A \'Fantastic\' Fitzgerald Story, Resurrected in The New Yorker

By CHARLES MCGRATH

The New Yorker this week is publishing a story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, “Thanks for the Light,” that it rejected three-quarters of a century ago. Turning the story down in 1936, the editors said that it was “altogether out of the question” and added, “It seems to us so curious and so unlike the kind of thing we associate with him and really too fantastic.”

It's not hard to see to see why they thought so. The story, though lovely in its odd way, is a long way from “Winter Dreams” or “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz.” “Thanks for the Light,” which Fitzgerald's grandchildren discovered while going through his papers, is just a vignette - only a page long - almost fable-like, and written in a pared-down style that, at the end especially, seems more Hemingway than Fitzgerald. According to Deborah Treisman, the New Yorker's fiction editor, the Fitzgerald scholar James West though it seemed “almost Chekhov ian” and suggested to the grandchildren that they give the magazine another crack at it.

The protagonist of “Thanks for the Light” is a widowed, 40-year-old corset saleswoman, Mrs. Hanson, whose main consolation in life is cigarettes. After being transferred to a new sales territory in the west, she discovers that social disapproval of smoking is even stronger there than it had been back east. The story even suggests there is a law against it. Desperate for a cigarette but embarrassed to smoke on the street, she ducks one afternoon into the vestibule of a Catholic cathedral and, finding herself without matches, obtains a light from a heavenly source. (The story's title may have a double meaning.)

Fitzgerald was himself a smoker and a heavy drinker as well. By the time he wrote “Thanks for the Light,” booze had pretty much destroyed his career and he was trying hard, though not always successfully, to stay on the wagon. So it's tempting to see Mrs. Hanso n's situation not just as a reflection on the plight of female smokers in the 30's but as a metaphor for alcohol dependence. If you read the story this way, the ironic, prayerful moment at the end is another version of the sense of loss and spiritual emptiness that Fitzgerald wrote so movingly about in the essays collected in “The Crack-Up.”

And the strange notion of a national ban on smoking? Prohibition had ended just three years earlier. In many parts of the country, though, Prohibition never took on the atmosphere of dour, blanket disapproval suggested by the hatchet-faced anti-smokers in “Thanks for the Light.” Oddly, the era most vividly evoked by the story is our own, where smoking (except in certain neighborhoods downtown and in Brooklyn) is something one does guiltily and on the sly, the butt cupped behind an ashamed hand. The difference is that, unlike Mrs. Hanson, you can't sneak indoors anywhere, not even into a bar, let alone a church. The street i s your only option.