The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Benediction: The Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament is a complete rite, during which the Blessed Sacrament is exposed or displayed in a vessel, often ornate, called a monstrance. “O Salutaris Hostia” (literally “O Saving Host”) is the second-to-last stanza of a hymn written by St. Thomas Aquinas, and it accompanies the Benediction rite.

  St. Francis Xavier: a founding member of the Society of Jesus and canonized in the same year as the Society’s primary founder, St. Ignatius Loyola. A converter of infidels, St. Francis Xavier is remembered as perhaps the greatest missionary since the era of the apostles.

  pietà, a life-size statue of the Blessed Virgin set within a semicircle of rocks: A pietà is a representation of Mary mourning over the dead body of Jesus.

  HEAD AND SHOULDERS

  Fitzgerald wrote “Head and Shoulders” (originally called “Nest Feathers”) in November 1919 during what was, to him in retrospect, the most exciting period of his life. Harold Ober, who had in this same month become responsible for the marketing of Fitzgerald’s stories at the Paul Revere Reynolds agency, sold “Head and Shoulders” for $400 to The Saturday Evening Post. This was nearly three times the amount Fitzgerald had received for any story he had sold thus far, and its appearance in the February 21, 1920, issue became Fitzgerald’s first publication in a mass-circulation magazine: while he had previously published three stories in The Smart Set, its circulation was just above twenty thousand; the Post’s weekly audience was over two million. As he wrote about this to Ober in 1925, just months before the publication of The Great Gatsby, “I was twenty-two when I came to New York and found that you’d sold Head and Shoulders to the Post. I’d like to get a thrill like that again but I suppose its only once in a lifetime.” From strictly a financial standpoint, the money that came from the sale of “Head and Shoulders” when coupled with the acceptance of his first novel, This Side of Paradise, enabled Fitzgerald to resume his courtship with the woman soon to become his wife, Zelda Sayre, who had called off their engagement until Fitzgerald could prove he was able to support her. “Head and Shoulders” marked the introduction of the flapper to middle America and in the process installed Fitzgerald as the flapper’s historian, the chronicler of the Jazz Age in fiction. The appetite that “Head and Shoulders” created in the popular American magazine audience would prompt the Post to publish five more of his flapper stories (one of which, “The Ice Palace,” introduced the combination of the flapper and Southern belle) in 1920 alone. Fitzgerald selected “Head and Shoulders” for inclusion in Flappers and Philosophers, placing it third after “The Offshore Pirate” and “The Ice Palace.”

  George M. Cohan: George M. Cohan (1878–1942), American actor, playwright, director, composer. The 1917 song “Over There” won him a Congressional medal.

  Château-Thierry: French village where French and American troops halted the German advance into France in a July 1918 battle.

  “Spinoza’s Improvement of the Understanding”: Baruch Spinoza (1632–77), Dutch philosopher, author of Treatise on the Improvement of the Understanding.

  “Home James”: 1917 Varsity Show at Columbia University, written by Oscar Hammerstein and Herman Axelrod.

  Blundering Blimp: Song in Fitzgerald’s play Porcelain and Pink, as published in The Smart Set in January 1920, has the lines, “As you blunder blindly, kindly through / The blinking, winking Blimp!”

  Pall Malls: popular cigarette made by American Tobacco Company.

  Sheffield: school for engineering and science at Yale.

  Berkeley: George Berkeley (1685–1753), Irish bishop and philosopher.

  Hume: David Hume (1711–76), Scottish philosopher.

  Omar Khayyam: Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, poem attributed to the Persian scholar Omar Khayyám, who died circa 1123.

  ten-twenty-thirty: vaudeville circuit where tickets cost ten, twenty, or thirty cents.

  Florodora Sextette: performers in the long-running musical Florodora, which opened in New York in 1900. A group of six women and six men in the show sang the hit song “Tell Me Pretty Maiden.”

  Mrs. Sol Smith’s: Sol Smith (1801–69), theater manager, ran a traveling show in the West and South in the 1830s and ’40s.

  little Boston boy in the comic magazines: perhaps a reference to Buster Brown, cartoon created by Richard Outcault.

  Uncle Remus: narrator in Southern black folktales retold by Joel Chandler Harris (1848–1908). Uncle Remus, a slave, tells his master’s children about Brer Rabbit’s escapades.

  Catullus: Gaius Valerius Catullus (84–54 B.C.), Roman poet.

  with Bergsonian trimmings: Henri Bergson (1859–1941), French philosopher. His lectures on “Creative Evolution” before World War I were popular with American visitors in Paris.

  “The Bohemian Girl”: 1843 opera by Irish composer Michael Balfe (1808–70).

  Hammerstein: Oscar Hammerstein (1895–1960), American composer. He wrote “Home James!” (see note 4 above). Hammerstein’s father and brother also had careers in musical theater.

  shimmy: shoulder-shaking dance. (See note 5 to “Benediction.”)

  Carlyle’s: Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881), Scottish essayist and historian.

  St. Vitus dance: A form of chorea occurring usually in children. Patients have involuntary, jerky muscular spasms.

  Kipling: Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936), English writer, author of Kim, The Jungle Book, and Captains Courageous.

  O. Henry: pseudonym of William Sydney Porter (1862–1910), popular short-story writer known for surprise endings.

  Herb Spencer: Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), English philosopher.

  “Pepys’ Diary”: Samuel Pepys (1633–1703), English diarist and naval historian. His diary, written between 1660 and 1669, gives a vivid account of life in seventeenth-century England.

  “Mens sana in corpore sano”: Latin for “A healthy mind in a healthy body.”

  fourth proposition of Euclid: Euclid, Greek mathematician, circa 300 B.C. In the thirteen books of the Elements he set forth geometric postulates and proofs. In the Data he made ninety-four propositions proving that if certain elements in a figure are given, the other elements can be determined.

  quod erat demonstrandum: Latin for “which was to be demonstrated.”

  Prometheus: In Greek mythology Prometheus defended men from Zeus and gave them fire from heaven. Zeus punished him by chaining him to a rock where eagles ate his liver. Each night the liver grew back and it was eaten again by the eagles. He was rescued generations later by Hercules.

  Isaac Newton: Isaac Newton (1642–1727), English scientist known for setting forth the laws of gravity.

  Hippodrome: Manhattan theater at Sixth Avenue and 43rd Street featuring circuses and other spectacles.

  Schopenhauer: Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860), German philosopher.

  William James pragmatism: William James (1842–1910), American philosopher.

  THE ICE PALACE

  Fitzgerald wrote “The Ice Palace” in December 1919, shortly after a return visit to Montgomery, Alabama, where he had been stationed during the war and where, in July 1918, he had first met Zelda Sayre at a country club dance. In an article that appeared in a 1920 issue of The Editor, he describes the story as having been prompted by a recent visit with a girl to a Confederate graveyard in Montgomery: “She told me I could never understand how she felt about the Confederate graves, and I told her I understood so well that I could put it on paper.” Back in Minnesota, the image of the graveyard was paired in Fitzgerald’s mind by way of contrast with images of the St. Paul ice palaces of the 1880s that his mother had described to him earlier. The two images came together, as Fitzgerald put it, “as all one story—the contrast between Alabama and Minnesota,” which embodies the North-South conflict at the heart of “The Ice Palace.” The story is the first of what has come to be known as Fitzgerald’s Tarleton Trilogy—three stories, “The Ice Palace,” “The Jelly-Bean,” and “The Last of the Belles,” all reflecting Fitzgerald’s complex and
ambiguous feelings about the South—set in “a little city of forty thousand,” clearly a thinly veiled Montgomery. The story of Sally Carrol Happer’s relationship with Harry Bellamy in “The Ice Palace” is an autobiographical version with an alternate ending of Scott Fitzgerald’s courtship with Zelda Sayre. Sally Carrol Happer’s legacy in the story is, first, that of the Southern belle, embodied in the character of Margery Lee, whom Sally Carrol so admires; but she is also a free, independent spirit with the glitter and sparkle of Fitzgerald’s most memorable flappers before and after her. Fitzgerald included “The Ice Palace” as the second story in Flappers and Philosophers.

  “Then blow, ye winds, heigho! A-roving I will go”: These lines are from “A Capital Ship,” by Charles E. Carryl (1841–1920). Carryl’s popular song incorporates the old sea song “Ten Thousand Miles Away.”

  Carmen from the South . . . Dangerous Dan McGrew: Roger lightheartedly compares Sally Carrol to the free-spirited and ill-fated heroine of Georges Bizet’s last and most famous opera, Carmen (1875), set in the south of Spain; Dangerous Dan McGrew, from the ballad “The Shooting of Dan McGrew” by Robert William Service (1874–1958).

  Ever read any Ibsen?: referring to Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906), the great Norwegian playwright, whose work often deals with individuals, both women and men, struggling against society. Later in the story Roger finds Sally Carrol, who had read no Ibsen when he earlier asked the question, reading Ibsen’s verse drama about the Norwegian folk hero Peer Gynt (Peer Gynt, 1867).

  the Serbia in the case: The incident that sparked World War I was the assassination in 1914 of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo by Serbian nationalists, an act which ultimately led to Austria-Hungary’s declaration of war on Serbia.

  the ice palace: Ice palaces have a long history, dating back to eighteenth-century Russia. The first ice palace in St. Paul was built for the Winter Carnival of 1886, an event postponed because of an outbreak of smallpox. Ice palaces were then built again in 1887 and 1888, though those planned for 1889 and 1890 were not built because the weather did not cooperate. In 1896, the year of Fitzgerald’s birth, ice structures on a smaller scale, called ice forts, were constructed, as they were in 1916 and 1917. The next ice palace to be built after the magnificent one of 1888 was in 1937, and it consisted of enormous screens, forts, and backdrops. Fitzgerald reports that he drew on a sketch of an ice palace of the 1880s, found in a newspaper of the period, for his conception of the ice palace in the story.

  “Kubla Khan” . . . “caves of ice!”: the famous poem fragment by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) and its first two lines.

  Wacouta Club: One of a number of winter sports clubs in St. Paul, the Wacouta Club was established in 1885.

  BERNICE BOBS HER HAIR

  The idea for “Bernice Bobs Her Hair” originated in a ten-page letter (circa 1916) that Fitzgerald wrote to his sister Annabel when he was nineteen and she fourteen. He instructed her in great detail in the areas of “Conversation,” “Poise,” and “Dress and Personality” as to how she could become a social success. The story that grew out of this letter was written in January 1920, and it was originally a ten-thousand-word story called “Barbara Bobs Her Hair.” After four magazines rejected it, Fitzgerald shortened it to seven thousand words, altered its climax (making it in his words “snappy”), and Ober sold it for $500 to The Saturday Evening Post with its new title, “Bernice Bobs Her Hair.” Written in the same month as “The Camel’s Back,” the story was published in the May 1, 1920, issue and was Fitzgerald’s fourth contribution to the magazine. Bernice fits in to the category of what Fitzgerald called the “wonderful kid,” a young woman of about sixteen who is on her way toward freespiritedness and liberation, the variety of flapper that Bernice has become by the time of the story’s unexpected turn. With her last gesture in the story Bernice signals her independence from the social hypocrisy of her cousin’s world, though ironically it is the precise world into which Fitzgerald had earlier given his sister the rules of entry. Fitzgerald included “Bernice Bobs Her Hair” in Flappers and Philosophers.

  Hill School: boys’ prep school in Pottstown, Pennsylvania.

  Hiram Johnson: A founder of the Progressive Party, Hiram Johnson served as governor of California (1911–17), then as a U.S. senator until his death in 1945. He opposed America’s entry into World War I, as well as its joining the League of Nations and the World Court.

  Ty Cobb: outstanding baseball player who played for the Detroit Tigers (1905–26) and then the Philadelphia Athletics, retiring in 1928. He led the league in batting from 1907 to 1915 and 1917 to 1919. His lifetime batting average was .367.

  red penny: Pennies from 1787 were made from copper or, beginning in 1856, an alloy of copper with nickel or zinc. Fresh from the mint, the coins were red, though they would later turn reddish brown or brown. From 1859 to 1909 pennies featured the head of an American Indian.

  Annie Fellows Johnston: Johnston (1863–1931) was a children’s author, best known for the Little Colonel books, a series of thirteen novels dating from 1896. The sentimental, nostalgic novels dealt with the aristocracy of Old Kentucky.

  “Little Women”: Louisa May Alcott’s successful novel (1868–69) depicting family life in nineteenth-century New England.

  League of Nations: The League of Nations was formed after World War I to promote world peace and diplomacy.

  amuse people or feed ’em or shock ’em: from the third act of Irish dramatist Oscar Wilde’s 1893 play A Woman of No Importance. Lord Illingworth: “To get into the best society, nowadays, one has to either feed people, amuse people, or shock people—that is all.”

  Marie Antoinette: Marie Antoinette (1755–93), Queen of France, wife of Louis XVI.

  THE OFFSHORE PIRATE

  Fitzgerald began writing “The Offshore Pirate,” originally entitled “The Proud Piracy,” in late January 1920, during which time he lived in a New Orleans boardinghouse and made frequent trips to Montgomery, Alabama, finally convincing Zelda to resume their engagement. When he returned to New York he continued work on the story while awaiting publication of his first novel, This Side of Paradise. He mailed a version of the piece to Ober in late January, describing it as “a very odd story” and suggesting that Ober cut the ending if he thought it lacked “pep.” Ober, likely in consultation with Post editor George Horace Lorimer, asked Fitzgerald to change the ending, which he did, sending the revised story back to Ober with the comment that “the required Jazz ending” contained “one of the best lines I’ve ever written.” The Post bought the new story for $500 and published it in the May 29, 1920, issue, less than two months after Scott and Zelda were married in the rectory of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York and began their honeymoon at the Biltmore Hotel. In an odd twist, the Post had cut Fitzgerald’s “Jazz ending” in the magazine version, perhaps because they thought that it might be confusing to their readers, and substituted what was, in effect, a third one. But whatever its ending, “The Offshore Pirate” is one of Fitzgerald’s most beautifully dreamy and delightful stories; and Ardita Farnam is perhaps his most exemplary flapper. In her exchanges with the pirate, she spells out the details of the flapper creed based on faith in herself, freedom from family and social expectations, and courage: “courage as a rule of life,” she says, and “[a] sort of insistence on the value of life and the worth of transient things”—a creed that could have been spelled out in words and actions close to Ardita’s (as it likely was in those months of the story’s composition) by his fiancée Zelda, the living embodiment of the Fitzgerald flapper. Fitzgerald included “The Offshore Pirate” as the first story in Flappers and Philosophers with its “Jazz ending” restored, and this is the version reprinted here.

  The Revolt of the Angels, by Anatole France: Jacques-Anatole-François Thibault (1844–1924), winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1921 and better known under the pseudonym Anatole France, was a witty French critic, historian, novelist, and poet. The Revolt of the Angels (1914) is a satire on C
hristianity. A skeptic like Voltaire, France mocked both church and state, attacking ignorance and superstition.

  statue of France Aroused: monument to French heroism in World War I erected on Marne battlefield by American sculptor Frederick MacMonnies.

  “Narcissus ahoy!”: In Greek mythology Narcissus, son of the river god Cephissus, rejected the advances of the nymph Echo, who then pined away until nothing was left but her voice. As punishment Narcissus was compelled to fall in love with his own image, and he too pined away until he was transformed into the flower narcissus.

  Stonewall Jackson: Thomas Jonathan Jackson (1826–63) was a Confederate general and Civil War hero regarded as a great tactical genius. Richard Taylor in Destruction and Reconstruction: Personal Experiences of the Late War (1879) noted that Jackson liked to suck on lemons. Historian James I. Robertson says that this is a myth and that Jackson just ate whatever fruit was available.

  Sing Sing: New York state penitentiary at Ossining, New York.

  Winter Garden and the Midnight Frolic: The Winter Garden at Broadway and 50th Street was one of the Great White Broadway Theaters. The Midnight Frolic shows were performed on the roof garden of the New Amsterdam Theater, 214 West 42nd Street. Florenz Ziegfeld staged the Ziegfeld Follies at New Amsterdam (1913–27), and showgirls from the Follies performed in the Midnight Frolic shows, which started at midnight and featured dance music between acts. The Frolic shows depended on drink sales after the performances. After Prohibition the Frolic shows became the Nine O’Clock Revue, shows that were sustained instead by admission charges.

  Orpheum circuit: a chain of theaters making up a major vaudeville circuit in the Midwest and on the West Coast. Vaudeville was family entertainment in contrast to burlesque, which was characterized by bawdy style. Entertainers sought jobs on the Orpheum circuit, where they were assured of a long run going from theater to theater.