The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald (3 page)

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.

What we know for certain is that Rudolph Miller and Jay Gatsby share much in common. Like the young Jimmy Gatz, Rudolph Miller has a need to create an alter ego in order to thrive in a higher class of society than the one into which he was born. Both Miller and Gatsby have fathers who worship at the altar of American materialism, as is clear from Mr. Miller’s adulation of the empire builder James J. Hill and from Mr. Henry Gatz’s reverence for his son’s success, which, if Gatsby had lived, would have made him, according to his father, “[a] man like James J. Hill.”
²⁴
In the case of Rudolph’s father, the tension in his life passed down to his son comes from being pulled between his faith in the Roman Catholic Church and his “mystical worship” of Hill. Rudolph’s stunning revelation after his exchange with the deranged priest—the realization that “There was something ineffably gorgeous somewhere that had nothing to do with God”—is a denunciation of at least one of his father’s sacred beliefs. As Fitzgerald put it in a letter, “the priest gives the boy a form of Absolution (not of course sacramental), by showing him that he (the priest) is in an even worse state of horror + despair.”
²⁵
Rudolph’s absolution lands him squarely at the doorstep of the modern world where old beliefs no longer prevail—in short, at the doorstep of the Roaring Twenties.

Fitzgerald’s best early short stories, from “Benediction” to “Absolution,” arc elegantly over the Jazz Age, and there is such thrill in their telling that it is perhaps easy to overlook the truth that they are, in the end, cautionary tales. In “Early Success” Fitzgerald said this, in retrospect, about his stories and novels of the early twenties: “All the stories that came into my head had a touch of disaster in them—the lovely young creatures in my novels went to ruin, the diamond mountains of my short stories blew up, my millionaires were as beautiful and damned as Thomas Hardy’s peasants.”
²⁶
Indeed, the stories in this collection paint pictures filled with despair as well as euphoria. In them the American flapper is born, she comes of age in a burst of momentary liberation, and she heads toward matrimony. The Southern belle merges with the flapper and explores the world only to move back South to live out her days under a blanket of the chivalric code—in a worst case, marrying a razor manufacturer after a drunken evening and presumably living unhappily ever after. The intellectuals and artists of the stories are driven at best to frustration and irony and at worst to cynicism and suicide from lack of appreciation of their work, while the social climbers find themselves lured into the traps of the very rich, who would toy with them before condemning them to death or prison deep within a diamond as big as the Ritz. And then there are the romantic dreamers, particularly the men: their plight, especially if they happen to be caught in the spell of an enchantress, is youthful disillusionment and finally middle age, during which they can ponder “the gray beauty of steel that withstands all time.”

In the trailing light of these early stories and of
The Great Gatsby
soon to come, Fitzgerald would spend years, in his words, “seeking the eternal Carnival by the Sea.” By 1931—far too soon, he believed, to write about the Jazz Age with perspective—he was looking back on it nostalgically and from a distant third-person point of view that he hoped would provide objectivity: “It bore him up,” he remembers in “Echoes of the Jazz Age”; it “flattered him and gave him more money than he had dreamed of, simply for telling people that he felt as they did, that something had to be done with all the nervous energy stored up and unexpended in the War.”
²⁷
In just a half dozen years more, when the wistful past had become barely a memory to him and the fulfilled future was now itself the wistful past, he would require twilight on the French Riviera to recover the time that had seemed “so rosy and romantic to those that were young then.”
²⁸

NOTES

F. Scott Fitzgerald, “Early Success,”
The Crack-Up,
ed. Edmund Wilson (New York: New Directions, 1945), p. 90.

“Early Success,” p. 90.

“Early Success,” p. 86.

“Echoes of the Jazz Age,”
The Crack-Up,
p. 14.

“Early Success,” p. 86.

“Early Success,” p. 86.

Matthew J. Bruccoli and Margaret M. Duggan, ed.
Correspondence of F. Scott
Fitzgerald
(New York: Random House, 1980), p. 51.

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Ledger
(Washington: Bruccoli Clark/NCR, 1972), p. 173.

“Early Success,” p. 86.

The Great Gatsby
(New York: Scribners, 1925), p. 134.

“Early Success,” p. 89.

This Side of Paradise
(New York: Scribners, 1920), p. 304.

“Echoes of the Jazz Age,” p. 21.

“Early Success,” pp. 87–8.

The Romantic Egoists: A Pictorial Autobiography from the Scrapbooks and Albums
of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald,
ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli, Scottie Fitzgerald Smith, and Joan P. Kerr (New York: Scribners, 1974), p. 97.

Romantic Egoists,
p. 79.

Tales of the Jazz Age
(New York: Scribners, 1922), p. viii.

The Great Gatsby,
pp. 2–3.

The Great Gatsby,
p. 134.

The Great Gatsby,
p. 3.

“Pasting It Together,”
The Crack-Up,
p. 77.

Dear Scott/Dear Max: The Fitzgerald-Perkins Correspondence,
ed. John Kuehl and Jackson R. Bryer (New York: Scribners, 1971), p. 112.

The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald,
ed. Andrew Turnbull (New York: Scribners, 1963), p. 509.

The Great Gatsby,
p. 202.

Bruccoli and Duggan,
Correspondence of F. Scott Fitzgerald,
p. 212.

“Early Success,” p. 87.

“Echoes of the Jazz Age,” p. 13.

“Echoes of the Jazz Age,” p. 22.

BENEDICTION

The Baltimore Station was hot and crowded, so Lois was forced to stand by the telegraph desk for interminable, sticky seconds while a clerk with big front teeth counted and recounted a large lady’s day message, to determine whether it contained the innocuous forty-nine words or the fatal fifty-one.

Lois, waiting, decided she wasn’t quite sure of the address, so she took the letter out of her bag and ran over it again.

“Darling”:
it began—
“I understand and I’m happier than life ever meant me to be. If I could give you the things you’ve always been in tune with—but I can’t, Lois; we can’t marry and we can’t lose each other and let all this glorious love end in nothing.

“Until your letter came, dear, I’d been sitting here in the half dark thinking and thinking where I could go and ever forget you; abroad, perhaps, to drift through Italy or Spain and dream away the pain of having lost you where the crumbling ruins of older, mellower civilizations would mirror only the desolation of my heart—and then your letter came.

“Sweetest, bravest girl, if you’ll wire me I’ll meet you in Wilmington—till then I’ll be here just waiting and hoping for every long dream of you to come true.

“HOWARD.”

She had read the letter so many times that she knew it word by word, yet it still startled her. In it she found many faint reflections of the man who wrote it—the mingled sweetness and sadness in his dark eyes, the furtive, restless excitement she felt sometimes when he talked to her, his dreamy sensuousness that lulled her mind to sleep. Lois was nineteen and very romantic and curious and courageous.

The large lady and the clerk having compromised on fifty words, Lois took a blank and wrote her telegram. And there were no overtones to the finality of her decision.

It’s just destiny—she thought—it’s just the way things work out in this damn world. If cowardice is all that’s been holding me back there won’t be any more holding back. So we’ll just let things take their course, and never be sorry.

The clerk scanned her telegram:

“Arrived Baltimore today spend day with my brother meet me Wilmington three P.M. Wednesday Love

“LOIS.”

“Fifty-four cents,” said the clerk admiringly.

And never be sorry—thought Lois—and never be sorry——