The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald (35 page)

pennon:
flag, ensign of a knight.

German cuirassiers at Sedan:
The Battle of Sedan on September 1, 1870, was the decisive battle of the Franco-Prussian War. Napeoleon surrendered. Cuirassiers are mounted soldiers wearing body armor.

COMMENTARY AND ILLUSTRATIONS

FROM
THE AMERICAN MAGAZINE,
SEPTEMBER 1922

F. Scott Fitzgerald (inset shows the author with his wife, Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald). PHOTO BY BROWN BROS.

Two years ago a certain novel by a new writer was hailed as a work of remarkable talent. The novel was “This Side of Paradise,” and the writer was Scott Fitzgerald, then only twenty-three years old. The book was followed by a score of short stories, later published under the title, “Flappers and Philosophers.” Last winter a second novel, “The Beautiful and Damned,” confirmed the belief that Fitzgerald was a writer of real genius.

He was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, went to preparatory school when he was fifteen, and entered Princeton University two years later. In his senior year he went into the army, where he became a first lieutenant. “This Side of Paradise” was begun while he was in training camp, and was finished in 1919, after he left the army. In 1920 he married Zelda Sayre, of Montgomery, Alabama; and the small picture at the right shows him with his young wife. They have one child, and their home is in St. Paul, where Mr. Fitzgerald was born, and where his parents still live.

FROM
THE AMERICAN MAGAZINE,
SEPTEMBER 1922

SCOTT FITZGERALD IS THE MOST FAMOUS YOUNG WRITER IN AMERICA TO-DAY.
READ HIS ARTICLE IF YOU WANT TO UNDERSTAND YOUTH’S POINT OF VIEW

WHAT I THINK AND FEEL AT 25

For one thing, I do not like old people—They are always talking about their
“experience,” and very few of them have any!—But it is the old folks that run the world;
so they try to hide the fact that only young people are attractive or important

By F. Scott Fitzgerald

Author of “This Side of Paradise,” “Flappers and Philosophers,” and
“The Beautiful and Damned”

The man stopped me on the street. He was ancient, but not a mariner. He had a long beard and a glittering eye. I think he was a friend of the family’s, or something.

“Say, Fitzgerald,” he said, “say! Will you tell me this: What in the blinkety-blank-blank has a—has a man of your age got to go saying these pessimistic things for? What’s the idea?” I tried to laugh him off. He told me that he and my grandfather had been boys together. After that, I had no wish to corrupt him. So I tried to laugh him off.

“Ha-ha-ha!” I said determinedly. “Ha-ha-ha!” And then I added, “Ha-ha! Well, I’ll see you later.”

With this I attempted to pass him by, but he seized my arm firmly and showed symptoms of spending the afternoon in my company.

“When I was a boy—” he began, and then he drew the picture that people always draw of what excellent, happy, care-free souls they were at twenty-five. That is, he told me all the things he liked to
think
he thought in the misty past.

I allowed him to continue. I even made polite grunts at intervals to express my astonishment. For I will be doing it myself some day. I will concoct for my juniors a Scott Fitzgerald that, it’s safe to say, none of my contemporaries would at present recognize. But they will be old themselves then; and they will respect my concoction as I shall respect theirs. . . .

“And now,” the happy ancient was concluding; “you are young, you have good health, you have made money, you are exceptionally happily married, you have achieved considerable success while you are still young enough to enjoy it—will you tell an innocent old man just why you write those—”

I succumbed. I would tell him. I began: “Well, you see, sir, it seems to me that as a man gets older he grows more vulner—”

But I got no further. As soon as I began to talk he hurriedly shook my hand and departed. He did not want to listen. He did not care why I thought what I thought. He had simply felt the need of giving a little speech, and I had been the victim. His receding form disappeared with a slight wobble around the next corner.

“All right, you old bore,” I muttered; “
don’t
listen, then. You wouldn’t understand, anyhow.” I took an awful kick at a curbstone, as a sort of proxy, and continued my walk.

THE CHIEF THING I HAVE LEARNED SO FAR

“I might as well declare,” says Mr. Fitzgerald, “that the chief thing I’ve learned so far is: If you don’t know much—well, nobody else knows much more. And nobody knows half as much about your own interests as
you
know.

“If you believe in anything very strongly—including yourself—and if you go after that thing alone, you end up in jail, in heaven, in the headlines, or in the largest house in the block, according to what you started after. If you
don’t
believe in anything very strongly—including yourself—you go along, and enough money is made out of you to buy an automobile for some other fellow’s son, and you marry if you’ve got time, and if you do, you have a lot of children whether you have time or not, and finally you get tired and you die.

“If you’re in the second of those two classes you have the most fun before you’re twenty-five. If you’re in the first, you have it afterward.”

Now, that’s the first incident. The second was when a man came to me not long ago from a big newspaper syndicate, and said:

“Mr. Fitzgerald, there’s a rumor around New York that you and— ah—you and Mrs. Fitzgerald are going to commit suicide at thirty because you hate and dread middle-age. I want to give you some publicity in this matter by getting it up as a story for the feature sections of five hundred and fourteen Sunday newspapers. In one corner of the page will be—”

“Don’t!” I cried, “I know: In one corner will stand the doomed couple, she with an arsenic sundae, he with an Oriental dagger. Both of them will have their eyes fixed on a large clock, on the face of which will be a skull and crossbones. In the other corner will be a big calendar with the date marked in red.”

“That’s it!” cried the syndicate man enthusiastically. “You’ve grasped the idea. Now, what we—”

“Listen here!” I said severely. “There is nothing in that rumor. Nothing whatever. When I’m thirty I won’t be this me—I’ll be somebody else. I’ll have a different body, because it said so in a book I read once, and I’ll have a different attitude on everything. I’ll even be married to a different person—”

“Ah!” he interrupted, with an eager light in his eye, and produced a notebook. “That’s very interesting.”

“No, no, no!” I cried hastily. “I mean my wife will be different.”

“I see. You plan a divorce.”

“No! I mean—”

“Well, it’s all the same. Now, what we want, in order to fill out this story, is a lot of remarks about petting-parties. Do you think the— ah—petting-party is a serious menace to the Constitution? And, just to link it up, can we say that your suicide will be largely on account of past petting-parties?”

“See here!” I interrupted in despair. “Try to understand. I don’t know what petting-parties have to do with the question. I have always dreaded age, because it invariably increases the vulner—”

But, as in the case of the family friend, I got no further. The syndicate man grasped my hand firmly. He shook it. Then he muttered something about interviewing a chorus girl who was reported to have an anklet of solid platinum, and hurried off.

That’s the second incident. You see, I had managed to tell two different men that “age increased the vulner—” But they had not been interested. The old man had talked about himself and the syndicate man had talked about petting-parties. When I began to talk about the “vulner—” they both had sudden engagements.

So, with one hand on the Eighteenth Amendment and the other hand on the serious part of the Constitution, I have taken an oath that I will tell somebody my story.

As a man grows older it stands to reason that his vulnerability increases. Three years ago, for instance, I could be hurt in only one way—through myself. If my best friend’s wife had her hair torn off by an electric washing-machine, I was grieved, of course. I would make my friend a long speech full of “old mans,” and finish up with a paragraph from Washington’s Farewell Address; but when I’d finished I could go to a good restaurant and enjoy my dinner as usual. If my second cousin’s husband had an artery severed while having his nails manicured, I will not deny that it was a matter of considerable regret to me. But when I heard the news I did not faint and have to be taken home in a passing laundry wagon.

In fact I was pretty much invulnerable. I put up a conventional wail whenever a ship was sunk or a train got wrecked; but I don’t suppose, if the whole city of Chicago had been wiped out, I’d have lost a night’s sleep over it—unless something led me to believe that St. Paul was the next city on the list. Even then I could have moved my luggage over to Minneapolis and rested pretty comfortably all night.

But that was three years ago when I was still a young man. I was only twenty-two. When I said anything the book reviewers didn’t like, they could say, “Gosh! That certainly is callow!” And that finished me. Label it “callow,” and that was enough.

Well, now I’m twenty-five I’m not callow any longer—at least not so that I can notice it when I look in an ordinary mirror. Instead, I’m vulnerable. I’m vulnerable in every way.

For the benefit of revenue agents and moving-picture directors who may be reading this magazine I will explain that vulnerable means easily wounded. Well, that’s it. I’m more easily wounded. I can not only be wounded in the chest, the feelings, the teeth, the bank account; but I can be wounded in the
dog.
Do I make myself clear? In the dog.

No, that isn’t a new part of the body just discovered by the Rockefeller Institute. I mean a real dog. I mean if anyone gives my family dog to the dog-catcher he’s hurting
me
almost as much as he’s hurting the dog. He’s hurting me
in
the dog. And if our doctor says to me tomorrow, “That child of yours isn’t going to be a blonde after all,” well, he’s wounded me in a way I couldn’t have been wounded in before, because I never before had a child to be wounded in. And if my daughter grows up and when she’s sixteen elopes with some fellow from Zion City who believes the world is flat—I wouldn’t write this except that she’s only six months old and can’t quite read yet, so it won’t put any ideas in her head—why, then I’ll be wounded again.

About being wounded through your wife I will not enter into, as it is a delicate subject. I will not say anything about my case. But I have private reasons for knowing that if anybody said to your wife one day that it was a shame she
would
wear yellow when it made her look so peaked, you would suffer violently, within six hours afterward, for what that person said.

“Attack him through his wife!” “Kidnap his child!” “Tie a tin can to his dog’s tail!” How often do we hear those slogans in life, not to mention in the movies. And how they make me wince! Three years ago, you could have yelled them outside my window all through a summer night, and I wouldn’t have batted an eye. The only thing that would have aroused me would have been: “Wait a minute. I think I can pot him from here.”

I used to have about ten square feet of skin vulnerable to chills and fevers. Now I have about twenty. I have not personally enlarged—the twenty feet includes the skin of my family—but I might as well have, because if a chill or fever strikes any bit of that twenty feet of skin
I
begin to shiver.

And so I ooze gently into middle-age; for the true middle-age is not the acquirement of years, but the acquirement of a family. The incomes of the childless have wonderful elasticity. Two people require a room and a bath; couple with child require the millionaire’s suite on the sunny side of the hotel.

So let me start the religious part of this article by saying that if the Editor thought he was going to get something young and happy—yes, and callow—I have got to refer him to my daughter, if she will give dictation. If anybody thinks that I am callow they ought to see her— she’s so callow it makes me laugh. It even makes her laugh, too, to think how callow she is. If any literary critics saw her they’d have a nervous breakdown right on the spot. But, on the other hand, anybody writing to me, an editor or anybody else, is writing to a middle-aged man.

Well, I’m twenty-five, and I have to admit that I’m pretty well satisfied with
some
of that time. That is to say, the first five years seemed to go all right—but the last twenty! They have been a matter of violently contrasted extremes. In fact, this has struck me so forcibly that from time to time I have kept charts, trying to figure out the years when I was closest to happy. Then I get mad and tear up the charts.

Skipping that long list of mistakes which passes for my boyhood I will say that I went away to preparatory school at fifteen, and that my two years there were wasted, were years of utter and profitless unhappiness. I was unhappy because I was cast into a situation where everybody thought I ought to behave just as they behaved—and I didn’t have the courage to shut up and go my own way, anyhow.

For example, there was a rather dull boy at school named Percy, whose approval, I felt, for some unfathomable reason, I must have. So, for the sake of this negligible cipher, I started out to let as much of my mind as I had under mild cultivation sink back into a state of heavy underbrush. I spent hours in a damp gymnasium fooling around with a muggy basket-ball and working myself into a damp, muggy rage, when I wanted, instead, to go walking in the country.

And all this to please Percy. He thought it was the thing to do. If you didn’t go through the damp business every day you were “morbid.” That was his favorite word, and it had me frightened. I didn’t want to be morbid. So I became muggy instead.

Besides, Percy was dull in classes; so I used to pretend to be dull also. When I wrote stories I wrote them secretly, and felt like a criminal. If I gave birth to any idea that did not appeal to Percy’s pleasant, vacant mind I discarded the idea at once and felt like apologizing.

Of course Percy never got into college. He went to work and I have scarcely seen him since, though I understand that he has since become an undertaker of considerable standing. The time I spent with him was wasted; but, worse than that, I did not enjoy the wasting of it. At least, he had nothing to give me, and I had not the faintest reasons for caring what he thought or said. But when I discovered this it was too late.

The worst of it is that this same business went on until I was twenty-two. That is, I’d be perfectly happy doing just what I wanted to do, when somebody would begin shaking his head and saying:

“Now see here, Fitzgerald, you mustn’t go on doing that. It’s—it’s morbid.”

And I was always properly awed by the word “morbid,” so I quit what I wanted to do and what it was good for me to do, and did what some other fellow wanted me to do. Every once in a while, though, I used to tell somebody to go to the devil; otherwise I never would have done anything at all.

In officers’ training camp during 1917 I started to write a novel. I would begin work at it every Saturday afternoon at one and work like mad until midnight. Then I would work at it from six Sunday morning until six Sunday night, when I had to report back to barracks. I was thoroughly enjoying myself.

After a month three friends came to me with scowling faces:

“See here, Fitzgerald, you ought to use the week-ends in getting some good rest and recreation. The way you use them is—is morbid!”