She held out her arms and he went over and knelt down beside her.
***
“One thing,” she said after a long while, “What did you do to that letter of recommendation? I saw you write something on it besides your name.”
“I just changed one word.” He began to laugh, a little at first and then hilariously until it became infectious and she laughed too. “I gave them a check for two hundred dollars,” he said, “but I’m afraid they’ll never be able to use that letter of recommendation.”
“What did you change?” she demanded. “Tell me quick!”
“Why, there was a line in it that says he was a letter-carrier. I changed the word ‘letter’ to the word ‘typhoid’.”
“A typhoid carrier?” she repeated, puzzled.
Then she understood and suddenly they both began to laugh again, happily and irrepressibly—laughter that floated upstairs and into the bedrooms and baths and curled around through the dining room into the pantry and back again to where they sat. The whole house was full of sunshine now, and as the fresh breeze blew the garden odors in at the window life seemed to begin all over again as life has a way of doing.
***
At twelve o’clock noon, a small baldish poodle dog, with the eyes of one far gone in drink, might have been seen rounding a corner and approaching the Pawling house. Reaching the kitchen door he apparently realized where he was for he visibly started and made a hasty retreat. Traversing a wide, suspicious circle he approached the front door, where he announced his presence with a discreet cough.
[“Hey,” he barked, “I’m home.”]
It was some time before he was able to obtain any attention. He had been noticing the drift of things and he feared for a moment that the place was deserted. But he was wrong: one couple, the couple he dreaded, had gone away, but there was still another couple in the house.
UNCOLLECTED STORIES
Postcard from Scott and Zelda’s trip to North Africa.
Fitzgerald wrote the brief piece “Ballet Shoes” (“Ballet Slippers”) as a movie treatment for Olga Spessivtseva and her manager, Arnold Braun, after meeting him while on vacation in North Africa in early 1930. Spessivtseva was internationally famous from the early 1910s for dancing Giselle. The plot is a story of immigration to America (from Russia), bootlegging, and ballet, and is very roughly developed. Zelda Fitzgerald’s own passion for ballet, to the extent that it brought Fitzgerald to Spessivtseva and the subject matter, the setting of New York City, and the fact that these Russians are probably refugees from the Bolshevik Revolution are compelling aspects of this story. The way in which Fitzgerald addresses their status as immigrants, and assimilation through art and theater, is contemporary and progressive.
No film was ever made of this synopsis. In 1937, Spessivtseva—who had researched the role of Giselle by visiting asylums to see how young women there moved and behaved—had a breakdown onstage in Australia, and was hospitalized for much of the rest of her life.
Fitzgerald wrote Harold Ober a long letter on February 6, 1936, discussing the synopsis in detail:
The man Braun is a plain, simple man with a true instinct toward the arts. He is of complete financial integrity and we were awfully nice to him once during a journey through North Africa and I think he is honestly fond of both Zelda and me. I start with this because I don’t want to mess up this chance with any of the inadvertencies and lack of foresight that lost me the sale of Tender Is the Night and ruined the Gracie Allen venture [Gracie at Sea]. You are now in touch with Hollywood in a way that you were not several years ago. This is obviously a job that I can do expertly—but it is also obviously a job that a whole lot of other people can do fairly well. Now it seems to me that the point can be sold that I am equipped to do this treatment which is the whole gist of this letter.
[Braun] has gone out [there] to Hollywood and they will put some hack on the thing and in two minutes will have a poor imitation of Lily Pons deserting the stage for a poor country boy or a poor country girl named Lily Pons astounding the world in ten minutes. A hack will do exactly that with it, thinking first what the previous stories dealing with ballet and theatre have been about, and he will try to write a reasonable imitation about it. As you know Zelda and I have been through hell about the whole subject and you’ll know, too, that I should be able to deliver something entirely authentic in the matter full of invention and feeling.
It seems odd having to sell you such a suggestion when once you would have taken it at my own valuation, but after these three years of reverses it seems necessary to assure you that I have the stuff to do this job and not let this opportunity slide away with the rumor that “Scott is drinking” or “Scott is through.”
Ober and his Hollywood contact, the agent Harold Norling “Swanie” Swanson (1899–1991), decided not to send the scenario for consideration. Ober’s card file notes state simply, “Swanson does not want to offer.”
“Ballet Shoes” (“Ballet Slippers”) was published in the Fitzgerald/Hemingway Annual in 1976.
Ballet Shoes
(Ballet Slippers)
In 1923 a Russian family (semi-theatrical) arrives at Ellis Island and is interminably detained. Young daughter, 18, has been in Imperial Ballet. She dances for other passengers in steerage to accordion music. She has no idea of New York, and to attract man in small launch, who may get her in before her parents, she throws an old ballet shoe at him.
He is an adventurous young rum runner coming in from the fleet—and says that if she’ll slip over the side he’ll run her to New York.
They get there, but next day they can’t get back. So she loses her family. He accompanies her to debarkation docks without success, and sadly she concludes they’ve been deported back to Europe.
The rum runner accompanies her to theatrical agencies interpreting the ways of New York to her. No go. On one pilgrimage she saves a little waif from traffic and in doing so breaks her ankle. She goes to emergency hospital and rum runner takes care of little girl. But she finds out she can never dance again. The ankle doesn’t last.
Meanwhile the father has been admitted to U.S. but has changed his name from Krypioski to Kress, on advice received in first sequence on boat and Ellis Island by comic figure, not mentioned further in this sketch but running through picture as father’s friend. He is a man who thinks he knows all about U.S. but never finds out anything. Father prowls streets looking for his daughter, thinking she has gone loose, stopping other girls. He speaks some English and becomes in course of time a theatrical booking agent.
On emerging from hospital heroine has decided to make little girl a great dancer as she can never be. She paints barn-like studio herself and starts ballet class with help of rum runner. He has inherited a small shoe factory and gone respectable. But she doesn’t marry him, her only deep passion being for the ballet and the little girl’s future, a substitute for her own.
Six years pass while the little girl grows up. The school struggles on. The great Pavlova comes to New York but she and the little girl can’t afford seats. The heroine has also changed her name on her beau’s advice. Frequently she has talked to her father on the phone, he asking her to supply a dozen dancers for such and such a ballet and having no idea that “Madame Serene” is his own daughter.
The time for the little girl’s debut has arrived. By sacrificing everything they have the money for it. The little girl sits in their apartment at 125th Street and sends her last pair of shoes to the cobbler because the ex–rum runner is to bring her some from his own little factory. She does not know that with his arms full of shoe boxes (including some ballet shoes he has made) he has been stopped at 48th Street by a detective who wants him as witness for some misdemeanor, committed six years before in his rum running days.
The time has grown short—the young protégé finds that a pair of worn ballet shoes are the only shoes in the apartment. Putting them on she starts for the theatre with one nickel for subway. She loses it in a grating and h
as to walk from 125th Street to the theatrical section. She reaches there exhausted and crying, and, to the Russian girl’s horror, with her feet in awful shape.
They try it however. The curtain goes up on her number and the Russian woman (the heroine) dances in the wings in time with the young girl, to keep her morale up. The number goes over.
There is a sudden interruption to the second number. The hero, intent on delivering the shoes, has broken away from the detective, but has been followed.
Now meanwhile, in the audience, the father has been impressed with young girl and gone behind scenes to engage her. He comes in on the row and in the course of it finds that his daughter is the teacher. It is implied that he can bring pressure to bear to exonerate the young man from what were only false charges.
The show is over, the stage is cleared. The Russian girl dances alone on the stage before her father who sits at the piano and plays for her. The hero and the young girl watch from the wings. The music of St. Saens, The Swan rises to a crescendo and there are tears in the father’s eyes—
—as the picture ends.
A portrait of the author as a young man.
“Thank You for the Light” is the very short story of a traveling saleswoman pausing, at the end of a long day, and hoping to relax with a cigarette. That Mrs. Hanson is not only a saleswoman but a widow, and has for many years traveled through the Midwest as a successful businessperson, selling ladies’ undergarments, might alone have been sufficient reasons for the New Yorker to reject the story in the summer of 1936. That it is intensely Catholic and concludes with a miracle further ensured its refusal.
The New Yorker initially turned down the story because it was “so curious and so unlike the kind of thing we associate with [Fitzgerald] and really too fantastic.” These are the very reasons it was popular, and engendered so much critical comment, when it finally did appear in their pages seventy-six years later, on August 6, 2012.
Thank You for the Light
Mrs. Hanson was a pretty somewhat faded woman of forty who sold corsets and girdles, travelling out of Chicago. For many years her territory had swung around through Toledo, Lima, Springfield, Columbus, Indianapolis, and Fort Wayne and her transfer to the Iowa, Kansas, Missouri district was a promotion, for her firm was more strongly entrenched west of the Ohio.
Eastward, however, she had known her clientele chattily and was often offered a drink or a cigarette in the buyer’s office after business was concluded. But she soon found that in her new district things were different. Not only was she never asked if she would smoke but several times her own inquiry as to whether anyone would mind was answered half apologetically with:
“It’s not that I mind, but it has a bad influence on the employees.”
“Oh, of course, I understand.”
Smoking meant a lot to her sometimes. She worked very hard and it had some ability to rest and relax her psychologically. She was a widow and she had no close relatives to write to in the evenings, while more than one moving picture a week hurt her eyes, so that smoking had come to be an important punctuation mark in the long sentence of a day on the road.
The last week of her first trip on the new circuit found her in Kansas City. It was mid-August and she felt somewhat lonely among all the new contacts of the past fortnight, and she was delighted to find at the outer desk of one firm a woman she had known in Chicago. She sat down before having herself announced and in the course of the conversation found out a little about the man she was going to interview.
“Will he mind if I smoke?”
“What? My God, yes!” said her friend. “He’s given money to support the law against it.”
“Oh. Well, I’m grateful for the advice—more than grateful.”
“You better watch it everywhere around here,” her friend said. “Especially with the men over fifty. The ones that weren’t in the war. A man once told me that nobody who was in the war would ever object to anyone smoking.”
But at her very next stop Mrs. Hanson ran into the exception. He seemed such a pleasant young man but his eyes fixed with so much fascination on the cigarette that she tapped on her thumb-nail that she put it away. She was rewarded when he asked her to lunch and during the hour she obtained a considerable order.
Afterwards he insisted on driving her to her next appointment, though she had intended to spot a hotel in the vicinity and take a few puffs in the wash room.
It was one of those days full of waiting, everyone was busy, was late, and it seemed that when they did appear they were the sort of hatchet faced men who did not like other people’s self indulgence, or they were women willingly or unwillingly committed to the ideas of these men.
She hadn’t smoked since breakfast and she suddenly realized that was why she felt a vague dissatisfaction at the end of each call, no matter how successful it had been in a business way. Aloud she would say, “We think we cover a different field. It’s all rubber and canvas, of course, but we do manage to put them together in a different way. A thirty per cent increase in national advertising in one year tells its own story.”
And to herself she was thinking: “If I could just get three puffs I could sell old-fashioned whale-bone.”
She had one more store to visit now but her engagement was not for half an hour. That was just time to go to her hotel but as there was no taxi in sight she walked along the street, thinking: “Perhaps I ought to give up cigarettes. I’m getting to be a drug fiend.”
Before her she saw the Catholic cathedral. It seemed very tall—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 little difference. How could the Good Lord care if a tired woman took a few puffs in the vestibule?
Nevertheless, though she was not a Catholic, the thought offended her. It didn’t seem so important whether she had her cigarette, because it might offend a lot of other people too.
Still—He wouldn’t mind, she thought persistently. In His days they hadn’t even discovered tobacco . . .
She went into the church; the vestibule was dark and she felt for a match in the bag she carried but there wasn’t any.
“I’ll go and get a light from one of their candles,” she thought.
The darkness of the nave was broken only by a splash of light in a corner. She walked up the aisle toward the white blur, and found that it was not made by candles and in any case it was going out soon—an old man was on the point of eliminating a last oil lamp.
“These are votive offerings,” he said. “We put them out at night. They float in the oil and we think it means more to the people that give them to save them for next day, than it would to keep them burning all night.”
“I see.”
He struck out the last one. There was no light left in the cathedral now, save an electric chandelier high overhead and the ever-burning lamp in front of the sacrament.
“Good night,” the sexton said.
“Good night.”
“I guess you came here to pray.”
“Yes I did.”
He went out into the sacristy. Mrs. Hanson knelt down and prayed.
It had been a long time since she had prayed. She scarcely knew what to pray for, so she prayed for her employer, and for the clients in Des Moines and Kansas City. When she had finished praying she knelt up. She was not used to prayer. The image of the Madonna gazed down upon her from a niche, six feet above her head.
Vaguely she regarded it. Then she got up from her knees and sank back wearily in the corner of the pew. In her imagination the Virgin came down, like in the play “The Miracle,” and took her place and sold corsets and girdles for her and was tired just as she was. Then for a few minutes Mrs. Hanson must have slept . . .
. . . She awoke at the realization that something had changed; and only gradually she perceived that there was a familiar scent that was not incense in the air and that her fingers smarted. Then she realized that the cigarette she held in her hand was alight�
��was burning.
Still too drowsy to think, she took a puff to keep the flame alive. Then she looked up again at the Madonna’s vague niche in the half-darkness.
“Thank you for the light,” she said.
That didn’t seem quite enough, so she got down on her knees, the smoke twisting up from the cigarette, between her fingers.
“Thank you very much for the light,” she said again.
FSF, Nice, 1924.
Acknowledgments
The Trustees of the Estate of F. Scott Fitzgerald invited me to edit this collection. To Eleanor Lanahan, Blake Hazard, and Chris Byrne, my especial thanks. Lanahan shared her knowledge, photographs, and so much more to make her grandfather and his writings closer to me, and to us all. Harold Ober Associates remain the careful stewards of Fitzgerald’s literary estate, as Harold Ober was for Fitzgerald’s lifetime as a professional writer. Phyllis Westberg, Craig Tenney, and Karen Gormandy carry on Ober’s tradition with intelligence and grace. The Department of Rare Books and Special Collections at the Princeton University Library houses the papers of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald; Linda Bogue, Sandra Bossert, Brianna Cregle, AnnaLee Pauls, Chloe Pfendler, Gabriel Swift, and Squirrel Walsh were liberal with help during my months there. Thanks to Elizabeth Sudduth and Michael Weisenburg of the Irvin Department of Rare Books and Special Collections at the University of South Carolina, and to the staff of the Beinecke Library at Yale.
I first met the Scribner team who brought this book into being in Princeton, on Fitzgerald’s birthday, as we looked at the manuscript of The Great Gatsby together. From that auspicious start, it was a pleasure at every twist and turn to work with Kara Watson, Janetta Dancer, Katie Rizzo, and Rosie Mahorter.
To Don C. Skemer, James L. W. West III, and James L. Pethica, scholars and gentlemen: without your expertise, generosity, and friendship, this book and I would both be far the poorer. Many fêtes, kind sirs.
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