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 METROPOLITAN MAGAZINE,
JUNE 1922
EULOGY ON THE FLAPPER
By Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald
The Flapper is deceased. Her outer accoutrements have been bequeathed to several hundred girls’ schools throughout the country, to several thousand big-town shop-girls, always imitative of the several hundred girls’ schools, and to several million small-town belles always imitative of the big-town shop-girls via the “novelty stores” of their respective small towns. It is a great bereavement to me, thinking as I do that there will never be another product of circumstance to take the place of the dear departed.
I am assuming that the Flapper will live by her accomplishments and not by her Flapping. How can a girl say again, “I do not want to be respectable because respectable girls are not attractive,” and how can she again so wisely arrive at the knowledge that “boys do dance most with the girls they kiss most,” and that “men will marry the girls they could kiss before they had asked papa?” Perceiving these things, the Flapper awoke from her lethargy of subdeb-ism, bobbed her hair, put on her choicest pair of earrings and a great deal of audacity and rouge and went into the battle. She flirted because it was fun to flirt and wore a one-piece bathing suit because she had a good figure, she covered her face with powder and paint because she didn’t need it and she refused to be bored chiefly because she wasn’t boring. She was conscious that the things she did were the things she had always wanted to do. Mothers disapproved of their sons taking the Flapper to dances, to teas, to swim and most of all to heart. She had mostly masculine friends, but youth does not need friends—it needs only crowds, and the more masculine the crowds the more crowded for the Flapper. Of these things the Flapper was well aware!
Now audacity and earrings and one-piece bathing suits have become fashionable and the first Flappers are so secure in their positions that their attitude toward themselves is scarcely distinguishable from that of their débutante sisters of ten years ago toward themselves. They have won their case. They are blasé. And the new Flappers galumping along in unfastened galoshes are striving not to do what is pleasant and what they please, but simply to outdo the founders of the Honorable Order of Flappers; to outdo everything. Flapperdom has become a game; it is no longer a philosophy.
I came across an amazing editorial a short time ago. It fixed the blame for all divorces, crime waves, high prices, unjust taxes, violations of the Volstead Act and crimes in Hollywood upon the head of the Flapper. The paper wanted back the dear old fireside of long ago, wanted to resuscitate “Hearts and Flowers” and have it instituted as the sole tune played at dances from now on and forever, wanted prayers before breakfast on Sunday morning—and to bring things back to this superb state it advocated restraining the Flapper. All neurotic “women of thirty” and all divorce cases, according to the paper, could be traced to the Flapper. As a matter of fact, she hasn’t yet been given a chance. I know of no divorcées or neurotic women of thirty who were ever Flappers. Do you? And I should think that fully airing the desire for unadulterated gaiety, for romances that she knows will not last, and for dramatizing herself would make her more inclined to favor the “back to the fireside” movement than if she were repressed until age gives her those rights that only youth has the right to give.
I refer to the right to experiment with herself as a transient, poignant figure who will be dead tomorrow. Women, despite the fact that nine out of ten of them go through life with a death-bed air either of snatching-the-last-moment or with martyr-resignation, do not die tomorrow—or the next day. They have to live on to any one of many bitter ends, and I should think the sooner they learned that things weren’t going to be over until they were too tired to care, the quicker the divorce court’s popularity would decline.
“Out with inhibitions,” gleefully shouts the Flapper, and elopes with the Arrow-collar boy that she had been thinking, for a week or two, might make a charming breakfast companion. The marriage is annulled by the proverbial irate parent and the Flapper comes home, none the worse for wear, to marry, years later, and live happily ever afterwards.
I see no logical reasons for keeping the young illusioned. Certainly disillusionment comes easier at twenty than at forty—the fundamental and inevitable disillusionments, I mean. Its effects on the Flappers I have known have simply been to crystallize their ambitious desires and give form to their code of living so that they can come home and live happily ever afterwards—or go into the movies or become social service “workers” or something. Older people, except a few geniuses, artistic and financial, simply throw up their hands, heave a great many heart-rending sighs and moan to themselves something about what a hard thing life is—and then, of course, turn to their children and wonder why they don’t believe in Santa Claus and the kindness of their fellow men and in the tale that they will be happy if they are good and obedient. And yet the strongest cry against Flapperdom is that it is making the youth of the country cynical. It is making them intelligent and teaching them to capitalize their natural resources and get their money’s worth. They are merely applying business methods to being young.
“Don’t treat me like a girl,” she warned him, “I’m not like any girl YOU ever saw.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s story “The Jelly-Bean,” illustrated by Arthur William Brown, was published in Metropolitan magazine, October 1920.
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
Allen, Joan M. Candles and Carnival Lights: The Catholic Sensibility of F. Scott Fitzgerald. New York: New York University Press, 1978.
Bruccoli, Matthew J. F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Descriptive Bibliography. Revised edition. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1987.
———. Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981.
———, ed., with the assistance of Jennifer McCabe Atkinson. As Ever, Scott Fitz—: Letters Between F. Scott Fitzgerald and His Literary Agent, Harold Ober, 1919–1940. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1972.
——— and Jackson R. Bryer, eds. F. Scott Fitzgerald in His Own Time: A Miscellany. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1971.
——— and Margaret M. Duggan, eds., with the assistance of Susan Walker. Correspondence of F. Scott Fitzgerald. New York: Random House, 1980.
———, Scottie Fitzgerald Smith, and Joan P. Kerr, eds. The Romantic Egoists: A Pictorial Autobiography from the Scrapbooks and Albums of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1974.
Bryer, Jackson R. The Critical Reputation of F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Bibliographical Study. Hamden, CT: Archon, 1967.
———. F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Critical Reception. New York: Burt Franklin, 1978.
———, ed. New Essays on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Neglected Stories. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1996.
———, ed. The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald: New Approaches to Criticism. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982.
———, Alan Margolies, and Ruth Prigozy, eds. F. Scott Fitzgerald: New Perspectives. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000.
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Ledger: A Facsimile. Washington, D.C.: NCR/Microcard Editions, 1972.
———. All the Sad Young Men. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1926.
———. The Crack-Up. Ed. Edmund Wilson. New York: New Directions, 1945.
———. Flappers and Philosophers. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1920.
———. The Great Gatsby. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1925.
———. Tales of the Jazz Age. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1922.
———. This Side of Paradise. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1920.
Fryer, Sarah Beebe. Fitzgerald’s New Women: Harbingers of Change. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1988.
Higgins, John A. F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Study of the Stories. Jamaica, NY: St. John’s University Press, 1971.
Kuehl, John. F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne, 1991.
———, ed. The Apprentice Fiction of F. Scott Fitzgerald: 1909–1917. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1965.
———, and Jackson R. Bryer, eds. Dear Scott/Dear Max: The Fitzgerald-Perkins Correspondence. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1971.
Mangum, Bryant. A Fortune Yet: Money in the Art of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Short Stories. New York: Garland, 1991.
Milford, Nancy. Zelda: A Biography. New York: Harper and Row, 1970.
Mizener, Arthur. The Far Side of Paradise: A Biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1951.
Petry, Alice Hall. Fitzgerald’s Craft of Short Fiction: The Collected Stories— 1920–1935. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1989.
Piper, Henry Dan. F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Critical Portrait. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1965.
Prigozy, Ruth, ed. The Cambridge Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
West, James L. W., III. The Perfect Hour: The Romance of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ginevra King, His First Love. New York: Random House, 2005.
———, ed. Flappers and Philosophers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
———, ed. Tales of the Jazz Age. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Wilson, Edmund, ed. The Crack-Up. New York: New Directions, 1945.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I wish to thank Judy Sternlight at Random House, who first suggested this project to me and who has guided it from beginning to end. I am also grateful to Vincent La Scala for his extraordinary vigilance, to Gabrielle Bordwin for a cover design that catches so many of the words in these stories in a single image, and to Allison Merrill for her sharp reader’s eye. My graduate and undergraduate Fitzgerald seminar members at Virginia Commonwealth University have provided useful suggestions during the preparation of this volume, and I am grateful to them. Thanks also to Matthew J. Bruccoli of the University of South Carolina for his ongoing support; to Rebecca M. Dale for her research assistance; and to James L. W. West III of Pennsylvania State University for his helpful advice to me on this project. Finally, thanks to Rebecca Angus Mangum for her patience and her support during the preparation of this volume.
READING GROUP GUIDE
In This Side of Paradise, written before any of the stories in this volume, Amory Blaine describes the generation coming of age in the early 1920s as a generation “grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken.” The main characters in these early Fitzgerald stories are part of this generation. To what degree are their actions and their codes of behavior—from the early flappers to the later sad young men— dictated by the moral complexity that comes with growing up in an age when the conventional wisdom of their elders no longer prevails? To what degree does gender play a role in their development of a system of values to live by?
The young women in these stories all seem to value individual freedom and independence, from the youngest like Bernice and Marjorie in “Bernice Bobs Her Hair” to the most seasoned like Ardita Farnam in “The Offshore Pirate.” But as Zelda Fitzgerald remarked in “Eulogy on the Flapper,” the flapper eventually “comes home, none the worse for wear, to marry, years later, and live happily ever afterwards.” In light of the fact that most of the young women in these stories either wind up married or headed in the direction of matrimony, do their professed beliefs in individual freedom seem illusionary or, at worst, disingenuous? For the young women in these stories, what is the relationship between individual liberty and economic freedom?
When Anton Laurier comes to the home of Horace and Marcia in “Head and Shoulders,” Horace makes this remark to him: “About raps. Don’t answer them! Let them alone—have a padded door.” Do you think Fitzgerald wrote this clever line for Horace simply to end the story on a light note? Or could it have deeper implications that reflect Horace’s true feelings about the course his life has taken after meeting Marcia? Could there be deeper biographical implications of this remark in light of the fact that Fitzgerald was about to embark on a life with Zelda? Discuss.
There is wide disagreement over the artistic value of “Benediction”—more so than any other story in this collection—particularly over whether it earns what some consider its “O. Henry” ending. There is also considerable debate among critics as to what Lois plans to do in the future. What do you think the torn up and discarded telegram left in the wastebasket suggests that Lois plans to do next? And do you think the story “earns” its ending? What is the connection between the story’s conclusion and what happens to Lois during the Benediction ceremony earlier in the story?
Fitzgerald maintained that “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” Throughout his fiction, he does seem able to appreciate the superficial attractiveness of the world he is also criticizing. “Bernice Bobs Her Hair” originated in a detailed letter Fitzgerald wrote to his sister advising her as to how she could make herself more acceptable to a society that is very much like the society Marjorie is grooming Bernice to enter. Does Fitzgerald appear to value, even to glorify, the exclusive society depicted in the story? If so, how do you reconcile this with Bernice’s dramatic act at the conclusion of the narrative? What could account for what might be called Fitzgerald’s “double vision,” not only in this story, but also in many of the stories in this collection? How are his themes strengthened or weakened by his double vision?
“The Diamond as Big as the Ritz” seems like an indictment of the capitalistic system that has produced individuals like Braddock Washington, who would rather blow up his diamond mountain and kill himself in the process than have the diamond market ruined through its discovery by the government. To what degree is the story, with its references to Hades and the twelve men of Fish, allegorical? How do you reconcile your ideas about its allegorical meaning with Fitzgerald’s contention that he wrote the story “utterly for my own amusement”?
Dexter Green is one of Fitzgerald’s saddest young men at the end of “Winter Dreams.” The catalyst for his sadness is Devlin’s revelation about what has become of Judy Jones. Is it finally Dexter’s loss of Judy Jones herself that brings him to the edge of despair, causing him to contemplate “the gray beauty of steel that withstands all time,” or is it some deeper thing she symbolizes? In either case, why do you think Dexter is devastated to learn what he learns from Devlin about Judy?
In the story “Absolution,” Carl Miller’s “two bonds with the colorful life were his faith in the Roman Catholic Church and his mystical worship of the Empire Builder, James J. Hill.” Given what lies “[o]utside the window” in the last paragraph of the story, what is Rudolph’s bond with the “colorful life” likely to be? Is it easy or difficult to imagine Rudolph, like Jay in The Great Gatsby, earning a fortune and wedding his visions to the “perishable breath” of a spoiled rich girl like Daisy Fay Buchanan?
ABOUT THE EDITOR
BRYANT MANGUM is professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University and is the author of A Fortune Yet: Money in the Art of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Short Stories. His essays have appeared in The Cambridge Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald, the Fitzgerald/Hemingway Annual, New Essays on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Neglected Stories , and American Literary Realism, among others. He lives in Richmond, Virginia.
THE MODERN LIBRARY EDITORIAL BOARD
Maya Angelou
A. S. Byatt
Caleb Carr
Christopher Cerf
Charles Frazier
Vartan Gregorian
Richard Howard
Charles Johnson
Jon Krakauer
Edmund Morris
Azar Nafisi
Joyce Carol Oates
Elaine Pagels
John Richardson
Salman Rushdie
Oliver Sacks
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.
Carolyn See
William Styron
Gore Vidal
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born on September 24, 1896, in St. Paul, Minnesota. Though both his parents were Irish Catholics they came from very different social backgrounds. His father, Edward, was descended from a long line of cultivated if impoverished Maryland gentry. His mother, née Mollie McQuillan, was the offspring of self-made immigrants who had prospered in the wholesale grocery business. When the child was two the family moved to upstate New York, where Edward Fitzgerald worked as a salesman for Procter and Gamble. In 1908 the Fitzgeralds returned to St. Paul, and twelve-year-old Scott enrolled in St. Paul Academy; later he attended the Newman School, a Catholic prep school in Hackensack, New Jersey. Handsome and ambitious, Fitzgerald was a precocious and self-centered youth who proved unpopular with his peers. “I didn’t know till fifteen that there was anyone in the world except me, and it cost me plenty,” he recalled.
In 1913 Fitzgerald entered Princeton University. Although he never graduated, his college years were crucial to Fitzgerald’s development as a writer. He formed friendships with classmates such as John Peale Bishop, an early literary mentor, and Edmund Wilson, who became his “intellectual conscience.” He wrote lyrics for musical revues produced by the school’s famous Triangle Club and contributed plays and short stories to The Nassau Literary Magazine.
In 1917 Fitzgerald left Princeton and joined the army, receiving an infantry commission as a second lieutenant. In 1918, while stationed near Montgomery, Alabama, he met a capricious Southern belle named Zelda Sayre at a country-club dance, and the two began a stormy courtship. All the while Fitzgerald worked feverishly on a first novel called The Romantic Egotist, subsequently retitled This Side of Paradise. “I know I’ll wake some morning and find that the debutantes have made me famous overnight,” he said in a letter to Edmund Wilson, adding, “I really believe that no one else could have written so searchingly the story of the youth of our generation.”
Indeed, the appearance of This Side of Paradise in 1920 brought Fitzgerald instant success. The book established him as the prophet and golden boy of the newly dawned Jazz Age. Flappers and Philosophers (1920), a collection of short stories, immediately solidified his reputation. The same year he wed Zelda Sayre, who gave birth to a daughter, Scottie, eighteen months later. In 1922 Fitzgerald brought out another novel, The Beautiful and Damned, and a second volume of stories, Tales of the Jazz Age. The couple settled for a time on Long Island, and in 1924 they journeyed to France, where Fitzgerald wrote The Great Gatsby (1925). The Fitzgeralds quickly made friends with a number of expatriate Americans, including a then unknown writer named Ernest Hemingway, who became Fitzgerald’s “artistic conscience.” Though he published a third collection of stories, All the Sad Young Men (1926), the author’s heavy drinking and destructive marriage took an increasing toll on his writing.
By 1930, when Zelda suffered a complete mental breakdown, the couple’s extravagantly led life read like scenes from Fitzgerald’s fiction. “Sometimes I don’t know whether Zelda and I are real or whether we are characters in one of my novels,” he confessed. Struggling against a mountain of debt, he wrote Tender Is the Night (1934) as well as scores of short stories, some of which were included in his final collection, Taps at Reveille (1935), before announcing his own “emotional bankruptcy” in a series of confessional essays, beginning with “The Crack-Up,” which appeared in Esquire magazine. In 1937 Fitzgerald resettled in Los Angeles, where he had worked periodically as a screenwriter. He died there suddenly of a heart attack on December 21, 1940. The Last Tycoon, an unfinished novel about Hollywood, came out in 1941. Several works drawn from his unpublished papers appeared posthumously, notably The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald (1963), Dear Scott/Dear Max (1963), As Ever, Scott Fitz— (1972), The Notebooks of F. Scott Fitzgerald (1978), and Correspondence of F. Scott Fitzgerald (1980). Zelda died in a hospital fire on March 10, 1948.
“Fitzgerald lived in his great moments, and lived in them again when he reproduced their drama,” observed critic Malcolm Cowley, “but he also stood apart from them and coldly reckoned their causes and consequences. That is his irony, and it is one of his distinguishing marks as a writer. He took part in the ritual orgies of his time, but he kept a secretly detached position. . . . Always he cultivated a double vision. In his novels and stories he was trying to intensify the glitter of life in the Princeton eating clubs, on the north shore of Long Island, in Hollywood, and on the Riviera; he surrounded his characters with a mist of admiration, and at the same time he kept driving the mist away. . . . It was as if all his fiction described a big dance to which he had taken, as he once wrote, the prettiest girl . . . and as if he stood at the same time outside the ballroom, a little Midwestern boy with his nose to the glass, wondering how much the tickets cost and who paid for the music.”