Can fiction ward off the death of others? This is the question F. Scott Fitzgerald explores over and over again in his short stories written during the 1930s, a question that is particularly apparent in four specific works: “Crazy Sunday” (1932), “The Fiend” (1935), “The Long Way Out” (1937), and the posthumously published “Last Kiss” (1949). Despite the persistence and urgency with which this question is presented, these stories have received relatively little to no critical attention. On the occasions that the tales are discussed, they have been dismissed as failed imitations of other authors, trivial prototypes of longer novels, or third-rate pieces written purely for profit.1 The merits of these stories, however, become clearest when we see them in relation to Fitzgerald's life as well as in relation to each other, that is, as variations of the same story attempting to answer the same question.This essay has two objectives. First, it attempts to explain why Fitzgerald chose resistance to death as the overarching motif of these tales. Secondly, it tries to identify the common narrative design shared amongst the stories as well as the purpose of such a design. Contrary to critics who have pointed primarily to Fitzgerald's relationship with his mother and siblings to explain the motif of loss in his fiction, I argue that Fitzgerald's choice of the motif also stems from the succession of deaths that he encountered during the 1930s as well as the threat these deaths posed to the integrity of his selfhood. Confronted with the need to resist these deaths, Fitzgerald explored the possibilities of doing so by composing stories in which the protagonists employ various narrative tactics designed to prevent the death of others. In writing stories within which characters compose fiction as a means to deny death, Fitzgerald himself, like his characters, attempts to avoid acknowledging the deaths of his loved ones as irrevocable events. Discussing these four neglected tales as a group rather than in isolation brings to light a novel dimension of Fitzgerald's engagement with the motif of loss. It also reconfirms the significance of these stories by positioning them as representative pieces of a literary style that Fitzgerald was particularly attached to during the 1930s.The motif of loss is often discussed as a characteristic trait of Fitzgerald's literature. One of the most well known examples of this motif can be found in The Great Gatsby, a novel that revolves around the protagonist Jay Gatsby's attempt to recover his relationship with his former lover, Daisy Buchanan. Gatsby's attitude toward loss is crystalized in a short exchange between him and Nick Carraway in chapter 6. When Gatsby expresses his hopes that Daisy will return to him, Nick warns him that “you can't repeat the past,” at which point Gatsby famously cries out: “Can't repeat the past? … Why of course you can!” (110). As this example suggests, what is at the core of the motif of loss here is not the loss itself but rather the inability to accept it, an inability that serves as the matrix from which the drama of the novel unfolds.The inability to acknowledge irrevocable loss also appears as a pattern in the four short stories Fitzgerald wrote during the 1930s. The treatment of loss in these tales, however, differs crucially from that of The Great Gatsby in two ways: the content of the loss and the form of resistance. While Gatsby's resistance is directed toward the idea that the past is irrevocably lost, the content of the loss that the protagonists of the four short stories attempt to resist is death, or, to be more precise, the death of those they love and/or to whom they are strongly attached. Moreover, while the resistance to loss in The Great Gatsby takes the form of recovering what has already been lost, the resistance to loss in the four stories takes the form of denying that the loss ever happened. Accordingly, whereas in The Great Gatsby death (Gatsby's murder) is what ends Gatsby's resistance to loss, in the four short stories death is what initiates the resistance.One potential cause for this shift in the treatment of loss is the succession of deaths that Fitzgerald experienced while writing these short stories. For Fitzgerald, the 1930s was an era marked by losses. The losses began in April 1930, when his wife Zelda suffered her first breakdown. In February 1932, she had a relapse and entered the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. She spent the rest of her life as a resident or outpatient of sanitariums (Bruccoli, “A Brief” 258–59). The loss of Zelda was followed by another form of loss: death. Fitzgerald's close friend Ring Lardner died in 1933, then Emily Vanderbilt and Thomas A. Boyd in 1935.2 Fitzgerald's mother Mollie had a heart attack in June 1936 and died that September. As he described in a letter to C. O. Kalman the month of his mother's death, Fitzgerald saw these deaths as related to each other: “Mother's death made me so sad in connection with so many deaths of people dear to me in the last two years, beginning with Ring's cashing in; after that Emily Vanderbilt shot herself on a lonely Montana ranch last summer which gave me the blues” (Bruccoli and Duggan 451). Fitzgerald had “countless lists of the vanquished scattered through his papers,” lists in which the succession of deaths Fitzgerald described in his letter to Kalman was drawn together in a circle: “On one page, for example, he drew a circle and around it wrote the names of the vanished, like so many ghosts invited to a funeral feast, Boyd, Lardner, Emily Vanderbilt, Mary Rumsey, Julian (the hero of ‘A New Leaf’) and others; presiding at this symbolic table is Zelda, the archfigure of the dispossessed” (Le Vot 293).3 For Fitzgerald, then, death and madness were similar in that they both entailed absolute loss. Fitzgerald was haunted by a circle of ghosts—the ghosts of the dead and the mad, the ghosts of close ones irrevocably lost to him.The loss of those close to him was particularly devastating for Fitzgerald because of the specific way he understood the structure of his own selfhood. In the midst of the expanding circle of deaths, Fitzgerald published the “Crack-Up” trilogy, a series of essays in which he revealed his propensity for relinquishing his selfhood to the self of others. In the first essay, “The Crack-Up” (1936), Fitzgerald introduced his “more than average … tendency to identify myself, my ideas, my destiny, with those of all classes that I came in contact with” (Wilson 71). The second essay, “Pasting It Together” (1936), clarified the nature of this identification by describing how he identified so strongly with his object of identification that the two were rendered indistinguishable. In the essay, Fitzgerald created a list of people who “represented” him, such as Edmund Wilson who represented his “intellectual conscience” (Wilson 79), and other unnamed representatives who stood in for his artistic and political conscience. Looking at this list, Fitzgerald concluded that his selfhood was a congregation of different selves and therefore lacked a definitive “I”: “So there was not an ‘I’ any more—not a basis on which I could organize my self-respect—save my limitless capacity for toil that it seemed I possessed no more. It was strange to have no self—to be like a little boy left alone in a big house” (Wilson 79). In this way, Fitzgerald describes his identification with others as a process in which his objects of identification became integral parts of his own identity. And for someone whose self consisted of the lives of others, the death of the constituents implied the potential death of the self. Fitzgerald's repeated return in his private writings to the growing circle of casualties, then, speaks of the sense of crisis that he was being confronted with during the 1930s.Critics who have discussed the link between Fitzgerald's biography and the motif of death in his writing have tended to emphasize the influence of Fitzgerald's relationship with his mother and siblings.4 Moreover, the discussion of this relationship has taken place with reference to his non-fictional works, specifically “The Crack-Up” essays and the “Authors” trilogy, in which Fitzgerald explicitly reflects on the link between death and his authorial identity. In the essay “Author's House” (1936), Fitzgerald points to the death of his two sisters prior to his birth as the origin of his identity as an author: “Well, three months before I was born my mother lost her other two children and I think that came first of all though I don't know how it worked exactly. I think I started then to be a writer” (Afternoon 184). Analyzing this passage, Mitchell Breitwieser argues that what constitutes the origin of Fitzgerald's authorial identity is the assumption of his mother's sense of the loss of her two daughters prior to his birth. According to Breitwieser, Fitzgerald inherited his mother's mourning, but since the object of mourning (his sisters) was already lost, only the formal process of mourning remained. Thus, Fitzgerald became a “griever … exiled from the possibility of representing either the loss or the lost,” a griever whose inability to mourn compelled him toward “a series of attempted approximations of the lost object in the imagination” (253, 254). In other words, although he did not “know how it worked exactly,” Fitzgerald sensed that his writing was prompted by deaths that preceded his experience, and thus, as Breitwieser points out, writing for him became an attempt to identify and recover the dead in his imagination so that the process of mourning could begin.What must be recalled here is the fact that during the composition of these essays Fitzgerald was also writing short fiction specifically concerned with the issues of death and authorship. What is repeated in Fitzgerald's short stories during the 1930s, however, is not the attempt to identify the dead through fiction, but rather the attempt to resist the acknowledgement of the death itself. Fiction in these stories is not a means for overcoming the inability to mourn, but rather the means to perpetuate this inability by banishing from the imagination the starting point of mourning—death.Exactly how this resistance to death via fiction works will be the main focus of this essay. In essence, what characterizes these four short stories is the way the absence of the corpse is used as the logical crux of narratives attempting to keep the dead alive.5 Informed of the death of their objects of identification with which their own identities are inextricably intertwined, the protagonists of these stories urgently need to deny the loss so that they themselves may also survive. The desperate logic that the characters rely on is this: if a situation that hinges on the existence of the deceased can be sustained, then the deceased will be sustained along with the situation. The key to this logic is the absence of the corpse.6 If death is never personally confirmed through a direct confrontation with the corpse, then there is always a minute, but undeniably real, possibility that the dead may somehow still be alive, and so by extension, the possibility that he or she will someday return. In other words, in order for it to remain plausible that the supposedly dead is alive and returning, the dead must also always be absent. In an attempt to maintain this possibility, the protagonists become both authors and characters of narrative situations in which the dead are perpetually kept alive in the form of what I will call the “absent/returning figure.”7“Crazy Sunday” is an early example of a story where this absent/returning figure is employed as the key trope.8 The protagonist is screenwriter Joel Coles, who falls in love with Stella Walker Calman, the actress wife of successful film director Miles Calman. Angry with Miles for having an affair with one of her best friends, Eva Goebel, Stella attempts to take revenge on Miles by having an affair with his friend and co-worker, Coles. Stella's choice of Coles is explained as the effect of her identification with Miles, an identification so strong that her life has become inseparable from his. The extent to which Stella identifies with Miles is made clear when Miles says, “I've influenced Stella in everything. Especially I've influenced her so that she likes all the men that I like—it's very difficult” (Babylon 242). His influence on Stella is brought up again when Coles surmises that a telegram sent from Stella inviting him to her house may have been motivated by Miles: “If Stella's telegram had been purely a gesture of courtesy then it was likely that Miles had inspired it…. Probably Miles had said: ‘Send him a wire—he's miserable—he thinks he's queered himself.’ It fitted in with ‘I've influenced Stella in everything. Especially I've influenced her so that she likes all the men I like’” (244). Stella's supposed love for Coles, and her initiation of the affair with Coles through this telegram, is described here as the extension of Miles's will.Stella's identification with Miles can also be seen in her internalization of his gaze. Coles and Stella meet at the “Hollywood Theater” at which point Stella begins “supposing he [Miles] was here watching everything I do,” despite the fact that Miles had sent her a telegram from Chicago (242, 243). For Stella, the border between screen and reality, between fiction and real, is blurred. She acts as if she is always on camera, always an actress playing a role in the fantasy of her director/husband. Coles describes this influence of Miles on Stella as a conferring of artistic “life” with its origin in Miles's mind: “‘Everything he touched he did something magical to,’ he thought. ‘He even brought that little gamin alive and made her a sort of masterpiece’” (248). Stella is thus an imaginary double of Miles's mind, and, as a consequence, her life depends on the existence of his mind, the source of the imaginative being that is her. And because Stella's mind is virtually co-existent with that of Miles, Stella is always attempting to mirror his mindset. Stella's affair, an act of revenge, is an effort to even out the difference between the revenger (Stella) and the revenged (Miles) by doubling his action. Her anxiety that Miles may be watching her is a reflection of her attempt to see herself through the eyes of Miles and to synchronize her perspective with his.In the midst of their affair in the Calman house, the news of Miles's death in an airplane crash reaches Stella and Coles. Stella's immediate reaction is to think that the news is a part of Miles's “scheme” of exposing her affair: “He isn't dead—I know he isn't. This is part of his scheme. He's torturing me. I know he's alive. I can feel he's alive” (246). Here Stella attempts to resist Miles's death by making it a part of a fictional script. More specifically, Stella's scheme is to maintain a theatrical situation that is predicated on Miles's participation, that is, her affair with Coles. As Sheldon Grebstein notes, the theatrical setting of the scene is emphasized by the fact that the Calman house is figured as a stage: “Miles Calman's house was built for great emotional moments—there was an air of listening, as if the far silences of its vistas hid an audience” (232).9 In the context of this setting, Stella begs Coles: “You won't go. You like me—you love me, don't you? Don't call up anybody. Tomorrow's time enough. You stay here with me tonight” (247). Hearing this, Coles “stared at her, at first incredulously, and then with shocked understanding. In her dark groping Stella was trying to keep Miles alive by sustaining a situation in which he had figured—as if Miles’ mind could not die so long as the possibilities that had worried him still existed. It was a distraught and tortured effort to stave off the realization that he was dead” (247; emphasis added). Stella continues to seduce Coles in an attempt to keep him secured in her affair scheme, at which point Coles concludes: “Ah then—if he betrayed Miles she would be keeping him alive—for if he were really dead how could he be betrayed?” (248). Stella's troubled logic here is that if a situation hinging on the betrayal of Miles can be sustained, then the fact of sustenance proves that Miles is still alive. The story ends with Coles predicting a repetition of the affair: “Oh, yes, I'll be back—I'll be back!” (248). The implication is that Coles will return to repeat the affair—and thus repeatedly preserve Miles.In addition to the element of betrayal, another crucial aspect of Stella's affair scheme is the perpetual absence of Miles. Stella's choice of an affair as the plot for a script that must include an absent actor (Miles) is shrewd because an affair only needs two actors to be present on stage while the third actor, the one being cheated on, can participate as a figure who is never there yet always threatening to enter. Stella's tactic is to have Miles continue to exist as a “gap” in her three-way-affair skit, a skit in which the existence of the third actor is sustained as an absence by the other two. Her skit is able to maintain its small but formidable measure of reality because she has yet to confront Miles's corpse, the ultimate proof of his death. The only evidence of Miles's death in the story is the news of the plane crash, a fact that allows Stella to wrestle Miles's absence from the hands of death and use it to defend his life.Through its reference to the significance of “gaps,” the tale further emphasizes the point that absence is the generative crux of Stella's life-saving narrative. The final section of the story where Miles dies begins with the declaration that “[i]t was Sunday again,” reminding us that this short story is about “crazy” Sundays (245). At the opening of the story, Sunday was defined as a “gap”: “It was Sunday—not a day, but rather a gap between two other days,” a gap that is out of the “set and sequences” of the week (231). In the final section, the narrative further defines this Sunday/gap as a space of perpetual renewal: “this was Sunday—the lovely, lazy perspective of the next twenty-four hours unrolled before him—every minute was something to be approached with lulling indirection, every moment held the germ of innumerable possibilities. Nothing was impossible—everything was just beginning” (246). Sunday, then, is “crazy” because it is a “gap” within the “sequence” from which the sequence itself (re)starts. It is on this Sunday/gap that Miles dies, a death that is described by Joel as that which leaves a gap: “What a hell of a hole he leaves in this damn wilderness—already!” (248). Miles thus becomes the “gap” through which Coles and Stella repeatedly “sustain the situation in which he had figured” presumably every Sunday. Moreover, the fact that Coles's job is “writing continuity” (230), that is, to compose “scenes and sequences” for pictures of which Miles is the director, matches with the image of Coles continuing the “sequence” of visiting Stella in order to sustain a “scheme” that will in turn sustain Miles.The significance of the dead being the director must be given particular attention. Through his death, Miles becomes the director not only of films but also reality. When shooting a scene in a film the director is simultaneously absent and present, absent from the scene of action both visually and verbally but nonetheless present as an invisible eye watching and orchestrating the scene offstage. This status of the director as an absent presence is juxtaposed with the figure of the dead who exerts his presence by literally “directing” the “affair” of Stella and Coles in the house/theater while maintaining his absence. The story makes it clear that Miles's influence on Stella extends beyond her profession and into her private life so that she has become a sort of actress in reality who feels that Miles is always directing her from somewhere where he cannot be seen, a sensation described most acutely in the theater-like Calman house where Stella argues that Miles's death is a “part of his scheme” and that she can still “feel he's alive.” Stella can “feel he's alive” even though he is physically absent from her immediate world because as an actress she is constantly feeling the presence of the director who is always absent from the world within which she is acting. By juxtaposing the director with the dead, Fitzgerald illustrates his idea that the relationship between the dead and the living is analogous to that of a director and an actress.Since Miles controlled Stella's actions as an absent figure even while he was alive, his absence by death does not necessarily negate his presence. Rather, as long as he remains absent, and as long as the actors continue to act out his scheme as if he were there, no change has occurred in the situation. As we have seen, it is said that Stella was Miles's artistic creation, a character in the sense of both personality and dramatis personae whom Miles had “influenced everything” in to the point where she is his “masterpiece.” When Miles dies, Stella reverses this design: since she exists only as an extension of Miles's creative imagination, does it not mean, in turn, that Miles is still directing, as long as her act continues? Thus Stella begins “sustaining a situation in which he [Miles] had figured,” the “situation” here being her affair with Coles that hinges on the existence of Miles as an absent presence, a situation that repeats the situation on a film set in which Miles had always figured as the absent yet present director. By preparing a space where one can exist by never being there, eternal absence is taken from the monopoly of death and given life.Because Stella is the double of Miles's mind, the death of Miles is also her death. Stella's sense of crisis is condensed in her exclamation that Miles's death will leave her in complete solitude: “Oh, my God, you don't know how alone I feel” (Babylon 247). It is emphasized that the reason Stella does not want to let go of Miles is because “Miles is my only friend” (246) and she needs him to identify with in order to sustain herself. But, as Fitzgerald states in “Pasting It Together,” an identification of this nature leads to the ceding of the self to the object, a particularly disastrous act if the object no longer exists since the identification becomes that of the self to its own mind, a closed circuit self-to-self identification that leads to the complete seclusion of the subject from external reality.This inability to bear solitude due to a need for identification is repeated in “The Fiend,” a story depicting protagonist Crenshaw Engels's paradoxical identification with the murderer of his family, the “Fiend.” After his family is killed, Engels goes to harass the murderer at the prison every two weeks until the Fiend eventually dies from an illness. What Engels seeks in his bi-weekly visits with the Fiend is “mental revenge to replace the physical one of which he was subducted” (Taps 315). In other words, Engels wants the Fiend to suffer the same suffering that he is going through. Moreover, at the same time he wants the Fiend to be him (sufferer), he also wants to be the Fiend (inflictor of suffering). As in the case of Stella against Miles, revenge, the act of getting even, is also an act of doubling.10The doubling of Engels and the Fiend is further implied through their mutual “imprisonment.” Engels tells the Fiend he will suffer for the rest of his life in the prison and then afterward in hell. He describes the nature of the suffering: “You'll be alone with your own vile thoughts in that little space, forever and ever. You'll itch with corruption so that you can never sleep, and you'll always be thirsty, with water just out of reach…. You'll be like a person just about to go crazy but can't go crazy. All the time you'll be thinking that it's forever and ever” (316). These threats, however, also correspond to the state of isolation in which Engels places himself. Since his memory refuses to let him move on from the moment “when his wife and son had started on their last walk that summer morning” (315), he is forever haunted by his hatred for the man who killed his family. He continues to develop “vile thoughts” in the “little space” of his mind “forever and ever,” thirsting to kill the Fiend placed in front of him but just out of reach, a perpetually harassed man “just about to go crazy but can't go crazy.” In his attempt to make the Fiend in the prison suffer to the brink of insanity, Engels simultaneously imprisons himself in his own mind and edges to the brink of insanity.The doubling is also apparent in Engels's attempt to force the Fiend into mirroring the content of his mind. Putting into action his promise to the Fiend that “[a]ll the time you'll be full of horror” (316), Engels seeks revenge on the Fiend by attempting, literally, to infuse his mind with horrible thoughts. The initial attempt consists of feeding “records of all that was gross and vile in man” to the Fiend, giving him books on incurable sicknesses, torture, miscellaneous accounts of crimes, and “horror stories” (316). This method of revenge is an act of mental doubling in the sense that many of the books come from Engels's own collection: “As a beginning Crenshaw had brought half a dozen books which his vagarious curiosity has collected over as many years” (316). When Engels exhausts his arsenal of books, he then changes tactics and attempts to torture the Fiend by peppering him with false hopes and fears. He lies that he is working toward the Fiend's pardon. He pretends to have a pistol with him. He bluffs that the “legislature had passed a new law which provided that the Fiend would be executed in a few hours” (317). Engels's tactics, however, are inverted equivalents of what Engels had suffered. After the Fiend's imprisonment, Engels attempts to shoot the Fiend with a gun and fails; he tries to “execute” the Fiend by strangling him and fails again; he tries to pass a “bill he had written himself for the introduction of capital punishment in the state” but is unsuccessful (315). All of Engels's tactics are attempts to make the Fiend experience his suffering and frustration, that is, to make him double his mental pain.The doubling of the Fiend with Engels's imagination, however, is most explicitly pointed to through the play on the word “double.” The day before he finally decides to kill the Fiend, Engels imagines bullets in the abdomen of the Fiend. When he goes to the prison the next day he discovers that the Fiend is already experiencing abdominal pain. Engels “fancied momentarily that this was a premonition in the man's bowels of a bullet that would shortly ride ragged through that spot.” He calls out to the Fiend, at which point the Fiend answers: “I'm doubled up. All doubled up” (318). The implication here is that the Fiend is “doubled up” with Engels's mind.Finding the Fiend seriously sick, Engels forces the guard to take the Fiend to the infirmary. The Fiend, however, dies within hours from what turns out to be a burst appendix. Upon hearing that the Fiend has died, Engels attempts to see his body but is promptly denied by the warden: “Which is the—the window of the infirmary?”“It's on the interior court, you can't see it from here.”“Oh.” (Taps 319) Similar to the ambivalent approaching and leaving of the burial site in “Author's House,” Fitzgerald has Engels gesture toward a desire to see the corpse and then immediately shuts down the possibility.The failure to confront the corpse is followed by Engels's attempt to resurrect the Fiend by repeating their bi-weekly meetings. As in the case of Stella, Engels laments the Fiend's death by saying he was his only friend and that he is now in complete solitude: “In a misery of solitude and despair he muttered aloud: ‘So he is dead. He has left me.’ And then with a long sigh of mingled grief and fear, ‘So I have lost him—my only friend—now I am alone’” (319). Through these words of grief, Engels shows that even his anger for the Fiend's crime is overwhelmed by the terror of being left alone with no one with whom to identify. And again like Stella, the story ends with Engels unconsciously attempting to preserve the Fiend through a repetition of a situation (meeting with the Fiend) which requires his presence: “Once more he called on the Fiend, after many weeks. ‘But he's dead,’ the Warden told him kindly. ‘Oh, yes,’ Crenshaw said. ‘I guess I must have forgotten’” (320). Reminiscent of Fitzgerald's tendency to become “identified with the objects of my horror and compassion” (Wilson 81), a tendency he notes in his essay “Handle With Care” (1936) published one year after the publication of “The Fiend,” the Fiend becomes for Engels an object of both horror and compassion, an object he despises but nevertheless identifies (“doubles up”) with as his “only friend,” an object so intertwined with the life of the protagonist that he must somehow preserve him in order for the protagonist to live.The motif of resisting death through the repetition of a situation is carried into “The Long Way Out,” a story revolving around a schizophrenia patient named Mrs. King. During the final stages of her recovery, Mrs. King's husband dies in a traffic accident. Unable to accept this fact, Mrs. King loses her mind again. The story begins with a description of a conversation on oubliettes, which then connects with the story of Mrs. King's relapse: We were talking about some of the older castles in Touraine and we touched upon the iron cage in which Louis XI imprisoned Cardinal Balue for six years, then upon oubliettes and such horrors. I had seen several of the latter, single dry wells thirty or forty feet deep where a man was thrown to wait for nothing…. So it was rather a relief when a doctor told this story—that is, it was