Flappers and Philosophers

FLAPPERS AND PHILOSOPHERS

BY F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

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Print ISBN 13: 978-1-4209-3156-3

Ebook ISBN 13: 978-1-59625-818-1

This edition copyright © 2014

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CONTENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

THE OFFSHORE PIRATE

THE ICE PALACE

HEAD AND SHOULDERS

THE CUT-GLASS BOWL

BERNICE BOBS HER HAIR

BENEDICTION

DALYRIMPLE GOES WRONG

THE FOUR FISTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

F. Scott Fitzgerald is considered by many to be the definitive American writer. His writing career coincided with the 1920s Jazz Age and the Great Depression, and it is the accuracy and honesty with which he portrayed this period of time that has set his fame in stone. Fitzgerald didn’t just write stories about America during a major economic decline; he succeeded in thoroughly encapsulating an era, a feat that even the most skilled of writers often fall short of. Fitzgerald was no more immune to the erratic fluctuations of an uncertain time than his characters. He experienced ups and downs in his life that easily could have been pulled directly from one of his novels or stories. The decadence as well as the tragedy of defeat and ruin made their mark on him throughout his life equally, and it was because of these experiences that he was capable of writing a mirror in words for a wild and desperate party that was the 1920s.

Fitzgerald was born Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald on September 24, 1896. He arrived in the Midwestern bustle of Saint Paul, Minnesota to parents of Irish stock. His name came from Francis Scott Key, a distant relative that gave Fitzgerald all the more claim to his embodiment of the quintessential American man. Edward Fitzgerald, his father, worked for Proctor and Gamble. The job took Edward and his family around the country, with their longest excursions being in Syracuse and Buffalo. These moves had a lasting impact on Fitzgerald, as they would allow him to see firsthand the cultural explosions that were emerging in cities across the United States.

Whether they were aware of it or not, his parents contributed much to the man their son would eventually become. Mollie, Fitzgerald’s mother, showered him with affection, making sure to impress upon him that his good looks and intelligence set him apart from other boys his age. She arranged for him to attend dancing lessons, where he discovered his passion for the opposite sex. By example, his father had perhaps the largest influence on directing his son’s disposition and sentiments; he taught him the delicate art of balancing frequent drinking while always maintaining good humor and the best of manners.

Fitzgerald’s education began with the New Jersey boarding school, Newman School, and culminated in his attending Princeton University. Two significant things happened during his early school years and his time at university: he discovered the theatre, and he began dating. The young F. Scott Fitzgerald’s foray into drama was important because it not only opened wide a door into the vista of art, but it gave him a chance to find his knack with writing. He wrote plays in his spare time for school productions, and through this he would eventually make the transition into writing fiction.

The other major source of impressions on Fitzgerald during his school years was dating. Dancing lessons may have given him his first taste of adolescent affection, but his teenage years shaped the way he would relate to women until his marriage. He didn’t see relationships as a mutual desire for companionship; he saw them as a matter of personal conquest and a means of attaining status among his male peers. This attitude is especially present in the character of Amory Blaine in This Side of Paradise, his first novel. While attending boarding school, Blaine seems to think that if he is not the best in sports, academics, and dating, he is at the evolutionary bottom of his school’s body of students. As it seems for Fitzgerald, as well as most of his characters, there is almost no point to living if life is not as complete and fully experienced as possible. Dating is just one arena in which he could experience every ounce of life that he could.

Through his teenage years and early adulthood, Fitzgerald had his share of love interests, but in 1920 he became engaged to Zelda Sayre and quickly settled down to a life of writing and domestic felicity. Raised in Montgomery, Alabama, Zelda had all the good manners expected of a woman who would frequent events put on by the social elite, but she also had a wild streak and would sometimes do the things decent women were supposed to stay away from: she danced, drank, and smoked cigarettes. She was considered beautiful by friends and acquaintances, and, like her husband, she was a writer.

This Side of Paradise was published shortly before Fitzgerald and Zelda’s marriage, and by the time the couple was wed, Fitzgerald was a literary celebrity. About a year after they married, Zelda gave birth to the Fitzgeralds’ only child, a daughter. Life went smoothly for the family in these first years with the success of Fitzgerald’s novels offering financial security and with plenty of social events to keep things interesting and entertaining. Despite the celebrity and success, eventually a shadow fell over the couple. While it may have seemed to outsiders as though things were crashing and burning out of nowhere, the marriage had become strained rather quickly and was largely unhappy for both husband and wife. Heavy drinking in the 1920s led to Fitzgerald’s ongoing struggle with alcoholism, and his wife was eventually admitted to a mental hospital where she was diagnosed with schizophrenia. She would remain in the hospital for the rest of her life. Fitzgerald died on December 21, 1940, in the hills of Hollywood, and Zelda was killed in a fire that consumed the mental hospital she was residing in. For Fitzgerald, life seemed much like one of the parties in The Great Gatsby. It was wild and beautiful at the start, but it ended just as messy, tragic, and memorable as the best of parties inevitably must.

The era in which Fitzgerald wrote, the 1920s, can be known as the Jazz Age. It was also often referred to as the Roaring Twenties, and roaring it was. Eventually, in response to the Great Depression arriving without much warning for many members of the upper class, people rebelled against ruin and made their parties that much rowdier, pushing the end of their nights back to the very start of day. The Great Depression had its official start during the month of October, 1929, when the New York Stock Exchange crashed, but in many areas of the country, an economic decline had already begun to set in earlier in the decade. When the Stock Exchange finally collapsed, thousands of Americans were left jobless, and companies and banks around the country were ruined. This was the economic setting Fitzgerald was writing in. Poverty and ruin became basic facts of everyday existence for everyone, and these experiences transferred into his novels.

Before the Stock Exchange crashed, the Jazz Age was already in full swing, but once disaster came along, people partook in more partying to escape the gloom that came from the everyday hardships and misery. It is hard to attach a definition to the Jazz Age, because it wasn’t just a time, but an experience and a feeling. For one decade (give or take a few years on each side) decadence reigned in spite of impoverishment. This was a time of artistic explosions both in the United States and overseas in Europe. It was an age that saw women declaring their equality to men and attempting to flout social rules. Had he not emerged from this era, Fitzgerald would have certainly been another author entirely.

The first novel F. Scott Fitzgerald published was This Side of Paradise (1920). A coming of age story of sorts, This Side of Paradise details the journey of Amory Blaine from boarding school to Princeton University to the battlefields of World War I and back to New York. The novel is divided into three sections: Book One: The Romantic Egoist, Interlude, and Book Two: The Education of a Personage. Through the character of Amory Blaine, Fitzgerald explores those things he saw as being the most affecting during development from adolescent to adult: love and the torment it can create when it is not reciprocated, the social hierarchy that exists on a microcosmic scale in schools, and the harsh realities that happen in life whether you’re ready for it or not. This is Fitzgerald’s most autobiographical novel. The love interest of Amory, Rosalind Connage, is based on Ginevra King, a real life love interest of Fitzgerald who rejected him. Throughout the novel, Amory’s experiences in boarding school and at Princeton derive from Fitzgerald’s own life.

The Beautiful and the Damned, Fitzgerald’s second novel, was published in 1922. Unlike This Side of Paradise, this book dealt more directly with the Jazz Age and all its accoutrements. Anthony Patch is the main character, joined by the character of his wife, Gloria. The narrative follows them through alcohol-crazed parties and artistic pursuits, with the two squandering for money along the way and sinking into a miserable and turbulent marriage. This novel showcased the extremes of emotion and experience that were so prevalent during the Roaring Twenties, and it proved to readers that Fitzgerald was not just a one hit wonder.

It is almost impossible to make it through the modern American high school without encountering The Great Gatsby, and there is a good reason for it. Generally considered to be Fitzgerald’s masterpiece, The Great Gatsby encapsulates the Jazz Age like no novel before it, by Fitzgerald or anyone else. It is the story of Jay Gatsby, the woman he loves, extravagant parties that have no end, and the tragedy that often follows and balances out the best of times. Here Fitzgerald details the ever conflicting notion of morality that runs among the members of high society, and most importantly, he takes a photograph of America, right then and there in the midst of a cultural cyclone. More than a story, The Great Gatsby is a record of a time and an experience.

Like This Side of Paradise, Tender is the Night draws much more from Fitzgerald’s own life. At the time of composition, his wife had begun her descent into schizophrenia and would soon be admitted to the mental hospital where she would stay for the remainder of her days. Troubled by his crumbling marriage and the mental, emotional, and psychological disintegration of Zelda, Fitzgerald channeled his rocky home life into the novel that many critics claim rivals to The Great Gatsby in terms of literary excellence. Tender is the Night is the story of the psychologist Dick Diver, his wife, Nicole, who also happens to be one of his most troubled patients, and Rosemary Hoyt, an American they meet while vacationing on the French Riviera. While events may rise and fall throughout the novel, it is always the strained relationship between Dick and Nicole that is of concern.

This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and the Damned, The Great Gatsby, and Tender is the Night are not the only works to Fitzgerald’s name. He wrote numerous short stories that were collected in several books, a few of which were Flappers and Philosophers, Tales of the Jazz Age, All the Sad Young Men, and Babylon Revisited and Other Stories. He also had begun one last novel titled The Last Tycoon, but he died before he could finish it.

Fitzgerald’s works stand as documents of the American experience during the 1920s. He would have been considered a novelist worthy of being studied in universities either way, but his honesty in portraying the victories and defeats of human life during a turbulent time in history has made him a national treasure.

JEAN ASTA

2011

THE OFFSHORE PIRATE

I

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 very 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. His son Toby has come all the way from New York to meet you and he's invited several other young people. For the last time, will you—

No said Ardita shortly, I won't. I came along on this darn cruise with the one idea of going to Palm Beach, and you knew it, and I absolutely refuse to meet any darn old colonel or any darn young Toby or any darn old young people or to set foot in any other darn old town in this crazy state. So you either take me to Palm Beach or else shut up and go away.

Very well. This is the last straw. In your infatuation for this man.—a man who is notorious for his excesses—a man your father would not have allowed to so much as mention your name—you have rejected the demi-monde rather than the circles in which you have presumably grown up. From now on—

I know interrupted Ardita ironically, from now on you go your way and I go mine. I've heard that story before. You know I'd like nothing better.

From now on, he announced grandiloquently, you are no niece of mine. I—

O-o-o-oh! The cry was wrung from Ardita with the agony of a lost soul. Will you stop boring me! Will you go 'way! Will you jump overboard and drown! Do you want me to throw this book at you!

If you dare do any—

Smack! The Revolt of the Angels sailed through the air, missed its target by the length of a short nose, and bumped cheerfully down the companionway.

The gray-haired man made an instinctive step backward and then two cautious steps forward. Ardita jumped to her five feet four and stared at him defiantly, her gray eyes blazing.

Keep off!

How dare you! he cried.

Because I darn please!

You've grown unbearable! Your disposition—

You've made me that way! No child ever has a bad disposition unless it's her fancy's fault! Whatever I am, you did it.

Muttering something under his breath her uncle turned and, walking forward called in a loud voice for the launch. Then he returned to the awning, where Ardita had again seated herself and resumed her attention to the lemon.

I am going ashore, he said slowly. I will be out again at nine o'clock to-night. When I return we start back to New York, wither I shall turn you over to your aunt for the rest of your natural, or rather unnatural, life.

He paused and looked at her, and then all at once something in the utter childishness of her beauty seemed to puncture his anger like an inflated tire, and render him helpless, uncertain, utterly fatuous.

Ardita, he said not unkindly, I'm no fool. I've been round. I know men. And, child, confirmed libertines don't reform until they're tired—and then they're not themselves—they're husks of themselves. He looked at her as if expecting agreement, but receiving no sight or sound of it he continued. Perhaps the man loves you—that's possible. He's loved many women and he'll love many more. Less than a month ago, one month, Ardita, he was involved in a notorious affair with that red-haired woman, Mimi Merril; promised to give her the diamond bracelet that the Czar of Russia gave his mother. You know—you read the papers.

"Thrilling scandals by an