This slim volume edited by Kirk Curnutt, chair of the English Dept. at Troy-Montgnery, collects Fitzgerald's three short pieces, his Montgomery stories, written as a result of his fortuitous journey to Montgomery in 1918 to 1920 where he met Zelda Sayre. The stories, unbeknownst to me, are quite good.
My FB interaction with the editor.
Hello Prof. Curnutt---I just became aware of your existence in the universe having just received your latest publication All of the Belles. I mistakenly thought the book was about bells in Montgomery before I ordered from Amazon, but am happy to see that I was mistaken. Thanks for producing the book. Have you always been as witty as you appear to be in the introduction?
It's great to meet you, Fred! Please call me Kirk. Thank you for buying Belles! It's been a labor of love trying to celebrate Scott and Zelda in Montgomery. Haha---I don't know about witty. Most days I feel borderline frivolous. I see you were in higher ed publishing? what did you do?
I was a sales rep for Wadsworth which became Thomson which is now Cengage from 1976 to 2016 when I retired all in Alabama. I represented the entire list until 1998 when I specialized in math and science though I am a humanities and social science person at heart. I graduated from Auburn in 1973 BA in history. Thought about grad school in history but never made in favor of 40 years as a textbook rep. It all worked out for the best.
Ah, you rode out some transformations then. I was a second-generation editor on the Heath Anthology of Am Lit, which Cengage acquired around 2008-9 when Harcourt sold off its academic publishing. I used to make some nice royalties off that book---once I received a $13, 000 check ... only to discover it wasn't made out to me, but to some guy who wrote whatever popular history textbook they had. Then Cengage went into bankruptcy and reorganization and we never received another drop. The guy who founded the anthology even tried to talk to them about buying the book back and taking it elsewhere, but he can't get a conversation with anybody. My Cengage rep drops by Troy every so often---I don't envy that job! I hope you're enjoying retirement. I can't wait to get there!
I appreciate your response. We'll have to keep taking. I would very much appreciate literary conversation. I just did an excerpt on FB from your introduction. I have read all of Fitzgerald's novels but only some of the short stories. I look forward to reading this one in your new book. I see that you have also published on Faulkner and Hemingway. Oh, my! (Yes, recent higher ed publishing activity is a bitch and now they're trying to consolidate Cengage and McGraw-Hill)
I love the short stories, mainly because they're not very well-known and there's opportunities for scholarship instead of trying to hammer out the 1,000,000th essay on Gatsby. That said, Gatsby was just "banned" or taken out of the curriculum in Matsu Alasksa, so apparently it's still controversial to somebody! LOL. I've been lucky to get opportunities here and there; I think mostly bc I could deliver final products. As you know, academics rarely have a sense of meeting actual deadlines. The real hell will be this fall in academia---the pandemic is going to whittle higher ed to the bone. Not like there was a lot of flesh to spare. Happy Tuesday! LOL
The Ice Palace is a magnificent story. I found myself wondering what part of Sally Carrol's words are fiction and what part of her words are verbatim from Zelda. There are at least three racial references in the story. What if anything have critics said about this? Did Fitzgerald make mocking remarks about the South to Zelda?
Yes, it's one of my faves, and demonstrates how good he was at comedy, which people forget because Gatsby is so sad. The racial references are tough: basically people either accept that such epithets were commonplace at the time, regrettably, or they just walk away from the story. There's no easy answer on that. He was not a racial progressive by any means. (Nor was Zelda). Supposedly that whole dialogue in the graveyard was Zelda's, or at least a paraphrase of what she said the day she took him there. But it's clearly amped up a bit to make it sound just shy of being over the top. I don't think FSF ever mocked the South the way Harry does---he probably picked that up from his fellow Princetonians. He actually identified with the South bc his father was a Marylander who supported the Confederacy. As you see, the politics are twisted, though the language is beautiful. My fave is "Last of the Belles"---it's the most mature of them.
I plan additional FSF reading. Over the years I've read all of novels including Gatsby several times. I have an edition of the complete short stories so I will be thorough here. Otherwise, as a former history major and continuing student of American history, I am more interested in Fitzgerald in the context of the social and intellectual history of his times than in literary criticism. I have ordered your historical guide to Fitzgerald. This might be the approach I am looking for most. I have the Bruccoli bio on my list. Can you think of anything else that you would recommend?
P.S. I have ordered the Edmund Wilson version of The Crackup.
That's a great collection---the Wilson Crack-up. He wrote his best work in the 1930s in nonfiction (Tender is the Night excluded). I really like the David S Brown biography that came out three years it---it depicts Fitzgerald as an intellectual, placing him in the intellectual traditions of the immediate past and president. Otherwise, the book is most recommend is the reprint of Scott Donaldson's Fool for Love that the Minnesota Historical Society published about 7 or 8 years ago. IT's very thorough but it's arranged thematically rather than chronologically, and he cites just about every Fitzgerald text under the sun. Plus it's very readable.
Much obliged, as they say in the South. I have ordered the Donaldson and Brown biographies. I already have Donaldson's Hemingway vs. Fitzgerald which my son purchased for me and I read back in 1999, which I may visit again and I have his Hemingway and Fitzgerald already which I have not read. I have signed up for the "spirited discussion" for tomorrow but I am iffy with a potential conflict. One of my Tennessee friends is in town visiting her father who is in ill-health in Alabaster and she said something about a picnic with proper distancing tomorrow afternoon so I may have to do that instead if it comes off. Thanks for interacting with me. I appreciate it SO much.
You'll probably have more fun at a picnic---so no worries! It'll be a pretty freewheeling discussion, nothing too formal or academic. Hemingway vs Fitzgerald is a great book too---it's actually been Scott's biggest seller of a long career. (He's getting ready to turn 91). Fool for Love is very much in the same style. I think you'll find it a quick but informative read.
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I will be listening in on a discussion of Zelda Fitzgerald at 3 this afternoon with Fitzgerald scholars in what is supposed to be a "spirited discussion." I like spirited discussions. Don't you? Especially if I can listen and learn.
At a dance in July 1918, barely a month after graduating from Sidney Lanier High School, Zelda met F. Scott Fitzgerald, a 21-year-old army second lieutenant stationed at nearby Camp Sheridan.
If I had been at that dance in Montgomery and met Zelda first, history might have been different. Reckon? Fred and Zelda. It has a ring to it
"In 'The Jelly Bean,' the hero is a townie, Jim Powell, so stymied by a lack of motivation and opportunity that he is stereotyped as a 'corner loafer,' the type of slacker 'who spends his life conjugating the verb to idle in the first person singular---I am idling, I have idled, I will idle.' The only thing in Tarleton* that sparks Jim's fire is Nancy Lamar, a friend of Sally Carroll's with 'a mouth like a remembered kiss,' who 'left a trail of broken hearts 'from Atlanta to New Orleans.' In other words, Zelda." -Kirk Curnett & F. Scott Fitzgerald "All of the Belles," The Montgomery Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald * fictional Montgomery
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