Nostalgic Nuances in Media in the Red Book Magazine Version of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Rich Boy”

Abstract

The present article attempts to contribute to both Fitzgerald scholarship and nostalgia studies by examining how text, illustration, and advertisement enter into dialogue in the original magazine format of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short story “The Rich Boy”. As research is still scarce on Fitzgerald’s stories as they were first published, this field may hold new, potential research paths for this canonical author, a few of which I endeavor to explore here. This paper suggests that this 1926 magazine version offers a unique nostalgic experience that differs from the reading of Fitzgerald’s text in an image-free anthology. It argues that, with some exceptions, these media generally interact in a cohesive way that echoes or reinforces a nostalgic mood. Niklas Salmose’s typology of nostalgic strategies will be used to draw out the nostalgia in these media, and an intermedial approach will be employed to investigate how they engage in nostalgic dialogue.

1. Introduction

Before “The Rich Boy” was selected by F. Scott Fitzgerald to form part of the short story collection All the Sad Young Men, it was first published in two installments in the January and February 1926 issues of the popular Red Book Magazine. This article looks back at the way “The Rich Boy” was presented in this magazine format, often sharing page space with illustrations or advertisements. My reading, which focuses on how this interaction transmits the nostalgic aspects of the story, aims to contribute to nostalgia studies on the notably nostalgic Fitzgerald: By exploring Niklas Salmose’s classification of strategies that may evoke nostalgia in the reader, I attempt to show how the different media—written narrative, illustration, and advertisement—generally collaborate to express a nostalgic narrative mood that is already thematically and stylistically present in the text. This investigation into text-image relations also invites the employment of an intermedial approach, that is, an approach that pays close attention to these media interactions, which, in fact, create a media product and reader experience that differ from what we may encounter in a recent image-free anthology.

This backward gaze and “return to the original” may be seen as a nostalgic endeavor. However, it is not my intention to endow the original version with less or more authority and value. Rather, I attempt to put forward a vision of how “The Rich Boy” could have been experienced in this magazine version, while also offering the current reader a new understanding of a familiar text. Also, as Jennifer Nolan points out, studying the context of Fitzgerald’s stories “reveals how Fitzgerald’s work was positioned for contemporary readers, without which no understanding of Fitzgerald’s reputation can be complete” (Nolan 2017a, p. 368). Despite this, due to their close connection to commercial culture, among other reasons, Fitzgerald’s short stories in their original format are as yet vastly unexplored in scholarship.

2. Approaching Nostalgia in F. Scott Fitzgerald

Eric Sandberg suggests that literature “is an inherently nostalgic art form, frequently if not exclusively retrospective” (Sandberg 2018, p. 116), and Fitzgerald is arguably one of the most notoriously nostalgic authors in the Western canon. Unsurprisingly, much research has already been carried out on nostalgia in Fitzgerald: For instance, Wright Morris, who studies nostalgia in Fitzgerald’s professional and personal life, labels him “the aesthete of nostalgia” (Morris 1963, p. 26). D.G. Kehl situates nostalgia in contemporary American literature and culture in Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel (Kehl 2002).

Fitzgerald’s nostalgia is manifest in both his non-fiction and fiction: Essays such as “My Lost City” and “Echoes of the Jazz Age” illustrate the author’s well-established nostalgia on a personal level. The latter, for instance, vividly describes the frenetic excess, and its consequences, that characterized the “borrowed time” of the Jazz Age, concluding that “it all seems rosy and romantic to us who were young then, because we will never feel quite so intensely about our surroundings anymore” (Fitzgerald 2013a, p. 138). His fictional works tend to feature nostalgic characters, such as, famously, Jay Gatsby, who exclaimed, “Can’t repeat the past? Why of course you can!” (Fitzgerald [1925] 1993, p. 70). This nostalgia often takes the shape of a female character, such as Daisy in Gatsby, Judy in “Winter Dreams”, Rosemary in Tender is the Night,1 and Paula in “The Rich Boy”, the story that the present article focuses on. Sandberg, discussing Niko Kazantzakis’ The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel in “The Double Nostalgia of Literature”, claims that “[t]he literary tradition associates the longing for home with male characters, the embodiment of home with female...” (Sandberg 2018, p. 117). There may be an echo of this in “The Rich Boy”: For instance, when Anson reencounters his former love Paula and she tells him that she believes that he will never marry, he bitterly answers that “if women didn’t spoil you for other women... If I could go to sleep... and wake up into a home that was really mine...” (Fitzgerald [1926] 2007, p. 39). There is a hint of Penelope in Paula, too, as she is repeatedly depicted as waiting for Anson to marry her; however, she ultimately gives up. Anson does not idealize Paula during their relationship, refusing to formally solidify it despite Paula already seeing another man. However, after they part ways, she is enshrined in his memory, and he even imagines seeing her photograph with its frame of “thrice-reflected moonlight” (p. 24) during a romantic encounter with another woman, which swiftly ends the affair. While Paula is a symbol of Anson’s nostalgia, Fitzgerald’s text also describes several other nostalgic factors—the shift of social structures, the loss of friendships, the consciousness of aging—that displace and destabilize him.

Most relevant to the present article are Salmose’s works on nostalgia: In “Art About Nostalgia or Nostalgic Art?”, as the title suggests, he distinguishes between (1) art about nostalgia, in which the content or characters of a narrative are markedly nostalgic, and (2) nostalgic art, where stylistic devices provoke nostalgia in the reader, whether or not the narrative is thematically nostalgic (Salmose 2018, p. 129). Both types of art, as we will see more clearly later on, commingle in “The Rich Boy”. The Great Gatsby is also an excellent example of this convergence, and in “Textual Memory in The Great Gatsby”, Salmose emphasizes that while the novel treats nostalgia thematically, Fitzgerald also employs several formal tools that enhance this (Salmose 2014, p. 67). Salmose construes nostalgia as a two-part experience in which the nostalgic first delights in the happy remembrance, and then, sadly reflects on “the passing status of the idealized image or event...” (Salmose 2014, p. 68). In his analysis of The Great Gatsby, the contrast between the two halves of the novel is likened to the two-phase experience of nostalgia: While the first half impresses the “never-ending party” (Salmose 2014, p. 70) of a vivid summer on the reader’s memory through diverse devices such as sensorial imagery, iterative frequency, mystery, and verbs that emphasize movement, the second half’s slower tempo and increased literary distance mirror the reflective, bittersweet second stage of the nostalgic experience (p. 76).

While there are a great many studies on nostalgia from diverse perspectives, Salmose’s approach is novel in its attempt to understand the formal aspect of how the nostalgic experience is evoked in a reader, and in Towards a Poetics of Nostalgia: The Nostalgic Experience in Modern Fiction, he collects a “toolbox” of stylistic devices that help achieve this (Salmose 2012, p. 28). For instance, in terms of stylistics, the employment of proximate and non-proximate word pairs such as “here and there” and “now and then”, call attention to “the space between two values” (p. 187) and may, thus, heighten the reader’s awareness of the unbridgeable gap between two times. This “in-betweenness”, which we may also relate to the irreconcilability of the two stages of the nostalgic experience, characterizes nostalgia and nostalgic stylistics. Other examples of devices that highlight the confrontation between two times and spaces are: the repetition of time markers; the employment of subsequent narration or “the standard nostalgic mode” (p. 183), which is associated with a more distant narrative mood (p. 210); and the recurrence of nostalgic dichotomies (p. 245), such as youth versus age.

Nostalgic tropes, which evolved from such dichotomies (p. 246), are “imagery, symbols, metaphors, and recurring motifs that have the capacity to induce nostalgic sentiments in the reader” (p. 241). The trope of the ruin (p. 253), for example, refers to a long-gone era and the inevitable deterioration that comes with time. Many of the other tropes—such as seasons, voyages, and waves—remind the reader of time’s steady progress (p. 246) and, again, intensify the space between now and then, and here and there. Moreover, the tropes engage the reader’s “private memories through their very universal2 and open nature” (p. 247). These strategies, as well as others, will be taken up again in the analysis of “The Rich Boy”.

As Salmose’s investigation has mainly focused on literature and film, my study of the images in “The Rich Boy” is also an attempt to contribute to the understanding and scope of his method. Through my analysis of the text-image relations in a text that is both art about nostalgia and nostalgic art, I have found this method to fit in—rather effortlessly—with a nostalgic reading of this text.

3. Approaching Text-Image Relations

It is still difficult to find and access Fitzgerald’s stories in their magazine format,3 which as previously mentioned, have been characterized by scholarly neglect. Fitzgerald himself contributed to this, due to his own conflicted attitude towards his stories (Bruccoli 1989, p. xiv), which were published in “’slicks’, mass-market, advertising-driven magazines so named because they were printed in high-quality paper...” (Beuka 2013, p. 284). These slicks were widely read and highly influential. Leon Whipple, in 1928, remarked on the Saturday Evening Post’s popularity: “Who reads The Post? Who looks in the mirror? Everybody—high-brow, low-brow...” (Whipple 1928, p. 699). Moreover, with regard to its influence on the people, Whipple states that this mirror of a magazine “not only reflects us, it creates us. What the SatEvePost is we are” (p. 699). These magazine stories were Fitzgerald’s main source of income and were decisive in giving him exposure as a writer. However, he resented how they took time away from his novel writing (Beuka 2013, p. 285). Moreover, his artistic freedom was curtailed by editorial dictate: Jarrod Waetjen writes that the editor “maintained strict control over every aspect of the Post...” (Waetjen 2011, p. 128). Writing to his agent, Harold Ober, Fitzgerald expressed disappointment “that a cheap story like The Popular Girl written in one week... brings $1500.00 + a genuinely imaginative thing into which I put three weeks of enthusiasm like The Diamond in the Sky brings not a thing” (Fitzgerald 1994, p. 54). Robert Beuka takes up this “tension between art and commerce” (p. 287) in Fitzgerald, which may also apply to the short story in general, especially the illustrated short story, which has experienced a long history of academic disregard. Aside from its strong association with commercial magazine culture, this is also due to various forms of contention such as the traditional pitting of the short story against the novel, the competition between writer and illustrator for authorship, and the long, drawn-out battle for cultural dominance between word and image.4 Thus, it may not be surprising that Fitzgerald’s stories are most often found in image-free anthologies. With regard to this, Waetjen claims that “there is an implicit argument that Fitzgerald’s texts were elevated when removed from the glossy pages in which they were originally published... and collected in a form that physically resembled a novel” (Waetjen 2011, p. 6).

Nolan and Waetjen, who also remark on the lack of scholarly interest in Fitzgerald’s magazine stories, are among the very few authors that have taken into account the images and magazine context in their analyses of these, and I align myself with the view that “these illustrations played an essential role in how they [the readers] experienced the text” (Nolan 2017b, p. 17). Both authors take the bibliographical codes5 into account in their readings: Thus, in Nolan’s study of “Babylon Revisited”, she investigates the collaboration between writer, illustrator and editor, underlining how the illustrations undermine Fitzgerald’s text to instead support the editor’s vision for the magazine (Nolan 2017a, p. 363). She relates this to how the size, placement and proleptic nature of the images constantly emphasize their primacy over text. Conversely, in “Visualizing ‘The Rich Boy’”, her interpretation shows how the illustrations “mutually reinforce Fitzgerald’s narrative and thematic emphasis...” (Nolan 2017b, p. 17), the illustrations tending to take the stance of the biased narrator in the text (p. 23). Nolan does not incorporate the advertisements in her readings, but they are included in Waetjen’s conceptualization of the illustrated short story as a “cultural artifact—a text published complete with illustration in either a ‘slick’ or ‘pulp’ magazine, filled with advertising images, with an editing board concerned with their own socio-economic agendas...” (Waetjen 2011, p. 16). Discussing text-image relations, Waetjen relates Sergei Eisenstein’s conception of the montage to the combination of text and image, concluding that “[w]hile text and image convey their own meaning, combining the two inexorably alters the message” (p. 100). Similarly, I construe the combination of text and image in the original version of “The Rich Boy” as one text, or from a media perspective, one media product in which the interactions of media may alter or add nuances to the reading experience.

In the attempt to understand this confluence of media in the page, I adopt an intermedial or multimodal perspective in my reading. Lars Elleström’s conception of a medium is relational: It is comprised of modes and modalities that encounter each other in various ways. According to him, intermediality is mainly “about studying all kinds of media with a high level of awareness of the modalities of media and the crucial modal differences and similarities of media” (Elleström 2010, p. 38). These modalities are: The material modality, or a medium’s “latent corporeal interface”, whose modes are “human bodies,... flat surfaces and three dimensional objects...” (p. 17); the sensorial modality, whose modes are the senses, refers to how a medium is perceived by the senses (p. 15); the spatiotemporal modality makes spatial and temporal sense of what was perceived through the senses (p. 18); and the semiotic modality refers to “the creation of meaning in the spatiotemporally conceived medium by way of different sorts of thinking and sign interpretation” (p. 22). Applying these concepts to the intermedial relations in “The Rich Boy”, one could put forward questions like “How do the images work to construct time and space in comparison to the text?” or “What kind of sensorial world do text and image create?” These questions, in this case, also help reveal how a nostalgic mood is generated in these interactions. Interestingly, this perspective has not often been employed in relation to Fitzgerald, despite the fact that the author displayed a keen awareness of the media surrounding him, integrating different narrative styles, and references to popular music and cinema in his works. Additionally, he was certainly aware of the interaction of media in the magazines, having written slogans for the Barrion Collier advertising agency (Turnbull 1962, p. 92).

Other critics’ approaches to text-image relations will also influence my reading: For instance, Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen believe that “the visual component of a text is an independently organized... message, connected with the verbal text, but in no way dependent on it” (Kress and van Leeuwen 2006, p. 18), and attempt to create a “visual ‘grammar’” (p. 1) in Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design. In the chapter “The Meaning of Composition”, they develop “three principles of composition”, which comprise the “three interrelated systems” of information value, salience, and framing.6 Information value focuses on placement, on what meanings are associated with, for instance, the left or right side of a page; salience focuses on how certain parts of a composition are more or less prominent; and framing emphasizes how “[t]he absence or presence of framing devices... disconnects or connects elements of the image” (p. 177).

Maria Nikolajeva and Carole Scott (Nikolajeva and Scott 2000) make general sense of text-image relations by classifying them as, for example, symmetrical, enhancing and contradictory interactions. Although these terms were designed to analyze children’s picturebooks, they can also be used to approach various types of texts, and they will be used at some points of my analysis.

In terms of advertising, Richard Ohmann writes innovatively on the correlation between advertising and story in “History and Literary History: The Case of Mass Culture” (Ohmann 1988). His study of “two simple texts” (p. 357) considers “the ensemble of historical forces” that influence them, and in his attempt to connect the story “On the Way North” by Juliet Wilbor Tomkins and the Quaker Oats ad that accompanies it,7 he highlights the intermingling of old and new elements to be found in both. Taking the ad as an example, the well-known, dependable Quaker introduces a safe predictability while promoting oatmeal as a novel breakfast alternative (p. 367). On a larger scale, in his work Selling Culture: Magazines, Markets, and Class at the Turn of the Century (Ohmann 1996) he relates this “conflation of modernity and tradition that still pervades mass culture” with the fact that while advertisements tended to praise innovations and shifts in lifestyle, they also had to take into account the unease that this progress caused (p. 206). Ohmann describes some key concepts in the language of advertising that are still prevalent.8 While it is not my intention to simplify this complex work, I have found that, at first glance, some key concepts in the discourse of advertising, like the interplay of past and present (in nostalgia there is more a sense of contrast), and distance and nearness, can be related to the discourse of nostalgia. Some examples of this will be taken up in the following section, which studies the interactions of the text, illustrations and advertisements in “The Rich Boy”.

4. Text, Illustrations and Advertisements: A Nostalgic Reading

4.1. The Illustrations

The illustrator for “The Rich Boy”, F.R. Gruger, created six illustrations for the story, three for each installment. Gruger was an established figure in the American golden age of illustration, a period in which “illustrations were considered important contributions to literature” (Nolan 2017b, p. 17). Nolan underlines the importance he gave to reading the text closely, as well as his autonomy as an illustrator, in that he had “complete control over which scenes to illustrate” (p. 22). Edward Hodnett, in his 1982 work Image and Text: Studies in the Illustration of English Literature, terms the scene that the illustrator selects as the “moment of choice”, referring to it as “[t]he most important decision an artist has to make about an illustration” (Hodnett 1982, p. 7). Figure 1, below, is Gruger’s second “moment of choice”, which depicts a fallen, inebriated Anson, who needs to be carried away from the dining room in the middle of a party.

Splayed out over two pages, the illustration conspicuously challenges the text with its placement and size. Moreover, keeping in mind the framing, the clear-cut borders on the image alienate it further from the text, supporting the contradictory dynamic. This dynamic is further enhanced by the prolepsis in the image, which gives the reader a glimpse into a dismal moment in the future while the text looks back into the past. Prolepsis, that is, relating an event before it happens, is a well-established suspense generator. Additionally, it may be interpreted as reinforcing the image’s “primacy over the text” (Nolan 2017a, p. 362), as “framing... the narrative” (Nolan 2017b, p. 17), or as giving the reader a feeling of authorial “superior knowledge” (Sillars 2004, p. 74).

I will also argue that this prolepsis may engage the reader more deeply into the text. The placement of this illustration is vital to the meaning making: If the first line of the text9 beneath the illustration reads “Let me tell you about the very rich... They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we...”, the reader, looking at Gruger’s moment of choice, may exclaim “but they’re not better!” What is more, in countering the temporal structure of the narrative, the proleptic nature of this image intensifies the nostalgia that is already present in the portion of text below the illustration, despite the fact that text and illustration describe differing scenes. In fact, while the text is not explicitly nostalgic in content (recall Salmose’s “art about nostalgia”), several devices endow it with a nostalgic mood: After the narrator’s direct address in the present tense, he shifts to subsequent narration when he begins to look back at the beginning of the rich boy’s life, shortly summarizing Anson’s childhood, school and college years, and his move to New York after college. For the most part, the picture of Anson’s early years describes a calm stability, where all is right in the world: He “had an English governess who spoke the language very crisply and clearly and well” (p. 6); he lived in “a big estate”; the deference paid to him by other children and their parents was “the natural state of things”; he lived “an ordered life” in school (p. 7); and he had “the kind of servants you don’t get anymore”. At the same time, the temporal markers call attention to the temporariness of this youthful time: “[i]n those days”; “[i]n the summer”; “at the beginning of the century, when daring young women were already gliding along Fifth Avenue in ‘electric mobiles’”; and so forth. Note, too, the use of the past progressive tense in the last example. According to Salmose, this tense (in this case, a combination of “were” and “gliding”) creates a sense of being in between past and present (Salmose 2012, p. 185). Moreover, the verb “gliding” suggests a picture of something slipping out of reach.

Even though the illustration tells a story that is not in itself nostalgic, its combination with the text confronts future deterioration with the past promises of youth, a common nostalgic trope (Salmose 2012, p. 278). This spatiotemporal gap is also made manifest in the rupture between the pages, connoting dichotomies such as age versus youth, authority versus powerlessness, and stability versus vulnerability. The style and symbolism of Gruger’s work create a grim atmosphere that powerfully contrasts with the one in the written narrative: Dark washes engulf the soft candlelight scene, in which the viewer naturally follows each and every grave, illuminated face, which is turned to the small, sunken figure of Anson. The traditional, Western left to right composition, which Kress and van Leeuwen equate to the “sequential information structure in language” (p. 181) supports the suspenseful progression of their gazes, and the values that the authors connect with left (given information) and right (new, and in this case, shocking information) support the abovementioned dichotomies.

The illustrator—and interpreter—seems to have used “silence” as a key word: “He [Anson] slid silently under the table... None of the young girls present remarked upon the incident—it seemed to merit only silence” (p. 11, italics are mine). Bearing in mind the sensorial modality, Gruger evokes this hushed silence: The shocked stillness is emphasized by small details such as the rustling curtain; the server frozen in media res with a bowl he is about to serve on his hands; the gentleman on the left side of the image who stands abruptly, napkin still in hand. Almost everyone has stood up to witness the scene, further emphasizing Anson’s fall. Moreover, there are no “young girls” in this picture; instead, there are eleven “older” men and three women, augmenting the air of authority of those who are watching and perhaps judging Anson.

Despite these details, it is doubtful that the image on its own can be read as especially nostalgic. In this case, in challenging the narrative text’s temporal framework, the prolepsis is essential in creating a dichotomy between past promise (text) and future decline (image), which supports the earlier discussed contradictory dynamic between the text and image in the above figure. Ultimately, however, this contradictory interaction may be considered to be an enhancing one in terms of nostalgia: Showing the reader this particularly bleak snapshot of the future while nostalgically narrating a “better” time in the past may magnify the already nostalgic mood that is present in the text below the illustration and in “The Rich Boy” as a whole.

The next image (Figure 2) achieves a similar effect, although it is analeptic, the depicted moment occurring before the text that accompanies it:

The page preceding this illustration covers, notably, Anson’s first encounter with the narrator, and later, more importantly, with Paula Legendre, who will come to symbolize his nostalgia. In fact, the “legend” in her name may already foreshadow pastness and idealization. By the end of the description of their flowering romance, they plan to get married, after which Paula announces that she, too, is rich. The text that captions the image and grounds it in the “right time” immediately follows this confession: “It was exactly as if they could say ‘Neither of us has anything: we shall be poor together’—just as delightful that they should be rich instead” (p. 9). After this pinnacle of promise, the problems begin almost immediately, and soon after this, Anson slips to the floor twice from drunkenness—the first time in front of Paula’s cousin Jo, and then later at the dinner party—much to Paula’s disappointment and Mrs. Legendre’s concern. The page ends with a description of his fall at the party. In the following, illustrated page, the text directly below the image describes Anson awakening from his drunken stupor. The illustration, which again dwarfs the text in terms of size, once more contradicts the temporal sequence of the text, creating a sense of nostalgia that, this time, is not in the text right below it, although it is highly present throughout “The Rich Boy”. Thus, in this case, the illustration may be seen as generating an additional nostalgic experience at a point of time in the text that is not nostalgic.

This moment of choice is not actually present in Fitzgerald’s narrative: It is a recreation of their romance by the artist. One way to see Gruger’s interpretation is to focus on the nostalgia it conveys, both on its own and in contrapuntal relation to the text and the previous illustration. Interestingly, it is the only illustration that is set outdoors. That Gruger chose to recreate their relationship in an idyllic, natural setting calls to mind Svetlana Boym’s definition of a nostalgia that she terms as restorative. The nostalgic often generates an “invented tradition” in the attempt to reconstruct what was lost (Boym 2001, p. 41). It appears as if Gruger endeavors to recreate Anson’s romanticized picture of their relationship after it ends.

Like the word “silent” in the previous picture, Gruger seems to have used the word “blossomed” from “with his love her nature deepened and blossomed... He felt that if he could enter into Paula’s warm, safe life he would be happy” (p. 8). Gruger thus chooses to depict the unfolding of their love in an Edenic garden in full bloom. This garden may be an expression of a longing for a natural, paradisiacal place, which relates to the idealization of spaces that is a characteristic of nostalgic discourse (Salmose 2012, p. 285). It also brings to mind the pastoral setting, a common nostalgic trope (p. 285). Turning to the trope of the seasons, Gruger seems to situate the moment in summer or spring, most likely spring, the season that has most been connected to youth, new beginnings and the blossoming of love. Both the garden and the season also open up a sensorial space that is fragrant and tactile (the flowers; the couple embracing). In Fitzgerald’s text, Anson meets Paula soon after he meets the narrator for the first time in the late summer. Several meetings, and a description of the solidification of their relationship, take place before the time of the caption. While the season is not described in this part of the text, it is certainly after summer. Thus, Gruger’s choice of spring to set this scene is, again, coherent to a nostalgic reading of the text-image relation: Like the above-discussed aspects in the image, it highlights the promise of the start of a romance, a promise that nostalgically counters the events in the text surrounding it.

Also pointing to the transitory nature of this idealized picture are the body language of the couple and the sequentiality of elements in the composition of the illustration, both of which nostalgically foreshadow something that is about to end: Anson’s right hand clutches Paula’s right arm and his left hand presses her to him as though he is afraid to let go; however, despite their physical closeness, their gazes are distant and not directed towards each other, as if they are already looking past the moment. The way the composition is sequenced echoes this nostalgia: While the general tendency is to read from left to right, this is not always the case. Nikolajeva and Scott claim that ”[t]he artist may deliberately or unconsciously place a detail in the picture... that will compel us to start reading the picture from this point” (Nikolajeva and Scott 2006, p. 161). The picture as a whole is characterized by large blocks of dark washes depicting trees and shrubs. Paula, who in the text is described as a “dark, serious beauty” projecting “primness” (p. 8), is aptly portrayed in a long, pristine white dress that is as pale as her skin. The composition thus beckons the eye to first fasten on Paula, as the brightest, most salient point of the picture. The reader’s eyes, possibly following this lighter tone, naturally move leftwards instead, to a little part of the garden behind them, and then to the small, disappearing spot of sky. The awareness of transience in this image can be likened to the mood in Baudelaire’s À Une Passante, where “the chance of happiness is revealed in a flash and the rest of the poem is nostalgia for what could have been” (Boym 2001, p. 21). There is a fleetingness conveyed in this frozen, embellished moment, which again recalls Boym’s restorative nostalgia: The illustration portrays a time and space, which as far as the reader of the text knows, has never existed. Similarly, later on in the text, Paula’s enshrined figure is in a sense frozen in a photograph, a medium that is associated with pastness.10 For instance, the earlier mentioned potentially romantic scene with new flame Dolly is disrupted when Anson’s memory, not of Paula but of her photograph, superimposes itself on another photograph of “a blurred shadow of a face that he did not know” (p. 24). This may fit to the idea of nostalgia as being “the disease of an afflicted imagination”, one of the definitions that Boym provides in The Future of Nostalgia (p. 4).

Thus, the spatiotemporal modality in the image, or the way that space (a natural paradise) and time (a relationship that is frozen in time before it fades) are conveyed, seems to support a nostalgic reading of the image on its own. However, the highly nostalgic connotations in this image gain strength from its temporal placement in relation to the previous events: Having just witnessed Anson’s decline in the previous illustration and section of the story, the reader may guess that this idealized picture cannot possibly stand still.

4.2. The Advertisements

This reading does not only take into account the interaction between Fitzgerald’s story and Gruger’s illustrations: It also considers a third medium, the advertisement,11 as relevant to the overall meaning making. There are several advertisements that share page space with the text of “The Rich Boy”, all of them clustered towards the end of the story, and none of them situated in the pages containing the illustrations. Bearing in mind the disrepute of Fitzgerald’s stories in connection with their magazine context, the advertisement is the most commercial element of the media interaction in the page. Its presence can be perceived in different ways: Jade Adams calls its inclusion “an interruptive reading experience” (Adams 2015, p. 42), and this may especially apply to pages that combine advertisement, illustration, the end of a story, and the beginning of a new one; Waetjen highlights how for Ohmann, “short stories served to create a sense of comfort in readers so that they might turn their attention to advertising images to satisfy non-essential needs” (Waetjen 2011, p. 122). Ohmann’s main question in his study of story and advertisement, “Is there any connection beyond that of physical proximity?” (Ohmann 1988, p. 361), is key to the present article, although he does not choose an illustrated short story. In “The Rich Boy”, the advertisements, along with the illustrations, seem to reflect the story’s moods, themes, and subjects. The first examples that will be looked at show how the ads mirror the nostalgic mood in the text and run parallel to the voyages undertaken by Anson’s friends (and later, by Anson himself), voyages that also relate to this nostalgic mood. Interestingly, these advertisements are placed “in time” with the story: As the reader does not expect the ads to relate to the story in the way she or he might expect an illustration to, their placement seems to make their connection clearer. As with the illustrations, Salmose’s method was applicable in helping substantiate how some of these ads may generate nostalgia in unison with Fitzgerald’s text and Gruger’s illustrations. In contrast to these illustrations, which were deliberately constructed to correspond to the story, the intentionality behind the advertisements—besides their obvious function—is less clear, making their connection to the story far more surprising. In the case of the story-advertisement relation that Ohmann analyzes, he claims that “the ad paid for the story” (Ohmann 1988, p. 365). While I do not own copies of the Red Book Magazine issues that featured “The Rich Boy”, I own an issue from April 1926 and have noticed that some of the same ads are present in this issue and are situated in similar sections of the magazine. Thus, despite their remarkable placement in story time and thematic resemblance, the possibility exists that it is a coincidence that the ads reflect Fitzgerald’s story so closely. Concerning this topic, a study that looks into the diverse agents that were involved in the construction of this media product may of course be of interest. However, while it may be relevant to call attention to the issue of intentionality, the focus of this section of the reading is on how the advertisements enter into dialogue with “The Rich Boy”, often reflecting its moods and themes. Figure 3 is a good example of how the ad relates to the nostalgia in the story:

This part of Fitzgerald’s text is especially nostalgic—nostalgic art and art about nostalgia—and sees Anson’s depression rapidly unraveling. The previous page ended with Anson displaying restlessness after his last close friend’s wedding: “’Go where?’ he asked himself” (p. 33). This question is followed by a long passage of remembrance of younger days that continues into the next page: “The Yale Club, of course; bridge until dinner, then four or five cocktails in somebody’s room and a pleasant confused evening... A party was a well adjusted thing—you took certain girls to certain places and spent just so much on their amusement... and at a certain time in the morning you stood up and said you were going home” (p. 34). Stylistic devices emphasize the nostalgia evoked in this passage: Iterative frequency, which relates an event as if it occurred several times before, is a “summarizing form” that brings out the nostalgic aspect of memory as “it lacks the specificity of memory and embraces the vagueness of nostalgic memory” (Salmose 2012, p. 202). Polysyndetons, which occur when conjunctions such as “and” and “or” are repeated in close succession, are also present in the passage and form part of Salmose’s classification of nostalgic strategies in how they rhythmically mark clock time (p. 190).

When Anson arrives at the Yale Club, he talks to the bartender and inquires about old friends and acquaintances. The word “gone” reverberates throughout the conversation: “Mr. Cahill’s gone to New Haven” (p. 34); “Gone to the ball game. Lot of men gone up”; “They’ve gone to the country” (p. 35); “They were gone to the country”; “Now they had gone without a word”. The trope of the voyage, in this instance, intensifies Anson’s instability, and the news of his friends’ departures is paralleled by his own wandering to familiar places looking to contact old friends he was once close to but ending up engaging in superficial conversations with bartenders. With the second bartender, who was “once a fashionable bartender in demand” (p. 35), Anson recalls old times: “Do you remember the wedding...?” (p. 36). He complains about how things are no longer the same: “Nick, the girls are different...” (p. 35). Temporal markers enhance the sense of time slipping by that is so present in Anson’s mind: “Two years before” as opposed to “Now” (p. 35); “And tomorrow”; “and Sunday”, and so forth. This awareness takes on a haunting quality when Anson looks up a window and sees how “a grey man with watery eyes stared down at him” (p. 34).

At first glance, the advertisement for French Line, which occupies one third of the page, seems to echo the voyages of Anson’s friends, and the sense of loneliness and nostalgia that these evoke in him. However, the overly cheerful headline (“The Rhone hurries gaily”) may also be seen as mocking Anson’s misery. Moreover, it may foreshadow the voyage, on perhaps a similar passenger ship, that Anson will undertake later in the text. But returning to the first idea of nostalgia, besides mirroring the travel in the text with an advertisement on travel, the way the different elements in the ad enter into dialogue seem to mimic nostalgic discourse in several ways. Firstly, there is a contradicting dynamic between past/stasis and future/motion in the way the illustrations are alienated by their sharp borders from the text. The images chosen are of: Frédéric Mistral, writer of Le Poème du Rhône, who received a Nobel Prize for literature in 1904, and died in 1914; and the bridge Pont Saint-Bénézet. The dead poet and ancient bridge clearly connote a celebrated past. What is more, the medieval bridge appears ruin-like, recalling the trope of the ruin, “a prime symbol of decay and past time” (Salmose 2012, p. 253). Coincidentally or not, nostalgia is implied in the way the images of this man and bridge are framed and set apart from the text: The old-fashioned, ornate borders seem to be a homage, but they also seem to emphasize the images’ alienation from the present, as, according to Hodnett, “borders clamped around illustrations are deadening” (Hodnett 1982, p. 21). Mistral’s image is quite sharply superimposed over the bridge’s, also alienating the images from each other. That they are illustrations and not photographs may also be significant to this idealization. Ohmann claims that advertisements refrained from using photography possibly “because the camera would lessen the abstractness and idealization...” (Ohmann 1996, p. 185).

The top of the images reads “FRANCE through the eyes of her Immortals”, and if we consider the sensorial modality, this generates a rather eerie, sensorial world. This line, and the nostalgic images, are immediately contradicted by the lively, forward-moving voice in the headline of the text: “The Rhone hurries gaily”. In fact, while the advertisement’s text describes travel through ancient landmarks that reflect the “immortal eyes” of the illustration, like “old Avignon, City of Popes”, “Nimes with its impressive Roman arena” or “Arles built in the time of Caesar”, at the same time, this is countered by the sheer enthusiasm that it transmits. Several prepositions and verbs as well as animated imagery generate a dynamic tempo: “through Provence”; “through old Avignon”; “Then down to the Riviera!”; “the Corniche road twists fantastically”, “Paris in three hours”; “little towns frantically clutching the towering rocks”; and “peak upon peak of snow clad mountains”. The uninterrupted flux is also implicit in the waves the ship moves through, waves being another nostalgic trope connected to “repetitiveness and the passing of time” (Salmose 2012, p. 256). In fact, this energetic tempo leads to a nostalgic line in the text: “It’s a ride that will become a precious memory”, which is “[a]s imperishable as the memory of Paris”. Not only does this passage nostalgically foreshadow the end of a voyage before it even begins, but it also opposes transience with permanence. Thus, time and space in the spatiotemporal modality are built on oppositions—old, ancient, and enshrined versus young, new, and dynamic—that we can relate to the previously discussed nostalgic dichotomies.

Just as past and present often encounter each other in their respective ways in both the discourses of nostalgia and of advertising, they also both play with distance and nearness in terms of voice. In advertising, as the distance between buyer and seller increased, advertisements took on a more personal voice in order “to preserve the feeling of personal communication” (Ohmann 1996, p. 187), ads often adopting the voice of a “savvy neighbor” that could be trusted for advice (p. 191). Here, the personal, advising voice in “Or take your car, uncrated, with you. Drive it off the covered dock” also projects a nearness that challenges the distance transmitted by the old-fashioned images. I mentioned earlier that perhaps, while nostalgic discourse counters past and present, in advertising there is more a sense of combination. However, looking at the above relation of text and image in the advertisement, the “combination” does not seem to be particularly harmonious.

The advertisement on its own already evokes nostalgia and the above application of Salmose’s approach seems to substantiate this. Its placement in an especially nostalgic section of Fitzgerald’s text makes it seem strikingly symmetrical to the story in terms of mood, subject, and theme. Finally, it is also worth making note of the “social meaning” (Ohmann 1996, p. 185) or contemporary, accommodated lifestyle depicted in the ad (“children kept happy by competent governesses”, “the inviting restfulness of your own suite”), which blends in with the social scenario of “The Rich Boy”.

The next advertisement (Figure 4) exhibits several of the above observations: At this point of Fitzgerald’s text, Anson’s nostalgia reaches its peak, and he ends up locking himself in a telephone booth of a hotel, unsuccessfully reaching out to everyone he once knew. Again, he hears that his friends are gone: “So-and-so was out, riding, swimming, playing golf, sailed to Europe last week” (p. 36). Just after this moment, there is a “turn”, and Anson’s nostalgic thoughts are suddenly personified: As he is about to leave the hotel, he sees his former girlfriend Paula by the revolving door. In his reencounter with the now happily married Paula, whom he has idealized for years, he realizes, much to his dismay “that the memory of him had lost poignancy to her” (p. 37). There is, thus, a devastating encounter between old/past and new/present: The Paula of his nostalgia-embellished memory and the Paula he actually meets.

This coming together of old and new is also present in the advertisement, for instance, in the arrangement of elements in time and space in the top illustration: The ruin-like construction, which again calls to mind the trope of ruins, takes precedence with its place in the center, occupying much of the illustration’s space. However, what appears to be tropical foliage incongruously grows on each side of the “ruin”, and a little boy walks with his mother nearby. The sensorial atmosphere that is evoked is warm and sunny—there are palm trees in the background, the sky is clear, and the mother even needs a parasol to shield herself from the sun. In the back, there is another, open structure made of pillars. Like the ruin, it is ambiguous, and the reader may wonder: Is it old or new?

The text also beckons to our senses, particularly our sense of sight, as the verb “see” reocurrs four times in the text, including in the headline, “See for Yourself”, which emphasizes this call to visualization through its prominent font size. In connection with this, the name of the community, INDRIO, competes with the top image for salience, and is likely an attempt to create a visual imprint on the reader’s mind, perhaps inviting her or him to imagine this old-new space.

In relation to the abovementioned encounter of ancient and nascent, change and stasis also commingle in this advertisement, as with the previous one. Despite the ruins, a community is emerging swiftly: it is “is growing to be”, it is “in the making”. The map and compass below allude to movement and the trope of the voyage, yet its old-fashioned and sharp borders are static and distancing. In the story, Anson resists change—he is attached to the past—yet everything is changing around him: “his quest roved into the country” (p. 36); “So-and-so was out, riding, swimming, playing golf, sailed to Europe last week” (p. 36); “the diversion of a traveling salesman” (p. 37); “the revolving door” (p. 37); “Pete had come East” (p. 37). This movement is echoed in the advertisement, where the voice familiarly advises “you” with several imperatives to “play golf, go surf bathing or fish”. More importantly, as mentioned, Paula, who has been embalmed in his memory like a photograph, is transformed: She is described sensorially, as standing “sideways to the light” (p. 37) in a ruffling cape. The movement of her cape, the revolving door, and her pregnancy all allude to transformation. Like the ruin, she is both old and new, and in this way, the ruin in the image may be read alongside Anson’s longing to return and start anew.

Like the previous example, the presence of nostalgic dichotomies and tropes found in this advertisement seems to echo the nostalgic mood of Fitzgerald’s text. The next advertisements (Figure 5) are not particularly nostalgic, but they also seem to mirror some events in the text.

The quantity and dominant placement of these ads, five of six of which are travel-related, might imply a more distracting or “interruptive” experience than the previous ones; however, like the previous ones, they connect thematically to the story. It seems as though Figure 3 and Figure 4 prepared the reader for this bombardment of travel advertisements, which take place alongside Anson’s own voyage, coinciding precisely with the moment he “moved off in the wet space between worlds” (p. 41). The trope of the voyage and the “space between worlds” emphasize the nostalgic space between “now and then” and “here and there”, and in fact, while the beginning of the short text on the left side of the page begins with Anson’s final interaction with Paula, at the very end of this section his eyes are fixed on a new girl: “’Did you see that girl in the red tam?” (p. 41). In this very small block of text, Anson takes leave of Paula; his superiors at work urge him to travel, as he “was stale and needed a change” (p. 40); he finds out that Paula dies; he sets off on a journey; and he notices a new woman.

On the one hand, the ads seem to distract the reader from the dire recent events (Anson’s depression; his reencounter with Paula; her passing). On the other hand, they align themselves with Anson’s transition, the spatiotemporal construction projecting constant motion, faraway places, and new possibilities. If the advertisements’ placement were deliberate, one could see them as employing their more typical function of offering a “solution” to Anson’s woes and a “promise” of more exciting times. Despite Anson’s depression and increasing preoccupation with time’s passage, after his first drink during his travel “he displayed the first joviality... in months” (p. 41). A new sensorial world opens up with “the girl in the red tam”, and in the next page, this fresh burst of color is made clearer with descriptions of her red hat, which “was a bright spot of color against the steel-grey sea”, and the “flashing bob of her head”. There is a change in Anson, who recovers his “strong, clear” (p. 41) voice and plays “pool with infectious gusto” (p. 41). This illusion of a recreation of youth is mirrored by the possibilities, and sunny, sensorial spaces alluded to by the foreign places promoted by the advertisements, most notably observed in the headlines “A Cruise to Europe and the Mediterranean” of Thos. Cook & Son, or in “Orient Round the World” (introduced with “The Sunshine Belt to the Orient”) of Dollar Steamship Line. The first, in terms of size and placement, is perhaps the most eye-catching; however, challenging its dominance in the page is the image of the stereotypical “exotic woman” on the lower right, her sideward glance suitably mysterious, simply captioned “Orient”. The following text associates her with many possible destinations: “Honolulu, Japan, China, the Philippines, Malaya, Ceylon, India, Egypt”, and so forth. She could also be seen as mirroring the possibilities suggested by the new girl in red that Anson meets. However, apart from this illustration, the advertisements seem to focus on the aesthetic appearance of words, which is likely part of how “[t]he newer visual advertising set out to ambush the readers attention... and lodge in the memory” (Ohmann 1996, p. 180). In fact, the only other image, that of Hotel Syracuse, is not as compelling as the text, which is repeated in large, varying fonts, as if indeed to secure the name in memory. As with many of the salient, travel-related words in the ads, in relation to the story, it seems to support the above-discussed emergence of new prospects that parallel Anson’s forward movement.

The advertisements in this page do not echo nostalgia or the nostalgic dichotomies the way the previously discussed ones do; however, they echo some of the subjects, themes, and moods of the story text they accompany, thus creating the impression of a symmetrical relation between ad and story.

5. Conclusions

While Fitzgerald’s “The Rich Boy” is rich in nostalgia in both form and content, to study it in its original, magazine version shows how the different media interacting on the page tend to mirror or enhance the nostalgia in the story, adding nuances to the nostalgic experience and ultimately creating an experience that differs from reading the story in a current, image-free anthology. Salmose’s approach helped substantiate how and why each studied media can be seen as evocative of nostalgia, and in fact, his classification of nostalgic strategies were easily applicable to text, illustration and advertisement. It was important for this study to investigate how each media could be considered nostalgic, but it was also important to understand how these media interact. Thus, an intermedial analytical frame was employed in relation to the nostalgic approach, in order to construe how these media affect each other and what kind of experience they may produce together.

In Figure 1, for example, we saw how Gruger’s proleptically-placed illustration charges the nostalgia transmitted by the text, despite the fact that the image on its own is not nostalgic. In their contradictory interaction, the spatiotemporal worlds of text and image seem to intensify the already nostalgic mood of the text. In like manner, the analeptic Figure 2, which can be read as nostalgic on its own, creates nostalgia in a section of the text that is not nostalgic, perhaps even altering when nostalgia is experienced while reading, as the reader would likely experience this illustration in its relation to the events of the text surrounding it and to the previous illustration. From a broader perspective, the spatiotemporal contrast between image and text in these two examples may also be seen as mirroring the nostalgic gap between times and spaces, as well as the two, contrasting stages of the nostalgic experience.

I also argued that in a more unexpected way, the advertisements also seemed to relate and contribute to the nostalgic mood of the story. In fact, the ads in the three pages featured in this article seem almost uncannily situated “in time” with the text. Figure 3 and Figure 4, which may be seen as nostalgic on their own, happen to be placed in particularly nostalgic points of the story. Moreover, the selected advertisements are all travel-related: Figure 3 and Figure 4 run parallel to Anson’s search for once-familiar places and his discovery that all his friends are gone, and the overwhelming cluster of travel ads in Figure 5 seem synchronized with Anson’s own journey.