freckling shadows here and there only intensified the rigor of the bath of light” [F&P 36]), “I'd Die for You” employs a more muted palette that seems to doubt the very possibility of intensifying that brightness: “Within a cup of the Carolina mountains lay the lake, a pink glow of summer evening on its surface. In the lake was a peninsula and on this an Italianate hotel of stucco turned to many colors with the progress of the sun” (91). And whereas the indelible “The Offshore Pirate” (1920; F&P 5–35) starts with a metafictional wink at the irreality of its romantic fantasia (“This unlikely story begins on a sea that was a blue dream, as colorful as blue–silk stockings, and beneath a sky as blue as the irises of children's eyes” [F&P 5]), another of the volume's strongest, “The Women in the House,” starts off with a weary acknowledgment that its strains will sound overly familiar to many readers: “This is one of those stories that ought to begin by calling the hero ‘X’ or ‘H— B—’ because there were so many people drawn into it that at least one of them will read it and claim to have been a leading character” (233).2In other cases, the stories are directly related to extant works: “Thumbs Up” (159–88) and “Dentist Appointment” (189–204) are early versions of the story Collier's eventually published as “The End of Hate” (1939; Price 740–51), one of the strangest Civil War tales ever. The tortured revisions Fitzgerald undertook before editor Kenneth Littauer purchased the piece are detailed in Justin Mellette's essay “Of Empresses and Indians: A Compositional History of ‘The End of Hate,’” published in our 2014 issue (108–23), which helps explain the varied detours each version takes. Finally, one of Fitzgerald's perpetual interests—football—returns in “Offside Play” (205–28), a story that will inevitably send readers back to “The Bowl” (1928; ASYM 381–405). Whereas that story finds Dolly Harlan choosing to play through injury as a testament to his work ethic, this tale's hero, Eubert G. (“Rip”) Van Kamp, confronts a threat of disqualification for rules he may not overcome through simple willpower.At least two of the stories collected here are of interest only as film treatments: “Gracie at Sea” (57–68; written for the comedy duo Gracie Allen and George Burns) and “Ballet Slippers” (313–18; written for Constance Talmadge) never really leap off the page as engaging stories. Another written as a prospective plot outline, however, transcends the undramatic, summary style of film treatments by virtue of its dynamic plot: an espionage tale that climaxes with seductive card game. As Daniel notes, “Love is a Pain” (277–90) bears similarities to “both Ernest Hemingway's strange Spanish Civil War play The Fifth Column (1937) and Hollywood's allegedly ‘light-hearted’ war movies of 1938–1940” (such as Comrade X [1940] or South of the Border [1939]), ultimately resembling “something Alfred Hitchcock might have filmed” (277–78).If one story evokes the confident, audacious Fitzgerald of his prime years, it is the opening selection, “The I. O. U.” (1–16). Written in 1920 amid the success of This Side of Paradise (1920) and only weeks after his marriage to Zelda Sayre, this farrago of a tale, not surprisingly, has all the farcical charm and sparkle of “A Diamond as Big as the Ritz” (1922; TJA 127–68) or even “Dice, Brassknuckles, & Guitar” (1923; TJA 277–97). For years I knew the title of this story from Atkinson's essay, and was intrigued by the enthusiasm Ober showed for it in his notes quoted by Atkinson: “Cleverly written story,” begins the synopsis attached to its manuscript. Yet Atkinson's negative opinion seemed to mute expectations: “Unfortunately Ober's assessment of ‘The I. O. U.’ was not one of his better judgments. He seems to have read more complexity and subtlety into the story than actually exists. While it could be considered a ‘clever’ story, and perhaps one worked up into a salable story, ‘The I. O. U.’ is truly one of Fitzgerald's inconsequential efforts” (35). Forty-six years later, the New Yorker disagreed and voted squarely with Team Ober by publishing the piece in March 2017 as a teaser for Daniel's collection (80–87). One literary blog even called the story “well timed for today's atmosphere of media distrust, where the line between fact and fiction is increasingly blurred by presidents and publishers alike” (Ha).One need not reach for Trumpian analogies to #fake news to enjoy “The I. O. U.,” however. Its most obvious corollary is actually “Head and Shoulders” (1920; F&P 61–86) and Marcia Meadows's improbable career as the author of Samuel Pepys, Syncopated (F&P 82). In this case, the anonymous narrator is a publisher who discovers—much to his horror—that his guaranteed blockbuster, The Aristocracy of the Spirit World, is fiction. The story of a psychologist's supernatural communion with a nephew killed in the Great War, this supposedly scientific investigation into the paranormal turns out to be bunk when said nephew inconveniently shows up after a long incapacitation from “brain fever” (7). The narrator tries to save his firm's bacon by bribing the soldier, only to be exposed as a fraud. “The I. O. U.” was apparently written at the behest of Harper's Bazaar editor Henry Blackman Sell, who five years later would quadruple his circulation by serializing Anita Loos's Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925). The blockbuster sales Loos enjoyed when Boni & Liveright published her novel the same year that The Great Gatsby moved only a modest 23,000 copies raises an intriguing possibility: what if Fitzgerald had set aside his notions of the novel as “serious” literature and allowed his farcical side to develop “The I. O. U.” into a full-length satire of publishing? Might it have earned him a modicum of Loos's success? Could he have sustained the satire through several installments? Might a broader plot have saved the story from seeming inconsequential to a reader like Atkinson? Arguing one way or another is pure speculation, but given that the humor of “The I. O. U.” takes pointed aim at the Jazz Age's susceptibility toward hype and hoopla, the attempt would have been interesting.Finally, a few other stories deserve mention. “Nightmare (Fantasy in Black)” (17–38) dates to the months in 1932 when Zelda Fitzgerald was hospitalized in Baltimore. Set in a clinic, its treatment of mental illness is far more absurd than in Tender Is the Night and raises insoluble questions about the borderline between mere eccentricity and genuine “insanity.” Its immaculate structure, deft humor, and controlled tone also demonstrate, perhaps more than any of these 1930s stories, how the Fitzgerald “brand” did indeed work against the writer, for there is no earthly reason the Post or Cosmopolitan should have rejected this story. Even Redbook turned “Nightmare (Fantasy in Black)” down, and Redbook published three installments of the painful, proto-Prince Valiant series featuring the medieval-era Philippe, the so-called “Count of Darkness,” in Fitzgerald's lifetime!3 Similarly, “Travel Together” (73–85) may seem to tiptoe into what would become Steinbeck territory with its rail-riding hoboes and tramps; its plot about a screenwriter seeing the “real” America for inspiration actually anticipates, as Atkinson argues (63), Preston Sturges's classic film Sullivan's Travels (1941). In a metafictional way, the story finds Fitzgerald comforting himself that even in the Depression audiences wanted some type of romance. It, too, is every bit as good as the equally whimsical commercial fiction Faith Baldwin sold Cosmopolitan in this era. What its editors were thinking is anyone's guess.Ultimately, I'd Die for You and Other Lost Stories presents an opportune challenge for Fitzgerald fans. Because they do not involve flappers or expatriates or (for the most part) writers washed ashore in Hollywood, the contents challenge us to set aside those images and topics most often associated with the writer to talk about the fundamentals of craft: plot structure, drama versus exposition, the ratio of dialogue to description, climax, and denouement. Readers will likely disagree about what twists feel forced and which ones seem organic, or which heroines are memorable variations on a stock character. Each story Daniel includes, however, deserves attention, if only to remind us of the need always to broaden our assumptions about the flavor and temper of his fiction—and of his short fiction in particular. We have still barely begun to read Fitzgerald in the context of the magazine market of the 1920s and 1930s, preferring instead the modernist story writer who can stand in distinction alongside Hemingway and Faulkner instead of an Edna Ferber or Pearl S. Buck. Yet I'd Die for You and Other Lost Stories reminds us, first and last, that Fitzgerald's stories were commercial enterprises that engaged the formulae and tropes of the popular marketplace. Because we need a stronger baseline sense of what exactly those popular themes and storylines were—especially during the darker years of the Depression, when romance did exist alongside hardboiled crime and science fiction—the message the book presents is clear:Scholars, get cracking.
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