More short stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Or, how to know when to stop reading?

I never set out to read all of F. Scott Fitzgerald.  Just most of him.  I naïvely thought (and, as a lit scholar myself, I really should have known better) that it would be fairly easy to identify the Fitzgerald Canon, and that's all I really wanted to read.  I seem to have read more than that, and that too has been rewarding:  "The Cruise of the Rolling Junk" seems pretty extra-canonical, but as I wrote, I think it's one of his most enjoyable things.

If I had set out to read everything, I'm not quite sure where I would have turned.  It seems there are a couple of ebooks out, just out, that contain the complete short stories and essays, and there is a complete-works scholarly edition finally coming out right now that presumably will eventually include all the short stories.  As it was, though, I think I was unconsciously figuring I'd read what's available in mass-market editions;  I'm really trying to figure out how American publishers curate and market American literature.  And on that score I've been mildly surprised and disappointed:  I figured at the very least Fitzgerald's original short-story collections would all be in print, but no.  And I figured the stuff uncollected in his lifetime might have been rationalized and made easily available.

But no, not really.  Up to this point I had read the pre-humous collections (Flappers and Philosophers. Tales of the Jazz Age, All the Sad Young Men, and Taps at Reveille), and then the posthumous collections that didn't seem to overlap with the pre-humous ones too much (The Basil and Josephine Stories, The Pat Hobby Stories, Bits of Paradise, Afternoon of an Author).  At that point I thought all that remained was The Price was High, at which I balked - even the subtitle of that one admits that it's scraping the bottom of the barrel.  Those can't be Canon, right?

But then I looked at Matthew Bruccoli's The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, which seems to be the current best attempt to identify the Best of FSF's stories, and realized that it includes a few from The Price was High.  More alarming, it included a few that aren't in there, and also weren't in any of the others I'd read.  I ultimately realized that the previous best attempt at the Best of FSF's stories, Malcolm Cowley's 1951 The Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, which drew from both collected and uncollected, and the uncollected of which stayed largely uncollected elsewhere, even as the book itself was superseded.  Confusing.

Anyway, since I'm in the mood to move on from this author, I read the stories from the Bruccoli and Cowley volumes that I hadn't yet read - about fifteen in all.  I'll pass on The Price was High (although Mrs. Sgt. T, who knows me rather well, says she's sure I'll read it someday, because I'm just that compulsive). 

It won't surprise anybody that these stories ended up being a mixed bag.  All of his collections are.  The Cowley volume includes at least a couple of gems:  "The Rough Crossing," about an intense few days on an ocean liner crossing the Atlantic, and the marital discord it shakes loose, is one;  "An Alcoholic Case," the most harrowing thing I've read by FSF about his alcoholism, is another.  The Bruccoli volume also includes some gems:  "Dice, Brassknuckles & Guitar" is as high-spirited and stylish as it sounds;  "More than Just a House" is another slightly pat relationship story, but any time FSF is honestly in touch with poverty it gets interesting;  and "The Lost Decade" (actually in the Cowley book too) is another intense short piece about alcoholism.

All of which is to say that I probably will find more gems in The Price was High when I get around to it.  Which in itself is another way of saying that I don't entirely agree with either Cowley's or Bruccoli's selections.  But if I had to recommend a one-volume selection of FSF stories, I'd probably say the Bruccoli is best.  However I still think the ones he published in his lifetime should be in print, and that's what you should reach for first.  See what he wanted to be remembered for, then read what he wanted forgotten.  He wasn't right, but he had the right to be wrong, and it's interesting to see how he exercised it.  I mean, it's worth realizing that, in 1935, he would rather preserve something as slight as "The Night of Chancellorsville" than "The Swimmers."

F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Cruise of the Rolling Junk

This is a three-part travelogue that was published in magazines in 1924, but not in book form until

2011. It's a mystery to me why it took so long, and why it's not better known.  As I've noted before, FSF's nonfiction just may be, with a few exceptions in either direction, where it's at.

Because I take it back:  this made me laugh.  Out loud.  At least a couple of times.  The idea is that it's a road trip, a true spur-of-the-moment, for-no-good-reason road trip of the type young Americans take:  Scott and Zelda wake up one morning in their Connecticut cottage and realize they need real Southern biscuits and peaches for breakfast, so they drive all the way to Alabama to get them.  In a car that's falling apart, through an America that's decades off from an interstate highway system.

I'm coming to realize that Fitzgerald's best characters were Zelda, the unflappable flapper, and F. Scott, the buffoonish author who thinks he's above it all, and in this book he plays those characters to the hilt.  It's sitcom stuff but it's great:  they have the devil-may-care attitude that leads them to think that money will buy them safety and comfort everywhere they go, but he also lets us see that in fact they don't have the money, and therefore they're in constant comic peril and real discomfort.  (Since they're driving through the South and Fitzgerald's a frightfully unself-conscious racist some of this peril is expressed in horrific terms, but.)

And most importantly, writing about his best and easiest subjects freed Fitzgerald up to make some really decent jokes.  It's all a natural performance, and quite witty.  A more or less random selection, from p. 65: 

About the time we crossed the white chalk line which divides Virginia from North Carolina, we became aware that some sort of dispute was taking place in the interior of the car.  It began as a series of sullen mutters but soon the participants were involved in a noisy and metallic altercation.  I gathered that things were being thrown...

Silly cartoon humor: the white chalk line.  Situational humor: the sophisticate mystified by machinery.  Witty self-deprecating irony: the parts of the car at war with each other mirroring the marital disputes they in some measure give rise to.  Plus, wonderfully musical writing:  "sullen mutters," "metallic altercation."

One of his best.

F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Vegetable (1923)

His only full-length published play.  It's hard to judge it, of course, just by what's on the page,

because the kind of comedy it was intended as is probably the kind that only comes to life on the stage.  Then again, he did publish it, so he must have intended it to have some kind of life beyond the stage.  But it doesn't:  it's dead on the page.

It's partly because it simply isn't funny.  Maybe it was funnier at the time - maybe the jokes haven't aged well - but I rather doubt it.  After all, the play bombed, and the book doesn't seem to have done much better...  The situations aren't particularly funny, the characters aren't particularly funny, and the dialogue isn't particularly witty.  It reads like the kind of thing that was screamingly funny when Fitzgerald and his friends concocted it - but the humor metabolized out along with the alcohol...  I've now read most of Fitzgerald (I'm a few volumes behind in my blogging, but I think I'm ready to say I've read enough now), and one thing I don't think he was, was funny.  There are smiles and smirks in his writing, but precious few actual laughs.  He's not that kind of writer.  He tries to be here - he thinks he is - but he's not.

But I could forgive that, actually.  Comedy often doesn't age well, and in fact comedy doesn't always have to provide laughs to be worthwhile.  There can be other things on offer.  What really sinks this book is that it puts the worst of Fitzgerald's social attitudes front and center.  The plot revolves around a shlubby Everyman for whom bootleg alcohol is the pillow of Kantan:  he dreams he's President.  The problem is that, rather than enjoying his success and then awakening to realize that all earthly glory is as transient as a dream, he screws everything up as President and then wakes up thankful that he's just a simple man after all.  In other words it's a profoundly antidemocratic work that laughs at little people for being little people, and tells them that they shouldn't aspire to great things, but should be content with their little stations in life.

If there is humor here, it's the snide laughter of the elite, aimed at shaming the plebes into remaining in their place. 

F. Scott Fitzgerald: Afternoon of an Author

Another posthumous collection, this one from 1957.  Which puts it after The Crack-Up and before Bits of Paradise.  And like The Crack-Up, it's a bit of a miscellany.  It's more or less evenly split between short stories and essays, but instead of being split into a section of "Essays" and one of "Stories," it's split into four sequential Parts meant to encapsulate four distinct phases of his career, with the essays and stories chosen to do that as well as possible from the theretofore-uncollected stuff.  I guess that was the plan, although the short stories included here are for the most part much weaker than those in Bits of Paradise;  these weren't the best of the theretofore-uncollected stuff.  Maybe just the best of what Arthur Mizener could arrange reprint rights for.

Anyway, I don't feel that the chronological arrangement works all that well because the stories and essays don't sit that well together.  Mizener argues that they do, that they bleed into one another, but I don't agree;  it's pretty easy to tell what's a personal essay and what's fiction with Fitzgerald.  I think what we have here is another example of how the personal essay was undervalued as a literary form in mid-20th century America:  to get these pieces taken seriously Mizener has to stress how close they are to his fiction.  They're not.  They're better.

Take "Who's Who - and Why," for example.  It's a very early (1920) account of his rise to fame, and it's exquisite in its mixture of justified pride and failed false humility, breathless excitement at what he's achieved and quixotic frustration that he hasn't gotten more, more, more, even at his young age.  It's a literary author speaking from within celebrity culture, at an age when he's young enough not to know the difference but old enough to know that he should.

Or take the nifty pair of essays "How to Live on $36,000 a Year" and "How to Live on Practically Nothing a Year."  Fitzgerald's great theme was money, if only he knew it.  Not class, not pride, not lost illusion, but money.  (That's why they call it money.)   And these essays perfectly capture why.  When you've got it, you can't help but spend it.  When you don't have it, you can't help but spend it.  You have to spend money to make money.  Nothing's as expensive as poverty.  It's all true.  And he captures it all so well that you can't hate his materialism.  It's so honest, so honestly American.  That's his theme.

F. Scott Fitzgerald: Bits of Paradise

And further on into the posthumous stuff.  Bits of Paradise was published in 1974 and collects 11

previously uncollected stories of FSF's, plus ten of Zelda's (a later edition added one more FSF story, "Dice, Brassknuckles, & Guitar" - I didn't read that version). 

I didn't read the Zelda stories.  I don't have anything against Zelda, but to be honest I'm not sure how I feel about having her short stories only made available as an adjunct to Scott's;  and I'm pretty sure that if I read her I want to read her separately, so that I can pay attention to her for her own sake, rather than as an adjunct to Scott.  Then again, if I'd been making the publishing decisions back in '74 and I'd had that attitude, it might have meant her stories never got collected at all.  I'm not sure which is worse.  Luckily I don't have to make that decision.  Just when to read her.  So:  later.

The one exception I made was for "Our Own Movie Queen," which is credited jointly to both of them;  the notes say Scott probably only wrote the climax.  If that's the case, then Zelda's a pretty damn good writer in her own right, based on this story and the co-credited essays in The Crack-Up.  The editor's intro doesn't think much of this story, dismissing it as typical popular fiction of the time.  Maybe I'm just responding in innocence, not having read much popular fiction of the time.  But it's a great story - fresh, vivacious, witty, spunky.  '20s in a way that one always comes to F. Scott's fiction expecting but seldom actually finds.

Of the Scott solo stories, many have been reprinted in what's currently the standard Fitzgerald short-story anthology.  And I won't argue with that selection:  "A New Leaf," "The Swimmers," "The Hotel Child," "Last Kiss," these are indeed the best stories in the book.  But the book's worth seeking out anyway, because most of the other stories are almost as good.  In particular, "The Popular Girl" really struck me.  It's double the length of his typical magazine story, which makes it practically a novella, and it has a correspondingly deeper realization of its main character and her storyline.  It doesn't particularly break with convention, and it has a pat storybook ending that I've learned to think is par for the course with his magazine writing, but it's well-written, well-plotted, and the protagonist, a young woman staving off sudden poverty by trading on her looks, hoping for the one big score, is presented in an admirably complicated way.

Most of these, according to the editor, were left out of Fitzgerald's authorized collections because he had taken their best or most meaningful bits for his full-length novels.  That policy of his was a shame, I think, because the short stories, at their best, have a focus and impact that his novels (always excepting Gatsby) sometimes lack, for all their compensating glories.  Take "A New Leaf," "The Swimmers," and "The Hotel Child."  All of them work the theme of Americans in Europe, innocence vs. experience, who's exploiting whom, and one of them throws in alcoholism;  as such they're clearly leading up to Tender is the Night.  But none of them feel too similar to the novel - he obviously transmuted his feelings greatly in coming up with the novel - and so these stories stand beautifully on their own.  In fact they complement the novel wonderfully.  "The Hotel Child" trades in caricature, of vampiric Europeans sucking the life (=money) out of fresh young Americans - but it does it so vividly, and so wittily, that it's hard to object.  And it's balanced out by "The Swimmers," which does a much better job than anything in Tender at getting at why Americans (of that generation) might have preferred living in Europe despite all that.

"Last Kiss" is kind of an exception.  Written in 1940, it wasn't collected primarily because Fitzgerald died soon after.  But even if he'd lived, he probably would have let it languish because it's clearly dealing with material he was working on for The Love of the Last Tycoon.  And while because that's incomplete we'll never know, here too the short story might just be better.  With tremendous economy it suggests all the great feeling behind the romance in that novel, and does a much better job of working in the British-American cultural subject - the unease, the resentment, that can't help but disrupt the relationship.  One empire dying, grasping at the youth of the one about to reach maturity.  It's all here.

F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Crack-Up

On I press with the posthumously-collected Fitzgerald.  This one was published in 1945 and consists

of three sections.  First come essays - short non-fiction pieces from his 1930s, most of which were actually published during his lifetime.  Second is something called "The Notebooks," which it appears that Fitzgerald had compiled before his death, but which also seems to bear the mark of editor Edmund Wilson, pretty deeply.  Third is letters, both to and from FSF.  My short take is that the first section is brilliant, I should have skipped the second section, and I did skip the third section.

The essays are the best thing of Fitzgerald's I've read outside of Gatsby.  Maybe better than that, although I'll admit that one probably wouldn't bother to read these if it wasn't for that.  But they're good enough to make me suspect that the essay might have been Fitzgerald's true metier, something that never could have been allowed him in his day because of the overwhelming prestige, in America, of the Novel.

Partly they're brilliant, but doomed to obscurity, because of their autobiographical nature.  This is clearly true of the title essays, dealing with Fitzgerald's own problems with alcohol.  These are full of insightful, beautifully embittered writing, and as Patricia Hampl points out, they were decades ahead of their time.  His decision to deal with his problems in non-fiction form (however successfully he obliqued them in these essays) seems to have been seen as an admission of artistic defeat by his peers, or worse:  sensationalism.  Now it's much easier to recognize that therein lies the art.  Now we've realized that Literature can, and in fact always has, included non-fiction writing.

I don't know, though;  maybe I'm a little more conscious of that than some?  Steeped as I am in the J-lit, where this kind of thing is not just accepted, but expected.  Any 20th century writer with an audience seems to have volumes and volumes of this kind of thing.  Not just the confessional, but also the ruminative, the playful, the acerbic, the documentary - all notes that the other essays in this volume hit.

Anyway, any reader who at all cares about Fitzgerald simply must read "Echoes of the Jazz Age" and "My Lost City," since they contain some of his most enduring writing on his own age.  And any reader who's interested in Fitzgerald as a modernist, an experimental writer, needs to read "Show Mr. and Mrs. F. to Number - ", cowritten with Zelda;  nothing more than a long, vivid catalog of hotels stayed in, making the reader feel at first dazzled, then nauseated, then amused, then somehow enlightened.

It's worth noting that FSF's writing, his style, in these pieces is polished to the highest sheen.  He reads like a man unleashed here, allowed to concentrate on the words because the story has taken care of itself.  Check out this sentence, from the eulogy to Ring Lardner, "Ring":  "His intentions, his will, once in motion, were formidable factors in dealing with him - he always did every single thing he said he would do."  Note how perfectly the words fit together, but also how the sentence does what it describes:  it starts slow, convoluted, like a man whose intentions aren't yet sorted out, but then as it progresses it starts to move and takes on a single-minded purpose, so that it culminates in that glorious string of monosyllables.

*

The Notebooks sounded like a good idea at first, but that was because I misunderstood what that idea was.  They looked to me like a kind of Pillow Book, like a collection of random, or random-feeling, jottings on various topics, where the variety and unstructured nature is part of the charm.  Coming straight out of the essays in the first part of the book this seemed promising, but in fact it got tedious very quickly.  There's just too much randomness here - unlike Sei Shonagon he's not actually consciously addressing any of the categories these fragments are placed into.  Rather it seems that these are bits and pieces he either jotted down or lifted from short stories he otherwise didn't want to preserve;  the categories were imposed after the writing.  And the fragments mostly read like snippets from longer, more coherent pieces.  Not a satisfying read at all.

Especially because I started in on Bits of Paradise right after, and am finding passages from the Notebooks right and left in these stories.  And they work much better here.  The Notebooks can be skipped.

F. Scott Fitzgerald: Taps at Reveille (1935)

So I'm still occasionally pressing on with my Fitzgerald obsession.  I am obsessive with things like this, and sometimes, when it's driven by past experience and future promise of joy, I consider it a good thing.  But sometimes it's just a neurotic inability to cut my losses and get out.  I was starting to feel that way about Fitzgerald:  after reading Gatsby I decided to read All of Fitzgerald, something I'd long been curious about.  Then I realized that of his novels only Tender is the Night and The Love of the Last Tycoon come close, and not too close at that;  and that his short stories, while sometimes striking and sometimes amusing, don't come any closer.  So I got burned out.  But here I am, reading Taps at Reveille.

It was the last collection he published during his lifetime, the last he oversaw.  The first half of it consists of all of the Basil and Josephine stories he saw fit to reprint, but those are best read in the posthumous collection by that name.   That leaves ten stories, a book-length volume in itself.

The best, by far, is "Babylon Revisited," and since that's frequently anthologized the casual Fitzgerald reader may be better off reading it elsewhere.  It's a masterpiece, maybe the only one of his short stories that I've read that touches Gatsby's power and grace.  It's got his familiar faults - the villain, the obstacle, is a woman, and she's depicted with scant empathy.  But the elegiac tone leaves a deep impression, and the protagonist's guilty self-control leaves a mark. 

Does it gain from being read in context?  Maybe.  The title of this collection asks us to think in terms of elegies, of laments for something that ended before it really even got started.  And a couple of the other stories suggest that theme:  "Crazy Sunday," with its delicious adulterous flirtation turned to ashes in the mouth by the death of the Other Man;  "The Last of the Belles" and "Majesty," two more, but still effective, foxtrots to Fitzgerald's familiar theme of the shockingly precocious young woman whose freshness is belied by her cynicism.  So:  maybe.

The volume also contains some more experiments, along the lines of "Benjamin Button" or "Tarquin of Cheapside."  There's the Civil War story "The Night of Chancellorsville" and the ghost story "A Short Trip Home."  Most interesting of these is "Family in the Wind," because it seems to show Fitzgerald trying to be Faulkner.  It's a failure, even embarrassing - it's not possible to believe Fitzgerald's sudden attempt at empathy with poor rural people - but it's revealing that he'd try this.  And that he'd elect to reprint it in his lifetime, when so many of his other short stories didn't make his cut.

F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Pat Hobby Stories

A series of short-short stories FSF published in Esquire starting the year before he died and running until after his death, collected in 1962. They're set in Hollywood and center around a hack scenario writer, a washed-up relic of the silent age.

As Hollywood stories they're the obvious counterpart to The Love of the Last Tycoon, and they're a nice counterpoint to that work, too.  Whereas the novel dealt with success, these stories deal with failure;  the hero of the novel was still in his prime professionally if not emotionally, a man of his age, while Hobby is over the hill in every way.

The temptation is to read these stories autobiographically, mapping Fitzgerald's own Hollywood malaise and post-Tender Is the Night literary irrelevance onto Hobby.  I don't know enough to say whether that reading is right or wrong, but I will note that Hobby isn't a mirror image of Fitzgerald. 

In later decades the Fitzgerald type, the literary writer who goes to Hollywood and fails even to become a hack screenwriter, would become a trope of its own, but that's not what Fitzgerald is giving us here.  Hobby isn't a genius with words who finds Hollywood's debasing of words beneath him;  he's a "writer" who started his career in a period when "writing" for the films wasn't really writing, when it was a matter of slapping together story clichés and a few intertitles.  It's the new Hollywood, the one that values and requires words, that Hobby can't deal with, and in fact the few real writers that Hobby encounters, the obvious analogs for Fitzgerald, seem to be succeeding pretty well.  What I'm saying is that if Hobby does represent Fitzgerald's own sense of failure, then Fitzgerald has objectified that in a determined way, so that the parallels aren't completely obvious.  Hobby is less a comment on the passé writer than he is on the transition from silents to talkies and what it might have felt like to be middle-aged at that time.

That's where I think the sense of failure comes in, or rather Fitzgerald's empathy with failure.  Hobby's a guy whose talents are obsolete, whose tastes and joys are superannuated, whose indulgence that once seemed heroic now seem tawdry.  He's middle aged, in other words, and his failure is that of every middle-aged guy.  Right?  He's 49 when these stories take place, which makes him a few years older than FSF was when he wrote them, but no doubt the author could see himself going there. 

Are they great stories?  I don't know about that.  I didn't laugh, but they kept me amused.  They didn't move me deeply, but they rang true.  And I'm always interested in literary explorations of failure, of decline.  It rings true...

F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Love of the Last Tycoon

His last, unfinished novel, of course.  Which means I've run the course with Fitzgerald, as far as full-length works go.  I've been pretty hard on, because disappointed in, FSF regarding most things except for Gatsby.  But this one was a pleasant surprise.  Well, not entirely pleasant, because of course it's unfinished.  But I came away from it feeling that Fitzgerald died, perhaps, just when he was beginning to get interesting. 

It's well known that this work is a product of Fitzgerald's failed Hollywood stint, and that it's a roman a clef of Irving Thalberg.  Which means that it's not about Fitzgerald himself, and not about Zelda.  Did his failure in Hollywood humble Fitzgerald?  Did he realize that there were worlds out there and people who didn't care about the Riviera and its denizens?  Did it knock him out of himself? 

If so, it seems to have been all to the good.  Even in its fragmented, blurry state this is one of the most focused things I've read by Fitzgerald.  The characters stand out in sharp relief;  they're largely new types in Fitzgerald, doing new things, talking in new ways.  The descriptions, the scenes, are carefully observed and rendered. And you get the feeling that all of this is possible because Fitzgerald has been forced to look at something outside himself and his familiar, self-reflecting world for a change.  And he had the good sense to write down what he saw.

F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Basil and Josephine Stories

Fitzgerald is a major American writer.  Right?  I mean, not only does he still get assigned in high school and college AmLit classes (frequently and copiously assigned, if the stacks of FSF in my local college-town used-book store are any indication), but it seems that people still read at least some of his work out of sheer interest.  You know, because it speaks to them.

So why is it that his last two short-story collections are out of print?  I'm talking about All the Sad Young Men and Taps at Reveille.  Granted, most of the stories in them are readily available in other collections that are in print - but not all of them.  And even if most college classes (undoubtedly the driving market for this kind of publishing) are content to assign an omnibus anthology to cover Fitzgerald's short stories, surely there are enough seminars out there, and interested general readers, to create a market for his short stories in their original book presentation? 

Well, I guess not.

The Basil and Josephine Stories is, then, where some of the contents of Taps at Reveille have found refuge.  I'm not even sure it's not a better presentation of them than Taps is.  I'm totally sold on the editors' argument that all of these stories (not just the selection of them that appeared in Taps) deserve to be read together, in sequence, as a sort of novel-in-short-story-form.  They do have a power and a coherence as a complete set that they would have lacked as a subsection of a more varied anthology;  and that's true even if, as a complete set, they're still incomplete in the story they tell.  As everybody notes, Fitzgerald had intended to have Basil meet Josephine, but stopped writing the series before that happened;  but then again, we kind of know what happens when they meet anyway.  It has to turn out pretty much like the relationship in The Beautiful and Damned, doesn't it?  Or, at best, the one in Tender is the Night.  Basil is a deeply flawed boy, but he has strength, and therefore the potential to overcome his flaws;  but Josephine is a femme fatale, an emotional and moral vacuum powerful enough (because attractive and skilled enough) to overcome Basil's strength.  The irresistible force meets the movable object.

It's a valuable anthology, then, to have in print, and certainly worth a read if you're into Fitzgerald.  Fitzgerald's clear focus on these two characters, respectively, lifts these stories above the run of his other short stories.  They're just as incisive a pair of character studies as anything in his novels, and they make a nice complement to the novels, which focus on adults, rather than adolescents.  And (although I'm less clear on this) they work as nice evocations of the age that produced the classic Fitzgerald protagonists and antagonists.  When I read Gatsby, that is, I tend to think of the characters as expressions of the Jazz Age, but of course they came of age (as people) before that;  what Fitzgerald is doing with these stories is showing how his characters were molded by growing up in the oughts and the teens, and therefore how the Jazz Age was actually an expression of them.  Not the other way around.

But it's not an entirely pleasant read, for reasons that I've been running into in the last few Fitzgerald books I've read.  This collection is the plainest display yet of the author's misogyny.  The romantic (in the context of the time, sexual) experimentation, the explorations of other ways of life than the one into which one was born - these things are presented as natural and perhaps even admirable in Basil, but in Josephine they're marks of the corruption at the heart of her character.  And this is done with great craft, so that we must notice the parallels.  For example, each character dabbles in theater.  But whereas for Basil it's a growing experience, one in which he learns how to handle people and how to cultivate the creative side of his personality, for Josephine it's just a walk on the wild side, another sexual fling, and at worst an indulgence of her egotism.

The concept of "emotional bankruptcy" (the title of the last story) is the one that people seem to keep coming back to with these stories.  And it does seem to be an important concept in other works of Fitzgerald's, applicable to both men and women.  But in these stories it only seems to be operative for Josephine, and there I'm not sure it really is emotional bankruptcy.  In that story, Josephine finds a boy who epitomizes everything she's been looking for, catches him, kisses him, and then finds that she feels nothing.  But how does Fitzgerald express that?  "One cannot both spend and have.  The love of her life had come by, and looking in her empty basket, she had found not a flower left for him - not one."

Why can't one both spend and have?  Basil seems to grow through his loves, losses, trials, failures - his expenditures can be seen as investments that bring him dividends.  But Fitzgerald doesn't allow that the same could be true of Josephine.  Her expenditures are purchases of pleasure, made with a finite cache of cash.  She has only so much within her to give to a man, and when it's gone, it's gone, he seems to say.  It doesn't take much reflection, or cynicism, to see emotional bankruptcy in this case as a euphemism for sexual bankruptcy, and Josephine's lament as being one for squandered virginity.  Fitzgerald seems to be suggesting, in other words, that loose girls of the 1910s were destined for unhappiness, because they gave it up too soon. 

Disappointing, if that is what he's saying.  Even if he's not fully aware that that's what he's saying.  And I'd imagine it isn't.  He's calling it emotional bankruptcy, after all, trying to develop a concept that hinges more on feeling, on mind and heart, than on body.  But body's there, too, and there's no escaping the double standard applied to what Basil does with his and Josephine does with hers.

F. Scott Fitzgerald: All The Sad Young Men (1926)

This is Fitzgerald's third collection of short stories, and best so far.  The most consistent, that is;  it doesn't have the jazz-age sass that the first two had in places, and it doesn't have anything quite as unforgettable as "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz," but there are fewer duds, fewer things that have aged as badly as some of the things in the first two collections.  That's why it's so odd that it's not in print.  Some of the stories (I won't say the best) are in the big Fitzgerald omnibus, but like his others, this really deserves to be read as a conceptual whole.  So, library.

Second things second, then:  why are all the young men sad?  It's the young women's fault.  Best to get this out right up front:  Fitzgerald, I'm learning anew with every book, exemplified some of the worst traits of the America of his day.  Racism, chauvinism, sexism, materialism.  At his best, he can maintain an ironic distance that makes you think he's putting these evils under a microscope.  But at other times they're just there, unexamined.  I suppose this shouldn't surprise me:  what I've always liked most about Gatsby (which is, I guess, always going to my touchstone for Fitzgerald) is just how conflicted the author/narrator is about the superficial hypermaterialism he portrays.  That is, he's both horrified by it and drawn to it.  This ambivalence - this eager ambivalence - has always struck me as honest, and therefore beautiful.  It's one of my core aesthetics.

So why should it be acceptable for him to be that way about one mental vice - materialism - and not others - racism and sexism?  Because that, really, is it.  In The Beautiful and Damned, he seems at first glance to be blaming Anthony's fall on the women in his life, but any careful reading will recall how lazy and privileged Anthony acted before ever meeting Gloria.  Similarly, the expressions of chauvinism in the book are couched in Anthony's own shrivelled Waspish p.o.v., which allows us to read them as part of his moral failure. 

But some of the stories in this book quite nakedly blame women for men's downfall.  "Gretchen's Forty Winks," "The Rich Boy," "The Adjuster," "The Baby Party", "Winter Dreams" - most of the stories, in fact.  The biographical reading would note that these stories are the product of a time of trouble in Fitzgerald's own marriage - which may explain, but hardly excuses, the misogyny. 

So, that's there.  At the same time, these are among Fitzgerald's most psychologically nuanced stories - at least in their portrayal of the male characters.  All those varieties of sadness, of defeat, of failure.  Even a surprisingly sincere and effective look at Catholic guilt and apostasy, in "Absolution."  Of what I've read, this is the short-story collection that comes closest to equaling his novels.

F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Beautiful and Damned (1922)

In some ways I kind of wish I hadn't embarked on this project of reading most of Fitzgerald.  There have been discoveries, but so far nothing has really come close to Gatsby, and so maybe it would have been better to let that book remain alone and untouched in my memory.  To a greater or lesser extent everything else has been a disappointment.

The Beautiful and Damned is probably the second-best thing he wrote, at least among the novels.  (And I guess I've read them all now, except the last, unfinished one.)  It's a truly harrowing portrait of two people who start their adult lives provisionally rich and go downhill from there, sinking into a morass of genteel poverty, idleness, and alcoholism.  It's actually a very simple, almost archetypal book:  it's about the Fall, or one of them, and it has the power that such a primal theme can marshal.  And it has a perfect ending, a deus-ex-machina* that saves them economically while damning them emotionally.  Irony, baby.

Which makes it sound like a simple story, and in its outlines it is, but in fact the story of Anthony Patch and his wife Gloria is told with enough detail, enough character-revealing incident, that it never feels barren.  In fact it feels like the collective generational self-portrait that This Side of Paradise was meant to be:  it contains, if not exactly multitudes, then a good-sized dinner party's worth of individually-detailed types.  It's a satisfying book.

Satisfying because it seems truthful in its details.  Like, here too the protagonist is drafted, but instead of going to glorious service in Europe he spends his war in Southern shitholes, engaging in ignominious behavior.  If Fitzgerald's great theme is the moral vacuity, the well-heeled nihilism, of his generation, then this war experience fits it far better than the fakery in his first book.  It works:  it really constructs Patch for us.

But it's not a perfect book, not like Gatsby.  What's most problematic for me is the ugliness of the attitudes it displays toward anybody who's not a rich male WASP.  Granted, Anthony is something of an antihero, so maybe we're supposed to be a bit shocked when he, or the narrator when exploring Anthony's point of view, says something bigoted about black people or Jews or Italians or Irish or Eastern Europeans or women or poor people or...  Just like we're (probably) supposed to be shocked when Tom Buchanan talks racial Darwinism in Gatsby (I remember a long class discussion about this in high school).  But the thing is, these attitudes are on display in pretty much everything I've read of Fitzgerald's so far - and they're not always carefully couched in the context of an antihero.  So was this how Fitzgerald really felt?  I guess in the context of this book the question is, how much of an antihero is Patch?  Are we supposed to feel any sympathy for him at any point?  He's actually pretty seductive at first...

*Actually, FSF lays the groundwork for the ending from at least halfway through the book.  But I, at least, never thought it would actually happen, so it worked on me like a bolt from the blue.

F. Scott Fitzgerald: This Side Of Paradise (1920)

FSF's first book.  James L. West III's intro quotes an anonymous original reviewer who dubbed it "the collected works of F. Scottt Fitzgerald."  True, that.  This Side of Paradise is incredibly disjointed, as befits a novel that was evidently cobbled together from a number of originally unrelated stories and novel fragments.  To say that this disjointed quality is what Fitzgerald intended would be giving him too much credit for planning ahead, but it sounds like it would be accurate to say that when he settled on this method he accepted disjointedness as the price he'd have to pay for it.  And tried to make a virtue out of necessity, by playing up the disjointedness, shifting tone and format at will.  Just goes to show that postmodernism is no such thing.

Is it effective?  Well, I enjoyed parts of it a great deal.  The out-of-nowhere intensity of the love affair in Maryland with Eleanor, recounted in the "Young Irony" chapter, is brilliantly moving, really capturing the insane romanticism of youth.  There were other bits here and there that worked really well, too. 

But they never did hang together well enough for me - the thing is I just don't believe that Fitzgerald's heart was in the disjointedness.  If he was really a postmodernist at heart, if he really had meant to challenge traditional fictional notions of the unified personality, the format would have meant something and the novel would have worked, but I don't believe Fitzgerald believed it.  And so the novel as a whole strikes me as glib.  Beautiful and effective in parts, but not in other parts, and not in the whole.

The worst aspect of it was how he fakes his way through his protagonist's war experiences.  As is well known, FSF spent his WWI Stateside;  in his second novel he depicts this experience vividly, but in this book he seems to have felt that to speak for his generation (as he so clearly wants this hero to do) the hero had to have served in Europe.  But because FSF himself didn't serve there he has nothing to say about his hero's time there.  He glosses over it, but still expects us to believe the guy is seriously affected by it.  He's conning us.

F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tales of the Jazz Age (1922)

This is more like it:  more what I expected from Fitzgerald's famous flapper period.  The first four stories, at least - the ones grouped as "My Last Flappers."  They keep the promise, deftly evoking a society on edge, a society being stretched and frayed by the mystifying energies of young women ducking away from their handlers and the nearly beat cynicism of the young men who can't catch them either.  Yes he's still objectifying the women, still making them vessels of everything but their own humanity, but at least he's doing it wholeheartedly this time. 

The first four stories are easily the best in the volume, though.  "May Day," in fact, is one of the best things I've read in all of Fitzgerald so far.  Its successful evocation of various levels of society - the way it evokes, or maybe just fakes, empathy for the downtrodden as well as the downtreaders - certainly foreshadows Gatsby, but the limited temporal and physical setting of it give it a dramatic unity and therefore intensity all its own.

The rest of the stories are real hit and miss.  Some inane comedy pieces ("Mr. Icky" and "Jemina"), some sophomoric trick pieces ("Tarquin of Cheapside" and "O Russet Witch!"), and some clearly major but rather off-putting fantasies.  "Benjamin Button" (never seen the film, so don't ask) and "The Diamond As Big As The Ritz" are the latter.  I didn't think much of "Benjamin Button" one way or the other, but "Diamond" was interesting.

Interesting for obvious reasons - it's a vividly told parable of something - but also disturbing.  It forced me to confront something that I've found increasingly hard to ignore as I make my way through early Fitzgerald.  His racial attitudes.  In "Diamond" the problematic idea is that this Shangri-la is based on the labor of slaves who were never freed after the Civil War.  Certainly we're not meant to see this as unproblematic, and I guess you could make a point that Fitzgerald was being exceptionally clear-eyed about race by admitting that a certain kind of white paradise could only be built on the stolen freedom of blacks.  But I'm not sure that's his intent either.  I'm sure he thinks he's being a little bit daring by imagining this, but I don't know that he thinks he's exposing the heart of American darkness either, although I think that's what he's doing in effect.  That is, the Peach Blossom Spring that he invents in the Rockies works perfectly as a metaphor for the antebellum South, or the society that the Lost Causers want to bring back:  a place whose wealth is entirely bound up with the existence of an enslaved class, a system that by its very backwardness calls forth other relics of behavior - the vaguely Oriental (in the oldest sense, the one followed by "despot") air about the place plugs in here.  That's how the thing works, I say, but I worry that Fitzgerald isn't as horrified by this vision as we might be today.  (As I am, and as I hope you are.)

I worry because although I never noticed it in Gatsby (is it there?), I've noticed in these early works Fitzgerald often taking a very cavalier attitude toward race.  Portraying black characters in essentialist way, having white characters talk about them in racist ways, evincing a nostalgia for the Confederacy, buying into the whole myth of Southern chivalry and Northern barbarism.  Well:  Fitzgerald may be no more than a victim of his times.  But when Tom Buchanan says things like this in Gatsby, I'm accustomed to being horrified, to seeing him as a bad guy, and therefore Fitzgerald as being more enlightened than his times.  But maybe not.

F. Scott Fitzgerald's Flappers and Philosophers (1920)

The best thing about Fitzgerald's first short-story collection is its title.  Seeing it, and knowing of Fitzgerald's reputation as poet laureate of the Jazz Age, and maybe being familiar with his later knowing, sympathetic portraits of wild women and enchanted men, you're probably going to expect a completely unbridled, unsobered-up collection of hot jazz fantasias.  Specifically the title seems to suggest that the collection will present a contrast between the body-centered concrete liberation represented the flapper and the mind-bound abstract repression represented by the philosopher, and that this contrast will redound (scandalously) to the Flapper's benefit by suggesting that she is the true Philosopher (in the sense of having the most persuasive access to Truth and Understanding).  The title does all this (for me, anyway), and what's even more exciting is that it does it all with such perfect music in the language - the three words of the title.  I mean, think of the orthography and how it relates to the sounds.  In the word "flapper" an "f" sound like an "f" and a "p" sounds like a "p":  straightforward, honest, no nonsense, intuitive.  In "philosopher" a "p" is denatured, abstracted by an "h" until it stands in for a displaced "f":  letters are one or two steps removed from their reflexive, direct sounds.  They're processed through the brain, rather than proceeding naturally from the lips.  The words work, in this instance, like the readings they're meant to evoke.  "Philosopher" is fake nonsense:  "flapper" is real.

I wanted to read that book.  Unfortunately, Fitzgerald's book only has a couple of stories worthy of that title.  "The Offshore Pirate" and "Head and Shoulders."  The latter really does translate the ancient mind/body split into contemporary (Jazz Age) terms, with its pairing of a Broadway ingenue and a Yale prodigy who in the end switch places.  The former presents a really indelible sketch of a flapper, Ardita, "slender and supple, with a spoiled alluring mouth and quick gray eyes full of a radiant curiosity," who is seduced by, or maybe seduces, a modern-day pirate.  Despite the condescending O. Henry twists at the end, these stories display the kind of louche brassiness that one might expect from the title of the book.

But the rest of the stories are not that.  At their best they're deft character studies (like "The Ice Palace" or "Bernice Bobs Her Hair"), and at their worst they're alarmingly conventional ("Benediction," "The Cut-Glass Bowl").  Either way, they're much more mundane than I've come to expect from Fitzgerald.  Middle-brow magazine fodder, which is I guess what they were.

F. Scott Fitzgerald: Tender Is The Night (1934)

Where do you go after Gatsby?  I went where Fitzgerald went, and frankly part of me wishes I hadn't;  Tender is the Night is such a different book, so much sadder.  More than anything it made me want to rush back and read his earlier, lighter things.  Flappers and Philosophers is next.

Other than that, I can't figure out how I feel about it.  Conventionally, probably.  I mean, I expect most everybody feels that the opening chapters, when we see the Gausse's crowd through Rosemary's eyes, gradually leading up to her/our encounters with Dick and Nicole Diver, are the most memorable. And it's no coincidence that those are the most Gatsby-like chapters, full of rich and beautiful people doing things that only rich and beautiful people can.

Once we start to see life from Dick and Nicole's perspective, they lose a lot of their appeal.  Which is, of course, part of Fitzgerald's brilliance in this book:  he's destroying their glamor for us, by showing us the insecurities and instabilities that lie behind it.

But that's not quite right, because if he had effectively destroyed their glamor for me, wouldn't I remember the opening scenes a little less fondly?  And yet a passage like this one floors me still (p. 21 of the Scribner paperback):

Simultaneously the whole party moved toward the water, supper-ready from the long, forced inaction, passing from the heat to the cool with the gourmandise of a tingling curry eaten with chilled white wine.  The Divers' day was spaced like the day of the older civilizations to yield the utmost from the materials at hand, and to give all the transitions their full value...

I mean, no matter how much skepticism Fitzgerald turns toward this kind of luxurious living, it's still what he's best at describing.  Maybe he's good at it because he's skeptical of it, but as Greil Marcus once wrote about somebody else in a different context, I think Fitzgerald's attitude toward it is a loud yes and a quiet no, rather than the other way around...

In that passage I love, by the way, how he translates all of the Divers' pleasure-taking into foodie terms.  They consume their days with the discernment and deliberation of a gourmet.

There's another metaphor he uses for it, at least twice, that of curating.  On p. 258, describing the Divers moving back to the Riviera and the obscene number of possessions they take with them, he notes that "Nicole was capable of being curator of it all."  And then he proceeds to list them all.

You see this term popping up these days, too.  I don't know if Fitzgerald invented this usage, but it's a brilliant one in his book, because it perfectly captures the self-absorption of the hedonist who in his/her mind gives his/her material indulgences the dignity of scholarly or aesthetic pursuits.  That is, there are certain objects, and certain collections of objects, and certain settings for those collections, that require and deserve the kind of discernment and care that justify the term "curator" - but your luggage ain't it.  Your iTunes playlist ain't it.  Your spice rack ain't it. 

My blog ain't it.

F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby (1925)

Aviator Books, in the International Wing of the San Francisco Airport, is the best bookstore I've ever encountered in an airport.  I can't sleep on airplanes, and I've stopped listening to any music I care about because the noise of the engines gets in the way, so I get a lot of reading done.  I read the Ishiguro book I just blogged about on a flight to Tokyo last week, and during my layover in SFO I could tell I was going to finish it before hitting Setagaya-ku, so I went hunting for a bookstore.  Aviator had more attractive things for the literary-minded than I had hoped for, and I settled on The Great Gatsby.  Had about twenty pages left in it when I got to my in-laws' house, so:  that worked out well.

And now I'm sitting in our hotel in Kyoto trying to think of something intelligent to say about it.  I've got nothing. It's one of those books that everybody loves, and so do I, and I'm sure I love it for the same reasons everybody else does.  The way it mingles wisdom about material wealth and worldly glamor with an honest human love of same;  the way it lays bare American obsessions with origins, with self-reinvention, with status and place;  the way it does all this in some of the most glorious English ever written.

I guess it's something, though, if I can say I love it now.  I don't think I've read it since high school (required reading, sophomore year), and I didn't have much patience with it then.  A) I didn't appreciate language for its own sake then (despite pretensions to poetry), and B) I was in my full-on anti-materialist hippie phase, and didn't have any patience for the narrator's patience with Gatsby and Daisy.

Like, these are shallow people, and Nick Carraway knows that, but he's attracted by their glamor anyway.  By their what Gatsby says (in just one of the novel's immortal lines) he hears in Daisy's voice:  money.  I didn't get this when I was young.  I figured you either bought that stuff or you didn't;  it was black or white.  You know, that's youth.  Now, as a wizened (not necessarily wise) old dude, I'm all about the conflicted feelings, the self-contradictory attitudes, the loving what you don't necessarily approve of.  It strikes me as being about as close as you can get to a summary of the human condition.

Fitzgerald nails it.