The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Other Jazz Age Stories

Table of Contents

 

 

 

 

THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON AND OTHER JAZZ AGE STORIES

F. SCOTT FITZGERALD was born on September 24, 1896, in St. Paul, Minnesota. He entered Princeton University in 1913, where he began to write and publish much of what would become
This Side of Paradise.
In 1920, he married Zelda Sayre; in the same year,
This Side of Paradise
, his first novel, was published, followed by a collection of stories,
Flappers and Philosophers.
In 1921 his daughter, Frances Scott Fitzgerald, was born. A second novel and collection of short stories,
The Beautiful and the Damned
and
Tales of the Jazz Age
, respectively, were published in 1922. Fitzgerald's major novel,
The Great Gatsby
, was published in 1925. After several years of traveling and moving during the onset and progress of Zelda's mental illness, Fitzgerald published
Tender Is the Night
in 1934 and a collection of stories,
Taps at Reveille
, in 1935. In 1936, Fitzgerald published a series of confessional essays in
Esquire
that would be collected under the title
The Crack-Up
and published in this form after his death. In the late '30s, Fitzgerald moved to Hollywood where he worked on screenplays and began writing his final novel,
The Last Tycoon
, which remained unfinished at the time of his death due to consequences following a heart attack on December 21, 1940.

 

PATRICK O'DONNELL is professor of English and American literature at Michigan State University. He is the author of several essays and books on modern and contemporary American fiction, including
Latent Destinies: Cultural Paranoia in Contemporary U.S. Narrative, Echo Chambers: Reading Voice in Modern Narrative, Passionate Doubts: Designs of Interpretation in Contemporary American Fiction,
and
John Hawkes.
He has taught at several universities in the United States and Europe, and in 2005 he was the Walt Whitman Distinguished Fulbright Chair at Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands.

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Flappers and Philosophers
first published in the United States of America by Charles Scribner's Sons 1920
Tales of the Jazz Age
published by Charles Scribner's Sons 1922
This volume with an introduction and notes by Patrick O'Donnell previously published
as
Jazz Age Stories
in Penguin Books 1998
This edition published in Penguin Books 2008

Introduction and notes copyright © Patrick O'Donnell, 1998

All rights reserved
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Fitzgerald, F. Scott (Francis Scott), 1896-1940.
The curious case of Benjamin Button and other Jazz Age stories / F. Scott Fitzgerald;
edited with an introduction and explanatory notes by Patrick O'Donnell.
p. cm.—(Penguin classics)
Contents: The offshore pirate—The ice palace—Head and shoulders—The cut-glass bowl—
Bernice bobs her hair—Benediction—Dalyrimple goes wrong—The four fists—The jelly-bean—
The camel's back—May Day—Porcelain and pink.
Includes bibliographical references (p. xxv).

eISBN : 978-0-143-10549-7

1. United States—Social life and customs—20th century—Fiction.
2. Nineteen twenties—Fiction. I. O'Donnell, Patrick, 1948-
II. Title. III. Series.
PS3511.I9A61999
823'.912—dc21 98-38479
Set in Sabon

 

 

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INTRODUCTION

Often considered to be the author of “the great American novel” in
The Great Gatsby
(1925), F. Scott Fitzgerald is not generally regarded as a great short-story writer. While perhaps a dozen of his stories are remembered—“The Diamond as Big as the Ritz,” “The Ice Palace,” and “Winter Dreams” are perennially anthologized—for the most part, the nearly 180 stories and dramatic sketches Fitzgerald wrote (65 of these appeared in
The Saturday Evening Post
alone) remain known primarily to Fitzgerald scholars and aficionados. The common perception of Fitzgerald's career as a short-story writer is that he wrote stories for the money he needed to support an extravagant lifestyle while he devoted his more serious energies to the writing of novels such as
Gatsby
,
The Beautiful and Damned
(1922), and
Tender Is the Night
(1934), which, following the remarkable success of
This Side of Paradise
(1920), had disappointing sales during Fitzgerald's lifetime.

It is true that Fitzgerald earned his living writing stories: by 1929, he could command $4,000 per story from
The Saturday Evening Post
(perhaps equivalent to as much as $50,000 in today's currency), and over the length of his career between 1919 and 1940, Fitzgerald earned more than $240,000 from the publication of his stories, while he earned less than $100,000 from advances and royalties on his novels. But the fact that story writing was Fitzgerald's financial mainstay should not overshadow his accomplishments as an author of short fiction. Fitzgerald wrote stories from the time he was an adolescent until he died at the age of forty-four; during his career he assembled four collections of stories that he carefully edited and revised for book publication. Even though he often disparaged and misjudged the quality of his stories, it is clear that Fitzgerald was as serious about the craft of story writing as he was about becoming a novelist; moreover, Fitzgerald's stories are not merely the pretexts for his novels—many of them stand alone as the discrete productions of a major writer who used the form of the short story to experiment with new styles, innovative narrative strategies, and emerging concepts. For Fitzgerald, the short story also offered to a form in which he could try out his artistry, and in which he could capture in kaleidoscopic fashion scenes of American life and culture as they passed by with the increasing velocity of what has come to be known as “the Jazz Age.”

The four collections Fitzgerald assembled for publication during his lifetime include
Flappers and Philosophers
(1920),
Tales of the Jazz Age
(1922),
All the Sad Young Men
(1926), and
Taps at Reveille
(1935). The first two are brought together here as
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Other Jazz Age Stories.
The tales in these collections are, variously and with few exceptions, vignettes of courtship and marriage, fantasy and disillusion that take place literally or metaphorically within the fast-paced, spirited “age” that came in the wake of World War I, the era of “trial marriages,” frenetic dances, and bathtub gin typified by the icons of the flapper and the raccoon coat. Fitzgerald's representation of these times occurs in his stories of the late teens and twenties, and most famously in
The Great Gatsby
; here, the age of the flapper—the Jazz Age—is one of disenchantment and skepticism, of a failed and vulnerable romanticism that takes the place of lost belief in the old gods of order and progress, and of exuberant, inflationary excess in which the philosophy of carpe diem vies with the restrictions of Prohibition as the gap between the rich and the poor expands to the point of collapse with the stock market crash of 1929.

At the behest of Scribner's, the publishers of his first novel,
This Side of Paradise
—and following a market strategy that stipulated the publication of a story collection succeed the publication of a novel within six months—Fitzgerald collected in
Flappers and Philosophers
and
Tales of the Jazz Age
stories that he had written between 1915 and 1921, during the time he metamorphosed from Princeton undergraduate to successful, married writer living and working in New York City. Several of the stories had first appeared in popular magazines and annuals including
The Saturday Evening Post, Scribner's Magazine
, and
The Smart Set
, as well as Princeton undergraduate literary journals such as the
Nassau Literary Magazine
. Together, the stories of Fitzgerald's first two collections might be thought of as apprentice work and, thus, doubly stories of an age in which Fitzgerald's maturation as a writer runs parallel to the maturation of a generation—the “lost generation” of Gertrude's Stein's famous dictum—for whom the experience of the Great War's massive destructiveness represents the annihilation of innocence in the consecration of adolescence and death. Fitzgerald's fiction of this period, which, like the age itself, reflects a protraction of adolescent idealism and dissolution set against the disillusions of historical experience, will culminate in
The Great Gatsby
with its final, grim recognition of the hold the past has upon the generational dreams of escape and transcendence: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” The stories of Fitzgerald's Jazz Age are thus tales of the incongruous relation between what Fitzgerald saw as his generation's hopes and its experience—an incongruity that, when recognized in the epiphanies of these stories, can variously result in ironic amusement, frenetic activity, despair, dissipation, listless acceptance, and even, occasionally, transformation.