Lost Stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald

After reading a sample story from I'd Die For You and Other Lost Stories on NetGalley I purchased the volume upon publication. Edited by Anne Margaret Daniel with insightful commentary and photographs, the volume includes stories and movie script rejected for publication during Fitzgerald's lifetime.

The magazines and the reading public wanted Fitzgerald to be a Johnny-one-note and the darker twist to these stories didn't fit with the persona based on his iconic Flapper stories of the 1920s.

I enjoyed reading these stories, some for their artistic merit and others for insight into the author and his times.

I felt a warm response to the 1935 story The Pearl and the Fur which Fitzgerald wrote about a girl his daughter's age. Daniel informs that a previous and a later Gwen story was published but after three revisions, requested by the Post, Fitzgerald never resubmitted this lost one.

Scott and Scottie, photo from I'd Die For You

The fourteen-year-old Gwen's father is hard-pressed for money. Gwen and a youthful cab driver become involved with returning a fur coat and is offered a reward. She relinquishes the reward to help the boy.

"She was happy, and a little bit older. Like all the children growing up un her generation she accepted life as a sort of accident, a grab bag where you took what you could get and nothing was very certain."~from The Pearl and the Fur by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Thumbs Up was inspired by a story Fitzgerald's father often told of a Civil War-era incident. He rewrote the story as The Dentist Appointment.

Other stories are set in hospitals, such as The Women in the House influenced by Fitzgerald's own health problems and Nightmare set in a mental institution.

The title story, I'd Die For You, was rejected because of the threats of suicide in the plot. It is set in the mountains of North Carolina, where Fitzgerald himself attempted suicide and where his wife Zelda was hospitalized. The story feels as if the author himself were speaking to us:

"What do you mean when you said you'd lived too long?"He laughed but at her seriousness he answered:"I fitted in to a time when people wanted excitement, and I tried to supply it.""What did you do?""I spent a lot of money--I backed plays and tried to fly the Atlantic, and I tried to drink all the wine in Paris--that sort of thing. It was all pointless and that's why it's so dated--it wasn't about anything."

This is a must-read for all Fitzgerald fans.

I'd Die For You And Other Lost Stories
By F. Scott Fitzgerald
Edited by Anne Margaret Daniel
Scribner
Publication April 10, 2018)
$17 paperback
ISBN13: 9781501144356

from the publisher:

A collection of the last remaining unpublished and uncollected short stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald. “A treasure trove of tales too dark for the magazines of the 1930s. Lucky us” (Newsday). “His best readers will find much to enjoy” (The New York Times Book Review).

I’d Die For You, edited by Anne Margaret Daniel, is a collection of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s stories never widely shared. Some were submitted individually to major magazines during the 1930s and accepted for publication during Fitzgerald’s lifetime, but never printed. Some were written as movie scenarios and sent to studios or producers, but not filmed. Others are stories that could not be sold because their subject matter or style departed from what editors expected of Fitzgerald.

Some of the eighteen stories were physically lost, coming to light only in the past few years. All were lost, in one sense or another: lost in the painful shuffle of the difficulties of Fitzgerald’s life in the middle 1930s; lost to readers because contemporary editors did not understand or accept what he was trying to write; lost because archives are like that. Readers will experience here Fitzgerald writing about controversial topics, depicting young men and women who actually spoke and thought more as young men and women did, without censorship. Rather than permit changes and sanitizing by his contemporary editors, Fitzgerald preferred to let his work remain unpublished, even at a time when he was in great need of money and review attention.

Written in his characteristically beautiful, sharp, and surprising language, exploring themes both familiar and fresh, these stories provide new insight into the bold and uncompromising arc of Fitzgerald’s career. I’d Die For You is a revealing, intimate look at Fitzgerald’s creative process that shows him to be a writer working at the fore of modern literature—in all its developing complexities.

A Mini Review Mixed Bag

I read The Other Einstein by Marie Benedict book for the Overdrive Big Read.
I found the book to be easy reading, like romance or women's fiction, while exposing the rejection of women by the scientific community and the cultural racism of Europe.

This fictional story of Mileva Einstein, first wife to Albert Einstein, will provide a discussion platform for discussions on how women have been, and still are, marginalized in the male-dominated science and academia. (See Lab Girl by Hope Jahren for a contemporary memoir of a female scientist.)

Whether Mrs. Einstein was the author of ideas that made her husband famous is conjecture or not is unimportant; this book is historical fiction and the author has imagined characters and events so as to tell a good story.

The issue, then, is this a good story? Yes, and no.

I felt a need to have a better understanding of how Mileva went from wanting to be a scientist, to agreeing to a 'bohemian' life with Albert as joint researchers in physics, to a woman who stays in a loveless marriage because of societal judgement of divorcees.

Also, Albert's motivation in pursuing their relationship and his behavior during their marriage is not explored. We only see him through Mileva's eyes as he first seduces her, beds her, then passes off her ideas and research as his own. Albert's actions become increasingly more abusive and mean. I am not sure if we are to think that Albert actually cared for Mileva and then became selfish and mean, or if he had manipulated her from the beginning because she offered something he did not have: a capacity for mathematics.

The structure for a better novel is all here, and it does spur me to want to find out more about the historical Mileva. But I was left feeling conflicted and unsatisfied.

***

I enjoyed reading a sample story from the collection I'd Die For You by F. Scott Fitzgerald. I liked it so much, I read it twice! 

I am certainly interested in reading the entire book based on this excerpt. I found the main character different from Fitzgerald's Flapper girl stories, and I liked how the story portrayed her moral and personal growth.

I can't wait to get my hands on this one!

I received a free story through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

***

I won a new translation of Augustine's Confessions translated by Sara Ruden from Goodreads. I read an old edition of Augustine's Confessions about ten years ago. I will read this over a lengthy period of time, for it is not something one rushes through.

I have finished Book One. I love how immediate and direct Augustine's voice comes through. His joy, his enthusiasm, his love of God is electric.

"My sin was that I sought not God himself, but in things he had created--in myself and the rest of his creation--delights, heights, and perceptions of what was true and right, and in this way I collapsed into sufferings, embarrassments, and erring ways." 

***

And talking about confessional books, I was given a copy of The Last Bar in NYC by the author through Goodreads. Brian Michael's novel memoir relates the experiences of a life spent in bars, from the narrator's first bar job at four years old, through the wild party days of booze, drugs, and sex that defined the last decades of the 20th c, until at age fifty leaves his dream of the perfect bar for a new life.

There are memorable scenes and vivid characters. Don't look for a discernable plot line; the book is episodic as it follows the narrator's life, from bar to bar, as he struggles to rise above the destructive lures of the bar environment. I kept rooting for him as he rises and falls and stumbles. The book ends with hope that in his post-bar life he found a far better place to be.

***

My local library book club choice for June was The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern. I had first heard of this book when a friend read it when it was first published. She loved the book.

This book club group is comprised of mostly older women. The overall response was lukewarm, with some disliking it and most mildly liking it. One woman who enjoys YA books loved it, and felt the teens in her life would love it as well. 

I talked with a friend who is a Language Arts teacher for Eighth Grade about this book, and she thought her kids would love it.

I myself did not finish the book. I had trouble with how a young female magician was being trained by her father through physical harm she was then to heal by magic. I shuddered with the visual image and could not return to the book.

I had the same problem with another book club's choice of the National Book Award-winning  Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead. A brutal scene of torture and murder of a slave was so horrendous I could not read on. 

It is not that these books were without merit! Obviously! But I find the older I get the more sensitive I am to the horrors humans inflict on each other. Some days it takes an awful lot of faith and hope to believe that we can do better, be better. 

**

Drugs, Booze and Women. Fitzgerald in Hollywood.

Cokes and chocolate candy during the day. Chloral hydrate and Nembutal before bed. Benzedrine to get going in the morning. Booze whenever it got too bad.

Zelda was under medical care; Scottie in private school; both were back East. Nineteen years of marriage, half with Zelda's demons keeping them apart, now he sees her on rare holidays when he can get away. Intimate relations ended a long time ago.

In 1937 F. Scott Fitzgerald was in Hollywood, struggling to get jobs and pay the bills. A has-been trying to write a novel about Hollywood, hired to write scripts but tossed from film to film with no billing, nothing to show for it. His royalty check from Scribners amounted to $1.43.

Like his character Stahr in his manuscript that became the incomplete novel The Last Tycoon, Fitzgerald sees a woman who reminds him of his wife. They fall in love. Sheilah Graham was thirty to his forty, a tough, smart, self-made gal. And Scott was grasping at the last golden ring of happiness, in spite of TB and heart disease: the luxury of love.

West of Sunset by Stewart O'Nan is Biographical Fiction based on Scott's last years. Told in the third person limited, we come to know Scott by his actions, and from the narrator's knowledge of  his thoughts.

I could not stop reading. And the day after I felt such sorrow.

Plenty of Hollywood denizens show up in the story, like Bogie and Mayo who mostly drink and romp around the pool. Dottie Parker and her husband Alan Campbell; Dottie who knew him back in the old days. Names are dropped, Scott is snubbed by some of the most famous.

Ernest Hemingway appears on crutches after a botched operation on his leg. His breath stinks, he is unwashed. He has 'sold out' Scott thinks, a wasted talent. It was Hemingway who told Max Perkins that Scott sold out after Tender Is The Night appeared, who told Scott that Zelda was no good for him.

Scott hears that Tom Wolfe, the Thomas Wolfe of  Look Homeward, Angel, has died. Scott admired Wolfe's work, his ecstasy and gargantuan vitality. Wolfe was 36 years old. Scott had chosen the sanitarium near Asheville for Zelda because it was Tom's hometown, the city Wolfe could not "go home" to.

The whole glorious Lost Generation writers, all edited by Max Perkins, are old and dying and already passé, so yesterday. Scott's daughter Scottie gives him an essay she wrote for Mademoiselle about how his generation was as fashioned and outmoded as the Charleston.

What Scottie did not know yet, thinks Scott, was how war changes everything. It is 1939. She will soon see for herself.

I had found a copy of The Last Tycoon while vacationing Up North and read it for the first time since I was a teenager. It is told in the first person, by the daughter of the main character Stahr. Wonderful name for a Hollywood "tycoon.".Stahr has achieved a legendary status, the Boy Wonder who knows how to fix everything, wielding his power for the greater vision in his head. His beloved wife has died, and has only his work to keep him going. Until he sees Kathleen, who looks like his wife. He searches for her, they meet, they fall in love.

The Tycoon Stahr meets a tragic end in a plane crash. Scott died at age 44 of a heart attack at Sheliah's place, where he was working with a secretary on Tycoon.

O'Tan's novel ends with letters exchanged between Scottie and Zelda after Scott's death. "Only in love are we redeemed," writes Zelda. "God answers all prayers."

How ironic.

To learn more visit
http://www.scottandzelda.com/
http://www.fscottfitzgeraldsociety.org/biography/index.html

Zelda by Nancy Mitford

Books seem to appear before I even know I wanted them--serendipity in action.

When I was researching John Quincy Adams for my quilt that is part of the Presidents Quilts exhibit to tour in 2017 I stumbled across two JQA books; one amongst a thousand in a thrift shop and the other in a small town library sale.

At the time I was reading  Maureen Corrigan's book And So We Read On about The Great Gatsby--which I then reread. At that same small town library sale I found The Last Tycoon, Fitzgerald's novel in process when he died. I read that. And a few weeks later at a church used book sale I found Zelda by Nancy Mitford, her 1970 biography on Zelda Fitzgerald. And I discovered the NetGalley offering of Stewart O'Nan's novel West of Sunset, a novel about Fitzgerald's last years in Hollywood--That review will appear on January 5, 2015.

I had not planned to read all these F. Scott books. I had read his "Gatsby Girls" stories and The Beautiful and The Damned about the time the Gatsby film came out and thought I was done. But since these books threw themselves at me, I have read them. And am glad I did.

An INTERNET search about Scott and Zelda will bring up everything you want to know about them. They were the 'it' couple of the Flapper age: charming, beautiful, carefree, talented, free spirited, young. And for a while rolling in money.

Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald and F. Scott Fitzgerald 

"Sometimes I don't know whether Zelda and I are real or whether we are characters in one of my novels." F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Named for a gypsy queen in a novel, Zelda was golden haired, athletic, fearless, and undisciplined. She chaffed against the Southern Belle expectations, drinking, and smoking, and "boodling" in cars. She was voted the prettiest in her high school senior class. Then she meet the living image of the Arrow Shirt man: Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald. Scott had the whole package: charm, looks, a Princeton education, and he was already a writer. They had in common great confidence and romantic self-images. Scott seemed worldly to the small town Zelda. He was on his way to financial success and fame. He wanted her along for the ride. And she hopped on the train.

Zelda was Scott's muse. His heroines are versions of Zelda. His stories hearken back to their own stories. Their triumphs and tragedies became fodder for their fiction.

The 1920s high life style caught up with them both. Scott was an alcoholic, and a mean one when drunk. His short stories sold like hot cakes. The lived in the moment. But Zelda wanted something of her own. She thought about an affair. She revived her girlhood dream of becoming a  ballet dancer. She became obsessive about her ballet, and insisted they move to Paris for her studies. They fought. Zelda had a break down and was hospitalized and eventually was diagnosed with schizophrenia.

Zelda and Scott never lived together again. He supported her, loved her for their shared past love, but they were unable to live together. Scott was furious when Zelda wrote about her life, using the same "material" he was working with in his book. He encouraged Zelda's painting. Scott fell in love with Sheila Graham and died in Hollywood of heart disease. Zelda died in a horrible fire. People forgot his books.

"They imagined things about themselves, then forgot the thread of the current romance and disintegrated through the fumes of the night in search of the story of their lives." Zelda Fitzgerald in "Caesar's Things"

Until the Armed Services Edition of The Great Gatsby created a buzz among the soldiers of WWII. And the high school and university literature courses took the book up as a good short read. I wrote about that on my post about When Books Went To War by Molly Guptail Manning.

Scott wondered if Zelda were already exhibiting mental instability when he married her. Had he fallen for an insane woman? And if he did, what did that indicate about HIM?

I still have to read Tender is the Night, the book Scott was written while Zelda was showing the early signs of her illness.

Rereading The Great Gatsby

So We Read On: How The Great Gatsby Came to Be and Why it Endures

Maureen Corrigan

Little, Brown and Company

Publication Sept 9, 2014

ISBN 9780316230070

$26.00

When the last Gatsby movie version came out I reread the novel, along with Tender is the Night and Flapper short stories by Fitzgerald that had appeared in magazines. Yet even before I had finished her book Corrigan had me reading Gatsby once again.

How many times have I read Gatsby? I read it in high school several times, first in the paperback used by high school English classes. It was not required reading for my classes, but in my teen years I was reading Modern fiction and spent my much of my precious allowance at the bookstore. Then I joined The Literary Guild and obtained cheaply bound sets of Hemingway, Steinbeck, Joyce, and of course Fitzgerald.

In those days Fitzgerald was not my favorite of the great Max Perkins discoveries, nor was Hemingway. I adored Thomas Wolfe – his language, his snippets of lovely insight. But Wolfe's writing was self-absorbed and emotional and I was a self-absorbed emotional teen, and neither of us had much control but spilled out like a roaring deluge. Some years later I found him unreadable. A year or so back I reread Look Homeward, Angel and appreciated Wolfe again. But I remembered Fitzgerald as a writer about romances and excesses, and his books had left my library many moves ago.

Corrigan maintains that we read Gatsby too young, that it is appropriated as a high school text based on it's diminutive length, before we understand regret and the powerful urge to revive the dead past. As a girl I did understand regret and nostalgia; moving at age 10 having set it's “deforming” foot on my soul. I was too young to appreciate the fine, honing work Fitzgerald accomplished in this beautifully faceted gem, and too young to truly 'get' Gatsby. My reading of a few years ago I was surprised by the mystery of Gatsby and the violence I had forgotten.

This reading I noticed the beauty of the language, how every scene is crystalline and sharp, how we are told just what we need to be told. How did I miss that before? I was labeled a “naive” reader in college, and I suppose even after all those critical classes I am still a naive reader. I am a speed reader, too, and too often forget to slow down and read words and sentences, not paragraphs. Somehow this reading I took my time.

Corrigan knows her subject. Fresh Air book critic and a professor who teaches Gatsby, she has read the novel fifty times. She writes about going to her New York City high school to discuss Gatsby, and like all teachers finds student's fresh perspectives bring up insights and readings she had not thought of. That is the mark of good literature: an ever freshening spring that revives each drinker whose thirst is slacked according to the needs they bring to it. How many readings can a book take? As many readings as we have years since we are never the same person each reading. Life jostles us around, marks it's losses like hash-tags, and we come at things with new wisdom even when looking at familiar scenery.

Never for a second is Corrigan boring. It's like having a great day at the amusement park while teacher surreptitiously pours knowledge into our ear. We venture into the nether regions of the Library of Congress on a last minute mission. We learn how the Armed Services Editions paperbacks spread literature through the ranks and helped revive Gatsby. We hear about Fitzgerald and Zelda's excesses which led them from the beautiful to the damned.

Corrigan reminds us that this is a Post-War novel. Nick goes East because he no longer feels at home in the Mid-West after service abroad. Gatsby and Tom were also in the service. The relationship between “buddies” Nick and Gatsby, Gatsby and his mentor Dan Cody, the rivalry between Tom and Gatsby and Tom and Wilson—this novel is about men. Fitzgerald bemoaned that sales were slow because the novel did not attract female readers. I get that: I don't get The Lord of the Rings mostly because it is about a war story about a bunch of guys. But I don't buy that excuse. Fitzgerald was typecast as the chronicler of the 1920s and people were so over the 20s.

From the perspective of fifty years reading Gatsby I resonate to lines I hardly took in as a girl. Such as Jordan's comment about liking large parties: “They're so intimate. At small parties there isn't any privacy.” I recall life in Philadelphia, its teeming streets, where I could sit in a park and not have one person notice I existed. There is a privacy in crowds. Brilliant.

Gatsby is a love song to the city. Midwesterner Nick talks about New York City, watching people live their glamorous lives. “At the enchanted metropolitan twilight I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others—poor young clerks who loitered in front of windows waiting until it was time for a solitary restaurant dinner—young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.” And later Nick writes, “I see now that this had been a story of the West, after all—Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern Life.” It is a failed love affair in the end, and Nick returns to his roots, still stunned, perhaps more affected by his sojourn East than by the War.

Nick tells us the story of Gatsby from two years perspective. He is compelled to tell the story, trying I suppose to put some form and meaning to the tragedy. Nick had a history of passively accepting the confidence man role. Near the end he tells Gatsby that he is “worth the whole damn bunch of them put together.” Later he tells us, “I've always been glad I said that. It was the only compliment I ever gave him, because I disapproved of him from beginning to end.”

“You can't repeat the past.”
“Can't repeat the past?” he cried incredulously. “Why of course you can!”

“I'm going to fix everything just the way it was before,” he said, nodding determinedly.

Nick is possessed by Gatsby and it is only by telling the story that he can begin to shrug off his burdon. Or is Nick trying to recreate the past, knowing it is futile? Either way, like Gatsby he is tangled in the web of memory and can't get free. Corrigan states that Nick loved Gatsby, no dispute. I wonder. Some things seen can't be unseen, and an eternal altercation arises as we endeavor to shake it off. We bury it, put out our eyes, stop our ears, but can't rid the ghost, so we try naming it.

So many questions are raised by Gatsby. About the role of class and money in America. About idol worship and dreams and cold reality. We weigh Gatsby's relation to bootleggers and larceny against Tom and Daisy's carelessness and selfishness. Nick's casual relationships to Gatsby's holding onto a youth's lovely imaginings. We each have to decide, after all, what was so “great” about Gatsby.

Corrigan's book is a pleasure and a revelation. 

I thank NetGalley and Little, Brown and Company for access to the e-book for review.