by CHARLES SCRIBNER III
Among the published works of Scott Fitzgerald, The Vegetable stands out as something of a curiosity. As the author’s only published full-length play, it represents his one attempt to establish himself as a successful playwright. It also represents Fitzgerald’s brief excursion into the realm of political satire. In The Vegetable an ordinary railroad clerk, Jerry Frost, gets drunk on the eve of Warren Harding’s nomination and suddenly finds himself and his entire family in the White House. The consequences are, of course, disastrous, but fortunately Jerry is able to escape them by simply waking up. Much relieved, he can finally fulfill his true calling: to be a postman. Although the play was a failure and Fitzgerald quickly returned to writing short stories and novels, this little-known work deserves to be made available to Fitzgerald’s public. Because of its possible interest to students, the publishers have also decided to add appendices, which include scenes cut from the manuscript during the author’s many revisions as well as final “corrections and addenda” for the acting script. If, on the one hand, these documents suggest some of Fitzgerald’s difficulty and uncertainty in writing for the stage, on the other they clearly reflect the amount of care and craftsmanship that went into this venture.
As a boy, Fitzgerald had a special love for the theater and enjoyed a precocious success as a playwright and impresario. At fourteen, he presented The Girl from “Lazy J” at an organizational meeting of the Elizabethan Dramatic Club of St. Paul, Minnesota. As he wrote in his scrapbook, his “head was turned,” and the next year the club produced his second drama, The Captured Shadow, as a benefit performance for the Baby Welfare Association. Fitzgerald himself played the “Shadow,” and later in his scrapbook he wrote, “Enter Success!” This was followed the next summer by a two-act melodrama, The Coward, about a reluctant Confederate soldier. According to one reviewer, it, too, was a “decided success.” This was just before Fitzgerald’s departure for Princeton, but it was not his final production for the club. The summer following his freshman year, he returned to St. Paul and wrote a comedy, Assorted Spirits, in which he also acted and served as stage manager. His final performance was unexpectedly memorable, for at one point during the show a fuse blew and there followed an explosion and sudden darkness. But the seasoned actor seized his cue and proceeded to calm the audience with an improvised monologue.
During the academic year, Fitzgerald had become active in the Princeton Triangle Club, which annually produced an original musical comedy. The 1914–15 show, Fie! Fie! Fi-Fi!, owed its plot and lyrics to Fitzgerald. In fact, the very notion of a sustained plot tying together the musical numbers was considered a real innovation and the Louisville Post proclaimed that Fitzgerald “could take his place right now with the brightest writers of witty lyrics in America.” And, to be sure, he continued to write the lyrics for the next two Triangle productions: The Evil Eye (1915–16) and Safety First (1916–17). In addition, he published in the Nassau Literary Magazine a one-act play, The Débutante, which would eventually become a chapter in his first novel, This Side of Paradise. Though one critic felt that it was “somewhat far-fetched” (an understandable tendency in a Triangle writer), it was praised as “a devastating skit on the foibles of young femininity.”
How was Fitzgerald rated by his college contemporaries? In the graduating class poll, he received six votes as their favorite dramatist (Shakespeare received sixty-one and Shaw twenty-nine)—not a bad start. But after Princeton his theatrical career gave way to the ambition of becoming a serious and successful novelist. Yet, his love for scriptwriting was never wholly suppressed, for in his first two novels—This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and Damned—several episodes were set as dramatic dialogues complete with stage directions. And two “short stories” for The Smart Set magazine were conceived and published as one-act plays: “Porcelain and Pink” and “Mr. Icky” (in Tales of the Jazz Age, 1922).
Finally, having published a novel and a collection of short stories (Flappers and Philosophers, 1920), Fitzgerald turned his eyes toward Broadway and in the late fall of 1921 wrote to his agent, Harold Ober, “I am conceiving a play which is to make my fortune,” adding in a subsequent letter that it “is the funniest ever written.” Then, with no less self-confidence, he wrote to his editor at Scribners, Maxwell Perkins, that he was at work on “an awfully funny play that’s going to make me rich forever.” From the very start, Fitzgerald viewed the play as something to guarantee his fortune, if not fame as well. On the day before publication of The Beautiful and Damned, he wrote to Ober that he was sending him the first draft of the play (which had as yet no title) to be placed with a producer. His opinion of it was still high, but he clearly foresaw the revisions that lay ahead: “I should not, I suppose I should say now, want to collaborate with anyone else in a revision of this. I’m willing to revise it myself with advice from whomsoever they should designate—but I feel that Acts I and III are probably the best pieces of dramatic comedy written in English in the last 5 years and I wouldn’t let them go entirely out of my possession nor permit the addition of another name to the authorship of the play.”
That was in March. By May he had revised the script, and his former college companion Edmund Wilson was trying to place it with the Theatre Guild. In a long and very revealing letter of 26 May 1922, Wilson offered much praise and suggested structural changes (see Appendix I):
So far as I am concerned, I think it is one of the best things you ever wrote. I have read only the first version—I didn’t take time to read the second because the Theater Guild insisted that they were in a great hurry about it—so won’t criticize it now at length. I thought the millionaire episode—except the first scene—a little weak and the last act too palpably padded. As for the battle scene, it was fine and you made a great mistake to have allowed them to kid you into removing it. The Guild thinks so too and have expressed disappointment that it isn’t in the revised version—so, if they decide to take it, I think you ought to put it back. I should suggest that you make the White House and Battle the second act and the millionaire and postman the third: this would do away with the necessity of stalling along at the beginning of the postman scene simply in order to make it into a whole act.—As I say, I think that the play as a whole is marvellous—no doubt, the best American comedy ever written. I think you have a much better grasp on your subject than you usually have—you know what end and point you are working for, as isn’t always the case with you…. I think you have a great gift for comic dialogue—even though you never can resist a stupid gag—and should go on writing plays…. By the way, the great question is, have you read James Joyce’s Ulysses? Because if you haven’t, the resemblances between the drunken visions scene in it and your scene in the White House must take its place as one of the great coincidences of literature.
(It was, in fact, a coincidence.) Soon afterwards, the Guild turned down the play, but Wilson told Fitzgerald that he ought to have it published even before it was accepted for production.
Fitzgerald then set out to revise a second time and in July wrote to Perkins, “At present I’m working on my play—the same one…. Bunny Wilson says that it’s without a doubt the best American comedy to date (that’s just between you and me).” By August, it had finally been given a title, Gabriel’s Trombone, an allusion to a scene, later cut from the script (Appendix I), in which the imminent Apocalypse is predicted by Jerry’s senile father, a Last Judgment heralded in tones familiar to the Jazz Age.
Dada: The world is coming to an end. The last judgment is at hand. Gabriel’s Trump will blow one week from today just at this hour.
Fish: What’s a trump?
Doris: It’s something like a trombone, only not so good.
Fitzgerald asked Perkins if Scribner’s Magazine would be interested in serializing it, “that is, of course, on condition that it is to be produced this fall.” Perkins replied that he was “mightily interested,” adding that “it would be most unusual if we should publish a play in Scribner’s, but we have no rule against it and would like to consider the possibility.” In the meantime, no producer was found and Fitzgerald continued to revise. By December, the manuscript was in Perkins’s hands, now reworked for the third time, and it bore a new, far simpler title: Frost. Perkins wrote a lengthy and extremely perceptive critique, which not only articulated the central theme of the satire but also suggested further revisions:
(To save space I’ve omitted most of the “I thinks,” “It seems to mes,” and “I may be wrong buts”: they should, however, be understood.)
I’ve read your play three times and I think more highly of its possibilities on the third reading than ever before;—but I am also more strongly convinced that these possibilities are far from being realized on account of the handling of the story in the second act. The reader feels, at the end, confused and unsatisfied:—the underlying motive of the play has not been sent home. And yet this motive, or idea, has been sufficiently perceived to prevent the play from being a sheer burlesque, like a comic opera. In the second act it seems to me that you yourself have almost thought it was that.
The underlying idea, a mighty good one, is expressed, or should be, in the story of Jerry Frost.
God meant Jerry to be a good egg and a postman; but having been created, in a democratic age, Free and Equal, he was persuaded that he ought to want to rise in the world and so had become a railroad clerk against his taste and capacity, and thought he ought to want to become President. He is therefore very unhappy, and so is his wife, who holds the same democratic doctrine.
Your story shows, or should, that this doctrine is sentimental bunk; and to do this is worthwhile because the doctrine is almost universal: Jerry and his wife are products of a theory of democracy which you reduce to the absurd. The idea is so good that if you hold to it and continuously develop it, your play, however successful simply as fun, will be deeply significant as well.
Moreover, the means you have selected to develop the idea are superb—the bootlegger, the super-jag his concoction induces, Jerry thereby becoming President, etc. (and dreams have a real validity nowadays on account of Freud). In fact all your machinery for expressing the idea is exactly in the tune of the time and inherently funny and satirical.
But when you come to the second act, which is the critical point in the play, and so in the expression of your idea, you seem to lose sense of your true motive. Partly, this is because you have three motives here, the main motive of Jerry’s story and its meaning, and two subordinate motives—(1) of conveying through the fantastic visions and incidents which are the stuff of a dream caused by a 1923 prohibition brew, the sense of a comic nightmare, and (2) of satirizing the general phenomena of our national scene. You have, I think, simply got more or less lost in the maze of these three motives by a failure to follow the green line of the chief one—Jerry’s actual story, or that stage of it which shows him that he doesn’t want to be President. Satirize as much as you can, the government, the army, and everything else, and be as fantastic as you please, but keep one eye always on your chief motive. Throughout the entire wild second act there should still be a kind of wild logic.
Aside then from imparting in this act the sense of a dream, you are using the difficult weapon of double edged satire—you are satirizing the conception held by Jerry and his like of the High Offices of President, Secretary of the Treasury, etc., and you are at the same time satirizing those high offices themselves. You begin excellently by making all the appurtenances of the Presidency, like the house, white; and the behavior of Jerry’s wife and sister-in-law are all within the scope of your purpose. The conduct of Dada as Secretary of the Treasury seems as though it ought to be a fine piece of two edged satire cutting both against the popular idea of the business of that official and against the official himself as he usually is, but the psychology of it is not made quite comprehensible; and the best instance of double satire is seen when General Pushing appears with fifer and drummer and medals—that is just the right note. Why couldn’t you do the same for bankers, and senators, etc.?
Maybe I can better express what I mean by examples. The selection of so obscure a man as Jerry for President is itself the stuff of satire in view of present political methods, and much could be made of it. The coffin episode as you use it results as things do in a dream from Jerry’s talk with Fish etc. and so it helps to give the sense of a dream, and that is all it does. But suppose coffins were being cornered by “The He-Americans Bloodred Preparedness League” as a preparedness measure, and that this was tied up with General Pushing’s feeling that a war was needed:—that would be a hit at extravagant patriotism and militarism as well as having its present value as part of a dream. Suppose the deal over the Buzzard Isles resulted in the Impeachment of Jerry—what a chance that would give to treat the Senate as you have the general and the Army, and also to bring Jerry’s affairs to a climax. You could have Jerry convicted, and then (as a hit at a senatorial filibuster) you could have his party place the Stutz-Mozart Ourangatang Band outside the Capitol (it would have appeared for the wedding of Fish), and every time the Justices of the Supreme Court began in chorus to pronounce the sentence, Stutz-Mozart would strike up the National Anthem in syncopated time and everyone would have to stand at attention. At present, the narrative of the second act lacks all logic; the significance of the approaching end of the world eludes me,—except as a dreamer’s way of getting release from a desperate situation.
I’ve now used a great many words to make this single point:—each part of the second act should do three things—add to the quality of a fantastic dream, satirize Jerry and his family as representing a large class of Americans, and satirize the government or army or whatever institution is at the moment in use. And my only excuse for all this verbiage is, that so good in conception is your motive, so true your characters, so splendidly imaginative your invention, and so altogether above the mere literary the whole scheme, that no one could help but greatly desire to see it all equalled in execution. If it were a comparative trifle, like many a short story, it wouldn’t much matter.
Fitzgerald was obviously intrigued by the idea of using a President’s impeachment as the climax of Act II. In fact, this new development led to the highlight of the entire play: President Frost’s oration in his own defense, a perfect piece of impassioned rhetoric that says absolutely nothing. It is also a virtuoso performance in mixing metaphors:
JERRY [nervously]. Gentlemen, before you take this step into your hands I want to put my best foot forward. Let us consider a few aspects. For instance, for the first aspect let us take, for example, the War of the Revolution. There was ancient Rome, for example. Let us not only live so that our children who live after us, but also that our ancestors who preceded us fought to make this country what it is!
General applause.
And now, gentlemen, a boy to-day is a man to-morrow—or, rather, in a few years. Consider the winning of the West—Daniel Boone and Kit Carson, and in our own time Buffalo Bill and—Jesse James!
Prolonged applause.
Finally, in closing, I want to tell you about a vision of mine that I seem to see. I seem to see Columbia—Columbia—ah—blindfolded—ah—covered with scales—driving the ship of state over the battle-fields of the republic into the heart of the golden West and the cotton-fields of the sunny South.
Great applause. Mr. Jones, with his customary thoughtfulness, serves a round of cocktails.
But if Fitzgerald exploited this scene to satirize political speeches he also found an opportunity to carry the satire a step further by injecting some real history into his fantasy. The subsequent declaration of impeachment by Chief Justice Fossile, for all its absurdity, was no mere play of the author’s imagination. Rather, he had turned to his history books and had lifted almost verbatim the opening speech of Congressman George Boutwell of Massachusetts at President Andrew Johnson’s impeachment hearings: “In the Southern Heavens, near the Southern Cross, there is a vast space which the uneducated call a hole in the sky, where the eye of man, with the aid of the powers of the telescope, has been unable to discover nebulae, or asteroid, or comet, or planet, or star or sun. In that dreary, dark, cold region of space…the Great Author of the celestial mechanism has left the chaos which was in the beginning. If the earth was capable of the sentiments and emotions of justice and virtue…it would heave and throw…and project this enemy of two races of men into that vast region, there forever to exist in a solitude eternal as life….” Paradoxically, if we compare this quotation with Fitzgerald’s version (page 617) we discover that the caricatured Chief Justice is actually less verbose than his historical counterpart. The author must have thoroughly enjoyed this delicious bit of irony.
In January of 1923, Fitzgerald sent Perkins a list of ideas for the play. He wanted John Held, Jr., the originator of the cartoon “flapper,” to design the jacket cover with “little figures—Dada, Jerry, Doris, Charlotte, Fish, Snooks and Gen Pershing [sic] scattered over it.” The popular cartoonist followed the author’s wishes and brilliantly captured the spirit of the play. This is one book that can be judged fairly by its cover, and so that original design has been kept for this present edition. Fitzgerald also requested that it “be advertised, it seems to me rather as a book of humor…than like a play—because of course it is written to be read.” This remark contained an unfortunate truth, as the eventual performance would demonstrate. For all its revisions, The Vegetable remained a novelist’s, not a dramatist’s, play, in which the lengthy stage directions often provide the most entertaining moments. Fitzgerald also suggested writing a preface and inserting “the subtitle ‘or from President to postman’ (note small p.).”
He never wrote the preface, but when the book went to press its title had been changed once again, to The Vegetable, and was accompanied by a quotation “from a current magazine” on the title page:
Any man who doesn’t want to get on in the world, to make a million dollars, and maybe even park his toothbrush in the White House, hasn’t got as much to him as a good dog has—he’s nothing more or less than a vegetable.
It has been suggested that Fitzgerald got his idea for the final title from a passage in H. L. Mencken’s essay “On Being an American”: “Here is a country in which it is an axiom that a businessman shall be a member of the Chamber of Commerce, an admirer of Charles M. Schwab, a reader of The Saturday Evening Post, a golfer—in brief, a vegetable.” If so, Fitzgerald obviously reversed the meaning of Mencken’s epithet with a kind of deadpan irony, which was later enriched by having Charlotte discover the quotation in her Saturday Evening Post (see Appendix II). But Fitzgerald’s dramatic satire is never as severe as Mencken’s, whatever his debt to the essayist may have been. It owed at least as much to his college days in the Triangle Club. The result is rather a mixture of satire and slapstick. One senses a basic indecisiveness beneath the banter, as though he were a composer who had forgotten his key and had begun a seemingly endless series of modulations. This was not the material for success in performance, no matter how entertaining it might be for the reader.
The book received mixed reviews, some enthusiastic in their praise. Although late in life Edmund Wilson claimed that he had never approved of the published version, that Fitzgerald had taken “too much advice” and had “ruined the whole thing,” nevertheless he was perhaps the most laudatory. In his review for Vanity Fair Wilson wrote that Fitzgerald’s play “is, in some ways, one of the best things he has done. In it he has a better idea than he usually has of what theme he wants to develop, and it does not, as his novels sometimes have, carry him into regions beyond his powers of flight. It is a fantastic and satiric comedy carried off with exhilarating humor. One has always felt that Mr. Fitzgerald ought to write dialogue for the stage and this comedy would seem to prove it. I do not know of any dialogue by an American which is lighter, more graceful or more witty. His spontaneity makes his many bad jokes go and adds a glamor to his really good ones.”
Another reviewer found that “Fitzgerald’s first act is Sinclair Lewis, his last act is James M. Barrie—and his middle act is nightmare.” And still another called the play “a caricature of a caricature.” Many saw only nonsensical riot; others, genuine satire. One critic even considered it “the most moral book in years,” the moral being simply that “what the country needs is more good postmen and fewer bad Presidents.” For a brief moment it even made the best-seller list.
Encouraged, Fitzgerald placed the script with Sam Harris, who scheduled it for a fall production. During the summer Fitzgerald commuted to New York from Long Island to attend rehearsals and make still more changes for the acting script (see Appendix II). The play finally opened on Monday, November 19, 1923, at Nixon’s Apollo Theatre in Atlantic City. Ernest Truex played the title role—“the best postman in the world,” as Fitzgerald inscribed the play to him. It was a disaster or, in the author’s own wry words, a “colossal Frost.” It closed almost immediately. Fitzgerald’s hopes for fortune in the theater evaporated, and he was forced to turn out a spate of short stories to improve his financial situation. His literary “recovery” was to take another two years and a new novel, The Great Gatsby (1925). After his first disappointment, Fitzgerald never really regained interest in the play. Later there were to be a few revivals, mostly by amateur groups, and even some talk of selling movie rights. But except for a momentary worry in 1932 that Ryskind and Kaufman had plagiarized The Vegetable in Of Thee I Sing, he gave his play little further thought. In his opinion, the whole venture had simply been a wasted year and a half.
But was it? The constant revising, the special demands imposed by a play—a short, carefully constructed work—coming after the sprawling Beautiful and Damned proved an ideal exercise for a young writer. Though the final piece was flawed, Fitzgerald had nevertheless gained valuable experience in literary craftsmanship. In an indirect way, The Vegetable prepared him for writing The Great Gatsby. And it may be more than pure coincidence that shortly after its publication Gatsby was adapted for the stage by Owen Davis and was a success on Broadway. Unfortunately Fitzgerald was abroad and was unable to attend its happy opening night.
Possibly The Vegetable was, above all, a victim of bad timing. The audience at Atlantic City in 1923 was still unaware of most of the scandals surrounding their deceased President. It was not until a year later that the lid blew off Teapot Dome. Fitzgerald’s political fantasy contained far more truth than the audience was prepared to take in. But a half-century later, after one near-impeachment and with much useful hindsight, this not-so-fantastic spoof can be experienced afresh. Interestingly enough, it has already enjoyed several successful revivals abroad: in the Netherlands, France, Czechoslovakia, and England. Evidently, Fitzgerald’s caricature of the American dream and its political system is more entertaining on the foreign stage. Whatever its appeal for those still on the home front, The Vegetable at the very least presents a new facet of Fitzgerald’s life and work. As his daughter recently pointed out, “It was one of his few efforts, until much later in his life, to write about the country outside of its country clubs.”