BUTCHER’S COPY-EDITING

THE CAMBRIDGE EDITION OF THE WORKS OF
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

Detail from F. Scott Fitzgerald to Maxwell Perkins, ca. 1 June 1925.
Charles Scribner’s Sons Archives,
Princeton University Libraries.

ALL THE SAD
YOUNG MEN

* * *

F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

Edited by

JAMES L. W. WEST Ⅲ

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo

Cambridge University Press
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Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York

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© 2006 Eleanor Lanahan, Thomas P. Roche, Jr., and Charles Byrne, Trustees
under agreement dated 3 July 1975, created by Frances Scott Fitzgerald Smith.
Introduction and notes © 2006 James L. W. West III
This edition © 2006 Cambridge University Press

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without
the written permission of Cambridge University Press.

First published 2006

Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge

A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library

ISBN-13 978-0-521-40240-8 hardback
ISBN-10 0-521-40240-9 hardback

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CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I thank Eleanor Lanahan, Thomas P. Roche, Jr., and Chris Byrne, the Trustees of the F. Scott Fitzgerald Estate, for their interest and support. I am grateful to Phyllis Westberg of Harold Ober Associates, Inc., for helping with permissions and for other advice and assistance. Special thanks to Cecilia Ross for access to the Fitzgerald manuscripts that are held by his grandchildren.

Illustrations for this volume are reproduced from the F. Scott Fitzgerald Papers and the Charles Scribner’s Sons Archives, Manuscript Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library. The cover of the transcript for the Daddy Browning–Peaches Heenan divorce trial is reproduced, with permission, from the copy in the University of Minnesota Law Library. Page 16 from the typescript of “Magnetism” is reproduced from the F. Scott Fitzgerald Collection, Clifton Waller Barrett Library, Special Collections, University of Virginia Library.

Don C. Skemer, AnnaLee Pauls, and Margaret Sherry Rich at Princeton were unfailingly cheerful and helpful. For assistance in solving two problems of emendation and annotation, I thank Marissa Ain of the Yale Club, New York City, and Scott Surrency of the Department of Italian at Pennsylvania State University. Bryant Mangum and Benita A. Moore, colleagues in the Fitzgerald field, generously made the results of their own research available to me. Richard Buller and Tim Young helped me to acquire the photograph of Lois Moran.

At Penn State I am grateful to Susan Welch, Dean of the College of the Liberal Arts; to Ray Lombra, Associate Dean for Research; and to Robert L. Caserio, Head of the Department of English, for their continuing support. Research assistance was provided by LaVerne Kennevan Maginnis, Jeanne Alexander, Robert R. Bleil, and Gregg Baptista.

J. L. W. W. III

Illustrations
(Beginning on page 495)

Frontispiece. F. Scott Fitzgerald to Maxwell Perkins, ca. 1 June 1925.

1.		Front panel of the dust jacket, first edition of All the Sad Young Men.
2.		Publicity photograph of the movie actress Lois Moran.
3.		Cover for transcript of the Daddy Browning–Peaches Heenan divorce trial.
4.		Advertising poster for Florenz Ziegfeld’s Midnight Frolic.

INTRODUCTION

1. background

The first edition of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short-fiction collection All the Sad Young Men (1926) contains nine stories, including three of his best—“The Rich Boy,” “Winter Dreams,” and “Absolution.” The entire collection is strong: its themes are consistent from story to story, its characters are memorable, and its language is pitch-perfect and luminous. Fitzgerald began to assemble and revise the material for the collection in May 1925, a few weeks after formal publication of The Great Gatsby. He was in Paris and had recently settled into an apartment at 14 rue de Tilsitt with his wife and daughter. Fitzgerald believed that Gatsby would demonstrate to reviewers and readers that he had achieved new maturity and control in his writing. He wanted All the Sad Young Men to reinforce this impression.

Early in June, Fitzgerald wrote to Maxwell Perkins, his editor at Charles Scribner’s Sons, giving this tentative table of contents:

ALL THE SAD YOUNG MEN
(9 short stories)

Perkins was enthusiastic. He cleared the way for All the Sad Young Men to pass quickly through production and into print for the fall season—a fairly simple task, since Scribners maintained its own manufacturing plant on West 43rd Street, and the printers there could move the occasional book through on an accelerated schedule. By 9 July, Perkins was having the dust-jacket art prepared; on 27 July he sent the royalty agreement to Fitzgerald, noting in his accompanying letter, however, that the promised manuscript had not yet arrived.2 It took Fitzgerald another month to send the manuscript. In his cover letter to Perkins, dated 28 August, he explained the delay: “Here’s the stuff,” he wrote. “I’ve been working over it for a month—especially this version of The Rich Boy. The Red Book hasn’t yet published it but I have asked them to hurry + they should by November.”3

The problem with the publication date for “The Rich Boy” in Red Book ended up delaying the release of All the Sad Young Men. Fitzgerald had begun the story in March 1925 and had worked on it during the spring and summer months that followed, sending a version to his literary agent, Harold Ober, in early August. Ober had sold that version to Red Book for a high price—$3,500. The magazine wanted to publish “The Rich Boy” as a two-part story but could not clear the necessary space until January and February 1926. The Red Book editors therefore told Perkins and Fitzgerald, with apologies, that Scribners would have to wait until late February to release All the Sad Young Men. The magazine wanted to publish the story first, before Fitzgerald put it between hard covers.

Author and editor now relaxed. Fitzgerald had not asked initially to see galleys of the collection, but now there was time for him to do so, even with the proofs passing back and forth across the Atlantic. Galleys were mailed to him in mid-October; he marked them and had them back to Perkins by 25 November. Bound copies of All the Sad Young Men were ready in early January, and Fitzgerald had a copy in his hands by the 19th. “It is beautiful,” he wrote to Perkins. “Max, I’m enormously obliged” (Dear Scott/Dear Max, 130).

The nine stories that Fitzgerald chose for the Scribners edition of All the Sad Young Men had all been published in magazines: “The Rich Boy,” Red Book, 46 (January–February 1926); “Winter Dreams,” Metropolitan Magazine, 56 (December 1922); “The Baby Party,” Hearst’s International, 47 (February 1925); “Absolution,” American Mercury, 2 (June 1924); “Rags Martin-Jones and the Pr-nce of W-les,” McCall’s, 51 (July 1924); “The Adjuster,” Red Book, 45 (September 1925); “Hot and Cold Blood,” Hearst’s International, 44 (August 1923); “‘The Sensible Thing,’” Liberty, 1 (5 July 1924); and “Gretchen’s Forty Winks,” Saturday Evening Post, 196 (15 March 1924).

All the Sad Young Men was formally published on 26 February 1926 at a price of $2.00. It sold well: a first printing of 10,100 was quickly exhausted; two more printings followed, one in March of 3,020 copies and another in May of 3,050. This was an unusually strong sale for a collection of short fiction. The Great Gatsby, a novel, had only sold around 21,000 copies the previous spring.

The notices for All the Sad Young Men were nearly all laudatory. Many reviewers noted that Fitzgerald’s writing had become more sophisticated and that a new artistry was apparent in his work. Several critics gave extra praise to “The Rich Boy,” “Winter Dreams,” and “Absolution.” “Mr. Fitzgerald has graduated from the jazz age,” wrote Henry F. Pringle in the New York World (28 February). “These are splendid pieces of work,” said an anonymous reviewer for the Cleveland Plain Dealer (14 March); “they prove that Fitzgerald’s is no mere flashy talent, but a deep and comprehensive one.” “The level of achievement is high,” wrote James Gray in the St. Paul Dispatch (2 March). “Fitzgerald has acquired maturity, a happy profundity,” said the anonymous reviewer for the Milwaukee Journal (12 March). “It is a joy to read these tales,” said Harry Hansen in the Chicago Daily News (3 March). A few reviewers hit sour notes: one found the majority of the stories to be “entirely lacking in any real distinction,” and another felt that not one of the stories measured “up to standard.”4 In the main, however, the notices were positive. Fitzgerald must have been pleased.

2.ADDITIONAL STOREIS

The eleven short stories added to this volume of the Cambridge edition were not collected by Fitzgerald during his lifetime. They are the uncollected stories that he published in magazines between 10 April 1925, the publication date of The Great Gatsby, and 28 April 1928, when the first installment of the Basil Duke Lee series, “The Scandal Detectives,” appeared in the Saturday Evening Post. (The Basil stories will appear in an upcoming volume of the Cambridge edition.) Many of these additional narratives are excellent: “The Dance,” “The Love Boat,” “The Bowl,” and “Magnetism” are as good as all but the best of Fitzgerald’s short fiction; and “Jacob’s Ladder” is one of the dozen or so best stories he ever wrote. If Fitzgerald had lived longer, he would surely have collected some of these stories, but he managed to publish only one more volume of short fiction—Taps at Reveille (1935)—before he died in 1940. And, too, some of these stories were so closely related to his novels that he might have hesitated to reprint them until late in his career. “The Love Boat,” for example, echoes many of the themes in The Great Gatsby; and both “Jacob’s Ladder” and “Magnetism” were mined for words and phrases that reappear in Tender Is the Night.5

The Cambridge edition is an omnium gatherum: these uncollected stories have been included so that readers can see the full range of Fitzgerald’s production during this period. The eleven additional stories are as follows: “One of My Oldest Friends,” Woman’s Home Companion, 52 (September 1925); “A Penny Spent,” Saturday Evening Post, 198 (10 October 1925); “‘Not in the Guidebook,’” Woman’s Home Companion, 52 (November 1925); “ Presumption,” Saturday Evening Post, 198 (9 January 1926); “The Adolescent Marriage,” Saturday Evening Post, 198 (6 March 1926); “The Dance,” Red Book, 47 (June 1926); “Your Way and Mine,” Woman’s Home Companion, 54 (May 1927); “Jacob’s Ladder,” Saturday Evening Post, 200 (20 August 1927); “The Love Boat,” Saturday Evening Post, 200 (8 October 1927); “The Bowl,” Saturday Evening Post, 200 (21 January 1928); and “Magnetism,” Saturday Evening Post, 200 (3 March 1928).

3. EDITORIAL PRINCIPLES

No copy-texts have been declared for these stories. This editorial procedure has been described by G. Thomas Tanselle in “Editing without a Copy-Text,” Studies in Bibliography, 47 (1994): 1–22. Equal authority is vested in serial and collected texts and, where appropriate, in the holographs and typescripts that precede them. Emending decisions are recorded in the apparatus.6

This is the first volume of short fiction in the Cambridge edition for which a significant amount of holograph and typescript evidence survives. For the original nine stories a holograph survives for “Rags Martin-Jones,” and typescripts are extant for “The Rich Boy,” “The Adjuster,” “Hot and Cold Blood,” and “Gretchen’s Forty Winks.” For the eleven added stories, typescripts survive for “A Penny Spent,” “‘Not in the Guidebook,’” “The Adolescent Marriage,” “The Dance,” “Your Way and Mine,” “Jacob’s Ladder,” “The Love Boat,” “The Bowl,” and “Magnetism.” The typescripts are quite helpful: most of them bear Fitzgerald’s handwritten revisions, and three of them preserve passages that were expurgated before publication. A description of the evidence that survives for each story appears at the head of the emendations for that story in the apparatus. The authority of each document is commented on there, and the strategy for emendation is described. As in all collections of this kind, each story represents a separate editorial problem.

For the nine stories chosen by Fitzgerald for the 1926 volume we also have magazine texts which, when collated against the Scribners versions, yield the revising (much of it quite heavy) that Fitzgerald did in the spring of 1925, plus any revisions in proof that he introduced that autumn. These variants can be attributed to Fitzgerald with confidence. The collations have revealed no evidence of unwarranted editorial intrusion at Scribners—no sophistications or expurgations or fancied improvements. The magazine texts, and the holographs and typescripts that precede them, when they survive, sometimes exhibit spelling, punctuation, word division, and capitalization that are more characteristic of Fitzgerald’s known usages than are similar features of the Scribners texts. Several of the typescripts, however, were prepared by typists in France or Italy who automatically imposed British forms of spelling, punctuation, and word division on the texts—single instead of double quotation marks in dialogue, for example, or –ise and –our spellings. Revisions by Fitzgerald in the wording or punctuation of these typescripts carry considerable authority, but, because he could not type, the texture of typed accidentals in these same documents has been treated with some skepticism and has not been assigned unduly heavy weight.

Fitzgerald introduced no late revisions into any of the stories in this volume. He kept tearsheets of many of the stories but did not make revisions on them. No copy of the Scribners 1926 edition of All the Sad Young Men, with revisions marked by Fitzgerald, is known to survive. Machine collation discloses no plate variants in the second and third impressions. No British edition of the collection was published. Several of the stories were reprinted during Fitzgerald’s lifetime in Canadian or British magazines; five were syndicated; three were reprinted in short-fiction anthologies. None of these reprintings contains authoritative revisions.7

When Fitzgerald made his initial selections for Taps at Reveille in 1934, he included “Jacob’s Ladder” in the collection. Perkins had the story set up in type and mailed the galley proofs to Fitzgerald. So many passages in “Jacob’s Ladder” had been transferred to Tender Is the Night, however, that Fitzgerald, when he reread the story in galleys, decided not to include it in Taps. The galley proofs survive among his papers at Princeton.

“The Rich Boy”

The history of composition for “The Rich Boy” had a significant effect on its published texts.8 Fitzgerald began writing the story in March 1925 while he and his wife, Zelda, were vacationing in Capri. In April he told Ober that he was “stretching” the story “into a three parter called The Rich Boy which might bring $5000.00 or so from College Humor or the Red Book.”9 Fitzgerald promised to mail the story to Ober in a week, but illness (his and Zelda’s) slowed his progress. By late May he had returned to Paris and had given the third version of the story to a typist, but that version did not entirely suit him, and he continued to revise the text into July. “The Rich Boy has been a scource of much trouble but its in shape at last,” he told Ober; “I’m rewriting the 3d part this week” (As Ever, Scott Fitz—, 79). Finally in early August he sent Ober a complete ribbon typescript bearing heavy handwritten revisions. Ober had the story retyped and sold it to Red Book. “The Rich Boy” was published there in two parts, as noted earlier, in January and February 1926.

Fitzgerald, in Paris, had retained a carbon copy of the typescript he had mailed to Ober. Using this carbon he continued to revise “The Rich Boy” for All the Sad Young Men, putting the story through at least one more intermediate typescript and arriving at a version that pleased him by late August. This final version was mailed to Perkins on the 28th, together with setting-copy typescripts for the other stories in the collection.

Four versions of “The Rich Boy” survive today, two of them embodied in a single document: (a) the typed text of the surviving typescript of the Red Book version, before Fitzgerald revised it by hand; (b) the text of this same typescript after Fitzgerald had revised it by hand; (c) the serial text from Red Book, and (d) the collected text from All the Sad Young Men. Collations among these four versions show that the carbon copy retained by Fitzgerald in Paris did not bear the same late handwritten revisions that he had made on the typescript sent to Ober. (That is to say, Fitzgerald did not transfer these revisions from the ribbon onto the carbon before putting the ribbon copy into the transatlantic mail.) As a consequence, three separate patterns of textual variation emerge:

Fitzgerald does not revise a reading on the Ober typescript but does revise it on the carbon, or on a subsequent typescript. The original reading therefore appears in Red Book; the revised reading is published in All the Sad Young Men.

Fitzgerald revises a reading on the Ober typescript but does not revise it on the carbon or on a later typescript. The revised reading therefore appears in Red Book; the original reading is printed in All the Sad Young Men.

Fitzgerald revises a reading on the Ober typescript, then revises it differently on the carbon, or on a subsequent typescript. The first revised reading is published in Red Book; the second revised reading appears in All the Sad Young Men.

In order to produce an eclectic text (here one might call it a portmanteau text), an editor might theoretically blend the revisions from categories 1 and 2. The readings in category 3, however, would present problems. Which readings should have precedence? Probably those from All the Sad Young Men, since that text falls later in the revising process—but should the surviving versions of “The Rich Boy” in fact be merged in this way? If Fitzgerald had wanted to preserve the revisions from the typescript mailed to Ober, he would presumably have done so. After studying the four texts and performing experiments in blending, the editor has decided that it would be a mistake to

Page 6 from the revised ribbon typescript of “The Rich Boy,” which Fitzgerald mailed to Harold Ober for sale to Red Book. The passage that Fitzgerald has deleted does not appear in the magazine text, but because he did not cut it from the carbon copy, it is printed in All the Sad Young Men. Fitzgerald Papers, Princeton University Libraries.

A by-product of this collating has been the discovery that “The Rich Boy” was expurgated before it appeared in Red Book. Predictably a “God damned” from the typescript becomes “damned” in the serial text (Cambridge text, 29), but more noteworthy is the removal of references to Paula Legendre’s swollen shape during pregnancy. Readers of “The Rich Boy” will remember that, near the end of the story, on a hot Friday afternoon in May, Anson Hunter (the protagonist) runs into Paula, his earliest love, in the lobby of the Plaza Hotel. She is now Mrs. Peter Hagerty and is expecting her fourth child. The text of the typescript reads: “Near the revolving door the figure of a woman, obviously with child, stood sideways to the light” (Cambridge text, 37). The words “obviously with child” were edited out before the story appeared in Red Book.

Paula invites Anson to spend the weekend with her and her husband at their country home, and he accepts. When they arrive at Paula’s house, her three children welcome her by hugging her. The typescript reads: “Abstractedly and with difficulty Paula took each one into her arms, a caress which they accepted stiffly, as they had evidently been told not to bump into Mummy” (Cambridge text, 38). Again the reference to Paula’s shape seems to have been judged improper for Red Book readers; the sentence appears in the magazine in truncated form, with a full stop after “arms.” The alteration makes Paula appear cool toward her children, or perhaps clumsy, and the reader has still not been told that she is pregnant.

These editorial excisions make for difficulties when Anson learns, a month later, that Paula has died in childbirth. A copy-editor at Red Book must have recognized the problem and tried to make a quick repair by changing “This baby” to “The baby that’s coming,” but the remedy is inadequate. Readers of the Red Book text must have been puzzled: Paula dies in childbirth without its having been made clear that she is pregnant. Fortunately the version published in All the Sad Young Men was not similarly meddled with. The references to Paula’s pregnancy are published there without alteration, and the reader is not wrong-footed.

Another type of change was requested by Ludlow Fowler, the model for Anson Hunter. Fowler, a classmate of Fitzgerald’s at Princeton, had served as best man when Fitzgerald married Zelda in 1920, and the two men had remained on friendly terms. (Fowler was one of the few people present at Fitzgerald’s funeral in 1940.) While composing “The Rich Boy,” Fitzgerald wrote to Fowler as follows:

I have written a fifteen thousand word story about you called The Rich Boy—it is so disguised that no one except you and me and maybe two of the girls concerned would recognize, unless you give it away, but it is in a large measure the story of your life, toned down here and there and symplified. Also many gaps had to come out of my imagination. It is frank, unsparing but sympathetic and I think you will like it—it is one of the best things I have ever [d]one. Where it will appear and when, I don’t as yet know.11

Fitzgerald could not make the cuts himself because he was in Paris. He seems to have assumed that Fowler would go to Ober’s office and indicate which passages he wanted to have removed. Fowler, for his part, apparently believed that Fitzgerald would contact Ober and identify the passages. As it turned out no one made the cuts, and the two passages appeared in the Red Book text. Fitzgerald made sure that the cuts were made for All the Sad Young Men. When he asked Perkins in October to send him galley proofs, he explained, “The reason I want to get proof on The Rich Boy is that the original of the hero wants something changed—something that would identify him” (Dear Scott/Dear Max, 122). Fitzgerald made the cuts on the proofs, and the passages do not appear in All the Sad Young Men. They have not been reinstated to the Cambridge text but are printed in an appendix of this volume, together with another passage from the typescript (anti-semitic comments by Robert Hunter, Anson’s uncle) that appears neither in Red Book nor in All the Sad Young Men.

“Winter Dreams”

The characters and themes of “Winter Dreams” are quite close to those of The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald referred to the story as a “sort of 1st draft of the Gatsby idea” in the letter he wrote to Perkins in early June. Fitzgerald had taken several passages from the serial text in Metropolitan and had incorporated them, slightly revised, into Gatsby. This was a common practice for him, especially when he had produced, for a short story, some particularly good descriptive passages or some especially telling lines of dialogue. His rule in such cases was either not to reprint the story at all, if the borrowings were heavy, or to remove or rewrite the passages if he did reprint the story. He chose the second strategy with “Winter Dreams,” carefully cutting or reworking the text that he had transferred to Gatsby and in the process thoroughly revising the rest of the story. Midway through the Metropolitan text, for example, one finds this passage:

But what gave it an air of breathless intensity was the sense that it was inhabited by Judy Jones—that it was as casual a thing to her as the little house in the village had once been to Dexter. There was a feeling of mystery in it, of bedrooms upstairs more beautiful and strange than other bedrooms, of gay and radiant activities taking place through these deep corridors and of romances that were not musty and laid already in lavender, but were fresh and breathing and set forth in rich motor cars and in great dances whose flowers were scarcely withered. They were more real because he could feel them all about him, pervading the air with the shades and echoes of still vibrant emotion.

An altered but still quite recognizable version of this paragraph appears on pages 177–78 of the Scribners first edition of Gatsby. Fitzgerald cut the passage entirely in revising “Winter Dreams” for All the Sad Young Men.

Several paragraphs along in the Metropolitan text, one discovers another passage that Fitzgerald reused in Gatsby, on page 179 of the first edition:

Suddenly she turned her dark eyes directly upon him and the corners of her mouth drooped until her face seemed to open like a flower. He dared scarcely to breathe; he had the sense that she was exerting some force upon him, making him overwhelmingly conscious of the youth and mystery that wealth imprisons and preserves, the freshness of many clothes, of cool rooms and gleaming things, safe and proud above the hot struggles of the poor.

   The porch was bright with the bought luxury of starshine. The wicker of the settee squeaked fashionably when he put his arm around her, commanded by her eyes. He kissed her curious and lovely mouth and committed himself to the following of a grail.

Then she smiled and the corners of her mouth drooped and an almost imperceptible sway brought her closer to him, looking up into his eyes. A lump rose in Dexter’s throat, and he waited breathless for the experiment, facing the unpredictable compound that would form mysteriously from the elements of their lips. Then he saw—she communicated her excitement to him, lavishly, deeply, with kisses that were not a promise but a fulfillment. They aroused in him not hunger demanding renewal but surfeit that would demand more surfeit . . . kisses that were like charity, creating want by holding back nothing at all.

   The revision of “Winter Dreams,” of which these passages offer typical examples, was heavy enough to produce two independent versions of the story. The differences cannot adequately be represented in a table of variants. The revised version, which appeared first in All the Sad Young Men, is published in this volume.12 The magazine version has been reprinted twice recently and can be consulted as a full text for comparison.13

4. RESTORATIONS AND REGULARIZATIONS

For “The Love Boat,” “Jacob’s Ladder,” and “Magnetism”—published in 1927 and 1928 in the Saturday Evening Post—the extant typescripts are unusually valuable. Collation of these typescripts against the serial texts has uncovered expurgations in all three stories, meant to scrub out any touch of sex or scandal, however faint. These verbal cleansings were designed to render the stories suitable for the broad, conventional, middle-class readership of the Post. No purpose will be served now by criticizing such editorial practices. The Post wished to avoid controversy, and Fitzgerald (who liked to know that his stories reached enormous audiences through the magazine and who wanted the top money that it paid to its authors) must have known that any objection from him would have been futile. It is not certain that he saw magazine proofs or knew of these expurgations. No evidence survives to show that he compared the Post texts, after they were published, to typescripts that he might have saved. Fitzgerald used sex and scandal sparingly in his fiction, but he knew how to employ both with telling effect. The survival of his typescripts has made it possible to reinstate the excised words and sentences and to restore the passages to the form in which he originally created them.

“Jacob’s Ladder”

The surviving typescript of “Jacob’s Ladder,” preserved by the Ober agency in its files, is now at Princeton. In that typescript (which bears Fitzgerald’s final handwritten revisions) the sixteen-year-old Jenny Delehanty, soon to take the screen name Jenny Prince, offers herself sexually to Jacob Booth as a form of thanks to him for sponsoring her budding movie career. Jenny and Jacob are riding together in “the dark cave” of a taxi-cab. She kisses him and he reciprocates, but “without enjoying it.” She is too young, and he senses that her offer of herself is insincere. Fitzgerald writes:

. . . there was no shadow of passion in her eyes or on her mouth, there was a faint spray of champagne on her breath. She clung nearer, desperately. He took her hands and put them in her lap. Her childish intention of giving herself to him shocked him.

The italicized words above disappear between the typescript and the Post text, making Jenny’s intentions unclear. Does she simply want more kisses? If that is all, then why does Jacob react as he does?

Later in the story, Jacob visits Jenny in Hollywood. She is older and has had several successes on the screen; Jacob decides that he now wants a full romantic involvement with her, but she has changed her mind. In the typescript he says to her: “If I didn’t thrill you, as you call it, why were you so ready to make me a present of yourself last summer?” (Cambridge text, 351). In the Post text, the second part of the sentence has become bland: “why did you seem to care so much last summer?”

Apart from these bleachings, one also discovers a series of typographical effects in the final paragraphs of “Jacob’s Ladder” that Fitzgerald wanted but that the Post was unable, or perhaps was disinclined, to provide. Jacob has now realized that he is never to have Jenny. By the end of the story she has become a woman, a professional cinema actress, and is no longer the girl he fell in love with earlier. And, she tells him, she has herself fallen for another man—a young actor in Hollywood. Jacob, crushed, says farewell to Jenny at the Plaza Hotel, where she is staying during a visit to New York. Then he walks west along 59th Street to Columbus Circle, where he turns south and walks down Broadway. At 51st Street he sees Jenny’s name on the marquee of the Capitol Theatre—an enormous gilded movie palace, a cavernous shrine where viewers came during the 1920s to worship the images of film stars. The Capitol is showing one of Jenny’s early movies. Jacob realizes that the Jenny he loves is still present in that film, captured by the camera, always young, impervious to change and to the passage of time. He created this woman: he invented her screen name, Jenny Prince, and bestowed it on her. Now that name hovers above his head. Here are the final few paragraphs of the story as Fitzgerald originally wrote them:

   The name startled him, as if a passer-by had spoken it. He stopped and stared. Other eyes rose to that sign, people hurried by him and turned in.

Fitzgerald marked his typescript to show the expansion of Jenny’s name in Jacob’s mind—from simple roman letters, to italics, to full capitals, to large centered caps (see the facsimile on page xxix). The Post, publishing this passage in narrow-gauge columns on a back page, did not reproduce the effects that Fitzgerald wanted. Because the typescript has survived, it has been possible to restore these effects in the Cambridge text.

Near the end of the story, Fitzgerald had also meant to touch one final time on Jacob’s earlier refusal of Jenny’s sexual advances. Jacob muses: “Beautiful child who tried so hard one night to give herself to me.” These words were cut from the text, along with the repetitive chant that follows: “Never any more. Never any more.” (Overtones of Keats are obvious in the story; the repetition of “Never any more” calls to mind “Nevermore” in “The Raven,” Poe’s lament for the lost Lenore.) And finally, a typist’s left index finger appears to have erred, striking the “f” key instead of the “v” just below and producing “fast throbbing darkness” instead of “vast throbbing darkness” as the last three words of the story.14 In the Post text a hyphen has been added to produce “fast-throbbing.” All subsequently published texts of “Jacob’s Ladder” have followed the Post version, printing the earlier passages in expurgated form, printing “Jenny

The final page of the surviving typescript of “Jacob’s Ladder,” with Fitzgerald’s handwritten revisions and his instructions about type size and location. Fitzgerald Papers, Princeton University Libraries.

Prince” with no typographical variation, and ending the story with “fast-throbbing darkness” instead of “vast throbbing darkness.”15 The correct readings from the surviving typescript have been restored in this edition. The text of “Jacob’s Ladder” as Fitzgerald originally wrote it is published here for the first time.

“The Love Boat”

Between typescript and print, “The Love Boat” was deprived of a reference to a tabloid scandal of the 1920s that was tawdry but appropriate. In the first scene of the story Bill Frothington and two of his friends, all three of them recent graduates of Harvard, crash a high-school graduation party being given on a tourist paddlewheeler on the Thames River in southern Connecticut. Bill, a rich boy, meets a pretty lower-class girl named Mae Purley at the party and pursues her that summer. They quarrel, however, and he breaks off the romance. After serving in the First World War, Bill comes home and marries a woman from his own social class. Eight years pass. Bill, now in his early thirties and weary of his marriage, returns to the same town at the same time of year and seeks out Mae. She too has married, and her beauty has faded.

Bill knows that he probably cannot recapture his lost youth, but fortified by a strong dose of brandy he makes a final attempt. He wanders down to the river and sees a paddlewheeler about to depart from the dock, again with a party of high-school seniors aboard for a graduation party. Bill goes onto the boat and insinuates himself into the festivities. Tipsy and fragrant from the brandy, he begins to cut in on the young dancers, particularly on a girl named May who resembles Mae Purley as she looked when she was young. Bill tries to persuade May to come with him to a private part of the boat, but she refuses. In Fitzgerald’s original text, in both the surviving holograph and the typescript, the teenage boys begin to make fun of Bill:

   “I’m Daddy Browning,” somebody was saying. “I got a swell love-nest up in the Bronx, Peaches.”

Page 35 from Fitzgerald’s composite typescript/manuscript of “The Love Boat,” with mention of Daddy Browning and Peaches Heenan. These references were cut before the story appeared in the Saturday Evening Post and have been restored to the Cambridge text. Fitzgerald Papers, Princeton University Libraries.

And several paragraphs along:

   “Just look at old Daddy Browning step.”

Who was Daddy Browning? Who was Peaches? They were in fact the principals in a lurid divorce case covered by the tabloids during the fall and winter of 1926–27, less than a year before “The Love Boat” appeared in the Post. In 1925 Edward “Daddy” Browning, a millionaire in his early fifties, married Frances “Peaches” Heenan, a chubby fifteen-year-old girl he had met at a high-school dance. The marriage was short-lived. Peaches, egged on by her mother, sued Daddy for divorce in October 1926, alleging mental cruelty and sexual perversion and charging, among other things, that Daddy had kept a honking gander in their bedroom. The trial was given wide coverage by the press: the judge did not believe Peaches’ story and suspected her and her mother of gold-digging; he awarded Peaches only a small settlement. Four days after the verdict, however, Peaches signed a $100,000 vaudeville contract and began to appear on stage, clad in a skimpy outfit and accompanied by a pet gander, which was itself decked out in a hat and bow tie. For several months, while public curiosity lasted, Peaches recounted to her audiences the tale of her marriage to Daddy.16

By mentioning Daddy Browning and Peaches, the boys in “The Love Boat” are saying that Bill has a sexual yen for May. There is nothing subtle about the taunt: to these boys Bill is foolish and lecherous. But in the Post text, and therefore in the only subsequent reprinting of the story, all mention of Daddy Browning and Peaches has been removed.17 Bill is now only called “daddy”—once, in lower-case. He seems harmless, a man in early middle age who is nostalgic for his lost youth. Readers of 1927 would have known immediately what was being implied by the reference to Daddy and Peaches, had it remained in the story. Fitzgerald must have wanted the ambiguity. Bill might only be making an innocent attempt to relive his past, but as a bored husband in his early thirties he might also have something else in mind. This ambiguity has been reintroduced in the Cambridge text of “The Love Boat,” which follows the typescript and restores Daddy Browning and Peaches to the story.

“Magnetism”

Evidence of bowdlerization at the Post is also found in the prepublication materials that survive for “Magnetism.” Here the setting-copy typescript itself is extant, not at Princeton but at the Barrett Library, University of Virginia. This typescript bears the markings of the Post editors and shows how the story was wiped clean of sexual innuendo.

“Magnetism,” set in Hollywood, tells the story of George Hannaford, a popular movie star, and his wife, Kay Tompkins, a film actress. George and Kay are engaged in a simmering argument over Helen Avery, an ingénue with whom George is starring in a movie and with whom he has been having a mild flirtation. In retaliation Kay has rekindled an old romance with a man named Arthur Busch. She has attended a party, with Arthur and George as joint escorts, and has staged an affectionate scene with Arthur in such a way that George will be certain to see it. Now she and George are back home, preparing to go to bed. They sleep in separate bedrooms, but with a connecting bath. George wants to smooth over the quarrel; he understands that his wife does not really love Arthur Busch, and he is certain that he does not love Helen Avery.

Kay, however, wishes to prolong the hostilities. In the original typed text of the setting copy, she says: “I’m going upstairs. Please don’t come in my room tonight” (Cambridge text, 417). A copy-editor at the Post, working in green ink, has flagged the second sentence, and another editor, using a red pencil, has struck the sentence out, substituting the single word “Goodnight”—which accordingly appears in the Post. A full collation of this setting copy against the Post text reveals that there was additional expurgation in proof. Later in the story, George (now on better terms with Kay) enters her

Page 16 of the setting copy for “Magnetism,” showing expurgation by the editors at the Post. “Please don’t come in my room tonight” was flagged and queried in green ink by a copy-editor. A second editor, working in red pencil, cut the sentence and substituted “Goodnight.” Barrett Library, University of Virginia.

Married couples often smooth over arguments by using sex as a palliative. Sometimes they fight to arouse themselves for sex. Perhaps George and Kay have moved through quarrels in this way before; perhaps George wants to try the remedy again. Probably this is what Fitzgerald means, ever so subtly, to suggest—but with the editing at the Post, the point is lost. The lines have been restored to the Cambridge text.

Regularized features

Fitzgerald employed American spellings for most words. He did favor some British forms—“grey” and “glamour,” for example, and “theatre.” These have been allowed to stand. He was inconsistent about word division; study of his holographs, however, has yielded his preferences for most words, such as “good-bye,” “motorboat,” “taxi-cab,” and “wrist watch.”

Fitzgerald used italics for emphasis and, usually, for words in languages other than English. His habit was to enclose the names of books and newspapers and the titles of literary works within quotation marks. These tendencies have been followed in this edition. Question marks and exclamation points that follow italicized words are italicized. The only narrative breaks retained from serial texts are those indicated by roman or Arabic numerals. Nonstructural breaks signaled by blank space followed by a display cap—inserted by magazines to break up the text visually—have been ignored. For the stories in this volume, typescript evidence usually survives to resolve such matters of spacing.

“Mother” and “Father,” as proper nouns, are capitalized. Seasons are given in lower-case; years are in Arabic numerals. The numbers of cross-streets in New York City are in Arabic numerals, and numbered avenues (Fifth Avenue) are spelled out. Dashes are one-em in length; three ellipsis points appear within sentences, four at the ends of sentences.

Fitzgerald sometimes punctuated lines of dialogue this way: “I called to apologize,” she added, “please excuse me.” Or, “I’ll be glad to sign,” he said, “do you have a pen?” The second comma in these readings has been emended to a period; when necessary the first word in the second sentence of dialogue has been capitalized. Fitzgerald sometimes left the comma out between two adjectives of equal weight and nearly always omitted the comma between the final two elements in a series. He sometimes did not put a comma before the conjunction in a compound sentence. All three practices are preserved in the Cambridge texts, so long as there is no possibility of confusion.

These emendation practices have introduced a measure of consistency to the accidentals in this volume. No effort, however, has been made to create a system of pointing and to impose it on Fitzgerald’s texts. To do so would only subject them to yet another round of house styling. A record of the emendations is printed in the apparatus.