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Reviewed by:
  • Fitzgerald & Hemingway: Works and Days
  • Kirk Curnutt
Fitzgerald & Hemingway: Works and Days. By Scott Donaldson. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009. 520 pp. Cloth $32.50.

Works and Days is Scott Donaldson's summa literaria of the two most famous American masters he has been writing about since he left journalism for academia nearly forty-five years ago. Thick as a phonebook but ten times as informative, it collects essays that (except for two instances) informed yet somehow escaped his well-known trio of biographies on their subjects, By Force of Will: The Life and Art of Ernest Hemingway (1977), Fool for Love: F. Scott Fitzgerald (1983), and Hemingway vs. Fitzgerald: The Rise and Fall of a Literary Friendship (1999). The earliest among the collected essays, "Hemingway's Morality of Compensation," was first published in 1971 in American Literature; the most recent, "The Last Great Cause" (also on Hemingway), was written especially for this volume and previewed at the Ronda, Spain Hemingway conference in 2006. In between are titles that will ring familiar to attendees of various Hemingway and/or Fitzgerald Society conferences since the two organizations were conceived in 1980 and 1992 respectively. Other entries will send the memory back to photocopies made in the shush of university libraries, perhaps while in graduate school or in the early days of one's own career, mined from journals such as Twentieth Century Literature, The Iowa Review, or Prospects, their passages highlighted in different colors as these articles were returned to over the years. Still other essays will recall important collections edited by Susan F. Beegel, Jackson R. Bryer, Don Noble, and H. L. Weatherby.

Reading the two dozen selections in sequence, one experiences both the reassurance of the familiar and the jolt of the new. Topics include such representative subjects as money, fame, craft, and the morality of character, while addressing broader "political" ramifications of narrative style such as "gaze," passivity, and ideological conservatism. Simply stated, it is good to have these observations together, finally, in one convenient source.

In his amiable introduction, Donaldson writes that the decade he worked in newspapers before pursing his Ph.D. at the University of Minnesota gave him a leg up on many of his colleagues: ". . . I was equipped to write about the authors whose work interested me in language most readers [End Page 147] could understand and [I was] accustomed as a professional to getting those words down on paper" (4). Undoubtedly, that "real world" experience gave him insight into Hemingway's journalistic roots as well, for the subject frames the portion of the book covering the former Kansas City Star cub. "Hemingway of The Star" explores the author's somewhat shady habit of supplementing his income from the Toronto paper in 1922–23 by writing dispatches simultaneously for both the International News Service and the United News Service. What comes through in Donaldson's analysis of Hemingway's contentious exchanges with his editors is how much of his later rabidity was already a coping mechanism in his apprenticeship: whenever caught kiting the trade, he would bluster, flinching at editorial restrictions and claiming economic injustice (241). Fifteen years later, that bark was such a publicly accepted facet of the Hemingway persona that when the author set off to cover the Spanish Civil War he roared indignantly whenever the North American Newspaper Alliance (which had commissioned him for a staggering $500–$1,000 per submission) hinted that he might be padding his reporting to take financial advantage of the arrangement (432). Reading Donaldson's account, it becomes clear that Hemingway did indeed believe in a morality of compensation: its golden rule boiled down to "nearly a dollar a word" (380).

That flippancy is mine, not Donaldson's. One of the most enjoyable aspects of reading "The Last Great Cause" is its untendentious account of Hemingway's four trips to Spain in 1937–38. Like a good newspaper man, Donaldson presents the story and lets the reader decide just where on the scale of ethics his subject might have scored. In this way, the essay offers a corrective to Stephen Koch's grossly cartoonish account in The Breaking Point: Hemingway, Dos Passos, and...

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