A Companion to the American Short Story
Page 68
the death of a former love. If the point of the story is to critique the self - absorption
of the rich – the main effect of Paula Legendre ’ s passing is to remind Anson that he
is now thirty and no longer young – the narrator ’ s presumed solidarity with the reader
assures us that the middle class does not suffer this fault. The very fact that the nar-
rator can invoke “ we ” and speak of “ our ” common values is proof of the empathy that
the titular protagonist lacks.
“ The Rich Boy ” represents one of Fitzgerald ’ s more self - conscious experiments in
fi rst person. More common is the technique of “ The Last of the Belles ” (1929), in
which the narrator is a full - fl edged character. Despite the seeming straightforwardness
of this approach, “ Belles ” manages to achieve the same complexity as “ Babylon Revis-
ited ” even without the ambiguity that free indirect discourse affords the latter. Instead
of any potential discrepancy between the author ’ s and character ’ s points of view that
the reader must resolve, Fitzgerald exploits the dissonance that arises from the ten -
year gap between the moment that the narrator, Andy, fi rst befriends Southern belle
Ailie Calhoun and his fi nal, melancholy encounter with her. From this gap, readers
must assess Andy ’ s narration to determine exactly what insight, if any, the intervening
decade has brought to his understanding of his infatuation with this quintessential
coquette. Any answer, again, is speculative, and how readers determine it will largely
affect whether they regard Ailie herself with sympathy or whether they view her, as
Petry does, as unworthy of “ the trouble of the narrator or of any man ” (158). This is
essentially the same task that readers face in Joyce ’ s “ Araby, ” at whose conclusion the
narrator condemns himself as “ a creature driven and derided by vanity ” (22). That the
interpretive demands of “ The Last of the Belles ” are every bit as complex as Joyce ’ s
classic suggests just how consanguineous Fitzgerald ’ s storytelling affi nities are with
modernism.
That said, Fitzgerald was apparently uninterested in either of those modernist
mainstays, the interior monologue or stream of consciousness. To fi nd an example of
the former, one must wade late into his story - writing career to 1934 ’ s “ The Night
Before Chancellorsville, ” a Civil War tale in which a prostitute, Nora, expresses her
disgruntlement over losing business during the 1863 Union routing in General
Robert E. Lee ’ s most audacious Confederate victory. Although idiosyncratic, the story
is one of Fitzgerald ’ s more notable attempts to break from his reputation as a Saturday
Evening Post writer, its success due in a large part to Nora ’ s voice. Unfortunately, the
same cannot be said for the author ’ s lone foray into stream of consciousness, “ Shaggy ’ s
Morning ” (1935), published, like “ The Night Before Chancellorsville, ” in Esquire ,
which became Fitzgerald ’ s main market when he no longer found himself able to
produce Post stories. One might give him the benefi t of the doubt and suggest that
he could have proved more capable at Joycean narration if he had not attempted to
write from the perspective of a dog going about its daily routine of burying bones
and dodging automobiles. As it stands, however, “ Shaggy ’ s Morning ” enjoys the
F. Scott Fitzgerald
309
unenviable reputation as the worst story Fitzgerald ever published – deemed so bad,
in fact, that it remains uncollected at the request of his estate. (As a result, it typically
falls to a short passage toward the end of This Side of Paradise to suggest how profi cient
he could have been at stream of consciousness had he more consistently experimented
with it.) Nor was Fitzgerald drawn to writing in the second person, which became a
common habit for Hemingway in his post - 1930 novels and non - fi ction – although,
curiously, not his short stories. Only casually would Fitzgerald slip into this form, as
in “ The Third Casket ” (1924), and only then as a means of introducing his plot, not
of interpolating the reader into the fi ction ( The Price 86). And while an argument can
be made that late efforts such as “ Three Acts in Music ” (1936) fl irt with experimenta-
tion by approximating the prose - poem styled perspectival collage of Toomer ’ s Cane ,
such exercises are as much acts of creative desperation as they are conscientiously
designed attempts at self - reinvention. The reality is that Fitzgerald was most at home
with standard fi rst - person retrospective and third - person free indirect discourse. The
unacknowledged reality is that, for as synonymous as innovation is with modernism,
his peers often were as well.
Exclamatory Style: Romantic Rhapsodies versus
Modernist Irony
The fi nal characteristic that has traditionally distinguished Fitzgerald from his con-
temporaries has to do with the amount of emotion expressed in his style. A devout
fan of the Romantic poets – John Keats in particular – he inherited their belief that
feeling is a catalyst of knowledge, the intensity of the sentiment theoretically elevat-
ing individuals past the boundaries of rational concentration to more intuitive insights
lost to everyday habits of thought. Such conviction in the power of imagination was
decidedly out of fashion in the early twentieth century, however. Amid the devasta-
tion of the Great War and the Versailles peace compromises – at a time when Freudian
psychology emphasized the neuroses of the subliminal instead of the ecstasies of the
sublime – the faith in optimism and progressivism that Romanticism advocated could
not help but seem na ï ve, if not outright quaint. Accordingly, leading modernists such
as T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound campaigned against feeling in art, insisting that it was
a sentimental corruption that distracted readers from the aesthetic complexities of
form. For practitioners of the short story, the result was the emergence of a certain
style of irony, most readily embodied in a stance of shellshocked detachment, which
suggested that one could only observe and not comprehend the upheaval of modern
life. The most celebrated exemplars of this style are the interchapters of Hemingway ’ s
In Our Time . In bursts of imagistic prose that rarely exceed a paragraph in length,
Hemingway captures the stunted inability to process the spectacle of violence, whether
warfare or bullfi ghting: “ We were in a garden at Mons. Young Buckley came in with
his patrol from across the river. The fi rst German I saw climbed up over the garden
wall. We waited till he got one leg over and then potted him. … Then three more
310
Kirk Curnutt
came over further down the wall. We shot them. They all came just like that ” ( Complete
Short Stories 77). Hemingway ’ s style infl uenced a range of writers from Steinbeck to
Hammett for two reasons: its irony bespoke the gritty cynicism of the age, and it was
(and remains) eminently imitable – so much so that, by the time of his third story
collection,
Winner Take Nothing
(1933), Hemingway veered dangerously close to
self - parody.
The staccato reportage of
the Hemingway style could not be farther from Fitzger-
ald ’ s modus operandi, which typically luxuriates in intricately paced crescendos of
metaphor that climax in melancholy exclamations of remorse and loss. Critics fre-
quently express discomfort with the conclusion of “ Winter Dreams, ” for example,
because Dexter Green ’ s discovery that Judy Jones ’ s youthful impiety has been squan-
dered in a loveless marriage borders on the overwritten: “ The dream was gone. …
The gates were closed, the sun was gone down, and there was no beauty but the gray
beauty of steel that withstands all time. Even the grief he could have borne was left
behind in the country of illusion, of youth, of the richness of life, where his winter
dreams had fl ourished ” ( Short Stories 235 – 6).
Whether one fi nds this lamentation over the top is a personal reaction, yet it should
be noted that its elaborateness is not as atypical as it might appear when read alongside
Hemingway. In the world of popular periodicals, such ornate intensity was part and
parcel of what Christopher Wilson has called the “ buttonholing ” rhetoric of the era ’ s
exuberant consumerism. Instead of the genteel,
“
toastmaster
”
style of interaction
favored by the preceding generation of editors such as William Dean Howells and
Horace Scudder of the Atlantic Monthly , magazines in the postwar period encouraged
aggressive, vigorous expression in order to “ cut through the reader ’ s barriers of resis-
tance and ‘ impose ’ an idea ” through the sheer affective force of “ pep ” and “ zest ”
(Wilson 49). Fitzgerald found a congenial home in the Saturday Evening Post , Metro-
politan (in which “ Winter Dreams ” originally appeared in December 1922), Hearst ’ s
International , and The Smart Set in part because his rhapsodic style conveyed precisely
the “ richness of life ” – the sorrow as well as the ebullience – that these venues aimed
to celebrate.
Nor were “ imposing ” styles restricted to the popular marketplace. The ending of
“ Winter Dreams ” is no more overwrought than the conclusions of such modernist
classics as Joyce ’ s “ The Dead ” or Porter ’ s “ Flowering Judas. ” In the former, Gabriel
Conroy ’ s realization that his wife loved another man earlier in life leads to a tearful
vision of his own insignifi cance. The pathos of this sudden awareness arises from
much of the same imagery as Fitzgerald ’ s: “ Generous tears fi lled Gabriel ’ s eyes. He
had never felt like that himself towards any woman but he knew that such a feeling
must be love. The tears gathered more thickly in his eyes and in the partial darkness
he imagined he saw the form of a young man standing under a dripping tree. Other
forms were near. His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of
the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and fl icker-
ing existence. His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the
solid world itself which these dead had one time reared and lived in was dissolving
F. Scott Fitzgerald
311
and dwindling ” (160 – 1). If there is a difference between the two endings, it is one
of volume, not content or tone, as Joyce avoids the exclamation point that, one
suspects, bears much of the responsibility for critics deeming Dexter ’ s grief border-
line mawkish. Unlike Joyce, Porter does not shy away from ejaculatory emotion as
her expatriate heroine, Laura, suffers a nightmare in which a betrayed Mexican revo-
lutionary comes to escort her to death: “ Eat these fl owers, poor prisoner, said Eugenio
in a voice of pity, take and eat: and from the Judas tree he stripped the warm bleed-
ing fl owers, and held them to her lips. She saw that his hand was fl eshless, a cluster
of small white petrifi ed branches, and his eye sockets were without light, but she
ate the fl owers greedily for they satisfi ed both hunger and thirst. Murderer! said
Eugenio, and Cannibal! This is my body and my blood. Laura cried No! and at the
sound of her own voice, she awoke trembling, and was afraid to sleep again ” (102).
Yet in this case one suspects that by framing these outbursts within the interior
monologue of a dream Porter spared herself the charge of excess feeling. Arguably,
the perspective dampens the emotion by ascribing it to solely to Laura instead of to
the authorial presence implied by Fitzgerald ’ s use of free indirect discourse. That
distinction is a technical one, however, and it should not obscure the fact that the
modernist irony for which Hemingway was known was only the reticent end of the
spectrum of emotional expression. Faulkner, Toomer, Woolf, and many others simi-
larly employed exclamatory styles when the occasion demanded. Their modernist
credentials simply pardoned them from the suspicion of sentimentality to which
Fitzgerald has been prone.
The climactic power of many Fitzgerald stories thus rests in their oratorical build -
up. Not all of these possess the clamor of
“
Winter Dreams,
”
however. In
“
‘
The
Sensible Thing, ’ ” George O ’ Kelly ’ s realization that his love for Jonquil Cary has
passed is more solemn and somber than Dexter Green ’ s epiphany: “ Well, let it pass,
he thought; April is over, April is over. There are all kinds of love in the world,
but never the same love twice ” ( Short Stories 301). In other cases, Fitzgerald does not
let the signifi cance of the emotion rest in personal experience, preferring instead to
extrapolate it into a statement on a larger abstraction. The oft - cited conclusion of
“ The Swimmers ” (1929) resembles the famous ending of The Great Gatsby by elevat-
ing one man ’ s disappointed love into a symbol of national character: “ France was a
land, England was a people, but America, having about it still the quality of the
idea, was harder to utter. … It was a willingness of the heart ” ( Short Stories 512).
Such passages are the opposite of Eliot ’ s objective correlative: rather than project the
emotion upon a concrete object, they revel in the subjective nuance of feeling, dra-
matizing its tangled confusions instead of its ability to be simplifi ed through
embodiment in a material form. While Fitzgerald ’ s tendency was toward the nebu-
lous and indefi nite rather than the specifi c, he could, when appropriate, pour that
emotion into something as particular as landscape. “ Absolution ” ends with a descrip-
tion of the Midwest that conveys the repressed sensuality with which Randolph
Miller grapples, with Fitzgerald
’
s setting every bit as charged with portent as
the upper Michigan woods of “ Big Two - Hearted River ” ( Short Stories
272). The
312
Kirk Curnutt
difference is that while Hemingway preferred symbolic detail, Fitzgerald reveled in
devices that call attention to the emotion of the scene: from the pathetic fallacy (a
trembling sirocco) to strategic adverbs to romantic imagery (the moon, which
appears in nearly all of his love stories), the ending
is self
-
consciously lush and
hypnotic instead of stoic and subdued.
Another reason that Fitzgerald is often accused of undue emotion has to do with
the whimsy of his comedy as opposed to the volubility of his melancholy. When other
modernists veered from the darker themes of alienation and despair, they tended
toward satire instead of the wryness of “ The Offshore Pirate, ” “ The Ice Palace, ” and
“ Bernice Bobs Her Hair. ” Thus, in Hemingway ’ s “ Mr. and Mrs. Elliot ” (1925), the
humor is aggressive and dehumanizing, thereby discouraging reader empathy for the
effete sterility of this expatriate couple ’ s dispassionate marriage: “ They were both
disappointed [after sex] but fi nally Cornelia went to sleep. Hubert could not sleep
and several times went out and walked up and down the corridor of the hotel. … As
he walked he saw all the pairs of shoes, small shoes and big shoes, outside the doors
of the hotel rooms. This set his heart pounding and he hurried back to his own room
but Cornelia was asleep ” ( Complete Short Stories 124). Even when Faulkner and Porter
take a lighter tack in semi - comedic tales, their local - color humor is infused with either
an air of Gothicism ( “ A Rose for Emily ” ) or outright tragedy ( “ The Jilting of Granny
Weatherall
”
) that renders them serious. Particularly in Fitzgerald
’
s early fl apper
stories, however, his style is full of coy overstatement, with the language almost chal-
lenging readers to take Fitzgerald ’ s scenarios seriously. Yet the exaggeration is central
to his Jazz Age vivacity: it suggests not only the exuberance of the early 1920s but
the self - deprecating sarcasm that implies Fitzgerald is simultaneously celebrating and
tweaking his generation ’ s yearning to break with Victorian propriety and express its
longings. In a tale like “ The Diamond as Big as the Ritz ” (1922) – a fantasy about a
secret estate built upon the world ’ s largest gem – such hyperbole is taken a step
further to become a mechanism of the thematic critique. In satirizing the unimagi-
nable prosperity promised by the new consumerism, Fitzgerald indulges in an extrava-
ganza of color, texture, and exotic allusion as John T. Unger compares Braddock