Editing Fitzgerald: James L. W. West III's Accomplishment

When James L. W. West III got the telephone call in 1994, Eleanor (Bobbie) Lanahan—the older of Scottie Fitzgerald's two daughters—was on the line with an intriguing question. Would he be interested in taking over as editor of the Cambridge edition of F. Scott Fitzgerald's writing? By that time Matthew J. Bruccoli had brought out two volumes in the series, The Great Gatsby (1991) and The Love of the Last Tycoon (1993). The family interests—the Fitzgerald Trust, administered (in 2013) by Lanahan, Thomas P. Roche Jr., and Chris Byrne—thought that Bruccoli had been somewhat heavy-handed in insisting on changes in Gatsby and on retitling The Last Tycoon. There had been a parting of the ways, and the trust was looking for a new editor.

West scarcely had to think twice; he knew this was a great opportunity. Before long he and Lanahan and representatives from Harold Ober Associates met at, "of all places, the Leona Helmsley Palace hotel" in New York and reached an agreement (Interview).

West understood that, in order to do justice to his new task as editor of Fitzgerald's works, he would have to give up his post as editor of Theodore Dreiser's for the University of Pennsylvania Press (Thomas Riggio supplanted him). West had brought out editions of Sister Carrie (1981) and Jennie Gerhardt (1995), but was glad to switch to Fitzgerald—for two reasons. The first was that much of Dreiser's fiction had been written haphazardly. He was given to collaborating with various amanuenses, some of whom were his mistresses. Dreiser and companion would spend time getting words on the page, then tumble into bed, then resume. It made for a certain lack of concentration. The second, and more important, reason was that West regarded Fitzgerald as "a much better writer" than Dreiser—at his limpid best a very great one. And his devotion to Fitzgerald has only deepened over time. "It may sound corny," he commented, "but to do the job right you have to love the writer and the writings" (Interview).

Back in 1994, no one knew exactly how long it would take to bring Fitzgerald's work into a single, well-edited, standard edition. Initially, West thought he could probably finish the job in a decade. His "own hubris" may have figured into that overly optimistic estimate (Interview). And, of course, he has done other things over the years: teaching and mentoring students as the Sparks Professor of English at the Pennsylvania State University; Fulbrighting abroad; and writing numerous articles, a fine short book on Fitzgerald and Ginevra King, and his widely acclaimed biography of William Styron. In any event, the ten years will have stretched into well over twenty before the edition is complete, four or five years hence. As of this date, the fall of 2012, there have been thirteen volumes in the Cambridge Edition, and West plans to finish with four more—seventeen volumes in all. He is sixty-five now, and expects to retire as he completes the edition. He will retire from the Pennsylvania State University, but not from writing. "I very much want to keep going," he remarked, and he may tackle another biography. Biography, he has found, is "a lot more fun than editing" (Interview).

Arriving at an accurate and authoritative edition of Fitzgerald could hardly be more worthwhile, and West has done it superlatively. But the work is often dull and repetitive. "You become immersed in a text," he said. "You probably know that text better than anyone other than the author at the moment he finished it. You almost feel that you've participated with the author in bringing it to life." That is rewarding, surely. To reach that goal, though, "you have to slog through collating, recording variants, compiling emendation tables, checking page and line numbers": detail and more detail. "It can become exceedingly tedious, but you've got to do it, and you've got to be correct" (Interview).

The four Fitzgerald books that remain on West's agenda are Taps at Reveille; late stories assembled under the title of A Change of Class; a collection of miscellany including The Vegetable, short stories, book reviews, and nonfiction tentatively titled Last Kiss; and a variorum edition of The Great Gatsby. That Gatsby edition, he explained, "will present an emended text (emendations from various sources, including the MS), and will in addition present the entire textual history of the novel, from American to British editions to paperbacks and student editions." Variants will appear at the bottom of the page, not in the back matter. Bruccoli's 1991 edition "did some of that sort of thing but (as was appropriate for his undertaking) did not take on the entire history of the text." The end product will be an edition as reliable and sound as possible, but West realizes that—especially with a novel with such staying power—the text of Gatsby "will continue to change and morph as the decades advance, so nothing is ever final or definitive" (E-mail).

In his introduction to Making the Archives Talk, West spells out the principles that govern his editing. "I am an intentionalist editor," he writes. "I believe that authors have intentions for their writings, that these intentions change over time, and that particular sets of intentions can be recaptured, though never fully or perfectly. The best method of recapture is eclectic emendation, which brings together readings from several witnesses or versions (when they survive) to form a new text. This text will be as close to the desired ideal as scholarly labor and imaginative reconstruction can bring it" (2-3; emphasis added).

He distinguishes such editors from versionist or historical editors, whose texts are "lightly emended or not emended at all." They are "often hobbled by theory and paralyzed by overanalysis," West maintains, and "become primarily copyists and annotators." He advocates a more active stance. "Editors, in my view, should interpret evidence, fashion narratives, make decisions, and take chances. They should see their decisions into print and accept responsibility for them" (4, 5).

West's own fashioning of narratives is exemplified in the Cambridge edition of This Side of Paradise, Fitzgerald's first book as well as the first one edited by West. (It made sense for him to begin with this novel, for he had already done much of the research for his 1983 book, The Making of This Side of Paradise.) "Good editors are good narrators" (1), West comments in the introduction to Making the Archives Talk, and in the excellent introductions to This Side of Paradise and to subsequent volumes, he has two separate stories to tell. As he explains it in Making the Archives Talk, "The primary narrative gives an account of how the literary work came into being; the secondary narrative tells how the editor gathered the evidence, evaluated it, and established the text" (1).

Like all stories, these command interest when well told, and West is an unusually "good narrator." In the primary narrative, he leads the reader along the winding route by which the young Fitzgerald arrived at the novel that would establish his reputation. It is a fascinating journey, with many obstacles to overcome, and in telling about it West meets his own criterion of "making the archives talk": the notes, manuscripts, typescripts, proofs, relevant letters and journals, publishers' records, and account books that lie mute on the page until stirred into life by an editor who is also a biographer and historian.

The secondary narrative, in West's words in Making the Archives Talk, is often a "quest" or process story: "the editor's account of gathering and evaluating materials, searching for error or interference, and presenting the text in a new form" (2). In the case of This Side of Paradise, West's "new form" of the book differed substantially from previously published ones, for he did Fitzgerald the considerable service of locating and correcting a multitude of errors. In writing his book, Fitzgerald was a young man in a hurry, stitching together fragments of stories, poems, and plays—his collected works at twenty-three years of age—in order to win the hand of Zelda Sayre. He also seems, according to West in his introduction to his edition, to "have taken it for granted . . . that Scribners had checked spelling and factual accuracy," while Maxwell Perkins "appears to have assumed that Fitzgerald—who had attended Princeton, after all, and had written for the literary magazine there—had set these matters right himself before submitting the book" (xxxvi).

But no one checked, and the reviewers, while acknowledging Fitzgerald's talent, "had a field day" (xxxvi), ridiculing his errors and show of pseudo-intellectuality. Franklin P. Adams ("F.P.A.") printed lists of mistakes in his "Conning Tower" column for the New York Tribune (these are reprinted in the edition's back matter [405, 406]). Fitzgerald's friend Edmund Wilson described This Side of Paradise as "one of the most illiterate books of any merit ever published (a fault which the publisher's wretched proof-reading apparently made no effort to correct). It is not only full of bogus ideas and faked literary references but it is full of English words misused with the most reckless abandon" (xxxix). These criticisms troubled Fitzgerald deeply, yet it remained for West, more than seventy years later, to produce an edition of the novel "purged of the misspellings and other errors that disfigured" the original novel (liii).

In the summary remarks at the end of this introduction, West eloquently justified these alterations. "If one wants to experience Fitzgerald's misspellings in This Side of Paradise, one should consult the facsimile of the manuscript. If one is curious about the text that made him both famous and infamous, one should look at the first printing. But if one wants to assess the book that Fitzgerald meant to write—so far as historical imagination and editorial skill can bring it into being—one should read the Cambridge edition" (liii).

West exhibited his intentionalist approach in slightly altering the final sentence. In the manuscript, Fitzgerald has Amory Blaine declare:

"I know myself," he cried, "but that is all - "

But in the novel as published in 1920, the dash is gone, replaced by a period. It proved impossible to determine who made the change, West found, for neither typescripts nor proofs have survived and letters between Fitzgerald and Perkins failed to address the question. End with a dash or end with a period? West had to make the decision himself, and decided to restore the dash. That ending left "the narrative open-ended," he reasoned in his introduction, with Amory's real life only beginning, whereas the period brought the novel to an abrupt ending. But the decision was not clear-cut. "Either way," he observed, "the editor takes a chance" (xxx).

This Side of Paradise as edited by West came out in 1995, and Tender Is the Night in 2012, his eleventh volume so far. Among the other volumes, the two that have proven most useful to me are Trimalchio (2000), which follows a versionist approach to present a faithful rendering of this semi-final draft of The Great Gatsby, and My Lost City (2005), which collects the best of Fitzgerald's excellent personal essays. Others may prefer his editions of The Beautiful and Damned (2008) or of the early story collections. All of the books are carefully and intelligently edited.

Fitzgerald spent nine years working on multiple drafts of Tender Is the Night, in the process changing the plot, the principal characters, and the underlying message of this shape-shifting novel. The miracle is that the end result ranks along with The Great Gatsby among the best books of the twentieth century—and it should be assigned far more often than it is in university classrooms. West does an especially good job in exploring the origins of Fitzgerald's original draft. Tentatively titled The Boy Who Killed His Mother, it was based on an actual matricide. As West explains in his introduction, on the morning of 13 January 1925 in San Francisco, sixteen-year-old Dorothy Ellingson shot and killed her mother after an argument about the girl's late-night drinking and partying with jazz musicians. The murder was sensational enough—while also serving as a cautionary tale against the ill effects of the jazz age on American youth—to be prominently featured in the newspapers. The New York Herald, the international edition of the New York Herald Tribune, ran the Ellingson matricide as its lead story for Saturday, 17 January 1925. West surmises that that is undoubtedly where Fitzgerald, then in Rome revising the galleys for Gatsby, read about it (xvi-xviii).

This kind of attention to detail is further demonstrated in West's superlative "Explanatory Notes" in the back matter. The novel traces the lives of expatriates in Europe from 1925 to 1930 (not from 1925 to 1929, West persuasively argues in refutation of Bruccoli's position on the book's internal chronology [xxxvi-xl]) and contains dozens of references to people, places, hotels, restaurants, painters, composers, and writers of the period that will be obscure to most readers of the present. Any twenty-one-year-old will derive enormous profit from scanning West's illuminating notes about these references, and so will readers three and four times that age.

A great deal of work went into assembling these notes. How did West go about it? "Much is available on the Internet," he observes in "Annotating Mr. Fitzgerald," which originally was published in 2000 in American Scholar and is reprinted in Making the Archives Talk:

Encyclopedias and reference books are helpful, but often [this was particularly true of annotating Tender] it's necessary to locate old Baedekers or to find maps and train schedules from ninety years ago. One must travel to libraries—frequently to the New York Public Library (both the main branch at Fifth and Forty-Second and the Library for Performing Arts at Lincoln Center), or to the Mudd Library at Princeton, where the university archives are kept. One telephones college alumni associations or pages through books in search of period advertisements. Sometimes one hires researchers on Long Island or in Minnesota to look through historical-society records, or one tracks down sheet music for popular songs of the 1910s and 1920s. And endlessly, it seems, one clicks around in the online edition of the New York Times.

(122)

As West himself comments at the end of this essay, it may "turn out that the major contribution these Cambridge editions make to the study of Fitzgerald, besides gathering all of his writings in one series, will be to annotate them fully—to re-create, as successfully as such efforts can, the intellectual and social world of the author" (124).

As one example, late in the novel West's notes guide the reader to the popular culture of the times. Fitzgerald refers to Ronald Colman on page 302. The note (387) glosses Colman as a silent film star who "made a smooth transition into the talkies," provides the information that in Stella Dallas (1925) Colman played the wealthy father of Lois Moran (the actress on whom Rosemary Hoyt is based), and mentions his starring role in Beau Geste (1926) as a brave and heroic figure (somewhat resembling the warrior Tommy Barban for whom Nicole leaves her husband). And by the way, West tells us, Colman appears in several of Fitzgerald's Pat Hobby stories. On the following page, there is a reference to "John Held's flat-chested flappers." These "epicene female figures," the note reveals (387), were drawn by the well-known (at the time) illustrator John Held Jr., whose artwork was used on book jackets for both Tales of the Jazz Age and The Vegetable. Yet on another page further on, a note reveals that "Danny Deever" (1890), one of Rudyard Kipling's best-known poems, "gives an account of the hanging of a British soldier in India" (387). These annotations deliver useful and critically significant information, illuminating the reader about the times.

To take another example, World War I (and war in general) is very much in the picture as the novel develops. During a visit to the battlefield of Beaumont Hamel, Dick Diver discourses on the connection between warfare and love of one's origins: an example of his ability through exercise of charm to turn a day's outing into a memorable event. West's notes help tremendously in that they provide background for Diver's contention that the carnage at this site on 1 July 1916, the first day of the Somme offensive when the British Army sustained nearly sixteen thousand casualties, would not have been possible without sentimental memories of Christmas "and postcards of the Crown Prince and his fiancée, and little cafés in Valence and beer gardens in Unter den Linden and weddings at the mairie, and going to the Derby, and your grandfather's whiskers." Diver's speech concludes with his assertion that "[t]his was the last love battle." "Isn't that true, Rosemary?" he asks the young actress he has become infatuated with (his performance is undertaken for her benefit). By her reply— "I don't know. . . . You know everything" (68)—Rosemary confirms that she shares his attraction in an affair that will threaten the Divers' marriage. It's an important scene, put into context effectively by West's note (366).

Fitzgerald was a notoriously poor speller, particularly of proper names. In the back matter for his edition of Tender Is the Night, West sets about to make things right. Almost 100 of the approximately 370 emendations in his "Record of Variants" (353-59) are devoted to correcting errors in the names of people and places. And he adds especially valuable lists of hotels and restaurants and of place names (390-93) (most of these in Europe). There, alas, I found a single error to add to the three typos that have so far come to light in West's scrupulous volumes: "Sienna" for Siena, Italy (391).

In the four collections of Fitzgerald's stories, as he explains in "The End Is Near," the last essay in Making the Archives Talk (it originally appeared in abbreviated form as "Twenty Years with Fitzgerald" in Chronicle Review in 2009), West has decided to include not only the original contents "but also the stories he chose not to reprint" from the same period (138). These stories were not necessarily inferior to the ones that appeared, say, in Flappers and Philosophers or Tales of the Jazz Age. Some were omitted because the plot line followed that of a selected story, and others because parts were used in novels. But all had appeared in magazines, and West's goal has been to include as much of Fitzgerald's work as possible.

Yet, as he acknowledges in "The End is Near," the edition will not be "a true omnium gatherum" reproducing every scrap of Fitzgerald's work, published and unpublished. Some unsigned pieces in the Nassau Lit attributed to him by "classmates . . . in very old age" did not make the cut. West has also had to deal with "the murky problems" involving published stories and essays attributed to F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald—some of them genuine collaborations, others Zelda's work entirely. Then there are nine stories that Scottie Fitzgerald Smith ruled out as "far below the level of writing" her father ordinarily achieved (139). Among them were the four "Count of Darkness" stories set in medieval times: this is weak work indeed but of some interest because the title character is presumably modeled on Ernest Hemingway. In addition, "approximately a dozen stories" unpublished during Fitzgerald's lifetime repose in a Philadelphia bank vault—not masterpieces but in West's judgment "at least as good" as some fiction that Fitzgerald did "place and publish." One of these, "Thank You for the Light," was printed in the New Yorker in the summer of 2012, but (according to "The End is Near") the Fitzgerald Trust "has decided for the present not to put [the others] into the edition." If permitted, West would have reprinted all of this material. This issue aside, though, West feels grateful that the estate has allowed him to proceed on his twenty-year project "with a minimum of interference—in fact, with great goodwill and cooperation" (140).

When the job is completed half a decade hence, its six thousand pages will constitute the first "multi-volume full-dress edition for a novelist of Fitzgerald's generation" (140). And West is almost entirely responsible for this accomplishment. When he took over the task from Bruccoli, he resolved to work alone, both as general editor of the entire series and as the sole editor of each volume. He has had assistants to help with the scut work of textual scholarship, but he made all the emendations and wrote all the introductions, glosses, and commentary himself. Working solo has, he believes, actually sped up the process, for in his experience (and mine) "[e]very collaborative project proceeds at the rate of its slowest contributor" (137).

West was a college basketball player and it seems appropriate to characterize his accomplishment as "useful" in the understated British sense of the term—as, for example, in their description of Bill Bradley, like Fitzgerald a Princetonian, as a "useful" member of the Oxford basketball team during his time as a Rhodes Scholar. In more expansive American language, it should be said that West has done and is doing a tremendously valuable service to Fitzgerald in particular and American literature in general, and we are all in his debt. As he nears the end, he commented in a recent e-mail, "I find myself fantasizing about the spines of all the volumes, facing out in an orderly row, shoulder to shoulder, and me outside tending the flower garden, though I'll probably be putting together another book." He well deserves the satisfaction of gazing at those Fitzgerald books, and of doing whatever else may await him down the road.