Master the 40: The Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald Kirk Curnutt and Robert Trogdon

Published in the August 27, 1932, issue of the Saturday Evening Post, "What a Handsome Pair!" clearly reflects F. Scott Fitzgerald's dour view of marital relationships amid the relapse that took Zelda to the Phipps Clinic in Baltimore. The story of two couples, Stuart and Helen Oldhorne and Teddy and Betty Van Beck, "Pair!" insists that for men to enjoy domestic contentment they must pick wives who will not compete with them in their chosen métier. In other words, not exactly a feminist story! Fitzgerald perhaps exposed a little too much anger here that Zelda had completed her novel, Save Me the Waltz, in two months that spring while he was just then kicking Tender Is the Night into gear after seven years of delay. Beyond the gloomy portrait of marriage, the story is notable for weird elements: it is set a generation earlier than the author's own era, and there are some strange intimations of proto-Ice Storm couples' hanky panky---which makes its appearance in the conservative Post even more head-scratching. Not a great story---but a curious one!  

Published on July 5, 1924 as F. Scott Fitzgerald was writing The Great Gatsby, this Liberty short story has always been seen as a key rehearsal for his magnum opus. In the story of George Rollins (or George O'Kelly in the version that appeared in 1926 in All the Sad Young Men) as he pursues the Tennessee belle Jonquil Cary we have yet another variation on Fitzgerald's quintessential "golden girl" theme. The story's reputation has been somewhat inflated by its compositional proximity to Gatsby. We explore the theme of first love, focusing on the oft-reprinted closing lines that have become endlessly meme-able in recent years ("April is over, April is over. There are all kinds of love in the world, but never the same love twice"); we also look at the biographical background and some of the structural "short cuts" the author took to neatly wrap up the business success that allows George to prove himself. We also wonder how the story gained a pesky pair of quotation marks around the title that have become a Fitzgerald copyeditor's nightmare. 

Appearing in the June 1936 issue of Esquire, "The Ants at Princeton" is by any measure a singularly kooky entry in F. Scott Fitzgerald's short-story corpus. A fantasy about a human-sized ant who steps onto the field to save the game between heated rivals Princeton and Harvard (you can probably guess who FSF roots for), the text has always baffled scholars: is it a short story or is it, as Fitzgerald wrote in his ledger, a mere "satire"? And does that even matter? Behind the peculiar and not particularly effective conceit, though, lies a lot of very interesting collegiate football history, not the least of which begs the question of whether Scott---whose dreams of gridiron stardom were famously dashed---had an influence on the game as latter-day fans have come to know it. Listen as two non-sports fans whose collective knowledge of football couldn't fill the few number of pages this story does make a mountain out of an anthill by exploring this possibility.  

Published in fall 1934 in the Saturday Evening Post, "Her Last Case" is one of F. Scott Fitzgerald's most important stories about the South. Indeed, it challenges consensus opinions about the writer's regard for the region that the Tarleton stories of the 1920s set. Far from a pastoral evocation of antebellum gentility, the story insists the South must exorcise its lingering obsession with the Lost Cause---and it does so through a variety of Gothic strum und drang featuring the literal book that named the South's revisionary insistence that the Civil War was fought to preserve a code of chivalry, Edward A. Pollard's The Lost Cause: A New Southern History of the War of the Confederates (1868). The setting for the story is equally important: Fitzgerald was inspired by a visit to the Middleburg, Virginia, estate called Welbourne owned by Elizabeth Lemmon, who just happened to be the great romantic love of his editor Maxwell Perkins's life. Thomas Wolfe also visited Welbourne and wrote of it, too. We discuss "Her Last Case" and how it reframes our perceptions of Fitzgerald's Southern loyalties. 

A contender for one of the strangest Fitzgerald titles ever, "Diamond Dick and the First Law of Woman," published in April 1924,  tells the story of a maverick young debutante, Diana Dickey, who returns from the Western front where she served as a canteen girl to spend the next five years wondering what to do with her life. Only when wounded aviator Charlie Abbott returns from a long convalescence in Paris does Diana seem to reenact her decidedly masculine persona of "Diamond Dick," the hero of hundreds of nineteenth-century dime novels, and find her purpose. Weirdly, her plan to save Charlie from dissipation involves a gun, which Diana uses to shake him from a bad case of ... amnesia. That's right, long before it became a soap-opera cliche, Fitzgerald resorted to a dubious trope that can prompt some whiplash-inducing plot twists. We look at the story's flawed construction and explore Fitzgerald's unhappy relationship with Hearst's International, the lesser sibling to William Randolph Hearst's more famous fiction magazine, Cosmopolitan. "Diamond Dick" may not be perfect, but it's never boring. More importantly, it belongs in the Venn diagram overlap between two important circles of Fitzgerald stories: "The Vegetable" cluster (stories written to relieve the writer's finances from his disastrous foray into the theater) and "The Gatsby" cluster (stories that rehearse themes and specific lines that will reappear in his classic 1925 novel).   

In late 1930 as Zelda Fitzgerald remained hospitalized in a sanitarium trying to regain her sanity her husband cranked out a frenzied series of stories to pay for her treatment. Out of this whirlwind of effort came "Babylon Revisited," which appeared originally in the February 21, 1931, issue of the Saturday Evening Post and later anchored the fourth and final story collection of his life, Taps at Reveille (1935). "Babylon" is the mack daddy of all Fitzgerald stories, widely hailed as the best of his short fiction and his most widely anthologized. This episode asks why the story enjoys that exalted status. While celebrating its virtuoso craftsmanship and complex characterization, we also note that the story appeals in part because it offers such a capsule portrait of the Fitzgeralds' own biographical tragedy, a hymn to their own self-destruction against the sudden shift from the Boom to the Great Depression. The story also captures the romance of expatriate Paris, which many of its central sites---the Right Bank's Ritz Bar, most famously---still attracting Fitzgerald fans galore each year. This story is hard to top, but we also recognize that it's important not to let its reputation overshadow his other stories.