Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (532 page)

Of the others Colonial, an old club with a history of ups and downs, Charter, a comparative newcomer, and Quadrangle, the only club with a distinctly intellectual flavor, are the most influential. One club vanished in the confusion of the war. Two have been founded since, both of them in a little old building which has seen the birth of many. The special characteristics of the clubs vary so that it is hazardous to describe them. One whose members in my day were indefatigable patrons of the Nassau Inn Bar, is now, I am told, a sort of restaurant for the Philadelphian Society.

The Philadelphian Society is Princeton’s Y. M. C. A., and in more sagacious moments it is content to function as such. Occasionally, though, it becomes inspired with a Messianic urge to evangelize the university. In my day for example, it imported for the purpose a noted rabble rouser, one Dr. X, who brought along in all seriousness a reformed Bad Example. Such students as out of piety or curiosity could be assembled were herded into Alexander Hall and there ensued one of the most grotesque orgies ever held in the shadow of a great educational institution. When Dr. X’s sermon had risen to an inspirational chant, several dozen boys rose, staunch as colored gentlemen, and went forward to be saved. Among them was a popular free thinker and wine bibber whose sincerity we later probed but never determined. The climax of the occasion was the Bad Example’s account of his past excesses, culminating in his descent into an actual stone gutter, his conversion and his rise to the position of Bad Example for Dr. X’s traveling circus.

By this time the tenderer spirits in the audience had become uncomfortable, the tougher ones riotous; a few left the hall. The unctuousness of the proceedings was too much even for those more timorous days, and later there were protests on the grounds of sheer good taste. Last year “Buchmanism, “ a milder form of the same melodrama, came in for some outspoken and impatient criticism in the university press.

There is so much of Princeton that I have omitted to touch. Perhaps to be specific for a moment will be a method of being most general. Vivid lights played on the whole colorful picture during the winter and early spring of 1917, just before the war.

Never had the forces which compose the university been so strong and so in evidence. Four score sophomores had democratically refused to join clubs, under the leadership of David Bruce (a son of Senator Bruce), Richard Cleveland (a son of President Cleveland), and Henry Hyacinth Strater of Louisville, Kentucky. Not content with this, the latter, the first man in his class to make the Princetonian and an ardent devotee of Tolstoy and Edward Carpenter, came out as a pacifist. He was brilliant and deeply popular; he was much patronized, somewhat disapproved of but never in the slightest degree persecuted. He made a few converts who joined the Quakers and remained pacifists to the end.

The Nassau Literary Magazine under John Peale Bishop made a sudden successful bid for popular attention. Jack Newlin, later killed in France, drew Beardsley-like pictures for frontispieces; I wrote stories about current prom girls, stories that were later incorporated into a novel; John Biggs imagined the war with sufficient virtuosity to deceive veterans; and John Bishop made a last metrical effort to link up the current crusade with the revolution — while we all, waiting to go to training camps, found time heartily to despise the bombast and rhetoric of the day. We published a satirical number, a parody on the Cosmopolitan Magazine, which infuriated the less nimble-witted members of the English department. We — this time the board of the Tiger — issued an irreverent number which burlesqued the faculty, the anticlub movement and then the clubs themselves, by their real names. Everything around us seemed to be breaking up. These were the great days; battle was on the horizon; nothing was ever going to be the same again and nothing mattered. And for the next two years nothing did matter. Five per cent of my class, twenty-one boys, were killed in the war.

That spring I remember late nights at the Nassau Inn with Bill Coan, the proctor, waiting outside to hale selected specimens before the dean next morning. I remember the long afternoons of military drill on the soccer fields, side by side perhaps with an instructor of the morning. We used to snicker at Professor Wardlaw Miles’ attempts to reconcile the snap of the drill manual with his own precise and pedantic English. There were no snickers two years later when he returned from France with a leg missing and his breast bright with decorations. A thousand boys cheered him to his home. I remember the last June night when, with two-thirds of us in uniform, our class sang its final song on the steps of Nassau Hall and some of us wept because we knew we’d never be quite so young any more as we had been here. And I seem to remember a host of more intimate things that are now as blurred and dim as our cigarette smoke or the ivy on Nassau Hall that last night.

Princeton is itself. WilliamsCollege is not “what Princeton used to be. “ Williams is for guided boys whose female relatives waul them protected from reality. Princeton is of the world; it is somehow on the “grand scale”; and for sixty years it has been approximately the same. There is less singing and more dancing. The keg parties arc over but the slags line up for a hundred yards to cut in on young Lois Moran. There is no Elizabethan Club as at Yale to make a taste for poetry respectable, sometimes too respectable; exceptional talent must create its own public at Princeton, as it must in life. In spite, of all persuasions the varsity man conservatively wears his P on the inside of his sweater, but so far no Attorney General Palmers or Judge Thayers have bobbed up among the alumni. President Hibben sometimes disagrees aloud with Secretary Mellon and only ninety-two members of the senior class proclaimed themselves dry last year.

Looking back over a decade one sees the ideal of a university become a myth, a vision, a meadow lark among the smoke stacks. Yet perhaps it is there at Princeton, only more elusive than under the skies of the Prussian Rhiheland or Oxfordshire; or perhaps some men come upon it suddenly and possess it, while others wander forever outside. Even these seek in vain through middle age for any corner of the republic that preserves so much of what is fair, gracious, charming and honorable in American life.

TEN YEARS IN THE ADVERTISING BUSINESS

“Well, Mr. Fitzgerald, what can I do for you today?” It was in a high office with a view of that gold building.

“I want a raise, Mr. Cakebook,” I said.

“Why?”

“I’m about to get married. You’re only paying me Ninety-Five Dollars a month and, of course, with a family to support I’ve got to think of money.”

Into his grey eyes came a faraway look.

“Ninety-Five Dollars is a pretty good salary. By the way, let me see that laundry slogan as it stands now.”

“Here it is,” I said, with eager pride. “Listen: ‘We keep you clean in Muskateen.’ How’s that? Good, isn’t it. ‘We keep — ‘“

“Wait a minute,” he interrupted. “Look here, Mr. Fitzgerald. You’re too temperamental. Your ideas are too fancy, too imaginative. You ought to keep your feet on the ground. Now let me see that layout.”

He worked over it for a moment, his large brain bulging a little from time to time, his lips moving as to melody.

“Now listen to this,” he said, “I’ve got something good: ‘Muskateen Laundry — we clean and press.’ Listen Miss Schwartz, take that down right away. ‘Muskateen Laundry — we clean and press.’ “

Obsequiously I congratulated him — when he began to beam I returned to my thesis.

“Well, how about money?”

. . . ”I don’t know,” he mused. “Of course we try to be fair. How much do you want?”

I thought for a moment.

“Suppose you name an amount.”

“I’ll tell you, Mr. Fitzgerald,” he said, “we don’t like to argue about money with anybody. You let us use your picture and your name as one of the judges in this contest and we’ll call it a thousand dollars.”

“But it’ll take a couple of hours,” I objected, “and, of course, with a family to support I’ve got to think of money.”

“I realize that. We’ll call it fifteen hundred.”

“And it’s understood that I’m in no sense to endorse this product.”

“Perfectly. You merely pick the prettiest girl.”

We stood up and I looked out the window at that gold building.

“Did I understand you to say you’re about to get married?” he asked.

“Oh, no, I’ve been married ten years. That was back before those little dots.”

“It must have been some other couple.”

“It was,” I assured him. “Only the names were the same. The tissues change every decade. Good-by, Mr. Cakebook.”

“Good-by Mr. Fitzgerald.”

ECHOES OF THE JAZZ AGE

It is too soon to write about the Jazz Age with perspective, and without being suspected of premature arteriosclerosis. Many people still succumb to violent retching when they happen upon any of its characteristic words — words which have since yielded in vividness to the coinages of the underworld. It is as dead as were the Yellow Nineties in 1902. Yet the present writer already looks back to it with nostalgia. It bore him up, flattered him and gave him more money than he had dreamed of, simply for telling people that he felt as they did, that something had to be done with all the nervous energy stored up and unexpended in the War.

The ten-year period that, as if reluctant to die outmoded in its bed, leaped to a spectacular death in October, 1929, began about the time of the May Day riots in 1919. When the police rode down the demobilized country boys gaping at the orators in Madison Square, it was the sort of measure bound to alienate the more intelligent young men from the prevailing order. We didn’t remember anything about the Bill of Rights until Mencken began plugging it, but we did know that such tyranny belonged in the jittery little countries of South Europe. If goose-livered business men had this effect on the government, then maybe we had gone to war for J. P. Morgan’s loans after all. But, because we were tired of Great Causes, there was no more than a short outbreak of moral indignation, typified by Dos Passos’
Three Soldiers
. Presently we began to have slices of the national cake and our idealism only flared up when the newspapers made melodrama out of such stories as Harding and the Ohio Gang or Sacco and Vanzetti. The events of 1919 left us cynical rather than revolutionary, in spite of the fact that now we are all rummaging around in our trunks wondering where in hell we left the liberty cap — “I know I had it” — and the moujik blouse. It was characteristic of the Jazz Age that it had no interest in politics at all.

It was an age of miracles, it was an age of art, it was an age of excess, and it was an age of satire. A Stuffed Shirt, squirming to blackmail in a lifelike way, sat upon the throne of the United States; a stylish young man hurried over to represent to us the throne of England. A world of girls yearned for the young Englishman; the old American groaned in his sleep as he waited to be poisoned by his wife, upon the advice of the female Rasputin who then made the ultimate decision in our national affairs. But such matters apart, we had things our way at last. With Americans ordering suits by the gross in London, the Bond Street tailors perforce agreed to moderate their cut to the American long-waisted figure and loose-fitting taste, something subtle passed to America, the style of man. During the Renaissance, Francis the First looked to Florence to trim his leg. Seventeenth-century England aped the court of France, and fifty years ago the German Guards officer bought his civilian clothes in London. Gentlemen’s clothes — symbol of “the power that man must hold and that passes from race to race.”

We were the most powerful nation. Who could tell us any longer what was fashionable and what was fun? Isolated during the European War, we had begun combing the unknown South and West for folkways and pastimes, and there were more ready to hand.

The first social revelation created a sensation out of all proportion to its novelty. As far back as 1915 the unchaperoned young people of the smaller cities had discovered the mobile privacy of that automobile given to young Bill at sixteen to make him “self-reliant.” At first petting was a desperate adventure even under such favorable conditions, but presently confidences were exchanged and the old commandment broke down. As early as 1917 there were references to such sweet and casual dalliance in any number of the
Yale Record
or the
Princeton Tiger
.

But petting in its more audacious manifestations was confined to the wealthier classes — among other young people the old standard prevailed until after the War, and a kiss meant that a proposal was expected, as young officers in strange cities sometimes discovered to their dismay. Only in 1920 did the veil finally fall — the Jazz Age was in flower.

Scarcely had the staider citizens of the republic caught their breaths when the wildest of all generations, the generation which had been adolescent during the confusion of the War, brusquely shouldered my contemporaries out of the way and danced into the limelight. This was the generation whose girls dramatized themselves as flappers, the generation that corrupted its elders and eventually overreached itself less through lack of morals than through lack of taste. May one offer in exhibit the year igaz! That was the peak of the younger generation, for though the Jazz Age continued, it became less and less an affair of youth.

The sequel was like a children’s party taken over by the elders, leaving the children puzzled and rather neglected and rather taken aback. By 1923 their elders, tired of watching the carnival with ill-concealed envy, had discovered that young liquor will take the place of young blood, and with a whoop the orgy began. The younger generation was starred no longer.

A whole race going hedonistic, deciding on pleasure. The precocious intimacies of the younger generation would have come about with or without prohibition — they were implicit in the attempt to adapt English customs to American conditions. (Our South, for example, is tropical and early maturing — it has never been part of the wisdom of France and Spain to let young girls go unchaperoned at sixteen and seventeen.) But the general decision to be amused that began with the cocktail parties of 1921 had more complicated origins.