Business Is Good: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Professional Writer 9780271096643

Table of contents :
Contents
List of Illustrations
Preface
Acknowledgments
Editorial Note
1. Fitzgerald’s Last Triangle “Preformance”
2. Fitzgerald and Moran Tudury
3. The Great Gatsby, Broadway 1926
4. Fitzgerald and Psychiatry
5. The Ledger as Autobiography
6. Fitzgerald’s Seven-Year Plan
7. Punctuating by Ear
8. Interpreting “Jacob’s Ladder”
9. Decisions, Decisions: Editing The Great Gatsby
10. Le déluge? New Editions of The Great Gatsby
11. The Cambridge Edition and the Cambridge Plumber
Endpiece: Gatsby Movie (in Skeltonics)
Index

Citation preview

business is good

Recto and verso of paperweight kept by F. Scott Fitzgerald on his writing desk. Princeton University Library.

business is good F. Scott Fitzgerald, Professional Writer

James L. W. West III The Pennsylvania State University Press University Park, Pennsylvania

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: West, James L. W., III, author. Title: Business is good : F. Scott Fitzgerald, professional writer / James L. W. West III. Description: University Park, Pennsylvania : The Pennsylvania State University Press, [2023] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Summary: “A collection of eleven essays on the career and texts of F. Scott Fitzgerald, focusing on the delicate balance in Fitzgerald’s career between money and literary respectability”—Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2022045717 | ISBN 9780271094878 (cloth) Subjects: LCSH: Fitzgerald, F. Scott (Francis Scott), 1896–1940. | Literature publishing— United States—History—20th century. | LCGFT: Essays. Classification: LCC PS3511.I9 Z917 2023 | DDC 813/.52 [B]—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022045717 Copyright © 2023 James L. W. West III All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Published by The Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, PA 16802–1003 Chapter 4 is copyright © Johns Hopkins University Press. This article first appeared in American Imago 68, no. 1 (2011): 59–65. Published with permission by Johns Hopkins University Press. Frontispiece: The paperweight pictured was given by Fitzgerald’s daughter, Scottie, to Arthur Mizener, her father’s first biographer, as a keepsake. The paperweight was later donated to Special Collections at Princeton University Library by Mizener’s daughter, Rosemary Colt, and is today kept among her father’s papers there. For additional information about the paperweight, see “Cover Note,” Princeton University Library Chronicle 65, no. 1 (2003): 145–46. The Pennsylvania State University Press is a member of the Association of University Presses. It is the policy of The Pennsylvania State University Press to use acid-free paper. Publications on uncoated stock satisfy the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Material, ansi z39.48–1992.

For my grandchildren: Bradley Clare Thomas Avery James Maya Helai and others to come.

contents

List of Illustrations  [viii] Preface [ix] Acknowledgments [xi] Editorial Note  [xiii]

1. Fitzgerald’s Last Triangle “Preformance”  [1] 2. Fitzgerald and Moran Tudury  [17] 3. The Great Gatsby, Broadway 1926  [32] 4. Fitzgerald and Psychiatry  [59] 5. The Ledger as Autobiography  [70] 6. Fitzgerald’s Seven-Year Plan  [87] 7. Punctuating by Ear  [96] 8. Interpreting “Jacob’s Ladder”   [112] 9. Decisions, Decisions: Editing The Great Gatsby [128] 10. Le déluge? New Editions of The Great Gatsby [148] 11. The Cambridge Edition and the Cambridge Plumber  [166]

Endpiece: Gatsby Movie (in Skeltonics)   [181] Index [183]

illustrations

1. Moran Tudury, ca. 1926  [21] 2. Cover of Sport Story, July 8, 1926  [24] 3. Fitzgerald’s ledger, with earnings from Gatsby productions  [56] 4. Fitzgerald’s ledger, “Ten Years Old”  [81] 5. Chart on which Fitzgerald has divided his life into increments  [88] 6. Final page of the revised typescript of “Jacob’s Ladder”  [120]

preface

No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money. —Samuel Johnson, 1776

I began to study the life and writings of F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1970. I have, from the beginning, been particularly interested in his career and in the texts of his writings, two subjects that are closely related. The present collection reflects these two concerns: six of the essays have to do with Fitzgerald’s decision to become a professional author and his subsequent dealings with the literary marketplace; the remaining five essays concern the composition, publication, and editing of his texts. All eleven of the essays grow out of my work as the general editor of The Cambridge Edition of the Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (1991–2019), complete in eighteen volumes, sixteen under my editorship. The essays in the present collection are based on materials that I discovered during the years I worked on the Cambridge Edition. Five of the essays have been previously published; these have been expanded for a second outing here. The remaining six appear in this collection for the first time. Fitzgerald was not a “professional” in the sense that a sociologist would define that term. Physicians, attorneys, and members of the clergy are true professionals. They hold advanced degrees and pass special examinations; they are certified to practice; they work within hierarchies of rank and title. For Fitzgerald it was different. To be a writer he was not required to have a specialized degree or pass an examination. Like all writers, he simply picked up a pencil and began. He was not certified to practice by a board or an agency or a diocese, and he held no rank or title. He believed authorship to be his calling and followed it with seriousness and diligence. The literary marketplace during Fitzgerald’s career was not designed to support full-time writers; most of them had other occupations or

x  preface

sources of income. Fitzgerald, however, had no trust fund and did not marry into money. He had no other occupation; he supported himself entirely with his pen. He had an extraordinary run of success from 1920 until 1940. He did as well financially as any author of his generation. Fitzgerald had the good fortune to be published by Charles Scribner’s Sons, to be edited by Maxwell Perkins, and to be represented in the marketplace by Harold Ober. Fitzgerald’s correspondence with his publishers, his editor, and his agent has been put into print. Fitzgerald himself preserved an extensive collection of manuscripts, typescripts, proofs, and working papers. Nearly all of this material is housed in the Special Collections Department at Princeton University Library. These papers have served as the basis of much Fitzgerald scholarship over the years and were essential to the work of the Cambridge Edition, especially to the reconstruction of the author’s compositional methods and to the editing of his texts. The Princeton collections provide the underpinning for most of the essays in this book. I have taken the title of this collection from a paperweight (pictured in the frontispiece) that Fitzgerald kept on his desk during the composition of Tender Is the Night. One side of the paperweight reads “keep smiling.” The other side reads “business is good.” Business was indeed good during the best years of Fitzgerald’s career; the Fitzgerald business has continued to thrive in the years after his death—until the present day, in fact. The Fitzgerald field is in excellent condition. The Cambridge Edition has been completed; the Fitzgerald Society is holding firm; a new generation of scholars is beginning to study the author’s writings. The essays in this volume represent my most recent work on Fitzgerald. I trust that there will be more.

acknowledgments

I thank the National Endowment for the Humanities for a fellowship in 2013–14 that enabled me to further my investigations of Fitzgerald’s professional career. My work during the fellowship period provided the basis for most of the essays in this collection. I am grateful to the Special Collections Department, Princeton University Library, for access to Fitzgerald’s papers; special thanks to Don Skemer, Curator of Manuscripts Emeritus; to Daniel Linke, University Archivist and Deputy Head of Special Collections; and to AnnaLee Pauls, Photoduplication Coordinator. Thanks also to Elizabeth Sudduth, Associate Dean for Special Collections, for permission to examine items in the Matthew J. and Arlyn Bruccoli Collection of F. Scott Fitzgerald at the University of South Carolina. Matt Hodge at the Irvin Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, South Carolina, was helpful with reproductions. Vicki Lynne Glantz at the American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming, provided me with a copy of the Broadway script of the Owen Davis stage version of The Great Gatsby. The staff at the Billy Rose Theatre Division of the New York Public Library supplied information and photographs from the original Broadway production in 1926. Much of this book was written during the first phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, between October 2020 and June 2021. A great deal of my research was pursued online. Robert Trogdon, Jeanne Alexander, Bryant Mangum, Kirk Curnutt, and Jade Broughton Adams (colleagues in the Fitzgerald field) discovered and sent to me much information that they had discovered on the internet. Robert and Jeanne were especially helpful in identifying Moran Tudury; Robert provided essential material about the road performances of the 1926 drama version of The Great Gatsby. During my twenty-five years as general editor of The Cambridge Edition of the Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald, I benefitted greatly from

xii  acknowledgments

the support of the F. Scott Fitzgerald Trust. The current trustees— Blake Hazard, Eleanor Lanahan, and Chris Byrne—have continued to be helpful with advice and permissions. I thank them for permission to reproduce the images from Fitzgerald’s papers and ledger that appear in this collection. Previous appearances of essays in this collection, or earlier versions of the material, are given here. I thank the editors and publishers of these journals for permission to reprint. For chapter 1: “F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Last Triangle ‘Preformance,’” Princeton University Library Chronicle 69 (Spring 2008): 513–24. For chapter 2: “Fitzgerald to Moran Ludury: The Letter Entire,” F. Scott Fitzgerald Society Newsletter 27 (April 2019): 15–16; “Moran ‘Ludury’ Identified,” F. Scott Fitzgerald Society Newsletter 28 (August 2020): 27–29; “Moran Tudury III: A Serendipitous Connection,” F. Scott Fitzgerald Society Newsletter 29 (May 2021): 28–29. For chapter 4: “F. Scott Fitzgerald and American Psychiatry: A New Letter,” American Imago 68 (2011): 59–65. For chapter 6: “Fitzgerald’s Seven-Year Plan,” F. Scott Fitzgerald Review 18 (2020): 48–55. For chapter 10: “Proliferating in the Public Domain: New Editions of The Great Gatsby,” F. Scott Fitzgerald Review 19 (2021): 222–37. For the endpiece: “Gatsby Movie (in Skeltonics),” F. Scott Fitzgerald Society Newsletter 23 (December 2013): 12.

editorial note

Unless otherwise indicated, quotations from Fitzgerald’s writings are from the following texts, all included in The Cambridge Edition of the Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald, published by Cambridge University Press. All the Sad Young Men (2006) The Basil, Josephine and Gwen Stories (2009) The Beautiful and Damned (2008) A Change of Class (2016) Flappers and Philosophers (2000) The Great Gatsby: An Edition of the Manuscript (2018) The Great Gatsby: A Variorum Edition (2019) Last Kiss (2017) The Lost Decade (2008) My Lost City (2005) Spires and Gargoyles (2010) Tales of the Jazz Age (2002) Taps at Reveille (2014) Tender Is the Night (2012) This Side of Paradise (1995) Trimalchio: An Early Version of The Great Gatsby (2000) In this book the publishing house for the nine books that Fitzgerald issued during his lifetime will be referred to as “Charles Scribner’s Sons” or as “Scribner.” Misspellings and other irregularities in Fitzgerald’s ledger and his letters have been preserved when quoting from those documents.

business is good

ONE

Fitzgerald’s Last Triangle “Preformance”

In 2007, Princeton University Library acquired a previously unpublished F. Scott Fitzgerald letter.1 The letter is undated, but the postmark on the envelope indicates that Fitzgerald mailed it from Princeton on the afternoon of Thursday, December 7, 1916. This was during the first semester of his fourth year at the university; because of poor marks, he was still academically a junior. The recipient was Elizabeth “Litz” Clarkson, a girl from Fitzgerald’s home town of St. Paul. Fitzgerald was inviting her and another St. Paul girl, Marie Hersey, to come to Princeton on Saturday, December 16, for a performance of Safety First!, the 1916–17 Triangle Club musical comedy, for which he had written the lyrics. This particular performance—or “preformance,” as Fitzgerald calls it in the letter—was one of two that were to be given on campus in mid-December, before Safety First! went on the road for its holiday tour.2 The initial performance would be for the student body on Friday, December 15. Fitzgerald was inviting Elizabeth and Marie to the second performance, to be given 1. The letter was purchased by the library at Bloomsbury Auctions, New York City, in the Literature sale for November 28, 2007, Lot 188. The letter was first published in Princeton University Library Chronicle 69, no. 3 (Spring 2008): 516. It does not appear in any of the standard editions of Fitzgerald’s correspondence. 2. Fitzgerald’s spelling was often faulty, but in this case “preformance” seems to have been the local term for the first two on-campus presentations of the Triangle shows.

2  Business Is Good

the following evening for the Princeton faculty. The girls were only a short train ride away: both were enrolled in The French School, a young women’s finishing academy at 24 East Ninety-Fourth Street in New York City.3 Elizabeth and Marie did make the trip. In his personal ledger, a month-by-month record that Fitzgerald kept of his life, he wrote “Marie and Litz Clarkson to Δ opening” beside the entry for December 1916.4 The letter reads as follows, with Fitzgerald’s misspellings and punctuation preserved: Dear Elizabeth: Is this the second letter I’ve ever written you or the third? Idea is this—You and Marie come down here Saturday afternoon—Dine with us at the Princeton Inn (as Jimmie Ackerman is unfortunately only a sophmore and cannot go up Prospect Avenue (where the clubs are). Then we will proceed to the Δ show at the Casino. This is not a gala occasion and you two will very concievably be the only out of town girls down here but as the Δ isn’t coming to St. Paul we thought you might like to see the faculty preformance here (Yes, I said faculty) You will stay the evening at the Princeton Inn and on Sunday we will amuse you to the best of our ability though I havn’t the slightest idea how as Sunday here is bedlam desolate. Hear you met Dave Mcdougal. Do you aimez him? Non! I met your friend Harold Bulkley the other day. Seems very charming. Oh dear! Saw Grant Worrel at a dance in Wilmington the other night. Your friend Jean Knox reminds me of Betty Mudge. How do you like the Wilmington stuff? Pretty good isn’t it. 3. The French School was a French-language academy directed by Mlle. Jeanne Chéron, who held a diploma from the Sorbonne and supervised a staff of five teachers. See A Handbook of American Private Schools (Boston: Porter E. Sargent, 1917), 209, 625. 4. Fitzgerald’s ledger is among the holdings in the Bruccoli Collection at the University of South Carolina. Digital images and transcriptions of the ledger pages are available on the website of the Irwin Department of Rare Books and Special Collections. For a printed reproduction, see F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Ledger: A Facsimile, intro. Matthew J. Bruccoli (Washington, DC: NCR/Microcard, 1972). The entry for December 1916 is on page 171.

Fitzgerald’s Last Triangle “Preformance” 3

St. Paul looks perfectly dead Xmas. Got a letter from Bob Dunn which says he is trying to organize a subscription dance which will bring the number of parties up to five—imagine. Bob C. showed me what you said about Alice. Trevor Hogg didn’t even come to the prom. I think there is some mystery there. Alice was very popular but her remark about everybody reeling was entirely uncalled for. It was a terrificly sober prom. [Fitzgerald inserts a stick-figure sketch here.] Well do drop a line as soon as you find out to Mr. Francis Scott Fitzgerald Cottage Club Princeton N.J. Of course I’ve got my same old Chemistry condition and for the fourth time can’t go on the trip or be in the show. As usual I wrote the lyrics and they’re using the same old “show girl picture” for advertising in the papers F.S.F. This is a pleasant, chatty epistle, typical of the letters exchanged between young men and women of Fitzgerald’s generation. They did not have cell phones or social media, but postal service in their time was rapid, especially in the urban Northeast. These young people developed conventions of letter-writing that kept them in touch with one another almost as efficiently as digital devices do for today’s college students. Once Fitzgerald has covered the details of the upcoming visit, he can move on to the gossip—what boys Elizabeth has met, whether she likes them, whom Fitzgerald has seen at dances or on campus, what the social scene is like in Wilmington. He and his friends sometimes showed letters to one another; thus Elizabeth’s comment about “Alice,” presumably made in a letter to “Bob C.” (Bob Clark, a Princeton sophomore from St. Paul), has been seen by Fitzgerald. Alice’s remark in the letter about “everybody reeling” probably had something to do with drinking at the Princeton prom. Fitzgerald wants to assure Elizabeth that it’s all a fiction and that the prom was “terrificly sober.”

4  Business Is Good

What Fitzgerald did not know in November 1916, and what gives this letter a certain poignancy, was that entry into World War I was just around the corner for the United States. Congress would formally declare war on Germany and its allies on April 6, 1917. The Princeton students mentioned in the letter would all join the armed forces. Fitzgerald’s career at the university would end in June 1917; he would return only for brief visits after that. December 1916 was almost the last moment at which he could write a letter as innocent as this one. ••••••

Scott Fitzgerald, Elizabeth Clarkson, and Marie Hersey were members of the same social circle in St. Paul. The names of both girls appear in his personal ledger along with the names of three of the other St. Paul youths mentioned in the letter—Betty Mudge, Bob Dunn, and Bob Clark. These names are found also in Fitzgerald’s “Thoughtbook,” an adolescent diary kept in 1910–11 in which he described the maneuverings for popularity that took place in his dance class when he was fourteen years old.5 Marie Hersey, the first girl he ever kissed, was his steady partner during those dancing classes. She and Elizabeth Clarkson both appeared in the plays that Fitzgerald wrote for the Elizabethan Dramatic Club, a local organization for teenagers that put on elaborately staged summer productions for the St. Paul community.6 In January 1915, Marie had introduced Fitzgerald to Ginevra King, the beautiful Chicago socialite who became his first true love. He and she carried on an intense romance, largely epistolary, for two years. He visited her twice in Chicago but found himself at a disadvantage away from his home turf. The absence of Ginevra’s name in the letter, in fact, tells us that Fitzgerald’s infatuation with her was nearing its end. She too 5. Thoughtbook of Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald, intro. John R. Kuehl (Princeton: Princeton University Library, 1965). A later edition is The Thoughtbook of F. Scott Fitzgerald, ed. Dave Page (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013). The text of the diary, edited with commentary by Page, appears in the Cambridge Edition volume Last Kiss (2017), 1–28. 6. Fitzgerald wrote three plays for the club. They have been published as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s St. Paul Plays, 1911–1914, ed. Alan Margolies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978).

Fitzgerald’s Last Triangle “Preformance” 5

was attending a Manhattan finishing school that year—Miss McFee’s on West Seventy-Second Street—but she and Fitzgerald were quarreling in their letters and were about to call off their romance. It is therefore significant that he should have turned to his childhood sweetheart, Marie, and to another St. Paul girl for company during the “preformance.”7 In the letter Fitzgerald laments the fact that only a few parties seem to be planned for the holidays back in St. Paul. Youths from the Midwest who attended schools in the East looked forward to the parties in their hometowns over Christmas vacation. One of the most memorable passages in all of Fitzgerald’s fiction occurs in chapter 9 of The Great Gatsby, where Nick Carraway, the narrator, remembers how he and his friends, on the way home for Christmas, would gather at Union Station in Chicago to change trains and compare notes about the parties they had been invited to. In the passage Fitzgerald uses the names of real St. Paul families, including Marie’s: “Are you going to the Ordways’? The Herseys’? The Schultzes’?”8 If Fitzgerald’s letter is to be believed, the party scene in St. Paul for December 1916 looked bleak. Marie and Litz were members of the upper bourgeoisie in St. Paul. Marie, whom Fitzgerald called “Bug,” was tall, good-looking, and a first-class dancer. She lived in an eleven-bedroom red stone house, designed in the Queen Anne style, at 473 Summit Avenue, the show street of St. Paul. By Midwestern standards Marie came from old money. Her grandfather was Samuel F. Hersey, a congressman from Maine who had invested early in Minnesota and Wisconsin lumber. Marie’s father, Edward Hersey, had come to St. Paul and taken over the business. He expanded it until he became a serious competitor of the lumber baron Frederick Weyerhaeuser. Edward Hersey had died in 1904 but had left his family in secure financial condition. In the 1910 US census, those living in the house on Summit Avenue are listed as Marie’s mother, Mary Hersey; Marie and 7. For an account of Fitzgerald’s relationship with Ginevra, see James L. W. West III, The Perfect Hour: The Romance of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ginevra King (New York: Random House, 2005). 8. The Great Gatsby: A Variorum Edition, ed. James L. W. West III (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 211.

6  Business Is Good

her two older sisters and four younger brothers; Mary’s brother and sister-in-law and their five children; and seven servants. Fitzgerald kept in touch with Marie after college and marriage. He based at least one character in his fiction on her—Margaret Torrence in the Basil Duke Lee stories of 1928–29.9 Elizabeth Clarkson, a pretty brunette, was the daughter of Worrell Clarkson, the founder of People’s Coal and Ice in St. Paul. He owned a coal dock in Duluth and also owned several ships that transported coal and mineral ore on the Great Lakes. The Clarksons lived in a large stucco, timber, and stone house at 94 Dellwood Avenue in St. Paul. On September 2, 1913, Litz’s father and mother had held a dinner there for the cast of Fitzgerald’s play The Coward, set for an encore performance later that evening. Litz’s steady boyfriend was Bob Dunn, who is mentioned in Fitzgerald’s letter. They would marry shortly before Dunn left for the war in the fall of 1917.10 In the first line of his letter to Elizabeth, Fitzgerald asks: “Is this the second letter I’ve ever written you or the third?” He had in fact written her at least once before, three years earlier, on September 15, 1913. In the letter, which he wrote on black-bordered mourning stationery, he apologizes for not being able to attend a social event to which she has invited him. He has been ill: “Bronchitis interposed its highly annoying hand,” he explains. He laments his current state of mind: “I am in a particularly despondent and dissipated mood. Outside the sun is shining but I am perfectly positive it is only doing it out of spite.” He promises to write her later at her prep school, Miss Hartridge’s in Plainfield, New Jersey. To amuse her, he ends with rhymed apologies for the disorderly state of his letter: My mind is all a-tumble And the letter seems a jumble 9. These stories, published as a series in the Saturday Evening Post, were first collected in The Basil and Josephine Stories, ed. John Kuehl and Jackson R. Bryer (New York: Scribner, 1973). Texts of the stories based on Fitzgerald’s revised typescripts are included in The Basil, Josephine, and Gwen Stories (2009), a volume in the Cambridge Edition. 10. Information about the Hersey and Clarkson families is taken from Dave Page, F. Scott Fitzgerald in Minnesota: The Writer and His Friends at Home (St. Paul: Fitzgerald in St. Paul, 2017).

Fitzgerald’s Last Triangle “Preformance” 7

For the words they seem to mumble And my pen’s about to stumble And the papers made to jumble So I sign myself your humble Servant Francis Scott Fitzgerald11 When he wrote the letter above, Fitzgerald had just been offered admission to Princeton. A week later he traveled by train to the university, settled into a rooming house near campus, and immersed himself in student activities, especially in the Triangle Club. This group, founded in 1891, mounted an elaborate musical comedy every fall. All parts in the productions were played by male students—with a member of the faculty occasionally taking a role. Music and lyrics, all original, were written and performed by students as well. Much of the humor came from the antics of the men who dressed in drag and took the female parts. In the letter inviting Elizabeth to campus, Fitzgerald emphasizes that her visit to Princeton will be a quiet one. Nothing much will happen on Sunday—though he teases her by writing that Sundays in the town are “bedlam,” then striking through the word and substituting “desolate.” The girls were to stay at the Princeton Inn, a three-story brick hotel that stood on the site of the current Princeton Borough Hall. The performances of Safety First! would be at the Casino, a large wooden theatre built on campus in 1895 and still in use when Fitzgerald was a student. It burned down in 1924 and was not rebuilt. The Triangle show was likely to be tame. One of the purposes of the “preformances” was to allow the faculty, and especially Jenny Davidson Hibben, the wife of John Grier Hibben, president of the university, to identify anything risqué or off-color in the plot and 11. This letter was also sold, as Lot 187, at the Bloomsbury auction mentioned in note 1. The letter was reproduced in facsimile in the auction catalogue. So far as I can determine, only seventeen Fitzgerald letters with dates earlier than this one are known to survive. Five of these are to girls; the others are to his parents and to relatives and teachers.

8  Business Is Good

lyrics. Offending elements would be toned down or struck from the script before the tour began. Mrs. Hibben was thorough in her work: the standard history of the Triangle Club mentions her “all-hearing Presbyterian ear” and her “inexhaustible supply of sharpened blue pencils.”12 Safety First! was set in the twenty-first century, with scenes laid in Paris, Hawaii, and Turkey (in a sultan’s harem). It satirized “futurist” art, prison reform, and the dilettantism of the wealthy. One character in the production, a painter, was attempting to make a representation of “the nude angleworm”; another sought to capture “the soul of a banana in flight.” Fitzgerald incorporated much of this foolishness into his lyrics: There are no strict requirements for a cubist, You only need a dipper full of paint, A little distance bring it, And at your canvas fling it, Then shut your eyes and name it what it ain’t. I’m using as a sitter, A young banana fritter, And painting her in pantalettes and bangs . . . And so on. Fitzgerald, who was remarkably adept at this sort of thing, had penned the lyrics for the previous two Triangle productions, Fie! Fie! Fi-Fi! (1914–15) and The Evil Eye (1915–16). By the time he wrote his second letter to Elizabeth, he was probably capable of turning out these dithyrambs in his sleep. The best of the lyrics for Safety First! are for the songs “One Lump Percy,” about a character named “Percy, the Parlor Snake,” who requires but a single lump of sugar in his tea; “The Vampires Won’t Vampire for Me,” concerning 12. Donald Marsden, The Long Kickline: A History of the Princeton Triangle Club (Princeton: Princeton Triangle Club, 1968), 110.

Fitzgerald’s Last Triangle “Preformance” 9

a young swain’s romantic frustrations; and “Charlotte Corday,” about the bloody-minded Girondist who murdered Jean-Paul Marat in his bathtub on July 13, 1793. (“Gee they were mean / To guillotine / That sweet, little innocent thing!”)13 Fitzgerald must have been eager for Marie and Elizabeth to see Safety First! The show was scheduled for performances in Brooklyn, Baltimore, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, St. Louis, and several other cities—but not, alas, in St. Paul.14 In any case Fitzgerald would not have been allowed to participate in, or even to attend, any of the road performances. This was a sore point with him. The holiday tour for the Triangle Club was an occasion for receptions, parties, newspaper notices, socializing, and lots of flirting with girls. Had he been able to take part, Fitzgerald would have been entirely in his element, accepting compliments for the lyrics and exercising his considerable personal charm. Academic troubles, however, stood in the way. Almost from the moment he arrived at Princeton, Fitzgerald had been an indifferent student. He had failed a mathematics class during the second term of his freshman year but had worked off the “condition,” as it was called, that summer. During his sophomore year he picked up the first of two conditions in chemistry. These prevented him from taking part in extracurricular activities that involved travel away from campus. A “conditioned man” was one who had performed poorly in a required class. He had to undergo special tutoring and pass a makeup exam in the subject before he was allowed to engage in sports or dramatics or to hold offices in the eating clubs or in student organizations. Fitzgerald never erased his second condition in chemistry; it was still in effect during his last full semester at Princeton, and it remains on his academic transcript today.15 In the spring of 1917 Fitzgerald gave up the struggle. 13. Safety First! (Cincinnati: John Church Co., 1916). Fitzgerald’s lyrics for all three of the Triangle shows are reprinted in the Cambridge Edition volume Spires and Gargoyles (2010), 47–100. “Charlotte Corday” appears on 88–89. 14. A record of the cities on the 1916–17 tour was published in the Princeton yearbook. See The Princeton Bric-a-Brac 42 (1918): 88. 15. Copies of Fitzgerald’s transcripts are preserved in Box 24 of the F. Scott Fitzgerald Additional Papers (C0188) at Princeton University Library.

10  Business Is Good

He decided to put his academic woes behind him and make an honorable exit from Princeton by answering the call to colors and entering the war. The only public role that Fitzgerald was allowed in Safety First! was to have his photograph appear in newspaper advertisements. For The Evil Eye the previous year, he had been photographed in drag as a Triangle chorus girl. Cross-dressing was standard in the Triangle shows; one of the anticipated features of each production was the pony chorus, made up of padded and bewigged young men who pranced across the stage in some semblance of a routine from the Moulin Rouge. Fitzgerald, however, must have hoped for something more than seeing himself in flowing skirt, face paint, and high-heeled shoes in a few newspaper advertisements.16 ••••••

Five Princeton students are mentioned in the letter.17 Four were sophomores: James Harvey Ackerman from Plainfield, New Jersey; David Blean McDougal from Chicago; Harold Kidder Bulkley from Englewood, New Jersey; and Robert Dean Clark from St. Paul. As the letter implies, sophomores were not allowed to appear on Prospect Street until they had accepted bids to the eating clubs there. Bicker (the period of selection) would occur during the coming spring, when all four would receive bids. Ackerman and Clark joined Tiger Inn; McDougal and Bulkley went to Cap and Gown. The fifth student mentioned in the letter was a senior, Frank Trevor Hogg, known as “Kootch,” a native of Brownsville, Pennsylvania, who was the captain of the football team and a member of Ivy. Fitzgerald belonged to University Cottage Club. All of the Princeton men whose names appear in the letter joined the armed forces. Bob Clark served in the American Ambulance Field Service and drove a camion at the Somme and in the AisneMarne offensive; Dave McDougal was a second lieutenant in the 101st Field Artillery; Trevor Hogg joined the navy and commanded a 16. The photograph of Fitzgerald as a showgirl is published in The Romantic Egoists, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli, Scottie Fitzgerald Smith, and Joan P. Kerr (New York: Scribner, 1974), 24. 17. Grant Worrel and Jean Knox, whose names appear in the second paragraph of the letter, have not been identified, nor has “Alice” in paragraph four.

Fitzgerald’s Last Triangle “Preformance” 11

squadron of submarine chasers off the coast of Ireland. Jimmie Ackerman and Harold Bulkley became fliers. Ackerman was wounded on June 11, 1918, during the Battle of Château-Thierry and spent more than a year recuperating in military hospitals. Bulkley was killed on February 18, 1918, in a midair collision while training for combat at Hounslow Heath, just outside London.18 Princeton had begun to prepare for the war not long after the outbreak of hostilities in August 1914. Beginning in March 1915, the university offered lectures in military history and rifle training; there was also instruction in how to build trenches, roads, and pontoons. By the fall term of 1916 (while Fitzgerald was writing the lyrics for Safety First!), the university was offering an elective class in military instruction to juniors and seniors. The Princeton Provisional Battalion was organized in February 1917; by the end of March, one thousand undergraduates had volunteered. Drill exercises were held in the campus gymnasium, and for those interested in aviation, a flying field was established on a nearby farm. Fitzgerald enrolled in an intensive military training course that spring. He wanted to serve as an officer and therefore planned to apply for a commission in the army. He felt relatively certain that he would be accepted; officer trainees were for the most part drawn from the ranks of college men. That summer he traveled to Fort Snelling, Minnesota, thirty miles to the south of St. Paul, and took the examination for a commission. His application was approved the following October, shortly after he had turned twenty-one. Princeton men of Fitzgerald’s generation distinguished themselves in the war. More than 40 percent of the student body served in some capacity; the majority of these “got over” to England or France, and many fought on the front lines. Most of Fitzgerald’s classmates were in the infantry. Others served in the navy or in aviation or in the medical corps. Several were cited for gallantry: among Fitzgerald’s classmates (the Class of 1917), three men won the Navy Cross, seven were awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, and no fewer 18. Information about the academic and military records of these students has been taken from the alumni files in the Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library, Princeton University.

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than twelve won the Croix de Guerre. Edmund Wilson and John Peale Bishop, Fitzgerald’s two best friends at Princeton, both made it to France. Wilson served there in the Intelligence Corps and the Interpreters Corps; Bishop was in charge of a company of German prisoners of war. Of Fitzgerald’s classmates who served in the war, probably the most famous was the flier Elliott White Springs. He enlisted in the fall of 1917 and was sent to England, where he trained with the Royal Air Force. He transferred to the US Air Service and eventually commanded the 148th Aero Squadron. Springs was shot down but survived; he himself shot down eleven German aircraft in the course of the war and won the Distinguished Service Cross. Later he published War Birds: Diary of an Unknown Aviator (1926), a book based on the experiences of his friend and fellow aviator John McGavock Grider, who was killed in combat. Another Princetonian who went to war, and whom Fitzgerald remembered years later, was Curtis Whittlesey “Hack” McGraw, a member of the Class of 1919. McGraw led troops in the Meuse–Argonne offensive and was wounded at Ivergny in July 1918. He returned to Princeton after the war and became captain of the football team in his senior year. After graduating, McGraw spent his professional career at McGraw-Hill in New York, a publishing house founded by his father. Of McGraw’s exploits on the gridiron after the war, Fitzgerald wrote, “I never saw him play without wondering what he thought about it all.”19 Fitzgerald’s record in the army was unimpressive. He entered as a provisional second lieutenant on November 26, 1917, and was assigned to the 45th Infantry. He trained at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas; Camp Taylor, Kentucky; Camp Gordon, Georgia; and (after a transfer to the 68th Infantry) at Camp Sheridan, Alabama, where he served as aide-de-camp to General Ryan, commander of the 17th Infantry Brigade, 9th Division. Fitzgerald’s most important accomplishment while in the army was to finish the manuscript of 19. Fitzgerald mentioned both Springs and McGraw in his 1940 essay “My Generation,” which remained unpublished during his lifetime. “My Generation” first appeared in the October 1968 issue of Esquire. Most recently it has been reprinted in the Cambridge Edition volume My Lost City (2005), 192–98; the comment about McGraw appears on page 195.

Fitzgerald’s Last Triangle “Preformance” 13

a novel called “The Romantic Egotist.” He later remembered writing the novel “on the consecutive weekends of three months” while sitting in the officers’ club “in a roomful of smoke, conversation and rattling newspapers.”20 “The Romantic Egotist” was rejected twice by Scribner but, in revised form, was published as This Side of Paradise in 1920. Certainly it was not Fitzgerald’s fault that he did not participate in the war in Europe. His division was scheduled to embark in November 1918, the month in which the Armistice was signed. Fitzgerald was discharged on February 14, 1919, without having left the United States. Other American writers of his generation saw the war firsthand: Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, E. E. Cummings, William March, Thomas Boyd, and others. Fitzgerald must have compared his wartime experiences to theirs, but he also compared his record to the achievements of his fellow Princetonians. Among these men, his record was negligible. ••••••

For Fitzgerald the weekend visit from the two St. Paul girls would have been an unsatisfactory substitute for traveling with the Triangle Club over the Christmas holiday, but the “preformance” would at least have given him a chance to show off his accomplishments. Marie and Litz, however, might well have asked Fitzgerald an awkward question that weekend. What did he plan to do with himself after leaving Princeton? Most of the other members of his class would graduate in the spring. Fitzgerald, if he chose to continue, would be required to return to the university in the fall of 1917, work off his conditions, and take his degree in the spring of 1918. During his childhood and adolescence in St. Paul, Fitzgerald had been clever, witty, prankish, and a great deal of fun to be around. He continued to behave this way in college and enjoyed some successes at Princeton. He was known chiefly for his work on the Triangle Club shows and for his writings in the Nassau Lit, the campus literary magazine. What were his plans going forward?

20. “Who’s Who—and Why,” Saturday Evening Post, September 18, 1920; collected in the Cambridge My Lost City, 3–5.

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He had recently turned twenty. Was he destined for conventional success? Would he settle down and put campus theatricals behind him? Fitzgerald talked a good deal about becoming a writer, but this was not really a profession that one could train for, as with medicine or law. He had tried his hand already at fiction and poetry but had shown the most talent for song lyrics. He was good at versifying in the Gilbert-and-Sullivan manner. It was conceivable that he might take his talents to Broadway, as Oscar Hammerstein II, his contemporary and rival at Columbia University, would do. Hammerstein wrote song lyrics for several of the Varsity Show musicals at Columbia University during Fitzgerald’s time at Princeton.21 Hammerstein was connected to the theatre world through his grandfather, his father, and other members of his family. After a half-hearted attempt at law school, he began to write for Broadway and eventually became one of the great lyricists of his generation. Fitzgerald had no such contacts in New York. Perhaps he could have produced song lyrics for the music publishers on Tin Pan Alley, but this would have been a long shot. Marie and Litz probably assumed that he would return to St. Paul after college, though there was no position waiting for him in a business back home. He was from a respectable family, but the wealth amassed by his grandfather, Philip McQuillan, had begun to diminish, and his own father, Edward Fitzgerald, was not a successful businessman. The Fitzgeralds lived modestly in a row house on Summit Avenue. Fitzgerald’s desire to earn a living as a writer must have seemed improbable. He was certainly aware of the problem. Like Amory Blaine, the autobiographical hero of This Side of Paradise, he must have wondered whether there was a place in American society for someone with his particular talents. “How’ll I fit in?” laments Amory. “What am I for?” (200). 21. Hammerstein collaborated on the lyrics for Home James!, the 1917 Varsity Show, which had its debut at the Hotel Astor on the evenings of March 28–31, 1917. Fitzgerald might have seen this production. One of his friends from Triangle, Ormond V. Gould, was “loaned out” to play the part of Lucius Vodka in the musical. Hammerstein himself played the maitre d’hotel, Armand Dubonnett. Home James! included a burlesque Hawaiian hula (with the Columbia boys in grass skirts) followed by a ragtime chorus. Fitzgerald mentions Home James! in one of his early Saturday Evening Post stories, “Head and Shoulders” (1920), but he makes the play into a professional production, with tryout performances at the Shubert Theatre in New Haven.

Fitzgerald’s Last Triangle “Preformance” 15

Fitzgerald was not a great success at Princeton. In fact, he failed at almost everything he attempted there. He enjoyed some victories during the spring of his sophomore year—he was elected secretary of the Triangle Club, and he received his bid to Cottage—but in the semesters that followed he did not improve his academic record and never took a degree. His disappointments continued for a time after he left Princeton. He made no special mark as a soldier. The most important event of the war for him was his romance with Zelda Sayre, the southern belle with whom he fell in love while stationed at Camp Sheridan. He persuaded her to marry him and, after his discharge, took a job as a writer of advertising copy for the Barron Collier agency in New York City, hoping to make a strike in that line of work. But writing advertising jingles bored him and paid little. Zelda, in Montgomery, grew tired of waiting and broke off their engagement in June 1919. A distraught Fitzgerald quit his job and limped home to St. Paul to take up residence with his parents in his old bedroom. There he considered his prospects, such as they were. With the twice-rejected manuscript of “The Romantic Egotist” in hand, he climbed to the top floor of his family’s brownstone on Summit Avenue and went to work. Laboring almost around the clock that July and August, he salvaged the best parts of his manuscript, composed fresh chapters, and pulled off an inspired cut-and-paste job, transforming “The Romantic Egotist” into This Side of Paradise. The novel was accepted for publication by Scribner on September 16, 1919.22 Thereafter Fitzgerald’s star began to shine. Backed by his success with Scribner, he persuaded Zelda to renew their engagement. The novel was published and went into the bookstores on March 26, 1920. A week later, on April 3, he and Zelda were married in St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue. Most of the reviews of This Side of Paradise were laudatory, and sales were gratifyingly brisk. After so many setbacks, he suddenly found himself one of the most famous and successful young authors in America. 22. The acceptance letter has been published in Dear Scott / Dear Max: The Fitzgerald-Perkins Correspondence, ed. John Kuehl and Jackson R. Bryer (New York: Scribner, 1971), 21. For an account of the composition and publication of the novel, see the introduction to the Cambridge edition of This Side of Paradise (1995).

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Fitzgerald never forgot his early struggles. They became parts of his personal myth, and he used them again and again in his fiction. In various guises and forms—novels, short stories, and personal essays—he repeatedly crafted versions of his tale of pluck, luck, and talent for readers who, even today, seem never to tire of these fictions. Fitzgerald wrote his letter to Elizabeth Clarkson near the end of his time at Princeton, when he was beginning to realize that most of his dreams of college success were not destined to come true. He would later go on to greater successes on much larger stages, but in December 1916, all of this was yet to come.

TWO

Fitzgerald and Moran Tudury

On April 11, 1924, Fitzgerald wrote a letter to an admirer named Moran Tudury. The existence of the letter was first made known in a June 29, 1979, catalogue issued by the Philadelphia auction house of Samuel T. Freeman. Under the heading “Important Fitzgerald Letter,” excerpts were published to stimulate interest among prospective bidders. The excerpts were quoted with inaccuracies. These bits of text were included in Correspondence of F. Scott Fitzgerald, and the entry from the Freeman catalogue was later facsimiled in F. Scott Fitzgerald in the Marketplace.1 A handwritten annotation reproduced in this facsimile indicates that the letter sold for $1,700—a high bid in 1979. The sale was probably to a manuscript dealer. The current owner of the letter, Mary Morant of Darien, Connecticut, sent an image of the letter, and of the envelope in which it was mailed, to Eleanor Lanahan, Fitzgerald’s granddaughter. Ms. Morant’s mother, Helen Means, purchased the letter in 1982 or 1983, probably from a bookdealer in New York City, possibly Argosy Book Store. (Helen Means was a friend of Scottie Fitzgerald, the author’s 1. Correspondence of F. Scott Fitzgerald, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli and Margaret M. Dugan (New York: Random House, 1980), 139; F. Scott Fitzgerald in the Marketplace: The Auction and Dealer Catalogues, 1935–2006, comp. and ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli with Judith S. Baughman (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2009), 59.

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daughter and Eleanor Lanahan’s mother.) The postmark on the envelope reveals that Fitzgerald mailed the letter on April 11 from Great Neck, New York, where he and Zelda and Scottie were living. Fitzgerald addressed the letter to Tudury at the offices of Adventure, one of the better pulp magazines of the time, at Spring and MacDougall Streets in lower Manhattan. Herewith a transcription of the letter: Dear Mr. Ludury:2 Your letter depressed me a little. I’m so anxious for people to see my new novel which is a new thinking out of the idea of illusion (an idea that I suppose will always dominate my more serious stuff) much more mature + much more truly romantic than This Side of Paradise. The B.+D. was a better book than the first but it was a false lead. Its attempted naturalism was a concession to Mencken—perhaps unconscious. The business of creating illusion is much more to my taste and my talent. Thanks for your letter Sincerely  FScott Fitzgerald The letter that Tudury wrote to Fitzgerald does not survive. It is not in the incoming correspondence files of the Fitzgerald Papers at Princeton University Library, nor is it preserved in any of the author’s scrapbooks there. Tudury seems to have been a fan who had read a recent piece of writing by Fitzgerald and had been moved to send him an appreciative letter. What might Tudury have read? A good guess is Fitzgerald’s autobiographical essay “How to Live on $36,000 a Year,” which had appeared in the Saturday Evening Post on April 5, 1924, six days before Fitzgerald mailed the letter to Tudury. That would allow time for Tudury to write and mail his letter and for Fitzgerald to write and mail his response. Exactly why Fitzgerald might have been “depressed” by Tudury’s letter cannot be known; possibly Tudury thought of Fitzgerald only as a popular writer and praised his first two novels as entertainments.

2. Fitzgerald misread Tudury’s capital “T” as a capital “L.”

Fitzgerald and Moran Tudury 19

Fitzgerald seems keen in his answering letter to distance himself from This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and Damned and to let Tudury know that he is embarking on a new and more ambitious path with his novel in progress. That novel was The Great Gatsby. By April 1924 Fitzgerald had drafted three chapters in manuscript and was preparing to leave Great Neck with his wife and daughter for an extended residence in Europe. There he would finish the novel and send it to Maxwell Perkins at Scribner in late October 1924. Eventually the book would be published, under the title we are familiar with, on April 10, 1925. The most interesting thing about the letter to Tudury is Fitzgerald’s attitude toward the “attempted naturalism” of The Beautiful and Damned, which he admits was “a concession to Mencken—perhaps unconscious.” The journalist and critic H. L. Mencken had been a strong supporter of Fitzgerald’s first two novels and had become a personal friend. Mencken had published Fitzgerald’s writing in The Smart Set, the magazine that he coedited with George Jean Nathan; “May Day” and “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz,” two of Fitzgerald’s best early efforts in short fiction, had appeared in the Smart Set issues for July 1920 and June 1922. Fitzgerald had continued to send work to Mencken: “Absolution,” another of his best noncommercial stories, and one with strong connections to The Great Gatsby, would be published in Mencken’s new magazine, The American Mercury, in June 1924. Mencken was a strong advocate of literary naturalism, especially of the writings of Theodore Dreiser, whose work he championed in reviews and essays. Fitzgerald was himself under the spell of Mencken and Dreiser for an extended period in the early 1920s. One sees this influence in The Beautiful and Damned and in stories such as “Dalyrimple Goes Wrong” (The Smart Set, February 1920) and “The Cut-Glass Bowl” (Scribner’s Magazine, May 1920). The Great Gatsby is usually thought of as a work of romantic fiction, but there are naturalistic elements in it. And naturalism does not disappear from Fitzgerald’s subsequent writings; one detects an overarching tone of pessimistic determinism in Tender Is the Night and The Last Tycoon, both of which are concerned in part with the futility of human effort and aspiration. That Fitzgerald was aware this early

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in his career of the influence of naturalistic thought on his writings, that he was ambivalent about this influence, that he could trace it to Mencken, and that he wanted to resist the seductiveness of naturalism in his new novel—all of this is noteworthy. Perhaps Fitzgerald came to see, later in his career, that one of his great strengths as an artist was the internal tension in his work between romantic and naturalistic elements, neither of which ever came fully to dominate his thinking or writing. The full text of Fitzgerald’s letter to Tudury appeared for the first time in 2019, in the F. Scott Fitzgerald Society Newsletter, together with my commentary about the history and content of the document.3 When I published the letter I did not know much about Moran Tudury and, in truth, did not make much of an effort to identify him. The envelope in which Fitzgerald sent the letter survives; as it was addressed to Tudury at the offices of Adventure, I assumed that Tudury worked in some capacity there, but his name was not listed on the masthead of the magazine in 1924. My guess was that Fitzgerald’s correspondent occupied a lowly position, had access to the printed stationery for the magazine, and wrote on that stationery to Fitzgerald. A friend of mine, Jeanne Alexander, read the piece in the Newsletter and decided to identify Tudury (fig. 1). Jeanne was for many years the chief editorial assistant on The Cambridge Edition of the Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald. She now is an assistant editor on the Hemingway Letters Project at Penn State; she keeps her hand in with Fitzgerald studies by compiling the annual bibliography of primary and secondary material for each issue of the F. Scott Fitzgerald Review. Jeanne has become adept at identifying people mentioned in Hemingway’s letters, people who otherwise have made no particular mark on history. She discovered a good bit of information about the recipient of the letter and passed it along to me. The first document sent by Jeanne is an application for a Seaman’s Protection Certificate from “Rudolph M. Tudury,” submitted in New 3. “Fitzgerald to Moran Ludury: The Letter Entire,” F. Scott Fitzgerald Society Newsletter 27 (April 2019): 15–16. In this article I accepted Fitzgerald’s spelling “Ludury.” I corrected the mistake and offered new information about Tudury in “Moran ‘Ludury’ Identified,” F. Scott Fitzgerald Society Newsletter 28 (August 2020): 27–29.

Fitzgerald and Moran Tudury 21

Fig.1 Moran Tudury, ca. 1926. Courtesy of Angela Clark.

Orleans on September 29, 1920. Such a certificate would have served as proof of US citizenship for Tudury should he have wanted to go ashore in a foreign port. His ship is identified as the Saccarappa and Tudury’s job on the vessel as “Messboy.” From the internet I learned that the Saccarappa was a 5,057-ton American cargo steamer, built in 1918 by the American International Shipbuilding Corporation at Hog Island Shipyard, Philadelphia, where ships were being produced for the war effort. The Saccarappa was requisitioned by the US Navy in 1918, probably to transport supplies to Europe during World War I, and remained in service with the navy until 1929. (It had other owners thereafter and eventually was acquired by a Panamanian firm, renamed the Bienvenido, and put into service. It sank in heavy fog off Taiwan in 1952.) Whether Tudury was an enlisted man in the navy is not revealed by his application. He gives his occupation as

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“Reporter”; perhaps he had plans to chronicle his travels for print. According to the application he is nineteen years old, five feet ten inches in height, with brown hair and blue eyes. A photo, in which he appears to be in civilian clothes, shows him to be a good-looking young fellow with an impeccably straight part in his hair. He signs himself “Rudolph M. Tudury” and gives his place of birth as New Orleans. The second source discovered by Jeanne is the marriage register for the state of Iowa, 1880–1940. We learn there that “Morin R. Tudury” (who by his age would appear to be our man, despite the spelling “Morin”) entered into matrimony with Katherine Tucker on May 13, 1922, in the town of Lee, Iowa (perhaps Lee Township in Adair County, Iowa). The groom’s father is named as F. W. Tudury and his mother as Mary A. Johnson. Katherine, his bride, is from Keokuk, Iowa, in the southeast corner of that state. Keokuk was a steamboat town, incorporated in 1848 and situated where the Des Moines River meets the Mississippi River. Mark Twain’s brother, Orion Clemens, lived there, and Twain mentions Keokuk in Life on the Mississippi (1883). Encouraged by these findings and desiring now to tease out more about Tudury, I asked Robert W. Trogdon, the Fitzgerald and Hemingway scholar at Kent State University, to see what he could discover. Robert is skilled at online searches.4 Very quickly Robert came up with additional information. It seems that Tudury, after his marriage, worked in the early 1920s for the Burlington HawkEye, a newspaper in Burlington, Iowa, a town on the Mississippi River forty miles north of Keokuk. Tudury then relocated to New York, where he became the managing editor at Adventure. He also began a career as a freelance writer. An article in the March 23, 1926, issue of the Hawk-Eye (titled “Bud Hedge, Boxer?,” p. 7) mentions that Tudury had recently published a story called “The Ringer” in Sport Story, a Street & Smith monthly magazine that eventually became Sport, a competitor of Sports Illustrated in the 1960s. Tudury’s satirical review of the career of Ward McAllister, 4. See his article “Fun with Newspaper Databases” in the April 2019 Newsletter, 17–18, after my piece on Moran “Ludury.”

Fitzgerald and Moran Tudury 23

the arbiter of high society in New York during the Gilded Age, appeared in the June 1926 issue of the American Mercury (“Ward McAllister,” pp. 138–43). A similar piece on Benjamin Franklin, under the title “Poor Richard,” was published in the Bookman for January 1927 (pp. 580–84). Tudury and his wife made their way to Europe, though we don’t know precisely when. The next mention of him, discovered by Robert, finds him taking ship in Le Havre and returning to the United States on the French liner Lafayette. The ship docked in New York on July 12, 1930. With Tudury was Katherine and their daughter Nancy, two years old, who had been born in Naples, Italy, on May 26, 1928. Their US address is given as 123 Carondelet Street in New Orleans, adjacent to the French Quarter. In the March 7, 1933, issue of the Brooklyn Citizen (p. 10), we find a photograph of two-year-old Janet Tudury, presumably a second daughter. The family now lives in New Hope, Pennsylvania. According to the caption for the photo, Tudury discovered a man placing a ladder beneath the second-story window of Janet’s room and chased him away, foiling what might have been an abduction attempt in the manner of the Lindbergh baby kidnapping on March 1, 1932. During these years Tudury was writing regularly for the pulps. His fees for this writing generated enough for him and his family to cover expenses. Certainly Tudury was not being paid the sums that Fitzgerald was earning, but he wrote and published steadily. Fiction Magazines Index lists some 150 stories that appeared between 1926 and 1942 by “(Rudolph) Moran Tudury.” Two of Tudury’s stories were in the Saturday Evening Post, three in Liberty, and one in Collier’s. Most of the others appeared in the pulps. Tudury’s outlets were Sport Story (fig. 2), Football Action, Knockout Magazine, Detective Action Stories, Love Story Magazine, Horror Stories, Western Aces, and many other magazines of similar type. Tudury published at least four pulp stories under the pseudonym “Alan Hyde.” It’s possible that he used other pen names. The last appearance in print that Robert could locate was a reprint of a dog story by Tudury called “Dirt Cheap” in the November 9, 1952, Sunday supplement of the Philadelphia Inquirer (pp. 14ff). According to Ancestry.com, Tudury died in New York City on November 5, 1954. At some point, probably

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Fig.2 Cover of the pulp magazine Sport Story, July 8, 1926, featuring a story by Tudury.

after his death, the letter from Fitzgerald, with the envelope, entered the collectors’ market. In the March 1936 issue of Writer’s Digest, Tudury published an article called “Casey at the Bat: Sport Stories That Sell” (pp. 24–27). The article, published ten years after the period we are examining in this essay, offers advice to would-be writers who want to break into print. It also reveals a great deal about Tudury and his attitude toward authorship. “A sport story,” he writes, “is the short story reduced to its most melodramatic, sure-fire form.” The plot for one of these stories, he tells us, usually covers three games. In the first game, a problem appears for the hero; in the second, the problem grows more serious; in the third, the story reaches its climax and the problem is resolved. “There is nothing startling about this plot scaffold,” Tudury says. “It worked for me.” The rest of a sport story for Tudury is atmosphere, “the glow, glamor—or whatever you call

Fitzgerald and Moran Tudury 25

it—that I try to throw over the plot itself.” Much of Tudury’s advice applies to any work of formula fiction: “Don’t have your hero’s problem a mental problem,” he writes. “Don’t have your hero win by a trick.” Further: “Don’t summarize your game. Put your teams out on the field—and make them play.” Finally: “Make your sport story hero speak rarely. Athletes are not talkers. . . . Action every page of the way.” Tudury recommends keeping the length under five thousand words. For him this formula was reliable: “It allowed me to spend four years in Europe,” he tells us. In the July 1915 number of the Atlantic Monthly, the critic Henry Seidel Canby published an essay entitled “Free Fiction” (pp. 32–36). In the essay, Canby provided a blueprint for formula fiction. “The story must begin, it appears, with action or with dialogue,” Canby writes. The first paragraph is not the place for description or rumination. The reader, paging through the magazine, must be hooked and landed. Canby continues: “Once started, the narrative must move, move, move furiously, each action and every speech pointing directly toward the unknown climax.” The pace is unforgiving: “A pause is a confession of weakness.” The climax is all-important. It “must neatly, quickly, and definitely end the action for all time, either by a solution you have been urged to hope for by the wily author in every preceding paragraph, or in a way which is logically correct but never, never suspected.” The ending should take the form of “a last suspiration, usually in the advertising pages,” with a touch of sentiment or a “smart epigram.” Canby is not a highbrow: the formula, he believes, is “a thoroughly efficient tool for the presentation of modern life.” Examples of Tudury’s fiction that I have been able to locate follow this approximate pattern. Tudury’s stories begin with action, often in medias res. The major characters are introduced; the plot is already in motion. The protagonist encounters a problem, sometimes of his own making. Short passages of atmosphere, exposition, and dialogue appear in predictable sequence. The climax arrives about three-quarters of the way through. The dénouement follows, and the story ends, not with a twist but with a sigh of satisfaction or relief, often ironic. Occasionally a moral is hinted at but not insisted upon. Some of these are sport stories; others are historical fiction, with

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details that must have been gleaned from biographies and popular historical accounts. Still others are contemporary stories that are probably based on newspaper articles and other reportage. All of the stories are set in America. They are entertaining but not memorable. Tudury was good at what he did and stuck to his last. At this point in my investigation of Tudury, I had a piece of good luck. Kirk Curnutt at Troy State University, one of the editors of the F. Scott Fitzgerald Review, was contacted by Angela Clark of Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Moran Tudury was her great-uncle. She knew of the letter to Fitzgerald but not of its fate. Kirk supplied her with information about the letter and put her in touch with me. Angela responded by sending much additional information to me—photographs of Tudury, copies of several of his letters, and issues of magazines in which his fiction appears.5 One of the letters sent by Angela was written by Tudury to his mother-in-law, Katie Tucker, on April 24, 1927. After sending along news of his wife’s health and their plans to relocate soon to Switzerland, he sends an account of the many writing assignments he has been given by editors. He has finished a sketch of the life of Booker T. Washington and a biographical treatment of Philip Freneau; he is about to begin a similar piece on the life of Horace Greeley. “Then, in a few days,” he writes, “I begin a sport story novelette that they want in New York.” He has also written forty-three pages of a short book about the Confederacy during the Civil War. He reassures his mother-in-law that his work is in demand and that assignments will continue to come. From this fragmentary information, some of it contradictory and of doubtful accuracy, we can perhaps speculate a little about Moran Tudury. He was born and grew up in New Orleans. He was probably a little too young to have served in World War I. In 1920, at the age of nineteen, he signed on as a messboy on a transport steamer. He aspired to be a reporter. He returned from his voyage (or voyages) and by the spring of 1922 was back in Iowa, where he married Katherine Tucker. By April 1924 he was living in New York 5. The photographs appear in “Moran Tudury III: A Serendipitous Connection,” F. Scott Fitzgerald Society Newsletter 29 (May 2021): 28–29.

Fitzgerald and Moran Tudury 27

City, working for Adventure. He read Fitzgerald’s article in the Post, wrote the author a fan letter (addressed to the Post or to Scribner, one assumes), and received a letter in return. Tudury managed to publish short articles in the American Mercury and the Bookman in 1926 and 1927. Like Fitzgerald, he lived in Europe during the late 1920s, perhaps working as a newspaper correspondent. He returned to the United States with his wife and first child in 1930. A second child was born; the marriage did not last; Tudury and his wife were divorced. He remarried, and this marriage lasted until his death in 1953. By then the heyday of the pulps had passed. Paperbacks took over the market position previously occupied by pulp magazines; competition from radio, movies, and television reduced the market for popular reading material. How Tudury made his way during the last few years of his life is not known. Perhaps he became a journalist or learned to write for other outlets. There is enough here for us to understand why R. Moran Tudury might have found F. Scott Fitzgerald’s writings and career of interest. Fitzgerald, like Tudury, had grown up in a city on the Mississippi River. He had come to the East and, through talent and luck, had made a considerable mark in literature. Perhaps Tudury hoped to do the same. Tudury had some success as a writer during the 1920s and 1930s, but mostly at a low level. Did Tudury remain a fan of Fitzgerald’s writing and follow his career? Did he read The Great Gatsby in 1925 and Tender Is the Night in 1934? What about the “Crack-Up” essays in 1936? The Last Tycoon in 1941? A final note: the most intriguing of the documents sent by Angela Clark is a copy of a letter from Tudury to his mother-in-law, written from the Hôtel l’Oiseau Bleu, Juan-les-Pins, Antibes, on December 14, 1926. The Fitzgeralds were living in the Villa Paquita in Juan-les-Pins in the spring of 1926. Fitzgerald was working on the early chapters of what would become Tender Is the Night. The Fitzgeralds turned the Villa Paquita over to the Hemingways in May or June but continued to live in Juan-les-Pins, at the Villa St. Louis, until the end of that year. Did Tudury and his wife and daughter come into contact with the Fitzgeralds, the Hemingways, and some of the other American expatriates in the area? It would certainly have been possible. ••••••

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Now for the monetary angle. It’s difficult to know exactly how much Tudury was paid for his writing, but one can get an approximate idea. Pulp writers were paid between one and five cents per word, depending on the outlet and the experience of the writer. Most writers were given assignments by the editors of the pulps, either directly or through a literary agent. An editor, for example, might call for a boxing story of 4,000 words for Knockout Magazine. The editor might be specific: he or she might ask for certain characters (a promising beginner, an aging club fighter, a crooked promoter, a worried girlfriend) and for a particular kind of plot. The pulp writer would produce the manuscript according to these specifications. Let us say that Tudury wrote a 4,000-word story along these lines for three cents a word. He would have been paid $120, minus a commission (probably 10 percent) to his agent, for a net of $108. Experienced pulp writers could turn out between 3,000 and 5,000 words per day, but perhaps Tudury only averaged 2,000 words at a sitting. If he produced the boxing story in two days with a third day for revision, he would have made about $40 a day—not bad in 1926. In today’s dollars, Tudury would have collected approximately $1,620 for this story. If he was paid the top rate of five cents a word, he would have made $200. After deducting the agent’s commission, he would have collected $180—or $2,700 in today’s money. If he managed to write four or five days a week, and if almost everything he wrote found a buyer, then he was earning enough for him and his family to live in reasonable comfort in postwar France, where the dollar was strong. It’s likely that his manuscripts were heavily edited; he would have had little control over the presentation of what he wrote. He published no collections of short fiction during his career, at least under his own name. He would probably have been paid only once for each story or article. There would likely have been no additional reprint money or payment for the sale of subsidiary rights. Still, even if Tudury and his wife had no other sources of income, theirs would have been a reasonably comfortable existence. We know with more accuracy how much Fitzgerald was earning for his magazine fiction. Let us take “The Rich Boy” as an example: Fitzgerald’s initial payment was $3,500. Ten percent of this fee went

Fitzgerald and Moran Tudury 29

to his agent, Harold Ober. Fitzgerald’s take was $3,150. The story, a 15,000-word two-parter, was published in Red Book in January and February 1926. Simple math tells us that Fitzgerald earned twenty-one cents a word for the magazine appearance. He then reprinted the story in All the Sad Young Men, his third collection of short fiction, published by Scribner on February 26, 1926, just after the second part of “The Rich Boy” had appeared in Red Book. All the Sad Young Men performed quite well in the bookshops. It had the strongest sales record of all of Fitzgerald’s short-story collections; approximately 15,000 copies were sold in 1926 and 1927. “The Rich Boy” is the lead story in All the Sad Young Men; it occupies 56 of the 267 pages in the book, roughly 20 percent. Fitzgerald’s royalties from All the Sad Young Men, recorded in his professional ledger, were almost $5,500 over a two-year span, 1926–27. This means that “The Rich Boy” by itself earned him an additional $1,100 in reprint form. Fitzgerald dealt directly with Scribner and did not pay a percentage of his book royalties to Ober. His grand total for “The Rich Boy” was therefore $4,250, or about twenty-eight cents per word. The buying power of that amount in today’s dollars is approximately $63,750. And “The Rich Boy” was only one of nine stories that he published in 1926–27. To complete the comparison: Fitzgerald earned $4,250 over a two-year period for 15,000 words of fiction. For 16,000 words (four pulp stories of 4,000 words at three cents a word), Tudury would have earned $480. At five cents a word, he would have earned $800. Fitzgerald was earning much more for his literary labor, but it is important to remember that both writers were, in effect, cottage workers. They manufactured a product that was sold, through an intermediary, to another buyer. They had to keep producing if they were to continue receiving income. ••••••

Pulp magazines descended from the dime novels that were widely popular in America during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The United States mail system began charging higher rates for dime novels in 1915. Publishers such as Street & Smith, Frank A. Munsey Co., and Condé Nast avoided the increase by shifting to pulp magazines and distributing them at newsstands, drugstores,

30  Business Is Good

tobacco shops, train stations, and bus depots. Pulp magazines were aimed at a working-class readership, largely male. During the heyday of the pulps, from about 1925 to 1940, some two hundred different pulp magazines were published each month. Many of these specialized in particular subjects: warfare, aviation, detective fiction, pirates, boxing, football, science fiction. A few, for women readers, published romance stories. Some pulp magazines were miscellanies offering stories of various kinds. For five or ten cents a copy, readers purchased 130 pages of entertainment—as opposed to twenty-five cents, on average, for the “slicks,” mass-circulation magazines printed on glossy, coated paper. Pulp magazines, which were printed on cheap pulp paper, carried almost no advertising; publishers took in revenue directly from sales. Pulp writers did not think of themselves as “lone creators” of their work. They worked on a literary assembly line. This was part of the appeal to readers; pulp writers were “naturals” who wrote every day. They were paid by the word and supplied stories at fixed rates. They could not afford to be sensitive about editing and presentation. Some of the names under which they published were inventions, owned by the magazines. Two or three different writers might produce stories of a similar type and see them published under the same name. Unusually productive writers published under several pseudonyms. Tudury wrote stories that would entertain his readers. His attitude toward authorship was almost surely that of a working magazine writer. He could not have been particularly high-minded about literary labor; he likely thought of it as an occupation, not a vocation. Willa Cather had more elevated ideas about authorship. In 1920 she wrote: “Writing ought either to be the manufacture of stories for which there is a market demand—a business as safe and commendable as making soap or breakfast foods—or it should be an art, which is always a search for something for which there is no market demand, something new and untried, where the values are intrinsic and have nothing to do with standardized values.”6 Fitzgerald’s approach to writing probably fell somewhere between 6. Cather, “On the Art of Fiction,” in The Borzoi 1920 (New York: Knopf, 1920), 7.

Fitzgerald and Moran Tudury 31

Cather’s and Tudury’s. He wrote for money, but he also wrote for posterity. He balanced on the tightrope between commerce and art—a precarious trick that, most of the time, he managed to perform quite well.

THREE

The Great Gatsby, Broadway 1926

On Easter weekend, April 1925, the theatrical producer William A. Brady (1863–1950) was vacationing in Atlantic City. On Saturday evening, April 11, weary of watching tryouts all day at one of the theatres on the boardwalk, he purchased a copy of The Great Gatsby at a newsstand. This copy must have been one of the first offered for sale. The book had been published by Scribner the previous day, Friday, April 10. Brady began reading the novel on Saturday evening and was immediately captured by the characters and plot. He read all night, finishing in the early hours of Sunday morning. Fitzgerald’s story, he sensed, might be put on the Broadway stage. As soon as the Atlantic City telegraph office opened on Monday, April 13, he wired his New York office to buy the dramatic rights.1 Brady, then sixty-one years old, was a veteran Broadway producer. He was also involved in the movie business and was a successful boxing promoter. He was a self-made man who, as a 1. “Mr. Brady’s Sleepless Night Put ‘The Great Gatsby’ on the Stage,” unattributed clipping in Scrapbook IV, F. Scott Fitzgerald Additional Papers, Princeton University Library. The scrapbook is unpaginated. Clippings and other materials that concern the stage production of The Great Gatsby are on inferential pages [78–106]. They are followed by photographs and clippings about the movie version. Images of the scrapbook are available on the website of the Department of Special Collections, Princeton University.

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boy, had sold newspapers on the street corners of New York City. When he was fifteen he hitchhiked to San Francisco and became a bit-part player in small-time drama productions there. He learned the theatre business, saved his money, and eventually returned to New York and began producing plays—some 260 by the end of his career. On the side he managed prizefighters, including two heavyweight champions, James J. Jeffries and James J. Corbett. He was a promoter and a hustler, with a good notion of what might please the ticket-buying public. To produce a script for the stage version, Brady secured the services of Owen Davis (1874–1956), a playwright with whom he had worked before. Davis was then one of the most successful playwrights on Broadway. Three years earlier he had won the Pulitzer Prize for his play Icebound, a family drama involving a will, a surprise inheritance, a troubled son, and an unexpected romance.2 Davis, fifty-one years old, had attended Harvard. He held a degree from the institution but had been an indifferent student, more interested in athletics (he was a sprinter and a football player) than in classes. He had begun his career writing sketches about the Tenderloin district of New York for the Police Gazette, a weekly tabloid that specialized in crime, sports, celebrity gossip, and girlie pin-ups. Davis wrote for the Gazette under several pseudonyms, including Ike Swift, Martin Hurley, and Robert Wayne. Later he served a long apprenticeship writing melodramas (as many as two hundred, by his estimate) for the popular theatre circuit. Among his successful efforts were Nellie, the Beautiful Cloak Model (1906), Chinatown Charlie (1906), and Deadwood Dick’s Last Shot (1907). By 1925 he had managed to have several of his plays presented on Broadway; by the end of his career he had written or been involved in some seventy-five Broadway productions.3 2. A movie version of the play, directed by William C. DeMille (brother of the director Cecil B. DeMille), was released in 1924. The play was revived in the fall of 2014 in a production at the Metropolitan Playhouse in New York City. See Anita Gates, “The Weather Is Cold, the Feelings More So,” New York Times, September 27, 2014, C2. 3. Fitzgerald, who was living in Paris, was pleased that Brady and Davis would do the play. He wrote to Maxwell Perkins: “Word has just come by cable that Brady has made an offer for the dramatic rights of Gatsby, with Owen Davis, king of proffessional

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The Great Gatsby was one of Davis’s first attempts to adapt a novel for the stage.4 He did not find the process easy. “It is, for me at any rate, far more difficult to make a play from some other person’s novel than it is to build one out of my own fancy,” he wrote in the New York Times. “Instead of being a never-failing adventure, it is simply a weary grind.” He envied the brilliance of Fitzgerald’s writing: “I couldn’t for the life of me see why this boy, half my age, should be able to write a better yarn than I could possibly write.” Davis felt, however, that he had done a creditable job of adapting the novel for the stage. “It really would take a very clever man to make a bad play out of ‘The Great Gatsby,’” he concluded.5 Brady hired George Cukor (1899–1983) to direct the production. Cukor, who had started his career as a stage manager and bit-part actor, began directing plays on the New York summer-stock circuit in 1920. His first Broadway drama, Antonia, opened at the Empire Theater on October 20, 1925, and ran through December of that year. The Great Gatsby was his second Broadway production. Two years later Cukor moved to Hollywood, where he became a successful film director. He was known in the movie business for coaxing top-flight performances from difficult female stars. He is remembered today for such films as Little Women (1933), The Philadelphia Story (1940), and My Fair Lady (1964), for which he won the Academy Award for Best Director. To play the part of Jay Gatsby, Brady secured the services of James Rennie (1889–1965), a popular leading man who was, incidentally, the husband of the actress Dorothy Gish. During the 1920s Rennie was appearing in silent movies and in stage plays, including some productions of Shakespeare. After The Great Gatsby had finished its run, Rennie made a successful transition to the “talkies” and starred play doctors, to do the dramatization. I am, needless to say, accepting, but please keep it confidential until the actual contract is signed.” F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Life in Letters, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli (New York: Scribner, 1994), 117. 4. Six years later, in 1932, he transformed Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth into a long-running Broadway play; three years after that he turned Edith Wharton’s novella Ethan Frome into a successful Broadway drama. 5. Owen Davis, “Making a Play from a Novel,” New York Times, March 28, 1926, X4. Portions of this article were reprinted in “Dramatizing Novel ‘No Fun,’” Baltimore Sun, October 17, 1926, 50.

The Great Gatsby, Broadway 1926  35

in several films, including Girl of the Golden West (1930), Illicit (1931), and The Divorce Racket (1932). He returned to the stage in the mid1930s and appeared in Broadway and touring productions into the late 1950s.6 Florence Eldridge (1901–1988) was signed to play Daisy Buchanan. Eldridge, a dark-haired beauty with aristocratic good looks, had begun her career as a chorus girl at the Astor Theatre in 1918. By the 1920s she, like Rennie, was appearing in both stage productions and silent films. In 1927 she married the actor Fredric March and played opposite him in many productions during the years that followed. Among the Broadway dramas in which she appeared were The Skin of Our Teeth (1942), An Enemy of the People (1950), and Long Day’s Journey into Night (1956), for which she received a Tony nomination.7 The rest of the cast was strong. Margherita Sargent, who played Daisy’s mother, had been appearing on Broadway since 1916 and would act in productions there until 1957. Edward H. Wever, who took the role of Nick, was a Princeton alumnus who had been president of the Triangle Club in his senior year; he appeared in thirteen Broadway productions between 1921 and 1929. Tom was played by Elliot Cabot, a member of the Cabot family in Boston. He had been educated at Harvard and at Caius College, Cambridge; he would appear on Broadway throughout the remainder of the 1920s and into the early 1930s. Charles Dickson, in the role of Wolfshiem, was a 6. Fitzgerald wrote to Rennie ca. July 17, 1926, about an idea that Rennie had asked him to transform into a drama script. After initial efforts Fitzgerald declined to pursue the project further. “I’m convinced that I’d simply ruin your idea,” wrote Fitzgerald. The letter is published in Correspondence of F. Scott Fitzgerald, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli and Margaret M. Dugan (New York: Random House, 1980), 197–98. 7. On April 1, Eldridge was replaced in the production by Betty Wales, a lesserknown performer. “Florence Eldridge Ousted as ‘The Great Gatsby’ Star; Calls Brady’s Action Funny,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, April 1, 1926, 12. In May, Eldridge (perhaps still under the spell of Fitzgerald’s novel) purchased a three-quarter-acre plot in Great Neck at a new residential colony, called Kenilworth, in the King’s Point section. According to the newspaper announcement of the purchase, the site “has an extensive view of Manhasset Bay and Long Island Sound. Miss Eldridge plans to build a home there which she will occupy herself.” “Actress Buys Home Site,” Brooklyn Times Union, May 15, 1926, 9. I am indebted to Anne Margaret Daniel and Jade Broughton Adams for sending these articles to me.

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veteran performer who had been appearing on Broadway since 1887. Catherine Willard, as Jordan, was in her third Broadway play and would go on to appear in productions into the early 1950s. Porter Hall, as Doc Civit, stayed busy on Broadway through the 1920s; in 1931 he made the transition to Hollywood and became a character actor. He appeared in numerous movies, including The Thin Man (1934), Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), Double Indemnity (1944), and Miracle on 34th Street (1947). Virginia Hennings had the role of the African American maid Sally, a part added by Davis. She must have played the part in blackface. The Great Gatsby was her only recorded appearance on Broadway during her career, but she had been active in vaudeville in Philadelphia since at least 1909—often listed as a “character impersonator.” By 1916 she was appearing in silent movies. A photograph published in the Philadelphia Inquirer in December 1917 reveals that she was white.8 Hennings later formed her own company and appeared on stage in Philadelphia and in road productions in New Jersey and Washington, DC. African Americans had been featured in all-Black productions on Broadway since the late 1890s, but the first production with a racially integrated cast was Show Boat, which opened in December 1927, almost two years after The Great Gatsby began its run. Having a blackface character in The Great Gatsby would not have raised eyebrows at the time. An early version of the Owen Davis script was sent to Fitzgerald in Switzerland. In a letter to Maxwell Perkins around January 19, 1926, Fitzgerald expressed misgivings about how much of Nick’s elevated language had been incorporated into the script as dialogue. Perkins attended a pre-Broadway performance in Stamford, Connecticut, on Wednesday, January 27. The next day he wrote a reassuring letter to Fitzgerald: You need not feel ashamed of the play. . . . Your ideas and the course of the action have been adhered to far more closely than I ever dreamed they would be. The cast is excellent, especially Gatsby, Buchanan, Daisy, and Wolfshiem. . . . And all 8. “She’s a ‘Glad’ Girl,” Philadelphia Inquirer, December 9, 1917, 42.

The Great Gatsby, Broadway 1926  37

the individuals I saw, like the Burts who went with me, and Bob Benchley, who was in the lobby after the second act, were much pleased. . . . “The Great Gatsby” is distinctly well done. It is certainly a good play, and highly interesting, and it seems to me it has an excellent chance for success.9 The Great Gatsby had a second out-of-town opening during the last week of January at the Great Neck Playhouse on Long Island. Once the kinks had been ironed out of the performance, the show was ready for Broadway. The production opened to a full house on Tuesday, February 2, 1926, at the Ambassador Theatre, 219 West Forty-Ninth Street, between Broadway and Eighth Avenue.10 In the audience that night were Mr. and Mrs. Charles Scribner; Mr. and Mrs. Harold Ober; the producers Jesse L. Lasky, Samuel Goldwyn, Gilbert Miller, and Jules Brulatour; the actors Henry Clapp Smith, Margaret Illington, Alice Brady, and Hope Hampton; the radio personality Major Edward Bowes; and other New York celebrities and luminaries.11 The next morning Charles Scribner sent a telegram to Fitzgerald at the Hotel Bellevue, Salies-de-Béarn, in the French Pyrenees: “gatsby great success . . . reviews excellent.” Ober also sent a wire: “audience enthusiastic over gatsby. play carried glamor of story. excellently cast and acted.

9. Dear Scott / Dear Max: The Fitzgerald-Perkins Correspondence, ed. John Kuehl and Jackson R. Bryer (New York: Scribner, 1971), 131. “Burt” is Maxwell Struthers Burt, a Scribner author. “Bob Benchley” is Robert Benchley, the humorist, newspaper columnist, and member of the Algonquin Round Table. 10. The theatre, which still stands, was then relatively new. It had been built in 1921 by the Shubert Brothers, theatrical managers and producers, as one of four theatres they erected in New York during the post–World War I period. The Ambassador is an unusual performance space. It was built at a diagonal on its site so that the maximum number of seats could be created. The auditorium, elaborately decorated, is hexagonal in shape, with a relatively small proscenium and limited room in the stage wings. Despite these oddities, the Ambassador has proved to be a popular and enduring venue. Among the productions there over the years have been The Diary of Anne Frank (1955), The Lion in Winter (1966), Godspell (1977), A View from the Bridge (1983), Bring in ’da Noise, Bring in ’da Funk (1996), and, in revival, Chicago (2003). 11. “Bootless Bootlegging,” New York Evening Telegram, Scrapbook IV.

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reviews all very favorable.” An unidentified friend sent a shorter telegram: “good play. should coin money.”12 Reviews of the play were quite favorable. J. Brooks Atkinson, in the New York Times, showed some familiarity with Fitzgerald’s novel. The production “retains most of the novel’s peculiar glamour,” he wrote. “By use of people in the flesh, speaking and acting, the play accents the telling contrasts between Gatsby, the romantic swindler, positive and honorable according to his precedents, and the Buchanans and Bakers and people of quality who have a high sense of honor and cheat it continually.”13 Alexander Woollcott, in the World, wrote that Davis had “carried the book over on to the stage with almost the minimum of spillage,” and that the cast had been “goaded into giving a vociferous performance.” In the Sun, Gilbert Gabriel wrote: “More entertaining drama has not come out of a book in a long time.” Frank Vreeland, in the Evening Telegram, called the production “one of the very best that Owen Davis ever tossed off between rounds of golf.” E. W. Osborne, the critic for the Evening World, praised the performances of individual actors: James Rennie was “almost ideally fitted in every particular to the Gatsby role”; Florence Eldridge, as Daisy, was “delightfully full of life”; Catherine Willard was “a blooming and charming Jordan Baker.” Percy Hammond in the Herald-Tribune singled out Owen Davis for the adaptation: “Mr. Davis’s dramatization was so able that it managed to emphasize the subtle qualities of Mr. Fitzgerald’s study of a golden vagabond without causing the usual epidemic of gooseflesh.”14 Davis must have been pleased by these reviews. To a friend he wrote, with appropriate self-deprecation: “I am quite bewildered at the reception of my gabby little yarn.”15 We should not be all that surprised today: it’s easy to forget that The Great Gatsby is a racy story. Both the novel and the play feature wild parties and bootlegging. 12. These telegrams were preserved by Fitzgerald in Scrapbook IV. The telegram from Ober is published in As Ever, Scott Fitz—, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli and Jennifer McCabe Atkinson (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1972), 85. 13. “Careless People and Gatsby,” New York Times, February 3, 1926, 22. 14. These clippings, all from February 2, are preserved in Scrapbook IV. 15. This note, undated, was written to a friend named “Jules.” It is laid in with the Rialto script of the play at the University of South Carolina.

The Great Gatsby, Broadway 1926  39

Some of the characters are glamorous and wealthy; others are from the underclass; still others are criminals and gangsters. Prohibition was in effect in 1926, but almost everyone in the play has a drink in hand. The women have bobbed hair, wear short skirts, and smoke cigarettes. Everyone knows the latest dance steps. The plot involves adultery, deception, revenge, and murder. Davis managed to extract these elements and fashion them into a fast-moving play. No wonder the critics liked it. Fitzgerald read these reviews, and a good many others, while he was in Europe. Ober sent over the opening-night notices. Fitzgerald subscribed to a clipping service, had the subsequent publicity mailed to him, and pasted everything into the scrapbook he was compiling for The Great Gatsby. Some of these reviews and articles are difficult to trace now because the headlines, by-lines, and other publication data have been snipped off. Fortunately, images of the pages from the scrapbook are available on the website of the Special Collections Department at Princeton University Library. The reviews and other publicity, all of it in Scrapbook IV, can be seen there. When The Great Gatsby opened in February 1926, Broadway was flourishing. New theatres were being built, and attendance was high. The post–World War I economic boom was in full swing; live theatre was popular and profitable. Competition for the entertainment dollar was stiff during this period. On opening night for The Great Gatsby there were more than one hundred choices for an evening’s distraction in the city—dramas, musicals, concerts, stage shows, and movies. Aficionados of serious drama could see Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, G. B. Shaw’s Arms and the Man, or Eugene O’Neill’s The Great God Brown. Lovers of classical music could hear the New York Symphony, the Boston Symphony, or “1,200 Male Voices” in a concert presented by the Associated Glee Clubs. Among the movies showing in the cinema palaces on Broadway were General Lew Wallace’s Ben-Hur (the Fitzgeralds had visited the set for this movie while it was being filmed in Rome) and Stella Dallas, starring the ingénue Lois Moran, who would later stand as the model for Rosemary Hoyt in Tender Is the Night. If one’s taste was for comedy, one could buy tickets for Is Zat So? at the Central, Laff That Off at Wallack’s, Puppy Love at the 48th Street Theater, or Easy

40  Business Is Good

Come Easy Go at the Biltmore. Leggy variety shows included Artists and Models (Paris Edition), Gay Paree, George White’s Scandals, and Earl Carroll’s Vanities. Among the long-running productions were No, No, Nanette! at the Globe and Abie’s Irish Rose at the Republic. Stars appearing that night, either on stage or on screen, included Norma Shearer, Ina Claire, George Jessel, Peggy Hopkins Joyce, John Barrymore, Lon Chaney, Marilyn Miller, and the Marx Brothers.16 From mid-June 1925 to mid-June 1926, some 262 productions were mounted on Broadway. There were 171 dramas, 24 musicals, 18 revues, 30 revivals, 15 return engagements, 2 “foreign presentations,” and 2 “miscellaneous” shows. The longest-running productions were Cradle Snatchers, at 338 performances, and The Jazz Singer, at 309 performances. The Butter and Egg Man made it to 243 performances; Love ’Em and Leave ’Em lasted for 158; Naughty Cinderella reached 121. The Great Gatsby did well for a drama: it had a respectable run of 112 performances, counting matinées. This was good enough for twenty-eighth place among the dramas in 1926. (Fitzgerald would probably have been miffed to know that a stage version of The Green Hat, by his fellow novelist and competitor Michael Arlen, had scored 237 performances and occupied ninth place on the list.) Many of the dramas made it to 50 performances. Flops included So That’s That, You Can’t Win, and Dope, each with two performances, and Beyond Evil, which opened and closed on the same night.17 The New York production of The Great Gatsby was originally supposed to close in the first week of May, but it was popular enough for its run to be extended to May 22. The play then moved to Chicago, with opening night planned for August 1, the beginning of the theatre season there. Brady took some of the cast of the New York production to Chicago. James Rennie continued as Gatsby, Catherine Willard as Jordan, and Charles Dixon as Wolfshiem. Other roles were filled by replacements: Helen Baxter appeared as Daisy, Walter Davis as Tom, and Monroe Owsley as Nick. Elsa Gray, who later became one of the original Roxy Girls in New York, played the role of Sally. 16. Display ads, New York Times, February 2, 1926, 21. 17. “Facts and Figures of the Past Season,” New York Times, June 20, 1926, X1.

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The cast began rehearsals in the Studebaker Theatre, an ornate auditorium on South Michigan Avenue, built in 1898 and expanded in the early 1920s. There a serious mishap occurred. On July 31, the day before the play was to open, Brady was rehearsing the cast on the Studebaker stage when he tripped and fell into the orchestra pit. He was carried unconscious to his hotel room; the house physician announced to the press later that Brady had broken his wrist. The rehearsal continued, however, and the play opened the following night.18 Notices were good. The anonymous reviewer for the Chicago Tribune praised the performances of James Rennie and Catherine Willard: “If you’ve read the novel, you’ll like the play.” Amy Leslie, reviewing in the Chicago Daily News, reported that there had been a “huge crowd” for opening night and that “the audience seemed enthralled.” She too praised Rennie (“he speaks the Michigan language of the Fitzgerald hero”) and Willard (she played Jordan Baker “with a captivating impudence and calm”).19 The play had been scheduled for a four-week run but was extended for another four weeks and had its final performance in late September. The production then traveled to the Shubert Theatre in New York for a one-week return engagement beginning October 4. With a different cast it moved on to Brooklyn, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Detroit, St. Louis, Denver, and possibly to other cities, each time for a oneweek stand.20 The last notice located for a road production was in Minneapolis, opening on February 1, 1927.21 By then the movie version had been out for five weeks, probably ending the demand for traveling productions. ••••••

Now for the play itself. In order to understand Davis’s adaptation, it helps to look at his memoir I’d Like to Do It Again, published 18. “William A. Brady Injured in Fall,” New York Times, August 1, 1926, 30. 19. See these reviews in Scrapbook IV. 20. Notices and advertisements: Brooklyn Times Union, October 12, 1926, 13; Baltimore Sun, October 19, 1926, 13; Philadelphia Inquirer, October 26, 1926, 14; Minneapolis Star Tribune, February 1, 1927, 13. Fitzgerald made note of the Detroit, St. Louis, and Denver productions in his ledger entry for 1926. 21. “Shubert Tonight and Week,” Minneapolis Star Tribune, February 1, 1927, 13.

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in 1931, five years after the opening of The Great Gatsby. In the book Davis reminisces about his years in regional theatre, when he was manufacturing melodramas for the popular stage. “The good play-maker of the popular-priced theater was supposed to know what a proper list of characters for a play must be,” Davis tells us. He always started with a cast of eight: the Hero, the Heroine, the Heavy Man, the Heavy Woman, the Soubrette, the Comedian, the Light Comedy Boy, and the Second Heavy. “These eight made up the cast,” he explains, “and to them we added two or three utility actors to play such ‘walking parts’ as the plot demanded, but no matter what the play these eight characters were always in it.”22 It’s not too much of a stretch to see the actors in his adaptation of The Great Gatsby as filling these roles. Davis also reveals another secret of the trade in his memoir: “One of the first tricks I learned was that my plays must be written for an audience who, owing to the huge, uncarpeted, noisy theaters, wouldn’t always hear the words and who, a large percentage of them having only recently landed in America, couldn’t have understood them in any case.” His solution was simple: “I therefore wrote for the eye rather than the ear and played out each emotion in action.”23 The plays were driven by movement. Dialogue was secondary. Davis took many liberties with Fitzgerald’s story line. He disassembled the novel, rearranged its parts into a prologue and three acts, and made the action chronological. Information about Jay Gatsby’s past, revealed to us gradually in the novel, is now presented all at once, early in the script. Nick is no longer the narrator; he is only Gatsby’s neighbor and friend. Lines from the novel have been extracted and put into the mouths of the actors. Lines spoken by one character in the novel, however, are often given to another character in the play. New characters have been invented—among them Daisy’s mother, Mrs. Amy Fay; the “colored maid” Sally; an army major named Will Carson; an Irish butler named Ryan; and two criminals named Donnivan and Crosby. Nothing is said in the 22. See Davis, I’d Like to Do It Again (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, Inc., 1931), 101–5. 23. Ibid., 36–37.

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script about East versus West. Gatsby still uses the expression “old sport,” but only a few times. Much has been dispensed with. There is no opening luncheon at the Buchanan house, no trip through the Valley of Ashes, no party at Tom and Myrtle’s love nest, and no scene at the Plaza Hotel. There is no billboard with the painted eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg, nor is there a guest list for Gatsby’s fabulous parties. Gatsby does not take Daisy on a tour of his mansion; Klipspringer does not play the piano or do his liver exercises; Gatsby does not display his shirts. Nick and Jordan are a couple, but their romance is not particularly important. Daisy’s voice is no longer full of money; she seems interested only in a fling with Gatsby. Wolfshiem still has cuff buttons made from human molars, still speaks in a Yiddish accent, and is still the man who fixed the 1919 World Series. His character, however, has been altered. He has become a friendly fellow who drives out to Long Island to visit Gatsby at his estate, misses the turnoff, and ends up at Nick’s cottage. Gatsby does not bump into a clock on Nick’s mantelpiece; he knocks over a vase, which smashes on the floor. Tom’s interest in eugenics and racial purity has been downplayed. Myrtle, who used to be a chorus girl, is now married to the renamed “Buck” Wilson, a former prizefighter who has become a chauffeur. Owl Eyes is missing, not present in Gatsby’s library or anywhere else in the play. Gone are Gatsby’s yellow car and his pink suit. The green light, thank goodness, is still visible across the bay. It’s fortunate that Fitzgerald was in Europe when Davis was preparing the script and, later, when rehearsals were being held. The Great Gatsby was his creation; he must have felt proprietary about the story. If he had been allowed to attend rehearsals, he would undoubtedly have been a pain in the neck. Anyone who reads the script today will react as Fitzgerald would have. We have learned to regard The Great Gatsby as a secular scripture, a verbal icon. Many of us have read and taught the novel so often that we have it almost by heart. We need to remember that, in 1926, The Great Gatsby was not thought of as a classic work of literature. It was simply another novel by a promising young author. Reviews of the book had been largely positive; sales had been moderately strong.

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Davis’s assignment was to turn Fitzgerald’s story into an evening’s entertainment for theatregoers. He needed a straightforward plot and recognizable character types. He also needed action, humor, and romance. In his script he succeeded commendably well. Two versions of the Owen Davis script are extant, both in typescript. The first of these, the “Broadway script,” is the earlier and longer of the two. A photocopy of this earlier text is at Princeton in the F. Scott Fitzgerald Additional Papers.24 A photocopy of another typescript of this earlier version survives in the Bruccoli Collection at the University of South Carolina. Also in the Bruccoli Collection is an original carbon typescript of this same text, a page-by-page transcription of the dialogue and stage directions marked “Tom Buchanan” in pencil on the cover.25 And a third exemplar of this earlier and longer version survives at the American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming, in a collection of Owen Davis scripts there. In 1926 the Xerox machine did not exist. If one wanted more than a single copy of a document and did not want to have it typeset and printed, or otherwise duplicated, one was compelled to have fresh typescripts made, with carbon copies. The fact that all three of these early versions are page-by-page transcripts (but not lineby-line) suggests that they were prepared for actors, directors, and others involved in the Broadway production. During rehearsals and script conferences, everyone would need to be quite literally “on the same page.” The second and shorter version of the script survives in only one copy known to me, in the Bruccoli Collection. It is the original of a mimeographed script, bound in heavy paper covers and secured with brass fasteners. This script was produced at the Rialto Service Bureau, a mimeographing and typing agency then located 24. The photocopy is in Box 1b, Folder 15. The original of this copy seems to have belonged either to George Cukor, who directed the Broadway production, or to a director of one of the road productions. The copy is marked with directions for the actors, indicating where they should begin a scene and where they should move in the action that follows. 25. This might be the copy used by Elliot Cabot, who played Tom on Broadway. Three pages in this copy are deleted with black X marks. The provenance of this copy is unknown.

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(according to the printing on the cover) at 229 West Forty-Second Street in New York. This “Rialto script” is the version for road productions. It includes sketches of the sets, hand-drawn onto the stencils, and two pages of lighting directions. In the Rialto version, the prologue has been cut from fifteen typed pages to ten. The prologue has been moved from the living room of Daisy’s house to the front porch, an easier set for a road production to mount. The dialogue has been trimmed and tightened so that the action moves more quickly. The remainder of the text (the three acts that constitute the body of the play) has been revised and polished, with occasional cutting to the text. It’s important to remember that the play seen by Broadway audiences, or by audiences for the road productions, might well have been different from either of the surviving scripts. Changes in dialogue and action are frequently made in rehearsals and even during the run of a play. And we cannot know how much was conveyed by voice and gesture, staging and lighting, costumes and makeup, sets and props, movement and music. Everything in a novel is done with words and by the imagination of the reader. Everything in a play is a collaboration. The participants are the dramatist, the actors, the director, the musicians, the makeup artists, the costume designers, the dressers, the lighting technicians, the stagehands—and the audience. When a novel is published in paper and ink it is rendered incarnate. So long as a single copy survives, the text survives. Once a play is performed, that performance vanishes. The play can only be brought back to life in the next performance. What we have today are two surviving scripts for the Owen Davis adaptation. In the paragraphs that follow I shall summarize the action and dialogue from the Broadway script, which I believe to be the earlier and more authoritative of the two versions.26 The play opens with a prologue set in the living room of Daisy’s house in Louisville. A description appears in the script: “It is an old-fashioned southern room, stately and elegant,” with a “door to 26. The Broadway script is paginated from P-1 to P-15 for the prologue; from 1-1 to 1-30 for act 1, from 2-1 to 2-28 for act 2, and from 3-1 to 3-27 for act 3. Quotations in the paragraphs that follow appear sequentially in the script.

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the hall” stage right, through which the characters will enter and exit. The date is August 1917, late in the summer. In the background, and softly, a military band plays “Over There.” Mrs. Amy Fay, a widow, enters and calls to her servant Sally, a middle-aged family retainer. “Is that you?” asks Mrs. Fay. “Yes, yes Miss Amy, dat am me,” answers Sally. Mrs. Fay is worried about the whereabouts of her daughter. “Was she there?” she asks Sally. “Can’t you find her?” Daisy has disappeared, not for the first time, with a young lieutenant named Gatsby. The hour is growing late. Mrs. Fay suspects that Sally knows what Daisy and Gatsby are up to. Sally, who also raised Mrs. Fay, attempts to cover for Daisy and her admirer. She answers Mrs. Fay’s questions with elaborate circumlocutions: “Well—she wasn’t exactly there,” she answers at one point. “Of course if a person has got to be absolutely truth-telling about it, she ain’t been there at all.” Now a family friend appears: he is Will Carson, a medical doctor who holds the rank of major. He is serving as an army physician in the training camp outside the city. At Mrs. Fay’s request, Carson has secured a report on Jay Gatsby from the Intelligence Department in Washington. Carson reads the report aloud, giving us much of the information about Gatsby’s origins that, in the novel, we learn later. Carson reports that Lieutenant Gatsby’s real name is James Gatz, that he was a clam-digger on the waterfront at Lake Superior, and that he worked for a “Nevada millionaire” named Dan Cody. Gatsby is one of the most promising young officers in training camp, but he is not of Daisy’s social class. Mrs. Fay knows only too well how a handsome young man in a uniform can turn a young girl’s head, no matter what his background might be. “He is as romantic as a gypsy, handsome, arrogant, ambitious,” says Mrs. Fay to Major Carson. “Daisy couldn’t really be serious about him!” Mrs. Fay is concerned because, on this particular evening, another of Daisy’s admirers, Captain Tom Buchanan, has traveled all the way to Louisville from New York, where his regiment will soon board a troopship for Europe. Tom, a man of wealth who is much more suitable for Daisy, has come to tell her goodbye.27 The same is true 27. Nothing is said in Fitzgerald’s novel about Tom’s activities during the war. Nick and Gatsby are both army veterans. Perhaps in the novel we are to assume that Tom

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of Gatsby: his training is finished, and he will leave on a train the next morning to travel to his embarkation point. Mrs. Fay and Dr. Carson leave the room. The lights grow dim. Daisy and Gatsby enter surreptitiously and are intercepted by Sally, who warns them about what’s happening. “Miss Daisy,” she says, “yo’ Ma is getting’ awful nervous like! Dey is somebody in there she wants you to see and she’s just a telephoning and a telephoning and a carryin’ on something terrible!” Daisy is weepy, and Gatsby is full of protestations. Since “last night,” when “you gave yourself to me,” he tells her, he has abandoned his dreams of wealth and power. “They were selfish dreams. They don’t matter now,” he says. Many of Gatsby’s lines, in the prologue and elsewhere in the script, are taken from the novel, where they are narrated in Nick’s voice. In the prologue, for example, Gatsby says: “There seemed to be a stir and bustle among the stars. I could see, out of the corner of my eye, the blocks of the sidewalks in the moonlight, and I had the fancy that they formed a ladder that mounted to a secret place above the trees.” And later: “For a moment, to listen just once more to the tuning fork I had struck upon a star, then—I kissed you, and as my lips touched yours you blossomed for me like a flower.” There are no stage directions here, but almost certainly these lines (if they survived into performance) were delivered as soliloquies. Perhaps Gatsby stood in a spotlight and addressed the audience directly.28 Gatsby leaves, and Daisy is teary. Mrs. Fay enters and informs Daisy that Captain Buchanan is waiting. At first Daisy refuses to see him; then she changes her mind. She ceases to weep, dries her eyes, and “takes a vanity case and fixes her hair in the little mirror and powders her face.” She recovers her poise just as her visitor enters. “Hello Tom!” she says. “You silly old thing. Why didn’t you come before?” There is a cue in the script for music: “Now in the middle

avoided service through his wealth and connections. Note that, in the play, Tom outranks Gatsby. 28. Fitzgerald seems to have written to Rennie, expressing his worries about overblown dialogue. Rennie wrote back to him in an undated letter, now in Scrapbook IV: “I am certain you have one of the earlier scripts where ‘Gatsby’ is much more flowery than we are doing him now.”

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distance an army band plays ‘Tipperary.’” The prologue comes to an end, and the curtain falls. Act 1 takes place in Nick Carraway’s cottage in West Egg. Davis has pushed the chronology forward: the action of the novel begins in June 1922, but for the play he has moved the date to August 1925. He has also spruced up the cottage: in Fitzgerald’s novel it is a small, shabby eyesore, but in the play it has become “a pretty, modern cottage” with fashionable furnishings and two French windows through which the characters come and go. Outside one of these windows is a veranda; the blue surface of Long Island Sound is visible in the distance. Nick, dressed in “afternoon sports clothes,” is smoking a cigarette and reading the newspaper. Meyer Wolfshiem, described as “a well-dressed Jew of middle age,” enters through a French window. Without introducing himself he asks: “I vonted to know if somebody couldn’t tell me the vay to the Gatsby place!” Nick supplies directions, but Wolfshiem lingers. He is friendly and talkative, eager to supply details about Jay Gatsby. “I knew I’d met a man of fine breeding after I had talked to him for an hour!” he exclaims. “I said to myself, there’s the kind of man it would be a pleasure to take home and introduce to your mother and sister!” Nick notices Wolfshiem’s cuff buttons. “They ain’t a secret,” says Wolfshiem. “Finest specimens of human molars.” Wolfshiem leaves and Gatsby enters. He tells Nick a little about himself. “I am the son of some wealthy people in the Middle West, all dead now,” he says. He was “educated at Oxford” and “lived like a young Rajah in all the capitals of Europe, Paris, Venice, Rome.” Sensing Nick’s skepticism, Gatsby extracts from his pocket “a bit of metal on a ribbon,” the decoration from “little Montenegro.” Nick reads the inscription on the reverse: “Major Jay Gatsby, For Valour Extraordinary.” Daisy is coming for tea. Gatsby, who has asked Nick to invite her over, has had the grass cut and is sending flowers and tea cakes. He departs to collect his wits and quiet his nerves. A pretty servant girl named Effie (who replaces Nick’s muttering Finnish housekeeper from the novel) now hurries about, tidying the cottage. She is happy to supply more information about Gatsby. “The grocer at the village says he knows for a fact that Mr. Gatsby was a German spy during

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the war!” she says. “If you could see the look on his face, I guess you’d believe he’d killed somebody.” Daisy now arrives, accompanied by Tom and Jordan Baker. Lines from the novel are inserted into the script but, as before, are sometimes given to different characters. It is Jordan, for example, and not Daisy who is “paralyzed with happiness” to see Nick. Tea is served by Effie. The telephone rings; the call is from Myrtle Wilson. Her husband, Buck Wilson, is Tom Buchanan’s chauffeur. Daisy is angry: she knows that Tom and Myrtle are having an affair. She leaves the room; we hear her arguing with Tom; Jordan and Nick eavesdrop. Daisy and Tom return, and Daisy confronts him, insisting that he fire Wilson. “Get rid of him, or get rid of me. Take your choice,” she says. Tom, exasperated, calls Buck into the cottage and fires him. Nick steps in immediately and promises to have Gatsby, who needs a chauffeur, hire Wilson as his driver. This business is handled awkwardly in the script, but the action is moving quickly and the audience would have accepted the result—which will have consequences later on. Tom leaves, and Gatsby enters. He and Daisy, who have not seen each other in eight years, are awkward at first. He leans against the mantelpiece and knocks over the vase, which smashes on the floor. He recovers quickly. “If it wasn’t for the mist you could see your home across the bay,” he tells Daisy. “You always have a green light that burns all night at the end of your dock.” As in the prologue, Gatsby declaims long passages from the novel: “Your house had seemed to me more mysterious and gay than any other house,” he says. “I stretched my hand out desperately as if to snatch a wisp of air, as if to save a fragment of the spot you had made so lovely.” Nick enters, interrupting Gatsby’s rather humid musings. “How about a little tea?” he suggests. “Why yes, old sport. Let’s have a little tea,” answers Gatsby. Act 1 ends, and there is an intermission. Act 2 is set in Gatsby’s library, one week after the tea party at Nick’s. The library is elegant and impressive. Davis includes a description: “This library is a great circular room with an enormous fireplace, an arch to the hall and very high French windows onto a wide veranda; the veranda is circular, like the room, and it is gay with decorative lanterns, etc.” There are “cases of well-bound books”

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between the windows and the door. Beyond the veranda railing we have “a view of the Sound, and on the distant shore there are a few twinkling lights.”29 Jay Gatsby and Meyer Wolfshiem, both dressed in evening clothes, are drinking highballs and smoking cigars. Wolfshiem is urging him to be careful about selling illegal liquor. “Lots of the boys I know got a good start,” he cautions, “but they pushed their luck, and something broke, somebody squealed maybe, or maybe it was a woman butted in.” The two men are joined by Ryan, the butler, who turns out to be Gatsby’s chief henchman. Gatsby takes a telephone call: “Blakeley in Detroit has been talking too much,” he reports. “He’s a welcher, Mr. Gatsby,” says Ryan. “He was a stool in the old days for Bill Devery.” In the novel Gatsby’s criminal activities are only hinted at, mostly toward the end of the book, but in the play they are known much earlier. Wolfshiem begins telling his story of “the night they shot Rosy Rosenthal” at “the Old Metropole” but cuts it short when the guests begin to arrive. Gatsby is having a party. Nick enters with Jordan; Tom and Daisy appear shortly after that. A character named Mrs. Gay, who has already had too much to drink, reminds Jordan that they met “about a month ago” at one of Gatsby’s parties. “Yes, but you’ve dyed your hair since then,” says Jordan. (In the novel Jordan addresses the remark to “two girls in twin yellow dresses,” but, alas, they are not at this party.) Tom wanders off to have a look at “a little movie star with wonderful red hair.” Gatsby and Daisy excuse themselves and go to his picture gallery where they can be alone. Doc Civit, who is also drunk, has a conversation with Catherine. She is no longer Myrtle’s sister; she is instead a friend from Myrtle’s chorus-girl days. Myrtle now enters for the first time, but she is not the character from the book. In Fitzgerald’s novel she is a woman “in the middle thirties, and faintly stout,” who carries “her surplus flesh sensuously

29. A photograph of this set, filled with guests at one of Gatsby’s parties, survives at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center. The set is impressive: the bookcases look to be around twelve feet high, and the French windows are covered with silk drapery. There is a crystal chandelier. The men are in formal dress; most of the women are in evening gowns; three women are in one-piece bathing suits.

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as some women can.”30 In the play, Myrtle is much younger, “about twenty-two . . . sulky and defiant.” She begins to complain to Catherine about her husband. “I was crazy when I married him,” she says. Catherine sympathizes: “Find yourself a nice sweetie,” she says. Wilson now enters. In the novel he is a whipped dog, exhausted and drained of vitality. In the play he has become “a pale, slight, threatening-looking fellow of thirty,” dressed in “chauffeur’s livery.” Wilson is now in Gatsby’s employ and has become his bagman. He is scheduled to drive to White Plains that night to deliver a suitcase. He has been told not to look inside. A band plays jazz in the background. Guests in evening clothes pass across the stage, laughing and drinking, and couples dance on the veranda. Daisy and Gatsby return. She tells Tom, who has come back from his wanderings, that she wants to go home. “She doesn’t like my party,” Gatsby says to Nick. “It isn’t the way I thought it would be.” “I wouldn’t ask too much of her,” says Nick. “You can’t repeat the past.” Gatsby is incredulous: “Can’t repeat the past! Why of course you can!” Gatsby guides Daisy onto the veranda, where they dance. Tom offers Nick a cigarette from a silver cigarette case. While Daisy is out of the room, Tom and Myrtle make plans to meet later that evening, while Wilson is on his trip to White Plains. (Myrtle and Wilson are now living in a cottage on Gatsby’s property.) Myrtle is worried: Wilson has gone through her handbag and found “the door key you gave me to the apartment on Seventy-Second Street.” Myrtle warns Tom: “Careful! Buck’s dangerous.” Our attention shifts to Mrs. Gay’s husband, Milton, who is inspecting the volumes on the bookshelves. “Absolutely real!” he exclaims. “This feller Gatsby is a regular Belasco. What realism!” Now Jordan, Catherine, and other female guests appear in one-piece bathing suits that show quite a bit of leg. Tom and Nick are shocked; others of the guests are appreciative. Wolfshiem and Ryan move center stage and begin to talk about a boat from Norfolk, Virginia, loaded with illegal liquor, scheduled 30. The Great Gatsby: A Variorum Edition, ed. James L. W. West III (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 30.

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to land in ten days. The liquor belongs to Gatsby, and he needs to get it to his customers. There is bad news from elsewhere, however. A crook named Crosby, another of Gatsby’s henchmen, comes into the library and reports that the “young Park boy” has been arrested in New Jersey for attempting to pass forged bonds. “There’s a leak somewhere,” says Crosby. Gatsby’s criminal operations are beginning to unravel, but he will not be distracted. He turns away from Wolfshiem and the others and stares out the window at “the little green light on the distant shore.” Wolfshiem, Ryan, and Crosby exit. Daisy enters, distraught. Tom is off with Myrtle: “He’s with her now! I followed him to her cottage. I saw them meet.” Daisy wants revenge and offers herself to Gatsby, but he turns her down. “You fool!” she says. “Don’t you know if you let me go now you’ll never see me again?” Gatsby still refuses: “I want the thing you promised me, openly, before all the world, and I am going to have it,” he tells her. Nick and Jordan appear on the veranda, and Daisy goes home with them. Gatsby continues to stare at the green light. By now the reader of this essay should be confused. Details from the novel have been shuffled together in a thoroughly unfamiliar order. New characters have appeared; familiar characters have vanished; lines have been swapped around. Nick controls the narrative in the book, selecting what we are to be told and when we are to know it, but in the drama one event seems to follow another in no particular order. Characters have brief exchanges, then move aside for other characters. The action tumbles along. Such an approach would not work in a novel, but it works in this playscript. Motivations are established, and clues (e.g., Tom’s silver cigarette case) are introduced. The action moves toward a climax, and tension is high. Gatsby’s world is falling apart, but he holds true to his vision. Act 2 comes to a close. Act 3 also takes place in Gatsby’s library. Ten days have passed; the weather is hot. Ryan, the butler, is on the telephone, trying to reach a man named Donnivan in order to learn about the boatload of illegal liquor. Wolfshiem stands nearby. Donnivan has not answered the phone, and Ryan is worried. “Things ain’t so good these last few days,” says Wolfshiem. “There’s something working hard against Mr. Gatsby—maybe his luck has gone.” Tom enters, looking for

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Gatsby. He has learned that Wolfshiem and Gatsby are connected somehow. “I am told it was you who started him in business,” says Tom. “Started him! I made him!” says Wolfshiem. “I saw right away he was a fine-appearing gentlemanly young man, and I knew I could use him good.” Now Wilson comes into the library and tells Tom that he needs money to go west with his wife. “I’ve been here too long. I want to get away.” Wilson has become suspicious: “I was out until morning on Wednesday. Some man was with her there in my cottage all that night.” Wilson produces the silver cigarette case. “Is that yours?” he asks. Tom denies it: “No, no! Of course it isn’t mine.” He shifts the blame to Gatsby: “Who sent you on that errand that kept you out all night? Better return his cigarette box,” he says. “He won’t like your keeping it.” Wilson leaves, followed a few moments later by Tom. Gatsby now enters with Ryan and Wolfshiem. Gatsby’s luck has indeed changed, and the word is out. A bank from which he had borrowed twenty thousand dollars has called in the loan. Young Park has decided to turn state’s evidence and testify against him. “We can beat this thing,” says Gatsby. “If you got the money,” says Wolfshiem. Donnivan shows up and tells Gatsby that the shipment of liquor on the boat has been seized by federal agents. Donnivan escaped by luck. Wolfshiem now decides to leave. “They’ve smashed you, Gatsby,” says Wolfshiem. “I got to get out.” Wolfshiem’s next lines are spoken in the novel to Nick, after Gatsby’s death. Here they are spoken directly to Gatsby: “When a man gets smashed I never like to get mixed up in it. When I was a young man it was different. If a friend of mine got into trouble I’d stick to him to the end. I can’t do it now. I got to be careful.” The servants get wind of the situation and decide to quit. Gatsby tells Ryan to pay them off in cash and opens his safe to get the money. He takes out some papers along with an old copybook, which he places on a table. Wolfshiem, Ryan, and Donnivan exit. Daisy, Nick, and Jordan enter. Daisy crosses to Gatsby and kisses him. “You forget there’s a lady present,” says Jordan. “I don’t care,” answers Daisy, and she begins to dance about the library. Gatsby leaves to fix drinks for the guests; Daisy picks up the copybook and begins to read from it: “Rise from bed 6 a.m. Dumbell exercise

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and wall scaling 6:15 to 6:30”—and so on, the schedule for selfimprovement from the novel. Tom enters: “It’s too damned hot,” he complains. He tries to persuade Daisy to go home with him, but she and Jordan, both dressed in white, are reclining on a long sofa at center stage. “We can’t move, can we Jordan?” she says. Daisy suggests that they all go to town. Gatsby leaves to get a bottle of scotch to take along on the trip. By the time he comes back, however, Daisy has changed her mind. Tom, exasperated, confronts Gatsby. “That’s a great expression of yours . . . that old sport business!” he says. “Where’d you pick it up?” Then follows much of the dialogue from the Plaza scene in the novel: the memories of Tom and Daisy’s wedding, the story of the freeloader “Blocks” Biloxi, Gatsby’s explanation of his time at Oxford just after the war, Tom’s impassioned speech about self-control. Gatsby tries to get Daisy to say that she has never loved Tom. She says the words but, as in the novel, they are unconvincing. “I did love him once,” she says, “but I love you too.” Tom has learned about Gatsby’s drug stores and forged bonds. “You haven’t any money!” Tom says. “The bank called your loan today, didn’t it? You haven’t made your second payment on this house here and tomorrow you’ll be thrown out onto the road. You’re not only a bluff and a common swindler but you’re a crook, and you’re going to jail!” Tom has inside information: “The District Attorney is asking for his indictment before the Grand Jury for passing some forged bonds on a bank in New Jersey,” he tells Daisy. “Is that enough, or do you want to hear some more about the Great Gatsby?” Tom taunts Gatsby with what might be the best line in the play: “You’re out of your class, old sport! You can’t speak her language.” Now Myrtle, distraught, enters through one of the windows and runs to Tom. “Help me! He beat me!” she cries. Tom pushes her away; she stumbles into Gatsby’s arms. There is a pistol shot from the veranda. Gatsby staggers back, his hand pressed to his side. Wilson comes to the window, a revolver in his hand. “You swine! You dirty swine!” screams Myrtle. Wilson raises the gun and shoots her dead; she falls at right center stage. Wilson flees. Gatsby crosses toward Daisy, calling her name: “Daisy—Daisy!” He falls dead at her feet,

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center stage. “Tom! Take me home!” screams Daisy. “I don’t want to be mixed up in this.” Nick looks down at Gatsby and pronounces the valedictory: “He was the best of the whole damned crowd of us!” he says. “Take me home!” cries Daisy again. The play ends, and the final curtain falls. ••••••

The audience got its money’s worth. So did Fitzgerald. During the New York run, box seats cost $3.20, orchestra seats $3.00, gallery $2.50, balcony $1.00. Four of the clippings in Fitzgerald’s scrapbook, all of them headed “Box Office Takings,” provide approximate figures for ticket sales and attendance. In one of its best weeks, the play took in $16,000, in another week $15,500, in a third $14,000, and in a fourth $11,500. According to the same clippings, the top earners during these weeks were A Night in Paris, with an average gross of $20,500; Artists and Models, averaging $21,000, and The Cocoanuts (the musical, with the Marx Brothers), averaging $24,000. Among the dramas, The Great Gatsby was one of the better performers. It was ahead of Twelve Miles Out, another play about a bootlegger, which was averaging $10,500, but a bit behind The Green Hat, which was taking in $16,500. The contract for drama rights was structured so that Fitzgerald’s earnings were calculated on percentages of the weekly box office. He received 40 percent of 5 percent of the first $5,000. Then his share went up: he was paid 40 percent of 7.5 percent of the next $2,000, and 40 percent of 10 percent of everything over $7,000.31 Fitzgerald did well by this contract. He recorded his payments on the ledger pages for 1925 and 1926 (see fig. 3). He received $1,000 as an advance; then he was paid $3,907 from the New York run, $2,971 from the Chicago production, and $751 from road performances. His total earnings were $7,629, on which he paid a 10 percent commission to Ober. Fitzgerald also received a flat fee of $16,666 for movie rights, representing one-third of the price of $50,000, and an additional $1,000 for newspaper syndicate rights. In all, Fitzgerald earned around $25,000—approximately $375,000 in today’s dollars. He did not have to lift a finger to collect the money; it came to him 31. For details of the contract, see As Ever, 79n.

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Fig.3  Page 60 of Fitzgerald’s ledger, with a record of his earnings for the various productions of The Great Gatsby. Bruccoli Collection, Irvin Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, University of South Carolina. Fitzgerald’s calculations differ from my figures on the preceding page. Possibly he paid commissions that are unrecorded.

as a bonus for creating the novel. He should have saved some of the money, but when money came this easily, how could he have imagined that it would someday cease? Fitzgerald never saw a performance of the Owen Davis play. He must have been happy about its success, but he surely regretted not

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having been there for the New York opening or for the production in Chicago. One remembers his disappointment during his college years at not being allowed to attend out-of-town performances of the Triangle shows he had worked on. Being present for the New York opening, and for the performances in Chicago and in Minneapolis (adjacent to St. Paul, his home town), would have been a welcome compensation. Perhaps he could have taken a bow at the final curtain on opening night in New York. He and Zelda might have been given walk-on parts for a few performances at the Ambassador, or in Chicago or Minneapolis. He would certainly have been interviewed by reporters; he and Zelda would have had their pictures in the newspapers. The Great Gatsby appeared on Broadway at precisely the right moment. It made Fitzgerald a great deal of money and spread his name across the country. During all of this activity, however, he was biding his time in Salies-de-Béarn, where Zelda was taking a cure for colitis in the salt baths. They were there during the off-season, when nothing much was happening. “We are two of seven guests in the only open hotel,” he told Ober in a letter.32 In the meantime “The Rich Boy” was appearing in Red Book (in two parts, January and February 1926). All the Sad Young Men, Fitzgerald’s third collection of short stories, was published to favorable reviews on February 26. The collection would go on to sell 15,000 copies, an excellent performance for a book of short fiction. Fitzgerald’s name was everywhere. He was at the peak of his powers as a writer and at the height of his fame as a literary celebrity. The last word should go to Davis. Toward the end of I’d Like to Do It Again, his theatrical memoir, he offered some thoughts about his career during the mid-1920s. “The best work I did at this time was a dramatization of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby,” he tells us. “The character of Gatsby made a strong appeal to me.” Davis’s most successful plays during this period were those with happy endings. This was not the case, however, with The Great Gatsby. Davis remembered: 32. Ibid., 84. The letter, undated, arrived at Ober’s offices on February 4, 1926, two days after the play had opened.

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The play was really good, and moderately successful, but here was another time when the truth was bitter and cruel and hard for the public to take. Naturally I knew perfectly well when I read this novel that Mr. Fitzgerald’s ending absolutely killed any hope of real success, but I have my own theories about dramatizing a novel, and one of them is that the dramatist is in honor bound not to cheapen or coarsen the original author’s story. Gatsby was a great lover; for the sake of the girl he loved he raised himself from nothing to wealth and power. To do this he became a thief. She was unworthy of so great a love and he died by one of those absurd ironic chances that saved him from ever knowing her complete unworthiness. Mr. Fitzgerald knew that, for Gatsby, death was a merciful friend, and I felt that I had no right to manufacture a conclusion that would satisfy a sentimental audience.33

33. Davis, Do It Again, 186–87.

FOUR

Fitzgerald and Psychiatry

In the spring of 1936 F. Scott Fitzgerald received a letter from one of his readers—Joan W. Tyson of Caldwell, New Jersey. She had read two of the personal essays he had recently published in a new men’s magazine, Esquire: “The Crack-Up” in the February 1936 issue and “Pasting It Together” in the March number. Fitzgerald had written these essays (along with a third, “Handle with Care,” which had appeared in the April 1936 issue) in an attempt to explore some of the creative and psychological difficulties he was having as he approached the age of forty. Life was no longer a “romantic business” for Fitzgerald; he believed that he had “prematurely cracked.” He had been mortgaging himself “physically and spiritually up to the hilt” and now found himself “in a real dark night of the soul” where it was “always three o’clock in the morning.” His ambitions and aspirations had evaporated: he felt as if he were “standing at twilight on a deserted range, with an empty rifle in my hands and the targets down.”1

1. These essays were collected by Edmund Wilson in The Crack-Up (New York: New Directions, 1945). This volume played an important role in the resurrection of Fitzgerald’s literary reputation after his death. The quotations here are from the texts in the Cambridge Edition volume My Lost City (2005), 139–47.

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The “Crack-Up” essays, when first published in Esquire, brought Fitzgerald much attention. He had been one of the most visible and celebrated American writers of the 1920s; his star had faded in the 1930s, but he had not altogether been forgotten. He was still famous for his novels This Side of Paradise (1920), The Beautiful and Damned (1922), and The Great Gatsby (1925)—and for his short stories about the rebellious young people of the post–World War I generation, published in such magazines as The Smart Set, Red Book, and the Saturday Evening Post. The 1920s had been a boom period for Fitzgerald, filled with success, praise, and money. During that decade, he and his wife, Zelda Sayre, were often portrayed by journalists as the quintessential Jazz Age couple. Their zany, publicity-seeking antics got them much ink in the gossip columns. In 1924 they sailed to Europe and quickly became part of the American expatriate community in Paris and on the French Riviera, developing friendships with many of the central figures of that group, including Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and Gerald and Sara Murphy. In April 1930, however, Zelda had a mental breakdown and was hospitalized for treatment, first in Paris and then in Switzerland. She was diagnosed as schizophrenic—then, as now, an imprecise designation.2 At first Fitzgerald thought Zelda’s condition would be temporary. He engaged the leading therapists in Europe to treat her; she was hospitalized in the best and most expensive institutions available. She was at the Malmaison clinic just outside Paris for approximately a month. She then entered Val-Mont, a facility for mental patients at Glion, Switzerland, where she was put under the care of Dr. H. A. Trutmann, who made an initial assessment of her condition. Dr. Oscar Forel, one of the leading analysts in Europe, examined her at Val-Mont and diagnosed her as schizophrenic. In early June, Zelda entered Forel’s clinic, Les Rives de Prangins, at Nyon on Lake Geneva near Lausanne. While there she was examined

2. The best account of Zelda’s breakdown and her subsequent treatments is to be found in Nancy Milford, Zelda: A Biography (New York: Harper and Row, 1970). For surviving letters between the Fitzgeralds, see Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda: The Love Letters of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, ed. Jackson R. Bryer and Cathy W. Barks (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2002).

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by Dr. Paul Eugen Bleuler, a specialist in schizophrenia, who confirmed the diagnosis.3 Zelda’s hospitalization put considerable strain on Fitzgerald both professionally and psychologically. He was forced to postpone work on his novel-in-progress and to devote all of his energies to light, romantic short stories that would sell to the high-paying “slicks”— popular magazines printed on glossy paper. Manufacturing these thinly plotted confections did not suit Fitzgerald’s mood; he felt enormous guilt over Zelda’s difficulties and, despite resistance from her doctors, attempted to participate as a consultant in her cure. Zelda’s condition improved enough for her to travel. In September 1931 she and Fitzgerald and their daughter, Scottie, returned to America. In February 1932 they took up residence in Baltimore, where Zelda could receive care as an outpatient at the Phipps Psychiatric Clinic at Johns Hopkins University Hospital. There she was treated by Dr. Adolf Meyer, the director of the clinic, and by Dr. Mildred Squires, who later pioneered the development of electroconvulsive therapy. Initially Zelda seemed better, but in the spring of 1934 she experienced a relapse. By May she was catatonic. Fitzgerald drew on these difficulties for his fiction. Tender Is the Night, which he had begun in 1925 as a novel of matricide, now became the story of Dick and Nicole Diver—he a talented young American psychiatrist and she his patient and wife. Fitzgerald completed the novel in Baltimore and published it in the spring of 1934. He had hoped for a positive reception and high sales, but the reviews of Tender Is the Night were lukewarm and its performance at the bookshops mediocre. By 1936 Fitzgerald had bottomed out. Zelda was now being treated at Highland Hospital, near Asheville, North Carolina; he was living at the Grove Park Inn, a resort hotel nearby. He had all but given up hope that Zelda would ever be well or whole again, or that they would be able to resume their married life together. His dependence on alcohol had increased, and his mental outlook was bleak. He found himself no longer able to turn out frothy tales of 3. For a good recent examination of Zelda’s diagnosis, see Lauren Moffat, “‘Bipolar Zelda’: A Cultural Phenomenon,” F. Scott Fitzgerald Review 19 (2021): 166–88.

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romance for the Post—indeed, unable to produce publishable work for any of his old magazine outlets. At the suggestion of Arnold Gingrich, the editor of Esquire, Fitzgerald wrote “The Crack-Up,” “Pasting It Together,” and “Handle with Care” in an effort to explain to himself (and to his readers) what had happened. The attention that these three essays brought to Fitzgerald was not altogether favorable. His editor at Charles Scribner’s Sons, Maxwell Perkins, and his friend and rival Ernest Hemingway both disapproved of the self-revelatory nature of the essays. A journalist named Michael Mok, scenting blood, interviewed Fitzgerald and published an exposé entitled “The Other Side of Paradise,” depicting the author as a washed-up alcoholic.4 Much of the attention, however, was positive and welcome. Fitzgerald received concerned letters from old friends and fellow writers and began also to find in his mail, for the first time in years, sympathetic letters from his readers. It is in this context that the exchange between Joan Tyson and Fitzgerald can best be understood. Her initial letter to him does not survive, but from his response (a four-page handwritten scrawl, undated, in pencil) it is obvious that she has urged him to seek psychiatric treatment. His response makes his reaction to her suggestion entirely clear: Dear Mrs. Tyson: Why I am moved to answer your letter when there are a dozen others that preceed it in obligation I don’t know—perhaps the very force of it, perhaps the temptation of egotism which a response holds. Trusting you (having liked my articles—there were 3 not 2) will take the egotism, here I am: I am not at all the sort of person I pictured in those articles. They were written in the utmost sincerity but definitely 4. Mok’s piece appeared in the New York Post, September 25, 1936. An abbreviated text of the article has been reprinted in F. Scott Fitzgerald in His Own Time: A Miscellany, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli and Jackson R. Bryer (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1971), 294–99. The full text is included in Conversations with F. Scott Fitzgerald, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli and Judith S. Baughman (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004), 120–26.

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in a “mood” which endured about four months—parallel to a man being one person when drunk + another when sober. I have had my fair share of trouble and struggle but I am not even faintly a quitter, except sometimes when the inevitable tragic sense of life gets hold of me—and I would never think of going to a psychiatrist. Is that from ignorance?—well then listen here. Go to your nearest library and get a copy of my book “Tender is the Night” (Scribners 1934) which has plenty of psychiatry in it. My wife lost her mind six years ago—a family thing (out of a family of five, there remain three alive, one of whom only is normal) and I had consultations and plenty of them with Bleuler and the younger Forel + Jung and eventually with Adolph Myer here in Baltimore which is why my daughter + I are located here. They were the four tops who speak either English or French and there would have been no point in putting her in other hands as those are our only languages. I don’t want to minimize my respect for any of these by saying this: but the fact remains that I never even faintly considered putting the high organized thing which I will refer to as my talent into their hands. I would never consider trusting myself to what passes for psychology-psychiatry in this country. How could someone not up to your ankles in intelligence + character help you. By some miracle? some act of God? I will go to a mechanic for a fault in a machine, to a surgeon for a fault in the body, but the mind—That’s another story. Thank you for your sweet letter. Scott Fitzgerald Fitzgerald had a reasonably good layman’s knowledge of the then-current state of psychiatric treatment, both in Europe and in the United States. In an effort to understand what had happened to Zelda he had read widely (if not especially deeply) in the literature of psychiatry. He was familiar with the theories of Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Emil Kraepelin, Eugen Bleuler, and Alfred Adler; he had corresponded with Oscar Forel and Adolf Meyer, two of Zelda’s doctors, displaying in his letters a good comprehension of the treatments

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she was receiving.5 He had put this knowledge to use in Tender Is the Night, creating in Dick Diver a believable psychiatrist, educated at Yale and Johns Hopkins and with postdoctoral training at Oxford, in Vienna, and at the University of Zürich. Initially Fitzgerald had put faith in Zelda’s doctors and their therapeutic methods, but by 1936 he had become disillusioned. Zelda’s treatments had done little to restore her equilibrium; the persistence of her mental problems baffled him. As he wrote in Tender Is the Night: “The brilliance, the versatility of madness is akin to the resourcefulness of water seeping through, over and around a dike. It requires the united front of many people to work against it” (218). Some of Zelda’s recent American doctors (Fitzgerald thought) were little better than snake-oil salesmen. He had also come to believe that Zelda’s problems were to a large degree hereditary. Her father, her brother, and one of her sisters had all been institutionalized at one time or another with mental difficulties.6 More than one of Zelda’s physicians had suggested to Fitzgerald that he himself should undergo therapy, a notion that he strongly resisted. His letter to Mrs. Tyson suggests why. Fitzgerald believed that his literary talent was a natural gift and that an overly close analysis of his inner psychology would short-circuit his creative apparatus. Even in 1936, suffering from discouragement and depression, Fitzgerald was arrogant about his intellect and his ability to write. One also senses that Fitzgerald took the time to compose this letter in part to convince himself that he was in good psychological shape and to confirm his decision to refuse treatment. 5. Correspondence of F. Scott Fitzgerald, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli and Margaret M. Dugan (New York: Random House, 1980), 292–93, 306–11. 6. Fitzgerald’s parenthetical remark about the Sayre family in his letter—“out of a family of five, there remain three alive, one of whom only is normal”—is confusing. The Sayres were a family of seven: mother, father, four daughters, and one son. Fitzgerald’s characterization of the family as prone to mental trouble is correct. Zelda’s father, Anthony D. Sayre (d. 1931), was hospitalized with a nervous breakdown several years before Fitzgerald met Zelda in 1917; her brother, Anthony D. Sayre Jr., committed suicide in a mental institution in 1933; her sister Marjorie was institutionalized periodically throughout her life for nervous troubles; Zelda began treatments for mental instability in 1930 and continued to be treated for the rest of her life. By 1936 the father and son were dead, leaving five members of the family alive—the mother and four daughters.

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Joan Tyson answered Fitzgerald’s letter. The second and third sheets of her reply survive among his papers at Princeton University Library.7 Both pages of Mrs. Tyson’s letter are written on personal stationery imprinted with her return address in Caldwell, New Jersey. In what survives of the second letter, Mrs. Tyson tells Fitzgerald that she has found and read the third Esquire article and that, following his suggestion, she has read Tender Is the Night. She praises his writing (she has read two of his other novels and many of his stories) and urges him to push ahead with his work. She compliments Fitzgerald on not needing therapy but insists that those who do seek it are courageous. Whether Fitzgerald answered this second letter is not known. Many years later Mrs. Tyson gave his initial letter, the one published above, to a psychiatrist friend named Herbert L. Pariser, who in turn gave it to his stepdaughter, Julie McDonald, who still possesses the letter. The letter to Mrs. Tyson reveals a good deal about Fitzgerald’s mental condition in the months after the “Crack-Up” articles appeared. He expected to recover from his problems and to write again. He had not lost faith in his abilities and was determined not to seek psychiatric help. Fitzgerald did recover, at least professionally. In the summer of 1937 he went to Hollywood to write filmscripts for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer at one thousand dollars a week, a figure that put him among the better-paid screenwriters in the movie business at that time. He continued with MGM until early in 1939. The work bored and frustrated him (he was not a good collaborator), but the money he earned allowed him to pay off his debts and begin work on The Last Tycoon, the novel about Hollywood that he was writing when he died in December 1940—still vain about his talent and still innocent of therapy. When Fitzgerald was writing Tender Is the Night during the early 1930s, psychiatry and psychology had not yet been fully defined or accepted as legitimate medical pursuits. In the first thirty years of the twentieth century, treatment of the insane was not too far distant from the days of lunatic asylums, mad doctors, phrenologists, 7. Correspondence files, Box 54.

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and alienists. Psychiatrists worked hard to be recognized as medical practitioners but were still thought of in some quarters as pseudo-scientists and quacks. Facilities for the mentally ill from middle- or lower-class families during this period were little more than warehouses of confinement. Not much research or therapy went on in these institutions. Sanitoriums for the wealthy, such as the one that Dick Diver and Franz Gregorovious operate on the Zürichsee, were certainly better but were still thought to be comfortable spas where the rich could lock away troublesome family members.8 Dick’s clinic is “of the modern type—no longer a single dark and sinister building but a small, scattered, yet deceitfully integrated village.” There was a workshop for ergo-therapy, a carpentry shop, a bookbindery, and a chamber “devoted to bead-work”—all of these meant to keep the patients active and mentally occupied. Special houses called the “Eglantine” and the “Beeches” were maintained for “those sunk into eternal darkness.” From the exterior these houses were “as cheerful as the others,” but their design was deceptive. “No uninstructed visitor would have dreamed that the light, graceful filigree work at a window was a strong, unyielding end of a tether” or that “even the flowers lay in iron fingers and every casual ornament and fixture was as necessary as a girder in a skyscraper” (TITN, 207–9). During the period in which Tender Is the Night is set, the writings and theories of Sigmund Freud were in the ascendant but had not yet come to dominate psychiatric treatment. The terminology for mental illness was not fixed, nor was its taxonomy established—as is still true today. Diagnosis and record-keeping, on which research would have been based, were sketchy. Psychiatrists debated then, as they always have, whether the causes of mental illness are genetic, neuroscientific, or psychosocial. Psychiatry and psychology had not yet been altogether differentiated from one another. The title 8. Two good histories of the field are Mark S. Micale and Roy Porter, Discovering the History of Psychiatry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), and Edward Shorter, A History of Psychiatry from the Era of the Asylum to the Age of Prozac (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1997).

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of Dick’s first and only book, A Psychology for Psychiatrists, reflects this ambivalence. During his years as a student and an internist Dick is filled with idealism, confident that he can use his intelligence, self-discipline, and charm to rise to the top of his profession and to cure his patients. He wants to give legitimacy to the profession and move it forward. He has studied at Johns Hopkins, among the first American universities to include psychiatry as a medical specialty, and has continued his training abroad. He makes a promising start as a psychiatrist, but by the time we see him on the beach in the first scene of the novel he has begun to lose momentum. He has not been able to push his second book forward; most of his energy and emotion has been consumed by caring for Nicole and their two children. He has also been seduced by the ease and luxury that her money has made possible. The enormous wealth of Nicole’s family overshadows anything that he might accomplish in research and publication, activities that would not have been understood or valued by the Warrens. Baby’s attitude toward him—that he has been hired to cure Nicole—is never far from his thoughts. Near the end of the novel, Nicole tells Baby, somewhat mechanically: “Dick was a good husband to me for six years. . . . All that time I never suffered a minute’s pain because of him, and he always did his best never to let anything hurt me.” Baby answers: “That’s what he was educated for” (TITN, 349). Fairly quickly after Zelda’s first breakdown in April 1930, Fitzgerald began to have doubts about the therapeutic methods that her physicians were using. “I became dissatisfied with the progress of the treatment,” he wrote to her father and mother on December 1, 1930, “not from any actual reason but from a sort of American hunch that something could be done, and maybe wasn’t being done to expedite the cure.”9 He came to feel that Zelda’s problems, in particular her attacks of eczema, were caused by a chemical imbalance in her system. “I can’t help clinging to the idea that some essential physical thing like salt or iron or semen or some unguessed at holy water is either missing or is present in too great quantity,” he wrote

9. Correspondence, 253.

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to Forel in January 1931.10 Zelda also had doubts about the diagnoses that her therapists had made. “They present you with a piece of bric-a-brac of their own forging which falls to the pavement on your way out of the clinic and luckily smashes to bits,” she wrote to John Peale Bishop. “Don’t ever fall into the hands of brain and nerve specialists unless you are feeling very Faustian.”11 This skepticism is reflected in Tender Is the Night. Dick comes to doubt the legitimacy of his profession and to question the effectiveness of the treatments he provides. Perhaps he and his colleagues are no more than businessmen who market a product, upmarket asylum-keepers who prescribe palliatives to wealthy inmates. Dick turns to alcohol to dull his misgivings and uses his charm, now fading, to convince his patients that they are improving. He cannot, however, recapture the ambition and self-discipline that he had as a young man. Franz, prodded by his wife, speaks to Dick about his drinking and unprofessional behavior. Fairly quickly after that, Franz arranges alternate financing so that Dick, who had been backed by the Warren money, can withdraw from the clinic. From there it is a short journey to the dissolution of his marriage to Nicole, to her recovery, and to his departure from Europe for the backwater towns of upstate New York. Perhaps after all he was only an illusionist and a charlatan, not a member of a serious profession. Fitzgerald came to feel the same way, at least for a time, about his own choice of profession. At the beginning of his career he saw authorship as a calling; he dreamed of fame and money but also wanted to analyze American society of his times and to speak for his generation. By 1936, however, Fitzgerald had lost much of his idealism about literature. Perhaps he was only a highly paid entertainer, manufacturing light, romantic stories for the slicks. Fitzgerald’s letter to Joan Tyson lets us see him at a low point in his emotional and professional life. It also helps us understand more fully Dick Diver’s difficulties and deterioration in Tender Is the Night. 10. F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Life in Letters, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli (New York: Scribner, 1994), 206. 11. The letter, undated but probably from the summer of 1932, is in Arthur Mizener, The Far Side of Paradise: A Biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald, rev. ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965), 258.

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Dick, like Fitzgerald, would have been a poor candidate for analysis. He is too knowledgeable, too sophisticated in his thinking, too experienced to believe in a permanent cure for his difficulties. Dick can heal others but cannot heal himself. His downfall can be attributed partly to flaws in his character but is also a result of exposure to the idle rich and their pliable morality. If he could somehow recapture the energy and conviction of his youth, he might recover—but this is impossible. His idealism has faded and his ambition has vanished.

FIVE

The Ledger as Autobiography

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ledger is a portmanteau of information about his life and literary career. It has been consulted by biographers and bibliographers who want to know how he earned a living from his writings. It has also been used by book historians who want to study his dealings with the publishing industry. The ledger is both a record book and a journal, an autobiographical document filled with bibliographical information and a memoir giving a year-byyear account of the author’s life. The ledger is a unique literary work, unclassifiable by genre, loosely unified, and with a shifting point of view. It is an unfinished narrative that can be read through from the first page to the last, then analyzed and interpreted as one would a work of nonfiction. In this essay I want to approach the ledger from several angles, showing how it can be used as a reference tool but also suggesting that it can be read as the autobiography Fitzgerald never published. ••••••

Until fairly recently, the ledger has been difficult of access. In 1972 Matthew J. Bruccoli published a black-and-white facsimile edition limited to one thousand copies with NCR/Microcard. This facsimile, aimed at collectors, is now out of print. The unsold stock was remaindered, however, and one can still acquire an unopened copy from Amazon or Alibris. The original ledger, which was given

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to Bruccoli by Fitzgerald’s daughter, Scottie, was acquired by the Irvin Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Ernest F. Hollings Special Collections Library, University of South Carolina, as part of the Matthew J. and Arlyn Bruccoli Collection of F. Scott Fitzgerald. After restoration, the ledger was made available for examination by scholars, but only in the Special Collections reading room and only with a curator present. In 2013, in order to make the ledger more widely accessible, the library released online a full-color digital edition, together with a transcription of the entire text. Images of the original pages and of the transcript can be downloaded and printed. The text is searchable: one can readily find the pages that bear Ginevra King’s name, or H. L. Mencken’s, or Gerald Murphy’s, or Ernest Hemingway’s. Fitzgerald’s ledger is thus now available to readers, teachers, students, and Fitzgerald devotees—to anyone, in fact, who has access to the internet. That does not mean that the ledger is easy to read. The 1972 facsimile has the advantage of being bound like a conventional book. It is a codex, with hard covers and spine and pages. One can read it while sitting at a table or in a chair. The trim size of the facsimile (9½ × 14¾ in.) is approximately that of the original ledger (8½ × 13¾ in.). Fitzgerald’s handwriting is sometimes difficult to read, especially in entries crowded with the names of people, places, and events. There is no index; to find a particular reference, one must turn the pages and read through the entries. The online edition, by contrast, provides superlative images of the pages. These images, captured by a Zeutschel OS 14000 A0 overhead scanner, are crisp and sharp. Shot at 400 ppi, with 24-bit depth, they reproduce ink colors, smudges, erasures, and marks of wear. The transcription of the text can be brought onto the screen simultaneously with the images of the pages, allowing the reader to see the original and then immediately read the transcription. All of this, however, must be done while staring at a computer screen. My own solution was to juggle the various forms of the text. I printed off the transcription, bound it in a ring binder, and read it against the bound facsimile, with frequent recourse to the digital images. None of the texts—facsimile edition, online scan, or word-byword transcription—has been annotated. Some of the people and

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events in the ledger will be familiar to readers who have studied Fitzgerald’s life, but many references will not be. The task of annotating everything in the ledger would be enormous; it would also be of dubious value and probably impossible to achieve. Most of the important references can found in standard biographies of Fitzgerald or in other compilations in the field.1 The original ledger is a fascinating document simply to inspect. It bears numerous layers of Fitzgerald’s handwriting in several colors of ink and pencil—blue, black, red, and green. The binding of the original is worn and the pages smudged from his frequent handling. One can see that Fitzgerald took great care with the early entries, correcting errors with ink eradicator, then pasting slips of blank paper over mistakes and writing the correct words and figures onto the substituted slips. Later he became more casual about neatness but continued to record much information. Internal evidence indicates that Fitzgerald acquired the ledger in 1922.2 He conceived a structure for the volume, divided it into five sections, and gave a title to each section. The titles of these sections, listed on a contents page, are as follows: Record of Published Fiction; Novels, Plays, Stories (Not including unpaid-for juvenilia) Record of Other Published Work, Paid for. Earnings by years Geneological Table Autobiographical Chart Fitzgerald’s first action was to fill out the ledger through 1922, which he seems to have done in a series of stints late in that year. He listed his publications since leaving the army in 1918, noting where each one had appeared, how much he had been paid for it, and whether the item had been republished or adapted for stage or screen. A 1. Robert L. Gale, An F. Scott Fitzgerald Encyclopedia (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998); Mary Jo Tate, F. Scott Fitzgerald, A to Z (New York: Facts on File, 1998). 2. In July 1922, Fitzgerald wrote to Harold Ober asking for “a list of all my stories sold to English magazines. . . . I’m getting up a record of all my work.” This appears to be the beginning of his record-keeping in the ledger. As Ever, Scott Fitz—, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli and Jennifer McCabe Atkinson (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1972), 46.

The Ledger as Autobiography 73

more elaborate task was to fill out the pages of the “Autobiographical Chart.”3 He began in 1896, the year of his birth, and moved forward through his childhood and adolescence, his years at prep school and at Princeton, his period of military service, and his first three years as a professional author. Thereafter the “filling out” of the ledger seems to have become a twice-yearly ceremony, with each page of the “Earnings by years” beginning in January but each page of the “Autobiographical Chart” beginning in September, the month in which Fitzgerald had been born. The autobiographical pages are crowded with experiences and travels. Fitzgerald always left room for addenda and corrigenda, however, and (to judge from ink colors and handwriting) revisited the ledger from time to time in order to set down further recollections and comments. Much later, probably in March or April 1932, Fitzgerald made changes in the table of contents and the lists of publications. He and his wife, Zelda Sayre, went through a bitter dispute over her novel Save Me the Waltz (1932). She had written this novel in an attempt to establish herself independently as a writer. Fitzgerald regarded the original version of the novel, now lost, as a personal attack on him and an attempt by Zelda to undermine their marriage. He insisted that she make revisions in this first version, and she complied.4 Perhaps in an effort to smooth over their disagreements, or to demonstrate that he had always been the major income-earner in the marriage, Fitzgerald went through the ledger, separated out Zelda’s writings from his own, and listed her appearances in print on a separate page. They had been casual about this sort of thing during the 1920s, publishing work under shared bylines and, more than once, allowing her work to appear under his name alone. (Magazine editors would pay more if his name was on the byline.) Now, on the contents page of the ledger, Fitzgerald struck through the heading “Geneological Table” and substituted a new heading:

3. I will use the section titles that Fitzgerald set down in the table of contents as opposed to interior section titles, which are sometimes different. 4. Zelda Fitzgerald, Save Me the Waltz (New York: Scribner, 1932). The novel was first published in England by Grey Walls Press in 1953. A good recent edition (2020), with an introduction by Erin E. Templeton, has been published by Handheld Press.

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“Zelda.”5 On page 143, a fresh blank, he wrote down a record of his wife’s publications and earnings since 1922. She had published one novel, nine short stories, and ten articles. For this writing she had earned approximately nine thousand dollars, a substantial sum but relatively small when compared to Fitzgerald’s earnings. Whatever its purpose for Fitzgerald, this record has been of great value to Zelda’s biographers and to editors of her work, establishing responsibility for each of her publications, whether written by her alone or in collaboration with her husband.6 For students of professional authorship, the ledger demonstrates how a productive writer, working with an effective agent—in Fitzgerald’s case, with Harold Ober—can make a work of literature pay more than once. This is the key to success for a full-time author: the ability to write a literary work and then to collect for its publication or adaptation many times over. A short story by Fitzgerald, for example, might appear first in a magazine, then be reprinted in an anthology, and later be collected in one of Fitzgerald’s own short-story volumes. A novel (The Beautiful and Damned or Tender Is the Night) might be serialized in a magazine, then appear in book form, later appear as a newspaper “second serial,” and eventually be issued by a cheap reprint line. The sale of subsidiary rights—for example, the stage and film rights for The Great Gatsby—might bring in substantial income. An edition by a London publisher, a translation into French, or an appearance in a British magazine might yield more money. Investments of time and thought made during the original acts of composition continued, over the years, to pay dividends.7

5. Whether Fitzgerald had gathered information about his forebears for the “Geneological Table” is unknown. Perhaps he made a start, but when he struck through that heading and substituted “Zelda” he also removed four leaves (pp. 145–50) on which he might have set down genealogical data. 6. Matthew J. Bruccoli, F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Descriptive Bibliography, rev. ed. (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1987); see appendix 1, “Zelda Fitzgerald’s Publications” (419–36). For the writings, see Zelda Fitzgerald: The Collected Writings, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli, intro. Mary Gordon (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1991). 7. James L. W. West III, American Authors and the Literary Marketplace Since 1900 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988). See chap. 7, “Subsidiary Rights” (114–43).

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The ledger contains financial totals through 1937, the year in which Fitzgerald went to Hollywood to write for the movies. The entries provide a record of Fitzgerald’s earnings during the first eighteen years of his professional career, which began with the publication of “Babes in the Woods,” a short story, in the September 1919 issue of The Smart Set. Fitzgerald had originally written the story while at Princeton and had published it for the first time in the May 1917 issue of the Nassau Literary Magazine; after the Smart Set appearance, for which he received thirty dollars, he included it as a subchapter in his first novel, This Side of Paradise (1920). Fitzgerald records all appearances in print and all payments for his writing. The figures are lopsided. During his career he earned some $66,000 in royalties from his books but took in more than $360,000 for short stories and nonfiction. It is difficult to compare sums of money across time, but if one multiplies by a factor of fourteen or fifteen, one can arrive at a reasonably accurate idea of how much Fitzgerald earned in today’s dollars. For dependable money, he relied on short stories published in popular magazines, particularly in the Saturday Evening Post. He produced these stories in short bursts of inspiration, had the manuscripts marketed by Ober, and received payment immediately. Later he had the best of the stories republished by Scribner in clothbound collections. He also mined the stories (especially those he chose not to reprint) for words, phrases, and passages that he reused in his novels. The composition of the novels, by contrast, was performed to a different rhythm, with advances from Scribner and with negotiations over publication dates, serial rights, and deadlines. Novel-writing became increasingly difficult for Fitzgerald during the 1930s, as financial demands and personal problems came to dominate his thoughts and intrude upon his work schedule. Writing for the magazines was an easier and more predictable way to earn income. Using the ledger as a reference tool is a relatively straightforward procedure. The first section, the “Record of Published Fiction; Novels, Plays, Stories,” covering pages 2–77, lists almost everything that Fitzgerald put into print between 1919 and 1938; a second section of “Published Miscelani,” occupying pages 103–5, records the rest. For

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Fitzgerald’s bibliographers—first Arthur Mizener, then Henry Dan Piper, then Matthew J. Bruccoli—these listings must have been useful.8 Most of what Fitzgerald had published in magazines of national circulation could have been discovered easily enough with the aid of standard reference works, such as the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature. The fugitive pieces, the book reviews and short articles and bits of journalism, would have been more difficult to locate, however. Fortunately, Fitzgerald recorded these oddments in the ledger as well, giving the title of the magazine or newspaper along with (usually) the date. His review of John V. A. Weaver’s forgotten novel Margey Wins the Game, published in the New York Tribune for May 7, 1922, might have escaped notice were it not for the ledger. He also recorded subsequent appearances of his work in other English-language markets. The reprinting of his 1922 story “Winter Dreams” in a Canadian magazine called Maclean’s (November 15, 1922) and the appearance of the same story as “Dream Girl of Spring” in an English periodical called The Royal Magazine (February 1923) are examples. Biographers and book historians interested in Fitzgerald’s income from his writings can consult the section “Earnings by years” on pages 51–77. Fitzgerald had a remarkable record of success here: his take from writing jumped from $879 in 1919 to $28,759 in 1923, then increased to $32,448 in 1929, the year of the stock market crash, and rose again to $37,599 in 1931, one of the worst years of the Great Depression. The following year, however, his income dropped to $15,823 (still quite a bit of money in 1932) and tailed off to $10,180 in 1936.9 The lesson for both the biographer and the book historian is that the emoluments of authorship are irregular and undependable. Professional authors need steady income, ideally from a source other than writing, to stay afloat. Fitzgerald never had extraneous income: he had no trust fund or inheritance, and his wife did not come from

8. Mizener, “Fitzgerald’s Published Work,” in The Far Side of Paradise: A Biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald, rev. ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965), 350–56; Piper, “F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Check List,” Princeton University Library Chronicle 12 (Summer 1951): 196–208. The Bruccoli bibliography, standard in the field, is cited in note 6. 9. Fitzgerald’s math is followed.

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a wealthy family. He and Zelda and their daughter lived on what he earned with his pen. Some years were flush, others lean.10 Ideally Fitzgerald could have counted on regular royalties from his previous books, the novels and collections of short stories that he published every few years with Scribner. But the American book trade during the 1920s and 1930s was not set up to support authors over the long term. Fitzgerald’s books sold well initially but then subsided onto the Scribner backlist, where they brought in only a few dollars a year. There were no trade paperback publishers in the United States until 1939, nearly at the end of Fitzgerald’s life, and mail-order book clubs were not yet a significant force in the market. Fitzgerald therefore collected little ongoing income from his previous books. To cover his expenses, he had to publish new work regularly in high-paying outlets. This required constant observation and gathering of material along with the invention of new plots, characters, and situations. For most of his career Fitzgerald was remarkably fertile and prolific, able to turn out saleable work more or less on command. From approximately 1932 forward, however, he found that the creative wellsprings were running dry. Searching through the “Autobiographical Chart” for the originals of characters and incidents is good fun. From the entry for September 1907: “He went to Confession about this time and lied by saying in a shocked voice to the priest ‘Oh no, I never tell a lie.’” Immediately one thinks of Rudolph Miller in “Absolution” (1924), who during confession tells the priest, “Oh, no, Father, I never tell lies.” In February 1908: “He went to a ‘kissing’ party given by the Penfields cousin and kissed Kitty a great deal.” “That Kind of Party,” a story in which adolescents play “post office,” a kissing game, comes to mind. Fitzgerald originally wrote it as one of the Basil Duke Lee stories; it was not published until 1951. “My hair pompadour,” mentioned in the entry for September 1908, makes one think of Daisy’s comment, during a tour of Jay Gatsby’s house, as she pauses to look at a framed photograph of young Jimmy Gatz. “The pompadour!” she exclaims. “You never told me you had a pompadour.” In June 10. William J. Quirk, “Living on $500,000 a Year,” American Scholar 78, no. 4 (2009): 96–101. This is a study of Fitzgerald’s tax returns.

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1914, according to the ledger, Fitzgerald and some of his Princeton friends took a trip to “Deal Beach by auto”—a trip that occurs in embellished form in This Side of Paradise. Skipping ahead, one finds the words “Blue Grot” in the entry for February 1925, a memory of the visit by Fitzgerald and Zelda to the famous Blue Grotto (La Grotta Azzurra) on the island of Capri, an experience that he transferred into the 1925 short story “A Penny Spent.” A puzzling reference in the November 1929 entry to “The smelly maid” brings to mind Kaethe Gregorovious, the wife of Dick Diver’s colleague Franz Gregorovious in chapter 1, book 3, of Tender Is the Night. The narrator tells us there that Kaethe does have a distinctive odor, “an ammoniacal reminder of the eternity of toil and decay.” Some of the references in the ledger call to mind works of nonfiction by Fitzgerald. From September 1910: “When you enter a room speak first to the oldest lady, says father.” This memory appears many years later in Fitzgerald’s unfinished reminiscence “The Death of My Father,” left among his papers and not published until 1951. From the March 1913 entry: “Wine at Fay’s in Washington.” One thinks here of “A Short Autobiography” (1929), in which Fitzgerald recalls his introduction to various alcoholic drinks over the course of his life. “Worked on Railroad. Kneel up to hammer nails. Lost overalls.” These notes from September 1919 have to do with the single day that Fitzgerald worked as a common laborer at the St. Paul railroad yards while he waited for Scribner to make a decision about This Side of Paradise. Fitzgerald used the memory almost twenty years later in an essay called “Early Success” (1937). “Bought Car” from June 1924 recalls “Salesmanship in the Champs-Élysées” (1930), Fitzgerald’s droll account of his effort to purchase an automobile from a snooty French car salesman. And “Scotty’s doll’s house” from November 1927 makes one think immediately of “Outside the Cabinet-Maker’s” (1928), a poignant memoir about how a father and his daughter play the game of make-believe. There are many more references in the ledger that do not appear in the fiction or nonfiction—or are so disguised as to be unrecognizable. For example, from February 1918: “Tinkling mandolins in the Leavenworth prison.” Or from November 1918: “Zelda’s friend Dent + the stolen kiss on the stairs.” From October 1919: “Eastman +

The Ledger as Autobiography 79

the safety pin.” December 1920: “The Hoveys and the milk bottle.” October 1922: “Mangy Xtian Bros + on steps of St Patricks a saturnine hierarchy of fat, favorite, secular priests.” October 1926: “The dentist + Balkin Baily.” October 1928: “Whorewhouse mirror.” September 1930: the “Baccarat cheater.” January 1931: “The Arnolds + their curious story—its sequel two years later.” These entries must have had meaning for Fitzgerald. Probably he set them down as sources for a sketch, a story, or a memoir that he never got around to writing. Without further clues one cannot know what he had in mind. ••••••

In an earlier piece of writing I suggested that the ledger might be read as a work of autobiography.11 In the ten years since my suggestion appeared in print, no one has attempted such an interpretation. I propose to do so here, to undertake an analysis of language, narration, mood, and theme. Fitzgerald almost surely did not mean for the ledger to be read in this way: it is a private document that he wrote for an audience of one, himself—though he might have had his eye on posterity. As with other private documents (letters, manuscripts, working drafts), this one has been published and can be analyzed for what it tells us about its author—which, in the case of Fitzgerald’s ledger, is quite a lot. The ledger is a work of autobiography in which the first-person pronoun “I” almost never appears, nor does the reader find many instances of “me,” “my,” or “mine.” Fitzgerald is the subject of the entries but is not immediately identifiable as the narrator. The aim appears to be objectivity. Fitzgerald wants to set down reminders of his experiences but not of the emotions that he felt. Later in his career he offered this insight: “Taking things hard . . . That’s the stamp that goes into my books so that people can read it blind like braille.”12 He must have understood from the beginning that the ledger was more a logbook than a personal journal. If he allowed himself to stray into emotional territory, the ledger would lose much of its value as a source for his fiction. In practical terms, there was 11. “Interpreting Fitzgerald’s Ledger,” in F. Scott Fitzgerald in Context, ed. Bryant Mangum (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 16–23. 12. The Crack-Up, ed. Edmund Wilson (New York: New Directions, 1945), 180.

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not enough room on the ledger pages for emotions to be set down. The feelings could be recalled or reimagined; only the experience itself (or a reminder of it) need be written out. The pronoun “I” was not necessary. In the record of the first eleven years, Fitzgerald nearly always refers to himself as “he” or as “the child.” In November 1896: “He had the colic.” In February 1897: “The child laughed for the first time.” In December 1897: “Bronchitis. A specialist was summoned but as his advice was not followed the child pulled through.” February 1900: “He celebrated the new century by swallowing a penny and catching the measles. He got rid of both of them.” Very occasionally Fitzgerald uses a first-person pronoun, as in June 1907: “I had ball-bearing skates too fancy to be any good.” Or in January 1911: “Egbert beat me in hand ball. We tied in boxing.” Usually, however, Fitzgerald employs “he” and “him” and “his.” This entry from September 1906 (fig. 4), the month in which Fitzgerald had his tenth birthday, is typical of the record of childhood and early adolescence: He made up shows in Ingham’s attic, all based on the American Revolution and a red sash and three cornered hat. He did tricks and mysteriously vanished a dime. Gus Shy’s play put him temporarily in the shade but he was impressed with Gus’s rhymes and imitations and passed on the dirty ones to another nurse girl. He told one cook “he’d been good to her” but would cease unless she gave him rocks. Finally the moving picture machine Inky’s uncle gave him eclipsed Gus Shy. Sometimes Joe Powel and Incky sided against him as when they wanted to make him President and then resign from the club. He played football on the Highland corner, guard or tackle and usually scared silly. He played pom-pom-pullaway at night. He told Miss Mcgraw at Narden’s that Mexico City was not the capitol of Central America. He used to go to the Wild West movies and the Teck Stock Company. The entry is made up of complete sentences. Fitzgerald records details (the “red sash” and the “three cornered hat”) and sets down

The Ledger as Autobiography 81

Fig.4  Page 161 of Fitzgerald’s ledger, “Ten Years Old.” Bruccoli Collection, Irvin Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, University of South Carolina.

reactions (“scared silly”). He avoids the verb “to be” and uses other verbs (“eclipsed,” “played,” “told”). He takes himself seriously: he regards his youthful self with curiosity and interest rather than nostalgia and sentimentality.

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In July 1909, in the record of his twelfth year, Fitzgerald drops the third-person disguise but does not shift to first-person narration. Instead he avoids pronouns and begins most statements with verbs. In July 1908: “Came out to St. Paul to live with Grandmother.” In December 1909: “Entered dancing school.” In July 1911: “Went to White Bear Yatch Club. . . . Played tennis. Swam. Stole candy. Sailed. Skinned gophers.” The implied grammatical subject is “I” but the illusion of objectivity is maintained. Many of the statements begin with nouns or adjectives. From May 1911: “Fight with Jim Thompson.” From October 1911: “The third football team. The scrubs.” Occasionally the first-person pronoun will intrude, as in January 1912: “A new start. Poor marks and on bounds. Trips to New York. I try to write a play.” For the most part, however, objective distance is maintained, as in September 1913: “Admitted to Princeton. . . . Freshman football. The Rushes, the singing. Electing class officers.” Fitzgerald employed this mode of narration, largely shunning pronouns, in the entries for his twenties and early thirties. This summary of February 1917, when Fitzgerald was twenty years old, is a good example: “Almost flunked out. Ideas of going to war. Washington Square with Bunny Wilson. Tea at the Plaza with Grace. Fay, Leslie and Barnes. Grace to prom. Stayed up all night. Electing Biggs to Tiger. Fuss with Paul Nelson. Jazzing to Vachael Lindsey.” The entries for each month become shorter as the record moves along. Forward momentum is strong, partly because (as in his writings) Fitzgerald avoids the passive voice. One has the sense of a crowded life filled with people and places, pleasure and displeasure, crisis and resolution, tension and relief. He is gathering and storing his experiences, partly to use them later in his fiction but also simply to have a record of where he has been, whom he has seen, and what he has done. The narration takes a further twist at some point in the late 1930s, perhaps when Fitzgerald was thinking in 1939 of writing a memoir. He went back to the entry for 1910–11 and began to set down short summaries for each year. These he wrote in the upper left-hand corner of each page. These entries are analytical and personal. For 1910–11: “A Year of Much Activity but dangerous.” For 1911–12: “A year of real unhappiness excepting the feverish joys of Xmas.” For

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1914–15: “A year of tremendous rewards that toward the end overreached itself and ruined me. Ginevra—Triangle year.” For 1915–16: “A year of terrible disappointments + the end of all college dreams. Everything bad in it was my own fault.” The year of 1918–19 was pivotal: “The most important year of my life. Every emotion and my life work decided. Miserable and exstatic but a great success.” The year 1923–24 was a low point: “The most miserable year since I was nineteen, full of terrible failures and accute miseries. Full of hard work fairly well rewarded in the latter half and attempts to do better.” The notation for 1932–33 is a warning: “A Strange year of Work + Drink. Increasingly unhappy.—Zelda up + down. 1st draft of novel complete. Ominous!” The last of the short summations (for 1933–34) is despairing: “Zelda breaks, the novel finished. Hard times begin for me, slow but sure. Ill Health Throughout.” These comments function like the shoulder notes in medieval manuscripts. They provide analysis in another voice, in this case more judgmental than the voice found elsewhere. People who study Fitzgerald often say that his life and his writings are intertwined, but this is not the case in the ledger. Life and writings are kept separate, confined to their own sections. It is therefore useful to compare pages from one section of the ledger to pages from other sections to see what might be revealed. Years that are crowded with people and experiences were not necessarily happy years. The twelve months following Fitzgerald’s birthday in September 1921 were full of activity: his daughter was born in October and “baptisized” (his spelling) in October; he and Zelda gave a rambunctious “Bad Luck Ball” in St. Paul on Friday, January 13; The Beautiful and Damned was published in March 1922; during that same month he traveled to New York and met the movie stars Constance Bennett, Marilyn Miller, and Gloria DeHaven; he and Zelda purchased their first automobile in May; they socialized with the writers Joseph Hergesheimer and Sinclair Lewis; Fitzgerald published “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” and “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz,” two of his best stories, in May and June of 1922. Yet his later summation of the year in the “Autobiographical Record” was harsh: “A bad year,” he wrote. “No work. Slow deteriorating repression with outbreak around the corner.”

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Years in which Fitzgerald earned top money for his writings were often difficult years in his personal life. On the page for 1926 in “Earnings by years,” Fitzgerald recorded his twelve-month take as $25,686, but he was hard on himself in the “Autobiographical Chart” when he summarized that year. “Futile, shameful, useless,” he wrote. “Self disgust. Health gone.” Between June 1935 and June 1937, he published fifteen stories and six pieces of nonfiction (including the three “Crack-Up” essays) but recorded almost nothing about those years in the “Autobiographical Chart.” Fitzgerald seems to have been happiest when he was writing, but the money he earned from his work did not necessarily bring satisfaction. When he had money in his pocket he wrote relatively little. He needed the pressure of debt to bring him to the writing table. Through 1932 Fitzgerald’s attitude is confident and forward-looking. After that, however, his mood becomes increasingly elegiac, melancholy, and regretful. During the 1930s Fitzgerald logs his experiences into the ledger but seems only to be fulfilling a duty. He takes no particular pleasure in recording what he has done. The entries are composed in a kind of shorthand. Verbs are now infrequent, as in this entry from September 1934, the month in which he celebrated his thirty-fourth birthday: “Welbourne again, twice perhaps—Sabins, butlers, Gaithers, Morrisons, the pool, the graveyard. New York with Spafford. Mayflower Hotel. Mother in Washington. Wine on Trains. The bus from Middleburg. Myra in Algonquin. Missy Sabin visited. The Bishops. Max down. Finance now serious.” It is as if, over the course of the years during which Fitzgerald has kept the ledger, he has gradually erased himself, first doing away with the “I” pronoun and later dropping even the verbs. As time goes on he seems less interested in himself and, indeed, increasingly less interested in life. ••••••

An autobiography is simultaneously an exercise in self-revelation and self-concealment. The author will often reveal details about the inner life—hopes and dreams, fears and frustrations, triumphs and failures and regrets. In Fitzgerald’s ledger, however, very little is revealed. Certainly there are conclusions to be drawn about his professional career and about the sources for his fiction, but there

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is little about his emotional life. The ledger is therefore primarily a document of self-concealment. The writings are mentioned by title but are treated as literary merchandise. Fitzgerald must have been deeply involved with his stories and novels while they sat unfinished on his work table, but once they had been completed they were sent out for sale. This was a realistic attitude. Fitzgerald wrote for a living and needed always to move on to the next project—whether story, essay, or novel. Readers who want to know about Fitzgerald’s inner life are likely to be disappointed by the ledger. Fortunately they can turn to the fiction, much of which is heavily autobiographical, to learn what he believed and felt. In the ledger as a whole one sees a pattern of early striving and initial failure followed by sudden success and notoriety. This in turn is followed by fame and visibility—both of which are undermined by marital problems and alcoholism. A period of great difficulty ensues, but a final period of restoration and redemption seems about to begin. Then death ends the story. This pattern, familiar to anyone who knows Fitzgerald’s life, appears first in the ledger. Fitzgerald himself supplied the template that was followed later by his biographers. Narratives of Fitzgerald’s life often end on a hopeful note. When Fitzgerald died in 1940 he had a promising novel under way. He might have repaired his health and learned to control his drinking. He might have lived into the 1940s and even into the 1950s, writing about the United States during World War II and the victorious years that followed. Because the ledger is unfinished, it can be given an ending of this kind. Laid into the original at the University of South Carolina are three loose sheets on which Fitzgerald has set down notes for three unfinished years in the “Autobiographical Chart.” These are rough drafts for the years 1934, 1935, and 1936. The notes suggest that Fitzgerald had plans for continuing with the ledger, that his interest in his life and career had not entirely disappeared. If his health had held up, he would probably have finished The Last Tycoon, but we cannot know how successful the novel would have been or how it would have been received. Perhaps Fitzgerald would have broken back into the magazine market and produced a handful of memorable late stories. Perhaps he would have gone to work in a

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movie studio other than MGM and mastered the craft of scriptwriting. His health was uncertain, and his difficulties with alcohol were probably not over. His capacity for self-destruction was still present, though there was always his luck. Let us choose the upbeat outcome and hope that, in some alternate reality, Fitzgerald eventually came out on top.

SIX

Fitzgerald’s Seven-Year Plan

This chapter concerns a single sheet of paper, caught up in a stack of miscellaneous materials that survive from the making of Tender Is the Night. These materials are stored in Box 9a of the F. Scott Fitzgerald Papers at Princeton University Library. The sheet (fig. 5), in Fitzgerald’s hand, has nothing to do with Tender Is the Night. It bears this text: Seven Years To 7

Seven Yrs

Gen

of Happy childhood (to 1903) (To Confession)

To 14

"

of Fairly Happy Youth to 1910 (To awakening)

To 21

"

of Education, ups + downs to 1917 (To the army) of Work, love, success to 1924 (To Italy)

To 28

"

To 35

"

of Waste + Tragedy to 1931 (no book) (To America)

to 42

"

of Work, Trouble, Discouragement Pictures to 1938 (Thru Metro)

to 49

"

of Let us see

To 56

"

of

To 63

"

of

To 70

"

of

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Fig.5  Holograph chart on which Fitzgerald has divided his life into seven-year increments. F. Scott Fitzgerald Papers, Special Collections, Princeton University Library.

Everything else in Box 9a is a handwritten document generated during the composition of Tender Is the Night. “Seven Years,” however, must be dated after the publication of that novel in April 1934. The key here is the reference to “Metro”—that is, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the movie studio that brought Fitzgerald to Hollywood in 1937 to work as a screenwriter. The words “Thru Metro” suggest that Fitzgerald inscribed this document late in 1938 or early in 1939, after he had been informed in December 1938 that his contract with MGM would not be renewed past January 1939.

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Fitzgerald had turned forty-two in September 1938. Perhaps this sheet of paper was a private effort to chart his life in seven-year increments. (Note the obvious: 7 × 6 = 42.) How the document made its way into a stack of Tender Is the Night materials is not known. Possibly it was put there after Fitzgerald’s death but before his papers came to Princeton. The curators at Princeton, following standard archival practice, would have left this sheet where it was located when Fitzgerald’s papers arrived at the library. It is impossible to know the origin of “Seven Years,” but one can speculate. Perhaps Fitzgerald was thinking about what writing projects he might tackle next, now that he was again a freelance. If this is true, then “Seven Years” looks to be a preliminary structure for an autobiographical book. In 1934 and again in 1936, Fitzgerald had attempted to persuade Maxwell Perkins at Charles Scribner’s Sons to publish a collection of his autobiographical writings.1 On both occasions Perkins was lukewarm about the idea, probably because he did not want Fitzgerald to reprint the three “Crack-Up” essays in such a collection. Perkins felt that these essays were overly revealing and that they had damaged Fitzgerald’s career. However, when Fitzgerald pitched the idea of a collection to Perkins the second time, in 1936, the editor did make a counter-suggestion. He told Fitzgerald to think about composing, from scratch, another kind of book entirely—“a reminiscent book,” wrote Perkins, “not autobiographical, but reminiscent.”2 Fitzgerald might have been trying to come up with a structure for such a “reminiscent” book and, in the process, might have thought about dividing his life into seven-year periods.3 1. The volume My Lost City published in 2005 in the Cambridge Edition is an effort to re-create the book that Fitzgerald proposed in 1936, as nearly as the surviving materials will allow. 2. Dear Scott / Dear Max: The Fitzgerald-Perkins Correspondence, ed. John Kuehl and Jackson R. Bryer (New York: Scribner, 1971), 228. 3. Fitzgerald was considering other writing projects at this same time. One of the most interesting was a plan for a novel that he sketched out on a single sheet of paper. Among the titles he was considering for the novel was “You Go Your Way.” The novel was to concern an estranged couple who meet every few years between 1929 and 1938. Their relationship was to have been presented against the backdrop of American history during that period. See Anne Margaret Daniel, “The Novel F. Scott Fitzgerald Never

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Why seven years? There are some hints in Fitzgerald’s writings about the seven-year idea—the notion that the human body replaces all of its cells in regular rotation and that everyone therefore becomes an entirely new person every seven years. Fitzgerald used this bit of folk wisdom at least twice in his writings. The first time was in his article “What I Think and Feel at 25,” published in American Magazine for September 1922.4 In the opening paragraphs of that article, Fitzgerald puts himself into conversation with a garrulous old man who insists that Fitzgerald state his philosophy of life. This oldster is followed a few paragraphs later by an eager young reporter from a newspaper syndicate who wants Fitzgerald to comment on the rumor that he and Zelda plan to commit suicide at thirty because they “hate and dread” the coming of middle age. “Listen here!” answers Fitzgerald in the article. “There is nothing in that rumor. Nothing whatever. When I’m thirty I won’t be this me—I’ll be somebody else. I’ll have a different body, because it said so in a book I read once, and I’ll have a different attitude on everything.”5 The second reference to the seven-year idea is in Fitzgerald’s short story “On Schedule,” published in the Saturday Evening Post for March 18, 1933.6 In this story, a widower named René du Cary is caring for his daughter Nöel. His wife, Edith, died three years earlier in Switzerland, leaving a provision in her will to prevent him from remarrying for a specified time. Fitzgerald writes, “Curiously crediting the legend that every seven years the human body completely renews itself, she had put a provision in her last sick will that if he married within seven years of her death, the moderate income she bequeathed him should accrue in trust for Nöel. What he did after the seven years would be, Edith considered, an act of someone she had never known.”7 Fitzgerald probably did not seriously believe that one started over as a new person every seven years, but the structure would have worked well as an organizing principle. The years Wrote,” Literary Hub, August 7, 2019, https://‌lithub‌.com‌/the‌-novel‌-f‌-scott‌-fitzgerald ‌-never‌-wrote. 4. The article has most recently been collected in My Lost City, 16–26. 5. Ibid., 17. 6. Collected in the Cambridge Edition volume A Change of Class (2016), 151–71. 7. Ibid., 155.

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from birth to the age of seven cover one’s childhood; the years from eight through fourteen encompass one’s adolescence. One’s teens and early adulthood fall approximately between the ages of fifteen and twenty-one; young manhood occurs between twenty-two and twenty-eight; the beginnings of maturity come between twenty-nine and thirty-five—and so on. Moreover, seven is a lively number. Anyone who thinks that the seven-year body replacement plan is not still around should type the words “seven-year renewal of body” into the search box for Google and have a look at the results. The computer screen will be filled with the websites of life coaches, yoga specialists, whole-food advocates, New Age gurus, Eastern swamis, and palm readers. The number seven also has some noteworthy numerical characteristics. It is the fourth prime number, a Mersenne prime, a Woodall prime, a factorial prime, a lucky prime, a safe prime, and a happy number. One thinks of Shakespeare’s “The Seven Ages of Man” from act 2, scene 7, of As You Like It. In the Bible there are the seven days of creation (Genesis 1), the seven years of plenty and seven of famine in Pharaoh’s dream (Genesis 41), the seven days of the feast of Passover (Exodus 13), the Seven Pillars of Wisdom (Proverbs 9), the seven loaves of bread (Matthew 15), and the seven torches of fire (Revelations 4). We should not forget the seven cardinal virtues and the seven deadly sins. And seven is the most likely number to result from a single throw of the dice in a game of craps. The document at Princeton is intriguing. Fitzgerald has invested some work and thought here. He first wrote “Happy Youth to 1910” but later added “Fairly” at the beginning of the line. He added “(no book)” to the fifth of the seven-year periods to account for the “Waste and Tragedy” of those years, remembering that he was unable to finish Tender Is the Night during that period. And he has erased whatever he first wrote for the next period and put down “Work, Trouble, Discouragement” as a summation. Each seven-year period ends with an event—first confession (initial awareness of sin), early awakening (probably sexual?), the army experience (during which he met Zelda), his initial successes in literature (until he finished the revision of The Great Gatsby in Italy), the difficulties with Tender Is the Night and Zelda’s deterioration

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during the years 1925–31, and the “Crack-Up” period, from which he was emerging in 1939. Fitzgerald seems apprehensive about what is still to come. “Let us see,” he writes beside the seventh period, and then draws a double line on the page, as if he were an accountant closing out an entry. Fitzgerald often said that he did not expect to live to an advanced age, but he was optimistic enough to do the math and write down the possible ages of fifty-six, sixty-three, and seventy. If I am right that he created this document early in 1939, then he had less than two years to live—a poignant note. Evidence that Fitzgerald might have thought further about the seven-year plan is to be found in another document, also headed “Seven Years,” that is facsimiled in Matthew J. Bruccoli’s Some Sort of Epic Grandeur.8 On this sheet of paper, which is set up like a chart, Fitzgerald has broken the years 1931–37 into their respective seasons and has written a word or two of description for each three-month period. Under summer 1931, for example, he has written “Children La Paix,” perhaps remembering Scottie and her friends during the time that the Fitzgeralds lived at La Paix, the Victorian frame house on the Bayard Turnbull property near Towson, Maryland. For winter 1933 he has written “Zelda’s Play,” a reference to Scandalabra, Zelda’s fantasy drama that was performed by the Vagabond Junior Players in Baltimore in June and July 1933. For the fall of 1937 Fitzgerald has put down “Shielah,” his misspelling of Sheilah Graham’s first name, probably remembering the first months of his developing romance with the Hollywood gossip columnist, whom he had met in July of that year. Almost surely this second document has some relation to the one about which I have been speculating. The facsimile in the Bruccoli biography is credited only to “Princeton University Library,” with no specific box or folder number. It is not in Box 9a with the Tender Is the Night materials, so it must be elsewhere in the collection. Probably it became separated from the first sheet before Fitzgerald’s papers arrived at Princeton; perhaps there are even more such sheets elsewhere in the Fitzgerald Papers. 8. Bruccoli, Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald, 2nd rev. ed. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2002), 436.

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Fitzgerald did not follow through on his seven-year plan. He did not write a book-length autobiography divided into seven-year periods. He did not, alas, write a book-length autobiography at all. It is regrettable that Fitzgerald did not leave behind such a work. Other American authors of his approximate generation did publish booklength memoirs. One thinks of Theodore Dreiser’s Dawn (1931), Sherwood Anderson’s A Story Teller’s Story (1922), H. L. Mencken’s Happy Days (1940) and Newspaper Days (1941), Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), and Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast (1964). Fitzgerald could certainly have produced an autobiography that would have held its own among this group. He had excellent material to draw upon and wrote well in the retrospective mode. Perhaps the problem was with the ending. How might he have brought such a book to a close? If he had begun writing his book in 1939 and finished it one year later, he would still probably have been at a low point in his life. There was also the problem of Zelda’s mental illness. How would he have treated her part of the story? Mental illness in the late 1930s was still a topic that one “didn’t talk about.” The most satisfactory trajectory for a memoir is from early success in youth to complications in the middle years to resolution (and perhaps triumph) later on. For Fitzgerald, however, no such resolution seemed imminent. In early 1939 he was an unemployed Hollywood screenwriter, once famous but now largely forgotten, whose wife was being institutionalized intermittently in psychiatric institutions. He was preparing to write again for the magazine market and had hopes of finishing a fifth novel, but his prospects were uncertain. He needed a lucky break. If Fitzgerald had lived through the 1940s, he might have found a proper ending for his seven-year memoir. All of us who study his life and writings regret that he did not live into and through World War II. He would have had much to say about the 1940s, probably comparing those years to his own decade of the 1920s. He would have seen the end of the Great Depression and witnessed the emergence of the United States, at the end of the war, as the most powerful nation on earth. Perhaps Fitzgerald would have repaired his health, finished his novel, and resurrected his literary career.

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Zelda’s condition might have improved; perhaps he could have found a way of writing about her difficulties. Then he might have followed his seven-year plan and set down a record of his life. After all, the next seven-year multiple would have come in 1945, when he was to turn forty-nine, and when World War II ended. Fitzgerald did in fact publish a book in 1945. This was the posthumous collection The Crack-Up, edited by his friend Edmund Wilson and published by New Directions. Fitzgerald’s death in 1940 had provided the proper terminal mark for his literary career. Wilson was able to look back on Fitzgerald’s achievements, make a selection from among the shorter writings, and publish a collection that put the author back into the public eye. Wilson had some deficiencies as an editor. In the case of The Crack-Up, he switched the titles of two of the essays, “Pasting It Together” and “Handle with Care.” His instincts for what to include in the volume, however, were flawless. He cast Fitzgerald in the retrospective mode—as an analyst of remorse and regret and an elegist for the 1920s. Wilson could have put together a miscellany from throughout Fitzgerald’s career. He might have included some of the earlier writings, amusing pieces like “What I Think and Feel at 25” (1922) or “How to Live on $36,000 a Year” (1924) or “Wait Till You Have Children of Your Own!” (1924). Instead, everything that Wilson selected was from the 1930s. He chose thoughtful, melancholy writings like “Echoes of the Jazz Age” (1931), “My Lost City” (1935), and “Early Success” (1937), and he built the collection around the three “Crack-Up” essays, which were first published in 1936. He included other items: selections from Fitzgerald’s notebooks, a clutch of Fitzgerald’s letters to friends, and a few of the matchless letters that Fitzgerald wrote to his daughter, Scottie. There were also letters of praise written to Fitzgerald by Gertrude Stein, John Dos Passos, and Thomas Wolfe, along with laudatory essays by the critics Paul Rosenfeld and Glenway Wescott. The result was an appealing volume about a writer who deserved reconsideration. The Crack-Up appeared at a propitious time. The collection was formally published on August 12, 1945, six days after the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and three days after the second bomb fell on Nagasaki. Japan announced its surrender almost

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immediately, on August 15. There was little public discussion about the morality of nuclear weapons then. World War II was over, and the soldiers were coming home. Surely this was the perfect moment for a collection like The Crack-Up to appear. The public responded. The book did well at the bookshops: by the end of 1945 New Directions had gone back to press twice for reprinting. More than ten thousand copies had been sold, an excellent showing for a book of literary nonfiction. And The Crack-Up has been a durable title. It has never been out of print since its initial publication in 1945. Perhaps Maxwell Perkins was right. A miscellany of writings by Fitzgerald, published in the late 1930s and including the three “Crack-Up” essays, would likely have made a poor showing. In the late 1930s, the reading public was probably not ready for a retrospective of the author’s career. The seven-year plan, however, had legs. In 1938, when Fitzgerald came up with the idea, a “reminiscent” book by him might well have struck the proper note. It is regrettable that he did not live to write the book.

SEVEN

Punctuating by Ear

You write naturally in sentences and one can read all of them and that among other things is a comfort. —Gertrude Stein to F. Scott Fitzgerald, May 22, 1925

One of the most important textual variants in the oeuvre of F. Scott Fitzgerald involves a single punctuation mark. The variant occurs in the final sentence of his first novel, This Side of Paradise (1920), a bildungsroman about the coming to maturity of a young aesthete named Amory Blaine. The sentence ends with a dash in manuscript but with a period in the first edition. With the dash (“‘I know myself,’ he cried, ‘but that is all—’”) the novel is open-ended. Self-knowledge is preliminary; much is yet to come in Amory’s life. When the dash is altered to a full stop, however, the novel comes to an abrupt halt. (“‘I know myself,’ he cried, ‘but that is all.’”) With the period, the story is complete; self-knowledge has become an end in itself. In the earlier chapters of This Side of Paradise, Amory has experimented with various approaches to life: initially through religious belief, The epigraph is drawn from The Crack-Up, ed. Edmund Wilson (New York: New Directions, 1945), 308. This is Stein’s reaction to her first reading of The Great Gatsby.

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then through formal education, then social striving, deliberate conformity, and deliberate rebellion. He has placed high hopes on women and love but has been disappointed. Nothing has satisfied his romantic nature or nourished his idealism, but he has at least come to understand himself. The dash at the end would seem to be the proper mark of punctuation. It is an expression of Amory’s unsettled state of mind, a satisfying conclusion to this part of his life, and a forecast of what lies ahead. Somewhere between manuscript and print, however, the dash became a period. From the surviving evidence it is impossible to know who made the change. It might have been Fitzgerald’s typist; it might have been Maxwell Perkins, his editor at Scribner; it might have been a copyeditor or compositor. Or it might have been Fitzgerald. The marked-up setting copy for the novel would tell us something, but that document does not survive, nor do the proofs. The dash is not mentioned in the extant letters between Fitzgerald and Perkins. The editor of a scholarly text of This Side of Paradise must therefore make a choice. Dash or period? When I edited the novel for the Cambridge series, I opted for the dash. It is there on the final page of the manuscript, inscribed in Fitzgerald’s hand. The period, by contrast, might have been introduced by anyone along the line of textual transmission. The evidence for the dash is stronger, but only slightly. Either way one takes a chance.1 Punctuation was important to Fitzgerald. His repertory was the standard one—periods, commas, semicolons, quotation marks, ellipses, and parentheses. In his manuscripts he used a free or open style of pointing, often omitting commas where a reader would expect to find them, but whether he meant for this manuscript punctuation to be transferred without change to his published texts is unknown. Fitzgerald always worked with stenographers; he could not himself type and seems to have expected his typists to supply needed punctuation. He likely expected the same thing from the copyeditors and compositors at Scribner who prepared his texts for

1. See the commentary in the Cambridge Edition This Side of Paradise (1995), xxix–xxx.

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publication. The problem, therefore, is to know whose punctuation we are getting when we attempt to edit his novels and short stories. Fitzgerald was a professional writer. He made his way with his pen.2 To publish with a major New York house such as Scribner, and with mass-circulation magazines such as the Saturday Evening Post and Red Book, Fitzgerald had to give up control over many features of his texts. One of these features was punctuation. This was not too bad a bargain. Unlike Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, and many others among the modernists, Fitzgerald attempted almost nothing experimental with punctuation. The dash at the end of This Side of Paradise is the only punctuation mark in all of his writings that carries truly significant import. He did not lose a great deal by leaving his punctuation to copyeditors and proofreaders, but that does not mean that he approved of their handling of his commas and periods. Nor does it mean that we, as students of his work today, must necessarily accept the punctuation that was imposed upon his writings. A great many of his holograph manuscripts survive at Princeton, along with an equally large number of typescripts revised in his own hand. When he revised these typescripts he gave most of his attention to the wording, but he adjusted punctuation as well. From these manuscripts and typescripts we can learn about his habits of pointing—about the “accidental texture” of his writings, which would include capitalization, spelling, word division, italics, parentheses, dashes, and spacing. How much of that texture should be restored from his manuscripts to the published texts? When we reinstate punctuation, word division, italics, and the rest, do we do Fitzgerald a service? His surviving manuscripts and typescripts are usually not fair copies, ready for the compositor. They are more nearly final drafts, ready to be put into publishable shape by typists, copyeditors, compositors, and proofreaders. What is the humble editor to do?3 2. James L. W. West III, “F. Scott Fitzgerald, Professional Author,” in A Historical Guide to F. Scott Fitzgerald, ed. Kirk Curnutt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 49–68. 3. Fitzgerald’s habit was compose in manuscript and, working with stenographers, to put his texts through one or two rounds of revision in typescript. He would submit

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Fitzgerald punctuated by ear. He was pitch-perfect when it came to the rhythms of American prose, but he had a sketchy knowledge of grammar and punctuation. His spelling might be called inspired. In almost everything he wrote, one finds beautifully crafted sentences full of memorable, evocative language. The grammar and punctuation, however, are another matter. One encounters missing punctuation marks, comma splices, misused semicolons, inconsistent hyphenation, floating participles, and rather too many dashes in both dialogue and exposition. As for orthography, Fitzgerald spelled “apartment” with two p’s, “juvenilia” as “juvenalia,” “nearby” as “n-ea-r-b-y-e,” and “yacht” as “yatch.” He was cavalier about the spellings of authors’ names (Ernest “Hemmingway” and Gertrude “Stien,” for example) and about the titles of books. He spelled Arnold Bennett’s name with one t and Samuel Johnson’s name as “Johnston,” with an added t. He often misspelled the names of cities, restaurants, and hotels. Usually he relied on memory, and sometimes his memory was faulty. The misspellings are easily enough dealt with unless they are deliberate—and sometimes they are.4 But punctuation is another matter. After many years of studying Fitzgerald’s pointing, particularly that found in his manuscripts, I have come to believe that most of his punctuation was rhetorical. One finds rhetorical punctuation in texts meant to be read aloud, as with the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer. Fitzgerald used commas, semicolons, dashes, and, in a few instances, a comma-dash in a similar fashion: to indicate pauses in rhythm rather than units of syntax. Here, for

the final typescript, bearing revisions in his hand, to his literary agent, Harold Ober. Ober would have a clean typescript made and send it out to magazine editors. Fitzgerald might see proofs from the magazine, but often he did not. His final typescripts were preserved in Ober’s files. These typescripts, with Fitzgerald’s revisions, eventually made their way into his papers at Princeton University Library. As the texts closest to his hand, they proved to be quite useful in establishing the texts for the Cambridge series. 4. In The Great Gatsby, Meyer Wolfshiem’s “sid” for “said” is deliberate; see the Cambridge variorum edition (2019; hereafter Variorum), 83, 205. In Tender Is the Night, the “Ragtime College Jazzes of Edinboro,” a pickup band in Cannes fronted by a young Scotsman, has the misspelling, presumably intentional, painted on the bass drum of its percussionist (304).

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example, is a short paragraph from the manuscript of The Great Gatsby, narrated (as is the entire book) by Nick Carraway: At nine oclock one morning in June Gatsby’s car lurched weightily up the rocky drive to my door and gave out a burst of melody from its three noted horn. It was the first time he had called on me though I had gone to two of his parties and, at his invitation, made frequent use of his beech.5 Fitzgerald has used only two commas in the passage. They set off the prepositional phrase “at his invitation.” He appears to be drafting quickly: he omits the apostrophe in “o’clock” and the hyphen in the compound adjective “three-noted.” The misspelling “beech” is phonetic, as were many of Fitzgerald’s orthographical errors. Here is the same passage, with some revision by Fitzgerald, as it appears in the first edition (1925): At nine o’clock, one morning late in July, Gatsby’s gorgeous car lurched up the rocky drive to my door and gave out a burst of melody from its three-noted horn. It was the first time he had called on me, though I had gone to two of his parties, mounted in his hydroplane, and, at his urgent invitation, made frequent use of his beach. (Variorum, 76)6 The two sentences have been improved by Fitzgerald’s revisions. The redundant adverb “weightily” has been removed, and two details have been added to the second sentence: Nick has gone flying with Gatsby in his hydroplane, and Gatsby has urged Nick to use his beach. (Gatsby wants to cultivate Nick so he will invite his cousin Daisy Buchanan over for tea.) But it is the punctuation in the passage that has undergone the greatest change. The element “one morning late in July” in the first sentence is now set off by commas, and the second sentence has three new commas, altering its rhythm. Who 5. See the Cambridge Edition The Great Gatsby: An Edition of the Manuscript (2018; hereafter Gatsby MS), 39. 6. The Cambridge Variorum uses the same pagination as the Scribner first edition of The Great Gatsby (1925).

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added this punctuation? The author or the copyeditors at Scribner? From the extant evidence it is impossible to know. Should these new commas be omitted in order to make the first-edition text read more nearly like the manuscript? The first sentence does not need the two new commas (notice that Fitzgerald has shifted the chronology from June to July here), but Fitzgerald’s revisions have changed the construction of the second sentence so that we now have three elements—parties, hydroplane, and beach—rather than just parties and “beech.” The new commas in the second sentence are needed and should probably stay, even if Fitzgerald did not add them. Fitzgerald’s punctuation of dialogue was often erroneous. Immediately after the paragraph just quoted, Fitzgerald wrote these lines, spoken by Jay Gatsby, in the manuscript: “Hello, old man,” he said as I came out, “You’re having lunch with me today and I thought you might like to ride up to town.” (Gatsby MS, 39) The comma after “out” should be a period. This was a frequent mistake in punctuation by Fitzgerald, a comma after a speech tag in dialogue where there should be a period. In the first edition, Gatsby’s lines are punctuated this way: “Good morning, old sport. You’re having lunch with me to-day and I thought we’d ride up together.” (Variorum, 76) The speech tag is gone, and the first sentence ends properly with a period. By this point Fitzgerald has added Gatsby’s habitual “old sport” to his remark; one finds “old sport” only a few times in the manuscript but numerous times in the published text. And “today” from the manuscript has been hyphenated. (More about this in a moment.) In editing for the Cambridge text, I removed the hyphen. If the speech tag had not been omitted, I would have emended the comma after “out” to a period. One of the most luminous paragraphs in The Great Gatsby occurs in the first chapter, where Nick describes his first view of Tom and Daisy Buchanan’s house. The punctuation, in the extant manuscript,

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is rhetorical. Here is the paragraph from the handwritten draft, with Fitzgerald’s punctuation: And so it happened that on a warm windy evening I drove over to East Egg to see two old friends who, in reality, I scarcely knew at all. Their house was even more elaborate than I expected, a great, cheerful red and white Georgian Colonial mansion overlooking the bay. The lawn started at the beach and ran toward his front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sun-dials and brick walks and burning gardens—finally when it reached the house drifting up the side in bright vines as though by the momentum of its run. The front was broken by a line of French windows, glowing now with reflected gold, and wide open to the warm windy afternoon, and Tom Buchanan in riding clothes was standing with his legs apart on the front porch. (Gatsby MS, 7) Fitzgerald revised the wording between manuscript and print, but only a little. Punctuation, however, has undergone a significant change. In the first edition, the paragraph reads this way: And so it happened that on a warm windy evening I drove over to East Egg to see two old friends whom I scarcely knew at all. Their house was even more elaborate than I expected, a cheerful red-and-white Georgian Colonial mansion, overlooking the bay. The lawn started at the beach and ran toward the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sun-dials and brick walks and burning gardens—finally when it reached the house drifting up the side in bright vines as though from the momentum of its run. The front was broken by a line of French windows, glowing now with reflected gold and wide open to the warm windy afternoon, and Tom Buchanan in riding clothes was standing with his legs apart on the front porch. (Variorum, 7–8) The copyeditors and compositors have for the most part left Fitzgerald’s punctuation alone here. They seem to have recognized that the prose in this paragraph should flow without a break. Nick’s gaze

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is moving swiftly up from the water and across the lawn toward the front façade of the house. The prepositional phrase “on a warm windy evening” has not been set off by commas, and no comma has been introduced between the two adjectives in that phrase. (This is consistent with Fitzgerald’s habit; he often omitted the comma between two adjectives of equal weight.) The grammatical error “who” for “whom” in the first sentence has been corrected; perhaps this mistake was made obvious by the trimming of “in reality,” an elision that Fitzgerald presumably made. The compound adjective “red-and-white” has been hyphenated, as is proper, but an unnecessary comma has been inserted after “mansion,” interrupting slightly the progress of that sentence. The dash after “gardens,” thank goodness, has been left alone. A more punctilious copyeditor might have stopped the sentence at “gardens,” capitalized “finally,” and changed “drifting” to “the lawn drifted” in order to create a new sentence. The comma after “gold” in the manuscript has disappeared from the final sentence in the first edition. A mixed bag, then. Is anything to be gained by transferring the manuscript punctuation to the first-edition text? The comma after “mansion” in the first edition should probably go, but the rest of the variants, including the (substantive) correction of “who” to “whom,” seem proper. Fitzgerald paid little attention to small details when he was drafting his manuscripts. He seems to have enjoyed the act of composition and particularly enjoyed recasting and revising—and, occasionally, fiddling with punctuation. His texts were entirely under his control in manuscript and were still largely his property in typescript. In proof, however, they were no longer altogether his, and once they were released into print they became commercial artifacts for which he had been paid. His attention had already moved ahead to the next story or novel, the manuscript that was currently sitting on his writing desk. One must remember this when editing his prose. One way to understand the punctuation of an author’s prose is to compare it to the pointing of another author’s writing. Besides Fitzgerald, the authors with whose texts I have worked most closely are Theodore Dreiser and William Styron. Dreiser was not much of a prose stylist. His critics have for years enjoyed making fun of his clumsy writing. He grew up in a German-speaking household, and

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his syntax seems to reflect his early exposure to that language. His sentences are overly long, heavy with abstractions and modifiers, and light on punctuation. Frequently the verb falls at the end of the sentence, forcing the reader to wonder what Dreiser intends to say until finally, with the concluding verb, all becomes clear, more or less. Dreiser was aware of these flaws in his writing; knowing that he needed help, he employed personal editors and amanuenses to put his manuscripts into shape for publication. When I edited Dreiser’s first two novels in scholarly editions, my tendency was to reject the work of these personal editors and to present Dreiser’s prose as it had appeared in his manuscripts. Was this “purist” approach, if it can be called that, in Dreiser’s best interests?7 The manuscripts of William Styron present different problems. Styron knew the rules of English grammar better than either Dreiser or Fitzgerald did. (He was also a demon speller. I cannot remember discovering a misspelling in any one of his manuscripts.) He had a tendency, however, to commit the comma splice, most often in drafts of commencement speeches and eulogies. These were written for oral delivery; Styron seems to have punctuated these documents to indicate pauses for breath and emphasis. I published a biography of Styron in 1998, and I kept in touch with him after the book had appeared. During the last ten years of his life, he fell into the habit of sending the manuscripts and typescripts of short pieces to me—prefaces, introductions, op-eds, speeches, and eulogies. He did this in part because he knew I was interested in anything he wrote, but he also did it because he did not want these manuscripts to disappear into the disorderly nest of papers that he kept in his study. After Styron’s death in 2006, I donated these manuscripts to Duke University, his alma mater, which maintains a large collection of his literary papers. Some of the shorter pieces of writing, I felt, deserved to be published, not buried in the archives. Therefore when I edited a volume of Styron’s collected nonfiction for Random House in 2015, a volume called My Generation, I made sure to include the best of these 7. See Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981) and Jennie Gerhardt (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992).

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unpublished items—eulogies for Ralph Ellison and James Dickey, for example, and a commencement speech about the rebel slave Nat Turner, delivered at Wilberforce University a little over a month after the publication of Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967). These speeches and eulogies, however, required some emendations in punctuation. Usually it was no more than a semicolon instead of a comma to avoid a splice, or a period to replace a dash, though on one or two occasions I recast sentences or supplied proper nouns to make antecedents clear. I justified these changes by remembering that, henceforth, these texts would be read, not heard. A purist approach to editing was not called for. Capitalization is an issue in some of Fitzgerald’s texts. Is it the “armistice” or the “Armistice”? Should it be “prohibition” or “Prohibition”? Should the word “depression” be capitalized or left in lowercase? In manuscript, Fitzgerald normally did not capitalize these words. All of Fitzgerald’s readers would have known what he meant by the “armistice.” It was the cease-fire that was signed between the Allies and the Central Powers at 11:00 a.m. on November 11, 1918—the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. Likewise with “prohibition,” a word that had not yet come to stand for the historical period between passage of the Eighteenth and Twenty-First Amendments. And the “depression” was not over when Fitzgerald died in 1940. It was only the latest of many slumps in the US economy, albeit a long-lasting one, and had not become in retrospect the “Depression”—or the “Great Depression,” as it is often referred to today. I left “armistice” and “prohibition” and “depression” in lowercase when I edited Fitzgerald’s texts for the Cambridge series. There was no need to update. A more difficult decision involved “negro” vs. “Negro.” The word, used to refer to African Americans, was not regularly capitalized until the early 1960s, twenty years after Fitzgerald’s passing. If “negro” appeared in lowercase in a Fitzgerald text, either a manuscript or a published work (and usually it was not capitalized), I left it in lowercase, but on several occasions I had to justify the decision to the Cambridge copyeditors. With “negro” I wanted to preserve the historical moment in which Fitzgerald was writing, just as I did with “armistice” and “prohibition” and “depression.”

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Anyone reading the first Scribner editions of Fitzgerald’s works through All the Sad Young Men (1926) will notice a quasi-British house style. One finds “centre,” “favour,” and “criticise,” for example, and one encounters more hyphenated compounds than one would expect to find in an American text: “to-day” and “to-morrow” and “text-book” and “dinner-jacket.” Was Scribner attempting to give an anglicized look to its products? Perhaps so, but there was a more practical reason for the phenomenon. Scribner used the “Oxford Style” of punctuation and word division for any book that might have potential for the British market. London publishers would order duplicate stereotype plates or unbound sheets of an American edition, but only if the accidentals had been lightly anglicized. Periods and commas did not have to appear outside quotation marks in dialogue, and double quotation marks were acceptable instead of singles, but –our and –ise endings were preferred for the American typesetting, along with the hyphenated forms of words. With the Oxford Style, only the printing (from American plates) and binding would need to be executed by the British publisher. There would be no need to set up the type afresh (the most expensive part of the publishing equation), and the American publisher, Scribner in this case, could extend its market across the Atlantic. This is what happened with the Chatto & Windus text of The Great Gatsby (1926). The text was set in the Oxford Style at the Scribner printing plant in New York City. Scribner had a duplicate set of electrotype plates manufactured and shipped to London. Chatto had the printing and binding done on their side of the water. For the Cambridge texts, I removed this overlay of British styling from the Scribner texts, except for a few British spellings that Fitzgerald commonly used—“theatre,” for example. But in so doing I removed a marker of the historical period in which Fitzgerald was writing. With “negro” and “armistice” and other words, I had preserved such markers. Probably this was an inconsistency (one of many) in my editing.8 8. The typescripts mailed by Fitzgerald to his agent from France, when he was living there, often exhibit British punctuation and spelling because the stenographers Fitzgerald hired were likely British or, if French, had learned to punctuate and spell English in the British style.

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What happened to Fitzgerald’s punctuation when a new edition was produced of one of his novels? A bibliographer defines a “new edition” as a fresh typesetting of the text—a new assemblage of the type forms. Everything is subject to change: all words, spelling, punctuation, styling, and spacing. If the author is still alive, he or she can make cuts, additions, and revisions—provided the publisher is willing. Editors and proofreaders can make these same sorts of changes, of course, whether the author is alive or not. Less than a year after Fitzgerald died in 1940, his Princeton friend Edmund Wilson, a prominent critic and editor, prepared a new edition of The Great Gatsby for Scribner. With the help of the copyeditors there, Wilson gave the punctuation of the novel an overhaul, adding a great many commas to the dialogue and the expository passages.9 Not to be outdone, the copyeditors at Bantam Books blue-penciled the text of the novel even more freely for the first American paperback edition in 1945, adding and deleting punctuation, changing spellings, and making various corrections, real and imagined. For example, in the final chapter old Mr. Gatz’s grammar was corrected: “If he’d of lived” becomes “If he’d lived,” and “He come out to see me” is altered to read “He came out to see me.”10 Even more can happen when a text travels across the Atlantic for a fresh typesetting by British compositors. This Side of Paradise was reset by W. Collins Sons & Co. for its first British outing. More than one thousand accidental readings were changed, most of them having to do with punctuation, and this does not count the alteration of double quotation marks in dialogue to singles or the omission of periods from the ends of abbreviations.11 Something similar happened to The Great Gatsby the first time its text was newly typeset by a British publisher—in this case, by Grey Walls Press for a 1948 edition. The double quotation marks become single quotation marks, new punctuation and hyphenation appear, a “tire” becomes a “tyre,” a “mustache” is a “moustache,” and “jail” is “gaol.” The “Queensboro Bridge,” which connects Queens with upper 9. Variorum, xxxv–xxxvii. 10. The Great Gatsby (New York: Bantam, 1945), 178, 182. 11. See the Cambridge Edition This Side of Paradise (1995), xxxvii–xxxviii.

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Manhattan, is rechristened the “Queensborough Bridge.” Nine space breaks, which Fitzgerald used to signal time shifts in the novel, are dropped. This is not to say that American publishers are innocent when they reset British texts for the American market. The same kinds of alterations are made, but in reverse. One of the functions of the variorum edition of The Great Gatsby was to root out these alterations and do away with them. Editors make a distinction between public and private texts. A public text is written for publication; the author intends from the outset to see the work in print. Novels, poems, stories, essays, memoirs, satire, parody, reportage—all are meant to be “made public” through the medium of print or, these days, digital text. Private writings, by contrast, are not intended for publication. Here we would include letters, diaries, journals, working drafts, foul papers, and similar forms of writing. The writer or public figure might suspect (or even hope) that someday his or her letters and journals might be published, but that was not the immediate intent when the documents were created. A considerable body of private text survives for Fitzgerald. Editors have had to decide how to handle the spelling and other features of these texts. Fitzgerald did not keep formal journals and diaries, but he was one of the great letter-writers of his time. A considerable number of his letters survive: he was a celebrity from an early age, and people knew to preserve the letters that he sent to them. Most of the letters that he sent to his wife, Zelda Sayre, seem to have perished in the fire that took her life in 1948, but Maxwell Perkins, his editor, and Harold Ober, his literary agent, saved virtually every letter that he sent to them, as did his daughter, Frances Scott “Scottie” Fitzgerald, and many of his friends and fellow authors, including Hemingway. The letters are wonderful, capturing Fitzgerald in relaxed periods, in distress, or in business mode. The initial edition of Fitzgerald’s letters was edited by Andrew Turnbull, one of his biographers.12 Perhaps at the urging of the publisher, Turnbull cleaned up the spelling and punctuation of 12. The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald, ed. Andrew Turnbull (New York: Scribner, 1962).

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Fitzgerald’s letters, giving them a polished surface that they did not possess in original form. Something was lost in the process. A typical Fitzgerald letter is sketchily punctuated and full of misspellings; often one finds scratched-out words along with additions between the lines and in the margins. Occasionally Fitzgerald adds a humorous drawing. Can all of this be captured in print, short of facsimile reproduction? Turnbull probably primped up the letters in his edition to protect Fitzgerald from the charge that he was poorly educated. He had failed to graduate from Princeton, and his first novel was full of errors of various kinds, giving reviewers the impression that he was at best a poor speller and at worst an intellectual fraud. This reputation dogged him throughout his career; indeed, one still finds traces of the attitude among a few critics today. It must have seemed advisable to Turnbull (not to mention much easier) to fix up the spelling and punctuation, or to have a copyeditor do it for him. But as Fitzgerald’s stature grew during the 1970s and 1980s it became permissible to reproduce his misspellings and idiosyncratic punctuation in editions of his letters and other private writings. The idea was to capture the flavor of the letters, their casual and improvisational quality. Sometimes this worked well—and sometimes less well. In an edition of the correspondence between Fitzgerald and Harold Ober called As Ever, Scott Fitz— (1972), the editors devised an elaborate system (not using sic) to preserve misspellings, cancellations, additions, marginalia, and the rest. Underscored words were underscored and not italicized; italics were used to indicate interlinear insertions; deleted words appeared within brackets. It must have been a considerable struggle to persuade the compositors to set the texts with so much typographical barbed wire; certainly it is difficult to read the letters to Ober with comprehension. More recent editions of Fitzgerald’s letters have employed a modified approach. The misspellings, or most of them, are preserved, as is the punctuation unless it might confuse the reader. Significant revisions and cancellations are handled in footnotes; insignificant ones are ignored. The resulting texts are better. The reader does not have

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to puzzle out the meaning; the selected oddities give a good sense of the nature of the original letter.13 Putting previously unpublished items by Fitzgerald into print brings up questions about their punctuation. On the way to France on the liner Minnewaska in April 1924, Fitzgerald wrote a nifty article about movie directors called “The Most Pampered Men in the World.” He had it typed in France and mailed the typescript to Harold Ober with instructions that it be forwarded to Myron Zobel, the editor of the movie magazine Screenland. Zobel had invited Fitzgerald to write the article, but he seems to have expected a piece of fluff. “Pampered” is in fact a perceptive examination of the role of the director in filmmaking—something not much commented upon in those years, when movies were still silent and most of the attention went to the stars. Zobel rejected the article; the typescript rested among Fitzgerald’s papers until I found it in February 2003. Through Fitzgerald’s literary agents, the piece was offered to The Times (London) and was published in its magazine supplement T2.14 The copyeditors at The Times, however, fiddled with Fitzgerald’s punctuation, so much so that I felt compelled to republish the text, without emendation, in the 2006 volume of the F. Scott Fitzgerald Review.15 Something similar happened six years later when I unearthed from Fitzgerald’s papers a lovely little story called “Thank You for the Light.” Ober had offered it to the New Yorker, and to four other magazines, in the late spring of 1936 but had found no takers. I prepared a text of this vignette from the surviving typescript; Fitzgerald’s agents submitted it again to the New Yorker, which accepted it this time around and published it in their issue for August 6, 2012. I had emended the punctuation of the typescript very lightly, but the New Yorker had other ideas and imposed their own pointing on the text, altering a few bits of wording as well. Again I felt it necessary 13. See, for example, Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda: The Love Letters of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, ed. Jackson R. Bryer and Cathy W. Barks (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2002). 14. “The Most Pampered Men in the World,” T2, May 19, 2003, 12–13. 15. As it turned out, “Pampered” had been published before, but under a different title. For the details, see James L. W. West III, “Polishing Up ‘Pampered,’” F. Scott Fitzgerald Review 5 (2006): 13–21.

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to republish the text, this time as an appendix in the Cambridge Edition Taps at Reveille volume (397–401). No one could object very strenuously to the editing at The Times or the New Yorker. These were public texts that Fitzgerald wrote for print. Having them appear in such widely read venues was good for his reputation and for the visibility of these two pieces. Still, it was important that texts closer to what Fitzgerald had written be made available to scholars and lay readers of his work. That is why I republished both texts. ••••••

Editing Fitzgerald’s punctuation is not an easy task. Because he punctuated by ear, one must learn to punctuate in the same way, always keeping in mind the rules of English grammar. In preparing his texts for the Cambridge series, my assistants and I spent considerably more time on punctuation, spelling, and word division than we did on the words themselves. Would Fitzgerald have wanted “taxi-cab” or “taxi cab” or “taxicab”? Did he always expect a comma to be inserted before the third element in a series? Did he want a comma to be placed before the conjunction in a compound sentence? Did he understand the grammatical function of a semicolon? (Indeed, had the function of the semicolon been codified in style manuals of Fitzgerald’s period?) Did he want a distinction made between a one-em and a two-em dash? Did he intend for some of his sentences to end with three ellipsis points and others with four, or was he just putting dots on paper? We must assume that at some level Fitzgerald did care about such matters, but the fact is that he left most of his punctuating to others. The scholarly editor, working with what survives and taking account of what does not survive, must therefore deal with the punctuation and the other accidentals, knowing that the results will be imperfect and, as with all scholarly editing, provisional.

EIGHT

Interpreting “Jacob’s Ladder”

We do not think of Fitzgerald as an author whose writings were bowdlerized. Changes did occur in his texts between manuscript and print, but there are relatively few cases in which his stories and novels were blue-penciled to remove offensive words or passages. In one of his best stories, however, this kind of thing did happen. The story is “Jacob’s Ladder,” published in the Saturday Evening Post for August 20, 1927. This is one of the earliest stories in which Fitzgerald created characters and treated themes that would appear later in Tender Is the Night. The two main characters in “Jacob’s Ladder” are early (and shadowy) versions of Dick Diver and Rosemary Hoyt in the novel. Fitzgerald stripped the story of many of its best phrases and passages and transferred them to the novel. The borrowings were so heavy that he decided not to include the story in Taps at Reveille, the collection of short fiction that he published in 1935.1 1. Fitzgerald had “Jacob’s Ladder” set in type for the first galleys of Taps at Reveille. As he corrected those proofs he realized that he had borrowed quite heavily from the story for Tender Is the Night. After attempting to write substitute passages for the Taps text, he decided to drop the story from the collection. See the Cambridge Edition Taps at Reveille (2014), xii–xiii. For an examination of the larger issue, see George Anderson, “F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Use of Story Strippings in Tender Is the Night,” in Reader’s Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Tender Is the Night” (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996), 1–48.

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The only text of the story to be published during Fitzgerald’s lifetime was the one that appeared in the Post. This text was edited before publication to remove instances of sexual innuendo, making the motivations of the two main characters unclear. The typographical treatment of the ending of the story further obscured some of what Fitzgerald wanted to say. In the text prepared for the Cambridge Edition, the sexual innuendo was reinstated and the typography put to rights. These editorial restorations call for a new reading of the story—an examination of its literary sources, its relation to Tender Is the Night, and its connections to Fitzgerald’s life. ••••••

“Jacob’s Ladder” opens in a New York courtroom where the verdict in a “particularly sordid” murder trial is about to be announced. The defendant, whose name is given as “Mrs. Choynski,” has been accused of dispatching her lover with a meat ax. Jacob Booth, the protagonist, has secured a pass to the event. These tickets are in short supply: the newspapers have given considerable play to the trial, attracting spectators who want to listen and observe and “escape from their own private lives.”2 Jacob, who is thirty-three, is lonely and bored. He has come with the others to see the spectacle, but his attention is almost immediately captured by a pretty face. The young woman has “the face of a dark saint with tender luminous eyes and a skin pale and fair” (333). She is Jenny Delehanty, sixteen years old and the sister of the accused murderess. The verdict is announced, Mrs. Choynski is found guilty, and sentencing is postponed until a later date. The courtroom begins to empty. Jacob stays behind, however, to observe Jenny. She is being harassed by a newspaper reporter who wants her to give him a photograph of Mrs. Choynski as a child. Jenny ignores the reporter’s entreaties: “Geeze!” she cries. “Can’t you lee me alone?” (334). She has been hounded by members of the press since the trial began. “Every day itsa same!” she complains. “I’m sicka the whole thing” (334).

2. “Jacob’s Ladder” is included in the Cambridge Edition All the Sad Young Men (2007), 333–58; this quotation is from page 333. Quotations from the story in this essay will be cited by the Cambridge page numbers.

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Jacob comes to Jenny’s rescue. He offers her a ride in his chauffeured automobile, and she accepts, escaping from the reporter. Her home address, which she gives to Jacob’s driver, is on the southern edge of Harlem, then a mixed-race neighborhood where the rents were low. Jenny is a shopgirl at one of the downtown department stores. On the way to her flat she tells Jacob that she has not seen her sister since she was a baby. “I didn’t even know she was my sister till they come and told me,” she says (336). Jacob, smitten by her beauty and curious about her low-class accent and manner, invites her to dinner that very evening. He appears to be kind and trustworthy, and she agrees to go with him. On the way to the restaurant, which is on Long Island, we learn a little about Jacob’s past. He is thirty-three years old, more than twice Jenny’s age. He had once possessed “a tenor voice with destiny in it” but had suffered from acute laryngitis and had lost the ability to sing (336). He bought acreage in Florida and spent five years developing the land into a golf course. During the land boom of the mid-1920s, he sold the property for eight hundred thousand dollars—approximately twelve million dollars today. He next pursued the “second richest woman in America” (337) but could not persuade himself to marry her. He is at loose ends now, idle and enervated, looking for stimulation—hence, probably, his presence at the murder trial. At dinner Jacob praises Jenny’s beauty in extravagant language. “You are the most beautiful thing I have ever seen,” he tells her (337). He promises to introduce her to a movie director who might put her into the films. She assumes that he wants something in return. On the way back to New York she offers to kiss him, but to her surprise, he turns her down. “You’re a card, handsome,” she tells him (338). Four days later Jacob does introduce Jenny to a movie director. On the way to the studio, Jacob gives her a stage name: “Jenny Prince.” (Her suggestion had been “Tootsie Defoe.”) The director is Billy Farrelly, a brash Irishman who is making films on the Famous Players lot in Queens. These are silent movies. Beauty is the most important thing; very little acting talent is required, and there are no lines to speak. Farrelly immediately casts Jenny as one of the leads in a picture he is shooting. “She’s all right,” he tells Jacob. “She’s got a good side face” (339). Jacob celebrates by buying Jenny an expensive

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evening dress and taking her to dinner that evening at Club Lido, a swank establishment at Seventh Avenue and Fifty-Third Street. He is avuncular with her: “Be good,” he tells her. “Work hard and I’ll be so proud of you” (340). Jacob has cast himself in the role of Jenny’s creator and protector. Afterward in “the dark cave of the taxi-cab,” she persuades him to kiss her, but he does not enjoy it. “There was no shadow of passion in her eyes or on her mouth, there was a faint spray of champagne on her breath.” Jenny, who seems to have had more sexual experience than Jacob might have supposed, is offering herself to him. “You’re young enough to be my daughter,” he tells her. “I’ll do anything you want,” she says. “Anything” (340–41). Jacob is sexually squeamish, yet he is jealous and possessive about Jenny—an unfortunate combination. This is a rich boy/poor girl story, though not a typical one. Jacob is Jenny’s sponsor and counselor, not her lover. Jenny turns out to be a natural for the films. She finishes her work in the movie at Famous Players and is offered a six-month contract at four hundred dollars a week—but in Hollywood, where she must go to further her career. When Jacob sees her off at the train station, he notices that she has already begun to change. Her manner is becoming professional, and her colorful accent is fading, replaced by more neutral speech.3 She makes him promise to visit her in Hollywood and weeps as she departs, but Jacob senses that she is acting. He is not offended; he too is playing a role in a drama of his own creation. Jacob and Jenny exchange telegrams and letters during the next five months. The picture Jenny had made at Famous Players is released to good reviews, with her performance singled out for special comment. Articles and interviews with her appear in the newspapers (many of them concocted by studio publicists), and she is spoken of as a rising film star. Jacob attempts to distract himself with another woman. He becomes engaged “to an old friend, now a widow,” but the romance sours on a trip to Florida, and they call off the marriage (345). In the spring Jacob books passage for Europe 3. This would be important when the “talkies” arrived. Silent-film stars with weak voices and marked accents often did not survive the transition.

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on the ocean liner Paris but cancels the trip at the last minute and takes the train to California to see Jenny. She meets him at the train station in Los Angeles and takes him to the Ambassador Hotel in her chauffeured limousine. Jacob notices immediately that she has continued to mature. She tells him that her new movie is going well and that the director is pleased with her work. “Everybody that’s seen the rushes says it’s the first one I’ve had sex appeal in,” she says (345). After lunch in her private apartment, she takes Jacob on a round of Sunday-afternoon parties, a ritual in Hollywood. There he observes directors, actors, and writers from most of the studios, along with attendant publicists, gossip columnists, journalists, and hangers-on. These parties are a chance for people in the industry to meet and talk and relax. Jenny is approached by a handsome young Latin actor named Raffino, a would-be Rudolph Valentino. Jacob becomes jealous and quizzes her about her involvement with Raffino, spoiling the afternoon. He drinks more than he should; Jenny limits herself to lemonade. Later in the day he proposes marriage, impulsively, and she is surprised. “But I don’t love you like that,” she tells him. “How can you come to me all at once and ask me to love you like that?” (349). They end the afternoon in confusion, with Jenny in tears. Jenny Prince has become for Jacob an illusion, a confection, an abstraction. She is his discovery but not entirely his creation. That night in his hotel room he is unable to sleep. He can think only of Jenny. In the most important passage of the story, he begins to fashion an image of her in his mind, an idealized picture of his own making: His desire recreated her until she lost all vestiges of the old Jenny, even of the girl who had met him at the train that morning. Silently, as the night hours went by, he molded her over into an image of love—an image that would endure as long as love itself, or even longer—not to perish till he could say “I never really loved her.” Slowly he created it with this and that illusion from his youth, this and that sad old yearning, until she stood before him identical with her old self only by name. Later, when he drifted off into a few hours’ sleep, the image

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he had made stood near him, lingering in the room, joined in mystic marriage to his heart. (350–51) The next day Jenny tells Jacob she will marry him, but he senses that she is accepting his proposal out of pity. He refuses her offer. “I won’t marry you unless you love me,” he tells her (351). He still protects her, however. A lawyer named Scharnhorst, who had defended Jenny’s sister at the murder trial, has come to Hollywood. He has learned of Jenny’s success in the movies, and he means to blackmail her. He threatens to reveal to the press that Jenny is the sister of Mrs. Choynski and wants twenty thousand dollars to keep silent. Jacob intervenes and takes control of the situation. He wires a friend who is “high in the political world in New York” (353) and arranges for Mrs. Choynski to be cut off from contact with Scharnhorst. He also threatens Scharnhorst, telling him that he has connections through which he can have the lawyer disbarred from legal practice in the East. Jacob’s quick thinking appears to work. He faces down Scharnhorst and makes him promise to leave Los Angeles on the train that night. In the final scenes of “Jacob’s Ladder,” Jenny returns to New York. Five months have passed since Jacob’s visit to Hollywood; she and he have communicated only by letter and wire. Two nights before she arrives, Jacob goes to “a huge night-bound vault on Broadway” (354) to see her most recent film. He discerns a new quality in her acting: “Every move she made, every gesture, was poignant and important” (355). The audience seems to notice; Jenny Prince is becoming a star. Shortly after she arrives in New York, Jacob proposes to her again, but she confesses to him that she has fallen in love with another man, the director of her latest picture. “I didn’t mean to,” she tells Jacob. “I tried not to, but first thing I knew there I was in love and all the wishing in the world couldn’t help it.” She and the director are to marry. “It only comes once, Jake, like that,” she explains. “If you lose it once, it’ll never come like that again” (355–56). Heartbroken, he leaves her at the Plaza Hotel, walks west on Fifty-Ninth Street, and turns south on Broadway. Soon he comes to the Capitol Theatre at Broadway and Fifty-First. This was an actual theatre, an opulent cinema palace with a marble staircase

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and rock-crystal chandeliers in the lobby. The theatre is showing one of Jenny’s recent movies. The passage below follows. It is the final passage of the story. In great block letters over the porte-cochère of the Capitol Theatre five words glittered out into the night: “Carl Barbour and Jenny Prince.” The name startled him, as if a passer-by had spoken it. He stopped and stared. Other eyes rose to that sign, people hurried by him and turned in. Jenny Prince. Now that she no longer belonged to him, the name assumed a significance entirely its own. It hung there, cool and impervious on the night, a challenge, a defiance. Jenny Prince. “Come and rest upon my loveliness,” it said. “Fulfill your secret dreams in wedding me for an hour.” JENNY PRINCE. It was untrue—she was back at the Plaza Hotel, in love with somebody. But the name, with its bright insistence, rode high upon the night. “I love my dear public. They are all so sweet to me.” The wave appeared far off, sent up white-caps, rolled toward him with the might of pain, washed over him. Never any more. Never any more. Beautiful child who tried so hard one night to give herself to me. Never any more. Never any more. The wave beat upon him, drove him down, pounding with hammers of agony on his ears. Proud and impervious, the name on high challenged the night.

JENNY PRINCE She was there! All of her the best of her—the effort, the power, the triumph, the beauty. Jacob moved forward with a group and bought a ticket at the window. Confused he stared around the great lobby. Then he saw an entrance and, walking in, found himself a place in the vast throbbing darkness.

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This final part of the text was compromised by editing at the Post. A typescript of the story survives in the Princeton archive. It is the final authorial typescript; Fitzgerald made his last handwritten revisions on this document before sending it to Harold Ober. A clean typescript was made and submitted to the Post. Fitzgerald’s typescript, with his revisions, was retained in Ober’s files and eventually became part of the archive at Princeton. The clean typescript submitted to the Post is not extant, nor are there surviving magazine proofs, but by comparing Fitzgerald’s typescript at Princeton to the text published in the Post, we can uncover alterations made at the magazine. First, the sexual innuendo was removed. During the taxicab ride after Jacob has introduced Jenny to Billy Farrelly, she kisses Jacob for the first time: “Her childish intention of giving herself to him shocked him.” He tells her: “You’re young enough to be my daughter.” She answers, “You’re not so old” (340). These three sentences were excised from the text, making Jenny’s advance relatively innocent. Later, during Jacob’s visit to Hollywood, when he is pressing Jenny about marriage, she tells him that he does not “thrill” her. He says: “If I didn’t thrill you, as you call it, why were you so ready to make me a present of yourself last summer?” (351). In the Post the second part of the sentence reads: “why did you seem to care so much last summer?” And at the end of the story, in the passage quoted above, these thirteen words are missing: “Beautiful child who tried so hard one night to give herself to me” (358). These excisions remove Jenny’s sexual advances and Jacob’s reactions, important elements in our understanding of his desire for her. In that same final passage, the typographical rendering of Jenny’s name has been regularized. In the typescript, and in the text quoted above from the Cambridge Edition, her name becomes emblematic of Jacob’s conception of her. The name, which he bestowed on her, appears first as “Jenny Prince,” next as “Jenny Prince,” then as “JENNY PRINCE,” and finally, in larger type and centered on the page, as “JENNY PRINCE.” On the last page of the typescript that he sent to Ober (p. 37), Fitzgerald printed out the final occurrence of Jenny’s name by hand and wrote “large letters” in the margin of the page. This typographic differentiation disappeared between typescript and print, perhaps when Ober had the clean typescript made

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Fig.6  Final page of the revised typescript of “Jacob’s Ladder,” with Fitzgerald’s directions for type size. F. Scott Fitzgerald Papers, Special Collections, Princeton University Library.

but more probably when the type was set for the Post appearance. Fitzgerald’s point, that Jenny’s name is all that Jacob has left of her, is lost. At the last three words of the story, a typographical error produced a peculiar reading in the Post. In the typescript sent to Ober, Jacob finds a seat in the “vast throbbing darkness” of the movie theatre. But in the Post this reading has become “fast-throbbing

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darkness,” which does not make sense. The explanation has to do with the typewriter keyboard. A typist, probably the stenographer who made the clean copy for Ober, seems to have missed the key for v and hit the key for f just above it. Probably the hyphen was added by the copyeditors at the Post. The erroneous reading appeared in the magazine text and in all other texts of the story until it was reedited for the Cambridge Edition. ••••••

There are weaknesses in “Jacob’s Ladder” that prevent it from being among the very best of Fitzgerald’s short stories. Jacob’s loss of his voice to acute laryngitis is not convincing, nor are his threats to have the crooked lawyer Scharnhorst disbarred from practice in New York. Neither Jacob nor Jenny is a compelling character; Jacob is indecisive and petulant, and Jenny is for the most part superficial. But there are strengths in the story, especially in the scenes that are set in Hollywood. Fitzgerald has Jacob stay at the Ambassador Hotel, the most celebrated caravanserai in town, with an Alhambra-like interior, ornate stone fireplaces, and semi-tropical courtyard. He also mentions Grauman’s Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard, where many films (including one of Jenny’s) are given their premieres. Fitzgerald presents a picture of social life in movieland and an idea of how connections are made among actors, directors, producers, and studio owners. Two movie stars are mentioned by name in the story—Constance Talmadge and Norma Shearer. Both women owed some of their success to the fact that they were backed by powerful men. Talmadge, like Jenny in the story, broke into the movie business as a teenager—in the role of the Mountain Girl in D. W. Griffith’s 1916 movie Intolerance. At the peak of her popularity she was paid $100,000 for each film in which she acted. Money, eventually, was not a concern for her: she married Joe Schenck, a wealthy movie producer who was also one of the owners of the Coney Island amusement park in Brooklyn. Norma Shearer was the wife of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer film producer Irving Thalberg (the original for Monroe Stahr in The Last Tycoon). She played chic, sophisticated women on the screen; her career took an upward turn after she married Thalberg, who was influential in Hollywood. It is perhaps no accident that, at the end of the story, Jenny is to be

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married to the director of her latest film. She tells Jacob that she fell in love spontaneously with this man, but one wonders whether that is entirely true.4 “Jacob’s Ladder” is a “literary” story—surprisingly so for the Saturday Evening Post. It traces its origins to the tale of the sculptor Pygmalion in book 10 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (ca. AD 8). Pygmalion, disillusioned by the immorality of the women of his time, carves a statue from ivory of an idealized woman. The statue is remarkably lifelike: he names it Galatea, dresses it in fine clothing, and adorns it with jewelry. Pygmalion falls in love with his creation. He prays to the goddess Aphrodite to give him a woman as perfect as his statue, and Aphrodite decides to grant the wish. Pygmalion, returning home from the temple of the goddess, kisses the lips of the statue and finds them warm and inviting. Galatea comes to life; she and Pygmalion marry; she bears him a daughter; they live together happily thereafter. In this version of the story, there are no complications involving change and eventual mortality, either for Pygmalion or for Galatea. Fitzgerald was familiar with George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion (1914), a retelling of the myth. Henry Higgins, a professor of phonetics, makes a wager with his new acquaintance Colonel Pickering that he can transform the speech of Eliza Dolittle, a Cockney flower girl, so completely that she will be able to pass as a duchess in London society. Higgins pulls off the deception and wins the bet, but the play ends ambiguously. Higgins and Eliza are human and flawed; they do not fall in love and provide the audience with a happy ending. Shaw’s play calls into question the myth from Ovid, suggesting that romance is a deception and love an ideal impossible to achieve. Eliza is remade by Higgins, but she continues to change on her own, as Jenny does in “Jacob’s Ladder.” The play, like the story, ends without a satisfactory resolution.5

4. Norma Shearer is the original for Stella Calman in Fitzgerald’s 1932 story “Crazy Sunday,” collected in Taps at Reveille. 5. Fitzgerald would have known the original version of Pygmalion, which ends ambiguously. A later version from 1941 hints that Higgins and Eliza might begin a romance later on.

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Another literary reference is found in the mention of a musical work. After Jenny has departed for Hollywood the first time, Jacob sits in his apartment “playing the ‘Kreutzer Sonata’ over and over on his new phonograph” (344). This is one of the most difficult of Beethoven’s violin sonatas, composed and first performed in 1803. In 1890 Leo Tolstoy used Beethoven’s title for a novella called Kreitserova Sonata. Fitzgerald knew the English translation, The Kreutzer Sonata, and made it part of Amory Blaine’s reading list in This Side of Paradise. The novella was controversial enough to be banned from the US mail system in 1890. It touches on many of the questions raised in “Jacob’s Ladder.” Tolstoy asks whether marriage is necessary, whether it should be based on love, whether sexual allure is deceitful, whether sexual abstinence is preferable, whether homosexuality is permissible, and whether art can be a substitute for sexual involvement. All of these matters are brought up in Fitzgerald’s story. Edgar Allan Poe is present in “Jacob’s Ladder” as well. The incantation “Never any more” appears four times in the final passage of the story, bringing to mind the repetition of “Nevermore” in Poe’s “The Raven,” his best-known poem, with its lamentation for the “rare and radiant maiden, whom the angels name Lenore— / Nameless here forevermore.” Poe had married his thirteen-year-old first cousin, Virginia Clemm, in 1836. He idealized her, as he did many women in his life. Their union was believed to have been platonic. Virginia died of consumption in 1847, when she was twenty-four, and Poe never fully recovered from the loss. He incorporated it into his art: in his essay “The Philosophy of Composition,” he famously asserted that the most appropriate subject for a poetic work was the death of a beautiful woman—the subject of Poe’s “The Raven,” “Annabel Lee,” “Ligeia,” and other writings. Jenny Prince does not die in “Jacob’s Ladder,” but she is lost forever to Jacob, as was Virginia Clemm to Poe. Also present in Fitzgerald’s story is the shade of John Keats. Fitzgerald had been enamored of Keats’s poetry since college; he could recite long passages from memory. He knew of the poet’s idealization of Fanny Burney, his fiancée, who was by most accounts a prosaic young woman. Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” is not mentioned in

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“Jacob’s Ladder,” but it must have been on Fitzgerald’s mind when he was composing the story. This familiar poetic lament is about change, the passage of time, and the vanishing of beauty. Truth and beauty are preserved only on the ancient urn. As a work of art it will never change: Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare; Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss, Though winning near the goal, yet do not grieve; She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss, For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair! (ll. 15–20) At the end of the story Jacob realizes that he will always have the image of Jenny, youthful and innocent, preserved in her films. People age and beauty fades, but not in the movies. Hollywood films have become the modern equivalent of the Grecian urn, works of art and artifice that are, in Keats’s words, impervious to the passage of “slow time” and will be “forever warm and still to be enjoyed.” Jacob and the other devotees can, for the price of a ticket, attend movies in darkened cinema palaces and worship the stars there. Anyone familiar with Tender Is the Night will have recognized in “Jacob’s Ladder” many elements that are present in Fitzgerald’s novel. Jacob is a version of Dick Diver, just as Jenny is a version of Rosemary Hoyt. Jacob, like Dick, is a man who likes to arrange things; also like Dick, he is sexually hesitant and perhaps ambivalent about women. Jenny is an ingénue who is willing, like Rosemary, to offer herself to an older man, but in both narratives the man refuses. Dick has difficulty accepting change in Rosemary and is jealous of a young Latin actor named Nicotera who is pursuing her—as Raffino is pursuing Jenny in the story. Rosemary and Jenny are both

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focused on their careers and are careful about their behavior. Jacob saves Jenny from a scandal in “Jacob’s Ladder,” just as Dick rescues Rosemary from a scandal in Tender Is the Night. Jacob and Dick, however, have lost their momentum and are beginning to drift as they approach middle age. In an added twist, Dick’s relationship with Nicole is similar to Jacob’s with Jenny. Dick regards Nicole as his creation; he credits himself with having restored her to health and sanity. Like Jacob, however, Dick cannot accept change in his creation. When Nicole is finally capable of reentering life and making decisions for herself, Dick has difficulty ceding control and letting go. Readers familiar with Fitzgerald’s life will have noticed how heavily he has drawn on his personal experience in “Jacob’s Ladder.” The name “Jenny Prince,” for example, is derived from the name “Ginevra King.” She was Fitzgerald’s first serious sweetheart; he met her in January 1915, when she had just turned sixteen. She was a popular and socially adept girl from a wealthy Chicago family. He and she were infatuated with each other and carried on an extended epistolary romance during 1915 and 1916. The romance did not end until January 1917. Ginevra was the model for one of Fitzgerald’s first fictional heroines, Isabelle Borgé in “Babes in the Woods,” a story that he later incorporated into This Side of Paradise. After their romance was over, Ginevra became an abstraction for Fitzgerald. He must have thought of her as his creation: he continued to base characters on her (including, in part, Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby) for the rest of his career. Fitzgerald composed “Jacob’s Ladder” in June 1927, shortly after returning from a stint in Hollywood where he had attempted to write a movie treatment, called “Lipstick,” for Constance Talmadge. Fitzgerald had met a seventeen-year-old starlet named Lois Moran while working on the movie. He was struck by her beauty and poise and became fixated on her—so much so that Zelda, his wife, became quite jealous. Fitzgerald praised Lois Moran’s ambition and her work habits, by implication suggesting to Zelda that she had done little with her own talents. Lois is the immediate model for Jenny Prince; she would later stand as the original for Rosemary Hoyt in Tender Is the Night. Lois Moran was not Fitzgerald’s creation, but Zelda was, at

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least in his own mind. He had made her a celebrity during the early years of his career and (as with Ginevra King) had based many of his fictional characters on her. By 1927, however, she was beginning to tire of this role and to resent having to play it in public. She had changed in the years since she and Fitzgerald had met. Fitzgerald had difficulty in accepting his wife’s new maturity. Fitzgerald had a tendency to give advice to women and to shape (or attempt to shape) their lives and personalities. He gave this treatment to his sister Annabel, offering advice to her about her appearance and social skills when she was in her teens. His story “Bernice Bobs Her Hair” (1919) is based on a long letter that he wrote to Annabel in 1915. In the letter he tells her how to dress, carry on conversation, and conduct herself at dances.6 Fitzgerald also played this role with his daughter, Scottie. After Zelda’s breakdown in 1930, Fitzgerald functioned for the most part as a single parent. He supervised Scottie’s schooling and watched her behavior carefully during her teenage years; later, when she was in prep school and college, he attempted to manage her life and education from Hollywood, where he was then working. In a series of long and hortatory letters, he lectured her about what she should study and with whom she should associate. Not surprisingly, she rebelled, and he was not happy about it.7 Sheilah Graham, with whom he was involved during his last period in Hollywood, from 1937 until 1940, had received only a rudimentary education during her childhood and adolescence in England. Fitzgerald took it upon himself to fashion a college curriculum for Sheilah—née Lily Sheil, born in a London slum in 1904. He constructed reading lists for her in history, literature, art, and philosophy. They searched used bookstores for texts and other materials, and they read the books together, with Fitzgerald acting as tutor. They attended concerts and visited museums; Fitzgerald supplied instruction and commentary. Graham, who was in her mid-thirties, was not as susceptible to Fitzgerald’s coaching as was 6. Correspondence of F. Scott Fitzgerald, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli and Margaret M. Dugan (New York: Random House, 1980), 15–18. 7. Fitzgerald’s letters to his daughter were first published in The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald, ed. Andrew Turnbull (New York: Scribner, 1962), 3–102.

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his daughter, but by her own later account she was grateful for his attention and concern. Both of them enjoyed the museums and concerts, the reading, and the discussion of the texts he had chosen for her.8 ••••••

Studying the restored text of “Jacob’s Ladder” reveals elements of sexual suggestion and innuendo not present in the Post text. Investigating the literary references in the story helps to uncover its antecedents and the context within which Fitzgerald wrote it. Examining the resemblances between “Jacob’s Ladder” and Tender Is the Night highlights themes and concerns in both pieces of fiction. And tracing the connections between the story and Fitzgerald’s own experiences, particularly his wish to sponsor and mold women in his life, makes the story more complex.

8. Sheilah Graham, College of One (New York: Viking, 1967).

NINE

Decisions, Decisions Editing The Great Gatsby

The surface of The Great Gatsby, calm and shimmering, conceals a mosh pit of textual variants. These changes in words, punctuation, and spacing originate at various points along the line of textual transmission—from composition to revision to first edition to later typesettings and reprintings. No single variant or group of variants is essential to the meaning of the novel; no single emendation or pattern of emendations will change the received interpretations of characters, narrative technique, and theme. All the same, these variants have a cumulative and pervasive effect on the text. Anyone who aspires to produce an edition of the novel should become familiar with its textual history and its patterns of variants, if the edition is to be reliable. On January 1, 2021, The Great Gatsby entered the public domain in the United States. The novel today is not protected by copyright and is no longer the exclusive property of Fitzgerald’s heirs or of Scribner, the originating publisher. Before 2021, anyone interested in editing the text needed permission from the F. Scott Fitzgerald Literary Trust and from Scribner, the copyright holder. Such permission, when granted, meant that the would-be editor could count on supervision from the heirs and the publisher and would need

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the approval of both before publication. Today, anyone can edit the text of the novel and any publisher can print and sell an edition of it. No permission, supervision, or approval is required. No royalty need be paid to the Trust or to Scribner. The Great Gatsby enjoyed an extraordinarily long period under the protection of copyright. Scribner published the first edition on April 10, 1925; the novel passed into the public domain, as I have noted, on January 1, 2021—a run of almost one hundred years. Neither Fitzgerald nor Scribner could have predicted a copyright of such longevity: when the novel originally appeared, its term of protection was for twenty-eight years, renewable for another twenty-eight. Had Scribner neglected to renew in 1953, the novel would have lost its protection just at the beginning of the revival of interest in Fitzgerald’s life and work after his death in 1940. Scribner did renew, of course, extending the protection to 1981, fifty-six years after the novel first appeared. By this time The Great Gatsby was well on its way to becoming a national scripture. Had the copyright expired on the first day of 1982, we would by now have seen many editors have a go at the text. In the late 1970s, however, the US Congress began to take steps toward adopting the Berne Convention, an international agreement that would, for works published after the last day of 1922, extend copyright to the author’s life plus sixty years—in Fitzgerald’s case, to the year 2000. It took until 1989 for the United States to sign on to the Berne Convention; in the years between 1981 and 1989, passage into the public domain was postponed for “at-risk” works such as The Great Gatsby. When the Berne Convention finally went into effect in the United States, the copyright for Fitzgerald’s novel was extended until 2000. Then, in 1998, came the Sonny Bono Act. This law extended the term of US copyright to the author’s life plus ninety-five years, rescuing The Great Gatsby once more and extending its protection to the last day of 2020. It should be noted that the chief beneficiaries of this piece of legislation were the holders of rights to musical and dramatic works, movies, photographs, and architectural works. This applied, for example, to the enormous catalogue of images and music owned by the Walt Disney Corporation. Rights to Mickey, Minnie, Goofy, and the rest of the gang were made safe for an additional

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twenty years, thanks to the Sonny Bono Act. The Great Gatsby was swept up with this great body of intellectual property and given a reprieve of two more decades. Copyright on The Great Gatsby has now expired. The novel now belongs to the people. Also passing into the public domain in 2021 were Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time, Sinclair Lewis’s Arrowsmith, Virginia Woolf ’s Mrs. Dalloway, and Franz Kafka’s The Trial. All appeared in the United States for the first time in 1925. A great many works of literature, along with much other intellectual property, passes into the public domain on the first day of each year. The Great Gatsby, however, is a special case. The editions published by Scribner have in recent years sold upward of 500,000 copies per year on the US market. The novel is readable and teachable; often it is assigned to students during the junior year of high school. The Great Gatsby has an appealing narrator, memorable characters, and a suspenseful plot. It also has a hero in a pink suit and a dock with a green light at the end. The themes and lessons in the novel are not difficult to understand. They involve social class and status-seeking, money and glamour, love and memory, aspiration and yearning. Any publisher would want to have such a book on the backlist. Everything necessary to produce a text of The Great Gatsby is now available to a would-be editor. Two facsimiles of the surviving holograph have been published, along with an annotated transcription of the holograph text, with all misspellings and slips of the pen preserved. The holograph is available in digital images on the website of Princeton University Library Special Collections. A facsimile of Fitzgerald’s set of marked galley proofs has been published. As with the holograph, Princeton University Library has made available digital scans of the marked galleys on its website. The penultimate version of the novel, called Trimalchio, was published in the Cambridge series in 2000. A facsimile of the first-edition text was published by Collectors Reprints in 1991. Tables of Fitzgerald’s handwritten emendations in his personal copy of The Great Gatsby have been published in both editions of the novel from Cambridge University Press. The correspondence between Fitzgerald and

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Maxwell Perkins, his editor at Scribner, was published in 1971. Two scholarly editions of the novel (taking markedly different approaches to the text) have been published in the Cambridge Edition; much information is available in the paratextual elements of these two volumes, especially in the notes and apparatus. All of this material is available to anyone who will take the time to study it.1 It will not pass muster simply to download the text from Project Gutenberg, correct a few typos, and publish the result. Nor is it enough to make a photocopy of the first-edition text, introduce a few “common-sense” emendations, and hand that document to the publisher to serve as printer’s copy. There is in fact an editorial tradition with which the aspiring editor should be familiar. The central question here is how much authority to assign to the surviving holograph and to the marked galleys. The initial volume in the Cambridge Edition, published in 1991, was an edition of The Great Gatsby edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli. This edition awards great authority to the holograph text, especially to its accidentals, and to the marked galleys. These are the two surviving forms of the text closest to Fitzgerald’s hand. The editor of the 1991 edition has in essence taken the texture of punctuation and capitalization from the holograph and applied it, as a kind of overlay, to the first-edition text. Corrections and revisions marked by Fitzgerald on his working galleys are regarded as final and are likewise incorporated into the reading text. The result is an edition that has been heavily emended, differing from the first-edition text at more than 1,400 points. A different approach is employed in the final volume of the Cambridge Edition, a variorum text of The Great Gatsby that I edited and published in 2019. This edition regards the holograph as an early composite draft, not a fair copy, and gives limited authority to its accidentals. As for the marked galleys, they are valuable but are the working set that Fitzgerald retained after he sent the master set (which does not survive) to the publisher. For the 2019 edition these galleys are also regarded as having limited authority. 1. A checklist of materials available to the aspiring editor is given at the end of this essay.

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Thus the influence of both the holograph and the marked galleys has been reduced and primary authority conferred on the firstedition text. For the 2019 variorum text, the first edition has been emended lightly, only ninety-eight times, of which seventy-seven are changes made on Fitzgerald’s authority. Both the 1991 edition and the variorum seek to recover Fitzgerald’s intentions, but the methods employed produce two quite different texts. The 1991 text has a rough, unfinished surface; the 2019 variorum is smooth and polished. Two additional sources of emendation must be considered. Almost anyone would agree that the six changes introduced into the plates for the second Scribner printing should be adopted. Four of these were revisions (such as “echolalia” for “chatter” at 60.16) that were requested by Fitzgerald. The other two changes are corrections of obvious errors. But what of Fitzgerald’s marked copy of The Great Gatsby? Some thirty-seven revisions have been penciled into this copy in Fitzgerald’s hand. These changes, however, do not appear to have been introduced during a single review of the text, when Fitzgerald was anticipating a new typesetting. (No resetting occurred during his lifetime.) Rather, the changes seem to have been marked on various pages during random visits to the text in the years between 1925, when the novel was first published, and 1940, when Fitzgerald died. All of the changes are stylistic; none is particularly consequential. Is a scholarly editor therefore obliged to accept these markings? I did adopt them for the Cambridge variorum, but I would have been happier if the alterations had demonstrably been part of a plan to revise the text for a new edition. Now that The Great Gatsby is in the public domain, editors can argue that Fitzgerald’s revisions in his personal copy are certainly of interest, suggesting that he remained engaged with the text after it appeared in print, but that these revisions need not be introduced into the reading text. That text should properly be the one published in 1925, a literary artifact with historical standing. Following this line of thought, the editor might disallow the four plate revisions by Fitzgerald (listing them in the back of the book) and present the text just as it appeared in the first printing. Obvious typos could be corrected (“its” for “it’s”

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at 165.16, for example), or they could be allowed to remain.2 One could even publish a facsimile of the first-printing text, arguing that it was the text that all reviewers and most readers engaged with in 1925, the form in which The Great Gatsby first saw the light. All of these approaches are defensible. If one does stay faithful to the 1925 text, however, there is the matter of quasi-British house styling. Scribner, like many American publishers of the period, imposed the “Oxford Style” of punctuation and word division on many of its texts. As I have mentioned in essay 7 of this collection, the Oxford Style was a modified system that gave the text a British “look” or “feel.” It was employed in case a British publisher wanted to order printed sheets or electrotype plates for its own edition across the water. The Oxford Style, it would seem, made the text more acceptable to British readers. This is all well and good, but the Oxford Style is alien to The Great Gatsby, a profoundly American novel. In the Scribner 1925 edition one finds “centre,” “to-morrow,” “week-end,” “defence,” “criticising,” and many other British renderings. If one is publishing a facsimile of the 1925 text, then the question is moot. The Oxford Style will stay as it is. But if the text is being reset post-2021, the editor can remove the British forms—and there are a great many of them. This is harder to do than one might think. At various times in its textual history, publishers have attempted to remove the Oxford Style from The Great Gatsby, but inevitably some spellings and word forms have escaped the purge. Some of these continue to appear in new editions today.3 To complicate matters, the editor should know that Fitzgerald favored some British spellings in his handwritten drafts. He always wrote “theatre,” for example, and he liked the double-l 2. Page-line references are simultaneously to the 1925 Scribner first edition and to the 2019 Cambridge variorum edition. The pagination and lineation is the same in these two editions. 3. It’s worth remarking that at least two British publishers, Grey Walls Press and Penguin, thoroughly anglicized the text for their editions. One finds “judgements,” “learnt,” “tyre,” “pyjamas,” and the “Queensborough Bridge” in the Grey Walls edition of 1948. In the Penguin 1950 edition, one finds “colour” and “tyre,” along with periods omitted after abbreviations and commas placed outside quotation marks. US publishers often did the same thing with British-styled texts when having them typeset for American editions.

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spellings (e.g., “marvelled,” at 132.2 of Gatsby). One of the most important words in The Great Gatsby is “gray.” In the manuscript of the novel Fitzgerald sometimes spells the word “grey”—and at other times “gray.” There seems to be no discernible pattern. The Scribner first edition spells it “gray” throughout. I opted for “gray” in the variorum, but another editor might choose “grey.” What about “errors” in fact and geography? Bruccoli was much concerned with three readings of this sort in his 1991 edition. At 27.19–20 of the text, Fitzgerald writes that the painted eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are “blue and gigantic—their retinas are one yard high.” The retina, however, is at the back of the eyeball and would not be visible in a painted rendering. Fitzgerald must have meant the “irises” of Doctor Eckleburg’s eyes. I made no change here for the Cambridge text; another editor, however, might make an emendation or drop a note at the foot of the page—though this would probably irritate the reader, who would resent the intrusion for such a pedantic point. At 43.1–2 of the first edition, near the end of the party scene in Tom Buchanan’s apartment on West 158th Street, Nick Carraway says to the reader: “I wanted to get out and walk eastward toward the Park through the soft twilight.” This is misleading: anyone leaving West 158th and walking toward Central Park would have to walk south for at least forty-eight blocks before turning “eastward”—or would have to walk first in an easterly direction. (The northern boundary of Central Park is at 110th Street.) I made no emendation, but another editor could make a change to “southward” or “southeast” or even delete the word “eastward” from the original reading. Finally, at 82.2 and 150.4 of the first edition, Nick mentions the neighborhood of Astoria in Queens. The references come up during two automobile rides, one from Long Island to Manhattan and the other from Manhattan to Long Island. Both times Nick travels over the Queensboro Bridge. This bridge in 1922 began in Long Island City, not Astoria—and still does today. Should one emend on both pages to “Long Island City”? I did not, reasoning that Astoria is close to Long Island City and that Nick probably would have traveled through Astoria on both trips. That must have been the way Fitzgerald remembered the journey from when he lived on Long

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Island. Nothing is disturbed by this “error,” if error it be. Another editor, however, might disagree and emend. If one does alter the text, however, one should listen to the new reading. Fitzgerald had an excellent ear for language; it is not a good idea to make changes if the sound or rhythm of the sentence is significantly altered. This also goes for “retinas” and “irises.” Which sounds better? And a different question: to which reading are we now accustomed? A case of this kind comes up early in the novel. Nick is describing his first view of Daisy and Jordan, both of whom are reclining on an enormous couch: They were both in white, and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house. I must have stood for a few moments listening to the whip and snap of the curtains and the groan of a picture on the wall. Then there was a boom as Tom Buchanan shut the rear windows and the caught wind died out about the room, and the curtains and the rugs and the two young women ballooned slowly to the floor. (10) Eight words might be missing from this passage. On leaf 12 in chapter 1 of the holograph, the reading “on the threshold, dazzled by the alabaster light,” occupies a complete line, the fourth line on that handwritten leaf. Fitzgerald could not type; he used a stenographic service to produce a typescript from this holograph draft.4 It’s possible that we have a case of “eyeskip” here. The typist might have typed “moments,” the last word in the third line of the manuscript page, and skipped inadvertently to the first word in the fifth line, “listening.” The words “on the threshold, dazzled by the alabaster light” would have been omitted. No grammatical or syntactical error would have resulted. The typescript (which does not survive) would have read “for a few moments listening to the whip and snap. . . .” Unless Fitzgerald remembered the original sentence word-for-word 4. This was the Institut Gaudeo in Nice. See the commentary by Don C. Skemer in the Cambridge Edition volume The Great Gatsby: An Edition of the Manuscript (2018), xxxiii.

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as he was reviewing the typescript, he would not have noticed the absence of the eight words and would have continued with his revisions and corrections. The altered sentence, without the eight words, would have made it all the way into the first edition—as indeed it did. It is also possible that the typist did type the sentence as Fitzgerald had inscribed it in the manuscript, and that he decided to cut those eight words (and the two commas) in revision. In that case, the sentence in the first edition reads as it should. I had a chance to restore the eight words to the text when I published an edition of Trimalchio (the penultimate version of the novel) in 2000. I decided not to do so: the possibility of eyeskip by the stenographer seemed speculative. Nor did I restore the words to the Cambridge variorum text, for the same reason. But I did restore them to an ebook edition of Trimalchio published by Scribner in 2014. Now that The Great Gatsby is in the public domain, an editor can with impunity insert “on the threshold, dazzled by the alabaster light,” into the reading text. The rhythm of the sentence is a consideration here, as is the meaning of the passage. The eight words change the cadence; they also introduce the idea that Nick, our narrator, is “dazzled” not only by the “alabaster light” but by the entire scene—the handsome house, the furnishings and décor, the reclining women, the evidence everywhere of money and privilege and ease. I like the sentence better with the eight words restored. Perhaps another editor will agree with me and put those words in. An important question of chronology will confront the new editor. Early in the novel, Daisy brings up the subject of her daughter. “You ought to see the baby,” she tells Nick, and then adds: “She’s three years old” (12). Later we learn that Tom and Daisy were married in June 1919 and that their daughter was born ten months later, in April 1920. The initial scene of The Great Gatsby is set in June 1922. The child, whose name is Pammy, must therefore be two years and three months old. When Fitzgerald originally drafted this scene he had a different chronology in mind for the novel. In that chronology, “three years old” was correct. In revising the narrative, however, he pushed Tom and Daisy’s wedding forward so that their daughter should now be only two years old. Perhaps this mistake was deliberate. Fitzgerald might have meant to suggest confusion on Daisy’s

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part, though this seems unlikely. Surely she knows her own daughter’s age. It’s also unlikely that Daisy was pregnant at her wedding. The would-be editor can emend here to “two years old,” but this will cause a problem later on, at 140.4–5, when Pammy is brought out by her nurse to meet Nick and Gatsby. “I got dressed before luncheon,” she says to Daisy. “Aunt Jordan’s got on a white dress too,” she adds a few lines later. These two sentences seem advanced for a child only three months past her second birthday. I made no emendation for the Cambridge text, reasoning that most readers of the novel would forget Pammy’s age between pages 12 and 140. Another editor might choose to emend. Some two-year-olds are quite articulate. Back on page 20 one finds another problem. Tom, Daisy, Nick, and Jordan are having lunch. They are sitting on the veranda on a warm, windy day. It’s a pleasant scene, with mostly small talk, but Tom keeps being interrupted by the ringing of the telephone. The calls are from Myrtle Wilson, his inamorata, and Daisy knows it. Nick comments: “I doubt if even Miss Baker, who seemed to have mastered a certain hardy skepticism, was able utterly to put this fifth guest’s shrill metallic urgency out of mind” (19–20). There are four people at table, but only two of them (Nick and Jordan) are guests. Strictly speaking, Myrtle would be the third guest, not the fifth. Is it necessary to emend? I did not do so, but one could alter the text to “this third guest’s” or “this extra guest’s” or “this fifth person’s” or even “this caller’s” and get rid of the problem. At 84.15 of the first edition, one finds a crux involving a speech tag in dialogue. This is the scene in which Gatsby introduces Nick to Meyer Wolfshiem in a cellar restaurant on Forty-Second Street. “This is a nice restaurant here,” says Wolfshiem. Then he adds, “But I like across the street better!” Five lines on in the first edition we find a question from Nick: “‘What place is that?’ I asked.” The following line reads, “The old Metropole.” Gatsby speaks the line, but in the first edition this is not clear. The text in the next paragraph reads this way: “‘The old Metropole,’ brooded Mr. Wolfshiem gloomily. ‘Filled with faces dead and gone. . . . ’” Then Wolfshiem launches into his reminiscence about “the night they shot Rosy Rosenthal.” On one of his trips through the first edition, Fitzgerald noticed the problem involving the unidentified speaker. He solved it in his

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personal copy by deleting the double quotation mark following the first occurrence of the word “Metropole.” This gives the line to Wolfshiem, along with the story in the following paragraph. Wolfshiem now repeats himself, saying “The old Metropole” twice, on different lines. This seems incorrect. Why should Wolfshiem repeat himself in two separate lines of dialogue? Reference to the manuscript reveals the source of the problem. On leaf 76 of chapter 3 in the manuscript, we see that Fitzgerald originally wrote: “‘What place is that?’ I asked Gatsby.” Now it is clear that Nick is asking the question of Gatsby, and that Gatsby’s response is the first of the lines that read “The old Metropole.” Gatsby has apparently heard this story before and is giving the cue to Wolfshiem, who takes it from there and proceeds with his reminiscence. If “Gatsby” is restored to the speech tag following Nick’s question, then it is Gatsby who responds and Wolfshiem who continues with the tale. This is surely what Fitzgerald intended. I restored “Gatsby” after “asked” in the variorum text, despite the fact that Fitzgerald had addressed the problem a different way by deleting the double quotes in his personal copy. The prospective editor of a new text must make a choice here between the manuscript and the marked copy. I chose the manuscript. Sometimes, however, the evidence favors the marked copy. On page 91 of the first edition, in an account of Tom and Daisy’s wedding in Louisville, Kentucky, we learn that Tom “hired a whole floor of the Muhlbach Hotel” for the occasion. Fitzgerald has made a factual error. He has confused the Muehlebach Hotel in Kansas City, Missouri, with the Seelbach Hotel in Louisville. Either he caught the error or had it pointed it out to him. In his personal copy he emended “Muhlbach” to “Sealbach,” misspelling the name of the hotel (as he had misspelled the name of the Muehlebach) but indicating that he wanted a correction. Is this factual error any different from the errors mentioned earlier involving retinas and irises, or Astoria and Long Island City, or easterly and southeasterly? Probably not. But Fitzgerald marked this particular error for correction in his personal copy; he did not mark the other readings. I emended to “Seelbach” for the variorum text; another editor might leave the reading alone and drop a note in the back matter of the book so

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as not to irritate the reader. An editor could even put forward an argument for “Sealbach” as Fitzgerald’s fictionalization of “Seelbach.” Another apparent factual error appears later in the novel. Tom, Daisy, Nick, Jordan, and Gatsby have checked into the room at the Plaza Hotel. The heat is so oppressive that the men open the windows of the room, admitting “a gust of hot shrubbery from the Park” (151). Daisy tells Tom to use the room telephone to order ice for mint juleps. This sentence follows: “As Tom took up the receiver the compressed heat exploded into sound and we were listening to the portentous chords of Mendelssohn’s Wedding March from the ballroom below.” A society wedding is taking place at the Plaza; the music brings to mind Tom and Daisy’s wedding three years earlier. Tom, Daisy, and Jordan (who was a bridesmaid) now reminisce about the wedding. They tell stories about a freeloader named “Blocks” Biloxi who fainted at the event, was carried into Jordan’s house to recover, and then had to be told, three weeks later, to leave. Gatsby is impatient with this talk. He wants Daisy to tell Tom that she does not love him and is leaving him. He wants to erase her wedding to Tom and then marry her himself in her house in Louisville. He and she will “repeat the past” and this time have it come out as he desires. On page 153 we read: “The music had died down as the ceremony began and now a long cheer floated in at the window, followed by intermittent cries of ‘Yes—ea—ea!’ and finally by a burst of jazz as the dancing began” (my emphasis). The problem is that Fitzgerald has the wrong work of music earlier in the passage. If the wedding is beginning, then the proper musical work would be a processional, probably the “Bridal Chorus” from Wagner’s Lohengrin, which most people think of as “Here Comes the Bride.” The “Wedding March” from Mendelssohn’s incidental music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream is the familiar recessional heard at conventional weddings, after the vows have been said, as the bride and groom leave the altar and pass out of the church. The problem is with the pacing of the scene. In the first edition there is not enough time for processional, vows, recessional, cheers, and jazz. Replacing Mendelssohn with Wagner does not remedy the problem. It can be solved, however, by emending “began,” the word I italicized above, to “ended” at

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153.22. Now the processional and vows have already taken place. The ceremony is ending, and Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March” is appropriate. The cheers can be uttered, and the jazz can begin. The emendation to “ended” seems a good solution. The strains of the “Wedding March” signal the formal beginning of a marriage. Probably this particular piece of music was played at Tom and Daisy’s wedding, but that marriage is now in trouble, perhaps broken beyond repair. Nick and Jordan have observed its failure. I explained these problems in the introduction to the variorum edition (xxv), but I made no emendation in the text. Another editor might want to take a deep breath and change “began” to “ended.” If I had it to do over again, and the Fitzgerald trustees would allow me to do it, that is probably what I would do. On this same page (153), in the talk of her wedding, Daisy identifies “Blocks” Biloxi as a box-maker from “Biloxi, Tennessee.” Here we have another factual error: the city of Biloxi is in Mississippi, not in Tennessee. Several earlier editions of The Great Gatsby emend to “Mississippi,” but I made no alteration for the variorum text. Daisy is distracted and uneasy in this scene; she wants to keep the conversation light and inconsequential and to avoid the subject of divorce. Perhaps Fitzgerald wants her to be confused about the location of Biloxi. Another editor could argue, however, that this is simply an error by the author that needs to be corrected, or that it is of a piece with Daisy’s error about Pammy’s age in the first chapter. The next crux provides a chance for significant emendation. The “young Greek” who runs a diner near George Wilson’s garage is named “Mavromichaelis” in the manuscript. Somewhere between manuscript and galley proof Fitzgerald shortened his name to “Michaelis.” At 165.12 of the first edition, however, we find an occurrence of “Mavromichaelis” that made it into the published text. Fitzgerald changed the name to “Michaelis” in his personal copy; everyone will agree that this emendation should be made in a new edition. But two pages later, the name causes a problem. Myrtle has been run down by Gatsby’s yellow car; she lies dead on a work table in the garage. Curious passersby have crowded into the space. Wilson is screaming “Oh, my Ga-od!” Tom, Nick, and Jordan have entered the garage. A policeman investigating the accident is

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questioning Michaelis. He is attempting to write down Michaelis’s name, but the name he is trying to spell appears to be “Mavromichaelis.” Here is the passage in question from the first edition: “M-a-v—” the policeman was saying, “—o——” “No, r—” corrected the man, “M-a-v-r-o——” “Listen to me!” muttered Tom fiercely. “r—” said the policeman, “o——” “g——” “g—” He looked up as Tom’s broad hand fell sharply on his shoulder. “What you want, fella?” “What happened?—that’s what I want to know.” (167) Repair work on this passage would involve more emendation than most scholarly editors would be comfortable with. Still, the business could be accomplished. Here is the passage with the letters altered so that “Michaelis” is the name being spelled: “M-i-k—” the policeman was saying, “—a——” “No, c—” corrected the man, “M-i-c-h-a——” “Listen to me!” muttered Tom fiercely. “c—” said the policeman, “h——” “a——” “a—” He looked up as Tom’s broad hand fell sharply on his shoulder. “What you want, fella?” “What happened?—that’s what I want to know.” Most readers will likely not notice this problem. I made no emendation in the Cambridge variorum, which is meant to be the text of record, but I would be tempted to alter the text if I had it to do over. Nothing significant is changed by the emendations, and the passage is set right. The final two cruxes are easy to deal with. On page 195, Nick is observing Gatsby’s dead body as it floats in the swimming pool on an air mattress. The first edition reads: “The touch of a cluster of leaves revolved it slowly, tracing, like the leg of transit, a thin red circle in the water.” In manuscript and galleys the word “transit” was

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“transept.” This is incorrect: “transept” is a term from church architecture that refers to either of the arms of the cross in a cruciform structure. Maxwell Perkins, Fitzgerald’s editor at Scribner, noticed the error and changed “transept” to “transit” in the proofs—but forgot to add the article “a.” Perkins had the right idea. A “transit” is a surveyor’s tool that is mounted on a tripod and used for measuring angles; probably “transit” was the word that Fitzgerald was trying to think of. Perkins wrote to Fitzgerald on March 19, 1925, explaining the correction. Fitzgerald answered on April 10: “Transit will do fine though of course I really meant compass.”5 Fitzgerald did not substitute “compass” for “transit” in his personal copy, and he did not request that a change be made for the second printing of the novel. One could in good conscience leave the reading as “transit,” but an emendation to “compass,” the word in Fitzgerald’s letter, is easy enough to make. I did so for the Cambridge text. We now come to the best-known variant in the text of The Great Gatsby. It occurs at 218.12, on the final page of the first edition, in this sentence: “Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us.” After Fitzgerald’s death his Princeton friend, the critic and journalist Edmund Wilson, edited a new edition of Gatsby for Scribner. Wilson emended “orgastic” to “orgiastic.” This was wrong. During the proofreading of the novel in 1925, someone (perhaps Perkins, perhaps a copyeditor) questioned the word on the galleys. In a letter to Perkins dated January 24, 1925, Fitzgerald responded: “‘Orgastic’ is the adjective from ‘orgasm’ and it expresses exactly the intended ecstasy. It’s not a bit dirty.”6 Wilson learned of his mistake years later and admitted it in a February 26, 1965, letter to George M. Schieffelin at Scribner: “I ought to report to you an error I made in editing The Great Gatsby. . . . The word orgastic on the last page I took to be Scott’s mistake for orgiastic—he was very unreliable about words. But it appears from a letter to Max Perkins that he actually meant orgastic.”7 5. Dear Scott / Dear Max: The Fitzgerald-Perkins Correspondence, ed. John Kuehl and Jackson R. Bryer (New York: Scribner, 1971), 97, 100. 6. Ibid., 93. 7. Quoted first in the introduction to the 1991 Cambridge edition of The Great Gatsby (liv). The letter is at Yale University Library.

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Wilson’s 1941 edition of the novel was, for a great many years, the standard text published by Scribner and the text from which most post-1941 editions descended, whether these editions were published by Scribner or by others. Nine editions of the novel published between 1941 and 1970 print “orgiastic.”8 The emendation was reversed in new Scribner editions to “orgastic” after that, but “orgiastic” is still a soiled fish swimming about in many old copies of The Great Gatsby. Other sophistications in the Wilson edition have made their way into subsequent texts. Wilson emended the spelling of “Wolfshiem” from the first edition to “Wolfsheim” throughout. Editions that descend from his text follow suit. “Wolfsheim” is indeed the more likely spelling, but Fitzgerald was consistent with the “ie” form in the manuscript, so I left it that way. Twice in the novel, at 83.29 and 205.28, Wolfshiem’s pronunciation of the word “said” is rendered as “sid.” This is an attempt by Fitzgerald to capture Wolfshiem’s Yiddish accent, as with “gonnegtion” and “Oggsford” elsewhere in the book. The Wilson edition changes both instances of “sid” to “said.” We know what Fitzgerald wanted here; in a letter to Perkins dated January 24, 1925, he wrote: “When Wolfshiem says ‘sid’ for ‘said,’ it’s deliberate.”9 A well-meaning copyeditor (or a spell-check feature in the software) might try to correct these two readings to “said.” One should be vigilant in the proofs and not let this happen. The most serious omissions in the Wilson edition come before the text proper. Both the epigraph and the dedication have been left out. The epigraph, four lines of exuberant poetry, are attributed to “Thomas Parke D’Invilliers.” (The poetry is in fact by Fitzgerald. Thomas Parke D’Invillers is a character in This Side of Paradise based on Fitzgerald’s Princeton friend John Peale Bishop.) The absence of the epigraph, which sets the tone for much of what is to follow in the narrative, is a serious mistake. The omission of the dedication—“once again to zelda”—is even more regrettable. She was 8. These editions are Armed Services 1945; Viking Portable 1945; Dial Press 1946; Grey Walls Press 1948; Scribner 1957; Bodley Head 1958; Scribner 1961; Scribner Fitzgerald Reader 1963; Scribner 1970. 9. Dear Scott / Dear Max, 93.

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Fitzgerald’s muse and inspiration; one feels her presence throughout the novel. Seven editions of The Great Gatsby that descend from Wilson’s edition omit the epigraph; these same seven and two more, for a total of nine, omit the dedication. Anyone producing an edition after 2021 must not make these errors.10 A copyeditor (or a grammar checker in the software) might also attempt to correct old Mr. Gatz’s speech. In the first paperback edition of the novel, published by Bantam Books in 1945, “If he’d of lived” (202) becomes “If he’d lived,” and “He come out to see me” (208) is corrected to “He came out to see me.” In the Grey Walls Press edition of 1948, Mr. Gatz’s grammar has been improved at another spot: “It just shows you, don’t it?” (209) becomes “It just shows you, doesn’t it?” Fitzgerald is making a point here, telling us something about Jay Gatsby’s upbringing and perhaps explaining the elaborate correctness of his speech. It’s best to leave Mr. Gatz’s words as they appear in the first edition. With the text in the public domain, there will also be opportunities to bowdlerize The Great Gatsby. In the first edition, about midway through the party scene at Tom and Myrtle’s apartment, Myrtle’s sister, who is named Catherine, tells Nick: “Neither of them can stand the person they’re married to” (41). Mrs. McKee, who lives in an apartment upstairs and who has come to the party, overhears what Catherine has said and offers some remarks of her own: “‘I almost made a mistake, too,’ she declared vigorously. ‘I almost married a little kyke who’d been after me for years. I knew he was below me. Everybody kept saying to me: “Lucille, that man’s ’way below you!” But if I hadn’t met Chester, he’d of got me sure.’” Most editions of the novel from 1925 onward print Fitzgerald’s spelling “kyke” or the more commonly found “kike.” Fitzgerald means for the word to be offensive. Mrs. McKee is repellent and coarse. In the first three impressions of the 1945 Bantam paperback (November 1945, January 1946, and March 1946) the word is “kyke,” as in the first edition, but in the fourth impression, from March 1951, the word has 10. The dedication is missing from the Scribner Three Novels 1953, Armed Services 1945, Viking Portable 1945, Dial Press 1946, Grey Walls Press 1948, Bodley Head 1958, Scribner 1961, Scribner Fitzgerald Reader 1963, and Scribner 1970. The epigraph appears in Scribner 1961 and the Fitzgerald Reader 1963.

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been altered in the printing plates to “guy.” It remained “guy” for the following two Bantam impressions (in March 1952 and March 1954), after which the plates were presumably retired. The word “kyke” was altered also in a Penguin 1974 edition. Here it was changed to “tyke.” The reading should ideally remain “kyke,” or perhaps “kike,” but now anything can be changed without permission. Another place in the text might require alteration. In chapter 4, Nick and Gatsby are traveling into the city in Gatsby’s gorgeous yellow car. Nick tells us: “As we crossed Blackwell’s Island a limousine passed us, driven by a white chauffeur, in which sat three modish negroes, two bucks and a girl. I laughed aloud as the yolks of their eyeballs rolled toward us in haughty rivalry” (83). This is not quite the same as using the n-word (which does not appear in The Great Gatsby), but it is offensive enough to attract attention. It was common in 1925 for “negro” or “negroes” to appear in lowercase; I left the word in lowercase in the variorum edition. Perhaps in future editions, those two words will be capitalized. Still, the passage as a whole, with “bucks” and “yolks of their eyeballs,” might draw unwelcome attention. A new editor might want simply to cut the two sentences quoted above. Nothing would prevent that editor from doing so. Space breaks are important in the novel. Sometimes they signal pauses in the narrative; at other places they indicate the passage of time. Fitzgerald changed the position of space breaks between stages of composition; some breaks in the manuscript are not present in the galleys, and some breaks in the galleys are not in the first edition. The safe thing, it seems to me, is to include only the space breaks that appear in the first edition. The editor should be aware that there is a space break at the bottom of page 183, following the word “forever.” This break is not immediately apparent to the reader because, in the first edition, the first line following each of the space breaks is indented as a normal paragraph would be, not signaled by a display cap or type ornament or by setting that first line flush left. If the type is being reset for a post-1921 edition, then the odds are that the break on page 183 will not fall at the bottom of a page, but other breaks might fall that way. These (only these) would need to be indicated by a line of three centered asterisks

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or by a type ornament. The most important thing is not to leave out any of the space breaks. Four were omitted from the Edmund Wilson edition of 1941 and were, as a consequence, left out of most of the editions that descended from the Wilson edition, including the Scribner Student’s Edition of 1957, which was the standard text for many years. The British edition published by Grey Walls Press in 1948 leaves out nine space breaks. Finally, there is the matter of the dust jacket. As almost everyone who has studied The Great Gatsby knows, the image on the front panel of the first-edition jacket was taken from a painting by the artist Francis Cugat. The painting, a gouache on paper, was created before Fitzgerald finished writing the novel. He saw it in the Scribner offices before he left for France in the spring of 1924. “For Christs sake don’t give anyone that jacket you’re saving for me,” he wrote to Perkins in late August. “I’ve written it into the book.”11 Cugat’s image, which did indeed appear on the front of the jacket, shows a woman’s eyes hovering over a nighttime scene from an amusement park. Probably Fitzgerald took the idea of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg’s eyes from the painting; in chapter 4, he might also have taken the “disembodied face” (97) of the girl from the image. This jacket art, which is iconic in its own right, has become closely associated with the novel and with Fitzgerald himself. Like the text of Gatsby, the image passed into the public domain on January 1, 2021. Any publisher can now use it. There are a great many colors in the image; it would be expensive for a publisher to reproduce it as a frontispiece or as jacket or wrapper art. Cambridge University Press (bless them) used a full-color image of the jacket, in situ in Fitzgerald’s Gatsby scrapbook, as the frontispiece for the variorum edition. This frontispiece leaf, printed separately on coated paper, was tipped into each copy of the variorum by hand—a costly process. Most trade publishers would not be willing to spring for the extra cost. The editor of a post-1921 edition should therefore alert readers, in the introduction or back matter, to the importance of the jacket and should refer them to the internet, where it is easy to

11. Dear Scott / Dear Max, 76.

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find full-color images of the original artwork, which is at Princeton, or of the 1925 jacket.12 Checklist

Dear Scott / Dear Max: The Fitzgerald-Perkins Correspondence. Edited by John Kuehl and Jackson R. Bryer. New York: Scribner, 1971. The Great Gatsby: A Facsimile of the Manuscript. Edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli. Washington, DC: Microcard, 1973. The Great Gatsby. Corrected galleys, facsimiled in F. Scott Fitzgerald Manuscripts. Edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli. New York: Garland, 1990. The Great Gatsby. New York: Collectors Reprints, 1991. Facsimile of the 1925 Scribner first printing text, with imitations of the dust jacket, casing, and paper. The Great Gatsby. Edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Trimalchio: An Early Version of “The Great Gatsby.” Edited by James L. W. West III. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. The Great Gatsby. Cambremer, France: Éditions des Saints Pères, 2017. Manuscript facsimile. The Great Gatsby: An Edition of the Manuscript. Edited by James L. W. West III and Don C. Skemer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. The Great Gatsby: A Variorum Edition. Edited by James L. W. West III. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Full-color digital images of the manuscript and marked galleys are available on the website of the Special Collections Department, Princeton University Library.

12. Charles Scribner III, “Celestial Eyes: From Metamorphosis to Masterpiece,” Princeton University Library Chronicle 53 (Winter 1992): 140–55.

TEN

Le déluge? New Editions of The Great Gatsby

The public domain is a swamp, or a valley of ashes. —Charles Scribner III, January 25, 2021

The previous essay in this collection was written in November and December 2020, shortly before The Great Gatsby entered the public domain. The suggestions in that essay were not available to editors and publishers who were then putting the finishing touches on new editions of the novel that were scheduled to appear early in 2021. Everything on which the suggestions were based, however, had been published and was available to be consulted, including the Cambridge variorum edition, which came out in April 2019, twenty months before copyright expired. I was curious to examine the new editions that were coming out. I anticipated low-priced paperbacks, mid-priced student editions, and high-priced gift editions. I ordered (mostly from Amazon) all print editions that had been published in 2020 or 2021. Over a period of several weeks I received and examined a total of thirty-four new

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editions. Possibly there are other new editions, but I believe I have acquired them all.1 I addressed several questions when I examined these editions. Was a base text declared? How were the various textual cruxes handled? Were editorial emendations reported? Was there an account, even a brief one, of the textual history of the novel? Were there remarks about the image, by the illustrator Francis Cugat, on the original dust jacket? As it turned out, only a few of the editions declared a base text. Only one of these offered a list of emendations, and no edition included a composition narrative. Only one said anything about the 1925 dust jacket. Most of the editions said nothing at all about what text was being presented. In the Cambridge variorum I traced the textual history of The Great Gatsby from its initial clothbound publication by Scribner in 1925 to the paperback published by Scribner in 2018. I was able to perform this exercise with confidence. Given the methods used in commercial printing operations for the majority of that period, I knew that for each new edition (i.e., fresh typesetting) there must have been a paper-and-ink printer’s copy—a typescript or a printed text that had been marked for the compositor. After typesetting, the text would have been proofread and then printed on paper from standing monotype or from linotype, or from an electrotype letterpress plate, or from a planographic plate mounted on an offset press. The result would have been a physical manifestation of the text that would have been bound and placed on a bookshelf. Later editions of The Great Gatsby would therefore inevitably descend, in some fashion, from earlier editions of the novel. Bibliographers demonstrate these relationships by constructing a “stemma,” a tree-like figure that shows the line of transmission from one text to another. Such assumptions can no longer be made. After examining these new editions of Fitzgerald’s novel, I am convinced that the texts have been cross-pollinating in the night. Editions that had been out of print for decades, editions that I thought were dead, have risen from 1. As of April 10, 2021. Other than the text available from Project Gutenberg, I did not examine ebooks or digital texts. These texts seemed to me too vulnerable to change for the kind of assessment I am making here.

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the graveyard. Variants that had not appeared in a printed text of The Great Gatsby in decades have popped up in one or more of these new editions. Sets of variants unique to one edition have become intermixed with variants characteristic of another. I therefore cannot speak with confidence in what follows about the origins of some of these new texts. They have simply materialized. A few years back, critics were apt to speak of the “instability of the text” as an abstract concept. Today, with The Great Gatsby, we have textual instability incarnate. Here are the editions: 1. The Great Gatsby. Edited by Philip McGowan with an introduction by Min Jin Lee. New York: Penguin Books, 2021. Paperback. 2. The Great Gatsby. Introduction by Wesley Morris. New York: Modern Library, 2021. Paperback. 3. The Great Gatsby. Edited by David J. Alworth. Norton Critical Editions. New York: Norton, 2021. Paperback. 4. The Great Gatsby. New York: Harper Perennial, 2021. Paperback. 5. The Great Gatsby. Introduction by Malcolm Bradbury. New York: Everyman’s Library / Knopf, 2021. Cloth in jacket. 6. The Great Gatsby. Edited by James L. W. West III. New York: Scribner, 2020. Rack-sized paperback. 7. The Great Gatsby. Introduction by John Grisham. New York: Vintage Classics, 2021. Paperback. 8. The Great Gatsby. Penguin English Library. London: Penguin Random House UK, 2021. Paperback. 9. The Great Gatsby: A Novel. Illustrated by Adam Simpson. New York: Black Dog and Leventhal Publishers, 2021. Cloth in jacket. 10. The Great Gatsby and Winter Dreams. Orinda, CA: Seawolf Press Classics, 2021. Paperback. 11. The Great Gatsby. Orinda, CA: Seawolf Press Classics, 2021. Paperback. Same text of the novel as #10. 12. The Great Gatsby and Other Works. Introduction by Ken Mondschien. San Diego, CA: Canterbury Classics, 2020. Decorated hardcover. Includes This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and Damned. 13. The Great Gatsby. Ware, Hertfordshire, UK: Wordsworth Editions, 2020. Decorated hardcover.

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14. The Great Gatsby. Edited by Janet B. Kopito. Garden City, NY: Dover Publications, 2021. Paperback. 15. The Great Gatsby. N.p.: Reader’s Library Classics, 2021. Paperback. 16. The Great Gatsby. London: Sirius Publishing, 2020. Cloth in jacket. 17. The Great Gatsby. Cincinnati, OH: Illuminated Content, 2021. Paperback. 18. The Great Gatsby. New Delhi: Fingerprint Classics, 2020. Decorated hardcover. 19. The Great Gatsby. N.p.: Decameron Books / West Egg, 2021. Paperback. 20. The Great Gatsby. N.p.: n.p., 2021. Paperback. 21. The Great Gatsby. Croxley Green, Hertfordshire, UK: Chiltern Books, 2020. Decorated hardcover. 22. The Great Gatsby. N.p.: n.p., 2021. Paperback. 23. The Great Gatsby. Milton Keynes, UK: Auroch Press, 2021. Paperback. 24. The Great Gatsby. Boston: Squid Ink Classics, 2021. Paperback. 25. The Great Gatsby. N.p.: n.p., 2021. Paperback. 26. The Great Gatsby and Other Stories. San Diego, CA: World Cloud Classics, 2021. Soft leather covers. Includes all eleven stories from Tales of the Jazz Age. 27. The Great Gatsby. N.p.: n.p., 2021. Two paperback issues, normal and rack-sized. 28. The Great Gatsby. N.p.: American History Editions, 2021. Paperback. 29. The Great Gatsby. N.p.: n.p., 2021. Paperback. 30. The Great Gatsby. N.p.: n.p., 2021. “Student Edition,” but with text only. Paperback. 31. The Great Gatsby. N.p.: Mr. Mintz Classics, 2021. Paperback. 32. The Great Gatsby. San Tan Valley, AZ: Pure Snow Publishing, 2020. Large Print Edition. Oversized paperback. 33. The Great Gatsby. New York: Clydesdale Press, 2021. Deluxe Illustrated Edition. Decorated hardcover. 34. The Great Gatsby. N.p.: n.p., 2021. Paperback.

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None of these editions pretends to be a scholarly performance, with the kinds of bibliographical data and textual apparatus that one might expect to find in such a volume. These are commercial products, most of them paperbacks, issued by publishers who want to capture a sliver of the enormous market for The Great Gatsby. Still, one feels that care should have been taken with the text of Fitzgerald’s masterpiece. I will admit to feeling protective about that text. Publishers, it seems to me, should feel the same way. A responsible publisher has a fiduciary duty to provide a reader with an accurate, reliable text of a classic work of literature. Scribner, Fitzgerald’s publisher for his entire career, did an exemplary job of publishing trustworthy texts of The Great Gatsby. From 1925 onward the book was never out of print. It was published in cloth and paper covers, in various price ranges, in editions for teachers, students, and lay readers. These editions (other than those meant for the classroom) were not overburdened with ancillary material. Scribner was sensitive to the accuracy of the text, incorporating Fitzgerald’s emendations from his personal copy into the standard text and correcting errors when they came to light. Scribner continues to publish The Great Gatsby in a variety of editions. The 2018 paperback, with an introduction by Jesmyn Ward, a foreword by Eleanor Lanahan, and a textual note by me, is still available. This edition, reissued in 2020 in an inexpensive rack-sized edition (#6 in the list above), offers a text based on the Cambridge variorum, as is the text of the 2018 paperback. Some of these new editions appear to descend from the text first posted on Project Gutenberg in January 2002. That text was updated in October 2020, probably in anticipation of the expiration of copyright. It’s impossible now to know how the Gutenberg text read before October 2020, during the period when prospective publishers of new Gatsby editions might simply have used the cut-and-paste feature to appropriate that text. The Gutenberg text that is available now appears to descend from a paperback edition published by Scribner in the late 1990s. The epigraph is present, but the dedication is missing. Plate changes from the second impression of Scribner 1925 have been incorporated, as have emendations from Fitzgerald’s personal copy. This text gives us

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“retinas,” “kyke,” “Astoria,” “eastward toward the park,” “echolalia,” and “sickantired.” Many of the new editions have special designations. There is a Student Edition, a Large Print Edition, a Dover Thrift Edition, an American History Edition, a Collector’s Edition, and a Deluxe Illustrated Edition. Others are “Classics” editions: Vintage Classics, Reader’s Library Classics, Fingerprint Classics, Seawolf Press Classics, Squid Ink Classics, World Cloud Classics, Canterbury Classics, Alma Classics, and Mr. Mintz Classics. Some of the imprints are familiar: Penguin, Modern Library, Norton, Harper, Vintage, Everyman, and Dover. Other imprints are less frequently encountered: Black Dog, Seawolf, Wordsworth, Sirius, Chiltern, Auroch, and Pure Snow. Many of the editions are one-offs that seem to belong to no series. These give no place of publication or publisher; several of them have blank copyright pages. When I prepared the Gatsby variorum for the Cambridge series, I discovered that seven editions between 1941 and 1970 had dropped the epigraph and that nine had omitted the dedication to Zelda. I had hoped that the epigraph and dedication would reappear in the 2021 editions. Alas, this was not to be. Five of the editions under examination here are missing the epigraph, and an astonishing seventeen have dropped the dedication to Zelda. At first I believed that this was a nefarious plot to erase Zelda’s name from the novel. I am now inclined to think that the problem is ineptitude. When the epigraph and dedication are present in some of the new editions, they are wedged into odd places—on the half-title, for example, or on the copyright page, or at the beginning of the first chapter. The epigraph should appear on the title page. The dedication, if possible, should be printed on an otherwise blank recto following the copyright page. Two of the editions that omit the dedication to Zelda have given us substitute dedications. The Decameron Books edition (#19) has the following on its copyright page: “This edition is dedicated to Alison Fields, whose love of this novel | brought others to read it, which is how literature becomes a shared | means of communication and a language unto itself.” And the text published by Wordsworth Editions (#13) has this on its copyright page:

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“Dedicated to | logan and olivia barbrook | May your lives be filled with wonderful stories, | great adventures and happily-ever-afters, | Love Mummy.” The problem with “orgastic” and “orgiastic” seems almost to have disappeared. Only two new editions have “orgiastic” on the final page, but these two, surprisingly, are published by established houses—Modern Library and Everyman. I had predicted that several others would resurrect “orgiastic” from the Edmund Wilson edition of 1941, but I was incorrect. As for contested readings, five of the new editions have “irises” rather than “retinas” in the description of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg’s eyes, but not all of these editions follow through by emending “Astoria” to “Long Island City” and “eastward toward the park” to “southward toward the park.”2 The slur “kyke” (Fitzgerald’s spelling in the first edition) appears in many of the new editions. A bowdlerization, “tyke,” first appeared in a Penguin text in 1974. It is still afloat and reappears in the new Penguin English Library text, #8 in the list. Along these same lines, I had thought that some of the new editions might do away with Nick’s mention of “three modish negroes, two bucks and a girl” and with the “yolks of their eyeballs”—this from chapter 3 of the 1925 edition, as Gatsby and Nick pass over the Queensboro Bridge on the way into Manhattan. But these words are present in all of the new editions. About half of the editions capitalize “Negroes,” which is normal practice today but was not in 1925. Space breaks have always been a problem in The Great Gatsby. Some of the new editions include the space breaks, or most of them, from the first edition; other new editions omit them altogether; still others mark space breaks with asterisks or bullets or type ornaments. Several of the new editions have extra space between each paragraph, which swells the page count. Many of the editions employ sans-serif typefaces, which make the text look like an auto-repair manual. Some of the editions have ersatz tables of contents; others have “the end” on the final page. Neither of these features appears 2. These are emendations favored by the late Matthew J. Bruccoli. See his “Getting It Right: The Publishing Process and the Correction of Factual Errors—with Reference to The Great Gatsby,” in On Books and Writers: Selected Essays, ed. John C. Unrue (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2010), 117–31.

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in the first edition. The Auroch Press edition (#23) ends with this familiar sentence on a verso page: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” But as one is contemplating this final sentence one is confronted, on the facing recto, with these five lines: old sport, if you enjoyed this book, and learnt from it too, why not write a review for the parties i threw! Only the Norton Critical edition (#3) has something to say about the Francis Cugat painting on the dust jacket of the original Scribner edition. (In the Norton edition the painting, a gouache on paper, is referred to as “washed with watercolor and gauche” [xxiii]). This dust-jacket image, like the text of The Great Gatsby, is now in the public domain. Any publisher can use it. Seven of the post-copyright editions have the image on the front cover, but the reproductions are often blurry and the colors not quite right. Also popular are representations of Gatsby’s yellow car. Five editions feature the automobile on the cover; three have champagne glasses and bubbles; four have the motif of a feather fan. Several of the hardback editions have decorative stamped bindings, silk ribbon bookmarks, and gilt edges. These editions, one assumes, are for the gift-book trade. The Canterbury Classics edition (#12) has a gold-stamped image of a languid-looking woman on the front cover. The rendering of her elegant dress is probably meant to suggest the style of the American 1920s but to my eye looks like something from the Mauve Decade, done in the manner of Aubrey Beardsley. The most elegant of the decorated editions was published in New Delhi by Fingerprint Classics (#18). Representations of a man and a woman in evening clothes are stamped, in gold and glossy red, on the front cover. This is appropriate, but the automobile parked behind these two people is a Dodge Charger, circa 1980, and the house behind the car is a McMansion. My favorite cover is on a paperback published in Boston by Squid Ink Classics (#24).

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The image is of majestic pine trees over which hover the northern lights—in luminous green, of course. The prize for the most peculiar edition goes to a paperback that has no title page, no copyright page, no half-title, no epigraph, no dedication, and no page numbers. Fitzgerald’s name appears only on the cover. The text of the novel begins on the very first page of the book. Some of the dialogue is set off with double quotation marks, as in the first edition, but most of it is prefaced only by a hyphen before the first word. What is truly strange is the text itself. Fitzgerald’s words appear to have been translated into another language and then rendered back into English, perhaps by an antic computer. Consider this passage, typical of many others in the edition: Anyway, Miss Baker’s lips frizzed; she nodded almost imperceptibly in my direction, then very quickly threw it back—no doubt the object she was balancing had almost fallen to her terror. Again, a sort of justification rose to my lips. Any display of self-assurance extorts me an astonished tribute. Or this passage: I glanced around. Most of the ladies still present were arguing with gentlemen who were said to be their husbands. Jordan’s first companions, the two East Eggs, were themselves cruelly torn by an argument. One of the men was talking to a young actress with serious intensity and his wife, after trying to laugh at it indifferently and dignifiedly, finally lost all restraint and engaged in flank attacks—at intervals, she suddenly appeared at his side, sparkling with anger like a diamond, and whistled in his ear: “Yet you had promised!” ” I merely transcribe. The two double quotation marks at the end of the second passage appear just as they do in this strange edition. Finally we have this familiar exchange between Nick and Gatsby: Gatsby turned to me all in one piece:

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-  I have nothing to say in this house, old brother. -  She has an indiscreet voice, a voice full of . . . I hesitated. -  Her voice is full of change, he said suddenly. There’s a surprise at the end of this edition: the final three pages of the original novel have been omitted. The text stops in the middle of the confrontation between Nick and Tom on Fifth Avenue. One doesn’t have to worry about “orgastic” vs. “orgiastic.” I would be keen to know how this misbegotten edition came into being. The cover is black; it bears the title of the book and Fitzgerald’s name. Between the title and the author’s name appear three rectangles in a sandy brown color. Collectors of textual curiosa should acquire a copy (ISBN 9798708844682). In September 2021 the edition was still available from Amazon, but it was necessary to scroll quite far down through the listings to find it. Some of these editions deserve special comment. One of the best is the Penguin Books paperback (#1), with a text prepared by Philip McGowan. Both McGowan and Min Jin Lee, who supplies the introduction, have done their homework. Lee’s endnotes and the “Suggestions for Further Reading” show an admirable effort to put into play the available scholarship on the novel. McGowan has consulted both the Cambridge edition of 1991 and the Cambridge variorum of 2019. McGowan tells us that his text is based on the first appearance of The Great Gatsby on the British book market, the 1926 Chatto & Windus subedition (37). As McGowan has learned from the Cambridge variorum, this Chatto edition was printed from a set of duplicate electrotype plates cast from the Scribner plates, or possibly from the standing type. These plates were used for the second American printing of 1925. This new Penguin text therefore derives from the second printing of Scribner 1925, incorporating the six changes made for that printing (e.g., “echolalia” and “sickantired”) plus one other, the correction of “absorbtion” to “absorption” at 119.5–6, which appears first in the Chatto text. McGowan lists

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new emendations in the textual note (xxxvii–xxxix). The revisions from Fitzgerald’s personal copy have not been included. This edition emends to “irises” in the description of the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg but leaves “Astoria” and “eastward” as they appeared in the first edition.3 Much of the quasi-British orthography has been preserved. The epigraph and dedication are present in their proper places. “Wolfshiem” has been retained, and “orgastic” appears on the final page. The space breaks from the first edition are present, along with a new one that appeared for the first time in the 1991 edition.4 Because the 1926 subedition has been used as the base text, however, the “Muhlbach Hotel” appears instead of the “Seelbach Hotel” at 80.28 of this Penguin text and, surprisingly, “Mavromichaelis” appears instead of “Michaelis” at 144.27–28. Both of these errors were corrected by Fitzgerald in his personal copy.5 The Norton Critical edition (#3) omits the dedication to Zelda. This is not a good beginning. The editor, David J. Alworth, includes a textual note that gives an account of emendation. This Norton edition is based on the second trade printing of Scribner 1925. The emendations that Fitzgerald made in his personal copy of The Great Gatsby are not included. A few mistakes in the second printing are carried over in the Norton text: “Mulbach Hotel” rather than “Seelbach Hotel” again, for example (51). “Mavromichaelis,” however, has been silently corrected to “Michaelis” (89). Alworth’s textual note, which is rather sketchy, reads in part: “Throughout the manuscript I have favored U.S. English spellings, but some British variants (e.g., 3. Two editions, the Sirius and the Illuminated Content, attempt to introduce all three emendations recommended by Bruccoli. Both editions emend “retinas” to “irises” and “eastward” to “southward.” Both alter the first “Astoria” to “Long Island City,” but both neglect to change the second “Astoria,” which therefore remains unemended (Sirius, 27, 36, 60, 102; Illuminated Content, 23, 35, 65, 124). 4. This is the break after “call him” in chapter 9. It would have appeared at 204.11 of the first edition and does appear at 178.2 of this Penguin text. Bruccoli adopted this break from Fitzgerald’s working galleys. 5. In my attempted sweep of new editions of The Great Gatsby, I ordered an earlier Penguin edition. This was the 2010 hardback, with an introduction (quite a good one) by Tony Tanner. This 2010 edition appears to be based on a still earlier Penguin edition, the first British paperback of 1950, which was in its turn based on Chatto & Windus 1926—thus completing the circle. The 2010 Penguin hardback arrived in style. Tucked inside was a $100 wine voucher from nakedwines‌.com, delivery included.

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‘centres’) have been preserved” (xii). The Norton text has most of the quasi-British word division from the first edition, such as “any one,” “down-stairs,” “to-night,” and “to-day.” Attention has been paid to other readings: Wolfshiem’s name is spelled with the “ie,” for example. On the final page one finds “orgastic,” as is proper, not “orgiastic” (117). The rest of the volume (548 pages in length) is of considerable utility. The edition includes much material that Fitzgerald read and was influenced by during composition, along with writings by Fitzgerald that have bearing on the novel, including the stories “Winter Dreams” and “Absolution.” There are also letters and essays, reviews and criticism. Like all of the volumes in the Norton Critical series, this one will be of value in advanced undergraduate courses and graduate seminars. Everything needed for extended discussion and for the preparation of term papers is here. I’ve been able to identify the source or base text for some of the editions, even if that text is not announced in the volume. Source texts can be identified by checking “points” or readings unique to particular typesettings. I like to think of these readings as “tells”— the quirks and tics that investigators in detective novels look for when questioning suspects. The new Modern Library paperback (#2) does not disclose its source text or give a list of emendations. It descends ultimately from Edmund Wilson’s 1941 Scribner edition. The epigraph and dedication are present (both were absent from the Wilson edition). The “tell” here is “orgiastic” on the final page, along with “Wolfsheim” throughout and “said” for “sid” both times. Other signs of the Wilson text are the words “with particular intensity,” missing from page 109 of this edition, and a short sentence (“It just shows you.”) absent from page 152. Four space breaks are omitted in chapter 9, as they are in Wilson’s text. Most of the emendations from Fitzgerald’s personal copy of The Great Gatsby are present, suggesting that the Modern Library text was typeset from one of the later subeditions of Scribner 1941 into which Malcolm Cowley had introduced those changes. The Everyman edition (#5) also descends from Scribner 1941. The “tell” is again “orgiastic” on the final page, though the epigraph and dedication are both present (they are absent in the 1941 edition). The Everyman gives us a text with mix-and-match variants. Much

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of the quasi-British accidental texture has been reproduced (e.g., “neighbour,” “week-end,” “eastwards,” and single quotes in dialogue). Wolfshiem says “said” instead of “sid” both times, and Biloxi is in Tennessee. The phrase “with peculiar intensity” is omitted, as in the 1941 text, but “It just shows you,” missing from the 1941 edition, has been restored. The plate changes for the second printing of Scribner 1925 are here, but the emendations from Fitzgerald’s personal copy are not. Hence we have “wonder” instead of “confusion,” “flesh” and not “surplus flesh,” “Muhlbach” instead of “Seelbach,” and “Mavromichaelis” rather than “Michaelis.”6 The Harper Perennial edition (#4) also has a mixture of variants. Gatsby’s self-admonitions toward the end of the novel (“No more smokeing or chewing,” “Bath every other day”) have been enclosed in boxes, as on a spreadsheet. The dedication is present, but the epigraph is missing. Daisy’s daughter is three years old; Doctor T. J. Eckleburg’s eyes have “retinas.” We have one “sid” and one “said”; Biloxi is in Mississippi; “Wolfshiem” is spelled with the “ie.” The changes from the second printing have been incorporated, as have Fitzgerald’s emendations from his personal copy. On the final page we find “orgastic,” as we should. Editions #19 and #20 present a few mysteries. The first of these, according to its title page, is published by “Decameron Books / West Egg,” a firm that I cannot find on the internet. There is no publisher’s name on the title page of #20, an edition that has no copyright page or copyright notice.7 Edition #20 bears, on its final page, a colophon of sorts. It reads: “Made in the USA | Columbia SC | 18 January 2021.” Edition #19 has the same colophon on its final page, in the same typeface, with the same first and second lines, but with the date changed to one day later: “19 January 2021.” One would think that some of the same people were involved in the making of both

6. Two of the new editions solve this last problem by giving Michaelis a first name. He appears as “Mavro Michaelis.” These are the Large Print Edition from Pure Snow Publishing (#32) and an edition with no place or publisher (#29). 7. Edition #20 bears some resemblance to the “Chump Change Edition” of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. I can find no information about publisher, date, or place of publication in the Wilde edition either.

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editions, on successive days, but this does not seem to have been the case. The Decameron edition (#19) offers an introduction that had its beginnings in the World Heritage Encyclopedia. To this encyclopedia entry have been added “further historical additions and edits” by E. Z. Kunst (155). Edition #3 has this to say in the back matter: “The text from this edition follows most of the edits Fitzgerald made to the novel later in life, keeping only a few earlier spellings and minor eccentricities of punctuation” (155). Exactly what this statement means is unclear. The fact is that the edition was typeset from the paperback edition that I edited for Scribner in 2018. The “tell” is this line: “‘The Old Metropole,’ said Gatsby.” This line appears only in the 2018 Scribner paperback, at 70.10. (This was an early attempt by me to resolve the difficulty about who is speaking this line, Gatsby or Wolfshiem.) There is nothing improper about using the Scribner paperback as setting copy, but it would have been nice to have an acknowledgment. The Dover Thrift edition (#14) is likewise a resetting of the 2018 Scribner paperback with no acknowledgment. In edition #20, with no publisher or copyright information, we are given only the text, plus a table of contents that appears on what is normally the copyright page. The epigraph is printed on the title page. The dedication, properly to Zelda, is on the contents page, just above the table of contents. It’s difficult to be certain, but this edition appears to have been typeset from a copy of the 1925 Scribner first edition, first printing, with some further copyediting. We have “retinas” and “kyke” and “Astoria” and “sid” (both times) and “Biloxi, Tennessee” and “leg of transit”—all from Scribner 1925. The changes for the second Scribner printing of 1925 do not appear, however. The text therefore reads “chatter” instead of “echolalia” and “sick in tired” instead of “sickantired.” The emendations from Fitzgerald’s personal copy are not present. Thus editions #19 and #20, printed on consecutive days in Columbia, South Carolina, have quite different texts.8 8. My initial assumption was that these texts were produced by former students or colleagues of Matthew J. Bruccoli, who taught in Columbia at the University of South Carolina for many years. But the corrections that Bruccoli wanted to see in the

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The next new edition, from Black Dog and Leventhal Publishers (#9), features illustrations and other decorations by the London artist Adam Simpson. The publisher’s note tells us that the base text for this new typesetting is the first printing of the Scribner 1925 first edition. The note goes on to say that this new edition “remains faithful to that edition, including in spelling, punctuation, and other characteristics of the text” (iii). For the most part this is true. Neither the alterations for the second Scribner printing nor the changes marked by Fitzgerald in his copy are included. We find “startingly,” “kyke,” “Vladmir,” “sid” (both times), and “leg of transit”—all from the first printing. One quibble: the ditto marks in Gatsby’s self-improvement list are typeset as curly quotes. I found the illustrations and other vignettes in the text to be distracting, particularly a typographical arrangement on pages 134–35 that has vectors running through the text. This is a gift edition and perhaps is not meant to be read. All else is in order, including the epigraph and the dedication. The Black Dog edition is the best of the illustrated texts. The Mr. Mintz Classics edition (#31) promises on its cover to be a “Complete Edition with Original Illustrations.” The illustrations turn out to be “computer-made” and include an image of a farmer and a plow horse on page 99, early in chapter 6—the chapter in which Tom Buchanan, his rude friend Sloan, and Sloan’s wife arrive at Gatsby’s mansion on horseback. Perhaps that is the connection. Edition #10, from Seawolf Press, includes both The Great Gatsby and “Winter Dreams,” but with no indication of how the story might be related to the novel. The volume is in their The Best of Fitzgerald series, which includes much of the writing by Fitzgerald that has so far gone out of copyright. No editor is listed on the title page or elsewhere in the book, but whoever prepared this text did some study of the published scholarship. Textual clues indicate that this is a resetting of the 1991 Cambridge edition. The child in chapter 1 is “two years old,” for example, and the telephone in the same chapter rings “startingly,” not “startlingly.” The misspelling “Vladmir” text (e.g., “irises” for “retinas” and “Long Island City” for “Astoria”) are not present in either edition.

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appears both times, “Negroes” is capitalized, and there are no quotation marks after “Metropole.” Changes for the second printing are present, as are most of the emendations from Fitzgerald’s personal copy. This particular combination of variants is unique to Cambridge 1991. The only difficulty with this edition has to do with the text of “Winter Dreams.” The first version of the story to see print, the magazine text published in Metropolitan in December 1922, went into the public domain several years ago, but the text that Fitzgerald revised for All the Sad Young Men (1926) was still in copyright in 2021 and did not enter the public domain until January 1, 2022. Seawolf Press has published the collected text, not the magazine text, in a book that was released in 2021. Their edition of “Winter Dreams” was therefore in violation of copyright when the book came out. The Great Gatsby and Other Works (#12), from Canterbury Classics, includes This Side of Paradise (1920) and The Beautiful and Damned (1922), both of which have been out of copyright for some time now, in the same volume with The Great Gatsby. This Canterbury edition came out in 2020, which would technically put it in violation of copyright for The Great Gatsby, but the book was printed in China. Perhaps this made it possible for the publisher to jump the gun by a year? The book has a heavily decorated binding, figured endpapers, and gilt edges all around. The text appears to descend ultimately from the 1941 Edmund Wilson edition. The epigraph is missing, as is the dedication to Zelda—characteristics of Wilson 1941. Fitzgerald’s “Wolfshiem,” however, appears throughout instead of Wilson’s “Wolfsheim,” and at the end of the book we find “orgastic” instead of “orgiastic.” This indicates emendation or perhaps another source text. Finally, we have a text from Wordsworth Editions in the United Kingdom (#13). This edition appeared in 2019. Copyright on The Great Gatsby had lapsed by then across the Atlantic. It’s difficult to tell what text served as printer’s copy. The accidentals have a British flavor (Daisy is “p-paralysed with happiness” in chapter 1), and dialogue is presented with single quotation marks, not doubles. Changes made for the second Scribner printing are present, but Fitzgerald’s emendations in his personal copy are not, so that we find the “Muhlbach Hotel” and “Mavromichaelis” still in their places.

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We do, however, have Edmund Wilson’s spelling “Wolfsheim.” The epigraph is given a page to itself in the prelims, but the dedication to Zelda is again missing. ••••••

This same treatment is on the way for other classic American texts. The Sun Also Rises (1926) loses copyright protection in 2022, Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) and Elmer Gantry (1927) in 2023, and The Sound and the Fury (1929) in 2025. Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), The Grapes of Wrath (1939), and Black Boy (1945) will pass into the public domain in the years after that, barring a change in copyright law. None of these books has the sales potential of The Great Gatsby, but all of them are important literary works. Any publisher will be free to release a new edition of any of them. One hopes that the publishers of these editions-to-come will do better than the majority of the publishers of these new editions of The Great Gatsby. Some readers are probably asking themselves whether any of this matters. Are we playing bibliographical parlor games? Other than the dedication, none of these variants carries truly heavy interpretive weight. The reader who purchases nearly any one of these editions will still get most of what Fitzgerald has to say. Daisy’s voice will still be full of money; Gatsby will have his same smile. Nick will be observant, Tom obnoxious, and Jordan faintly arrogant. Wolfshiem, whether he says “sid” or “said,” will wear cuff buttons made from human molars. Myrtle will be vulgar and George full of despair. Owl Eyes will be the only guest to come to the funeral. The language will be beautiful, the parties spectacular, and the jazz hot. Perhaps a textus immaculatus is not necessary. That said, I believe we owe it to Fitzgerald, and to this superlative novel, to attempt to get the text right. A great deal more care might have been taken by the people who are offering most of these new texts for sale. In preparing the Cambridge variorum, I came to the conclusion that many of the editors and publishers who issued editions of The Great Gatsby between 1925 and 1975 believed that any old text would do for a start and that it was all right to improve Fitzgerald’s novel with a little helpful blue-penciling. I had hoped

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that this would not be the case this time around, but (with a few exceptions) not much seems to have changed. Other new editions of The Great Gatsby are surely in the works. It would be good if the editors and publishers of those editions would consult the existing scholarship, including the two Cambridge editions. They can also consult the essay that precedes this one. Such an effort will help them choose a base text and make decisions about textual cruxes. It would also be good, dammit, if publishers would stop leaving out the dedication to Zelda.

ELEVEN

The Cambridge Edition and the Cambridge Plumber

In this final essay I’ll offer some afterthoughts about the Cambridge Edition. How might the edition have been done differently? How did decisions made early in the history of the project work out over the long term? My ruminations on these matters should be useful to the next editor of Fitzgerald’s works or to the editor of a similar multivolume series for another author. It’s always necessary to think ahead: a course of action must be decided upon in the beginning; work must commence; room must be left for changes as the project goes along. One should not set rigid rules early on that might have to be abandoned later. To a certain extent, changing course is part of the game in scholarly editing. ••••••

The Cambridge Edition of the Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (its formal title) was founded in the late 1980s by Matthew J. Bruccoli, a bibliographer, biographer, and editor who devoted a great portion of his career to scholarly labor on Fitzgerald. The project had the blessing of the F. Scott Fitzgerald Literary Trust and the cooperation of Charles Scribner’s Sons, Fitzgerald’s publisher. Harold Ober Associates, Inc., Fitzgerald’s literary agency, was to handle rights and permissions. The publisher was Cambridge University Press.

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Fitzgerald’s writings had been discovered and catalogued; there was (as it turned out) no significant published work that had escaped his bibliographers. This was partly because Fitzgerald was a good self-bibliographer, listing his publications in his personal ledger and keeping copies of almost everything that he had put into print. Fitzgerald’s correspondence with his editor, Maxwell Perkins, and with his agent, Harold Ober, had been published and annotated many years before the edition got under way. Book-length checklists of secondary material were available. Finally and crucially, a large collection of Fitzgerald’s literary papers was available at Princeton University, his alma mater, boxed and processed, ready for use. Bruccoli published the first two volumes in the series, an edition of The Great Gatsby (1925) and an edition of The Last Tycoon (1941), which he retitled The Love of the Last Tycoon: A Western. These volumes appeared in 1991 and 1993. In 1994 Bruccoli fell into disagreement with the Fitzgerald Trust and with Cambridge University Press. The matters on which they disagreed had to do with emendations Bruccoli was prevented from making in The Great Gatsby, the retitling of The Last Tycoon, and other issues. Bruccoli resigned as general editor, and I took over late in 1994. By then many decisions had been made about the project. The Cambridge Edition was to be a collected edition, not a selected edition. Each volume was to have an introduction tracing the history of composition and publication for the work(s) in that volume. An extensive textual apparatus, listing variants and emendations, was to appear in the rear of each volume, along with illustrations (usually facsimiles of manuscript and typescript material) and appendixes. Historical notes would also be included in the back matter—extensive annotations identifying all sorts of references in Fitzgerald’s writing. And what about the publication order of the volumes? This decision had also been made: the volumes would not necessarily appear in chronological order by original date of publication. If that had been the case, then a volume of apprentice writings would have led off, followed by the first novel, This Side of Paradise (1920), then by the first short-story collection, Flappers and Philosophers (1920), and so on. As it turned out, the writings did appear more or less in chronological order, but this was not a requirement that I inherited.

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As for the texts themselves, the Cambridge Edition was to be an intentionalist edition. The edition would seek to recover Fitzgerald’s intentions for his texts, as nearly as those intentions could be recaptured and reconstructed from the surviving evidence. The texts would be “clean” reading texts, without brackets and other barbed wire and without superscript numbers or asterisk-dagger markers for footnotes. Nothing, in fact, would appear at the bottoms of the pages of Fitzgerald’s writing. Variant readings and annotations were to be confined to the back of each volume, keyed to the texts by page and line numbers. The idea was that Fitzgerald’s texts, rigorously proofread and printed on ink and paper, could be reproduced by photo-offset in a series of paperbacks published by Scribner. No additional proofreading would be necessary. This was one of many assumptions that would change as new technology emerged during the twenty-eight years it took to complete the Cambridge Edition. Collected vs. Selected In his twenty-year professional career Fitzgerald published quite a lot of writing. How much of it should be included in the Cambridge Edition? All of the novels (four completed, one unfinished) would certainly be included, but what of the short stories? Fitzgerald’s major source of income during his lifetime came from the short fiction that he wrote for mass-circulation magazines, particularly for the Saturday Evening Post. Over the course of his career he published some 165 stories. If one of the functions of a collected edition is to provide an overview of a writer’s entire oeuvre, then all of the stories should be included. The problem was that these stories varied enormously in quality. Five or six were masterpieces, perhaps fifteen others were excellent, twenty or so were hackwork, and the others were respectable professional writing. Certainly the Cambridge Edition should include “May Day” (1920), “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz” (1922), “Winter Dreams” (1922) “The Rich Boy” (1926), and “Babylon Revisited” (1931). The Basil Duke Lee stories of 1928–29 deserved a place. But what of the rest? Much of it is mediocre; some of it is embarrassingly bad. One possible solution was to plan separate volumes for the four collections of short fiction that Fitzgerald himself published with

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Scribner during his lifetime: Flappers and Philosophers (1920), Tales of the Jazz Age (1922), All the Sad Young Men (1926), and Taps at Reveille (1936). Fitzgerald chose the stories that appeared in those collections; perhaps we could publish the four volumes and let it go at that? However, some of Fitzgerald’s choices were odd. Flappers and Philosophers, for example, includes “The Ice Palace” and “Bernice Bobs Her Hair,” wonderful examples of his early short fiction, but it also includes “The Four Fists,” a tiresome piece of morality. Tales of the Jazz Age contains “May Day” and “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz,” which are among the best stories Fitzgerald ever wrote, but he had trouble filling out the volume and so included “Tarquin of Cheapside” and “Jemina, the Mountain Girl” from among his college writings, not to mention “The Lees of Happiness,” which is almost unbearably sentimental. In All the Sad Young Men one finds two superlative stories, “The Rich Boy” and “Winter Dreams,” but one also finds “Gretchen’s Forty Winks,” a narrative that will annoy any woman reader. Taps at Reveille includes “Babylon Revisited” and “The Last of the Belles,” which show Fitzgerald at his best, but also includes “The Night of Chancellorsville” and “The Fiend,” both of which are forgettable. Furthermore, volumes that included only the stories Fitzgerald chose for his own collections would not be lengthy enough for the Cambridge Edition. Ideally the short-story volumes, counting front and back matter, would be between 350 and 400 pages long. This meant that other stories would have to be included in each volume. I solved the problem by including, in each short-story volume, the stories from the same period that Fitzgerald chose not to reprint, either because they were similar to stories that he did choose for reprinting or because he had borrowed from these stories for his novels—or simply because the stories were not good enough. This filled out the volumes and made it possible to compare the stories that Fitzgerald chose for inclusion with the stories that he rejected. This accounted for the majority of the 165-odd stories. What of the rest? Would it not have been better to choose the best stories from what remained and let the remainder be consigned to oblivion? Perhaps so, but who would decide what stories made the cut? A poll might be taken from among Fitzgerald scholars, or the

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general editor alone might make the selections. Neither course of action was appealing. Even in the weakest stories there is often a character or a passage of description or a sequence of dialogue that bears Fitzgerald’s touch and reveals a glimmer of his genius. Should these stories be excluded? And what about the nonfiction? Fitzgerald produced some excellent articles and memoirs during the 1920s, not to mention the “Crack-Up” essays of 1936. Much of the other nonfiction, however, was undistinguished, particularly a group of articles that Fitzgerald wrote early in his career on the “flapper” phenomenon. Another question: was a volume of apprentice writing from prep school and Princeton needed? That writing had been collected and published already by various Fitzgerald scholars. Much of it was hastily written and rather silly. And finally, what to do about The Vegetable (1923), Fitzgerald’s only published play and one of the most lifeless pieces of writing he ever produced? The solution was to include it all, to publish a collected edition. This did not mean that every scrap of writing Fitzgerald committed to paper would go into the Cambridge Edition. Fitzgerald’s daughter, Scottie, had decided before her death that nine stories were so far below the standard that her father had set with his other work that they should never be reprinted. I could probably have made a case for including these stories as well, for the sake of completeness, but I tended to agree with her, especially about the “Count of Darkness” stories that Fitzgerald wrote for Redbook Magazine late in his career.1 There were surviving writings, both short stories and articles, that existed only in typescript and had never been published. I included what I judged to be the best of this material in one or other of the volumes. Two of these items were “Thank You for the Light,” a lovely little vignette that Ober could not sell in 1936, and a restored version of “The High Cost of Macaroni,” an attempt at humor that went sour but recorded an incident that Fitzgerald used in Tender 1. The stories are “Shaggy’s Morning” (1935), “The Passionate Eskimo” (1935), “‘Send Me in, Coach’” (1936), “The Honor of the Goon” (1937), and “Strange Sanctuary” (1939). The “Count of Darkness” stories are “In the Darkest Hour” (1934), “The Count of Darkness” (1935), “The Kingdom in the Dark” (1935), and “Gods of Darkness” (1941).

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Is the Night.2 Somehow I forgot to include “Turkey Remains and How to Inter Them,” a short and supposedly funny article about what to do with Thanksgiving leftovers. “Turkey Remains” was not published in Fitzgerald’s lifetime, but it had appeared in 1956 in a limited edition. Why it escaped my gaze I cannot say. If this was to be a collected edition, then “Turkey Remains” deserved a place. The decision to include everything brought up the problem of how much editorial attention to devote to each item. I have mentioned that Fitzgerald left behind a great mass of working papers—manuscripts and typescripts and proofs that preserved preprint versions of all of his novels and many of his stories, essays, and articles. For “The Rich Boy” we have a typescript that was heavily revised by Fitzgerald; we also have a version of the text published in Red Book and a different version that appeared in All the Sad Young Men. For “Babylon Revisited” we have two typescripts, one from the Harold Ober files and another (a carbon) sent by Fitzgerald to Zelda’s sister Rosalind, along with a version from the Saturday Evening Post and another version from Taps at Reveille. All of these versions had to be examined and collated, one with another, to discover how Fitzgerald created the two stories and to bring to light any readings that should be restored to the Cambridge texts. It’s obvious that “The Rich Boy” and “Babylon Revisited” deserve any amount of textual labor. But we also have three typescripts for “The Night of Chancellorsville,” one of the weakest items in Taps at Reveille, together with magazine and collected texts of the story. Must all of this material be examined and collated? And there are numerous typescripts and proofs that survive for the Pat Hobby stories of 1940–41. These stories have a few bright moments but are for the most part undistinguished. Fitzgerald did not collect them during his lifetime, though he might have done so had he lived longer. Must the editor compare and collate all of the Pat Hobby versions, plus the many versions that survive for other work that is less than stellar? 2. “Thank You for the Light” was first published in the New Yorker (June 13, 2012) and is included in the Cambridge Edition Taps at Reveille (2014). “The High Cost of Macaroni” first appeared in Interim (1954) and was included in the Cambridge Edition volume Last Kiss (2017).

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That decision had not been made before I took over the Fitzgerald Edition. None of the short-story volumes had been published yet. I decided to collate everything, to devote as much editorial attention to a humble story written for money as I had devoted to “The Rich Boy” and “Babylon Revisited”—which were also, by the way, written for money. This policy lengthened by several years the time it took to finish the Cambridge Edition, but it seemed the proper course of action. When would such a multivolume edition be attempted again? Who would be able to summon the effort and line up the permissions? What university or other institution would provide the office space and travel money? The alternate course would have been simply to reprint the last published version of a story to appear in Fitzgerald’s lifetime—correcting typos and misspellings but doing little else. Perhaps that would have been the better thing to do. Editorial interference between typescript and print was discovered for a few stories in the Cambridge Edition, along with errors by typists and compositors, but this sort of thing occurred for the most part in the minor stories. Annotations Fitzgerald’s writings beg for historical annotation. His novels, stories, essays, and articles are filled with references to statesmen, politicians, philosophers, composers, authors, Broadway stars, cinema idols, sports heroes, criminals, reformers, entertainers, orchestra leaders, books, poems, musical compositions, works of art, elections, battles, and treaties. Most of these references would have been familiar to his readers during the 1920s and 1930s, but people who study Fitzgerald’s work today need help—just as readers of Shakespeare and Milton and Swift and Byron and George Eliot do. Before the coming of the internet, most scholarly editions included historical notes; these were especially helpful to teachers, who could display their erudition (and fill up ten minutes of class time) by elaborating upon a reference by Fitzgerald to Ulysses S. Grant or Woodrow Wilson or Gilda Gray or the False Armistice. For the first several volumes published under my editorship, my assistants and I spent a great amount of time in the library. We searched out information about Cardinal Mercier, the Midnight

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Frolic (a risqué nightclub in New York), the illustrator Maxfield Parrish, the actress Theda Bara, the train schedule for the Broadway Limited, and the architecture of the Petit Trianon. Today all of those references are easily identified on the internet, often with photographs, documentation, and more information than a publisher would want or need to include in a printed edition. Most literary works (and summaries of them) that are mentioned in Fitzgerald’s writing can now be called up quickly on Google Books or found elsewhere in digital form. Musical compositions, classical and popular, can be listened to on one’s cell phone.3 In compiling the annotations for This Side of Paradise we had great difficulty identifying a reference to “the chariot-race sign on Broadway” in the first edition. We checked histories of New York City and guidebooks from the period before finding, in an old reference volume, an entry for “The Fiery Chariot Race in New York,” one of the first big electric signs ever erected in the city. This one, inspired by General Lew Wallace’s novel Ben-Hur, depicted the famous scene from the book in which horses and drivers and chariots speed around a Roman arena. On this particular sign, flames belched from braziers on either end, and dust whorls rose from beneath the horses’ hoofs. At the top of the sign was a flashing message board advertising everything from toothpaste to cigarettes to underwear. The sign was mounted atop the Hotel Normandie in Herald Square; it cast a lurid glow over the region at night and was constantly gawked at by tourists. Back in the mid-1990s it took legwork and a bit of luck to discover this information. Today one can enter “chariot race sign broadway” in the Google search box, and all sorts of information about the sign will pop up, along with photographs and newspaper articles. With this kind of information

3. Recently, while reading Lethal White, a thriller by J. K. Rowling (writing as Robert Galbraith), I came across the following sentence in chapter 3: “A pair of gigantic, crumbling stone skulls sat on top of carved bones on gateposts, beyond which a tall square tower rose.” The character in the scene is walking through Deptford, in southeast London. It took only a minute to locate St. Nicholas Church, where the two stone skulls are to be found. The internet entry gave a short history of the church and the gateposts and supplied numerous photographs of the skulls, the church, and the Deptford area.

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almost instantly available, are printed notes in the rear of an edition even needed? One alternative that presented itself about midway through the Cambridge Edition, after the internet really got going, was to establish a website on which references in Fitzgerald’s texts could be identified and explained at length. The idea was to have brief notes (or possibly no notes) in the printed volumes and infinitely expandable notes on the website. Such a website, however, would have necessitated a great deal of updating and maintenance, even after the edition had been completed, and would have left no printed record. For that reason I stuck with printed notes but made frequent use of the internet for initial identifications and later amplifications. For the next attempt to edit Fitzgerald’s entire oeuvre, however, such a website might be a good idea. There might not be a need for historical notes at all in this later editorial project. Intentionalist or Documentary? When I inherited the Cambridge Edition, the decision had already been made that it would be an intentionalist edition. That would have been my choice in any case. An intentionalist edition is based on principles of editing set forth by W. W. Greg and Fredson Bowers and elaborated upon by G. Thomas Tanselle. The aim is to recapture an author’s active intentions—the author’s desire to be read and understood in a particular way. This approach, however, requires an editor’s interpretation of the evidence and the text. At a more basic level, the editor can seek simply to know what letters, words, and punctuation marks the author wanted to appear at specific locations in the story or book. Proceeding in this manner requires no interpretation of the author’s literary intentions. For an intentionalist edition, all surviving evidence must be examined and compared; a narrative of inception, composition, and publication must be set forth. Such narratives are fabrications, dependent on the amount of evidence that survives, whether in manuscript, typescript, proof, or correspondence with the publisher. A copy-text or base text is declared; emendations taken from other forms of the text are introduced into that text. This produces an “eclectic” text, one that has not existed before. It approaches but

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likely does not achieve the ideal—the text that the author originally envisioned. Readers of the new text must understand that editing in this fashion is, in part, an act of the imagination. The text that is created and published is always provisional. New evidence might appear, necessitating a new typesetting, or old evidence might be interpreted in a new way. No intentionalist text is definitive. The alternative is to present a documentary edition. In such an edition a single text, usually the first edition or the first magazine appearance, is presented without emendation—or sometimes with correction of misspellings and factual errors, though this can be tricky. Editing of this kind is essentially an archival exercise. An already-existing text is presented as an historical artifact that was encountered by the first readers of the work. Deviations from that text, whether in pre-publication materials or in post-publication incarnations, can be listed in some fashion, either at the foot of each page or in an apparatus elsewhere in the volume. Ideally, no emendations are made. The amount of work required for a documentary edition is roughly equal to that for an intentionalist edition, but the editor makes no effort to recapture authorial intention. The text is regarded as having been “socially constructed” or “domesticated” during the original publication process. The text that is set forth results from a collaboration among (for example) an author, an amanuensis, a typist, an editor, a publisher, and a book designer, along with typesetters, proofreaders, and printers. Depending on the scholarly editor’s attitude toward such matters, the author can be granted greater authority over the text than the other players, or all of the participants can be given an equal say in the result. The attraction of documentary editing is that it requires almost no interpretation of text or evidence by the editor. The chosen text is printed; deviations from that text are recorded; the whole is presented to the user in a neutral fashion. Documentary editions include many of the same features that one finds in intentionalist editions: an introduction, textual apparatus, historical annotations, facsimiles, and appendixes. If the editor explains what is being offered, if the chosen text is reproduced accurately (or in facsimile), and if all of the other materials are set forth in a logical fashion, then the edition cannot

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be criticized. The aim has been to reproduce a group of documents, not to synthesize those materials into a new or ideal text. As with an intentionalist text, a documentary text is not definitive. New evidence, if it appears, can be published later, as can new interpretations of the old evidence. My own preference in editing is to use an intentionalist approach. If a project has been put into motion, a publisher secured, permissions arranged, and a team of workers trained, then (in my view) something more should be attempted than faithful reproduction of existing texts. An attempt to put the literary work through a different “publication process,” more sensitive to authorial intention and more conscious of human error, will create a new text—likely better than any existing text, and certainly different from any text that has come before. The Cambridge Plumber To demonstrate my preference for intentionalist editing, I shall offer an account of an experience I had during a sabbatical period in England. I spent the academic year 1985–86 at the University of Cambridge on a Fulbright research appointment. I was studying the cross-influences between British and American book publishing from 1840 onward. This was a memorable year. I was a visiting fellow at Clare Hall; I had access to the University Library; I had the daily pleasure of being in Cambridge, a lovely place, then a trifle more run-down and seedy than it is today. My family and I occupied a two-story Victorian row house on Emery Street, just off Mill Road and not far from Parker’s Piece. The house was relatively comfortable, but there was a problem. It was the plumbing. The water heater did not work well, and water pressure throughout the house was weak. The flow of water into the kitchen sink was slow. Water emerged from the bathtub tap in a lukewarm drool. If one wanted to take a bath, one turned on the water, took up one’s current novel, and read for forty-five minutes. By then, deo volente, the tub would be half full of tepid water. I rang up the Cambridge Plumber. He came within a day or two, arriving in a small van filled with tools, pipes, and other paraphernalia of his trade. This was encouraging. Soon, I thought, we’ll

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have that water gushing, hot and hotter. The Cambridge Plumber began his inspection straightaway. He was thorough, investigating the insides of the water heater, crawling about under the sink and peering behind the tub. In an hour he returned to me. I anticipated a learned analysis and a strategy for action, but I was to be disappointed. I’ll never forget the mournful expression on his face, or his diagnosis, delivered in the native accent of the Fenlands. He fixed me with a sorrowful eye, sucked on his teeth, and said: “There is nothing to be done.” But, I protested, is there no way to make the water hotter? Is there no device that will boost the water pressure? “No,” he repeated. “There is nothing to be done.” The Cambridge Plumber went on to explain that our rented house had been built in the 1880s and had not been designed to accommodate modern plumbing. The current system had been installed in the 1940s. (House and plumbing, it might be said, had been yoked by violence together.) Since then the system had been emended many times. The plumber could identify several generations of improvements. The loo beneath the front staircase, for example, had originally been a storage area. He himself had transformed it into a water closet some years before. Hot running water, he told me, was not installed in many Cambridge domiciles until the 1970s. Yet again the Cambridge Plumber delivered his assessment: “There is nothing to be done.” He presented me with a bill for his services. As I recall it was for £25, a fair amount of money in 1985. I paid the bill gladly, and with sympathy, because there was nothing to be done. I resolved to bear up. We learned to boil extra water in the kitchen and pour it into the bathtub before stepping in. We dealt with the low water pressure as best we could. We lasted through the year and returned to the States the following June, happy with our accomplishments in England but weak with anticipation for a strong, hot shower. I wish I had made the connection then between the Cambridge Plumber and scholarly editing. It’s not much of a jump. The plumbing in our row house, you see, had been “socially constructed.” It was a collaboration, the product of many actors. It had been emended by many hands, all of whom meant well. It functioned, more or less. It was not ideal, but it was familiar—a product of its times and culture.

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It had to be taken “as is.” The ideal—hot water gushing freely from the tap—was only to be imagined. Is it not the same with documentary editing? The text presented in the edition was socially constructed, the work of many hands. This text was the product of its culture at some point in the past. (It is the culture, not the author, that “speaks” the text.) If there are imperfections, then readers must put up with them. They must make do and carry on. I won’t pursue this comparison much further. After all, under this formulation the ur-text was a privy in the back garden, dug when the house in Cambridge was originally erected. But I do want to mention that the plumbers with whom I had dealt in the past in the United States were all intentionalists. They began by telling me that the previous plumbers who had worked on my house were incompetent and dishonest, not knowing hot from cold or ass from elbow. Typically an intentionalist plumber would vow to straighten things out, usually by ripping out the previous work and installing new pumps and pipes and fittings. My intentionalist plumbers promised that the situation would improve and that the plumbing in my house would approach a Platonic ideal. I always hoped that these plumbers were right. As with the Cambridge Plumber, I paid their bills with a glad heart. Preferences My aversion to documentary editing might be a matter of temperament. I don’t mind taking chances, and I can live with a bad review. If a documentary edition is executed correctly, if it fulfills its stated aims, it cannot receive a bad review. Not much has been attempted; no chances have been taken. The intent is archival. The editor has made only a few independent decisions. The stance is cautious and defensive. This reminds me of the typical springtime department meeting during my time as an academic. An important question is before us; a decision is needed. Someone, however, always calls for more information. What is the history of the problem? What are other departments doing? Let’s gather more data and discuss the issue further, but let’s not take action yet, and, if we ever do, let’s only

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make a few adjustments. The situation now is stable, familiar to us. Let’s think about the matter over the summer and take it up again in the autumn semester, providing someone remembers to do so. Everyone in the room has his or her say, five o’clock arrives, the department meeting is adjourned, and we all go home. Nothing has been changed. I prefer the intentionalist approach. I believe that authors have intentions as they write, that their intentions change over time, and that these intentions can be recaptured, though never perfectly or fully. Using this approach to edit texts involves using one’s imagination, taking chances, and risking negative reviews. But it also offers the possibility of putting into play better texts created by eclectic emendation, texts that have never before existed. This can be said of the texts in The Cambridge Edition of the Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald. All of these texts are new, in one way or another, and can be interpreted afresh. The texts are synthetic creations. Like the texts published originally, these new texts are socially constructed. My argument would be that the process of social construction through which I put the Cambridge texts is superior to, or at least different from, the process through which other actors put them before their initial publication, back when Fitzgerald was alive. I am skating over a good deal of complexity here. I realize that there are many stopovers between pure documentary editing and pure intentionalist editing, if either approach can ever be called pure. I see many virtues in documentary-style editing. But for most of the texts in the Cambridge Edition, I have created eclectic texts—largely because I had a great deal of pre-publication evidence to work with and, therefore, an array of alternate readings. In the Cambridge Edition, I tried to publish what Fitzgerald wrote, not what some editor or compositor thought he should have written. If we continue to read Fitzgerald and to value his writings highly, it might be possible to put all of the surviving versions of his work into digital files and instruct the computer to compare one with another. The results can be made available on a website. Will anyone be interested enough to consult and interpret these data? Most academics want textual scholars to do this work for them and present a text for reading and teaching.

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I like paper and ink. I am sure that the Cambridge Edition will be the last print edition of the author’s oeuvre. The next Fitzgerald edition will be a combination of print and digital technology, or will be altogether digital. After that, and not so far in the future, will come an old-spelling edition of Fitzgerald’s writings. None of us will be around to see this edition emerge, but perhaps our great-grandchildren will. That will mean that people are still reading Fitzgerald, admiring his skill with the language, and learning from his thoughts and insights. That is a consummation devoutly to be anticipated. Par sit fortuna labori.

endpiece

Gatsby Movie (in Skeltonics)* Jay was sexy, Nick was nutty; Tom was angry, Myrtle slutty; Daisy lovely, Still the fairy; Wilson sweaty, Wolfshiem hairy; Sets were gorgeous, Music breathy; Driving reckless, Scared-to-death-y! Costumes stylish, Quite the thing-y, Jewelry shiny, Lots of bling-y, Baz was daring, Scenes were speedy; Loved Beyoncé, Yes indeed-y! Acting brilliant, Best I’ve seen; Suit was pink, Light was green. *After viewing the Baz Luhrmann production of The Great Gatsby, June 2013.

index

Italicized page references indicate illustrations. Endnotes are referenced with “n” followed by the endnote number. “Absolution” (Fitzgerald), 19, 77, 159 Ackerman, James Harvey, 10–11 Adventure (magazine), 18, 20, 22, 27 Alexander, Jeanne, 20–22 All the Sad Young Men (Fitzgerald), 29, 57, 106, 163, 169, 171 Alworth, David J., 158–59 Ambassador Theatre, 37, 37n10 American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming, 44 American Magazine, 90 American Mercury, 19, 23, 27 American typesetting, 106 As Ever, Scott Fitz (Bruccoli), 109 Atkinson, J. Brooks, 38 Atlantic Monthly (magazine), 25 authorial intention. See intentionalist editions authorship, 24, 30, 68, 74, 76 autobiography, 70–86, 89, 93 “Babes in the Woods” (Fitzgerald), 75, 125 “Babylon Revisted” (Fitzgerald), 168–69, 171–72 Bantam Books, 107, 144–45 Basil Duke Lee stories, 6, 77, 168 Baxter, Helen, 40 Beautiful and Damned, The (Fitzgerald), 19, 60, 83, 163 Berne Convention, 129 “Bernice Bobs Her Hair” (Fitzgerald), 126, 169 Bishop, John Peale, 12, 68, 143 Bleuler, Paul Eugen, 61–64

Blue Grotto (La Grotta Azzurra), 78 Bookman (magazine), 23, 27 bowdlerization, 112, 144–45, 154 Bowers, Fredson, 174 Brady, William A., 32–34, 33n3, 40–41 British house styling, 106–8, 107n8, 133–34, 133n3, 158–60 British spellings, 133–34, 158–59 Brooklyn Citizen (newspaper), 23 Bruccoli, Matthew J., 70–71, 76, 92, 131, 134, 158nn3–4, 161n8, 166–67 Bruccoli Collection at the University of South Carolina, 2n4, 44, 71 Buck, Pearl S., 34n4 Bulkley, Harold Kidder, 10–11 Burlington Hawk-Eye (newspaper), 22 Cabot, Elliot, 35, 44n25 Cambridge University Press, 130, 146, 166–67 Canby, Henry Seidel, 25 Capri, 78 “Casey at the Bat: Sport Stories That Sell” (Tudury), 24–25 Cather, Willa, 30–31 Charles Scribner’s Sons. See Scribner Chatto & Windus subedition, 106–7, 157 Chicago Daily News, 41 Chicago Tribune, 41 Clark, Angela, 26–27 Clark, Robert Dean, 10 Clarkson, Elizabeth “Litz,” 1–7, 9, 13–14, 16 Clarkson, Worrell, 6 Collectors Reprints, 130 Collier’s (magazine), 23 copyeditors, 97–98, 102–3, 105, 107, 110, 121, 143–44 copyright, 128–30, 152–53, 160–64

184  index Correspondence of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Bruccoli), 17 “Count of Darkness” stories (Fitzgerald), 170 Coward, The (Fitzgerald), 6 Cowley, Malcolm, 159 Crack-Up, The (Wilson), 59n1, 94–95, 170 “Crack-Up, The” essays, 59–62, 65, 89 Cugat, Francis, 146, 149, 155 Cukor, George, 34, 44n24 Curnutt, Kirk, 26 “Cut-Glass Bowl, The” (Fitzgerald), 19 “Dalyrimple Goes Wrong” (Fitzgerald), 19 Davis, Owen, 33–58, 33n3 Davis, Walter, 40 “Death of My Father, The” (Fitzgerald), 78 DeMille, William C., 33n2 Detective Action Stories, 23 “Diamond as Big as the Ritz, The” (Fitzgerald), 19, 83, 168–69 Dickson, Charles, 35–36 dime novels, 29 “Dirt Cheap” (Tudury), 23 Dixon, Charles, 40 dramatic rights, 32, 33n3, 55 “Dream Girl of Spring” (Fitzgerald), 76 Dreiser, Theodore, 19, 103–4 Duke University, 104 “Early Success” (Fitzgerald), 78, 94 earnings, 28–29, 55–56, 56, 72–77, 84 eclectic texts, 174–75, 179 Eldridge, Florence, 35, 35n7, 38 Elizabethan Dramatic Club, 4 emendations, 100–105, 111, 113, 119–20, 128, 130–46, 152–64, 167, 174–76 See also copyeditors; intentionalist editions; scholarly editions/ editing epigraphs, 143–44, 144n10, 152–53, 156, 158–64 Ernest F. Hollings Special Collections Library, 71

Esquire (magazine), 12n19, 59–60, 65 Ethan Frome (Wharton), 34n4 Evening Telegram, 38 Evening World, 38 Evil Eye, The (Triangle production), 8, 10 Fie! Fie! Fi-Fi! (Triangle production), 8 “Fiend, The” (Fitzgerald), 169 Fitzgerald, Annabel, 126 Fitzgerald, Edward, 14 Fitzgerald, Frances Scott «Scottie,» 92, 94, 108, 126, 170 Fitzgerald, F. Scott Davis’s adaptation of The Great Gatsby, 32–58 early struggles, 15–16 editing The Great Gatsby, 128–47 “Jacob’s Ladder,” 112–27, 120 Ledger, 2, 2n4, 4, 29, 55–56, 56, 70–86, 81, 167 new editions of The Great Gatsby, 148–65 and psychiatry, 59–69 pulp magazines, 29–30 punctuating, 96–111 Safety First! performance, 1–10, 13–14 Seven-Year Plan, 87–95, 88 Triangle Club, 1–15 and Tudury, 17–31 World War II, 10–13 See also Cambridge Edition of the Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald; Sayre, Zelda; individual titles by Fitzgerald, Zelda. See Sayre, Zelda Flappers and Philosophers (Fitzgerald), 167, 169 Football Action, 23 Forel, Oscar, 60 formula fiction, 25 Fort Snelling, Minnesota, 11 “Four Fists, The” (Fitzgerald), 169 Franklin, Benjamin, 23 “Free Fiction” (Canby), 25 Freeman, Samuel T., 17 French School, The, 2, 2n3

index 185 Freud, Sigmund, 63, 66 F. Scott Fitzgerald Additional Papers, 44 F. Scott Fitzgerald in the Marketplace, 17 F. Scott Fitzgerald Literary Trust, 128–29, 166 F. Scott Fitzgerald Review, 20, 110 F. Scott Fitzgerald Society Newsletter, 20

Highland Hospital, 61 Hogg, Frank Trevor, 10–11 Hollywood, 65, 75, 88, 125–27 See also “Jacob’s Ladder” (Fitzgerald) Horror Stories, 23 “How to Live on $36,000 a Year” (Fitzgerald), 18, 94

Gabriel, Gilbert, 38 Galbraith, Robert, 173n3 Good Earth, The (Buck), 34n4 Graham, Sheilah, 92, 126–27 Gray, Elsa, 40 Great Gatsby, The (Fitzgerald), 99n4 British compositors, 107–8 Broadway 1926, 32–58 Chatto & Windus text, 106–7 editing, 128–46 new editions, 148–65 punctuating, 100–103 Wilson edition, 107 Great Neck, New York, 18–19, 35n7 Great Neck Playhouse, 37 Greg, W. W., 174 “Gretchen’s Forty Winks” (Fitzgerald), 169 Grey Walls Press, 108, 133n3, 144, 146 Grider, John McGavock, 12

“Ice Palace, The” (Fitzgerald), 169 I’d Like to Do It Again (Davis), 41–42, 57 intentionalist editions, 168, 174–79 Irvin Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, 71

Hall, Porter, 36 Hammerstein, Oscar II, 14, 14n21 Hammond, Percy, 38 “Handle with Care” (Fitzgerald), 59, 62, 94 Harold Ober Associates, Inc., 166 Hemingway, Ernest, 13, 20, 27, 60, 62, 71, 93, 108, 130 Hemingway Letters Project, 20 Hennings, Virginia, 36 Herald-Tribune, 38 Hersey, Edward, 5 Hersey, Marie, 1–6, 9, 13–14 Hersey, Samuel F., 5 Hibben, Jenny Davidson, 7–8 Hibben, John Grier, 7–8 “High Cost of Macaroni, The” (Fitzgerald), 170–71, 171n2

“Jacob’s Ladder” (Fitzgerald), 112–27, 112n1, 120 “Jemina, the Mountain Girl” (Fitzgerald), 169 Keats, John, 123–24 King, Ginevra, 4–5, 125 Knockout Magazine, 23, 28 Kreutzer Sonata, The (Tolstoy), 123 Kunst, E. Z., 161 Lanahan, Eleanor, 17, 152 “Last of the Belles, The” (Fitzgerald), 169 Last Tycoon, The (Fitzgerald), 19, 65, 85, 167 Lee, Min Jin, 157 “Lees of Happiness, The” (Fitzgerald), 169 Leslie, Amy, 41 Les Rives de Prangins, 60–61 Lethal White (Galbraith), 173n3 Liberty, 23 “Lipstick” (Fitzgerald), 125 Love of the Last Tycoon, The (Fitzgerald), 167 Love Story Magazine, 23 Maclean’s, 76 Margey Wins the Game (Weaver), 76 Matthew J. and Arlyn Bruccoli Collection of F. Scott Fitzgerald, 71 “May Day” (Fitzgerald), 19, 168–69

186  index McAllister, Ward, 22–23 McDonald, Julie, 65 McDougal, David Blean, 10 McGowan, Philip, 157–58 McGraw, Curtis Whittlesey “Hack,” 12, 12n19 McQuillan, Philip, 14 Means, Helen, 17–18 Mencken, H. L., 18–20 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), 65, 88 Metropolitan, 163 Meyer, Adolf, 61, 63–64 MGM (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer), 65, 88 Minnewaska (ship), 110 Miss Hartridge’s, 6 Miss McFee’s, 5 Mok, Michael, 62, 62n4 Moran, Lois, 39, 125–26 Morant, Mary, 17 “Most Pampered Men in the World, The” (Fitzgerald), 110 “My Generation” (Fitzgerald), 12n19 My Generation volume, 105 Nassau Literary Magazine, 13, 75 Nathan, George Jean, 19 New Yorker, 110–11, 171n2 New York Times, 34, 38 “Night of Chancellorsville, The” (Fitzgerald), 169, 171 Ober, Harold, 29, 37–39, 55, 57, 74–75, 99n3, 108–10, 119–21, 166–67, 170–71 “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (Keats), 123–24 “On Schedule” (Fitzgerald), 90 orgiastic emendation, 142–43, 154, 157, 159, 163 Osborne, E. W., 38 “Other Side of Paradise, The” (Mok), 62 “Outside the Cabinet-Maker’s” (Fitzgerald), 78 Owsley, Monroe, 40 Oxford Style, 106, 133 Pariser, Herbert L., 65

“Pasting It Together” (Fitzgerald), 59, 62, 94 Pat Hobby stories, 171 Penguin 1950 edition, 133n3 Penguin 1974 edition, 145, 154 Penguin 2010 hardback, 158n5 Penguin Books paperback, 157–58 “Penny Spent, A” (Fitzgerald), 78 Perkins, Maxwell, 19, 33n3, 36, 62, 89, 95, 97, 108, 131, 142, 167 Philadelphia Inquirer, 23, 36 “Philosophy of Composition, The” (Poe), 123 Phipps Psychiatric Clinic, 61 Poe, Edgar Allan, 123 Police Gazette, 33 “Poor Richard” (Fitzgerald), 23 Princeton Inn, 7 Princeton Provisional Battalion, 11 Princeton University, 1–4, 7–16, 39, 44, 65, 87–92, 119, 130, 147, 167 Project Gutenberg, 131, 149n1, 152 public domain, 128–30, 132, 136, 144, 146, 148, 155, 163, 164 public texts, 108, 111 pulp magazines, 23–24, 27–30 punctuation, 96–111 See also Oxford Style Pygmalion (Shaw), 122, 122n5 quasi-British house style, 106, 133, 158–60 Random House, 104–5 “Raven, The” (Poe), 123 Red Book, 29, 57, 60, 98 Redbook Magazine, 170–71 Rennie, James, 34–35, 35n6, 38, 40–41, 47n28 Rialto script, 38n15, 44–45 “Rich Boy, The” (Fitzgerald), 28–29, 57, 168–69, 171–72 “Ringer, The” (Tudury), 22 road productions, 36, 44n24, 45 “Romantic Egotist, The” (Fitzgerald), 13, 15

index 187 Rowling, J. K., 173n3 Royal Magazine, The, 76 Safety First! (musical), 1–2, 7–10 “Salesmanship in the Champs-Élysées” (Fitzgerald), 78 Salies-de-Béarn, 57 Sargent, Margherita, 35 Saturday Evening Post, 6n9, 18, 23, 27, 60, 75, 90, 98, 112–13, 119–22, 168, 171 Save Me the Waltz (Sayre), 73 Sayre, Zelda Broadway adaptation of The Great Gatsby, 57 dedication to, 143–44, 153–54, 158, 161, 163–64, 165 as Fitzgerald’s creation, 125–26 in the ledger, 78, 83 letters to, 108 marriage to, 15 mental illness, 60–64, 67–68, 92–94 Save Me the Waltz, 73–74 Scandalabra, 92 Sayre family, 64n6 Scandalabra (play), 92 Schieffelin, George M., 142 “Scotty’s doll’s house” (Fitzgerald), 78 Scribner copyright of Great Gatsby, 128–30 dust jacket painting, Great Gatsby, 155 earnings from, 29, 75, 77 Great Gatsby editions descending from, 149, 152, 157–64 and punctuation, 97–98 quasi-British house style, 106–7 sources of emendations, 132–34 This Side of Paradise, 13, 15 Wilson Great Gatsby edition, 142–43 Scribner Student’s Edition, 146 “Seven Years,” 87–95, 88, 99n3 Shaw, George Bernard, 122 Shearer, Norma, 40, 121, 122n4 “Short Autobiography, A” (Fitzgerald), 78

short stories, 19, 29, 57, 60–61, 74–75, 77–78, 90, 168–72 See also “Jacob’s Ladder” (Fitzgerald); magazine fiction; sport stories Shubert Theatre, 14n21, 37n10, 41 Simpson, Adam, 162 Smart Set, The, 19, 60, 75 Some Sort of Epic Grandeur (Bruccoli), 92 Sonny Bono Act, 129–30 space breaks, 108, 145–46, 154, 158–59, 158n4 speech tag, 101, 137–38 Sport Story, 22–23, 24 Springs, Elliott White, 12, 12n19 Squires, Mildred, 61 stenographers, 97, 98n3, 107n8, 121, 135–36 St. Paul, Minnesota, 1–6, 13–15 Studebaker Theatre, 41 Styron, William, 103–5 subsidiary rights, 28, 74 Sun, 38 Tales of the Jazz Age (Fitzgerald), 169 Talmadge, Constance, 121, 125 Tanselle, G. Thomas, 174 Taps at Reveille (Fitzgerald), 111, 112, 112n1, 122n5, 169, 171 “Tarquin of Cheapside” (Fitzgerald), 169 Tender Is the Night (Fitzgerald), 112n1 and “Jacob’s Letter,” 112–13, 112n1, 124–27 in the ledger, 78 literary naturalism, 19 and misspellings, 99n4 and psychiatry, 61, 64–68 “Seven Years,” 87–92 and Tudury, 27 typescript items, 170–71 textual cruxes, 141–42, 149, 165 textual instability, 150 textual variants, 96, 103, 128, 142, 150, 159–60, 167 Thalberg, Irving, 121

188  index “Thank You for the Light” (Fitzgerald), 110–11, 170, 171n2 “That Kind of Party” (Fitzgerald), 77 This Side of Paradise (Fitzgerald), 13, 15, 75, 78, 96–98, 107, 123, 125, 143, 163, 167, 173 Times, The (London), 110–11 Tolstoy, Leo, 123 Triangle Club, 1–16 Trimalchio (Fitzgerald), 130, 136 Trogdon, Robert W., 22–23 Trutmann, H. A., 60 Tucker, Katherine, 22–23, 26 Tudury, Moran, 17–31, 21 “Turkey Remains and How to Inter Them” (Fitzgerald), 171 Turnbull, Andrew, 109 Tyson, Joan W., 59, 62–65, 68 University Cottage Club, 10, 15 Vegetable, The (Fitzgerald), 170 Villa Paquita, 27 Villa St. Louis, 27 Vreeland, Frank, 38

“Wait Till You Have Children of Your Own!” (Fitzgerald), 94 Wales, Betty, 35n7 Walt Disney Corporation, 129–30 War Birds (Springs), 12 Ward, Jesmyn, 152 W. Collins Sons & Co., 107 Weaver, John V. A., 76 Western Aces, 23 Wever, Edward H., 35 “What I Think and Feel at 25” (Fitzgerald), 90, 94 Whatron, Edith, 34n4 Willard, Catherine, 36, 38, 40–41 Wilson, Edmund, 12, 59n1, 94, 107, 142–44, 146, 154, 159, 163–64 “Winter Dreams” (Fitzgerald), 76, 159, 162–63, 168–69 Woollcott, Alexander, 38 Wordsworth Editions, 153–54, 163–64 World, 38 World War I, 4, 10–13 World War II, 93–95 Writer’s Digest, 24 Zobel, Myron, 110