Book Review: Flamethrowers: Carlton & Gossage, by Bill Gutman (1982)

My copy of Flamethrowers: Carlton & Gossage, by Bill Gutman, 1982. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor)

Why did I recently read the 1982 baseball book Flamethrowers: Carlton & Gossage, by Bill Gutman, when it was probably intended for 6^th graders? Well, because Steve Carlton is my favorite baseball player. When I found Flamethrowers in a box of books marked 50 cents at one of my favorite used bookstores, I had to get it. There was a book about Steve Carlton that I didn’t even know about!

As you can tell from the title, Flamethrowers focuses on two pitchers who ended up in the Hall of Fame: Steve Carlton and Rich “Goose” Gossage. Bill Gutman tells us their backstories and takes us through their careers, year by year. Flamethrowers is written well, for what it is, and although I don’t think Gutman interviewed either Steve Carlton or Goose Gossage for the book, he sprinkles it with quotes from newspapers and other sources. (I’m assuming Gutman used other sources, although, not surprisingly, the book lacks either footnotes or a bibliography.) 

The part of the book about Goose Gossage was less interesting to me, so I’ll cover that first. It’s still an interesting overview of Gossage’s career through 1981. Gossage was one of the finest relief pitchers in baseball from 1975-1985, using his wild delivery, overpowering fastball, and Fu Manchu mustache to intimidate batters in late innings. On the subject of mustaches, Al Hrabosky, another Fu Manchu-d reliever from the 1970’s, once said, “How can I intimidate batters if I look like a fucking golf pro?” 

It’s interesting now to read about how Gossage was used in relief, which is very different from how most closers are used today. Nowadays, your closer comes in for the 9^th inning, throws some fastballs, and nails down the save. But in Flamethrowers, you’ll read about Gossage coming into games in the 7^th or 8^th innings! That’s right, closers sometimes used to pitch more than just one inning!

Gossage was part of the craziness that was the New York Yankees during the George Steinbrenner years of the 1970’s and 1980’s. Despite that, Gossage pitched well under pressure on the game’s biggest stages. Minnesota Twins fans like myself will enjoy the references to two of the Yankees’ other relief pitchers of 1981: Ron Davis and George Frazier. Ron Davis was the Twins’ closer from 1982 to 1985, and that time was, um, somewhat tumultuous. I’m pretty sure that Minneapolis Star Tribune columnist Patrick Reusse credits the trade of Davis to the Cubs in August of 1986 as the crucial move that allowed the Twins to triumph in the World Series in 1987. Ironically, George Frazier was one of the players the Twins received from the Cubs for Davis. Frazier set the ignominious record of losing three games in the same World Series for the Yankees in 1981. Fortunately, Frazier emerged unscathed from his one appearance in the 1987 World Series for the Twins.

I learned some new facts about Steve Carlton from Flamethrowers. For example, Gutman writes that Carlton was called up by the Cardinals at the end of the 1964 season, but didn’t pitch in any games. I had never heard this before. 1964 was Carlton’s first professional season, and he quickly rose through the ranks and was promoted to Tulsa, the Cardinals AA farm team. Gutman writes that Carlton warmed up once for the Cardinals in the bullpen, during a high scoring game against the Mets. He even quotes Carlton: “I was so nervous I couldn’t believe it. I began throwing to Dave Ricketts and I couldn’t even see him.” (p.8) 

I’ve never encountered the story of Carlton being called up at the end of 1964, and since the Cardinals were involved in a tight pennant race, which they ended up coming out on top of, I thought it was unlikely they would have called up a 19-year-old pitcher just finishing his first pro season. But I did some Googling to see what I could find. And I found a copy of a major league contract signed by Steve Carlton, dated September 19, 1964. Carlton’s contract was approved by National League President Warren Giles on September 24^th. The game that Gutman references where Carlton warmed up, but didn’t actually enter, took place on October 3, 1964. The Mets beat the Cardinals 15-5. The Cardinals used 8 pitchers in the game, so their bullpen was stretched thin. The fact that Carlton signed a major league contract in September of 1964 is proof enough for me that they called him up at the end of the season. 

Steve Carlton is known now for his silence with the media, for his intense and unorthodox physical conditioning program, and for his focus on the mental aspect of baseball. But these characteristics took time to develop, and they were not part of his makeup when he made his major league debut with the Cardinals on April 12, 1965. 

Carlton was clearly a talented young pitcher with a live fastball and an excellent curve, but when he added a slider to his repertoire in 1969, he took his game to the next level and emerged as a truly dominant starting pitcher. Carlton’s slider looked just like his fastball, until it dove downward at the last possible instant. It was a pitch that would confuse hitters for the rest of Carlton’s career. Late in 1969, Carlton set a major league record by striking out 19 New York Mets. (Ironically, Carlton lost the game, 4-3.) 

However, in 1970 Carlton stopped throwing his slider, as it was hurting his arm. He was struggling through a difficult season as the losses piled up. Sometime that season he started getting letters from a fan who thought that Carlton wasn’t focusing his mental energy. Carlton said: “You can create an atmosphere about yourself, positive or negative. The year I lost nineteen games {1970} I was all wrapped up in self-pity. I really learned a lot about mental attitude that year.” (p.23) 

Carlton rebounded from 1970 to become a 20-game winner for the first time in 1971. When he wanted a raise from the Cardinals, the team refused. The difference in dollars between Carlton and the Cardinals was small, but in February, 1972, the team traded him to the lowly Philadelphia Phillies. Carlton was determined to not let this affect his positive mental attitude. Carlton proclaimed days that he started to be “win day,” and in 1972, he was almost always right. Carlton won 27 games for a last-place team that only managed 59 wins, meaning that Carlton was responsible for 45.8% of the Phillies’ wins! Carlton won the pitching Triple Crown, leading the National League in wins, ERA, and strikeouts. He also won the Cy Young Award. Phillies manager Paul Owens said the team performed differently when Carlton was pitching: “It was Steve’s charisma, the feeling of confidence everyone had when he was on the mound.” (p.33)

Expectations were sky-high for Carlton entering the 1973 season. Carlton had done nothing to tamp these expectations down, as he spoke publicly about the possibility of winning 30 games. Instead, he went from a 20-game winner to a 20-game loser, finishing 1973 with an ERA almost two runs higher than 1972, and a record of 13-20. Carlton had walking pneumonia during the season, and although he didn’t spend any time on the disabled list because of that, it couldn’t have helped. The media started being more critical of Carlton during 1973. If he was thinking so positively, why couldn’t he win 30 games? Up to this point in his career, Carlton’s relationship with the press had been largely positive. Now it turned antagonistic. Eventually, as the 1970’s wore on, Carlton stopped talking to the press altogether. Despite what most people have written about Carlton’s silence in the media, it was not absolute, as he still gave occasional interviews during this time. For example, Hal Bodley interviewed him in the 1980-81 off-season for his book about the 1980 Phillies, The Team That Wouldn’t Die. And Carlton would still talk to reporters off the record about subjects other than baseball. But if they tried to wheedle an on the record baseball-related quote from him, Carlton would grin and say, “Policy is policy.” 

1974 and 1975 were two more up-and-down seasons for Carlton, as the Phillies slowly improved. According to Gutman, Carlton was suffering from a sore arm these two seasons. Carlton led the league in strikeouts in 1974, but he also led the league in walks. In 1976 both Carlton and the Phillies exploded, as the Phillies surged to the top of the NL East, and Carlton won 20 games while losing just 7. So, what changed? For Carlton, he started working with Gus Hoefling, a “strength and flexibility expert.” (p.59) Carlton and Hoefling devised an unusual workout strategy that defied much of the conventional logic about how pitchers should train. The thinking was that pitchers should run. A lot. Carlton wasn’t a fan of running, and he was an early proponent of weight lifting, which was not very widespread in baseball in the 1970’s. Carlton also studied martial arts, and some of his training was inspired by martial arts exercises. One of the exercises called for Carlton to stick his left arm in a barrel of rice and work his hand down to the bottom of the barrel. Carlton’s best friend in baseball, the chatty catcher Tim McCarver, said of Lefty’s workouts: “It’s a very strenuous training program. I know because I’ve tried it and it almost killed me.” (p.60) 

My own theory is that Carlton’s career was rejuvenated by his unorthodox training program. After the 1975 season, Carlton’s won-loss record stood at 148-119, for a winning percentage of .554. From 1976 through the 1984 season, Carlton’s record was 165-88, for a winning percentage of .652. I’m not saying wins and losses are the be all and end all for pitchers, and surely part of Carlton’s changing fortunes were due to the Phillies’ improvement as a team over those same years, but I think Carlton’s training helped make him a better pitcher. 

Carlton won the Cy Young Award again in 1977 and 1980. The latter season was one of Carlton’s best, as he led the league in wins and strikeouts, going 24-9 for a Phillies team that finally made it past the NLCS to the World Series. Carlton went 2-0 in the World Series, including the deciding Game 6. Unbeknownst to anyone at the time, in 1980 Carlton put up what will probably be the last 300-inning season a pitcher ever throws. Carlton threw 304 innings in the regular season, and then added another 27 1/3 innings in the postseason! In Game 2 of the World Series, Carlton threw eight innings and 159 pitches. No pitcher would be allowed to do that today. 

The 1981 season saw Carlton add more highlights to his formidable resume, as he became the first left-hander to strike out 3,000 batters, and he also surpassed Bob Gibson’s record for most strikeouts in the National League. And that’s where Flamethrowers leaves Steve Carlton, a 37-year-old power pitcher whose slider was still one of the best pitches in baseball. 

Carlton had another great season in 1982, as he became the first pitcher to win four Cy Young Awards, leading the league in pretty much everything: wins, games started, complete games, shutouts, innings pitched, strikeouts—as well as most hits allowed. In 1983 Carlton won his 300^th game, led the league in strikeouts and innings, and helped the Phillies make it back to the World Series. In 1983 and 1984 Carlton and Nolan Ryan traded off the title of all-time strikeout leader. Carlton went on the disabled list for the first time in his career in 1985 with rotator cuff issues. He wasn’t the same pitcher after that, although he persisted with his positive mental outlook, even as he bounced from team to team. He recorded his 4,000^th strikeout with the San Francisco Giants in 1986, which is still the National League record. Carlton pitched his last game for the Minnesota Twins in 1988, finishing his career with 329 wins. Carlton was a first-ballot Hall of Famer in 1994. 

If you’re really, really obsessed with either Steve Carlton or Goose Gossage, or baseball in the 1970’s, then I can heartily recommend Flamethrowers to you.

Book Review: F. Scott Fitzgerald in Minnesota: The Writer & His Friends at Home, by Dave Page, Photographs by Jeff Krueger (2017)

Fitzgerald historian Dave Page, author of F. Scott Fitzgerald in Minnesota: The Writer & His Friends at Home, 2017.

Photographer Jeff Krueger.

I’m a big fan of F. Scott Fitzgerald, and I give Fitzgerald walking tours of the Saint Paul neighborhood he lived in. The more I read by and about Fitzgerald, the more intrigued I am by this man who wrote such fantastic prose. 

In 2017’s F. Scott Fitzgerald in Minnesota: The Writer & His Friends at Home, author Dave Page has produced the essential work about Fitzgerald’s life in Minnesota. Page has written about Fitzgerald before: in the 1996 book F. Scott Fitzgerald in Minnesota: Toward the Summit, co-written with John J. Koblas, in the notes he wrote for the 2004 collection The St. Paul Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, which he co-edited, and in his perceptive Introduction and Afterword to the 2013 re-printing of The Thoughtbook of F. Scott Fitzgerald, a teenage diary that Fitzgerald kept. 

F. Scott Fitzgerald in Minnesota: The Writer & His Friends at Home is beautifully illustrated with photographs by Jeff Krueger, who has done a fantastic job at capturing the essence of Fitzgerald’s neighborhood. There are also period photos of some of the houses and buildings, as well as newspaper clippings about Fitzgerald and his friends. 

F. Scott Fitzgerald in Minnesota: The Writer & His Friends at Home was published by Fitzgerald in Saint Paul, a non-profit organization dedicated to “celebrating the life and literature of F. Scott Fitzgerald.” The organization was started by an endowment from Richard McDermott, who lived in Fitzgerald’s birthplace for almost forty years. 

Throughout the book, Page reminds us of Fitzgerald’s place in the Saint Paul society of his adolescence and young adulthood—he was not merely on the fringes of the Saint Paul elite, he was among the elite. Scott’s family was prominent enough in Saint Paul that when he visited Europe for the first time in 1921, the Archbishop of Saint Paul wrote him a letter of introduction to the Pope! (Despite the kind words from the Archbishop, Scott and Zelda did not meet the Pontiff.) Fitzgerald sometimes exaggerated his stories, as when he expressed his fear that his family would have to go to the poorhouse after his father lost his job in 1908. Page cuts through those misconceptions to give us a portrait of Fitzgerald as he truly was—someone born into a prominent family of some means, but who would also have to work for a living. 

Fitzgerald was an insider who could also project himself to be an outsider. There’s a beautiful passage in The Great Gatsby where Nick Carraway does exactly that. He’s at a party with Tom Buchanan and Myrtle Wilson:

“Yet high over the city our line of yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening streets, and I was him too, looking up and wondering. I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.” (p.40) 

I suspect that it must have been that way for Fitzgerald in his own life—at the same time he was experiencing something, there was part of his brain that was cataloguing it, storing it for later, gathering information and scenes that would later inform his fiction. 

Page has done his homework, and he uncovers tidbits that other Fitzgerald historians have not. For example, it’s sometimes stated that Scott’s two older sisters died in an epidemic, which makes it sound as though they died close together. As Page shows, they actually died seven months apart. Sure, that fact by itself probably doesn’t mean much to all but the most devoted Fitzgerald aficionados, but my point is that Page is dispelling myths, and the more myths we can dispel, the more accurate we can be about Fitzgerald’s life. Numerous biographies repeat the story that Scott’s sisters died in an epidemic, and once an error like that appears in print, it can multiply indefinitely, as the book then becomes the source for others. 

Sprinkled throughout the book are insights into Fitzgerald from his childhood friends and contemporaries. Bob Clark gives us a sense of Scott’s charm: “He absolutely charmed the older women. My mother thought he was great…he absolutely charmed you when he was talking to you, as if you were the most interesting person in the world.” (p.139) 

There’s a lovely quote from Scott’s aunt, thanking him for his letter after the sudden death of his uncle: “…nothing touched me so much as your beautiful telegram & letter. I read them over & over and will always keep them. Father Barron said, ‘No one but Scott could have written that.’” (p.152) 

F. Scott Fitzgerald in Minnesota: The Writer & His Friends at Home will give great pleasure to passionate Fitzgerald fans who want to know more about his life in Minnesota, and how Saint Paul impacted his life and work. It will also no doubt give enjoyment to those not deeply immersed in Fitzgerald’s life and work as a beautiful visual record of the Saint Paul neighborhood that he called home.

Book Review: The Vegetable, or from President to Postman: A Comedy in Three Acts by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1923)

The original dust jacket of The Vegetable, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1923. The cover was designed by the famous Jazz Age illustrator John Held, Jr.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, early 1920's.

F. Scott Fitzgerald is not known as a playwright. However, when he was in high school and college, Fitzgerald wrote four plays for the Elizabethan Dramatic Club in Saint Paul, Minnesota. In addition to writing those four plays, Fitzgerald also acted in them. When he was at Princeton University, Fitzgerald was a member of the Triangle Club, a drama club that wrote and performed satirical musicals. Fitzgerald provided the lyrics for several Triangle Club shows during his college years. However, once Fitzgerald became a professional author in 1919, the only play that he published was a comedy entitled The Vegetable, or from President to postman. 

The Vegetable is a political satire, not the genre you might expect from an author best known for tackling subjects like love, class, status, and money. The title of the play comes from a quotation from “a current magazine.” (Fitzgerald doesn’t specify which one.) “Any man who doesn’t want to get on in the world, to make a million dollars, and maybe even park his toothbrush in the White House, hasn’t got as much to him as a good dog has—he’s nothing more or less than a vegetable.” The “vegetable” in question here is one Jerry Frost, a railroad clerk who does not seek to park his toothbrush in the White House. His wife, Charlotte, is annoyed that Jerry does not have more ambition. In fact, Jerry’s real dream is to be a postman. 

In the first act, Jerry is visited in his home by several characters—his aged father Dada, his sister-in-law Doris, a parody of a flapper, and a bootlegger named Snooks, who fixes Jerry several strong drinks. Jerry then has a dream/hallucination that he becomes President of the United States. 

The second act finds President Jerry Frost dealing with a number of crises—the state of Idaho wants to impeach him for naming his father Secretary of the Treasury, and the military is eager for war. One of my favorite exchanges in the play is between General Pushing—a play on John J. Pershing’s name—and Jerry:

General Pushing: The people are restless and excited. The best thing to keep their minds occupied is a good war. It will leave the country weak and shaken—but docile, Mr. President, docile. Besides—we voted on it, and there you are.

Jerry: Who is it against?

General Pushing: That we have not decided. (p.70) 

At the end of the second act, Jerry is impeached and removed from office. Act three finds us back at the Frost home, however, Jerry has been missing since the evening of his dream/hallucination. As the subtitle of the play indicates, Jerry has become a postman and found true happiness at last. 

Fitzgerald’s concerns about money and class show up during the play. His stage directions describe Doris: “She’s a member of that portion of the middle-class whose girls are just a little bit too proud to work and just a little bit too needy not to.” (p.22) When Jerry is dreaming that he’s President, he learns that Dada has destroyed all of the money in the Treasury. Dada has taken the Biblical adage about rich men getting into heaven to heart, and he believes he has saved the country. That tells us something about Fitzgerald’s own ambivalent relationship to money. 

Most critics of The Vegetable have noted that the first and third acts work well, while the second act is problematic at best. Personally, I think there are problems throughout the play, but I found the second act the most humorous. The second act is what makes the play, as the political satire becomes more pointed. 

The Vegetable satirizes the Babbitt-like mindless boosterism of the 1920’s—the idea that every man should have the drive to want to be President is clearly one that Fitzgerald finds ridiculous. And so he gives us an Everyman as President and it’s a disaster. 

Fitzgerald is also satirizing Warren G. Harding, who was President when Fitzgerald wrote the play. Harding was an affable Babbitt-type from Ohio who had somehow managed to win the presidency. He was regarded as a fairly ordinary and down to earth fellow. Unfortunately, Harding’s administration was about as successful as Jerry Frost’s. In the Teapot Dome scandal it emerged that the Secretary of the Interior had taken bribes from oil companies. Oops! Consequently, Harding is usually at the bottom of rankings of the presidents, hanging out with James Buchanan and Franklin Pierce. 

Fitzgerald’s satire of Harding was a little ahead of its time. The Teapot Dome scandal that exposed the corruption in Harding’s cabinet had yet to fully break at the time The Vegetable was performed. And unfortunately for Fitzgerald, in between the time the play was published in April 1923 and performed in November, Harding died. Thus Fitzgerald was satirizing Harding during the brief window when he was one of the most beloved Presidents in our nation’s history. This isn’t the only reason the play was not successful, but it certainly didn’t help.

Fitzgerald satirizes Harding’s use of language in Jerry’s speech at the end of act two, as he is trying to defend himself from impeachment. Jerry strings together a series of empty patriotic phrases and slogans, a clear parody of Harding’s speeches. In the Introduction to the 1976 paperback reprint of The Vegetable, Charles Scribner III alerts us to another parody of political language. Chief Justice Fossile’s declaration of impeachment is an almost verbatim repeat of the speech given by Congressman George Boutwell of Massachusetts at the impeachment of Andrew Johnson in 1868. (p.xvi) I certainly didn’t catch that reference. 

Fitzgerald’s skill with humor is generally underappreciated. He wasn’t a humorist by any means, but he used irony very skillfully in his work, and there are numerous humorous moments throughout The Vegetable, even if it wasn’t the laugh-a-minute play Fitzgerald envisioned. 

While Fitzgerald was writing the play, he was convinced it was going to be a massive hit. This wasn’t unusual for Fitzgerald, as he was always optimistic about the commercial prospects for his writing. What is striking with The Vegetable is how lofty his hopes were, and how completely the play failed. 

In December of 1921, as he was writing the play, Fitzgerald made a bold prediction to his literary agent Harold Ober, writing in a letter to Ober: “My play is the funniest ever written + will make a fortune.” (As Ever, Scott Fitz, p.32) 

That same month Fitzgerald also wrote much the same thing to Maxwell Perkins, his editor at Scribner’s: “I am writing an awfully funny play that’s going to make me rich forever. It really is. I’m so damned tired of the feeling that I’m living up to my income.” (Correspondence of F. Scott Fitzgerald, p.90) 

Fitzgerald continued his bold predictions in a March 2, 1922 letter to Ober: “I feel that Acts I + III are probably the best pieces of dramatic comedy written in English in the last 5 years.” (As Ever, Scott Fitz, p.39)

When Fitzgerald had finished the initial draft of the play, he wrote to Perkins in August 1922: “It is, I think, the best American comedy to date and undoubtedly the best thing I have ever written.” In this same letter Fitzgerald heaps praise upon “Tarquin of Cheapside” and “The Off-Shore Pirate,” two of his weaker short stories, so maybe he was just feeling especially exuberant that day. As the letter concludes, Fitzgerald badgers Perkins for another advance, and writes “After my play is produced I’ll be rich forever and never have to bother you again.” Fitzgerald was wrong on both accounts, as the play flopped and he continued to borrow against future royalties from both Perkins and Ober. (The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edited by Andrew Turnbull, p.180) 

While Fitzgerald’s exuberant enthusiasm for The Vegetable may seem overstated, his Princeton friend Edmund Wilson, on his way to becoming one of the country’s most esteemed literary critics, had similar praise for the play. He wrote Fitzgerald: “As I say, I think that the play as a whole is marvelous—no doubt, the best American comedy ever written.” (Some Sort of Epic Grandeur, p.164-5) Wilson’s hyperbolic enthusiasm for The Vegetable might indicate his limitations as a critic of Fitzgerald’s work. 

Throughout 1922 Fitzgerald tried to interest various theatrical producers in The Vegetable, but no one took the bait. I find that surprising, since he was probably at the peak of his popularity at that time, and was one of the hot young American novelists. However, the fact that no one wanted to produce it might also speak to the quality of the play. 

Fitzgerald decided to publish the play as a book first in order to attract a producer—an unusual decision. The book of The Vegetable was published on April 27, 1923, in a first printing of 7,650 copies. Sales were not outstanding. As Fitzgerald biographer Matthew J. Bruccoli wrote: “There was only one printing.” (Some Sort of Epic Grandeur, p.176) The book was dedicated to Edmund Wilson and Katherine Tighe, a St. Paul friend who had helped Fitzgerald edit his first novel, This Side of Paradise. 

In a January 1923 note to Maxwell Perkins, Fitzgerald wrote: “To be advertised, it seems to me rather as a book of humor, like the Parody outline of History or Seventeen than like a play—because of course it is written to be read.” (Dear Scott/Dear Max, p.66) And that’s exactly the problem with the play—it’s meant to be read, not performed. Fitzgerald’s copious stage directions are some of the funniest things in the play, but it would be very difficult, if not impossible, to translate them to the stage. 

In November 1923, seven months the book publication, The Vegetable made its stage debut in Atlantic City, New Jersey. It did not go well. In a December 1923 letter Fitzgerald wrote: “My play (The Vegetable) opened in Atlantic City and foundered on the opening night. It did better in subsequent performances, but at present is laid up for repairs.” (Correspondence of F. Scott Fitzgerald, p.138) The Vegetable played for one week in Atlantic City, with Fitzgerald rewriting and revising the script throughout the week, but it did not inspire anyone to produce it on Broadway. 

Fitzgerald uses The Vegetable as a comic motif throughout his 1924 essay “How to Live on $36,000 a Year.” In the essay, Fitzgerald keeps expecting that the play will bring him untold wealth. He writes about the first time he heard the play read by the cast: “I could almost hear the people scrambling for seats, hear the ghostly voices of the movie magnates as they bid against one another for the picture rights.” (A Short Autobiography, p.42) 

Fitzgerald goes on to describe opening night: “It was a colossal frost. People left their seats and walked out; people rustled their programs and talked audibly in bored impatient whispers. After the second act I wanted to stop the show and say it was all a mistake but the actors struggled heroically on.” (A Short Autobiography, p.43) 

Throughout the rest of his life, Fitzgerald was consistently dismissive of The Vegetable. The play is referenced in his letters more often than you might expect, but Fitzgerald never references it with any affection. Fitzgerald was always interested in his writing being discovered by new audiences, but he was continually uninterested in possible productions of The Vegetable, which is very surprising. That could be the key to his true feelings about the play—if he thought it was any good, he would have championed it more. 

In a February 1925 letter to Harold Ober Fitzgerald wrote: “The second act was the biggest flop of all on the Atlantic City try out—and the whole thing has already cost me about a year + a half of work so I’d rather let it drop. It’s honestly no good. From Feb. 1922 until Nov. 1923 I was almost constantly working + patching the damn thing + I don’t think I could bear to look at it anymore. If I ever change I’ll let you know.” (As Ever, Scott Fitz, p.75) 

By 1929, Fitzgerald didn’t want the play produced at all. In a letter to Ober probably from late May, he wrote about a possible film version—which was never produced: “A talkie of Vegetable would be okay with me—only no more stage representations on any account, charity or otherwise. I wouldn’t feel guilty about a talkie.” (As Ever, Scott Fitz, p.135) 

In a February 9, 1934 letter to Ober Fitzgerald was uncharacteristically terse: “Dear Harold: I don’t want ‘The Vegetable’ produced.” That’s the entire text of the letter. (As Ever, Scott Fitz, p.203)

Fitzgerald explained himself in more detail in a letter to Barrett H. Clark, dated October 16, 1936. Clark was a drama critic and the executive director of the Dramatists Play Service. Fitzgerald wrote to him:

“’Vegetable’ reads well, but it simply won’t play, and I would be doing you a disservice and you would be doing an equal disservice to the prospective producers to offer it to them as part of any repertory. It reads well, but there is some difference between the first and second acts that is so disparate that every time a Little Theatre has produced it (and many of them have tried it), it has been a failure in a big way. This is not to say that I do not realize that the thing reads well, or that I am not tremendously grateful for your interest, but simply to say that I can’t give you the permission that you ask.” (Correspondence of F. Scott Fitzgerald, p.456) 

Did he mention that it reads well? I think Fitzgerald knew deep down that The Vegetable clearly wasn’t his best work. Even Matthew J. Bruccoli, Fitzgerald’s most sympathetic biographer, didn’t have much good to say about The Vegetable: “The play is just not very funny, scarcely rising above the level of an undergraduate production. Despite Fitzgerald’s apprenticeship as a playwright, his talent was novelistic, not dramatic. His dialogue is not entertaining, and many of his jokes depend on the stage directions.” (Some Sort of Epic Grandeur, p.165) 

Bruccoli is a perceptive critic about those qualities that made Fitzgerald’s work so brilliant on the page: “much of the effectiveness of Fitzgerald’s stories depends on elements of style and narrative technique that cannot be transferred to the stage. He was a storyteller, relying heavily on tone, language, point of view, and authorial voice. A Fitzgerald story or novel in dramatic form loses many of the qualities that make it a Fitzgerald work—as the disappointing movie versions of his novels have demonstrated.” (Some Sort of Epic Grandeur, p.184)

For Fitzgerald fans like me who live in his hometown of Saint Paul, Minnesota, The Vegetable has a couple of interesting connections. When Fitzgerald started writing the play, he and Zelda, and their daughter Scottie, were living on Goodrich Avenue in Saint Paul. In the play, the Frosts live on Osceola Avenue. (p.10) What street is two blocks south of Goodrich? Osceola Avenue, of course! There’s also a reference in the play to Crest Avenue, which is a fictitious street that also appears in Fitzgerald’s short story “The Popular Girl,” and is modeled after Saint Paul’s Summit Avenue. 

After The Vegetable failed, Fitzgerald found himself in debt, and so during the winter of 1923-4 he cranked out ten short stories for magazines. Fitzgerald finished the ten stories by March of 1924, and they earned him the impressive total of $16,450, which would be roughly $200,000 today. (Some Sort of Epic Grandeur, p.185) Earning that much money also bought Fitzgerald time he needed to work on his third novel, which had been put on hold for much of 1923 as he focused on the production of The Vegetable. Fitzgerald’s working title for the novel was Among Ash Heaps and Millionaires. As Scott and Zelda sailed off to Europe in May of 1924, little did he know that his third novel would prove to be one of the greatest American novels of the 20^th century: a slim volume titled The Great Gatsby.