Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald UK (Illustrated)

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

  ‘What news from New York?’

  ‘Stocks go up. A baby murdered a gangster.’

  ‘Nothing more?’

  ‘Nothing. Radios blare in the street.’

  I once thought that there were no second acts in American lives, but there was certainly to be a second act to New York’s boom days. We were somewhere in North Africa when we heard a dull distant crash which echoed to the farthest wastes of the desert.

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘Did you hear it?’

  ‘It was nothing.’

  ‘Do you think we ought to go home and see?’

  ‘No - it was nothing.’

  In the dark autumn of two years later we saw New York again. We passed through curiously polite customs agents, and then with bowed head and hat in hand I walked reverently through the echoing tomb. Among the ruins a few childish wraiths still played to keep up the pretence that they were alive, betraying by their feverish voices and hectic cheeks the thinness of the masquerade. Cocktail parties, a last hollow survival from the days of carnival, echoed to the plaints of the wounded: ‘Shoot me, for the love of God, someone shoot me!’, and the groans and wails of the dying: ‘Did you see that United States Steel is down three more points?’ My barber was back at work in his shop; again the head waiters bowed people to their tables, if there were people to be bowed. From the ruins, lonely and inexplicable as the sphinx, rose the Empire State Building and, just as it had been a tradition of mine to climb to the Plaza Roof to take leave of the beautiful city, extending as far as eyes could reach, so now I went to the roof of the last and most magnificent of towers. Then I understood — everything was explained: I had discovered the crowning error of the city, its Pandora’s box. Full of vaunting pride the New Yorker had climbed here and seen with dismay what he had never suspected, that the city was not the endless succession of canyons that he had supposed but that it had limits - from the tallest structure he saw for the first time that it faded out into the country on all sides, into an expanse of green and blue that alone was limitless. And with the awful realization that New York was a city after all and not a universe, the whole shining edifice that he had reared in his imagination came crashing to the ground. That was the rash gift of Alfred W. Smith to the citizens of New York.

  Thus I take leave of my lost city. Seen from the ferry boat in the early morning, it no longer whispers of fantastic success and eternal youth. The whoopee mamas who prance before its empty parquets do not suggest to me the ineffable beauty of my dream girls of 1914. And Bunny, swinging along confidently with his cane towards his cloister in a carnival, has gone over to Communism and frets about the wrongs of southern mill workers and western farmers whose voices, fifteen years ago, would not have penetrated his study walls.

  All is lost save memory, yet sometimes I imagine myself reading, with curious interest, a Daily News of the issue of 1945:

  MAN OF FIFTY RUNS AMUCK IN NEW YORK

  Fitzgerald Feathered Many Love Nests Cutie Avers Bumped Off By Outraged Gunman

  So perhaps I am destined to return some day and find in the city new experiences that so far I have only read about. For the moment I can only cry out that I have lost my splendid mirage. Come back, come back, O glittering and white!

  ONE HUNDRED FALSE STARTS

  This essay was printed in the Saturday Evening Post in 1933.

  “Crack!” goes the pistol and off starts this entry. Sometimes he has caught it just right; more often he has jumped the gun. On these occasions, if he is lucky, he runs only a dozen yards, looks around and jogs sheepishly back to the starting place. But too frequently he makes the entire circuit of the track under the impression that he is leading the field, and reaches the finish to find he has no following. The race must be run all over again.

  A little more training, take a long walk, cut out that nightcap, no meat at dinner, and stop worrying about politics —

  So runs an interview with one of the champion false starters of the writing profession — myself. Opening a leather-bound waiste-basket which I fatuously refer to as my “notebook, “ I pick out at random a small, triangular piece of wrapping paper with a canceled stamp on one side. On the other side is written:

  Boopsie Dee was cute.

  Nothing more. No cue as to what was intended to follow that preposterous statement. Boopsie Dee, indeed, confronting me with this single dogmatic fact about herself. Never will I know what happened to her, where and when she picked up her revolting name, and whether her cuteness got her into much trouble.

  I pick out another scrap:

  Article: Unattractive Things Girls Do, to pair with counter article by woman: Unattractive Things Men Do.

  No. 1. Remove glass eye at dinner table.

  That’s all there is on that scrap. Evidently, an idea that had dissolved into hilarity before it had fairly got under way. I try to revive it seriously. What unattractive things do girls do — I mean universally nowadays — or what unattractive things do a great majority of them do, or a strong minority? I have a few feeble ideas, but no, the notion is dead. I can only think of an article I read somewhere about a woman who divorced her husband because of the way he stalked a chop, and wondering at the time why she didn’t try him out on a chop before she married him. No, that all belongs to a gilded age when people could afford to have nervous breakdowns because of the squeak in daddy’s shoes.

  Lines to an Old Favorite

  There are hundreds of these hunches. Not all of them have to do with literature. Some are hunches about importing a troupe of Ouled Nail dancers from Africa, about bringing the Grand-Guignol from Paris to New York, about resuscitating football at Princeton — I have two scoring plays that will make a coach’s reputation in one season — and there is a faded note to “explain to D. W. Griffith why costume plays are sure to come back. “ Also my plan for a film version of H. G. Wells’ History of the World.

  These little flurries caused me no travail — they were opium eater’s illusions, vanishing with the smoke of the pipe, or you know what I mean. The pleasure of thinking about them was the exact equivalent of having accomplished them. It is the six-page, ten-page, thirty-page globs of paper that grieve me professionally, like unsuccessful oil shafts; they represent my false starts.

  There is, for example, one false start which I have made at least a dozen times. It is — or rather has tried to take shape as — a short story. At one time or another, I have written as many words on it as would make a presentable novel, yet the present version is only about twenty-five hundred words long and hasn’t been touched for two years. Its present name — it has gone under various aliases — is The Barnaby Family.

  From childhood I have had a daydream — what a word for one whose entire life is spent noting them down — about starting at scratch on a desert island and building a comparatively high state of civilization out of the materials at hand. I always felt that Robinson Crusoe cheated when he rescued the tools from the wreck, and this applies equally to the Swiss Family Robinson, the Two Little Savages, and the balloon castaways of The Mysterious Island. In my story, not only would no convenient grain of wheat, repeating rifle, 4000 H. P. Diesel engine or technocratic butler be washed ashore but even my characters would he helpless city dwellers with no more wood lore than a cuckoo out of a clock.

  The creation of such characters was easy, and it was easy washing them ashore:

  For three long hours they were prostrated on the beach. Then Donald sat up.

  “Well, here we are, “ he said with sleepy vagueness.

  “Where?” his wife demanded eagerly.

  “It couldn’t be America and it couldn’t be the Philippines, “ he said, “because we started from one and haven’t got to the other. “

  “I’m thirsty, “ said the child.

  Donald’s eyes went quickly to the shore.

  “Where’s the raft?” He looked rather accusingly at Vivian. “Where’s the raft?”

  “It was gone when I woke up. �
�

  “It would be, “ he exclaimed bitterly. “Somebody might have thought of bringing the jug of water ashore. If I don’t do it, nothing is done in this house — I mean this family. “

  All right, go on from there. Anybody — you back there in the tenth row — step up! Don’t be afraid. Just go on with the story. If you get stuck, you can look up tropical fauna and flora in the encyclopedia or call up a neighbor who has been shipwrecked.

  Anyhow, that’s the exact point where my story — and I still think it’s a great plot — begins to creak and groan with unreality. I turn around after a while with a sense of uneasiness — how could anybody believe that rubbish about monkeys throwing coconuts? — trot back to the starting place, and I resume my crouch for days and days.

  A Murder That Didn’t Jell

  During such days I sometimes examine a clot of pages which is headed Ideas for Possible Stories. Among others, I find the following:

  Bath water in Princeton or Florida.

  Plot — suicide, indulgence, hate, liver and circumstance.

  Snubbing or having somebody.

  Dancer who found she could fly.

  Oddly enough, all these are intelligible, if not enlightening, suggestions to me. But they are all old — old. I am as apt to be stimulated by them as by my signature or the beat of my feet pacing the floor. There is one that for years has puzzled me, that is as great a mystery as Boopsie Dee.

  Story:

  THE WINTER WAS COLD

  CHARACTERS

  Victoria Cuomo

  Mark de Vinci

  Jason Tenweather

  Ambulance surgeon

  Stark, a watchman

  What was this about? Who were these people? I have no doubt that one of them was to be murdered or else be a murderer. But all else about the plot I have forgotten long ago.

  I turn over a little. Here is something over which I linger longer; a false start that wasn’t bad, that might have been run out.

  Words

  When you consider the more expensive article and finally decide on the cheaper one, the salesman is usually thoughtful enough to make it alt right for you. “You’ll probably get the most wear out of this, “ he says consolingly, or even, “That’s the one I’d choose myself. “

  The Trimbles were like that. They were specialists in the neat promotion of the next best into the best.

  “It’ll do to wear around the house, “ they used to say; or, “We want to wait until we can get a really nice one. “

  It was at this point that I decided I couldn’t write about the Trimbles. They were very nice and I would have enjoyed somebody else’s story of how they made out, but I couldn’t get under the surface of their lives — what kept them content to make the best of things instead of changing things. So I gave them up.

  There is the question of dog stories. I like dogs and would like to write at least one dog story in the style of Mr. Terhune, but see what happens when I take pen in hand:

  DOG

  THE STORY OF A LITTLE DOG

  Only a newsboy with a wizened face, selling his papers on the corner. A big dog fancier, standing on the curb, laughed contemptuously and twitched up the collar of his Airedale coat. Another rich dog man gave a little bark of scorn from a passing taxicab.

  But the newsboy was interested in the animal that had crept close to his feet. He was only a cur; his fuzzy coat was inherited from his mother, who had been a fashionable poodle, while in stature he resembled his father, a Great Dane. And somewhere there was a canary concerned, for a spray of yellow feathers projected from his backbone —

  You see, I couldn’t go on like that. Think of dog owners writing in to the editors from all over the country, protesting that I was no man for that job.

  I am thirty-six years old. For eighteen years, save for a short space during the war, writing has been my chief interest in life, and I am in every sense a professional.

  Yet even now when, at the recurrent cry of “Baby needs shoes, “ I sit down facing my sharpened pencils and block of legal-sized paper, I have a feeling of utter helplessness. I may write my story in three days or, as is more frequently the case, it may be six weeks before I have assembled anything worthy to be sent out. I can open a volume from a criminal-law library and find a thousand plots. I can go into highway and byway, parlor and kitchen, and listen to personal revelations that, at the hands of other writers, might endure forever. But all that is nothing — not even enough for a false start.

  Twice-Told Tales

  Mostly, we authors must repeat ourselves — that’s the truth. We have two or three great and moving experiences in our lives — experiences so great and moving that it doesn’t seem at the time that anyone else has been so caught up and pounded and dazzled and astonished and beaten and broken and rescued and illuminated and rewarded and humbled in just that way ever before.

  Then we learn our trade, well or less well, and we tell our two or three stories — each time in a new disguise — maybe ten times, maybe a hundred, as long as people will listen.

  If this were otherwise, one would have to confess to having no individuality at all. And each time I honestly believe that, because I have found a new background and a novel twist, I have really got away from the two or three fundamental tales I have to tell. But it is rather like Ed Wynn’s famous anecdote about the painter of boats who was begged to paint some ancestors for a client. The bargain was arranged, but with the painter’s final warning that the ancestors would all turn out to look like boats.

  When I face the fact that all my stories are going to have a certain family resemblance, I am taking a step toward avoiding false starts. If a friend says he’s got a story for me and launches into a tale of being robbed by Brazilian pirates in a swaying straw hut on

  the edge of a smoking volcano in the Andes, with his fiancee bound and gagged on the roof, I can well believe there were various human emotions involved; but having successfully avoided pirates, volcanoes and fiancees who get themselves bound and gagged on roofs, I can’t feel them. Whether it’s something that happened twenty years ago or only yesterday, I must start out with an emotion — one that’s close to me and that I can understand.

  It’s an Ill Wind

  Last summer I was hauled to the hospital with high fever and a tentative diagnosis of typhoid. My affairs were in no better shape than yours arc, reader. There was a story I should have written to pay my current debts, and I was haunted by the fact that I hadn’t made a will. If I had really had typhoid I wouldn’t have worried about such things, nor made that scene at the hospital when the nurses tried to plump me into an ice bath. I didn’t have either the typhoid or the bath, but I continued to rail against my luck that just at this crucial moment I should have to waste two weeks in bed, answering the baby talk of nurses and getting nothing done at all. But three days after I was discharged I had finished a story about a hospital.

  The material was soaking in and I didn’t know it. I was profoundly moved by fear, apprehension, worry, impatience; every sense was acute, and that is the best way of accumulating material for a story. Unfortunately, it does not always come so easily. I say to myself — looking at the awful blank block of paper — “Now, here’s this man Swankins that I’ve known and liked for ten years. I am privy to all his private affairs, and some of them are wows. I’ve threatened to write about him, and he says to go ahead and do my worst. “

  But can I? I’ve been in as many jams as Swankins, but I didn’t look at them the same way, nor would it ever have occurred to me to extricate myself from the Chinese police or from the clutches of that woman in the way Swankins chose. I could write some fine paragraphs about Swankins, but build a story around him that would have an ounce of feeling in it — impossible.

  Or into my distraught imagination wanders a girl named Elsie about whom I was almost suicidal for a month, in 1916.

  “How about me?” Elsie says. “Surely you swore to a lot of emotion back there in the past. Have you forgotten
?”

  “No, Elsie, I haven’t forgotten. “

  “Well, then, write a story about me. You haven’t seen me for twelve years, so you don’t know how fat I am now and how boring I often seem to my husband. “

  “No, Elsie, I — “

  “Oh, come on. Surely I must be worth a story. Why, you used to hang around saying good-bye with your face so miserable and comic that I thought I’d go crazy myself before I got rid of you. And now you’re afraid even to start a story about me. Your feeling must have been pretty thin if you can’t revive it for a few hours. “

  “No, Elsie; you don’t understand. I have written about you a dozen times. That funny little rabbit curl to your lip, I used it in a story six years ago. The way your face all changed just when you were going to laugh — I gave that characteristic to one of the first girls I ever wrote about. The way I stayed around trying to say good night, knowing that you’d rush to the phone as soon as the front door closed behind me — all that was in a book that I wrote once upon a time. “

  “I see. Just because I didn’t respond to you, you broke me into bits and used me up piecemeal. “

  “I’m afraid so, Elsie. You see, you never so much as kissed me, except that once with a kind of a shove at the same time, so there really isn’t any story. “

  Plots without emotions, emotions without plots. So it goes sometimes. Let me suppose, however, that I have got under way; two days’ work, two thousand words are finished and being typed for a first revision. And suddenly doubts overtake me.

  A Jury of One

  What if I’m just horsing around? What’s going on in this regatta anyhow ? Who could care what happens to the girl, when the sawdust is obviously leaking out of her moment by moment? How did I get the plot all tangled up ? I am alone in the privacy of my faded blue room with my sick cat, the bare February branches waving at the window, an ironic paper weight that says Business is Good, a New England conscience — developed in Minnesota — and my greatest problem: