Dismissed as \'Too Fantastic,\' a Fitzgerald Story Gets Another Chance

By CLYDE HABERMAN

If you're the sort who sees no reason to avoid clichés like the plague, you could do worse than to trot out the one about how there are no second acts in American lives. That was from F. Scott Fitzgerald. It is used and misused a lot, commonly to mean that there are no second chances, which may not be quite what Fitzgerald had in mind, especially considering that his most enduring work, “The Great Gatsby,” is about a man who reinvents himself.

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Clyde Haberman offers his take on the news.

That said, Fitzgerald himself is experiencing a version of a second act and then some, including yet another cinematic stab at “Gatsby,” the fifth that we know of, going back to 1926. (This latest - scheduled to be released at year's end with Leonardo DiCaprio in the title role - was shot in 3-D. Mind the popping Cham pagne corks.)

More immediately, The New Yorker this week has given a second shot to a Fitzgerald short story that could be described as forgotten except that, to be forgotten, people had to know it ever existed. This story, “Thank You for the Light,” is running in the magazine's current issue. It is quite short, not even 1,200 words.

What makes it worth noting is that Fitzgerald, by this point a drinker with writing problems, submitted it to The New Yorker in 1936, only to have it rejected by the editors as being “altogether out of the question.” In a letter to his agent, they said it seemed “so curious and so unlike the kind of thing we associate with him, and really too fantastic.” They meant fantastic as in unreal, not in the modern usage of, you know, like, awesome.

The story is about one Mrs. Hanson, a widowed and “somewhat faded woman of 40” who sells corsets and likes to smoke. While on a business tri p to Kansas City, she craves a cigarette, but there is apparently a law against smoking indoors. Maybe this is what The New Yorker of 1936 found to be fantastic. C'mon, what city is going to pass laws making it illegal to smoke in certain places?

Anyway, Mrs. Hanson ducks into a cathedral, figuring that “if so much incense had gone up in the spires to God, a little smoke in the vestibule would make no difference.” Only she'd run out of matches. In the end, her cigarette is lit, apparently by a divine hand. “Thank you for the light,” she says to an image of the Madonna that gazes down upon her.

“Its ambition is not to be the greatest story ever read,” said Deborah Treisman, the magazine's fiction editor. “It's just a vignette. It's a little sketch of a scene.” Some have suggested this week that the story is a parable for Fitzgerald's struggles with alcohol, but Ms. Treisman was not so sure this is so.

She said that Fitzgerald's grandchildr en had come across the story while sifting through his papers for a recent auction at Sotheby's. The Fitzgerald scholar James West, she said, suggested to them, “Why don't you think about sending it back to The New Yorker, and give them another chance at it? They might have fun with this, and they might have fun with what I have from the rejection letter.”

Clearly, the legal concept of stare decisis does not apply at the magazine. The 1936 ruling was overturned.

“There are little lines in it that were surprising,” Ms. Treisman said - “little touches that were very sharp.”

On its Web site, the magazine has a companion article outlining its relationship with Fitzgerald, who died in 1940 at the tender age of 44. “Fitzgerald's work,” it notes, “did not always meet with rejection from The New Yorker's editors.” From 1929 to 1937, they published three of his short stories and two poems, including a couple of pieces after that rejection lett er.

There are also excerpts from a New Yorker profile of him published in 1926, a year after “Gatsby.” It ran under the title “That Sad Young Man” and, referring to both Fitzgeralds, Scott and Zelda, it said that “money has poured in upon this young couple, thousands and thousands a month. And just as fast it has poured out. Where it goes, no one seems to know. Least of all evidently, the Fitzgeralds.”

Oh well. Isn't there also a cliché about how you can't take it with you?

Perhaps there is some solace in all this for young writers who cope with the agony of rejection slips (assuming such things exist anymore - maybe by now there's a rejection app). In time, even venerable institutions may come around. You just have to hang in for 76 years.