Book Review: Taps at Reveille, by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1935)

My battered paperback copy of Taps at Reveille, by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Originally published in 1935, this paperback is from the 1970's. The cover illustration looks like it was a reject for Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men. Did anyone tell the artist anything about Fitzgerald?

F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1930's.

 Taps at Reveille was F. Scott Fitzgerald’s fourth short story collection. Published in March of 1935, it proved to be the final book of Fitzgerald’s writings published before Fitzgerald’s premature death at age 44 in December 1940.  

Taps at Reveille was the largest short story collection that Fitzgerald assembled, containing 18 short stories written between 1927 and 1935. During this period, Fitzgerald struggled to complete his fourth novel, Tender Is the Night, but he wrote many of his finest short stories. Between 1928 and 1931, Fitzgerald wrote 14 short stories about the characters Basil Duke Lee and Josephine Perry. Fitzgerald considered collecting all these stories together as a stand-alone book, and perhaps adding a 15th story where Basil and Josephine would meet. Ultimately, Fitzgerald decided against this, and it wasn’t until 1973 that all of the Basil and Josephine stories were collected in one volume. In my opinion, The Basil and Josephine Stories is one of the finest collections of Fitzgerald’s short stories.  

Taps at Reveille contains 8 of the 14 Basil and Josephine stories, and the stories provide an excellent introduction to Fitzgerald as a sharp-eyed social historian. I suspect that young Basil Duke Lee was quite similar to young F. Scott Fitzgerald.  

“Crazy Sunday” is one of Fitzgerald’s greatest short stories, probably in his top 10, I’d say. Parts of the story are based on a party that was held at the home of producer Irving Thalberg and actress Norma Shearer. Several drinks into the afternoon, Fitzgerald decided to perform a silly song called “Dog” that he had written with Edmund Wilson. His performance went over like a lead balloon. Actor John Gilbert booed Fitzgerald. (Gilbert is referred to in “Crazy Sunday” by his nickname, “The Great Lover.”) It should have been evident to all present that “Dog” was not merely a bad song, but a deliberately bad song: 

“Dog, Dog—I like a good dog 

Towser or Bowser or Star 

Clean sort of pleasure 

A four-footed treasure 

And faithful as few humans are! 

Here, Pup: put your paw up 

Roll over dead like a log! 

Larger than a rat! 

More faithful than a cat! 

Dog! Dog! Dog!” 

(Some Sort of Epic Grandeur, p.132-3) 

Personally, I find “Dog” quite funny, although it’s certainly not sophisticated humor. The day after the party, Norma Shearer sent Fitzgerald a telegram: “I thought you were one of the most agreeable persons at our tea.” (Some Sort of Epic Grandeur, p.318) In “Crazy Sunday,” the character modeled after Shearer sends a similarly worded telegram. 

“The Last of the Belles” is another of my favorite Fitzgerald short stories. 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.232)  

Fitzgerald set a handful of his short stories in the American South, and “The Last of the Belles” and “Family in the Wind” are fine examples of these stories. “Family in the Wind” is somewhat uncharacteristic of Fitzgerald’s work, as it depicts an alcoholic doctor helping victims of a town that has been devastated by a tornado. Like the best of Fitzgerald’s work, it’s beautifully touching.  

Speaking of doctors, there’s another doctor story in the book, “One Interne.” It’s not as successful as “Family in the Wind,” in my opinion. Fitzgerald’s personal life always made it into his fiction in one way or another, and after his wife Zelda suffered mental breakdowns in 1930, 1932, and 1934, doctors and hospitals often appeared in his fiction.  

The two most recent short stories in Taps at Reveille were “The Fiend” and “The Night of Chancellorsville,” which both appeared in Esquire magazine in 1935. Both stories are noticeably shorter than the others in the book, and they differ widely in tone and subject matter from the typical Fitzgerald short story. Both stories reflect the change that occurred in Fitzgerald’s work after Zelda’s third breakdown in 1934. Scott found that he could no longer write the same type of short stories that he used to. I believe that Scott was coming to terms with the fact that Zelda would never be “cured” of her mental illness, and they would never live together again. Whatever youthful illusions Scott was still holding onto were shattered. When he tried to write the same stories about love, class, and money, it didn’t come out right anymore. Fitzgerald was floundering, looking for inspiration anywhere he could find it. His next short story after “The Fiend” and “The Night of Chancellorsville” was “Shaggy’s Morning,” which was written from the perspective of a dog. Fitzgerald made it clear that “Shaggy’s Morning” was not to be collected in a book, and indeed, it never has been. 

“The Fiend” name-checks Stillwater, Minnesota, a town on the St. Croix River, not far from Fitzgerald’s hometown of Saint Paul. The main character in the story is Crenshaw Engels, whose wife and son are murdered. Engels then exacts a kind of revenge on the murderer by visiting him in jail and tormenting him by giving him books with blank pages, or with the ending ripped out. It’s a weird story, and eventually Engels comes to realize his own dependence on these regular visits where he torments the murderer. 

 “The Night of Chancellorsville” is narrated in the first person by a woman who is turning to prostitution during the Civil War. The narrator and other women are sent on a train car, which gets attacked during the Battle of Chancellorsville. It’s an odd story, almost as if Fitzgerald was setting a challenge to himself to write something far outside of his comfort zone. But I think it’s admirable for Fitzgerald to try something different, and it’s especially bold of him to use first-person narration.  

If you removed the author’s name and gave “The Fiend” and “The Night of Chancellorsville” to 100 people to read, I wonder how many people would guess the stories were by F. Scott Fitzgerald? The stories are a good reminder that authors create many different and varied works, sometimes quite different from the style we’re used to reading. 

“A Short Trip Home” is another unusual tale for Fitzgerald, as it deals with the supernatural. I think it’s a very good story. Fitzgerald would sometimes work passages from his short stories into his novels, and then re-write the passage when the story appeared in book form. Fitzgerald used this technique extensively while writing his novel Tender Is the Night, and he was chagrined when a paragraph in “A Short Trip Home” that he had used in Tender slipped through the editing for Taps at Reveille. Fitzgerald wrote a short apology that appears at the bottom of the first page of “A Short Trip Home.” “In a moment of hasty misjudgment a whole paragraph of description was lifted out of this tale where it originated, and properly belongs, and applied to quite a different character in a novel of mine. I have ventured none the less to leave it here, even at the risk of seeming to serve warmed-over fare.” (p.273) 

It’s admirable that Fitzgerald felt this responsibility to not repeat himself and use the same passages in his stories. I’d argue that Fitzgerald was too hard on himself, and I strongly doubt anyone reading Taps at Reveille would have noticed the paragraph if he hadn’t alerted readers to it. There are many fine Fitzgerald short stories from this period that he chose not to collect in Taps at Reveille, and I suspect the fact that he borrowed bits for Tender Is the Night is the reason why he left those stories out of Taps. Fortunately, those stories have since been collected in various Fitzgerald anthologies. Some of my favorite stories from this period that didn’t make it into Taps are: “Jacob’s Ladder,” “The Rough Crossing,” “The Swimmers,” “The Bridal Party,” “One Trip Abroad,” and “A New Leaf.” It speaks to the quality of Fitzgerald’s writing that I can look at perhaps his strongest story collection and name six more stories that I think should have been included.  

“Babylon Revisited” is the final story in Taps at Reveille, and it’s one of Fitzgerald’s very best. It’s a fine ending to a strong collection by one of America’s finest short story writers.