The New Yorker has just done a favor for all of us who are admirers of F. Scott Fitzgerald and "The Great Gatsby." Earlier this month, the magazine published a story of Fitzgerald's, "Thank You for the Light," that it rejected in 1936. In so doing, it opened up the whole question of what we should expect from posthumously published writing.
The New Yorker got its second
chance at "Thank You for the Light" because Fitzgerald's
grandchildren found it while going through his papers for an auction at
Sotheby's. It wasn't the first Fitzgerald story to be discovered after his
death. His uncompleted final novel, "The Last Tycoon," was edited by
his friend, the literary critic Edmund Wilson, and published in 1941, a year
after Fitzgerald died from a heart attack at the age of 44.
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.
Ralph Ellison, who died in
1994, had equally bad luck with his posthumous novel, "Juneteenth,"
which was published in 1999. Ellison, who had started it decades earlier, left
no instruction about what he wanted done with his work, and it took his
literary executor, John F. Callahan, more than three years to whittle down some
2,000 pages of typescript and printouts into 354 pages. We will never know what
Ellison, the author of the 1952 classic, "Invisible Man," had in mind
for his second and final novel, a tale of the relationship between a black
preacher and a bigoted Northern senator.
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.