Book Review: The Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Selected by Malcolm Cowley (1951)

 

My well-worn paperback copy of The Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Selected by Malcolm Cowley, first published in 1951. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor)

The Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, selected by Malcolm Cowley, gathered 28 of Fitzgerald’s finest short stories into one volume. First published in 1951, 11 years after Fitzgerald’s death, it’s now long out of print, and has since been supplanted in the Fitzgerald bibliography by Matthew J. Bruccoli’s 1989 collection The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, currently the most widely available collection of Fitzgerald’s short stories.

Cowley did a superb job in selecting the stories for this volume, although there will always be quibbles about selection. (Where’s “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”?) Fitzgerald left behind just shy of 200 short stories, meaning that Cowley was only able to pick 14-15% of Fitzgerald’s total output for this volume. (In contrast, the much longer Bruccoli volume includes 43 short stories.)

The Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald starts with one of the author’s finest short stories, “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz.” There’s young romance, plus an ironic critique of capitalism. (And some cringy racism—along with Fitzgerald offering a stinging critique of racism.) The seven stories in the first section of the book, “Early Success,” are all fantastic, and show a young author who was finely in tune with his generation. Some of these stories are now more than 100 years old, and they still feel fresh and brilliant.

One of my favorite stories in this book is “The Last of the Belles.” Fitzgerald writes so movingly of loss, and the yearning for the past. The last three paragraphs of “The Last of the Belles” are a beautiful example of his evocative style. In the story, the narrator is searching for the Army camp where he was stationed a decade earlier during World War I, but he can find no trace of it:

“I tried to sight on a vaguely familiar clump of trees, but it was growing darker now and I couldn’t be quite sure they were the right trees…No. Upon consideration they didn’t look like the right trees. All I could be sure of was this place that had once been so full of life and effort was gone, as if it had never existed, and that in another month Ailie would be gone, and the South would be empty for me forever.” (p.253)

“The Bridal Party” is a fantastic story that Fitzgerald never collected in a book. He was a harsh critic of his own work, but just because he didn’t judge “The Bridal Party” worthy of collecting doesn’t mean it’s not worth our time. “The Bridal Party” focuses on love and class, two of Fitzgerald’s favorite subjects. It also features this gorgeous description: “On the corner the long dresses of girls, five abreast, fluttered many-colored in the wind. Girls had become gossamer again, perambulatory flora; such lovely fluttering dresses in the bright noon wind.” (p.283)

There are a few stories in this collection that don’t appear in any other Fitzgerald collection. “Magnetism” isn’t a totally successful story, and it belongs to what I’d call the “Lois Moran story cluster.” Lois Moran was an 18-year-old actress when the 31-year-old Fitzgerald met her on his trip to Hollywood in 1927. Fitzgerald quickly became besotted with Moran and based several characters on her, including Rosemary Hoyt in Tender Is the Night. “Magnetism” features this sentence as the 30-year-old protagonist thinks about the 18-year-old female: “He had felt that they both tolerated something, that each knew half of some secret about people and life, and that if they rushed toward each other there would be a romantic communion of almost unbelievable intensity.” (p.224) One wonders if this is how Fitzgerald felt about Lois Moran.

Another story unavailable in any other collection is the excellent “The Rough Crossing,” which documents a turbulent Atlantic crossing on an ocean liner. The protagonist is a married playwright who embarks on a shipboard romance with a younger woman. “He could not remember when anything had felt so young and fresh as her lips. The rain lay, like tears shed for him, upon the softly shining porcelain cheeks. She was all new and immaculate, and her eyes were wild.” (p.262) “The Rough Crossing” fits into both the “Lois Moran cluster” and the “marriage problems cluster,” several stories written in 1929 and 1930 that give the reader the distinct impression that all was not well between Scott and his wife Zelda.

One of my favorites of Fitzgerald’s late short stories is “Three Hours Between Planes,” posthumously published in Esquire in 1941. It’s a beautiful little miniature of the kind that Fitzgerald excelled at during his final years. It’s only five pages long, but it’s stuck in my mind since I first read it more than 20 years ago.

The Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald did exactly what Malcolm Cowley wanted it to do: demonstrate definitively that Fitzgerald’s finest short stories were indeed works of art, not mere potboilers tossed off to keep the creditors at bay in between parties with Zelda.

Book Review: The Fitzgerald Reader, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edited by Arthur Mizener (1963)

 

My battered paperback copy of The Fitzgerald Reader, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edited by Arthur Mizener, 1963. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor)

The Fitzgerald Reader, a collection of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s writings, was first published in 1963. By the early 1960’s, the Fitzgerald boom that had begun a decade earlier was in full swing. When F. Scott Fitzgerald died in 1940, he feared that he was forgotten writer, and to some degree he was correct. The New York Times obituary of Fitzgerald pigeonholed him as a dusty relic of the bygone Jazz Age. But a generation after his death, Fitzgerald was firmly in the canon of Great American Writers, and he’s maintained that position even today, more than 100 years after he first came to prominence. Fitzgerald is one of the few authors whose importance has increased, rather than decreased, since his death.

The inside cover of The Fitzgerald Reader tells the tale: in the Scribner Library, The Great Gatsby was given the catalogue number SL 1, indicating it’s pride of place among Scribner’s authors. Tender Is the Night was SL 2. Fitzgerald no doubt would have been tickled to know that he was ahead of his friend and sometimes rival Ernest Hemingway, who had SL 4 (For Whom the Bell Tolls) and SL 5 (The Sun Also Rises). (For the record, John Galsworthy had SL 3, The Man of Property.)

The Fitzgerald Reader gathers together the entire text of The Great Gatsby, excerpts from Tender Is the Night and The Last Tycoon, along with many of Fitzgerald’s best short stories and essays. Altogether, it’s an excellent one volume introduction to the genius and beauty of Fitzgerald’s best work.

The book starts strong, with four of Fitzgerald’s very best short stories: “May Day,” “Winter Dreams,” “Absolution,” and “The Sensible Thing.” Mizener isn’t pulling any punches here; he’s showing you the best of the best of Fitzgerald. After those four stories, you get the full text of The Great Gatsby. If those four stories and Gatsby haven’t convinced you of Fitzgerald’s brilliance, there’s probably nothing that will.

Mizener skips over Fitzgerald’s first two novels, This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and Damned. That’s telling of their place in Fitzgerald’s canon, as so much attention is paid to The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night, while This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and Damned are left to languish.

“Echoes of the Jazz Age,” one of Fitzgerald’s finest essays is included, along with the three “Crack-Up” essays that were originally published in Esquire magazine in 1936. At the time, authors like John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway were shocked and outraged by the “Crack-Up” essays, and the very idea that Fitzgerald would admit that his personal life was in turmoil. Because we know so much more now about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s personal life, what’s remarkable about the “Crack-Up” essays isn’t how much Fitzgerald reveals to the reader, but how little. The true crises in his life at the time the essays were written were his alcoholism and his wife Zelda’s mental illness—these go unmentioned in the “Crack-Up” essays. Fitzgerald still had enough old-world reticence that there was no way he was going to write about those two intensely personal topics for public consumption.

The fine short stories of the early 1930’s are here: “Babylon Revisited” and “Crazy Sunday,” along with “Family in the Wind,” an excellent story that is a departure from Fitzgerald’s usual milieu. The late 1930’s are also well represented by the autobiographical “Afternoon of an Author,” and the bitterly funny “Financing Finnegan,” which pokes fun at Fitzgerald’s own problems with money.

The Fitzgerald Reader is a collection that ably demonstrates why F. Scott Fitzgerald was such a brilliant talent.

Movie Review: Purple Noon (Plein Soleil) Starring Alain Delon, Maurice Ronet, and Marie Laforet, Directed by Rene Clement (1960)

 

Original poster for Purple Noon, 1960. (French title: Plein Soleil)

Maurice Ronet, Marie Laforet, and Alain Delon share a tense meal on boat the boat in Purple Noon.

Maurice Ronet warily eyes up Alain Delon in the opening scene of Purple Noon.

The 1960 movie Plein Soleil, English title Purple Noon, was the film that made French actor Alain Delon a star. (A literal translation of the title to English would be Full Sun.) Watching the movie 62 years after it was first released, it’s easy to see why the movie catapulted Delon to the upper ranks of French film stars. Based on the novel The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith, Purple Noon follows the amoral Ripley as he commits murder, and then goes on to assume the dead man’s identity.

Ripley has been sent on something of a fool’s errand: his assignment is to convince wealthy ne’er-do-well Philippe Greenleaf to return to San Francisco and assist his father in the family business. But Philippe (expertly played by Maurice Ronet) seems perfectly happy to hang out in Italy, buy a boat, and spend lots of money. The good news for Ripley is that Philippe allows Ripley to enjoy the good life with him and his girlfriend Marge (the stunning Marie Laforet, making her acting debut).

Ripley and Greenleaf have an odd relationship, to state the obvious. At the beginning of the film, we see them enjoying the pleasures of Rome. They sit in the back of a horse-drawn carriage, a beautiful blonde in-between them, and they alternate kissing her. In another scene, Ripley puts on Philippe’s clothes and starts impersonating Philippe in front of a mirror, touching his lips to his own reflection. It makes for quite the awkward scene when Philippe walks into the room. The homoerotic subtext between the two characters is so obvious that it hardly needs to be mentioned.

While on Greenleaf’s boat, Ripley stabs him and throws his body overboard. But rather than tell anyone that Greenleaf fell overboard and drowned, Ripley strings Marge along into thinking that Philippe is still alive. Ripley needs people to think that Greenleaf is still alive so that he can access Philippe’s money and live the life he feels he deserves. Needless to say, complications ensue.

Purple Noon was directed by Rene Clement, who also co-wrote the screenplay. The look and feel of the film are outstanding, and it looks as fresh as though it were filmed yesterday. I appreciated how whenever the characters are on the boat, it’s very clear they are really on a boat, whereas a Hollywood production from the same era might have been filmed in a water tank with crappy looking rear-projection special effects.

The wardrobe and costuming of Purple Noon are superb as well, and Delon and Ronet look very sharp in everything they wear, the very pictures of mid-century Mediterranean cool.

One of the biggest things that Purple Noon has going for it is Alain Delon’s remarkable handsomeness. Delon was strikingly photogenic, with high cheekbones, a thick head of dark, tousled hair, and piercing blue eyes. There are many people who would argue that Alain Delon is the most handsome man ever, and I’m not about to quibble with them. Delon was just 23 years old when Purple Noon was filmed. He had made a handful of movies, but in Purple Noon Delon is tasked with carrying the movie. He’s in nearly every scene, and the film would have collapsed under a less talented, less charismatic actor.

Delon is a naturalistic actor. He does not seem to be visibly acting, and he already knows that the camera will pick up on all of the little nuances of his expressions. Delon commands the attention of the audience, in no small part because of how good-looking he is. The quiet charisma that was Delon’s trademark as an actor is already in full blossom in Purple Noon. Delon has enough confidence in himself as an actor that he keeps our attention during the scene in the middle of the movie where he walks around an outdoor market. There’s no dialogue, Ripley is merely at the market by himself, as Marge writes a letter to Greenleaf. But the scene works, and it’s Delon’s cool confidence that draws us in.

Rene Clement originally wanted Delon for the role of Philippe Greenleaf, not Tom Ripley. But Delon persisted in wanting the role of Ripley, and he ultimately got his wish. Delon would have no doubt delivered an effective performance as Greenleaf, but he would be too obvious as Greenleaf—for someone so handsome to play a rich playboy would be too perfect, too on the nose. Whereas Maurice Ronet was perfect as Greenleaf—and he played a similar part opposite Delon again years later in the classic La Piscine. In La Piscine, Ronet plays the loud, gregarious playboy Harry, who drives a flashy Maserati—again, casting Delon in that part would have been too obvious.

Ronet gives an excellent performance as Greenleaf, drawing us in with his strong charisma and handsome looks, but he also shows us the hollow rot at Greenleaf’s core, and the callous way he treats both Ripley and Marge. And then there’s Marge. Poor Marge! You could make a fascinating version of this same story by focusing more on Marge’s point of view, rather than Ripley’s, and highlighting the emotional journey she goes on throughout the story. Marie Laforet is excellent as Marge, a performance all the more remarkable considering it was her film debut. Laforet turned 20 during the filming of Purple Noon, and like Delon, she has the confidence required to hold the audience’s attention.

At the end of Purple Noon, a thought struck me: Alain Delon would have made a fantastic Jay Gatsby. Delon’s characters are so often a little bit on the outside, never quite fully at ease, always striving for more. Delon would have brought a brooding intensity to Gatsby’s vision. And Maurice Ronet would have made a great Tom Buchanan.

Purple Noon was released in France on March 10, 1960, and in the United States on August 31, 1961. To watch it now is to see Alain Delon the actor, movie star, and icon of European cinema, blossom before your eyes.