F. Scott Fitzgerald was never well-served by Hollywood. It was a love/hate relationship that he explored in seventeen acerbic short stories about a down-on-his-luck screenwriter named Pat Hobby. Then there was last year’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, a big-budget film not without charm, but with scant connection to the Fitzgerald story upon which it claimed to be based. He was better served by Frances Kroll Ring, his 22-year-old personal secretary during those final months before his death from heart failure in 1940 (at age 44, like Chekhov, which seems more and more unbelievably young, especially as I grow older) when he was working on his never-to-be-completed Hollywood-themed novel The Last Tycoon.
Frances Kroll Ring
David Ulin in the Los Angeles Times has written a wonderful profile of Ring, now 92 years old. In 1985 she published a brief self-effacing memoir of her time working for Fitzgerald, Against the Current: As I Remember F. Scott Fitzgerald. The book was made into a solid 2002 Showtime movie titled Last Call. British actor Jeremy Irons might seem an unlikely candidate to play the Minnesota-born Fitzgerald, but he’s very effective in the role. The young Frances Kroll Ring is played with appropriate doe-eyed innocence by Neve Campell.
Also of interest is an article and accompanying video documenting a recent visit by the remarkably spry amanuensis/author to a class of literature students at the University of Missouri.
Wells Tower’s short story collection, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, is getting raves. Must-read books are piling up on my coffee table and in the literary Netflix queue in the back of my mind. I’m tempted to bump Tower to the front of the line. If I do, it’ll be because of Deborah Eisenberg’s beautifully written review in the New York Review of Books. Her piece is filled with provocative thoughts on fiction and fiction writing. Here’s Eisenberg discussing how plot functions differently in a short story vs. a novel:
It could be said, as an expedient, that the plot of a given piece of fiction is a phantom organism—an embodiment and enactment of the author’s preoccupations and obsessions—and that this organism is what allows us to experience the piece’s deep pleasures: its insight, its beauty, its mystery, its power—whatever are the essential properties of the piece; that a plot, like a grammatical structure, is an expression of innate relationships in the mind. Long fiction has room to fill things in whereas short fiction, due to the stringency of selection it imposes, tends to demand a more active role from the reader, who must supply a chargeable receptivity, a medium in which compressed signals can unfold and send an associative web of sparks flying out between them. And it seems to me—to make yet another broad and possibly somewhat rickety generalization—that because a work of short fiction must so quickly and unerringly present evidence of the world that lies under its surface, the plot of a good story is likely to be a stranger, more volatile, and more evanescent sort of thing than the plot of a novel.
I love great beginnings. Take a look at the opening paragraph of Eudora Welty’s “A Visit of Charity” (from the Collected Stories), a wonderful story that famously was rejected 13 times by various magazines in the early 1940s, including The Atlantic Monthly and Ladies Home Journal. It was finally published in a small literary magazine for which Welty was paid $30. “A Visit of Charity” is about a hapless Campfire Girl hoping to earn a few extra merit points by making a perfunctory visit to a local retirement home.
It was mid-morning—a cold, bright day. Holding a potted plant before her, a girl of fourteen jumped off the bus in front of the Old Ladies’ Home, on the outskirts of town. She wore a red coat, and her straight yellow hair was hanging down loose from the pointed white cap all the little girls were wearing that year. She stopped for a moment beside one of the prickly dark shrubs with which the city had beautified the Home, and then proceeded slowly toward the building, which was of whitewashed brick and reflected the winter sunlight like a block of ice. As she walked vaguely up the steps she shifted the small pot from hand to hand; then she had to set it down and remove her mittens before she could open the heavy door.
One of the remarkable aspects of this passage, and indeed of the story as a whole, is the point of view employed by the author. We’re in the third person, of course, but note that Welty has chosen to dispense with any omniscience that might pull us comfortably into this girl’s state of mind and into the story. There’s a disquieting lack of empathy, seemingly on the author’s part. Yet, this emotional coldness is quickly established as the story’s central theme. Isolation, and images of isolation are reinforced throughout the paragraph. The day is cold. We’re on the outskirts of town. Moreover, the nameless girl (Marian, we learn shortly) is painted for us almost cruelly in terms of bland typicality. We’re told she’s wearing “the pointed white cap all the little girls were wearing that year.”
This young person clearly is no spirited free-thinker; even her walk is described as “vague.” She represents a sort of blindly dutiful, socially conditioned innocence. She is, in other words, ill-prepared for and blithely ignorant of the devastation of old age, of failing health, of loneliness and death, all of which are symbolized and foreshadowed in this opening passage by the image of a monolithic retirement home which Welty conjures as a kind of sinister internment camp. Not only does the ugly building resemble a “block of ice” in the harsh winter sunlight, but the “prickly dark shrubs” planted in front of the building suggest barbed wire.
You might think this sets the stage for a grim tale that sentimentalizes the elderly as oppressed victims of abuse and neglect. However, “A Visit of Charity” is in fact one of Eudora Welty’s masterful little black comedies. Dickensian sentimentality is nowhere to be found. The two old women upon whom the young girl attempts to impose her charity are bitter and mean-spirited. Old age isn’t merely an inconvenience for them, it’s a black hole of delusion and despair. The old women bicker among themselves, they whine and say hateful things to one another. The girl is mocked and insulted by them, treated with the same kind of indifference that the story seems to imply we collectively treat our elderly in and out of society. But Welty steers clear of easy symbols and this never remotely resembles a screed on the theme of ageism. Her adjectives set a tone of discomfort and unease. The implications are ultimately ambiguous, if deeply pessimistic. Youth and old-age alike seem unavoidably blighted by ignorance and folly.
Some commentators have seen the girl’s journey as a kind of allegory of a Persephone-like character descending into the underworld. The story ends with her outside of the retirement home biting into an apple, which has led others to see a biblical theme at work, of innocence tarnished and sent packing into the fallen world. Welty, who had little regard for academic critics—she was essentially self-taught as a writer—said the impetus behind the story was simply her own childhood memories of being creeped out by old ladies in retirement homes. She was being disingenuous, however, by that response. On other occasions she spoke of the care she took with every word in a story like “A Visit of Charity,” looking to bring out echoes of myths and fairy tales (the girl’s red coat, for instance) and biblical lore. Eudora Welty has been called a writer’s writer, in part, I think, because we as writers can learn so much from her work, from the choices she makes as a stylist and as a storyteller. Her best stories have a powerful impressionistic quality in which tone, imagery and character become indistinguishable from plot. “Action is character,” F. Scott Fitzgerald liked to remind himself.
F. Scott Fitzgerald was never well-served by Hollywood. It was a love/hate relationship that he explored in seventeen acerbic short stories about a down-on-his-luck screenwriter named Pat Hobby. Then there was last year’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, a big-budget film not without charm, but with scant connection to the Fitzgerald story upon which it claimed to be based. He was better served by Frances Kroll Ring, his 22-year-old personal secretary during those final months before his death from heart failure in 1940 (at age 44, like Chekhov, which seems more and more unbelievably young, especially as I grow older) when he was working on his never-to-be-completed Hollywood-themed novel The Last Tycoon.
Wells Tower’s short story collection, 
Coffee Spew 