Book Review: All the Sad Young Men, by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1926)

The original dust jacket of All the Sad Young Men, F. Scott Fitzgerald's third collection of short stories, 1926.

 

F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1896-1940.

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s third short story collection, All the Sad Young Men, was published in February 1926, ten months after the release of his third novel The Great Gatsby. It was the pattern of Fitzgerald’s publisher Scribner’s to issue a collection of his short stories immediately following the publication of one of his novels. 

All the Sad Young Men was Fitzgerald’s strongest short story collection to date, and it contains four of his very best short stories: “The Rich Boy,” “Winter Dreams,” “Absolution,” and “’The Sensible Thing.’”   

Similar to The Great Gatsby, “The Rich Boy” also features narration from a secondary character. “The Rich Boy” starts with this memorable opening line: 

“Begin with an individual and before you know it you find that you have created a type; begin with a type, and you find that you have created—nothing.” (p.3)  

The third paragraph of the story begins with these famous lines: 

“Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are, because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves.” (p.3)    

Ernest Hemingway famously misquoted the first two lines of that paragraph in his 1936 short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.” Hemingway attacked Fitzgerald by name in the story, writing of Fitzgerald and the rich “He remembered poor Scott Fitzgerald and his romantic awe of them and how he had started a story once that began, ‘The very rich are different from you and me.’ And how some one had said to Scott, Yes, they have more money. But that was not humorous to Scott. He thought they were a special glamorous race and when he found they weren’t it wrecked him just as much as any other thing that had wrecked him.” (Ernest Hemingway: The Short Stories, p.72) 

Hemingway’s inclusion of Fitzgerald in his story was superfluous to the plot, and Esquire editor Arnold Gingrich should have insisted that Hemingway cut it, rather than start a feud between two of his star writers. Fitzgerald was obviously annoyed by Hemingway’s mention of him and wrote a letter to Hemingway that began: “Please lay off me in print.” Maxwell Perkins finally convinced Hemingway to change Scott to “Julian” when the story appeared in book form.  

As Scott Donaldson and other scholars have shown, what really happened, according to Maxwell Perkins, was that Hemingway had said that he was getting to know the rich, and the author Mary Colum responded with, “The only difference between the rich and other people is that the rich have more money.” (Hemingway vs. Fitzgerald, p.198) For whatever reason, Hemingway then rewrote the incident to make the punchline at Fitzgerald’s expense. 

Reading “The Rich Boy” may cause us to rethink the veracity of Nick Carraway’s narration in The Great Gatsby. Chapter 3 of Gatsby ends with Nick writing: “Everyone suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known.” (p.64) The narrator of “The Rich Boy” cautions us in the first paragraph:  

“When I hear a man proclaiming himself an ‘average, honest, open fellow’ I feel pretty sure that he has some definite and perhaps terrible abnormality which he has agreed to conceal—and his protestation of being average and honest and open is his way of reminding himself of his misprision.” (p.3)  

“The Rich Boy” demonstrates Fitzgerald’s devotion to his craft and his tireless editing: he made more than 500 changes between the magazine and book versions of the story. (Some Sort of Epic Grandeur, by Matthew J. Bruccoli, p.229)  

“Winter Dreams” was, Fitzgerald later wrote, “sort of a 1st draft of the Gatsby idea.” There’s certainly a connection to be made between Dexter Green’s constant striving and Jay Gatsby’s bold reinvention of himself. “Winter Dreams” is a story that is deeply connected to Fitzgerald’s home state of Minnesota. The town of “Black Bear Lake” is modeled on White Bear Lake, and the “Sherry Island Golf Club” where Dexter caddies and first sees Judy Jones on the driving range, is the White Bear Yacht Club, where Scott and Zelda lived during the summer of 1922, while Fitzgerald was writing “Winter Dreams.”  

To best examine the connections between “Winter Dreams” and The Great Gatsby, you need to read the original text of the story, as it appeared in the December 1922 issue of Metropolitan magazine. Fitzgerald incorporated sentences and phrases from the magazine version of “Winter Dreams” into Gatsby, and then re-wrote the text for the version of the story that appears in All the Sad Young Men. “Winter Dreams” is beautiful and haunting, one of Fitzgerald’s finest short stories.  

“The Baby Party” is pretty slight, especially in comparison to the two excellent short stories that have preceded it.  

“Absolution” is fantastic, and one of Fitzgerald’s few short stories that features Catholicism as a theme. Fitzgerald was raised Catholic and spent his junior and senior years of high school attending the Newman School, a Catholic prep academy in New Jersey. By the time he was an adult, Fitzgerald was no longer a practicing Catholic.  

The main character in “Absolution” is Rudolph Miller, an 11-year-old boy who goes to confession. After confessing his sins, large and small, the priest asks Rudolph if he has told any lies. Rudolph responds, “Oh, no, Father, I never tell lies.” Rudolph is now caught in a paradox: “he realized that in heroically denying he had told lies, he had committed a terrible sin—he had told a lie in confession.” (p.84)  

“Rags Martin-Jones and the Pr-nce of W-les" (yes, the dashes are in the title of the story) is a festive romp, similar in theme to Fitzgerald’s earlier short story “The Off-Shore Pirate.” The Prince of Wales at the time Fitzgerald wrote the story was the future King Edward VIII, who ruled for less than a year before abdicating the throne in order to marry Wallis Simpson—thereafter, he was known as the Duke of Windsor.  

“The Adjuster,” about a frivolous wife who adjusts her temperament in order to take care of her ill husband, reminded me a bit of Edith Wharton’s novels and short stories. There’s a marvelous quote in the story from the mysterious Doctor Moon, who tells Luella, “You’re trying to leave yourself behind but you can’t. The more you try to run away from yourself, the more you’ll have yourself with you.” (p.135) Fitzgerald may have been trying to give himself advice, as he was always on the move throughout his life.  

“Hot and Cold Blood” has a tiny connection to Gatsby: the main character Jim Mather runs a successful hardware store, which is also the family business of the Carraways. Fitzgerald describes Mather as “essentially and enormously romantic,” a character trait that I would say Mather shares with Fitzgerald himself. (p.147) A reference to Selby Avenue pinpoints “Hot and Cold Blood” as being another of Fitzgerald’s short stories set in his hometown of Saint Paul. (p.149) 

 “’The Sensible Thing’” is one of my favorite Fitzgerald stories, and the closing line could easily have been written with Jay Gatsby in mind: “There are all kinds of love in the world, but never the same love twice.” (p.169)  

“Gretchen’s Forty Winks” is, well...a little problematic these days, as the main character ends up drugging his wife so she sleeps all day, and he can finally get the work done to secure an important client for his advertising business. It’s hard not to read the story as a portrait of Scott and Zelda’s own marriage. I’m not sure if that’s an accurate reading of the story, but it certainly went through my head. Perhaps Scott was indulging in some wish-fulfillment by writing this story.  

All the Sad Young Men is a fantastic collection of short stories, and the book finds Fitzgerald reaching an artistic peak.