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

which he could not possibly have envisioned: with Marcia Meadow—whose philosophy is caught in her line “’At’s all life is. Just going round kissing people”—he introduced the large American magazine-reading public to the Fitzgerald flapper; and from the moment that
The Saturday Evening Post
arrived on newsstands and in mailboxes a week after St. Valentine’s Day 1920, he became the creator of the flapper in fiction. American audiences and magazine editors began from that moment to ask for Fitzgerald’s flapper stories by name. In the end, counting “Head and Shoulders,” his first true flapper story, and his last, “Rags Martin-Jones and the Pr-nce of W-les” (McCall’s, July 1924), Fitzgerald would write only ten of these stories—twelve if the boundaries of the genre are loosened slightly; and thirteen if one includes his resurrection of the Southern belle variation of the flapper-grown-older in his 1929 story “The Last of the Belles.” It is largely on the strength of the dozen true flapper stories, and the ongoing commentary on the flapper as a figure in popular culture supplied by both Scott and Zelda in magazines and newspapers of the early 1920s, that the Fitzgerald flapper came to occupy a prominent—and seemingly permanent—space in the American psyche.
    As Fitzgerald would later comment, “The Jazz Age had a wild youth and a heady middle age,” 13 and there is perhaps no better exhibit of its wild youth than the American flapper. Her outward flamboyance—her bobbed hair, her flapping galoshes, her rouged face, her short skirts— made her perhaps the most visible outward representation of the revolution in manners and morals of a postwar generation whose inward spirit was less festive, a spirit echoed in the phrase “lost generation.” Fitzgerald, of course, did not invent the flapper, but he did invent the flapper in fiction, bringing her for the first time to the attention of the more than two and a half million readers of the middle-American mouthpiece,
The Saturday Evening Post.
The stories in this volume provide perhaps the best record that exists of the flapper in her first blush: “Benediction,” “Head and Shoulders,” “The Ice Palace,” “Bernice Bobs Her Hair,” “The Offshore Pirate,” and “The Jelly-Bean.”
    At first Fitzgerald was taken aback by the enthusiastic response to his fictional depiction of the American flapper, recalling that when he received hundreds and hundreds of letters after the appearance of “Bernice Bobs Her Hair” he had thought it “rather absurd.” 14 But in fact he made it a point to become an authority on this new cultural phenomenon, having his brightest and most exemplary flappers spell out the flapper creed, as Ardita Farnam does in “The Offshore Pirate”: “I began to see that in all my idols in the past some manifestation of courage had unconsciously been the thing that attracted me. . . . My courage is faith—faith in the eternal resilience of me. . . .” Then in popular magazine pieces during the early twenties, examples of which are included in Commentary and Illustrations (page 269), he and Zelda did as much as anyone to keep the flapper alive in the public consciousness. In interviews, Fitzgerald delighted in categorizing various types of flappers. In one of these, subtitled “Novelist Says Southern Type of Flapper Best,” Fitzgerald “classifies American flappers according to their locality.” 15 Accompanying the article is a quarter-page map of the United States containing cartoon renditions of flappers from every geographical area and depicting Fitzgerald with a pointer singling out the Southern flapper. Given Fitzgerald’s relationship with the quintessential flapper–Southern belle Zelda, few will be shocked to learn that Fitzgerald liked the “Southern Type of Flapper Best,” nor is it surprising that one of his greatest stories, “The Ice Palace,” was inspired by trips that he had taken to see Zelda