Paradise Lost: A Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald and I'd Die for You and Other Lost Stories

Abstract

For an author as intimately tied to the twentieth-century American literary canon as F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940), it is remarkable how sweepingly general some assessments of his work have been: he is the Jazz Age writer extraordinaire, lauding and critiquing the era à la Nick Carraway; he is the Depression era burnout, longing for the lost whims of Babylon; he dies a Hollywood hack, paying off his debts while churning away at a series of stories and an unfinished novel that will excoriate the film industry, a lesser form of art in his mind. As with any general appraisal, returning to the author's work provides the palliative to such critical ennui and generalized assessments.David S. Brown, in Paradise Lost: A Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald, does not seek to remind us why The Great Gatsby (1925) is (one of) The Great American Novels, nor does he provide an apologia for F. Scott Fitzgerald, the working author, turning out pleasurable fare for the The Saturday Evening Post, about which he always remained conflicted. Instead, Brown tells us his biography will treat Fitzgerald as a “cultural historian” (1), as an author invested in the pressing issues of his day, not necessarily the pressing political issues (indeed, Brown discusses Fitzgerald's scant political commentary throughout), but rather the issues that a postwar generation found themselves facing in an era of unrestrained excess and abandonment. What Brown has provided most successfully is an approach to Fitzgerald that aligns him with other cultural historians, those of his time and those who came before. In addition to examples long noted by Fitzgerald scholars and fans—such as Thorstein Veblen, who had coined the term “conspicuous consumption” to characterize American capitalism at the dawn of the twentieth century and whose ideas are frequently explored by Fitzgerald—Brown also draws upon his historian's perspective to discuss Fitzgerald alongside such luminary thinkers as Frederick Jackson Turner, Oswald Spengler, and the Comte de Buffon. The last example almost seems to strain credulity and reads more as a historian enlightening a general audience about the naturalist's infamous dismissal of a supposedly inferior form of Nature found in North America, but Brown astutely steers the work back to Fitzgerald as he successfully ties Buffon's ideas into a novel analysis of Fitzgerald's anxieties over expatriation and the role of America on the world stage (231–35).As a biographer, Brown is not concerned with digging up fresh anecdotes of Fitzgerald bacchanalia; readers seeking chapter upon chapter of the Fitzgeralds dancing their way through hotel fountains will not find them. Nor will readers seeking hagiography leave satisfied; refusing to shy away from the more desultory moments in Fitzgerald's life, Brown notes Fitzgerald's callousness in some of his extramarital affairs and turns a somewhat sharp eye on Fitzgerald's epistolary relationship with his daughter Scottie. And while the Fitzgerald fan likely knows the broad strokes of his attempts to woo the Alabama belle Zelda Sayre, Brown moves through their courtship quite briefly, and she often disappears for long stretches of the text. Brown is sensitive and sparse, unsparing and unromantic, in his discussions of the author's turbulent life, and a biography that eschews the tawdry and gossipy components is a welcome addition to Fitzgeraldiana.Many of Brown's chapters are in fact extended readings of Fitzgerald's works, often alongside whatever cultural ideal Brown sees Fitzgerald as writing about; he aligns his readings of This Side of Paradise (1920) and some of Fitzgerald's early stories like “Bernice Bobs Her Hair” (1920) alongside a cultural history of flappers and post–World War I America (102–4); specifically, in a discussion of “A Diamond as Big as the Ritz” (1922), Brown notes how Fitzgerald writes a “powerful condemnation of greed” and a “direct rebuke to the speculative orgy that was already then coming to grip the 1920s” (104). Elsewhere, he provides nuanced readings, not only of the major novels (The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night [1934]), but also of the run of Basil and Josephine stories, as well as the Gwen stories; and, to this reviewer's mind, he offers a more incisive critique of Fitzgerald's play The Vegetable (1923) than one would think imaginable, as he aligns its themes with Fitzgerald's “primary concerns” as an artist (160).Overall, Brown's work is welcoming to both those whose association with Fitzgerald was merely dozing through a high school reading of Gatsby and those who have devoured the entirety of his canon. The historical context does much to complicate our too-simplistic understanding of the Roaring Twenties, a reductive view of the era that some critics have blamed Fitzgerald himself for bolstering. Instead, Brown provides a strong contextual examination of the man and his work without relying too heavily on the twice-told tales of debauchery with which we are familiar.If Brown's biography asks us to interrogate Fitzgerald as a historical artifact, a chronicler of a shifting epoch in American history, I'd Die for You: And Other Lost Stories asks that we reconsider Fitzgerald as a product of the economic environment of the 1920s and 1930s. That Fitzgerald wrote stories for money, stories that he was less than entirely satisfied with, is not news. But while Fitzgerald was keenly attuned to the literary marketplace, that does not mean that he churned out unpolished hackwork. Even the unpublished stories in I'd Die for You show him honing his craft and experimenting with ideas (such as the worlds of film and medicine) that would later come to play important roles in works such as Tender Is the Night and The Last Tycoon (1941).As an eminently capable editor and chronicler of Fitzgerald's craft, Anne Margaret Daniel has presented a version of Fitzgerald that has escaped popular consciousness. Through her meticulous footnotes and ample textual analysis in the headnotes for each of the volume's selections, Daniel presents a version of Fitzgerald that has been underrated: the painstaking craftsman. Daniel provides, in her introduction, succinct and enticing summaries of the stories, as well as an overview of Fitzgerald's life at the time of their composition. With the exception of the first story in the collection, a humorous tale about a profit-obsessed publisher titled “The I.O.U.,” the stories are from the 1930s and were written in the wake of the great hardships in Fitzgerald's final decade: his relationship with his now-institutionalized wife, his financial burdens, and his complicated thoughts regarding his work in Hollywood. In addition, Daniel has scrupulously annotated the stories, providing explanations of everything from obscure place names to popular songs now largely forgotten to the era's colorful slang. Most important, Daniel's notes are not obtrusive, and her commentary provides vital context for those unaware of the day-to-day details of Fitzgerald's life.While F. Scott Fitzgerald was certainly no stranger to darkness and despair in his works, from Nicole Diver's mental illness and abuse at the hands of her father, to Jay Gatsby's and Myrtle Wilson's sordid deaths, and Braddock T. Washington's desire permanently to imprison innocent men to preserve the secrets of his gaudy wealth, these stories will likely surprise—if not shock—both the casual Fitzgerald fan and the more seasoned veteran. Consider “Salute to Lucy and Elsie,” which at first seems a simple story of generational misunderstandings between a father and his son but quickly turns dark, when the father blackmails his son's best friend for being a corrosive influence on his son, as the friend had been engaged in a series of illicit relationships (indeed, the story is more sexually explicit than most of Fitzgerald's work). The resolution does not hinge upon a new understanding between father and son but instead reveals dismay, disappointment, and a sense of loss. And in the titular story, perhaps the collection's strongest, a mysterious individual named Carley Delannux leads several women astray through a carefully concealed series of lies. An actress who falls in love with him, Atlanta Downs, is hardly a starry-eyed naïf; instead, she is a complex and ambitious character who attempts to pierce Delannux's aloof and distant manner. Delannux is also an atypical Fitzgerald protagonist; while as much a dreamer as Gatsby or Amory Blaine, he is more haunted than the others, and he is nicknamed “Suicide Carley” because of the fates of past women with whom he has been involved. Having written this story after he himself had attempted suicide (and as Daniel notes, while he feared that his wife might attempt the same [89]), Fitzgerald faced stark pushback from editors over the dark content; his unwillingness to tone it down, particularly its bleak ending, led to the story not being published during his lifetime.Another set of stories stems from Fitzgerald's observations of his wife's hospitalizations and treatments. While Tender Is the Night is, of course, the most concentrated fiction on that subject, I'd Die for You contains several other attempts at hospital and doctor stories, replete with medical jargon. While the stories, which include “Nightmare,” “What to Do about It,” “The Women in the House,” and the wonderfully titled “Cyclone in Silent Land,” all incorporate some standard Fitzgerald romance fare, they also frequently depict the darkness surrounding his own relationship to the medical field. The story “Nightmare” depicts three brothers who were institutionalized after each went insane after the 1929 stock market crash, an ample metaphor for the author's depiction of the corrosive effects of wealth elsewhere in his works.A particular treat for readers is the rare opportunity to see Fitzgerald the screenwriter at work. The collection includes several movie treatments that ultimately frustrated and disappointed Fitzgerald because they did not sell and yet sapped his time from other projects. “Gracie at Sea,” a collaboration with George Burns, opens with the author proclaiming that the “general idea” of the story “is dependent upon the thesis that farce and comedy do not hold attention over half an hour” (59). The tale follows a lonely man named George finding himself thrust into an unusual family struggle, as a millionaire has decided that his older daughter must marry before his younger daughter can do so. Shenanigans ensue, and the story follows their struggles until it resolves into a happy ending. It is fully plotted and reads more like a short story than a film treatment, reminding us that film work never came easily to Fitzgerald, who always longed for lost time writing fiction. Another treatment, “Love is A Pain,” is a war story depicting a secret agent for an unnamed side of an unnamed war; it aligns with, as Daniel remarks, “Hollywood's allegedly ‘light-hearted’ war movies of 1938–1940 that refused to name Germany or Hitler as the enemy while making melodramatic love plots their focus” (277). And, because this is F. Scott Fitzgerald we are talking about, the careful reader will not be surprised to find out that Princeton plays a role. And for “Ballet Shoes (Ballet Slippers),” Fitzgerald seems to have drawn upon his wife's interest in ballet for a story about Russian immigrants. The project was for Olga Spessivtseva, whom Fitzgerald had met in North Africa, though like these other efforts, no film would result from it.The collection includes a few other hidden gems on topics not frequently covered in Fitzgerald's work. “The Pearl and the Fur” is an amusing sample of the Gwen stories, roughly based on his daughter Scottie, that Fitzgerald labored at in the 1930s without quite finding the success he had earlier with the Basil and Josephine stories. Its ending, revealing an epiphany-like moment for Gwen, is as heartfelt as the best of those stories and bears more than a passing resemblance to the structure of the tales in James Joyce's Dubliners (1914). Anyone who has even a passing interest or awareness of college sports and the scandals regarding amateurism and eligibility will find “Offside Play” an eerily prescient tale, one that reveals that the bribery and extortion one hears whispers of today was not foreign to college sports a century ago. Another example of unfamiliar Fitzgerald subject matter is his consideration of the Civil War stories in “Thumbs Up” and “Dentist Appointment,” two versions of the same story that would eventually be published as “The End of Hate” (1940). The tale stems from a family legend, Fitzgerald maintained, where an ancestor was strung up by his thumbs as a form of punishment during the Civil War (159–60). The gruesome scene occurs in both versions of the story, although the second halves are wildly different; in the first, the thumbless Confederate veteran Tib Dulany and the Yankee doctor who called for him to be tortured meet in France, where, unbelievably, they encounter the Empress Eugénie, the wife of Emperor Napoleon III, who resolves the pair's conflict. In “Dentist Appointment,” Tib travels west and encounters an Indian attack, resolved when the doctor performs a dental procedure on an Indian chief. While at first one might be tempted to write off these stories as scarcely believable, they are snapshots into Fitzgerald's tenacity as a writer, for he was determined to work and rework the story into a suitable state (ultimately, “The End of Hate” ends on an ever-so-slightly more believable moment as Tib encounters the doctor on the night of Lincoln's assassination). But the two stories are interesting today in that they remind us of Fitzgerald's lifelong fascination with the Civil War and the South even while they show us how doggedly he worked on his material.A question lingers over these stories, the question of why: Why didn't some of these stories get published? Why did others end up in more obscure venues than Fitzgerald's other fare? Thanks to Daniel's careful editing and inclusion of relevant letters from Fitzgerald to the likes of his agent Harold Ober and Saturday Evening Post editor Kenneth Littauer, we can see that the author strove to remain true to his artistic integrity. He refused to compromise on the stories, reminding us, or perhaps informing us, that he did not spend his twilight years as a misanthropic, greedy hack who was willing to sell poor stories that he could have published more easily. Instead, he held fast to convictions about his work, and if at times the pieces he was defending lacked the depth we find in his best stories and novels, so be it. These stories, by and large, read as publishable today, and they reveal an author hard at work, striving for artistic and, yes, financial success. And today, when Fitzgerald continues to infiltrate the public consciousness through film and television shows, these stories remind us of the lingering hold he has on our imaginations. One wonders what he would think of the fact that his vignette “Thank You for the Light” was published in the New Yorker in 2012, some seventy-six years after that magazine rejected it.