Mills: F. Scott Fitzgerald's 'new' story rounds out our view
Author F. Scott Fitzgerald was considered by some to be one of the greatest writers of his generation. Credit: Handout
In the case of "Thank You for the Light," the good news is that the one-page story required no editing. It stands as Fitzgerald wrote it, so we don't have to wonder about his intentions.
Most writers who have their work published after their deaths have no such luck. Their unfinished art is finished by someone else, and they lose the authority death should give them over what they meant to say.
Ernest Hemingway's "A Moveable Feast," an account of his Paris years in the 1920s, was published in 1964, three years after he died, with only one added feature -- the title, supplied by Hemingway's friend, A. E. Hotchner, on the basis of a remark Hemingway made to him. But in 2009, the book was extensively reworked by Hemingway's grandson Sean, who didn't like what it said about his grandmother, Pauline Pfeiffer, Hemingway's second wife.
Hemingway, who suffered from depression, and Ellison, who suffered from pancreatic cancer, were in fragile condition when they died. It's understandable why their executors felt free to make changes in both novelists' work. Neither writer was in full control of himself at the end of his life.
Still, for most of us a flawed work -- true to an author's original intentions -- seems preferable to a tidy work that may be misleading. That's why the "new" Fitzgerald story is so interesting.
In the case of Hemingway and Ellison, the posthumous publication of their writing did not add to their reputations. Publication simply gave us more of them to read. Even today, it's not clear that their last books would have found a publisher if they'd been written by unknown authors.
Fitzgerald is a different case. In "Thank You for the Light" he has taken on a central character, Mrs. Hanson, who is the very opposite of the wild and ambitious Jay Gatsby, who lived so lavishly on Long Island's North Shore. In rejecting the story in 1936, the editors of The New Yorker wrote, "It seems to us so curious and so unlike the kind of thing we associate with him and really too fantastic." The editors were right -- but that's why Fitzgerald's story deserved publication.
Mrs. Hanson, who sells girdles and corsets, is "a pretty, somewhat faded woman of forty," so desperate for a cigarette that she stops in a church for a smoke and believes the Virgin Mary has lit her cigarette. She shows us a softer side of Fitzgerald. She's a figure he never would have been interested in at the height of his powers.
Mrs. Hanson lets us see that during 1936, the year he was also writing "The Crack-Up," his personal account of his own depression, Fitzgerald had widened his sympathies. He had outgrown his need to be spokesman for the Jazz Age or distance himself from his most eccentric characters.
"So unlike the kind of thing we associate with him," indeed. And that's exactly the point.
