FITZGERALD had been from his college days a great admirer of Samuel Butler’s Note-Books, and he undertook at some point in his later life to do for his own accumulations of material what Festing Jones had done for Butler’s. He carefully sorted them out and grouped them under alphabetical headings in such a way as to impose upon them a certain coherence and general design, almost as if he were preparing a book to be read as well as a storehouse for his own convenience.
They do make, in fact, extremely good reading. There are among them many passages on the level of brilliant and precise expression which is characteristic of Fitzgerald’s best work. Certain of them were evidently intended to be used in the short stories of his later years; but, actually, he seems rarely so to have used them; and this was perhaps because they belonged to a plane of the activity of his mind and his craft so much higher than that represented by this rather inferior magazine fiction that it was difficult for him to incorporate them in it. It was only—as in The Last Tycoon— when he was attempting something artistically more serious that he drew much upon this collection; and these note-books really ought to be read with Tender Is the Night, The Last Tycoon and the pieces in the first part of this volume for their record of the final phases of the milieux in which Fitzgerald lived and of his sensations, emotions and ideas in the last years before his death.
The manuscript is here presented in a considerably abbreviated form. It has been necessary for personal reasons to suppress a certain amount of matter which would otherwise be included, and the editor has had to use his best judgment in weeding out entries which were of value to Fitzgerald as suggestions or reminders for his work, but which seem otherwise unintelligible or uninteresting. A number of notes that have already been printed with the manuscript of The Last Tycoon have not been reprinted here, and two jottings that were found with that manuscript but do not relate to the story have been added on page 181 at the end of the section called Literary.
The Basil and Josephine sometimes referred to in these notes are the central figures of two series of stories included in Taps at Reveille; the Philippe was to have figured as the hero of a mediaeval novel. Four episodes dealing with this last character were published in the Redbook magazine (October, 1924; June and August, 1935; and November, 1941); but the requirements of the fiction market compelled Fitzgerald to depart from his original conception, and he eventually lost interest in the story.