A Fitzgerald Potpourri

With James L. W. West III's The Great Gatsby: A Variorum Edition, the Cambridge Edition of the Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald officially comes to a close after eighteen volumes across twenty-eight years. As scholars well know, the Herculean effort that has gone into the series has standardized texts whose original book and/or periodical appearances were riddled with typos and spelling errors; provided illuminating annotations of the more obscure references Fitzgerald sowed into his texts; made conveniently available essays and short stories relegated to out-of-print sources; and clarified composition histories whose details are scattered all too often among a horizon-wide variety of correspondence, drafts, tear sheets, and galleys. Although the Cambridge Edition does not claim to gather every scrap of ephemera known to exist—as West acknowledges elsewhere, the estate continues to decline to reprint five stories deemed inferior (LK xviii; Curnutt 247)—the series nevertheless demonstrates the continued importance of textual scholarship and editing. Considering that efforts are under way only now for establishing similarly reliable texts for Ernest Hemingway as Robert W. Trogdon edits an edition of The Sun Also Rises (1926) for the Library of America, the past three decades seem to have put Fitzgerald ahead of many of his fellow modernists. As the editor of the series since 1994—his first volume was This Side of Paradise in 1995—West deserves immense appreciation and gratitude; his closing reflections on the challenges the series has posed to him professionally and personally for roughly half of his prestigious career appear in this issue of the Fitzgerald Review and offer quite an education for those who have no clue why we worry whether Wolfshiem is i before e or whether we can quantify what Fitzgerald simply "polished" in collaborative efforts with his wife, Zelda Fitzgerald, in pieces with shared bylines such as "Show Mr. and Mrs. F. to Number—'" (1934; MLC 116–29) or "Auction—Model 1934" (1934; MLC 157–62).

As West notes, four out of the eighteen volumes of the Cambridge Edition offer different versions of Gatsby: Matthew J. Bruccoli's 1991 series kickoff, which controversially argued for correcting factual inaccuracies Fitzgerald mistakenly slipped into the text (more on that below); the version Scribner's typeset in late 1924 before Fitzgerald performed a transformative revision at the suggestion of Maxwell Perkins who elevated the storyline from a "novel of manners" into a "near-perfect work of art" (xiii), which West published in 2000 under the title Trimalchio after a character in Petronius's Satyricon; the earliest-known manuscript version of the text that is perhaps most remarkable for including a scene in which Jay Gatsby breaks out into song (GGMs 92), published in 2018 as The Great Gatsby: An Edition of the Manuscript and assessed in detail in last year's Fitzgerald Review (Curnutt); and this edition, which, apropos of the definition of the Latin phrase "cum notis variorum" (literally, "with various notes") collates textual differences both large and small that have crept into the text throughout the nearly ninety-five years it has been in print. "The aim of the variorum is twofold," West writes in his characteristically straightforward introduction, "to set forth the textual history of The Great Gatsby after its first publication, and to provide an authoritative text for teachers, scholars, critics, and readers" (xi).

There is a widespread feeling throughout Fitzgerald studies that, while no one would seriously argue that Gatsby is not the author's masterpiece, its cultural prominence overshadows other novels, stories, and nonfiction worthy of critical attention. Accordingly, it is...