Porcelain and Pink

Published on July 5, 1924 as F. Scott Fitzgerald was writing The Great Gatsby, this Liberty short story has always been seen as a key rehearsal for his magnum opus. In the story of George Rollins (or George O'Kelly in the version that appeared in 1926 in All the Sad Young Men) as he pursues the Tennessee belle Jonquil Cary we have yet another variation on Fitzgerald's quintessential "golden girl" theme. The story's reputation has been somewhat inflated by its compositional proximity to Gatsby. We explore the theme of first love, focusing on the oft-reprinted closing lines that have become endlessly meme-able in recent years ("April is over, April is over. There are all kinds of love in the world, but never the same love twice"); we also look at the biographical background and some of the structural "short cuts" the author took to neatly wrap up the business success that allows George to prove himself. We also wonder how the story gained a pesky pair of quotation marks around the title that have become a Fitzgerald copyeditor's nightmare. 

Appearing in the June 1936 issue of Esquire, "The Ants at Princeton" is by any measure a singularly kooky entry in F. Scott Fitzgerald's short-story corpus. A fantasy about a human-sized ant who steps onto the field to save the game between heated rivals Princeton and Harvard (you can probably guess who FSF roots for), the text has always baffled scholars: is it a short story or is it, as Fitzgerald wrote in his ledger, a mere "satire"? And does that even matter? Behind the peculiar and not particularly effective conceit, though, lies a lot of very interesting collegiate football history, not the least of which begs the question of whether Scott---whose dreams of gridiron stardom were famously dashed---had an influence on the game as latter-day fans have come to know it. Listen as two non-sports fans whose collective knowledge of football couldn't fill the few number of pages this story does make a mountain out of an anthill by exploring this possibility.  

Published in fall 1934 in the Saturday Evening Post, "Her Last Case" is one of F. Scott Fitzgerald's most important stories about the South. Indeed, it challenges consensus opinions about the writer's regard for the region that the Tarleton stories of the 1920s set. Far from a pastoral evocation of antebellum gentility, the story insists the South must exorcise its lingering obsession with the Lost Cause---and it does so through a variety of Gothic strum und drang featuring the literal book that named the South's revisionary insistence that the Civil War was fought to preserve a code of chivalry, Edward A. Pollard's The Lost Cause: A New Southern History of the War of the Confederates (1868). The setting for the story is equally important: Fitzgerald was inspired by a visit to the Middleburg, Virginia, estate called Welbourne owned by Elizabeth Lemmon, who just happened to be the great romantic love of his editor Maxwell Perkins's life. Thomas Wolfe also visited Welbourne and wrote of it, too. We discuss "Her Last Case" and how it reframes our perceptions of Fitzgerald's Southern loyalties. 

A contender for one of the strangest Fitzgerald titles ever, "Diamond Dick and the First Law of Woman," published in April 1924,  tells the story of a maverick young debutante, Diana Dickey, who returns from the Western front where she served as a canteen girl to spend the next five years wondering what to do with her life. Only when wounded aviator Charlie Abbott returns from a long convalescence in Paris does Diana seem to reenact her decidedly masculine persona of "Diamond Dick," the hero of hundreds of nineteenth-century dime novels, and find her purpose. Weirdly, her plan to save Charlie from dissipation involves a gun, which Diana uses to shake him from a bad case of ... amnesia. That's right, long before it became a soap-opera cliche, Fitzgerald resorted to a dubious trope that can prompt some whiplash-inducing plot twists. We look at the story's flawed construction and explore Fitzgerald's unhappy relationship with Hearst's International, the lesser sibling to William Randolph Hearst's more famous fiction magazine, Cosmopolitan. "Diamond Dick" may not be perfect, but it's never boring. More importantly, it belongs in the Venn diagram overlap between two important circles of Fitzgerald stories: "The Vegetable" cluster (stories written to relieve the writer's finances from his disastrous foray into the theater) and "The Gatsby" cluster (stories that rehearse themes and specific lines that will reappear in his classic 1925 novel).   

In late 1930 as Zelda Fitzgerald remained hospitalized in a sanitarium trying to regain her sanity her husband cranked out a frenzied series of stories to pay for her treatment. Out of this whirlwind of effort came "Babylon Revisited," which appeared originally in the February 21, 1931, issue of the Saturday Evening Post and later anchored the fourth and final story collection of his life, Taps at Reveille (1935). "Babylon" is the mack daddy of all Fitzgerald stories, widely hailed as the best of his short fiction and his most widely anthologized. This episode asks why the story enjoys that exalted status. While celebrating its virtuoso craftsmanship and complex characterization, we also note that the story appeals in part because it offers such a capsule portrait of the Fitzgeralds' own biographical tragedy, a hymn to their own self-destruction against the sudden shift from the Boom to the Great Depression. The story also captures the romance of expatriate Paris, which many of its central sites---the Right Bank's Ritz Bar, most famously---still attracting Fitzgerald fans galore each year. This story is hard to top, but we also recognize that it's important not to let its reputation overshadow his other stories.  

As spring turned to summer in 1920 and This Side of Paradise was making a celebrity of F. Scott Fitzgerald, the periodical published by his very own publisher, Scribner's Magazine, featured an atypical story by him: "The Four Fists," whose premise is---no, seriously---that we would all be better off if in moments of moral impurity we took a knuckle sandwich to the chiclets. Four times in this odd tale the hero, Samuel Meredith, gets punched in the face, and four times he becomes a better person for it. Although it sounds like it might make for a better title for a 1973 Bruce Lee movie, "The Four Fists" is one of Fitzgerald's most infamous stories: it's universally derided as moralistic and didactic, as proof that when the author aimed for the creakiest, stuffiest magazine audiences of the era---and Scribner's was actually more conservative in taste in 1920 than even the Saturday Evening Post---he ended up betraying all the beautiful nuances and poignancies for which we value his writing. Does that mean somebody should have socked him in the jaw for publishing this story (which only made him $150, anyway)? As we suggest, two explanations suggest why "The Four Fists" has gone down in literary history as one of Fitzgerald's worst : 1) for reasons that remain unclear, he chose to include it as the final story in Flappers and Philosophers, his first story collection, giving it a spotlight it might not otherwise have had had he just let in sink in the pages of Scribner's June 1920 issue; and 2) the then president of Princeton, John Grier Hibben, wrote Fitzgerald a notorious letter praising this tale and wishing Fitzgerald would follow this preachy path rather than revel in the jazz debauchery of This Side of Paradise---a condescending bit of career advice that sparked a feisty reply from the twenty-three-year-old voice of "the rising generation."   

In late 1931 F. Scott Fitzgerald traveled to Hollywood for a second attempt to crack the lucrative movie market. While there he attended a party at the home of MGM studio chieftain Irving Thalberg and his wife, Norma Shearer, at which he performed a bit of drunken doggerel and embarrassed himself. Never one not to avail himself of autobiographical material, he quickly shaped a story about an emotional triangle between a "hack" screenwriter (Joel Coles) and a charismatic director (Miles Calman) and his actress/Pygmalion figure/wife (Stella). Because it addressed the theme of adultery frankly, the Saturday Evening Post rejected "Crazy Sunday," as did the somewhat racier Cosmopolitan, fearing the wrath of publisher William Randolph Hearst (who had his own "interest" in Hollywood, of course). Instead, the story appeared in H. L. Mencken's influential journal American Mercury, where it become the second of only two Fitzgerald stories to appear there. In this episode we explore the Hollywood background, connect "Crazy Sunday" to Fitzgerald's eventual attempt at a Hollywood novel (The Last Tycoon), note the prominence of psychoanalysis in the plot, and even speculate what Fitzgerald's disastrous lyrics to "Dog"---the poem he performed at that fateful party---might have sounded like with a little musical accompaniment. (Of course, it would have sounded craz-eee!).   

Of all the commercial genres F. Scott Fitzgerald attempted in his stories (romance, moral tales, even fantasy and supernatural fiction), he was probably least adept at crime writing. That may seem odd considering The Great Gatsby's influence on the gangster tales and film noir and given the fact the crime fiction was racing toward its hardboiled peak  when the unfortunately titled "The Fiend" appeared in Esquire in January 1935. Rather than a Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler ode to moral corruption, though, Fitzgerald's short tale of a widower's attempt to destroy the incarcerated killer who murdered his wife and child reads more like a nineteenth-century Hawthorne or Poe tale of obsession and revenge. Even then the final product is a far cry from Criminal Minds, to say nothing of "The Tell-Tale Heart" or "Ethan Brand." We here at the FBI (Fitzgerald Bureau of Investigation) crack open the case of this odd entry in Fitzgerald's canon, taking on the mission impossible of uncovering clues to what exactly our man thought he was doing with this bloody plot, as well as why he included it in his final story collection, Taps at Reveille (also 1935).   

Just when you thought your stocking couldn't get any more stuffed this Christmas, we're slipping underneath your holly jolly to drop our second episode of season two. "Porcelain and Pink" appeared in the January 1920 issue of The Smart Set, one month before F. Scott Fitzgerald debuted in the Saturday Evening Post and two before the publication of This Side of Paradise. A charming trifle, "P&P" tells the story of a young flapper, Julie, luxuriating in a blue bathtub who teases a young literary beau by pretending to be her sister (the gentleman's girlfriend), Lois. Written as a one-act play, the slight (and we do mean slight) comedy reminds us that early in his career Fitzgerald was fond of cranking out fiction written in the form of a theater script. Our discussion takes us to the vaudeville halls where the story's tantalizing set-up (Julie is bathing au naturel, naturally) makes burlesque sense. Trying to find a theme here is like trying to snatch a floating bubble, but we do connect "Porcelain and Pink" to other, more significant stories from 1920 such as "Head and Shoulders" and "Bernice Bobs Her Hair." We also offer a history of the bathtub (!) and a long list of iconic bathing moments in art, music, and literature. Rub-a-dub-dub! 

We kick off season 2 of Master the 40 with our first foray into the series of "juveniles" Fitzgerald wrote for the Saturday Evening Post between 1928 and 1931. Actually, he wrote two coming-of-age series for the magazine, one about a boy (Basil Duke Lee) and one about a girl (Josephine Perry). The latter tend to be darker and sadder, while the former offer nostalgic glimpses of Fitzgerald's own adolescence in St. Paul in the 1910s. Chronologically, "He Thinks He's Wonderful" is the fourth of eight Basil stories and captures our hero smackdab in the middle of the awkward age. We explore Fitzgerald's treatment of American teenagers before they became rebels without a cause. On the one hand, the author's empathy for young people led him to depict the foibles of growing up with far more psychological realism than predecessors such as Booth Tarkington. At the same time, the Basil series eschews the "fall from innocence" vision of coming of age modernist contemporaries shared, which insisted that some kind of epiphany would mercilessly and irrevocably initiate young people into the hypocrisies and compromises of adulthood, forever denying them their prelapsarian naivete. In the end, Basil is no Holden Caulfield ... but he just may be a more honest depiction of adolescence, an intense but ultimately transitory stage of the life cycle. No matter how much American popular culture glamorizes the teen years, most of us are happy never to go back to that age!