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.