[In the following essay, Mangum explores the relationship between Fitzgerald's novels and short stories and discusses the reputation of his short stories as inferior fiction written only for financial gain.]

From the beginning critics have argued that Fitzgerald prostituted his talent by writing slick magazine fiction when he could have devoted his energy to the production of more novels. Consequently, his career is often viewed as a study in literary schizophrenia. In a 1935 review of Taps at Reveille, T. S. Matthews mirrored the contemporary critical opinion that Fitzgerald's short stories were weaker than his novels because they were written for popular audiences: “Scott Fitzgerald is supposed to be a case of split personality: Fitzgerald A is the serious writer; Fitzgerald B brings home the necessary bacon. … There seems to be a feeling abroad that it would be kinder not to take any critical notice of the goings-on of Fitzgerald B, since his better half is such a superior person and might be embarrassed.”¹ Margaret Marshall, surveying Fitzgerald's achievement a month after his death, concluded that he did not fulfill his early promise, partly because he could not resist the high prices that the Saturday Evening Post was willing to pay him for “short stories about glamorous and, today, boring girls, and boys who are not even glamorous.”² Arthur Mizener also sees the stories as Fitzgerald's inferior work: the creative output of Fitzgerald B. According to Mizener, the short stories caused Fitzgerald regularly to compromise his artistic integrity, a practice which resulted in moral conflicts that would “haunt his career from beginning to end.”³

But Fitzgerald's career as a short story writer is not dissociated from and irrelevant to his career as a novelist. Despite the financial successes of This Side of Paradise, which earned over ＄11,000 during the first two years of publication, and The Beautiful and Damned, whose royalties in the first year of publication amounted to over ＄12,000, he found that in order to earn a regular income as opposed to a sporadic—and in terms of the Fitzgeralds' spending habits, moderate—one, he needed to produce marketable short stories. Beginning in 1924 the stories became and remained the backbone of his income. During the year in which The Great Gatsby appeared, Fitzgerald earned ＄11,025 from short stories as opposed to the ＄3,952 he received in royalties that year for all of his novels combined. In 1930, ＄25,529 of his ＄29,331 income came from his short story writing. Fitzgerald's stories provided the money that enabled him to remain a novelist, particularly in the “barren years” between The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night, years filled with stories for which he was consistently paid high prices.

Early in his career Fitzgerald became aware of the difficulties involved in writing things that were good while at the same time supporting himself by producing marketable fiction. “May Day,” a fine 1920 novelette, earned only ＄200, while a weak, reworked Nassau Literary Magazine story, “His Russet Witch,” earned ＄810 in that same year.⁴ Any conflict that this might have created in his mind, however, was short-lived. From the beginning his goals as a writer were clearly defined. He wanted to write good novels and he wanted to make a lot of money. Fitzgerald expressed his feelings to his literary agent, Harold Ober, about selling stories to the Saturday Evening Post: “But, by God + Lorimer, I'm going to make a fortune yet,” he wrote in early 1922.⁵ Approximately two years later he gave Ernest Hemingway his reasons for writing stories for the slicks. According to Hemingway, “He [Fitzgerald] said it was whoring but that he had to do it as he made his money from the magazines to have money ahead to write decent books.”⁶

The primary function of the short stories, then, was to provide the financial means that enabled Fitzgerald to remain a professional writer. A central question is whether he would have written more novels if he had not spent so much time writing stories for money. But given his near-mania for rewriting, given the amount of time that the composition of a novel like Tender Is the Night required, and given the amount of money needed to keep the Fitzgerald household in operation, the practical function that the stories served is clear. They could be written quickly—“The Camel's Back,” Fitzgerald claimed in his introduction to Tales of the Jazz Age, took only one day to write—and with much less effort than his novels. The big magazines, therefore, provided him with a well-paying job with fringe benefits: while living on the money from his most recent stories, he could put on the kind of sustained drive necessary to write The Great Gatsby or Tender Is the Night.

Aside from seeing the stories solely as the means by which he “would make a fortune” and get enough “ahead to write decent books,” Fitzgerald also learned to use the magazines as a workshop for his novels. This central literary function of the stories is usually dismissed in a few words. Critics occasionally point to a well-known story such as “Winter Dreams” as an example of a story that can be associated with a novel, but, in fact, most of Fitzgerald's stories can be directly linked with a particular novel. More often than not, the novels are surrounded by groups of stories in which he experimented with themes, subjects, and techniques that he would later use in novels.⁷ Also, stories written after certain novels show him treating material that he had used in that novel in a different way. Indeed, a study of the cluster stories—those stories which are associated with particular novels because of similarities of theme, subject matter, and technique—is important in any examination of Fitzgerald's development as a writer.⁸

When one considers that Fitzgerald, between 1919 and 1940, wrote 178 stories⁹ and made from them approximately one-half of his lifetime earnings as a professional writer, the important role that the stories play in his overall career becomes obvious. Looking back on those months late in 1919 after This Side of Paradise had been accepted, he describes the beginning of his career as a professional writer: “While I waited for the novel to appear, the metamorphosis of amateur into professional began to take place—a sort of stitching together of your whole life into a pattern of work so that the end of one job is automatically the beginning of another.”¹⁰ Some of Fitzgerald's writing jobs were better than others, some made more money than others, and some were more fun than others; but each is important as a link in the chain of his maturation as a writer. The writer of This Side of Paradise did not simply blossom into the author of The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night. He worked a lot in between. The stories, particularly his tailoring of them for particular buyers, provide “a more orderly writer's notebook” through which his development as a professional writer can be followed, almost literally, month by month.

.....

Fitzgerald was a serious craftsman who depended on his craft for his livelihood. The problems which existed for him—and they exist for any literary artist who is also a professional writer—are indicated by William Charvat in his study of the profession of authorship in America:

The terms of professional writing are these: that it provides a living for the author, like any other job; that it is a main and prolonged, rather than intermittent or sporadic, resource for the writer; that it is produced with the hope of extended sale in the open market, like any article of commerce; and that it is written with reference to buyers' tastes and reading habits. The problem of the professional writer is not identical with that of the literary artist; but when a literary artist is also a professional writer, he cannot solve the problems of the one function without reference to the other.¹¹

Fitzgerald had three major markets: the book publishing industry from which he earned approximately ＄120,000; the magazine market, which netted for him over ＄250,000; and the movie industry, from which he made over ＄110,000.¹² From an artistic viewpoint the book industry was the most important, and it was also the market that brought in a relatively small amount of money. The least important for its contribution to Fitzgerald's artistic development was the movie industry, which, in terms of money earned for actual time spent working, was the most profitable.¹³ In 1938 alone he made some ＄50,000 writing for the movies.

Standing between these two outlets for his work was the magazine market.¹⁴ It served neither a purely artistic purpose as did the book industry, nor did it act solely as a financial resource as did the movie industry. The big magazine market functioned in both of these capacities. Between 1920 and 1936 Fitzgerald earned ＄289,612—a yearly average of ＄18,000—from the sale of his stories to popular magazines. The fact that he was a popular writer in his time is clear. His daughter notes in her introduction to Six Tales of the Jazz Age, and Other Stories that the significant increase in price—from ＄500 for “The Camel's Back” in 1920 to ＄2,000 for “The Adjuster” in 1925—“is a tangible measure of my father's remarkable and rapid success.”¹⁵ With the last of these, the prices of Fitzgerald's stories had just begun to climb to the high mark of ＄4,000 per story that he began receiving from the Post in 1929.¹⁶

Fitzgerald's career as a writer of magazine fiction breaks logically into three periods: 1919-1925, those years during which he shopped around for markets and published stories in most of the important periodicals of the times; 1925-1933, the central period characterized by a close association with the Saturday Evening Post—a relationship which almost precluded his publication of stories in other magazines; and 1934-1940, a period beginning with the publication of his first Esquire story and continuing through a subsequent relationship with that magazine which lasted until his death. During the first of these periods he published thirty-two stories in ten different commercial magazines, two novels (This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and Damned), two short story collections (Flappers and Philosophers and Tales of the Jazz Age), and one play (The Vegetable). In the second period he enjoyed the popular reputation he had built with readers of the Post, and he published forty-seven of his fifty-eight stories which appeared during this nine-year period in that magazine; the remaining eleven were scattered through five different magazines. Also in the second period Fitzgerald published The Great Gatsby, his third short story collection (All the Sad Young Men), and he delivered Tender Is the Night to Scribners. In the third period he lost the large Post audience and gained the smaller Esquire audience. Of the forty-four Fitzgerald stories to appear between 1934 and his death, twenty-eight appeared in Esquire. In addition to Tender Is the Night, which was completed and delivered before his relationship with Esquire began, he published one short story collection (Taps at Reveille), and he wrote the incomplete The Last Tycoon in the Esquire years. Thirteen stories, nine of which have appeared in Esquire, have been published since his death.

One conclusion to be drawn from a summary of Fitzgerald's professional career—and it is supported by the closer study which follows—is that he was at his best artistically in the years of his greatest popularity. During the composition of The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald's commercial fiction was in such demand that large magazines such as the Post, Metropolitan, and Hearst's competed for it. Tender Is the Night was written during the time when his popularity with slick magazine readers was at its all-time high point: in 1929 and 1930, important years in the composition of Tender Is the Night, he published fifteen stories in the Post. For the first six of these he was paid ＄3,500 per story, and the last nine brought ＄4,000 each. In sharp contrast to the 1925-1933 stories, which are characteristically of an even, high quality, and many of which are closely related to the two novels of this period, the stories of the Esquire years are, in general, undistinguished. In addition, with the exceptions of “Discard” and “Last Kiss,” the stories written in this period have little relation to his last “serious” work, The Last Tycoon. No amount of wishing alters the basic fact that Fitzgerald wrote Esquire stories because he could no longer write Post stories. The Esquire years constitute a low point, from both a popular and an artistic standpoint, in his career. They are years during which Fitzgerald lost the knack of pleasing the large middle-American reading public and at the same time produced very little serious fiction.

Notes

1. T. S. Matthews, New Republic, LXXXII (10 April 1935), p. 262. Matthews, however, saw “no real difference in kind between ‘Taps at Reveille’ and ‘Tender Is the Night’; the creatures whom he has sold down the river for a good price are a little cruder, that's all.”

2. Margaret Marshall, “Notes By the Way,” The Nation, CLII (8 February 1941), pp. 159-160.

3. Arthur Mizener, The Far Side of Paradise (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1951), p. 94.

4. These and all figures relating to Fitzgerald's earnings may be located in F. Scott Fitzgerald's Ledger (Washington: Bruccoli Clark/NCR, 1972). In this study, figures are rounded off to the nearest dollar.

5. Matthew J. Bruccoli, ed., and Jennifer McCabe Atkinson, As Ever, Scott Fitz-, Letters Between F. Scott Fitzgerald and His Literary Agent Harold Ober, 1919-1940 (New York: Lippincott, 1971), p. 36. Hereafter cited as As Ever.

6. Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast (New York: Scribners, 1964), p. 153.

7. As Richard Lehan notes, “To discuss Fitzgerald's stories … involves a discussion of the major themes of his novels-the theme of youthful cynicism and disillusionment that characterized This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and Damned, the theme of romantic limits that characterized The Great Gatsby, the theme of cultural and personal decline that characterized Tender Is the Night, and the theme of romantic betrayal that characterized the unfinished The Last Tycoon.” See “The Romantic Self and the Uses of Place in the Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald” in The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, ed. Jackson R. Bryer (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982), p. 3.

8. The “cluster story” concept was developed by Bruccoli and is discussed in Matthew J. Bruccoli, The Composition of Tender Is the Night (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1963). John Higgins notes some of the connections in F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Study of the Stories (Jamaica: St. John's University Press, 1971).

9. Bryer lists the 178 stories in alphabetical order in The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, pp. 348-377. Bruccoli comments on the numbering of the stories in this way: “The Fitzgerald story canon includes some 160 published stories, including his school writings. (The ‘some’ is necessitated by the borderline essay/fiction pieces.).” “Preface,” The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald (New York: Scribners, 1989), p. xii. For discussion of the lost and unpublished stories, see Jennifer McCabe Atkinson's “Lost and Unpublished Stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald,” Fitzgerald/Hemingway Annual, III (1971), pp. 32-63, and also Ruth Prigozy's “The Unpublished Stories: Fitzgerald in His Final Stage,” Twentieth Century Literature XX (April 1974), pp. 69-90.

10. F. Scott Fitzgerald, “Early Success,” American Cavalcade, I (October 1937), reprinted in The Crack-up, ed. Edmund Wilson (Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1945), p. 86.

11. William Charvat, The Profession of Authorship in America, 1800-1870, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1968), p. 3.

12. Here the earnings from the book publishing industry include royalties from novels and short story volumes, the latter of which earned a total of approximately ＄15,000. Earnings from the magazine market here do not include novel serializations, nor do the figures relating to the movie industry include sales of novels and stories sold to the movies. The figures are approximations intended to indicate the relative importance of each of the three markets.

13. Alan Margolies in “The Hollywood Market” in Bryer's Short Stories, pp. 65-73, tells how Fitzgerald tried early to take advantage of the Hollywood market by writing stories that would also interest Hollywood, but failed. Hollywood earnings came largely from his work under contract to MGM in the late thirties.

14. Steven Wayne Potts's dissertation, “F. Scott Fitzgerald: His Career in Magazines” (University of California, Berkeley, 1980) is the only study to date which closely examines Fitzgerald's stories in the context of the editorial policies and audience tastes of the magazines in which the stories appeared.

15. Frances Fitzgerald Lanahan, introduction to Six Tales of the Jazz Age and Other Stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald (New York: Scribners, 1960), p. 9.

16. The Saturday Evening Post will be referred to in the text as the Post.