Brian Higgins and I had some breathing room
between the publication of our article on Tender
is the Night in Proof 4 (1975)
and 1986, when Milton R. Stern's G. K. Hall Critical
Essays on Fitzgerald's "Tender is the Night" appeared.
Rather than reprinting our article with the other essays, Stern, listed
what he called our eleven "objections to the revised edition" and
followed each with a stern rebuttal. We
had been wholly ignorant of the power of the New Criticism in sanctifying the
text a reader held in hand. According to
Stern, we had been "totalitarian" to insist that Fitzgerald's
intentionality was embodied in the 1934 edition rather than diffused both
through that and Cowley's edition. In
the official Fall 1974 memo to the department I defined what the article meant
to my thinking: "Ever since writing with Brian Higgins the long study of Tender is the Night which will appear in
the next Proof I have become more and
more committed to writing lengthy essays which make detailed critical
interpretations on the basis of thorough study of textual problems." I was working with critical approaches and
assumptions and trying to relate them to textual assumptions, but the connections
were difficult to push because the words (starting with "textual" and
"critical") might be the same but the meanings might be
different. Nobody in the CEAA had been
talking about the aesthetic consequences of rearranging large hunks of
prose.
On 29 December 1993, after a
session on Tender at the MLA
convention in Toronto Stern challenged me to adjourn to his hotel room, strip to the
waist, and there, one on one, resolve the textual issues of Tender is the Night.
I had missed not missed an MLA convention
since 1968; after 1993 I never attended another.
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