Fitzgerald as Prose Technician: A Short Catalog of Rhetorical Devices

Fitzgerald as Prose Technician: A Short Catalog of
   Rhetorical Devices

   Brett Zimmerman

   The F. Scott Fitzgerald Review, Volume 15, 2017, pp. 149-199 (Article)

   Published by Penn State University Press

       For additional information about this article
       https://muse.jhu.edu/article/682575

[ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the COVID-19 pandemic. ]

Fitzgerald as Prose Technician

A Short Catalog of Rhetorical Devices

Brett Zimmerman

Abstract
Using the taxonomy and the terminology of classical rhetoric, this article
­examines the prose of the four novels published in Fitzgerald’s lifetime as well
 as several of his most notable short stories. This methodology enables one to go
 beyond the fuzzy descriptors—such as “brilliant,” “clear,” “vital,” “lucid,” ­“fluent,”
 “natural,” “fine,” and “rich”—often applied to Fitzgerald’s writing. The article
 eschews the ­impressionistic in favor of a more “scientific” approach to that prose:
 through the exegetical microscope of the rhetorical lexicon, it demonstrates the
 ­surprising ­subtleties of Fitzgerald’s linguistic craftsmanship. Without claiming
  that Fitzgerald was steeped in the terminology of classical rhetoric, it proposes
  that he at least had an ­intuitive understanding of the syllabic, ­lexical, aural,
  descriptive, ­metaphorical, ­syntactical, argumentative, grammatical, v­ erisimilous,
   emotional, psychological, and even the comedic and satirical ­strategies and
   maneuvers that the terms describe and for which the ancient Greeks and
   Romans provided names and ­categories. The article concludes with a number of
  ­observations about Fitzgerald’s careful and c­onscientious craftsmanship: some
  buttress widely accepted ­pronouncements about his prose style, techniques, and
  philosophy of c­ omposition; others, one hopes, are new insights that may surprise
  even Fitzgerald’s most enthusiastic champions and be embraced by them.

Keywords
classical rhetoric, prose style, stylistics, linguistics

Poetry is dying first. It’ll be absorbed into prose sooner or later. For
instance, the beautiful word, the colored and glittering word, and the
beautiful simile belong in prose now.
           —Anthony Patch to Richard Caramel (B&D 346)

The F. Scott Fitzgerald Review, Vol. 15, 2017
Copyright © 2017 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA

Almost certainly, serious Fitzgerald devotees would agree with Donald Monk
that the Jazz Age chronicler was “a man painstakingly aware of the weight sty­
listic effects, in their own right, can bear” (78), and that his best short stories
“are memorable not for narrative but for stylistic evocation of mood and atmo­
sphere” (79). Too often, however, expressions of appreciation for Fitzgerald’s
prose style have been impressionistic—with “brilliant” or “lyrical” typically
employed—or exemplifications of what Louis T. Milic, back in 1967, referred
to as “metaphysical stylistics,” nonliterary language used to describe style. In
“Writing ‘naturally in sentences’: The Joys of Reading F. Scott Fitzgerald,” Linda
Wagner-Martin tells us about Gertrude Stein’s appreciation of “the overall luster
of Fitzgerald’s style,” celebrates his “remarkable” (218) and “amazing sentences”
(224), and closes her argument by providing instances of “the intricate charm
and beauty of his style” (225). Fitzgerald’s prose, F. H. Langman remarks, has
been praised “for its clarity, vitality, and flavour” (31). While the nonliterary term
“flavor” is typically applied to food and beverages, I have no idea how it relates
to the technical aspects of a writer’s prose and I suspect Langman is equally
puzzled. Yet his own analysis of Fitzgerald’s writing is no more precise one page
later when he uses the lexical triplet “lucidity, fluency, and naturalness” (32)
and, three pages further on, “firmness, fineness, richness” (35). Happily, his
descriptive terms become more precise as his analysis moves forward.
    I have tracked down a handful of other useful essays describing the ­technical
aspects and effectiveness of Fitzgerald’s prose; one of the best is Jackson R.
Bryer’s “Style as Meaning in The Great Gatsby: Notes Toward a New Approach.”
Lamenting the paucity of stylistic studies of Fitzgerald’s prose, Bryer ­challenges
scholars: “For Fitzgerald, style was meaning; and we need to ­examine that style
in greater detail for the truest evidence of his achievement as a writer” (128).
He does acknowledge that more recently “study of Gatsby has ­increasingly
­concerned itself with style and language” but, nevertheless, with two ­exceptions,
 “none of the recent studies of style deal in any detail with the way in which the
 smallest units in the language of the novel function as indicators of its m  ­ eaning
 as a whole” (123). The remainder of his essay demonstrates that proposition—
 “the smallest units in the language of the novel function as indicators of its
 meaning as a whole”—admirably and I draw attention to some of his insights
 below. Also notable is “Style as Politics in The Great Gatsby” by Janet Giltrow
 and David Stouck, from whom I also quote; additionally, Kirk Curnutt has made
 many valuable and insightful observations and I shall feature them as well.
    Bryer made his complaint about the dearth of stylistic analyses in 1984; more
 has been accomplished since but, despite Curnutt’s general observations, not
 enough has been done with the prose, it seems, outside of Gatsby. Bryant Mangum

150  Brett Zimmerman

has a brief bibliography in F. Scott Fitzgerald in Context (431–32) but some authors
by “style” often mean something else—such as “technique” or “point of view.”
As someone new to the Fitzgerald oeuvre—I was maneuvered into accepting a
winter-term course on him as one of the “new preps” with which I was burdened
recently—I had only ever taught Gatsby; his other novels and short stories (all 178
of them) represented a new pedagogical and intellectual adventure. While read­
ing the primary and exploring the secondary material, I was just as interested in
aspects of Fitzgerald’s writing style as I was in his themes, plots, characters, and
other techniques of the craft. I found very little about the former and thus put to
use my own training in stylistics and the figures of speech (tropes and schemes)
and figures of thought that comprise the lexicon of classical rhetoric (which has
been called the first stylistics). I had done the same fruitfully in my courses on
Poe, Melville, and Hawthorne, and hoped to be able to discover some patterns
at the sentence and paragraph level that would enable me to make some general
observations about Fitzgerald as a prose technician—something more precise
than “remarkable,” “amazing,” “brilliant,” “lyrical,” “clear,” “vital,” “lucid,” “fluent,”
“natural,” “fine,” and “rich” (and the less said about “flavor,” the better).
    This exegetical approach has some drawbacks, to be sure. For one thing,
many undergraduates—surprised at being taken beyond those old staples
“symbol,” “metaphor,” “personification,” and, perhaps, “alliteration”—are dis­
mayed to learn that the ancients furnished over 300 more terms, many with
unpronounceable Latin or Greek names. Students can be easily intimidated.
Even other scholars have been known to express skepticism bordering on hos­
tility toward this approach to language and literature. Occasionally, the criti­
cism goes something like this: “Putting Greek and Latin names on things going
on at the sentence level in a prose text is nothing more than a pedantic and
egotistical academic exercise. What is the advantage of having this nomencla­
ture for the figures people use?” It is distressing to hear English professors talk
(or write) like that. I have never heard them apply the same objections to the
language devised for poetry: “What’s the use of having terms like ‘simile,’ ‘meta­
phor,’ ‘personification,’ ‘iambic pentameter,’ ‘trochee,’ ‘anapest,’ and so on?”
I have heard no complaints about the nomenclature devised for drama: “Isn’t
it merely an exercise in pedantry to apply to characters in plays such terms as
‘anagnorisis,’ ‘catharsis,’ ‘harmartia,’ ‘hubris,’ and ‘peripeteia’?” Those are Greek
names too. The Greek word “metaphor” designates a device many writers use—
it is part of their artistry; it has a purpose and it is helpful to have a name for
it. The same can be said for other rhetorical figures. Many writers and orators
use those devices and each has a purpose, a purpose often beyond the merely
ornamental. It is helpful to have names for them.

                                                 Fitzgerald as Prose Technician   151

It is not enough simply to have the names of rhetorical terms at our d   ­ isposal
(in addition to other labels from, say, linguistics—such as “morphological set,”
“phonological set,” and “notional set”): knowledge of the lexicon and the tax­
onomy increases our sensitivity to prose. I have learned to notice features that I
would have missed had I not been steeped in the terminology. Even more, hav­
ing an understanding of the classical figures of speech and figures of thought
heightens our exegetical sophistication: we can identify things going on at
the sentence level—even down to the lexical items and, deeper than that, the
“microcosmic” level of vowel and consonant groupings—and describe them,
relating them if possible to questions of vernacular verisimilitude and to
broader literary categories such as plot, theme, and characterization. That is,
we can relate the linguistic to the extralinguistic; in fact, we are forced to try or,
indeed, face the charge of being pretentious pedants adding nothing useful or
valuable to the field of literary analysis.
    Did Fitzgerald have knowledge of the rhetorical terminology, or would that
be to claim too much? Although he certainly would have been familiar with
such commonly known terms as “alliteration,” we have no need to assume that
he was familiar with any of the more esoteric rhetorical names in the follow­
ing (abbreviated) catalog; what matters, at least, is that he had an instinctive
understanding of what the devices describe and how they work in human com­
munication—as well as how they can indicate the psychological or emotional
condition of characters. It is enough that we know, can identify, and can attempt
to explain their use in his stories and novels. I will not pretend to have provided
in every case a brilliant exegetical insight stemming from the identification of a
device, but I would then humbly invite scholars whose expertise in Fitzgerald is
greater than mine to try. At any rate, let us make a start. By way of a conclusion,
I shall attempt some generalizations about Fitzgerald as a conscientious literary
craftsman, generalizations that arise from the following catalog and that I hope
intensify our appreciation of him as a prose technician. (I have borrowed most
of the pronunciation guides and the classification system, for the most part,
from Lanham.)

ACRYLOGIA: the use of an inexact or illogical word:

      Muriel was exclaiming enthusiastically. “There was a crazy woman behind
      us on the bus. She was absitively, posolutely nutty!” (B&D 76)

152  Brett Zimmerman

We may be inclined to associate this sort of linguistic silliness to Ned Flanders
on The Simpsons, but we see that Fitzgerald was having fun with the device
many decades earlier. Already, then, we have evidence of his lexical sportive­
ness—and in “acrylogia” a more precise (if less descriptive) term than “lexical
sportiveness.”
Cf. “barbarismus” (see below) and “malapropism.”
Pronunciation: a cy ro LO gi a
Type: ungrammatical, illogical, or unusual uses of language

ALLITERATION: repetition of initial or middle consonants in nearby or adja­
cent words. As with “acrylogia,” the device can suggest a linguistic playfulness
on the part of the author and an appreciation of the melodic, the musical, quali­
ties that language can possess:

      Resignedly and with difficulty Tom removed the cigar—that is, he removed
      part of it, and then blew the remainder with a whut sound across the room,
      where it landed liquidly and limply in Mrs. Ahearn’s lap (“The Cut-Glass
      Bowl” [1920], F&P 99).

Pronunciation: al lit er A tion
Type: repetition: letters and sounds

AMPHIBOLOGIA (amphibology or amphiboly): intended or accidental ambigu­
ity arising from an ambivalence of grammatical structure, sometimes by mis­
punctuation, vague pronoun reference, or dangling modifiers. Ambiguity can
arise not solely due to grammatical or punctuational sloppiness, however; it
can also arise due to the multivalent nature of language: many words have more
than one meaning. Fitzgerald depends several times on double meanings in
“Babylon Revisited” (1931):

      “Helen died of heart trouble,” Charlie said dully.
         “Yes, heart trouble.” Marion spoke as if the phrase had another m
                                                                         ­ eaning
      for her. (TAR 170)

It does: Marion has never forgiven Charlie for his shabby treatment of her sis­
ter, Charlie’s now-deceased wife (see “antanaclasis,” below). Most of the lin­
guistic ambiguity in the story, however, relates to its money metaphors. As in
Gatsby, the idea of paying, and of the ability to pay, is related to moral laxity.

                                            Fitzgerald as Prose Technician   153

At the tale’s conclusion, while talking to a bartender, Paul, Charlie reminisces
about his former days in Paris before the stock market crash of 1929:

      “I heard that you lost a lot in the crash.”
      “I did,” and he added grimly, “but I lost everything I wanted in the boom.”
      “Selling short.”
      “Something like that.” (177)

With the expression “selling short,” Paul is referring to a risky strategy investors
use on the stock and commodities markets; Charlie, on the other hand, seems
to be thinking of the phrase in the more well-known sense of “doing an injus­
tice” to someone—a secret allusion to his emotionally thoughtless treatment of
his wife and daughter. The story ends with the concept of paying in its double
meaning. After being told by his former brother-in-law that he has lost custody
of his daughter, Honoria, for another six months, Charlie reverts to his custom­
ary strategy of throwing money at people:

      There wasn’t much he could do now except send Honoria some things; he
      would send her a lot of things tomorrow. He thought rather angrily that
      this was just money—he had given so many people money. . . .
         “No, no more,” he said to another waiter. “What do I owe you?”
         He would come back some day—they couldn’t make him pay
      forever. (177)

When accidental, the term “demonstrates a character’s verbal and mental
incompetence,” says Dupriez (32); however, Harmon and Holman suggest that,
in literature, “amphibology is usually intentional when it occurs” (18). It cer­
tainly is in the hands of an author in control of his or her writing—as in the
passage above: “pay” refers to the exchange of money but it also refers to the
punishment Charlie’s in-laws are forcing upon him. One of the factors that con­
tribute to the status of “Babylon Revisited” as a short literary masterpiece is
Fitzgerald’s awareness of the multivalent nature of language and the thematic
use to which he puts that awareness.
Pronunciation: am phi bo LO gi a
Type: ungrammatical, illogical, or unusual uses of language

ANACOLUTHON: ending a sentence with a different syntactic structure from
that with which it began:

154  Brett Zimmerman

“We’ll all be failures?”
        “Yes. I don’t mean only money failures, but just sort of—of ineffectual
      and sad, and—oh, how can I tell you?” (“The Ice Palace” [1920], F&P 39)

“Anacoluthon” is a device of vehemence: we often do not speak in calm, linear
syntax (normal word order) when upset. In this case, Sally Carrol has diffi­
culty expressing herself because she is uncomfortable and embarrassed criticiz­
ing her dearest friends. Nicole evinces a similar embarrassment with Dick in
Tender Is the Night:

      If I hadn’t been sick would you—I mean, would I have been the sort of girl
      you might have—oh, slush, you know what I mean. (177)

Sometimes the feature appears not due to the embarrassment of the speaker but
simply due to rage. In Tender Is the Night, Baby Warren discovers that her money
and consequent influence have no effect on the natives as she attempts to get Dick
out of jail. At one point, she is so livid that she can barely express herself coherently:

      If it wasn’t for the scandal we can—I shall see that your indifference to this
      matter is reported in the proper quarter. (262)

“Anacoluthon” can also suggest mental distraction and even madness, like the
“derailing”—the broken, interrupted or unfinished syntax—that can c­ haracterize
the expressions of someone suffering from schizophrenia. Indeed, Nicole Diver
has been diagnosed with schizophrenia and now and then she does exhibit
derailing. In a letter she wrote to Dick, we find this puzzling sentence:

      My head aches so, so excuse this walking there like an ordinary with a
      white cat will explain, I think. (140)

Later, we find a passage concerning her improved mental health: “Nicole
seemed well-knit again; when a month had passed without tension, without
the tight mouth, the unmotivated smile, the unfathomable remark” (196). The
reference to “the unfathomable remark” can be interpreted as meaning Nicole’s
derailing, her “anacoluthon.”
   We see, then, that such devices of emotion are not merely ornamental, are
not used merely to “dress up” speech. Rather, they are rooted in psychology;
they indicate the mental/emotional state of a speaker. As Ben Jonson wrote,

                                                 Fitzgerald as Prose Technician   155

oratio imago animi, “speech is the image of the mind” (705). All great writers
recognize this insight, this truth—Poe and Shakespeare come to mind—and we
must place Fitzgerald among them. The use of such a device in dialogue shows
him to be a good linguistic psychologist: he recognizes how speech patterns can
indicate a character’s mental processes.
Pronunciation: an a co LU thon
Type: devices of vehemence
Type: ungrammatical, illogical, or unusual uses of language

ANANTAPODOTON: (anapodoton): a kind of ellipsis in which the second mem­
ber of a correlative expression is left unstated (Lanham 11). A correlative is an
expression that always involves the same elements—such as “if . . . then,” “not
only . . . but also,” “either . . . or,” “whether . . . or.” Sometimes, the missing
clause is a threat, making the figure one of vehemence:

      “If I had the little devils!” muttered Haley, between his teeth. (Stowe, Uncle
      Tom’s Cabin 86)

The slave catcher Haley might have given us the full statement in the form of the
“if . . . then” clause—something like this: “If I had the little devils, then I’d whip
them until they learned some respect!” (The device is similar to “­anacoluthon”,
in which the sentence ends with a different grammatical structure than that
with which it commenced; see above.) Dupriez makes no mention of missing
halves of correlative expressions (35); he simply defines the term as involving
a sentence abandoned before the end—in which case we can cite this example
from “The Ice Palace”:

      “Oh, Clark, I love you, and I love Joe here, and Ben Arrot, and you-all,
      but you’ll—you’ll—”
         “We’ll all be failures?” (F&P 39)

Sally Carrol is experiencing an awkward moment, unable or unwilling to
finish her sentence, as it is such a harsh judgment on her friends. Fitzgerald
­understands the old saying from Ben Jonson that speech is the image of the
 mind: our words, our hesitancies, our syntax—all reflect the mental turmoil
 or tranquility inside. Perhaps the most famous instance of “anantapodoton” in
 American literature is found at the conclusion of Gatsby:

156  Brett Zimmerman

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year
      recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—­tomorrow
      we will run faster, stretch out our arms further. . . . And one fine
      morning—
         So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into
      the past. (141)

Fitzgerald considers the rest of the clause unnecessary because it is understood
by the reader, but he may also omit it for thematic reasons: the lesson in futility
exemplified by Gatsby’s tragic experience suggests that the idealistic dream of
the future can never be attained in the vulgar world of modern America.
Pronunciation: a nan ta PO do ton
Type: addition, subtraction, and substitution: words, phrases, and clauses
Type: brevity
Type: vehemence

ANAPHORA: repetition of the same word or group of words at the beginning of
successive clauses or verses, usually in a parallel series. Fitzgerald’s employment
of devices of repetition and roughly parallel syntax is evident from the begin­
ning of his career, as this excerpt—from a larger passage reminiscent of Poe’s
1840 tale “The Man of the Crowd” (Selected Writings 232–39)—demonstrates:

      He pictured the rooms where these people lived—where the patterns of
      the blistered wall-papers were heavy reiterated sunflowers on green and
      ­yellow backgrounds, where there were tin bathtubs and gloomy hallways
       and verdureless, unnameable spaces in back of the buildings; where even
       love dressed as seduction—a sordid murder around the corner, illicit
       ­motherhood in the flat above. (TSOP 236)

Pronunciation: a NA pho ra
Type: repetition: words
Type: vehemence

ANTANACLASIS: this device has at least three distinct definitions: (1) ­punning
repetition; (2) homonymic pun; (3) the use of one word (or phrase) in two
senses, often contrasting, for comedy or “to drive a point home” (Frye et al.
38). It is obviously a type of pun. Dupriez provides yet another ­definition,

                                             Fitzgerald as Prose Technician   157

­ erhaps merely refining Frye’s third: “The speaker takes up the words of the
p
­interlocutor, or of the adversary, and changes their meaning to the speaker’s
 own advantage” (43). We find an exemplification of this last definition in
 “Babylon Revisited”:

      “I think Marion felt there was some kind of injustice in it—you not even
      working toward the end, and getting richer and richer.”
          “It went just as quick as it came,” said Charlie.
          “Yes, a lot of it stayed in the hands of chasseurs and saxophone
      ­players and maîtres d’hôtel—well, the big party’s over now.” (TAR 172)

Charlie is referring to the stock market crash of 1929 but his disapproving former
brother-in-law twists Charlie’s meaning by alluding to his spendthrift habits in
Paris before the crash. “Antanaclasis” employed this way shows its function as a
purely rhetorical device; here it suggests, broadly speaking, the rhetorical under­
pinnings often found in the antagonistic relations between Fitzgerald’s characters.
Pronunciation: an ta NA cla sis
Type: puns
Type: repetition: words

ANTIMETABOLE: sometimes called the “reversible raincoat”; inverting the
order of repeated words (AB:BA) to sharpen their sense or to contrast the ideas
they convey or both (Lanham 14):

      He wondered idly whether she was a poor conversationalist because she
      got no attention or got no attention because she was a poor conversa-
      tionalist. (“Bernice Bobs Her Hair” [1920], F&P 111)

As my acquaintance with U.S. fiction and oratory has taught me, Americans
love this device. It is certainly, at the very least, an indication of wit, though it
can also serve other significant functions—for instance, to suggest ironic rever­
sal (as occasionally in Thoreau). In Fitzgerald, as with anyone who employs
the device, it is an indication of wit and a close and careful attention to syntax.
Pronunciation: an ti me TA bo le
Type: balance
Type: repetition: words

ANTISTOECON: the substitution of one letter or sound for another within a
word—a fancy name for a spelling mistake, in other words. We may well ask,
as Quinn does at length (23–25), why a writer would deliberately misspell a

158  Brett Zimmerman

word. Certainly “antistoecon” can be used to reproduce dialect more accurately
(cf. barbarismus, below) or to suggest the ignorance of uneducated fools like
some of those we find in Huckleberry Finn (1884). The device clearly can have
a comedic function, too. In “May Day” (1920), two inebriated characters take
a cab to a hotel but are too drunk, once they arrive, to remember why they
wanted to go there in the first place:

      “Somep’m ’bouta coat,” suggested the taxi-man. (TJA 108)

“Antistoecon” appears often in the vernacular prose of the American literary
tradition, and Fitzgerald’s use of the device shows his good ear for the linguistic
subtleties of American informal speech.
Pronunciation: an ti STO e con
Type: addition, subtraction, and substitution: letters and syllables

ANTITHESIS: two opposed ideas set up in parallel form for comparison—but
then how would we differentiate it from “syncrisis” (see below)? Let us stay with
a looser definition of antithesis, the statement of opposites, but not necessarily
insist on syntactical parallelism. Here is an example from “Winter Dreams”
(1922) that at once marvels at the irresistible romantic appeal but also criticizes
the callous nature, even the moral bankruptcy, of the modern woman, the flap­
per Judy Jones:

      She had brought him ecstatic happiness and intolerable agony of spirit.
      (ASYM 57).

Fitzgerald likes the device—and, of course, it is a structural principle in the East–
West antithesis of The Great Gatsby and the North–South antithesis of the Tarleton,
Georgia, short story sequence, noticeable especially in “The Ice Palace.” Antithesis
functions in Fitzgerald, then, as a large structural principle at the “­macrocosmic”
level of entire texts but also at the “microcosmic” level of the sentence.
Pronunciation: an TI the sis
Type: balance, antithesis, paradox

APHAERESIS: the omission of a syllable or a letter from the beginning of a
word:

      “Anyway, I know you too well to fall in love with you.”
            “’At doesn’t mean you ought to marry a Yankee,” he persisted (“The
      Ice Palace,” F&P 38).

                                              Fitzgerald as Prose Technician   159

For an additional example, see below under “elision.” Fitzgerald employs this as
another device indicating the sloppy informality of American vernacular speech.
Pronunciation: a PHAE re sis
Type: addition, subtraction, and substitution: letters and syllables

APOCOPE: omitting a syllable or letter from the end of a word. The
device ­figures often in informal speech and is another of many devices dem­
onstrating Fitzgerald’s attention to linguistic mimesis in the dialogue of his
characters:

      Then why you gettin’ engaged to a Yankee? (“The Ice Palace,” F&P 39)

For an additional example, see below under “elision.”
Pronunciation: a PO co pe
Type: addition, subtraction, and substitution: letters and syllables

ASCHEMATISTON: most rhetors define this as (1) the absence of ornamental or
figured language. Some consider it a vice, “whereas we are more likely to see it as
a healthy sign of the plain style,” says Lanham (23). He provides a second defini­
tion, however: (2) “Unskillful use of figures” (24). We could consider the mixed
metaphor as an example. Since it is impossible to imagine the highly imagis­
tic prose of Fitzgerald as ever illustrating an absence of ­ornamental language,
then we are more likely to encounter only the second definition of “aschematis­
ton”. Indeed, he is notorious for his imagistic striving—and s­ ometimes he goes
too far:

      The Montana sunset lay between two mountains like a gigantic bruise from
      which dark arteries spread themselves over a poisoned sky. (“The Diamond
      as Big as the Ritz” [1922], TJA 130)

That is just terrible. We tend to imagine sunsets as bright, luminous, not dark
like bruises. And why should the Montana sky be “poisoned”? Curnutt has
written thoughtfully and insightfully on Fitzgerald’s prose style, and when he
complains about the writer’s tendency toward “overripe, metaphorical excess,”
he might have cited the above excerpt (“Literary Style” 40).
Pronunciation: a sche ma TIS ton
Type: ungrammatical, illogical, or unusual uses of language

160  Brett Zimmerman

ASSONANCE: a scheme of repetition involving a resemblance or similarity
between internal vowel sounds in neighboring words:

      Prosperous apostles known for their emotional acting go the rounds of
      the universities (68)
         . . . he wondered that people invariably chose inimitable people to
      imitate. (76)

These two examples from The Beautiful and Damned demonstrate Fitzgerald
the prose poet’s sensitivity to the aural potentialities of words.
Pronunciation: AS so nance
Type: repetition: letters and sounds

AUXESIS: (1) use of a heightened word (or phrase) in place of an ordinary
one (Lanham 26); magnifying the importance of something by referring
to it with a disproportionate name (Corbett and Connors 403); (2) words
or clauses placed in a climactic order; (3) building a point around a series
of ­comparisons. Fitzgerald employs the first definition in This Side of
Paradise:

      The waiter approached and Kerry gravely handed him a dollar,
      tossed two dollars on the check and turned away. They sauntered
      leisurely toward the door, pursued in a moment by the suspicious
      Ganymede. (76)

In Greek mythology, Ganymede was a cupbearer to Zeus; here it is a substitu­
tion for “waiter.” Used this way, “auxesis” is a kind of metonymic substitution
(see “metonymy,” below). Is it necessary in the above context? Does it contribute
to our understanding of plot, theme, or characterization—or is the very young
Fitzgerald merely employing a literary device, which he no doubt learned as an
undergraduate, merely to show off his “literariness”?
Pronunciation: aux E sis
Type: amplification
Type: metaphorical substitutions

 BARBARISMUS: a mistake in vocabulary, pronunciation, or grammar—an
­illiterate expression that violates the rules of a language due to ignorance or
 confusion (cf. malapropism). Since the early nineteenth century, at least,

                                            Fitzgerald as Prose Technician   161

American writers have had some fun with the dialects of uneducated slaves
and free Blacks. Fitzgerald is no exception:

      “Oh, Babe, is this your island?”
         The mulatto’s miniature head appeared from round the corner of the
      deckhouse.
         “Yas-suh! This yeah’s it.” (“The Offshore Pirate” [1920], F&P 19)

And let us not forget what some have called the anti-Semitic portrayal of Meyer
Wolfshiem in The Great Gatsby, suggested in part by Nick’s unflattering report­
ing of the gangster’s problematic pronunciation:

      I understand you’re looking for a business gonnegtion. (56)

Janet Giltrow and David Stouck maintain, correctly, that Nick Carraway has
an ear for the “accents of daily usage” (482), which he often mimics with ironic
intent: “The dialogic ironies of speech locate Nick in a socially elevated posi­
tion, this trick of rank or hierarchy deriving from his acute sense of social dif­
ferentials” and “an identifiable position in the social-order: Nick’s well-placed
family” (488).
   Occasionally, Fitzgerald uses “barbarismus” sportively, as when Amory
Blaine’s classmates make fun of him by ridiculing his vocal mannerisms:

      Aw—I b’lieve, doncherknow, the Umuricun revolution was lawgely an
      affair of the middul clawses. . . . (TSOP 16)

“Barbarismus” joins various kinds of linguistic omissions (see below) in
Fitzgerald’s arsenal of devices employed, comically, to indicate the sloppy,
slurred speech of intoxicated characters:

      “’S a mental was’e,” he insisted with owl-like wisdom. “Two years my life
      spent inalleshual vacuity. Los’ idealism, got be physical anmal.” (TSOP 186)

Finally, the device can be employed to demonstrate ignorance in a character—
in the case of Myrtle Wilson in Gatsby, pretentiousness as well:

      I had a woman up here last week to look at my feet and when she gave me
      the bill you’d of thought she had my appendicitus [appendix] out. (27)

162  Brett Zimmerman

Langman notices the ludicrous “appendicitus” but also Myrtle’s use of “you’d
of ” rather than the correct “you’d have.” “Exemplified here,” he points out, quite
rightly, is Fitzgerald’s “appreciation of language as an index to sensibility” and
the “accent and idiom of different social classes” (38).
Pronunciation: bar ba RIS mus
Type: ungrammatical, illogical, or unusual uses of language

BOMPHIOLOGIA: bombastic, pompous speech. Characters can be guilty of this
vice but Fitzgerald uses it in the following instance for satirical comedy:

      . . . the Bilphistic demiurge decided suddenly in mid-December that Mrs.
      Gilbert’s soul had aged sufficiently in its present incarnation. (B&D 161)

Fitzgerald in a more serious mood might have written more simply and prosai­
cally, “Mrs. Gilbert died.” Lanham relates this term to “macrologia,” long-winded
speech in which more words are used than necessary (29). Taylor (79–80) con­
siders “bomphiologia” as a kind of hyperbole similar to “auxesis” (see above).
Pronunciation: bom phi o LO gi a
Type: amplification
Type: “comedic”

BREVITAS: concise expression:

      His determination to stay in at night during the week did not survive, and
      a good half of the time he came to work with a splitting, sickish headache
      and the crowded horror of the morning subway ringing in his ears like
      an echo of hell.
         Then, abruptly, he quit. (B&D 195)

The idea of abruptness is illustrated effectively with the curt statement that fol­
lows the long-winded sentence preceding it. Clearly, Fitzgerald could demon­
strate an awareness that style can illustrate theme, a cognizance found in and a
practice illustrated by the greatest of prose stylists. We may be put in mind of
Fitzgerald’s advice to his daughter, Scottie, about writing: “the thing you have
to say and the way of saying it [should] blend as one matter—as indissolubly as
if they were conceived together” (Fitzgerald, Letters 11).
Pronunciation: BRE vi tas
Type: brevity

                                             Fitzgerald as Prose Technician   163

CHARIENTISMUS: a type of irony involving the glossing over of a disagreeable
subject with more agreeable language; soothing over a difficulty, or turning aside
antagonism with a joke or pleasant words (Lanham 33; Sonnino 198–99). Dupriez
lists this term under “persiflage,” “Light banter or raillery; a frivolous manner of
treating any subject” (339). Harmon and Holman (90) provide this example:

      I graduated from New Haven in 1915, just a quarter of a century after my
      father, and a little later I participated in that delayed Teutonic migration
      known as the Great War. (GG 6)

This passage exemplifies the first definition, above, and clearly compares with
“euphemism.”
Pronunciation: cha ri en TIS mus
Type: techniques of argument

CHIASMOS (sometimes spelled chiasmus): reversing the arrangement of sub­
ject and complement in successive clauses (AB:BA)—or, more generally, any
arrangement in which words are repeated in reverse order:

      The notion of sitting down and conjuring up, not only words in which to
      clothe thoughts but thoughts worthy of being clothed—the whole thing
      was absurdly beyond his desires. (B&D 22)

While some rhetors make no distinction between “antimetabole” (see above)
and “chiasmos,” I would insist on differentiating: in “antimetabole” the exact
same two words are reversed in order and case functioning; in “chiasmos” the
words reversed are not entirely the same and up to four different words can be
used. Like “antimetabole,” “chiasmos” can be used to suggest ironic reversal and
to get us to see relationships in a new light—a fact with which Henry David
Thoreau was familiar:

      We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us. (Walden [1854] 62)

I cannot claim, at least with the examples of “antimetabole” and “chiasmos”
I have provided from Fitzgerald, that his use of these devices serves any
­significant rhetorical function; they seem rather to demonstrate a kind of
 ­syntactical wit.
  Pronunciation: chi AS mos
  Type: balance, antithesis, paradox

164  Brett Zimmerman

CLICHÉ: a trite, banal, commonplace, worn-out expression that was once c­ leverly
original. This is not a rhetorical term, strictly speaking, and from the French
rather than the Greek or Latin. In French, a cliché is the stereotype plate used in
printing; hence, a cliché is a stereotyped expression. Except for deliberate satire
or comedy, all good writers avoid them and their use in the mouths of characters
can tell us how unimaginative those characters can be. As Dupriez argues, how­
ever, a cliché can be revived by the substitution of terms, which is exactly what
the witty Fitzgerald does with the phrase “blood is thicker than water”—

      When Amory had the whooping cough four disgusted specialists glared at
      each other hunched around his bed; when he took scarlet fever the number
      of attendants, including physicians and nurses, totalled fourteen. However,
      blood being thicker than broth, he was pulled through. (TSOP 13)

—or with “To the victor belong the spoils”:

      Don’t let the victor belong to the spoils. (B&D 160)

Pronunciation: clee SHAE

DIAERESIS: (1) dividing a larger component into its constituent smaller ones in
order to explore the idea more fully—a way of taking a general statement and
amplifying, enlarging it, by examining its details; (2) dividing one syllable into
two, pronouncing each, as in preëminent. We find an instance of the first defini­
tion in This Side of Paradise: “The rain gave Amory a feeling of detachment, and
the numerous unpleasant aspects of city life without money occurred to him in
threatening procession.” That is the general statement; here follows the elabora­
tion, the amplification:

      There was the ghastly, stinking crush of the subway—the car-cards thrust­
      ing themselves at one, leering out like dull bores who grab your arm with
      another story; the querulous worry as to whether someone isn’t leaning
      on you; a man deciding not to give his seat to a woman, hating her for it;
      the woman hating him for not doing it; at worst a squalid phantasmagoria
      of breath, and old cloth on human bodies and the smells of the food men
      ate—at best just people—too hot or too cold, tired, worried—. (236)

Sometimes, Lanham tells us, the amplification can involve the “division of
subject into adjuncts, cause into effects, antecedent into consequents” (55).

                                             Fitzgerald as Prose Technician   165

At any rate, the passage above joins many vivid descriptions of metropolises
found in the Fitzgerald oeuvre.
    Giltrow and Stouck also discuss types of syntactical accumulations, ampli­
fications, but with the term appositives. They note that Nick in Gatsby will now
and then begin a sentence that merely moves the narrative forward in time
and place but that subsequent amplifying appositives bring the narrative into
the realm of possibility, the imagination, poetic invention, heightened sensa­
tion, romantic conceits, and aspirations of ambition (480). Here Nick describes
Gatsby:

      For a while these reveries provided an outlet for his imagination; they were
      a satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the
      world was founded securely on a fairy’s wing. (77)

The appositive clauses after the colon amplify the initial independent clause; their
diction (“hint,” “unreality of reality,” “promise,” “fairy’s wing”) suggests that, while
being repelled by Gatsby’s world, the moralistic Nick is simultaneously drawn to
and even enchanted by his host’s romantic vision. Carraway’s narrative style of
speaking “registers two views simultaneously” (Giltrow and Stouck 481).
Pronunciation: di AE re sis
Pronunciation: di nu me RA ti o
Type: amplification
Type: techniques of argument

ELISION: the omission of a vowel, consonant, or syllable in pronunciation.
Rhetorical terms for the subtraction of letters and syllables are the following:

• “aphaeresis”: omitting a syllable or letter(s) from the beginning of a word:

       How ’bout hurryin’ up? (F&P 37)

• “apocope”: omitting a syllable or letter from the end of a word:

       Come on go swimmin’—want to? (F&P 37)

• “synalepha”: omitting letters so that two words are fused into one:

       ’Tain’t mawnin’, Sally Carrol. (F&P 36)

• “syncope”: omitting a syllable or letter from the middle of a word:

       S’pose I love him? (F&P 38)

166  Brett Zimmerman

As these examples from “The Ice Palace” demonstrate, Fitzgerald makes good
use of every type of elision to mimic the casual way many people really do talk;
the device makes for linguistic verisimilitude in the tradition initiated by Mark
Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. This condition is carried on, either
through ignorance or through shrewd calculation, by Marcia Tarbox in her
book “Sandra Pepys, Syncopated,” as the newspaper review remarks: “A distinct
contribution to American dialect literature”; “No attempt at literary tone; the
book derives its very quality from this fact, as did ‘Huckleberry Finn’” (“Head
and Shoulders” [1920], F&P 85).
   Additionally, and somewhat humorously, Fitzgerald employs elisions to
indicate the inexact speech of intoxication—something we would expect to
find frequently in the Fitzgerald canon. In “May Day,” Peter Himmel is, as he
puts it, “a li’l stewed” (TJA 91)—but, oddly, Fitzgerald has the narrator mimic
Peter’s drunken speech at a second remove rather than letting Peter speak in his
own person as he attempts to apologize to Edith Bradin for his earlier boorish
behavior:

      She was a mos’ beautiful girl in whole worl’. Mos’ beautiful eyes, like stars
      above. He wanted to ’pologize—firs’, for presuming try to kiss her. . . .
      (TJA 92)

In “Babylon Revisited,” Charlie Wales attempts to demonstrate to his skepti­
cal, judgmental in-laws that his days of alcoholic revelries are behind him,
that he is rehabilitated, and that he can now be relied upon to take custody
of his daughter once and for all—but when two of his old drinking com­
panions show up, and one of them speaks like this, “Come and dine. Sure
your cousins won’ mine. See you so sel’om” (TAR 175), it is likely that most
readers sense that his whole scheme will come crashing down. At any rate,
Fitzgerald’s use of elision (as well as other devices of omission—see below)
to indicate intoxication is a linguistic habit he displays as early as This Side
of Paradise.
Pronunciation: e LEE shun
Type: addition, subtraction, and substitution: letters and syllables
Type: ungrammatical, illogical, or unusual uses of language

ELLIPSIS: a kind of “minus additioning,” the omission of a word or words in a
clause that would be necessary for full grammatical completeness but not for
understanding of meaning. As with his use of elisions (see above), Fitzgerald

                                            Fitzgerald as Prose Technician   167

often employs ellipsis rather humorously to indicate the linguistic inexactitude
of drunken speech:

      “Don’t serve it? Ne’mind. We force ’em serve it. Bring pressure bear.”
        “Bring logic bear.” (“May Day,” TJA 108)

Sometimes he joins words that normally would be separated by another—in
this case, a preposition (“of ”):

      I thin’ if you gave me a glassbrandy I could go downstairs. (“The Rich Boy”
      [1926], ASYM 12)

Pronunciation: el LIP sis
Type: addition, subtraction, and substitution: words, phrases, and clauses
Type: brevity

EPANALEPSIS: (1) the repetition at the end of a clause, verse, or sentence of
the word or phrase with which it began. Here is an example from Poe’s tale
“Berenice” (1835):

      Convinced myself, I seek not to convince. (Selected Writings 141)

The sentence itself is a closed entity, the word convince acting as a barrier on
both ends, which functions rhetorically to suggest that the matter (in this case,
the theory of prebirth existence) is not open to discussion; the matter is closed.
Quinn suggests that “epanalepsis tends to make the sentence or clause in which
it occurs stand apart from its surroundings” (89). Certainly the repeated words
seem to create walls enclosing the words in between and perhaps to draw atten­
tion to them.
    The device does not just work on the sentence level, though, for it can func­
tion to begin and close entire texts. It functions this way in Shirley Jackson’s
novel The Haunting of Hill House (1959), as it does in “The Ice Palace” as Clark
Darrow rides up in his rickety Ford and stops in front of Sally Carrol’s steps:

      “Good mawnin’ .”
      With difficulty Clark twisted his tall body round and bent a distorted
   glance on the window.

168  Brett Zimmerman

“’Tain’t mawnin’, Sally Carrol.”
      “Isn’t it, sure enough?”
      “What you doin’?”
      “Eatin’ ’n apple.”
      “Come on go swimmin’—want to?”
      “Reckon so.” (F&P 36–37)

After Sally Carrol’s disastrous and traumatic excursion to the wintery northern
states, she has returned to the languid and heat-soaked Dixie, the climate and
environment she loves, as her life has come full circle to its original routine and
customary patterns:

      “Good mawnin’ .”
      A head appeared tortuously from under the car top below.
      “’Tain’t mawnin’, Sally Carrol.”
      “Sure enough!” she said in affected surprise. “I guess maybe not.”
      “What you doin’?”
      “Eatin’ green peach. ’Spect to die any minute.”
      Clark twisted himself a last impossible notch to get a view of her face.
      “Water’s warm as a kettla steam, Sally Carroll. Wanta go swimmin’?”
      “Hate to move,” sighed Sally Carrol lazily, “but I reckon so.” (60)

These two parallel passages enclose the tale like a pair of parentheses, suggest­
ing the circumscribed boundaries of Sally Carrol’s life—and, perhaps, the limits
of a lazy, languid, unproductive southern lifestyle, which Fitzgerald does not
explicitly condemn.
Pronunciation: e pa na LEP sis
Type: repetition: words and phrases

EPIC SIMILE: an elaborated comparison differing from the ordinary
simile in being more involved, more ornate, and often beginning with As
or As when ­followed eventually by so or even so. We find a few in This Side of
Paradise:

      As an actress even in the fullest flush of her own conscious magnetism gets
      a deep impression of most of the people in the front row, so Isabelle sized
      up her antagonist. (66)

                                            Fitzgerald as Prose Technician   169

Clara Page is also described with an epic simile:

      As an open fire in a dark room throws romance and pathos into the quiet
      faces at its edge, so she cast her lights and shadows around the rooms that
      held her. . . . (131)

This type of comparison is also called an “Homeric simile” after its first prac­
titioner, and it is imitated by Virgil, Milton, and other writers of epics in part
“to enhance the ceremonial quality and wide-ranging reference of the narrative
style” (Abrams and Harpham 99). As Moby-Dick (1851) is an oceanic epic, it is
perfectly appropriate that Melville should employ the device, but Fitzgerald’s
employment of it seems entirely inappropriate in the context of his first novel—
at least, as used in the service of characterization (as above).
Type: description
Type: metaphorical substitutions and puns

EPIZEUXIS: emphatic repetition of a word with no other words between. Like
other devices of repetition, “epizeuxis” can function to suggest heightened emo­
tions. Espy suggests that “We are likely to use epizeuxis in moments of stress”
(92) when we are so overwhelmed emotionally that other words (synonyms or
elaborations) are beyond our powers of expression. This example from “The
Ice Palace” illustrates Espy’s point beautifully, as Sally Carrol has an emotional
breakdown after her traumatic experience lost in the frozen labyrinth of the ice
palace:

      “Oh, I want to get out of here! I’m going back home. Take me home”—her
      voice rose to a scream that sent a chill to Harry’s heart as he came ­racing
      down the next passage— . . . “Tomorrow! Tomorrow! Tomorrow!”
      (F&P 60)

In “Babylon Revisited,” Fitzgerald employs the device to indicate childish speech:

      Good-bye dads dads dads dads. (TAR 166)

“Epizeuxis” can involve a phrase rather than a single word.
Pronunciation: e pi ZEUX is
Type: repetition: words

170  Brett Zimmerman

IMAGERY: in literature, an image can be a representation of a scene or object
(a castle, for instance)—a mental picture evoked by a descriptive passage in
a poem or prose; but “imagery” also refers to qualities of sense perception in
addition to the visual. Thus, the different kinds of images relate to our senses.
Fitzgerald is celebrated for his striking imagery—for the “painterly” qualities
illustrated by some of his passages (the term is Langman’s [36]). Here are some
categories:
    “auditory imagery”: appealing to our sense of hearing:

      The clink of glasses and the slap of hands on the bars issued from saloons. . . .
      (“Winter Dreams,” ASYM 60).

“gustatory imagery”: appealing to our sense of taste.
“kinesthetic imagery”: sensations of movement.
“olfactory imagery”: appealing to our sense of smell:

      From the room she had left drifted out the heavy fragrance left by the
      passage to and fro of many scented young beauties—rich perfumes and
      the fragile memory-laden dust of fragrant powders. This odor drifting
      out acquired the tang of cigarette smoke in the hall, and then settled
      sensuously down the stairs and permeated the ballroom where the
      Gamma Psi dance was to be held. It was an odor she knew well, exciting,
      stimulating, restlessly sweet—the odor of a fashionable dance. (“May
      Day,” TJA 80)

“tactile imagery”: appealing to our sense of touch:

      she felt something on her cheek—it felt wet. Someone had seized her and
      was rubbing her face with snow. (“The Ice Palace,” F&P 59)

“thermal imagery”: appealing to our sense of hot and cold. “The Ice Palace” is a
study in contrasts between aspects of the American South and North, including
temperature differences:

      And round the drowsy picturesqueness, over the trees and shacks and
      muddy rivers, flowed the heat, never hostile, only comforting like a great
      warm nourishing bosom for the infant earth. (F&P 40)

                                               Fitzgerald as Prose Technician   171

The snow had filtered into the vestibules and covered the floor with a
      slippery coating. It was intriguing, this cold, it crept in everywhere. Her
      breath was quite visible. . . . (F&P 44)

“visual (optical) imagery”: appealing to our sense of sight. This category
includes “chromatic” imagery, descriptions of colors:

      This unlikely story begins on a sea that was a blue dream, as colorful as
      blue silk stockings, and beneath a sky as blue as the irises of children’s
      eyes. From the western half of the sky the sun was shying little golden
      disks at the sea—if you gazed intently enough you could see them skip
      from wave tip to wave tip until they joined a broad collar of golden coin
      that was collecting half a mile out and would eventually be a dazzling
      sunset. (F&P 5)

Curnutt comments on this passage: “‘The Offshore Pirate’ suggests how
Fitzgerald’s palette creates an almost Day-Glo luminosity that renders the set­
ting every bit as fantastic as the faux-kidnapping plot” (Cambridge 108). Readers
and critics have been complaining since Fitzgerald’s time about his imagistic
excesses, what Curnutt calls “sumptuous overstatement” (107); he cites the fol­
lowing passage from the opening of “The Ice Palace” to illustrate:

      The sunlight dripped over the house like golden paint over an art jar, and
      the freckling shadows here and there only intensified the rigor of the bath
      of light. (F&P 36)

In this word picture, Fitzgerald is employing the concept of chiaroscuro, the
contrast between light and dark (here, golden sunlight and shadows). One
wonders if he was familiar with the theories of his contemporary, Johannes
Itten (1888–1967), whose theory of composition was based on the concept of
contrast. Itten taught at the Bauhaus, the German school of art, design, and
architecture, which was very influential in the 1920s.
    “synaesthesia”: a special use of imagery—employing one sense to describe
another. Here Fitzgerald is describing music, something that appeals
to our sense of hearing, with a color, yellow, which appeals to our sense of seeing:

      now the orchestra is playing yellow cocktail music, and the opera of voices
      pitches a key higher. (GG 34)

172  Brett Zimmerman

Bryer cites that image as an instance of a “recurrent pattern in Gatsby [of]
the linking of nouns with unusual descriptive adjectives.” He goes on to say,
“while studies of color symbolism in Gatsby are numerous, few have noted
how strikingly unusual and jarring these colors seem when paired with the
objects they describe”; “the effect is a mixture of surprise and a realization
of appropriateness” (125). In The Beautiful and Damned, Fitzgerald provides
more examples of unusual synaesthetic pairings when he describes smells
with colors:

      From the door came a smell that was hot, doughy, and pink . . . then a
      Chinese laundry, still open, steamy and stifling, smelling folded and
      vaguely yellow. (29)

How is it possible to smell yellow? For that matter, how is it possible to smell
folded? For additional examples, see below under “synaesthesia.”
   The examples above might convey the idea that Fitzgerald’s image types are
isolated; however, his more elaborate passages combine image categories, as in
this excerpt from “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz” describing the Washington
château:

      The many towers, the slender tracery of the sloping parapets, the chiselled
      wonder of a thousand yellow windows with their oblongs and hectagons
      and triangles of golden light, the shattered softness of the intersecting
      planes of starshine and blue shade, all trembled on John’s spirit like a
      chord of music. On one of the towers, the tallest, the blackest at its base,
      an arrangement of exterior lights at the top made a sort of floating fairy­
      land—and as John gazed up in warm enchantment the faint acciaccatura
      sound of violins drifted down in a rococo harmony that was like nothing
      he had ever heard before. Then in a moment the car stopped before wide,
      high marble steps around which the night air was fragrant with a host of
      flowers. (TJA 134–35)

This excerpt is another notable Fitzgeraldean word picture replete with visual,
chromatic, auditory, and olfactory imagery. We might call it gorgeous (to
use a term popular in the 1920s). A nearby passage describing John’s over­
whelmed sensations might function nicely as a statement about the author’s
stylistic techniques: “Afterward John remembered that first night as a daze
of many ­colors, of quick sensory impressions, of music soft as a voice in love

                                            Fitzgerald as Prose Technician   173