One Trip Abroad

Master the 40: The Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald

For our tenth episode we explore a short story we think falls just outside of the Top 10: October 11, 1930's "One Trip Abroad," which totally blows anything else in that issue of the Saturday Evening Post out of the water. Many critics considered it Fitzgerald's second greatest story about expatriation after "Babylon Revisited," which was written right on the heels of this masterful depiction of marital disillusionment and moral drift. The story came at a desperate time: following Zelda's June 1930 entry to Les Rives des Prangins in Switzerland Scott needed to crank out a story roughly every six weeks to pay for her $1,000-a-month treatment (that's $12k today). The pressure produced some of his best work, but unfortunately he repurposed portions of "Abroad" for Tender Is the Night, which is why this story wasn't republished in Taps at Reveille, despite its excellence. As Nelson and Nicole Kelley drift from North Africa to Italy to Monte Carlo to Paris, they find themselves besieged by the placelessness and purposelessness of expatriation. Fitzgerald touches on great themes of ethnocentrism and Orientalization, especially in the opening section set in Algeria, and captures the sense of retreat Switzerland's clinic culture offered weary travelers. We explore these and other issues, including his use of the doppelgänger or double that gives the story a Gothic edge. "One Trip Abroad" is an underappreciated masterpiece that dramatizes how even when writing under financial pressure Fitzgerald could tap his genius for melancholy.