F. Scott Fitzgerald proves he’s no hack
No English-language author ever wrote a more musical sentence and it shows through in a new collection of unpublished stories
The myth that F. Scott Fitzgerald, arguably the most gifted of the American Modernist authors, wasted his potential churning out short stories for pay cheques had no greater champion than Fitzgerald himself. In letters to friends and colleagues, Fitzgerald often lamented the hours lost to writing “trash” and “hack work” for the weekly glossies that regularly paid him $2,000 for a single story (more than twice the average annual U.S. income at the time).
The truth is more complicated, and sadder. It’s true that, after the financial and critical failure of “The Great Gatsby” in 1925, Fitzgerald often neglected his uncompleted novels to fund, via the writing of blatantly commercial stories, he and his wife Zelda’s extravagant lifestyle.
This juggling act proved more difficult to pull off as the romantic, excessive Roaring Twenties, an age his fiction in many ways defined for the public imagination, gave way to the Great Depression, when critical tastes turned toward social realism. With the added burden of Zelda’s increasingly frequent stays in private psychiatric hospitals, Fitzgerald became almost entirely dependent on magazines and movie studios for his income.
As proven by this new collection of unpublished stories, “I’d Die For You and Other Lost Stories,” many of them recently unearthed in archives and private collections, Fitzgerald was incapable, even in the most dire financial straits, of turning out hack work, despite his own self-derisive remarks.
No English-language author ever wrote a more musical sentence than Fitzgerald. Those talents are on display throughout the collection. The opening story, “The I.O.U.,” dates back to 1920, the year Fitzgerald, then 23, was vaulted to literary stardom by his debut novel, “This Side of Paradise.” “The I.O.U.” captures the young author’s buoyancy and supreme confidence in its comical depiction of a publisher bamboozled by a fake spiritual medium. Even the light tone and a romantic subplot do not entirely obscure the story’s deeper themes, which explore the loss of traditional cultural beliefs in the afterlife and the collective trauma of the First World War, which had ended only two years previously.
In “Nightmare (Fantasy in Black),” written in 1932, readers can already sense the yawning gap of experience separating the bestselling debut novelist from the barely middle-aged pro struggling to keep his family and career afloat. The story takes place in the kind of discrete private sanatorium that Fitzgerald was already far too familiar with, both from his own struggles with alcoholism and exhaustion and Zelda’s nervous breakdowns. The story’s tone is hopeful, and the heroine is a headstrong, witty beauty familiar to Fitzgerald’s readers, but a worldliness has set into the prose, a mournful tone absent even from “The Great Gatsby,” with its tragic ending.
“Nightmare” was rejected by several magazines because of its troubling subject matter, a fate shared by many of the stories in “I’d Die for You.” Magazine editors wanted their former Golden Boy to keep churning out stories of young love, glamorous debauchery and high society; Fitzgerald was anxious to explore new artistic and thematic territory, and to find a tone that would reconcile his romantic idealism to the harsh realities of adulthood.
As the 1930s wore on, Fitzgerald found it impossible to satisfy these warring demands. He refused to alter his increasingly mature stories to satisfy his editors and suffered the financial consequences. The collection also includes two of Fitzgerald’s attempts at writing historical fiction, a genre he planned, until the end of his life at age 44, to explore in novel-length form. The results are intriguing, playing to Fitzgerald’s strengths as a chronicler of the gap between our public manners and the often irrational and very impolite demands of our private fantasies and passions. When Fitzgerald died of a heart attack in Hollywood in 1940, his reputation was in tatters, his novels largely relegated to the status of relics of the 1920s. Whether he lived up to his potential is for readers and scholars to decide, but few can doubt the greatness of what he did write in his hectic, too-short life, even the “hack work” collected here.