On the morning of 23 March 2010, the contents of unit 114 of a self-storage facility on San Antonio Road, Palo Alto, California, were sold at auction under the state's lien law, the rent having gone unpaid in consequence of a bankruptcy that the Papers themselves will reach in their own time, and which the editor will therefore not anticipate here. The purchaser, a dealer in used office furniture, expected filing cabinets. He got them; but the cabinets were full, and what they were full of he had the very good sense to sell on, unread, to the university that has employed me to prepare it for the press.
The unit contained sixty-two yellow legal pads, written over in a strong, rapid hand that deteriorates in the later bundles; a further quantity of manuscript on the stationery of some nineteen hotels; a shoebox of photographs, most of them annotated in the same hand and several of them well known from other men's biographies; a pair of white canvas tennis shoes of a pattern manufactured in the early 1920s, much worn, wrapped in tissue with something like care; and one unposted letter, dated September 1922, addressed in a copperplate script to a Mr. E. Klipspringer and signed by the under-butler of an estate in West Egg, Long Island, requesting instructions for the forwarding of certain effects. The reader will learn, soon enough, what the shoes and the letter are. I confess I have never opened the tissue again after the first time. One develops, in this work, a feeling for which objects are exhibits and which are wounds.
The hand, and internal evidence of a volume that will become apparent, identify the author beyond argument as Jay Klipspringer — the same whose death in October 2009, at eighty-six, was marked by the long and affectionate obituaries the reader may remember: the six honorary doctorates, the presidential medal, the photographs beside four further Presidents, the famous prescience of March 2000, the title, bestowed on television and never afterward shaken off, of "the conscience of the Valley." The Papers now published are his own account of how each of these things was come by. If they are to be believed, the obituaries were accurate in the dates and in the spelling of his name.
Whether they are to be believed is the question the reader will ask, and the editor is obliged to answer it squarely: I do not know, and I have stopped expecting to. Wherever the Papers can be checked, they check. The buildings stand where he says; the weather over Burbank on a certain Sunday in May 1942 was as he says; men long dead said in their letters what he reports them saying in his rooms. But the Papers display, throughout, a genius for asserting precisely that which cannot be checked, and the author was aware of the property, and proud of it. I have accordingly annotated rather than argued. Where he can be corroborated, the notes corroborate him; where he can be contradicted, they contradict him; where he can be neither, the reader is on his own, as the author always intended.
One claim, because it governs everything, must be addressed at the outset. The author maintains — not as a flourish, but flatly, as a man states his address — that the novel published by Charles Scribner's Sons in April 1925 as The Great Gatsby is a work of reportage; that its people lived; and that the minor figure called Klipspringer, occupation "the boarder," was his father. The editor's position is as follows. The guests catalogued in that novel's fourth chapter have been traced by three generations of scholars to their living originals with fair success; the boarder is among the few who has never been traced to anyone. Fitzgerald's working papers at Princeton contain, on the verso of an early draft leaf, the pencilled memorandum "Klip — real one? ask Ring," which scholarship has not found occasion to pursue. I pursue nothing. I print.
Of the editing there is little to say. The author's spelling, which was confident and wrong, has been corrected. His names have been left as he wrote them, with two exceptions made on the advice of counsel, both indicated where they occur, and one exception made by the author himself, for reasons he promises to give and the reader is advised to remember. Nothing has been softened. The author's opinions of women, of the poor, of the honest, and of every race and calling that ever obstructed him are printed as written, not because they ornament him but because they were the working equipment of the century that decorated him, and to launder the instrument would be to falsify the crime.
The author left the manuscript sorted into nine bundles, each tied with string and labeled in his own hand, and I have followed his arrangement. The first is marked Trinity. There is also a tenth bundle, much thinner, marked only R. — later. The editor has read it, has taken certain advice, and will say only that it is not what the reader will suppose, and that it is not to be published at this time.
It remains to answer the question I am most often asked: what value there can be in the sworn confession of a man who states, on his first page, that he lied to everyone he ever met for sixty years. I can only reply that every liar retires, and that this one, having outlived all profit, all subpoenas, and every man who could contradict him, found himself at the end with a single audience left — posterity — and could not resist telling it, at length and in his best form, what fools its grandparents had been. Vanity brought him to honesty as it had brought him to everything else. It is the one witness in these Papers whose testimony I have never had cause to doubt.
Palo Alto, 2026 — Ed.