A Companion to the American Short Story
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— — — . “ Technique as Myth: The Structure of The
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— — — . The Eye of the Story: Selected Essays and
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. ”
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.
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19
The Short Stories of F. Scott
Fitzgerald: Structure, Narrative
Technique, Style
Kirk Curnutt
It has become something of an unfortunate obligation when writing about the 160 -
plus short stories that F. Scott Fitzgerald published during his lifetime to acknowl-
edge his tenuous place in the canon of American short fi ction. Although “ Babylon
Revisited ” (1931) is a staple of high - school and undergraduate anthologies, and while
the expired copyrights on his earliest and most popular tales have resulted in a slew
of new editions of Flappers and Philosophers (1920) and Tales of the Jazz Age (1922),
Fitzgerald remains at best a tangential presence in most histories of the form. From
Henry Seidel Canby and Alfred Dashiell ’ s A History of the Short Story (1935 ) through
Austin Wright ’ s The American Short Story in the Twenties (1961) to Arthur Voss ’ s The
American Short Story: A Critical Survey (1973 ) and, most recently, Charles E. May ’ s
Short Story Writers (2008 ), he either goes unmentioned entirely or is referenced as a
counterpoint to Ernest Hemingway ’ s more central contributions to the genre ’ s devel-
opment. This is not to deny, of course, that there have been excellent full - length
examinations of Fitzgerald ’ s stories. Alice Hall Petry ’ s Fitzgerald ’ s Craft of Short Fiction
(1989 ) and Bryant Mangum ’ s A Fortune Yet: Money and Art in the Short Stories of F.
Scott Fitzgerald (1991 ) are but two sterling examples of the nuanced thematic analysis
that the short fi ction can inspire, while collections such as Jackson R. Bryer ’ s two
volumes on neglected efforts ( 1982, 1996 ) rightfully remind us that “ Babylon ” is by
no means his lone tale to reward repeated close readings. Unfortunately, however, the
infl uence of these secondary sources tends to resonate most loudly in the rather cir-
cumscribed world of Fitzgerald studies and not necessarily among short - story histo-
rians and theorists. As a result, what the late Matthew J. Bruccoli wrote in the
introduction to The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald: A New Collection (1989 ) is as true
today for genre specialists as it was twenty years ago for authorial enthusiasts: “ F.
Scott Fitzgerald ’ s short stories remain a misunderstood and underrated aspect of his
career ” (xiii).
The reasons for this perpetual undervaluing are many. For starters, a mere forty - six
of Fitzgerald ’ s stories were collected in book form before his 1940 death, the other
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Kirk Curnutt
two - thirds of his output left to languish for decades in periodicals like the Saturday
Evening Post that, however originally popular at newsstands and via subscription, were
far too ephemeral a medium upon which to build a critical reputation. Additionally,
as Martin Scofi eld adds, “ None of the [four] short story collections ” that Fitzgerald
did publish during his lifetime – the other two are All the Sad Young Men (1926) and
Taps at Reveille (1935) – “ as a whole is as signifi cant as his achievement in the genre
of the novel, particularly his masterpiece, The Great Gatsby (1925) ” (150). As far as
the American short story goes, this reality puts Fitzgerald at a distinct disadvantage
to contemporaries such as Sherwood Anderson, none of whose longer works can hold
a candle to Winesburg, Ohio (1919). This same is arguably true of Hemingway, whose
In Our Time (1925), to many critics, packs a more concise, dramatic punch than either
A Farewell to Arms (1929) or For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). Then there is the problem
of Fitzgerald ’ s own dismissive attitude toward his short fi ction. Even a cursory reading
of his correspondence reveals the constancy of his derogatory comments, most famously
his claim to Hemingway that his economic dependency on the Post rendered him a
prostitute – albeit one handsomely paid several grand per turn ( Life in Letters 169).
&nb
sp; Nor has his habit of mining passages from stories that earned such extravagant sums
for use in his novels helped matters. Tender Is the Night (1934), for example, contains
“ strippings ” from more than three dozen stories, from 1922 ’ s “ The Popular Girl ” to
1933 ’ s “ I Got Shoes. ” Except for a handful, these rifl ed efforts rank among Fitzgerald ’ s
most critically ignored, in large part because their reputation as workshop exercises
for the long - delayed follow - up to Gatsby have tainted perceptions of any intrinsic
merit they might possess.
These debilities are well known and have been attributed to the author ’ s belief
that while the novel was the medium in which he must make his critical reputation,
the short story was good for little more than paying his bills. Yet there is a larger if
less acknowledged reason why Fitzgerald is relatively marginalized: in such decisive
criteria as structure and form, narrative perspective, and style, his short fi ction simply
does not fi t the paradigm of the modernist short story as it has traditionally been
constructed. As Dominic Head argues, several parallels between the attributes of the
defi ning artistic movement of the early twentieth century and the formal properties
of the short story made the genre especially attractive to European and American
writers, from James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Katherine Mansfi eld to Hemingway,
William Faulkner, and Katherine Anne Porter. First, the constricted space of short
fi ction appealed to the modernist desire to intensify drama through techniques of
foregrounding – what Head calls “ the cultivation of expression through form ” (7) –
that do away with exposition and immerse the reader in narrative immediacy. Addi-
tionally, the genre facilitated modernists ’ interest in breaking the requisites of the
well - developed plot by abandoning the obligatory temporality of narrative sequence
in favor of a spatiality that Joseph Franks has compared to that of the plastic arts
(60). The modernist reliance upon fi gural patterns and motifs to convey thematic
signifi cance provides a third point of comparison, for “ the short form often implies
the typicality of a specifi c episode, while narrative limitation demands oblique
F. Scott Fitzgerald
297
expression through image and symbol ” (Head 7). Finally, while a great deal of short -
story theory reiterates Edgar Allan Poe ’ s claim that short fi ction is superior to the
novel in its ability to enable a “ unity of effect or impression ” (570 – 1), Head makes
a persuasive case that its brevity actually encouraged the modernist preference for
fragmentation and discontinuity. While his paradigmatic example is Mansfi eld
’
s
“ Bliss ” (1918), one can nominate a range of contemporaneous American authors who
defy the organicism presumed by Poe ’ s defi nition: aside from Hemingway, Faulkner,
and Porter, one thinks of Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes, and Jean Toomer, to name
but one eclectic trio.
The contiguities that Head discusses are by no means the only ones shared by
modernism and the short story. What is striking from even a basic overview of his
study, however, is how absolutely inapplicable the characteristics he outlines are to
Fitzgerald ’ s short fi ction. Whereas the canonical modernist story tends to eschew
plot, even Fitzgerald ’ s most famous ones – “ Babylon Revisited ” is a prime example
– are constructed according to the classical Aristotelian structure that begins with
complicating action, rises to a climax, and ends with a denouement. And while
modernists developed innovative points of view to convey new theories of phenom-
enology (stream of consciousness, most famously), Fitzgerald was prone to that most
grievous storytelling foible of post
-
Flaubertian prose, the omniscient narrator.
Finally, while many modernists disparaged emotion, arguing that feeling corrupted
art by appealing to the sentimentality with which the mass market supposedly
pandered to general readers, Fitzgerald ’ s Romantic affi nities inspired a propensity
for lyric expressionism whose central tenet was its lush appeal to pathos. Compared
to experimental writers who forged their reputations in obscure but infl uential liter-
ary magazines such as the Little Review, Transatlantic Review, and transition , Fitzger-
ald ’ s stories cannot help seeming a bit old - fashioned. This putative traditionalism
is especially intriguing given that his themes generally address mainline modernist
concerns: like his peers, Fitzgerald was fascinated with the psychological displace-
ment of expatriation, with Freudian neuroses and the relationship between dreams
and reality, and the ruptures of historical change that the Great War imposed upon
his generation.
And yet one senses that the differences that distinguish self - consciously modern
short fi ction from the popular marketplace for which Fitzgerald wrote are as much a
matter of degree as of kind. Even the most abbreviated of modernist stories, for
example, has a plot. However compressed, the interchapters of Hemingway ’ s In Our
Time still revolve around a central dramatic action, be it the wounding of Nick Adams,
the execution of the King of Hungary, or the hanging of Sam Cardinella. As such,
each fragment is more akin to a traditional story than to the verbal statuary of imag-
istic poems such as Ezra Pound
’
s
“
In a Station of the Metro
”
or William Carlos
Williams ’ s “ The Red Wheelbarrow. ” Similarly, to whatever degree modernists might
preach against the intrusive narrative garrulity of nineteenth - century predecessors
such as Nathaniel Hawthorne or Herman Melville, it was not unheard of for some of
them – Woolf in particular – to resort to omniscience to evoke a communal sensibility
298
Kirk Curnutt
(Levitt 99 – 100). Finally, despite the sneers of modernists toward sentimentality, the
type of intricately cadenced, exclamatory passages that signal the rhapsodic climax of
“ Winter Dreams ” (1922) has its counterpart in Joyce ’ s “ The Dead ” (1914 ), Porter ’ s
“ Flowering Judas ” (1931) or Faulkner ’ s “ Delta Autumn ” (1942) – in such examples,
the emotion simply unfurls within devices that represent the inner workings of an
agonized mind instead of directly addressing the audience. Because Fitzgerald ’ s char-
acteristic habits of structure, perspective, and style are nowhere near as different from
his contemporaries ’ as critics have traditionally assumed, his stories allow us to qualify
the conventional defi nition of the modernist short story while suggesting the ways in
which his short fi ction is more modernistic than heretofore recognized.
Structure, Form, Plot
According to Bruccoli, Fitzgerald proved a prolifi c story writer because “ his best story
ideas came to him as complete structures, and by writing them in concentrated bursts
of effort, he was able to preserve the spontaneity of the narrative ” ( Epic Grandeur 131).
The author ’ s term for structure was “ jump, ” as in the “ three - jump story, �
� a reference
not to any tripartite division within the plot but to the number of successive days a
good effort should take to complete. (It is a sign of Fitzgerald ’ s fl ippancy toward his
stories that early in his career he liked to brag about how quickly he could churn
them out, such as the single day required by “ The Camel ’ s Back ” or the lone night
spent on “ The Four Fists ” [both 1920]. He would later regret such boasts when they
earned him a reputation as a “ facile ” writer.) But while Fitzgerald was apt to measure
the unity of a story according to the time required to realize it, one could argue that
his profi ciency was enabled by his savvy use of a basic story structure that has come
to be known as Freytag ’ s Pyramid. Named after German novelist Gustav Freytag
(1816 – 95), the form expands upon the terminology Aristotle defi ned in Poetics (335
bce ) to prescribe the fi ve basic parts of a plot: exposition, rising action, climax, falling
action, and denouement. Freytag proposed his model in his study Technique of the
Drama (1863, translated into English in 1895), intending it for use in understanding
the unity of classical drama. Despite its utter inapplicability to modern literature
(something Freytag himself admitted), the schema had been widely adapted by the
1920s to illustrate the internal cohesion of a range of narrative prose forms, including
the short story. Several story
-
writing handbooks of the 1920s offer variations on
Freytag, often without explicitly acknowledging their debt, while advising tyros on
how to produce salable short fi ction. There was good reason for their emphasis on the
pyramidal arrangement: the high - circulation “ slicks ” that paid the best showed a
marked preference for short fi ction with a clear - cut climax and defi nitive conclusions.
For litterateurs, the market ’ s fondness for well - wrought plot meant that form had
eroded into formula. As early as 1915, Henry Seidel Canby alluded to Freytag when
complaining of the predictable structure into which short fi ction had devolved, spe-
cifi cally singling out for attack the complicating action that will “ move, move, move
F. Scott Fitzgerald
299
furiously, each action and every speech pointing directly toward the unknown climax ”