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| F. Scott Fitzgerald |
The Lost Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald
March 13, 2017
A conversation with Anne Margaret Daniel, the editor of “I’d Die for You and Other Lost Stories,” by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
“The I.O.U.”—as well as another F. Scott Fitzgerald story that was published in The New Yorker, in 2012, “Thank You for the Light”—will appear in a new collection of Fitzgerald stories that comes out late next month, “I’d Die for You and Other Lost Stories.” How did the collection come about? How were the stories lost (and found)?
I was invited to edit a collection of fifteen stories by the Trustees of the Fitzgerald Estate. There weren’t enough unpublished stories to constitute a collection until very recently. Fitzgerald scholars had known of the existence of some of these stories, like “Thank You for the Light,” for decades, but others were rediscovered by Fitzgerald’s family only a few years ago. To these fifteen, I added three more that I uncovered as I worked on the edition, including a fragment that allows an intimate look at Fitzgerald’s creative process.
“The I.O.U.” was written in 1920, when Fitzgerald was twenty-three. He’d just published “This Side of Paradise,” which was a huge success, but had he written many short stories?
He had. Fitzgerald is the best source for anyone writing about his professional life. He kept a ledger of everything he published from 1919 until 1938. You can page through this ledger online, thanks to the Irvin Department of Rare Books and Special Collections at the University of South Carolina Library; they have digitized it. Fitzgerald’s “Record of Published Fiction” lists dates and places of publication, what he was paid for stories, and whether or not he mined the stories later for use in his novels. (If he did, he often noted that such a story had been “Stripped and Permanently Buried.”) The songs he wrote for Triangle Club plays at Princeton from 1914 to 1917 were printed and sold by the John Church Company, but Fitzgerald’s first commercial sale of a short story was “Babes in the Woods,” sold to The Smart Set in 1919. The Smart Set was a major literary magazine, edited by H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan, both of whom continued to be champions of Fitzgerald’s writing; and surely Fitzgerald knew that they had published an idol of his, James Joyce, in 1915. While he was struggling to make a living in advertising in New York the year before, Fitzgerald had received his much-mentioned one hundred and twenty-two rejection slips for stories. But when “Babes in the Woods” ran, in the fall of 1919, he had arrived. The Smart Set and the Saturday Evening Post began buying his stories—“Head and Shoulders” and “Benediction” were two more he finished that fall—as fast as he could write them. By the summer of 1920, when he wrote “The I.O.U.,” he was a celebrity.
“The I.O.U.” is a kind of spoof on the cravenness of the publishing industry. Was Fitzgerald writing from personal experience?
Remember those hundred and twenty-two rejection slips! Fitzgerald’s initial experiences with the publishing industry were not sanguine. However, he had a friend in the Irish writer and Scribner author Shane Leslie. Leslie had met him when Fitzgerald was a student at the Newman School, a Catholic prep school in Hackensack, New Jersey. He read Fitzgerald’s poetry, and when Fitzgerald was in officer-training camp in 1918 he sent Leslie drafts of the novel he was working on, which would become “This Side of Paradise.” From Fort Leavenworth, Fitzgerald wrote to Leslie, “Think of a romantic egoist writing about himself in a cold barracks on Sunday afternoons . . . that is the way this novel has been scattered into shape—for it has no form to speak of.” Leslie showed a final draft to Charles Scribner II, who rejected it and sent it back to Fitzgerald to be rewritten. Scribner’s legendary editor Maxwell Perkins accepted “This Side of Paradise” after that revision—and became one of Fitzgerald’s best and most trusted friends for the rest of his life.
There’s a lot of humor here—including lighthearted jabs at publishers, spiritualists, and newspaper reporters—but also a more serious undercurrent: What would it be like to be presumed dead in the First World War, hospitalized with “brain fever” for months, and then come home to find that your relative had capitalized on your (fictional) death?
I believe that Fitzgerald never really stopped thinking about the First World War. He was meant to ship out to France when the Armistice was signed; he was prepared and willing to go; he lost a host of friends and acquaintances. That war was once called the “War to End Wars.” For anyone to capitalize upon a soldier’s fictional death is grim indeed, and the humor in this story relies entirely upon Cosgrove Harden’s being alive—and being reconciled enough to forgive, through love, his uncle’s betrayal and use of his identity. Note, though, that the story doesn’t quite end with reconciliation. Fitzgerald would take the idea of a young man altered by war and explore it much more deeply in “The Great Gatsby,” in the characters of Nick Carraway and Jay Gatsby. Both were lost in the war, in a way: Carraway stumbling away from the Middle West and into the world of the bond business without interest, because that was what men of his age and class were doing now, and Gatsby remaking his entire identity for an unreality of love.
Before his death, Fitzgerald saw another world war at hand. Addressing an antiwar meeting at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, in the mid-thirties, he told his listeners how he had “progressed from an enthusiastic first lieutenant, brought up on the American fetish of marching feet and stationary brains,” to opposition to the thought of war. He was horrified by Hitler, and wrote to his daughter, Scottie, of his too-prescient fears for a completely global combat this time: “Still I think many of your friends will probably draw their last breaths in Paraguay or the forests of the Chaco.”
Thalia, Cosgrove’s self-serious fiancée, takes her name from the Greek muse of comedy. The last name Harden also has some (possibly comedic) connotations. Are these intentional jokes on Fitzgerald’s part?
Yes. After all, this is a writer who calls a woman dressed in white “Daisy” and the king of Hollywood producers “Stahr.” Fitzgerald’s favorite writers, from William Shakespeare to James Joyce, all made these name jokes, too.
In your introduction to the collection, you mention that in this period Fitzgerald was writing for money, rather than, necessarily, for art. What do you think distinguishes this story? Why wasn’t it published in Harper’s Bazaar, for which he originally wrote it?
Short stories were Fitzgerald’s bread and butter. Yes, he sold his work for money from 1919 on, and was acutely aware of how much he could make, quickly, with stories, as opposed to waiting longer for a novel to be complete enough to serialize. He never lied to himself about what he himself called “hack work” and, sometimes, “trash,” and keenly felt the difference between commercially successful and imaginatively satisfying stories. In 1922, he complained to his agent, Harold Ober, “I am rather discouraged that a cheap story like ‘The Popular Girl’ written in one week while the baby was being born brings $1500 + a genuinely imaginative thing into which I put three weeks real entheusiasm [sic] like ‘The Diamond in the Sky’ [‘The Diamond as Big as the Ritz’] brings not a thing.” By 1925, he’d become even blunter, telling Perkins, “The more I get for my trash the less I can bring myself to write.” From the first, Fitzgerald walked the tightrope between art and commerce as well as any writer of his generation.
He wrote “The I.O.U.” in the late spring of 1920, evidently after a specific request from Henry Blackman Sell, the editor of Harper’s Bazaar. Fitzgerald dropped the story off at Ober’s offices in New York, reminding him, “This is the plot that Sell particularly wanted for Harps. Baz and which I promised him. I think it is pretty good.” In July, Ober sent the story on to the Saturday Evening Post, but Fitzgerald asked for it back because he wanted to revise it. Ober returned the manuscript and typescript to Fitzgerald, who set it aside and concentrated instead on his second novel, “The Beautiful and Damned,” telling Ober “there will probably be no more short stories this summer.” Lost in the sparkling shuffle of Fitzgerald’s first fame, the story remained the property of the Trustees of the Fitzgerald Estate until it was rediscovered and sold to Yale University’s Beinecke Library in 2012.
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