May Day

By F Scott Fitzgerald

Utilizing the May Day Riots of 1919 as historical backdrop, and the themes of lost youth and wealth as well as two distinct yet interrelated plots, this story contrasts the lower-class fighting for their causes, while a group of privileged Yale alumni meet for a dance.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Start Publishing LLC
• Release date: Apr 14, 2020
• ISBN: 9781952438257

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.

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May Day

Start Publishing LLC

Copyright © 2020 by Start Publishing LLC

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First Start Publishing eBook edition.

Start Publishing is a registered trademark of Start Publishing LLC

Manufactured in the United States of America

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ISBN 978-1-952438-25-7

Table of Contents

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

May Day

There had been a war fought and won and the great city of the conquering people was crossed with triumphal arches and vivid with thrown flowers of white, red, and rose. All through the long spring days the returning soldiers marched up the chief highway behind the strump of drums and the joyous, resonant wind of the brasses, while merchants and clerks left their bickerings and figurings and, crowding to the windows, turned their white-bunched faces gravely upon the passing battalions.

Never had there been such splendor in the great city, for the victorious war had brought plenty in its train, and the merchants had flocked thither from the South and West with their households to taste of all the luscious feasts and witness the lavish entertainments prepared—and to buy for their women furs against the next winter and bags of golden mesh and varicolored slippers of silk and silver and rose satin and cloth of gold.

So gaily and noisily were the peace and prosperity impending hymned by the scribes and poets of the conquering people that more and more spenders had gathered from the provinces to drink the wine of excitement, and faster and faster did the merchants dispose of their trinkets and slippers until they sent up a mighty cry for more trinkets and more slippers in order that they might give in barter what was demanded of them. Some even of them flung up their hands helplessly, shouting:

Alas! I have no more slippers! and alas! I have no more trinkets! May heaven help me for I know not what I shall do!

But no one listened to their great outcry, for the throngs were far too busy—day by day, the foot-soldiers trod jauntily the highway and all exulted because the young men returning were pure and brave, sound of tooth and pink of cheek, and the young women of the land were virgins and comely both of face and of figure.

So during all this time there were many adventures that happened in the great city, and, of these, several—or perhaps one—are here set down.

I

At nine o’clock on the morning of the first of May, 1919, a young man spoke to the room clerk at the Biltmore Hotel, asking if Mr. Philip Dean were registered there, and if so, could he be connected with Mr. Dean’s rooms. The inquirer was dressed in a well-cut, shabby suit. He was small, slender, and darkly handsome; his eyes were framed above with unusually long eyelashes and below with the blue semicircle of ill health, this latter effect heightened by an unnatural glow which colored his face like a low, incessant fever.

Mr. Dean was staying there. The young man was directed to a telephone at the side.

After a second his connection was made; a sleepy voice hello’d from somewhere above.

Mr. Dean?—this very eagerly—it’s Gordon, Phil. It’s Gordon Sterrett. I’m down-stairs. I heard you were in New York and I had a hunch you’d be here.

The sleepy voice became gradually enthusiastic. Well, how was Gordy, old boy! Well, he certainly was surprised and tickled! Would Gordy come right up, for Pete’s sake!

A few minutes later Philip Dean, dressed in blue silk pajamas, opened his door and the two young men greeted each other with a half-embarrassed exuberance. They were both about twenty-four, Yale graduates of the year before the war; but there the resemblance stopped abruptly. Dean was blond, ruddy, and rugged under his thin pajamas. Everything about him radiated fitness and bodily comfort. He smiled frequently, showing large and prominent teeth.

I was going to look you up, he cried enthusiastically. I’m taking a couple of weeks off. If you’ll sit down a sec I’ll be right with you. Going to take a shower.

As he vanished into the bathroom his visitor’s dark eyes roved nervously around the room, resting for a moment on a great English travelling bag in the corner and on a family of thick silk shirts littered on the chairs amid impressive neckties and soft woollen socks.

Gordon rose and, picking up one of the shirts, gave it a minute examination. It was of very heavy silk, yellow, with a pale blue stripe—and there were nearly a dozen of them. He stared involuntarily at his own shirt-cuffs—they were ragged and linty at the edges and soiled to a faint gray. Dropping the silk shirt, he held his coat-sleeves down and worked the frayed shirt-cuffs up till they were out of sight. Then he went to the mirror and looked at himself with listless, unhappy interest. His tie, of former glory, was faded and thumb-creased—it

Reviews for May Day

[quondame · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

A novella, a story and 25 Aphorisms. The aphorisms are by far the most enjoyable.The title novella takes place during the de-mobilization after The Great War, and two of the recently freed soldiers are one thread, another is a young man visiting the city for pleasure including a dance for his Yale fraternity, a previous roommate who has made a mess of his life, and a young woman once of some importance to the distressed young man. Everyone is mostly drunk, most of the story and it feels like you are getting all of their hangovers.The male gaze is poisonous enough to read. The drunken male gaze is even worse. In Winter Dreams, well, a man enthralled by his own enthrallment to the object of that gaze is about as bad as it gets without the incels getting involved.

[elizajane_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Reason for Reading: I've decided to try the club for 6 months and plan to read the two selections, the month following their arrival. Hence this is my January read.I've read several of Fitzgerald's novels and short stories and find him an interesting author. This title was new for me and I looked forward to reading it. The story is explained as a sample of American class systems but I'm not sure I agree with that. Class structure doesn't really exist in America the same way it does in Britain which I am more familiar with, where your class was a birthright. Americans earned there way to their class level but then there was (and still is) the problem of the youth, the ones who didn't earn their way into the social position they find themselves.Anyway this story revolves around several groups of people from different walks of life who all ultimately intermingle one fateful May Day evening and the reader is thrown into their mindsets, thoughts and actions when given the freedom to act of their own free will. We also see how the end of WWI and the return to 'civilization' has affected these people. The young college men who left to fight the war, some come back the same, others changed. Some still belong to their social status, others have lost it and the main character of this story is a young man who has lost his money, his status, his morals and his self-respect. He has gotten himself in desperate trouble with a lady (what exactly is not mentioned, but it is not hard to imagine) The woman is presented as malicious, until we actually meet her near the end of the story. Socialist journalists and carefree debutantes clash with freshly returned soldiers from the lower ranks, marking two extremes in ideology. All come together in the end where death and tragedy ensue but sympathy (mine at least) does not lie with the one who it is perhaps intended to lie with. I think the person most injured in this whole tale is the poor woman who had the unfortunate fate of falling in love with the young college man. An intriguing story!