Book Review: Flappers and Philosophers, by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1920)

The original dust jacket of Flappers and Philosophers, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1920. Bernice's hair is about to get bobbed.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, early 1920's.

During his lifetime, F. Scott Fitzgerald was better-known, and certainly more widely read, as a short story author rather than a novelist. His masterpiece The Great Gatsby sold less than 25,000 copies during Fitzgerald’s lifetime. In contrast, his short stories regularly appeared in the pages of The Saturday Evening Post, which boasted a circulation of over 2 million copies in the 1920’s. Fitzgerald wrote just under 200 short stories, but most of these were not collected in books until after his death in 1940. Flappers and Philosophers was Fitzgerald’s first collection of short stories. It was published in September of 1920, five months after his debut novel, This Side of Paradise. 

The eight stories collected in Flappers and Philosophers vary in quality. They range from some of his most famous, “Bernice Bobs Her Hair” and “The Ice Palace,” to others, “The Cut-Glass Bowl” and “The Four Fists” that haven’t been republished in any of the anthologies of Fitzgerald’s short stories. 

The lead story, “The Off-Shore Pirate” is a light and frothy entertainment. It’s very dated in its attitudes towards women and African Americans. The set-up of the story is that a beautiful and haughty girl named Ardita is sunning herself on her uncle’s yacht when the boat is suddenly boarded and taken over by a handsome young man named Curtis Carlyle and his six African American assistants. Curtis claims that they are also musicians, but tired of playing society parties and have turned to a life of crime. 

Carlyle and Ardita carry on flirtatious banter, as she is quite unafraid of him, and agrees to go along with his stealing of the yacht. Carlyle pours out his soul to her, saying “You see, this is the beauty I want. Beauty has got to be astonishing, astounding—it’s got to burst in on you like a dream, like the exquisite eyes of a girl.” (p.18) I found this quote to be indicative of Fitzgerald’s essentially romantic nature.

One of Ardita’s best lines in the story occurs after Carlyle asks her if every man she meets tells her that he loves her. Ardita nods and says, “Why shouldn’t he? All life is just a progression toward, and then a recession from, one phrase—‘I love you.’” (p.20) 

The casual racism of the story makes it badly dated, as the African American characters speak in the clichéd “Yes, suh, no suh” tones of “Amos ’n’ Andy.” Perhaps the worst passage occurs on page 35, as the six African Americans fall asleep, “announcing now and then with sonorous snores that not even the presence of danger could subdue their unconquerable African craving for sleep.” Ugh. 

Ultimately, the unlikely events of “The Off-Shore Pirate” are neatly wrapped up with a trick ending. It turns out that the whole thing has been set up by Ardita’s uncle! Curtis Carlyle isn’t actually a hardened criminal; he’s a nice guy from a socially acceptable family! His real name is Toby Moreland! Ardita takes it all in stride, and “kissed him softly in the illustration.” (p.40) Fitzgerald suddenly turns meta with this last line, as now Ardita and Toby become characters in a story, illustrated in a glossy magazine like, say, The Saturday Evening Post. It’s a cheesy ending, but preferable to the original magazine ending, where it was all just a dream. Fitzgerald’s changing the ending also shows how he kept editing his stories until the last possible minute. He frequently made changes between the magazine and book publications of his short stories, seeking to further sharpen details and make the words come to life. 

Curiously, “The Off-Shore Pirate” keeps showing up in Fitzgerald’s letters. Writing to his editor Maxwell Perkins in 1922 about the shorty story “Tarquin of Cheapside,” which worried Perkins because the story supposes that the events of the William Shakespeare poem “The Rape of Lucrece” actually occurred, thus making the most famous writer in history a rapist, Fitzgerald wrote: “Structurally it is almost perfect and next to ‘The Off-Shore Pirate’ I like it better than any story I have ever written.” (The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald, p.180) One can only assume that Fitzgerald was being sarcastic about his admiration for both these stories, and pressing the point in order to get Perkins to agree to include “Tarquin of Cheapside” in his short story collection Tales of the Jazz Age. 

In Fitzgerald’s comments introducing the stories in 1922’s Tales of the Jazz Age, his second collection of short stories, he writes about “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz,” “One well-known critic has been pleased to like this extravaganza better than anything I have written. Personally I prefer ‘The Off-Shore Pirate.’” (Tales of the Jazz Age, p.viii) It’s quite surprising to read Fitzgerald denigrating what’s now considered one of his greatest short stories by comparing it unfavorably to “The Off-Shore Pirate.” 

However, it is possible that Fitzgerald was being serious when he expressed his admiration for “The Off-Shore Pirate.” In a letter to H.L. Mencken dated May 4, 1925, Fitzgerald wrote: “My trash for the Post grows worse and worse as there is less and less heart in it—strange to say my whole heart was in my first trash. I thought that ‘The Off-Shore Pirate’ was quite as good as ‘Benediction.’ I never really ‘wrote down’ until after the failure of The Vegetable {Fitzgerald’s unsuccessful 1923 play that closed in tryouts and left him in debt} and that was to make this book {The Great Gatsby} possible.” (F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Life in Letters, p.111) 

Zelda Fitzgerald also had good things to say about “The Off-Shore Pirate.” An article from the Louisville Courier-Journal, published on September 30, 1923, says that “The Off-Shore Pirate” was one of Zelda’s favorites among Scott’s work. (Conversations with F. Scott Fitzgerald, p.49) It’s the only short story of his that she names in the article. 

In late 1931, when Scott was in Hollywood working on screenplays, Zelda wrote to him from her hometown of Montgomery, Alabama, where they were living. Zelda had suffered a mental breakdown in 1930, was diagnosed with schizophrenia, and spent fifteen months in Swiss mental hospitals. She wrote to Scott on November 11, 1931: “I read ‘The Off-Shore Pirate’ to-day. You were younger than anybody in the world once—what fun you must have had in that curious place that’s younger than life—It’s a good story. Can they make clocks out of cellos in Hollywood?” (Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda: The Love Letters of F. Scott & Zelda Fitzgerald, p.116-7) The line about making clocks out of cellos comes from a song Fitzgerald made up in the story. Like so much about the Fitzgeralds, these few lines are beautiful, sad, and haunting. Clearly, “The Off-Shore Pirate” harkened back to an easier, simpler time in their lives, and no doubt brought back fond memories for Zelda. When she wrote that letter, Scott was 35, and she was 31, but they had both aged beyond their years. 

“The Ice Palace” is one of Fitzgerald’s finest short stories. It tells the tale of Southern belle Sally Carrol Happer, who wins the heart of Northerner Harry Bellamy. They become engaged, and Sally Carrol visits Harry’s hometown, which goes unnamed in the story, but is obviously meant to be Fitzgerald’s own hometown of Saint Paul. 

“The Ice Palace” was written before Zelda had ever been to Minnesota, but it probably sums up her feelings very well. Scott and Zelda lived in Saint Paul and White Bear Lake for a year, from the fall of 1921 to the fall of 1922. However, Zelda never warmed to Scott’s hometown, finding it stuffy and provincial.

Sally Carrol has a romantic notion of the Old South, and when she and Harry visit a cemetery and see the Confederate dead, she remarks to him, “they died for the most beautiful thing in the world—the dead South.” (p.49) Although Fitzgerald was a Northerner, he was somewhat torn between the North and the South. He was raised in the North, in Minnesota and New York, but his father’s family was from Maryland, a border state that remained in the Union but retained slavery and had many Southern sympathizers. Fitzgerald was always drawn towards lost causes, and he seems to have retained a romantic vision of a languid Southern aristocracy. Of course, slavery doesn’t enter into this romantic vision of Fitzgerald’s. 

Bellamy, like Fitzgerald, feels the need to apologize for his hometown being a three generation town. He tells her, “Everybody has a father, and about half of us have grandfathers. Back of that we don’t go.” (p.54) Fitzgerald went back farther than that, but only on his father’s side in America. Scott was quite proud that through the Fitzgerald side of his family, he could claim relation (second cousin, three times removed) to Francis Scott Key, author of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Fitzgerald was even named after him, as his full name was Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald. But on his mother’s side of the family, the McQuillans, he could only go back to his grandfather, P.F. McQuillan, an Irish immigrant who came to Saint Paul after a stop in Galena, Illinois. P.F. McQuillan built a successful wholesale grocery business before dying young at age 44 of Bright’s disease. Thus the Fitzgerald side had the impressive background, but no money, and the McQuillan side had the money, but no impressive pedigree to go with it. 

Sally Carrol is dismayed at how the men in Harry’s hometown keep to themselves: “In the South an engaged girl, even a young married woman, expected the same amount of half-affectionate badinage and flattery that would be accorded a debutante, but here all that seemed banned.” (p.56) 

Sally does meet one person she likes, Roger Patton, a professor, who thinks that the people are “freezing up.” He explains: “I think they’re growing like Swedes—Ibsenesque, you know. Very gradually getting gloomy and melancholy. It’s these long winters.” (p.58) So, what do you do for fun if you have long, gloomy winters? Well, if you’re like the people of Saint Paul, you hold a Winter Carnival and celebrate snow and ice. The Winter Carnival started because a newspaper insulted Saint Paul and how cold it was, calling it “another Siberia, unfit for human habitation.” The city decided to turn our cold winters into a plus and made up an excuse to have a party in the middle of winter. One of the crazier things someone dreamed up was building palaces made of ice for the Winter Carnival. The first ice palace was built in 1886. After twenty years of lying dormant, the Winter Carnival was revived in 1916 and 1917, during Fitzgerald’s time in college and the Army. 

Fitzgerald does a lovely job of describing winter in Saint Paul: “There was no sky—only a dark, ominous tent that draped in the tops of the streets and was in reality a vast approaching army of snowflakes.” (p.65) 

In a 1920 essay, Fitzgerald wrote about the story: “I was in Montgomery, Alabama, and while out walking with a girl I wandered into a graveyard. 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.” Of course, the girl he was walking with was Zelda. Unfortunately, we don’t seem to know what Zelda thought of “The Ice Palace.” 

“Head and Shoulders” was the first Fitzgerald story to appear in The Saturday Evening Post. Fitzgerald was paid $400 for it, and the story appeared in the February 21, 1920 issue. Throughout 1919 Fitzgerald had been accumulating rejection slips for his short stories. When Scribners accepted This Side of Paradise in September of 1919, Fitzgerald gained stature as an author. Harold Ober became his literary agent, and was able to help him start getting his stories placed in magazines. Fitzgerald went from earning $30 for short stories published in The Smart Set to making $400 per story from The Saturday Evening Post. In April and May of 1920 Fitzgerald published five short stories in the Post, and his fee was raised to $500 before the year was over.

The story is good, if slight, as it tells the story of a genius and a chorus girl falling in love. The main character Horace Tarbox is the academic prodigy that Fitzgerald wasn’t. While Horace scores numerous A’s on his entrance examinations to Princeton, Scott flunked most of his.

 “The Cut-Glass Bowl” reminded me of Edith Wharton. Fitzgerald is writing about his parent’s generation, which he didn’t do very often. The main characters are Evylyn and Harold Piper. Harold is described thus: “Yet, like all men who are preoccupied with their own broadness, he was exceptionally narrow.” (p.110) Like some other Fitzgerald stories that are moral tales, there’s a touch of the supernatural in “The Cut-Glass Bowl.”

“Bernice Bobs Her Hair” concerns the popular Marjorie and her seemingly hopeless cousin Bernice, who is visiting her for the summer. A young man thinks about Bernice: “He wondered idly whether she was a poor conversationalist because she got no attention or got no attention because she was a poor conversationalist.” (p.52) However, with Marjorie’s help, Bernice is able to achieve social popularity. The story also features this beautiful line, which shows how Fitzgerald was wise beyond his years: “At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide.” (p.56) 

The advice that Marjorie gives Bernice can be traced back to a 1915 letter that Scott wrote his sister Annabel, giving her advice on how to present herself to boys in order to attract their attention. “Never try to give a boy the affect that you’re popular—Ginevra always starts by saying she’s a poor unpopular woman without any beaux.” (The St. Paul Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, p.47) Fitzgerald’s letter to Annabel is an early example of his ability to put himself in someone else’s shoes—a trait that would serve him very well as a writer. 

 “Benediction,” a lovely and beautiful story, is one of Fitzgerald’s few stories that reference his Catholic upbringing. Fitzgerald’s parents were both Catholic, and he was educated largely at Catholic schools. Fitzgerald spent his junior and senior years of high school at the Newman School, a private Catholic prep academy in New Jersey. 

The main character in “Benediction” is nineteen-year-old Lois, who goes to visit her much older brother Kieth. No, that’s not a misspelling; it’s a variation of Keith, as I discovered when I looked it up. Kieth is a Jesuit priest about to take his orders. Lois has come to tell him that their mother’s health is failing. As these two siblings who have not seen each other in years spend an afternoon together, they discuss many topics, including religion. 

Here’s how Fitzgerald describes the main character, Lois: “When men of talent saw her in a streetcar they often furtively produced little stub-pencils and backs of envelopes and tried to sum up that profile or the thing that the eyebrows did to her eyes. Later they looked at their results and usually tore them up with wondering sighs.” (p.169)

In Fitzgerald’s Notebooks, which were posthumously published, there’s a section titled “Descriptions of Girls.” One can imagine Scott himself seeing a beautiful woman on a streetcar and trying to describe her beauty in a similar fashion. 

Eventually Lois tells Kieth of her misgivings about Catholicism: “It seems so—so narrow. Church schools, for instance. There’s more freedom about things that Catholic people can’t see—like birth control.” (p.183) The same thing could be said of the Catholic Church today, nearly one hundred years later. 

“Benediction” reflects Fitzgerald’s own ambivalence towards Catholicism. Like Lois, he admires Kieth’s strong belief in the church, but ultimately has doubts about Catholicism as a philosophy. In Fitzgerald’s Ledger, a book where he kept track of his earnings as an author and also of momentous events in his life, part of the heading for the year September 1917-August 1918 is “last year as a Catholic.” 

However, Fitzgerald’s Catholic upbringing continued to influence some of his ideas. Arthur Mizener wrote that “his unfaltering sense of life—and especially his own life—as a dramatic conflict between good and evil was cultivated, if not determined, by his early training.” (The Far Side of Paradise, p.92) This fits in with the episode in This Side of Paradise when Amory Blaine sees the Devil appear in the apartment of a chorus girl. Fitzgerald’s moral sense of right and wrong was always very strong. In a 1939 letter to his daughter Scottie he wrote: “I am too much a moralist at heart and really want to preach at people in some acceptable form rather than to entertain them.” (The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald, p.79) That’s a very interesting statement coming from a writer who was often criticized for merely being an entertainer. Fitzgerald’s Saint Paul friend Oscar Kalman said of him: “Poor Scott, he never really enjoyed his dissipation because he disapproved intensely of himself all the time it was going on.” (The Far Side of Paradise, p.93) Fitzgerald himself said, "Parties are a form of suicide. I love them, but the old Catholic in me secretly disapproves." (The Far Side of Paradise, p.135) I think Kalman was right about Fitzgerald—he suffered from terrible feelings of guilt over his drinking, and his own actions while he was drinking. One has to go no further than the depths that his alcoholic characters Anthony Patch in The Beautiful and Damned and Dick Diver in Tender is the Night sink to in order to get a sense of the guilt Fitzgerald felt about his drinking. 

Fitzgerald’s status as a Catholic even affected his burial. He wanted to be interred in the Fitzgerald family plot, located in Saint Mary’s Catholic Church in Rockville, Maryland, but the Baltimore Diocese refused to allow it, saying that Fitzgerald was not a practicing Catholic—which was true. He was buried in Rockville Union Cemetery instead. In 1975, he and Zelda were re-interred in Saint Mary’s in the Fitzgerald family plot.

“Dalyrimple Goes Wrong” is a satiric tale of a young man who returns to his hometown a decorated war hero, but has trouble finding a job once his fame has worn off. There’s a connection to Fitzgerald’s family background as one character is a wholesale grocer—just like Scott’s grandfather P.F. McQuillan!

The line in the story that made me laugh the most was this: “Mr. Macy delivered a paragraph on present-day opportunities which Dalyrimple’s mind completely skipped.” (p.191)

“Dalyrimple Goes Wrong” is somewhat atypical, as it’s one of the few Fitzgerald short stories without a beautiful girl in it. Scott’s Saint Paul friend Richard “Tubby” Washington provided the inspiration for the story, as he told Scott of some of the hypocrisies he had encountered in the business world. Tubby bought Fitzgerald Cokes and cigarettes when he was broke and writing and revising This Side of Paradise in 1919. Three years later, Tubby asked him for a loan of fifty dollars. Fitzgerald gave him forty-nine. (The Far Side of Paradise, p.149) 

“The Four Fists” is another morality tale, as we learn how four punches have affected the life of Samuel Meredith. Each punch ends up teaching him some moral truth, and he becomes a better person for it. The story is somewhat ironic, given Fitzgerald’s own propensity for getting into fights when he was drunk. Unlike Samuel Meredith, Fitzgerald may not have learned any lessons from his fights. Fitzgerald presents fights as the time when the main character is at his lowest ebb in both The Beautiful and Damned and Tender is the Night.

In college Samuel is quite the snob, as Fitzgerald explains: “Samuel despised all those who were merely sportsmen without being gentlemen, or merely gentlemen without being sportsmen.” (p.215)

Fitzgerald himself didn’t care for “The Four Fists” very much. In a letter to his editor Maxwell Perkins in late 1921 Fitzgerald wrote: “I’ve always hated & been ashamed of that damn story ‘The Four Fists.’ Not that it is any cheaper than ‘The Off-Shore Pirate’ because it isn’t but simply because it is a mere plant, a moral tale & utterly lacks vitality.” (Dear Scott/Dear Max: The Fitzgerald-Perkins Correspondence, p.44)

Flappers and Philosophers sold decently, with 15,000 copies moving off the shelf in the first two years after it was published. (Some Sort of Epic Grandeur, p.145) One of the most interesting pieces that references the book was written by Thomas Boyd, who owned Kilmarnock Books, a bookstore in downtown Saint Paul, and also reviewed books in the newspaper. Boyd and Fitzgerald became friends, and Scott recommended Boyd’s World War I novel Through the Wheat to Scribners, who published it in 1923. Boyd interviewed Fitzgerald for an article published in the August 28, 1921 issue of the St. Paul Daily News: “His short stories, almost without exception, show that there was one thing uppermost in his mind when he was writing them and that was no more nor less than $350. No thought was required to write ‘The Cut Glass Bowl’ and ‘The Four Fists.’ These stories have been done more competently in many languages. ‘Head and Shoulders’ and ‘The Off-Shore Pirate’ are mere titillations for oafs and lumpheads. ‘Dalyrimple Goes Wrong’ was the only story in Flappers and Philosophers I cared for. Each short story is competently phrased.” (Conversations with F. Scott Fitzgerald, p.10) And Thomas Boyd was his friend! 

Boyd’s article is part of a larger trend of writers knocking Fitzgerald—something that continued throughout his life, and also after his death. Edmund Wilson, John Dos Passos, and Ernest Hemingway, to name just three friends of Fitzgerald’s, all criticized Fitzgerald’s intellect, leading to the myth that he was a sort of “holy fool” who churned out perfect sentences in first drafts and then went out partying. Nothing could be further from the truth. Fitzgerald was a meticulous editor and re-writer; he still made considerable changes to The Great Gatsby and Tender is the Night when they were in galley form. Fitzgerald went through seventeen drafts of Tender is the Night. He made changes to his short stories after they were published in magazines and before they were published in books. Matthew J. Bruccoli noted “500 substantive changes” between the magazine and book versions of “The Rich Boy.” (Some Sort of Epic Grandeur, p.229) This was not the work of a careless writer. Personally, I think Wilson, Dos Passos, and Hemingway all knew that Fitzgerald was a brilliant writer and were jealous of his talent. 

Fitzgerald rated the short stories in Flappers and Philosophers in an inscription in a copy that he gave to H.L. Mencken:

Worth reading:

The Ice Palace

The Cut-Glass Bowl

Benediction

Dalyrimple Goes Wrong

Amusing:

The Off-Shore Pirate

Trash:

Head and Shoulders

The Four Fists

Bernice Bobs Her Hair

As Matthew J. Bruccoli notes, “Fitzgerald’s ranking of ‘Benediction’ and ‘Dalyrimple’ was influenced by their publication in The Smart Set.” Mencken was the editor of The Smart Set. (Some Sort of Epic Grandeur, p.145) I think Fitzgerald does himself a disservice by ranking “Bernice Bobs Her Hair” so low, as it’s one of my favorites from the book. 

It’s a legitimate complaint that the stories vary in quality, but as Bruccoli writes of Fitzgerald’s first two collections of short stories: “In addition to demonstrating the fecundity of his ideas and the flexibility of his style, this variety of material and techniques suggests that Fitzgerald was deliberately testing his talents while producing commercial fiction.” (Some Sort of Epic Grandeur, p.169) Fitzgerald was experimenting, and some experiments worked better than others. 

It’s also important to remember that at the time Flappers and Philosophers was published, these were basically all the stories Fitzgerald had. Scribners accepted This Side of Paradise in early September, 1919, and Flappers and Philosophers published exactly a year later. Fitzgerald had really only been a professional author for a year, and much of his juvenilia was worked into This Side of Paradise. Flappers and Philosophers is an entertaining look at the early works of one of the greatest American short story writers.