“My check was thirty—how much was yours?”
“Thirty-five.”
The real blight, however, was that my story had been written in college two years before, and a dozen new ones hadn’t even drawn a personal letter. The implication was that I was on the down-grade at twenty-two. I spent the thirty dollars on a magenta feather fan for a girl in Alabama.
My friends who were not in love or who had waiting arrangements with “sensible” girls, braced themselves patiently for a long pull. Not I—I was in love with a whirlwind and I must spin a net big enough to catch it out of my head, a head full of trickling nickels and sliding dimes, the incessant music box of the poor. It couldn’t be done like that, so when the girl threw me over I went home and finished my novel. And then, suddenly, everything changed, and this article is about that first wild wind of success and the delicious mist it brings with it. It is a short and precious time— for when the mist rises in a few weeks, or a few months, one finds that the very best is over.
It began to happen in the autumn of 1919 when I was an empty bucket, so mentally blunted with the summer’s writing that I’d taken a job repairing car roofs at the Northern Pacific shops. Then the postman rang, and that day I quit work and ran along the streets, stopping automobiles to tell friends and acquaintances about it—my novel This Side of Paradise was accepted for publication. That week the postman rang and rang, and I paid off my terrible small debts, bought a suit, and woke up every morning with a world of ineffable toploftiness and promise.
While I waited for the novel to appear, the metamorphosis of amateur into professional began to take place—a sort of stitching together of your whole life into a pattern of work, so that the end of one job is automatically the beginning of another. I had been an amateur before; in October, when I strolled with a girl among the stones of a southern graveyard, I was a professional and my enchantment with certain things that she felt and said was already paced by an anxiety to set them down in a story—it was called The Ice Palace and it was published later. Similarly, during Christmas week in St. Paul, there was a night when I had stayed home from two dances to work on a story. Three friends called up during the evening to tell me I had missed some rare doings: a well-known man-about-town had disguised himself as a camel and, with a taxi-driver as the rear half, managed to attend the wrong party. Aghast with myself for not being there, I spent the next day trying to collect the fragments of the story.
“Well, all I can say is it was funny when it happened.” “No, I don’t know where he got the taxi-man.” “You’d have to know him well to understand how funny it was.”
In despair I said:
“Well, I can’t seem to find out exactly what happened but I’m going to write about it as if it was ten times funnier than anything you’ve said.” So I wrote it, in twenty-two consecutive hours, and wrote it “funny,” simply because I was so emphatically told it was funny. The Camel’s Back was published and still crops up in the humorous anthologies.
With the end of the winter set in another pleasant pumped-dry period, and, while I took a little time off, a fresh picture of life in America began to form before my eyes. The uncertainties of 1919 were over—there seemed little doubt about what was going to happen—America was going on the greatest, gaudiest spree in history and there was going to be plenty to tell about it. The whole golden boom was in the air—its splendid generosities, its outrageous corruptions and the tortuous death struggle of the old America in prohibition. All the stories that came into my head had a touch of disaster in them—the lovely young creatures in my novels went to ruin, the diamond mountains of my short stories blew up, my millionaires were as beautiful and damned as Thomas Hardy’s peasants. In life these things hadn’t happened yet, but I was pretty sure living wasn’t the reckless, careless business these people thought—this generation just younger than me.
For my point of vantage was the dividing line between the two generations, and there I sat—somewhat self-consciously. When my first big mail came in—hundreds and hundreds of letters on a story about a girl who bobbed her hair—it seemed rather absurd that they should come to me about it. On the other hand, for a shy man it was nice to be somebody except oneself again: to be “the Author” as one had been “the Lieutenant.” Of course one wasn’t really an author any more than one had been an army officer, but nobody seemed to guess behind the false face.
All in three days I got married and the presses were pounding out This Side of Paradise like they pound out extras in the movies.
With its publication I had reached a stage of manic depressive insanity. Rage and bliss alternated hour by hour. A lot of people thought it was a fake, and perhaps it was, and a lot of others thought it was a lie, which it was not. In a daze I gave out an interview—I told what a great writer I was and how I’d achieved the heights. Heywood Broun, who was on my trail, simply quoted it with the comment that I seemed to be a very self-satisfied young man, and for some days I was notably poor company. I invited him to lunch and in a kindly way told him that it was too bad he had let his life slide away without accomplishing anything. He had just turned thirty and it was about then that I wrote a line which certain people will not let me forget: “She was a faded but still lovely woman of twenty-seven.”
In a daze I told the Scribner Company that I didn’t expect my novel to sell more than twenty thousand copies and when the laughter died away I was told that a sale of five thousand was excellent for a first novel. I think it was a week after publication that it passed the twenty thousand mark, but I took myself so seriously that I didn’t even think it was funny.
These weeks in the clouds ended abruptly a week later when Princeton turned on the book—not undergraduate Princeton but the black mass of faculty and alumni. There was a kind but reproachful letter from President Hibben, and a room full of classmates who suddenly turned on me with condemnation. We had been part of a rather gay party staged conspicuously in Harvey Firestone’s car of robin’segg blue, and in the course of it I got an accidental black eye trying to stop a fight. This was magnified into an orgy and in spite of a delegation of undergraduates who went to the board of Governors, I was suspended from my club for a couple of months. The Alumni Weekly got after my book and only Dean Gauss had a good word to say for me. The unctuousness and hypocrisy of the proceedings was exasperating and for seven years I didn’t go to Princeton. Then a magazine asked me for an article about it and when I started to write it, I found I really loved the place and that the experience of one week was a small item in the total budget. But on that day in 1920 most of the joy went out of my success.
But one was now a professional—and the new world couldn’t possibly be presented without bumping the old out of the way. One gradually developed a protective hardness against both praise and blame. Too often people liked your things for the wrong reasons or people liked them whose dislike would be a compliment. No decent career was ever founded on a public and one learned to go ahead without precedents and without fear. Counting the bag, I found that in 1919 I had made $800 by writing, that in 1920 I had made $18,000, stories, picture rights and book. My story price had gone from $30 to $1,000. That’s a small price to what was paid later in the Boom, but what it sounded like to me couldn’t be exaggerated.
The dream had been early realized and the realization carried with it a certain bonus and a certain burden. Premature success gives one an almost mystical conception of destiny as opposed to will power—at its worst the Napoleonic delusion. The man who arrives young believes that he exercises his will because his star is shining. The man who only asserts himself at thirty has a balanced idea of what will power and fate have each contributed, the one who gets there at forty is liable to put the emphasis on will alone. This comes out when the storms strike your craft.
The compensation of a very early success is a conviction that life is a romantic matter. In the best sense one stays young. When the primary objects of love and money could be taken for granted and a sh
aky eminence had lost its fascination, I had fair years to waste, years that I can’t honestly regret, in seeking the eternal Carnival by the Sea. Once in the middle twenties I was driving along the High Corniche Road through the twilight with the whole French Riviera twinkling on the sea below. As far ahead as I could see was Monte Carlo, and though it was out of season and there were no Grand Dukes left to gamble and E. Phillips Oppenheim was a fat industrious man in my hotel, who lived in a bathrobe—the very name was so incorrigibly enchanting that I could only stop the car and like the Chinese whisper: “Ah me! Ah me!” It was not Monte Carlo I was looking at. It was back into the mind of the young man with cardboard soles who had walked the streets of New York. I was him again—for an instant I had the good fortune to share his dreams, I who had no more dreams of my own. And there are still times when I creep up on him, surprise him on an autumn morning in New York or a spring night in Carolina when it is so quiet that you can hear a dog barking in the next county. But never again as during that all too short period when he and I were one person, when the fulfilled future and the wistful past were mingled in a single gorgeous moment—when life was literally a dream.
The Note-Books
FITZGERALD had been from his college days a great admirer of Samuel Butler’s Note-Books, and he undertook at some point in his later life to do for his own accumulations of material what Festing Jones had done for Butler’s. He carefully sorted them out and grouped them under alphabetical headings in such a way as to impose upon them a certain coherence and general design, almost as if he were preparing a book to be read as well as a storehouse for his own convenience.
They do make, in fact, extremely good reading. There are among them many passages on the level of brilliant and precise expression which is characteristic of Fitzgerald’s best work. Certain of them were evidently intended to be used in the short stories of his later years; but, actually, he seems rarely so to have used them; and this was perhaps because they belonged to a plane of the activity of his mind and his craft so much higher than that represented by this rather inferior magazine fiction that it was difficult for him to incorporate them in it. It was only—as in The Last Tycoon— when he was attempting something artistically more serious that he drew much upon this collection; and these note-books really ought to be read with Tender Is the Night, The Last Tycoon and the pieces in the first part of this volume for their record of the final phases of the milieux in which Fitzgerald lived and of his sensations, emotions and ideas in the last years before his death.
The manuscript is here presented in a considerably abbreviated form. It has been necessary for personal reasons to suppress a certain amount of matter which would otherwise be included, and the editor has had to use his best judgment in weeding out entries which were of value to Fitzgerald as suggestions or reminders for his work, but which seem otherwise unintelligible or uninteresting. A number of notes that have already been printed with the manuscript of The Last Tycoon have not been reprinted here, and two jottings that were found with that manuscript but do not relate to the story have been added on page 181 at the end of the section called Literary.
The Basil and Josephine sometimes referred to in these notes are the central figures of two series of stories included in Taps at Reveille; the Philippe was to have figured as the hero of a mediaeval novel. Four episodes dealing with this last character were published in the Redbook magazine (October, 1924; June and August, 1935; and November, 1941); but the requirements of the fiction market compelled Fitzgerald to depart from his original conception, and he eventually lost interest in the story.
THE NOTE-BOOKS
A
ANECDOTES
René had never before searched for a colored man in the Negro residential quarter of an American city. As time passed, he had more and more a sense that he was pursuing a phantom; it began to shame him to ask the whereabouts of such ghostly, blatantly immaterial lodgings as the house of Aquilla’s brother.
But he came back because the herd (society) is all we have and we cannot stray without shortly finding that the wolves have to eat us, too. He preached his special gospel to the herd. They (let us assume) liked it or half liked it. It worked.
Then there’s Emily. You know what happened to her; one night her husband came home and told her she was acting cold to him, but that he’d fix that up. So he built a bonfire under her bed, made up of shoes and things, and set fire to it. And if the leather hadn’t smelled so terrible, she’d have been burned to death.
The absent-minded gentleman on the train started to get off at the wrong station. As he walked back to his seat he assumed a mirthless smile and said aloud as though he were talking to himself: “I thought this was Great Neck.”
But he couldn’t smooth over his mistake—we all knew that he had made a fool of himself and looked upon him with distaste and contempt.
A man wrapped up some domestic rats in small blankets cut from an old carpet, lest they should spread germs. A few months after he had turned them loose he found young rats around the house with carpet patterns on their fur.
“How peculiar!” he exclaimed. “I didn’t suspect it would turn out that way when I wrapped up those rats.”
But it did.
Story of the ugly aunt in album.
Jimmy the 95 pd. center.
The girl who fell off the shelf.
Once there was a whole lot of bird seed around the room because an author had adopted a chicken. It was impossible to explain to anyone just why he had adopted the chicken, but still more impossible to know why he had bought the bird-seed for the chicken. The chicken was later broiled and the bird-seed thrown out, but the question of whether the man was an author or a lunatic was still unsolved in the minds of the hotel servants who had to deal with the situation. The hotel servants didn’t understand it. They didn’t understand how months later the author could write a story about it, but they all bought the magazine.
B
BRIGHT CLIPPINGS
“Snowladen evergreens will decorate the stairway and foyer leading to the ballroom, where a reproduction of the boat in which the Viking princes, at the invitation of the Russians, came to rule Russia in the ninth century, will be arranged against a mirrored background. Its huge golden sails will bear the imperial insignia, the double-headed eagle, and Joss Moss and his orchestra, in Russian garb, will be seated in the craft.
“Flags of old Russia will recall the imperial regime. The ancient Russian custom of welcoming guests will be invoked by six young Russian girls, in costume, who will serve to those arriving, at a table near the ballroom entrance, tiny squares of black bread dipped in salt and small tumblers of vodka.
“Prince Alexis Obolensky will sing during the midnight supper in the oval restaurant and will present the Siberian Singers, a male ensemble, on their first appearance in New York, in a selection of Russian folk songs. Several dance numbers will feature the entertainment.”
Blossom Time—the greatest musical romance ever written.” Cleveland: “One of the best musical sows written in modern times”
“Men of Genius are great as certain ethereal Chemicals operating on the Mass of neutral intellect—but they have not any individuality, and determined Character.”—Keats.
Egyptian Proverb: The worst things:
To be in bed and sleep not,
To want for one who comes not.
To try to please and please not.
C
CONVERSATIONS AND THINGS OVERHEARD
“I’m having them all psychoanalyzed,” he said. “I got a guy down from Zürich, and he’s doing one a day. I never saw such a gloomy bunch of women; always bellyaching wherever I take ’em. A man I knew told me he had his wife psychoanalyzed and she was easier to be with afterward.”
“When I hear people bragging about their social position and who they are, and all that, I just sit back and laugh. Because I happen to be descended directly from Charlemagne. What do you think of that?” Josephine blushed for him.
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“I like poetry and music better than anything in the world,” she said. “They’re wonderful.”
He believed her, knowing that she spoke of her liking for him.
“Yes, he has a position with the Dolleh Line, has a position with the Dolleh Line.”
“Sweetie, he just scratched and scratched and scratched all night. Scratched and scratched and—”
“Of course I’m afraid of horses. They try to bite me.”
“I’ve never met a horse—socially, that is—who didn’t try to bite me. They used to do it when I put the bridle on; then, when I gave up putting the bridle on, they began reaching their heads around trying to get at my calves.”
“When I went to Southampton, I was—thrown at him.”
“Thrown from a horse?”
“She’s really radiunt,” she said, “really radiunt.”
“You meig me sick to my stomach.”
“S’Chris’ Watisis—a ship?”
“Perfectly respectable girl, but only been drinking that day. No matter how long she lives she’ll always know she’s killed somebody.”
“Well, isn’t it true? I told him how American education was terrible and you thought mine ought to be different.”
“Oh-h-h! And then to finish it off you slapped him?”
“Well, I thought the best thing was to be partly American and slap him.”
“What nice words,” she teased him. “If you keep on, I’m going to throw myself under the wheels of the cab.”
“Call me Micky Mouse,” she said suddenly.
“Why?”
“I don’t know—it was fun when you called me Micky Mouse.”
“I am willing to die with my boots on—I just want to be sure that they are my own boots and that they’re all on.”
“Showing off.”
The Crack-Up Page 9
