Master the 40: The Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald

In 1929 F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote Ernest Hemingway that because his short stories now earned $4000 a pop he was "an old whore" who had "mastered the 40 positions" when "in her youth one was enough." But were the upwards of 180 stories he cranked out when not writing The Great Gatsby really the work of a literary prostitute selling out his talent for a fast buck? Kirk Curnutt and Robert Trogdon don't think so. Each episode they draw a random title from a hat and explore its place in Fitzgerald's career, in the magazines such as the Saturday Evening Post or Esquire where it may have appeared, and in the overall development of the American short story. Along the way, they talk literary politics, history, and gossip from the 1920s and 1930s, rediscovering the lively personalities and rivalries that tried to define the porous boundaries between commercial and artistic fiction, between the popular and the avant-garde, between the forgotten and the canonized.

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Master the 40: The Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald

"What a Handsome Pair!"

March 25, 2024 • Kirk Curnutt and Robert Trogdon • Season 3 • Episode 2

Published in the August 27, 1932, issue of the Saturday Evening Post, "What a Handsome Pair!" clearly reflects F. Scott Fitzgerald's dour view of marital relationships amid the relapse that took Zelda to the Phipps Clinic in Baltimore. The story of two couples, Stuart and Helen Oldhorne and Teddy and Betty Van Beck, "Pair!" insists that for men to enjoy domestic contentment they must pick wives who will not compete with them in their chosen métier. In other words, not exactly a feminist story! Fitzgerald perhaps exposed a little too much anger here that Zelda had completed her novel, Save Me the Waltz, in two months that spring while he was just then kicking Tender Is the Night into gear after seven years of delay. Beyond the gloomy portrait of marriage, the story is notable for weird elements: it is set a generation earlier than the author's own era, and there are some strange intimations of proto-Ice Storm couples' hanky panky---which makes its appearance in the conservative Post even more head-scratching. Not a great story---but a curious one!