Book Review: Afternoon of an Author, by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1957)

Paperback cover of Afternoon of an Author, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1957. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor)

Afternoon of an Author: A Selection of Uncollected Stories and Essays is a posthumous collection of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s writings that shed light on his personal life. Fitzgerald biographer Arthur Mizener wrote the introduction and notes about the pieces that he selected for the volume. 

Fitzgerald’s fiction was almost always closely connected to his personal life, and sometimes the line between his fiction and non-fiction gets quite blurry. Fitzgerald’s non-fiction can help the reader get a sense of the man behind the short stories and novels. Afternoon of an Author is now out of print, and has been surpassed as a collection of Fitzgerald’s non-fiction writing by the excellent 2011 collection, A Short Autobiography, which I reviewed here. Of the twenty pieces collected in Afternoon, eight of them also appear in A Short Autobiography, however, there are still some oddities like “News of Paris—Fifteen Years Ago,” that don’t appear in any other Fitzgerald collection.

And that brings us to another problem: the fact that there simply hasn’t been an ideal collection of Fitzgerald’s non-fiction. Part of the reason for this is the 1945 collection The Crack-Up, edited by Fitzgerald’s Princeton classmate Edmund Wilson. The Crack-Up features Fitzgerald’s three remarkable “Crack-Up” essays, which were first published in Esquire in 1936. Fitzgerald’s editor at Scribners, Maxwell Perkins, didn’t care for the “Crack-Up” essays, so he allowed Wilson to publish the book with New Directions. Which is all well and good, but that means that the “Crack-Up” essays, probably Fitzgerald’s most famous non-fiction writings, don’t appear in either Afternoon of an Author or A Short Autobiography, which leaves them feeling incomplete. 

In my opinion, the perfect collection of Fitzgerald’s non-fiction writing would include all three “Crack-Up” essays, along with other excellent pieces like “Early Success” that appeared in the New Directions Crack-Up book, and also a generous sampling of the pieces found in Afternoon and A Short Autobiography, like “How to Waste Material: A Note on My Generation,” “One Hundred False Starts,” “Afternoon of an Author,” and “Author’s House.” 

Afternoon of an Author includes a mixture of short stories and non-fiction, which isn’t a bad thing, as Fitzgerald’s fiction was often liberally drawn from his own life and experiences. The collection begins with three short stories from the Basil Duke Lee series, a group of short stories that Fitzgerald wrote in 1928 and 1929, as he was struggling with the novel that would eventually become Tender is the Night. The short stories follow Basil from adolescence through the rest of his teenage years and into college. Reading the Basil short stories made me feel very close to Fitzgerald, and I get the sense that Basil Duke Lee shared many similarities with his creator. There are many surface similarities between Basil and Fitzgerald: both grew up in St. Paul, both lived on Holly Avenue, and they both go off to boarding school and college in the East. (However, Basil attends Yale, while Fitzgerald went to Princeton.) Fitzgerald always dreamed of glory on the athletic fields, and while he was never able to find that glory himself, he was able to write about it. Fitzgerald was cut on the first day of tryouts for Princeton’s football team, but in the story “Basil and Cleopatra,” he made Basil Duke Lee the hero of the Yale-Princeton football game. 

In “Author’s House,” the author tells his guest about a time in school when he failed at football. “It inspired me to write a poem for the school paper which made me as big a hit with my father as if I had become a football hero. So when I went home that Christmas vacation it was in my mind that if you weren’t able to function in action you might at least be able to tell about it, because you felt the same intensity—it was a back door way out of facing reality.” (p.185-6) Fitzgerald used his imagination and skill and his intensity of feeling to make Basil the kind of football hero that he never was. 

Fitzgerald’s 1927 essay “Princeton” is an affectionate and nostalgic look back at the university that he attended. School was always difficult for Fitzgerald, and his career at Princeton was no exception. He was perpetually in danger of flunking out. A case of tuberculosis at the beginning his junior year led to an extended absence from Princeton, and also meant that Scott dropped down from the Class of 1917 to the Class of 1918. Fortunately for Fitzgerald’s studies, the United States entered World War I in April of 1917. Fitzgerald enrolled in officers’ training school and left Princeton in the fall of 1917 without finishing his diploma. In a case of “better super late than never,” the Princeton class of 2017 awarded him an honorary diploma. Fitzgerald always felt a close kinship with Princeton, and he was reading an issue of the Princeton Alumni Weekly and making a list of Princeton football players when he was struck by a fatal heart attack. 

In “Princeton” Fitzgerald wrote of that period just before the war: “Everything around us seemed to be breaking up. These were the great days; battle was on the horizon; nothing was ever going to be the same again and nothing mattered. And for the next two years nothing did matter. Five per cent of my class, twenty-one boys, were killed in the war.” (p.78) Fitzgerald himself was fully expecting to be killed in the trenches of France or Belgium—on weekends he was furiously writing his first novel in the officer’s club, then titled The Romantic Egoist, which would eventually become This Side of Paradise. 

One of the most bitterly funny pieces in Afternoon is the 1924 essay, “How to Live on $36,000 a Year.” The gist of the piece is that it’s impossible for Scott and Zelda to save money, even though he was earning that much money through his writing—at a time when two-thirds of Americans earned less than $1,500 a year. (One wonders how funny any of those people found Fitzgerald’s article.) Scott’s inability to handle money was a continual theme throughout his life and career. He was extremely well-paid during his career, earning $245,000 from his writings during the decade of the 1920’s. That would be roughly $3.5 million in 2018 dollars, which you would think would be more than enough money to live comfortably on. But there were always fancy places to rent—Scott and Zelda rented Ellerslie, a mansion in Delaware, during the late 1920’s. Supposedly they got a good deal on it, but it was still a mansion. And there were always parties to be thrown, and servants to hire—who made breakfast in the morning? Who put daughter Scottie to bed at night? It sure wasn’t Scott or Zelda. 

In “One Hundred False Starts” Fitzgerald gives the reader an idea of what it is like to be an author, to conjure up words from out of thin air and weave them into a tale. Fitzgerald references his notebook of scraps and ideas, which would be published after his death. Fitzgerald tells us that one scrap has written on it just four words: “Boopsie Dee was cute.” 

Fitzgerald continues: “Nothing more. No cue as to what was intended to follow that preposterous statement. Boopsie Dee, indeed, confronting me with this single dogmatic fact about herself. Never will I know what happened to her, where and when she picked up her revolting name, and whether her cuteness got her into much trouble.” (p.128) 

Fitzgerald also gives us an idea of where his own stories came from in “One Hundred False Starts”:

“Mostly we authors must repeat ourselves-that’s the truth. We have two or three great and moving experiences in our lives, experiences so great and moving that it doesn’t seem at the time that anyone else has been so caught up and pounded and dazzled and astonished and beaten and broken and rescued and illuminated and rewarded and humbled in just that way ever before. Then we learn our trade, well or less well, and we tell our two or three stories-each time in a new disguise-maybe ten times, maybe a hundred, as long as people will listen.” (p.132)

Fitzgerald also writes: “Whether it’s something that happened twenty years ago or only yesterday, I must start out with an emotion—one that’s close to me and that I can understand.” (p.132) This is why so much of his fiction was closely connected to the events of his own life. 

One of the more poignant short stories is 1928’s “Outside the Cabinet-Maker’s,” in which a father invents a fairy tale for his daughter while they are waiting for mother to finish an errand. Fitzgerald writes of the father: “The man was old enough to know that he would look back to that time—the tranquil street and the pleasant weather and the mystery playing before the child’s eyes, mystery which he had created, but whose luster and texture he could never see or touch any more himself.” (p.140) 

Fitzgerald was only 32 years old when “Outside the Cabinet-Maker’s” was published, and it’s sad to think of him as already being beyond the age at which he could access the magic and mystery of fiction. But Fitzgerald had certainly seen and experienced a lot of life during those 32 years, and he would experience much more of life in the next few years. The experiences of adolescence and early adulthood cast a long shadow over most of our lives, and Fitzgerald was no exception to that. After the difficulties of the early 1930’s, Zelda’s mental breakdowns, his own increased drinking, the struggle to finish Tender is the Night, and then the relatively lukewarm reception that novel received, Fitzgerald knew that he couldn’t go on writing the same stories of young love for The Saturday Evening Post that had been paying his bills. In I’d Die for You, a 2017 book of previously unpublished Fitzgerald short stories, many of the stories date from the mid-1930’s and have characters who have faced life’s disappointments. They have indeed been “beaten and broken” and sometimes rescued as well, but not always. 

It’s hard not to read the 1930 short story “One Trip Abroad” as a portrait of Scott and Zelda. The story features the bitter line, “Switzerland is a country where very few things begin, but many things end.” (p.161) This seems to me a clear reference to Zelda’s long stay at a clinic in Prangins, Switzerland. 

In 1936 Fitzgerald wrote a number of autobiographical pieces for Esquire magazine: the aforementioned three “Crack-Up” essays, plus “Afternoon of an Author,” “Author’s House,” and “An Author’s Mother.” In Mizener’s notes for “Afternoon of an Author,” he writes: “This story shows again how nearly fabulous Fitzgerald’s life always was for him, how intensely he experienced even the smallest movement of feeling and how objectively he could judge it.” (p.177) Although I have no way to prove it, my sense of Fitzgerald was that he was someone who simply felt things more deeply than other people—there was a deep empathy there, as well as an intense interest in other people. Fitzgerald was known to ask questions of strangers or friends that crossed the border into rudeness, and I suspect that by doing so he was gathering material, trying to learn more about the human condition. We see some of Fitzgerald’s empathy on display in “Author’s House,” as the author recalls his moment of failure on the football field of his youth, when, in a game that his team was winning handily, he didn’t intercept the ball, but merely knocked it down. The author remembers the long bus ride back to school, “with everybody thinking I had been yellow on the occasion, when actually I was just distracted and sorry for that opposing end.” (p.185) Because he was imagining the experience of someone else, the author was unable to fulfill his macho duty in the world of sports. 

In “Afternoon of an Author” Fitzgerald shares his annoyance at his reputation as someone who wrote quickly and easily: “It was like in the beginning fifteen years ago when they had said he had ‘fatal facility,’ and he labored like a slave over every sentence so as not to be like that.” (p.181) That was the early critical knock on Fitzgerald; that he was someone who wrote a perfect first draft and then went out partying. That does a huge disservice to the kind of writer he actually was. If you read anything about how Fitzgerald actually worked, you’ll quickly discover that he took his writing very seriously. He went through seventeen drafts of Tender is the Night. He was still making changes to The Great Gatsby when it was in galleys. 

In “Author’s House” there’s a funny anecdote about a woman writing to one of the author’s characters, thinking that the character may be her long-lost brother. (This woman obviously didn’t understand that the character was fictional.) This actually happened to Fitzgerald, as a woman wrote to his character Basil Duke Lee. Mischievously, Fitzgerald wrote back to her as Basil, telling her that he was on death row, and that she could contact him through his lawyer, F. Scott Fitzgerald. His letter is reproduced in The Correspondence of F. Scott Fitzgerald on pages 409-10, and it’s almost word for word what appears in “Author’s House.” 

At the end of his life, Fitzgerald wrote seventeen short stories featuring the hack screenwriter Pat Hobby. The stories appeared in Esquire, and they are a humorous glimpse of Hollywood, as seen through the eyes of a has-been. Pat Hobby is like a cousin of Fitzgerald’s—not close enough to be a brother, but with some similarities. However, when Pat is asked if he’s heard of an author, Fitzgerald writes: “The name was unfamiliar. Pat had scarcely opened a book in a decade.” (p.203) 

Despite their differences in reading habits, Fitzgerald still used some of his real life experiences to inform the Pat Hobby stories. A screen treatment that Hobby is supposed to expand into a screenplay is titled “Ballet Shoes.” Thanks to I’d Die for You, we know that Fitzgerald himself actually wrote a short screen treatment called “Ballet Shoes or Ballet Slippers.” (Fitzgerald used both titles on the cover sheet.) Fitzgerald’s treatment dates from 1936, and was never filmed. 

The Pat Hobby stories show off Fitzgerald’s sense of humor, like when he describes Secrets of Film Writing, a 1928 book that Hobby co-authored: “It would have made money if pictures hadn’t started to talk.” (p.204) Another line that made me laugh was when a producer offers to pay him—not quite a job, “more of a sinecure” in the producer’s words. “Pat became uneasy. He didn’t recognize the word, but ‘sin’ disturbed him and ‘cure’ brought a whole flood of unpleasant memories.” (p.213) 

Afternoon of an Author is an interesting look at how Fitzgerald’s own biography informed his fiction.