Book Review: Tales of the Jazz Age, by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1922)

The original cover of Tales of the Jazz Age, with drawings by illustrator John Held, Jr., 1922.

Author F. Scott Fitzgerald, looking handsome in the early 1920's.

 F. Scott Fitzgerald’s second short story collection Tales of the Jazz Age was published on September 22, 1922, two days before Fitzgerald’s 26th birthday. It was Fitzgerald’s fourth book. Shortly after Tales of the Jazz Age was published, Fitzgerald left his hometown of Saint Paul, Minnesota for what would turn out to be the last time. Scott and Zelda and their daughter Scottie moved to Great Neck, on Long Island, where Scott would work on his play The Vegetable, which he was hoping would become a hit on Broadway. Fitzgerald was also starting to outline ideas for his third novel. You might know, old sport, that Scott’s third novel ended up becoming slightly more successful than The Vegetable.  

If you only know Fitzgerald’s writing from The Great Gatsby, you’d probably assume that all Fitzgerald’s short stories are about love and class and money. Those are certainly important themes that run throughout much of his work and many of his short stories. But if you dive into Fitzgerald’s short stories, you’ll find a more diverse subject matter, and some real oddities.  

Tales of the Jazz Age is a mixed bag. It contains three of Fitzgerald’s finest short stories: “May Day,” “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz,” and “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.” It also contains clunkers like “Tarquin of Cheapside,” “Mr. Icky,” and “Jemina, the Mountain Girl.” There are also entertaining stories full of Fitzgerald’s trademark beautiful prose: “The Jelly-Bean,” “The Camel’s Back,” and “Porcelain and Pink.”  

I’ll briefly review the stories, in the order in which they appear in the book.  

“The Jelly-Bean" is one of Fitzgerald’s Southern stories. Because of Scott’s marriage to Zelda Sayre, a Southern belle from Montgomery, Alabama, several of his stories touch on the differences between the North and the South. “The Ice Palace,” “The Last of the Belles,” “The Dance” and “The Jelly-Bean” are all fine examples of Fitzgerald’s relationship with the South. Devoted Fitzgerald fans should look out in “The Jelly-Bean" for a name-check of Sally Carrol Hopper, the heroine of Fitzgerald’s 1920 short story “The Ice Palace.” “The Jelly-Bean" is quite entertaining, as Fitzgerald spins a tale of a Southern ne’er-do-well. There’s a beautiful sentence at the end: “All life was weather, a waiting through the hot where events had no significance for the cool that was soft and caressing like a woman’s hand on a tired forehead.” (p.26)  

“The Camel’s Back” is a fun yarn, set at a holiday party in Saint Paul.  

“May Day” is a superb story, one of the few times Fitzgerald explicitly used political themes in his fiction. It’s also one of the few times where Fitzgerald shifts among different groups of characters in a short story. 

“Porcelain and Pink” is a trifle. Written in play form. 

“The Diamond as Big as the Ritz” is one of Fitzgerald’s finest short stories. A beguiling fantasy that satirizes wealth in America.  

“The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” is beautiful. When Benjamin Button was born in 1860, he emerged as an old man. To everyone’s amazement and consternation, Benjamin ages backwards, getting younger every year. The last few paragraphs of the story, written as Benjamin reverts into a baby, moving ever closer to death, are as beautiful and haunting as anything Fitzgerald ever wrote: 

“He did not remember. He did not remember clearly whether the milk was warm or cool at his last feeding or how the days passed—there was only his crib and Nana’s familiar presence. And then he remembered nothing. When he was hungry he cried—that was all. Through the noons and nights he breathed and over him there were soft mumblings and murmurings that he scarcely heard, and faintly differentiated smells, and light and darkness. 

Then it was all dark, and his white crib and the dim faces that moved above him, and the warm sweet aroma of the milk, faded out altogether from his mind.” (p.223-4) 

“Tarquin of Cheapside,” in which Fitzgerald ponders if William Shakespeare wrote the poem “The Rape of Lucrece” from personal experience, thus accusing the most well-known writer in the English language of sexual assault. Written during Fitzgerald’s college days, and published in the Nassau Literary Magazine in 1917, "Tarquin” also appeared in The Smart Set magazine in 1921. It’s not my favorite Fitzgerald short story, and I think Tales of the Jazz Age would be just fine without it.  

“O Russet Witch!” is fine. Good, but not great.  

“The Lees of Happiness” tells the tale of a woman who has to take care of her husband, rendered an invalid by a stroke. This story prefigures some of Fitzgerald’s stories with medical themes written in the 1930’s after Zelda’s mental breakdowns. “The Lees of Happiness,” “O Russet Witch!” and “Benjamin Button” all cover a long time span and putting “Lees” and “Russet” right next to each other does no favors to either story. It also doesn’t help that “Lees” and “Russet” have to follow “Benjamin Button,” by far the strongest of the three stories.  

“Mr. Icky” is a rather surreal little play. Plays and the dramatic form are an interesting recurring theme in Fitzgerald’s work. Fitzgerald wrote four plays during the summers of 1911-1914, which he also acted in. At Princeton, Fitzgerald wrote material for several Triangle Club shows. He wrote the aforementioned play The Vegetable, which was not a success. And he spent the last years of his life living in Hollywood, working as a screenwriter. I’d be interested to know if any Fitzgerald scholars have analyzed all of his work in the dramatic medium, as it was a form that he kept returning to throughout his career. I think one of the reasons why the dramatic medium is not Fitzgerald’s most successful is that it’s usually antithetical to what is best about Fitzgerald’s work: the narration and descriptions. 

“Jemina, the Mountain Girl” is, well, more than a little ridiculous. Fitzgerald isn’t his funniest when he’s trying to be funny, as he is in “Jemina.” I think he’s much funnier when he lets his fine sense of irony take over, as he does in “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz.”  

Fitzgerald didn’t include his short story “The Popular Girl” in Tales of the Jazz Age. Perhaps I’m biased because I live in Saint Paul, and I enjoy the description of “Crest Avenue” (the real-life Summit Avenue) that’s found in “The Popular Girl,” but I quite enjoy the story. Fitzgerald himself wasn’t fond of “The Popular Girl,” and while he was an incisive critic of his own work, he was also quite hard on himself. Had I been in charge of compiling Tales of the Jazz Age, I would have included “The Popular Girl” and cut “Tarquin of Cheapside,” “Mr. Icky,” and “Jemina, the Mountain Girl.” But that’s just me.  

F. Scott Fitzgerald would no doubt be amazed to know that his term “the Jazz Age” is still being used to describe the 1920’s. In addition to giving a name to a decade, Tales of the Jazz Age contains short stories that still vividly leap off the page now, more than 100 years after their first publication in book form.