The Saturday Evening Post

The Saturday Evening Post functions in the book as both a measure of publication success and a source of commercial income. Its place in two contrasting accounts—Gertrude Stein’s verdict on the narrator’s prospects and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s account of magazine writing—exposes a tension between literary ambition and the practical business of making a living as a writer.

A Standard of Publication

Stein names The Saturday Evening Post alongside The Atlantic Monthly when telling the narrator that he is not yet a good enough writer to be published in either. She nevertheless allows that he might become a new sort of writer in his own way. Her immediate rule is that he must not write stories she considers inaccrochable: for her, work of that kind has no point and is wrong. The magazine thus serves as one of the public benchmarks by which Stein measures a writer’s readiness, even as she leaves open the possibility that the narrator’s work might follow a different path.

Fitzgerald’s Commercial Method

The narrator’s account of Fitzgerald gives the magazine a different role. Fitzgerald writes stories he considers good, then revises them for submission, deliberately adding the twists that make them salable magazine stories. He describes this alteration as a kind of whoring, but says the magazine income gives him money ahead to write decent books. The Post therefore belongs to a commercial system that Fitzgerald treats not simply as an artistic ideal but as a means of supporting book writing.

The Narrator’s Resistance

The narrator is shocked by Fitzgerald’s method and calls it whoring; he cannot accept the claim that changing a story after writing its original form does no harm. Fitzgerald’s explanation is that the first version already exists, so the later revisions do not destroy it. The narrator wants a novel to support his opposing belief, but has not yet written one. He has begun breaking down his own writing, rejecting facility and trying to make rather than describe; the work feels wonderful to do, yet can take a whole morning for a single paragraph. Against that difficult practice, the Post represents a visible model of saleable writing, while Fitzgerald’s account makes clear that magazine success can also finance a writer’s more serious ambitions.