Fiction, Essays, and Other Things

  I strive to be a completionist in regard to the artists I admire and writers are no exception. Of course, this almost always leads us through a variable quality of work, even for those we hold in high regard. However, to understand the evolution of an artist it is important to study at least the bulk of their work including, maybe even especially, the failures. In this vein, any one at all interested in the career of F. Scott Fitzgerald should read his first short story, published in  St. Paul Academy Now and Then  in October of 1909 when Fitzgerald was only thirteen. The truth is “The Mystery of the Raymond Mortgage” is not a very good detective story filled with lapses of narrative clarity, jerky plot turns and an abrupt resolution. It reads at best like a summation, or a draft, of the writers that inspired it, Doyle and Poe. It looks, indeed, like it was written by a thirteen-year-old. But what a thirteen-year-old! What astounds about “The Mystery of the Raymond Mort...

  Henry James could have written “The Jolly Corner”, one of his last short stories, only at the time of life he did and I had the fortune to find it at just the right time in my life. It is, however, a story that could speak to all of us for, no matter our lives in later years, who does not have their own jolly corner deep back in their memory from what often are or at least ought to be the best years of our lives? No matter where or how we spent our childhood there was a place we called home where our wonders and dreams were formed, where we spent our years of innocence and optimism and made it our own jolly corner.   In the 1900s, his last full decade alive, James was reflecting on a life that to most would seem like a life exceptionally well spent. And yet, in 1903 came his most revealing tale, “The Beast in the Jungle”, about a blue-blooded American ex-pat who at old age and at the death of the woman who stood by him for decades reflects on a life wasted awaiting a grand...