Brief Notices: The Portable F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Portable F. Scott Fitzgerald. Selected by Dorothy Parker. Introduction by John O’Hara. Viking. $2.00

This compact little volume is as convenient an introduction to Scott Fitzgerald as a reader is likely to get. Since Fitzgerald is rapidly recovering the reputation that he ought always to have had as the most interesting person among American prose writers of the ‘twenties, it is a book worth having. Mrs. Parker has, inevitably, reprinted The Great Gatsby, but she has also reprinted Tender Is the Night, which is surely Fitzgerald’s most important novel for all its manifest flaws of construction. These are the only novels of Fitzgerald that a reader not interested in “impure,” historical considerations needs to know, though there are many of us who feel about the others as Matthew Arnold did about Wordsworth’s address to Mr. Wilkinson’s spade: we can read even them “with pleasure and edification.”

Mrs. Parker also reprints nine of the short stories. It is impossible to guess just what motivated the particular selection, but it has its oddities. There are three of Fitzgerald’s best, “The Rich Boy,” “Crazy Sunday,” and “Babylon Revisited”; and perhaps the second best of the Basil Duke Lee stories. Besides these there are an interesting but unsuccessfully realized early story, “The Cut-Glass Bowl”; the two stories which Fitzgerald’s contemporaries seem always to over-rate (I suppose this is historically significant), “Absolution” and “May Day”; one of his second-drawer parent stories (the subject obsessed him); and an embarrassing piece of smart, 1920’s fluff called “The Offshore Pirate,” which is a perfect example of what makes people wish to forget Fitzgerald and all his works. Unless Mrs. Parker was trying to represent him at his worst as well as his best, it is hard to understand this selection. One thing, however, is certain, that until Fitzgerald’s final stories are reprinted or his editors dig a little in the magazines for such stories as “Between Planes” and “The Lost Decade,” we shall not get a fair selection of his best.

But here, for all this, are Fitzgerald’s two best novels and some very good stories in convenient, readable form. This is a lot of book for very little and a great credit to its publisher.