P. 87 Substitute for Jerry’s first speech.
“Well, I don’t like to beat you down but—” (he sees Snooks shrugging his shoulders and adds hastily:) “Four million.”
Pps 91-94 See book for cuts.
P. 105 Cut the words “Buffalo Bill and”.
or
“Old King Brady” or “Nick Carter”
or
“The Liberty Boys of Seventy-six”
P. 108 Insert before Pushings first speech.
Jerry —You’re just kidding, arn’t you general? The General’s a great kidder. Ha-ha.
(His laughter fades as the General continues)
P. 110 See book for speech cut.
Charlotte’s last speech in Act II.
“So you’ve turned out to be a drunkard too, you poor weak, miserable failure.”
Acknowledgments
The publishers wish to thank Mrs. Elena Wilson and the Princeton University Library for permission to quote from Edmund Wilson’s letter to Fitzgerald (26 May 1922), which will appear in. the forthcoming book, Edmund Wilson: Letters on Literature and Politics (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc., © 1976 Elena Wilson).
We also wish to express our gratitude to the Princeton University Library for its characteristic helpfulness.
Finally, our special thanks to Alexander Clark, Matthew J. Bruccoli, and Edward J. Milne, Jr., for their assistance and advice.
Introduction
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 scrap-book, 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 Debutante, 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
