Review by Mack Hassler
Scott Fitzgerald published and sold to mass-market and glossy magazines that paid well in order to maintain the expensive life style that his debutante wife Zelda expected. As a major American fiction writer, he also published four financially successful novels. This substantial collection gathers 43 of the 164 stories he sold with fine critical and historic commentary at the head of each story and a solid Preface about his work.
I might have opened this review with ihe editor Matthew Bruccoli, who was one of the finest academic scholars we have devoted to the work of Fitzgerald as well as ro the work of Ernest Hemingway and other modernist writers in American literature. Further in these reviews for UPPAA, I have a particular interest in both Hemingway and Fitzgerald as they impact our emerging regional literature of the Northern tier of states that include Michigan and Minnesota. As a young writer Hemingway would often take the ferry over to the UP (this was before the Bridge) and write about the Seney area; and Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul and wrote his first romantic novel about a Minnesota debutante whom he was in love with before Zelda: This Side of Paradise (1920). I like to label our UP literature as “writing of the North.” Ironically, Bruccoli, though born in New York City, developed his own mastery of textual editing working under Fredson Bowers at the University of Virginia and then moved that work to the University of South Carolina in Columbia (for Southern women since Zelda was a debutante in Montgomery Alabama and for the North versus the South, see Brucolli’s headnote to the story “The Ice Palace” pp.48-49)._ I taught in Ohio at a university where several of my colleagues had been trained by Brucolli and considered him nearly a demigod. Brucolli died in 2008 in South Carolina. In other words, I think the influences on UP writing extend far out into the general literature of our time.
These are important writers and any connection with our emerging work should be noted. Even in our troubled times as I write this review, The Great Gatsby (1925) is listed among the top 10 books assigned for reading in English classes on the front page of The Wall Street Journal (26 July). One of the tricks and one of the beauties in this reviewing is to project ourselves back in time to the days when our fathers were young and when the culture we now know was starting to generate, to evolve. It gives some self-knowledge . It is strange and a sort of time rravel. The decade of the twenties just after the Great War and at the exciting moment that Fitzgerald called The Jazz Age in his third novel Gatsby (1925)/ It was a dangerous and tense time. Fitzgerald had to write material that could be sold. He had a debutante wife and he had a drinking habit that must (both) be supported He had the Irish gift to make language “sing” and he had what Hemingway his friend called a “crazy” wife in Zelda.
The close comradeship with Hemingway and his women was fascinating in thinking of Fitzgerald. They were both writers kicking around the Europe of what Gertrude Stein had labeled “the lost generation” and both were committed to their work Bruccolli claims that in Fitzgerald’s private notebook there was an entry about his “love” for the tough :fighter” Hemingway. (on this entry see the headnote to the story “Crazy Sunday” pp 698-699). The rumor got around of Hemingway having to check out Fitzgerald’s love-making abilities and of Hemingway saying it was “average.” But Fitzgerald sure could write about romantic love even though the first Minnesota debutante, whom he did not marry, spread rumors about his love-making. The 1920 novel was a best-seller and earned him a huge fortune.
I love this exciting and rich period of the twenties. But how does it relate to the litersture of the “North” that we are working to promote in the UPPAA? I happened to review here the Eighth Edition of the Walloon Writers Review Walloon Lake is just a few miles south and west of the Bridge. Hemingway’s family spend summers in Petoskey nearby. I looked back into the early issues of this publication and located the name “Ernest Miller Hemingway” years before he had established himself as the great Hemingway. The current Review could never afford to pay his agents for even the shortest piece from him now. They do print a couple poems near the back of the Review that remind me of him.. Ellen Lord is the poet. I have reviewed a book of her work. The poem here in this Review for the Eighth Edition is titled “Fish Tale: an Elegy” I end my review by evoking Hemingway: “It is the image near the end of his war novel A Farewell to Arms (1929); his hero watches the ants jump into the campfire off the log as they run along it to get away from the heat.” I look at that review again and see that Lord captures in the dead fish both Hemingway the tragic fighter as well as Fitzgerald’s glorious sparkle of the Jazz Age: “a quiver /of salmon colored dazzle / glorious in the mist. Ellen Lord knows both the Jazz Age and the sadness of it too. Even a fishing poem captures effects from both Fitzgerald and from Hemingway.
The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald: A new Collection, edited and with a Preface by Matthew J Bruccoli (Scribner Paperback Fiction , Simon and Schuster, 1969), 776 pages, pbk, $18,00,
