'His newly published vignette, Thank You for the Light,
suggests that Fitzgerald's faith – in life, in art, even in Catholicism – may
have lapsed, but it never expired'
F Scott Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda in 1921. Photograph:
CSU Archives/Everett Collection/Rex Features
You might expect that a writer as celebrated as Scott Fitzgerald
would have no unpublished material languishing in archives – but you would be
wrong. Perhaps as many as 15 short stories that he was unable to sell have
never appeared in print; many more have been published once and then forgotten;
a few have been lost.
Several were stories Fitzgerald "stripped", by
which he meant that he pulled his favourite sentences and used them elsewhere,
afterwards considering the stories unsuitable for publication. Most of the
stories he couldn't sell were written during the Depression, in the mid-1930s;
sections of several found their way into Tender is the Night.
Last week, the New Yorker published for the first time a
1936 vignette called "Thank You for the Light", without explaining
its history – perhaps because that history begins with the New Yorker rejecting
it.
Throughout the 1930s the New Yorker published the occasional
Fitzgerald sketch, as well as a poem ("Obit on Parnassus"). In 1937,
they bought a sketch called "A Book of One's Own", which opens:
"In this age of drastic compression, it is the ambition of all the
publishers I know to get everything worth reading into one little book."
So Fitzgerald proposes "a new super-anthology": "All you want to
read in one pocket-size volume! A miracle of book-making." Prescient as
ever, he recommended binding it "to look like a small radio".
Fitzgerald's first piece for the magazine, "A Short Autobiography",
comically told his life up to 1929 through a catalogue of cocktails.
Seven years later, the cocktails had caught up with him, and
it was no longer funny. On 19 June 1936, desperate for cash, he sent his agent
"Thank You For the Light", suggesting that it might be suitable for
the New Yorker: "It's an old idea I had hanging around in my head for a
long time." The New Yorker rejected "Thank You for the Light"
(and then rejected a poem called "Thousand-and-First Ship"). Seventy
five years later, Fitzgerald is famous enough to have received his acceptance
slip at last; the irony would not be lost on him.
The summer of 1936 was a difficult one for Fitzgerald. From
February to April 1936, he had published the essays in Esquire magazine that
are now well known as The Crack-Up, the articles that helped invent
confessional journalism, in which he revealed the collapse of his life and his hopes,
and his determination to save himself with his art. Contrary to the impression
most people have, The Crack-Up pieces never mention Fitzgerald's alcoholism:
that was the main cause of the fracture (although Zelda's mental illness
certainly contributed), but Fitzgerald was too firmly in denial to admit his
alcoholism in public.
The book we consider Fitzgerald's masterpiece, The Great
Gatsby, had been largely dismissed when it appeared in 1925. Fitzgerald spent
the next nine years struggling with his drinking, and Zelda's breakdown, before
pinning all his hopes on Tender is the Night in 1934. It received mixed reviews
and sold poorly; its failure pushed him over the edge. He was hospitalised four
times for alcoholic breakdowns over the next two years, reaching the bottom of
his personal abyss at the end of 1935. "My life looked like a hopeless
mess there for a while," he wrote later, "and the point was I didn't
want it to be better. I had completely ceased to give a good god-damn."
'Thank You for the Light", finished a few months after
The Crack-Up essays were published, is certainly slight, but it acquires more
poignancy in this context. It is about addiction: in the story Mrs Hanson is
addicted to cigarettes, but Fitzgerald's deep knowledge of the mechanics of
addiction drives the tale. And it is a story about starting to give a good
god-damn again.
The symbolically (and magically) returning light at story's
end is too trite for a writer of Fitzgerald's calibre, to be sure, but the
story has one small, tired flourish: Mrs Hanson thinks that her cigarette is
"an important punctuation mark in the long sentence of a day on the
road". The pun is not accidental – language, for Fitzgerald, was always a
release from imprisonment.
"Thank You for the Light" suggests that
Fitzgerald's faith – in life, in art, even in Catholicism – may have lapsed,
but it never expired. A year or so later, he would begin work on his last,
unfinished novel, The Last Tycoon. Mrs Hanson's lit cigarette is not a green
light at the end of a dock, but it's an image of renewed faith, and signals the
beginning of Fitzgerald's struggle to regain his capacity for hope – his
greatest theme of all.