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
Crazy Sunday
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In late 1931 F. Scott Fitzgerald traveled to Hollywood for a second attempt to crack the lucrative movie market. While there he attended a party at the home of MGM studio chieftain Irving Thalberg and his wife, Norma Shearer, at which he performed a bit of drunken doggerel and embarrassed himself. Never one not to avail himself of autobiographical material, he quickly shaped a story about an emotional triangle between a "hack" screenwriter (Joel Coles) and a charismatic director (Miles Calman) and his actress/Pygmalion figure/wife (Stella). Because it addressed the theme of adultery frankly, the Saturday Evening Post rejected "Crazy Sunday," as did the somewhat racier Cosmopolitan, fearing the wrath of publisher William Randolph Hearst (who had his own "interest" in Hollywood, of course). Instead, the story appeared in H. L. Mencken's influential journal American Mercury, where it become the second of only two Fitzgerald stories to appear there. In this episode we explore the Hollywood background, connect "Crazy Sunday" to Fitzgerald's eventual attempt at a Hollywood novel (The Last Tycoon), note the prominence of psychoanalysis in the plot, and even speculate what Fitzgerald's disastrous lyrics to "Dog"---the poem he performed at that fateful party---might have sounded like with a little musical accompaniment. (Of course, it would have sounded craz-eee!).