Gertrude Stein Gets a Snarky Rejection Letter from Publisher (1912)

in Letters, Literature | June 27th, 2013

stein-rejection-letter

Gertrude Stein con­sid­ered her­self an exper­i­men­tal writer and wrote what The Poet­ry Foun­da­tion calls “dense poems and fic­tions, often devoid of plot or dia­logue,” with the result being that “com­mer­cial pub­lish­ers slight­ed her exper­i­men­tal writ­ings and crit­ics dis­missed them as incom­pre­hen­si­ble.” Take, for exam­ple, what hap­pened when Stein sent a man­u­script to Alfred C. Fifield, a Lon­don-based pub­lish­er, and received a rejec­tion let­ter mock­ing her prose in return. Accord­ing to Let­ters of Note, the man­u­script in ques­tion was pub­lished many years lat­er as her mod­ernist nov­el, The Mak­ing of Amer­i­cans: Being a His­to­ry of a Fam­i­ly’s Progress (1925). You can hear Stein read­ing a selec­tion from the nov­el below. Also find oth­er Gertrude Stein works in our col­lec­tions of Free eBooks and Free Audio Books.

via Elec­tric Lit­er­a­ture

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Gertrude Stein Read Works Inspired by Matisse, Picas­so, and T.S. Eliot (1934)

Gertrude Stein Recites ‘If I Told Him: A Com­plet­ed Por­trait of Picas­so’

The Dead Authors Pod­cast: H.G. Wells Com­i­cal­ly Revives Lit­er­ary Greats with His Time Machine

James Joyce in Paris: “Deal With Him, Hem­ing­way!”

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Watch Monty Python’s “Summarize Proust Competition” on the 100th Anniversary of Swann’s Way

in Comedy, Literature, Television | June 25th, 2013

Mar­cel Proust’s Swan­n’s Way, the first vol­ume of In Search of Lost Time, appeared in 1913. This year, exact­ly a cen­tu­ry lat­er, Proust enthu­si­asts, both indi­vid­u­al­ly and insti­tu­tion­al­ly, have found all man­ner of ways to cel­e­brate. The Mor­gan Library and Muse­um, for instance, put on an exhi­bi­tion of “a fas­ci­nat­ing selec­tion of the author’s note­books, pre­lim­i­nary drafts, gal­ley-proofs, and oth­er doc­u­ments from the col­lec­tion of the Bib­lio­thèque nationale de France” — lit­er­ar­i­ly seri­ous stuff. For a Proust cen­ten­ni­al expe­ri­ence equal­ly lit­er­ary but far less seri­ous, why not watch the Mon­ty Python sketch above depict­ing the “All-Eng­land Sum­ma­rize Proust Com­pe­ti­tion”?

The sit­u­a­tion presents the chal­lenge you’d expect: con­tes­tants must relate, in fif­teen sec­onds, the entire­ty of Proust’s sev­en-vol­ume mas­ter­work, “once in a swim­suit, and once in evening dress.” The attempt of one hap­less par­tic­i­pant, por­trayed by Gra­ham Chap­man, runs as fol­lows: “Proust’s nov­el osten­si­bly tells of the irrev­o­ca­bil­i­ty of time lost, the for­fei­ture of inno­cence through expe­ri­ence, the rein­stall­ment of extra-tem­po­ral val­ues of time regained. Ulti­mate­ly, the nov­el is both opti­mistic and set with­in the con­text of a humane reli­gious expe­ri­ence, re-stat­ing as it does the con­cept of atem­po­ral­i­ty. In the first vol­ume, Swann, the fam­i­ly friend, vis­its…” But ah, too long. Watch the whole thing and find out if Michael Pal­in’s char­ac­ter fares any bet­ter at sum­ma­riz­ing the unsum­ma­riz­able, and, this hap­pen­ing in Mon­ty Python’s real­i­ty, how quick­ly it will all cease to mat­ter any­way.

Works by Proust can be found in our col­lec­tion of Free eBooks.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

New Ani­mat­ed Film Tells the Life Sto­ry of Mon­ty Python’s Gra­ham Chap­man

John Cleese’s Eulo­gy for Gra­ham Chap­man: ‘Good Rid­dance, the Free-Load­ing Bas­tard, I Hope He Fries’

Mon­ty Python’s Best Phi­los­o­phy Sketch­es

Mon­ty Python Chan­nel Launch­es on Youtube

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on lit­er­a­ture, film, cities, Asia, and aes­thet­ics. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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Hear Charlton Heston Read Ernest Hemingway’s Classic Story, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”

in Literature | June 17th, 2013

snows hemingway2

“ ‘The mar­velous thing is that it’s pain­less,’ he said. ‘That’s how you know when it starts.’

‘Is it real­ly?’

‘Absolute­ly. I’m awful­ly sor­ry about the odor though. That must both­er you.’ ”

Most Amer­i­can read­ers sure­ly rec­og­nize these lines, though it may take a moment to remem­ber where they rec­og­nize them from. They open “The Snows of Kil­i­man­jaro,” a short sto­ry by Ernest Hem­ing­way that first ran in Esquire in 1936, then, two years lat­er, appeared in the col­lec­tion The Fifth Col­umn and the First Forty-Nine Sto­ries. (Find in our col­lec­tion of Free eBooks.) Deal­ing with the mem­o­ries and regrets of a writer on safari dying of a gan­grenous thorn wound, the sto­ry has over the past 76 years become one of the most respect­ed works in Hem­ing­way’s oeu­vre and an essen­tial piece of twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry Amer­i­can lit­er­a­ture. As often hap­pens with essen­tial pieces of Amer­i­can lit­er­a­ture, Hol­ly­wood got to it, adapt­ing it into a 1952 block­buster fea­tur­ing Gre­go­ry Peck, Susan Hay­ward, and Ava Gard­ner. (Find in our col­lec­tion of 535 Free Movies Online.)

Though the star­ring role of Har­ry, the fast-fad­ing rough-and-tum­ble man of let­ters who sees him­self as ruined by afflu­ence and hedo­nism, went to Peck, I could also imag­ine it played by Charl­ton Hes­ton. Even if you could­n’t quite place that bit of dia­logue from “The Snows of Kil­i­man­jaro,” you’d be imme­di­ate­ly able to place Hes­ton’s voice read­ing the sto­ry aloud in the record­ing avail­able on this Harper­Au­dio Hem­ing­way site. Lis­ten below and see for your­self if the actor’s deliv­ery, so often asso­ci­at­ed with sil­ver-screen roles meant to project a grand stern­ness, can also deliv­er the bit­ter­ness of Hem­ing­way’s pro­tag­o­nist, who cer­tain­ly shares with his cre­ator the con­vic­tion that “pol­i­tics, women, drink, mon­ey and ambi­tion” bring writ­ers tru­ly low, down to the point where they can declare, as Har­ry so mem­o­rably does, “The only thing I’ve nev­er lost is curios­i­ty.”

Bonus: Here you can also lis­ten to Don­ald Suther­land read an excerpt from Old Man and the Sea.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ernest Hem­ing­way Reads “In Harry’s Bar in Venice”

The Span­ish Earth, Writ­ten and Nar­rat­ed by Ernest Hem­ing­way

Sev­en Tips From Ernest Hem­ing­way on How to Write Fic­tion

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on lit­er­a­ture, film, cities, Asia, and aes­thet­ics. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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James Joyce Reads a Passage From Ulysses, 1924

in Books, Literature | June 16th, 2013

Today is “Blooms­day,” the tra­di­tion­al day for book lovers to cel­e­brate James Joyce’s mas­ter­piece, Ulysses (text — audio). To mark the occa­sion we bring you this rare 1924 record­ing of Joyce read­ing from the Aeo­lus episode of the nov­el. The record­ing was arranged and financed by the author’s friend and pub­lish­er Sylvia Beach, who brought him by taxi to the HMV (His Mas­ter’s Voice) gramo­phone stu­dio in the Paris sub­urb of Bil­lan­court. The first ses­sion did­n’t go well. Joyce was ner­vous and suf­fer­ing from his recur­ring eye trou­bles. He and Beach returned anoth­er day to fin­ish the record­ing. In her mem­oir, Shake­speare & Com­pa­ny, Beach writes:

Joyce had cho­sen the speech in the Aeo­lus episode, the only pas­sage that could be lift­ed out of Ulysses, he said, and the only one that was “declam­a­to­ry” and there­fore suit­able for recital. He had made up his mind, he told me, that this would be his only read­ing from Ulysses.

I have an idea that it was not for declam­a­to­ry rea­sons alone that he chose this pas­sage from Aeo­lus. I believe that it expressed some­thing he want­ed said and pre­served in his own voice. As it rings out–“he lift­ed his voice above it boldly”–it is more, one feels, than mere ora­to­ry.

The pas­sage par­al­lels the episode in Home­r’s Odyssey fea­tur­ing Aeo­lus, god of the winds. As a pun, Joyce sets it in a news­pa­per office where his hero Leopold Bloom stops by to place an ad, only to be stymied by the blus­tery noise of the print­ing press­es and of the var­i­ous “wind­bags” in the office.

One char­ac­ter tries to enter­tain a cou­ple of his friends with a mock­ing recital of a politi­cian’s speech print­ed in the day’s news­pa­per. Here is the pas­sage Joyce reads:

He began:

–Mr. Chair­man, ladies and gen­tle­men: Great was my admi­ra­tion in lis­ten­ing to the remarks addressed to the youth of Ire­land a moment since by my learned friend. It seemed to me that I had been trans­port­ed into a coun­try far away from this coun­try, into an age remote from this age, that I stood in ancient Egypt and that I was lis­ten­ing to the speech of a high­priest of that land addressed to the youth­ful Moses.

His lis­ten­ers held their cig­a­rettes poised to hear, their smoke ascend­ing in frail stalks that flow­ered with his speech…Noble words com­ing. Look out. Could you try your hand at it your­self?

–And it seemed to me that I heard the voice of that Egypt­ian high­priest raised in a tone of like haugh­i­ness and like pride. I heard his words and their mean­ing was revealed to me.

From the Fathers
It was revealed to me that those things are good which yet are cor­rupt­ed which nei­ther if they were supreme­ly good nor unless they were good could be cor­rupt­ed. Ah, curse you! That’s saint Augus­tine.

–Why will you jews not accept our lan­guage, our reli­gion and our cul­ture? You are a tribe of nomad herds­men; we are a mighty peo­ple. You have no cities nor no wealth: our cities are hives of human­i­ty and our gal­leys, trireme and quadrireme, laden with all man­ner mer­chan­dise fur­row the waters of the known globe. You have but emerged from prim­i­tive con­di­tions: we have a lit­er­a­ture, a priest­hood, an age­long his­to­ry and a poli­ty.

Nile.

Child, man, effi­gy.

By the Nile­bank the babe­maries kneel, cra­dle of bul­rush­es: a man sup­ple in com­bat: stone­horned, stonebeard­ed, heart of stone.

–You pray to a local and obscure idol: our tem­ples, majes­tic and mys­te­ri­ous, are the abodes of Isis and Osiris, of Horus and Ammon Ra. Yours serf­dom, awe and hum­ble­ness: ours thun­der and the seas. Israel is weak and few are her chil­dren: Egypt is an host and ter­ri­ble are her arms. Vagrants and day­labour­ers are you called: the world trem­bles at our name.

A dumb belch of hunger cleft his speech. he lift­ed his voice above it bold­ly:

–But, ladies and gen­tle­men, had the youth­ful Moses lis­tened to and accept­ed that view of life, had he bowed his head and bowed his will and bowed his spir­it before that arro­gant admo­ni­tion he would nev­er have led the cho­sen peo­ple out of their house of bondage nor fol­lowed the pil­lar of the cloud by day. He would nev­er have spo­ken with the Eter­al amid light­nings on Sinai’s moun­tain­top nor even have come down with the light of inspi­ra­tion shin­ing in his coun­te­nance and bear­ing in his arms the tables of the law, graven in the lan­guage of the out­law.

For more of Ulysses, click here to find out how you can down­load it as a free audio book. And to hear a clear­er record­ing of Joyce’s voice made five years after this one, see our 2012 post: “James Joyce Reads ‘Anna Livia Plura­belle’ from Finnegans Wake.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hen­ri Matisse Illus­trates 1935 Edi­tion of James Joyce’s Ulysses

Stephen Fry Explains His Love for James Joyce’s Ulysses

Mar­i­lyn Mon­roe Reads Joyce’s Ulysses at the Play­ground (1955)

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Zen Master Alan Watts Discovers the Secrets of Aldous Huxley and His Art of Dying

in Life, Literature, Religion | June 11th, 2013

Few fig­ures were as influ­en­tial as Alan Watts and Aldous Hux­ley in pop­u­lar­iz­ing exper­i­ments with psy­che­del­ic drugs and East­ern reli­gion in the 20th cen­tu­ry. Watts did more to intro­duce West­ern­ers to Zen Bud­dhism than almost any­one before or since; Huxley’s exper­i­ments with mesca­line and LSD—as well as his lit­er­ary cri­tiques of West­ern tech­no­crat­ic rationalism—are well-known. But in a coun­ter­cul­tur­al move­ment large­ly dom­i­nat­ed by men—Watts and Hux­ley, Ken Kesey, Tim­o­thy Leary, Allen Gins­berg, etc—Huxley’s wid­ow Lau­ra came to play a sig­nif­i­cant role after her husband’s death.

In fact, as we’ve dis­cussed before, she played a sig­nif­i­cant role dur­ing his death, inject­ing him with LSD and read­ing to him from The Tibetan Book of the Dead as he passed away. In the inter­view above, Lau­ra speaks with Watts about that expe­ri­ence, one she learned from Aldous, who per­formed a sim­i­lar ser­vice for his first wife as she died in 1955. The occa­sion of the interview—conducted at Watts’ Sausal­i­to home in 1968—is the pub­li­ca­tion of Lau­ra Huxley’s mem­oir of life with her hus­band, This Time­less Moment. But talk of the book soon prompts dis­cus­sion of Huxley’s grace­ful exit, which Watts calls “a high­ly intel­li­gent form of dying.”

Watts relates an anec­dote about Goethe’s last hours, dur­ing which a vis­i­tor was told that he was “busy dying.” “Dying is an art,” says Watts, “and it’s also an adven­ture,” Lau­ra adds. Their dis­cus­sion then turns to Huxley’s final nov­el, Island (which you can read in PDF here). Island has rarely been favor­ably reviewed as a lit­er­ary endeav­or. And yet, as Watts points out, it wasn’t intend­ed as lit­er­a­ture, but as a “soci­o­log­i­cal blue­print in the form of a nov­el.” Lau­ra Hux­ley, upset at the book’s chilly recep­tion, wish­es her hus­band had “writ­ten it straight.” Nonethe­less, she points out that Island was much more than a Utopi­an fan­ta­sy or philo­soph­i­cal thought exper­i­ment. It was a doc­u­ment in which “every method, every recipe… is some­thing he exper­i­ment­ed with him­self in his own life.” As Lau­ra wrote in This Time­less Moment:

Every sin­gle thing that is writ­ten in Island has hap­pened and it’s pos­si­ble and actu­al … Island is real­ly vision­ary com­mon sense. Things that Aldous and many oth­er peo­ple said, that were seen as so auda­cious — they are com­mon sense, but they were vision­ary because they had not yet hap­pened.

Those things includ­ed not only rad­i­cal forms of liv­ing, but also, as Hux­ley him­self demon­strat­ed, rad­i­cal ways of dying.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Aldous Huxley’s Most Beau­ti­ful, LSD-Assist­ed Death: A Let­ter from His Wid­ow

Aldous Hux­ley Reads Dra­ma­tized Ver­sion of Brave New World

Leonard Cohen Nar­rates Film on The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Fea­tur­ing the Dalai Lama (1994)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Wash­ing­ton, DC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Philip Roth Reads “In Memory of a Friend, Teacher & Mentor” (A Free Download Benefiting a Public Library)

in Audio Books, Life, Literature | June 5th, 2013

roth reading

Philip Roth announced his retire­ment from the writ­ing life last fall, a few months shy of his 80th birth­day. Now, on a com­put­er in his New York City apart­ment, hangs a Post-It note that reads, “The strug­gle with writ­ing is over.” There won’t be anoth­er nov­el. There won’t be a 29th.

Admir­ers of Philip Roth may have to set­tle for the occa­sion­al odd pub­li­ca­tion, like the eulo­gy Roth pub­lished in the New York Times in April, when his high school teacher and long-time friend passed away. His name was Bob Lowen­stein. He taught at Wee­quahic High School in Newark, New Jer­sey, and Roth came to know him like this:

Bob was my home­room teacher. This meant that I saw him first thing in the morn­ing, every sin­gle day of the school year. I was nev­er to take a lan­guage course with him — I had Made­moi­selle Glucks­man for French and Señori­ta Baleroso for Span­ish — but I didn’t for­get him. Who at Wee­quahic did? Con­se­quent­ly, when it came his turn to be mauled in Congress’s anti-Com­mu­nist cru­sade of the 1940s and 1950s, I fol­lowed his fate as best I could in the sto­ries that I had my par­ents clip from the Newark news­pa­pers and mail to me.

I don’t remem­ber how we came togeth­er again around 1990, about 40 years after I’d grad­u­at­ed Wee­quahic High. I was back in Amer­i­ca from hav­ing lived large­ly abroad for some 12 years, and either I wrote to him about some­thing or he wrote to me about some­thing and we met for lunch at Zel­da and his house in West Orange. In the spir­it of Bob Lowen­stein, I will put the mat­ter in plain lan­guage, direct­ly as I can: I believe we fell in love with each oth­er.

In recent weeks, Roth vis­it­ed the head­quar­ters of Audible.com — also based in Newark, New Jer­sey — and record­ed an audio ver­sion of his trib­ute. You can down­load it for free at Audi­ble (or hear an excerpt below), and, for every down­load, Audi­ble will donate $1 to the Newark Pub­lic Library, cap­ping at $25,000. The down­load requires reg­is­ter­ing with Audi­ble.

Sep­a­rate­ly, if you want to down­load a nov­el by Philip Roth, you can always head over to Audible.com and reg­is­ter for a 30-day free tri­al. You can down­load any audio­book for free. Then, when the tri­al is over, you can con­tin­ue your Audi­ble sub­scrip­tion (as I do — I love the ser­vice), or can­cel it, and still keep the audio book. And, by the way, when­ev­er some­one signs up for a free tri­al, it helps sup­port Open Cul­ture. Also find more great reads in our col­lec­tion of Free Audio Books.

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Watch Animations of Oscar Wilde’s Children’s Stories “The Happy Prince” and “The Selfish Giant”

in Animation, Film, Literature | June 4th, 2013

Long before Oscar Wilde became a lit­er­ary celebri­ty for his most famous work—The Pic­ture of Dori­an Gray and plays like Salome and The Impor­tance of Being Earnest—he was a bit of a real­i­ty star. Wilde trav­eled the UK and the Unit­ed States (as por­trayed by Stephen Fry here) as a rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the pop­u­lar phi­los­o­phy of “aes­theti­cism,” an urbane nine­teenth-cen­tu­ry move­ment against Vic­to­ri­an prud­ery and the dry moral cal­cu­lus of util­i­tar­i­an­ism and its asso­ci­a­tions with indus­tri­al cul­ture. Aes­thetes such as Wilde sought to ele­vate good taste and the pur­suit of beau­ty alone as a guid­ing prin­ci­ple of art and life. Wilde expressed the ideas in sev­er­al well-known epi­grams, such as the wry­ly redun­dant, “In all unim­por­tant mat­ters, style, not sin­cer­i­ty, is the essen­tial. In all impor­tant mat­ters, style, not sin­cer­i­ty, is the essen­tial.”

Wilde was ridiculed for the many of the same rea­sons he was feted—his flam­boy­ant pub­lic per­sona and devo­tion to aes­theti­cism, which satirists car­i­ca­tured as a kind of deca­dent navel-gaz­ing. But care­ful read­ers of Wilde’s diverse canon of poet­ry, prose, and dra­ma will know of his crit­i­cal looks at solip­sism and super­fi­cial­i­ty. Some of his best works as a moral­ist are his children’s sto­ries, such as the 1888 book of fairy sto­ries The Hap­py Prince and Oth­er Tales. In the title sto­ry, a prince is trans­formed into a glit­ter­ing stat­ue on a pedestal high above a city, where res­i­dents look up to him as an exam­ple of human per­fec­tion. But the prince, we learn, spends his time weep­ing in com­pas­sion for the pover­ty and suf­fer­ing he sees below him. Made in 1974 by Cana­di­an com­pa­ny Pot­ter­ton Pro­duc­tions, and fea­tur­ing the voic­es of Christo­pher Plum­mer and Gly­nis Johns, the ani­mat­ed short film above is a faith­ful ren­der­ing of Wilde’s sto­ry. You can find it added to our col­lec­tion of Free Movies Online, under Ani­ma­tion.

In 1971, Pot­ter­ton pro­duced an ear­li­er ani­mat­ed short film based on anoth­er sto­ry from the Hap­py Prince col­lec­tion. A Chris­t­ian alle­go­ry, The Self­ish Giant (above) tells the tale of a cranky giant who walls off his gar­den to keep chil­dren out. The plight of one lit­tle boy changes the giant’s dis­po­si­tion. The film was nom­i­nat­ed for an Oscar for best ani­mat­ed short in 1972. Pot­ter­ton also pro­duced a short film of Hans Chris­t­ian Andersen’s “The Lit­tle Mer­maid,” and stu­dio head Ger­ald Pot­ter­ton would go on in 1981 to direct the cult ston­er film Heavy Met­al. An inter­est­ing irony of the Wilde ani­ma­tions above: both films, and a third called The Remark­able Rock­et, were co-pro­duced with Reader’s Digest, the mag­a­zine that rep­re­sents the hard-head­ed prac­ti­cal­i­ty and sen­ti­men­tal, sex­u­al­ly repres­sive Vic­to­ri­an val­ues (in Amer­i­can dress) that Wilde dis­dained.

If you can’t get enough of Wilde’s mov­ing fairy tales, you won’t want to miss Stephen Fry read­ing “The Hap­py Prince” below.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Oscar Wilde Offers Prac­ti­cal Advice on the Writ­ing Life in a New­ly-Dis­cov­ered Let­ter from 1890

Hear Oscar Wilde Recite a Sec­tion of The Bal­lad of Read­ing Gaol (1897)

“Jer­sey Shore” in the Style of Oscar Wilde

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Wash­ing­ton, DC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Free: The Great Gatsby & Other Major Works by F. Scott Fitzgerald

in Literature | June 3rd, 2013

In some pop­u­lar imag­in­ings, F. Scott Fitzger­ald becomes so asso­ci­at­ed with the jazz age friv­o­li­ty he keen­ly observed, and the social climb­ing of his best-known char­ac­ter, that much of his pre- and post-Gats­by writ­ing gets occlud­ed. While Fitzger­ald may have been an alco­holic spend­thrift who pre­ferred the fin­er things and those who wore them, he was also a very dis­ci­plined and seri­ous writer, espe­cial­ly of short sto­ries, which were his sole source of income through­out much of the ‘20s. Fitzgerald’s des­per­ate­ly pro­lif­ic out­put in the form means that there are a few hasti­ly-com­posed pieces, some light­weight, whim­si­cal fan­tasies, but all of the work is beau­ti­ful­ly writ­ten and a joy to read.

The fan­tasies (which include the now-famous “The Curi­ous Case of Ben­jamin But­ton”) reveal quite a bit about Fitzgerald’s pre­oc­cu­pa­tion with arti­fice. He was a very well-read, if not par­tic­u­lar­ly deep, thinker who approached lit­er­a­ture through fairy tales—Orientalist fables, adven­ture sto­ries, Edmund Spencer’s allegories—and his ear­ly sto­ries mix a boy­ish imag­i­na­tion with the feigned world­li­ness of a Prince­ton under­grad­u­ate. The most sub­stan­tial of those ear­ly sto­ries “May Day,” almost a novel­la, opens in a post-World War One New York City described as a fairy king­dom in the throes of mar­ket-mad­ness:

So gai­ly and nois­i­ly were the peace and pros­per­i­ty impend­ing hymned by the scribes and poets of the con­quer­ing peo­ple that more and more spenders had gath­ered from the provinces to drink the wine of excite­ment, and faster and faster did the mer­chants dis­pose of their trin­kets and slip­pers until they sent up a mighty cry for more trin­kets and more slip­pers in order that they might give in barter what was demand­ed of them. Some even of them flung up their hands help­less­ly, shout­ing:

“Alas! I have no more slip­pers! and alas! I have no more trin­kets! May heav­en help me for I know not what I shall do!”

This excerpt from the open­ing sec­tion of “May Day” reads like Hans Chris­t­ian Ander­sen, but with the sly satir­i­cal under­tone of one of Oscar Wilde’s children’s sto­ries. The sto­ry then shifts to a real­ist mode, intro­duc­ing the famil­iar Fitzger­ald themes of extrav­a­gant wealth and privilege—and their pre­car­i­ous nature. Some of the char­ac­ters embody­ing these traits, a group of Yale grad­u­ates, soon show the moral fail­ings exem­pli­fied by Gats­by’s Buchanans: cal­lous indif­fer­ence to the needs of oth­ers and vain self-regard.

The main plot of “May Day” goes to a very dark place, deal­ing with the kind of upper-class despair Bret Eas­t­on Ellis trades in, with a doomed main char­ac­ter quite obvi­ous­ly a stand-in for Fitzger­ald him­self. A some­what clum­sy sub­plot reach­es at times for a com­ic foil but also sounds a grim note. The story—with its almost vicious depic­tion of class division—is a minor work with major ambi­tion and a com­plex inter­weav­ing of Fitzgerald’s major themes.

“May Day”—first pub­lished in The Smart Set mag­a­zine in 1920 and lat­er appear­ing in the col­lec­tion Tales of the Jazz Age—draws from events of the Cleve­land May Day riots of 1919 and some New York expe­ri­ences in Fitzgerald’s life. Once asked, how­ev­er, if the sto­ry was auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal, the author replied, “there are no good biogra­phies of nov­el­ists because they are so many peo­ple.”

You can encounter all of the var­i­ous peo­ple Fitzger­ald car­ried with­in him in the sto­ries and nov­els we’ve gath­ered in our col­lec­tions of Free eBooks and Free Audio Books. (Find them below.) And to learn more about Fitzger­ald, in rela­tion to two oth­er 20th-cen­tu­ry Amer­i­can mas­ters, you might want to check out Wai Chee Dimock’s Open Yale online course, “Hem­ing­way, Fitzger­ald, Faulkn­er,” avail­able on YouTube and iTunes. It oth­er­wise appears in our col­lec­tion of 700 Free Cours­es Online.

eBooks

Audio

  • Flap­pers and Philoso­phers
  • The Curi­ous Case of Ben­jamin But­ton
  • Tales of the Jazz Age
  • The Great Gats­by
  • This Side of Par­adise

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Sev­en Tips From F. Scott Fitzger­ald on How to Write Fic­tion

F. Scott Fitzger­ald in Drag (1916)

Ernest Hem­ing­way to F. Scott Fitzger­ald: “Kiss My Ass”

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Wash­ing­ton, DC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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