I'd Die For You
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Thanks to Bernett Belgraier, who cast a cold eye over dotted i’s and crossed t’s. For advice, friendship, information of one sort or another, and kindnesses that have enriched my work on this volume, I am also indebted to A. Scott Berg, Margaret Rogers Bowers, Jackson R. Bryer, James Campbell, Elinor Case-Pethica, Sarah Churchwell, Margaret Daniel, Scott Donaldson, Robin Dufour, Neil Gower, Katherine Graham, Patricia Hill Meyer, Scott Jordan Harris, Peter Hellemaa, Lorraine Koffman, Bryant Mangum, Margaret McPherson, Thomas Patrick Roche Jr., Jeff Rosen, Cecilia Ross, Kim Ruehl, Mike Scott, Charles Scribner III, and Elaine Showalter; and to the F. Scott Fitzgerald Society, Princeton Alumni Association, Princeton Triangle Club, Princeton Class of 2017, and University Cottage Club.
i.m. Thomas F. Bergin ’46, Garrick P. Grobler ’86, and A. Walton Litz ’51.
AMD
New York City 2017
Works Consulted
In preparing this collection, I have used all of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novels (This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and Damned, The Great Gatsby, Tender Is the Night, and The Love of the Last Tycoon) and also his collections of short stories, from those published during his lifetime (Flappers and Philosophers, Tales of the Jazz Age, All the Sad Young Men, and Taps at Reveille) to those, including stories written with Zelda Fitzgerald, published since 1940. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s St. Paul Plays, 1911–1914 (ed. Alan Margolies), the scripts of his shows for the Princeton Triangle Club, and his play The Vegetable were valuable for responding to Fitzgerald’s screenplays and scenarios included here. Poems 1911–1940 (ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli) shows his touch for light verse. The Notebooks of F. Scott Fitzgerald and The Crack-Up are essential reading for anyone writing on Fitzgerald. The magisterial Cambridge Edition of the Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald, currently in thirteen volumes, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli (volumes 1 and 2) and James L. W. West III (volumes 3–13) is invaluable to scholars, and lovers, of Fitzgerald’s writing. It has been a chief resource for this book. My explanatory notes are modeled upon those in the Cambridge Fitzgerald.
Seven principal volumes contain all of Fitzgerald’s letters published to date: The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald (ed. Andrew Turnbull); Correspondence of F. Scott Fitzgerald (eds. Bruccoli and Margaret W. Duggan); Letters to His Daughter (ed. Turnbull); Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda (eds. Jackson R. Bryer and Cathy W. Barks); Dear Scott/Dear Max: The F. Scott Fitzgerald–Maxwell Perkins Correspondence (eds. John Kuehl and Bryer); As Ever, Scott Fitz—: Letters Between F. Scott Fitzgerald and His Literary Agent, Harold Ober, 1919–1940 (ed. Bruccoli); and A Life in Letters (ed. Bruccoli). Much correspondence from, and most correspondence to, Fitzgerald remains unpublished, however.
My work on this volume draws primarily from the Fitzgerald Papers in the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections at Princeton University: the F. Scott Fitzgerald Papers, including the Additional Papers; the Zelda Fitzgerald Papers; and the John Biggs Jr. Collection of F. Scott Fitzgerald Estate Papers. Fitzgerald remains his own best resource for anyone writing about him, his publications, and his life. He saved everything from scribbled notes on drink coasters and restaurant menus to manuscript drafts to final tearsheets (on which he often wrote further revisions and notes). He kept files of interesting newspaper clippings, illustrations he liked, lists of books he was reading, and very much more. His scrapbooks, now available online, are at once a pleasure and a crucial resource. The Daily Princetonian and the Princeton Alumni Weekly provide the principal information on Fitzgerald’s time on campus, from 1913 to 1917. “The I.O.U.” (in manuscript and typescript) is at Yale’s Beinecke Library. The typescripts of “Thumbs Up” and “Dentist Appointment,” and the only known version of “The Couple” (part typescript and part manuscript), and the Ledger of his life and publications (now available online) are at the University of South Carolina’s Irvin Department of Rare Books and Special Collections. The original card files of Fitzgerald’s story submissions and revisions, still the property of Harold Ober Associates, provided correct dates and in some cases alternate titles, as well as the responses from contemporary magazines to which stories were submitted.
In his scrapbooks, Fitzgerald himself compiled a comprehensive record of the contemporary critical reception of his writings. He kept reviews, columns, and even advertisements that often cannot be recovered in any searches of online newspaper and magazine databases—essential material that would otherwise be lost. Mary Jo Tate’s Critical Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald, the entire run of the Fitzgerald/Hemingway Annual (1969–1979), and the F. Scott Fitzgerald Review (2002–present) are where the ladders start for complex contemporary scholarship on Fitzgerald.
Books about the Fitzgerald family have proliferated in recent years. The standard biography of Fitzgerald himself remains Bruccoli’s Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Versions of his life as viewed through Zelda’s include Nancy Milford’s Zelda and Sally Cline’s Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise. Zelda Fitzgerald’s novel Save Me the Waltz is a fictionalized account of the Fitzgeralds’ lives that has more resonance than biographies of Zelda completed to date. Eleanor Lanahan’s Scottie: The Daughter Of . . . is a compassionate biography of Scottie Fitzgerald Lanahan Smith, based on primary sources.
About the Author
F. Scott Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1896. He attended Princeton University, joined the United States Army during World War I, and published his first novel, This Side of Paradise, in 1920. That same year he married Zelda Sayre of Montgomery, Alabama, and for the next decade the couple divided their time among New York, Paris, and the Riviera. Fitzgerald was a major new literary voice, and his masterpieces include his short stories, The Great Gatsby, and Tender Is the Night. He died in 1940 at the age of forty-four of a heart attack in Los Angeles, California, while working on The Love of the Last Tycoon. Fitzgerald’s fiction has secured his reputation as one of the most important, and beloved, American writers of the twentieth century.
Anne Margaret Daniel teaches literature at the New School University in New York City. She has published extensively on Fitzgerald and on Modernism since 1996. Anne Margaret lives in Manhattan and in upstate New York.
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Authors.SimonandSchuster.com/F-Scott-Fitzgerald
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BY F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
NOVELS
The Love of the Last Tycoon (Unfinished)
Tender Is the Night
The Great Gatsby
The Beautiful and Damned
This Side of Paradise
STORIES
Bits of Paradise
uncollected stories by F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald
The Basil and Josephine Stories
edited and with an introduction by Jackson R. Bryer and John Kuehl
The Pat Hobby Stories
edited and with an introduction by Arnold Gingrich
Taps at Reveille
Six Tales of the Jazz Age and Other Stories
with an introduction by Frances Fitzgerald Smith
Flappers and Philosophers
with an introduction by Arthur Mizener
The Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald
a selection of 28 stories, with an introduction by Malcolm Cowley
Babylon Revisited and Other Stories
The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald
edited and with a preface by Matthew J. Bruccoli
STORIES AND ESSAYS
The Crack-Up
edited by Edmund Wilson
Afternoon of an Author
with an introduction and notes by Arthur Mizener
The Fitzgerald Reader
with an introduction by Arthur Mizener
LETTERS
The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald
with an introduction by Andrew Turnbull
Correspondence of F. Scott Fitzgerald
&nbs
p; edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli and Margaret M. Duggan
F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Life in Letters
edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli
Letters to His Daughter
edited by Andrew Turnbull and with an introduction by Frances Fitzgerald Lanahan
As Ever, Scott Fitz—: Letters Between F. Scott Fitzgerald and His Literary Agent, Harold Ober
edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli and Jennifer McCabe Atkinson
Dear Scott/ Dear Max: The Fitzgerald-Perkins Correspondence
edited by John Kuehl and Jackson Bryer
Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda
edited by Jackson R. Bryer and Cathy W. Barks
POEMS
Poems, 1911–1940
with an introduction by James Dickey
AND A COMEDY
The Vegetable
with an introduction by Charles Scribner III
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Explanatory Notes
“THE I.O.U.”
female apaches: The word “apaches,” taken from the Native American tribe but pronounced “a-PASH,” is a term applied to knife-wielding Parisian girls, reportedly an informal gang, of the early 1900s. “Les Apaches de Belleville” in turn gave their name to a rather violent Jazz Age dance, in which the partners cuff each other around and melt into a concluding waltz.
Samuel Butler: Samuel Butler (1835–1902), author of the anti-Victorian autobiographical novel The Way of All Flesh (1903); Theodore Dreiser (1871–1945), journalist and author of the naturalistic novels Sister Carrie (1900) and An American Tragedy (1925); James Branch Cabell (1879–1958), novelist best known for Jurgen (1919) and the subsequent prosecution of Cabell and his publisher for obscenity. Fitzgerald regularly broke the “i before e” rule—Meyer Wolfshiem, in The Great Gatsby, is an example—and spelled Dreiser’s name incorrectly; most likely he would have been diagnosed as dyslexic today. Fitzgerald wrote fan letters to Cabell, and received responses that he pasted into the scrapbooks he compiled for most of his adult life.
psychic research: Since 1885, when the American Society for Psychical Research was founded, scientists, psychologists, dream researchers, clairvoyants, and physicists had published books pondering issues from telepathy to life after death. Not coincidentally, 1913 was the last year of peacetime before World War I broke out—Fitzgerald here makes the booming interest in psychic research, and particularly communication with the dead, an outgrowth of a world shattered by war.
April 15th: Not a tax deadline in the 1920s. However, Scribner tended to publish Fitzgerald’s own books in late March and early April.
Dundreary whiskers: Long, particularly bushy sideburns. They take their name from the comic character Lord Dundreary in Tom Taylor’s play Our American Cousin (1858). The play was best known for Lord Dundreary and his silliness until it became, on April 14, 1865, the play President Abraham Lincoln was watching at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C., when he was assassinated.
Mohammed (or was it Moses?): In Essays (1625), Francis Bacon stated the proposition “If the hill will not come to Mahomet, Mahomet will go to the hill.” Moses went to Mount Sinai—there was never a question of Mount Sinai coming to him—to receive God’s commandments; see Exodus 19:34.
“Basil Kings”: William Benjamin Basil King (1859–1928), an Anglican rector from Prince Edward Island, Canada, began to write successful novels with a spiritual bent after 1900. The Abolishing of Death (1919) is based on his own communications with the dead, particularly in the period following the Armistice of November 11, 1918. In 1923, the Harvard Crimson described King as “one of the outstanding figures in American literature.” Fitzgerald surely satirizes King in the figure of Dr. Harden.
drug-store . . . cocktail: The Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution barred the “manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors within, the importation thereof into, or the exportation thereof from the United States” after January 1920. However, the Volstead Act, which implemented and enforced the amendment, was full of loopholes. Cider and wines could be homemade, in small amounts. And doctors could legally write prescriptions for distilled spirits, chiefly whiskey and brandy, that were filled at drugstores—hence the “drug-store cocktail.” When, in Chapter 6 of The Great Gatsby, Daisy Buchanan tells her husband that Gatsby “owned some drug-stores, a lot of drug-stores. He built them up himself[,]” she confirms that Gatsby is, among other things, a bootlegger.
“printer’s devil”: An apprentice who did the menial tasks in an old-style print shop, including carrying type.
Philadelphia Press: The Philadelphia Press ceased publication on October 1, 1920.
“Thalia”: Of the Nine Muses, she is the Muse of comedy and of short pastoral poetry. From the Greek for the verb to bloom; blooming.
“crocked off ”: What Dr. Harden has written is a crock of shit; or, in the polite translation, nonsense. Also encompassed here is the English sense of a crock, or old crock, as something broken down and useless. However, these are very old usages, and the point here is that Thalia is using modern slang. A RIT dye advertisement of 1923 promises to restore blouses where the color has “crocked off,” which seems relevant. In 1924, though, the expression was used in a short story—serialized in an Ohio newspaper—to mean someone has died.
“prom”: Thought of today as high school dances at year’s end, proms were large college parties that went on for days of events during the course of the academic year. The centerpiece was a formal dance; each class had their own prom, with that of the senior class being the most socially sought-after invitation. In Fitzgerald’s day as an undergraduate at Princeton, the campus paper, the Daily Princetonian, was full of advertisements for the best places to order one’s prom invitations and dance cards, the lineups for musical entertainment, and lavish columns on the events. Thornton Wilder, in 1928 a graduate student and resident advisor studying French literature at Princeton, complained to Fitzgerald that February, “I’m dog-tired just now: the House is always restless during the Winter-term and espec. just before the 3-day Prom.”
105th Infantry: An infantry regiment from New York State. It suffered heavy losses at Ypres and the Somme.
Sing Sing: A maximum-security prison built on the Hudson River in Ossining, New York, and opened in 1826.
Red Queen’s in Alice in Wonderland: Lewis Carroll’s Red Queen actually appears in Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871). She is cold and severe, with a remarkable sense of logic that she and her counterpart, the White Queen (both drawn from chess pieces), try to apply to Alice.
“ten thousand a year”: The average annual wage in the United States in 1920 was just over one thousand dollars.
“Toledo Blade” . . . “Akron World”: A checklist of Ohio’s city and town newspapers.
sell five hundred thousand copies: In 1920 and 1921, Fitzgerald’s debut novel, This Side of Paradise, sold just under fifty thousand copies and, based upon this, was deemed a great success.
“NIGHTMARE” (“FANTASY IN BLACK”)
pleasant section of New Hampshire: Fitzgerald seems here to have made an imaginative combination of the sanitarium at Glencliff, New Hampshire, and the State Hospital in Concord. Patients with tuberculosis came to “The San” in Glencliff, in the southwestern White Mountains, from 1909 until the early 1970s, when it became a home for the elderly. The State Hospital, initially the New Hampshire Asylum for the Insane, opened in 1842; it encompassed in the 1930s just such a cluster of varied buildings, for different purposes, as
Fitzgerald describes in this story.
Suppé’s Light Cavalry: The overture to this operetta by Austrian composer Franz von Suppé (1819–1895), with its constant horns and light, elegant strings, has been popular since its 1866 premiere.
“Mrs. Miller . . . curls”: An allusion to Alexander Pope’s mock-heroic poem The Rape of the Lock (1712). In it, the beautiful Belinda loses one of her long curls to a lout of a lord and his sly scissors while her head is bent over an afternoon game of cards.
“New York, New Haven and Hartford”: The New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad was a major commuter rail line between New York’s Grand Central Terminal and points northeast.
“market crash in twenty-nine . . . ticker-tape”: The Wall Street crash culminating in “Black Tuesday,” on October 28, 1929, was the New York manifestation of a worldwide economic collapse brought on by speculation in stocks. Billions were lost as prices for stock tumbled, and the “ticker tape” paper strips, transmitting stock prices via a stock ticker, told of the catastrophe in print. The suicides of bankers and business executives broken by the crash, like J. J. Riordan of the County Trust Company and Robert M. Searle of Rochester Gas and Electric Company, were front-page news in national newspapers, though the urban-legend tales of legions of stockbrokers jumping from Wall Street windows on that Halloween are baseless.
“South America . . . railroad securities”: As with the 1929 crash, Fitzgerald has chosen triggering events for each of the Woods brothers’ breakdowns. Walter, in charge of the Foreign Bond Department, is institutionalized after the “revolutions in South America”—during the late 1920s and early 1930s, there were uprisings in Mexico, Brazil, Peru, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and other Latin American countries. John, who speculates in railroad securities, breaks down in autumn of the year in which railroad securities were worth barely more than a tenth of their pre-crash value, and almost twenty railroad lines had gone bankrupt.