NOTES INTRODUCTION F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, "THE CULTURAL WORLD," AND THE LURE OF THE AMERICAN SCENE 1. Dear Scott/Dear Max: The Fitzgerald-Perkins Correspondence, eds. John Kuehl and Jackson R. Bryer (New York: Scribner's, 1971),47. Hereafter cited as Dear Scott/Dear Max. Throughout this book, I preserve Fitzgerald's spelling, punctuation, and diacritical errors as preserved in the edited volumes of his correspondence. 2. F. Scott Fitzgerald, A Life in Letters, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994),67. Hereafter cited as Life in Letters. 3. F. Scott Fitzgerald, F. Scott Fitzgerald on Authorship, eds. Matthew J. Bruccoli and Judith S. Baughman (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996),83. Hereafter cited as Fitzgerald on Authorship. 4. For a superb discussion of the voguish "difficulty" associated with the rise of modernist art, see Leonard Diepeveen, The Difficulties ofModernism (New York: Routledge, 2003),1-42. 5. There is a further irony that might be noted here: putting Joyce and Anderson on the same plane would soon be a good indicator of provin­ cialism. Fitzgerald could not have written this statement after his sojourn in France, and certainly not after encouraging his friend Ernest Hemingway's nasty parody, The Torrents of Spring (1926). Anderson may be one of the most notable casualties from the period of ambitious claimants, such as Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and William Faulkner, to a place within "the cultural world." 6. Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, tr. Susan Emanuel (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 142. 7. "The principle of differentiation is none other than the objective and subjective distance of enterprises of cultural production with respect to the market and to expressed or tacit demand, with producers' strate­ gies distributing themselves between two extremes that are never, in fact, attained-either total and cynical subordination to demand or absolute independence from the market and its exigencies" (ibid., 141-42). 8. See ibid., 47-112. 158 • NOTES 9. In his contribution to The Cambridge History ofAmerican Literature, Jonathan Arac demonstrates why Hawthorne "was the writer of prose narrative most important in establishing the kind of writing now recognized as 'literary'" (693), though he also suggests that historical circumstances and antebellum literary institutions were not favorable to sustaining the position of the pure, disinterested artist. Hence Henry James's need to establish again, more than a generation later and under new circumstances, the position Hawthorne very precari­ ously enjoyed. James's contact with the French literary scene was doubtless essential to the success of his effort. See Jonathan Arac, Narrative Forms, in The Cambridge History of American Literature, Vol. 2, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995),693-777. 10. Matthew J. Bruccoli and Jennifer McCabe Atkinson, eds. As Ever, Scott Fitz-: Letters Between Scott Fitzgerald and His Literary Agent Harold Ober, 1919-1940 (Philadelphia and New York: J. B. Lippincott, 1972), 35-36. Hereafter cited as As Ever, Scott Fitz-. 11. Matthew J. Bruccoli, "The Man of Letters as Professional," introduction to Fitzgerald on Authorship, 11. See also James L.W. West III, "F. Scott Fitzgerald, Professional Author," in A Historical Guide to F. Scott Fitzgerald, ed. Kirk Curnutt (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004),49-68. 12. See Bruccoli, "The Man of Letters as Professional," 20-21. For Lionel Trilling on Fitzgerald, see The Liberal Imagination (1950; New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1979), especially 234-39. 13. Bruccoli, "The Man of Letters as Professional," 21. 14. See Kirk Curnutt, "Fitzgerald's Consumer World," in A Historical Guide to F. Scott Fitzgerald, 85-88. 15. Willa Cather, "On the Art of Fiction," in On Writing: Critical Studies on Writing as an Art (New York: Knopf, 1953), 103. 16. Cited in Mark Schorer, Sinclair Lewis: An American Life (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1961),298. 17. Life in Letters, 169. 18. Matthew Bruccoli, ed. The Only Thing That Counts: The Ernest Hemingway/Maxwell Perkins Correspondence, 1925-1947 (New York: Scribner's, 1996), 119. 19. Bruccoli, "The Man of Letters as Professional," 11. 20. See F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up, ed. Edmund Wilson (New York: New Directions, 1945),89. Hereafter cited as Crack-Up. 21. "I am a professional writer with a huge following. I am the highest paid short story writer in the world," he desperately boasted during the meet­ ing before Dr. Thomas Rennie of the Phipps Clinic: cited in Matthew J. Bruccoli, Some Sort ofEpic Grandeur: The Life ofF Scott Fitzgerald, 2nd rev. ed. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press), 349. 22. Literary authors such as Fitzgerald were thus in fact not professionals in the sense that, e.g., lawyers, physicians, or university professors NOTES • 159 were: see West, "F. Scott Fitzgerald, Professional Author," 49-51; and Thomas Strychacz, Modernism, Mass Culture and Professionalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 22-27. Strychacz argues nonetheless that there is a profound identity between the struc­ ture of professional discourses and of modernist writing strategies emerging out of a shared matrix of historical imperatives, and that the economic and social rewards accruing to professionals are comparable to the cultural rewards (the symbolic capital) accruing to modernist writers. Writers and professionals alike have attempted to demarcate a space that exists culturally, economically, and linguistically apart from mass culture and the imperatives of the mass market (26). The space he refers to here is what Fitzgerald called "the cultural world" and what I am following Bourdieu in calling the field of restricted production within a larger literary field. 23. Life in Letters, 108. 24. These are most helpfully discussed by Astadur Eysteinsson, The Concept ofModernism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 1-3, 8-102. 25. Select recent work in this vein includes Ann Douglas, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995); Susan Hegeman, Patterns for America: Modernism and the Concept of Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999); Michael North, Reading 1922: A Return to the Scene of the Modern (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Chip Rhodes, Structures of the Jazz Age (London: Verso, 1998); and Walter Benn Michaels, Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995). For a good "broad" definition of modernism, see Daniel Joseph Singal, "Towards a Definition of American Modernism," American Quarterly 39 (March 1987): 7-26. 26. Lawrence Rainey, Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998); Diepeveen, The Difficulties of Modernism; and Mark McGurl, The Novel Art: Elevations ofAmerican Fiction After Henry James (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). 27. For example, though Fitzgerald was an ardent admirer of Gertrude Stein's Three Lives and would later claim to admire The Making of Americans as it was appearing in the transatlantic review in 1925, in a letter from the early 1920s he attacked the "bogus 'arty-ness'" of a writer like Waldo Frank, and deplored Stein's "attempt to transfer the technique of Mattisse + Picasso to prose," which "made her coo-coo": see Correspondence ofF. Scott Fitzgerald, eds. Matthew J. Bruccoli and Margaret M. Duggan (New York: Random House, 1980), 123. (Hereafter cited as Correspondence.) When he began working to launch Ernest Hemingway's career, he expressed "horror" to Maxwell Perkins that his new discovery was giving his stories for low sums to "an 'arty' publication" and publishing "in the cucoo magazines": see Matthew J. Bruccoli, Fitzgerald and Hemingway: A Dangerous 160 ~ NOTES Friendship (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1994),47-48. Alongside his writing, Fitzgerald's most significant literary legacy may be in luring Hemingway away from avant-garde venues. 28. Fitzgerald still gets classified as a "social realist" (certainly Bruccoli reads him as such), but it is undoubtedly those qualities of his work that identifY it with high modernist fiction-symbolism, the poetic economy oflanguage, and a tendency toward spatial form or design­ that facilitated his canonization in the postwar academy. Though Fitzgerald hlirdly mentions James as an influence upon him (indeed, he seems to have followed Mencken and Van Wyck Brooks in belit­ tling James's importance), The Great Gatsby and Tender is the Night were readily placed in what McGurl calls "the Jamesian modernist tradition-that loosely conceived canon ... established in the university after the Second World War under aesthetic criteria that had largely been set forth half a century earlier by James himself' (Novel Art, 7). This process was undoubtedly abetted by T.S. Eliot's description of The Great Gatsby as "the first step that American fiction has taken since Henry James"-in a private letter reprinted in The Crack-Up, the 1945 collection so influential in establishing Fitzgerald's canonical status (see Crack-Up, 310). 29. Douglas, Terrible Honesty, 70-71. 30. See Alan Margolies, "Introduction" to F. Scott Fitzgerald)s St. Paul Plays (Princeton: Princeton University Library, 1978),3-9; and Chip Deffaa, "Introduction" to F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Princeton Years (Fort Bragg: Cypress House, 1996), 3-16. 31. Ruth Prigozy, "Introduction: Scott, .Zelda, and the Culture of Celebrity,"