Writing Celebrity: Modernism, Authorial Personas, and Self-Promotion in the Early Twentieth Century United States

Writing Celebrity: Modernism, Authorial Personas, and Self-Promotion in the Early Twentieth Century United States Timothy W. Galow A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English and Comparative Literature. Chapel Hill 2008 Approved by: Linda Wagner-Martin (Director) Erin Carlston (Chair) María DeGuzmán John McGowan Janice Radway ABSTRACT Timothy W. Galow: Writing Celebrity: Modernism, Authorial Personas, and Self- Promotion in the Early Twentieth Century United States (Under the direction of Linda Wagner-Martin, Erin Carlston, John McGowan, Maria Deguzmán, and Janice Radway) “Writing Celebrity” argues that the rise of a national celebrity culture at the turn of the twentieth century transformed cultural production in the United States. While most literary studies of this period focus on the relationship between elite authors and the mass market, I assert that the influence of personality marketing transcended traditional aesthetic categories and reshaped the profession of authorship for both “highbrow” and “lowbrow” writers. Against this backdrop, my work traces the impact that an emergent celebrity culture had on the careers of Gertrude Stein and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Drawing on archival documents, literary texts, and various extant publicity materials, I examine how both of these authors attempted to market distinctive personas and the various ways in which readers and critics responded to their public identities. Gertrude Stein, immediately following the runaway success of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas , theorized an authorial identity that exists only in the very instant of creation and instills texts with permanent value. Contrary to contemporary readings of Stein as a proto-postmodern theorist of the “open” text, readings largely based on interpretations of her early poetry, I argue that, in response to the pressures of public exposure, Stein cultivated a theory very ii similar to that of contemporary New Critics. This identity formation also allowed Stein to align herself with masculine idealizations of “high” art by complicating overt signs of difference, including femininity, lesbianism, and Jewishness, from her textual persona. F. Scott Fitzgerald, who positioned himself as a young genius in early publicity materials, attempted to refashion himself as a reflective and dedicated professional in the 1930’s. Yet, Fitzgerald’s narrative persona does not simply mimic the stereotypical high masculine author. Instead, he attempts to challenge these traditional conceptions by promoting a new, more nuanced, version of the male writer. Thus, by extending previous work on authorial self-fashioning and taking seriously these authors’ engagements with celebrity culture, my work argues for the larger importance of celebrity as an interpretive paradigm, both from a historical perspective and as a unifying concept for textual analysis. iii To Amy and Calvin, and Mom and Dad. And to Linda Wagner-Martin, for all the support. You have been a mentor and a model. iv I have been fortunate enough to receive a significant amount of institutional support while working on this project. I would like to acknowledge the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, for a Frankel Dissertation Fellowship, a Smith Graduate Research Grant, and the John R. Bittner Fellowship in Literature and Journalism; the Bentley Historical Library at the University of Michigan, for a Mark C. Stevens Researcher Travel Fellowship; and the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction……………………………………………………………………….1 Section I. From Toklas To Everybody: Gertrude Stein Between Autobiographies........……………………….....53 Gertrude Stein and Her Critics…………………………………….…….53 Chapter 1. The Celebrity Speaks: Gertrude Stein’s Aesthetic Theories After The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas …………69 The First Year of Fame…………………………….………....…69 The Lectures……………………………...……......……………90 2. After the Tour: Naturalized Aesthetics and Systematized Contradictions……………………….……….…112 From Theory to Practice: Laying the Groundwork for the Next Autobiography…………………………………………...112 Everybody’s Autobiography and the Art of Contradictions………………………………………..…128 II. The Crack-Up of F. Scott Fitzgerald…………………………………..155 F. Scott Fitzgerald and His Critics…………………………………….155 3. On the Limitations of Image Management: The Long Shadow of “F. Scott Fitzgerald”………………………………172 The Construction of a Persona (1920-1926)…………………..172 vi The Fallout of Celebrity (1926-1940) 4. The Crack-Up Essays: Masculine Identity, Modernism, and the Dissolution of Literary Values………………………..186 The Crack-Up, Contradictions, and Fitzgerald’s Narrative Persona……………………………………………...210 The Narrator as “Literary Man”…………………………….....211 “Being a Writer Only”: Solutions and Contradictions……..….226 Creative Freedom and Masculine Crisis………....………..…..231 Masculinity and the Negative Response to the Crack-Up..…...235 Epilogue………………………………………………………………..…...…271 Works Cited…………………………………………………………..……….275 vii Introduction When F. Scott Fitzgerald submitted what would become his first novel, This Side of Paradise, to Scribner’s for the third time in late 1919, young editor Maxwell Perkins had to deliver an impassioned speech to the board, effectively resigning over the book’s repeated dismissal, before Paradise was finally accepted for publication (Bruccoli Epic Grandeur 97-100; Berg 12-14). At this point in his career, Fitzgerald had only one story published in a commercial magazine and was unknown outside the coterie of literary friends he had made during his undergraduate years at Princeton. Yet, within a year, the novel had become an essential text for many teenagers in the United States and Fitzgerald himself was being heralded as the voice of the younger generation. Similarly, Gertrude Stein labored for nearly three decades to find a major publisher for her writing, labored, that is, until writing The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas in the fall of 1932. Much like Paradise, this book was an overnight success that turned Stein into a major public figure and allowed her to begin publishing pieces from her massive collection of manuscripts. When she returned from Paris for a lecture tour of the United States in late 1934, her arrival was front-page news in most of the urban dailies and she was flocked by interviewers and curiosity-seekers the moment she stepped off the boat. While such stories of near-immediate national renown have become commonplace in the digital age, the speed with which Fitzgerald’s and Stein’s names traveled across a continent and the extensive opportunities that such sudden fame afforded them were relatively new phenomena in the early decades of the twentieth century, phenomena made possible largely by the massive restructuring of the U.S. cultural landscape in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The rapid development of new resources and technologies that have come to be lumped under the general term “modernity” not only brought populations physically closer together, but they gave rise to production processes and forms of distribution that enabled widespread consumption of relatively homogeneous products and messages. Thus, F. Scott Fitzgerald, three weeks after the publication of Paradise, could script an “interview” with himself and submit it to his publishers with the hope that it might be reprinted almost simultaneously in newspapers, literary inserts, and book reviews around the country. He could, for the first time in history, anticipate submitting his opinions to millions of contemporary readers across the continental United States. Writing Celebrity traces the effects that these historical developments had on the careers of Stein and Fitzgerald, two writers who followed seemingly opposite career paths. Stein followed what critics today might deem a “typical” modernist arc, spending years generating cultural capital by publishing in “little reviews” and cultivating relationships with influential critics and patrons until her breakthrough book, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, thrust her into the public spotlight. Conversely, F. Scott Fitzgerald received national recognition with the publication of his first novel and spent much of the next two decades writing for smaller and smaller audiences. Despite these seemingly divergent paths and the radically different places each writer has been afforded in twentieth century literary history, both authors shared a surprisingly similar set of concerns about the ambivalent position writers occupied in American culture and, 2 in the wake of their first major public successes, both engaged in very public self- fashioning efforts designed to influence popular and critical responses to their work. The Mass Market, Masculinity, and Popular Culture in the Late 19 th Century United States Much recent modernist criticism has been devoted to tracing the historical conditions that made such campaigns possible and to assessing the specific tensions that emerged as a result of these changes. The first truly national mass print markets emerged in the 1890’s. Urban dailies, for one, began to reach wider audiences at this time. The invention of the telegraph in the 1840’s provided the means for distributing news beyond the confines of written text and, by the early 1850’s, the United States had developed one of the most complex telegraph networks in the entire world (Hochfelder 307-09).

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