Fitzgerald and Hemingway

Hemingway's centennial provided much to celebrate: a new edition of his nonfiction memoir, True at First Light; the conclusion of a superb five-volume biography; two collectible issues of the Hemingway Review; another sturdy reference encyclopedia; and anthologies that treat Hemingway and the natural world, To Have and Have Not, and The Old Man and the Sea. Fitzgerald garnered fewer publications, but what appeared is important: a critical edition of Flappers and Philosophers; a biography addressing the rise and fall of his friendship with Hemingway; and a guide to the critical reception of Gatsby. News, notes, and selected web addresses for the authors appear in Charles Oliver's Hemingway Newsletter (nos. 37–38) and in the Fitzgerald Newsletter (no. 9), ed. Jackson R. Bryer, Ruth Prigozy, and Alan Margolies.

i Texts, Letters, the Archives, and Bibliography

James L. W. West III has edited Fitzgerald's "initial encore," Flappers and Philosophers (Cambridge), which includes the eight stories from the 1920 Scribner's edition; two stories from Smart Set, "Babes in the Woods" and "The Debutante"; and four other stories, uncollected in Fitzgerald's lifetime but republished in posthumous collections. As with This Side of Paradise, West provides a lucid introduction and articulates his editorial principles and rationale for inclusiveness. His textual apparatus includes a complete record of variants and 30 pages of thorough explanatory notes designed for Fitzgerald's international audience. Appendices include "Genesis of 'Bernice Bobs Her Hair,'" "Composition of 'The Ice Palace,' July 1920," the "Original Ending for 'The Offshore Pirate,'" and "composition, publication, and earnings" for each story. Donald W. Rude in "F. Scott Fitzgerald on Joseph Conrad" (Conradiana 31: 217–19) discovers another instance of Fitzgerald's proclaiming his appreciation of Conrad; in a previously unreported news column, Fanny Butcher's "Confessions" in the Chicago Tribune (10 May 1923), Fitzgerald announces that he would rather have written Nostromo than any other novel. Edward L. Tucker unearths a brief congratulatory note from Fitzgerald to George Latimer, editor of the Saturday Evening Post, and prints it for the first time (Fitzgerald Newsletter 9: 8–9). Bruccoli Clark Layman produced 500 copies of the "Memorandum of agreement made this twenty-third day of September 1919 between F. Scott Fitzgerald . . . and Charles Scribner's Sons . . . [on] a work entitled: This Side of Paradise: Contract" (Columbia) to commemorate publication of volume 200 of the DLB.

Edited by son Patrick, a professional hunter who witnessed some of the 1953–54 safari on which the narrative is based, Hemingway's True at First Light: A Fictional Memoir (Scribner's) has sparked spirited debate and stretched to eight the number of consecutive decades in which something "new" by the author has appeared. The manuscript is reportedly 200,000 words, from which Sports Illustrated culled 55,000 for publication in 1971–72. This edition includes about half of the manuscript, according to the prefatory remarks, and it frames the selected text with an introduction and glossaries describing the characters and defining the Swahili terms. Malcolm Cowley links Hemingway to the "haunted and nocturnal writers" Poe and Melville, and in True at First Light we again see why. The warp of Hemingway's tapestry is hunting, the Mau Mau insurgency, marital sparring and extramarital longings, and reflections on ethics and religion; the woof is an Eden lost, restorative sleep vanished, and a child's heart and nobility reluctantly retreating. An uncut version of the manuscript, "which supposedly is going to come out" according to Patrick Hemingway, may elucidate themes that are not immediately discernible in this version (Blake de Pastion's "The Son Also Rises," Missoula Independent, 8–15 July: 12–13). In a special section of HN (19, i: 7–63) dedicated to the memoir, editor Susan F. Beegel provides "An Evening with Patrick Hemingway" (pp. 8–16), a transcript of his remarks and interaction with attendees of the centennial conference in Oak Park (July 1999) and "First Perspectives on True at First Light" (pp. 19–59), a collection of 10 reviews by a diverse group of scholars. Other significant reviews include Joan Didion's passionate condemnation ("Last Words—Those Hemingway Wrote...