THE APPRENTICE FICTION OF F. SCOTT FITZGERALD: 1909-1917. Edited with an introduction by John Kuehl.

THE APPRENTICE FICTION OF F. SCOTT FITZGERALD: 1909-1917.
Edited with an introduction by John Kuehl.

The New York Times - May 2, 1965

Young Man With a Style

By ANDREW TURNBULL

THE APPRENTICE FICTION OF F. SCOTT FITZGERALD: 1909-1917. Edited with an introduction by John Kuehl.

After the homme manque, the femme fatale, Fitzgerald's vampiric destroyer, is the most vital character he ever created. She pervades the later fiction in this volume....His femme fatale, however, is no mere foil. From the heroine of "A Luckless Santa Claus' (1912) to the heroine of " The Pierian Springs and the Last Straw" (1917) she acts as the most persistent and powerful barrier to the protagonist's success. Her development into an independently significant figure represents one of the major achievements of these early writings, whose author told his secretary, "I am half feminine - at least, my mind is....Even my feminine characters are feminine." - "The Apprentice Fiction of F. Scott Fitzgerald."

This round-up of Fitzgerald's "apprentice fiction" consists of 13 stories and two one-act plays which he wrote between the ages of 13 and 21 for school and college publications. The editor has supplemented his general introduction with individual prefaces to most of the pieces. The book is attractively illustrated, although the photograph said to be Fitzgerald's father is actually of his maternal uncle.

Fitzgerald was precocious - his talent, as he once said, being in large part the poetic type that matures early - yet he was no demon of precocity like Rimbaud or Raymond Radiguet or Stephen Crane. He did not become a professional till the summer of 1919, following his unhappy but maturing romance with Zelda Sayre. After she had turned him down on the grounds that he couldn't support her, he rewrote his manuscript of a novel with the desperation that often succeeds, got it accepted and was in turn accepted by Zelda, who now become the archetype of the flapper heroines in the Jazz Age stories that poured from his pen. This dramatic transformation was still two years away when he completed the work in the present volume, aimed primarily at the Fitzgerald specialist or buff interested in tracing his themes and narrative devices.

As might be expected, the best pieces are experiments with the materials of 'This Side of paradise." "The Spire and the Gargoyle," a clumsy story inspired by Fitzgerald's academic failure, nevertheless breathes the almost mystical love of Princeton that would lend beauty and vitality to his college novel "The Debutantes," reprinted in Smart Set as it stands here, was incorporated into "This Side of Paradise" in a version so much rewritten and improved as to be hardly recognizable. "Babes in the Woods," on the other hand, was spliced into the novel with comparatively few changes, the verbal shimmer and ironic grace of the first version already approximating the standard which made Fitzgerald famous. Written at about the time that his college flame, Ginevra King, was throwing him over, this story based on their first meeting is remarkably objective, and here, if anywhere, we have the kernel of "This Side of Paradise."

"How do you mean he's heard about me? What sort of things? Asks the heroine, Isabelle. "He knows you're good-looking and all that," her friend replies, adding after a pause, "I guess her knows you've been kissed." Isabelle's resentment is downed by her awareness that in a strange city her reputation as a "speed" will help to launch her. Tossing around such firecrackers in 1917, Fitzgerald was setting up shop as the spokesman and enfant terrible of a generation which in retrospect seems refreshing innocent.

Unrelated to "This Side of Paradise" but biographically important is "Tarquin of Cheepside," another Smart Set reprint which Fitzgerald considered his undergraduate masterpiece. This fantasy of Elizabethan London describes Shakespeare being chased into hiding by the relatives of a woman he has just assaulted, and as soon as the danger passes, he sits down to compose "The Rape of Lucrece." In the energy of the writing not to mention Fitzgerald's self-identification with the hectic poet, there is the premonitory thrill of a big career but also a dangerous one, for Fitzgerald began with the Romantic premise that a writer should be a man of action experiencing his material at first hand, and in escapades of a different sort he would not always get off so lightly as the Shakespeare of his yarn.

THE LETTERS OF F. SCOTT FITZGERALD Edited by Andrew Turnbull.

THE LETTERS OF F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
Edited by Andrew Turnbull.

The New York Times - October 18, 1963

The Fitzgerald Years in Letters

By HERBERT MITGANG

THE LETTERS OF F. SCOTT FITZGERALD Edited by Andrew Turnbull.

Here is the first full selection of Scott Fitzgerald's letters, assembled by Andrew Turnbull, his best biographer, and what makes the book worthwhile is that it does not speculate about Scott Fitzgerald - it is about him. Sometimes we are offered the original but settle for carbon copies. During the Hollywood and television blacklisting years a producer once asked for a "John Garfield-type." The story goes that the producer replied: "Sorry, I want a John Garfield-type." Nobody can find fault with this book as "a Fitzgerald- type."

The letters are so arranged that this thick volume forms a personal and literary history of the writer, his family, and his writing contemporaries. Because Fitzgerald wrote at length to his daughter and wife, we see clearer than ever, before what drove his engine of self-destruction so gallantly. He was pressed financially, ought to live high and was given a fearful choice - one always nagging extremely talented writers.

That choice was: Should he knock off little magazine stories and movie scripts for Shirley Temple or should he write new Gatsbys? The obviously poor choice he made is mitigated here somewhat in his own words, but not excused; Fitzgerald was too honest a literary person to rationalize about the junk on Grub Street or Vine Street. (It is not the doing of shabby jobs but their rationalization that show hypocrisy.) In the end, when he was writing "The Last Tycoon," he had decided to make a supreme effort to conserve his great talent, but illness cut him down. The letters reach a climax of life any novelist would envy.

One value of the letters is that they reveal brutally the combination of drudgery and creativity operating at once in a n artist's life. So many aspects of both appear in letters to his friend and to his editor, Edmund Wilson and Maxwell Perkins. Curiously, his letters to Ernest Hemingway are the only ones that seem to strike a false, Fitzgerald-type note; too gay and full of imitative bravado. Mr. Turnbull says of these newly discovered letters: "They show Fitzgerald's fascination with the Hemingway legend, his amused deference to the other's more commanding personality, and finally his dignity and magnanimity after Hemingway turned him down." In the Hemingway letters Fitzgerald always seems to be on the giving and seldom on the receiving end.

Nearly all the letters have a phrase or more worth repeating:

To Ernest Hemingway - "Riches have never fascinated me, unless combined with the greatest charm or distinction." To Edmund Wilson - "It was sun when we all believed the same things. It was more fun to think that we were all going to die together or live together, and none of us anticipated this great loneliness, where one has dedicated his remnants to imaginative fiction and another his slowly dissolving trunk to the Human Idea."

To his daughter - "Advertising is a racket, like the movies and the brokerage business. You cannot be honest without admitting that its constructive contribution to humanity is exactly minus zero. It is simply a means of making dubious promises to a credulous public."

Again to Scottie - "All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath."

To Joseph Mankiewicz - "I'm a good writer - honest."

This pathetic comment was addressed to Mr Mankiewicz because he had rewritten a screenplay that Fitzgerald had fashioned for M-G-M. "To say I'm disillusioned is putting it mildly," Fitzgerald continued. "For 19 years, with two years out for sickness, I've written best-selling entertainment, and my dialogue is supposedly right up at top. But I learn from the script that you've suddenly decided that it isn't good dialogue and you can take a few cuts off and do much better."

So Fitzgerald wrote Mr. Mankiewicz in 1938. It is interesting to ponder the relative values of American letters to this day: As writer-director of the current "Cleopatra" Mr. Mankiewicz was paid more money than Scott Fitzgerald received for every novel and word he wrote in his entire life.

THE PAT HOBBY STORIES By F. Scott Fitzgerald.

THE PAT HOBBY STORIES
By F. Scott Fitzgerald.

The New York Times - July 22, 1962

The Last Buffoon

By ANDREW TURNBULL

THE PAT HOBBY STORIES By F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Forty-nine, with red-rimmed eyes and a soft purr of whisky on his breath, Pat Hobby seemed less like a film writer than like an extra down on his luck, or like a bit player who specialized in the sort of father who should never come home. His jalopy was the property of the North Hollywood Finance and Loan Company; his Chesterfield came from the costume department of the studio where he sporadically worked; he was so impecunious that his two former wives has given up asking for alimony. He hadn't read a book in a decade and his daily newspaper was the racing sheet-- yet he was a film writer of sorts, a left-over from the good old silent days when he had miraculously earned up to $2,500 a week.

The talkies, with their increased demands on writers, had inaugurated his long decline; by 1940 he was lucky when he could wangle $250 a week for the "polish jobs" that were thrown his way in pity or contempt. Imaginatively sterile, he was skilled at making small changes in a collaborator's script ("crimson" to "red," "Get out of my sight!" to "Scram!"), so he could claim part credit for the final product. The rest of his ingenuity was reserved for blackmail, borrowing money and palming off other people's inspirations as his own. From our first glimpse of him we know he is doomed, that none of his machinations can possibly succeed. Yet there is fascination in watching him wriggle, and we come to admire his resilience, his infinite hope.

Fitzgerald created this anti-hero out of his own long and painful experience as a scriptwriter. On three occasions (between 1927 and 1937) he had been lured to Hollywood not simply by the large salary but by the artistic possibilities of the cinematic form. It seemed to him that the movies, with their "more glittering, grosser power," were stealing the fire of the novelist, and he longed to conquer the insurgent medium. All his scripts, however, had been rejected, or else rewritten to the point where he no longer recognized them as his own. His intricate, personal, evocative style was perhaps unsuited to the movies, and it wasn't his nature to "write down."

During the last two years of his life, when he was pinioned to Hollywood by financial necessity, he saw his dilemma for what it was-- that of the artist caught in a tough, materialistic enterprise-- and he turned it to fictional use. His tragic side went into Monroe Stahr, hero of "The Last Tycoon," while his comic spirit found release in Pat Hobby. Stahr became the embodiment of Fitzgerald's aspirations, Hobby of his degradations and humiliations.

The seventeen stories in this volume are short-- their author was short-winded and hoarding his strength for his novel-- but they are the work of a master hand. The prose is lean, swift and deadly accurate. The tone is typical of Fitzgerald after his crack-up: utterly detached, stripped of all illusion, yet compassionate enough to win sympathy for a protagonist who is essentially a rat-- and reveals it in such stories as "Pay Hobby's Christmas Wish" (a foredoomed scheme to frame a producer) and "Pat Hobby's College Days" (a disastrous attempt to capture a campus prank in a scenario). Other stories, like "Pat Hobby's Secret" and "The Homes of the Stars" are agonizingly funny, and throughout the book the irony, the little curls of humor keep one smiling. If these aren't the greatest stories Fitzgerald ever wrote, they are important to an understanding of his career, and they belong to the small company of works that genuinely evoke Hollywood.

Arnold Gingrich's authoritative introduction gives a running account of how the series was written for publication in Esquire and anxiously presided over by Fitzgerald.

Mr. Turnbull is the author of a current biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Talent

"To those grouped together under the name 'talent,' the atmosphere of a studio is not unfailingly bright-- one fluctuates too quickly between high hope and grave apprehension. Those few who decide things are happy in their work and sure that they are worthy of their hire-- the rest live in a mist of doubt as to when their vast inadequacy will be disclosed."

-- from "The Pat Hobby Stories"

AFTERNOON OF AN AUTHOR A Selection of Uncollected Stories and Essays. By F. Scott Fitzgerald.

AFTERNOON OF AN AUTHOR
A Selection of Uncollected Stories and Essays. By F. Scott Fitzgerald.

April 27, 1958

The Magic Is Authentic

By BURKE WILKINSON

AFTERNOON OF AN AUTHOR A Selection of Uncollected Stories and Essays. By F. Scott Fitzgerald.

The story of F. Scott Fitzgerald is in one sense the story of the moon that never rose. His death in 1940 at the age of 44 cut off what could have been many rich creative years. But it is also the story of the moon that shone very brightly-- though many people thought it was a quick comet only. Even in the Roaring Twenties-- which Fitzgerald helped to quicken into life, epitomizing the Jazz Age in his stories and novels-- people recognized that he wrote attractive, sensitive fiction but wondered whether it was the real thing.

Now we know. After two decades of limbo, in 1951 the greatest revival took place: he is in the anthologies, and in Valhalla. Fitzgerald, by his own admission a most indifferent caretaker of his talent, has now an eager and zealous custodian in the person of Arthur Mizener, who sits at the gates and makes very sure you have a guided tour of the grounds.

Let Mr. Mizener, who wrote the biography "The Far Side of Paradise," tell you his goal in assembling the present fine collection: "I have tried to include in this book only pieces which will serve its main purpose, to show the character of Fitzgerald's fundamental perception. Some are obviously more personal than others, but all derive their energy from some actual experience in which Fitzgerald was deeply involved. This is not so when their superficial details are not literally autobiographical... All were written because these experiences seemed, to Fitzgerald, fabulous."

The fourteen stories and six essays, never before between book covers, fulfill this purpose indeed. These range in time from the autobiographical essay, "Who's Who-- and Why" (1920) to a story, "News of Paris-- Fifteen Years Ago" (1940). Among the essays are "How to Live on Practically Nothing a Year," "How to Live on $36,000 a Year" and a literary piece, partially in praise of Hemingway, "How to Waste Material: A Note on My Generation." There are stories about Fitzgerald's memorable teen-age character, Basil Duke Lee, and about Pat Hobby, the Hollywood writer. And there are part-story, part-essay pieces, such as "Afternoon of an Author" and "Author's House."

The stories are, perhaps, not quite up to the best he ever wrote. The essays are unequal in contemporary interest. But the standard is remarkably high, the authentic magic is here. And the juxtaposition of fiction and fact in the same book brings into sharp focus an essential truth about Fitzgerald: the line in his work between reality and make-believe scarcely exists. Or it is crossed so often it tends to blur, like the frontiers of friendly countries.

As Mr. Mizener has pointed out, both his fact and his fiction stem from direct experience, deeply felt. Wit and imagination play over fact. Acutely observed fact informs and lends reality to fiction. From the three stories about Basil Duke Lee to the wry sketches telling of the miseries of Pat Hobby, the origin of the central character is never in doubt. Both are facets of Fitzgerald. As for the other side of the coin, there is more of the fanciful and fictional in some of the essays than there is in most short stories.

For all his taste and insight, Mr. Mizener, in his short introductory notes to each piece, tends to give Fitzgerald's every word the respectful attention one would give to the remarks of a queen mother. For example, the slightest piece in the book is a lovely bit of nonsensical dialogue called "Ten Years in the Advertising Business." Mr. Mizener's comment is that "a good many of the important criticisms of America's business society are implicit here."

Yet one can be grateful to Mr. Mizener for his part in the rediscovery, and the skill he has shown in making the present selection. And Fitzgerald did have a remarkable consistency. Everything he touched, fiction or fact, nonsense or deeply felt experience, he put his own mark on. The celebrated style, with its grace and high tensile strength, has not since been approximated. Fitzgerald has occasional literary descendents in subject-matter, but none in style. So today, at a time when obscurity, non-grammar and prolixity are becoming a kind of substitute for style, this encore of his own especial music is doubly welcome.

A quote or two suffices: "I went to my regiment happy. I had written a novel. The war could now go on." Here is the authentic blend of irony and involvement.

"Switzerland is a country where few things begin, but many things end." Here is the very quiet, almost Gallic, precision of phrase.

Finally here is a bravura bit, near the end of a Basil Lee story, that has a fresh beauty in it:

"There was a flurry of premature snow in the are and the stars looked cold. Staring up at them he saw that they were his stars as always-- symbols of ambition, struggle and glory. The wind blew through them, trumpeting that high white note for which he always listened."

As a musician does, Fitzgerald himself reached for that high white note. Uncommonly gifted as he was, he found it very often.

Burke Wilkinson, critic and novelist, wrote "Proceed at Will" and "Last Clear Chance." 

Published by The New York Times