Book Review: The Apprentice Fiction of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edited by John Kuehl (1965)

Paperback cover of The Apprentice Fiction of F. Scott Fitzgerald, edited by John Kuehl, 1965. That's one of my Fitzgerald shelves. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor)

F. Scott Fitzgerald, probably taken during his time at Princeton.

The Apprentice Fiction of F. Scott Fitzgerald, edited by John Kuehl and first published in 1965, collects Fitzgerald’s first 15 short stories, written from 1909-1917. The stories take us through Fitzgerald’s school career, from Saint Paul Academy to the Newman School, a prestigious Catholic prep academy in New Jersey, to Princeton University, which Fitzgerald left in 1917 before completing his degree. (Fitzgerald was posthumously awarded an honorary diploma from the Princeton class of 2017.) 

Fitzgerald was very selective about the short stories that he selected for the collections that were published during his lifetime, so he might be annoyed if he knew that future generations of readers could pore over his prep school works. However, as juvenile as some of these stories might be, they do give us some insight into the future of Fitzgerald’s writing career. 

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s very first appearance in print was at the age of 13 in the October, 1909 issue of Now and Then, the school newspaper of Saint Paul Academy. His short story “The Mystery of the Raymond Mortgage” was included in that issue. It was something of an inauspicious debut, as the readers of the detective story never actually learn who stole the titular mortgage. The story could almost be read as a parody of detective stories, as the mystery of the mortgage remains unsolved. However, it’s more likely that the shortcomings of the plot stem from the youth of the author, rather than a deliberate attempt on Fitzgerald’s part to parody the conventions of detective stories. 

By the time Fitzgerald wrote “A Luckless Santa Claus,” in 1912 he had learned more about grabbing the reader’s attention. The first sentence of the story is: “Miss Harmon was responsible for the whole thing.” (p.48) Instantly, your curiosity is piqued. What whole thing is Miss Harmon responsible for? 

Lifelong preoccupations of Fitzgerald’s surface in these early stories. His second story, published in the February, 1910 issue of Now and Then, is “Reade, Substitute Right Half.” It’s a brief sketch that shows us how a scrawny youth wins recognition for his stellar play on the football field. Fitzgerald longed for glory of his own on the athletic fields, but at 5 foot 8 and of slender build, it was unlikely that he would succeed at football. (According to F. Scott Fitzgerald in Minnesota: Toward the Summit, he weighed 138 pounds. P.77) One of Fitzgerald’s keenest disappointments during his college years was that he didn’t make the Princeton football team. While football never became a major theme in Fitzgerald’s work, he remained a devoted fan of the sport his whole life. When he suffered his fatal heart attack on December 21, 1940, he was reading and annotating his copy of the Princeton Alumni Weekly, making notes about the current Princeton football team. 

Fitzgerald’s interest in the Civil War shows up in his stories “A Debt of Honor,” and “The Room with the Green Blinds.” Fitzgerald was somewhat torn between the North and the South. He was raised in the North, in Minnesota and New York, but his father’s family was from Maryland, a border state that remained in the Union but retained slavery and had many Southern sympathizers. Fitzgerald was always drawn towards lost causes, and he seems to have retained a romantic vision of a languid Southern aristocracy. And, of course, he married a Southern belle, Zelda Sayre, from Montgomery, Alabama. Zelda’s family was well entrenched in the Old South—her father was a Justice on the Alabama Supreme Court. 

The weirdest story in The Apprentice Fiction is “Tarquin of Cheepside,” later revised and reprinted in Fitzgerald’s 1922 short story collection Tales of the Jazz Age. The story describes a young man’s flight from angry pursuers, and the friend who shelters him. Although the man who is fleeing remains unnamed, we learn that he had assaulted a woman. Once the pursuers have left, the young man starts writing a poem—“The Rape of Lucrece.” The young man is William Shakespeare! Fitzgerald is calling the greatest writer of all time a rapist! Didn’t anticipate that plot twist! The writing in “Tarquin” is impressionistic and poetic, but I would guess that the subject matter irked some readers. 

Fitzgerald’s interest in the theater is also on display in his early stories. As a teenager, he wrote four plays for the Elizabethan Dramatic Club, a group of young amateur actors in Saint Paul. Fitzgerald also contributed to several shows for the Triangle Club, Princeton University’s dramatic club. “Shadow Laurels,” from April 1915, is presented as a play, complete with stage directions. There’s a marvelous line in it, as one of the characters says, “He was bright and clever—when we worked, he worked feverishly hard, but he was always drunk, night and day.” (p.74) The same could be said of F. Scott Fitzgerald himself. 

The Princeton short story “Babes in the Woods” later shows up as Amory and Isabelle’s initial meeting in Fitzgerald’s first novel, This Side of Paradise, published in March of 1920. A line in the story “Sentiment—and the Use of Rouge” is later repeated in This Side of Paradise, as Eleanor is asked if she is a sentimentalist. She replies, “No, I’m a romantic. There’s a huge difference; a sentimental person thinks things will last, a romantic person hopes they won’t.” (p.150) This quote seems to be an apt description of Fitzgerald himself. 

“The Pierian Springs and the Last Straw” is a very interesting story. I read the characters of Uncle George and Mrs. Fulham as portraits of Scott and his lost love, Ginevra King. That might be too much of a stretch, but Fitzgerald got much of his inspiration from his own life. Ginevra King was one of the most famous debutantes of the era. She was from a wealthy family in Lake Forest, Illinois. King and Fitzgerald dated a few times, but later in life she didn’t even remember if she had kissed him or not. Their relationship was mainly through letters. Scott kept all of Ginevra’s letters to him, and later had them bound into a book. The book was 227 pages long. Ginevra didn’t keep any of Scott’s letters to her. Many Fitzgerald biographers believe that Ginevra was the model for Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby. 

Throughout The Apprentice Fiction you see Fitzgerald working out what will become his classic themes—class, status, money, love, drinking. There are flashes of good writing and insight, but also clunky sentences and hackneyed plots. There are no real hints that the author of the stories in The Apprentice Fiction will become one of the major American authors of the 20^th century. However, you can see that Fitzgerald has progressed a long way from the juvenilia at the beginning of the book.

I wouldn’t recommend The Apprentice Fiction for casual readers of Fitzgerald’s work, but it’s a very useful collection for readers interested in Fitzgerald’s youthful writings.