"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.