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.
Master the 40: The Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald
One Trip Abroad
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For our tenth episode we explore a short story we think falls just outside of the Top 10: October 11, 1930's "One Trip Abroad," which totally blows anything else in that issue of the Saturday Evening Post out of the water. Many critics considered it Fitzgerald's second greatest story about expatriation after "Babylon Revisited," which was written right on the heels of this masterful depiction of marital disillusionment and moral drift. The story came at a desperate time: following Zelda's June 1930 entry to Les Rives des Prangins in Switzerland Scott needed to crank out a story roughly every six weeks to pay for her $1,000-a-month treatment (that's $12k today). The pressure produced some of his best work, but unfortunately he repurposed portions of "Abroad" for Tender Is the Night, which is why this story wasn't republished in Taps at Reveille, despite its excellence. As Nelson and Nicole Kelley drift from North Africa to Italy to Monte Carlo to Paris, they find themselves besieged by the placelessness and purposelessness of expatriation. Fitzgerald touches on great themes of ethnocentrism and Orientalization, especially in the opening section set in Algeria, and captures the sense of retreat Switzerland's clinic culture offered weary travelers. We explore these and other issues, including his use of the doppelgänger or double that gives the story a Gothic edge. "One Trip Abroad" is an underappreciated masterpiece that dramatizes how even when writing under financial pressure Fitzgerald could tap his genius for melancholy.