Fitzgerald story found at last
Temperature reveals The Great Gatsby writer on a slow, downward slide
A year before F. Scott Fitzgerald died of a heart attack, he completed a short story about a hard-drinking writer diagnosed with cardiac disease.
“And as for that current dodge ‘No reference to any living character is intended’ — no use even trying that,” Fitzgerald warns at the start of Temperature, an 8,000-word piece dated July 1939 that is receiving its publishing debut in the current issue of the literary quarterly The Strand Magazine.
Presumed lost for decades, Temperature was written while the author known for The Great Gatsby struggled to find work in the movie business and hoped to revive his fiction career. His screenwriting contract with MGM had expired and twice in 1939 he had been hospitalized because of alcoholism.
“He felt anachronistic, and was trying to find a voice that didn’t echo with the Jazz Age,” Kirk Curnutt, author of The Cambridge Introduction to F. Scott Fitzgerald, wrote in a recent e-mail. “To this end he experimented with more hard-boiled tones and sardonic comedy.”
Set in Los Angeles, Temperature is an antic story of failure, illness and decline, common themes in Fitzgerald’s work. The narrative is consciously cinematic, with such lines as “And at this point, as they say in picture making, the Camera Goes into the House.”
The protagonist is a 31-year-old writer, Emmet Monsen, whom Fitzgerald describes as “notably photogenic,” “slender and darkly handsome.” Circling around the self-destructive Monsen are medical authorities, personal assistants and a Hollywood actress and estranged lover who gets more estranged all the time.
Andrew F. Gulli, managing editor of The Strand, came upon the manuscript earlier this year while looking through the rare books and manuscript archive at Fitzgerald’s alma mater, Princeton University.
Fitzgerald’s stories had run in Collier’s, The Saturday Evening Post and other magazines, but by the late 1930s he no longer had a wide following and was unhappy with his literary agent, Harold Ober, who in the past had supported him financially. In a letter sent to Ober in August 1939, Curnutt was amazed to learn that a copy of Temperature still existed and called the discovery a “great find.”
Fitzgerald bibliographies list the story as unpublished, or, in a 2007 Critical Companion, as “Lost: mentioned in correspondence but no surviving transcript or manuscript.”
Fitzgerald called Hollywood a “hideous town,” but also “the history of all aspiration.”
It was the author’s literary setting for the rest of his life. By early 1940 he was turning out his selfdeprecating Pat Hobby stories, dispatches about a failing screenwriter that ran in Esquire. He died in December 1940 at age 44.