The Cambridge Edition of the Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald

Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-76613-5 — Last Kiss F. Scott Fitzgerald , Edited by James L. W. West, III Frontmatter More Information

THE CAMBRIDGE EDITION OF THE WORKS OF F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

© in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-76613-5 — Last Kiss F. Scott Fitzgerald , Edited by James L. W. West, III Frontmatter More Information

Page 1 of the surviving typescript of “The High Cost of Macaroni.” The cancelled title is “What Price Macaroni?” Princeton University Libraries.

LAST KISS *** F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

Edited by JAMES L. W. WEST III

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C 2017 Eleanor Lanahan, Eleanor Blake Hazard, and Charles Byrne, Trustees under agreement dated 3 July 1975, created by Frances Scott Fitzgerald Smith.

Thoughtbook C 2013 University of Minnesota Press

Introduction and notes C 2017 James L. W. West III

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments page xi Illustrations xiii Abbreviations xiv

Introduction xv

THOUGHTBOOK OF FRANCIS SCOTT KEY FITZGERALD 1

Text, annotations, and commentary by Dave Page 3

THE VEGETABLE 35

POEMS 125

A Dirge (Apologies to Wordsworth) 127

Sleep of a University 128

Lamp in a Window 129

Obit on Parnassus 130

To a Beloved Inﬁdel 132

BOOK REVIEWS 135

The Baltimore Anti-Christ 137

Three Soldiers 140

vi Contents

Poor Old Marriage 143

Aldous Huxley’s “Crome Yellow” 145

Tarkington’s “Gentle Julia” 148

“Margey Wins the Game” 150

Homage to the Victorians 152

A Rugged Novel 154

The Defeat of Art 156

Sherwood Anderson on the Marriage Question 159

Minnesota’s Capital in the Roleˆ of Main Street 162

Under Fire 165

SHORT FICTION 167

On Your Own 169

Lo, the Poor Peacock! 187

The End of Hate 207

AFullLife 221

Discard 227

Last Kiss 242

News of Paris—Fifteen Years Ago 261

Contents vii

PUBLIC LETTERS 267

The Claims of the LIT. 269

The Credo of F. Scott Fitzgerald 271

Confessions 273

Letter to A. Philip Randolph 275

In Literary New York 276

Who’s Who in This Issue 278

Letter to Class Secretary 279

F. Scott Fitzgerald Is Bored by Efforts at Realism in ‘Lit’ 280

Unfortunate “Tradition” 282

Fitzgerald Sets Things Right about His College 283

False and Extremely Unwise Tradition 284

Letter to H. N. Swanson 285

Confused Romanticism 286

An Open Letter to Fritz Crisler 288

Anonymous ’17 290

Letter to Harvey H. Smith (1938) 291

Letter to Harvey H. Smith (1939) 292

viii Contents

JOURNALISM 293

The Cruise of the Rolling Junk 295

The High Cost of Macaroni 343

“Why Blame It on the Poor Kiss ...” 356

Does a Moment of Revolt . . . 362

What Kind of Husbands Do “Jimmies” Make? 364

Our Young Rich Boys 371

MISCELLANEOUS 377

The Author’s Apology 379

Contributions to The American Credo 380

An Interview with Mr. Fitzgerald 382

On the Girl Scouts 385

This Is a Magazine 386

Three Cities 391

Reminiscenses of Donald Stewart 394

What I Was Advised to Do—and Didn’t 397

How I Would Sell My Book If I Were a Bookseller 398

Some Stories They Like to Tell Again 400

Contents ix

10 Best Books I Have Read 401

Censorship or Not 402

The Most Disgraceful Thing I Ever Did 403

The Most Pampered Men in the World 405

My Old New England Homestead on the Erie 410

From Three Years (Testimonial) 413

Ten Years in the Advertising Business 414

Salesmanship in the Champs-Elys´ ees´ 416

The Death of My Father 418

On “Family in the Wind” 421

Fitzgerald’s List of Neglected Books 422

The True Story of Appomattox 423

‘My Ten Favorite Plays’ No. 152.— 425

The Broadcast We Almost Heard Last September 426

From These Stories Went to Market 428

Huckleberry Finn 429

A Book of One’s Own 430

Foreword to Colonial and Historic Homes of Maryland 432

x Contents

Record of Variants 435 Explanatory Notes 439 Illustrations 461

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am grateful to Eleanor Lanahan, Eleanor Blake Hazard, and Chris Byrne, the Trustees of the F. Scott Fitzgerald Estate, for their support and cooperation, and to Phyllis Westberg and Craig Tenney of Harold Ober Associates, Inc., for their assistance with permissions and copyrights. The evidence employed to establish many of the texts in this volume is housed in the F. Scott Fitzgerald Papers, Manuscript Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton Uni- versity. I thank Don Skemer, Curator of Manuscripts at Princeton, for many courtesies during my visits there. Permission to publish facsimiles and other reproductions has been granted by Princeton University Libraries and Harold Ober Associates, Inc., on behalf of the Fitzgerald Trust. For permission to include the Thoughtbook in this volume, I thank the University of Minnesota Press, publishers of a 2013 edition of the document, edited by Dave Page. The original Thoughtbook is part of the Matthew J. and Arlyn Bruccoli Col- lection of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Irvin Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, University of South Carolina. I am indebted to the director, Elizabeth Sudduth, and to her staff for access. At Penn State I acknowledge the long-term support of the Col- lege of the Liberal Arts and the Department of English. Susan Welch, my dean; Mark Morrisson, my department head; and Bob Burkholder, my acting head during the preparation of this volume—all provided valuable support. Stephen Wheeler of the Department of Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies gave assistance with Latin; Willa Z. Silverman, Department of French and Francophone Studies, has again helped with the French language.

xii Acknowledgments

Assistance with transcriptions, annotations, and proofreading was supplied by my Penn State editorial and research assistants, Chris Weinmann, LaVerne Maginnis, Jeanne Alexander, Bethany Mannon, Ethan Mannon, and Robert Birdwell.

J. L. W. W. III

ILLUSTRATIONS (Beginning on p. 461)

Frontispiece. Page 1, typescript of “The High Cost of Macaroni.”

1. Page 12, typescript of “The High Cost of Macaroni.” 2. “The End of the World,” addenda to The Vegetable. 3. Title page, Fitzgerald’s copy of The American Credo. 4. College Humor text of “My Old New England Homestead.”

xiii

ABBREVIATIONS

Crack-Up F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up, ed. Edmund Wilson. New York: New Directions, 1945. Price The Price Was High: The Last Uncollected Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979. Fortune Bryant Mangum, A Fortune Yet: Money in the Art of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Short Stories.NewYork: Garland, 1991. Stories The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald: A New Collection, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli. New York: Scribners, 1989. Scott/Max Dear Scott/Dear Max: The Fitzgerald-Perkins Correspondence, ed. John Kuehl and Jackson R. Bryer. New York: Scribners, 1971. As Ever As Ever, Scott Fitz— Letters between F. Scott Fitzgerald and His Literary Agent Harold Ober, 1919–1940, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli and Jennifer McCabe Atkinson. Philadelphia and New York: Lippincott, 1972. Poems F. Scott Fitzgerald, Poems, 1911–1940, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli. Bloomﬁeld Hills, Michigan: Bruccoli Clark, 1981. Own Time F. Scott Fitzgerald in His Own Time: A Miscellany, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli and Jackson R. Bryer. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1971. Egoists The Romantic Egoists, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli, Scottie Fitzgerald Smith, and Joan P. Kerr. New York: Scribners, 1974. Ledger F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Ledger: A Facsimile, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli. Washington, DC: NCR/Microcard, 1972.

xiv

INTRODUCTION

Last Kiss is a miscellany, a gallimaufry, a florilegium. It brings together items that have not found a place in any of the earlier volumes in the Cambridge Fitzgerald Edition. This volume presents writings in a range of genres: Fitzgerald’s Thoughtbook, an adolescent diary of sorts; The Vegetable, his only published play; the five poems that he published after he became a full-time author; twelve book reviews, all published between 1921 and 1923; seven short stories from the last decade of his career; seventeen public letters, ten of which appeared in Princeton University publications; six items of journalism, in four of which Fitzgerald attempts to explain the “flapper” phenomenon; and twenty-eight miscellaneous pieces, including a self-interview, several short autobiographical exercises, an essay on the movie business, and an unfinished reminiscence about his father. The most important writings in Last Kiss are the Thoughtbook and The Vegetable.TheThoughtbook, set down by Fitzgerald at the ages of thirteen and fourteen, is a private document in which he recorded the romantic crushes and competitions for popularity among a group of boys and girls from his dancing classes. The Thoughtbook is a remarkable piece of writing; it reveals young Scott Fitzgerald’s urge, already strong in his adolescent years, to observe and put down on paper the inner workings of a social group—the impermanent affections and shifts in status that would interest him as an adult, and would appear repeatedly in his fiction. The Vegetable is an anomaly in Fitzgerald’s career. It is his only published play—indeed, his only effort to write professionally for the stage—and his greatest failure. Fitzgerald should have been able to produce a Broadway hit. Much of his apprentice work was in the dramatic line: four plays written as a teenager for a local theatrical group in his home town of St. Paul, three musical

xvi Introduction

comedies at Princeton for which he supplied book and/or lyrics, and a handful of one-act playlets that he published early in his career as a magazinist. Fitzgerald knew that a successful play could be profitable. (“I am concieving a play which is to make my fortune,” he wrote to Harold Ober, his literary agent, late in 1921.1)The box office returns from a long run on Broadway followed by the receipts from a road production could provide steady income, money that would free him from the toils of magazine work and make it possible for him to write his novels. Fitzgerald produced a preliminary script of his play, first entitled “Gabriel’s Trombone,” in the early months of 1922. He revised the text in the summer of that year and revised it further in the fall. Early in 1923 he decided to publish the play, now called The Vegetable, in book form, hoping to interest a producer in taking it on. In a January 1923 letter to Maxwell Perkins, his editor at Charles Scribner’s Sons, Fitzgerald called this published version “a book of humor” that was “written to be read.”2 The Broadway producer Sam H. Harris signed a contract with Fitzgerald to mount a stage production. Harris gave Fitzgerald a $500 advance and agreed to pay him 5 percent of the first $5000, 7.5 percent of the next $2500, and 10 percent thereafter—all payments to be calculated on gross receipts. Fitzgerald retained the book, serial, magazine, newspaper, and musical rights. If the play ran for fifty performances, Harris and Fitzgerald would divide stock, amateur, and repertoire receipts fifty–fifty.3 None of this came to pass. Fitzgerald labored further on the play in the summer and fall of 1923 and participated in the rehearsals for a one-week tryout in Atlantic City. The play opened on 19 November at Nixon’s Apollo Theatre. In Zelda Fitzgerald’s words,

1 As Ever,p.32. 2 Scott/Max,p.66. 3 James L. W. West III, American Authors and the Literary Marketplace since 1900 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988): 135–36. The original contract between Harris and Fitzgerald for The Vegetable is preserved in the ﬁles of the American Play Company, Berg Collection, New York Public Library.

Introduction xvii

it “flopped as flat as one of Aunt Jemimas famous pancakes.”4 Fitzgerald attempted repairs, but the play never reached Broadway. The text of The Vegetable in Last Kiss is that of the published version, issued by Scribners in a single printing of 7,650 copies on 27 April 1923. This is the text that was “written to be read.” In 1976 Charles Scribner III produced an expanded edition of the play, also published by Scribners, comprising an offset reproduction of the 1923 text, an introduction, and unpublished scenes and correc- tions taken from Fitzgerald’s marked copy of The Vegetable and from other addenda among his papers at Princeton. These materials anticipated a possible second production of the play, a production that never materialized.5 Two other genres that Fitzgerald abandoned—poetry and book reviews—are represented in Last Kiss.6 In the early part of his career he thought of himself as a man of letters who might excel in several kinds of writing, but as the years passed he learned to concentrate his efforts on fiction and autobiography. His book reviews are lively and combative, but book reviews (for which he was usually paid a pittance) absorbed time better spent on short stories and novels. The book reviews reprinted in Last Kiss provide a glimpse of Fitzgerald as literary critic. They record his reactions to the writings of several important authors of his time, including H. L. Mencken, John Dos Passos, Aldous Huxley, Booth Tarkington, Shane Leslie, Sherwood Anderson, and Thomas Boyd.

The following stories have been omitted from the Cambridge Edi- tion: “Shaggy’s Morning,” Esquire 3 (May 1935); “The Passionate

4 Zelda Fitzerald to Xandra Kalman, n.d., Zelda Fitzgerald Papers, Princeton University Library. 5 Additional material from The Vegetable, including scenes cut from Act 2 before book publication, has been reproduced in facsimile in F. Scott Fitzgerald Manuscripts, vol. VI, part 1, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli (New York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1991): 3–57. 6 Fitzgerald’s undergraduate poems and book reviews are included in a previous volume of the Cambridge Edition, Spires and Gargoyles, published in 2010. For a full gathering of his poetry, see F. Scott Fitzgerald: Poems, 1911–1940, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli (Bloomﬁeld Hills, Michigan, and Columbia, South Carolina: Bruccoli Clark, Inc., 1981).

xviii Introduction

Eskimo,” Liberty 12 (8 June 1935); “‘Send Me in, Coach,’” Esquire 6 (November 1936); “The Honor of the Goon,” Esquire 7 (June 1937); “Strange Sanctuary,” Liberty 16 (9 December 1939); and the four Count of Darkness stories: “In the Darkest Hour,” Red- book 63 (October 1934); “The Count of Darkness,” Redbook 65 (June 1935); “The Kingdom in the Dark,” Redbook 65 (August 1935); and “Gods of Darkness,” Redbook 78 (November 1941). Scottie Fitzgerald, the author’s daughter, judged these stories to be so far below the level of writing that her father was capable of that they should not be reprinted. These stories are available online or through interlibrary loan. Also omitted are the four plays that Fitzgerald wrote for the Elizabethan Dramatic Club, a teenage theatrical group in St. Paul. A scholarly edition of these plays is available: Alan Margolies, ed., F. Scott Fitzgerald’s St. Paul Plays, 1911–1914 (Princeton: Princeton University Library, 1978). The four blurbs produced by Fitzgerald during his career have been reprinted in Matthew J. Bruccoli and Jackson Bryer, eds., F. Scott Fitzgerald in His Own Time: A Miscellany (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1971). The collaborations with Zelda Fitzgerald are available in Matthew J. Bruccoli, ed., Zelda Fitzgerald: The Collected Writings (New York: Scribners, 1991). The St. Paul Daily Dirge, a spoof newspaper produced by Fitzgerald and distributed to friends on Friday, 13 January 1922, has been facsimiled in F. Scott Fitzgerald in His Own Time (p. 233), and in Matthew J. Bruccoli, F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Descriptive Bibliography, rev. ed. (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1987), p. 36. Fitzgerald’s screenwrit- ing survives in manuscripts and typescripts housed at the Ernest F. Hollings Special Collections Library, University of South Car- olina. His ﬁnal unpublished stories have recently been published in Anne Margaret Daniel, ed., I’d Die for You (New York: Scribners, 2017).

The several editorial strategies employed in this volume have been selected to suit the materials presented. The Thoughtbook is ren- dered in a line-by-line type facsimile, in diplomatic text, without substantive emendation and with all misspellings and other irregu- larities preserved. This approach captures, as nearly as possible, the

Introduction xix

flavor of the original handwritten pages.7 The Vegetable has been edited in documentary style with only two substantive emendations, both recorded in the apparatus. The spelling and punctuation of the published text has not been altered. Obvious typographical errors have been silently corrected in the poems, book reviews, public letters, journalism, and miscellaneous writings. No attempt has been made to restyle the punctuation, orthography, or word division of these items. Two passages have been restored to “The High Cost of Macaroni”; both are identified in the Record of Variants. The seven short stories in Last Kiss have been edited according to the principles and practices employed in previous volumes of this series. All extant prepublication versions of the texts have been examined; these versions have been compared (or collated when appropriate) with the first-published texts. Surviving typescripts are described in the apparatus for each story. No evidence of bowdler- ization has emerged. Emendations are listed in the apparatus. Within each section, items are arranged chronologically by date of first publication or, in the case of the short stories, by date of composition. Citations to first appearances in print, together with explanatory information about the composition of certain items, will be found in headnotes or in other annotations. The history of subsequent publication is recorded in the revised edition of F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Descriptive Bibliography.

7 The Thoughtbook was originally published as a facsimile, with commentary by John Kuehl, in the Princeton University Library Chronicle 26 (Winter 1965): 102–08 and unpaginated plates. A separately bound edition of this facsimile was issued by Princeton University Library in April 1965. A new edition of the Thoughtbook, with the text typeset, and with an introduction and afterword by Dave Page, was published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2013.