Sexual
innuendo, drug references and antisemitic slurs removed by newspaper editors restored
in new edition of Taps at Reveille
From
sexual innuendo to antisemitism, a wealth of censored material that was sliced
out of F Scott Fitzgerald's short stories by newspaper editors is being
restored in a new edition of the author's work which presents the stories in
their unbowdlerised form for the first time in almost 80 years.
The
stories in his fourth collection, Taps at Reveille, were written by Fitzgerald
for publication in the Saturday Evening Post during the late 1920s and early
1930s – a time of debt and personal difficulty for the author, who would die in
1940 at the age of 44. Close study of the final, messy typescripts, complete
with handwritten revisions, that Fitzgerald sent to his literary agent Harold
Ober show significant differences between what The Great Gatsby author intended
to be published, and what the Post – keen not to offend its middle-class
readership – actually released, with any sexual innuendo eliminated, almost all
profanity cut out, as well as any passages touching on racial or ethnic
prejudice, drunkenness or reference to drug-taking.
In
the original story Two Wrongs, for example, the unpleasant protagonist Bill
describes someone as a "dirty little kyke", an insult which is cut
from the published edition. Another scene in the story shows Bill's wife
getting undressed and having a bath after ballet practice, with the scene
changed in its published version to see her fully clothed before her bath. In
The Hotel Child, a reference to the Marquis Kinkallow "surreptitiously feeding
a hasheesh tablet to the Pekingese" was also removed from the Post's
version, with other cuts including removal of profanities such as "Get the
hell out of here!" and slang ("broads" for "girls"),
and changing the slur "Sheeny" to "Jewess".
The
new edition of Taps at Reveille, the latest volume of The Cambridge Edition of
the Works of F Scott Fitzgerald, restores Fitzgerald's original prose in these
and other stories, and is published this week by Cambridge University Press.
"Major" changes have also been made to the story seen by many to be
Fitzgerald's masterpiece in the genre, Babylon Revisited, said CUP. General
editor James West, Sparks Professor of English at Pennsylvania State
University, believes the edition is important "because we want to read
what Fitzgerald wrote, not what the editors at the Post thought he should have
written".
"Before
these stories were bowdlerised, they contained antisemitic slurs, sexual
innuendo, instances of drug use and drunkenness. They also contained profanity
and mild blasphemy. The texts were scrubbed clean at the Post," he said.
"Two
Wrongs", according to West, "now makes much more sense", with
Bill "punished more justly for his wrongdoings – his antisemitism and his
reprehensible treatment of his wife". And in The Hotel Child, West says
that "the decadence of several of the characters is revealed more clearly
because of their alcoholism, drug use, and prejudice".
"More
generally, in all of the stories, the characters use the profanity, mild
blasphemies, and slang words that Fitzgerald wanted them to use. They speak
like real people," he said. "One of the commonplaces of Fitzgerald
criticism, for decades, has been that he avoided unpleasant topics and
realistic language in his magazine fiction. We can see now that this was not
altogether his choice."
West
was clear that the new versions of the stories do not expose Fitzgerald as an
antisemite: "the antisemitic slurs in these stories are spoken by
reprehensible characters. These slurs are not spoken in Fitzgerald's authorial
voice. It's the characters who are antisemitic, not Fitzgerald," he said.
Fitzgerald
found the medium of the short story difficult, writing in his Notebooks that
"the price was high, right up with Kipling, because there was one little
drop of something not blood, not a tear, not my seed, but me more intimately
than these, in every story", and telling Ober that "all my stories
are conceived like novels, require a special emotion, a special
experience".
He
wrote 178 short stories in his lifetime, selling them for up to $4,000 to the
Post and other magazines to support his family. "No purpose is served by
criticising the Post for adjusting Fitzgerald's texts," writes West in his
introduction to the new volume. "These were the rules of the marketplace:
Fitzgerald, as a professional author, accepted them. The Post aimed for a broad
middle-class readership and avoided potential offence to readers or
advertisers. As Fitzgerald composed and revised, he included language or
situations in his stories that he surely knew might be softened or deleted with
the blue pencil."
Sarah
Churchwell, professor of American literature at the University of East Anglia
and author of the biographical study of The Great Gatsby, Careless People,
welcomed publication of the new edition. "This is the version which
Fitzgerald wanted to see the light of day, and it's really great news,"
she said.
She
predicted that the changes would reveal Fitzgerald in a new light. "It
will change how people think about Fitzgerald, particularly in his short
fiction. He is seen as a very sentimental writer – even in his novels people
think his greatest fault is when he crosses the line into sentimentality or
romance and becomes less realistic," she said. "This shows that this
was often not his choice."
The
original editions of the stories, she said, "will give people the sense
that Fitzgerald is actually a bit edgier, particularly in his later stories;
that there is more grit in these tales than people think."
Taps
at Reveille was Fitzgerald's fourth and final collection of short stories, and
his last published book, released in 1935. "It's a short story shadow
version of Tender is the Night," said Churchwell. "It's an important
collection of Fitzgerald's fiction, and only one or two stories in it are very
well-known. Hopefully this new edition will bring people back to
Fitzgerald."