A Fortune Yet Money in the Art of F Scott Fitzgeralds Short Story Summary
Literary Theory and Criticism
Analysis of F. Scott Fitzgerald'due south Stories
F. Scott Fitzgerald (September 24, 1896 – Dec 21, 1940) was a professional author who was too a literary artist. In practical terms this meant that he had to support himself by writing short stories for pop magazines in order to get sufficient income, co-ordinate to him, to write decent books. Indeed, well-nigh of the money that Fitzgerald earned by writing before he went to Hollywood in 1937 was earned by selling stories to magazines. In his xx-year career as a writer, he published 164 magazine stories; other stories were never published. All but 8 of the stories that originally appeared in magazines became available in hardcover editions.
As one would await of a body of 164 stories written in a 20-twelvemonth menses mainly for popular consumption, the quality of the stories is uneven. At the bottom of this collection are at least a dozen stories, about of them written for Esquire during the terminal years of his life, which have few redeeming qualities; at the superlative of the list are at to the lowest degree a dozen stories which rank among the best of American brusque stories. I should not, however, be led to believe that these, equally well as the hundred or more "potboilers" in the middle, practice not serve a useful office in his development as an creative person. Fitzgerald in the 1920's was considered the all-time author of quality magazine fiction in America, and his stories brought the highest prices paid past slick magazines; the Sat Evening Post, for case, paid him four one thousand dollars per story even during the Low. The noted wit Dorothy Parker commented that Fitzgerald could write a bad story, merely that he could non write badly. Thus each story, no matter how weak, has the recognizable Fitzgerald touch—that sparkling prose which Fitzgerald chosen "the something extra" that most pop short stories lacked. Fitzgerald also learned at the offset of his career that he could use the popular magazines as a workshop for his novels, experimenting in them with themes and techniques which he would later contain into his novels. An understanding of a Fitzgerald story should take into account this workshop part of the story besides as its creative claim.
Fitzgerald's career every bit a writer of magazine fiction breaks logically into 3 periods: 1919-1924, years during which he shopped effectually for markets and published stories in almost of the of import periodicals of the times; 1925-1933, the central menses characterized past a close association with the Saturday Evening Post—a relationship which almost precluded his publication of stories in other magazines; and 1934- 1940, a period beginning with the publication of his first Esquire story and standing through a subsequent human relationship with that magazine which lasted until his death. During the outset of these periods, Fitzgerald published thirty-two stories in x different commercial magazines, 2 novels (This Side of Paradise, 1920, and The Cute and Damned, 1922), ii short-story collections (Flappers and Philosophers and Tales of the Jazz Age), and 1 volume-length play (The Vegetable). In the 2d menses, during which The Swell Gatsby and a third curt-story collection (All the Sad Young Men) appeared, he enjoyed the popular reputation he had built with readers of the Sat Evening Post and published forty-seven of the l-eight stories which appeared during this nine-year period in that mag; the remaining 11 stories were scattered throughout five different magazines. In the final menstruum, Fitzgerald lost the big Saturday Evening Postal service audience and gained the Esquire audience, which was smaller and quite unlike. Of the twoscore-4 Fitzgerald stories to appear between 1934 and his death, twenty-eight appeared in Esquire. In improver to Tender Is the Night, which was completed and delivered before Fitzgerald's relationship with Esquire began, Fitzgerald published his concluding short-story collection (Taps at Reveille); he also drafted The Concluding Tycoon (1941) during the Esquire years. Twelve stories, nine of which have appeared in Esquire, have been published since his expiry.
An obvious conclusion may exist drawn almost Fitzgerald's professional career: He was at his best artistically in the years of his greatest popularity. During the limerick of The Bully Gatsby, Fitzgerald's commercial fiction was in such need that big magazines such as the Saturday Evening Mail service, Hearst's, and Metropolitan competed for it. Tender Is the Dark was written during the fourth dimension when Fitzgerald'due south popularity with slick mag readers was at its all-time high indicate; for example, in 1929 and 1930, of import years in the composition of Tender Is the Night, he published 15 stories in the Saturday Evening Post. In sharp contrast to the 1925-1933 stories, which are characteristically of an even, high quality, and many of which are closely related to ii novels of this menses, the stories of the Esquire years are, in general, undistinguished. In add-on, with minor exceptions, the stories written in this last period have little relation to Fitzgerald's last "serious" work, The Concluding Tycoon. The Esquire years thus constitute a low betoken from both a popular and an artistic standpoint. They are years during which he lost the knack of pleasing the large American reading public and at the same fourth dimension produced a comparatively small amount of skilful artwork.
In the kickoff two years of Fitzgerald's storywriting, his sensitivity to audience tastes was naïve. "May Day" and "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz," not merely the two all-time stories from these years merely besides 2 of the best stories in the Fitzgerald canon, were written for auction to mass-apportionment magazines. Both, notwithstanding, were too cynical about American values to exist adequate to a large, middle-American audience. By 1922 and the publication of "Winter Dreams" in Metropolitan, Fitzgerald had learned how to tailor his stories for slick magazine readers while at the same time using them to experiment with serious subjects and themes that he would later use in longer works. "Winter Dreams" • Viewed in clan with The Great Gatsby, "Wintertime Dreams" provides an first-class illustration of Fitzgerald's method of using his stories as a proving ground for his novels. In a letter to Maxwell Perkins, Fitzgerald describes "Winter Dreams" as a "sort of 1st draft of the Gatsby thought," and indeed, it contains sufficient similarities of theme and character to be chosen a miniature of The Great Gatsby. Parallels between Dexter Green and Jay Gatsby are hitting: Both men take made a total commitment to a dream, and both of their dreams are hollow. Dexter falls in love with wealthy Judy Jones and devotes his life to making the money that will permit him to enter her social circle; his idealization of her is closely alike to Gatsby'southward feelings for Daisy Buchanan. Gatsby'south idealized conception of Daisy is the motivating strength that underlies his compulsion to get successful, but as Dexter's formulation of Judy Jones drives him to amass a fortune by the time he is twenty-five. The theme of delivery to an idealized dream that is the core of "Wintertime Dreams" and The Great Gatsby, and the similarities between the two men signal up the close relationship between the story and the novel. Considering "Winter Dreams" appeared three years before The Great Gatsby, its importance in the gestation of the novel cannot be overemphasized.
Important differences in Fitzgerald's methods of amalgam curt stories and novels emerge from these closely related works. Much of the effectiveness of The Great Gatsby lies in the mystery of Gatsby's groundwork, while no such mystery surrounds the early life of Dexter Light-green. In "Wintertime Dreams," Dexter'due south disillusionment with Judy occurs suddenly; when he learns that she is no longer pretty, the "dream was gone. Something had taken it from him . . . the moonlit veranda, and gingham on the golf links and the dry sunday and the gold colour of her cervix'south soft downwardly. . . . Why these things were no longer in the world!" Because his enchantment could be shattered and then quickly, Dexter's commitment to Judy is non of the magnitude of Gatsby's commitment to Daisy. Gatsby's disenchantment could merely occur gradually. When he is finally able to encounter Daisy, "the colossal significance of the green light . . . vanished forever," but his "count of enchanted objects" had just diminished by one. Even toward the end of the novel, at that place is no way of knowing that Gatsby is completely disenchanted with Daisy. Nick says that "possibly he no longer cared." The "perhaps" leaves open possibilities of interpretation that are airtight at the end of "Winter Dreams." Although Dexter can cry at the loss of a dream, Gatsby dies, leaving the reader to guess whether or non he withal held on to any fragment of his dreams almost Daisy. The expansiveness of the novel obviously allowed Fitzgerald to make Gatsby and his dream conceivable while he could maintain the mystery of Gatsby's past and the origins of his dream. Fitzgerald could not practice this too with Dexter in "Wintertime Dreams." The betoken is that in writing "Winter Dreams" Fitzgerald was giving shape to his ideas about Jay Gatsby, and, afterwards creating the story, he could better come across the advantages of maintaining the sense of mystery that made Gatsby a more than memorable grapheme than his analogue in "Winter Dreams."
The Rich Boy
Like "Winter Dreams," "The Rich Boy," published a year after The Great Gatsby, conspicuously illustrates the workshop office that the stories served. The story's rich male child, Anson Hunter, falls in beloved with the beautiful and rich Paula Legendre, only he ever finds some reason for non marrying her, although he maintains that his love for her never stops. Anson, the bachelor, ironically becomes an unofficial advisor to couples with martial difficulties and, in his office as protector of the family unit name, puts an end to an affair that his aunt is having. Paula marries an other man, divorces him, and, when Anson encounters her late in the story, he finds her happily remarried and pregnant. Paula, whose revered place has been jeopardized past her pregnancy, finally dies in childbirth, symbolically taking with her Anson's youth. He goes on a cruise, disillusioned that his only existent dear is gone. Withal he is still willing to flirt with any woman on the ship who will affirm the feeling of superiority about himself that he cherishes in his centre.
In "The Rich Boy," then, Fitzgerald uses many of the themes—amongst them, lost youth and disillusionment in wedlock—that he had covered in previous stories; in add-on, he uses devices such as the narrator-observer point of view that had been successful in The Swell Gatsby, and he pulls from the novel subjects such as the idealization of a woman who finally loses her suitor's reverence. "The Rich Boy" likewise blends, along with the themes he had dealt with before, new topics that he would afterward dribble and treat singly in another story, but as he first deals explicitly with the rich-are-dissimilar thought in "The Rich Male child" and later focuses his narrative specifically on that idea in "Vi of One." Finally, particularly in the use of the theme of bad marriages in "The Rich Male child," in that location are foreshadowings of Tender Is the Night and the stories which cluster around it.
Babylon Revisited
The best of these Tender Is the Night cluster stories is "Babylon Revisited," which earned Fitzgerald his top Sat Evening Mail price of 4 thousand dollars and which is generally acclaimed as his finest story. "Babylon Revisited" represents a loftier indicate in Fitzgerald's career every bit a short-story author: Information technology is an artistically superior story which earned a loftier price from a commercial magazine. In the story's main character, CharlieWales, Fitzgerald creates one whose future, in spite of his heroic struggle, is prescribed by his imprudent by, a past filled with heavy drinking and irresponsibility. He is destined to exist haunted past reminders of his early life, embodied by Lorraine and Duncan, drinking friends from the past; to be judged for them past Marion, his dead married woman'due south sis who, like Charlie's censor personified, is disgusted past his past and demands penalization; and to exist denied, for his penance, whatever right to make full the emptiness of his life with his daughter Honoria, who is in Marion'south custody and who is the only really meaningful matter left. Fitzgerald fashions Charlie equally a sensitive channel through which the reader tin simultaneously view both Paris equally information technology existed for expatriate wanderers before the Depression and the now-dimmed Paris to which Charlie returns.
The contrast is masterfully handled in that the class of Charlie's emotional life closely parallels the changing mood of the city—a movement from a kind of unreal euphoria to a mood of loss and melancholy. The contrast at once heightens the reader'southward sense of Charlie's loneliness in a ghost town of bad memories and foreshadows his empty-handed return to Prague, his present home. All of Charlie's present misery has resulted, in Fitzgerald'due south precise summary, from his "selling short" in the boom—an innuendo to the loss of his dead wife Helen. Charlie, however, refuses to be driven dorsum to alcohol, even in the face of beingness denied his daughter Honoria. Although he might easily have done and so, Fitzgerald avoids cartoon the reader into a sentimental trap of identification with Charlie's plight, the responsibility for and consequences of which must finally exist borne merely by Charlie. Every bit he later did in Dick Diver's case in Tender Is the Night, Fitzgerald has shown in "Babylon Revisited" how one homo works his way into an beingness with nothing at the core; how he manages to dissipate, "to make aught out of something," and thus prescribe for himself a future without direction. It is also in the cosmos of this mood of Charlie's isolation that the artistic luminescence of the story, as well as its kinship to Tender Is the Night, lies.
The popular thrust of "Babylon Revisited" is a dual i in which Fitzgerald plays on what were likely to be clashing feelings of popular readers toward Charlie. On i hand, he is pictured first as an expatriate about whose resolution to remain abroad American audiences may have been skeptical. On the other, Charlie appears to accept reformed and obviously loves his daughter. Marion, by contrast, is depicted as a shrew, and the reader is left to cull, therefore, between the penalisation of a life sentence of loneliness for a penitent wrongdoer and the granting of his complete freedom and forgiveness rendered against the better judgment of the unsympathetic Marion. Fitzgerald guarantees that the reader will become emotionally involved past centering the story around the highly emotional relationship between a begetter and his girl. Because Charlie is, in fact, guilty, to let him get free would be to permit wrongdoing become unpunished—the strictest kind of violation of the Puritan ethic. To deprive Charlie of Honoria, however, would be to side with the unlikable Marion. Fitzgerald, and then, resolves the conflict in the but satisfactory way—past proposing a compromise. Although Marion keeps Honoria for the moment, Charlie may exist paroled, may come up back and effort again, at any time in the time to come.
The story, therefore, is successful on three major counts: It served as a workshop in which Fitzgerald shaped the mood of Tender Is the Night; information technology entertained with the struggle against unfair odds of a well-intentioned father for the amore of his daughter; and it succeeded on the mythic level, suggested in the championship, as a story in which all ingredients conspire to atomic number 82 to Charlie'south exile—an isolation from the city that has fallen in the absence of a now-reformed sinner, carrying with information technology non only the bad but also the good which Charlie has come up to salvage.
Esquire Stories
About four years after the publication of "Babylon Revisited," Fitzgerald had lost the knack of writing Saturday Evening Mail service stories, and he began writing shorter pieces, many of which are sketches rather than stories, for Esquire. Esquire, however, was not a suitable medium to serve a workshop function as the Saturday Evening Post had been. On the one hand, information technology did not pay enough to sustain Fitzgerald through the composition of a novel; even if information technology had, information technology is difficult to imagine how Fitzgerald would take experimented in the framework of brusk Esquire pieces with the complex relationships that he was concurrently developing in The Last Tycoon. Moreover, at that place is the question of the suitability of Fitzgerald's The Final Tycoon material, regardless of how he treated it, for Esquire: The Monroe Stahr-Kathleen relationship in The Last Tycoon, for example, and certainly also the Cecelia-Stahr human relationship, would have been every bit out of place in Esquire every bit the Esquire story of a ten-year binge, "The Lost Decade," would have been in the Sabbatum Evening Post. In curt, Esquire was sick-suited to Fitzgerald's need for a assisting workshop for The Concluding Tycoon, and it is hard to read the Esquire pieces, particularly the Pat Hobby stories about a pathetic motion picture scriptwriter, without realizing that every hour Fitzgerald spent on them could have been meliorate spent completing The Last Tycoon. From a practical standpoint, it is fair to say that the minor sums of income for which Fitzgerald worked in writing the Esquire stories may take interfered with the completion of his last novel, whereas the high prices Fitzgerald earned from the Saturday Evening Post between 1925 and 1933 provided the financial climate that made it possible for him to consummate Tender Is the Night.
Indeed, if the Esquire stories in general and the Pat Hobby stories in particular, close as they were in terms of composition to The Final Tycoon, marked the distance Fitzgerald had come up in resolving the professional author-literary artist dichotomy with which he had been confronted for twenty years, any study of the function of the stories in Fitzgerald's overall career would end on a bleak note. Ii stories, "Discard" and "Last Buss," neither of which was published in Fitzgerald's lifetime, indicate, nevertheless, that he was attempting to re-create the climate of gratis exchange between his stories and novels characteristic particularly of the limerick menstruation of Tender Is the Nighttime. "Last Kiss" provides a good commentary on this endeavour. When the story appeared in 1949, the editors remarked in a headnote that the story contained "the seed" that grew into The Concluding Tycoon. The claim is too extravagant for the story in that it implies the sort of relationship betwixt the story and the novel that exists between "Winter Dreams" and The Great Gatsby, a relationship that simply does not exist in the case of "Concluding Kiss" and The Terminal Tycoon. There are, however, interesting parallels.
Last Kiss
Fitzgerald created in "Concluding Kiss" counterparts both to Monroe Stahr and Kathleen in The Terminal Tycoon. Jim Leonard, a thirty-5-year-erstwhile film producer in "Last Buss," is similar to Stahr in that he possesses the same kind of power: When the budding starlet, Pamela Knighton, meets Leonard, her amanuensis'south voice tells her: "This is somebody." In fact, on the Hollywood success ladder he is, in Fitzgerald's words, "on top," although, similar Stahr, he does not flaunt this fact. Although Pamela is fundamentally different from Kathleen in her self-centered coldness, they also share a resemblance to "pink and silverish frost" and an uncertainty well-nigh Americans. Kathleen is no aspiring thespian, just her past life, like Pamela's, has an aureola of mystery virtually it. Moreover, the present lives of both are complicated by binding entanglements: Pamela's to ChaunceyWard, and Kathleen's to the nameless man she finally marries. There are other parallels: The starting time important meet betwixt Leonard and Pamela, for example, closely resembles the ballroom scene during which Stahr becomes enchanted past Kathleen's dazzler. In fact, the nature of Leonard's attraction to Pamela is like to that of Stahr's to Kathleen; although there is no Minna Davis lurking in Leonard'due south past as there is in Stahr'southward, he is drawn to Pamela by the kind of romantic, mysterious force which had finally, apart from her resemblance to Minna, fatigued Stahr to Kathleen. Moreover, both attachments end abruptly with the same sort of finality: Pamela dies leaving Jim with merely film fragments to recall her past, and Kathleen leaves Stahr when she marries "the American."
The possibility that these parallels were the seeds of The Concluding Tycoon is small. The of import point, however, is that "Final Kiss" is a popular treatment of the primary material that Fitzgerald would work with in the novel: Jim's sentimental return to the drugstore where he had once seen Pamela and his nostalgic remembrance of their concluding kiss earmark the story for a pop audience which, no dubiety, Fitzgerald hoped would help pay his bills during the composition of the novel. Fitzgerald was unable to sell the story, probably because none of the characters generates strong emotion. It is sufficiently clear from "Final Osculation," yet, that Fitzgerald was regaining his sense of audience. In the process of demonstrating how well he understood Hollywood, the story also captured much of the glitter that is associated with it in the popular mind. In lodge to rebuild the kind of popular magazine workshop that he had had for Tender Is the Night, it remained for him to subordinate his understanding of Hollywood to the task of re-creating its surface. If he had continued in the direction of "Last Kiss," he would possibly have done this and thus returned to the kind of climate which had in the by proven to be most favorable for his serious novel work—one in which he wrote handfuls of stories for popular magazines while the novel was taking shape. It is besides possible that he might have used such stories to brand The Last Tycoon something more than a great fragment.
Regarding the role of the stories in Fitzgerald's career, one can finally state that they functioned as providers of financial incentive, as proving grounds for his ideas, every bit workshops for his craft, and every bit dictators of his pop reputation. The problem for the serious pupil of Fitzgerald's works is whether one should examine the popular professional person author who produced some 164 stories for mass consumption or limit one's examination of Fitzgerald to his acclaimed works of art, such as "Babylon Revisited," "The Rich Boy," The Neat Gatsby, and Tender Is the Nighttime. To practise i to the exclusion of the other is to present not only a fragmented film of Fitzgerald's literary output simply also a distorted one. But equally the stories complement the novels, so do the novels make the stories more than meaningful, and the financial and emotional climate from which they all came illuminates the nature of their interdependence.
Major works
Play: The Vegetable: Or, From President to Postman, lead. 1923.
Novels: This Side of Paradise, 1920; The Beautiful and Damned, 1922; The Great Gatsby, 1925; Tender Is the Nighttime, 1934; The Last Tycoon, 1941.
Miscellaneous: Afternoon of an Author: A Selection of Uncollected Stories and Essays, 1958; F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Princeton Years, Selected Writings, 1914-1920, 1996 (Chip Deffaa, editor).
Nonfiction: The Crack-Up, 1945; The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1963; Letters to His Daughter, 1965; Thoughtbook of Francis Scott Fitzgerald, 1965; Dear Scott/Dearest Max: The Fitzgerald-Perkins Correspondence, 1971; Every bit Always, Scott Fitzgerald, 1972; F. Scott Fitzgerald'southward Ledger, 1972; The Notebooks of F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1978; A Life in Messages, 1994 (Matthew J. Bruccoli, editor); F. Scott Fitzgerald on Authorship, 1996; Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda: The Love Letters of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, 2002 (Jackson R. Bryer and Cathy West. Barks, editors).
Bibliography
Bruccoli, Matthew J. Some Sort of Epic Grandeur. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981.
Eble, Kenneth. F. Scott Fitzgerald. Rev. ed. Boston: Twayne, 1977.Eble, Kenneth. F. Scott Fitzgerald. Rev. ed. Boston: Twayne, 1977.
Claw, Andrew. F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Literary Life. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2002.
Jefferson, Margo. "Still Timely, Yet a Writer of His Fourth dimension." The New York Times, Dec 17, 1996, p. C17.
Kuehl, John. F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Study of the Curt Fiction. Boston: Twayne, 1991.
Mangum, Bryant. A Fortune Withal: Money in the Art of F. Scott Fitzgerald's Short Stories. New York: Garland, 1991.
May, Charles Due east., ed. Masterplots II: Brusk Story Series, Revised Edition. eight vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004.
Meyers, Jeffrey. Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography. New York: HarperCollins, 1994.
Petry, Alice Hall. Fitzgerald's Craft of Brusk Fiction. Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Enquiry Printing, 1989.
Tate, Mary Jo. F. Scott Fitzgerald A to Z: The Essential Reference to His Life and Piece of work. New York: Facts on File, 1998.
Categories: American Literature, Literary Criticism, Literary Theory, Short Story
Source: https://literariness.org/2020/04/22/analysis-of-f-scott-fitzgeralds-stories/
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