Book Review: Bits of Paradise: 21 Uncollected Stories, by F. Scott & Zelda Fitzgerald (1973)

 

Hardcover of Bits of Paradise: 21 Uncollected Stories, by F. Scott & Zelda Fitzgerald, 1973. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor)

Bits of Paradise: 21 Uncollected Stories, published in 1973, was the first volume to collect Zelda Fitzgerald’s short stories along with several uncollected stories written by her husband, F. Scott Fitzgerald. 9 of the stories are Zelda’s, 11 are Scott’s, and 1 is credited to both Scott and Zelda.

Like most short story collections, Bits of Paradise is a mixed bag. Scott’s greatest short stories had already been gathered in several posthumous collections, and Bits of Paradise was the best of what was left over. The Foreword by Scottie Fitzgerald Smith, Scott and Zelda’s only child, claims “This is the last book which will ever be published devoted to previously uncollected writings of my parents.” (p.1) Scholars of both Scott and Zelda will have to stifle their laughter at that one, as there have been numerous collections of both Scott and Zelda’s writings published since 1973.

The stories in Bits of Paradise are presented in chronological order. “The Popular Girl,” published in two parts in The Saturday Evening Post in 1922, is a fine story with some of Fitzgerald’s most vivid descriptions of Saint Paul, his hometown. It’s curious to me that Fitzgerald didn’t include “The Popular Girl” in his 1922 short story collection Tales of the Jazz Age, as it’s much stronger than the weakest stories in that volume. (“Tarquin of Cheapside,” “Mr. Icky” and “Jemina,” I’m looking at you!) Fitzgerald did not share my opinion and considered “The Popular Girl” “too cheap to print.” (Dear Scott, Dear Max, p.54) Like many of his short stories, “The Popular Girl” shows Fitzgerald’s fascinations with young love and class.

“The Popular Girl” tells the tale of Yanci Bowman, a girl who wants to marry a rich man in order to secure her financial future. The story may seem cheesy and melodramatic to readers now, 100 years after its first publication, but it is at the same time a realistic picture of the limited choices a woman like Yanci had to make about her future in 1922.

The male character in “The Popular Girl” is named Scott, which makes it the rare Fitzgerald story (possibly the only one) where he gave a character his own name. (Fitzgerald was “Scott” to his friends, no one ever called him by his given name, Francis.) The Scott in the story does not share any meaningful characteristics with the author, however.

The description of Saint Paul occurs as Yanci takes Scott for a moonlight drive down “Crest Avenue,” patterned after Summit Avenue, a street that Fitzgerald lived on, and nearby, for much of his youth. “Crest Avenue” also appears in Fitzgerald’s play The Vegetable, and in the Basil Duke Lee short story “Forging Ahead.” Fitzgerald critiques the architecture of Summit Avenue, such as “the great brownstone mass built by R.R. Comerford, the flour king, followed by a half mile of pretentious stone houses put up in the gloomy 90’s.” (p.29) The Comerford house is meant to be the James J. Hill house, a massive mansion built in the Richardsonian Romanesque style, which was greatly in vogue in the 1880’s and 1890’s, but was decidedly out of fashion by the time Fitzgerald was writing the story in 1921. Yanci and Scott drive until Crest dead-ends at the Mississippi River. “This is our show street,” she says to him. Scott responds, “A museum of American architectural failures.” (p.30) That quote still gets attributed to Scott Fitzgerald, although it’s rarely mentioned as coming from “The Popular Girl,” and it oddly gets mangled to “a mausoleum of American architectural monstrosities.” The quote is certainly emblematic of what a snobbish Easterner like Scott Kimberley might have thought of Saint Paul in 1921.

Fitzgerald was always concerned with the passage of time, and the impermanence of life. As Yanci sits on a train, Fitzgerald narrates, “Here and there sat a chaperone, a mass of decaying rock in a field of flowers, predicting with a mute and somber fatality the end of all gayety and all youth.” (p.54) That quote is so beautifully emblematic of Fitzgerald to me: even in the midst of happiness he focuses instead on something sad and somber.

“Love in the Night” was published just a month before The Great Gatsby came out. It’s a slight story, set on the French Riviera. The main character is a Russian nobleman, working as waiter. While that may sound like a fanciful twist of fate to modern readers, it was the plight of many of the wealthy “white” Russians who fled during or after the “red” Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, and the bloody civil war that followed. Once again, Fitzgerald is concerned with those people of a certain genteel class who have status, but no money. It’s always a bit odd to read something of Fitzgerald’s from around the same time as Gatsby that just isn’t as good.

“Our Own Movie Queen” was originally published as by F. Scott Fitzgerald, but according to his notes, it was “Two-thirds by Zelda. Only my climax and revision.” (p.86) It appears in Bits of Paradise as by Scott and Zelda. “Our Own Movie Queen” is another short story set in Scott’s home state of Minnesota—this time in the fictional town of New Heidelberg.

“Our Own Movie Queen” is light as a feather, and my favorite line from it is the following: “Mr. Pomeroy, though impervious both to ridicule and insult, was a sensitive man to compliments.” (p.94)

 “A Penny Spent” is another lighter than air confection, riding along with the breeze of Scott’s jaunty sentences. It features the marvelous line: “Among our deficiencies as a race is the fact that we have no respect for the contemplative mood.” (p.113)

I found “The Dance” to be a fascinating story. It’s perhaps not that successful, but it’s interesting nonetheless. It’s told in the first person, from the viewpoint of a female narrator, it takes place in the South, and there’s a little bit about race. And “The Dance” features a beautiful closing sentence: “What I dread above all things is the unknown depths, the incalculable ebb and flow, the secret shapes of things that drift through opaque darkness under the surface of the sea.” (p.157)

“Jacob’s Ladder” is one of the best short stories in Bits of Paradise. Fitzgerald was a harsh critic of his own work, and he was particularly insistent about not reprinting material that he used in his novels. When Fitzgerald took material from the magazine version of his short story “Winter Dreams” for The Great Gatsby, he re-wrote the paragraphs in “Winter Dreams” when it appeared in his short story collection All the Sad Young Men. Fitzgerald used sentences and paragraphs from many different short stories for his 1934 novel Tender Is the Night, with the result being that many of his finest short stories from the late 1920’s and early 1930’s went uncollected.

“Jacob’s Ladder” belongs to what I would call the “Lois Moran story cluster,” a group of stories concerning older male protagonists and younger female love interests. 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. Did anything physical ever happen between Moran and Fitzgerald? Depends on who you ask, old sport. Whether or not their relationship was ever consummated, it provided Fitzgerald with the material for some fine short stories.

In one of his sharpest lines critiquing America and capitalism, Fitzgerald writes bitingly of Jacob: “Like so many Americans, he valued things rather than cared about them.” (p.162)

“The Swimmers” is another one of the “Lois Moran cluster” stories, and it also fits into the “marriage problems cluster,” a group of stories, largely written in 1929 and 1930, that give the reader the distinct impression all was not well in the Fitzgerald household.

There are plenty of beautiful sentences in “The Swimmers,” and one of my favorites is about the young woman who entrances the main character: “Looking for a last time into her eyes, full of cool secrets, he realized how much he was going to miss these mornings, without knowing whether it was the girl who interested him or what she represented of his ever-new, ever-changing country.” (p.195)

The last paragraph of “The Swimmers” ranks with the best of Fitzgerald’s writing. “France was a land, England was a people, but America, having about it still that quality of the idea, was harder to utter—it was the graves at Shiloh and the tired, drawn, nervous faces of its great men, and the country boys dying in the Argonne for a phrase that was empty before their bodies withered. It was a willingness of the heart.” (p.210)

After “The Swimmers” we get 6 stories in a row from Zelda. The “girl” series of stories mostly appeared in the magazine College Humor, which was not as lowbrow as it sounds. College Humor had made Scott an offer of $10,000 to serialize The Great Gatsby in 1925. Thankfully, Fitzgerald turned them down, writing to his literary agent Harold Ober, “most people who saw it advertised in College Humor would be sure that Gatsby was a great halfback.” (As Ever, Scott Fitz, p.74)

The “girl” stories were written by Zelda, and Scott assisted with the editing, but they appeared in College Humor as written by both Scott and Zelda. Harold Ober wrote a memo about the “girl” stories on February 14, 1929. “Scott Fitzgerald said that Zelda would do six articles for College Humor, that he would go over them and fix them up and that the articles would be signed with both their names.” (As Ever, Scott Fitz, p.127) We don’t know what Zelda thought of this co-billing arrangement.

Adding to the confusion about authorship and billing, Zelda’s story “A Millionaire’s Girl” appeared in The Saturday Evening Post in May of 1930 under Scott’s name alone. How did the authorship change come about? It was partly Harold Ober’s fault. Ober wrote a memo about the story: “I think it was meant for College Humor but came from France with Scott’s handwritten changes and I thought it was his and sent it to SEP {The Saturday Evening Post} and they bought it.” (As Ever, Scott Fitz, p.166) Ober makes it sound as though it was just an honest mistake, and it is conceivable that he thought Scott wrote it, as it’s the most “Scott-like” of the “girl” series of stories. But “A Millionaire’s Girl” was also the fifth story in the “girl” series, and the general pattern of the story fits with the previous stories, so didn’t that tip off Ober that it was part of the series for College Humor? And the confusion also begs the question, didn’t Scott send the story with a cover letter, or anything indicating who wrote the story? Maybe he did, and maybe he didn’t, we don’t know.

In a letter to Scott, dated April 8, 1930, Ober wrote: “I note what you say about Zelda’s story that I sold to the Post. It is much too good a story for College Humor and it had so much of you in it that I am sure it would have been recognized as your story no matter under what name it was published…I think it is a great mistake to waste good ideas on Swanson {the editor of College Humor} for such a low price. I really felt a little guilty about dropping Zelda’s name from that story, but I think she understands that using the two names would have tied the story up with the College Humor stories and might have got us into trouble. Will you please tell her for me that it was a mighty good piece of work.” (As Ever, Scott Fitz, p.166)

The difference in money that Ober refers to was large: College Humor paid $500 for most of the “girl” stories, eventually raised to $800 for the final story in the series, while The Saturday Evening Post paid $4,000 for “A Millionaire’s Girl.” Unfortunately, we don’t know what Scott said to Ober about the story, since that letter is not included in the book of Fitzgerald-Ober correspondence.

There’s more to the story, but we must go to another source for the information. Nancy Milford’s 1970 biography Zelda tells us that there was a telegram, presumably sent by Ober, (although Milford doesn’t say who the telegram is from) telling Scott “Millionaire’s Girl can sell Post four thousand without Zelda’s name cable confirmation.” (Zelda: A Biography, by Nancy Milford, p.398) Scott must have cabled back yes to Ober, allowing him to sell the story to the Post without Zelda’s name attached as the author.

I suspect Ober thought “A Millionaire’s Girl” was too good for College Humor, so he submitted it to The Saturday Evening Post, which was the prime market for Scott’s short stories. We don’t know how Ober presented the story to the Post: did he say it was written by Scott and Zelda, or did he present it as by Scott alone? Either way, Ober was going behind Scott’s back, as the story should have been offered to College Humor first. We don’t have Scott’s telegram responding to Ober about selling the story to the Post, all we know is that he obviously said yes, knowing that Zelda’s name would be off the story.

I doubt there was conscious malicious intent on either Ober or Scott’s part to strip Zelda of the authorship credit for “A Millionaire’s Girl,” but the incident doesn’t reflect well on either one of them. We don’t know if Zelda was consulted about any of this, and we don’t know how she reacted. I would assume she was not happy about the incident.

In a letter dated May 26, 1930, shortly after the Post publication of “A Millionaire’s Girl,” Ober wrote to Fitzgerald that H.N. Swanson, the editor of College Humor, had sent a telegram to both Ober and Fitzgerald. The telegram is presumably lost to history, but from what Ober writes to Fitzgerald, it seems as though Swanson was annoyed that “A Millionaire’s Girl” had been published in The Saturday Evening Post and not offered to College Humor first. Swanson had every right to be annoyed about this. Ober advised Scott not to answer, and gave his own opinion of Swanson:

“I think Swanson is slightly crazy. He seems to be possessed with the idea that for some unknown reason he should get the best work of the best authors for a fraction of the price other magazines are willing to pay…I am pretty much disgusted with him…I don’t think his magazine has any great dignity and I’ll be just as pleased if your name never again appeared in it.” (As Ever, Scott Fitz, p.171)

This letter plainly shows Ober’s attitude towards College Humor and reinforces his motivation for submitting “A Millionaire’s Girl” to the Post. The higher price Scott’s short stories fetched, the higher Ober’s commission as an agent would be. Ober also knew that the story would have much high visibility if it was published in the Post rather than College Humor. I’m not trying to justify Ober’s actions, but I think money played a role, as well as his general dislike of Swanson and College Humor.

Much of the discussion of Scott and Zelda’s relationship unfortunately turns into a competition of Scott vs. Zelda, or Zelda vs. Scott. As author Mary Gordon wrote in her 1991 introduction to The Collected Writings of Zelda Fitzgerald, “Why do we feel as if we can belong to only one of two armed camps, the camp that sees her as a formless, scattershot nothing who made a great writer’s last days miserable with her pretensions and demands, or the camp that is sure she wrote his best work, and blames him for her disintegration.” (p.xviii) I agree. Too often, discussions of Scott and Zelda’s marriage turns into a competition of “who was worse to whom,” which does neither side any favors. Isn’t it enough to say that they were both awful to each other, yet they both loved each other in some deep, unexplainable way?

“A Millionaire’s Girl” is perhaps the finest story of the “girl” series, and features terrific observations, such as this: “I could see her changing personalities behind the first onrush of people in the Los Angeles station, marking herself with the silent wary confidence so necessary in a world of competitive struggle.” (Bits of Paradise, p.259) “A Millionaire’s Girl” really is an excellent story, and it’s close enough to Scott’s work to masquerade as it, but Zelda’s odd metaphors and similes mark it clearly as her own work.

Because readers who encountered “A Millionaire’s Girl” in 1930 thought it was a story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, and readers in 2022 know it’s a story by Zelda Fitzgerald, I was struck as I read the story by this odd sensation of switching the gender of the narrator between male and female. (We never learn the gender of the narrators of the “girl” stories.)

Zelda was a talented writer with a gift for description and narration, but I think Nancy Milford accurately diagnoses the shortcomings of the “girl” stories. “They do not quite succeed in coming to life. Seen always from a distance by a detached and omniscient narrator about whom we know nothing (we are not even sure whether that observer is male or female), the girls do not interact with life. Rather, they are moved through it. Dialogue is almost nonexistent…what she does is to describe the characters, not develop them.” (Zelda: A Biography, by Nancy Milford, p.151)

I found two of Zelda’s later stories, “Miss Ella,” and “A Couple of Nuts” to be more successful than the “girl” stories. Zelda’s voice seems more developed in these stories, there’s more a sense of her individual style as a writer.

It’s not quite fair to come up with a final judgement on Zelda’s writings based on the short stories in Bits of Paradise. Zelda suffered mental breakdowns in 1930, 1932, and 1934, and she published no stories or articles after 1934. (Although she was able to write a novel, Save Me the Waltz, in just a couple of months while she was in the hospital in 1932.) it’s impossible to know in what direction her writing talents might have developed. If we were to judge Scott on his first 10 short stories, there’s no way anyone could have predicted that he would turn out so many masterpieces in the future. But Zelda showed a clear talent for writing.

Scott’s remaining stories in Bits of Paradise are interesting: “A New Leaf” finds Fitzgerald exploring alcoholic dissipation in a manner that carried over into his novel Tender Is the Night. There’s a beautiful sentence at the beginning of the story: “Anything added to beauty has to be paid for—that is to say, the qualities that pass as substitutes can be liabilities when added to beauty itself.” (p.299-300)

“What a Handsome Pair!” isn’t Fitzgerald’s best story, but there are magnificent sentences. Consider this description in the second paragraph: “Her eyes were red from weeping, but she was young enough for it not to detract from her glossy beauty—a beauty that had reached the point where it seemed to contain in itself the secret of its own growth, as if it would go on increasing forever.” (p.340) There’s nothing quite like Fitzgerald when he’s writing about a pretty girl—they obviously moved him to new heights of expression.

I can’t help but wonder if parts of “What a Handsome Pair!” were inspired by Scott and Zelda’s marriage. “He hated the conflict that had grown out of their wanting the same excellences, the same prizes from life.” (p.358) There was certainly conflict between Scott and Zelda during the time this story was written in 1932, and Scott was worried that Zelda’s writings would cover the same subject matter as the long-gestating novel he was working on. In “What a Handsome Pair!” there is a composer whose wife knows nothing about music, and I wonder if this was a mean-spirited jab at Zelda’s attempts to be a writer.

Bits of Paradise finishes with two pieces of Scott’s that were published posthumously. “Last Kiss” appeared in Collier’s magazine in 1949, 9 years after Scott’s death. It reads like a rough draft of The Last Tycoon; the novel Scott was working on when he died. At the very end of “Last Kiss,” we get a nod towards Fitzgerald’s most famous work, as the main character seeks to repeat the past, just like Jay Gatsby.

“Dearly Beloved” is an odd little sketch. Just over two pages in length, it was unpublished until 1969. It’s Fitzgerald’s only story featuring main characters who are Black. Fitzgerald’s short stories changed after Zelda’s breakdowns. Scott lost some of that golden, romantic charm of youth, some of the optimism that fueled him, that tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther…and it was replaced by a knowledge that life could be harsh and cruel. He writes in “Dearly Beloved,” “For things change and get so different that we can hardly recognize them and it seems that only our names remain the same.” (p.386) “Dearly Beloved” ends with Fitzgerald stating, “So things go,” a phrase that oddly enough brings to mind Kurt Vonnegut’s repeated refrain of “So it goes,” from Slaughterhouse-Five, published in 1969, the same year that “Dearly Beloved” first appeared. And so, Fitzgerald continues to echo and rhyme down the generations, his beautiful, evocative prose still reverberating.