Tales of the Jazz Age
()
About this ebook
F. Scott Fitzgerald
F. Scott Fitzgerald was born in Saint Paul, Minnesota, in 1896, attended Princeton University in 1913, and published his first novel, This Side of Paradise, in 1920. That same year he married Zelda Sayre, and he quickly became a central figure in the American expatriate circle in Paris that included Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway. He died of a heart attack in 1940 at the age of forty-four.
Read more from F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Last Tycoon: The Authorized Text Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Tales of the Jazz Age Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Great Gatsby (Pretty Books - Painted Editions) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAll the Sad Young Men Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Great Gatsby Original Classic Edition: The Complete 1925 Text Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Complete Short Stories and Essays, Volume 2 Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Babylon Revisited: And Other Stories Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda: The Love Letters of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Great Gatsby (Deluxe Illustrated Edition) Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Trimalchio: An Early Version of The Great Gatsby Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Collected Short Stories Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I'd Die For You: And Other Lost Stories Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Last Tycoon: An Unfinished Novel Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5A Short Autobiography Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Life in Letters Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Szerelem az éjszakában – Love in the night Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Greatest American Short Stories: 50+ Classics of American Literature Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBabylon Revisited Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Great Gastby Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Complete Short Stories, Essays, and a Play, Volume 1 Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Related to Tales of the Jazz Age
Related ebooks
Tales of the Jazz Age Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Curious Case of Benjamin Button Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThis Side of Paradise Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Beautiful and Damned Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Great Gatsby and Other Classic Works (Barnes & Noble Collectible Editions) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsF. Scott Fitzgerald: Classic Works: Two Novels and Nineteen Short Stories Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5F. Scott Fitzgerald: Classic Works (Barnes & Noble Collectible Editions) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Ready Reference Treatise: The Great Gatsby Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Study Guide for F. Scott Fitzgerald's "Babylon Revisited" Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsF. Scott Fitzgerald: A Complete Life from Beginning to the End Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Study Guide for F.Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Short Autobiography Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Winter Dreams: The Inspiration for The Great Gatsby Novel (Read & Co. Classics Edition) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsDear Scott/Dear Max: The F. Scott Fitzgerald - Maxwell Perkins Correspondence Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Vegetable; Or, from President to Postman: With the Introductory Essay 'The Jazz Age Literature of the Lost Generation ' Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSave Me The Waltz Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Flappers and Philosophers Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Collected Writings of Zelda Fitzgerald Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This Side of Paradise (SparkNotes Literature Guide) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsGreat Gatsby, The (MAXNotes Literature Guides) Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5A Study Guide for F. Scott Fitzgerald's "This Side of Paradise" Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThis Side of Paradise (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Study Guide for F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz" Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsF. Scott Fitzgerald: The Paris Years Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Study Guide for Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBetter Angels Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Study Guide for F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A Son of the Middle Border Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Classics For You
The Master & Margarita Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Farewell to Arms Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Poisonwood Bible: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Fellowship Of The Ring: Being the First Part of The Lord of the Rings Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Odyssey: (The Stephen Mitchell Translation) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Flowers for Algernon Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Confederacy of Dunces Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Silmarillion Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Animal Farm: A Fairy Story Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5East of Eden Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Little Women (Seasons Edition -- Winter) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Wuthering Heights (with an Introduction by Mary Augusta Ward) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Learn French! Apprends l'Anglais! THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY: In French and English Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Sense and Sensibility (Centaur Classics) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Warrior of the Light: A Manual Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Old Man and the Sea: The Hemingway Library Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Ulysses: With linked Table of Contents Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Jungle: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Count of Monte-Cristo English and French Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5For Whom the Bell Tolls: The Hemingway Library Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Republic by Plato Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Bell Jar: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Good Man Is Hard To Find And Other Stories Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Count of Monte Cristo (abridged) (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Canterbury Tales Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5As I Lay Dying Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Heroes: The Greek Myths Reimagined Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5We Have Always Lived in the Castle Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Persuasion Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Reviews for Tales of the Jazz Age
0 ratings0 reviews
Book preview
Tales of the Jazz Age - F. Scott Fitzgerald
TABLE OF CONTENTS
COVER
THE BOOK
THE AUTHOR
TITLE
COPYRIGHT
TALES OF THE JAZZ AGE
A TABLE OF CONTENTS
MY LAST FLAPPERS
THE JELLY-BEAN.
THE CAMEL’S BACK
MAY DAY
PORCELAIN AND PINK
FANTASIES
THE DIAMOND AS BIG AS THE RITZ
THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON
TARQUIN OF CHEAPSIDE
THE LEGEND OF BRITOMARTIS OR OF CHASTITY
O RUSSET WITCH!
UNCLASSIFIED MASTERPIECES
THE LEES OF HAPPINESS
MR. ICKY
THE QUINTESSENCE OF QUAINTNESS IN ONE ACT
JEMINA, THE MOUNTAIN GIRL
THE BOOK
Tales of the Jazz Age (1922) is a collection of eleven short stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Divided into three separate parts, according to subject matter, it includes one of his better-known short stories, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
.
All of the stories had been published earlier, independently, in either Metropolitan Magazine (New York), Saturday Evening Post, Smart Set, Collier's, Chicago Sunday Tribune, or Vanity Fair.
THE AUTHOR
Born in 1896 in Saint Paul, Minnesota, to an upper-middle-class family, Fitzgerald was named after his famous second cousin, three times removed, Francis Scott Key, but was referred to by the familiar moniker Scott Fitzgerald. He was also named after his deceased sister, Louise Scott, one of two sisters who died shortly before his birth. Well, three months before I was born,
he wrote as an adult, my mother lost her other two children ... I think I started then to be a writer.
His parents were Mollie (McQuillan) and Edward Fitzgerald. His mother was of Irish descent, and his father had Irish and English ancestry.
Fitzgerald spent the first decade of his childhood primarily in Buffalo, New York (1898–1901 and 1903–1908, with a short interlude in Syracuse, New York between January 1901 and September 1903). His parents, both Catholic, sent Fitzgerald to two Catholic schools on the West Side of Buffalo, first Holy Angels Convent (1903–1904, now disused) and then Nardin Academy (1905–1908). His formative years in Buffalo revealed him to be a boy of unusual intelligence and drive with a keen early interest in literature, his doting mother ensuring that her son had all the advantages of an upper-middle-class upbringing. In a rather unconventional style of parenting, Fitzgerald attended Holy Angels with the peculiar arrangement that he go for only half a day—and was allowed to choose which half.
In 1908, his father was fired from Procter & Gamble, and the family returned to Minnesota, where Fitzgerald attended St. Paul Academy in St. Paul from 1908 to 1911. When he was 13 he saw his first piece of writing appear in print—a detective story published in the school newspaper. In 1911, when Fitzgerald was 15 years old, his parents sent him to the Newman School, a prestigious Catholic prep school in Hackensack, New Jersey. Fitzgerald played on the 1912 Newman football team. At Newman, he met Father Sigourney Fay, who noticed his incipient talent with the written word and encouraged him to pursue his literary ambitions.
After graduating from the Newman School in 1913, Fitzgerald decided to stay in New Jersey to continue his artistic development at Princeton University. Fitzgerald tried out for the college football team, but was cut the first day of practice. At Princeton, he firmly dedicated himself to honing his craft as a writer. There he became friends with future critics and writers Edmund Wilson (Class of 1916) and John Peale Bishop (Class of 1917), and wrote for the Princeton Triangle Club, the Nassau Lit, and the Princeton Tiger. He also was involved in the American Whig-Cliosophic Society, which ran the Nassau Lit. His absorption in the Triangle—a kind of musical-comedy society—led to his submission of a novel to Charles Scribner's Sons where the editor praised the writing but ultimately rejected the book. He was a member of the University Cottage Club, which still displays Fitzgerald's desk and writing materials in its library.
Fitzgerald's writing pursuits at Princeton came at the expense of his coursework. He was placed on academic probation, and in 1917 he dropped out of school to join the U.S. Army. Afraid that he might die in World War I with his literary dreams unfulfilled, in the weeks before reporting for duty Fitzgerald hastily wrote a novel called The Romantic Egotist. Although the publisher Charles Scribner's Sons rejected the novel, the reviewer noted its originality and encouraged Fitzgerald to submit more work in the future.
Fitzgerald was commissioned a second lieutenant in the infantry and assigned to Camp Sheridan outside of Montgomery, Alabama. While at a country club, Fitzgerald met and fell in love with Zelda Sayre (1900–1948), the daughter of an Alabama Supreme Court justice and the golden girl
, in Fitzgerald's terms, of Montgomery youth society. The war ended in 1918, before Fitzgerald was ever deployed, and upon his discharge he moved to New York City hoping to launch a career in advertising that would be lucrative enough to convince Zelda to marry him. He worked for the Barron Collier advertising agency, living in a single room at 200 Claremont Avenue in the Morningside Heights neighborhood on Manhattan's west side.
Zelda accepted his marriage proposal, but after some time and despite working at an advertising firm and writing short stories, he was unable to convince her that he would be able to support her, leading her to break off the engagement. Fitzgerald returned to his parents' house at 599 Summit Avenue, on Cathedral Hill, in St. Paul, to revise The Romantic Egoist, recast as This Side of Paradise, a semi-autobiographical account of Fitzgerald's undergraduate years at Princeton. Fitzgerald was so short of money that he took up a job repairing car roofs. His revised novel was accepted by Scribner's in the fall of 1919 and was published on March 26, 1920 and became an instant success, selling 41,075 copies in the first year it was published. It launched Fitzgerald's career as a writer and provided a steady income suitable to Zelda's needs. They resumed their engagement and were married in St. Patrick's Cathedral, New York. Their daughter and only child, Frances Scott Scottie
Fitzgerald, was born on October 26, 1921.
Paris in the 1920s proved the most influential decade of Fitzgerald's development. Fitzgerald made several excursions to Europe, mostly Paris and the French Riviera, and became friends with many members of the American expatriate community in Paris, notably Ernest Hemingway. Fitzgerald's friendship with Hemingway was quite vigorous, as many of Fitzgerald's relationships would prove to be. Hemingway did not get on well with Zelda. In addition to describing her as insane
he claimed that she encouraged her husband to drink so as to distract Fitzgerald from his work on his novel
, the other work being the short stories he sold to magazines. Like most professional authors at the time, Fitzgerald supplemented his income by writing short stories for such magazines as The Saturday Evening Post, Collier's Weekly, and Esquire, and sold his stories and novels to Hollywood studios. This whoring
, as Fitzgerald and, subsequently, Hemingway called these sales, was a sore point in the authors' friendship. Fitzgerald claimed that he would first write his stories in an authentic manner but then put in twists that made them into saleable magazine stories
. Although Fitzgerald's passion lay in writing novels, only his first novel sold well enough to support the opulent lifestyle that he and Zelda adopted as New York celebrities. (The Great Gatsby, now considered to be his masterpiece, did not become popular until after Fitzgerald's death.) Because of this lifestyle, as well as the bills from Zelda's medical care when they came, Fitzgerald was constantly in financial trouble and often required loans from his literary agent, Harold Ober, and his editor at Scribner's, Maxwell Perkins. When Ober decided not to continue advancing money to Fitzgerald, the author severed ties with his longtime friend and agent. (Fitzgerald offered a good-hearted and apologetic tribute to this support in the late short story Financing Finnegan
.)
Fitzgerald began working on his fourth novel during the late 1920s but was sidetracked by financial difficulties that necessitated his writing commercial short stories, and by the schizophrenia that struck Zelda in 1930. Her emotional health remained fragile for the rest of her life. In February 1932, she was hospitalized at the Phipps Clinic at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, Maryland. During this time, Fitzgerald rented the La Paix
estate in the suburb of Towson, Maryland to work on his latest book, the story of the rise and fall of Dick Diver, a promising young psychiatrist who falls in love with and marries Nicole Warren, one of his patients. The book went through many versions, the first of which was to be a story of matricide. Some critics have seen the book as a thinly-veiled autobiographical novel recounting Fitzgerald's problems with his wife, the corrosive effects of wealth and a decadent lifestyle, his own egoism and self-confidence, and his continuing alcoholism. Indeed, Fitzgerald was extremely protective of his material
(i.e., their life together). When Zelda wrote and sent to Scribner's her own fictional version of their lives in Europe, Save Me the Waltz, Fitzgerald was angry and was able to make some changes prior to the novel's publication, and convince her doctors to keep her from writing any more about what he called his material
, which included their relationship. His book was finally published in 1934 as Tender Is the Night. Critics who had waited nine years for the followup to The Great Gatsby had mixed opinions about the novel. Most were thrown off by its three-part structure and many felt that Fitzgerald had not lived up to their expectations. The novel did not sell well upon publication but, like the earlier Gatsby, the book's reputation has since risen significantly. Fitzgerald's alcoholism and financial difficulties, in addition to Zelda's mental illness, made for difficult years in Baltimore. He was hospitalized nine times at Johns Hopkins Hospital, and his friend H.L. Mencken noted in a 1934 letter that The case of F. Scott Fitzgerald has become distressing. He is boozing in a wild manner and has become a nuisance.
In 1937, Fitzgerald moved to Hollywood, and he made his highest annual income thus far of $29,757.87. Most of the income came from short story sales. Besides writing, he also started to get involved in the film industry. Although he reportedly found movie work degrading, Fitzgerald was once again in dire financial straits, and spent the second half of the 1930s in Hollywood, working on commercial short stories, scripts for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (including some unfilmed work on Gone with the Wind), and his fifth and final novel, The Love of the Last Tycoon. Published posthumously as The Last Tycoon, it was based on the life of film executive Irving Thalberg. Among his other film projects was Madame Curie, for which he received no credit. In 1939, MGM ended the contract, and Fitzgerald became a freelance screenwriter. However, during all this, Fitzgerald's alcoholic tendencies still remained, and conflict with Zelda surfaced. Fitzgerald and Zelda became estranged; she continued living in mental institutions on the East Coast, while he lived with his lover Sheilah Graham, the gossip columnist, in Hollywood. In addition, records from the 1940 US Census reflect that he was officially living at the estate of Edward Everett Horton in Encino, California in the San Fernando Valley. From 1939 until his death in 1940, Fitzgerald mocked himself as a Hollywood hack through the character of Pat Hobby in a sequence of 17 short stories, later collected as The Pat Hobby Stories
, which garnered many positive reviews. The Pat Hobby Stories were published in The Esquire and appeared from January 1940 to July 1941, even after Fitzgerald died.
Fitzgerald had been an alcoholic since his college days, and became notorious during the 1920s for his extraordinarily heavy drinking, leaving him in poor health by the late 1930s. According to Zelda's biographer, Nancy Milford, Fitzgerald claimed that he had contracted tuberculosis, but Milford dismisses it as a pretext to cover his drinking problems. However, Fitzgerald scholar Matthew J. Bruccoli contends that Fitzgerald did in fact have recurring tuberculosis, and according to Nancy Milford, Fitzgerald biographer Arthur Mizener said that Fitzgerald suffered a mild attack of tuberculosis in 1919, and in 1929 he had what proved to be a tubercular hemorrhage
. It has been said that the hemorrhage was caused by bleeding from esophageal varices.
Fitzgerald suffered two heart attacks in the late 1930s. After the first, in Schwab's Drug Store, he was ordered by his doctor to avoid strenuous exertion. He moved in with Sheilah Graham, who lived in Hollywood on North Hayworth Avenue, one block east of Fitzgerald's apartment on North Laurel Avenue. Fitzgerald had two flights of stairs to climb to his apartment; Graham's was on the ground floor. On the night of December 20, 1940, Fitzgerald and Sheilah Graham attended the premiere of This Thing Called Love starring Rosalind Russell and Melvyn Douglas. As the two were leaving the Pantages Theater, Fitzgerald experienced a dizzy spell and had trouble leaving the theater; upset, he said to Graham, They think I am drunk, don't they?
The following day, as Fitzgerald ate a candy bar and made notes in his newly arrived Princeton Alumni Weekly, Graham saw him jump from his armchair, grab the mantelpiece, gasp, and fall to the floor. She ran to the manager of the building, Harry Culver, founder of Culver City. Upon entering the apartment to assist Fitzgerald, he stated, I'm afraid he's dead.
Fitzgerald had died of a heart attack. His body was moved to the Pierce Brothers Mortuary.
Among the attendants at a visitation held at a funeral home was Dorothy Parker, who reportedly cried and murmured the poor son-of-a-bitch
, a line from Jay Gatsby's funeral in Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. His body was transported to Maryland, where his funeral was attended by twenty or thirty people in Bethesda; among the attendants were his only child, Frances Scottie
Fitzgerald Lanahan Smith (then age 19), and his editor, Maxwell Perkins. Fitzgerald was originally buried in Rockville Union Cemetery. Zelda died in 1948, in a fire at the Highland Mental Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina. Scottie Smith worked to overturn the Archdiocese of Baltimore's ruling that Fitzgerald died a non-practicing Catholic, so that he could be buried at the Roman Catholic Saint Mary's Cemetery where his father's family was interred; this involved re-Catholicizing
Fitzgerald after his death. Both of the Fitzgeralds' remains were moved to the family plot in Saint Mary's Cemetery, in Rockville, Maryland, in 1975.
Fitzgerald died before he could complete The Love of the Last Tycoon. His manuscript, which included extensive notes for the unwritten part of the novel's story, was edited by his friend, the literary critic Edmund Wilson, and published in 1941 as The Last Tycoon. In 1994 the book was reissued under the original title The Love of the Last Tycoon, which is now agreed to have been Fitzgerald's preferred title.
(source wikipedia.org)
F. Scott Fitzgerald
TALES
OF THE
JAZZ AGE
Arcadia Ebooks 2016
arcadiaebooks@gmail.com
www.arcadiaebooks.altervista.org
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Tales of the Jazz Age
(1922)
TALES
OF THE
JAZZ AGE
A TABLE OF CONTENTS
My Last Flappers
The Jelly-Bean
This is a Southern story, with the scene laid in the small Lily of Tarleton, Georgia. I have a profound affection for Tarleton, but somehow whenever I write a story about it I receive letters from all over the South denouncing me in no uncertain terms. The Jelly-Bean,
published in The Metropolitan,
drew its full share of these admonitory notes.
It was written under strange circumstances shortly after my first novel was published, and, moreover, it was the first story in which I had a collaborator. For, finding that I was unable to manage the crap-shooting episode, I turned it over to my wife, who, as a Southern girl, was presumably an expert on the technique and terminology of that great sectional pastime.
The Camel’s Back
I suppose that of all the stories I have ever written this one cost me the least travail and perhaps gave me the most amusement. As to the labor involved, it was written during one day in the city of New Orleans, with the express purpose of buying a platinum and diamond wrist watch which cost six hundred dollars. I began it at seven in the morning and finished it at two o’clock the same night. It was published in the Saturday Evening Post
in 1920, and later included in the O. Henry Memorial Collection for the same year. I like it least of all the stories in this volume.
My amusement was derived from the fact that the camel part of the story is literally true; in fact, I have a standing engagement with the gentleman involved to attend the next fancy-dress party to which we are mutually invited, attired as the latter part of the camel — this as a sort of atonement for being his historian.
May Day.
This somewhat unpleasant tale, published as a novelette in the Smart Set
in July, 1920, relates a series of events which took place in the spring of the previous year. Each of the three events made a great impression upon me. In life they were unrelated, except by the general hysteria of that spring which inaugurated the Age of Jazz, but in my story I have tried, unsuccessfully I fear, to weave them into a pattern — a pattern which would give the effect of those months in New York as they appeared to at least one member of what was then the younger generation.
Porcelain and Pink.
And do you write for any other magazines?
inquired the young lady.
Oh, yes,
I assured her. I’ve had some stories and plays in the ‘Smart Set,’ for instance ———
The young lady shivered.
The ‘Smart Set’!
she exclaimed. How can you? Why, they publish stuff about girls in blue bathtubs, and silly things like that
And I had the magnificent joy of telling her that she was referring to Porcelain and Pink,
which had appeared there several months before.
Fantasies
The Diamond As Big As the Ritz.
These next stories are written in what, were I of imposing stature, I should call my second manner.
The Diamond as Big as the Ritz,
which appeared last summer in the Smart Set,
was designed utterly for my own amusement. I was in that familiar mood characterized by a perfect craving for luxury, and the story began as an attempt to feed that craving on imaginary foods.
One well-known critic has been pleased to like this extravaganza better than anything I have written. Personally I prefer The Offshore Pirate.
But, to tamper slightly with Lincoln: If you like this sort of thing, this, possibly, is the sort of thing you’ll like.
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.
This story was inspired by a remark of Mark Twain’s to the effect that it was a pity that the best part of life came at the beginning and the worst part at the end. By trying the experiment upon only one man in a perfectly normal world I have scarcely given his idea a fair trial. Several weeks after completing it, I discovered an almost identical plot in Samuel Butler’s Note-books.
The story was published in Collier’s
last summer and provoked this startling letter from an anonymous admirer in Cincinnati:
"Sir —
I have read the story Benjamin Button in Colliers and I wish to say that as a short story writer you would make a good lunatic I have seen many peices of cheese in my life but of all the peices of cheese I have ever seen you are the biggest peice. I hate to waste a peice of stationary on you but I will."
Tarquin of Cheapside.
Written almost six years ago, this story is a product of undergraduate days at Princeton. Considerably revised, it was published in the Smart Set
in 1921. At the time of its conception I had but one idea — to be a poet — and the fact that I was interested in the ring of every phrase, that I dreaded the obvious in prose if not in plot, shows throughout. Probably the peculiar affection I feel for it depends more upon its age than upon any intrinsic merit.
O Russet Witch!
When this was written I had just completed the first draft of my second novel, and a natural reaction made me revel in a story wherein none of the characters need be taken seriously. And I’m afraid that I was somewhat carried away by the feeling that there was no ordered scheme to which I must conform. After due consideration, however, I have decided to let it stand as it is, although the reader may find himself somewhat puzzled at the time element. I had best say that however the years may have dealt with Merlin Grainger, I myself was thinking always in the present. It was published in the Metropolitan.
Unclassified Masterpieces
The Lees of Happiness.
Of this story I can say that it came to me in an irresistible form, crying to be written. It will be accused perhaps of being a mere piece of sentimentality, but, as I saw it, it was a great deal more. If, therefore, it lacks the ring of sincerity, or even, of tragedy, the fault rests not with the theme but with my handling of it.
It appeared in the Chicago Tribune,
and later obtained, I believe, the quadruple gold laurel leaf or some such encomium from one of the anthologists who at present swarm among us. The gentleman I refer to runs as a rule to stark melodramas with a volcano or the ghost of John Paul Jones in the role of Nemesis, melodramas carefully disguised by early paragraphs in Jamesian manner which hint dark and subtle complexities to follow. On this order:
The case of Shaw McPhee, curiously enough, had no hearing on the almost incredible attitude of Martin Sulo. This is parenthetical and, to at least three observers, whose names for the present I must conceal, it seems improbable, etc., etc., etc.,
until the poor rat of fiction is at last forced out into the open and the melodrama begins.
Mr. Icky
This has the distinction of being the only magazine piece ever written in a New York hotel. The business was done in a bedroom in the Knickerbocker, and shortly afterward that memorable hostelry closed its doors forever.
When a fitting period of mourning had elapsed it was published in the Smart Set.
Jemina.
Written, like Tarquin of Cheapside,
while I was at Princeton, this sketch was published years later in Vanity Fair.
For its technique I must apologize to Mr. Stephen Leacock.
I have laughed over it a great deal, especially when I first wrote it, but I can laugh over it no longer. Still, as other people tell me it is amusing, I include it here. It seems to me worth preserving a few years — at least until the ennui of changing fashions suppresses me, my books, and it together.
With due apologies for this impossible Table of Contents, I tender these tales of the Jazz Age into the hands of those who read as they run and run as they read.
MY LAST FLAPPERS
THE JELLY-BEAN.
Jim Powell was a Jelly-bean. Much as I desire to make him an appealing character, I feel that it would be unscrupulous to deceive you on that point. He was a bred-in-the-bone, dyed-in-the-wool, ninety-nine three-quarters per cent Jelly-bean and he grew lazily all during Jelly-bean season, which is every season, down in the land of the Jelly-beans well below the Mason-Dixon line.
Now if you call a Memphis man a Jelly-bean he will quite possibly pull a long sinewy rope from his hip pocket and hang you to a convenient telegraph-pole. If you Call a New Orleans man a Jelly-bean he will probably grin and ask you who is taking your girl to the Mardi Gras ball. The particular Jelly-bean patch which produced the protagonist of this history lies somewhere between the two — a little city of forty thousand that has dozed sleepily for forty thousand years in southern Georgia occasionally stirring in its slumbers and muttering something about a war that took place sometime, somewhere, and that everyone else has forgotten long ago.
Jim was a Jelly-bean. I write that again because it has such a pleasant sound — rather like the beginning of a fairy story — as if Jim were nice. It somehow gives me a picture of him with a round, appetizing face and all sort of leaves and vegetables growing out of his cap. But Jim was long and thin and bent at the waist from stooping over pool-tables, and he was what might have been known in the indiscriminating North as a corner loafer. Jelly-bean
is the name throughout the undissolved Confederacy for one who spends his life conjugating the verb to idle in the first person singular — I am idling, I have idled, I will idle.
Jim was born in a white house on a green corner, It had four weather-beaten pillars in front and a great amount of lattice-work in the rear that made a cheerful criss-cross background for a flowery sun-drenched lawn. Originally the dwellers in the white house had owned the ground next door and next door to that and next door to that, but this had been so long ago that even Jim’s father, scarcely remembered it. He had, in fact, thought it a matter of so little moment that when he was dying from a pistol wound got in a brawl he neglected even to tell little Jim, who was five years old and miserably frightened. The white house became a boarding-house run by a tight-lipped lady from Macon, whom Jim called Aunt Mamie and detested with all his soul.
He became fifteen, went to high school, wore his hair in black snarls, and was afraid of girls. He hated his home where four women and one old man prolonged an interminable chatter from summer to summer about what lots the Powell place had originally included and what sorts of flowers would be out next. Sometimes the parents of little girls in town, remembering Jim’s. mother and fancying a resemblance in the dark eyes and hair, invited him to parties, but parties made him shy and he much preferred sitting on a disconnected axle in Tilly’s Garage, rolling the bones or exploring his mouth endlessly with a long straw. For pocket money, he picked up odd jobs, and it was due to this that he stopped going to parties. At his third party little Marjorie Haight had whispered indiscreetly and within hearing distance that he was a boy who brought the groceries sometimes. So instead of the two-step and polka, Jim had learned to throw, any number he desired on the dice and had listened to spicy tales of all the shootings that had occurred in the surrounding country during the past fifty years.
He became eighteen. The war broke out and he enlisted as a gob and polished brass in the Charleston Navy-yard for a year. Then, by way of variety, he went