Love in the Night

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)
From F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby, All the Sad Young Men & Other Writings 1920–1926

Interesting Links

“The Beautiful and Damned”: F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald on the Riviera (Jonathan Miles, AirMail)

“F. Scott Fitzgerald and the Psychic Cost of Selling Out” (Anne Margaret Daniel, Literary Hub)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “How to Live on $36,000 a Year,” F. Scott Fitzgerald
• “Cat in the Rain,” Ernest Hemingway
• “A Point at Issue!,” Kate Chopin
• “A Traveler at Forty: Paris!” Theodore Dreiser

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F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby, All the Sad Young Men & Other Writings 1920–1926
Includes 25 short stories and 9 essays | 756 pages
List price: $35.00
Web store price: $28.00

Vieux port de Cannes, 1918, oil on canvas by Paul Signac (1863–1935). Wikimedia Commons.

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“I feel very old this winter,” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in January 1925 to his agent, Harold Ober. “I’m twenty eight. I was twenty-two when I came to New York and found that you’d sold ‘Head and Shoulders’ to The Saturday Evening Post. I’d like to get a thrill like that again but I suppose it’s only once in a lifetime.”

In fact, Ober ended up selling six of Fitzgerald’s stories—at $400 a piece—for publication in the Post during the first half of 1920. Over the next five years, Fitzgerald became a literary celebrity, publishing two novels and two story collections, all of which sold respectably. Although Fitzgerald would, of course, never again enjoy that once-in-a-lifetime thrill of being an unknown author making his debut in a national magazine, his writing would continue to appear in The Saturday Evening Post—sixty-five stories in all, as well as four essays.

Between June 1920 and February 1924, however, nearly all of his stories appeared elsewhere. Ober negotiated with Metropolitan Magazine for the first option on Fitzgerald’s future stories ($900 each); then, when the magazine went under, he struck a more lucrative deal with Hearst publications ($1,500). During this period, only one of his stories (“The Popular Girl”) appeared in the Post. Fitzgerald’s permanent reappearance in the magazine, which had more than two-and-a-half-million subscribers, came about in large part from his dire financial situation. His would-be Broadway play, The Vegetable, utterly flopped when its Atlantic City tryout opened in late 1923, leaving him in debt for almost ten thousand dollars—much of it owed to his agent.

Fitzgerald stopped drinking, shut himself up in a room over his garage, wrote ten stories in four months, and sent them off to Ober. Once the obligation to Hearst had been fulfilled, Ober struck a fresh deal with the Post, giving the magazine the right of first refusal on his stories. Four of the ten stories written in the months after The Vegetable were accepted by the Post—three of them earning $1,750 each. The windfall allowed Fitzgerald to pay all his outstanding bills, leaving a $7,000 surplus to carve out the time and space he needed to finish writing his next novel. He and his wife, Zelda, chose to spend that summer and autumn in the French Riviera, where he could work undistracted by the temptations of New York’s social scene.

“This is the loveliest piece of earth I’ve ever seen without excepting Oxford or Venice or Princeton or anywhere,” he wrote to the novelist Thomas Boyd shortly after arriving in May. “Well, I shall write a novel better than any novel ever written in America and become par excellence the best second-rater in the world.” At last, he completed the much-delayed novel, which would soon bear the title The Great Gatsby, and sent a typescript to Max Perkins, his editor at Scribner’s, in late October.

Despite the exorbitantly favorable exchange rate, the Fitzgeralds had burned through nearly all the cash they had brought to Europe, and Scott again began requesting advances from Ober. They decided to go to Rome, where he buckled down once more and wrote several new magazine pieces, including the romantic story “Love in the Night,” which appeared in the Post the month before Gatsby was published. It was both his first story set outside the U.S. and the first of a cluster of seventeen stories Fitzgerald later mined for settings, scenes, themes, and characters for his final completed novel, Tender Is the Night. The tale takes place in the French Riviera, which would provide the setting for most of the novel.

Fitzgerald wearied of writing for the Post and other mass-market magazines, often referring to the stories he sent to them as “trash.” To friends and correspondents, he would describe much of his magazine writing as piecework to pay the bills while he worked on his next novel. When he realized The Great Gatsby wouldn’t become the phenomenal success he had hoped for, he confessed to H. L. Mencken, “I never really ‘wrote down’ until after the failure of The Vegetable and that was to make this book possible.” Yet a number of the post-Vegetable stories he wrote for the slicks—such as “The Rich Boy” for Red Book; “The Last of the Belles” and “Babylon Revisited” for the Post—are among his best works. Bryant Mangum, in The Cambridge Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald, contends that the Tender Is the Night cluster is “perhaps the most significant group of stories that Fitzgerald ever wrote when they are considered together. . . . They show him in many cases walking a thin line between the demands of contemporary popular readers and discriminating critics.”

Notes: Gian Lorenzo Bernini was a seventeenth-century Baroque sculptor and architect whose works include many fountains in Rome and the colonnade outside St. Peter’s at the Vatican.

A brief summary of the historical events mentioned in the story: The Romanoffs were the ruling dynasty of Russia from 1613 to March 1917, when Czar Nicholas II abdicated. (He was executed in 1918 along with his wife and children.) Aleksander Kerensky headed the short-lived Russian Provisional Government, which was toppled in November by the Bolsheviks, led by Lenin and Trotsky. Val, the principal character of Fitzgerald’s story, appears to have served on the eastern front between Russia and Germany, a confrontation that Kerensky wanted to prolong; Val’s commander, Anton Denikin, commanded the White army in southern Russia and Ukraine from April 1918 to April 1920.

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The words thrilled Val. They had come into his mind sometime during the fresh gold April afternoon and he kept repeating them to himself over and over: “Love in the night; love in the night.” . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

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