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)

Book Review: The Perfect Hour: The Romance of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ginevra King, His First Love by James L.W. West III (2005)

 

Cover of The Perfect Hour, by James L.W. West III, 2005.

Professor James L.W. West III, one of the leading scholars on the life and work of F. Scott Fitzgerald.

In the studies of F. Scott Fitzgerald, one of the more important people in Fitzgerald’s life was Ginevra King. Fitzgerald and King met fewer than a dozen times in person, so how could she possibly be so important to him? Ginevra King was Scott’s first serious girlfriend, and she inspired many of his female characters in his fiction. In the 2005 book The Perfect Hour: The Romance of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ginevra King, His First Love, by esteemed Fitzgerald scholar James L.W. West III, the full story of Scott and Ginevra’s romance is finally told.

Scott and Ginevra met in Saint Paul in January of 1915, at the home of Marie Hersey, a mutual friend.  Fitzgerald was a sophomore at Princeton University when he met Ginevra, who was two years younger and a student as Westover, a girl’s boarding school in Connecticut. Fitzgerald was from Saint Paul, and the King family was from Chicago. The Fitzgeralds still enjoyed high social standing in Saint Paul, but the family was coasting as the money slowly ran out. In contrast, the Kings were very wealthy, and Ginevra’s father was a stockbroker. The Kings had a large summer residence in Lake Forest and were building a four-story mansion in the Gold Coast area of Chicago.

Scott and Ginevra were instantly smitten with each other and carried on a long-distance romance for two years that was largely conducted through letters. Unfortunately, after their break-up, Scott badgered Ginevra to destroy all of his letters to her. (The modern-day equivalent would be deleting one’s texts, I suppose.) Ginevra’s original letters do not survive, so Scott presumably destroyed those, but before doing so, he hired someone to type them up, and had them bound in a book, which is 227 pages long! (Fitzgerald did not type himself, ergo he must have found someone to type the letters for him.) After Fitzgerald’s death, his daughter Scottie gave the letters back to Ginevra. Ginevra’s descendants allowed West to have full access to her letters, which they have now donated to the Princeton University Library, where they reside with Fitzgerald’s papers.

Thanks to his access to Ginevra’s letters, West can show us that Ginevra reciprocated Scott’s affections, at least for a while. Scott and Ginevra met in person just eight times that we know of. Six of those meetings occurred in 1915, and just two in 1916, indicating that the flame had cooled considerably by then. They broke up in January 1917, two years after their initial meeting. Ginevra later told Scott’s first biographer that she didn’t even remember if she had ever kissed Scott. Ouch. By the summer of 1918, Ginevra was engaged to Billy Mitchell, a family friend who was a naval aviator—the most romantic type of soldiering a young man could do in World War I. Unsurprisingly, Ginevra went for the super-wealthy WASP friend of the family rather than the aspiring novelist with no trust fund from the Irish Catholic family.

Scott was invited to Ginevra’s wedding, which took place in Chicago in September of 1918, but in all likelihood, he did not attend, as he was stationed at Camp Sheridan in Alabama. Fitzgerald did paste the wedding invitation into his scrapbook, along with a newspaper article describing the wedding.  By the time of Ginevra’s wedding, Scott had already met his future wife: the vivacious southern belle Zelda Sayre.

Fitzgerald’s personal life always informed his fiction, and there are numerous connections between the two. He used Ginevra as the model for several characters. In his first novel, This Side of Paradise, elements of Ginevra appear in both Isabelle Borge and Rosalind Connage, two flames of the narrator (and Fitzgerald proxy) Amory Blaine. Ginevra was also the inspiration for Judy Jones, the femme fatale in one of his finest short stories, “Winter Dreams,” first published in 1922.

And what about The Great Gatsby, old sport? Ginevra most likely inspired aspects of the character of Daisy Fay Buchanan. It’s an oversimplification to say that Ginevra was Daisy. As West writes, “Daisy Buchanan is a composite.” (p.96) Aspects of both Ginevra and Zelda went into Daisy’s character, but Daisy’s wealth and social status are much more in line with Ginevra King’s rather than Zelda Sayre’s.

The narrative part of The Perfect Hour is rather short, just over 100 pages. Fortunately, West has also included some of Ginevra’s diary entries, five of her letters to Fitzgerald, and the texts of “Babes in the Woods” and “Winter Dreams” two of the short stories that Ginevra helped to inspire. For a Fitzgerald fan, The Perfect Hour is a must-read, as West tells Scott and Ginevra’s story honestly, without hyperbole or exaggeration.

Book Review: The Apprentice Fiction of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edited by John Kuehl (1965)

Paperback cover of The Apprentice Fiction of F. Scott Fitzgerald, edited by John Kuehl, 1965. That's one of my Fitzgerald shelves. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor)

F. Scott Fitzgerald, probably taken during his time at Princeton.

The Apprentice Fiction of F. Scott Fitzgerald, edited by John Kuehl and first published in 1965, collects Fitzgerald’s first 15 short stories, written from 1909-1917. The stories take us through Fitzgerald’s school career, from Saint Paul Academy to the Newman School, a prestigious Catholic prep academy in New Jersey, to Princeton University, which Fitzgerald left in 1917 before completing his degree. (Fitzgerald was posthumously awarded an honorary diploma from the Princeton class of 2017.) 

Fitzgerald was very selective about the short stories that he selected for the collections that were published during his lifetime, so he might be annoyed if he knew that future generations of readers could pore over his prep school works. However, as juvenile as some of these stories might be, they do give us some insight into the future of Fitzgerald’s writing career. 

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s very first appearance in print was at the age of 13 in the October, 1909 issue of Now and Then, the school newspaper of Saint Paul Academy. His short story “The Mystery of the Raymond Mortgage” was included in that issue. It was something of an inauspicious debut, as the readers of the detective story never actually learn who stole the titular mortgage. The story could almost be read as a parody of detective stories, as the mystery of the mortgage remains unsolved. However, it’s more likely that the shortcomings of the plot stem from the youth of the author, rather than a deliberate attempt on Fitzgerald’s part to parody the conventions of detective stories. 

By the time Fitzgerald wrote “A Luckless Santa Claus,” in 1912 he had learned more about grabbing the reader’s attention. The first sentence of the story is: “Miss Harmon was responsible for the whole thing.” (p.48) Instantly, your curiosity is piqued. What whole thing is Miss Harmon responsible for? 

Lifelong preoccupations of Fitzgerald’s surface in these early stories. His second story, published in the February, 1910 issue of Now and Then, is “Reade, Substitute Right Half.” It’s a brief sketch that shows us how a scrawny youth wins recognition for his stellar play on the football field. Fitzgerald longed for glory of his own on the athletic fields, but at 5 foot 8 and of slender build, it was unlikely that he would succeed at football. (According to F. Scott Fitzgerald in Minnesota: Toward the Summit, he weighed 138 pounds. P.77) One of Fitzgerald’s keenest disappointments during his college years was that he didn’t make the Princeton football team. While football never became a major theme in Fitzgerald’s work, he remained a devoted fan of the sport his whole life. When he suffered his fatal heart attack on December 21, 1940, he was reading and annotating his copy of the Princeton Alumni Weekly, making notes about the current Princeton football team. 

Fitzgerald’s interest in the Civil War shows up in his stories “A Debt of Honor,” and “The Room with the Green Blinds.” Fitzgerald was somewhat torn between the North and the South. He was raised in the North, in Minnesota and New York, but his father’s family was from Maryland, a border state that remained in the Union but retained slavery and had many Southern sympathizers. Fitzgerald was always drawn towards lost causes, and he seems to have retained a romantic vision of a languid Southern aristocracy. And, of course, he married a Southern belle, Zelda Sayre, from Montgomery, Alabama. Zelda’s family was well entrenched in the Old South—her father was a Justice on the Alabama Supreme Court. 

The weirdest story in The Apprentice Fiction is “Tarquin of Cheepside,” later revised and reprinted in Fitzgerald’s 1922 short story collection Tales of the Jazz Age. The story describes a young man’s flight from angry pursuers, and the friend who shelters him. Although the man who is fleeing remains unnamed, we learn that he had assaulted a woman. Once the pursuers have left, the young man starts writing a poem—“The Rape of Lucrece.” The young man is William Shakespeare! Fitzgerald is calling the greatest writer of all time a rapist! Didn’t anticipate that plot twist! The writing in “Tarquin” is impressionistic and poetic, but I would guess that the subject matter irked some readers. 

Fitzgerald’s interest in the theater is also on display in his early stories. As a teenager, he wrote four plays for the Elizabethan Dramatic Club, a group of young amateur actors in Saint Paul. Fitzgerald also contributed to several shows for the Triangle Club, Princeton University’s dramatic club. “Shadow Laurels,” from April 1915, is presented as a play, complete with stage directions. There’s a marvelous line in it, as one of the characters says, “He was bright and clever—when we worked, he worked feverishly hard, but he was always drunk, night and day.” (p.74) The same could be said of F. Scott Fitzgerald himself. 

The Princeton short story “Babes in the Woods” later shows up as Amory and Isabelle’s initial meeting in Fitzgerald’s first novel, This Side of Paradise, published in March of 1920. A line in the story “Sentiment—and the Use of Rouge” is later repeated in This Side of Paradise, as Eleanor is asked if she is a sentimentalist. She replies, “No, I’m a romantic. There’s a huge difference; a sentimental person thinks things will last, a romantic person hopes they won’t.” (p.150) This quote seems to be an apt description of Fitzgerald himself. 

“The Pierian Springs and the Last Straw” is a very interesting story. I read the characters of Uncle George and Mrs. Fulham as portraits of Scott and his lost love, Ginevra King. That might be too much of a stretch, but Fitzgerald got much of his inspiration from his own life. Ginevra King was one of the most famous debutantes of the era. She was from a wealthy family in Lake Forest, Illinois. King and Fitzgerald dated a few times, but later in life she didn’t even remember if she had kissed him or not. Their relationship was mainly through letters. Scott kept all of Ginevra’s letters to him, and later had them bound into a book. The book was 227 pages long. Ginevra didn’t keep any of Scott’s letters to her. Many Fitzgerald biographers believe that Ginevra was the model for Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby. 

Throughout The Apprentice Fiction you see Fitzgerald working out what will become his classic themes—class, status, money, love, drinking. There are flashes of good writing and insight, but also clunky sentences and hackneyed plots. There are no real hints that the author of the stories in The Apprentice Fiction will become one of the major American authors of the 20^th century. However, you can see that Fitzgerald has progressed a long way from the juvenilia at the beginning of the book.

I wouldn’t recommend The Apprentice Fiction for casual readers of Fitzgerald’s work, but it’s a very useful collection for readers interested in Fitzgerald’s youthful writings.