In January of 1923, Fitzgerald sent Perkins a list of ideas for the play. He wanted John Held, Jr., the originator of the cartoon “flapper,” to design the jacket cover with “little figures—Dada, Jerry, Doris, Charlotte, Fish, Snooks and Gen Pershing [sic] scattered over it.” The popular cartoonist followed the author’s wishes and brilliantly Captured the spirit of the play. This is one book that can be judged fairly by its cover, arid so that original design has been kept for this present edition. Fitzgerald also requested that it “be advertised, it seems to me rather as a book of humor… than like a play—because of course it is written to be read.” This remark contained an unfortunate truth, as the eventual performance would demonstrate. For all its revisions, “The Vegetable remained a novelist’s, not a dramatist’s, play, in which the lengthy stage directions often provide the most entertaining moments. Fitzgerald also suggested writing a preface and inserting “the subtitle ’or from President to postman’ (note small p.).”
He never wrote the preface, but when the book went to press its title had been changed once again, to The Vegetable, and was accompanied by a quotation “from a current magazine” on the title page:
Any man who doesn’t want to get on in the world,, to make a million dollars, and maybe even park his toothbrush in the White House, hasn’t got as much to him as a good dog has—he’s nothing more or less than a vegetable.
It has been suggested that Fitzgerald got his idea for the final title from a passage in H. L. Mencken’s essay “On Being an American”: “Here is a country in which it is an axiom that a businessman shall be a member of the Chamber of Commerce, an admirer of Charles M. Schwab, a reader of The Saturday Evening Post, a golfer—in brief, a vegetable.” If so, Fitzgerald obviously reversed the meaning of Mencken’s epithet with a kind of deadpan irony, which was later enriched by having Charlotte discover the quotation in her Saturday Evening Post (see Appendix II). But Fitzgerald’s dramatic satire is never as severe as Mencken’s, whatever his debt to the essayist may have been. It owed at least as much to his college days in the Triangle Club. The result is rather a mixture of satire and slapstick. One senses a basic indecisiveness beneath the banter, as though he were a composer who had forgotten his key and had begun a seemingly endless series of modulations. This was not the material for success in performance, no matter how entertaining it might be for the reader.
The book received mixed reviews, some enthusiastic in their praise. Although late in life Edmund Wilson claimed that he had never approved of the published version, that Fitzgerald had taken “too much advice” and had “ruined the whole thing,” nevertheless he was perhaps the most laudatory. In his review for Vanity Fair Wilson wrote that Fitzgerald’s play “is, in some ways, one of the best things he has done. In it he has a better idea than he usually has of what theme he wants to develop, and it does not, as his novels sometimes have, carry him into regions beyond his powers of flight. It is a fantastic and satiric comedy carried off with exhilarating humor. One has always felt that Mr. Fitzgerald ought to write dialogue for the stage and this comedy would seem to prove it. I do not know of any dialogue by an American which is lighter, more graceful or more witty. His spontaneity makes his many bad jokes go and adds a glamor to his really good ones.”
Another reviewer found that “Fitzgerald’s first act is Sinclair Lewis, his last act is James M. Barrie—and his middle act is nightmare.” And still another called the play “a caricature of a caricature.” Many saw only nonsensical riot; others, genuine satire. One critic even considered it “the most moral book in years,” the moral being simply that “what the country needs is more good postmen and fewer bad Presidents.” For a brief moment it even made the best-seller list.
Encouraged, Fitzgerald placed the script with Sam Harris, who scheduled it for a fall production. During the summer Fitzgerald commuted to New York from Long Island to attend rehearsals and make still more changes for the acting script (see Appendix II). The play finally opened on Monday, November 19, 1923, at Nixon’s Apollo Theatre in Atlantic City. Ernest Truex played the title role—“the best postman in the world,” as Fitzgerald inscribed the play to him. It was a disaster or, in the author’s own wry words, a “colossal Frost.” It closed almost immediately; Fitzgerald’s hopes for fortune in the theater evaporated, and he was forced to turn out a spate of short stories to improve his financial situation. His literary “recovery” was to take another two years and a new novel, The Great Gatsby (1925). After his first disappointment, Fitzgerald never really regained interest in the play. Later there were to be a few revivals, mostly by amateur groups, and even some talk of selling movie rights. But except for a momentary worry in 1932 that Ryskind and Kaufman had plagiarized The Vegetable in Of Thee I Sing, he gave his play little further thought. In his opinion, the whole venture had simply been a wasted year and a half.
But was it? The constant revising, the special demands imposed by a play—a short, carefully constructed work—coming after the sprawling Beautiful and Damned proved an ideal exercise for a young writer. Though the final piece was flawed, Fitzgerald had nevertheless gained valuable experience in literary craftsmanship. In an indirect way, The Vegetable prepared him for writing The Great Gatsby. And it may be more than pure coincidence that shortly after its publication Gatsby was adapted for the stage by Owen Davis and was a success on Broadway. Unfortunately Fitzgerald was abroad and was unable to attend its happy opening night.
Possibly The Vegetable was, above all, a victim of bad timing. The audience at Atlantic City in 1923 was still; unaware of most of the scandals surrounding their deceased President. It was not until a year later that the lid blew off Teapot Dome. Fitzgerald’s political fantasy contained far more truth than the audience was prepared to take in. But a half-century later, after one near-impeachment and with much useful hindsight, this not-so-fantastic spoof can be experienced afresh. Interestingly enough, it has already enjoyed several successful revivals abroad: in the Netherlands, France, Czechoslovakia, and England. Evidently, Fitzgerald’s caricature of the American dream and its political system is more entertaining on the foreign stage. Whatever its appeal for those still on the home front, The Vegetable at the very least presents a new facet of Fitzgerald’s life and work. As his daughter recently pointed out, “It was one of his few efforts, until much later in his life, to write about the country outside of its country clubs.”
