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F. Scott Fitzgerald and the New Yorker, 1925-1941
Even when potboiling, he can make you read him.
—Touchstone. "New Books," New Yorker, 13 March 1926
The first issue of the New Yorker magazine appeared on 21 February 1925. "Not edited for the little old lady in Dubuque," as the oft-misquoted phrase actually appears in print, the new magazine sold itself from the start as urban and urbane. It boasted George S. Kaufman, Rea Irvin, Alice Duer Miller, Dorothy Parker, and Alexander Woollcott as advisory editors, and sold for fifteen cents a copy, or five dollars a year ("Of All Things" 2).
In February 1925, Scott Fitzgerald was in Rome, revising the galleys of The Great Gatsby. From the Hotel des Princes, he announced to Hazel "Patsy" McCormick: "I've written a novel . . . that's just about the best one written in America for twenty years. It appears in the spring. I'd tell you the name only I'm going to change it." He did not tell her the name of his new novel, but, either jokingly or unavoidably, he spelled her name not "Patsy" but "Patsby" throughout the letter. Fitzgerald soon shipped the galleys back to Maxwell Perkins in New York, and went to Capri for a well-deserved celebratory rest. On 10 April 1925, Scribner's published The Great Gatsby in New York.
The young author was already famous; the young magazine would quickly become so. The New Yorker appeared at the heart of the decade Fitzgerald named the Jazz Age, and, as a literary, social, and intellectual magazine concerned primarily with New York City and the cosmopolitan metropolitan area from Southampton to Saratoga, the New Yorker chronicled the same events, people, and scenes from which Fitzgerald took much of his inspiration for fiction. This Side of Paradise gets scary and seamy—and so very exciting—when the Princeton boys take trains into the city and out to the posh spots on the seacoast. The Beautiful and Damned is a novel of escape to, and from, Manhattan. [End Page 10] The Great Gatsby veers along those new commuter rail lines between Wall Street and the Hamptons; the restaurants and businesses and hotels of Manhattan are crucial settings for the novel's events. Even Fitzgerald's Riviera masterpiece, Tender Is the Night, is populated and haunted by Americans who hail from New York, who refer to it constantly, and whose names—like McKisco—evoke its suburbs long before the novel's end fades back to the city, and to the Empire State beyond, to Geneva, Hornell, to "a very small town—in that section of the country, in one town or another" (300).
Today we are accustomed to having some of the biggest and most enduring names in American letters long associated with the New Yorker: John Updike, appearing there for nearly sixty years; E. B. White; James Thurber; John Cheever; John McPhee; Jay McInerney; Seymour Hersh; Alice Munro; and many more. Of these authors, Updike and McInerney particularly, have been called Fitzgerald's heirs, and they seem to have liked it. James Dickey, Arthur Krystal, and Claudia Roth Pierpont have written about Fitzgerald for the New Yorker; Ian Frazier wrote a short essay in 2011 about "Jay Gatsby's house." Logically, we look back at the New Yorker during its first days and rather expect to see Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner publishing in it. The Jazz Age Manhattan magazine, to our retrospective eyes, should surely have carried Fitzgerald as its biggest-name contributor, its poster boy, and its alter ego.
However, the New Yorker was a newcomer. Fitzgerald had arrived in 1920—so young himself, but half a decade earlier. Those already established names in contemporary writing, many of them authors under thirty, published instead in Collier's, the Saturday Evening Post, Smart Set, and, particularly if their books were published by the parent organization, in Scribner's Magazine. By the 1930s, more recent arrivals E. B. White, Thurber, and John O'Hara, along with the founding folk of the New Yorker, would become known for their fiction as well as essays, reviews, and illustrations. Fitzgerald, though, generally remained too much in demand for the New Yorker, and beyond its budget—much to its regret—in the first decade of its life.
This greatly bothered people at the magazine. They would have loved to publish Fitzgerald, and did snap up occasional writings whenever they could—such as his infamous drinker's "A Short Autobiography" in the 25 May 1929 number. But for years the connection of the New Yorker with Fitzgerald was largely restricted to reviewing his novels and short story collections when they appeared—generally unfavorably, or at least without much visible affection—although the magazine was peppered with cartoons, couplets, little asides, and [End Page 11] mentions of Fitzgerald that have gone uncollected and largely unnoticed. The attention that the New Yorker paid to Fitzgerald and his work was sometimes envious, sometimes admiring, sometimes quite entertaining, and sometimes sadly dismissive, considering both the source and the author.
The real world that the New Yorker reported on and the fictional world that The Great Gatsby depicted were remarkably similar, which is unsurprising given that Fitzgerald based his novel on the places, people, and events of the short corridor—less than twenty-five miles—from Manhattan to Great Neck. The public spectacles were elaborate and varied. Women's golf, Jordan Baker's sport, received extensive coverage. Baseball was immensely popular, but so were entirely unrelated extravaganzas at the city ballparks. In July 1925, Aida was performed at Yankee Stadium, with live horses and a bored camel (R. A. S.) (not to be outdone, the Polo Grounds booked the Municipal Opera Company to perform Carmen in September 1925, though without animals ["Goings On"]). In the Gold Cup Regatta in 1925, a thirty-foot mahogany powerboat with a V-8 engine, built on City Island, returned the Cup to New York waters. She won the race in Manhasset Bay, Long Island, and her Gatsbyesque name was Baby Bootlegger (Bull; see fig. 1).
Drinking mattered as much in Prohibition-era Manhattan as it did in East Egg and West Egg. In the month that Gatsby was published, on 25 April 1925, "The Talk of the Town" reported on a bootlegger called "the Yale Boy," who had made a fortune courtesy of a swift yacht and "London offices of distilling concerns." Having spent the fortune on hotel living, a titled lady, and gambling, the Yale Boy was reported to be plying the seas again ("Prohibition" 4). A regular feature near the end of each issue of the magazine in 1925, "The Liquor Market," listed what hard liquors and champagnes were available in town—although it rarely printed from whom—and what the prices were that
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week. Helpfully, the magazine reminded its readers during the summer of 1925 that Coney Island, where Gatsby wants to take Nick that steamy summer's day, was a good place to get drink (Lipstick). Cartoons about drinking and stories about drinking were in just about every issue (see fig. 2). When Babe Ruth managed to get his hands on a particularly generous supply of illicit beverages and appeared in public "bousing with more than the usual flagrance, in short, violently drunk," he was suspended for a week by Yankees manager Miller Huggins and fined $5,000—earning top coverage in the New Yorker (Markey 15). In two glorious touches like Jay Gatsby's, Ruth insisted on pink pajamas when taken ill in Asheville, North Carolina, on 25 April 1925, only two weeks after Gatsby was published ("Talk of the Town: King's"); and, at a St. Louis hotel in the heat of summertime of 1925, Ruth "bought some twenty, bright silk shirts." When he checked out, "'They're yours,' said Mr. Ruth to the conscientious bell boy who ran after him with the collected garments" ("Talk of the Town: Generosity"). Perhaps The Babe, himself a poor boy on his own from his youth who found wealth and immortal celebrity in New York and far beyond, and who lived not merely like a young rajah but as the Sultan of Swat, read Fitzgerald's novel and found some things to like in its title character— even if Gatsby might, reprehensibly, have also been involved in fixing the 1919 World Series.
There were regular letters from "Tophat" telling women and men what to wear, and exulting in new, flourishing clubs like the Club de Vingt, "rivaled only by the Plaza Grill in its Scott Fitzgeraldism." The New Yorker reported who
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was lucky enough to be sailing for Europe, and who was to be seen or visited where. Even in the humor columns, Fitzgerald was noted in absentia. He might not have even been in New York when the magazine commenced, but who might one look for, on the trip from Paris to Rome? According to the "Speaking of Europe" column on 25 April 1925, "the Fitzplasters . . . and the Hemingnits" (C. G. S.).
Full reports were in the magazine that fall on every Ivy League football game, with special attention to Columbia, Princeton, Harvard, and Yale. The New Yorker seemed most taken with Princeton, Fitzgerald's and Amory Blaine's alma mater. John R. Tunis gushed in a football-weekend essay in 1926: "it is probably the most picturesque college town in America—thanks to a natural setting of great beauty and some lovely buildings scattered around the campus and Alexander Hall—it furnishes an ideal situation for the staging of a spectacle like a big football game. . . . From early morning, cars pour into town, cars adorned with Harvard and Princeton colors; they fill the roads bordered by those charming and mysterious looking clubs; they even adorn the driveways of these same clubs" (26; see fig. 3).
The Great Gatsby was, however, reviewed snidely, on 23 May 1925: "[Fitzgerald] still reveres and pities romantic constancy, but with detachment. Gatsby, its heroic victim, is otherwise a good deal of a nut, and the girl who is its object is idealized only by Gatsby" ("Books"). Fitzgerald himself got his first mention other than in parody, caricature, or advertisement on 28 November 1925, as someone who divided the generations: "Our elders criticize many things about us, but usually they attribute to us sins too gaudy to be true. The trouble is that Our Elders are a trifle gullible; they have swallowed too much of Mr. Scott Fitzgerald and Miss Gertrude Atherton" (Mackay 7). It is interesting to see the New Yorker suddenly admitting that little old ladies in Dubuque might indeed be reading Fitzgerald and believing in him. After 1920, his reputation had always preceded him.
So, too, did the idea of being beautiful and damned. Death and images of death are coupled with Fitzgerald from the very beginning in the New Yorker. [End Page 14]
Caricaturist and photographer Herb Roth did a "Suggested Bookplates" series for English and American authors; the first was Shakespeare's. Fitzgerald's ran in 26 September 1925, embedded in an article about one of Fitzgerald's favorite writers, Joseph Conrad. For Fitzgerald, Roth drew a capering skeleton, clad in black tie and holding a saxophone in one hand and mask in the other as confetti streams down, under the imperative motto "BE YOUR AGE." A booze bottle bounces near the skeleton's knee. A toad with a gemstone gleaming from its head—poison and antidote combined (as Shakespeare's Duke Senior in "As You Like It" knows)—crowns the illustration (Roth; see fig. 4). "Be Your Age" shows how fully the magazine at the pulse of the Jazz Age registered both Fitzgerald's personification of the decade in many readers' eyes, as well as the dangers he had foretold in Gatsby of decadence and of the coming Crash. Fitzgerald was amused by Roth's illustration, and saved it in a place of honor. He clipped it out and pasted it into the front inside cover of his Gatsby scrapbook, turning it into the very bookplate suggested (Fitzgerald, Gatsby Scrapbook). [End Page 15]
In the Valentine's Day week issue of 1926, the same issue in which the Broadway version of Gatsby was reviewed, Kenneth P. Britton killed off both Fitzgeralds in his "Epitaphs for Authors" series, a bleak appearance anticipating the toll of drink on shining young lives: "Scott Fitzgerald and his Zelda / Here on earth no longer are / You can find them up in heaven, / Leaning on the golden bar."
A major profile of Fitzgerald ran on 17 April 1926, under a title that already felt inevitable, "That Sad Young Man." John Chapin Mosher wrote of Fitzgerald's loss of youth (but remarkably enduring beauty at the advanced age of twenty-nine), his drinking and driving, his fabulous and yet-unmatched early success, and, happily, his dedication as a writer. "The popular picture of a blond boy scribbling off best sellers in odd moments between parties is nonsense. He's a very grave, hardworking man, and shows it. In fact there is the touch of the melancholy often obvious upon him." Mosher ends his profile hopeful for "more and more revealing, penetrating pictures of American life as [Fitzgerald] settles gravely down into the twilight of the thirties" (21; see fig. 5).
When, shortly after its publication, the New Yorker began recommending Gatsby in their "Tell Me A Book To Read" column (designed to direct readers to "a few of the recent ones best worth while"), Gatsby was summarized thus on 22 August 1925: "Quixote dismounts near Great Neck from a blind-tiger Rosinante, to sacrifice himself to a despicable Dulcinea." Other blurbs in the "Tell Me" column during the spring and summer of 1925 would call Gatsby the "[u]gly-duckling emergence of a true romantic hero in North Shore Long Island high low life" (30 May); "a Yankee Quixote so fine as to be taken seriously" (6 June); and "a rough diamond of devotion and chivalry, cast before swine on Long Island" (20 June). In the same column on 4 July, the New Yorker had to admit that Fitzgerald, the "grandfather of the Long Island flapper," had "ripen[ed] as a novelist." However, the "Talk of the Town" column on 27 June 1925 could not resist noting that Fitzgerald, "disappointed in the Motherland's reception of the latest chef d'oeuvre," had been seen moping about Paris (5). Gatsby was no longer on the recommended book list by the end of August.
Little squibs, longer articles, and even cartoons in the New Yorker after the publication of The Great Gatsby nonetheless routinely paralleled its stories and themes. An inordinate number of the small illustrations by generally unidentified artists at the bottoms of pages feature speeding cars, policemen in pursuit, and car wrecks (see fig. 6). Gatsby is, of course, driven by car accidents of all kinds, as was contemporary New York. Traffic lights had just come to major American cities in the late 1910s and were often disregarded. On Long Island, the roads had three lanes: a middle lane, intended as a passing and turning lane, [End Page 16] was the inevitable site of dreadful head-on collisions. Both Fitzgeralds were bad drivers; in 1920 Zelda wrote genially to Ludlow Fowler that she had "ruined" their car "because I drove it over a fire-plug and completely deintestined it."
Cars were dangerous but also beautiful. Henry Ford's famous dictum that a customer could have a car painted in any color as long as it was black would
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help lead to the demise of the first affordable American car, the Model-T, in 1927. Customers wanted colorful cars in the Jazz Age. The colors available were every bit as outrageous as Myrtle Wilson's chosen lavender taxicab; Caprice Rose, Pigeon Egg Blue, and Sea-Fog Green were among the colors of the cars on display in the showroom at the Hotel Commodore in November 1925 (L. L. 25). "Motor Caste" by Stanley Jones in the 30 May 1925 issue is full of descriptions of cars that read like a parody of Jay Gatsby's "circus wagon" and its kin: "My eye was struck by a low, coffee colored car of tremendous length which thrust a long, pointed nose at us. Lamps like snare drums bound in silver flanked the boat-like prow, and the low leather top fitted close over the tonneau, like a girl's sport hat" (7).
And, in a keen irony where Gatsby and Fitzgerald are concerned, a young Harvard lawyer named Charles Brackett published a novel, Week-End, in the summer of 1925. The New Yorker gave a rave review that September to Brackett's Long Island saga of decadence and lavish limousines, a wealthy hostess, and "a muscular young man and a determinedly coltish girl." The magazine dubbed him "a rather surprising and shining debutant" and soon hired him as its drama critic (Touchstone, "Critique" 22). Week-End then got Brackett a job at Paramount as a screenwriter in 1932. He would win three Academy Awards—including one for The Lost Weekend (1945), whose alcoholic writer hero Don Birnam loves The Great Gatsby—and an honorary Oscar, and would serve as president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences during the 1950s. The easy success of Week-End in print and Brackett in Hollywood contrast vividly to the fates of Gatsby at the time and Fitzgerald in Hollywood. Fitzgerald had in his own library a copy of Week-End, inscribed "To Scott in reverence from C.B. Antibes August 24th [1925]."
Close on the heels of the publication of The Great Gatsby came a Broadway play adapted by Owen Davis, who had won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1923 for Icebound. The New Yorker gave Davis's Gatsby a good review and a full-page cartoon, which Fitzgerald clipped and pasted into his Gatsby scrapbook. He did not like the play; however, in 1938, in a letter to Mrs. Edwin Jarrett, Fitzgerald spoke approvingly of a stage adaptation of Tender Is the Night, which "pleases me in a manner that the acting version of THE GREAT GATSBY did not." The play is, indeed, bad. It is difficult to like a version of Gatsby in which George Wilson is the Buchanans' chauffeur, the valley of ashes is absent, and in which far too much time is spent in deep melodrama in the Fay home in Louisville. In Davis's adaptation, to quote the New Yorker, the "romantic vulgarian, the great bootlegger and the near-lover, . . . writhing in the noble agonies of his small catastrophe," was played by Canadian [End Page 18] film and stage actor James Rennie, later the husband of Dorothy Gish. Florence Eldredge, who would marry Fredric March the next year, played an evasive Daisy, trying "to get away without too much Long Island mud on her reputation." According to the full-page illustration of the two principals in the New Yorker, the stage version had Daisy recoiling as Gatsby is shot indoors, beautifully clothed, and right in front of her ("Final Pot Shot"; see fig. 7). The ultimate praise provided by the New Yorker was to snap out a précis of the play in corkscrewed, tabloid language: "a spirited, slap-dash fresco of latter-day Long Island life on the shore-fronts of our best people and in the mansions of the rich-quick . . . a heady, hearty fling" (G[abriel] 23). A 13 February 1926 advertisement for the play specifically linked it to the magazine in which it ran: "At the Ambassador, now—The Great Gatsby—civilized entertainment; no concession to Dubuquers" (Advertisement). The New Yorker might have enjoyed picking on Fitzgerald, but chiefly, I think, because it wanted to be him.
There are stings in the early New Yorker at Fitzgerald's failure to have gone to war, which surely must have hurt him. Sniped the "Talk of the Town" on 24 April 1926, truly nastily, "Mention was made of Scott Fitzgerald's army career in our recent limning of that fabled character; in those profound times, Zelda Fitzgerald was a more vital figure in military life than her husband-to-be." Why? Outside Montgomery was an infantry camp, Sheridan—at which Fitzgerald was stationed—and an air force base, Taylor. "Lieutenant Fitzgerald was attached to the more plebeian of the two camps. Any aviator will tell you which that was." The aviators practicing at Taylor Field near Montgomery, Alabama, in 1916 and 1917 would "fly their machines above the town and perform stunts for her edification above her domicile." This not-so-veiled attack on Fitzgerald's manhood echoes the critical tone in which the magazine would
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keep on condemning his new fictions as immature, wondering when he would grow up as a writer.
Similarly, where Fitzgerald was concerned, there is also a great deal in the New Yorker, in print and in the form of cartoons, about Princeton University as a juvenile place full of young carousers that directly mocks This Side of Paradise. When John Grier Hibben and his wife sailed for Europe on a summer holiday in June 1925, the New Yorker announced, in "The Talk of the Town" column in its 4 July issue, the departure of the "president of Country Club University." John O'Hara was especially keen to parody Fitzgerald in his own earliest New Yorker stories, and used Princeton to do it. In "Most Likely
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to Succeed," O'Hara's Amory-Blainish narrator explains that "ever since Prep school I'd wanted to belong to Cottage" and that he got a bid there after styling himself "to be what I thought Cottage wanted" (38). Fitzgerald loved his time at the University Cottage Club so much that he had recently given the lines of its red-and-white Georgian Colonial revival style and row of French windows to Tom and Daisy Buchanan's mansion—and installed the replica of Oxford's Merton College library at Cottage in Gatsby's own house.
Fitzgerald's writing and its style came under fire not only from reviewers in the New Yorker, but also in the little unsigned squibs at the end of a long article, quoting a passage from some other magazine or newspaper, and mocking it with a pithy editorial word or phrase. These critical one-liners were a New Yorker hallmark from the very first issue. Fitzgerald was taunted in the 19 July 1930 issue for a passage from "A Millionaire's Girl," in a recent number of the Saturday Evening Post: "She was then about sixteen, and dressed herself always in black dresses—dozens of them—falling away from her slim, perfect body like strips of clay from a sculptor's thumb." The New Yorker commented: "In that case, dozens of them would be none too many" (Unsigned comment). Was the anonymous writer for the New Yorker aware that this story was, in fact, written by Zelda and published under Scott's name just as she was first being hospitalized in Europe? One hopes not.
When the Fitzgeralds were on the Riviera in the late 1920s, he was featured often in the magazine's "Paris Letter" and made his way into E. B. White's humor columns. In one, on 11 June 1927, White recounted a conversation his wife had had at a party with a poet off to the south of France. "Afterwards she asked me why is it that writers always go to southern France to write a book, and when I told her it was because there was no more ink over there she thought I was joking, and of course I was. Nobody knows why they go, and she ought not to have asked." Wishing only to "rub elbows" with Scott Fitzgerald, as they leave the party, Mrs. White is obliged to settle for Gene Tunney instead, and is not happy about it ("Rubbing Elbows" 24).
Once in the south of France, for whom was one always on the lookout—on the beaches and in the blue-green waters? Why, F. Scott Fitzgerald, of course. He might be spotted not only writing or at a party but kindly helping a dog to hijinks and fame. Marveled Alexander Woollcott in May 1928, of the celebrated German shepherd Egon Finney, suggested as the successor to Rin Tin Tin but too precious to his owner, Ben Finney, to be given up to Hollywood: "[Egon] rides a surf board. He cannot mount one unaided, but I have seen Scott Fitzgerald help his floundering efforts to get on. Then Fitzgerald would slip off into the water and Egon would ride alone, balancing [End Page 21] expertly and terribly pleased with himself. Indeed, he can thus circle the bay indefinitely, provided only that Ben Finney is in the motor boat in plain sight" (27; see fig. 8). Finney would later write about his good fishing pal Ernest Hemingway and about Fitzgerald in his autobiography Feet First (1971).
Fitzgerald's work of the later 1920s was more pleasing to New Yorker critics, perhaps because the magazine was becoming more established and confident itself. But even when they were generally favorable, its reviewers could not resist being gossipy about him. Under the headline "Stories by Scott Fitzgerald, Some Good, Others Please Remit," the reviewer of All The Sad Young Men on 13 March 1926 approved of "The Rich Boy," "The Adjuster," and one of Fitzgerald's finest stories, "Winter Dreams." What was best about them? "In maturity and general quality, if not irony or brilliancy, 'The Rich Boy' seems to us to come off the same piece with 'The Great Gatsby.' 'Absolution' suggests Fitzgerald showing the Arty that he can write their sort of story when he chooses; it is about an ironic conjunction of the penitences and phantasies of a boy with cobalt eyes, and a troubled priest. Two or three frank, flaring potboilers fill out the volume. Even when potboiling, he can make you read him" (Touchstone, "New Books" 51). The next week, on 20 March 1926, All The Sad Young Men was the sole recommendation under "Short Stories" in the "Tell Me a Book to Read" column, but with only partial praise: "Two, perhaps
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three samples of the Fitzgerald who wrote 'Gatsby,' one well-done experiment in the psycho-sexual, 'slice' genre, and some quid-pro-quoes for checks from magazines."
There would not be a new Fitzgerald book to review until 1934. In the interim, Fitzgerald published "A Short Autobiography" in the New Yorker on 25 May 1929. The magazine ran his drinking menu on two pages, each with a cartoon: one of a bum arrested by an enormous cop; and one of a hoochie-coochie dancer being much appreciated by an old male crowd. On 15 February 1930, Fitzgerald's "Salesmanship in the Champs-Elysées," a saga of a car salesman confronted by a brash American, with the concluding moral that "[t]he impolite will end himself by being able to get no car at all," took up less than a page. The rest of the page was occupied by a large barroom cartoon in which one man complains to another that there ought to be a law against a glass of beer costing thirty cents.
A young Clifton Fadiman would take on Fitzgerald's next novel when it appeared. Writing on 14 April 1934, Fadiman fell back on stereotyping: "[i]n Mr. Fitzgerald's case . . . money is the root of all novels[, a] universe he both loves and despises; he sees through it and is confused by it." Tender Is the Night was to Fadiman a story that at first simply glittered, then began "to move," and, in the end, the "life that began so gaily, so musically, under the Riviera sun has withered to dust and ashes." Yet despite Fitzgerald's "wit, grace, [and] astonishing narrative skill," Fadiman felt the characters inadequately developed, a flaw "that helps to prevent this novel from being the first-rate work of fiction we have been expecting from F. Scott Fitzgerald" (113-14). He also complained of numerous misspellings in the book; like W. B. Yeats, among other Modern writers, Fitzgerald was a notoriously bad speller. When the New Yorker recommended Tender Is the Night, briefly, in the 19 May 1934 issue, they supplied a thoughtful précis of the novel that contained some truths but studiedly ignored others, preferring simplification: a "beautifully written and bitter novel tracing the moral degeneration of some over-endowed Americans to whom Europe is a playground and life pretty much a game" ("Readers' Reminder" 104).
During a wretched decade for him, Fitzgerald had three more short pieces accepted by the New Yorker, and at least one was rejected—about which more in a moment. The 23 March 1935 issue ran a tragic poem, "Lamp In A Window," that might as well have been called "Once Again to Zelda." With his wife in the hospital in Baltimore and he himself convinced he was very ill with tuberculosis, Fitzgerald had spent a miserable holiday season in 1934-35, and had gone to Tryon, North Carolina, for his health in February 1935. The misery and loss [End Page 23] of the poem is profound and naked, from the first lines: "Do you remember, before keys turned in the locks, / When life was a closeup, and not an occasional letter[?]" The couple's arguments are silly and kind, such as each trying to give the third drawer of a hotel bureau to the other. Sometimes, they are heated: "We blamed each other, wild were our words and strong, / And, in an hour, laughed and called it liver." Even the fights, small and sweet or strident, are to be missed. In the wake of a "desolate and unkind" end, of a June that rushes into December before any young couple are ready, the poet, "stupid-got with grief," can remember only these few small moments of discord, and no others. Is there still a lamp in the window, the poem concludes, or has that last symbol of hope gone dark?
In June 1936, Fitzgerald submitted another writing about symbolic light to the New Yorker, and the magazine rejected it. That summer was perhaps the worst in Fitzgerald's life, and the lead-up to it was stark. Esquire had published "The Crack-Up" in March 1936, showing the world in dreadful detail what 1935 had been like for F. Scott Fitzgerald. E. B. White, in the 14 March 1936 "Talk of the Town," had little sympathy: "F. Scott Fitzgerald has been telling, in Esquire, how sad he feels in middle life. . . . Such picturesque despondency is doubly disturbing: it makes one wonder whether any man should write a good novel, or anything at all, till he is well past fifty" (11). In April, Zelda was admitted to Highland Hospital, near Asheville, North Carolina. Stay away from Asheville, her mother Minnie Sayre had written to her a few years earlier, "[i]t is full of hospitals and sick people always in evidence." Nonetheless, of course, Zelda would try to live at Highland for much of the rest of her life and would die in the fire there in 1948.
By May, Fitzgerald was deeply in debt and distraught. He wrote to Harold Ober, his agent since 1919, on the last day of the month, "I come dispirited to my work and leave it sick and exhausted and the fact that I am largely responsible for all this situation has nothing to do with the question and simply reproaching me about it only adds to the trouble." On 5 June, Fitzgerald admitted to Adelaide Neall, the fiction editor of the Saturday Evening Post, that he had "lost my touch on the short story—by touch I mean the exact balance, how much plot, how much character, how much background you can crowd into a limited number of words." He referred to his recent stories as being "built rather than written" (Life in Letters 301). It was at almost this moment that he nevertheless decided to ask Ober to submit "Thank You for the Light" to the New Yorker, who were considering it by 15 June (Bruccoli 274; McGrath).
Fitzgerald followed Zelda to western North Carolina in July, saw himself ridiculed in print by Ernest Hemingway as "poor Scott Fitzgerald" (27) in [End Page 24] "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" (published in August in Esquire), and mourned the death of his mother weeks later. Alone, in debt, and desperate, Fitzgerald would have been delighted to see his story in the New Yorker; but the magazine declined it. He would, I think, also appreciate the irony that in January 2013 a Google search for "fitzgerald 'thank you for the light'" returned "about 6,380,000 results." "Thank You for the Light" was finally published by the New Yorker last summer in its issue of 6 August 2012. In brief—very brief, for the story runs only one magazine page—"Thank You for the Light" is about a traveling saleswoman pausing at the end of a long day and hoping to relax with a cigarette. That Mrs. Hanson is a woman, "a pretty, somewhat faded woman of forty," a widow as well, and has for many years traveled through the Midwest as a successful business person, selling ladies' undergarments, might alone have been sufficient reasons why the New Yorker rejected it in 1936. That the story is intensely Catholic and concludes with a miracle seems to me the chief reason.
Mrs. Hanson herself is not particularly religious. At the end of a very long day, though, she realizes that she "hadn't smoked since breakfast" and is in new territory, farther from the permissive East Coast in a place where women smoking was not only frowned upon but gently prevented. She has one more appointment that day, and though she wonders if she's "getting to be a drug fiend" Mrs. Hanson is still desperate for a cigarette. The only place where she can take refuge is a place where many tired, addicted people have sought refuge over the ages: a church. Not just a church, but a "Catholic cathedral. It seemed very tall, and suddenly she had an inspiration: if so much incense had gone up in the spires to God, a little smoke in the vestibule would make no difference. How could the Good Lord care if a tired woman took a few puffs in the vestibule?"
Not only does the Good Lord not seem to mind, but the Virgin Mary actively helps Mrs. Hanson when humanity fails her. Mrs. Hanson has no matches, and the votive lights have just been extinguished by a thrifty old man who is keeping them from being wasted by burning all night. Prompted by his statement that she must be there to pray, Mrs. Hanson does so. With no family to pray for, she prays for her employer and her clients. Exhausted, she sits back in the pew and falls asleep: "In her imagination, the Virgin came down . . . and took her place and sold corsets and girdles for her and was tired, just as she was." Fitzgerald may have been echoing W. B. Yeats's ballad "Father Gilligan" (1890), in which a tired person, at prayer, falls asleep, and God works a miracle as they sleep to relieve them of their duties. However, the Virgin is not just a workingwoman, like Mrs. Hanson. Her pity extends to literal illumination, and to absolving what others view as a vice: Mrs. Hanson wakes to smarting fingers, with a burning cigarette between them. On "her knees, [End Page 25] the smoke twisting up from the cigarette between her fingers," Mrs. Hanson humbly, gratefully, thanks the Virgin "very much" for the light.
The New Yorker rejected the story in 1936 because, as Ober wrote Fitzgerald on 30 June 1936, it was "so curious and so unlike the kind of thing we associate with him and really too fantastic" (Bruccoli 275). Curious and fantastic seem to me a diplomatic way of saying "religious." The lapsed (but occasionally intensely devout) Catholic Fitzgerald had contemplated the priesthood, if very briefly, while a student at the Newman School. He dedicated his first novel to one of his Newman School teachers, an Episcopalian reverend turned Catholic priest, Sigourney Fay. He also wrote several stories, most notably " Absolution" (1924), originally meant to be part of The Great Gatsby as a depiction of Gatsby's youth, that center on Catholicism. An undated newspaper clipping Fitzgerald saved from the New York Herald Tribune, not ripped out and battered as so many of his clippings are, but carefully cut and preserved, shows Pope Pius XI, an avid mountaineer in his youth, celebrating high mass at St. Peter's for fallen Alpine soldiers (Fitzgerald, Clipping). Fitzgerald's regard for the Pope was not uniform through his life; in a poem for a superior officer's girlfriend, written while he was in uniform, he is more cynical, though identifying himself as Catholic all the same:
I hear you're a Catholic, so'm I and I hopeYou pray to the saints but don't worship the popeExcept when he speaks ex cathedra (to the crowd)I'm afraid he's pro-German (don't breathe it out loud)
(Letter to Mildred McNally)
Shane Leslie, who met Fitzgerald while he was at the Newman School and who in the spring of 1918 had sent This Side of Paradise to his own publisher, Charles Scribner II, once told Fitzgerald in a 1920 letter that "you like Fay and myself can never be anything but Catholics however much we write and pose to make the bourgeois stare!"
The New Yorker accepted Fitzgerald's work twice more during his lifetime: on 5 June 1937, they ran a poem, "Obit on Parnassus"; and on 21 August 1937, Fitzgerald's humorous proposal for an anthology, "A Book of One's Own." "Obit on Parnassus" is a cleverly rhymed chronicle of famous authors who died in various decades of their lives: Byron, Shelley, and Keats all before forty; Austen and Poe in their forties; Shakespeare and Dickens in their fifties—and on to Tennyson, Wordsworth, and those who died after eighty. Fitzgerald concludes: "But, Death, while you make up your quota, / Please note this confession of candor— / That I wouldn't give an iota / To linger till ninety, like Landor." [End Page 26] His funny, but also depressing, anthology proposal, with its Woolfian title, acknowledges that, in "this age of drastic compression, it is the ambition of all the publishers I know to get everything worth reading into one little book no bigger than a Reuben's sandwich." Accordingly, Fitzgerald comes up with "splendid chapters" like "Shakespeare (Laughs from), Plastic Age, Ten Atlantic Prize Novels condensed in one, Sears-Roebuck, Bradstreet, Tony Adverse."
He tried to publish in the New Yorker again after 1937 but failed. When the Saturday Evening Post began rejecting his stories, Fitzgerald asked Harold Ober to try the New Yorker again and asked Ober what they would pay. The answer: fifteen cents a word for the first 1200 words, eight cents a word thereafter. Ober reminded him on 17 October 1939 that "they paid $50 for a piece you wrote called A BOOK OF MY OWN and $30 for LINES FOR AN URN ["Obit on Parnassus"] and $25 for LAMP IN A WINDOW." This, for a man who had received $4,000 in 1929 for a short story. Feeling that Ober had lost confidence in him, Fitzgerald began sending out stories on his own—to Ober's dismay.
On 11 January 1940, Fitzgerald used light humor to try to sell himself to the New Yorker, but with a conclusion no publisher knowing an author had a longtime agent could respect: "Unless my daughter has crowded me out of your magazine, I beg to submit this piece. Will you communicate about it directly to me with no intermediary[.]" On 4 March, he tried a poem or poems: "I cull this my little sheaf of woodland pipings." Both efforts were to no avail, but the reference to his daughter bears mention here. Frances Scott "Scottie" Fitzgerald worked as an intern for the magazine while she was a Vassar undergraduate in 1940. After her father's death and her graduation from Vassar in 1942, William Shawn hired Scottie and three other young women, including Lillian Ross, as the first women general staff reporters at the New Yorker—yet this plum job came with a qualification. Scottie, Ross, Andy Logan, and Roseanne Smith were reporting only for "The Talk of the Town," as replacements for male reporters away at war. The women would make notes on a story, which would then be rewritten, Ross recalled, "so that the voice would be perceived as male" (174).
Fitzgerald himself made it into "The Talk of the Town" column one last time during his life, on 10 September 1938, before his daughter's tenure there. By 1938 Fitzgerald was in Hollywood once again, struggling, once more, to get and keep work as a screenwriter. E. B. White turned the knife with a grin, announcing the "great and startling news" that the "Lost Generation—those maladjusted waifs of the Deux Magots, those orphans of the stormy postwar years"—has been found. Where? "In the New Building of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in Culver [End Page 27] City, California." Fitzgerald—a source of comment, a star to be wished upon for the New Yorker of the 1920s—was no longer a presence in the magazine after it became fully established as an arbiter of cultural criticism and of taste and after the Jazz Age crumbled into breadlines and government relief. Fadiman's review of Tender Is the Night and Fitzgerald's own few short pieces marked his major moments in the New Yorker in the 1930s.
When Fitzgerald died and E. B. White memorialized him in "The Talk of the Town" on 4 January 1941, he did so with an eye to the very same, essential, fabulous fatality that had characterized the magazine's first representations of him. It was as if by dying young he had somehow proved them right. Even with his death, the New Yorker refused to abandon the view of Fitzgerald it had maintained during his lifetime. Though praising him for his beautiful writing and regretting the fact that he was already becoming forgotten, they could not stop likening F. Scott Fitzgerald to Amory Blaine and diminishing and dismissing him, even in the act of commemoration. Strangely and wonderfully, though, White made an admission of what the magazine had clearly seen but not wanted to admit in the mid-1920s—equating Jay Gatsby and Manhattan, Fitzgerald and the prospect of the infinite possibility of American dreams: "If Jay Gatsby was no more than could be expected of Amory Blaine, Manhattan Island has never quite come up to Peter Stuyvesant's early dreams." What might Fitzgerald have had left, in his next forty years as an author? For White and the New Yorker, there was no possibility that the Jazz Age Golden Boy would ever have achieved anything good. Their writers' admiration and emulation of him, and their respect for him, would come hereafter: "The desperate knowledge that it was much too late, that there was nothing to come that would be more than a parody of what had gone before, must have been continually in his mind in the last few years he lived. In a way, we are glad he died when he did and that he was spared so many smaller towns, much further from Geneva" (9).
Anne Margaret Daniel teaches literature and writes in New York City. She received her PhD in English from Princeton University, where, in 1996, she gave the keynote address at the F. Scott Fitzgerald Centenary Conference. Since then, she has written about Fitzgerald, American Modernism, Irish literature and culture, redheads, and music. She is working on a book about Fitzgerald and Hollywood, and has finished her first novel. For more, please visit www.annemargaretdaniel.com.
Note
. I delivered a very short version of this paper at the Fifth International F. Scott Fitzgerald Society Conference in Nice in 2000. My thanks to Thomas P. Roche Jr., and to all who enjoyed the essay at the time, and encouraged me to expand and publish it (complete with a hard copy of Herb Roth's dancing skeleton). My thanks, as ever, to the Princeton University Library's Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, where the Fitzgerald Papers reside. Don C. Skemer and his staff make working on Fitzgerald a delight. Many of the mentions of Fitzgerald, other writings, and illustrations in the New Yorker are unidentified as to author or illustrator; or, in some cases, identified illegibly or only with initials. [End Page 28] The New Yorker records from the 1920s with regard to illustrations are not complete. Where it is possible, I cite an author or artist, and, if supplied, a title for their contribution. In other cases, I state the issue date of the magazine, and the page upon which the item being cited to occurs, together with as much further information as is available therein.