The Sewanee Review's poetry can be mannered and trite, as if the last 100 years had never happened and modernism not overthrown Georgian sensibilities. The University of the South's short stories also conform to traditional modes, with little acceptance of metafictional experimentation. This hewing to old-fashioned standards can be reassuring, as if the reader had sailed into the calm water of a sunny, windless harbor.
For all of its orthodoxy, George Core's journal, whose blue-covered illustration-less design has not changed for decades, displays a subtle editorial originality. Core has a penchant for themed issues that reflect artistic daring guided by judgment, bringing a coherence often lacking in the bombastic projects of flashier publications. The journal generates its own fire and heat with its critical essays, personal and biographical reflections and articles on the literary world.
The Winter 2016 issue is titled "dwelling in possibility," a speculative prism for the reader's thoughts. A highlight of the winter issue is literary biographer Scott Donaldson's fascinating piece on the long friendship between Dorothy Parker and F. Scott Fitzgerald, of which I was previously unaware, although I thought I'd known every detail about Fitzgerald's life.
From their first taste of fame in the 1920s through the dispiriting 1930s, Parker and Fitzgerald were friends and supporters of each other's careers. Donaldson, who wrote a biography of Fitzgerald, examines in detail their deep relationship, including the possibility of a brief love affair.
Both reaching literary stardom in the giddy years after World War I, they shared glittering talent, chronic alcoholism, self-destructive impulses and swings between excessive confidence and crippling self-doubt. Donaldson relates that during Jazz Age debauches, Parker came to loathe Fitzgerald, seeing him as the male reflection of herself.
Their friendship endured through a changing circumstances and places, from Europe to New York to Hollywood, from success to failure. The main thread underlying Donaldson's narrative is whether Parker and Fitzgerald engaged in a brief and unsatisfying love affair in the 1930s. Most Fitzgerald biographers don't mention the affair, and the sole source is the notoriously unreliable Lillian Hellman, who said Parker mentioned the two-day fling to her at a party that might not have ever happened. Donaldson, though, believes the affair could have occurred.
The friendship ended with Fitzgerald's death in December 194o in Hollywood, where both were screenwriters, Parker more successfully than Fitzgerald. Parker last saw Fitzgerald on a Friday the 13th, eight days before his death.
Donaldson discloses many details that were new to me. In discussing Parker's involvement with Hollywood left-wing groups, he reveals Fitzgerald's sympathy for leftist politics, which I never knew before.
He also talks about a pleasant lunch meeting between Fitzgerald and his former protege Ernest Hemingway in Hollywood in 1937. I thought the two were long estranged by then, with Hemingway now an established literary star and Fitzgerald a nearly forgotten has-been.
I was also fascinated by an account of an art exhibition of works by Fitzgerald's wife, Zelda, in New York City in the late 1930s. Zelda, long institutionalized at this point, came down to the event from a hospital in Beacon, N.Y. A couple of friends purchased a few of her paintings out of charity, paying very little. I wondered what those paintings are worth now.
One of those friends was Gerald Murphy, the model for Dick Diver in Fitzgerald's "Tender Is the Night," and also a close friend of Parker. Donaldson in a fascinating passage details Parker's friendship with Murphy and his wife, Sarah, after the Fitzgeralds had become estranged from them temporarily.
Donaldson brings alive the era's exuberant creativity and tragic underside, giving a fresh perspective on a generation that has been exhaustively studied. Even anecdotes about Parker's involvement in the Algonquin Roundtable don't sound musty.
Parker outlived Fitzgerald by nearly three decades, dying in 1967 in a residential hotel in New York City's Upper East Side where she had lived for years. Unlike him, she experienced World War II, the 1950s era of prosperity and conformism, and the 1960s counterculture. She kept writing and making witty observations until the end.
She also witnessed the astounding revival of Fitzgerald's literary reputation. Donaldson says that Parker in a posthumous act of friendship aided Fitzgerald's rehabilitation, editing a portable volume of his writings that gained a strong readership in the postwar years.
Through the years, I've imagined Fitzgerald standing beside Zelda or his last mistress, Sheilah Graham. Now, Dorothy Parker will join the picture.
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