The Notebooks of F. Scott Fitzgerald/The Price Was High
Long, Robert Emmett
Brilliant fragments of sensibility THE NOTEBOOKS OF F. SCOTT FITZGERALD Edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, $14.95, 336 pp. THE PRICE WAS HIGH: THE LAST...
...Diamond Dick and the First Law of Woman" establishes a rich emotional atmosphere in its middle section, and several passages were transferred from it, almost unchanged, to The Great Gatsby...
...they were cut, combined, and in certain cases "corrected...
...and the source of these entries has been identified in a back-of-the-book index...
...Bruccoli's Notebooks is a definitive edition, with all of Fitzgerald's entries accurately printed, together with a new section of notations made during his last years in Hollywood...
...The Rubber Check" is also highly readable, and involves a complicated, partly sympathetic response to a fortune hunter...
...The forty-nine stories in The Price Was High were those that Fitzgerald considered his worst...
...Many of the entries were "stripped" by Fitzgerald from short stories he had published in magazines but did not plan to collect...
...On the jacket of the book, James Dickey comments that the Notebooks '' make writers of us all," and in a certain sense they do...
...But, after all, sensibility is what one remembers Fitzgerald for...
...Some of the Notebooks entries appeared previously in The Crack-Up, edited by Edmund Wilson in 1945...
...but at their best, they convey the excitement of creative vision...
...THE PRICE WAS HIGH: THE LAST UNCOLLECTEO STORIES OF F. SCOTT FITZGERALD Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, $19.95, 784 pp...
...The Notebooks, particularly, contain nothing but moments—witty or reflective observations, comments on contemporaries ("Ernest would always give a helping hand to a man on a ledge a little higher up''), descriptions of scenery and of men and (more often) women, fragments of conversation, jottings...
...Neither book will appreciably alter his reputation, but they will fill out the Fitzgerald record, and will clearly be of interest to Fitzgerald's committed followers with still unquenched appetites for his connoisseurship of moods and effectively captured moments...
...At Your Age," about an older man's attempt to recover his youth by winning a young woman, has such freshness...
...Fitzgerald sees a trolley "running on the crack of doom...
...The Price Was High brings together all of Fitzgerald's magazine fiction not pub14 March 1980: 153 lished previously in the six posthumous volumes of his stories...
...It is here, too, honed and sharpened by his gift for compression, Fitzgerald's sensibility projected dramatically in a phrase...
...is marked by sharp observation...
...An Author's Mother" is small but shows a large, compassionate understanding...
...What one finds then, in this final installment of Fitzgeraldiana, in the Notebooks and The Price Was High, is a trunk full of brilliant fragments of sensibility...
...The act of seeing is especially important...
...but they were not as Fitzgerald made them...
...Fitzgerald's entries, over two thousand of them, made between 1932 and his death in 1940, constantly reveal the man, and have the intimate, "confidential" quality that one finds in his fiction...
...Overhead a huge harvest moon "drips" its light...
...Fitzgerald's heart was often not in the stories...
...Here and there, however, one finds a story that is still fresh...
...A bus approaches in the darkness with' 'nineteen wild green eyes.'' A "toiling, sweating sun stoked the sky...
...and it has a particular interest if it is read in conjunction with the Notebooks...
...14 March 1980: 155...
...There are skilfully evoked impressions of places—New York, with its "evening gem play" outside a window, and its "quick metropolitan rhythm of love and birth and death that supplied dreams to the imaginative.'' Men in public life are glimpsed from startling angles: "those terrible sinister figures of Edison, of Ford and Firestone—in the rotogravures...
...Sharp, caustic humor intrudes in Fitzgerald's portrayal of the rich, as in "An Unspeakable Egg," where a newspaper announcement of a rich girl's engagement is illustrated by a picture of the founders of the family dynasty—"a cross-eyed young lady holding the hand of a savage gentleman with four rows of teeth...
...the intensely felt, personal quality that he brought to his best work is often missing...
...There are stories that end with a surge of poetic power or with sharply edged irony...
...Robert Emmet Long WITH the Notebooks and The Price Was High, Fitzgerald's last backshelf of writing has now been collected in book form...
...and characterization, particularly in the earlier stories, is subordinated to ingenious twists and turns of plot to meet the requirements of the Saturday Evening Post...
...and ends strongly with Tom Squires's recognition that though he loses the girl, he has recaptured the conflict felt in the heart that "has a value beyond victory and defeat...
...It is a large, handsome edition of the almost eight hundred pages, with an introduction and explanatory headnotes...
...Indecision" contains gem-like descriptions of Switzerland, and other stories have the quickening touches that are distinctively Fitzgerald's—as in "A Freeze-Out," where summer comes so suddenly that it is as if someone had "opened a cage full of robins...
...they reveal his professionalism under pressure...
...A number of stories, written in the early 1930s, have the shared concerns and the remarkable style—the hard burnished finish, and grave, chastened prose rhythms— of Tender Is the Night...
...Reading The Price Was High one sees where a number of the entries came from, where the highlighted moments occurred, and in what context...
...At the end of "Discard," Fitzgerald writes tersely: "She was in another street now, opening another big charge account with life...
...Which is what we all do after a fashion—open an account and then pay...
...He remarks on "the railroad kings of the pioneer West who sent their waitress sweetheart^ to convents in order to prepare them for their high destinies," and their whole lives are revealed in a vivid moment...
...The Price Was High stories show Fitzgerald making his reluctant accommodation to the commercial market in order to survive, and to clear space in which to write his serious fiction...
...and reading through so many of them, all at once, is not a happy experience...
...They are a mixed treasury indeed, containing both diamonds and dross...
...Other stories, which are not wholly successful, have striking passages...
Vol. 107 • March 1980 • No. 5
