The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Other Jazz Age Stories (Penguin Classics) Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Introduction

  Acknowledgements

  FLAPPERS AND PHILOSOPHERS

  The Offshore Pirate

  The Ice Palace

  Head and Shoulders

  The Cut-Glass Bowl

  Bernice BobsHer Hair

  Benediction

  Dalyrimple Goes Wrong

  The Four Fists

  TALES OF THE JAZZ AGE

  The Jelly-Bean

  The Camel’s Back

  May Day

  Porcelain and Pink

  The Diamond as Big as the Ritz

  The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

  Tarquin of Cheapside

  “O Russet Witch!”

  The Lees of Happiness

  Mr. Icky

  Jemina, The Mountain Girl

  APPENDIX

  EXPLANATORY NOTES

  FOR MORE FROM F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, LOOK FOR THE

  THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON AND OTHER JAZZ AGE STORIES

  F. SCOTT FITZGERALD was born on September 24, 1896, in St. Paul, Minnesota. He entered Princeton University in 1913, where he began to write and publish much of what would become This Side of Paradise. In 1920, he married Zelda Sayre; in the same year, This Side of Paradise, his first novel, was published, followed by a collection of stories, Flappers and Philosophers. In 1921 his daughter, Frances Scott Fitzgerald, was born. A second novel and collection of short stories, The Beautiful and the Damned and Tales of the Jazz Age, respectively, were published in 1922. Fitzgerald’s major novel, The Great Gatsby, was published in 1925. After several years of traveling and moving during the onset and progress of Zelda’s mental illness, Fitzgerald published Tender Is the Night in 1934 and a collection of stories, Taps at Reveille, in 1935. In 1936, Fitzgerald published a series of confessional essays in Esquire that would be collected under the title The Crack-Up and published in this form after his death. In the late ’30s, Fitzgerald moved to Hollywood where he worked on screenplays and began writing his final novel, The Last Tycoon, which remained unfinished at the time of his death due to consequences following a heart attack on December 21, 1940.

  PATRICK O’DONNELL is professor of English and American literature at Michigan State University. He is the author of several essays and books on modern and contemporary American fiction, including Latent Destinies: Cultural Paranoia in Contemporary U.S. Narrative, Echo Chambers: Reading Voice in Modern Narrative, Passionate Doubts: Designs of Interpretation in Contemporary American Fiction, and John Hawkes. He has taught at several universities in the United States and Europe, and in 2005 he was the Walt Whitman Distinguished Fulbright Chair at Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands.

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  Flappers and Philosophers first published in the United States of America by Charles Scribner’s Sons 1920

  Tales of the Jazz Age published by Charles Scribner’s Sons 1922

  This volume with an introduction and notes by Patrick O’Donnell previously published

  as Jazz Age Stories in Penguin Books 1998

  This edition published in Penguin Books 2008

  Introduction and notes copyright © Patrick O’Donnell, 1998

  All rights reserved

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

  Fitzgerald, F. Scott (Francis Scott), 1896-1940.

  The curious case of Benjamin Button and other Jazz Age stories / F. Scott Fitzgerald;

  edited with an introduction and explanatory notes by Patrick O’Donnell.

  p. cm.—(Penguin classics)

  Contents: The offshore pirate—The ice palace—Head and shoulders—The cut-glass bowl—

  Bernice bobs her hair—Benediction—Dalyrimple goes wrong—The four fists—The jelly-bean—

  The camel’s back—May Day—Porcelain and pink.

  Includes bibliographical references (p. xxv).

  eISBN : 978-0-143-10549-7

  1. United States—Social life and customs—20th century—Fiction.

  2. Nineteen twenties—Fiction. I. O’Donnell, Patrick, 1948-

  II. Title. III. Series.

  PS3511.I9A61999

  823’.912—dc21 98-38479

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  INTRODUCTION

  Often considered to be the author of “the great American novel” in The Great Gatsby (1925), F. Scott Fitzgerald is not generally regarded as a great short-story writer. While perhaps a dozen of his stories are remembered—“The Diamond as Big as the Ritz,” “The Ice Palace,” and “Winter Dreams” are perennially anthologized—for the most part, the nearly 180 stories and dramatic sketches Fitzgerald wrote (65 of these appeared in The Saturday Evening Post alone) remain known primarily to Fitzgerald scholars and aficionados. The common perception of Fitzgerald’s career as a short-story writer is that he wrote stories for the money he needed to support an extravagant lifestyle while he devoted his more serious energies to the writing of novels such as Gatsby, The Beautiful and Damned (1922), and Tender Is the Night (1934), which, following the remarkable success of This Side of Paradise (1920), had disappointing sales during Fitzgerald’s lifetime.

  It is true that Fitzgerald earned his living writing stories: by 1929, he could command $4,000 per story from The Saturday Evening Post (perhaps equivalent to as much as $50,000 in today’s currency), and over the length of his career between 1919 and 1940, Fitzgerald earned more than $240,000 from the publication of his stories, while he earned less than $100,000 from advances and royalties on his novels. But the fact that story writing was Fitzgerald’s financial mainstay should not overshadow his accomplishments as an author of short fiction. Fitzgerald wrote stories from the time he was an adolescent until he died at the age of forty-four; during his career he assembled four collections of stories that he carefully edited and revised for book publication. Even though he often disparaged and misjudged the quality of his stories, it is clear that Fitzgerald was as serious about the craft of story w
riting as he was about becoming a novelist; moreover, Fitzgerald’s stories are not merely the pretexts for his novels—many of them stand alone as the discrete productions of a major writer who used the form of the short story to experiment with new styles, innovative narrative strategies, and emerging concepts. For Fitzgerald, the short story also offered to a form in which he could try out his artistry, and in which he could capture in kaleidoscopic fashion scenes of American life and culture as they passed by with the increasing velocity of what has come to be known as “the Jazz Age.”

  The four collections Fitzgerald assembled for publication during his lifetime include Flappers and Philosophers (1920), Tales of the Jazz Age (1922), All the Sad Young Men (1926), and Taps at Reveille (1935). The first two are brought together here as The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Other Jazz Age Stories. The tales in these collections are, variously and with few exceptions, vignettes of courtship and marriage, fantasy and disillusion that take place literally or metaphorically within the fast-paced, spirited “age” that came in the wake of World War I, the era of “trial marriages,” frenetic dances, and bathtub gin typified by the icons of the flapper and the raccoon coat. Fitzgerald’s representation of these times occurs in his stories of the late teens and twenties, and most famously in The Great Gatsby; here, the age of the flapper—the Jazz Age—is one of disenchantment and skepticism, of a failed and vulnerable romanticism that takes the place of lost belief in the old gods of order and progress, and of exuberant, inflationary excess in which the philosophy of carpe diem vies with the restrictions of Prohibition as the gap between the rich and the poor expands to the point of collapse with the stock market crash of 1929.

  At the behest of Scribner’s, the publishers of his first novel, This Side of Paradise—and following a market strategy that stipulated the publication of a story collection succeed the publication of a novel within six months—Fitzgerald collected in Flappers and Philosophers and Tales of the Jazz Age stories that he had written between 1915 and 1921, during the time he metamorphosed from Princeton undergraduate to successful, married writer living and working in New York City. Several of the stories had first appeared in popular magazines and annuals including The Saturday Evening Post, Scribner’s Magazine, and The Smart Set, as well as Princeton undergraduate literary journals such as the Nassau Literary Magazine. Together, the stories of Fitzgerald’s first two collections might be thought of as apprentice work and, thus, doubly stories of an age in which Fitzgerald’s maturation as a writer runs parallel to the maturation of a generation—the “lost generation” of Gertrude’s Stein’s famous dictum—for whom the experience of the Great War’s massive destructiveness represents the annihilation of innocence in the consecration of adolescence and death. Fitzgerald’s fiction of this period, which, like the age itself, reflects a protraction of adolescent idealism and dissolution set against the disillusions of historical experience, will culminate in The Great Gatsby with its final, grim recognition of the hold the past has upon the generational dreams of escape and transcendence: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” The stories of Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age are thus tales of the incongruous relation between what Fitzgerald saw as his generation’s hopes and its experience—an incongruity that, when recognized in the epiphanies of these stories, can variously result in ironic amusement, frenetic activity, despair, dissipation, listless acceptance, and even, occasionally, transformation.

  Fitzgerald began writing and publishing stories as a student at St. Paul Academy, a private high school near the family home in St. Paul, Minnesota. He was thirteen years old in 1909 when his first story, “The Mystery of the Raymond Mortgage,” was published in the school literary magazine, the St. Paul Academy Now and Then; the last story to be published in his lifetime, “A Patriotic Short,” one of the “Pat Hobby” stories about a Hollywood screenwriter, appeared in Esquire in December 1940. An author, then, of stories for more than three decades, Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald, was born on September 24, 1896, in St. Paul to Edward and Mary Fitzgerald; his father, a traveling salesman, had moved the family to New York in search of success during Fitzgerald’s childhood, but when Scott was eleven years old the family returned to the St. Paul family home of Scott’s maternal grandmother, Louisa McQuillan, after his father was fired from his job in Buffalo. With his father ruined financially, Scott grew up as a poorer relation in the prosperous, Catholic McQuillan household; this provided a basis for the fear of poverty and obsession with money that was to become so prominent in both his life and his fiction. In childhood, his health was precarious, and his mother often took him south to Washington, D.C., in order to escape the St. Paul winters.

  Entering St. Paul Academy in 1908, Scott began to write and to develop a circle of friends. He would base many of the “Basil and Josephine” stories he wrote between 1928 and 1931 upon the adolescent relationships he formed during his years at St. Paul’s. In 1911, concerned about his poor academic performance, his parents enrolled him in Newman, a Catholic boarding school near New York City. Fitzgerald was a Midwestern outsider at Newman, but even though he was unhappy, he continued to write stories and keep a ledger, which—along with occasional trips to the city where he could nourish his desire for cultural experience and his fantasies about the opulence of the “East”—provided him with temporary escapes from the dreariness of boarding school life.

  Fitzgerald entered Princeton University in 1913: a bequest from Louisa McQuillan’s estate and markedly better academic performance at Newman enabled him to enter a world of class, privilege, and intellectual richness that had seemed remote and fantastic to him growing up in St. Paul. Fitzgerald’s experience at Princeton, like that of so many of his fictional protagonists, was one of contradictory satiation and disillusion. Studying Flaubert, Wilde, and Dante with mentors such as Christian Gauss, and in the company of peers including Edmund Wilson and John Peale Bishop, Fitzgerald found himself immersed in a welter of ideas out of which he would begin to shape his view of modern identity. This evolving conception was one in which the “self” is fully immersed into worldly experience and simultaneously desires to transcend the limitations of time and circumstance, effectively seeking to escape the world into which one is plunged. The combined strains of nostalgia and disillusion that we find in much of Fitzgerald’s fiction are informed by this contradiction and the self-recognition it brings to the lives and minds of his protagonists.

  At Princeton, Fitzgerald wrote continuously, producing much of the material that would become part his first novel, This Side of Paradise , as well as a steady stream of stories, poems, and humorous sketches, many of which were published in the Nassau Literary Magazine and the Princeton Tiger; a few of these, such as the bizarre “Tarquin of Cheapside,” a “historical” tale of pursuit set in Elizabethan London that portrays Shakespeare as a rapist, would be republished in his first two collections. Fitzgerald became an integral part of the Princeton literary scene during his college years and engaged in a series of personal relationships, most notably with Ginerva King, a Chicago socialite. Enlisting in the service for World War I in October 1917, Fitzgerald left Princeton in his senior year without graduating and received a commission as an officer of the U.S. Army.

  His Princeton experiences served as the basis for This Side of Paradise , which Fitzgerald drafted and revised throughout his months in the service. He submitted the manuscript of the novel to Scribner’s twice in 1918 under the title The Romantic Egotist without success. At Scribner’s, however, Fitzgerald found an editor in Maxwell Perkins who would become his friend, publicist, and professional mainstay throughout his career. While stationed at Camp Montgomery, Alabama, Fitzgerald met Zelda Sayre and quickly fell in love; the tumultuous nature of their early relationship would become characteristic of their marriage of twenty years, which, despite infidelity, disastrous cycles of notoriety and financial distress, alcoholism, and mental illness, would not end until Scott’s death in 1940.


  During the period in which he was revising This Side of Paradise, Fitzgerald was also writing stories. After discharge from the army at the war’s end in February 1919, Fitzgerald moved to New York City to find work as a newspaper reporter but had to settle a job writing copy in an advertising agency. Amidst the flurry of activity that resulted from a day job, attempts to keep up his relationship with Zelda, and the revising of his first novel, he wrote a score of stories and, sending them out for publication, received one rejection slip after another. For over half a year, he endured a miserable existence as he navigated through an on-again, off-again relationship with Zelda and deflected the blows of rejection. But in September 1919, Fitzgerald’s life underwent a dramatic change. Scribner’s accepted This Side of Paradise for publication, and within a matter of weeks he was married to Zelda and began to see checks rolling in from The Smart Set, Scribner’s Magazine, and The Saturday Evening Post for “The Debutante” and “Babes in the Woods” (both revised versions of earlier Nassau Literary Magazine stories), “Dalyrimple Goes Wrong” and “Head and Shoulders,” later collected in Flappers and Philosophers , and “Mr. Icky” and “The Camel’s Back,” which Fitzgerald placed in Tales of the Jazz Age.

  This Side of Paradise, the story of Amory Blaine’s maturation as a representative of the lost generation, was a brilliant success for a first novel. Fitzgerald was beginning to make a considerable income from both his novel and his stories, and he and Zelda were seized upon as a glamorous couple whose extravagances and flaunting of convention combined well with intelligence and charismatic personality to set them forth as models for the Jazz Age. From this point on, throughout a career that would end on December 21, 1940, in his early death from a heart attack brought on, at least partially, by alcoholism, Fitzgerald had continuous access to the high-paying, large circulation magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post, McCall’s, Redbook, and Esquire that served as primary venues for the publication of literary fiction in the first half of the twentieth century. Fitzgerald’s long-lived popularity as a story writer can in part be attributed to his spectacular early success and the magnetism of the authorial personality that he cultivated; but it is equally true that during the hard months of 1919 he began to learn how to write entertaining, saleable stories that caught the imagination and reflected the desires and anxieties of the large public that read those popular literary and cultural magazines which are only partially comparable to today’s New Yorker or Harper’s. From the beginning, many of these stories shattered the stereotype of the popular story written for money in terms of their quality and complexity, and it is clear that Fitzgerald was perfecting his craft as a story writer at the same time that he was successfully marketing his work.