I'd Die For You

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Sometime after January 1931, Fitzgerald wrote a few longhand sheets, with the title “The Death of My Father” on the first page. These were later torn in half, but taped back together. The short set of memories concludes:

  I ran away when I was seven on the fourth of July—I spent the day with a friend in a pear orchard + the police were informed that I was missing and on my return my father thrashed me according to the custom of the nineties—on the bottom and then, let me come out and watch the night fireworks from the balcony with my pants still down + my behind smarting + knowing in my heart that he was absolutely right. Afterwards, seeing in his face his regret that it had to happen I asked him to tell me a story. I knew what it would be—he had only a few, the Story of the Spy, the one about the Man Hung by his Thumbs, the one about Earlys March.

  Do you want to hear them. I’m so tired of them all that I can’t make them interesting. But maybe they are because I used to ask father to repeat + repeat + repeat.

  Fitzgerald dictated “Thumbs Up” in the late summer and autumn of 1936, while he was recovering from a broken shoulder. Harold Ober was enthusiastic after receiving the first version in August: “I like THUMBS UP very much indeed. I think it is one of the best stories you have written for a long time.” When the story failed to sell, Ober suggested shortening it considerably, and told Fitzgerald that October, “The Civil War story is in many ways a good piece of work but it is not what editors expect from you.” Ober elaborated on this in December, quoting one of the editors who had rejected the story as saying, “ ‘I thought it was swell but all the femmes down here said it was horrid. The thumbs, I suppose, were too much for them.’ I have talked to several editors and I think it is mostly because of the incident with the thumbs that this story has not sold.”

  Fitzgerald knew it had been a mistake to try to combine, through the figure of a dentist, his father’s stories. However, he was not going to give up the grim story of what he had been told had actually happened to his father’s cousin. In early 1937 he wrote to Ober from a hospital bed in Baltimore:

  I can do no more with Thumbs Up. I think I told you that its shifting around was due to my poor judgement in founding it arbitrarily on two unrelated events in father’s family—the Thumbs Up and the Empresses Escape. I don’t think I ever put more work on a story with less return. Its early diffuseness was due, of course, to my inability to measure the length of dictated prose during the time my right arm was helpless—that’s why it strung out so long.

  Despite his statement that he could “do no more” with the story, he revised it in March, scrapping the “Empresses Escape” or spy portion and giving the story another ending, set in St. Paul, and another title, “Dentist Appointment.” (Other alternatives he tried out included “No Time for That,” “Two Minutes Alone,” “Midst War’s Alarms,” “When This Cruel War,” and “Of All Times.”) Collier’s bought the story in June 1937, but asked for more revisions. That August, Kenneth Littauer told Ober and Fitzgerald the story “still leaves a great deal to be desired. For reasons too numerous to mention we don’t like the new ending. . . . The best of this story has always been the part that takes place in the farmhouse.”

  On October 8, now at work full-time in Hollywood on a screenplay based on Erich Maria Remarque’s post–World War I novel Three Comrades, Fitzgerald wrote to Ober:

  I am going to do something about [“Dentist Appointment” and “Offside Play”] but have definitely postponed it until after THREE COMRADES is in the bag—as I told you which is a matter of three weeks more. Then I will either take a week off or simply find time some way in the early morning. So tell Colliers not to fret about it. The longer I wait the more I am liable to get a fresh point of view. . . . Both of them come so near to being right that I am sure the actual writing won’t be any trouble.

  The fresh point of view changed the end of the story once more. Fitzgerald set the conclusion in Washington, D.C., and titled this version “The End of Hate.” Collier’s did not commit to it financially for two more years, finally agreeing on a price in June 1939. Ober wrote to Fitzgerald on June 2: “I’m delighted to hear that you are going to do some more stories as I think it is time that your name should be appearing again, and I don’t think there is any reason for your coming down to Two Thousand Dollars and I [don’t] think any magazine will ask you to.” Collier’s finally published the story, cut to the bone, in their June 22, 1940, issue, with a lavish lead illustration of a blonde Yankee belle and wounded Confederate soldier by Mario Cooper. Fitzgerald wrote one word on his clipping of the story: “File.”

  His father’s old bedtime story stayed on his mind for the remainder of his life. In early 1940, Fitzgerald tried, and failed, to sell MGM on a Civil War movie based in part on the stories. He sent a screenplay scenario to producer Edwin H. Knopf that rewrote the “thumbs” story yet again with details from “The Night of Chancellorsville” (1935) thrown in:

  The girls are separated and their first task is to find each other. One of them meets a confederate private from Alabama who at first she dreads and dislikes. In a Union counter attack the Confederate private is captured. He is identified as a Mosby guerilla by a man who bears him a grudge and hung up by his thumbs. (This actually happened to a cousin of my father’s in the Civil War and I have embodied the incident in another story called “When This Cruel War” which Collier’s bought last spring but has not yet published.) The northern girl cuts down the Confederate soldier and helps him to escape. The girl has begun by being impatient of her sister’s gayety. During their time behind the Confederate lines she has conscientiously continued her search for her brother’s grave. Now, after helping her enemy escape, and at the moment of a love scene between them she finds that they are only a few yards from her brother’s grave. Entwined with the story of the two girls I would like to carry along the semi-comic character of one of those tarts, using her somewhat as Dudley Nichols used the tart in Stagecoach . . .

  We can all see ourselves as waving swords or nursing the sick but it gets monotonous. A picture like this would have its great force from seeing ourselves as human beings who go on eating and loving and displaying our small vanities and follies in the midst of any catastrophe.

  The movie pitch got no bites. This story, or rather this series of stories, many-told tales with different twists and endings, shows Fitzgerald working his way through the major fault lines of nineteenth-century American history, from the Civil War to the frontier range wars. Issues of race and ethnicity abound and complicate. The swirl of international relations and the questioning of both French empire and republicanism, with the sympathies of the former Confederate soldier pivoting him in a particular direction, are also worth noting.

  Thumbs Up

  The buggy was progressing at a tired trot. Its two occupants had driven since before dawn and were as tired as their horses when they turned into the Rockville Pike toward Washington. The girl was tawny and lovely. Despite the July heat she wore a light blue dress of bombazine cloth and on this subject she had listened politely to her brother’s strictures during the drive down. If she was to nurse in a Washington hospital she must not present herself in gay regalia. Josie was sad about this. It was the first really grown-up costume she had ever owned. A lot of boys at home had observed the unholy glow of her hair since she was twelve, but Josie belonged to a strict family moved out to Ohio from Massachusetts. Nonetheless she was approaching the war as if she were going to a party.

  “When do we get there, brother?” She dug him lightly with the handle of the buggy whip. “Is this still Maryland or are we in the District of Columbia?”

  Captain Doctor Pilgrim came alive.

  “D. C. I guess—unless you’ve managed to turn us around. Let’s stop and get water at this farmhouse just ahead. And, Josie, don’t get enthusiastic with these people down here. Most of them are secesh, and if you’re nice to them they take advantage of it. Don’t give them a chance to get haughty with you.”

  �
��I won’t,” she said, “I’ll show them what we feel.”

  They were possibly the only people in the vicinity unaware that this part of Maryland was temporarily Confederate. To ease the pressure on the Southern army at Petersburg, and make a last despairing threat at the capital, General Early had marched his corps up the valley to the city limits of Washington. After throwing a few shells into the suburbs he had turned his weary columns about for the march back into Virginia. The last infantry had scarcely passed, leaving a faint dust along the road, and the girl had been rather puzzled by the series of armed tramps, who had been limping by them in the last ten minutes, and there was something in the determined direction of the two men riding toward her which made her ask with a certain alarm, “What are these men, brother, secesh?”

  To Josie or indeed to anyone who had not been to the front, it might have been difficult to guess the profession of these men—even more so to guess what cause they served. Tib Dulany, who had once contributed occasional verse to the Lynchburg Courier, wore a hat that had once been white, a butternut coat, blue pants that had once belonged to a Union trooper, and as his only designating badge, a cartridge belt stamped C.S.A. All that the two riders had in common were their fine new carbines taken last week from Pleasanton’s cavalry.

  They came up beside the buggy in a whirl of dust and Tib said:

  “Hi there, Yank!”

  Remembering her brother’s caution about being haughty Josie reined in her horses.

  “We want to get some water,” she said to the handsomest young man. “We—” she stopped short seeing that Captain Doctor Pilgrim’s elbow was poked backward, his hand at his holster, but immobile; Josie saw why—the second rider was holding his carbine three feet from his heart.

  Slowly, almost painfully, Captain Pilgrim raised his hands.

  “What is this—a raid?” he asked.

  Josie felt an arm reaching about her and shrunk forward; Tib was taking her brother’s revolver from its holster.

  “What is this?” Dr. Pilgrim demanded, “Are you guerrillas?”

  “Who are you?” Tib and Wash inquired in unison. Without waiting for an answer Tib said to Josie, “Young lady, walk your team up a little way and turn in yonder at the farmhouse. You can get a drink of water up there.”

  He realized suddenly that she was lovely, that she was frightened and brave, and he added: “Nobody’s goin to hurt you. We just aimin to detain you a little.”

  “Will you tell me who you are?” Captain Pilgrim demanded, “Do you know what you’re doing?”

  “Calm down!” Tib told him. “You’re inside Lee’s lines now.”

  “Lee’s lines!” Captain Pilgrim cried. “You think every time you Mosby murderers come out of your hills and cut a telegraph—”

  The team, barely started, jolted to a stop—Wash had grabbed the reins, and he turned black eyes upon the northerner.

  “Say one thing more about Major Mosby and I’ll drag you out of that buggy and clean your little old face with dandelions.”

  “There’s a lady here, Wash,” Tib said, “and the officer simply isn’t informed of the news. He’s a prisoner of the Army of Northern Virginia.”

  Captain Pilgrim looked at them incredulously as Wash released the reins and they drove in silence to the farmhouse. Only as the foliage parted and gave a sudden vista of two dozen horses attended by grey-clad orderlies, did he awake to a premonition that something was wrong—that his news was indeed several days behind.

  “What’s happened?” he asked Wash. “Is Lee’s army here?”

  “You didn’t know that?” Tib said. “Why, right now we got Abe Lincoln in the kitchen washing dishes—and General Grant’s upstairs making the beds.”

  “Ah-h-h!” grunted Captain Pilgrim.

  “Say, Wash, I sure would like to be in Washington tonight when Jeff Davis walks in. That Yankee rebellion didn’t last long.”

  —And Josie, she believed the whole thing. Her world was crashing around: The Boys in Blue and the Union forever and Mine eyes have seen the Glory of the Coming of the Lord. Her eyes were full of hot tears of grief.

  “You can’t take my brother prisoner. Why, he’s not really just an officer because he’s a doctor. He was wounded at Cold Harbor—”

  “Doctor, eh? Don’t know anything about teeth, does he?”

  “Oh yes—that’s his specialty.”

  They reached the porch and the scouts dismounted.

  “So you’re a tooth doctor?” Tib said. “Well, that’s just what we been seeking all over Maryland, my Maryland for the last hour. If you’ll be so kind as to come in here you can probably pull a tooth of one of the real Napoleons, a cousin of the Emperor, Napoleon III.”

  Captain Pilgrim cautioned Josie:

  “They’re joking but don’t say anything.”

  “Joking?—we’re sure not joking. He’s attached to General Early’s staff and he’s been bawling in here for the last hour but the medical men went on with the ambulances and nobody on the staff can pull teeth.”

  A staff officer came out on the porch and gave a nervous ear to a crackling of rifles in the distance; then bent an eye upon the buggy.

  “Lieutenant, we found a tooth specialist,” Tib said. “Providence sent him right into our lines and if Napoleon is still—”

  “Good heavens!” the officer exclaimed. “Bring him in. We didn’t know whether to take him or leave him.”

  Suddenly Josie had her first real picture of the Confederacy staged for her on the vine-covered veranda. There was a sudden egress: first a grizzled man in a fine grey riding coat, followed by two younger men cramming papers into a canvas sack. Then came a miscellany of officers, one on a single crutch, one stripped to an undershirt and with the gold star of a general pinned to a bandage on his shoulder, one laughing as a man laughs who has just told some joke himself but the general air was not of cheerfulness—and Josie saw in their tired eyes the reflection of some disappointment.

  Then they made a single gesture as one man; perceiving her, they wheeled toward her and their dozen right hands rose to their dozen hats, topping them slightly, and they bowed faintly in her direction.

  Josie bowed back stiffly, trying to bring some expression into her face—of hauteur, scorn, reproach—but she was unable to do aught but respond to their courtesy.

  . . . In a moment the staff had swung into their saddles; the aide who had first come out of the farmhouse paused at General Early’s stirrup.

  “Good enough,” the General said.

  He looked for a moment at the city that he could not conquer, at the arbitrary swamp that another Virginian had conceived. “No further change in orders,” he said. “Tell Mosby that I want couriers every hour up to Charlestown. One battery of horse artillery to put up a big noise while the engineers blow up the bridge over Montgomery Creek—you understand, Major Charlesworth.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I guess that’s all, then.” He turned. “Oh, yes.” His sun-strained eyes focussed on the buggy. “I understand you’re a doctor. Prince Napoleon is in there—He’s been with us as an observer. Pull out his tooth or whatever he needs. These two troopers will stay with you. Do well by him now—they’ll let you go without parole when you’ve finished with him.”

  Then all was drowned out in the clop and crunch of mounted men moving down a lane. The little group was left standing by the porch as the last sally of the Army of Northern Virginia faded swiftly into the distance.

  “We got a dentist here for Prince Napoleon,” said Tib to the French aide-de-camp.

  “That’s very well,” the aide exclaimed, leading the way into the front room of the farmhouse. “He is in the most great agony.”

  “The doctor is a Yankee,” Tib continued. “One of us will have to stay while he’s operating.”

  The stout invalid across the room, a gross miniature of his world-shaking uncle, tore his hand from his groaning mouth and sat upright in an armchair.

  “Operating!”
he cried. “Mon Dieu! Is he going to operate?”

  “This is the doctor,” Tib said. “His name is—”

  “Pilgrim,” the doctor supplied coldly. “My sister—where will she be?”

  “I’ll put her in the parlor, Doctor. Wash, you stay here.”

  “I’ll need hot water,” said Dr. Pilgrim, “and my instrument case from the buggy.”

  Prince Napoleon groaned again.

  “What you do? Cut my head off my neck? How do you know what to do about this before you see even? Ah, cette vie barbare!”

  Tib consoled him gently.

  “This doctor specializes in teeth, Prince Napoleon. He won’t hurt you.”

  “I am a trained surgeon,” said Dr. Pilgrim stiffly. “Now, sir, will you take off that hat?”

  The Prince removed the wide white Cordoba which topped a miscellaneous costume of grey tail coat, French uniform breeches and dragoon boots.

  “Can we trust this medicin if he is a Yankee? How can I know he will not cut to kill? Does he know I am a Frenchman citizen?”

  “Prince, if he doesn’t do well by you we got some apple trees outside and plenty rope.”

  Tib went to summon a servant; then he looked into the parlor where Miss Josie sat frightened on the edge of a horsehair sofa.

  “What are you going to do to my brother?”

  Very sorry for her pretty, stricken young face, Tib said, “We ain’t fixin to hurt him. I’m more worried what he’s about to do to the Prince.”

  An anguished howl arose from the library.

  “You hear that?” Tib said. “Your brother’s the one going to do the damage.”

  “Are you going to send us to that Libby Prison?”

  “Don’t you get excited now, young lady. This time we don’t want any prisoners. You’re going to be held here till your brother fixes up the Prince. Then, as soon as our cavalry pickets come past, you and your brother can continue your journey.”