The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Other Jazz Age Stories

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Fitzgerald’s career and, in many senses, his life reached its epitome in March 1920 with the publication of This Side of Paradise. Scribner’s quickly followed the novel’s success with the publication of Flappers and Philosophers in October of that year, a collection that included “Dalyrimple Goes Wrong” and “Benediction,” published first in The Smart Set edited by H. L. Mencken; “The Offshore Pirate,” “Bernice Bobs Her Hair,” “Head and Shoulders,” and “The Ice Palace,” published only months previously in The Saturday Evening Post; and “The Cut-Glass Bowl” and “The Four Fists,” published in Scribner’s own Scribner’s Magazine. The collection not only brought together most of Fitzgerald’s significant early efforts—ranging from “Benediction,” originally drafted during his time at Princeton, to stories he had written during the dark days of 1919, such as “Dalyrimple Goes Wrong”—it also reflects the concerns that would come to typify the Jazz Age as defined by Fitzgerald: the idealism of adolescence and disillusions of adulthood, the downward slope of life’s career, the evanescence of romance. While many of these are clearly apprentice fictions, some written hurriedly and under pressure, they embody themes and issues that Fitzgerald would continue to explore in the long succession of stories and novels to follow.

  The rapidity and volume of publication continued through 1922 as Fitzgerald, now a new father with the birth of his daughter, Scot-tie, on October 26, 1921, serialized his second novel, The Beautiful and Damned in the Metropolitan Magazine, while he continued to publish several stories each year. Some of them—“May Day,” “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz,” “Winter Dreams”—are among the best stories he would write. The Beautiful and Damned, published in book form by Scribner’s in March 1922, relates the story of the failed marriage of Anthony and Gloria Patch; in its depiction of the crash of romance and the ravages of dissipation, it amplifies many of the themes Fitzgerald was exploring in the stories of this period. As with This Side of Paradise, within six months Scribner’s followed the publication of Fitzgerald’s second novel with the release of Tales of the Jazz Age in September 1922. Hurried by the publisher to rush his second volume of stories into publication, Fitzgerald was forced to include in this collection—about one-fifth longer than Flappers and Philosophers—an uneven assemblage of very early work, stories from the 1919-1920 period that for reasons of length were not included in the earlier volume, and stories recently published in the magazines.

  Fitzgerald divided this second collection into parts and composed for the table of contents comments upon the writing and publication history of each story (see Appendix). In the section entitled “My Last Flappers,” Fitzgerald included “The Jelly-Bean,” originally published in the Metropolitan Magazine; “May Day” and “Porcelain and Pink” (a farcical one-act play), published earlier in The Smart Set; and “The Camel’s Back,” originally published in the Post. In “Fantasies” he included “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz” and “Tarquin of Cheapside” (the latter originally published in Princeton’s Nassau Literary Magazine) from The Smart Set; “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” from Collier’s; and “ ‘O Russet Witch’ ” from Metropolitan Magazine. Finally, in “Unclassified Masterpieces” he included “The Lees of Happiness,” from the Chicago Sunday Tribune, “Mr. Icky,” another one-act play, from The Smart Set, and “Jemina,” a story originally written while at Princeton and later published in Vanity Fair.

  Fitzgerald originally wanted the collection to be entitled Sideshow, a rubric that aptly describes this assortment of fictions, scenes, and vignettes ranging from an allegory about money, power, and corruption (“The Diamond as Big as the Ritz”) and a farcical tale of courtship (“The Camel’s Back”) to a novella that employs a technique reminiscent of Dos Passos’s historical panoramas as it conjoins the movements, crowds, street politicians, and socialites (“May Day”) and a fantasy about the social construction of identity in which a man is born in his sixties and “grows down” to infancy (“The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”). Yet there are commonalities amongst this menagerie of stories that reveal Fitzgerald’s ongoing concerns as well as his tendency toward experimentalism early in his career. Collectively, tales of the Jazz Age, they manifest the collision of modern historical forces or pressures and individual desire, of the social and the ego—an encounter that for Fitzgerald produces comic or ironic effects as often as it does tragedy. Indeed, many of the stories of Fitzgerald’s “sideshow” in Tales of the Jazz Age are written in the tragicomic mode, which, one might argue, is later reflected in the mature work of Gatsby and Tender Is the Night.

  As Fitzgerald continued to write stories and novels in the midst of declining fame and a chaotic life foreshortened by alcoholism, he expanded the range and improved the quality and consistency of his short stories while maintaining their marketability. In his third compilation, All the Sad Young Men, he collected stories such as “Winter Dreams” and “The Rich Boy” that reflect the obsessions with wealth and sex masked as romance which are the mainstays of The Great Gatsby. Taps at Reveille, the final collection Fitzgerald assembled, contains stories, such as “Crazy Sundays” and “Babylon Revisited,” replete with apocalyptic scenes of dissipation and breakdown that typify the “late” Fitzgerald culminating in the posthumous The Crack-Up (1945); but Fitzgerald also included in Taps several of the “Basil and Josephine” stories in which he returns to his own childhood and adolescence, tracing the sexual and social maturation of the two title characters. Toward the end of his life, Fitzgerald wrote a series of stories for Esquire about a Hollywood screenwriter (the “Pat Hobby” stories) that borrowed upon his own experiences in “Babylon,” working for MGM on such films as A Yank at Oxford and Gone With the Wind. At the time of his death, Fitzgerald had published over 150 stories, most of them written in the two decades that constitute his professional career as a writer.

  When Flappers and Philosophers was published a half year after the surprising success of This Side of Paradise, the wave of enthusiasm generated by Fitzgerald’s first novel was diminished somewhat by his first collection—admittedly, an assemblage of very uneven quality. It was greeted by many critics with cautious praise and was scorned by some. H. L. Mencken, who had lauded This Side of Paradise as the “best American novel I have seen of late. . . . A truly amazing first novel—original in structure, extremely sophisticated in manner, and adorned with a brilliancy that is as rare in American writing as honesty is in American statecraft,” wrote acerbically of Flappers and Philosophers—in the very magazine (The Smart Set) in which he had first published two stories from the collection—that it “offers a sandwich made up of two thick and tasteless chunks of Kriegsbrod with a couple of excellent sardines between.” No doubt Mencken believed the “sardines” to be the Smart Set stories, “Benediction” and “Dalyrimple Goes Wrong.” Playing upon the fresh memories of a recent world war, Mencken opined further that such stories as “The Offshore Pirate” offered “thin and obvious stuff—in brief, atrociously bad stuff,” and rhetorically shook his head at “the sagacity of a publisher who lets a young author print ‘Flappers and Philosophers’ after ‘This Side of Paradise.’ If it were not two years too late I’d almost suspect a German plot.”

  Other critics were equally unforgiving. The Nation’s reviewer wrote that the stories of Flappers and Philosophers “have a rather ghastly rattle of movement that apes energy and a hectic straining after emotion that apes intensity. The surface is unnaturally taut; the substance beneath is slack and withered.” The critic for the Chicago Evening Post lamented, “It seems a pity” that Fitzgerald’s considerable talent “is expended, for the most part, on themes of such slight importance.” Moralizing about the dangers of the literary marketplace, the Baltimore Evening Sun reviewer, unfavorably comparing Fitzgerald’s collection of stories to This Side of Paradise (“undoubtedly one of the best works of fiction published in America in the past year”), suggested that Flappers and Philosophers “must have been written specially to please those people whose ho
bby it is to harp on the harmfulness of praise and early success to an artist, emphasizing the theory that only in penury and neglect can a man do good work.”

  Yet if some critics argued that Fitzgerald’s stories provided evidence of his pandering to success, others clearly viewed them as signs of Fitzgerald’s emergence as an important new author. Heywood Broun, who contended with Mencken as one of the leading critical voices of the day, grudgingly admired some of the stories in the New York Tribune Review, admitting that despite “not having liked This Side of Paradise” and thus “prepared to find confirmation for everything we thought and said about the novel in the new collection of short stories,” a story like “The Ice Palace” convinced him that Fitzgerald “did have something to say and knew how to say it,” and that he “may yet find a powerful springboard and go on to write something which will make us eat all the prophecies we have ever made about him.” Less ambivalently, if petulantly, the reviewer for the New York Herald wrote that in the stories Fitzgerald’s “faculty of characterizing people in a sentence in a way to make one thank Heaven one is not related to them; his facility in the use of the limited but pungent vocabulary of his type; his ingenuity in the hatching of unusual plots, all point to a case of cleverness in its most uncompromising form.”

  In stark contrast to Mencken, the reviewer for the San Francisco Chronicle claimed that “Flappers and Philosophers’ marks the conversion of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s undisciplined and turbid genius of “This Side of Paradise’ into a bridled and clarified talent.” Fanny Butcher, writing for the Chicago Sunday Tribune, viewed Flappers and Philosophers as “a most important volume of short stories because it collects tales which, perhaps more than any published lately, are weather vanes of the popular magazine fiction of the next few years”; moreover, she suggested that the stories are cultural weather vanes through which Fitzgerald “has crystallized his generation.” Using broad strokes, the critic for The New York Times Book Review and Magazine wrote, “Not the most superficial reader can fail to recognize Mr. Fitzgerald’s talent and genius. So far as seriousness is concerned, no one appreciates the value of the Russian School [referring to the “realistic” stories of Chekov and Turgenev] better than he himself. The ingenuity which marks his works he may consider a necessity in American fiction today. . . . Mr. Fitzgerald is working out an idiom, and it is an idiom at once universal, American and individual.”

  The mixed and, in many instances, polarized reviews generated by Flappers and Philosophers typifies the reception of Fitzgerald’s novels and stories from this point onward. While it is not unusual for an author of Fitzgerald’s popularity and significance to garner such a range of responses, what is remarkable is the intensity of the disputes over Fitzgerald’s status either as a literary lightweight, catering to popular tastes, or an always emerging major American writer who portrays with combined accuracy and lyricism the desires and cultural assumptions—the ideology—of the Jazz Age generation.

  By the time of the appearance of The Beautiful and Damned in March 1922, Fitzgerald was rapidly becoming a known quantity, and the prodigious sensationalism that surrounded the publication of This Side of Paradise was beginning to wear thin. Fitzgerald’s second novel, which one reviewer described as “two in swift descent on life’s toboggan,” another as “the flapper’s tragedy,” and a third as a book that “ought to be called ‘The Boozeful and Damned,’ by Scotch Fitzgerald,” earned neither the critical applause nor the money that Fitzgerald—at this point living the life of dissipation he ascribed to his protagonists—had hoped for.

  Tales of the Jazz Age, appearing in September of that year, while it generally fared better with the reviewers than did Flappers and Philosophers, was still met with enough critical and financial ambivalence to bring disappointment and concern to Fitzgerald and his publisher. Writing in the Baltimore News, Robert Garland called the collection “both silly and profound,” and claimed that “the enfant terrible of modern American literature has gone on a ragtime holiday. In these ‘Tales of the Jazz Age’ Scott Fitzgerald is once more the precocious and more than a little acrid youngster of Princetonian days, profoundly foolish, ironically wise.” More astringently, the critic for The New Republic wrote that Fitzgerald is “amusing, flippant, glib, sophisticated according to Princeton undergraduate standards. . . . His characters never complete into substance; he sometimes succumbs to salesmanship; he has a fair range; he is better in fantasies; there are split-seconds of beauty expressed. But that emphatically is all.” In a similar vein, the poet Stephen Vincent Bénet, who would go on to win a Pulitzer Prize in 1929, wrote in the New York Evening Post Literary Review that Tales of the Jazz Age “is competent enough, but it doesn’t mean anything. It shows neither that Mr. Fitzgerald is a flash in the pan nor that he is a constellation. It shows nothing. There is no reason why it should. Mr. Fitzgerald, to compare him with any good football coach, very sensibly doesn’t believe in showing all of his stuff in preliminary or intermediate games.” But if Bénet felt that Fitzgerald was calculatingly holding “genius” in reserve, others suggested that he was wasting his time and talent. John Gunther in the Chicago Daily News wrote that “some of the stories in the book are good stories, true enough, but a collection containing only a few mere good stories is hardly enough from a man with the promise of Fitzgerald. And some of the stuff in the volume is absolute rot.”

  Yet critics as astute as Edmund Wilson who, if he was Fitzgerald’s friend from Princeton days was also unfailingly honest in his assessment of Fitzgerald’s work, wrote in Vanity Fair that “Scott Fitzgerald’s new book of short stories . . . is very much better than his first.” Wilson described himself as being full of “admiration at Fitzgerald’s mastery of the nuances of the ridiculous” in “The Lees of Happiness,” and deemed “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz” a “sustained and full-rounded fantasy”; he concluded the review by proposing Fitzgerald as “the most incalculable of our novelists; you never can tell what he is going to do next. He always has some surprise: just when you think the joke is going to be on you, it may turn out to be on him.—Nonetheless, in Tales of the Jazz Age, he has staged the most charming of ballets—something like the Greenwich Village Follies with overtones of unearthly music.”

  The reviewer for The Cleveland Plain Dealer was equally attentive to what he perceived to be the aesthetic qualities of Fitzgerald’s topical stories: claiming that he is “workmanlike, but he has a constant and irresistible gayety and insouciance that makes his workmanship effective,” this critic wrote that the tales of Fitzgerald’s second collection “are as new as the latest dance step; they are original, styleful, expert. And without moralizing, without bitterness, without even satirizing, they expose the jazz quality of the age—the post-war laxness, the cynicism of the young, the bewilderment of the old.” Finally, John Farrar, writing for the New York Herald, viewed Tales of the Jazz Age as “by far the most interesting” of Fitzgerald’s books to date and asserted, “In this collection he displays his amazing and still youthful verve and his virtuosity. He does many things, and does most of them well.”

  The reviews of Tales of the Jazz Age—positive and negative—together reveal that the critical reception of Fitzgerald’s work through two novels and two story collections was beginning to focus on the question of whether he was going to become an important American writer who was still coming to terms with the depth of his subject and honing his artistic skills, or whether he was, indeed, like the age he portrays—perceived as passing away with the rapidity of fashion, his bright talent already expended and, now, both burnt out and out of control. Such questions are always answered in time, and in Fitzgerald’s case they would be answered by The Great Gatsby. But at the point on the curve of his career when Tales of the Jazz Age was published, there was considerable uncertainty, both in Fitzgerald’s own mind and in the minds of his critics, about his future as a writer of great significance.

  In “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz,” after an apocalyptic explosion th
at destroys the fabulous diamond mountain which is both a paradise and a prison, John Unger, the story’s protagonist, proposes that everything he has experienced in the Montana empire of Braddock Washington “was a dream. . . . Everybody’s youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness.” He concludes that “there are only diamonds in the whole world, diamonds and perhaps the shabby gift of disillusion.” The notion that youth, or even the long career of life, is a dream polarized by the pursuit of the luxurious transcendence signified by diamonds (“diamonds are forever”) and the disenchantment that inevitably follows in the wake of the dream’s collapse suggests the thematic framework for many of the stories in Flappers and Philosophers and Tales of the Jazz Age. The bulk of these stories are concerned with life as staged, and they either capture a glimpse of life at a point of crucial transition—often the point at which youth vanishes—or they trace lives passing through states of transition marked by repeated symbolic encounters. Throughout his career, and in these stories, Fitzgerald views life as theater, and the plot as articulated around those moments of awakening from the dream of life.