Writing Celebrity: Stein, Fitzgerald, and the Modern(ist) Art of Self-Fashioning

243 Pages·2011·1.566 MB·English

by  Timothy W. Galow (auth.)

AMERICAN LITERATURE READINGS IN THE 21ST CENTURY
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American Literature Readings in the 21st Century publishes works by
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Freak Shows in Modern American Imagination: Constructing the
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By Kelly Lynch Reames
American Political Poetry in the 21st Century
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Science and Technology in the Age of Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, and
James: Thinking and Writing Electricity
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F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Racial Angles and the Business of Literary Greatness
By Michael Nowlin
Sex, Race, and Family in Contemporary American Short Stories
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Democracy in Contemporary U.S. Women’s Poetry
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Language, Gender, and Community in Late Twentieth-Century Fiction:
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Repression and Realism in Postwar American Literature
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Writing Celebrity: Stein, Fitzgerald, and the Modern(ist) Art of Self-
Fashioning
By Timothy W. Galow
Writing Celebrity
Stein, Fitzgerald, and the Modern(ist)
Art of Self-Fashioning
Timothy W. Galow
WRITING CELEBRITY
Copyright © Timothy W. Galow, 2011.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2011 978-0-230-11271-1
All rights reserved.
First published in 2011 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN®
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this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills,
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ISBN 978-1-349-29465-7 ISBN 978-0-230-11949-9 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9780230119499
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Galow, Timothy W.
Writing celebrity : Stein, Fitzgerald, and the modern(ist) art of
self-fashioning / Timothy W. Galow.
p. cm. —(American literature readings in the twenty-first century)
1. American literature—20th century—History and criticism.
2. Modernism (Literature)—United States. 3. Celebrities—United
States—History—20th century. 4. Fame—Social aspects—United
States—History—20th century. 5. Fitzgerald, F. Scott (Francis Scott),
1896–1940—Criticism and interpretation. 6. Stein, Gertrude,
1874–1946—Criticism and interpretation. I. Title.
PS228.M63G35 2011
810.9(cid:2)112—dc22 2010048453
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.
First edition: June 2011
To the professor who made me want to do this work
in the first place and the one whose tireless
efforts made it possible
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Prelude xi
Part I Contexts: Literary Modernism in
the Age of Celebrity
1 Critical Histories: The Changing Face of
Literature, 1870–1920 5
2 Critical Reassessments: Celebrity, Modernism, and
the Literary Field in the 1920s and 1930s 23
Part II From Toklas to Everybody: Gertrude
Stein between Autobiographies
3 The Celebrity Speaks: Gertrude Stein’s Aesthetic
Theories after The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas 53
4 After the Tour: Naturalized Aesthetics and Systematized
Contradictions 81
Part III The Crack-Up of F. Scott Fitzgerald
5 On the Limitations of Image Management: The Long
Shadow of “F. Scott Fitzgerald” 121
6 The “Crack-Up” Essays: Masculine Identity, Modernism,
and the Dissolution of Literary Values 143
Epilogue 175
Notes 179
Bibliography 217
Index 231
Acknowledgments
Looking back over the course of this project, I realize that it would
take another book to thank all the people who have helped along the
way. So I will be far too brief here, leaving out the names of liter-
ally hundreds of people who provided intellectual, emotional, and
economic support as Writing Celebrity developed. Your help, I assure
you, is not forgotten.
My first debt of gratitude is always to my mother and father, with-
out whom none of this would have been possible, and I mean that in
the broadest possible way. I also wish to single out Fran Ratzburg.
I mention the unsolicited support that put food on my table during
graduate school, but it was your generosity of spirit that mattered
most. You are much missed.
Friends, colleagues, and students at the University of Chicago,
the University of North Carolina, and Wake Forest University have
supplied invaluable assistance at all stages of this project. I have
received significant institutional support from each school as well.
Without the graduate fellowship from the University of Chicago, I
would have missed out on many opportunities. At the University of
North Carolina, a Frankel Dissertation Fellowship, a John R. Bittner
Fellowship in Literature and Journalism, and a Smith Research
Grant all provided economic support at crucial junctures. An Archie
Research Fellowship at Wake Forest University enabled me to con-
duct research at several libraries around the country. The Bentley
Historical Library at the University of Michigan provided research
support for work on Esquire, which figures into the later chapters of
this book. I want to express gratitude to Modernism/modernity, which
published a piece of this book under the title “Literary Modernism in
the Age of Celebrity,” © 2010 The Johns Hopkins University Press.
This article first appeared in Volume 17, Issue 2, April 2010, pages
313–29. Grateful acknowledgment is also given to the Journal of
Modern Literature, in which an earlier version of chapter 4 appeared
under the title, “Gertrude Stein’s Everybody’s Autobiography and the
Art of Contradictions,” © Indiana University Press. This article first
appeared in Volume 32, Issue 1, Fall 2008, pages 111–28.
x ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I cannot finish this woefully insufficient expression of gratitude
without mentioning my son, Calvin, who is now only three, but may
some day grow curious about his father and pull this dusty old book
off the shelf. You will have no memory of the hours we spent throw-
ing stones on the path in front of our apartment building, or the
afternoons we went down to the lake to talk with ducks. But these are
the things that I remember most about writing this book. You make
the work worth doing.
Lastly, and a bit sheepishly, I address the one person whom I could
not possibly thank enough: my wife, Amy. You gave up more for this
book than your stupid husband will ever realize. And you did it with
more humor than I had any right to expect. Please know, my only
regret about this project is that I had to spend so many nights away in
my office, when I could have been home with you.
Prelude
Writing Celebrity outlines the rise of a national celebrity culture in
the United States and surveys the impact that this culture had on “lit-
erary” writing in the decades before World War II. Then, it examines
how two authors, Gertrude Stein and F. Scott Fitzgerald, negotiated
with this new landscape while constructing their public personae dur-
ing the 1920s and 1930s. Each part can be treated as a self-contained
analysis, but all three parts were designed to communicate with one
another and support a number of larger arguments that emerge over
the course of the book.
Chapter 1 examines several important changes in U.S. culture
during the latter half of the nineteenth century. Print technologies
evolved and markets expanded so that, by the turn of the century,
magazines and newspapers were able to help lay the groundwork for
a culture that was truly national in scope. As this new “mass” culture
began to emerge, the literary field split into two highly visible sets
of institutions for producing and promoting texts, a situation that
encouraged people to speak about books in binary terms. High/low,
elite/popular, and serious/light are just a few of the labels that have
historically been used to distinguish between texts.
While aspects of this discussion may seem familiar to American
literary or cultural scholars, much of the previous work done on these
developments has neglected one crucial and related change: the emer-
gence of a national celebrity culture. In order to convince readers of
the important role that celebrity media played during this period, I
argue against two positions that feature prominently in contemporary
writing on the subject. First, critics continue to treat star coverage as
if it were a degraded offshoot of “serious” journalism. Second, some
literary scholars, despite the recent explosion of studies on celebrity,
continue to marginalize the topic in discussions of modern authorship.
In order to challenge these views, I argue that celebrity coverage has
long been a part of American media and that it played an increasingly
prominent role in the press over the course of the nineteenth century.
By 1900, this form of journalism had become important enough that