Tales of the Jazz Age. Фрэнсис Скотт Фицджеральд
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Holocaust doctor when his reverse life takes him to a younger age. Of course, this concept of playing with time was first investigated by H. G. Wells in his novel The Time Machine (1895). In this story Wells has the central character existing in real time, but the machine enables him to travel both forward and backward in time.
There are ten other shorts in Tales of the Jazz Age. Some examine the human characteristics that made the Jazz Age what it was, such as the excess, frivolity, vanity, pretensions, and cultural hysteria brought about by the mood following World War I.
Just as the Restoration in England generated a kind of lighthearted optimism after the suppressive atmosphere under the Puritans, so the Jazz Age was a kind of celebration of life after so much death in Europe. It was marked by the popularity of jazz music and an associated dance craze, but would all come to an end in the early1930s with the Great Depression.
Exploring the topic of excess in this collection is the tale A Diamond as Big as the Ritz. In this story, Fitzgerald gives the central character a dilemma to solve. In his quest to become rich, Percy Washington discovers a mountain comprising a single diamond, but he realizes that if he saturates the market with diamonds, they will become commonplace and have no value. Both stories highlight Fitzgerald’s underlying inclination to experiment with intellectual and philosophical concepts in his work. This is largely why he is regarded as a literary writer, rather than merely a teller of tales.
On face value, much of his writing would seem to be amusing comment on his own “Smart Set” lifestyle and aimed at others from the same milieu, but Fitzgerald was an intelligent man with considerable depth to his thinking. It is just that he also knew how to be commercial enough to make money from his writing, which demanded a layer of gloss and polish. His was a world of inherited privilege, inhabited by pseudo-intellectuals and posers. He himself made several trips to Paris and the French Riviera, where he cultivated and honed a lifestyle that went hand in hand with his writing style. He wrote about what he knew, but he injected other elements to facilitate his curiosity about the human condition and give his writing greater literary weight.
Fitzgerald and Hemingway
Fitzgerald was friends with arguably the greatest American writer, Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway encouraged Fitzgerald to pursue his prose with artistic integrity, but grew frustrated with Fitzgerald’s tendency toward making his literature commercial. However, most of Fitzgerald’s novels did not perform that well, so a large part of his income came from magazine work, writing short stories that, by their very nature, had to conform to editorial requirements. Nine years after The Great Gatsby, he had struggled to complete his final novel Tender Is The Night. Unfortunately for Fitzgerald, the book was received with disappointment, and the decline of his writing career continued unabated. In the latter half of the 1930s, he found work developing movie scripts and carried out further commercial writing. By the time of his death, his literary career had died, too.
In hindsight, Fitzgerald’s work is regarded variously, but The Great Gatsby has become the quintessential American classic. Some feel that Fitzgerald’s talent would have been better focused on his novel writing, but fiscal matters always dictated that he continue with his commercial work. However, Hemingway may have been a heavyweight writer but he was certainly not a contented man. For him the praise he garnered for each new book was a fix. When he ran out of ideas, he suffered severe depression and ultimately took his own life with a shotgun. Fitzgerald battled on in a workmanlike manner even when plaudits were a distant memory. Fitzgerald the legendary writer has now outlived Fitzgerald the man several times over.
CONTENTS
The Diamond as Big as the Ritz
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Classic Literature: Words and Phrases adapted from the Collins English Dictionary
The Jelly-Bean
This is a Southern story, with the scene laid in the small Lily of Tarleton, Georgia. I have a profound affection for Tarleton, but somehow whenever I write a story about it I receive letters from all over the South denouncing me in no uncertain terms. “The Jelly-Bean,” published in “The Metropolitan,” drew its full share of these admonitory notes.
It was written under strange circumstances shortly after my first novel was published, and, moreover, it was the first story in which I had a collaborator. For, finding that I was unable to manage the crap-shooting episode, I turned it over to my wife, who, as a Southern girl, was presumably an expert on the technique and terminology of that great sectional pastime.
I
Jim Powell was a Jelly-bean. Much as I desire to make him an appealing character, I feel that it would be unscrupulous to deceive you on that point. He was a bred-in-the-bone, dyed-in-the-wool, ninety-nine three-quarters per cent Jelly-bean and he grew lazily all during Jelly-bean season, which is every season, down in the land of the Jelly-beans well below the Mason-Dixon line.
Now if you call a Memphis man a Jelly-bean he will quite possibly pull a long sinewy rope from his hip pocket and hang you to a convenient telegraph-pole. If you Call a New Orleans man a Jelly-bean he will probably grin and ask you who is taking your girl to the Mardi Gras ball. The particular Jelly-bean patch which produced the protagonist of this history lies somewhere between the two—a little city of forty thousand that has dozed sleepily for forty thousand years in southern Georgia occasionally stirring in its slumbers and muttering something about a war that took place sometime, somewhere, and that everyone else has forgotten long ago.
Jim was a Jelly-bean. I write that again because it has such a pleasant sound—rather like the beginning of a fairy story—as