University of Virginia Library

The Corrections Lists for F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise
by
James L. W. West III

F. Scott Fitzgerald liked to make lists, "hundreds of lists: of cavalry leaders and football players and cities, and popular tunes and pitchers, and happy times, and hobbies and houses lived in and how many suits since I left the army and how many pairs of shoes . . . ."[1] And there are the famous lists in his writings: the list of New England schools in This Side of Paradise, the list of homosexuals in a rejected manuscript fragment of Tender is the Night, the guest list in The Great Gatsby.[2] This article, however, will deal with a different kind of list, a list (or in this case several lists) of changes that Fitzgerald wanted made in the plates of his first novel, This Side of Paradise. These lists, which Fitzgerald sent to Scribners during the spring and summer months after the March 1920 publication of This Side of Paradise, were recently found in the Scribner Archive at Princeton University Library. They supply new bibliographical evidence about the printing history of This Side of Paradise and establish Fitzgerald's attitude toward the faulty text of that book. For the student of textual problems, they also demonstrate that once a flawed text is in print, it is difficult for an author or his publisher to repair it.

This Side of Paradise has a sloppy text. There are worse texts: prepublication cutting and tampering marred Look Homeward, Angel and Absalom, Absalom! and post-publication corruption damaged The Great Gatsby and The Wild Palms, but in the category of careless error This Side of Paradise is probably unequalled. Fitzgerald was a notoriously bad speller, and his grammar and punctuation were idiosyncratic to say the least. Examination of the manuscript of This Side of Paradise (among the Fitzgerald Papers at Princeton) reveals that many of the errors in the printed version of the novel were carried over intact from the manuscript. But a collation of this manuscript with the first printing of This Side of Paradise has also brought to light numerous additional mistakes that are almost surely attributable to typist and compositorial error or to careless copy-editing and proofing. Not all of the errors in the printed version, then, are Fitzgerald's.[3]

The mistake-riddled first printing of This Side of Paradise was published on 26 March 1920, and Fitzgerald was not long in hearing about the condition of his text. On 1 April 1920 Robert Bridges, editor of Scribner's Magazine, typed up the following office memo which listed eleven blunders:

Fitzgerald, in New York in early April to marry Zelda Sayre, followed Bridges' list with a list of his own. On the backs of sheets of stationery from the Biltmore Hotel — Fitzgerald and his bride were honeymooning there — he wrote down 29 changes that he wanted made in the plates. Of these alterations, 19 corrected errors in spelling, punctuation, and word usage, and the other ten were stylistic. This is not the conventional accidental-substantive distinction; there are mixtures of accidentals and substantives in both categories:

Corrections for This Side of Paradise

• On Dedication page Substitute Sigourney for Sigorney
• On page 6, line 7. change raconteur to the fem. gender
• On page 17 Should be two quotation marks in front of Casey Jones.
• On page 18, line 26. change Rhinehart to Rineheart
• On page 3, (1st sentence in the book), put a comma after trait and one after few.
• On page 51, line 9. Change Litt. to Lit.
• On page 51, line 29, Change Cumizza to Cunizza
• On page 56, line 2 Change Litt. to Lit.
• On page 80, line 29 Change Cambell to Campbell or whatever correct spelling is.
• Page 116, line 6. Substitute metier for flare
• Page 117, Line 30 Substitute Lit. for Litt.
• Page 119, line 4 One dot is outside the parenthesis
• Page 180, line 24 Substitute shimmee entheusiasticly. for tickle-toe on the soft carpet
• Page 182, line 27 Substitute the word utterly for the word just
• P. 184, line 1 Should be unimpeachable instead of impeachable
• P 199, 4th line from bottom Change juvenalia to juvenilia
• Page 224, line 24 Change Jenny to Jennie
• Page 224, line 25 Change Mckenzie to Mackenzie
• P. 228, line 23 Change I restless to I am restless
• P 229, line 17 Gunmeyer is not the correct Spelling of this name.
• Page 234, line 8 juvenilia instead of juvenalia
• Page 235, line 14 delete comma after sight
• P 235, line 23 should read was dead and sound not yet awoken—Life cracked like ice!—one brilliant ect (In other words, the word life should be capitalized but not the word one)
• P 240 Are the genders right in fifth line of poem?
• P 251, Line 9 Stretch! should be Scratch!
• P 296, line 27 deep should be much [5]

Scribners now had one list from Bridges and one from Fitzgerald. Maxwell Perkins, Fitzgerald's editor, apparently directed the printers at the Scribner Press to make the changes in these lists, for on 8 July 1920 he wrote to Fitzgerald that the corrections were made "in the earliest

edition [i.e., printing] we could catch."[6] This was the fourth printing of May 1920. However, not all of the changes that Fitzgerald had asked for were made. No alteration was made in the French poem on page 240 (Fitzgerald would dictate a specific spelling change in a later list), and the spelling error "juvenalia" for "juvenilia" was left standing on both pages mentioned by Fitzgerald.

So matters stood through May and June and two more printings of This Side of Paradise. By now the book was attracting notice and selling well. Word of its success spread to England, and W. Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. of London agreed to bring out an edition for the English market. News of the planned fresh typesetting reached Fitzgerald in Westport, Connecticut, where he and his wife were living for the summer, and caused him to write the following letter to Perkins:

All of the new errors mentioned in this second Fitzgerald list were changed in the Scribners plates. The new readings appeared in the seventh impression of August 1920. On 8 July 1920, Perkins wrote a letter to Fitzgerald telling him what was being done about the upcoming English edition:

Perkins had on hand one list from Bridges and two from Fitzgerald, and he apparently conflated the three and sent the resulting list to Collins in London. This conflated list is not in the Scribner Archive at Princeton, but judging from the English publisher's reply to Scribners, one error was again not mentioned:

On this side of the Atlantic, new criticism of the text of This Side of Paradise was appearing. Franklin P. Adams in his New York Tribune column "The Conning Tower" for 6 July 1920 attacked Fitzgerald for writing a book that was "sloppy and cocky; impudent instead of confident; and verbose. It is doubtful whether the Scribner proofreading is at fault for the numerous errors; and if they are the author's, they indicate a sloppy carelessness that it will pay Mr. Fitzgerald to overcome." Adams followed his remarks with a list of errors which he evidently got from a first, second, or third printing of This Side of Paradise, since some of them had by that time been changed in subsequent printings:

Fitzgerald was undoubtedly troubled by these fresh evidences of error in his book. His response was another letter to Perkins and another list of errors:

But F.P.A. was not through with This Side of Paradise. In his 14 July 1920 column he published a second collection of errors from the book — this list supplied him by someone with the initials "C. W."

Fitzgerald, still anxious to patch up his novel, sent a postcard to Perkins three days later giving his fourth and last list of errors:

Perkins, with Fitzgerald's third and fourth lists in hand, did some checking and wrote back to Fitzgerald on 30 July 1920. His letter indicates that he, too, wanted to mend the text of This Side of Paradise:

For his third and fourth lists, however, Fitzgerald had not given Perkins page or line references to the readings, and probably for this reason only one of the new errors from these last two lists was located: "Ghunga Dhin" at 18.22 was changed to "Gunga Dhin." Also, the correct reading "Rinehart" at 18.26 (which itself was a plate change over erroneous "Rhinehart" of the first three printings) was altered again between the sixth and seventh printings to read "Rineheart," the wrong spelling Fitzgerald had suggested in his first list. These two changes, like the ones from Fitzgerald's third list, appeared for the first time in the seventh printing of the book. That ended the work on the plates of This Side of Paradise; the novel finished out its run and these plates were probably stored. When they were resurrected in 1947 for a new printing, only a little type batter had been added.

Here we might pause and count up the number of corrections lists that seem to have been made. They are: (1) Robert Bridges' list of 1 April 1920; (2) Fitzgerald's first list, probably compiled in early April 1920; (3) the list "some Harvard scholar" sent to Fitzgerald; (4) Fitzgerald's second list, made for the English edition and included in a 7 July 1920 letter to Perkins; (5) Perkins' conflated list which he sent to Collins in London probably in early July 1920; (6) F.P.A.'s first list in his column for 6 July 1920; (7) Fitzgerald's third list, occasioned by F.P.A.'s first list — this list was sent to Perkins on 16 July 1920; (8) the list put together by "C. W." and published in F.P.A.'s column for 14 July 1920; (9) Fitzgerald's fourth list, occasioned by "C.W.'s" list—this list was sent to Perkins on 17 July 1920; (10) Perkins' "list of the corrections that were made" which he told Fitzgerald he was going to send to him; (11) Perkins' "list of those that still should be made" which he told Fitzgerald that he would send "to our press for the next edition."

With so much effort going into the making of lists, one wonders what happened to the plates. The machine collation below tells the story. There are no unexplained changes; each plate variant is mentioned in at least one of the lists given above:[16]

                                                                                           

Page
&	First	Fourth	Seventh
Line	Printing	Printing	Printing
[v]	SIGORNEY	SIGOURNEY
3.1	trait	trait,
3.2	few	few,
4.1	Margaritta		Margherita
6.7	raconteur	raconteuse
7.33	Ashville		Asheville
17.3	'Casey-Jones	"Casey-Jones
18.22	"Ghunga Dhin,"		"Gunga Dhin,"
18.26	Rhinehart	Rinehart	Rineheart
28.10	ex-ambassador	ex-minister
51.9	Litt.	Lit.
51.29	Cumizza	Cunizza
56.2	Litt.	Lit.
80.29	Cambell	Campbell
116.6	flare	metier
117.30	Litt.	Lit.
119.4	Booth . . .).	Booth . . .)
120.13	Dachari	Daiquiri
154.--	Cecelia		Cecilia
176.36	Johnston		Johnson
180.25	tickle-toe	shimmy
	on the soft carpet	enthusiastically
182.27	just	utterly
184.1	impeachable	unimpeachable
224.24	Jenny	Jennie
224.25	McKenzie	Mackenzie
226.35	Benêt	Benêt
228.23	I restless	I am restless
229.13	Kerenski	Kerensky
229.17	Gunmeyer	Guynemer
232.21	Gouveneer	Gouverneur
233.14	Bennet		Bennett
235.14	sight,	sight
235.23	life	Life
235.24	One	--one
240.28	langeur		langueur
242.26	Celleni		Cellini
251.9	Stretch!	Scratch!
252.34	tens		teens
294.23	Mackeys	Mackays
296.27	deep	much
300.27	born		borne
304.19	God's	Gods

But this chart only shows changes. Some errors were corrected in one spot but left standing in another. For example, "Bennet" at 233.14 was

altered to "Bennett" but a second "Bennet" referring to the same English novelist was left at 224.25. "Ashville" at 7.33 was corrected to "Asheville" but another "Ashville" five lines above at 7.28 was untouched. Other errors mentioned by Fitzgerald were not corrected: for instance, "flambuoyant" at 49.15 was left alone, and "Juvenalia" at 234.8 and 235.2 and "juvenalia" at 199.29 were never changed. And there are errors in the text of the first edition that were not noticed by any of the list-makers. See, for example, the readings at 139.21 and 233.8.[17]

As late as 1922, at least one critic was still chiding Fitzgerald and Scribners about the errors in This Side of Paradise. In his first essay on Fitzgerald, Edmund Wilson wrote of the novel, "it is one of the most illiterate books of any merit ever published (a fault which the publisher's wretched proofreading apparently made no effort to correct). It is not only full of bogus ideas and faked literary references but it is full of English words misused with the most reckless abandon."[18] Fitzgerald was embarrassed by the text of This Side of Paradise. In the novel he had flaunted his familiarity with books, poems, critics, authors, and philosophers. He had attempted to balance his showiness with a good dose of irony, but the misspelled words, incorrect titles, and wrong names undercut his attitude more than he had intended. Indeed, these mistakes were the beginning of Fitzgerald's largely undeserved reputation for pseudo-intellectuality, a reputation that is still brought out and aired occasionally today.

Fitzgerald remained aware of the errors in This Side of Paradise for the rest of his life. He once inscribed a copy of the novel: "This book is a history of mistakes — something never retracted yet, in a way, to be ashamed of, by a conscientious worker . . . Scott Fitzgerald."[19] In 1938 he tried to persuade Scribners to bring out a new impression of the novel, and having given up hope of getting the errors expunged from the plates, was toying with the idea of writing a "glossary of absurdities and inaccuracies"[20] for the printing. No new impression was issued, however, and no

such glossary seems to survive. Fitzgerald's scheme to turn errors into assets apparently died with him in 1940.

Today, there is still no reliable text of This Side of Paradise available. Scribners preserved most of the errors in the last printing of the first edition when they re-set the novel in 1960. In fact, the 1960 Scribners edition — distributed as a Scribner Library paperback and widely used by students, teachers, and even by publishing scholars — is worse than the 1920 text it is based on. A collation of the first printing of Scribners 1920 against the clothbound B-11.60[H] printing of Scribners 1960 reveals some 187 variants, a figure that does not include minor features of typography. Of the 187 changes, 40 enter the 1960 text legitimately from plate alterations in the first edition. Twenty-four of the remaining 147 variants are substantive, but only two of these substantive changes — at 127.26 and 270.22 of the 1960 text — can be classed as corrections. The other 22 changes are new corruptions. As might be expected, the 1960 text preserves "Juvenalia" at 218.25, "Juvenalia" at 219.17, and "juvenalia" at 186.20.

The errors in This Side of Paradise are significant. They figure in the initial reception of the book and in its subsequent critical reputation. One might even say that the mistakes have become a part of the history of the novel. But as has been noted, not all of the errors in the book are Fitzgerald's. Blame for the mistakes has to be distributed all along the line of textual transmission. Fitzgerald deserves some of the blame, but as he wrote years later of the errors in This Side of Paradise: — "My God — did they expect me to spell? If I was such a hot shot couldn't the proof-readers do the spelling?"[21]

The errors in This Side of Paradise should not be perpetuated. We are not getting the flavor of Fitzgerald's idiosyncratic spelling and word usage. We are instead getting a book marred by the careless error of most of the people — Fitzgerald included — who were involved in its original publication.

Notes