Barry Day speaks on Raymond Chandler.

On Gary Shapiro's radio program From the Bookshelf, Barry Day (known for his works on Noel Coward) discusses his new book The World of Raymond Chandler: In His Own Words, in which he endeavors to show what Chandler thought of his own work. Day highlights Chandler's emphasis on language rather than plot or character, his admiration for the writing of F. Scott Fitzgerald, and his dislike of the work of Ernest Hemingway.

It came from the archives: Fitzgerald's ledger.

The Irvin Dept of Rare Books and Special Collections at the University of South Carolina has digitized F. Scott Fitzgerald's ledger in which he recorded his earnings from writing, as well as income by his wife, Zelda. Entries range from the listing of his first published short story ("Babes in the Woods," Smart Set, Sept. 1918) and notations on the income from his novels to the record of his appreciation of journalist and author Ring Lardner (New Republic, Oct. 1933) and the radio piece "Let's Go Out and Play" (1935).

F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Library of Congress,
Prints and Photographs Div. 

The ledger also includes an autobiographical timeline. Although many may not be interested in the fact that Fitzgerald had colic when he was a baby and find his references to being drunk or "tight" repetitive, he notes in the 1909 entries, "Wrote the Mystery of the Raymond Mortgage." (This flawed mystery tale, later reprinted in EQMM, is found in The Apprentice Fiction of F. Scott Fitzgerald, ed. John Kuehl; I discuss it in my 1999 piece for Mystery Scene, "F. Scott Fitzgerald: Mystery Writer?") There is a tantalizing notation on one of the "ten years old" pages, "He began a history of the U.S. and also a detective story about a necklace that was hidden in [sic] a trapdoor under the carpet," but the latter does not seem to have come to fruition (a trap door concealed by a carpet does appear in Fitzgerald's Pat Hobby story "No Harm Trying").

There are lively bits such as the reaction of his grade school classmates to him ("Will someone poison Scotty or find some means to shut his mouth") and sadder details such as "Zelda transferred to Sheppard [psychiatric facility in Maryland] in katatonic [sic] state."

Update. Princeton has digitized the corrected galleys to The Great Gatsby. (thanks, PhiloBiblos)

New light on the neglected.

An unexpected sidelight to the Authors Guild's lawsuit against HathiTrust is the attention it has garnered for authors and works that may have been neglected in recent years (although I was stunned that J. R. Salamanca's The Lost Country [1958] initially was included in HathiTrust's orphan works list. Prof. Salamanca was a major presence at University of Maryland––College Park when I was a student there and has just signed an ebook deal for one of his works).

James Gould Cozzens,
from the cover of the
Jan. 4, 1936, Saturday
Review of Literature

One work initially on HathiTrust's orphaned list (pulled when the heir of the estate, Harvard, was revealed) was Pulitzer Prize winner James Gould Cozzens's first novel, Confusion (1924), which he published at age 21 and is deemed by Daniel S. Burt in The Chronology of American Literature (2004) to be "pretentiously overwritten" (371). Cozzens himself ended up not thinking much of the novel, which focuses on the search by a young Frenchwoman to realize her ambitions.

Cozzens is on the Haycraft-Queen Cornerstone list for his fine novel The Just and the Unjust (1942; about the effects of a murder on a small town, especially its implications for the ambitious assistant DA. A 1942 issue of Esquire chose The Just and the Unjust as a good Christmas present for an "average reader," along with Maugham's The Hour before the Dawn).

Cozzens also wrote "Foot in It" (Redbook 1935; repr. as "Clerical Error," EQMM June 1950 and Muller & Pronzini, eds., Chapter & Hearse; adapted for Tales of the Unexpected, 1983). Raymond Chandler thought highly of Cozzens's Guard of Honor (1948). Gordon Van Ness has written an interesting essay about Cozzens's work in honor of Cozzens biographer Matthew J. Bruccoli, including Cozzens's criticism of Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, and Capote as well as his own work: "To learn to write and to write decently is simply a much longer and harder thing than is generally admitted" (203).

I also found that full text of Leslie Ford's The Girl from the Mimosa Club (1957, selected by Mystery Loves Company bookstore as one of the best mysteries of the 20th century) is in the HathiTrust library. After consulting with author Marcia Talley (who knows a lot about Ford's oeuvre and personal background), checking copyright records, and reviewing copyright law, I think it probably did go out of copyright.

Books about books: Bruccoli on Chandler, Sansom.

The Fine Books Blog offers a list of recommended books about books published in the past year, which includes On Books and Writers: Selected Essays by the late Fitzgerald specialist Matthew J. Bruccoli (which includes an essay on Chandler) and Ian Sansom's The Bad Book Affair: A Mobile Library Mystery. (Hat tip to PhiloBiblos)

Author portraits at Sotheby's.

Among other results, the June 17th auction at Sotheby's resulted in $5,000 for a signed pen-and-ink portrait of Arthur Conan Doyle;  a whopping $98,500 for an inscribed pen-and ink portrait of F. Scott Fitzgerald; and $2500 for a lot of inscribed British and Irish author portraits, which included G. K. Chesterton and E. Phillips Oppenheim.
About the image: E. Phillips Oppenheim, NYPL

F. Scott Fitzgerald's tax returns.

In the new issue of American Scholar, University of South Carolina law professor William J. Quirk examines F. Scott Fitzgerald's tax returns and draws some unexpected conclusions, such as refuting the common notion that Fitzgerald was a reckless spendthrift (surprising to anyone who has read Fitzgerald's letters to his editor, Max Perkins, as they usually include the writer's request for an advance on royalties). He also notes that Fitzgerald was paid more during his time in Hollywood ($1000 per week) than William Faulkner ($300 per week). Quirk estimates that Fitzgerald made an average of $24,000 per year, which translates, in today's dollars, to about $500,000 annually.

(Hat tip to PhiloBiblos. Photo of Fitzgerald, 1932, by Carl Van Vechten, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division)

Jay Gatsby and Lew Archer.

There's an interesting article posted online, "Ross Macdonald's Marked Copy of The Portable F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Study in Influence," by Robert F. Moss. In it, Moss compares and contrasts Jay Gatsby and Lew Archer and the lives of Fitzgerald and Macdonald; he also discusses Macdonald's annotations in The Portable F. Scott Fitzgerald (ed. Dorothy Parker), which suggest that Macdonald was seriously studying the craft of Fitzgerald's writing. The article also includes photographs of two pages of Macdonald's notes.

So We Beat On...

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born today in St. Paul in 1896. He died in 1940 and is buried in Rockville, Maryland (Fitzgerald's father, a Confederate sympathizer, was originally from Maryland). Go here to see his grave (his wife, Zelda, and daughter, former Washington Post reporter Scottie Fitzgerald Lanahan Smith, are also buried here).

Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby was influenced by New Jersey's Hall-Mills case (involving a Johnson & Johnson heiress; see Henry C. Phelps, "Literary History/Unsolved Mystery: The Great Gatsby and the Hall-Mills Murder Case," ANQ 14.3 [2001]: 33-39). I wrote an article for Mystery Scene in 1999 on some youthful attempts by Fitzgerald to write mysteries, most of them unsuccessful ("F. Scott Fitzgerald: Mystery Writer?" MS #65). There is a promising ghost story, "The Room with Green Blinds" (1911), in which a young man inherits his grandfather's house and a mystery with it. The story can be found in The Apprentice Fiction of F. Scott Fitzgerald (ed. John Kuehl, Rutgers UP, 1965).

For an interesting article by Charles Scribner III on the original cover art for The Great Gatsby, go here.