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| ISBN-13: | 9781416556053 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Scribner |
| Publication date: | 08/14/2007 |
| Edition description: | Reprint |
| Pages: | 64 |
| Sales rank: | 124,838 |
| Product dimensions: | 4.75(w) x 7.25(h) x 0.20(d) |
Date of Birth:
September 24, 1896Date of Death:
December 21, 1940Place of Birth:
St. Paul, MinnesotaEducation:
Princeton University
As long ago as 1860 it was the proper thing to be born at home. At present, so I am told, the high gods of medicine have decreed that the first cries of the young shall be uttered upon the anesthetic air of a hospital, preferably a fashionable one. So young Mr. and Mrs. Roger Button were fifty years ahead of style when they decided, one day in the summer of 1860, that their first baby should be born in a hospital. Whether this anachronism had any bearing upon the astonishing history I am about to set down will never be known.
I shall tell you what occurred, and let you judge for yourself.
The Roger Buttons held an enviable position, both social and financial, in ante-bellum Baltimore. They were related to the This Family and the That Family, which, as every Southerner knew, entitled them to membership in that enormous peerage which largely populated the Confederacy. This was their first experience with the charming old custom of having babies — Mr. Button was naturally nervous. He hoped it would be a boy so that he could be sent to Yale College in Connecticut, at which institution Mr. Button himself had been known for four years by the somewhat obvious nickname of "Cuff."
On the September morning consecrated to the enormous event he arose nervously at six o'clock, dressed himself, adjusted an impeccable stock, and hurried forth through the streets of Baltimore to the hospital, to determine whether the darkness of the night had borne in new life upon its bosom.
When he was approximately a hundred yards from the Maryland Private Hospital for Ladies and Gentlemen he saw Doctor Keene, the family physician, descending the front steps, rubbing his hands together with a washing movement — as all doctors are required to do by the unwritten ethics of their profession.
Mr. Roger Button, the president of Roger Button & Co., Wholesale Hardware, began to run toward Doctor Keene with much less dignity than was expected from a Southern gentleman of that picturesque period. "Doctor Keene!" he called. "Oh, Doctor Keene!"
The doctor heard him, faced around, and stood waiting, a curious expression settling on his harsh, medicinal face as Mr. Button drew near.
"What happened?" demanded Mr. Button, as he came up in a gasping rush. "What was it? How is she? A boy? Who is it? What — "
"Talk sense!" said Doctor Keene sharply. He appeared somewhat irritated.
"Is the child born?" begged Mr. Button.
Doctor Keene frowned. "Why, yes, I suppose so — after a fashion." Again he threw a curious glance at Mr. Button.
"Is my wife all right?"
"Yes."
"Is it a boy or a girl?"
"Here now!" cried Doctor Keene in a perfect passion of irritation, "I'll ask you to go and see for yourself. Outrageous!" He snapped the last word out in almost one syllable, then he turned away muttering: "Do you imagine a case like this will help my professional reputation? One more would ruin me — ruin anybody."
"What's the matter?" demanded Mr. Button, appalled. "Triplets?"
"No, not triplets!" answered the doctor cuttingly. "What's more, you can go and see for yourself. And get another doctor. I brought you into the world, young man, and I've been physician to your family for forty years, but I'm through with you! I don't want to see you or any of your relatives ever again! Good-bye!"
Then he turned sharply, and without another word climbed into his phaeton, which was waiting at the curbstone, and drove severely away.
Mr. Button stood there upon the sidewalk, stupefied and trembling from head to foot. What horrible mishap had occurred? He had suddenly lost all desire to go into the Maryland Private Hospital for Ladies and Gentlemen — it was with the greatest difficulty that, a moment later, he forced himself to mount the steps and enter the front door.
A nurse was sitting behind a desk in the opaque gloom of the hall. Swallowing his shame, Mr. Button approached her.
"Good-morning," she remarked, looking up at him pleasantly.
"Good-morning. I — I am Mr. Button."
At this a look of utter terror spread itself over the girl's face. She rose to her feet and seemed about to fly from the hall, restraining herself only with the most apparent difficulty.
"I want to see my child," said Mr. Button.
The nurse gave a little scream. "Oh — of course!" she cried hysterically. "Upstairs. Right upstairs. Go — up!"
She pointed the direction, and Mr. Button, bathed in a cool perspiration, turned falteringly, and began to mount to the second floor. In the upper hall he addressed another nurse who approached him, basin in hand. "I'm Mr. Button," he managed to articulate. "I want to see my — "
Clank! The basin clattered to the floor and rolled in the direction of the stairs. Clank! Clank! It began a methodical descent as if sharing in the general terror which this gentleman provoked.
"I want to see my child!" Mr. Button almost shrieked. He was on the verge of collapse.
Clank! The basin had reached the first floor. The nurse regained control of herself, and threw Mr. Button a look of hearty contempt.
"All right, Mr. Button," she agreed in a hushed voice. "Very well! But if you knew what state it's put us all in this morning! It's perfectly outrageous! The hospital will never have the ghost of a reputation after — "
"Hurry!" he cried hoarsely. "I can't stand this!"
"Come this way, then, Mr. Button."
He dragged himself after her. At the end of a long hall they reached a room from which proceeded a variety of howls — indeed, a room which, in later parlance, would have been known as the "crying-room." They entered. Ranged around the walls were half a dozen white-enameled rolling cribs, each with a tag tied at the head.
"Well," gasped Mr. Button, "which is mine?"
"There!" said the nurse.
Mr. Button's eyes followed her pointing finger, and this is what he saw. Wrapped in a voluminous white blanket, and partially crammed into one of the cribs, there sat an old man apparently about seventy years of age. His sparse hair was almost white, and from his chin dripped a long smoke-colored beard, which waved absurdly back and forth, fanned by the breeze coming in at the window. He looked up at Mr. Button with dim, faded eyes in which lurked a puzzled question.
"Am I mad?" thundered Mr. Button, his terror resolving into rage. "Is this some ghastly hospital joke?"
"It doesn't seem like a joke to us," replied the nurse severely. "And I don't know whether you're mad or not — but that is most certainly your child."
The cool perspiration redoubled on Mr. Button's forehead. He closed his eyes, and then, opening them, looked again. There was no mistake — he was gazing at a man of threescore and ten — a baby of threescore and ten, a baby whose feet hung over the sides of the crib in which it was reposing.
The old man looked placidly from one to the other for a moment, and then suddenly spoke in a cracked and ancient voice. "Are you my father?" he demanded.
Mr. Button and the nurse started violently.
"Because if you are," went on the old man querulously, "I wish you'd get me out of this place — or, at least, get them to put a comfortable rocker in here."
"Where in God's name did you come from? Who are you?" burst out Mr. Button frantically.
"I can't tell you exactly who I am," replied the querulous whine, "because I've only been born a few hours — but my last name is certainly Button."
"You lie! You're an impostor!"
The old man turned wearily to the nurse. "Nice way to welcome a newborn child," he complained in a weak voice. "Tell him he's wrong, why don't you?"
"You're wrong, Mr. Button," said the nurse severely. "This is your child, and you'll have to make the best of it. We're going to ask you to take him home with you as soon as possible — some time today."
"Home?" repeated Mr. Button incredulously.
"Yes, we can't have him here. We really can't, you know?"
"I'm right glad of it," whined the old man. "This is a fine place to keep a youngster of quiet tastes. With all this yelling and howling, I haven't been able to get a wink of sleep. I asked for something to eat" — here his voice rose to a shrill note of protest — "and they brought me a bottle of milk!"
Mr. Button sank down upon a chair near his son and concealed his face in his hands. "My heavens!" he murmured, in an ecstasy of horror. "What will people say? What must I do?"
"You'll have to take him home," insisted the nurse — "immediately!"
A grotesque picture formed itself with dreadful clarity before the eyes of the tortured man — a picture of himself walking through the crowded streets of the city with this appalling apparition stalking by his side. "I can't. I can't," he moaned.
People would stop to speak to him, and what was he going to say? He would have to introduce this — this septuagenarian: "This is my son, born early this morning." And then the old man would gather his blanket around him and they would plod on, past the bustling stores, the slave market — for a dark instant Mr. Button wished passionately that his son was black — past the luxurious houses of the residential district, past the home for the aged....
"Come! Pull yourself together," commanded the nurse.
"See here," the old man announced suddenly, "if you think I'm going to walk home in this blanket, you're entirely mistaken."
"Babies always have blankets."
With a malicious crackle the old man held up a small white swaddling garment. "Look!" he quavered. "This is what they had ready for me."
"Babies always wear those," said the nurse primly.
"Well," said the old man, "this baby's not going to wear anything in about two minutes. This blanket itches. They might at least have given me a sheet."
"Keep it on! Keep it on!" said Mr. Button hurriedly. He turned to the nurse. "What'll I do?"
"Go downtown and buy your son some clothes."
Mr. Button's son's voice followed him down into the hall: "And a cane, father. I want to have a cane."
Mr. Button banged the outer door savagely...
Copyright © 1922 by P.F. Collier & Sons Co.
BERNICE BOBS HER HAIR
"Bernice Bobs her Hair" was Fitzgerald's fourth Saturday Evening Post story (1 May 1920) and provided the subject for the dust-jacket illustration when it was collected in Flappers and Philosophers. It occupies an important position in the Fitzgerald canon as a witty early treatment of a characteristic subject that he would later examine more seriously: the competition for social success and the determination with which his characters — especially the young women — engage in it. The story was based on the detailed memo Fitzgerald wrote his younger sister, Annabel, advising her how to achieve popularity with boys: "Cultivate deliberate physical grace." (See the complete letter in Correspondence of F. Scott Fitzgerald, pp. 15-18.) Fitzgerald had some difficulty bringing "Bernice" to salable form; he cut some three thousand words and rewrote to "inject a snappy climax."
After dark on Saturday night one could stand on the first tee of the golf-course and see the country-club windows as a yellow expanse over a very black and wavy ocean. The waves of this ocean, so to speak, were the heads of many curious caddies, a few of the more ingenious chauffeurs, the golf professional's deaf sister — and there were usually several stray, diffident waves who might have rolled inside had they so desired. This was the gallery.
The balcony was inside. It consisted of the circle of wicker chairs that lined the wall of the combination clubroom and ballroom. At these Saturday-night dances it was largely feminine; a great babel of middle-aged ladies with sharp eyes and icy hearts behind lorgnettes and large bosoms. The main function of the balcony was critical. It occasionally showed grudging admiration, but never approval, for it is well known among ladies over thirty-five that when the younger set dance in the summer-time it is with the very worst intentions in the world, and if they are not bombarded with stony eyes stray couples will dance weird barbaric interludes in the corners, and the more popular, more dangerous, girls will sometimes be kissed in the parked limousines of unsuspecting dowagers.
But, after all, this critical circle is not close enough to the stage to see the actors' faces and catch the subtler byplay. It can only frown and lean, ask questions and make satisfactory deductions from its set of postulates, such as the one which states that every young man with a large income leads the life of a hunted partridge. It never really appreciates the drama of the shifting, semicruel world of adolescence. No; boxes, orchestra-circle, principals, and chorus are represented by the medley of faces and voices that sway to the plaintive African rhythm of Dyer's dance orchestra.
From sixteen-year-old Otis Ormonde, who has two more years at Hill School, to G. Reece Stoddard, over whose bureau at home hangs a Harvard law diploma; from little Madeleine Hogue, whose hair still feels strange and uncomfortable on top of her head, to Bessie MacRae, who has been the life of the party a little too long — more than ten years — the medley is not only the center of the stage but contains the only people capable of getting an unobstructed view of it.
With a flourish and a bang the music stops. The couples exchange artificial, effortless smiles, facetiously repeat "la-de-da-da dum-dum," and then the clatter of young feminine voices soars over the burst of clapping.
A few disappointed stags caught in midfloor as they had been about to cut in subsided listlessly back to the walls, because this was not like the riotous Christmas dances — these summer hops were considered just pleasantly warm and exciting, where even the younger marrieds rose and performed ancient waltzes and terrifying fox trots to the tolerant amusement of their younger brothers and sisters.
Warren McIntyre, who casually attended Yale, being one of the unfortunate stags, felt in his dinner-coat pocket for a cigarette and strolled out onto the wide, semidark veranda, where couples were scattered at tables, filling the lantern-hung night with vague words and hazy laughter. He nodded here and there at the less absorbed and as he passed each couple some half-forgotten fragment of a story played in his mind, for it was not a large city and every one was Who's Who to every one else's past. There, for example, were Jim Strain and Ethel Demorest, who had been privately engaged for three years. Every one knew that as soon as Jim managed to hold a job for more than two months she would marry him. Yet how bored they both looked, and how wearily Ethel regarded Jim sometimes, as if she wondered why she had trained the vines of her affection on such a wind-shaken poplar.
Copyright © 1989 by Charles Scribner's Sons
THE OFFSHORE PIRATE
"The Offshore Pirate" (29 May 1920) was Fitzgerald's third Saturday Evening Post appearance during that month and demonstrates his rapid development as a versatile fiction writer. It is the first story that develops Fitzgerald's recurring plot idea of a heroine won by her lover's performance of an extraordinary deed.
The story had originally ended with the weak explanation that it was all Ardita's dream. Fitzgerald rewrote the conclusion to emphasize the storyness of the story: "The last line takes Mr. Lorimer [the editor of the Post] at his word. Its one of the best lines I've ever written." "The Offshore Pirate" was collected in Flappers and Philosophers.
This unlikely story begins on a sea that was a blue dream, as colorful as blue-silk stockings, and beneath a sky as blue as the irises of children's eyes. From the western half of the sky the sun was shying little golden disks at the sea — if you gazed intently enough you could see them skip from wave tip to wave tip until they joined a broad collar of golden coin that was collecting half a mile out and would eventually be a dazzling sunset. About half-way between the Florida shore and the golden collar a white steam-yacht, very young and graceful, was riding at anchor and under a blue-and-white awning aft a yellow-haired girl reclined in a wicker settee reading The Revolt of the Angels, by Anatole France.
She was about nineteen, slender and supple, with a spoiled alluring mouth and quick gray eyes full of a radiant curiosity. Her feet, stockingless, and adorned rather than clad in blue-satin slippers which swung nonchalantly from her toes, were perched on the arm of a settee adjoining the one she occupied. And as she read she intermittently regaled herself by a faint application to her tongue of a half-lemon that she held in her hand. The other half, sucked dry, lay on the deck at her feet and rocked very gently to and fro at the almost imperceptible motion of the tide.
The second half-lemon was well-nigh pulpless and the golden collar had grown astonishing in width, when suddenly the drowsy silence which enveloped the yacht was broken by the sound of heavy footsteps and an elderly man topped with orderly gray hair and clad in a white-flannel suit appeared at the head of the companionway. There he paused for a moment until his eyes became accustomed to the sun, and then seeing the girl under the awning he uttered a long even grunt of disapproval.
If he had intended thereby to obtain a rise of any sort he was doomed to disappointment. The girl calmly turned over two pages, turned back one, raised the lemon mechanically to tasting distance, and then very faintly but quite unmistakably yawned.
"Ardita!" said the gray-haired man sternly.
Ardita uttered a small sound indicating nothing.
"Ardita!" he repeated. "Ardita!"
Ardita raised the lemon languidly, allowing three words to slip out before it reached her tongue.
"Oh, shut up."
"Ardita!"
"What?"
"Will you listen to me — or will I have to get a servant to hold you while I talk to you?"
The lemon descended slowly and scornfully.
"Put it in writing."
"Will you have the decency to close that abominable book and discard that damn lemon for two minutes?"
"Oh, can't you lemme alone for a second?"
"Ardita, I have just received a telephone message from the shore —"
"Telephone?" She showed for the first time a faint interest.
"Yes, it was —"
"Do you mean to say," she interrupted wonderingly, "'at they let you run a wire out here?"
"Yes, and just now —"
"Won't other boats bump into it?"
"No. It's run along the bottom. Five min —"
"Well, I'll be darned! Gosh! Science is golden or something — isn't it?"
"Will you let me say what I started to?"
"Shoot!"
"Well, it seems — well, I am up here —" He paused and swallowed several times distractedly. "Oh, yes. Young woman, Colonel Moreland has called up again to ask me to be sure to bring you in to dinner.
Copyright © 1989 by Charles Scribner's Sons
MAY DAY
"May Day," Fitzgerald's first great novelette — published during his first year as a professional writer — appeared in July 1920. Fitzgerald presumably sold it directly to Smart Set editors H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan without offering it to the Post, or any other magazine, because the material was too strong or realistic for the slicks. "May Day" was the most successful work inspired by Fitzgerald's temporary interest in the school of naturalistic or deterministic fiction. Although it was read by the people Fitzgerald wanted to reach, The Smart Set paid him only $200 for this masterpiece.
"May Day" drew upon Fitzgerald's feelings of failure during the spring of 1919 when he was working for a New York advertising agency. He provided this comment when the story was collected in Tales of the Jazz Age (1922):
This somewhat unpleasant tale...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.
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."
Copyright © 1989 by Charles Scribner's Sons
FOREWORD
"My whole theory of writing I can sum up in one sentence. An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward." So proclaimed the young Scott Fitzgerald in the first flush of success at the appearance of This Side of Paradise in 1920. How magnificently — if, sad to say, posthumously — he fulfilled that ideal. His all too brief literary career — a dozen years of commercial and critical success followed by distractions and disappointments — ended in 1940 when he suffered a fatal heart attack at the age of forty-four. He was hard at work on the Hollywood novel he hoped would restore his literary fortunes, The Last Tycoon. At the time of his death his books were not, as was later supposed, out of print with his publisher. The truth is sadder: they were all in stock at our warehouse and listed in the catalogue, but there were no orders.
Now, a half century later, more copies of F. Scott Fitzgerald's books are ordered each year than were sold cumulatively throughout his entire lifetime. His novels and short stories are taught in virtually every high school and college across the country. This new, comprehensive collection of Fitzgerald's best short fiction is being published some seventy years — a biblical lifespan — after the author's first novel was accepted by my great-grandfather in 1919. I am struck by the realization that three generations (and namesakes) later I was the first of our family to have been introduced to Fitzgerald's work in the classroom. My grandfather, Fitzgerald's friend and publisher for the latter half of his career, died on the eve of the author's reappraisal and subsequent revival that gained momentum through the Fifties and has continued in full force down to the present time. It was my father who was to preside over Fitzgerald's literary apotheosis, a publishing phenomenon perhaps unprecedented in modern American letters. Through him I had the good fortune to meet and work with the author's talented and generous daughter, Scottie, and her collaborator and advisor, Matthew J. Bruccoli, whose prolific scholarship and infectious enthusiasm have long fanned the flames of Fitzgerald studies.
The day I met Professor Bruccoli fifteen years ago I asked what had prompted him to devote the lion's share of his scholarship to Fitzgerald. He told me exactly how it happened. One Sunday afternoon in 1949 Bruccoli, then a high school student, was driving with his family along the Merritt Parkway from Connecticut to New York City when he heard a dramatization of "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz" on the car radio. He later went to a library to find the story; the librarian had never heard of Scott Fitzgerald. But finally he managed to locate a copy — "and I never stopped reading Fitzgerald."
There is something magical about F. Scott Fitzgerald. Much has been written — and dramatized — about the Jazz Age personas and syncopated lives of Scott and Zelda. But the real magic lies embedded in his prose and it is perhaps nowhere more pervasive than in the amazing range and versatility of his short stories: the best sparkle with greater luster than ever in this new collection that displays them afresh in their proper literary and biographical settings. Each tale partakes of its creator's poetic imagination, his dramatic vision, his painstaking (if virtuosic and seemingly effortless) craftsmanship. Each bears Fitzgerald's distinctive hallmark, the indelible stamp of grace.
Fitzgerald once claimed to his agent Harold Ober that "good stories write themselves — bad ones have to be written." Yet a decade later he confessed that "there is no use of me trying to rush things." Even during his most prolific stages, he noted, "I could not turn out more than 8-9 top-price stories a year." The secret of success was not to be found in original themes. In his own view there were but "two basic stories of all times — Cinderella and Jack the Giant Killer — the charm of women and the courage of men." Nor should we look to the "booze and inspiration" school of thought, as he dubbed it: "You do not," he argued, "produce a short story for the Saturday Evening Post on a bottle." (Fitzgerald did, however, admit to writing his first novel with the aid of a liquid "stimulant" — Coca-Cola!) Some clues to his creative craftsmanship may be gleaned from his instructive if sometimes professorial letters to his daughter: "Stories are best written in either one jump or three, according to length. The three-jump story should be done on three successive days, then a day or so for revise and off she goes. This of course is the ideal...." Still, he cautioned her, "nobody ever became a writer just by wanting to be one. If you have anything to say, anything you feel nobody has ever said before, you have got to feel it so desperately that you will find some way to say it that nobody has ever found before, so that the thing you have to say and the way of saying it blend as one matter — as indissolubly as if they were conceived together."
In the last year of his life Fitzgerald pondered in a poignant letter to his wife, Zelda, then hospitalized in an asylum, the loss of his former success in the genre: "It's odd that my old talent for the short story vanished. It was partly that times changed, editors changed, but part of it was tied up somehow with you and me — the happy ending. Of course every third story had some other ending, but essentially I got my public with stories of young love. I must have had a powerful imagination to project it so far and so often into the past." The key to Fitzgerald's enduring and elusive enchantment lies, I believe, in the power of his romantic imagination to transfigure his characters and settings — and indeed the very shape and sound of his prose. I shall never forget that evening train ride from Princeton to Philadelphia on which I first read "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz": a commute was converted into a fantastic voyage. And I can still see Anson Hunter, "The Rich Boy," whose self-conscious superiority will forever, in my eyes, embellish the gilded lobby of New York's Plaza Hotel. Fitzgerald's stories transform their external geography as thoroughly as the realm within. The ultimate effect, once the initial reverberations of imagery and language have subsided, transcends the bounds of fiction.
Charles Scribner III
Copyright © 1989 by Charles Scribner's Sons
Reading Group Guide for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
This reading group guide contains an introduction, questions for discussion , and suggestions to further enhance your book club.
INTRODUCTION
F. Scott Fitzgerald is best known for classic jazz age novels such as The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night, but the acclaimed writer’s impressive canon also boasts some 160 published short stories. “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” first appeared in Collier’s in 1922 and was one of several fantasy stories for which Fitzgerald garnered widespread praise in his lifetime. “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”is the heartbreaking and often humorous tale of a man who ages in reverse through the course of his long and highly unconventional life.
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
1. How does Fitzgerald use tone and style to create a world that is fantastical and dreamlike, yet realistic?
2. How does Fitzgerald employ humor in the story? In what ways is the idea of someone aging in reverse inherently humorous?
3. By the time Benjamin takes over his father’s company, his relationship with his father is dramatically different. Fitzgerald writes, “And if old Roger Button, now sixty-five years old, had failed at first to give a proper welcome to his son he atoned at last by bestowing on him what amounted to adulation.” Benjamin’s reverse aging is responsible for many of the highs and lows of his relationships with his father and his son. Do you think these relationships in some ways parallel those of all fathers and sons?
4. How does this story, though written almost a century ago, reflect our society’s current attitude toward age and aging?
5. What is ironic about Benjamin marrying a “younger” woman? What does the story reveal about our perceptions of age and beauty?
6. The happier Benjamin becomes in his career, the more strained his marriage grows. Fitzgerald writes, “And here we come to an unpleasant subject which it will be well to pass over as quickly as possible. There was only one thing that worried Benjamin Button: his wife had ceased to attract him.” Why does he fall out of love with Hildegarde?
7. How does Fitzgerald use Benjamin’s condition to ridicule social norms?
8. How does Benjamin’s reverse aging ironically mirror the modern midlife crisis?
9. When Benjamin returns from the war, Hildegarde, annoyed with his increasingly youthful appearance, says, “You’re simply stubborn. You think you don’t want to be like any one else. . . . But just think how it would be if every one else looked at things as you do—what would the world be like?” Later Fitzgerald writes of Roscoe, “It seemed to him that his father, in refusing to look sixty, had not behaved like a ‘red-blooded he-man’ . . . but in a curious and perverse manner.” What is significant about their attitudes? How is it ironic that Hildegarde and Roscoe seem to believe that Benjamin should control his aging?
10. Why do you think that fantasy and stories that manipulate time are so popular in our culture at the moment? What are some of the films, TV shows, and books that reflect these trends? Are you a fan of fantasy and stories that play with time, or do you prefer more traditional forms of storytelling?
ENHANCE YOUR BOOK CLUB
1. Read other books about characters who age in reverse, such as The Confessions of Max Tivoli
by Andrew Sean Greer, The Body by Hanif Kureishi, and the Fitzgerald-inspired story collection The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Apt. 3W by Gabriel Brownstein.
2. Host a movie night. Check out the new David Fincher film, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, starring Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett or pick up The Great Gatsby, starring Mia Farrow and Robert Redford.
3. Learn more about Fitzgerald at http://www. fitzgeraldsociety.org.
Questions for Discussion
1. How does Fitzgerald use tone and style to create a world that is fantastical and dreamlike, yet realistic?
2. How does Fitzgerald employ humor in the story? In what ways is the idea of someone aging in reverse inherently humorous?
3. By the time Benjamin takes over his father's company, his relationship with his father is dramatically different. Fitzgerald writes, "And if old Roger Button, now sixty-five years old, had failed at first to give a proper welcome to his son he atoned at last by bestowing on him what amounted to adulation." Benjamin's reverse aging is responsible for many of the highs and lows of his relationships with his father and his son. Do you think these relationships in some ways parallel those of all fathers and sons?
4. How does this story, though written almost a century ago, reflect our society's current attitude toward age and aging?
5. What is ironic about Benjamin marrying a "younger" woman? What does the story reveal about our perceptions of age and beauty?
6. The happier Benjamin becomes in his career, the more strained his marriage grows. Fitzgerald writes, "And here we come to an unpleasant subject which it will be well to pass over as quickly as possible. There was only one thing that worried Benjamin Button: his wife had ceased to attract him." Why does he fall out of love with Hildegarde?
7. How does Fitzgerald use Benjamin's condition to ridicule social norms?
8. How does Benjamin's reverse aging ironically mirror the modern midlife crisis?
9. When Benjamin returns from the war, Hildegarde, annoyed with his increasingly youthful appearance, says, "You're simply stubborn. Youthink you don't want to be like any one else.... But just think how it would be if every one else looked at things as you do — what would the world be like?" Later Fitzgerald writes of Roscoe, "It seemed to him that his father, in refusing to look sixty, had not behaved like a 'red-blooded he-man'...but in a curious and perverse manner." What is significant about their attitudes? How is it ironic that Hildegarde and Roscoe seem to believe that Benjamin should control his aging?
10. Why do you think that fantasy and stories that manipulate time are so popular in our culture at the moment? What are some of the films, TV shows, and books that reflect these trends? Are you a fan of fantasy and stories that play with time, or do you prefer more traditional forms of storytelling?
Enhance Your Book Club
1. Read other books about characters who age in reverse, such as The Confessions of Max Tivoli by Andrew Sean Greer, The Body by Hanif Kureishi, and the Fitzgerald-inspired story collection The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Apt. 3W by Gabriel Brownstein.
2. Host a movie night. Check out the new David Fincher film, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, or pick up The Great Gatsby, starring Mia Farrow and Robert Redford.
3. Learn more about Fitzgerald at http://www.fitzgeraldsociety.org.
F. Scott Fitzgerald was one of the major American writers of the twentieth century — a figure whose life and works embodied powerful myths about our national dreams and aspirations. Fitzgerald was talented and perceptive, gifted with a lyrical style and a pitch-perfect ear for language. He lived his life as a romantic, equally capable of great dedication to his craft and reckless squandering of his artistic capital. He left us one sure masterpiece, The Great Gatsby; a near-masterpiece, Tender Is the Night; and a gathering of stories and essays that together capture the essence of the American experience. His writings are insightful and stylistically brilliant; today he is admired both as a social chronicler and a remarkably gifted artist.
Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, on September 24, 1896. His father, Edward Fitzgerald, was descended from Maryland gentility; he was dapper and well bred but lacked commercial acumen and, after a series of business failures, was forced to rely on support from his wife's family. Fitzgerald's mother was Mollie McQuillan, an intelligent, eccentric woman whose Irish immigrant father had made a success in St. Paul as a wholesale grocer. The Fitzgeralds lived conventionally — "In a house below the average / On a street above the average," wrote young Fitzgerald in a poem. As a boy he was precocious: handsome and socially observant, he wrote plays for the local dramatic society and produced fiction and poetry for the school newspaper. In 1911 his parents sent him east to a Catholic prep school, the Newman School in Hackensack, New Jersey, where he came under the influence of a sophisticated priest, Monsignor Sigourney Fay, and an Anglo-Irish author named Shane Leslie. These two men ignited his literary ambitions and encouraged him to develop his considerable talent as a writer. Fitzgerald entered Princeton in the fall of 1913. He was captured immediately by the great beauty of the university and by its aura of high striving and achievement. He labored under social disadvantages there — he was a midwesterner and an Irish Catholic — but his enthusiasm and literary talent won him some successes during his first two years. He wrote musical comedies for the Triangle Club, published fiction and poetry in the Nassau Literary Magazine, and accepted a bid to the prestigious Cottage Club. He was an indifferent student, though, and his poor marks eventually caught up with him, denying him the awards he had dreamed of. Fitzgerald never took a degree from Princeton; he made a semi-honorable exit from the university in 1917, answering the call to colors and serving as an army officer in World War I.
To his great regret, Fitzgerald "didn't get over." His battalion was waiting in New York to embark for Europe just as the armistice was signed in November 1918. Fitzgerald never saw the front, but the war years were momentous for him in other ways. In the summer of 1918, while in a training camp near Montgomery, Alabama, he met Zelda Sayre, a beautiful and unconventional belle, the daughter of a prominent local judge. Fitzgerald fell in love with her — with her passionate nature and adventurous spirit — and they became engaged. After his discharge from the army he took a job in advertising in New York City, determined to make a success in business so that they might marry. Fitzgerald was a failure as an ad man, though, hating the work and chafing at his separation from Zelda. She lost faith in him, believing that he could not support her, and broke off their engagement in June 1919. After an epic bender, Fitzgerald quit his advertising job and spent his last few dollars on a train ticket home to St. Paul. He meant to prove himself to Zelda by writing a novel: "I was in love with a whirlwind," he later recalled, "and I must spin a net big enough to catch it out of my head."
Fitzgerald began this improbable quest by resurrecting the typescript of a novel that he was calling "The Romantic Egotist." He had finished the narrative during army training camp, working on it in the officers club during nights and weekends. The book had been rejected twice by Charles Scribner's Sons, a prestigious New York publishing house, but a young editor there named Maxwell Perkins had recognized Fitzgerald's promise and had told him to keep trying. During the summer of 1919, working diligently in the attic of his parents' home in St. Paul, Fitzgerald reconceived "The Romantic Egotist" and transformed it into This Side of Paradise, a daring and experimental novel. Perkins accepted the book in September for publication the following spring.
Backed by this success, Fitzgerald rekindled his romance with Zelda. They renewed their engagement and were married in St. Patrick's cathedral in New York on April 3, 1920, just a week after publication of This Side of Paradise. The novel was an immediate hit, with enthusiastic reviews and excellent sales, and the Fitzgeralds became famous overnight. Fitzgerald found that he was in demand as a writer; his price for stories rose quickly, and he began to write much commercial short fiction — a dependable source of money for the extravagant life that he and Zelda now were leading. These triumphs in literature, love, and finances gave Fitzgerald great faith in his talent and luck. "The compensation of a very early success is a conviction that life is a romantic matter," he later wrote. "In the best sense one stays young."
For Fitzgerald the early 1920s were productive. He published a second novel, The Beautiful and Damned, in 1922; it marked an advance over This Side of Paradise in form and style, though it lacked the energy and charm of the earlier book. Fitzgerald also wrote some of his best short stories during these years — prophetic tales like "May Day" and "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz" and perceptive character studies like "Dalyrimple Goes Wrong" and "The Ice Palace." He and Zelda lived near New York City, in a cottage in Westport, Connecticut; later they rented a house on Great Neck, Long Island, where they socialized with the Manhattan literati and the Broadway theater crowd of the day. In the spring of 1924 the Fitzgeralds and their young daughter Scottie, born in 1921, traveled to Europe and settled on the French Riviera. Fitzgerald needed quiet and freedom from distraction in order to compose his third novel. He labored through the summer and by October had completed a narrative called "Trimalchio" — a short, well-crafted novel of manners set on Long Island. His hero was a hazily depicted parvenu from the Midwest named Jay Gatsby. Fitzgerald mailed the novel to Perkins in New York, and Perkins had it set in type for spring publication. Fitzgerald continued to work on the text in galley proofs, however, rewriting two chapters, focusing Jay Gatsby's character more sharply, and infusing the story with an aura of myth and wonder. The novel, now titled The Great Gatsby, was published in April 1925. Reviews were good but sales disappointing. In the years that followed, however, Gatsby would win much praise and ascend to a very high place in the American literary canon. Today it is probably the most widely read American novel of the twentieth century.
The Great Gatsby established Fitzgerald as a skilled professional. This is one of the paradoxes of his life: though he was sometimes frivolous and irresponsible in his personal behavior, he was thoroughly serious as an artist. He had a good understanding of the marketplace and was ambitious and self-critical, aiming to create a body of writing that would survive him. His struggles to balance work against amusement, popular appeal against literary artistry, energized his career and gave complexity to the fiction he wrote. The Fitzgeralds remained in Europe during the late 1920s. These were years of growth for Fitzgerald; he read and traveled and observed, "seeking the eternal Carnival by the Sea" and capturing in his fiction the exoticism of the great European cities. He knew James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Sylvia Beach, Sinclair Lewis, and Archibald MacLeish; his and Zelda's closest friends were Gerald and Sara Murphy, a sophisticated American couple who later served as partial models for Dick and Nicole Diver in Tender Is the Night. Fitzgerald also met a talented young writer named Ernest Hemingway, and they became intimate friends for a time. Their relationship, however, was eventually eroded by competition and jealousy, mostly on Hemingway's part.
The Fitzgeralds' marriage began to disintegrate during their last few years in Europe. Fitzgerald's drinking increased as he struggled to produce a new novel; he managed to write some excellent short fiction, including the Basil Duke Lee stories of 1928 and 1929, but failed to make much progress on the manuscript of his book. Zelda's health deteriorated as she worked fervently to construct a life of her own as a ballet dancer. Talented and restless, she wanted an identity apart from her role as Fitzgerald's wife. The strain of ballet training helped to bring about a mental breakdown in 1930 from which she never entirely recovered.
The family returned to America in 1931. Fitzgerald managed to complete his novel Tender Is the Night while living in Baltimore. Scribners published the book in April 1934 to generally good reviews but, again, to only moderate sales. Fitzgerald was greatly disappointed; he had worked on the book over a nine-year period, putting the manuscript through some seventeen drafts. Tender Is the Night shows evidence of this labor on every page; it is a brilliantly written study of expatriate life, but its flashback structure causes difficulty for readers, and the fall of its hero, Dick Diver, seems overly precipitate.
Fitzgerald's personal life went into decline after the novel was published. His health, never strong, had been damaged by the push to finish the novel, and his personal troubles had left him creatively and financially drained. Zelda was being treated at Johns Hopkins Hospital and later in clinics near Asheville, North Carolina. In good periods she and Fitzgerald lived together, but the reconciliations were never successful or lasting. Zelda had begun to paint and write, producing an autobiographical novel called Save Me the Waltz. She and Fitzgerald had quarreled bitterly about her use of autobiographical material in the novel. Scribners had published the book in 1932, but not before Zelda, at Fitzgerald's insistence, had reworked the narrative in manuscript. Fitzgerald himself revised the text in galleys. Scottie, the Fitzgeralds' daughter, had flourished during the years in Europe, but now her parents could not provide her with a stable home. She spent her teenage years in eastern boarding schools; during most vacations she stayed with the family of Harold Ober, Fitzgerald's literary agent.
Fitzgerald reached a professional crisis in the mid-1930s. He found that he could no longer manufacture the light, entertaining tales of love that had sold for many years to Redbook, Metropolitan, and the Saturday Evening Post. While living in North Carolina he began to write for a new magazine, Esquire, and published three autobiographical "Crack-Up" essays there, famous today as dissections of the American Dream and as measured reflections on failure and loss. At the age of forty he found himself emotionally bankrupt, "standing at twilight on a deserted range, with an empty rifle in my hands and the targets down."
Fitzgerald was rescued in the summer of 1937 by Harold Ober, who arranged a lucrative Hollywood contract for him. He went to the West Coast in July and worked as a screenwriter for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer for eighteen months, paying off large debts to Scribners and Ober. He established a relationship with the newspaper columnist Sheilah Graham, who took care of him and endured his sometimes erratic behavior. Fitzgerald began his stint in Hollywood with high hopes but quickly became disillusioned. He was temperamentally unsuited for movie work and resented the requirements of the studio system, which dictated that he collaborate with other scriptwriters. Despite his frustrations Fitzgerald was a diligent breadwinner, sending Scottie to Vassar College, where she wrote plays and was a popular student. Zelda lived intermittently with her family in Montgomery; her health was fragile, and she spent periods of instability, by her own choice, in the Highland Hospital in Asheville.
MGM declined to renew Fitzgerald's contract at the end of 1938, and he returned to magazine writing. In October 1939 he began a novel about Hollywood; his hero, called Monroe Stahr, was based on the movie producer Irving Thalberg. Fitzgerald was excited about the project and made good headway on his manuscript, but his health began to fail in 1940 and in late November of that year he suffered a mild heart attack. After a brief convalescence he resumed work on the novel; he died unexpectedly of a second heart attack on December 21. The drafts of the novel were published as The Last Tycoon in 1941. These chapters show great promise and provide a tantalizing glimpse of Fitzgerald's spare, mature style. He was buried in Rockville, Maryland, a town not far from his father's birthplace. Zelda lived on until March 1948, when she perished in a fire at the Highland Hospital. She was buried beside her husband in Rockville. In his working notes for The Last Tycoon, Fitzgerald wrote, "There are no second acts in American lives" — but his own life has been resurrected and reexamined by two generations of biographers and historians. His victories and defeats (as he knew) mirrored the triumphs and downfalls of American society during the boom years of the twenties and the bust years that followed. His writings embody lessons of ambition and disappointment, idealism and disenchantment, success and failure and redemption, that are central to the American experience. During his short professional career he won a wide audience and helped to establish American authors as deserving of serious attention. His romantic readiness for life and his gift for hope have come to embody important aspects of the American identity; he was among the first to recognize his country's dreams of infinite possibility. Fitzgerald's works and life still fascinate us, and his reputation continues to grow.
F. Scott Fitzgerald: Life and Career
By James L. W. West III
Pennsylvania State University
Every novel is ambitious, but some are more ambitious than others, especially when it comes to scope and timeline. Where the majority of novels focus onsmall slices of time in the lives of their characters, these five novels tell a complete life story, from birth to death (or almost).
![The Great Gatsby [16pt Large Print Edition]](http://prodimage.images-bn.com/pimages/9780369388254_p0_v1_s90x140.jpg "The Great Gatsby [16pt Large Print Edition]")
