The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald Read Free Page A

undergraduate fiction in search of a salvageable narrative, and he found it in “The Ordeal” (
The Nassau Literary Magazine,
1915), a fictionalized version of a visit he had paid to his cousin Tom Delihant at the Jesuit monastery in Woodstock, Maryland, during the Easter season of 1912. In the revision of this story into “Benediction,” Fitzgerald transferred the moral conflict of the male protagonist in “The Ordeal” onto a female character, Lois, who is of the generation that Amory Blaine in the already-written-but-yet-to-be-published
This Side of Paradise
characterized as one “grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken.” 12 Set free in the moral minefield of the dawning Jazz Age, Lois demonstrates as convincingly as any previous Fitzgerald character how a member of her generation begins to form a code for living in such a time; and her code, grounded in freedom and independence from traditional beliefs, will wind itself through these early stories, finally coming into its most lyrical expression in “Absolution”—the last story in this collection. With “Benediction,” Fitzgerald seems literally to have discovered the principle of artistic detachment or aesthetic distance, a discovery that will lead in his most mature work to that often-cited quality that Malcolm Cowley labeled “double vision”— simply defined, the ability to participate emotionally in experience while, at the same time, retaining the ability to stand back and view it objectively. And while all good literary artists possess this kind of vision to a greater or lesser degree, great writers like Fitzgerald couple it with a lyrical quality that creates magic. Nowhere is this magic quite so evident as it is in
The Great Gatsby,
where it is expressed in the construction of the rational, if poetic, Nick Carraway, who observes and chronicles Jay Gatsby’s romantic quest for Daisy Buchanan. Those looking for something approaching the earliest expression of Fitzgerald’s double vision will find it in “Benediction.”
    As an ironic monument of sorts to his portrait of Lois, his earliest credible representation of the emerging new woman of the Roaring Twenties,
The Smart Set
paid $40 for “Benediction,” prompting Fitzgerald from this moment forward to approach professional authorship from a different angle: he began, on the one hand, paying greater attention to the literary marketplace, specifically considering the kinds of stories slick magazines would be more likely to buy; and, on the other, he turned the marketing of his stories over to a literary agent, Paul Revere Reynolds, who quickly assigned the handling of Fitzgerald’s work to Ober. The first manuscript that Fitzgerald sent the Reynolds agency was “Head and Shoulders,” and the
Post
bought it for $400. Fitzgerald’s letters to Ober in those weeks and months after his first sale of a story to a commercial magazine indicate Fitzgerald’s awareness of the fact that he was now writing stories with an eye on what he hoped would become their eventual market—most often the
Post,
which had a circulation in the 1920s of 2,750,000.
    The delightfully ingenious “Head and Shoulders” is Fitzgerald’s first concerted effort to write for what he perceived to be the slick magazine audience, and though it is in some ways over the top and a dramatic departure from the seriousness of “Benediction,” it contains the beautiful lyricism that lifts all of Fitzgerald’s fiction above the level of the merely popular. There are also complexities beneath the surface of Marcia Meadow’s charming into a marriage the stodgy and scholarly Horace Tarbox, complexities that draw power from Scott’s projected anxieties about the potential danger of actually catching the whirlwind Zelda, with whom he was in love. In the course of writing “Head and Shoulders” with the popular magazine audience in mind, Fitzgerald managed to do something, the repercussions of