 | |  |
Much has been said about F. Scott Fitzgerald's illiteracy, and This Side of Paradise has been singled out for notice as the worst offender. Fitzgerald's inattentive years at Princeton and his vagarious reading produced an only partially educated young writer. Though he came to perfect his ear for English, throughout his career he remained a wretched speller.
This Side of Paradise, his first novel, published in 1920, was peppered with errors. These did not pass unnoticed, and they were commented upon by the press. Edmund Wilson wrote: "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."[1] In his column, "The Conning Tower," Franklin P. Adams reprimanded Fitzgerald for "sloppy carelessness" and proceeded to list twenty-eight errors in the book.[2]
How bad is the original printed text? What types of errors was Fitzgerald prone to make at this stage in his career? And how conscious was Scribner's of the faults in the book? To ascertain the answers to these problems, the Hinman Collating Machine at the University of Virginia has been employed to compare the first printing of This Side of Paradise (Scribner's, April 1920) with a 1954 Scribner's reprint made from the same plates. This collation revealed thirty-one changes which fall into six categories: corrections of misspelled references to books and authors (10); corrections of misspellings of names and places (5); other corrections of errors in spelling and usage (6); corrections of errors involving careless proof-reading (3); corrections of miscellaneous errors (3); and revisions of non-errors (4). The category of 'corrections of errors involving careless proof-reading' refers to such items as: "I restless", where the missing verb should have been supplied before the novel went to press; and the category of 'revisions of non-errors' refers to such changes as: "tickle-toe on the soft carpet" to "shimmy enthusiastically", where the revision was dictated by stylistic concerns.
Altogether there are nineteen spelling errors, and some of them are truly surprising. For example, the dedication in the first printing is "To Sigorney Fay", which was corrected to "To Sigourney Fay"; and three times the Nassau Literary Magazine (for which Fitzgerald wrote as an undergraduate)
After the collation on the Hinman Machine, the list of revisions was checked against the first twelve impressions of This Side of Paradise.[5] This revealed that revisions were made only in the fourth impression of May 1920 and the seventh impression of August 1920. One of these corrections introduced a new error into the book: Mary Roberts Rhinehart is correctly changed to Rinehart in the fourth impression, but this is incorrectly changed to Rineheart in the seventh impression; elsewhere in the novel the name is spelled correctly throughout all impressions.[6] At least some of the alterations in the fourth impression appear to have been made by direction of the author, but those in the seventh are indifferent and may have resulted from the publisher's review proofreading.
The search for impressions turned up a special state of the third impression, specially bound for presentation at a meeting of the American Booksellers Association in May 1920. Tipped in before the title-page is a leaf bearing a photograph of the author and "The Author's Apology" (reprinted below).
The evidence gathered in this collation of This Side of Paradise establishes that the first printing was an inexcusably sloppy job, and that the blame must be distributed between author and publisher. Furthermore, the correction of this foul text was itself a slap-dash project, for the 1954 reprint still contains errors—including those listed by Adams and Wilson, although in some cases the required corrections are as simple as changing single letters, as in the word Juvenalia.[7]
(The numbers in parentheses indicate the impression in which the alteration first appeared.)
| April 1920 First impression |
1954 | |
| Sigorney Fay | Sigourney Fay (4) | |
| p. 4 | Margaritta | Margherita (7) |
| p. 6 | raconteur | raconteuse (4) |
| p. 7 | Ashville | Asheville (7) |
| p. 18 | "Ghunga Dhin" | "Gunga Dhin" (7) |
| p. 18 | Rhinehart Rinehart (4) | Rineheart (7) |
| p. 28 | ex-ambassador | ex-minister (4) |
| p. 51 | Litt. | Lit. (4) |
| p. 56 | Litt. | Lit. (4) |
| p. 80 | Cambell Hall | Campbell Hall (4) |
| p. 116 | flare [for flair] | metier (4) |
| p. 117 | Litt. | Lit. (4) |
| p. 120 | Dachari | Daiquiri (4) |
| p. 176 | Samuel Johnston | Samuel Johnson (7) |
| p. 180 | tickle-toe on the soft carpet | shimmy enthusiastically (4) |
| p. 182 | just | utterly (4) |
| p. 184 | impeachable skin | unimpeachable skin (4) |
| p. 224 | "Jenny Gerhardt" | "Jennie Gerhardt" (4) |
| p. 224 | [Compton] McKenzie | Mackenzie (4) |
| p. 228 | I restless | I am restless (4) |
| p. 232 | Gouveneer Morris | Gouverneur Morris (4) |
| p. 233 | Bennet | Bennet (7) |
| p. 235 | —life | —Life (4) |
| p. 235 | One | —one (4) |
| p. 240 | langeur | langueur (7) |
| p. 242 | Celleni | Cellini (7) |
| p. 251 | Stretch! | Scratch! (4) |
| p. 252 | tens | teens (7) |
| p. 294 | Mackeys | Mackays (4) |
| p. 296 | deep profundity | much profundity (4) |
| p. 300 | born off | borne off (7) |
The Author's Apology
I don't want to talk about myself because I'll admit that I did that somewhat in this book. In fact, to write it took three months; to conceive it—three minutes; to collect the data in it—all my life. The idea of writing it came on the first of last July: it was a substitute form of dissipation.
My whole theory of writing I can sum up in one sentence: An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward.
So, gentlemen, consider all the cocktails mentioned in this book
drunk by me as a toast to the American Booksellers Association.
May, 1920
Sincerely [signed]
F. Scott Fitzgerald
| | |