Book Review: The Basil and Josephine Stories, by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1973)

 

Paperback cover for the current edition of The Basil and Josephine Stories, by F. Scott Fitzgerald. The stories were written and published between 1928 and 1931, and this collection was first published in 1973.

A young F. Scott Fitzgerald, at a similar age as his character Basil Duke Lee.

As F. Scott Fitzgerald was struggling mightily with the novel that would become Tender Is the Night in 1928 and 1929, he suddenly reached back into his past and wrote a series of nine short stories detailing the adolescence of Basil Duke Lee. These stories brought Fitzgerald a great deal of money, as The Saturday Evening Post paid Fitzgerald just under $3,500 for each of the Basil stories, or a little over $50,000 in 2020 dollars. Not too shabby, old sport. All of the Basil stories weren’t collected together until the publication of The Basil and Josephine Stories in 1973, 33 years after Fitzgerald’s death.

The Basil Duke Lee stories contain some of Fitzgerald’s finest writing. It’s overly simplistic to say that the Basil stories are autobiographical. However, the stories draw in large part from Fitzgerald’s own life. Fitzgerald biographer Scott Donaldson wrote of the Basil stories: “The stories present recognizable people and places from his boyhood and can be traced to their origins in the yearly ledger he kept.” (Fitzgerald & Hemingway: Works and Days, p.42)

Reading these short stories gave me the sense that Basil Duke Lee shared many personality traits 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. Basil’s boarding school is St. Regis, a fictional stand-in for the Newman School in New Jersey, a Catholic prep school Fitzgerald attended his junior and senior years. When the time came for college, Basil attended Yale, rival to Fitzgerald’s Princeton.

The Basil short stories are a showcase for Fitzgerald’s sense of humor and irony, which often get overlooked in discussions of his writing. One of the incidents I found the most humorous was at the end of “The Scandal Detectives.” Basil and his friend Riply Buckner have the brilliant idea to write down scandalous rumors that they hear about the upstanding citizens of Saint Paul. What little information they glean, they record in invisible ink in a hidden notebook. The narration then intrudes to inform us that the notebook was found years later by a janitor. Thinking it to be blank, he gave it to his daughter. Thus, the contents of the notebook were obliterated “beneath a fair copy of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.” (p.49) That twist feels perfectly Fitzgerald to me, as he was always deeply conscious of the impermanence of life.

Fitzgerald’s lyrical gift for description is on full display in the story “A Night at the Fair,” in which he paints a vivid picture of the Minnesota State Fair:

“The first lights of the evening were springing into pale existence; the afternoon crowd had thinned a little, and the lanes, empty of people, were heavy with the rich various smells of popcorn and peanuts, molasses and dust, and cooking Wienerwurst and a not-unpleasant overtone of animals and hay. The Ferris wheel, pricked out now in lights, revolved leisurely through the dusk; a few empty cars of the roller coaster rattled overhead. The heat had blown off and there was the crisp stimulating excitement of Northern autumn in the air.” (p.73)

A recurring theme in the stories is that Basil is a little too full of himself, and he makes the same mistakes over and over again. However, we do see Basil begin to grow up during the stories, and at the end of “The Freshest Boy” he has a poignant revelation: “He had gathered that life for everybody was a struggle, sometimes magnificent from a distance, but always difficult and surprisingly simple and a little sad.” (p.108)

On the final page of “The Freshest Boy” are three sentences of eloquence and beauty that rank among my favorite Fitzgerald quotations. “It isn’t given to us to know those rare moments when people are wide open and the lightest touch can wither or heal. A moment too late and we can never reach them any more in this world. They will not be cured by our most efficacious drugs or slain with our sharpest swords.” (p.110)

Malcolm Cowley famously wrote of what he called Fitzgerald’s “double vision.” Cowley meant that Fitzgerald was able to be in a social situation, and at the same time, be apart from it, and be critiquing it from the outside. I suspect Cowley was correct, and in “He Thinks He’s Wonderful,” something similar happens to Basil: “Passing from the gleaming store into the darkness, Basil was submerged in an unreality in which he seemed to see himself from the outside, and the pleasant events of the evening began to take on fresh importance.” (p.117)

The Josephine stories center around Josephine Perry, an attractive, wealthy young girl from Chicago. Written in 1930 and 1931, these five stories are less successful than the Basil stories, but still make for entertaining reading. Josephine was based on Ginevra King, Fitzgerald’s first serious girlfriend. Scott and Ginevra only met in person a handful of times, but they wrote each other frequently over a two-year period before they broke up. (For more about Scott and Ginevra, read James L.W. West’s excellent book The Perfect Hour, which I reviewed here.) West notes that since the Josephine stories were written after Zelda Fitzgerald’s mental breakdown, “Josephine Perry shows the effects of Fitzgerald’s disillusionment.” (The Perfect Hour, p.102) I agree with West, and I think Fitzgerald’s personal identification with Basil make those stories stronger. Fitzgerald understood Basil because he was so similar to him, and Fitzgerald probably found it more difficult to access the psychology of Josephine. And it may have been that Fitzgerald had lost interest in accessing the psychology of a character like Josephine. What was the sense in writing about a beautiful young girl playing flirtatious games when your wife was spending 15 months in a Swiss sanitarium?

While the Basil stories are full of humor, there’s precious little humor to soften Josephine. However, Fitzgerald does have an excellent line at the beginning of “A Snobbish Story” when he writes about the summer of 1915: “Dresses were long and hats were small and tight, and America, shut in on itself, was bored beyond belief.” (p.286)

Fitzgerald toyed with collecting the Basil and Josephine stories together as a book, and he intended to write a short story where he brought Basil and Josephine together, but it never happened. Fitzgerald had misgivings about a Basil and Josephine book, thinking that it might seem too trivial. Personally, I think these stories stand with the best that Fitzgerald wrote, and I think he was incorrect to undervalue the material. But, as so many authors are, Fitzgerald was a harsh critic of his own work. I can understand some of Fitzgerald’s hesitation at publishing a book of Basil and Josephine stories in, say, 1932. He was trying to reestablish his reputation as a novelist, and he didn’t feel that a collection of stories about adolescent romance was about to do that. However, a Fitzgerald book of any kind in 1932 would have kept his name before the reading public at a time when he hadn’t published a novel for 7 years, and a collection of short stories for 6 years. Ultimately, 9 years passed between the publication of The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night. When Fitzgerald selected short stories for his next collection, 1935’s Taps at Reveille, he selected 5 of the Basil stories, and 3 of the Josephine stories. The Basil and Josephine Stories fills an important place in the Fitzgerald canon by collecting all these excellent stories together.

A final odd footnote to the Basil Duke Lee stories: in 1935 a Mrs. Albert Kibble wrote a letter to Basil Duke Lee, care of The Saturday Evening Post, and asked if he was her long-lost half-brother. (Mrs. Kibble didn’t seem to understand that the short story was a piece of fiction, and that Basil didn’t actually exist.) The letter was forwarded on to Fitzgerald, who mischievously replied in character as Basil. Fitzgerald opened with: “I got your letter here in the Penitentiary just as I was about to be hanged for murder.” Fitzgerald writes that if he gets out of jail, he would love to come and stay with Mrs. Kibble. He closes by saying, “Please write me care of my attorney, F. Scott Fitzgerald.” (Correspondence of F. Scott Fitzgerald, p.409-10)

Fitzgerald referenced this incident in his 1936 essay “Author’s House,” in which a visitor pokes around a house that is occupied by an unnamed writer who is a stand-in for Fitzgerald. The writer tells the visitor: “The letter amused me and was so different from any that I had received for a long time that I made up an answer to it.” The writer then receives the woman’s response to his facetious letter that informed her that her brother was on death row. In her response, the woman replies that he can stay with her if he is released from jail and not executed. The author suffers a pang of regret for lying to this woman, and he tells his secretary to respond that her brother is out of jail and went to China, and to enclose $5. The writer then remarks to his visitor, “You can pay a little money but what can you do for meddling with a human heart? A writer’s temperament is continually making him do things he can never repair.” (A Short Autobiography, p.137-9)