It would have been a terrible loss to let the stories in I’d Die for You and Other Lost Stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald continue to languish as manuscripts in those mausoleums, special collections of university libraries. Fitzgerald’s admirers should be grateful to editor Anne Margaret Daniel for compiling the collection, providing a thoughtful and carefully researched introduction as well as a smart introductions for each story, and additionally providing a substantial appendix of helpful notes.
The collection is uneven, but no story in it is without narrative charm. Even the weakest stories yield passages that stick with you, as when a woman’s artificial fingernails are of a length described as violating all disarmament treaties. Many stories have a playful humor that sometimes reminds me — I swear to God and I won’t take it back — of Ring Lardner.
Here’s a particularly enjoyable run from from the longest story in the collection, “The Women in the House”:
“A girl, a pretty girl (but not the leading girl) was talking to a young man whose business was developing electro-cardiographs or heart charts — automatic recordings of that organ which has never been famed as an instrument of precision.
“‘Eddie hasn’t phoned today, ‘ she said.
“‘Excuse these tears,’ he answered. ‘It’s my old sinus. And here’re the heart charts for your candid camera album.’
“‘Thanks — but don't you think when a girl is going to be married in a month, or at least before Christmas, he could phone her every morning.’
“‘Listen — if he loses that job at Wadford Dunn Sons, you won’t be able to afford a MEXican marriage.’
‘The laboratory girl carefully wrote the name ‘Wilford Dunn Sons” at the top of the first heart chart, swore in a short but vicious California idiom, erased, and substituted the name of the patient.
“”’Maybe you better think about your job here,’ added the laboratory man. ‘Those cardiographs are supposed to go out by —‘
“Telephones interrupted him — but they by no means bore a message from Eddie; it was two doctors, both very angry at once. The young lady was galvanized into frantic activity which landed her a few minutes later in a 1931 model, bound for one of those suburbs which make Los Angeles the most far-flung city in the world.”
Shortly later in the same story comes this: “Dr. Cardiff, having finished his reading (of the cardiograph) arose in half a dozen gigantic sections, and paced up and down meditatively, his chin alternately resting on his necktie or following his gaze toward t he chandelier, as if he thought his eight years of training were lurking there like guardian angels, ready to fly down to his assistance.”
The editor’s introduction to “The Women in the House” points out that when agent Harold Ober, with whom Fitzgerald ultimately split, requested massive cuts to the manuscript, Fitzgerald refused, writing that “One’s pencil gets garrulous after that snail’s pace movie writing.”
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Matthew de Lacey Davidson
Academically edited collection produces a superb result
Peter M. Little
