F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short story “Absolution” was published in H.L. Mencken’s magazine The American Mercury in June 1924. “Absolution” was subsequently included in Fitzgerald’s 1926 short story collection All the Sad Young Men. It has since been collected in many Fitzgerald short story collections and is generally considered one of his finest short stories.
Two weeks ago, “Absolution” was the short story under consideration by poet, baker, and man-about-town Danny Klecko and other local Fitzgerald fans. As Klecko noted, “Absolution” is a rare Fitzgerald story that does not have a traditional beginning, middle, and end. This might be due to the fact that it was originally intended to be part of a larger work—namely, the novel that became The Great Gatsby.
Matthew Bruccoli wrote of “Absolution” that “There has been reckless speculation about its relationship to The Great Gatsby.” (The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, p.259) I do not wish to add to the reckless speculation, so I will instead carefully speculate about the relationship of “Absolution” to The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald wrote to his editor Maxwell Perkins, on June 18, 1924: “I’m glad you liked Absolution. As you know it was to have been the prologue of the novel but it interfered with the neatness of the plan. Two Catholics have already protested by letter.” (Dear Scott, Dear Max, p.72)
I suspect part of the reason Fitzgerald may have jettisoned “Absolution” from Gatsby might be because he wanted to heighten the mystery surrounding the character of Jay Gatsby. Starting the novel with an 11-year-old James Gatz in the Dakota wheatfields might have given too much away too quickly.
“Absolution” tells the tale of 11-year-old Rudolph Miller, a “beautiful, intense little boy” growing up in the Dakota wheatfields. (All the Sad Young Men, p.78) The plot centers around Rudolph and his experiences with the Catholic church. Rudolph goes to confession, where he tells the priest “Oh, no, father, I never tell lies.” As Fitzgerald writes, “He realized that in heroically denying he had told lies, he had committed a terrible sin—he had told a lie in confession.” (p.83)
Fitzgerald is so good at describing Rudolph’s terror and fear at his mistake—he perfectly captures the fear of being 11 years old and doing something wrong. Rudolph had briefly considered leaving the church without going to confession and then lying about it, “but this meant that he must avoid communion next day, for communion taken upon an uncleansed soul would turn to poison in his mouth, and he would crumple limp and damned from the altar rail.” (p.81)
Rudolph’s father works as a freight agent. Fitzgerald describes him: “His 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...For twenty years he had lived alone with Hill’s name and God.” (p.84) In the same paragraph, Fitzgerald writes of Carl Miller, “he had never in his life felt the balance of any single thing in his hands.” Many times Fitzgerald captures a character so well in his writing. You understand from this one sentence exactly what Fitzgerald means, and what kind of man Rudolph's father is.
James J. Hill was a businessman and railroad tycoon who built the Great Northern Railway from the Twin Cities to the Pacific Northwest. Hill was a friend and neighbor of Fitzgerald’s maternal grandfather, P.F. McQuillan. James J. Hill is also mentioned in The Great Gatsby. After Gatsby’s death, his father, Henry C. Gatz, travels to Gatsby’s mansion for the funeral and says to Nick Carraway: “If he’d of lived he’d of been a great man. A man like James J. Hill. He’d of helped build up the country.” (p.176) Had “Absolution” remained as the prologue of Gatsby, the mention of Hill at the end of the novel would have thus provided a neat bookend for the character of Gatsby’s father.
Because Rudolph has told a lie in confession, he plans on drinking water on Sunday morning so he can’t take communion. At this time, Catholics needed to fast all day long before taking communion. Now the fasting period is only one hour before receiving communion. But Rudolph’s plan is interrupted by his father. They argue, and when Rudolph throws the glass he was holding into the sink, his father beats him.
The other main character in the story is the priest, Father Adolphus Schwartz. As the story opens, Father Schwartz is having something of a spiritual crisis: “the afternoons were warm and long, and he was unable to attain a complete mystical union with our Lord.” (p.78) Father Schwartz tells Rudolph he should go to an amusement park. He warns Rudolph: “But don’t get up close, because if you do you’ll only feel the heat and the sweat and the life.” (p.92) Father Schwartz is drawn to things that remind him of the heat and the sweat and the life, like the pretty Swedish girls that pass by his house, but they frighten him too, as they threaten his vow of abstinence.
Rudolph’s faith in religion is shaken by this odd conversation with Father Schwartz, and he thinks to himself, “There was something ineffably gorgeous somewhere that had nothing to do with God.” (p.92) “Absolution” is one of Fitzgerald’s few short stories to have a Catholic theme. Fitzgerald was raised Catholic, but by the time he was in his early 20’s, he had little use for organized religion. I’ve never come across any writing where Fitzgerald explicitly states how he would define himself in religious terms, but I suspect he would have said that he was an agnostic or an atheist. In one of my favorite sarcastic Fitzgerald quotes, he mocked his friend Ernest Hemingway’s conversion to Catholicism in order to marry his second wife, writing to Hemingway, “Well, old Mackerel Snapper, wolf a Wafer and a Beaker of blood for me.” (By Force of Will: The Life and Art of Ernest Hemingway, by Scott Donaldson, p.226) This is conjecture, but I wonder if Fitzgerald’s first inklings of a life apart from the church happened around the same age as Rudolph.
The fifth, and final, section of “Absolution” is subtitled “Sagitta Volante in Die,” a Latin phrase “fear not the arrow that flieth in the day,” that references Psalm 90 in the Latin Vulgate translation of the Bible—Psalm 91 in the King James version of the Bible. Fitzgerald later used this same passage from Psalm 90 in his 1934 essay about insomnia, “Sleeping and Waking.” In that essay, Fitzgerald wrote of the sleepless hours in the middle of the night, “This is the time of which is it written in the Psalms,” and then quotes verses 5 and 6 in Latin. The English translation is: “His truth shall compass thee with a shield: thou shalt not be afraid of the terror of the night. Of the arrow that flieth in the day, of the business that walketh about in the dark: of invasion, or of the noonday devil.” (My Lost City, p.163) The subtitle of this section of “Absolution” seems to offer a hint to Father Schwartz’s impending spiritual crisis in front of Rudolph, with the Swedish girls and the amusement parks of the world being the arrows of the day that threaten to pierce the armor of Father Schwartz’s priestly vows.
“Absolution” is one of Fitzgerald’s few stories that center around a father/son relationship. In reading the story again, it struck me that you could read all of Fitzgerald’s fiction and not gain much of a sense of what his parents were like. That’s unusual for an author, especially an author who drew much inspiration from his own life, as Fitzgerald did. However, for as much as Fitzgerald did pull from his own life, he also transformed and transmuted his experiences into his fiction. Reading Zelda Fitzgerald’s novel Save Me the Waltz and Thomas Wolfe’s novel Look Homeward, Angel, I was struck by how nakedly autobiographical Zelda and Wolfe’s novels were, and how rarely I get that feeling in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s work. There are echoes of Fitzgerald’s own life and his own autobiography, of course, but rarely when reading him do I think “Oh, this must have actually happened just the way it’s set down on the page.” It’s hard to describe this feeling, but that’s the sense I get from him. I think the Basil Duke Lee stories are probably the most autobiographical of Fitzgerald’s work. Of his novels, I think This Side of Paradise, Fitzgerald’s first novel, was the most autobiographical.
Parents in Fitzgerald’s novels are mostly notable for their absence. In This Side of Paradise, Amory Blaine’s father dies when Amory is young, and Amory’s flamboyant, globe-trotting mother is very different from Fitzgerald’s own mother. Anthony Patch’s parents in The Beautiful and Damned are dispensed with early in the narrative, and the core relationship Anthony has with his elders is with his grandfather, the extremely wealthy Adam Patch. In The Great Gatsby, the novel famously opens with Nick Carraway passing on to the reader advice his father has given him. But beyond that, the elder Carraway remains an unseen presence. Jay Gatsby’s father makes an appearance in the novel, and he is notable as a marked contrast from Gatsby. I can’t remember much about Dick Diver’s parents in Tender Is the Night, but the passage where Dick fondly recalls his father started as an essay titled “The Death of My Father” that Fitzgerald wrote after the passing of Edward Fitzgerald in 1931. Parents play a much larger, and more destructive role, in the life of Nicole Warren in Tender Is the Night, but that’s the subject of another essay.
I don’t think “Absolution” tells us much about Scott’s relationship with his father, Edward Fitzgerald. Edward was not successful at business, but he was not the ill-tempered tyrant that Carl Miller is. It was Edward who read the poetry of Byron and Poe to young Scott. I suspect that Edward shared a similar artistic temperament with his son, but perhaps Edward lacked the artistic talent that Scott possessed. Edward was proud of his son’s accomplishments as a writer—Scott wrote in a letter that Edward “takes an immense vicarious pleasure in any success of mine.” (Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald, p.413)
Fitzgerald’s decision to cut “Absolution” from the novel that became Gatsby might also have been due to his decision to change the narrative voice. The earliest surviving pages of the novel that became Gatsby were written in the third person, as is “Absolution.” At some point, Fitzgerald had the idea to make Nick Carraway the narrator of his novel, switching the perspective from third person to first person. Perhaps it was at that point that Fitzgerald decided that “Absolution” no longer fit with the rest of the novel. The switch from third person to first person narration might have been due to the influence of Joseph Conrad, one of Fitzgerald’s favorite authors. Conrad had famously used partially involved narrators in Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim, as Fitzgerald would do in The Great Gatsby.
Fitzgerald wrote to Maxwell Perkins around April of 1924 about the progress on his novel: “In approaching it from a new angle I’ve had to discard a lot of it—in one case 18,000 words (part of which will appear in the Mercury as a short story).” (Dear Scott, Dear Max, p.69) “Absolution” is about 5,600 words long, and I’m sure I'm not the only Fitzgerald fan who is curious as to what the other 12,000 words that Fitzgerald cut from Gatsby were like.
“Absolution” is a great short story, and it provides ample evidence of Fitzgerald’s mastery of the written word.
