The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald Read online

  Perkins’s letter and finally Zelda’s acceptance of Fitzgerald’s proposal became bookends for the formative and most important period in Fitzgerald’s development as a professional writer. In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Ledger, which contains a detailed diary and auto-bibliography that Fitzgerald kept religiously for most of his professional life, he wrote these words at the top of the page for 1919, his twenty-second year: “The most important year of life. Every emotion and my life work decided. Miserable and ecstatic but a great success.”8 Looking back from the vantage point of 1937, he would characterize the months leading up to September 1919 in more pragmatic terms: “While I waited for the novel to appear, the metamorphosis of amateur into professional began to take place—a sort of stitching together of your whole life into a pattern of work, so that the end of one job is automatically the beginning of another.” 9 The earliest phase of his professional life, that two-year period from which the stories in this volume emerge, was a time when life, for Fitzgerald, was literally a dream; and the beauty of the stories comes from the conviction—not altogether different from Jay Gatsby’s conviction just before he kissed Daisy and “wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath” 10—that, in the forty-one-year-old Fitzgerald’s words about the twenty-two-year-old dreamer, “life is a romantic matter.” 11

  It was on the solid rock or butterfly’s wing, depending upon one’s perspective, of this view that life is a romantic matter that Fitzgerald entered the profession of authorship in late September 1919. The first two stories he wrote after the acceptance of his novel, “Benediction” and “Head and Shoulders,” show him confronting the central dilemma of professional authorship—the problem of how one who is a serious literary artist manages to earn his living through his writing. After the numerous rejection slips that he had received during the demoralizing spring and summer of 1919, one can imagine Fitzgerald’s quandary as he pondered the direction to take in his story writing after the acceptance of his novel. In the end he followed an understandable impulse to return to his already published undergraduate fiction in search of a salvageable narrative, and he found it in “The Ordeal” (The Nassau Literary Magazine, 1915), a fictionalized version of a visit he had paid to his cousin Tom Delihant at the Jesuit monastery in Woodstock, Maryland, during the Easter season of 1912. In the revision of this story into “Benediction,” Fitzgerald transferred the moral conflict of the male protagonist in “The Ordeal” onto a female character, Lois, who is of the generation that Amory Blaine in the already-written-but-yet-to-be-published This Side of Paradise characterized as one “grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken.”12 Set free in the moral minefield of the dawning Jazz Age, Lois demonstrates as convincingly as any previous Fitzgerald character how a member of her generation begins to form a code for living in such a time; and her code, grounded in freedom and independence from traditional beliefs, will wind itself through these early stories, finally coming into its most lyrical expression in “Absolution”—the last story in this collection. With “Benediction,” Fitzgerald seems literally to have discovered the principle of artistic detachment or aesthetic distance, a discovery that will lead in his most mature work to that often-cited quality that Malcolm Cowley labeled “double vision”— simply defined, the ability to participate emotionally in experience while, at the same time, retaining the ability to stand back and view it objectively. And while all good literary artists possess this kind of vision to a greater or lesser degree, great writers like Fitzgerald couple it with a lyrical quality that creates magic. Nowhere is this magic quite so evident as it is in The Great Gatsby, where it is expressed in the construction of the rational, if poetic, Nick Carraway, who observes and chronicles Jay Gatsby’s romantic quest for Daisy Buchanan. Those looking for something approaching the earliest expression of Fitzgerald’s double vision will find it in “Benediction.”

  As an ironic monument of sorts to his portrait of Lois, his earliest credible representation of the emerging new woman of the Roaring Twenties, The Smart Set paid $40 for “Benediction,” prompting Fitzgerald from this moment forward to approach professional authorship from a different angle: he began, on the one hand, paying greater attention to the literary marketplace, specifically considering the kinds of stories slick magazines would be more likely to buy; and, on the other, he turned the marketing of his stories over to a literary agent, Paul Revere Reynolds, who quickly assigned the handling of Fitzgerald’s work to Ober. The first manuscript that Fitzgerald sent the Reynolds agency was “Head and Shoulders,” and the Post bought it for $400. Fitzgerald’s letters to Ober in those weeks and months after his first sale of a story to a commercial magazine indicate Fitzgerald’s awareness of the fact that he was now writing stories with an eye on what he hoped would become their eventual market—most often the Post, which had a circulation in the 1920s of 2,750,000.

  The delightfully ingenious “Head and Shoulders” is Fitzgerald’s first concerted effort to write for what he perceived to be the slick magazine audience, and though it is in some ways over the top and a dramatic departure from the seriousness of “Benediction,” it contains the beautiful lyricism that lifts all of Fitzgerald’s fiction above the level of the merely popular. There are also complexities beneath the surface of Marcia Meadow’s charming into a marriage the stodgy and scholarly Horace Tarbox, complexities that draw power from Scott’s projected anxieties about the potential danger of actually catching the whirlwind Zelda, with whom he was in love. In the course of writing “Head and Shoulders” with the popular magazine audience in mind, Fitzgerald managed to do something, the repercussions of which he could not possibly have envisioned: with Marcia Meadow—whose philosophy is caught in her line “’At’s all life is. Just going round kissing people”—he introduced the large American magazine-reading public to the Fitzgerald flapper; and from the moment that The Saturday Evening Post arrived on newsstands and in mailboxes a week after St. Valentine’s Day 1920, he became the creator of the flapper in fiction. American audiences and magazine editors began from that moment to ask for Fitzgerald’s flapper stories by name. In the end, counting “Head and Shoulders,” his first true flapper story, and his last, “Rags Martin-Jones and the Pr-nce of W-les” (McCall’s, July 1924), Fitzgerald would write only ten of these stories—twelve if the boundaries of the genre are loosened slightly; and thirteen if one includes his resurrection of the Southern belle variation of the flapper-grown-older in his 1929 story “The Last of the Belles.” It is largely on the strength of the dozen true flapper stories, and the ongoing commentary on the flapper as a figure in popular culture supplied by both Scott and Zelda in magazines and newspapers of the early 1920s, that the Fitzgerald flapper came to occupy a prominent—and seemingly permanent—space in the American psyche.

  As Fitzgerald would later comment, “The Jazz Age had a wild youth and a heady middle age,”13 and there is perhaps no better exhibit of its wild youth than the American flapper. Her outward flamboyance—her bobbed hair, her flapping galoshes, her rouged face, her short skirts— made her perhaps the most visible outward representation of the revolution in manners and morals of a postwar generation whose inward spirit was less festive, a spirit echoed in the phrase “lost generation.” Fitzgerald, of course, did not invent the flapper, but he did invent the flapper in fiction, bringing her for the first time to the attention of the more than two and a half million readers of the middle-American mouthpiece, The Saturday Evening Post. The stories in this volume provide perhaps the best record that exists of the flapper in her first blush: “Benediction,” “Head and Shoulders,” “The Ice Palace,” “Bernice Bobs Her Hair,” “The Offshore Pirate,” and “The Jelly-Bean.”

  At first Fitzgerald was taken aback by the enthusiastic response to his fictional depiction of the American flapper, recalling that when he received hundreds and hundreds of letters after the appearance of “Bernice Bobs Her Hair” he had thought it “rather absurd.”14 But in fact he made it a point to
become an authority on this new cultural phenomenon, having his brightest and most exemplary flappers spell out the flapper creed, as Ardita Farnam does in “The Offshore Pirate”: “I began to see that in all my idols in the past some manifestation of courage had unconsciously been the thing that attracted me. . . . My courage is faith—faith in the eternal resilience of me. . . .” Then in popular magazine pieces during the early twenties, examples of which are included in Commentary and Illustrations (page 269), he and Zelda did as much as anyone to keep the flapper alive in the public consciousness. In interviews, Fitzgerald delighted in categorizing various types of flappers. In one of these, subtitled “Novelist Says Southern Type of Flapper Best,” Fitzgerald “classifies American flappers according to their locality.” 15 Accompanying the article is a quarter-page map of the United States containing cartoon renditions of flappers from every geographical area and depicting Fitzgerald with a pointer singling out the Southern flapper. Given Fitzgerald’s relationship with the quintessential flapper–Southern belle Zelda, few will be shocked to learn that Fitzgerald liked the “Southern Type of Flapper Best,” nor is it surprising that one of his greatest stories, “The Ice Palace,” was inspired by trips that he had taken to see Zelda in Montgomery in the months preceding the composition of the story, trips he had made to urge her to resume their engagement. The other two stories inspired by his connection to Montgomery are “The Jelly-Bean” and “The Last of the Belles” (Post, March 2, 1929). In these stories, known now as the Tarleton Trilogy, Fitzgerald creates a hybrid of the flapper and the Southern belle, another original Fitzgerald creation and one whose philosophy and outlook are a product of both her Southern heritage and of the movement toward social liberation of women in America during the 1920s.

  Of the flapper-belles in the Tarleton Trilogy, Sally Carrol Happer from “The Ice Palace,” with her two sides—“the sleepy old side you love” and the side that “makes me do wild things”—comes closest to embodying the originality and complexity that distinguishes all of Fitzgerald’s flappers, whatever their type. Nancy Lamar in “The Jelly-Bean,” on the other hand, has no apparent loyalty to the chivalric tradition and seems surely headed toward an unhappier end than Sally Carrol: “I’m a wild part of the world, Jelly-bean,” she tells Jim Powell before her wild side leads her to marry her suitor from Savannah during a drunken evening. The growing darkness of mood in the Tarleton stories foreshadows the approaching end of Fitzgerald’s flapper stories. When an interviewer reminded him in 1921 that he had brought the customs of the flapper to the attention of the older generation, Fitzgerald responded that “My new novel will, I hope, be more mature. It will be the story of two young married folk and it will show their gradual disintegration—broadly speaking, how they go to the devil.”16

  In those dreamy months during the winter of 1919 and spring of 1920 during which Fitzgerald was creating his early flappers and securing his reputation as the flapper’s historian, he was having difficulty making progress toward a novel that would follow This Side of Paradise. It is likely that “May Day,” written in March 1920, was originally the beginning of what he thought would become that novel, though he eventually compressed its three episodes and brought them together as a long short story in “May Day,” which he sold to The Smart Set for $200. In these episodes he captures the feeling of those days around the May Day riots of 1919 that grew out of a nationwide postwar sentiment against socialists and other dissidents and were fueled by anarchist bombings. The riots took place all over the country, most notably in Boston and New York, and Fitzgerald continued throughout his life to maintain they had “inaugurated the Jazz Age.” 17 The story shows Fitzgerald at a pivotal moment when he began to draw from recent personal experience, to communicate its poignancy and residual pain, and yet to distance himself from it by juxtaposing it against historical events that place individual conflict—Gordon Sterrett’s in the case of “May Day”—in a social context. As it happens, it also shows him in the grips of a brief flirtation with the philosophy of determinism that he could not finally embrace fully because it so depreciated the role of the romantic vision. When Fitzgerald’s experimentation with naturalism reached its dead end in The Beautiful and Damned he began shaping the aesthetic and philosophical underpinnings of what would become his most powerful affirmation of the romantic vision in The Great Gatsby, and he did so in stages evident in three stories featured in this collection: “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz,” “Winter Dreams,” and “Absolution.”

  In The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald enshrines Gatsby’s “gift for romantic readiness,” which causes him, in spite of his tragic death, to turn out “all right in the end,”18 according to Nick—an assertion that Nick can make because Gatsby never wavered in the pursuit of his dream that originated in a mind that romped “like the mind of God.”19 It was, in the end, “the foul dust that floated in the wake of his dreams,”20 the corrosive materialism of the American Dream gone bad and embodied in the immorality of the very rich of East Egg, most obviously in Daisy and Tom Buchanan, that finally betrayed him, not his enormous capacity to imagine and to dream. “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz” is Fitzgerald’s first major step toward The Great Gatsby’s indictment of wealth and of its effect on the romantic imagination, and the Post predictably declined the story because of its anticapitalistic message. Ultimately it was sold for $300 to The Smart Set, whose readers would immediately have gotten its message and appreciated it, though Fitzgerald maintained that he had not written the story as an indictment of materialism. Later he would look back on the months of his early poverty as he walked the streets of New York, and then his sudden reversal of fortune with the acceptance of his first novel, as having heightened his mistrust of the wealthy: “The man with the jingle of money in his pocket who married the girl a year later would always cherish an abiding distrust, an animosity toward the leisure class—not the conviction of a revolutionist but the smouldering hatred of a peasant.”21 One could argue that in “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz” this smouldering hatred came close to the surface in the form of a fantasy which damns those like Percy Washington and his sisters, Kismine and Jasmine, who would bring friends home knowing full well that the price of their momentary pleasure would be the death of their friends.

  It is likely because of Fitzgerald’s determination to avoid open blasphemy against the money god and his desire to remain in the good graces of the popular magazine audience that we have “Winter Dreams.” This story was written immediately after “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz,” while the Fitzgeralds were living at the White Bear Yacht Club in St. Paul, the thinly disguised setting for Dexter Green’s meeting of Judy Jones, and it is unquestionably the most important forerunner of The Great Gatsby. Like Jay Gatsby, Dexter Green in “Winter Dreams” invented a kind of self that he thought would make him acceptable to the “nice girl,” Judy Jones, who like Daisy Fay in the novel is “nice” primarily in the sense that she is rich and respectable. And Dexter, whose father owns “the second best grocery store” in town, sets out to make a fortune with the primary goal of being able to enter the world of Judy Jones, much as Gatsby sets out to make the money that he believes will win him access to the world of Daisy. The parallels between story and novel are as striking as one would expect in a story that Fitzgerald later described as “[a] sort of 1st draft of the Gatsby idea.” 22 In the end, “Winter Dreams” is, of course, a hauntingly sad love story that is, beneath its surface, a study of the power of a spoiled rich girl to determine the course of a poor, young romantic’s winter dreams of a better life than his father’s. With Ober’s difficulty in selling “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz” Fitzgerald had come to understand that in order to use the popular magazines as a workshop for what he professed to consider his “serious” work—his novels—he could not openly attack values that were sacred to middle-American magazine audiences.

  In September 1922, after sending “Winter Dreams” to Ober, the Fitzgeralds moved to New York, settling in Great Neck,
Long Island, and remaining there until they sailed for Europe in April 1924. Their time in Great Neck is important not only because Long Island would ultimately provide the models for East Egg and West Egg in The Great Gatsby, but also because it was here that Fitzgerald began an early draft of the novel, a draft from which only “Absolution” survives. In letters, Fitzgerald alluded to “Absolution” as being closely related to The Great Gatsby, in one case referring to it as “a picture of [Gatsby’s] early life,”23 and his comments have provoked speculation and debate about the relationship of the story to the novel. The most reasonable explanation regarding the connection between the two is this: At least as early as April 1924 Fitzgerald had been at work on a novel that had a strong Catholic element and included a protagonist who would evolve from a character like Rudolph Miller in “Absolution”; he eventually put this novel aside, apparently scrapping it altogether after salvaging what was probably its prologue, which he sent to The American Mercury. Then when he returned to the novel during the summer and fall of 1924 he began anew on what would become The Great Gatsby, perhaps bringing his earlier conception of Rudolph Miller to bear on his ideas about Jay Gatsby’s past.