The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald (2 page)

INTRODUCTION

Bryant Mangum

The stories in this collection come from a brief moment that F. Scott Fitzgerald would recall as the most thrilling and enchanted time of his life. In a retrospective essay, “Early Success,” he describes an episode at the height of the Jazz Age—a time near the publication of
The Great
Gatsby—
when he drove through the twilight on the French Riviera looking at the sea below and was, for an instant, reunited with a younger version of himself at the very beginning of his career. He went “back into the mind of the young man with cardboard soles who had walked the streets of New York” and relived those dreams from that earlier time “when the fulfilled future and the wistful past were mingled in a single gorgeous moment—when life was literally a dream.”
¹
That moment had begun in September 1919 when Maxwell Perkins, then a new editor at Charles Scribner’s Sons, had written to tell Fitzgerald that his novel
This Side of Paradise
had been accepted for publication, news that was followed quickly in November by a letter from Harold Ober, assigned to market Fitzgerald’s stories at the Paul Revere Reynolds agency, reporting that
The Saturday Evening Post
had bought his story “Head and Shoulders” for $400. In February 1920 the
Post
would publish “Head and Shoulders,” and
This Side of Paradise
would appear on March 26. A few days later, on April 3, he would marry Zelda Sayre of Montgomery, Alabama, whom he had met in July 1918 and who had agreed to become his wife, at least partly on the strength of the promise of his now seemingly assured “early success.” In the six-month period preceding the publication of
This Side of Paradise,
Fitzgerald wrote and sold eight stories, five of which appear in this volume; in its afterglow— those four years leading up to
The Great Gatsby—
he wrote and sold not only his second novel,
The Beautiful and Damned,
but eighteen more stories, four of which appear in this volume and all of which derive energy from Fitzgerald’s wistful backward glance toward what he called the “all too short period”
²
when he and the young man roaming the streets of New York with cardboard soles were one. These ten stories, inspired by that time when life for Fitzgerald was literally a dream, are, as it turns out, not only the best early Fitzgerald stories; they are among the very best of the nearly 170 stories that he wrote during his entire professional career, 1920–40.

Seen through the lens of those dizzying events of the fall of 1919, Fitzgerald’s entry into the profession of authorship seems effortless and painless, which of course it was not. After the Armistice Fitzgerald had returned to New York from Montgomery, where he had been stationed during the war, and took a job with the Barron Collier advertising agency, doing work that he later admitted detesting. In his spare time he continued to revise and submit the novel that would eventually become
This Side of Paradise,
as well as revising old undergraduate stories, but his submissions resulted in a disheartening stream of rejection slips. His one success, the sale of “Babes in the Woods” in 1919 to
The Smart Set,
depressed him because it brought only $30 and because it was an old undergraduate piece written two years earlier, a fact which, he said, made him feel that he “was on the down-grade at twenty-two.”
³
In the midst of these personal crises and also during a time in America when events leading up to and away from the May Day riots had left his generation, as he said, “cynical rather than revolutionary,”
⁴
Zelda broke their engagement, and when Fitzgerald’s frantic and unsuccessful trips from New York to Montgomery in the spring of 1919 failed to persuade her to change her mind, he concluded that he was “in love with a whirlwind and I must spin a net big enough to catch it out of my head.”
⁵
When Zelda threw him over, he “went home [to St. Paul] and finished my novel.”
⁶
Perkins’s letter accepting
This Side of Paradise
arrived in mid-September 1919. Then, in just under six months, came a letter from Zelda that began, “Darling Heart, our fairy tale is almost ended, and we’re going to marry and live happily ever afterward”
⁷
—the first two parts of which were in fact soon to come true.

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.