The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Other Jazz Age Stories

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

  This existential trope informs stories as diverse as “Head and Shoulders,” “The Cut-Glass Bowl,” “The Four Fists,” “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” “ ‘O Russet Witch!’,” and “The Lees of Happiness.” In “The Four Fists,” the protagonist, Samuel Meredith, an otherwise fairly ordinary man, encounters and inflicts violence at four crucial stages of his life, and at each stage learns lessons of humility, courage, or generosity. Similarly, in “ ‘O Russet Witch!’,” a quiet bookstore salesman, Merlin Grainger, on several occasions throughout his life encounters a mysterious femme fatale who, it turns out, was the one on earth destined for him, yet who he was too confused or cowardly—too distracted by life’s ordinariness—to pursue. The story concludes with Merlin’s recognition of how he has wasted his life: “But it was too late. He had angered Providence by resisting too many temptations. There was nothing left but heaven, where he would meet only those who, like him, has wasted earth.”

  In “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” and “Head and Shoulders,” Fitzgerald tests the thesis that life is a theater upon which is staged a series of trials and disillusionments. The ironic reversals that befall the protagonists of the stories can appear to be the kind of contrivances found by Fitzgerald’s immediate predecessors in popular magazine fiction, such as Frank R. Stockton’s “The Lady or the Tiger?” or O. Henry’s “The Gift of the Magi.” It is not surprising that “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” would have been chosen as the basis for a major motion picture, for at first glance it appears to be a simple, aptly cinematic fantasy of a man born old and growing younger—the inverse of life’s normal arc. In fact the story is a complex portrayal of life conceived as a journey, and of the symmetries to be found between being born and dying. Benjamin Button “grows down” as his life evolves, and the device of portraying him becoming younger with each passing year allows Fitzgerald to address with humor a number of themes that he wrote about throughout his career: the place of the individual within the class and generation that he inhabits, the callowness of youth and the combined wisdom and frailty of old age, the transience of fashion, and the imposing force of history. In this curious story, Fitzgerald is preparing the way for such novels as The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night, whose protagonists are in search of eternal youth and a sense of permanence in a world of shifting realities and aging bodies. In “Head and Shoulders,” Fitzgerald traces the marriage of a cerebral philosopher, who imagines a brilliant academic career, and his athletic wife, who is a nightclub dancer. As they grow older, they change places: she becomes renowned as a popular writer—the Samuel Pepys of the Jazz age—while he descends, becoming an acrobat at the Hippodrome. As in “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” the plot device used in “Head and Shoulders” to follow the reversed careers of the marriage partners reveals the discordant, quasiaccidental relation between individual desire and historical progress that sweeps up individuals into its own plots. The prospect is essentially ironic, and in many of these stories Fitzgerald depicts life’s career as on a downward trajectory from the moment that youthful dreams begin to fade in the backwash of youth’s extravagances.

  In his stories of a fashionable age Fitzgerald is also concerned to capture youth as an evanescent state that inversely reflects the values of the age, while serving as the most visible sign of its passing. In stories such as “The Offshore Pirate,” “The Ice Palace,” “Bernice Bobs Her Hair,” “Benediction,” “The Jelly-Bean,” and “The Camel’s Back”—stories of failed or endangered courtships, friendships, amorous relations—Fitzgerald portrays the crisis of youth as one in which decisions must be made that bind one over to fate and temporality. In this form of theatricalization, youth is often viewed as an interruption of or transient state within the flow of time and the passing of fashion. It is not innocent but gestational, and the signs of gestation are sudden and frenetic: the precipitous barbering of Bernice’s hair on a bet; Lois’s, sudden decision to tear up a farewell message to her lover in “Benediction”; the comic, impetuous shifts of an engagement portrayed in an evening of dancing in “The Camel’s Back.” Fitzgerald suggests in these stories that every act of youth, however seemingly insignificant, has lifelong consequences; for from his perspective, youth is the stage of fate’s formation and the point at which dream becomes reality. As in the tale of a life’s career, these stories of youthful suddenness are set against the backdrop of a continuously changing and evolving social order of uncertain shape and direction; thus the acting out of individual desire and the formation of individual destiny comes into direct conflict with the larger, uncertain history of a world in which the patterns of fate have unraveled.

  Fitzgerald’s representation of history and the social order in his stories of a sped-up, fleeting age (the language itself points out the contradiction) must be placed within the context of the fallout from “the war to end all wars.” As many commentators on the Great War have noted, not only did nations and empires fall as the result of international conflict, the senses of social coherence and the orderly progress of history were annihilated by a conflagration that swept up millions in its unpredictable course. Born of what appeared in the aftermath to be a series of historical accidents, the Great War generated a belief that history itself was an accident—that the only constants were illusion, the extension of desire, and death. In the face of such assumptions, one response was the carpe diem philosophy that came to typify the Jazz Age and the Roaring Twenties.

  Fitzgerald’s stories exemplify this period, in the sense that they often accurately portray the stereotypes and prejudices of the age (witness in our view the unbearable racism of such apprentice stories as “The Offshore Pirate” with its grotesque depictions of black folk culture and servitude) as well as the historical currents that limn the actions and desires of his protagonists. Perhaps the two of Fitzgerald’s finest stories in this regard are “May Day” and “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz.” The former is a novella in which characters pursuing their own pleasures are brought into direct contact with the larger history of socialist labor movements in a street riot: Fitzgerald’s cinematic technique in this story enables him to conjoin seemingly disparate vignettes so that the narratives of the marginalized, the alienated, and the upwardly mobile are paralleled. In the allegory of “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz,” Fitzgerald relates the narrative of manifest destiny and westward expansion in the form of a fantasy which suggests that the dreams of Jazz Age youth—dreams of riches, power, and eternal life—are perfectly consonant with the ambitions of the failed American Dream. As this reading of “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz” suggests, Fitzgerald’s larger subject in his stories of the Jazz Age is America viewed as a young nation of uncertain destiny that had claimed its place on the world stage in the Great War and is now poised to realize those dreams of prosperity, expansion, and release from the constraints of time and space that have been part of the American imaginary since its founding. The history of the United States in the twentieth century, as Fitzgerald accurately predicts in these narratives of mundane lives and allegorical circumstance, is one in which the insubstantiality of the dream itself and the disastrous consequences of its pursuit have been made manifest.

  There is no doubt that the stories collected in Flappers and Philosophers and Tales of the Jazz Age are of uneven quality and reflect the status of a writer who is working through his own youthful apprenticeship. “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz,” “May Day,” and “The Ice Palace,” for example, are truly excellent stories told with skill and artistic certainty that offer substantial explorations of identity, place, and history; on the other hand, “The Offshore Pirate,” “Tarquin of Cheapside,” or “Jemina” are early, stiff efforts that offer only a sense of Fitzgerald’s promise as a writer. But in all of these stories, from the successful to the failed, we can recognize Fitzgerald as a modern, even experimental writer—perhaps himself engaging in some youthful “chemical madness”—trying out techniques and strategies, plot li
nes, structures, character types, patterns of trope and imagery, and styles of dialogue that would cohere as he developed his craft into the recognizable signature of The Great Gatsby, or of “Winter Dreams,” and “Babylon Revisited.”

  The short story form offered not only financial recompense for an author who, in some sense, was obsessed with money, it offered Fitzgerald a medium in which he could place artistry and authorship on trial. It is important to discern Fitzgerald’s nerve as a writer in these stories—some good, some bad, all of great interest as the early work of a major American author—particularly in his willingness to combine imitation with exploration in his portraits of the age that his stories he articulated and identified. The predictions of some reviewers of his short-story collections that Fitzgerald might become just another literary hack are contravened by literary history, but their predictions are also disproven by the stories themselves, which reveal—if, at times, in epiphanic flashes, in a surprising phrase or fragment of dialogue—Fitzgerald’s unique ability to convey philosophy through style, to manufacture a world dependent upon a word. They remain valuable renditions of an age that has ended, yet one which reappears in each passing generation as it defines youth and its vanishing on its own terms.

  SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING

  Bruccoli, Matthew J., and Jackson R. Bryer, eds. F. Scott Fitzgerald in His Own Time: A Miscellany. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1971.

  Bruccoli, Matthew J. Scott and Ernest: The Authority of Failure and the Authority of Success. New York: Random House, 1978.

  ———. Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981.

  Bryer, Jackson R. The Critical Reputation of F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Bibliographical Study. Rev. Ed. Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1984.

  ———, ed. F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Critical Reception. New York: B. Franklin, 1978.

  ———, ed. New Essays on Fitzgerald’s Neglected Stories. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1996.

  Cowley, Malcolm. Fitzgerald and the Jazz Age. New York: Scribner’s, 1966.

  Donaldson, Scott. Fool for Love: F. Scott Fitzgerald. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983.

  Eble, Kenneth Eugene. F. Scott Fitzgerald. Rev. Ed. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1977.

  Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Apprentice Fiction of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Ed. John Kuehl. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1965.

  ———. Dear Scott/Dear Max: The Fitzgerald-Perkins Correspondence. Ed. John Kuehl and Jackson R. Bryer. New York: Scribner’s, 1971.

  ———. F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Life in Letters. Ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli. New York: Scribner’s, 1994.

  ———. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Ledger: A Facsimile. Introd. Matthew J. Bruccoli. Washington: NCR/Microcard Editions, 1972.

  ———. Letters, 1896-1940. New York: Scribner’s, 1963.

  Fryer, Sarah Beebe. Fitzgerald’s New Women: Harbingers of Change. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1988.

  Hindus, Milton. F. Scott Fitzgerald: An Introduction and Interpretation. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968.

  Hook, Andrew. F. Scott Fitzgerald. New York: Routledge, Chapman and Hall, 1992.

  Kuehl, John. F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1991.

  Lehan, Richard. F. Scott Fitzgerald and the Craft of Fiction. Carbon-dale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1966.

  Le Vot, Andre. F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography. New York: Doubleday, 1983.

  Mellow, James R. Invented Lives: F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1984.

  Meyers, Jeffrey. F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography. New York: HarperCollins, 1994.

  Miller, James E., Jr. F. Scott Fitzgerald: His Art and His Technique. New York: New York University Press, 1964.

  Mizener, Arthur. The Far Side of Paradise: A Biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald. 2d ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965.

  Perosa, Sergio. The Art of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1965.

  Petry, Alice Hall. Fitzgerald’s Craft of Short Fiction: The Collected Stories 1920-1935. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1989.

  Piper, Henry Dan. F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Critical Portrait. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1965.

  Sklar, Robert. F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Last Laocöon. New York: Oxford University Press, 1967.

  Stavola, Thomas J. Scott Fitzgerald: Crisis in an American Identity. London: Vision, 1979.

  Way, Brian. F. Scott Fitzgerald and the Art of Social Fiction. New York: St. Martin’s, 1980.

  A NOTE ON THE TEXT

  With only minor typographical corrections made in this edition, the seventeen stories and two one-act plays of this collection are reprinted exactly as they appeared, in the order of their appearance in the first editions of Flappers and Philosophers and Tales of the Jazz Age published in 1920 and 1922, respectively, by Scribner’s. For these collections, Fitzgerald revised and corrected the copy of the stories originally published in magazines; the variations between the magazine and book versions of the stories are in most instances minor. Fitzgerald’s commentaries on the individual stories of Tales of the Jazz Age, which appeared under the title of each story, are reproduced in the Appendix. The dedication page of Flappers and Philosophers reads “To Zelda”; that of Tales of the Jazz Age reads “Quite Inappropriately To My Mother.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I wish to gratefully acknowledge the assistance of Peter Berg of the Michigan State University Libraries Special Collections for his help in locating and reproducing the first editions of Flappers and Philosophers and Tales of the Jazz Age. My thanks also to Viking/Penguin editor Michael Millman for suggesting this project and for his patience and support in seeing it through to conclusion.

  FLAPPERS AND PHILOSOPHERS

  The Offshore Pirate

  This unlikely story begins on a sea that was a blue dream, as colorful as blue-silk stockings, and beneath a sky as blue as the irises of children’s eyes. From the western half of the sky the sun was shying little golden disks at the sea—if you gazed intently enough you could see them skip from wave tip to wave tip until they joined a broad collar of golden coin that was collecting half a mile out and would eventually be a dazzling sunset. About half-way between the Florida shore and the golden collar a white steam-yacht, very young and graceful, was riding at anchor and under a blue-and-white awning aft a yellow-haired girl reclined in a wicker settee reading The Revolt of the Angels, by Anatole France.1

  She was about nineteen, slender and supple, with a spoiled alluring mouth and quick gray eyes full of a radiant curiosity. Her feet, stockingless, and adorned rather than clad in blue-satin slippers which swung nonchalantly from her toes, were perched on the arm of a settee adjoining the one she occupied. And as she read she intermittently regaled herself by a faint application to her tongue of a half-lemon that she held in her hand. The other half, sucked dry, lay on the deck at her feet and rocked very gently to and fro at the almost imperceptible motion of the tide.

  The second half-lemon was well-nigh pulpless and the golden collar had grown astonishing in width, when suddenly the drowsy silence which enveloped the yacht was broken by the sound of heavy footsteps and an elderly man topped with orderly gray hair and clad in a white-flannel suit appeared at the head of the companionway. There he paused for a moment until his eyes became accustomed to the sun, and then seeing the girl under the awning he uttered a long even grunt of disapproval.

  If he had intended thereby to obtain a rise of any sort he was doomed to disappointment. The girl calmly turned over two pages, turned back one, raised the lemon mechanically to tasting distance, and then very faintly but quite unmistakably yawned.

  “Ardita!” said the gray-haired man sternly.

  Ardita uttered a small sound indicating nothing.

  “Ardita!” he repeated. “Ardita!”

  Ardita raised the lemon languidly, allowing three words to slip out before it reache
d her tongue.

  “Oh, shut up.”

  “Ardita!”

  “What?”

  “Will you listen to me—or will I have to get a servant to hold you while I talk to you?”

  The lemon descended slowly and scornfully.

  “Put it in writing.”

  “Will you have the decency to close that abominable book and discard that damn lemon for two minutes?”

  “Oh, can’t you lemme alone for a second?”

  “Ardita, I have just received a telephone message from the shore——”

  “Telephone?” She showed for the first time a faint interest.

  “Yes, it was——”

  “Do you mean to say,” she interrupted wonderingly, “ ’at they let you run a wire out here?”

  “Yes, and just now——”

  “Won’t other boats bump into it?”

  “No. It’s run along the bottom. Five min——”

  “Well, I’ll be darned! Gosh! Science is golden or something—isn’t it?”

  “Will you let me say what I started to?”

  “Shoot!”

  “Well, it seems—well, I am up here—” He paused and swallowed several times distractedly. “Oh, yes. Young woman, Colonel Moreland has called up again to ask me to be sure to bring you in to dinner. His son Toby has come all the way from New York to meet you and he’s invited several other young people. For the last time, will you——”

  “No,” said Ardita shortly, “I won’t. I came along on this darn cruise with the one idea of going to Palm Beach, and you knew it, and I absolutely refuse to meet any darn old colonel or any darn young Toby or any darn old young people or to set foot in any other darn old town in this crazy state. So you either take me to Palm Beach or else shut up and go away.”