Washington ’ s mountain - sized jewel to Eastern exotica displayed for a “ Tartar Khan ”
( Short Stories 188).
It was inevitable that such stylistic luxuriance would fall out of fashion as the Great
Depression rendered chinchilla and gold unfathomable riches instead of merely intem-
perate ones. After the lukewarm commercial reception of his fourth novel, Tender Is
the Night – a work that took nearly a decade to complete, in part because of the fi nan-
cial imperative of producing salable short fi ction – Fitzgerald recognized the need to
tone down his extravagance. The result was the rigorously pared down language of
“ The Lost Decade, ” “ An Alcoholic Case ” (1937), and the seventeen sketches featuring
Hollywood hack Pat Hobby that began appearing in
Esquire
in the fi nal year of
Fitzgerald ’ s life. James L. W. West III argues that the “ stripped, compressed prose ”
of this “ late style ” demonstrates how market savvy the author remained despite his
alcoholism and the fi nancial and emotional strain of the mental illness that claimed
F. Scott Fitzgerald
313
Zelda after 1930: “ During his years as a Post author he had mastered the kind of story
published by that magazine. … For Esquire , Fitzgerald learned to write a very differ-
ent kind of narrative – the brief, unplotted, elliptical tale typical of Chekov, Turgenev,
and DeMaupassant ” (Fitzgerald, Lost Decade xv). Yet as professionally necessary as this
reinvention was, the Esquire stories lack the very element of emotion that is the dis-
tinctive ingredient of Fitzgerald ’ s pre - 1935 fi ction. The sad reality is that dozens of
writers in this period produced competent stories in the hardboiled manner, so that
whatever insights “ The Lost Decade ” might reveal about the emotional costs of dip-
somania, there is nothing particularly original about it – unlike the early Post stories,
which, even at their most commercial, contain a quality of vibrancy that makes them
as vivacious today as they were nearly a century ago. Of course, Fitzgerald ’ s intent in
this later period was to disassociate himself from marketplace stereotypes of his
writing. As he wrote one editor shortly before his death, he was tired of being ste-
reotyped: “ I ’ d like to fi nd out if people read me just because I am F. Scott Fitzgerald
or what is more likely, don ’ t read me for the same reason ” ( Life in Letters 433). Such
was this desire that he even published one Esquire story, “ On an Ocean Wave, ” under
the pseudonym “ Paul Elgin, ” hoping to fool readers. More contributions would have
appeared under this nom de plume had Fitzgerald ’ s December 21, 1940, death not
rendered the need to mask his authorship a moot point.
The great challenge of studying Fitzgerald ’ s entire body of stories is to separate
long - standing assumptions of “ commercial ” from parallel presumptions of what con-
stitutes “ literary modernism. ” Sentimentality was by no means exclusive to the Sat-
urday Evening Post or Red Book ; it lurks under the surface of Hemingway stories such
as “ In Another Country ” or “ A Canary for One ” (both 1927) as much as it is overt in
such supposed Fitzgerald piffl es as “ The Lees of Happiness ” (1922) or “ Diamond Dick
and the First Law of Woman ” (1924). Nor were avant - garde journals the sole province
of psychological complexity. The depth of character Fitzgerald could plumb in “ The
Rich Boy ” or “ The Last of the Belles ” is no less profound than what Faulkner or Porter
could achieve with more experimental tactics. Even the obvious recycling of formulae
and plots that can make stories such as “ The Popular Girl ” or “ Presumption ” read
like expedient cash - ins rather than artistic accomplishments is hardly a fault of the
popular marketplace; the modernist vanguard was likewise accused of too often drink-
ing from the same well as they explored their war traumas or their Yoknapatawpha
genealogies in repeated efforts. As Fitzgerald defensively noted when fl ustered by a
sense of his own limitations, authors inevitably repeat themselves: “ We have two or
three great moving experiences in our lives. … Then we learn our trade, well or less
well, and we tell our two or three stories … as long as people will listen ” ( Afternoon
132). The great tragedy of Fitzgerald ’ s career as a story writer was not that he toiled
for commercial periodicals. It was, rather, twofold: more people listened early rather
than late to those two or three great stories he had to tell, and he himself did not
appreciate what he had accomplished in the genre. Rather than lament that he only
completed four and a half novels in his twenty - year career – as the fi rst revivers of his
reputation were prone to do in the 1940s and 1950s
–
we should admire the
314
Kirk Curnutt
professionalism that enabled him to publish 160 stories in that span. Few writers of
his generation were as prolifi c when it came to short fi ction, and none have seen their
standing so suffer because of it.
References and Further Reading
Booth , Wayne C. The Rhetoric of Fiction . Chicago :
Zelda Fitzgerald . Eds. Jackson R. Bryer and
University of Chicago Press , 1983 .
Cathy W. Barks . New York : Scribner , 2002 .
Bruccoli , Matthew J. Some Sort of Epic Grandeur:
Franks , Joseph . “ Spatial Form in Modern Litera-
The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald . 1st rev. edn. New
ture . ” The Idea of Spatial Form . New Brunswick,
York : Carroll & Graf , 1991 .
NJ : Rutgers University Press , 1991 . 31 – 66 .
Bryer , Jackson R. New Essays on F. Scott Fitzgerald ’ s
Freytag , Gustav . Technique of the Drama: An Exposi-
Neglected Short Stories . Columbia : University of
tion of Dramatic Composition and Art . Trans. Elias
Missouri Press , 1996 .
J. MacEwan . New York : Griggs , 1895 .
— — — . The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald: New
Head , Dominic . The Modernist Short Story: A Study
Approaches in Criticism . Madison : University of
in Theory and Practice . New York : Cambridge
Wisconsin Press , 1982 .
University Press , 1992 .
Canby , Henry Seidel . “ Free Fiction . ” Atlantic
Hemingway , Ernest . The Complete Short Stories of
Monthly 116 (July 1915 ): 60 – 8 .
Ernest Hemingway: The Finca Vig í a Edition . Eds.
Canby , Henry Seidel , and Alfred Dashiell . A
Patrick John and Gregory Hemingway . New
History of the Short Story . New York : Holt , 1935 .
York : Scribner , 1987 .
Fitzgerald , F. Scott . Afternoon of an Author . Ed.
— — — . A Moveable Feast . New York : Scribner ,
Arthur Mizener . New York : Scribner , 1958 .
1964 .
— — — . As Ever, Scott Fitz
—
: Letters Between F. Joyce , James . Dubliners . 1914. Ed. Robert Scholes .
Scott Fitzgerald and His Literary Agent Harold
New York : Viking , 1961 .
Ober, 1919 – 1940 . Eds. Matthew J. Bruccoli and
Kroeber , Karl . R
etelling/Rereading: The Fate of
Jennifer McCabe Atkinson . London : Woburn
Storytelling in Modern Times . New Brunswick,
Press , 1973 .
NJ : Rutgers University Press , 1992 .
— — — . Flappers and Philosophers . 1920. Ed. James
Levitt , Morton P. The Rhetoric of Modernist Fiction:
L. W. West III. New York : Cambridge Univer-
From a New Point of View . Hanover : University
sity Press , 1999 .
Press of New England , 2005 .
— — — . F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Life in Letters . Ed.
Mangum , Bryant . A Fortune Yet: Money and Art in
Matthew J. Bruccoli . New York : Scribner ,
the Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald . New York :
1994 .
Garland , 1991 .
— — — . The Lost Decade: Short Stories from Esquire,
May , Charles E. Short Story Writers . Pasadena :
1936 – 1941 . Ed. James L. W. West III. New
Salem Press , 2008 .
York : Cambridge University Press , 2008 .
O ’ Brien , Edward J. The Dance of the Machines: The
— — — . The Price Was High: The Last Uncollected
American Short Story and the Industrial Age . New
Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald . Ed. Matthew J.
York : Macaulay , 1929 .
Bruccoli . New York : Harcourt Brace Jovanov-
Petry , Alice Hall . Fitzgerald ’ s Craft of Short Fiction:
ich , 1979 .
The Collected Stories, 1920
–
1935 . Tuscaloosa :
— — — . The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald: A
University of Alabama Press , 1989 .
New Collection . Ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli . New
Piper , Henry Dan . F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Critical
York : Scribner , 1989 .
Study . New York : Holt, Rinehart & Winston ,
— — — . Tales of the Jazz Age . 1922. New York :
1965 .
Cambridge University Press , 2002 .
Poe , Edgar Allan . Edgar Allan Poe: Essays and
Fitzgerald , F. Scott , and Zelda Fitzgerald . Dear
Reviews . Ed. G. R. Thompson . New York :
Scott, Dearest Zelda: The Love Letters of Scott and
Library of America , 1984 .
F. Scott Fitzgerald
315
Porter , Katherine Anne . The Collected Stories of
tion: Mass Market Magazines and the Demise of
Katherine Anne Porter . New York : Harcourt,
the Gentle Reader, 1880 – 1920 . ” The Culture of
Brace & World , 1965 .
Consumption: Critical Essays in American History,
Scofi eld , Martin . The Cambridge Introduction to the
1880 – 1980 . Eds. Richard Wightman Fox and
American Short Story . New York : Cambridge
T. J. Jackson Lears . New York : Pantheon , 1984 .
University Press , 2006 .
39 – 64 .
Voss , Arthur . The American Short Story: A Critical
Wright , Austin . The American Short Story in the
Survey . Norman : University of Oklahoma Press ,
Twenties . Chicago : University of Chicago Press ,
1973 .
1961 .
Wilson , Christopher . “ The Rhetoric of Consump-
20
“ The Look of the World ” : Richard
Wright on Perspective
Mikko Tuhkanen
Thus early I learned that the point from which a thing is viewed is of some importance.
– Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom
In his 1950 assessment of the Harlem Renaissance, Alain Locke, the “ dean ” of the
movement and the editor of The New Negro anthology (1925), suggests that African
American writing of the 1920s and the 1930s evinced “ vision without true perspec-
tive. ” According to him, the texts of the New Negro Movement failed to achieve
“ objective universality, ” which would have made them relevant to a wider audience.
Locke names Richard Wright ’ s Native Son (1940) – at least its fi rst two parts before
what he, like many other critics, deems the novel ’ s disintegration under the “ propa-
gandist formulae ” of its third and fi nal section – as the exemplary corrective to such
failure of perspective in African American literary history. With its “ social discoveries
of common - denominator human universals between Negro situations and others, ”
Wright ’ s debut novel evinces the kind of “ universalized particularity [that] has always
resided [in] the world ’ s greatest and most enduring art ” (Locke 59).
If he read Locke ’ s rendition of black literary history – with whose premises and
assumptions many would quibble – Wright would have undoubtedly been pleased.
He, too, identifi es “ perspective ” as an issue of crucial import for African American
writing. The craft of the black writer entails the identifi cation and inhabitation of an
appropriate perspective on the world, a viewpoint that, bringing things into focus,
allows the artist to render his or her material into effective narratives. Perspective, he
explains in “ Blueprint for Negro Writing ” (1937) , “ is that fi xed point in intellectual
space where a writer stands to view the struggles, hopes, and sufferings of his people.
There are times when he may stand too close and the result is a blurred vision. Or he
may stand too far away and the result is a neglect of important things ” (45). While
Wright here argues for the benefi t of a socialist Weltanschauung for the emerging
black artist, he also suggests that the perspective embodied by the American Com-
munist Party must be only a preliminary step in the dialectics of vision. As such,
Richard
Wright
317
Wright ’ s subsequent writings can be understood as an ongoing experimentation with
perspectives through which he sought to change what he frequently calls “ the look
of the world, ” that is, the way the world both appears to and apprehends the black
subject. 1
As an African American author, Wright is by no means unique in this emphasis.
The search for transformative vision(s) occupies black writing from slave narratives
onward. 2 In the earliest of these texts, the experience of literacy often occasions per-
spectival shifts. In his 1845 Narrative , Frederick Douglass famously describes literacy
as an anguished revelation, a painful visionary moment, that directs his gaze into the
abyss of his degraded condition as a slave: the newly gained ability to read “ opened
[his] eyes to the horrible pit, but to no ladder upon which to get out ” (42). The cost
of vision is an initial loss of voice, and the narrator is stunned to silence: “ learning to
read … torment[ed] and st[ung] my soul to unutterable anguish. As I writhed under
it, I would at times feel that learning to read had been a curse rather than a blessing.
It had given me a view of my wretched condition, without the remedy ” (42). Empow-
ering and immobilizing, literacy for Douglass becomes, precisely, a vehicle for the
kind of “ second - sight ” that, according to W. E. B. Du Bois, the world has “ gifted ”
the double - conscious African American ( Souls 10). As etymology tells us – etymology
of which Du Bois, having studied in Germany, may have been cognizant – the double
perspective of the visionary black sub
ject functions as what Jacques Derrida has called
the pharmakon : it is both “ good and bad, … gift and poison ( Gift - gift ) ” (Derrida 81).
Wright delineates this diffi cult logic throughout his work. His protagonists are
afforded revelations of new worlds when their perspectives are radically reorganized,
usually as a result of calamities not of their own choosing. Yet, rather than an experi-
ence of transcendence and liberation, such moments entail as many unforeseen dangers
as possibilities. For example, in his autobiography, literacy enables experimentations
with forms of vision unavailable to the African American subject growing up under
Jim Crow. Black Boy ’s adolescent narrator describes the activation of a certain mobility
through the unexpected perspectives he discovers in books. Recounting his childhood
experiences of reading, he writes: “ The plots and stories in the novels did not interest
me so much as the point of view revealed ” (238). Perspectives offer a way of organiz-
ing the world such that possibilities are made available, or at least thinkable, that
have been absent from the narrator ’ s environment. Wright describes this dynamic in
a later interview: “ Living in the South doomed me to look always through eyes which
the South had given me, and bewilderment and fear made me mute and afraid. But
after I had left the South, luck gave me other eyes, new eyes with which to look at
the meaning of what I ’ d lived through. … Books were the windows through which
I looked at the world. … [A]t once I was able, in looking back through alien eyes,
to see my own life ” ( Conversations 81). As Lawrence Levine argues, reading and writing
has helped bring about “ changes in perception and world view ” for the antebellum
and post - Emancipation black subject (156 – 7). Yet, as with slave narrators, literacy
provides no panacea. Echoing Douglass, Wright observes: “ In buoying me up, reading
also cast me down. … My tension returned, new, terrible, bitter, surging, almost too
318
Mikko Tuhkanen
great to be contained. I no longer felt that the world about me was hostile, killing; I
knew it. … I seemed forever condemned, ringed by walls ” ( Black Boy 239). Reading
and writing unexpectedly distance the autobiographical narrator from the black com-
munity, too. Having seen his published story in a local paper, his friends “ looked at
A Companion to the American Short Story Page 69