Books > The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald > Excerpts

FOREWORD

"My whole theory of writing I can sum up in one sentence. An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward." So proclaimed the young Scott Fitzgerald in the first flush of success at the appearance of This Side of Paradise in 1920. How magnificently -- if, sad to say, posthumously -- he fulfilled that ideal. His all too brief literary career -- a dozen years of commercial and critical success followed by distractions and disappointments -- ended in 1940 when he suffered a fatal heart attack at the age of forty-four. He was hard at work on the Hollywood novel he hoped would restore his literary fortunes, The Last Tycoon. At the time of his death his books were not, as was later supposed, out of print with his publisher. The truth is sadder: they were all in stock at our warehouse and listed in the catalogue, but there were no orders.

Now, a half century later, more copies of F. Scott Fitzgerald's books are ordered each year than were sold cumulatively throughout his entire lifetime. His novels and short stories are taught in virtually every high school and college across the country. This new, comprehensive collection of Fitzgerald's best short fiction is being published some seventy years -- a biblical lifespan -- after the author's first novel was accepted by my great-grandfather in 1919. I am struck by the realization that three generations (and namesakes) later I was the first of our family to have been introduced to Fitzgerald's work in the classroom. My grandfather, Fitzgerald's friend and publisher for the latter half of his career, died on the eve of the author's reappraisal and subsequent revival that gained momentum through the Fifties and has continued in full force down to the present time. It was my father who was to preside over Fitzgerald's literary apotheosis, a publishing phenomenon perhaps unprecedented in modern American letters. Through him I had the good fortune to meet and work with the author's talented and generous daughter, Scottie, and her collaborator and advisor, Matthew J. Bruccoli, whose prolific scholarship and infectious enthusiasm have long fanned the flames of Fitzgerald studies.

The day I met Professor Bruccoli fifteen years ago I asked what had prompted him to devote the lion's share of his scholarship to Fitzgerald. He told me exactly how it happened. One Sunday afternoon in 1949 Bruccoli, then a high school student, was driving with his family along the Merritt Parkway from Connecticut to New York City when he heard a dramatization of "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz" on the car radio. He later went to a library to find the story; the librarian had never heard of Scott Fitzgerald. But finally he managed to locate a copy -- "and I never stopped reading Fitzgerald."

There is something magical about F. Scott Fitzgerald. Much has been written -- and dramatized -- about the Jazz Age personas and syncopated lives of Scott and Zelda. But the real magic lies embedded in his prose and it is perhaps nowhere more pervasive than in the amazing range and versatility of his short stories: the best sparkle with greater luster than ever in this new collection that displays them afresh in their proper literary and biographical settings. Each tale partakes of its creator's poetic imagination, his dramatic vision, his painstaking (if virtuosic and seemingly effortless) craftsmanship. Each bears Fitzgerald's distinctive hallmark, the indelible stamp of grace.

Fitzgerald once claimed to his agent Harold Ober that "good stories write themselves -- bad ones have to be written." Yet a decade later he confessed that "there is no use of me trying to rush things." Even during his most prolific stages, he noted, "I could not turn out more than 8-9 top-price stories a year." The secret of success was not to be found in original themes. In his own view there were but "two basic stories of all times -- Cinderella and Jack the Giant Killer -- the charm of women and the courage of men." Nor should we look to the "booze and inspiration" school of thought, as he dubbed it: "You do not," he argued, "produce a short story for the Saturday Evening Post on a bottle." (Fitzgerald did, however, admit to writing his first novel with the aid of a liquid "stimulant" -- Coca-Cola!) Some clues to his creative craftsmanship may be gleaned from his instructive if sometimes professorial letters to his daughter: "Stories are best written in either one jump or three, according to length. The three-jump story should be done on three successive days, then a day or so for revise and off she goes. This of course is the ideal...." Still, he cautioned her, "nobody ever became a writer just by wanting to be one. If you have anything to say, anything you feel nobody has ever said before, you have got to feel it so desperately that you will find some way to say it that nobody has ever found before, so that the thing you have to say and the way of saying it blend as one matter -- as indissolubly as if they were conceived together."

In the last year of his life Fitzgerald pondered in a poignant letter to his wife, Zelda, then hospitalized in an asylum, the loss of his former success in the genre: "It's odd that my old talent for the short story vanished. It was partly that times changed, editors changed, but part of it was tied up somehow with you and me -- the happy ending. Of course every third story had some other ending, but essentially I got my public with stories of young love. I must have had a powerful imagination to project it so far and so often into the past." The key to Fitzgerald's enduring and elusive enchantment lies, I believe, in the power of his romantic imagination to transfigure his characters and settings -- and indeed the very shape and sound of his prose. I shall never forget that evening train ride from Princeton to Philadelphia on which I first read "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz": a commute was converted into a fantastic voyage. And I can still see Anson Hunter, "The Rich Boy," whose self-conscious superiority will forever, in my eyes, embellish the gilded lobby of New York's Plaza Hotel. Fitzgerald's stories transform their external geography as thoroughly as the realm within. The ultimate effect, once the initial reverberations of imagery and language have subsided, transcends the bounds of fiction.
Charles Scribner III

Copyright © 1989 by Charles Scribner's Sons