The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald (32 page)

“Look here—” he came nearer to Rudolph, but the boy drew away, so Father Schwartz went back and sat down in his chair, his eyes dried out and hot. “Did you ever see an amusement park?”

“No, Father.”

“Well, go and see an amusement park.” The priest waved his hand vaguely. “It’s a thing like a fair, only much more glittering. Go to one at night and stand a little way off from it in a dark place—under dark trees. You’ll see a big wheel made of lights turning in the air, and a long slide shooting boats down into the water. A band playing somewhere, and a smell of peanuts—and everything will twinkle. But it won’t remind you of anything, you see. It will all just hang out there in the night like a colored balloon—like a big yellow lantern on a pole.”

Father Schwartz frowned as he suddenly thought of something.

“But don’t get up close,” he warned Rudolph, “because if you do you’ll only feel the heat and the sweat and the life.”

All this talking seemed particularly strange and awful to Rudolph, because this man was a priest. He sat there, half terrified, his beautiful eyes open wide and staring at Father Schwartz. But underneath his terror he felt that his own inner convictions were confirmed. There was something ineffably gorgeous somewhere that had nothing to do with God. He no longer thought that God was angry at him about the original lie, because He must have understood that Rudolph had done it to make things finer in the confessional, brightening up the dinginess of his admissions by saying a thing radiant and proud. At the moment when he had affirmed immaculate honor a silver pennon
¹²
had flapped out into the breeze somewhere and there had been the crunch of leather and the shine of silver spurs and a troop of horsemen waiting for dawn on a low green hill. The sun had made stars of light on their breastplates like the picture at home of the German cuirassiers at Sedan.
¹³

But now the priest was muttering inarticulate and heart-broken words, and the boy became wildly afraid. Horror entered suddenly in at the open window, and the atmosphere of the room changed. Father Schwartz collapsed precipitously down on his knees, and let his body settle back against a chair.

“Oh, my God!” he cried out, in a strange voice, and wilted to the floor.

Then a human oppression rose from the priest’s worn clothes, and mingled with the faint smell of old food in the corners. Rudolph gave a sharp cry and ran in a panic from the house—while the collapsed man lay there quite still, filling his room, filling it with voices and faces until it was crowded with echolalia, and rang loud with a steady, shrill note of laughter.

Outside the window the blue sirocco trembled over the wheat, and girls with yellow hair walked sensuously along roads that bounded the fields, calling innocent, exciting things to the young men who were working in the lines between the grain. Legs were shaped under starchless gingham, and rims of the necks of dresses were warm and damp. For five hours now hot fertile life had burned in the afternoon. It would be night in three hours, and all along the land there would be these blonde Northern girls and the tall young men from the farms lying out beside the wheat, under the moon.

METROPOLITAN,
OCTOBER 1920.

NOTES

BENEDICTION

“Benediction” has its origins in an early story, “The Ordeal” ( June 1915,
The
Nassau Literary Magazine
), which Fitzgerald wrote and published as an undergraduate at Princeton, following a visit with his Jesuit-priest cousin and during a time when his association with Father Sigourney Webster Fay and Shane Leslie had led him to consider entering the priesthood. In “The Ordeal” a novice priest struggles with forces pulling him, on the one hand, toward the outside world and its sensual pleasures and, on the other, toward the vows of the priesthood and the ascetic life of the church. In reworking this story that would become “Benediction,” Fitzgerald adds a female character, Lois, who does not appear in “The Ordeal,” and shifts the spiritual crisis onto her.
The
Smart Set
bought “Benediction” for $40 and published it in the February 1920 issue. With nineteen-year-old Lois in “Benediction” he introduces a forerunner of the “very romantic and curious and courageous” flapper who, as he explains in a later story, “is tendered the subtle compliment of being referred to by her [first] name alone.” Fitzgerald included “Benediction” in his first story collection,
Flappers and Philosophers
(1920), which
The Smart Set
would review, singling out “Benediction” as the best story in the collection.

thick volumes of Thomas Aquinas and Henry James and Cardinal Mercier and Immanuel Kant:
The volumes carried by the middle-aged monks suggest erudition and broad interests that extend across time (from the thirteenth through the twentieth centuries) and beyond church doctrine (Aquinas and Mercier) into fiction ( James) and philosophy (Kant).

the Society of Jesus, founded in Spain five hundred years before by a tough-minded
soldier:
the Jesuits, founded by St. Ignatius Loyola (1491–1556).

Farmington:
Miss Porter’s School founded by Sarah Porter in 1843 and located in Farmington, Connecticut.

the Jesuit College in Philadelphia:
likely referring to St. Joseph’s College, the seventh oldest Jesuit college in America, founded in 1851.

shimmys . . . maxixe:
Both the shimmy and the maxixe (pronounced max-ish) were popular American dances in the 1910s and ’20s, but both have origins in other cultures. The shimmy is thought to have its origins in the Haitian voodoo dances, and in all of its various incarnations it has been a shoulder-shaking dance, while the maxixe originated in the Brazilian tango and emphasizes movement of the feet rather than the torso.

Benediction:
The Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament is a complete rite, during which the Blessed Sacrament is exposed or displayed in a vessel, often ornate, called a monstrance. “O Salutaris Hostia” (literally “O Saving Host”) is the second-to-last stanza of a hymn written by St. Thomas Aquinas, and it accompanies the Benediction rite.

St. Francis Xavier:
a founding member of the Society of Jesus and canonized in the same year as the Society’s primary founder, St. Ignatius Loyola. A converter of infidels, St. Francis Xavier is remembered as perhaps the greatest missionary since the era of the apostles.

pietà, a life-size statue of the Blessed Virgin set within a semicircle of rocks:
A pietà is a representation of Mary mourning over the dead body of Jesus.

HEAD AND SHOULDERS

Fitzgerald wrote “Head and Shoulders” (originally called “Nest Feathers”) in November 1919 during what was, to him in retrospect, the most exciting period of his life. Harold Ober, who had in this same month become responsible for the marketing of Fitzgerald’s stories at the Paul Revere Reynolds agency, sold “Head and Shoulders” for $400 to
The Saturday Evening Post.
This was nearly three times the amount Fitzgerald had received for any story he had sold thus far, and its appearance in the February 21, 1920, issue became Fitzgerald’s first publication in a mass-circulation magazine: while he had previously published three stories in
The Smart Set,
its circulation was just above twenty thousand; the Post’s weekly audience was over two million. As he wrote about this to Ober in 1925, just months before the publication of
The Great Gatsby,
“I was twenty-two when I came to New York and found that you’d sold Head and Shoulders to the Post. I’d like to get a thrill like that again but I suppose its only once in a lifetime.” From strictly a financial standpoint, the money that came from the sale of “Head and Shoulders” when coupled with the acceptance of his first novel,
This Side of Paradise,
enabled Fitzgerald to resume his courtship with the woman soon to become his wife, Zelda Sayre, who had called off their engagement until Fitzgerald could prove he was able to support her. “Head and Shoulders” marked the introduction of the flapper to middle America and in the process installed Fitzgerald as the flapper’s historian, the chronicler of the Jazz Age in fiction. The appetite that “Head and Shoulders” created in the popular American magazine audience would prompt the
Post
to publish five more of his flapper stories (one of which, “The Ice Palace,” introduced the combination of the flapper and Southern belle) in 1920 alone. Fitzgerald selected “Head and Shoulders” for inclusion in
Flappers and Philosophers,
placing it third after “The Offshore Pirate” and “The Ice Palace.”

George M. Cohan:
George M. Cohan (1878–1942), American actor, playwright, director, composer. The 1917 song “Over There” won him a Congressional medal.

Château-Thierry:
French village where French and American troops halted the German advance into France in a July 1918 battle.

“Spinoza’s Improvement of the Understanding”:
Baruch Spinoza (1632–77), Dutch philosopher, author of
Treatise on the Improvement of the Understanding.

“Home James”:
1917 Varsity Show at Columbia University, written by Oscar Hammerstein and Herman Axelrod.

Blundering Blimp:
Song in Fitzgerald’s play
Porcelain and Pink,
as published in
The Smart Set
in January 1920, has the lines, “As you blunder blindly, kindly through / The blinking, winking Blimp!”

Pall Malls:
popular cigarette made by American Tobacco Company.

Sheffield:
school for engineering and science at Yale.

Berkeley:
George Berkeley (1685–1753), Irish bishop and philosopher.

Hume:
David Hume (1711–76), Scottish philosopher.

Omar Khayyam: Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám,
poem attributed to the Persian scholar Omar Khayyám, who died circa 1123.

ten-twenty-thirty:
vaudeville circuit where tickets cost ten, twenty, or thirty cents.

Florodora Sextette:
performers in the long-running musical
Florodora,
which opened in New York in 1900. A group of six women and six men in the show sang the hit song “Tell Me Pretty Maiden.”

Mrs. Sol Smith’s:
Sol Smith (1801–69), theater manager, ran a traveling show in the West and South in the 1830s and ’40s.

little Boston boy in the comic magazines:
perhaps a reference to Buster Brown, cartoon created by Richard Outcault.

Uncle Remus:
narrator in Southern black folktales retold by Joel Chandler Harris (1848–1908). Uncle Remus, a slave, tells his master’s children about Brer Rabbit’s escapades.

Catullus: Gaius Valerius Catullus (84–54 B.C.), Roman poet.

with Bergsonian trimmings:
Henri Bergson (1859–1941), French philosopher. His lectures on “Creative Evolution” before World War I were popular with American visitors in Paris.

“The Bohemian Girl”:
1843 opera by Irish composer Michael Balfe (1808–70).

Hammerstein:
Oscar Hammerstein (1895–1960), American composer. He wrote “Home James!” (
see note 4 above
). Hammerstein’s father and brother also had careers in musical theater.

shimmy: shoulder-shaking dance. (See note 5 to “Benediction.”)

Carlyle’s:
Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881), Scottish essayist and historian.

St. Vitus dance:
A form of chorea occurring usually in children. Patients have involuntary, jerky muscular spasms.

Kipling:
Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936), English writer, author of
Kim, The
Jungle Book,
and
Captains Courageous.

O. Henry: pseudonym of William Sydney Porter (1862–1910), popular short-story writer known for surprise endings.

Herb Spencer:
Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), English philosopher.

“Pepys’ Diary”:
Samuel Pepys (1633–1703), English diarist and naval historian. His diary, written between 1660 and 1669, gives a vivid account of life in seventeenth-century England.

“Mens sana in corpore sano”: Latin for “A healthy mind in a healthy body.”

fourth proposition of Euclid: Euclid, Greek mathematician, circa 300 B.C. In the thirteen books of the
Elements
he set forth geometric postulates and proofs. In the
Data
he made ninety-four propositions proving that if certain elements in a figure are given, the other elements can be determined.

quod erat demonstrandum: Latin for “which was to be demonstrated.”

Prometheus:
In Greek mythology Prometheus defended men from Zeus and gave them fire from heaven. Zeus punished him by chaining him to a rock where eagles ate his liver. Each night the liver grew back and it was eaten again by the eagles. He was rescued generations later by Hercules.

Isaac Newton:
Isaac Newton (1642–1727), English scientist known for setting forth the laws of gravity.

Hippodrome:
Manhattan theater at Sixth Avenue and 43rd Street featuring circuses and other spectacles.

Schopenhauer:
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860), German philosopher.

William James pragmatism:
William James (1842–1910), American philosopher.

THE ICE PALACE

Fitzgerald wrote “The Ice Palace” in December 1919, shortly after a return visit to Montgomery, Alabama, where he had been stationed during the war and where, in July 1918, he had first met Zelda Sayre at a country club dance. In an article that appeared in a 1920 issue of
The Editor,
he describes the story as having been prompted by a recent visit with a girl to a Confederate graveyard in Montgomery: “She told me I could never understand how she felt about the Confederate graves, and I told her I understood so well that I could put it on paper.” Back in Minnesota, the image of the graveyard was paired in Fitzgerald’s mind by way of contrast with images of the St. Paul ice palaces of the 1880s that his mother had described to him earlier. The two images came together, as Fitzgerald put it, “as all one story—the contrast between Alabama and Minnesota,” which embodies the North-South conflict at the heart of “The Ice Palace.” The story is the first of what has come to be known as Fitzgerald’s Tarleton Trilogy—three stories, “The Ice Palace,” “The Jelly-Bean,” and “The Last of the Belles,” all reflecting Fitzgerald’s complex and ambiguous feelings about the South—set in “a little city of forty thousand,” clearly a thinly veiled Montgomery. The story of Sally Carrol Happer’s relationship with Harry Bellamy in “The Ice Palace” is an autobiographical version with an alternate ending of Scott Fitzgerald’s courtship with Zelda Sayre. Sally Carrol Happer’s legacy in the story is, first, that of the Southern belle, embodied in the character of Margery Lee, whom Sally Carrol so admires; but she is also a free, independent spirit with the glitter and sparkle of Fitzgerald’s most memorable flappers before and after her. Fitzgerald included “The Ice Palace” as the second story in
Flappers and Philosophers.

“Then blow, ye winds, heigho! A-roving I will go”:
These lines are from “A Capital Ship,” by Charles E. Carryl (1841–1920). Carryl’s popular song incorporates the old sea song “Ten Thousand Miles Away.”

Carmen from the South . . . Dangerous Dan McGrew:
Roger lightheartedly compares Sally Carrol to the free-spirited and ill-fated heroine of Georges Bizet’s last and most famous opera,
Carmen
(1875), set in the south of Spain; Dangerous Dan McGrew, from the ballad “The Shooting of Dan McGrew” by Robert William Service (1874–1958).

Ever read any Ibsen?:
referring to Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906), the great Norwegian playwright, whose work often deals with individuals, both women and men, struggling against society. Later in the story Roger finds Sally Carrol, who had read no Ibsen when he earlier asked the question, reading Ibsen’s verse drama about the Norwegian folk hero Peer Gynt (
Peer Gynt,
1867).

the Serbia in the case:
The incident that sparked World War I was the assassination in 1914 of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo by Serbian nationalists, an act which ultimately led to Austria-Hungary’s declaration of war on Serbia.

the ice palace:
Ice palaces have a long history, dating back to eighteenth-century Russia. The first ice palace in St. Paul was built for the Winter Carnival of 1886, an event postponed because of an outbreak of smallpox. Ice palaces were then built again in 1887 and 1888, though those planned for 1889 and 1890 were not built because the weather did not cooperate. In 1896, the year of Fitzgerald’s birth, ice structures on a smaller scale, called ice forts, were constructed, as they were in 1916 and 1917. The next ice palace to be built after the magnificent one of 1888 was in 1937, and it consisted of enormous screens, forts, and backdrops. Fitzgerald reports that he drew on a sketch of an ice palace of the 1880s, found in a newspaper of the period, for his conception of the ice palace in the story.

“Kubla Khan” . . . “caves of ice!”:
the famous poem fragment by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) and its first two lines.

Wacouta Club:
One of a number of winter sports clubs in St. Paul, the Wacouta Club was established in 1885.

BERNICE BOBS HER HAIR

The idea for “Bernice Bobs Her Hair” originated in a ten-page letter (circa 1916) that Fitzgerald wrote to his sister Annabel when he was nineteen and she fourteen. He instructed her in great detail in the areas of “Conversation,” “Poise,” and “Dress and Personality” as to how she could become a social success. The story that grew out of this letter was written in January 1920, and it was originally a ten-thousand-word story called “Barbara Bobs Her Hair.” After four magazines rejected it, Fitzgerald shortened it to seven thousand words, altered its climax (making it in his words “snappy”), and Ober sold it for $500 to
The Saturday Evening Post
with its new title, “Bernice Bobs Her Hair.” Written in the same month as “The Camel’s Back,” the story was published in the May 1, 1920, issue and was Fitzgerald’s fourth contribution to the magazine. Bernice fits in to the category of what Fitzgerald called the “wonderful kid,” a young woman of about sixteen who is on her way toward freespiritedness and liberation, the variety of flapper that Bernice has become by the time of the story’s unexpected turn. With her last gesture in the story Bernice signals her independence from the social hypocrisy of her cousin’s world, though ironically it is the precise world into which Fitzgerald had earlier given his sister the rules of entry. Fitzgerald included “Bernice Bobs Her Hair” in
Flappers and Philosophers.