By Stuart Mitchner
Well, don’t forget, Scott, that a great writer is not only a leaver-outer but also a putter-inner…
—Thomas Wolfe (1900-1938)
As long as I’m unknown, I’m a pretty nice fellow, but give me a little notoriety and I swell up like a poison toad.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940)
Quoted in Andrew Turnbull’s 1962 biography Scott Fitzgerald, the future author of The Great Gatsby, is responding to the praise bestowed on his contribution to the Triangle Club production Fie! Fie! Fi! Fi!. According to the Baltimore Sun, “Much of the success of the production was due to the clever lyrics of F.S. Fitzgerald,” who, said the Louisville Post, “could take his place right now with the brightest writers of witty lyrics in America.”
Thomas Wolfe arrives on the occasion of his 125th birthday, Friday, October 3, while Fitzgerald is here courtesy of the upcoming Friends of the Princeton Public Library Book Sale, which opens with a preview on Friday, October 10 and runs through October 12. While the featured attraction of the 2023 sale — a first edition of Gatsby — would be hard to top any year, there’s nothing as illustrious on offer in 2025 unless you count two rare but “ungently” used pieces of Fitzgeraldiana, the Princeton Bric-a-Brac editions from 1917 and 1918, in which Fitzgerald’s Triangle Club lyrics for 1917’s production of Safety Last are noted: “Gentlemen Bandits We,” “A Slave to Modern Improvements,” “In Her Eyes,” “What the Manicure Lady Knows,” and “Good Night and Good-Bye.”
The October 1916 New York Times previewed Safety Last, which “will be presented in New York during the Christmas season. From all accounts the students will put out one of the most original comedies that has been produced since the club was founded back in the nineties by Booth Tarkington….Scott Fitzgerald of St. Paul, Minn., is composing the lyrics.”
Even a passing mention in the Times qualifies as a “little notoriety.” Visitors to this year’s book sale can have a look at Fitzgerald in the 1917 Bric a Brac group photo of the Triangle Club. Admitting the hindsight enjoyed by citizens of 2025, there’s no doubt that the most potently present face in the picture belongs to the young man who will create a sensation in the book world a few years later with his breakthrough bestseller of Princeton life, This Side of Paradise. While the most intense individual in the group may not quite resemble a “poison toad,” he’s not merely there to be photographed: he’s cocked, loaded, and aimed for fame.
Here Comes Flaubert
Given Thomas Wolfe’s volcanic five-page letter (July 26, 1937) responding to Fitzgerald’s well-meant if smugly presumptuous missive critiquing the author of Look Homeward, Angel (which Fitzgerald greatly admired) and Of Time and the River (which he thought “gawky and profuse”), I can’t resist quoting the Book of Days for the Literary Year entry for October 1,1856, when “the first installment of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary appears in the Revue de Paris, although the publisher refuses to print a passage in which Emma effects an adulterous liaison in the back of a hired cab.”
Aware that he was telling the massive combination of orchestra, marching band, and chorus that was Thomas Wolfe to, in effect, “tone it down,” Fitzgerald was politic to an extreme while advising the big man “to cultivate an alter ego, a more conscious artist in you…. The novel of selected incidents has this to be said that the great writer like Flaubert has consciously left out the stuff that Bill or Joe (in his case Zola) will come along and say presently. He will say only the things that he alone sees. So Madame Bovary becomes eternal while Zola already rocks with age….” He signs himself “Ever your friend” after saying “That, in brief, is my case against you, if it can be called that when I admire you so much and think your talent is unmatchable in this or any other country.”
Scott and Tom
One of the most memorable moments of my freshman year at Indiana University was reading aloud Thomas Wolfe’s response, quoted in full in Edmund Wilson’s edition of Fitzgerald’s uncollected writings, The Crack-Up. I still have my copy of the New Directions paperback, which long ago broke apart on page 312 because of being passed back and forth with my friend as we recited Wolfe’s response with cackles of delight, for we loved Wolfe more than Fitzgerald before we both eventually came to our toned-down senses.
We must have flipped a coin for the right to read Wolfe’s booming first sentence, “I don’t know where you are living and I’ll be damned if I’ll believe anyone lives in a place called ‘The Garden of Allah.’” Knowing now that Flaubert put something in his novel that the Revue de Paris took out resonates in Wolfe’s argument. “Just remember that although in your opinion Madame Bovary may be a great book, Tristram Shandy is indubitably a great book, and that it is great for quite different reasons. It is great because it boils and pours — for the unselected quality of its selection. You say that the great writer like Flaubert has consciously left out the stuff that Bill or Joe will come along presently and put in. Well, don’t forget, Scott, that a great writer is not only a leaver-outer but also a putter-inner, and that Shakespeare and Cervantes and Dostoievsky were great putter-inners — greater putter-inners, in fact, than taker-outers and will be remembered for what they put in — remembered, I venture to say, as long as Monsieur Flaubert will be remembered for what he left out.”
Wolfe’s Farewell
My old feeling for Wolfe has come back after rereading his letter in full, remembering that as much as my friend and I may have been laughing with him and not at him, we were responding to the very caricature of the Great Writer Unbound that he was exhibiting in his defense. I’ve long since given up trying to “recapture the rapture” of first discovering Wolfe and walking around Greenwich Village and Brooklyn Heights following in his footsteps. For a period between the ages of 18 and 21, the big, forever wandering egomaniac from North Carolina was the most compelling of my alter egos, over even Holden Caulfield and James Dean. And I find the farewell letter to his editor Maxwell Perkins as moving now as I did at 21.
Written a month before his death September 15, 1938, from a cerebral infection set off by pneumonia, the letter begins, “I’m sneaking this against orders, but ‘I’ve got a hunch’ — and I wanted to write these words to you … I’ve made a long voyage and been to a strange country, and I’ve seen the dark man very close…. I wanted most desperately to live and still do… and there was the impossible anguish and regret of all the work I had not done, of all the work I had to do — and I know now I’m just a grain of dust, and I feel as if a great window has been opened on life I did not know about before …Whatever happens — I had this ‘hunch’ and wanted to write you and tell you, no matter what happens or has happened, I shall always think of you and feel about you the way it was that Fourth of July day three years ago when you met me at the boat and we went out on the cafe on the river and had a drink and later went on top of the tall building, and all the strangeness and the glory and the power of life and the city was below.”
Critics might claim that even his last letter needs editing, which I admittedly did to highlight the essence of the document, with its soaring last words about the day he’d returned to America from Europe to find that Of Time and the River was a great success.
The Plunging Whale
In an article about the 2013 Friends of the Library Book Sale, I noted that Wolfe once compared his editor Maxwell Perkins to “a man who is trying to hang onto the fin of a plunging whale.” The “whale” was the manuscript for Of Time and the River and the feature attraction of that year’s sale was a copy of the 912-page first edition signed by Maxwell Perkins, the man without whom it could not have been written and to whom it is emotionally dedicated. The first edition of The Great Gatsby is 700 pages shorter. Its place among the greatest novels of the 20th Century is assured.
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Note: I’ll take a closer look at the Friends Sale on October 8. For more information, contact Claire Bertrand, Friends and Foundation Book Sale and annual giving manager, (609) 924-9529 ext. 1227, or cbertrand@princetonlibrary.org.