The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Other Jazz Age Stories (3 page)

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 hobby 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 that 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.

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.