I'd Die For You, Page 2

  No one chronicled his hardest times better than Fitzgerald himself, in his self-excoriating and confessional essay collection The Crack-Up (1936). The reevaluations he was making show in these pieces: a man trapped in an asylum desperate for a way out in “Nightmare”; a writer changing career course in “Travel Together”; a cameraman and a movie star thinking through the limits of their success, and wanting more, in “I’d Die for You.”

  In several of the stories in this collection, Fitzgerald explores new opportunities available to women during the 1930s—and the limits on those opportunities: Mrs. Hanson, the traveling saleswoman of “Thank You for the Light”; teenagers such as Lucy and Elsie having sex; Kiki’s apparent affairs in “Offside Play.” The traditional marriage plot is under siege; “Salute to Lucy and Elsie,” for example, leaves a nuanced mix of approval and contempt for the new generation’s freedoms; and the film scenario “Gracie at Sea” alternately mocks and endorses them.

  That four of these stories feature nurses and doctors in leading roles connects all too clearly to the Fitzgeralds’ lives during this period. The “medical stories”—“Nightmare,” “What to Do About It,” “Cyclone in Silent Land,” and “The Women in the House”—borrow some of their grim detail from what happened on the way to the crack-up, and Fitzgerald’s, and Zelda’s, continuing illnesses thereafter.

  “I’d Die for You,” the collection’s title story, which Fitzgerald also called “The Legend of Lake Lure,” stems from his sad days in the salubrious North Carolina mountains. He went there for his health; fearing a recurrence of tuberculosis, he hoped the fresh air would help cure him—and cure Zelda. From 1935 until 1937, with trips back to Baltimore, where he, Zelda, and Scottie had tried to live in the early 1930s, Fitzgerald spent most of the time at a variety of North Carolina hotels. When he was solvent, he stayed at resort hotels, including the Lake Lure Inn, Oak Hall, and the Grove Park Inn; when he was broke, he lived in motels, ate canned soup, and washed out his clothes in the sink. When he had the time, health, and capacity to work, Fitzgerald was quite literally writing for his life. “I’d Die for You” comes from that time and those places.

  Despite Fitzgerald’s own preoccupations and anxieties, some stories are the antithesis of autobiographical. Rather than wondering about the forces operative in his own life, Fitzgerald takes inspiration from, and perhaps refuge in, thinking and writing about the larger forces affecting American culture and history, from Depression-era poverty to questions of race and civil rights, and regional customs, perspectives, and culture. Sometimes, to be sure, those public and historical matters melded with the personal and private for Fitzgerald. As he was leaving the South, and his Alabama-born wife, for Hollywood in 1937, Fitzgerald was thinking hard about history and family. The genesis for a Civil War tale, presented here in two complete drafts with very different plots, came from his father’s story of a cousin strung up by his thumbs in rural Maryland. “Thumbs Up” and “Dentist Appointment” are full of brutality and torture, hard deeds and hard words—offering a sharp contrast to the romantic rewrites Fitzgerald was adding at the same time to the screenplay of Gone With the Wind. These stories jarringly explore key moments in one of the most significant times of American history, and wonder at the myths that had arisen from it, while also showing Fitzgerald’s questioning of what sort of connection family history had given, or forced upon, him as a writer to larger historical moments. They also question originality and creative sources; retelling, or perhaps exorcising, a bedtime story one has heard as a child, versus a writer wanting to find something new.

  “Ballet Shoes,” “Gracie at Sea,” and “Love Is a Pain” are in the form of screenplay proposals, or scenarios. Others read as if Fitzgerald had set out to write a marketable screenplay, and reshaped it into what he would rather be working on—a short story, or a novel draft—instead. For example, “The Women in the House” reads at first like a bright Golden Age romantic comedy, designed for William Powell and Carole Lombard. Then keen descriptions come into play, and a dark shadow falls across the plot: the handsome adventurer hero is dying of a heart condition that, tragically, mirrors Fitzgerald’s own. Can he still, in good conscience, court the beautiful movie star he loves? Twists enter the story that no movie studio would have approved, like a nurse criticizing past patients who were “dope fiends” and a male film star who is possessed of an uncanny “extraordinary personal beauty” and a large marijuana patch. The story sears and blisters Hollywood’s vanities, falsities, and greed, but literally delivers a bed of roses, in one of Fitzgerald’s classically beautiful, but not quite redemptory, endings. He not only mocks the love and romance plot Hollywood profited from, but serves up a knife-sharp parody of what editors wanted from him, and has fun doing it.

  “Gracie at Sea,” “Ballet Shoes,” and “Love Is a Pain” are certainly imperfect as short stories, but that is what they are trying hard not to be. “Ballet Shoes” was written for another ballerina, but Fitzgerald felt that Zelda’s passion and training for ballet would help him “deliver something entirely authentic in the matter, full of invention and feeling”—and this makes the scenario revealing biographically. Fitzgerald returned to “Gracie at Sea” five years after starting it; his revision is included here for comparison. “Love Is a Pain” is notable for being “an original” by Fitzgerald; his own idea for a whole movie, and not simply his treatment of a story by someone else.

  ***

  I think the nine years that intervened between The Great Gatsby and Tender hurt my reputation almost beyond repair because a whole generation grew up in the meanwhile to whom I was only a writer of Post stories. . . .

  It’s odd that my old talent for the short story vanished. It was partly that times changed, editors changed, but part of it was tied up somehow with you and me—the happy ending. Of course every third story had some other ending but essentially I got my public with stories of young love. I must have had a powerful imagination to project it so far and so often into the past.

  —Fitzgerald to Zelda Fitzgerald, October 1940

  The imagination driving the stories of I’d Die for You is acutely powerful. Their quality is uneven, and Fitzgerald himself knew this, as is evident from his correspondence. Some were very clearly written for cash, and, though radiant lines and phrases and characters are there, they feel hasty and flawed. Debt and hard times wounded him irrevocably in the mid-1930s; the pain and honesty of what he wrote to Ober in May 1936 sounds out in the stories from these days:

  This business of debt is awful. It has made me lose confidence to an appalling extent. I used to write for myself—now I write for editors because I never have time to really think what I do like or find anything to like. Its [sic] like a man drawing water out in drops because he’s too thirsty to wait for the well to fill. Oh, for one lucky break.

  Yet as he said to Zelda, about what the Post wanted of him and what he was no longer willing to do, “As soon as I feel I am writing to a cheap specification my pen freezes and my talent vanishes over the hill.” Whether Fitzgerald was writing to suit himself or someone else’s expectations, all these stories, taken together, show his increasing creative freedom, exploring of possibilities, and, often, heady resistance to producing what was expected of “F. Scott Fitzgerald,” or to following traditional rules or demands. Editors and readers didn’t want young people having sex on a cruise ship? Didn’t want soldiers to be tortured during a war? Didn’t want people threatening to commit suicide? Or drinking and drugs in the Hollywood hills? Or graft and payola in college sports? Too bad. Sometimes he was willing to revise. Sometimes, and particularly in cases where he was spending his talent seeking Hollywood approval—as in “Gracie at Sea”—Fitzgerald’s lukewarm feeling about what he was doing is plain. But sometimes, and increasingly as the 1930s went on, Fitzgerald refused to submit to the expectations of those surprised to find in him a broad streak of realism, or a progression into the bleakness and broken styles of High Modernism, or just plain somethi
ng they thought ugly.

  The fineness and precision, the lapidary phrases and elegant language we associate with Fitzgerald’s earlier prose, remain in the best of these stories as well. In Fitzgerald’s writings from the first to the last there continued to be humor both bright and dark, a fascination with beautiful people and places and all things, a delight in what the moonlight or dappled sunlight could do to a mood, and an affection for both his readers and his writing. Even when he despaired of ever regaining his popularity during his lifetime, Fitzgerald knew how good he was, and still could be, telling Perkins, in the spring of 1940,

  Once I believed . . . I could (if I didn’t always) make people happy and it was more fun than anything. Now even that seems like a vaudevillian’s cheap dream of heaven, a vast minstrel show in which one is the perpetual Bones. . . .

  But to die, so completely and unjustly after having given so much. Even now there is little published in American fiction that doesn’t slightly bare [sic] my stamp—in a small way I was an original.

  Although Hollywood was, as he always knew it to be, bad for his craft as a writer in most ways, it was not entirely negative for Fitzgerald. In these stories there is often a compelling strain of the cinematic, where long scenes of description without dialogue seem like visual images on a screen: a man running, breathing harder and harder, up the stairs at Chimney Rock, looking for a girl, in “I’d Die for You”; an ambulance crashing in slow motion, its occupants emerging shaken and bruised to see a school bus full of screaming children in flames, in “Cyclone in Silent Land.” Skillful or innovative sequences like these offset, or atone for, other moments, such as the baby crawling up a harp in “Gracie at Sea,” where Fitzgerald’s talents are compromised or downright abused. He wrote to Zelda in April 1940, “I have grown to hate California and would give my life for three years in France,” but the month before he had told her, “I write these ‘Pat Hobby’ stories—and wait. I have a new idea now—a comedy series which will get me back into the big magazines—but my God I am a forgotten man.” Those new ideas, comic and not tragic ones, would make him remembered again. Through it all, through the difficulties and alcoholism and sickness, Fitzgerald kept on writing, and trying to reflect what he knew and saw. The true Fitzgerald hallmark of these stories is their capacity for hoping.

  Anne Margaret Daniel

  January 2017

  Editorial Note

  The versions of the stories printed here are the last surviving ones on which it can be determined Fitzgerald worked. I have incorporated his handwritten changes to typescripts or manuscripts, placing in brackets phrases and passages lined through in uncompleted revisions. For example, the copy of “Offside Play” supplied to me by the Trustees of the Fitzgerald Estate predated one in the Fitzgerald Papers at Princeton. The texts were identical, but the Princeton copy bore Fitzgerald’s revisions in pencil, including the instruction on the first page: “Change to Princeton” (indicating that he wanted the location of this story to be changed from Yale to Princeton). The change was never made in the text of the story itself, but his intention should be known. Likewise, I have followed his stated preferences in cases where variant versions of a story survive. For example, Fitzgerald agreed to cut “The Women in the House” into a far shorter story called “Temperature,” but did not like the result and insisted in his letters that the longer original be offered for publication. Based on this, I have reproduced “The Women in the House” in its June 1939 version here. Where there is evidence of a substantially different version of a story having been drafted that does not now survive, such as the two pages from “Salute to Lucy and Elsie” focusing on the girls and their families, I have noted this.

  “Day Off from Love,” while unfinished, is a section of a short story that reveals a moment of Fitzgerald’s creative process. Many examples of what Fitzgerald called “false starts” and what are obviously drafts of incomplete stories survive. Some run to twelve or fifteen pages before they fade out or stop abruptly. Others are as short as a paragraph or two. No other incomplete or fragmentary efforts are included. On some of these manuscripts or typescripts, Fitzgerald has marked his intention to save individual lines. One of these starts, titled “Ballet School—Chicago,” was identified in 2015 as the beginning of a novel; it is not, being instead an abandoned story. Fitzgerald wrote ideas in several paragraphs or pages for Pat Hobby stories, and for many movie scenarios, to which he never returned. Three stories that Fitzgerald is known to have completed have since disappeared: “Recklessness” (1922), “Daddy Was Perfect” (1934), and “They Never Grow Older” (1937) are discussed in his correspondence but have not, so far, been found.

  Almost a hundred years have passed from the composition of the earliest of these stories until today. As many things mentioned in these stories are unfamiliar to readers now, the annotations are designed to situate the reader, explain what Fitzgerald meant, and, where relevant, add details about his connection to a particular event or situation or person. In the headnotes, I have drawn upon Fitzgerald’s correspondence to outline a story’s compositional history. The typists working on these stories were various and their styles not consistent. In some cases, I worked from carbon copies upon which commas and periods are indistinguishable. Rather than creating a diplomatic transcription, I have standardized punctuation for the sake of the contemporary reader. I retain Fitzgerald’s frequent use of the em dash—a trait he shares with Modern writers he admired, such as James Joyce. Where he underlines for emphasis or to indicate a quotation, or sets off a book title in quotation marks, I have italicized, as was the case in the final typeset publication of his writings. In my headnotes to each story, I have tried not to reveal crucial plot details. However, to avoid any spoilers, please read the stories themselves first.

  AMD

  FSF, 1921.

  Fitzgerald wrote “The I.O.U.” in 1920, when he was only twenty-three. All the sparkle and wit of his earliest writing is here, in the wake of This Side of Paradise and its success. On the surface, the story is a happy satire of a new business with which he had just become familiar—the publishing world. Even as a young man and writer, though, Fitzgerald was never light. The story is set in a post–World War I world of disappointment and death, and there are thoroughly modern notes of poking fun at books of self-help, spiritual communication, and bodice-ripping romance. The setting is midwestern, with a start in Manhattan—that is to say, two of Fitzgerald’s home places.

  This story is crucially concerned with the commercial aspect of publishing, at a time when Fitzgerald was making a great deal of money for his own writing. And he evidently wrote it for Harper’s Bazaar, which did not print it. On June 2, 1920, when the Fitzgeralds had just moved to Westport, Connecticut, he told Harold Ober that he would be dropping off a finished draft for Ober to send to Henry Blackman Sell, editor of Harper’s Bazaar: “I am also leaving ‘The I.O.U.’ This is the plot that Sell particularly wanted for Harps. Baz and which I promised him. I think it is pretty good.” By July, however, it had gone on to the Saturday Evening Post; said Fitzgerald, “If ‘The I.O.U.’ comes back from the Post I wish you’d return it to me as I think I can change it so there’ll be no trouble Selling it.” He was beginning The Beautiful and Damned at just this time, though, and was concentrating hard on his second novel, letting Ober know in the same letter that “there will probably be no more short stories this summer.” This story was lost in the shuffle of Fitzgerald’s first fame. “The I.O.U.” remained the property of the Trustees of the Fitzgerald Estate until 2012. Yale University’s Beinecke Library purchased the manuscript and typescript that year for $194,500.

  The I.O.U.

  The above is not my real name—the fellow it belongs to gave me his permission to sign it to this story. My real name I shall not divulge. I am a publisher. I accept long novels about young love written by old maids in South Dakota, detective stories concerning wealthy clubmen and female apaches with “wide dark eyes,” essays about the menace of this
and that and the color of the moon in Tahiti by college professors and other unemployed. I accept no novels by authors under fifteen years old. All the columnists and communists (I can never get these two words straight) abuse me because they say I want money. I do—I want it terribly. My wife needs it. My children use it all the time. If someone offered me all the money in New York I should not refuse it. I would rather bring out a book that had an advance sale of five hundred thousand copies than have discovered Samuel Butler, Theodore Drieser and James Branch Cabell in one year. So would you if you were a publisher.

  Six months ago I contracted for a book that was undoubtedly a sure thing. It was by Harden, the psychic research man—Dr. Harden. His first book—I published it in 1913—had taken hold like a Long Island sand-crab and at that time psychic research had nowhere near the vogue it has at present. We advertised this new one as being a fifty heart-power document. His nephew had been killed in the war and Dr. Harden had written with distinction and reticence an account of his psychic communion through various mediums with this nephew, Cosgrove Harden.

  Dr. Harden was no intellectual upstart. He was a distinguished psychologist, Ph.D. Vienna, LL.D. Oxford and late visiting professor at the University of Ohio. His book was neither callous nor credulous. There was a fundamental seriousness underlying his attitude. For example he had mentioned in his book that one young man named Wilkins had come to his door claiming that the deceased had owed him three dollars and eighty cents. He had asked Dr. Harden to find out what this deceased wanted done about it. This Dr. Harden had steadfastly refused to do. He considered that such a request was comparable to praying to the saints about a lost umbrella.