"Head and Shoulders"

from: The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald
edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli (Scribners, 1989)
Pages 3-24

(University of South Carolina)

Since it was the first story in my "collection" you'd think I would've started there, right? No. I'm an odd girl that way. But finally I went with the first story...so presented first probably because it was his first piece to appear in the Saturday Evening Post (February 1920).

It is obvious that F. Scott was only 24 when this was written. There is a sense of hopefulness and big dreams. It all crashes, of course--in the typical Fitzgerald way. But I love that way.

We are introduced to the "infant prodigy," Horace Tarbox and his extreme brain and deep thoughts. He has entered college at the tender age of 13 and cares more about his academic pursuits than the world around him. (HEY! What's wrong with that??)

As a joke, his cousin sends an actress to his room one night. Oh no! The trouble begins! He hears the rapping at his door "--three seconds leaked by--the rap sounded."

(The Raven anyone? THE RAVEN? All I could think about was Poe here.)

Horace is almost 18 while the very mature Marcia Meadow is 19. She is bold and just sits right down in one of his reading chairs: "Horace stared at her dazedly. The momentary suspicion came to him that she existed there only as a phantom of his imagination."

She grabs his attention, by her boldness and ability to spout off dramatic lines from plays. Eventually he agrees to attend one of her plays--after my favorite exchange in the story:

"No," interrupted Marcia emphatically. "And you're a sweet boy. Come here and kiss me."

Horace stopped quickly in front of her.

"Why do you want me to kiss you?" he asked intently. "Do you just go round kissing people?"

"Why, yes," admitted Marcia, unruffled. "'At's all life is. Just going round kissing people."

Wisdom, again, in just a snippet of dialogue. F. Scott gets me every time, with every single moment he captures. Of course--there will be kissing, there will even be a marriage between the unlikely couple and a complete role reversal by the end. And even one of my favorite words--syncopated--makes its appearance.

"Poor gauzy souls trying to express ourselves in something tangible. Marcia with her written book; I with my unwritten ones. Trying to choose our mediums and then taking what we get--and being glad."

Never answer the door when someone knocks--you never know who it might be...you never know what they may take from you.

~~J

"Winter Dreams"

from: The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald

edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli (Scribners, 1989)

Pages 217-236

Original illustration by Arthur William Brown for Metropolitan Magazine

I decided to stay in a seasonal realm and found myself reading (and enjoying) another Gatsby cluster story. "Winter Dreams" first appeared in Metropolitan Magazine in December 1922. and was later put in a collection.

F. Scott was working on his third novel at the time and eliminated some of the text in the magazine and later used it in The Great Gatsby. Little did I know while reading that "Winter Dreams" seems to be his most discussed short story--at least of the ones I have read thus far.

"In the fall when the days became crisp and gray, and the long Minnesota winter shut down like the white lid of a box..." We follow Dexter Green, winter dreamer and the finest golf caddy (only for extra pocket money) from age 14 to 32.

He has big dreams, as a golf champion commanding over imaginary audiences as he defeats Mr. T. A. Hedrick a hundred times--each different, but important. Typical 14-year-old boy stuff, I suppose.

Until he means Miss Judy Jones one day over the summer while he is caddying at Sherry Island Golf Club in New Jersey...bam! She ruins him, even though she is only eleven-- "beautifully ugly" but with a spark and "lips twisted down at the corners when she smiled..."

After observing and conversing with Miss Jones and her nurse, he quits. Suddenly because "he had received a strong emotional shock, and his perturbation required a violent and immediate outlet."

Part two takes place nine years later, and Dexter has gone to a university in the East (leaving behind the Midwest) and has become a successful business man (laundry business, washing woollen golf-stockings without shrinking them) and is invited to play at the Sherry Island Golf Club.

Guess who is there and is "arrestingly beautiful" and always looking as if she wants to be kissed?

Now we get more beautiful F. Scott prose:

"Later in the afternoon the sun went down with a riotous swirl of gold and varying blues and scarlets, and left the dry, rustling night of Western summer. Dexter watched from the veranda of the Golf Club, watched the even overlap of the waters in the little wind, silver molasses under the harvest-moon. Then the moon held a finger to her lips and the lake became a clear pool, pale and quiet..."

Dexter happens to come across Miss Judy Jones at the lake, and of course, he's already in love with her...just as every other man is..."His heart turned over like a the fly-wheel of the boat, and, for the second time, her casual whim gave a new direction to his life."

This is the point where I'm internally screaming at Dexter--NO! She's going to break your heart! Don't do it, don't do it....but he doesn't listen. Poor Dexter.

Parts 3 and 4 we watch the intoxicating Judy work her spell and ruin a man. That's how women are, after all. "When the scarlet corners of her lips curved down, it was less a smile than an invitation to a kiss." Man? Many men, as the snobbish daughter of a rich man--she can do whatever she pleases.

"She was not a girl who could be 'won' in the kinetic sense--she was proof against cleverness, she was proof against charm;..." I think F. Scott is talking about me here, but maybe not.

Dexter finally realizes that he could not have Judy Jones (finally!)--"Then he said to himself that he loved her, and after a while he fell asleep." This is how these things go. He becomes engaged to another woman even.

But damn her, if that Judy Jones doesn't come back into the picture. Poor Irene doesn't stand a chance! Judy comes back from vacation and actually confronts Dexter and proposes to HIM:

"I'd like to marry you if you'll have me, Dexter. I suppose you think I'm not worth having..."

A million phrases of anger, pride, passion, hatred, tenderness fought on his lips. Then a perfect wave of emotion washed over him, carrying off with it a sediment of wisdom, of convention, of doubt, of honor. This was his girl who was speaking, his own, his beautiful, his pride.

"Won't you come in?" He heard her draw in her breath sharply.

Waiting.

"All right," his voice was trembling, "I'll come in."

We could end it right here. But we go on and we fast forward seven years to see what has become of Dexter and Judy. Poor Irene and the rest of the Sherry Island Golf Club crew. I'll stop right here and let you find out for yourself.

-----

I do love a good moment of tension. A moment that is written so clearly and with so much...HONESTY that it drips from the pages and wells up in my heart. Moments. F. Scott is so good with his moments between lovers or almost-lovers or will-never-be lovers.

I always get the question, "What do you write?"

I say, "short fiction." I get a look of confusion. "But like what?"

And then I come up with, "Moments. I write moments between people."

More confused looks. F. Scott understands.

~~J

Note: I had a good time noticing repeated words whilst reading (not complaining, only noticing) especially ecstasy and spasmodically.

"The Ice Palace"

from: The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald

edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli (Scribners, 1989)

Pages 48-69

This was the second time I read this particular short story--in fact, The Ice Palace was my first (and therefore my favorite) by F. Scott. It was originally published in The Saturday Evening Post in May of 1920 and was included in a collection.

I like how it poetically it begins on a September day:

"The sunlight dripped over the house like golden paint over an art jar, and the freckling shadows here and there only intensified the rigor of the bath of light."

Can't you just TASTE that?

We are introduced to Sally Carrol of Tarleton, Georgia, (apparently a town F. Scott writes a lot about--it makes me think of the identical twins buzzing around Scarlet O'Hara at the barbecue). She is lovely and nineteen and has all the boys within her grasp, especially Clark Darrow.

But Sally Carrol has an imagination and thirst for life elsewhere, as we learn she is engaged to a Yankee she met in Asheville over the summer. Fie!

In the second section we are introduced to Harry (the Yankee) and he seems respectable enough. We go to one of Sally Carrol's favorite places, a cemetery and visit "Margery Lee 1844-1873"...a woman never known but often imagined as the quintessential Southern Belle.

--"...and then she kissed him until the sky seemed to fade out and all her smiles and tears to vanish in an ecstasy of eternal seconds." What a kiss!

We travel along by train to the great white North, covered in snow and freezing cold. So are the people, as you can imagine--especially the ladies, they are "vaguely Scandinavian."

Sally Carrol wants to play in the snow, build snowmen, and go sledding. They finally indulge her but she realizes all of these things are typical of children, not adults. Ho-Hum.

There is a party and she only has one interesting conversation with a professor (of course!)--and we realize that Sally Carrol may be rethinking her choice:

"You see I always think of people as feline or canine, irrespective of sex."

"Which are you?"

"I'm feline. So are you. So are most Southern men an' most of these girls here."

"What's Harry?"

"Harry's canine distinctly. All the men I've met to-night seem to be canine."

Ouch!

Fast forward to the breathtaking palace built of ice-- "three stories in the air, with battlements and embrasures and narrow icicled windows, and the innumerable electric lights inside..."

Now here we get to the "good stuff" because Sally Carrol is "dazzled by the magic of the great crystal walls" and starts repeating lines from Kubla Khan (smart girl!) to herself and my poetry mind starts to drool:

It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!

F. Scott is a smart one, because if you squint your mind's eye just right you can see the relationship between the poem and his short story. It's so rich!

I can't give away the ending of the story--but I could probably write a scholarly paper about it. What really happens to Sally Carrol? Really? Think about it, look at the subtle hints and get back to me on this...

~~J

p.s. alcohol mentioned? "hard yella licker"....but there is a LOT of coffee-drinking!

"The Sensible Thing"

from: The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald
edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli (Scribners, 1989)
Pages 289-301

(Jonquils, not Daisies...but here we have his love of yellow flowers, oddly enough there is no mention of alcohol in this story...)

"The crowd all looked slightly upward and took deep March breaths, and the sun dazzled their eyes so that scarcely any one saw any one else but only their own reflection on the sky."

I decided to step away from the Tender clusters and picked my next short story based solely on the title...

Funny how that works sometimes.

So I moved into my F. Scott reading position: it's almost like praying, because I kneel aside my bed and prop my head against a pillow.

There with a highlighter I get down to business.

I really liked this story (which belongs to the Gatsby cluster)--it was originally published in "Liberty" in July 1924. The earliest piece I have read thus far.

It's a heartbreaking tale of the lost love between George and Jonquil--"the dark little girl who had made this mess, this terrible and intolerable mess...waiting to be sent for in a town in Tennessee."

George is working in New York and after receiving a letter--"in sacred ink, on blessed paper...He read the commas, the blots, and the thumb-smudge on the margin"...and has to go visit her again (losing his job in the process).

NOT a sensible thing. Like a lot of his stories, we have to read between the lines, and I like that.

"Perhaps she too would see the sunset and pause for a moment, turning, remembering, before he faded with her sleep into the past."

Ten months pass and a lot changes: as it always does. The distance is too much for the heart to traverse. Remember this is the time of letters, nothing digital about it. But George goes back one more time and we have our big moment:

"Does my being here bother you?"
"No." The answer was both reticent and impersonally sad. It depressed him.
"Are you engaged?" he demanded.

"No."

"Are you in love with some one?"
She shook her head.

"Oh." He leaned back in his chair.

We have our answer with his reaction. We know how she shook her head--in which direction her neck moved. How she probably closed her eyes when she did it. I think we hear his heart breaking in that moment too. There is room there between the lines.

And, of course, F. Scott pulls it all together at the end. His endings are different. He rarely leaves on an image or a scene--a piece of dialogue. Instead we get wisdom to pull it all together.

"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."

Like that's not the most true statement ever written in the world. Hopeful and tragic.

~~J

Let me just "geek out" a bit right here and marvel at the play on the name Jonquil and the fact the flower is also known as a Narcissus--and the springness of the story with the mention of both March...(when they bloom) and April when it is all over...it's three or more metaphors all colliding. It makes me drool.

A "New" Book:

Although I've taken a "classic" reading break in order to read a more "modern" book (Little Children) I did get this one in the mail yesterday:

The Basil and Josephine stories (used) should be a good addition to the mix.

I also realize that I didn't mention it here, but I found a "second edition" copy of both Tender is the Night (complete with annotations--aka underlining--I may include some of that when I reread it)...AND

Although Save Me the Last Waltz wasn't written by F. Scott--it was written by Zelda instead--I am going to include my reading of it on this blog since it is obviously related.

Due to the frosty weather I may have to read THE ICE PALACE and blog about it (outside of the current pattern I am taking)...

I'm such a nerd!

~~J

"The crack's in me." I said heroically.

Three personal essays were published in Esquire in February, March, and April of 1936.

I read them this morning whilst lying upright in bed--highlighter in hand so I could mark the parts that resonated with me.

F. Scott was at a low point, reflecting and writing--writing and reflecting on his life and his writing life and things in between.

It almost felt a bit like cheating--like skipping to the end of a really good book to see what happens.

I found The Fitzgerald Reader: A Collection of His Finest Work [1963 Scribners] Edited by Arthur Mizener sometime over the summer. The essays appear on pages 405-420 (although they are printed all over the place).

I don't know exactly HOW to write about them...I can include the parts I marked though:

"Of course all life is a process of breaking down..."
(so it begins)

"One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise."

"I suddenly realized that I had prematurely cracked."

"...hating the night when I couldn't sleep and hating the day because it went toward night."

"...in a real dark night of the soul it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day."
(apparently a famous quote by F. Scott)

"I took a beating on English poetry; when I got the idea of what it was all about."

"Life around me was a solemn dream, and I lived on the letters I wrote to a girl in another city. A man does not recover from such jolts--he becomes a different person and, eventually, the new person finds new things to care about."

"Once I had had a heart but that was about all I was sure of."

"I felt--therefore I was."
(and then I wrote and then I was reduced to tears--for all the feeling--Me)

"I must continue to be a writer because that was my only way of life, but I would cease any attempt to be a person--to be kind, just or generous."

"I have now at last become a writer only."

"My own happiness in the past often approached such as ecstasy that I could not share it even with the person dearest to me but had to walk it away in quiet streets and lanes with only fragments of it to distill into little lines in books--"

So beautiful, heartbreaking and filled with recognition of key moments, feelings. All the world exploded into nothingness. And he died four years later.

~~J

"The Hotel Child"

from: The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald
edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli (Scribners, 1989) Pages 598-615

Hôtel Hotel Des Trois Couronnes

I decided to go ahead and read another short story last night. "The Hotel Child" was published in January 1931 (Saturday Evening Post) and is another Tender cluster story dealing with Americans living in Europe.

This time F. Scott told his agent that, "Practically the whole damn thing is true, bizarre as it seems." One of the things critics baulk at his writing about is how things aren't "creative" enough because F. Scott draws so much from his own life and the lives around him.

I'm sorry, critics. That's how "we" do. (Notice I called myself a writer). Most fiction is really faction (fiction based on facts, thank you very much Laura Zigman). Maybe it's not cleverly disguised enough for you, but that's how it works.

So the story revolves around a radiantly beautiful Jewess who is celebrating her 18th birthday in a grand hotel. We find out that this has been her existence for the last four years as she as been traveling with her mother and brother throughout various countries.

"Watching the dancing there would be a gallery of Englishwomen of a certain age, with neckbands, dyed hair and faces powered pinkish gray; a gallery of American women of a certain age, with snowy-white transformations, black dresses and lips of cherry red."

Now the story wasn't that fascinating for me. I loved reading the original Rosemary (from Tender is the Night) or her counterpart--whatever you'd like to call it.

Fifi is pursued by many men, she keeps getting kicked out of the hotel bar because of her age, and wants to go to Paris to study at the Sorbonne.

"Didn't evening sometimes end on a high note and not fade out vaguely in bars? After ten o'clock every night she felt she was the only real being in a colony of ghosts, that she was surrounded by utterly intangible figures who retreated whenever she stretched out her hand."

Wow! The passage above has inspired me to write a short story, all on its own!

Alcohol mentioned: Spanish wine & whisky-and-soda

There is a suspicious Count, money goes missing, someone sets the hotel bar on fire, and a funny saying is repeated several times--it's a quick read but falls flat for me by the end. I would rank it last of the four I have read thus far.

~~J

"The Swimmers"

from: The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald
edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli (Scribners, 1989) Pages 495-512

As you can see, "The Swimmers" was published in the Saturday Evening Post (19 October, 1929). F. Scott told his agent that it was "the hardest story I ever wrote, too big for its space..."

So we begin in Paris with Henry Marston coming home early from work and discovering that his French wife, Choupette, has a male visitor. Uh Oh.

"...for the first time in his life he heard silence--a loud, singing silence, oppressive as heavy guns or thunder."

He collapses and is attended to by a physician--spends four weeks in a state of emotional distress and then decides he is going to continue on with his married life (they do have two boys, by the way)--AFTER a trip to the shores of St. Jean de Luz.

We find out that Henry is originally from Virginia and despite NOT being able to swim, decides to dive into the ocean to save an American girl whom his wife didn't like the look of:

"In her grace, at once exquisite and hardy, she was that perfect type of American girl that makes one wonder of the male is not being sacrificed to it..."

To show her gratitude for his attempt (he ends up having to be rescued) she offers to teach him and his two boys to swim--and in an interesting move, she remains UNNAMED throughout the story:

"Looking for a last time into her eyes, full of cool secrets, he realized how much he was going to miss these mornings, without knowing whether is was the girl who interested him or what she represented of his ever-new, ever-changing country."

There is a move back to Virginia, swimming, a divorce, a blackmail attempt, more swimming and the drinking of a gin fizz--before it is all said and done:

"The burden of his wretched marriage fell away with the bouyant tumble of his body among the swells, and he would begin to move in a child's dream space."

F. Scott has such a beautiful way of writing the words into feelings. You can FEEL them, sense them...and it always seems so effortless. Like he didn't TRY to make YOU feel this way, he didn't stumble over words or phrasing--I see the words floating off his pen in neat little lines.

By the way, this one is divided into four sections--unlike the first two I read. It is my favorite after "The Bridal Party," pushing "One Trip Abroad" down to number #3.

~~J