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Afternoon of an Author: A Selection of Uncollected Stories and Essays
Afternoon of an Author contains fourteen uncollected short stories and six uncollected essays, evenly distributed over the course of F. Scott Fitzgerald's writing career, beginning with the autobiographical essay called "Who's Who - and Why," which he wrote for The Saturday Evening Post in 1920, and ending with "News of Paris - Fifteen Years Ago," a story found among Fitzgerald's papers, apparently written in 1940, and posthumously published in Furioso.
Here, clearly, is a book to be read both for the enjoyment of good writing, and for its illumination of an important figure in American letters. To supplement the reader's own insight into Fitzgerald's art, Arthur Mizener, author of the highly successful biography of Fitzgerald, The Far Side of Paradise, provides a revealing introduction and pertinent notes heading each selection.
Here, clearly, is a book to be read both for the enjoyment of good writing, and for its illumination of an important figure in American letters. To supplement the reader's own insight into Fitzgerald's art, Arthur Mizener, author of the highly successful biography of Fitzgerald, The Far Side of Paradise, provides a revealing introduction and pertinent notes heading each selection.
226 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published July 1, 1987
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About the author
F. Scott Fitzgerald
2,332 books25.5k followersFrancis Scott Key Fitzgerald, widely known simply as Scott Fitzgerald, was an American novelist, essayist, and short story writer. He is best known for his novels depicting the flamboyance and excess of the Jazz Age, a term he popularized in his short story collection Tales of the Jazz Age. During his lifetime, he published four novels, four story collections, and 164 short stories. Although he achieved temporary popular success and fortune in the 1920s, Fitzgerald received critical acclaim only after his death and is now widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century.
Born into a middle-class family in Saint Paul, Minnesota, Fitzgerald was raised primarily in New York state. He attended Princeton University where he befriended future literary critic Edmund Wilson. Owing to a failed romantic relationship with Chicago socialite Ginevra King, he dropped out in 1917 to join the United States Army during World War I. While stationed in Alabama, he met Zelda Sayre, a Southern debutante who belonged to Montgomery's exclusive country-club set. Although she initially rejected Fitzgerald's marriage proposal due to his lack of financial prospects, Zelda agreed to marry him after he published the commercially successful This Side of Paradise (1920). The novel became a cultural sensation and cemented his reputation as one of the eminent writers of the decade.
His second novel, The Beautiful and Damned (1922), propelled him further into the cultural elite. To maintain his affluent lifestyle, he wrote numerous stories for popular magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post, Collier's Weekly, and Esquire. During this period, Fitzgerald frequented Europe, where he befriended modernist writers and artists of the "Lost Generation" expatriate community, including Ernest Hemingway. His third novel, The Great Gatsby (1925), received generally favorable reviews but was a commercial failure, selling fewer than 23,000 copies in its first year. Despite its lackluster debut, The Great Gatsby is now hailed by some literary critics as the "Great American Novel". Following the deterioration of his wife's mental health and her placement in a mental institute for schizophrenia, Fitzgerald completed his final novel, Tender Is the Night (1934).
Struggling financially because of the declining popularity of his works during the Great Depression, Fitzgerald moved to Hollywood, where he embarked upon an unsuccessful career as a screenwriter. While living in Hollywood, he cohabited with columnist Sheilah Graham, his final companion before his death. After a long struggle with alcoholism, he attained sobriety only to die of a heart attack in 1940, at 44. His friend Edmund Wilson edited and published an unfinished fifth novel, The Last Tycoon (1941), after Fitzgerald's death. In 1993, a new edition was published as The Love of the Last Tycoon, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli.
Born into a middle-class family in Saint Paul, Minnesota, Fitzgerald was raised primarily in New York state. He attended Princeton University where he befriended future literary critic Edmund Wilson. Owing to a failed romantic relationship with Chicago socialite Ginevra King, he dropped out in 1917 to join the United States Army during World War I. While stationed in Alabama, he met Zelda Sayre, a Southern debutante who belonged to Montgomery's exclusive country-club set. Although she initially rejected Fitzgerald's marriage proposal due to his lack of financial prospects, Zelda agreed to marry him after he published the commercially successful This Side of Paradise (1920). The novel became a cultural sensation and cemented his reputation as one of the eminent writers of the decade.
His second novel, The Beautiful and Damned (1922), propelled him further into the cultural elite. To maintain his affluent lifestyle, he wrote numerous stories for popular magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post, Collier's Weekly, and Esquire. During this period, Fitzgerald frequented Europe, where he befriended modernist writers and artists of the "Lost Generation" expatriate community, including Ernest Hemingway. His third novel, The Great Gatsby (1925), received generally favorable reviews but was a commercial failure, selling fewer than 23,000 copies in its first year. Despite its lackluster debut, The Great Gatsby is now hailed by some literary critics as the "Great American Novel". Following the deterioration of his wife's mental health and her placement in a mental institute for schizophrenia, Fitzgerald completed his final novel, Tender Is the Night (1934).
Struggling financially because of the declining popularity of his works during the Great Depression, Fitzgerald moved to Hollywood, where he embarked upon an unsuccessful career as a screenwriter. While living in Hollywood, he cohabited with columnist Sheilah Graham, his final companion before his death. After a long struggle with alcoholism, he attained sobriety only to die of a heart attack in 1940, at 44. His friend Edmund Wilson edited and published an unfinished fifth novel, The Last Tycoon (1941), after Fitzgerald's death. In 1993, a new edition was published as The Love of the Last Tycoon, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli.
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October 2, 2018
Afternoon of an Author: A Selection of Uncollected Stories and Essays is a posthumous collection of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s writings that shed light on his personal life. Fitzgerald biographer Arthur Mizener wrote the introduction and notes about the pieces that he selected for the volume.
Fitzgerald’s fiction was almost always closely connected to his personal life, and sometimes the line between his fiction and non-fiction gets quite blurry. Fitzgerald’s non-fiction can help the reader get a sense of the man behind the short stories and novels. Afternoon of an Author is now out of print, and has been surpassed as a collection of Fitzgerald’s non-fiction writing by the excellent 2011 collection, A Short Autobiography. Of the twenty pieces collected in Afternoon, eight of them also appear in A Short Autobiography, however, there are still some oddities like “News of Paris—Fifteen Years Ago,” that don’t appear in any other Fitzgerald collection.
And that brings us to another problem: the fact that there simply hasn’t been an ideal collection of Fitzgerald’s non-fiction. Part of the reason for this is the 1945 collection The Crack-Up, edited by Fitzgerald’s Princeton classmate Edmund Wilson. The Crack-Up features Fitzgerald’s three remarkable “Crack-Up” essays, which were first published in Esquire in 1936. Fitzgerald’s editor at Scribners, Maxwell Perkins, didn’t care for the “Crack-Up” essays, so he allowed Wilson to publish the book with New Directions. Which is all well and good, but that means that the “Crack-Up” essays, probably Fitzgerald’s most famous non-fiction writings, don’t appear in either Afternoon of an Author or A Short Autobiography, which leaves them feeling incomplete.
In my opinion, the perfect collection of Fitzgerald’s non-fiction writing would include all three “Crack-Up” essays, along with other excellent pieces like “Early Success” that appeared in the New Directions Crack-Up book, and also a generous sampling of the pieces found in Afternoon and A Short Autobiography, like “How to Waste Material: A Note on My Generation,” “One Hundred False Starts,” “Afternoon of an Author,” and “Author’s House.”
Afternoon of an Author includes a mixture of short stories and non-fiction, which isn’t a bad thing, as Fitzgerald’s fiction was often liberally drawn from his own life and experiences. The collection begins with three short stories from the Basil Duke Lee series, a group of short stories that Fitzgerald wrote in 1928 and 1929, as he was struggling with the novel that would eventually become Tender is the Night. The short stories follow Basil from adolescence through the rest of his teenage years and into college. Reading the Basil short stories made me feel very close to Fitzgerald, and I get the sense that Basil Duke Lee shared many similarities with his creator. There are many surface similarities between Basil and Fitzgerald: both grew up in St. Paul, both lived on Holly Avenue, and they both go off to boarding school and college in the East. (However, Basil attends Yale, while Fitzgerald went to Princeton.) Fitzgerald always dreamed of glory on the athletic fields, and while he was never able to find that glory himself, he was able to write about it. Fitzgerald was cut on the first day of tryouts for Princeton’s football team, but in the story “Basil and Cleopatra,” he made Basil Duke Lee the hero of the Yale-Princeton football game.
In “Author’s House,” the author tells his guest about a time in school when he failed at football. “It inspired me to write a poem for the school paper which made me as big a hit with my father as if I had become a football hero. So when I went home that Christmas vacation it was in my mind that if you weren’t able to function in action you might at least be able to tell about it, because you felt the same intensity—it was a back door way out of facing reality.” (p.185-6) Fitzgerald used his imagination and skill and his intensity of feeling to make Basil the kind of football hero that he never was.
Fitzgerald’s 1927 essay “Princeton” is an affectionate and nostalgic look back at the university that he attended. School was always difficult for Fitzgerald, and his career at Princeton was no exception. He was perpetually in danger of flunking out. A case of tuberculosis at the beginning his junior year led to an extended absence from Princeton, and also meant that Scott dropped down from the Class of 1917 to the Class of 1918. Fortunately for Fitzgerald’s studies, the United States entered World War I in April of 1917. Fitzgerald enrolled in officers’ training school and left Princeton in the fall of 1917 without finishing his diploma. In a case of “better super late than never,” the Princeton class of 2017 awarded him an honorary diploma. Fitzgerald always felt a close kinship with Princeton, and he was reading an issue of the Princeton Alumni Weekly and making a list of Princeton football players when he was struck by a fatal heart attack.
In “Princeton” Fitzgerald wrote of that period just before the war: “Everything around us seemed to be breaking up. These were the great days; battle was on the horizon; nothing was ever going to be the same again and nothing mattered. And for the next two years nothing did matter. Five per cent of my class, twenty-one boys, were killed in the war.” (p.78) Fitzgerald himself was fully expecting to be killed in the trenches of France or Belgium—on weekends he was furiously writing his first novel in the officer’s club, then titled The Romantic Egoist, which would eventually become This Side of Paradise.
One of the most bitterly funny pieces in Afternoon is the 1924 essay, “How to Live on $36,000 a Year.” The gist of the piece is that it’s impossible for Scott and Zelda to save money, even though he was earning that much money through his writing—at a time when two-thirds of Americans earned less than $1,500 a year. (One wonders how funny any of those people found Fitzgerald’s article.) Scott’s inability to handle money was a continual theme throughout his life and career. He was extremely well-paid during his career, earning $245,000 from his writings during the decade of the 1920’s. That would be roughly $3.5 million in 2018 dollars, which you would think would be more than enough money to live comfortably on. But there were always fancy places to rent—Scott and Zelda rented Ellerslie, a mansion in Delaware, during the late 1920’s. Supposedly they got a good deal on it, but it was still a mansion. And there were always parties to be thrown, and servants to hire—who made breakfast in the morning? Who put daughter Scottie to bed at night? It sure wasn’t Scott or Zelda.
In “One Hundred False Starts” Fitzgerald gives the reader an idea of what it is like to be an author, to conjure up words from out of thin air and weave them into a tale. Fitzgerald references his notebook of scraps and ideas, which would be published after his death. Fitzgerald tells us that one scrap has written on it just four words: “Boopsie Dee was cute.”
Fitzgerald continues: “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.” (p.128)
Fitzgerald also gives us an idea of where his own stories came from in “One Hundred False Starts”:
“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.” (p.132)
Fitzgerald also writes: “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.” (p.132) This is why so much of his fiction was closely connected to the events of his own life.
One of the more poignant short stories is 1928’s “Outside the Cabinet-Maker’s,” in which a father invents a fairy tale for his daughter while they are waiting for mother to finish an errand. Fitzgerald writes of the father: “The man was old enough to know that he would look back to that time—the tranquil street and the pleasant weather and the mystery playing before the child’s eyes, mystery which he had created, but whose luster and texture he could never see or touch any more himself.” (p.140)
Fitzgerald was only 32 years old when “Outside the Cabinet-Maker’s” was published, and it’s sad to think of him as already being beyond the age at which he could access the magic and mystery of fiction. But Fitzgerald had certainly seen and experienced a lot of life during those 32 years, and he would experience much more of life in the next few years. The experiences of adolescence and early adulthood cast a long shadow over most of our lives, and Fitzgerald was no exception to that. After the difficulties of the early 1930’s, Zelda’s mental breakdowns, his own increased drinking, the struggle to finish Tender is the Night, and then the relatively lukewarm reception that novel received, Fitzgerald knew that he couldn’t go on writing the same stories of young love for The Saturday Evening Post that had been paying his bills. In I’d Die for You, a 2017 book of previously unpublished Fitzgerald short stories, many of the stories date from the mid-1930’s and have characters who have faced life’s disappointments. They have indeed been “beaten and broken” and sometimes rescued as well, but not always.
It’s hard not to read the 1930 short story “One Trip Abroad” as a portrait of Scott and Zelda. The story features the bitter line, “Switzerland is a country where very few things begin, but many things end.” (p.161) This seems to me a clear reference to Zelda’s long stay at a clinic in Prangins, Switzerland.
In 1936 Fitzgerald wrote a number of autobiographical pieces for Esquire magazine: the aforementioned three “Crack-Up” essays, plus “Afternoon of an Author,” “Author’s House,” and “An Author’s Mother.” In Mizener’s notes for “Afternoon of an Author,” he writes: “This story shows again how nearly fabulous Fitzgerald’s life always was for him, how intensely he experienced even the smallest movement of feeling and how objectively he could judge it.” (p.177) Although I have no way to prove it, my sense of Fitzgerald was that he was someone who simply felt things more deeply than other people—there was a deep empathy there, as well as an intense interest in other people. Fitzgerald was known to ask questions of strangers or friends that crossed the border into rudeness, and I suspect that by doing so he was gathering material, trying to learn more about the human condition. We see some of Fitzgerald’s empathy on display in “Author’s House,” as the author recalls his moment of failure on the football field of his youth, when, in a game that his team was winning handily, he didn’t intercept the ball, but merely knocked it down. The author remembers the long bus ride back to school, “with everybody thinking I had been yellow on the occasion, when actually I was just distracted and sorry for that opposing end.” (p.185) Because he was imagining the experience of someone else, the author was unable to fulfill his macho duty in the world of sports.
In “Afternoon of an Author” Fitzgerald shares his annoyance at his reputation as someone who wrote quickly and easily: “It was like in the beginning fifteen years ago when they had said he had ‘fatal facility,’ and he labored like a slave over every sentence so as not to be like that.” (p.181) That was the early critical knock on Fitzgerald; that he was someone who wrote a perfect first draft and then went out partying. That does a huge disservice to the kind of writer he actually was. If you read anything about how Fitzgerald actually worked, you’ll quickly discover that he took his writing very seriously. He went through seventeen drafts of Tender is the Night. He was still making changes to The Great Gatsby when it was in galleys.
In “Author’s House” there’s a funny anecdote about a woman writing to one of the author’s characters, thinking that the character may be her long-lost brother. (This woman obviously didn’t understand that the character was fictional.) This actually happened to Fitzgerald, as a woman wrote to his character Basil Duke Lee. Mischievously, Fitzgerald wrote back to her as Basil, telling her that he was on death row, and that she could contact him through his lawyer, F. Scott Fitzgerald. His letter is reproduced in The Correspondence of F. Scott Fitzgerald on pages 409-10, and it’s almost word for word what appears in “Author’s House.”
At the end of his life, Fitzgerald wrote seventeen short stories featuring the hack screenwriter Pat Hobby. The stories appeared in Esquire, and they are a humorous glimpse of Hollywood, as seen through the eyes of a has-been. Pat Hobby is like a cousin of Fitzgerald’s—not close enough to be a brother, but with some similarities. However, when Pat is asked if he’s heard of an author, Fitzgerald writes: “The name was unfamiliar. Pat had scarcely opened a book in a decade.” (p.203)
Despite their differences in reading habits, Fitzgerald still used some of his real life experiences to inform the Pat Hobby stories. A screen treatment that Hobby is supposed to expand into a screenplay is titled “Ballet Shoes.” Thanks to I’d Die for You, we know that Fitzgerald himself actually wrote a short screen treatment called “Ballet Shoes or Ballet Slippers.” (Fitzgerald used both titles on the cover sheet.) Fitzgerald’s treatment dates from 1936, and was never filmed.
The Pat Hobby stories show off Fitzgerald’s sense of humor, like when he describes Secrets of Film Writing, a 1928 book that Hobby co-authored: “It would have made money if pictures hadn’t started to talk.” (p.204) Another line that made me laugh was when a producer offers to pay him—not quite a job, “more of a sinecure” in the producer’s words. “Pat became uneasy. He didn’t recognize the word, but ‘sin’ disturbed him and ‘cure’ brought a whole flood of unpleasant memories.” (p.213)
Afternoon of an Author is an interesting look at how Fitzgerald’s own biography informed his fiction.
Fitzgerald’s fiction was almost always closely connected to his personal life, and sometimes the line between his fiction and non-fiction gets quite blurry. Fitzgerald’s non-fiction can help the reader get a sense of the man behind the short stories and novels. Afternoon of an Author is now out of print, and has been surpassed as a collection of Fitzgerald’s non-fiction writing by the excellent 2011 collection, A Short Autobiography. Of the twenty pieces collected in Afternoon, eight of them also appear in A Short Autobiography, however, there are still some oddities like “News of Paris—Fifteen Years Ago,” that don’t appear in any other Fitzgerald collection.
And that brings us to another problem: the fact that there simply hasn’t been an ideal collection of Fitzgerald’s non-fiction. Part of the reason for this is the 1945 collection The Crack-Up, edited by Fitzgerald’s Princeton classmate Edmund Wilson. The Crack-Up features Fitzgerald’s three remarkable “Crack-Up” essays, which were first published in Esquire in 1936. Fitzgerald’s editor at Scribners, Maxwell Perkins, didn’t care for the “Crack-Up” essays, so he allowed Wilson to publish the book with New Directions. Which is all well and good, but that means that the “Crack-Up” essays, probably Fitzgerald’s most famous non-fiction writings, don’t appear in either Afternoon of an Author or A Short Autobiography, which leaves them feeling incomplete.
In my opinion, the perfect collection of Fitzgerald’s non-fiction writing would include all three “Crack-Up” essays, along with other excellent pieces like “Early Success” that appeared in the New Directions Crack-Up book, and also a generous sampling of the pieces found in Afternoon and A Short Autobiography, like “How to Waste Material: A Note on My Generation,” “One Hundred False Starts,” “Afternoon of an Author,” and “Author’s House.”
Afternoon of an Author includes a mixture of short stories and non-fiction, which isn’t a bad thing, as Fitzgerald’s fiction was often liberally drawn from his own life and experiences. The collection begins with three short stories from the Basil Duke Lee series, a group of short stories that Fitzgerald wrote in 1928 and 1929, as he was struggling with the novel that would eventually become Tender is the Night. The short stories follow Basil from adolescence through the rest of his teenage years and into college. Reading the Basil short stories made me feel very close to Fitzgerald, and I get the sense that Basil Duke Lee shared many similarities with his creator. There are many surface similarities between Basil and Fitzgerald: both grew up in St. Paul, both lived on Holly Avenue, and they both go off to boarding school and college in the East. (However, Basil attends Yale, while Fitzgerald went to Princeton.) Fitzgerald always dreamed of glory on the athletic fields, and while he was never able to find that glory himself, he was able to write about it. Fitzgerald was cut on the first day of tryouts for Princeton’s football team, but in the story “Basil and Cleopatra,” he made Basil Duke Lee the hero of the Yale-Princeton football game.
In “Author’s House,” the author tells his guest about a time in school when he failed at football. “It inspired me to write a poem for the school paper which made me as big a hit with my father as if I had become a football hero. So when I went home that Christmas vacation it was in my mind that if you weren’t able to function in action you might at least be able to tell about it, because you felt the same intensity—it was a back door way out of facing reality.” (p.185-6) Fitzgerald used his imagination and skill and his intensity of feeling to make Basil the kind of football hero that he never was.
Fitzgerald’s 1927 essay “Princeton” is an affectionate and nostalgic look back at the university that he attended. School was always difficult for Fitzgerald, and his career at Princeton was no exception. He was perpetually in danger of flunking out. A case of tuberculosis at the beginning his junior year led to an extended absence from Princeton, and also meant that Scott dropped down from the Class of 1917 to the Class of 1918. Fortunately for Fitzgerald’s studies, the United States entered World War I in April of 1917. Fitzgerald enrolled in officers’ training school and left Princeton in the fall of 1917 without finishing his diploma. In a case of “better super late than never,” the Princeton class of 2017 awarded him an honorary diploma. Fitzgerald always felt a close kinship with Princeton, and he was reading an issue of the Princeton Alumni Weekly and making a list of Princeton football players when he was struck by a fatal heart attack.
In “Princeton” Fitzgerald wrote of that period just before the war: “Everything around us seemed to be breaking up. These were the great days; battle was on the horizon; nothing was ever going to be the same again and nothing mattered. And for the next two years nothing did matter. Five per cent of my class, twenty-one boys, were killed in the war.” (p.78) Fitzgerald himself was fully expecting to be killed in the trenches of France or Belgium—on weekends he was furiously writing his first novel in the officer’s club, then titled The Romantic Egoist, which would eventually become This Side of Paradise.
One of the most bitterly funny pieces in Afternoon is the 1924 essay, “How to Live on $36,000 a Year.” The gist of the piece is that it’s impossible for Scott and Zelda to save money, even though he was earning that much money through his writing—at a time when two-thirds of Americans earned less than $1,500 a year. (One wonders how funny any of those people found Fitzgerald’s article.) Scott’s inability to handle money was a continual theme throughout his life and career. He was extremely well-paid during his career, earning $245,000 from his writings during the decade of the 1920’s. That would be roughly $3.5 million in 2018 dollars, which you would think would be more than enough money to live comfortably on. But there were always fancy places to rent—Scott and Zelda rented Ellerslie, a mansion in Delaware, during the late 1920’s. Supposedly they got a good deal on it, but it was still a mansion. And there were always parties to be thrown, and servants to hire—who made breakfast in the morning? Who put daughter Scottie to bed at night? It sure wasn’t Scott or Zelda.
In “One Hundred False Starts” Fitzgerald gives the reader an idea of what it is like to be an author, to conjure up words from out of thin air and weave them into a tale. Fitzgerald references his notebook of scraps and ideas, which would be published after his death. Fitzgerald tells us that one scrap has written on it just four words: “Boopsie Dee was cute.”
Fitzgerald continues: “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.” (p.128)
Fitzgerald also gives us an idea of where his own stories came from in “One Hundred False Starts”:
“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.” (p.132)
Fitzgerald also writes: “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.” (p.132) This is why so much of his fiction was closely connected to the events of his own life.
One of the more poignant short stories is 1928’s “Outside the Cabinet-Maker’s,” in which a father invents a fairy tale for his daughter while they are waiting for mother to finish an errand. Fitzgerald writes of the father: “The man was old enough to know that he would look back to that time—the tranquil street and the pleasant weather and the mystery playing before the child’s eyes, mystery which he had created, but whose luster and texture he could never see or touch any more himself.” (p.140)
Fitzgerald was only 32 years old when “Outside the Cabinet-Maker’s” was published, and it’s sad to think of him as already being beyond the age at which he could access the magic and mystery of fiction. But Fitzgerald had certainly seen and experienced a lot of life during those 32 years, and he would experience much more of life in the next few years. The experiences of adolescence and early adulthood cast a long shadow over most of our lives, and Fitzgerald was no exception to that. After the difficulties of the early 1930’s, Zelda’s mental breakdowns, his own increased drinking, the struggle to finish Tender is the Night, and then the relatively lukewarm reception that novel received, Fitzgerald knew that he couldn’t go on writing the same stories of young love for The Saturday Evening Post that had been paying his bills. In I’d Die for You, a 2017 book of previously unpublished Fitzgerald short stories, many of the stories date from the mid-1930’s and have characters who have faced life’s disappointments. They have indeed been “beaten and broken” and sometimes rescued as well, but not always.
It’s hard not to read the 1930 short story “One Trip Abroad” as a portrait of Scott and Zelda. The story features the bitter line, “Switzerland is a country where very few things begin, but many things end.” (p.161) This seems to me a clear reference to Zelda’s long stay at a clinic in Prangins, Switzerland.
In 1936 Fitzgerald wrote a number of autobiographical pieces for Esquire magazine: the aforementioned three “Crack-Up” essays, plus “Afternoon of an Author,” “Author’s House,” and “An Author’s Mother.” In Mizener’s notes for “Afternoon of an Author,” he writes: “This story shows again how nearly fabulous Fitzgerald’s life always was for him, how intensely he experienced even the smallest movement of feeling and how objectively he could judge it.” (p.177) Although I have no way to prove it, my sense of Fitzgerald was that he was someone who simply felt things more deeply than other people—there was a deep empathy there, as well as an intense interest in other people. Fitzgerald was known to ask questions of strangers or friends that crossed the border into rudeness, and I suspect that by doing so he was gathering material, trying to learn more about the human condition. We see some of Fitzgerald’s empathy on display in “Author’s House,” as the author recalls his moment of failure on the football field of his youth, when, in a game that his team was winning handily, he didn’t intercept the ball, but merely knocked it down. The author remembers the long bus ride back to school, “with everybody thinking I had been yellow on the occasion, when actually I was just distracted and sorry for that opposing end.” (p.185) Because he was imagining the experience of someone else, the author was unable to fulfill his macho duty in the world of sports.
In “Afternoon of an Author” Fitzgerald shares his annoyance at his reputation as someone who wrote quickly and easily: “It was like in the beginning fifteen years ago when they had said he had ‘fatal facility,’ and he labored like a slave over every sentence so as not to be like that.” (p.181) That was the early critical knock on Fitzgerald; that he was someone who wrote a perfect first draft and then went out partying. That does a huge disservice to the kind of writer he actually was. If you read anything about how Fitzgerald actually worked, you’ll quickly discover that he took his writing very seriously. He went through seventeen drafts of Tender is the Night. He was still making changes to The Great Gatsby when it was in galleys.
In “Author’s House” there’s a funny anecdote about a woman writing to one of the author’s characters, thinking that the character may be her long-lost brother. (This woman obviously didn’t understand that the character was fictional.) This actually happened to Fitzgerald, as a woman wrote to his character Basil Duke Lee. Mischievously, Fitzgerald wrote back to her as Basil, telling her that he was on death row, and that she could contact him through his lawyer, F. Scott Fitzgerald. His letter is reproduced in The Correspondence of F. Scott Fitzgerald on pages 409-10, and it’s almost word for word what appears in “Author’s House.”
At the end of his life, Fitzgerald wrote seventeen short stories featuring the hack screenwriter Pat Hobby. The stories appeared in Esquire, and they are a humorous glimpse of Hollywood, as seen through the eyes of a has-been. Pat Hobby is like a cousin of Fitzgerald’s—not close enough to be a brother, but with some similarities. However, when Pat is asked if he’s heard of an author, Fitzgerald writes: “The name was unfamiliar. Pat had scarcely opened a book in a decade.” (p.203)
Despite their differences in reading habits, Fitzgerald still used some of his real life experiences to inform the Pat Hobby stories. A screen treatment that Hobby is supposed to expand into a screenplay is titled “Ballet Shoes.” Thanks to I’d Die for You, we know that Fitzgerald himself actually wrote a short screen treatment called “Ballet Shoes or Ballet Slippers.” (Fitzgerald used both titles on the cover sheet.) Fitzgerald’s treatment dates from 1936, and was never filmed.
The Pat Hobby stories show off Fitzgerald’s sense of humor, like when he describes Secrets of Film Writing, a 1928 book that Hobby co-authored: “It would have made money if pictures hadn’t started to talk.” (p.204) Another line that made me laugh was when a producer offers to pay him—not quite a job, “more of a sinecure” in the producer’s words. “Pat became uneasy. He didn’t recognize the word, but ‘sin’ disturbed him and ‘cure’ brought a whole flood of unpleasant memories.” (p.213)
Afternoon of an Author is an interesting look at how Fitzgerald’s own biography informed his fiction.
August 23, 2022
This was a good collection of shorts by Fitzgerald. Some of these I had read before in different compilations, others were brand new to me. Part I, which focused on Basil Duke Lee, were the most interesting as these stories came straight from Fitzgerald’s real life. It was cool to read stories that took place during his childhood. The introduction and notes before each story gave great insight into Fitzgerald’s life at the time of writing each story. This information made the stories more fun to read. I don’t think a casual reader would find this collection very interesting but as a bit Fitzgerald fan, it was a great read.
January 12, 2022
a quite beautiful & introspective collection of fitzgerald’s greatest stories & personal essays. highly recommend to anyone who enjoys hearing about the tragic yet flamboyant age that is the 1920s.
July 31, 2021
“Il nevrotico perfetto” disse guardandosi allo specchio. “Sottoprodotto di un’idea, scoria di un sogno”
Il mio lento e tardivo avvicinamento ad alcuni scrittori a volte inizia da pubblicazioni come queste, di un singolo racconto. Non sono riuscita a scoprire se “Pomeriggio di uno scrittore” appartenga a una raccolta e, se sì, a quale; se la critica lo abbia considerato un testo minore o una piccola gemma nascosta.
Questo primo approccio mi è servito per scoprire la prosa di Fitzgerald che, al di là delle tematiche, manifesta la sua eleganza anche in poche pagine. Il racconto è un’istantanea precisa e articolata che ci offre l’immagine di un declino artistico che lo stesso protagonista percepisce, osserva come separato da se stesso, senza riuscire ad opporvisi. In uno scatto, nello sguardo di quest’uomo, cogliamo l’ispirazione del passato e i fiacchi tentativi di ritrovarla, l’assenza di spinta e di aspettativa; una deriva consapevole e composta riflessa in uno specchio, mentre il mondo fuori esplode inutilmente di vita e di momenti da raccontare.
Il mio lento e tardivo avvicinamento ad alcuni scrittori a volte inizia da pubblicazioni come queste, di un singolo racconto. Non sono riuscita a scoprire se “Pomeriggio di uno scrittore” appartenga a una raccolta e, se sì, a quale; se la critica lo abbia considerato un testo minore o una piccola gemma nascosta.
Questo primo approccio mi è servito per scoprire la prosa di Fitzgerald che, al di là delle tematiche, manifesta la sua eleganza anche in poche pagine. Il racconto è un’istantanea precisa e articolata che ci offre l’immagine di un declino artistico che lo stesso protagonista percepisce, osserva come separato da se stesso, senza riuscire ad opporvisi. In uno scatto, nello sguardo di quest’uomo, cogliamo l’ispirazione del passato e i fiacchi tentativi di ritrovarla, l’assenza di spinta e di aspettativa; una deriva consapevole e composta riflessa in uno specchio, mentre il mondo fuori esplode inutilmente di vita e di momenti da raccontare.
June 9, 2021
A fascinating read and a real workings into the mind of this masterful modern novelist.
April 13, 2024
An author takes a break from work to get out and experience and enjoy life before getting back to work. It was ok, no Catcher and the Rye, could have been A LOT better.
January 18, 2025
This is a collection of writings from his various magazine contributions. A posthumous curation of essays that read much like a conversation with a mentor. Full of pithy astute commentary on economy and class-- eloquently expressed through detached irony and moral observation. His essay on living on $36,000 a year (adjusted for inflation) is as relevant today as it was 100 years ago. The essay alone is worth the price of admission. Fitzgerald again proves he is masterclass in execution as wordsmith, even in banal documents his prose is fluid, lucid and realized. Imo, essential reading for fans.
February 4, 2016
This is one of the later collections of FSF's work, having been published in 1957. It contains some of his short stories which do not appear in any other collection. It also contains some of his essays, none of which I had ever read before. They were most revealing. The essays, written in first person, make one realize that Fitzgerald is always front and center in most of his writings, whether fiction or an essay. It is always about something he has experienced, as painful as it might be. I have a new respect for the pride and seriousness that he put into his writings. He was a true professional.
July 1, 2016
I don't know why, I have the feeling Fitzgerald really needed to end his tale
Collection and, at that moment, he really hadn't any idea what to write about. This particular tale of a writer looking for something to write about its interesting but it does only exhibit Fitzgerlad's lack of inspiration at that moment. Not necessarily is something bad, it is an interesting point of view and it's done pretty quickly, but for a closure, its pretty weak. I really think his novels are his strongest suits, but this tale has nothing new to offer, and that's my biggest complain with it.
Collection and, at that moment, he really hadn't any idea what to write about. This particular tale of a writer looking for something to write about its interesting but it does only exhibit Fitzgerlad's lack of inspiration at that moment. Not necessarily is something bad, it is an interesting point of view and it's done pretty quickly, but for a closure, its pretty weak. I really think his novels are his strongest suits, but this tale has nothing new to offer, and that's my biggest complain with it.
October 10, 2007
a nice change of pace from his glossy and proper stories and novels. here's some "non fiction" by the king of slickness. the autobiographical stuff seems to be the big draw in this volume. i particularily like the story for which the book is titled, it is a nice and quiet tale of an author getting a shave. the banal dailiness is great to find after some of fitzgerald's more extravagent stories.
August 22, 2011
Insight into young Fitzgerald. Pretty much read this because of Woddy Allen.
October 16, 2013
An excellent view into the mind of the author.. Loved this..
March 20, 2014
Kind of useless but anything Fitzgerald writes is worth your while.
August 16, 2015
If you love Fitzgerald, you might enjoy this interesting collection that offers more insight into his professionalism and process than anything I've read.
March 10, 2019
Autore baten arratsa. Xerezaderen Artxiboa podcastean entzunda. Tituluak ez du inor engainatzen. Tipo batek arratsa nola pasa duen deskribatzen du testu honek
April 17, 2009
Pitch perfect in wit and insights.
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