Fitzgerald & Hemingway: Works and Days.

Curnutt, Kirk

Fitzgerald & Hemingway: Works and Days. By Scott Donaldson. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009. 520 pp. Cloth $32.50.

Works and Days is Scott Donaldson's summa literaria of the two most famous American masters he has been writing about since he left journalism for academia nearly forty-five years ago. Thick as a phonebook but ten times as informative, it collects essays that (except for two instances) informed yet somehow escaped his well-known trio of biographies on their Subjects, By Force of Will: The Life and Art of Ernest Hemingway (1977), Fool for Love: F. Scott Fitzgerald (1983), and Hemingway vs. Fitzgerald: The Rise and Fall of a Literary Friendship (1999). The earliest among the collected essays, "Hemingway's Morality of Compensation," was first published in 1971 in American Literature the most recent, "The Last Great Cause" (also on Hemingway), was written especially for this volume and previewed at the Ronda, Spain Hemingway conference in 2006. In between are titles that will ring familiar to attendees of various Hemingway and/or Fitzgerald Society conferences since the two organizations were conceived in 1980 and 1992 respectively. Other entries will send the memory back to photocopies made in the shush of university libraries, perhaps while in graduate school or in the early days of one's own career, mined from journals such as Twentieth Century Literature, The Iowa Review, or Prospects, their passages highlighted in different colors as these articles were returned to over the years. Still other essays will recall important collections edited by Susan F. Beegel, Jackson R. Bryer, Don Noble, and H. L. Weatherby.

Reading the two dozen selections in sequence, one experiences both the reassurance of the familiar and the jolt of the new. Topics include such representative subjects as money, fame, craft, and the morality of character, while addressing broader "political" ramifications of narrative style such as "gaze," passivity, and ideological conservatism. Simply stated, it is good to have these observations together, finally, in one convenient source.

In his amiable introduction, Donaldson writes that the decade he worked in newspapers before pursing his Ph.D. at the University of Minnesota gave him a leg up on many of his colleagues: "... I was equipped to write about the authors whose work interested me in language most readers could understand and [I was] accustomed as a professional to getting those words down on paper" (4) Undoubtedly, that "real world" experience gave him insight into Hemingway's journalistic roots as well, for the subject frames the portion of the book covering the former Kansas City Star cub. "Hemingway of The Star" explores the author's somewhat shady habit of supplementing his income from the Toronto paper in 1922-23 by writing dispatches simultaneously for both the International News Service and the United News Service. What comes through in Donaldson's analysis of Hemingway's contentious exchanges with his editors is how much of his later rabidity was already a coping mechanism in his apprenticeship: whenever caught kiting the trade, he would bluster, flinching at editorial restrictions and daiming economic injustice (241). Fifteen years later, that bark was such a * publicly accepted facet of the Hemingway persona that when the author set off to cover the Spanish Civil War he roared indignantly whenever the North American Newspaper Alliance (which had commissioned him for a staggering $500-$1,000 per submission) hinted that he might be padding his reporting to take financial advantage of the arrangement (432). Reading Donaldson's account, it becomes clear that Hemingway did indeed believe in a morality of compensation: its golden rule boiled down to "nearly a dollar a word" (380).

That flippancy is mine, not Donaldson's. One of the most enjoyable aspects of reading "The Last Great Cause" is its untendentious account of Hemingway's four trips to Spain in 1937-38. Like a good newspaper man, Donaldson presents the story and lets the reader decide just where on the scale of ethics his subject might have scored. In this way, the essay offers a corrective to Stephen Koch's grossly cartoonish account in The Breaking Point: Hemingway, Dos Passos, and the Murder of Jose Robles (2005), whose "damning indictment" is skewed beyond credibility to mock the leftism of Americans supporting the Loyalist cause. Even when criticizing the dubious treatment of Hemingway's political consciousness in The Breaking Point, however, Donaldson is measured: "Koch undervalued his man, who may have been mistaken but was nobody's fool" (399). Circumspection is also a benefit of a newspaper background, one surmises.

Part of what makes Donaldson's approach so enjoyable is its seamless fusion of critical approaches. As he notes in the introduction, he belongs to the "late stages" of a generation for whom New Criticism was Gospel orthodoxy. One can sense the lessons of "reading one word after another" (7) that I. A. Richards taught in Practical Criticism in several passages devoting meticulous attention to the tectonics of textual development. The discussion of what Donaldson calls "scopophobia" in "The Averted Gaze in Hemingway's Fiction" is particularly compelling in its assessment of the wayward glances and silences that build tension between reticent characters. If my description seems to portend some sort of narratological autopsy by which the critic needlessly spills the innards of a work just to prove there are innards, consider these two sentences from the essay's conclusion: "Like all great writers, [Hemingway] became a world-class noticer, and not only of the natural world. Over time the noticing shifted from grasshoppers and trout to the human beings he knew and cared about" (288). One of the debilities of formalism that pushed critics to the slogan "Always Historicize!" in the late 1960s was the tendency of the inward turn to become too forensic. It is a danger I will readily admit to struggling with in my own writing. But Donaldson's scrupulosity never gives way to the detriment of "interprephila" (as I like to call it), and a phrase like "world-class noticer" helps explain why: keeping things casual and clear--yet another benefit of a journalism career, one imagines--allows him to avoid the rip currents of over-reading that have sucked so many of us out to the deep seas of New Critical complexity.

Another approach deftly integrated into Donaldson's style of analysis is composition history. In "Preparing for the End of 'A Canary for One,'" he examines drafts of this perplexing 1927 story to explore how rewriting prepared the way for its surprise ending. Studies of writers' revision processes are notoriously underappreciated; our unfortunate tendency to think of them as exercises in collating deletions and insertions masks the artistry they unveil by revealing how final products attain their ultimate polish. "A Canary for One" allowed Hemingway a rare opportunity to ply a structural technique associated more with popular short-story authors (O. Henry especially) than his modernist peers. The surprise ending was not a device Hemingway intuitively grasped, however, and the trio of drafts he went through shows how he wrestled with foreshadowing to set the reader up for the question that good twists should leave readers asking: "Why didn't we see that coming?" While the final revelation that the unnamed narrator and his wife will "set up separate residences" when their train arrives in Paris was present from the conceptual outset, the author had to finesse both dialogue and descriptive details to hint at their marital sorrow as they listen to their garrulous fellow traveler. The revisions included not only excising a self-referential "red herring" common in early Hemingway drafts ("My wife and I are not characters in this story"), but, more subtly, adding symbolic shadings of chiaroscuro, revealing glimpses of character, and syntactical emphasis.

Interestingly, Donaldson declines to end his analysis by claiming that "A Canary for One" out-O. Henries O. Henry--it does not. Instead, Donaldson suggests that the effort to delay explaining the narrator and his wife's role in the narrative until the very end hints at Hemingway's need to prolong accepting the autobiographical reality inspiring the story: namely, the end of his marriage to Hadley Richardson: "Perhaps sensing that he was too close to his material, Hemingway imposed a kind of distance" by which he "delay[ed] until the last sentence the extent of the narrator's involvement in the proceedings" (268). Readers accustomed to visiting the Kennedy Library these last thirty years may take this sort of conclusion for granted. Yet this essay (originally published in 1990) exudes an enthusiasm reflecting the excitement of that first decade in which the manuscripts were open to critical inspection. While I remain unconvinced that "A Canary for One" has a whole lot going for it in terms of formal merit, the link between craft and emotional circumstance comes vividly alive in Donaldson's reading.

Comparably interesting insights surface in several other selections. "Humor as a Measure of Character" begins with an understated sentence ("Ernest Hemingway started out trying to be funny" [309]) before proceeding to demonstrate why the author had to push his often adolescent instinct for parody to deeper levels of poignancy to convey the Wastelanders' tragedy in The Sun Also Rises. "Frederic's Escape and the Pose of Passivity" offers an interesting twist on the age-old question of the hero's detachment in A Farewell to Arms. As Donaldson notes, Frederic Henry defines himself through symbols of self-protective camouflage that complicate the idea that he is emotionally obtuse. One peculiar passage finds him identifying with a fox precisely at the moment he and Catherine Barkley should feel most secure in each other's arms. What Donaldson takes from this overlooked scene is a wonderful example of how close reading can make Us rethink consensus opinion: "Like the wily fox in the woods, [Frederic] pretends to an innocence he does not possess; the comparison itself constitutes a caveat against accepting as gospel Frederic Henry's presentation of himself. In the end, his pose of passivity cannot hide the guilt he feels, nor can he dissipate the guilt by playacting or writing about it" (351).

The nuances in the Fitzgerald half of Works and Days are equally compelling. Thirty-five years after its first publication, "Fitzgerald's Romance with the South" remains the single best assessment of its subject's complicated regard for the Confederacy. Untangling the author's fixation with loss, Donaldson demonstrates how Fitzgerald projected both paternal resentment and feelings of romantic inadequacy onto the region. "A Short History of Tender Is the Night" probably will not teach anyone who knows the story of that novel's painfully protracted incubation anything new, but non-specialists seeking an informed introduction will not find a better overview. Finally, "Fitzgerald's Political Development" is the structural and thematic complement to "The Last Great Cause:' It challenges the lingering "image of the frivolous playboy" (189) by defining the various periods through which the author traveled from "May Day" (1920) to the posthumous The Last Tycoon (1941). Again, a more tendentious perspective would be content to pronounce Fitzgerald's growth from wannabe aristocrat to left-leaner as a trajectory common to posturing hypocrites. Yet Donaldson's insistence that "espousing revolutionary doctrine while following reactionary practice" (219) was a contradiction of many thinkers (including Karl Marx) makes the boy from St. Paul seem all the more complicated and, therefore, human.

It is tempting to dub Fitzgerald and Hemingway: Works and Days "Scott Donaldson's Greatest Hits." That would be misleading, however, for two reasons. For starters, these two writers represent only a portion of the range of authors to which he has devoted his career. His 1988 biography of John Cheever remains a cause celebre among Cheeverites, and his most recent "big" project--his 2007 biography of Edwin Arlington Robinson--has resuscitated interest in a major poet unfairly shunted to the sidelines of literary history. Secondly, "greatest hits" has about it a whiff of nostalgia and backward glancing. The striking thing about reading these essays all the way through is how absolutely contemporary they feel. (As Donaldson admits in the introduction, they have been lightly revised, though more for consistency than content). If there is one drawback, it is that readers thoroughly versed in Fitzgerald and Hemingway may be so familiar with the contours of their artistic development that they may skim right over the new insights that Donaldson's close readings contribute. That said, I would much rather enjoy a piece of straight-ahead prose that addresses me as a general reader than be bashed over the head by a critic braying about his revolutionary analysis. On a very basic level, Works and Days provides an essential collection of essays for easy reference. More importantly, it will serve many of us as the totem of the career we should be so lucky to have.

Kirk Curnutt

Troy University, Montgomery