“I didn’t Get Over”

The war and the army were background, the “world without” in which the really important “world within” was forced to operate. When the Armistice was signed a year later, just as Fitzgerald was at the point of embarkation for overseas, a new realization set in: the war was ended and “to his everlasting regret, Fitzgerald had missed it”. “‘I Didn’t Get Over,’” he entitled a 1936 story about army life. In a 1920 article, Fitzgerald described his preoccupation in 1917: By autumn was in an infantry officers’ training camp … with poetry in the discard and a brand-new ambition— was writing an immortal novel. The completion and rejection of the second version of “The Romantic Egotist” make a sort of ending to one phase of Fitzgerald’s life, overlapping into the next which turned almost entirely around Zelda Sayre. It is a transition document in other ways as well.