The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Other Jazz Age Stories Read Free Page B

some. H. L. Mencken, who had lauded This Side of Paradise as the “best American novel I have seen of late. . . . A truly amazing first novel—original in structure, extremely sophisticated in manner, and adorned with a brilliancy that is as rare in American writing as honesty is in American statecraft,” wrote acerbically of Flappers and Philosophers —in the very magazine ( The Smart Set ) in which he had first published two stories from the collection—that it “offers a sandwich made up of two thick and tasteless chunks of Kriegsbrod with a couple of excellent sardines between.” No doubt Mencken believed the “sardines” to be the Smart Set stories, “Benediction” and “Dalyrimple Goes Wrong.” Playing upon the fresh memories of a recent world war, Mencken opined further that such stories as “The Offshore Pirate” offered “thin and obvious stuff—in brief, atrociously bad stuff,” and rhetorically shook his head at “the sagacity of a publisher who lets a young author print ‘Flappers and Philosophers’ after ‘This Side of Paradise.’ If it were not two years too late I’d almost suspect a German plot.”
    Other critics were equally unforgiving. The Nation’s reviewer wrote that the stories of Flappers and Philosophers “have a rather ghastly rattle of movement that apes energy and a hectic straining after emotion that apes intensity. The surface is unnaturally taut; the substance beneath is slack and withered.” The critic for the Chicago Evening Post lamented, “It seems a pity” that Fitzgerald’s considerable talent “is expended, for the most part, on themes of such slight importance.” Moralizing about the dangers of the literary marketplace, the Baltimore Evening Sun reviewer, unfavorably comparing Fitzgerald’s collection of stories to This Side of Paradise (“undoubtedly one of the best works of fiction published in America in the past year”), suggested that Flappers and Philosophers “must have been written specially to please those people whose hobby it is to harp on the harmfulness of praise and early success to an artist, emphasizing the theory that only in penury and neglect can a man do good work.”
    Yet if some critics argued that Fitzgerald’s stories provided evidence of his pandering to success, others clearly viewed them as signs of Fitzgerald’s emergence as an important new author. Heywood Broun, who contended with Mencken as one of the leading critical voices of the day, grudgingly admired some of the stories in the New York Tribune Review , admitting that despite “not having liked This Side of Paradise ” and thus “prepared to find confirmation for everything we thought and said about the novel in the new collection of short stories,” a story like “The Ice Palace” convinced him that Fitzgerald “did have something to say and knew how to say it,” and that he “may yet find a powerful springboard and go on to write something which will make us eat all the prophecies we have ever made about him.” Less ambivalently, if petulantly, the reviewer for the New York Herald wrote that in the stories Fitzgerald’s “faculty of characterizing people in a sentence in a way to make one thank Heaven one is not related to them; his facility in the use of the limited but pungent vocabulary of his type; his ingenuity in the hatching of unusual plots, all point to a case of cleverness in its most uncompromising form.”
    In stark contrast to Mencken, the reviewer for the San Francisco Chronicle claimed that “Flappers and Philosophers’ marks the conversion of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s undisciplined and turbid genius of “This Side of Paradise’ into a bridled and clarified talent.” Fanny Butcher, writing for the Chicago Sunday Tribune , viewed Flappers and Philosophers as