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