SOURCE: Prigozy, Ruth. “An Unsentimental Education: ‘The Rubber Check’.” In New Essays on F. Scott Fitzgerald's Neglected Stories, edited by Jackson R. Bryer, pp. 206-18. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1996.

Five years have rolled away from me and I can't decide exactly who I am, if anyone.

—Letter from F. Scott Fitzgerald to Maxwell Perkins, May 1932

Sometimes he was able to forget that he really wasn't anybody at all.

—Fitzgerald, “The Rubber Check”

Fitzgerald wrote “The Rubber Check” in May 1932, probably at the Hotel Rennert in Baltimore, Maryland, during one of the bleakest periods of his life.¹ After the Fitzgeralds' return to the United States in September 1931, following Zelda Fitzgerald's release from Prangins Clinic in Switzerland, they took a six-month lease on a house in Montgomery, Alabama, where Fitzgerald continued to produce short stories to reduce the enormous debt that had resulted from his wife's illness. (He had written eight in 1930 and the same number by September 1931.) He then spent several months in Hollywood but had to return quickly when Zelda Fitzgerald suffered a relapse. In February of 1932, she entered the Phipps Clinic of Johns Hopkins University Hospital. While there, she wrote her autobiographical novel, Save Me the Waltz, and sent it off to Maxwell Perkins without showing it to her husband. Fitzgerald was angered by her action, in particular by her transparent and unflattering portrait of him. “My God,” he wrote to her doctor, “my book made her a legend and her single intention in this somewhat thin portrait is to make me a non-entity.”²

In March of 1932, Fitzgerald noted in his Ledger, “Scotty sick, me sick, Mrs. Sayre playing the fool … everything worser and worser, Zelda's novel arrives, neurosis, strained situation.” Determined to leave Montgomery and to be closer to his wife, Fitzgerald moved into the Hotel Rennert in Baltimore after their lease expired in April. “The Rubber Check” was the third story he wrote during this unsettled period; in April he completed “Family in the Wind” and “What a Handsome Pair!” “The Rubber Check” was published in the August 6, 1932, Saturday Evening Post, but Fitzgerald received less than his usual fee—three thousand dollars, down from the four thousand dollars to which he had recently been accustomed. The story was among those Fitzgerald described as “Stripped and Permanently Buried”—stories that he mined for lines and phrases for possible use in his novels, and it was not collected until 1979, when Matthew J. Bruccoli included it in The Price Was High.³

Much of the scant critical attention “The Rubber Check” has received has been dismissive or disparaging. Robert Sklar describes it as “a conventional genteel story, with overtones of bitterness, that was his poorest story in half a decade.” John A. Higgins calls it “a preposterous story despite being based on an actual experience,” and Scott Donaldson, admitting that “it has its moments,” concludes that “it fails for lack of feeling.” Bryant Mangum finds it “much less entertaining than many other Fitzgerald stories dealing with the corrosive influence of wealth,” its main character so unsympathetic that the story is often irritating. A few critics have responded more positively to the story. Matthew J. Bruccoli, in his introduction to the story, calls it “underrated,” and Henry Dan Piper, without commenting on its overall merits, calls it a “vigorous defense of a poor but capable young man who has been cruelly humiliated by some rich boys because he inadvertently cashed a bad check—as Fitzgerald himself had once done.” Kenneth Eble, in the same autobiographical vein, sees the story as coming “closest to revealing Fitzgerald's own feeling of occupying a social position to which he was not really entitled” and notes that the list-making of a character in the story is reflective of Fitzgerald's “own compulsions” for making up lists during the period of his crack-up.⁴

Two other critics discuss the story at greater length and in each case suggest that it is a richer, more complex work than others have suggested. Although Brian Harding finds that it “rehearses the old story of the poor boy in search of the rich girl,” it does so “in a new mode, restating, in hyperbolic terms, many of the ideas that had been part of all the stories.” For Harding, the “crude reduction of the success story and the emptying of character … can hardly be unintentional.” He thus concludes that in “The Rubber Check,” Fitzgerald wrote a parody of the love story as a form of social aspiration, exposing “the conventions on which that story depended and created radical tales of alienation—stories of men without countries and without selves.” Harding's analysis is intriguing, but the problems in shifting authorial distance throughout the story make his case for intentional parody less than persuasive. Finally, as I indicate in an overview of Fitzgerald's stories written during the depression, “‘The Rubber Check,’ in many ways a very interesting work, suffers from Fitzgerald's over-identification with Val, the protagonist. … Val himself has no distinction, strength, or solidity. Were it not for such an important lapse, the ending, wry, ironic, and honest, would prove more effective than it does. …”⁵ Although I still believe that Fitzgerald's shifting distance from Val weakens the story, I would qualify my earlier remarks considerably. Upon reconsideration, I conclude that “The Rubber Check” has been undervalued in the past by every commentator and that it deserves the full discussion that follows. I hope to demonstrate that, despite its flaws (and few of Fitzgerald's stories are flawless), it belongs among the most complex and important stories he ever wrote.

The incident upon which the central complication of “The Rubber Check” was based occurred in 1920 when Fitzgerald cashed a check for more money than he had in his account (Perkins usually deposited money directly to his bank account). He soon discovered that because the next day was Saturday, Scribner's would not be able to cover the overdrawn check in time. “The result was that he spent the interim in a cold sweat, momentarily expecting the police to arrive and carry him off to jail,” Piper observes.⁶ That Fitzgerald not only remembered the incident but also was able to recreate all the tension and anxiety associated with it twelve years later suggests how strong its impact was on his psyche.

For his fictionalized treatment, Fitzgerald used the incident as a catalyst for a new exploration of subjects and themes that had always figured prominently in his work: money, social class and class distinctions, manners, clothes and their symbolic value to personal identity, loss of romantic illusions, love (real or illusory), the past and the golden moment, and finally, the quest for personal freedom. Like This Side of Paradise, and so many of his stories of sad young men, “The Rubber Check” is about the education of its protagonist. By 1932, however, Fitzgerald had learned so many lessons about his own life and his society that, while generally belonging to the category Scott Donaldson so ably describes as “tales of rejection and disappointment” with the author's “disturbing sense that pursuit and capture of the golden girl was not really worth the trouble and heartache,” the story transcends that genre.⁷ “The Rubber Check,” like The Great Gatsby, Tender Is the Night, “Winter Dreams” (1922), “Babylon Revisited” (1931), and other major Fitzgerald works, approaches its subjects with a sophisticated clarity that results in a highly ambiguous and original treatment of familiar material.

The plot is simple: Val Schuyler, a middle-class boy who has pushed his way into the social world of the rich, is embarrassed into picking up the lunch bill for a group of friends of Ellen Mortmain, the beautiful rich girl he has been pursuing for years. He writes a check assuming that his mother will cover the overdraft, and Mr. Templeton, at whose home he has been staying, provides him a reference. His mother refuses to cover it, the check bounces (later she relents and pays it), and the damage to his name and reputation has been done. From that moment on, Val suffers cruel snubs, rejections, and abject humiliation by those at whose social functions he had previously been a welcome attendant. In a few quick plot twists, Val rises socially when he inherits money, falls financial victim to the depression, and ends up on a farm, cultivating Mr. Templeton's cabbages, while contemplating without enthusiasm the prospect of marrying wealthy Mercia Templeton and an assured future, save for the beauty and romantic love he had always craved.

The story spans nine years, including a three-year flashback, taking Val from eighteen to twenty-seven, the years from 1922 to 1931. Like so many other Fitzgerald stories written during this period, the style is spare, but imagistic, without the lavish rhetoric of earlier stories of this type. Indeed, the images carry the weight of the narrative, providing a firm symbolic matrix that reinforces the major themes.

At the outset, the circular pattern of the story is revealed in Val's discussion with his mother about her impending marriage (her fourth) and his memories of his first encounter with the very rich. Val's thoughts are always centered on money; he offers no objections to his mother's marriage, providing the new husband “doesn't get what's left of your money” (417). When his mother informs him that if Val should die during her trip abroad, she will keep his remains in cold storage until she returns—to save the money of an extra trip—Val accepts his being kept “on ice” good-humoredly, but refuses to accept another name change. His name, originally Jones, had, after the second husband, become Schuyler, an aristocratic name that provided him with an identity that could open doors to the world of his dreams. Like Gatsby, the new name emboldens him; as in a tale of fantasy, he walks through a stone gate opening into the Mortmain mansion's “heavenlike lawn with driveways curling on it” (417) and a landscape dotted with a conservatory, tennis courts, a circular ring for ponies, and an empty pool. Even the roses are “proud, lucky” and the dust “aristocratic.” Val knows at once, “This is where I belong” (418), and his pursuit begins. Fitzgerald thus links money, identity, death, and romantic illusion at the outset; the rest of the story chronicles the slow erosion of Val's youthful dream. The circularity of the driveway symbolizes the pattern of Val's quest: He ends without achieving the freedom that he assumes money will ensure. He tells Ellen, “I don't want to be owned” (420) without realizing the price he, like so many of Fitzgerald's aspiring young men, are forced to pay.

Val is self-educated in the manners of the rich. He has cultivated his voice and his social skills; perhaps his most important virtue to the Mortmains, he knows his place, accepts his lower social status, and is thus allowed to attend the family throughout “the years of his real education.” (419). He has cheerfulness, wit, good manners; “he was invariably correct and dignified, he never drank too much, he had tried to make no enemies, he had been involved in no scandal” (426). Yet his real education has not begun. Val's new identity is linked inseparably with appearance—particularly clothes. Just as Gatsby's shirts symbolize his self-delusory social status, Val's knowledge of clothes indicates his own awareness of social acceptability. Thus, he does not manipulate Ellen's fascination with him, never taking advantage of “the romantic contrast between his shining manners and his shiny suits” (420). Later, however, he succumbs to his own masquerade; indeed, as his clothes improve, he becomes intoxicated with his new identity. Sadly, after the incident of the rubber check has tarred his reputation, he learns that the clothes masked only the emptiness of his own self: “His role took possession of him. He became suddenly a new figure, ‘Val Schuyler of New York’” (420).

But what is his identity? Unfortunately, like Gatsby, he never allows himself to admit a self other than the inventions of his romantic imagination.⁸ But Val lacks Gatsby's passion and drive; his work (in a brokerage house) is boring, and his muted passions are spent only on play. Whatever cachet he assumes he has acquired is illusory. The author assures us that “What stamped him as an adventurer was that he just could not make any money” (419). After a season of Mrs. Templeton's gossip has irrevocably branded him a dishonest climber, Val is barred from the “rich and scintillant” (427) world he has grown to love. His clothes can no longer conceal the emptiness at the core of his soul: “No longer did the preview of himself in the mirror—with gloves, opera hat and stick—furnish him his mead of our common vanity. He was a man without a country—and for a crime as vain, casual and innocuous as his look at himself in the glass” (427).

After his inheritance, Val still assumes that perfect attire assures social identity. Fitzgerald now distances himself from Val, perhaps because he has not learned from his painful rejections: “Regard him on a spring morning in London in the year 1930. Tall, even stately, he treads down Pall Mall as if it were his personal pasture. He meets an American friend and shakes hands, and the friend notices how his shirt sleeve fits his wrist, and his coat sleeve incases his shirt sleeve like a sleeve valve; how his collar and tie are molded plastically to his neck” (432). Val's obsession with clothes becomes farcical when, unable to pay his London hotel bill, he dons as many layers of clothing as his body can bear, lurches clumsily out the door and pulls himself, sweating profusely, onto a bus. Ironically, when we last see Val he is wearing work clothes, digging among the cabbages.

For all his education, Val had never really learned the lesson of the very rich: Money is not enough. His background, his social class, would forever bar him from full participation in their world. The rubber check itself proved a convenient symbol of Val's social unacceptability: “The check had been seized upon to give him a questionable reputation that would match his questionable background” (429). The painful rejections after the incident constitute Val's true education. The story is memorable for the searing documentation of those rejections. Fitzgerald's recollection of his own pain twelve years earlier undoubtedly translated into Val's, and the reader is caught up in the drama of carefully timed, destructively skillful social snobbery.

Val's first snub occurs, ironically, when he is attired in “full evening dress,” cutting such an impressive figure that “sometimes he was able to forget that he really wasn't anybody at all” (425). A debutante dancing partner excuses herself, confessing that her mother did not want her to dance with Val. Another similar snub leads him to confront Mercia Templeton who he knows does not like him (she seems to see through his facade whenever they meet). Unable to elicit an explanation from her, he confronts her mother, who he suspects had spread ugly gossip about his rubber check some months earlier. Feeling “helpless rage” as he looks at the “calm dowagers” (426) on the balcony, he tells Mrs. Templeton how unfair it is to hold against him what college boys do all the time. She brushes him off, and he continues to attend similar parties. But the unfortunate incident does not go away, and Val continues to meet suspicion and mistrust in his social forays.

When Ellen Mortmain, back from Europe, asks him to accompany her to a weekend party at the Halbirds', Val accepts, and learns thoroughly and painfully that they will never forget. Here Fitzgerald uses clothing as a metaphor for rejection. When Val enters a room, “the conversation faded off … giving him the impression of continually shaking hands with a glove from which the hand had been withdrawn” (428). For Mrs. Halbird's “soft brutality,” Fitzgerald again invokes the glove: “there was a rough nap on the velvet gloves with which she prepared to handle Val” (429). After a series of probing questions about his background, she suggests that Val is too old (at twenty-three) for these parties and that he associate with people who are in the working world. This, his most searing lesson, and the continued rejections now pierce his “protective shell.” His anxieties are reflected in a dream, where “many fashionable men and women sat at a heaped table and offered him champagne, but the glass was always withdrawn before it reached his lips” (430).

Finally, Val is forced to face the reality of his social existence when he overhears some of the Halbirds' young guests discussing him. He learns that, indeed, he is regarded by their parents as an adventurer, that Mrs. Templeton has used him as “part of her New York conversation” (430), that Mercia's defense of him is unavailing, and, perhaps most hurtful, that rich boys leave rubber checks all over New York without exacting any social penalty. Val leaves the Halbirds' quietly, at night, and in another circular driveway, sees Ellen Mortmain emerge from a car where he glimpses “a small, satisfied mustache above a lighting cigarette” (431). The gates of paradise are firmly closed to him. But Val's education in the anguish of social snobbery is not complete; believing that money is the social leveler, after he gains his inheritance (ironically, it is his mother, not he, who dies, and he does become the beneficiary), he abandons those who had rejected him and becomes a man of the world. He knows that “his apprenticeship had been hard, but he had served it faithfully, and now he walked sure-footed through the dangerous labyrinths of snobbery” (431).

No longer a victim, and just as mistaken about his status and identity as in the past, Val dabbles as an art dealer while continuing his self-education: “His drift was toward the sophisticated section of society, and he picked up some knowledge of the arts, which he blended gracefully with his social education” (431). It is at this point that the story falters, for Fitzgerald's identification with Val, so strong when he was an innocent victim, now weakens as Val becomes a snobbish arriviste, thus giving some weight to the opinions of his detractors. I have noted elsewhere that a weakness in Fitzgerald's stories “is related to point of view and distance, particularly in relation to the protagonists. Fitzgerald is most successful when his central character is both a participant and an observer of the action, weakest when the protagonist is simply a member of the upper class or an outsider.”⁹ At the same time, Fitzgerald resorts to a mechanical plot trick, the too-neat reversal, as the financial tides of the depression sweep away Val's small inheritance, and he once again faces the specter of poverty.

In this story of a social climber, romantic love is a casualty of changing fortunes, as it is so often in Fitzgerald's fiction. As Scott Donaldson notes, “As he grew older, he could no longer care very much whether his young man won the golden girl.”¹⁰ In “The Rubber Check,” although Val's pursuit of Ellen Mortmain is one of the narrative strands, it is subsidiary to the protagonist's search for self-definition in the cold fortress of the very rich.

Although Ellen Mortmain is the obvious symbol of his youthful dreams, Fitzgerald does not invest her with the same magnetism characteristic of such other femmes fatales as Judy Jones (“Winter Dreams”), Edith Braden (“May Day” [1920]), or Jonquil Cary (“The Sensible Thing” [1924]); singularly absent is the charged romantic rhetoric that customarily accompanied descriptions of the protagonist's love interest. Instead, Fitzgerald uses striking, almost parodistic images that seem to mock as well as describe Ellen: “The face of young Ellen Mortmain regarded him with the contagious enthusiasm that later launched a famous cold cream. Her childish beauty was wistful and sad about being so rich and sixteen” (418). We are never certain, as we are in other Fitzgerald stories, that Val really desires the young woman of his dreams; their brief romance seems more an accident of propinquity than genuine love. Val's role in Ellen's world had led inevitably to his being cast as suitor, indeed as a well-regarded suitor. Living that role intensely, “suddenly he really was in love with her” (420). Val's narcissistic appreciation of his own performance and his love for Ellen are inextricably connected. As his identity gradually melts away during the incident of the rubber check, so too does his love: “He felt a sudden indifference toward her” (423) as he tries to salvage his reputation. After the incident has been resolved, “in his relief at being spared the more immediate agony, he hardly realized that he had lost her” (425).

Years later, he has come to London to see Ellen or “attempt to recapture something in his past” (432). She is engaged to someone else, like herself impoverished by the depression, but the rubber check still darkens Val's name and clouds his identity. Ellen asks (reminiscent of Tom Buchanan's words to Gatsby at the Plaza Hotel), “Who are you, Val? I mean, aren't you a sort of a questionable character? Didn't you cheat a lot of people out of a whole lot of money with a forged check or something?” Realizing that he has lost her, he feels only “a sentimental regret”; the stronger sensation is the sense that his own identity has been eroded by the Mortmain's bankruptcy, that “all around her he could feel the vast Mortmain fortune melting down, seeping back into the matrix whence it had come, and taking with it a little of Val Schuyler” (433). Money, whether his mother's or Ellen's, is indissolubly linked with love; yet paradoxically, for Fitzgerald, money is inevitably the barrier between lovers, and, as Donaldson notes, “too much money militates against true love.”¹¹ In this story, Fitzgerald questions the nature of love and the possibility of authentic feeling in a society so thick with social striations, but he leaves the matter unresolved.

As in so many of Fitzgerald's later stories, the protagonist lacks passion and vitality. Val's passivity (indeed his good manners) fails to ignite the tension normally inherent in the quest for the romantic dream. The authenticity of romantic love in the story is further clouded by the intermittent presence of Mercia Templeton, who is not conventionally beautiful, but is intelligent, perceptive, and, as we later discover, deeply in love with Val. Val's cynicism at the end—he will marry Mercia for her money—is ambiguous. Mercia is clearly superior to Ellen and has no illusions about Val, who at last has no illusions about himself. He clearly finds her attractive, if too aggressive, but he will marry her. It is unclear whether his sadness at the end is for the loss of his illusions, for being forced by need to marry a woman he doesn't love, for the loss of his self-image, or most likely, for the loss of what had always been the object of his strivings: “His precious freedom—not to be owned” (436). The casualty in “The Rubber Check” is romantic love as it is associated with youthful illusion, but money—and a lot of it—is the undeniable necessity for life.

At the end, Val is “sophisticated … he had that, at least, from his expensive education” (436). His most valuable lesson is that, for him, there was never a remedy; money alone could never have won him the freedom he craved. Fitzgerald, writing in the depths of the depression, understood that the kind of freedom Val seeks is given at birth: “He knew in his sadness that the only way he could have gotten what he really wanted was to have been born to it” (436). “Not to be owned” assumes an assured selfhood, an unsought entitlement that those born into great wealth accept as their privilege. Fitzgerald weaves the depression itself into this fable of lost illusions. When Ellen Mortmain loses her fortune, she is not impoverished. Wrapped in the calm security of her class, “she had survived the passing of her wealth; the warm rich current of well-being still flowed from her” (433). Like Gatsby, Val has become the victim of his own illusions. No amount of money can purchase the automatic self-assurance of those born into great wealth and social status. Thus his sadness at the end may be less at having to marry a girl he does not love than at knowing that for him, genuine freedom had been lost before his quest had ever begun.

“The Rubber Check,” although reminiscent of other Fitzgerald stories and novels, is memorable as a mature exploration of the meaning of money, social class, and the romantic illusions of an aspiring young man. It is particularly notable for its style, for what Jay McInerney describes as “the conversational intimacy of his narrative voice,” and for the complexity of its ideas.¹² Because Fitzgerald relies upon the brief but sharp image rather than extended rhetoric, because so much is suggested rather than delineated, because the structure so clearly reveals the underlying thematic pattern, “The Rubber Check” takes on the quality of a fable, tracing an archetypal American struggle for success. Val's circular journey takes him from rags to riches to rags, with the possibility of new riches waiting. But the roses at the beginning of the tale have metamorphosed into the cabbages at the end; regardless of what Val achieves in the future, the final image of this once-elegant social climber cultivating a rich man's garden is Fitzgerald's wry commentary on the American myth of success. As in several other stories of this period, Fitzgerald takes a mature, backward look at the subjects of his youthful fictional successes. The results were often stale and contrived, but here the author's reassessment of many familiar subjects results in a subtle, artistically rich work.¹³

Why is this an underrated, neglected story? Undoubtedly the central flaw is the character of Val and Fitzgerald's inability to maintain a consistent distance from him. Unfortunately, Mercia's reproach that Val seems superficial is close to the mark, as Fitzgerald's sharp narrative stroke indicates: “Actually he cared deeply about things, but the things he cared about were generally considered trivial” (422). But if Val is superficial, why do we feel so keenly the rebuffs and rebukes directed at him? Fitzgerald, as I have elsewhere suggested, was unable to find the narrative stance from which to observe Val Schuyler, and, as a result, the reader is left in doubt as to the seriousness of his search.¹⁴ That the issues Fitzgerald raises are important, that he treats them with sophisticated assurance, is never in question. But the characterization of Val is so thin throughout that, although the story should be read as a fable, it needs a more consistent figure to carry the weight of meaning Fitzgerald attaches to his protagonist.

Admirers of Fitzgerald should not, however, overlook “The Rubber Check.” Fitzgerald's writing, in the new, sparer style he was cultivating in his later years, is close to the level of his more celebrated depression-era stories such as “Crazy Sunday” and “Babylon Revisited.” His treatment of romantic love and illusion, identity, caste and class, and the dream of success is as complex as in many of his past works. It illuminates This Side of Paradise, The Great Gatsby, the early stories, and his own uncertainties during the depression. “The Rubber Check,” finally, is quintessential Fitzgerald. In the story of his life and his art, it deserves if not a chapter, then at least a secure place of its own.

Notes

1. Matthew J. Bruccoli, ed., The Price Was High: The Last Uncollected Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, 425. All subsequent page references to “The Rubber Check” are to this edition and will appear parenthetically in the text.

2. Matthew J. Bruccoli, Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald, 325.

3. F. Scott Fitzgerald, F. Scott Fitzgerald's Ledger: A Facsimile, 186. In Matthew J. Bruccoli, ed., The Notebooks of F. Scott Fitzgerald, there are twelve passages culled from “The Rubber Check”: numbers 112, 430, 480, 597, 907, 908, 1164-67, 1401, 1435.

4. Robert Sklar, F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Last Laocoön, 248; John A. Higgins, F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Study of the Stories, 154; Scott Donaldson, “Money and Marriage in Fitzgerald's Stories,” 81; Bryant Mangum, A Fortune Yet: Money in the Art of F. Scott Fitzgerald's Short Stories, 125; Bruccoli, ed., Price Was High, 417; Henry Dan Piper, F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Critical Portrait, 176; Kenneth Eble, F. Scott Fitzgerald, 121, 122.

5. Brian Harding, “‘Made for—or against—the Trade’: The Radicalism of Fitzgerald's Saturday Evening Post Love Stories,” 128-29; Ruth Prigozy, “Fitzgerald's Short Stories and the Depression: An Artistic Crisis,” 121. This essay discusses all the short stories Fitzgerald wrote during the depression, and the impact of the depression on his art.

6. Piper, Fitzgerald: Critical Portrait, 85.

7. Donaldson, “Money and Marriage,” 82.

8. Ward McAllister is one of Val's models. McAllister (1827-1895) was introduced as a young man to New York society by a relative. Years later he returned to that city and carved out a position as a leading social lion. It was McAllister who named the best New York families “the Patriarchs” and widened the social hierarchy to include the “Four Hundred,” a phrase that achieved more lasting fame than its creator.

9. Ruth Prigozy, “F. Scott Fitzgerald,” 107.

10. Donaldson, “Money and Marriage,” 81.

11. Ibid., 85.

12. Jay McInerney, “Fitzgerald Revisited,” 23. McInerney notes that, unlike the modernist works of his contemporaries, “Fitzgerald's third-person narratives always sound as if they are verging into the first person, as indeed they sometimes do. … F. Scott Fitzgerald never disappeared from his stories. They were entirely personal, intimate, and confidential.”

13. “Indecision” (1931) and “A Change of Class” (1931) are two of these less than successful stories.

14. Prigozy, “Fitzgerald's Short Stories and the Depression,” 120-21.