The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald (36 page)

That word convinced me. It sent the usual shiver down my spine. The next week-end I laid the novel aside, went into town with the others and danced all night at a party. But I began to worry about my novel. I worried so much that I returned to camp, not rested, but utterly miserable. I
was
morbid then. But I never went to town again. I finished the novel. It was rejected; but a year later I rewrote it and it was published under the title, “This Side of Paradise.”

But before I rewrote it I had a list of “morbids,” chalked up against people that, placed end to end, would have reached to the nearest lunatic asylum. It was morbid:

1st. To get engaged without enough money to marry 2d. To leave the advertising business after three months 3d. To want to write at all 4th. To think I could 5th. To write about “silly little boys and girls that nobody wants to read about”

And so on, until a year later, when I found to my surprise that everybody had been only kidding—they had believed all their lives that writing was the only thing for me, and had hardly been able to keep from telling me all the time.

But I am really not old enough to begin drawing morals out of my own life to elevate the young. I will save that pastime until I am sixty; and then, as I have said, I will concoct a Scott Fitzgerald who will make Benjamin Franklin look like a lucky devil who loafed into prominence. Even in the above account I have managed to sketch the outline of a small but neat halo. I take it all back. I am twenty-five years old. I wish I had ten million dollars, and never had to do another lick of work as long as I live.

But as I
do
have to keep at it, I might as well declare 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.

You see, if you’re in the first class you’ll frequently be called a darn fool—or worse. That was as true in Philadelphia about 1727 as it is today. Anybody knows that a kid that walked around town munching a loaf of bread and not caring what anybody thought was a darn fool. It stands to reason! But there are a lot of darn fools who get their pictures in the schoolbooks—with their names under the pictures. And the sensible fellows, the ones that had time to laugh, well, their pictures are in there, too. But their
names
aren’t—and the laughs look sort of frozen on their faces.

The particular sort of darn fool I mean ought to remember that he’s
least
a darn fool when he’s being
called
a darn fool. The main thing is to be your own kind of a darn fool.

(The above advice is of course only for darn fools
under
twenty-five. It may be all wrong for darn fools over twenty-five.)

I don’t know why it is that when I start to write about being twentyfive I suddenly begin to write about darn fools. I do not see any connection. Now, if I were asked to write about darn fools, I would write about people who have their front teeth filled with gold, because a friend of mine did that the other day, and after being mistaken for a jewelry store three times in one hour he came up and asked me if I thought it showed too much. As I am a kind man, I told him I would not have noticed it if the sun hadn’t been so strong on it. I asked him why he had it done.

“Well,” he said, “the dentist told me a porcelain filling never lasted more than ten years.”

“Ten years! Why, you may be dead in ten years.”

“That’s true.”

“Of course it’ll be nice that all the time you’re in your coffin you’ll never have to worry about your teeth.”

And it occurred to me that about half the people in the world are always having their front teeth filled with gold. That is, they’re figuring on twenty years from now. Well, when you’re young it’s all right figuring your success a long ways ahead—if you don’t make it
too
long. But as for your pleasure—your front teeth!—it’s better to figure on to-day.

And that’s the second thing I learned while getting vulnerable and middle-aged. Let me recapitulate:

1st. I think that compared to what you know about your own business nobody else knows
any
thing. And if anybody knows more about it than you do, then it’s
his
business and you’re
his
man, not your own. And as soon as your business becomes
your
business you’ll know more about it than anybody else.

2d. Never have your front teeth filled with gold.

And now I will stop pretending to be a pleasant young fellow and disclose my real nature. I will prove to you, if you have not found it out already, that I have a mean streak and nobody would like to have me for a son.

I do not like old people. They are always talking about their “experience”—and very few of them have any. In fact, most of them go on making the same mistakes at fifty and believing in the same white list of approved twenty-carat lies that they did at seventeen. And it all starts with my old friend vulnerability.

Take a woman of thirty. She is considered lucky if she has allied herself to a multitude of things; her husband, her children, her home, her servant. If she has three homes, eight children, and fourteen servants, she is considered luckier still. (This, of course, does not generally apply to more husbands).

Now, when she was young she worried only about herself; but now she must be worried by
any
trouble occurring to
any
of these people or things. She is ten times as vulnerable. Moreover, she can never break one of these ties or relieve herself of one of these burdens except at the cost of great pain and sorrow to herself. They are the things that break her, and yet they are the most precious things in life.

In consequence, everything which doesn’t go to make her secure, or at least to give her a sense of security, startles and annoys her. She acquires only the useless knowledge found in cheap movies, cheap novels, and the cheap memoirs of titled foreigners.

By this time her husband also has become suspicious of anything gay or new. He seldom addresses her, except in a series of profound grunts, or to ask whether she has sent his shirts out to the laundry. At the family dinner on Sunday he occasionally gives her some fascinating statistics on party politics, some opinions from that morning’s newspaper editorial.

But after thirty, both husband and wife know in their hearts that the game is up. Without a few cocktails social intercourse becomes a torment. It is no longer spontaneous; it is a convention by which they agree to shut their eyes to the fact that the other men and women they know are tired and dull and fat, and yet must be put up with as politely as they themselves are put up with in their turn.

I have seen many happy young couples—but I have seldom seen a happy home after husband and wife are thirty. Most homes can be divided into four classes:

1st. Where the husband is a pretty conceited guy who thinks that a dinky insurance business is a lot harder than raising babies, and that everybody ought to kow-tow to him at home. He is the kind whose sons usually get away from home as soon as they can walk.

2d. When the wife has got a sharp tongue and the martyr complex, and thinks she’s the only woman in the world that ever had a child. This is probably the unhappiest home of all.

3d. Where the children are always being reminded how nice it was of the parents to bring them into the world, and how they ought to respect their parents for being born in 1870 instead of 1902.

4th. Where everything is for the children. Where the parents pay much more for the children’s education than they can afford, and spoil them unreasonably. This usually ends by the children being ashamed of the parents.

And yet I think that marriage is the most satisfactory institution we have. I’m simply stating my belief that when Life has used us for its purposes it takes away all our attractive qualities and gives us, instead, ponderous but shallow convictions of our own wisdom and “experience.”

Needless to say, as old people run the world, an enormous camouflage has been built up to hide the fact that only young people are attractive or important.

Having got in wrong with many of the readers of this article, I will now proceed to close. If you don’t agree with me on any minor points you have a right to say: “Gosh! He certainly is callow!” and turn to something else. Personally I do not consider that I am callow, because I do not see how anybody of my age could be callow. For instance, I was reading an article in this magazine a few months ago by a fellow named Ring Lardner that says he is thirty-five, and it seemed to me how young and happy and care-free he was in comparison with me.

Maybe he is vulnerable, too. He did not say so. Maybe when you get to be thirty-five you do not
know
any more how vulnerable you
are.
All I can say is that if he ever gets to be twenty-five again, which is very unlikely, maybe he will agree with me. The older I grow the more I get so I don’t know anything. If I had been asked to do this article about five years ago it might have been worth reading.

“Bob It”

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s story “Bernice Bobs Her Hair,” illustrated here by May Wilson Preston, was published in
The Saturday Evening Post
, May 1, 1920.

“Is it a Proposal of Marriage? Extra! Ardita Farnam Becomes Pirate’s Bride.
Society Girl Kidnapped by Ragtime Bank Robber.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s story “The Offshore Pirate,” illustrated by Leslie L. Benson, was published in
The Saturday Evening Post,
May 29, 1920.

FROM
SHADOWLAND,
JANUARY 1921

FITZGERALD, FLAPPERS AND FAME

An Interview with F. Scott Fitzgerald

By Frederick James Smith

F. Scott Fitzgerald is the recognized spokesman of the younger generation—the dancing, flirting, frivoling, lightly philosophizing young America—since the publication of his now famous flapper tale, “This Side of Paradise.” Perhaps our elders were surprised to discover, as Mr. Fitzgerald relates, that the young folk, particularly the so-called gentler sex, were observing religion and morals slightly flippantly, that they had their own views on ethics, that they said damn and gotta and whatta and ’sall, that older viewpoints bored them and that they both smoked cigarets and admitted they were “just full of the devil.”

All of which
is
the younger generation as Fitzgerald sees it. Indeed, the blond and youthful Fitzgerald, still in his twenties, is of, and a part of, it. He left Princeton in the class of ’17 and, like certain young America, slipped into the world war
via
the training camp and an officership. We suspect he did it, much as the questioning hero of “This Side of Paradise,” because “it was the thing to do.” He was a lieutenant in the 45th Infantry and later an aide to Brigadier General Ryan. It was in training camp that he first drafted “This Side of Paradise.”

“We all knew, of course, we were going to be killed,” relates Fitzgerald with a smile, “and I, like everybody else, wanted to leave something for posterity.” But the war ended and Fitzgerald tried writing advertising with a New York commercial firm. All the time he was endeavoring to write short stories and sell them, but every effort came back with a rejection slip. Finally, Fitzgerald resolved upon a desperate step. He would go back to his home in St. Paul and live a year with his parents, aiming consistently to “get over.”

Then he sold his first story to
Smart Set
in June, 1918, receiving thirty dollars therefrom. He worked for three months rewriting “This Side of Paradise”—and sold it to Scribner’s. Success came with a bang and now Fitzgerald is contributing to most of the leading magazines. At the present moment he is completing his second novel, to be ready shortly.

“I realize that ‘This Side of Paradise’ was immature and callow, just as such critics as H. L. Mencken and others have said, altho they were kind enough to say I had possibilities. 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. I have one ideal—to write honestly, as I see it.

“Of course, I know the sort of young folks I depict
are
as I paint them. I’m sick of the sexless animals writers have been giving us. I am tired, too, of hearing that the world war broke down the moral barriers of the younger generation. Indeed, except for leaving its touch of destruction here and there, I do not think the war left any real lasting effect. Why, it is almost forgotten right now.

“The younger generation has been changing all thru the last twenty years. The war had little or nothing to do with it. I put the change up to literature. Our skepticism or cynicism, if you wish to call it that, or, if you are older, our callow flippancy, is due to the way H. G. Wells and other intellectual leaders have been thinking and reflecting life. Our generation has grown up upon their work. So college-bred young people, here and in England, have made radical departures from the Victorian era.

“Girls, for instance, have found the accent shifted from chemical purity to breadth of viewpoint, intellectual charm and piquant cleverness. It is natural that they want to be interesting. And there is one fact that the younger generation could not overlook. All, or nearly all, the famous men and women of history—the kind who left a lasting mark—were, let us say, of broad moral views. Our generation has absorbed all this. Thus it is that we find the young woman of 1920 flirting, kissing; viewing life lightly, saying damn without a blush, playing along the danger line in an immature way—a sort of mental baby vamp. It is quite the same with the boys. They want to be like the interesting chaps they read about. Yes, I put it all up to the intellectuals like Wells.

“Personally, I prefer this sort of girl. Indeed, I married the heroine of my stories. I would not be interested in any other sort of woman.”

We asked Fitzgerald about motion pictures. “I used to try scenarios in the old days,” he laughed. “Invariably they came back. Now, however, I am being adapted to the screen. I suspect it must be difficult to mold my stuff into the conventional movie form with its creaky mid-Victorian sugar. Personally, when I go to the pictures, I like to see a pleasant flapper like Constance Talmadge or I want to see comedies like those of Chaplin’s or Lloyd’s. I’m not strong for the uplift stuff. It simply isn’t life to me.”