The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Other Jazz Age Stories (2 page)

Fitzgerald began writing and publishing stories as a student at St. Paul Academy, a private high school near the family home in St. Paul, Minnesota. He was thirteen years old in 1909 when his first story, “The Mystery of the Raymond Mortgage,” was published in the school literary magazine, the
St. Paul Academy Now and Then
; the last story to be published in his lifetime, “A Patriotic Short,” one of the “Pat Hobby” stories about a Hollywood screenwriter, appeared in
Esquire
in December 1940. An author, then, of stories for more than three decades, Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald, was born on September 24, 1896, in St. Paul to Edward and Mary Fitzgerald; his father, a traveling salesman, had moved the family to New York in search of success during Fitzgerald's childhood, but when Scott was eleven years old the family returned to the St. Paul family home of Scott's maternal grandmother, Louisa McQuillan, after his father was fired from his job in Buffalo. With his father ruined financially, Scott grew up as a poorer relation in the prosperous, Catholic McQuillan household; this provided a basis for the fear of poverty and obsession with money that was to become so prominent in both his life and his fiction. In childhood, his health was precarious, and his mother often took him south to Washington, D.C., in order to escape the St. Paul winters.

Entering St. Paul Academy in 1908, Scott began to write and to develop a circle of friends. He would base many of the “Basil and Josephine” stories he wrote between 1928 and 1931 upon the adolescent relationships he formed during his years at St. Paul's. In 1911, concerned about his poor academic performance, his parents enrolled him in Newman, a Catholic boarding school near New York City. Fitzgerald was a Midwestern outsider at Newman, but even though he was unhappy, he continued to write stories and keep a ledger, which—along with occasional trips to the city where he could nourish his desire for cultural experience and his fantasies about the opulence of the “East”—provided him with temporary escapes from the dreariness of boarding school life.

Fitzgerald entered Princeton University in 1913: a bequest from Louisa McQuillan's estate and markedly better academic performance at Newman enabled him to enter a world of class, privilege, and intellectual richness that had seemed remote and fantastic to him growing up in St. Paul. Fitzgerald's experience at Princeton, like that of so many of his fictional protagonists, was one of contradictory satiation and disillusion. Studying Flaubert, Wilde, and Dante with mentors such as Christian Gauss, and in the company of peers including Edmund Wilson and John Peale Bishop, Fitzgerald found himself immersed in a welter of ideas out of which he would begin to shape his view of modern identity. This evolving conception was one in which the “self” is fully immersed into worldly experience and simultaneously desires to transcend the limitations of time and circumstance, effectively seeking to escape the world into which one is plunged. The combined strains of nostalgia and disillusion that we find in much of Fitzgerald's fiction are informed by this contradiction and the self-recognition it brings to the lives and minds of his protagonists.

At Princeton, Fitzgerald wrote continuously, producing much of the material that would become part his first novel,
This Side of Paradise
, as well as a steady stream of stories, poems, and humorous sketches, many of which were published in the
Nassau Literary Magazine
and the Princeton
Tiger
; a few of these, such as the bizarre “Tarquin of Cheapside,” a “historical” tale of pursuit set in Elizabethan London that portrays Shakespeare as a rapist, would be republished in his first two collections. Fitzgerald became an integral part of the Princeton literary scene during his college years and engaged in a series of personal relationships, most notably with Ginerva King, a Chicago socialite. Enlisting in the service for World War I in October 1917, Fitzgerald left Princeton in his senior year without graduating and received a commission as an officer of the U.S. Army.

His Princeton experiences served as the basis for
This Side of Paradise
, which Fitzgerald drafted and revised throughout his months in the service. He submitted the manuscript of the novel to Scribner's twice in 1918 under the title
The Romantic Egotist
without success. At Scribner's, however, Fitzgerald found an editor in Maxwell Perkins who would become his friend, publicist, and professional mainstay throughout his career. While stationed at Camp Montgomery, Alabama, Fitzgerald met Zelda Sayre and quickly fell in love; the tumultuous nature of their early relationship would become characteristic of their marriage of twenty years, which, despite infidelity, disastrous cycles of notoriety and financial distress, alcoholism, and mental illness, would not end until Scott's death in 1940.

During the period in which he was revising
This Side of Paradise
, Fitzgerald was also writing stories. After discharge from the army at the war's end in February 1919, Fitzgerald moved to New York City to find work as a newspaper reporter but had to settle a job writing copy in an advertising agency. Amidst the flurry of activity that resulted from a day job, attempts to keep up his relationship with Zelda, and the revising of his first novel, he wrote a score of stories and, sending them out for publication, received one rejection slip after another. For over half a year, he endured a miserable existence as he navigated through an on-again, off-again relationship with Zelda and deflected the blows of rejection. But in September 1919, Fitzgerald's life underwent a dramatic change. Scribner's accepted
This Side of Paradise
for publication, and within a matter of weeks he was married to Zelda and began to see checks rolling in from
The Smart Set
,
Scribner's Magazine
, and
The Saturday Evening Post
for “The Debutante” and “Babes in the Woods” (both revised versions of earlier
Nassau Literary Magazine
stories), “Dalyrimple Goes Wrong” and “Head and Shoulders,” later collected in
Flappers and Philosophers
, and “Mr. Icky” and “The Camel's Back,” which Fitzgerald placed in
Tales of the Jazz Age.

This Side of Paradise
, the story of Amory Blaine's maturation as a representative of the lost generation, was a brilliant success for a first novel. Fitzgerald was beginning to make a considerable income from both his novel and his stories, and he and Zelda were seized upon as a glamorous couple whose extravagances and flaunting of convention combined well with intelligence and charismatic personality to set them forth as models for the Jazz Age. From this point on, throughout a career that would end on December 21, 1940, in his early death from a heart attack brought on, at least partially, by alcoholism, Fitzgerald had continuous access to the high-paying, large circulation magazines such as
The Saturday Evening Post, McCall's, Redbook
, and
Esquire
that served as primary venues for the publication of literary fiction in the first half of the twentieth century. Fitzgerald's long-lived popularity as a story writer can in part be attributed to his spectacular early success and the magnetism of the authorial personality that he cultivated; but it is equally true that during the hard months of 1919 he began to learn how to write entertaining, saleable stories that caught the imagination and reflected the desires and anxieties of the large public that read those popular literary and cultural magazines which are only partially comparable to today's
New Yorker
or
Harper's
. From the beginning, many of these stories shattered the stereotype of the popular story written for money in terms of their quality and complexity, and it is clear that Fitzgerald was perfecting his craft as a story writer at the same time that he was successfully marketing his work.

Fitzgerald's career and, in many senses, his life reached its epitome in March 1920 with the publication of
This Side of Paradise
. Scribner's quickly followed the novel's success with the publication of
Flappers and Philosophers
in October of that year, a collection that included “Dalyrimple Goes Wrong” and “Benediction,” published first in
The Smart Set
edited by H. L. Mencken; “The Offshore Pirate,” “Bernice Bobs Her Hair,” “Head and Shoulders,” and “The Ice Palace,” published only months previously in
The Saturday Evening Post
; and “The Cut-Glass Bowl” and “The Four Fists,” published in Scribner's own
Scribner's Magazine
. The collection not only brought together most of Fitzgerald's significant early efforts—ranging from “Benediction,” originally drafted during his time at Princeton, to stories he had written during the dark days of 1919, such as “Dalyrimple Goes Wrong”—it also reflects the concerns that would come to typify the Jazz Age as defined by Fitzgerald: the idealism of adolescence and disillusions of adulthood, the downward slope of life's career, the evanescence of romance. While many of these are clearly apprentice fictions, some written hurriedly and under pressure, they embody themes and issues that Fitzgerald would continue to explore in the long succession of stories and novels to follow.

The rapidity and volume of publication continued through 1922 as Fitzgerald, now a new father with the birth of his daughter, Scot-tie, on October 26, 1921, serialized his second novel,
The Beautiful and Damned
in the
Metropolitan Magazine
, while he continued to publish several stories each year. Some of them—“May Day,” “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz,” “Winter Dreams”—are among the best stories he would write.
The Beautiful and Damned
, published in book form by Scribner's in March 1922, relates the story of the failed marriage of Anthony and Gloria Patch; in its depiction of the crash of romance and the ravages of dissipation, it amplifies many of the themes Fitzgerald was exploring in the stories of this period. As with
This Side of Paradise
, within six months Scribner's followed the publication of Fitzgerald's second novel with the release of
Tales of the Jazz Age
in September 1922. Hurried by the publisher to rush his second volume of stories into publication, Fitzgerald was forced to include in this collection—about one-fifth longer than
Flappers and Philosophers
—an uneven assemblage of very early work, stories from the 1919-1920 period that for reasons of length were not included in the earlier volume, and stories recently published in the magazines.

Fitzgerald divided this second collection into parts and composed for the table of contents comments upon the writing and publication history of each story (see Appendix). In the section entitled “My Last Flappers,” Fitzgerald included “The Jelly-Bean,” originally published in the
Metropolitan Magazine
; “May Day” and “Porcelain and Pink” (a farcical one-act play), published earlier in
The Smart Set
; and “The Camel's Back,” originally published in the
Post
. In “Fantasies” he included “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz” and “Tarquin of Cheapside” (the latter originally published in Princeton's
Nassau Literary Magazine
) from
The Smart Set
; “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” from
Collier's
; and “ ‘O Russet Witch' ” from
Metropolitan Magazine
. Finally, in “Unclassified Masterpieces” he included “The Lees of Happiness,” from the
Chicago Sunday Tribune
, “Mr. Icky,” another one-act play, from
The Smart Set
, and “Jemina,” a story originally written while at Princeton and later published in
Vanity Fair
.

Fitzgerald originally wanted the collection to be entitled
Sideshow
, a rubric that aptly describes this assortment of fictions, scenes, and vignettes ranging from an allegory about money, power, and corruption (“The Diamond as Big as the Ritz”) and a farcical tale of courtship (“The Camel's Back”) to a novella that employs a technique reminiscent of Dos Passos's historical panoramas as it conjoins the movements, crowds, street politicians, and socialites (“May Day”) and a fantasy about the social construction of identity in which a man is born in his sixties and “grows down” to infancy (“The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”). Yet there are commonalities amongst this menagerie of stories that reveal Fitzgerald's ongoing concerns as well as his tendency toward experimentalism early in his career. Collectively, tales of the Jazz Age, they manifest the collision of modern historical forces or pressures and individual desire, of the social and the ego—an encounter that for Fitzgerald produces comic or ironic effects as often as it does tragedy. Indeed, many of the stories of Fitzgerald's “sideshow” in
Tales of the Jazz Age
are written in the tragicomic mode, which, one might argue, is later reflected in the mature work of
Gatsby
and
Tender Is the Night
.

As Fitzgerald continued to write stories and novels in the midst of declining fame and a chaotic life foreshortened by alcoholism, he expanded the range and improved the quality and consistency of his short stories while maintaining their marketability. In his third compilation,
All the Sad Young Men
, he collected stories such as “Winter Dreams” and “The Rich Boy” that reflect the obsessions with wealth and sex masked as romance which are the mainstays of
The Great Gatsby
.
Taps at Reveille
, the final collection Fitzgerald assembled, contains stories, such as “Crazy Sundays” and “Babylon Revisited,” replete with apocalyptic scenes of dissipation and breakdown that typify the “late” Fitzgerald culminating in the posthumous
The Crack-Up
(1945); but Fitzgerald also included in
Taps
several of the “Basil and Josephine” stories in which he returns to his own childhood and adolescence, tracing the sexual and social maturation of the two title characters. Toward the end of his life, Fitzgerald wrote a series of stories for
Esquire
about a Hollywood screenwriter (the “Pat Hobby” stories) that borrowed upon his own experiences in “Babylon,” working for MGM on such films as
A Yank at Oxford
and
Gone With the Wind
. At the time of his death, Fitzgerald had published over 150 stories, most of them written in the two decades that constitute his professional career as a writer.