The Unpublished Stories: Fitzgerald in His Final Stage

Abstract

A writer's failures may tell us more about his art than his successes. Certainly, unpublished works may better reveal unfinished struggles than the whole or partial successes that manage to find their way into print. This observation is particularly applicable to F. Scott Fitzgerald, who during his lifetime devoted inordinate energy to getting as much of his work widely published as he could, who always wrote with a steady eye on remunerative, large-circulation magazines. Unlike his contemporary, Ernest Hemingway, whose large body of unpublished efforts his widow is now gradually and with much fanfare allowing into print, Fitzgerald left relatively little: some movie scripts, early drafts of some novels, and a handful of short stories and short-story fragments.1 Fitzgerald's unpublished stories are particularly illuminating on several counts: through their glaring weaknesses they illustrate more clearly perhaps than anything he ever wrote, the technical problems that plagued him throughout his career, in the novels as well as in the shorter works. They reflect too the acute emotional difficulties he faced in the years following a serious physical collapse. Their chief value, however, is the light they throw on his developing style in the last years of his life.2 For the unpublished stories are truly transitional pieces in Fitzgerald's struggle to find new forms of expression for his most mature vision of American life and society. He was forced to recognize that many of his old fictional practices were moribund. The romantic rhetoric that had for fifteen years hauntingly underscored the tragic dissolution of his heroes no longer came easily. But while his interests never flagged and his perceptions never dulled, his formidable artistic task in the late thirties was to express them in a manner consonant with the