“THE COUPLE”
magic of first love: A well-known quotation, at the time, from Henrietta Temple: A Love Story (1837), by English politician and author Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881): “The magic of first love is our ignorance that it can ever end.”
“Mr. Marbleton and Mr. Shafter”: These gentlemen and their fineness are invoked often by Katy and Reynolds. In a deleted passage, the two servants mock Lou during an argument for not having clothes that are as nice as the Philadelphia gentlemen’s.
“grass” . . . looked up in surprise: Butlers do not cut grass, hence Carrol’s surprise.
Yale Club: In 1915 the Yale Club moved to its present building at 50 Vanderbilt Avenue, on the corner of Forty-Fourth Street next to Grand Central Terminal. In the late 1910s and 1920s, the Princeton Club was renovating a new clubhouse on Park Avenue and Thirty-Ninth Street, and shared space at the Yale Club. In his biography Scott Fitzgerald (1962), Andrew Turnbull reported that in 1919, when he was living in New York and working in advertising, “Fitzgerald often ate at the Yale Club . . . and one day, drinking martinis in the upstairs lounge, he announced that he was going to jump out the window.” He didn’t, but in Chapter 3 of The Great Gatsby Nick Carraway reflects, “I took dinner usually at the Yale Club—for some reason it was the gloomiest event of my day—and then I went up-stairs to the library and studied investments and securities for a conscientious hour. There were generally a few rioters around, but they never came into the library, so it was a good place to work.”
“I’m John Bull himself”: An eighteenth-century personification of England that remains current today. Long popular as a caricature, Bull is usually drawn as a stout man in Regency clothing, sometimes with a Union Jack waistcoat.
“got a Marconi”: Received a wireless telegraph message. The technology was developed by Guglielmo Marconi (1874–1937), and had been used for ship-to-shore communications since the America’s Cup races of 1899.
“Mauretania”: One of a pair of cruise ships—the other being the ill-fated Lusitania—launched in 1906 by the Cunard Line. The world’s largest ship until the White Star Line launched its trio of competitors, Olympic, Titanic, and Britannic, Mauretania was a transatlantic liner during the 1920s. In 1930, she was switched to a route from New York to Halifax, Nova Scotia, and in 1935, despite much protest, she was broken up.
“saw a revolver”: The Sullivan Act of 1911 required the licensing in New York State of any firearms small enough to be concealed. The law applied to handguns, razor knives, and brass knuckles.
Twine cooked à la maître de hotel: A simple sauce of butter, parsley, lemon juice, salt, and pepper.
“typhoid carrier”: A person who is asymptomatic for typhoid but who can spread the disease to others. The most famous, or infamous, example in history is Mary Mallon (1869–1938), nicknamed “Typhoid Mary.” In the first years of the twentieth century, Mallon worked as a cook for a string of New York families, in which every family came down with typhoid fever and several people died. She refused to stop working as a cook, even after she was discovered to be a carrier, and changed her name and place of employment often. From 1915 until her death, Mallon remained in quarantine at Riverside Hospital, on North Brother Island in New York’s East River, choosing a life of isolation and incarceration rather than having her gallbladder, which was full of active typhoid bacteria, removed.
the drift of things: A well-known line from Robert Frost’s poem “Reluctance” (1913). It is a poem quite pertinent to this story, and for Fitzgerald to have the dog, as it were, quoting it is a funny touch. Frost did a reading at Princeton in January 1917, sponsored by Fitzgerald’s friend John Peale Bishop and his literary club, that Fitzgerald likely attended; surely he knew the poem and the collection from which it comes, A Boy’s Will.
“BALLET SHOES” (“BALLET SLIPPERS”)
arrives at Ellis Island: Island in New York Bay, from 1892 to 1954 the principal inspection station for immigrants arriving on the East Coast. However, the stream of people went both ways: Ellis Island also had detention facilities, and was a point of deportation for would-be immigrants who were not permitted into the country, as well as “aliens” being sent back to a home country—which is what the dancer daughter in this story initially believes has happened to her family.
Imperial Ballet: The Imperial Russian Ballet (today the Kirov, or Mariinsky, Ballet) has flourished in St. Petersburg from the early 1700s; under its various names, the ballet and its associated school are among the most celebrated in the world.
young rum runner: Initially, someone smuggling rum by boat from areas where it was locally and legally made, like Jamaica and the Bahamas, to Florida during Prohibition (1920–1933). By the time Fitzgerald is writing, “rum runner” is a generic term for any bootlegger bringing illegal alcohol into American cities, though still, as we see here, principally by boat.
The great Pavlova: Anna Pavlova (1881–1931), the most celebrated prima ballerina of her day. After leaving the Imperial Ballet and Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, Pavlova formed her own ballet company. She made her American debut at the Metropolitan Opera House in February 1910, and received a rave review from Fitzgerald’s friend Carl Van Vechten, then the dance critic for the New York Times.
apartment at 125th Street: 125th Street, Martin Luther King Boulevard today, was in the 1930s the “Main Street” of Harlem. It housed theaters including the New Burlesque Theater, renamed the Apollo in 1934, the Hotel Theresa, and St. Joseph of the Holy Family Church, one of the oldest Catholic churches in New York. When Fitzgerald moved to New York after he took a job with an advertising agency in 1919, he lived in an inexpensive apartment at 200 Claremont Avenue, just off the corner of West 125th Street and Broadway.
St. Saens, The Swan: Camille Saint-Saëns (1835–1921) wrote the suite Le carnaval des animaux (The Carnival of the Animals) in 1886. Movement 13 (of 14) is “le cygne,” the swan—also known as “the dying swan” since Michel Fokine choreographed a four-minute ballet for Pavlova to perform to the music in 1905. It was her signature solo; a two-minute film clip of Pavlova dancing the Swan survives.
“THANK YOU FOR THE LIGHT”
“the law against it”: During the 1920s, riding on the coattails of Prohibition, various temperance organizations campaigned against tobacco use, and particularly cigarettes. Fourteen states passed laws against smoking before the public tide turned, and those laws fell—leaving in place only legislation barring minors from buying tobacco products.
“ones that weren’t in the war”: By the end of World War I, organizations, including newspapers, were supplying soldiers with cigarettes, over the protests of state health boards.
“old-fashioned whale-bone”: The stiffening pieces in old-fashioned corsets, made of bone taken from baleen whales.
Catholic cathedral: The Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception, on Broadway at Eleventh Street in Kansas City, built in 1882. Its name indicates its dedication to the Virgin Mary, of whom there is much iconography in the building.
the play “The Miracle”: Das Mirakel, a 1911 play by Karl Vollmöller (1878–1948) about a nun who flees her convent with a man, but returns in the end to find that a statue of the Virgin Mary has come to life and taken her place, covering for her in her absence. A film version in English was made in 1912; in 1924, Lady Diana Manners Cooper (1892–1986) starred in a popular Broadway version as the Madonna. Scott and Zelda socialized with Cooper in Hollywood in January 1927, while she was performing in The Miracle at the new Shrine Auditorium. Zelda termed her, though cold and unapproachable, “the most lovely, attractive person I ever saw.” In The Love of the Last Tycoon, Fitzgerald refers to the stage extravaganza, which was directed by Max Reinhardt: “every eight days the company must release a production as complex and costly as Reinhardt’s Miracle.”
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
ISBN 978-1-5011-4434-9
ISBN 978-1-5011-4436-3 (ebook)
“Ballet Shoes”/ “Ballet Slippers” was published in the Fitzgerald/Hemingway Annual in 1976.
“Thank You for the Light” was published in The New Yorker August 2012.
F. Scott Fitzgerald Papers, Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library.
Zelda Fitzgerald Papers, Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library.
Irvin Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, University of South Carolina.
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
Trustees of the F. Scott Fitzgerald Estate.
Photograph credits: p. 39: courtesy of and © MOTOR magazine; p. 267: courtesy of and © The Matthew J. and Arlyn Bruccoli Collection of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Irvin Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, University of South Carolina; pp. 291 and 313: courtesy of and © the Trustees of the Fitzgerald Estate; all other images: courtesy of and © the Fitzgerald Papers, Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library.
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