NOTES
BENEDICTION
“Benediction” has its origins in an early story, “The Ordeal” ( June 1915, The Nassau Literary Magazine), which Fitzgerald wrote and published as an undergraduate at Princeton, following a visit with his Jesuit-priest cousin and during a time when his association with Father Sigourney Webster Fay and Shane Leslie had led him to consider entering the priesthood. In “The Ordeal” a novice priest struggles with forces pulling him, on the one hand, toward the outside world and its sensual pleasures and, on the other, toward the vows of the priesthood and the ascetic life of the church. In reworking this story that would become “Benediction,” Fitzgerald adds a female character, Lois, who does not appear in “The Ordeal,” and shifts the spiritual crisis onto her. The Smart Set bought “Benediction” for $40 and published it in the February 1920 issue. With nineteen-year-old Lois in “Benediction” he introduces a forerunner of the “very romantic and curious and courageous” flapper who, as he explains in a later story, “is tendered the subtle compliment of being referred to by her [first] name alone.” Fitzgerald included “Benediction” in his first story collection, Flappers and Philosophers (1920), which The Smart Set would review, singling out “Benediction” as the best story in the collection.
thick volumes of Thomas Aquinas and Henry James and Cardinal Mercier and Immanuel Kant: The volumes carried by the middle-aged monks suggest erudition and broad interests that extend across time (from the thirteenth through the twentieth centuries) and beyond church doctrine (Aquinas and Mercier) into fiction ( James) and philosophy (Kant).
the Society of Jesus, founded in Spain five hundred years before by a tough-minded soldier: the Jesuits, founded by St. Ignatius Loyola (1491–1556).
Farmington: Miss Porter’s School founded by Sarah Porter in 1843 and located in Farmington, Connecticut.
the Jesuit College in Philadelphia: likely referring to St. Joseph’s College, the seventh oldest Jesuit college in America, founded in 1851.
shimmys . . . maxixe: Both the shimmy and the maxixe (pronounced max-ish) were popular American dances in the 1910s and ’20s, but both have origins in other cultures. The shimmy is thought to have its origins in the Haitian voodoo dances, and in all of its various incarnations it has been a shoulder-shaking dance, while the maxixe originated in the Brazilian tango and emphasizes movement of the feet rather than the torso.
Benediction: The Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament is a complete rite, during which the Blessed Sacrament is exposed or displayed in a vessel, often ornate, called a monstrance. “O Salutaris Hostia” (literally “O Saving Host”) is the second-to-last stanza of a hymn written by St. Thomas Aquinas, and it accompanies the Benediction rite.
St. Francis Xavier: a founding member of the Society of Jesus and canonized in the same year as the Society’s primary founder, St. Ignatius Loyola. A converter of infidels, St. Francis Xavier is remembered as perhaps the greatest missionary since the era of the apostles.
pietà, a life-size statue of the Blessed Virgin set within a semicircle of rocks: A pietà is a representation of Mary mourning over the dead body of Jesus.
HEAD AND SHOULDERS
Fitzgerald wrote “Head and Shoulders” (originally called “Nest Feathers”) in November 1919 during what was, to him in retrospect, the most exciting period of his life. Harold Ober, who had in this same month become responsible for the marketing of Fitzgerald’s stories at the Paul Revere Reynolds agency, sold “Head and Shoulders” for $400 to The Saturday Evening Post. This was nearly three times the amount Fitzgerald had received for any story he had sold thus far, and its appearance in the February 21, 1920, issue became Fitzgerald’s first publication in a mass-circulation magazine: while he had previously published three stories in The Smart Set, its circulation was just above twenty thousand; the Post’s weekly audience was over two million. As he wrote about this to Ober in 1925, just months before the publication of The Great Gatsby, “I was twenty-two when I came to New York and found that you’d sold Head and Shoulders to the Post. I’d like to get a thrill like that again but I suppose its only once in a lifetime.” From strictly a financial standpoint, the money that came from the sale of “Head and Shoulders” when coupled with the acceptance of his first novel, This Side of Paradise, enabled Fitzgerald to resume his courtship with the woman soon to become his wife, Zelda Sayre, who had called off their engagement until Fitzgerald could prove he was able to support her. “Head and Shoulders” marked the introduction of the flapper to middle America and in the process installed Fitzgerald as the flapper’s historian, the chronicler of the Jazz Age in fiction. The appetite that “Head and Shoulders” created in the popular American magazine audience would prompt the Post to publish five more of his flapper stories (one of which, “The Ice Palace,” introduced the combination of the flapper and Southern belle) in 1920 alone. Fitzgerald selected “Head and Shoulders” for inclusion in Flappers and Philosophers, placing it third after “The Offshore Pirate” and “The Ice Palace.”
George M. Cohan: George M. Cohan (1878–1942), American actor, playwright, director, composer. The 1917 song “Over There” won him a Congressional medal.
Chateau-Thierry: French village where French and American troops halted the German advance into France in a July 1918 battle.
“Spinoza’s Improvement of the Understanding”: Baruch Spinoza (1632–77), Dutch philosopher, author of Treatise on the Improvement of the Understanding.
“Home James”: 1917 Varsity Show at Columbia University, written by Oscar Hammerstein and Herman Axelrod.
Blundering Blimp: Song in Fitzgerald’s play Porcelain and Pink, as published in The Smart Set in January 1920, has the lines, “As you blunder blindly, kindly through / The blinking, winking Blimp!”
Pall Malls: popular cigarette made by American Tobacco Company.
Sheffield: school for engineering and science at Yale.
Berkeley: George Berkeley (1685–1753), Irish bishop and philosopher.
Hume: David Hume (1711–76), Scottish philosopher.
Omar Khayyam: Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, poem attributed to the Persian scholar Omar Khayyám, who died circa 1123.
ten-twenty-thirty: vaudeville circuit where tickets cost ten, twenty, or thirty cents.
Florodora Sextette: performers in the long-running musical Florodora, which opened in New York in 1900. A group of six women and six men in the show sang the hit song “Tell Me Pretty Maiden.”
Mrs. Sol Smith’s: Sol Smith (1801–69), theater manager, ran a traveling show in the West and South in the 1830s and ’40s.
little Boston boy in the comic magazines: perhaps a reference to Buster Brown, cartoon created by Richard Outcault.
Uncle Remus: narrator in Southern black folktales retold by Joel Chandler Harris (1848–1908). Uncle Remus, a slave, tells his master’s children about Brer Rabbit’s escapades.
Catullus: Gaius Valerius Catullus (84–54 B.C.), Roman poet.
with Bergsonian trimmings: Henri Bergson (1859–1941), French philosopher. His lectures on “Creative Evolution” before World War I were popular with American visitors in Paris.
“The Bohemian Girl”: 1843 opera by Irish composer Michael Balfe (1808–70).
Hammerstein: Oscar Hammerstein (1895–1960), American composer. He wrote “Home James!” (see note 4 above). Hammerstein’s father and brother also had careers in musical theater.
shimmy: shoulder-shaking dance. (See note 5 to “Benediction.”)
Carlyle’s: Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881), Scottish essayist and historian.
St. Vitus dance: A form of chorea occurring usually in children. Patients have involuntary, jerky muscular spasms.
Kipling: Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936), English writer, author of Kim, The Jungle Book, and Captains Courageous.
O. Henry: pseudonym of William Sydney Porter (1862–1910), popular short-story writer known for surprise endings.
Herb Spencer: Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), English philosopher.
“Pepys’ Diary”: Samuel Pepys (1633–1703), English diarist and naval historian. His diary, written between 1660 and 1669, gives a vivid account of life in seventeenth-century England.
“Mens sana in corpore sano”: Latin for “A healthy mind in a healthy body.”
fourth proposition of Euclid: Euclid, Greek mathematician, circa 300 B.C. In the thirteen books of the Elements he set forth geometric postulates and proofs. In the Data he made ninety-four propositions proving that if certain elements in a figure are given, the other elements can be determined.
quod erat demonstrandum: Latin for “which was to be demonstrated.”
Prometheus: In Greek mythology Prometheus defended men from Zeus and gave them fire from heaven. Zeus punished him by chaining him to a rock where eagles ate his liver. Each night the liver grew back and it was eaten again by the eagles. He was rescued generations later by Hercules.
Isaac Newton: Isaac Newton (1642–1727), English scientist known for setting forth the laws of gravity.
Hippodrome: Manhattan theater at Sixth Avenue and 43rd Street featuring circuses and other spectacles.
Schopenhauer: Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860), German philosopher.
William James pragmatism: William James (1842–1910), American philosopher.
THE ICE PALACE
Fitzgerald wrote “The Ice Palace” in December 1919, shortly after a return visit to Montgomery, Alabama, where he had been stationed during the war and where, in July 1918, he had first met Zelda Sayre at a country club dance. In an article that appeared in a 1920 issue of The Editor, he describes the story as having been prompted by a recent visit with a girl to a Confederate graveyard in Montgomery: “She told me I could never understand how she felt about the Confederate graves, and I told her I understood so well that I could put it on paper.” Back in Minnesota, the image of the graveyard was paired in Fitzgerald’s mind by way of contrast with images of the St. Paul ice palaces of the 1880s that his mother had described to him earlier. The two images came together, as Fitzgerald put it, “as all one story—the contrast between Alabama and Minnesota,” which embodies the North-South conflict at the heart of “The Ice Palace.” The story is the first of what has come to be known as Fitzgerald’s Tarleton Trilogy—three stories, “The Ice Palace,” “The Jelly-Bean,” and “The Last of the Belles,” all reflecting Fitzgerald’s complex and ambiguous feelings about the South—set in “a little city of forty thousand,” clearly a thinly veiled Montgomery. The story of Sally Carrol Happer’s relationship with Harry Bellamy in “The Ice Palace” is an autobiographical version with an alternate ending of Scott Fitzgerald’s courtship with Zelda Sayre. Sally Carrol Happer’s legacy in the story is, first, that of the Southern belle, embodied in the character of Margery Lee, whom Sally Carrol so admires; but she is also a free, independent spirit with the glitter and sparkle of Fitzgerald’s most memorable flappers before and after her. Fitzgerald included “The Ice Palace” as the second story in Flappers and Philosophers.
“Then blow, ye winds, heigho! A-roving I will go”: These lines are from “A Capital Ship,” by Charles E. Carryl (1841–1920). Carryl’s popular song incorporates the old sea song “Ten Thousand Miles Away.”
Carmen from the South . . . Dangerous Dan McGrew: Roger lightheartedly compares Sally Carrol to the free-spirited and ill-fated heroine of Georges Bizet’s last and most famous opera, Carmen (1875), set in the south of Spain; Dangerous Dan McGrew, from the ballad “The Shooting of Dan McGrew” by Robert William Service (1874–1958).
Ever read any Ibsen?: referring to Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906), the great Norwegian playwright, whose work often deals with individuals, both women and men, struggling against society. Later in the story Roger finds Sally Carrol, who had read no Ibsen when he earlier asked the question, reading Ibsen’s verse drama about the Norwegian folk hero Peer Gynt (Peer Gynt, 1867).
the Serbia in the case: The incident that sparked World War I was the assassination in 1914 of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo by Serbian nationalists, an act which ultimately led to Austria-Hungary’s declaration of war on Serbia.
the ice palace: Ice palaces have a long history, dating back to eighteenth-century Russia. The first ice palace in St. Paul was built for the Winter Carnival of 1886, an event postponed because of an outbreak of smallpox. Ice palaces were then built again in 1887 and 1888, though those planned for 1889 and 1890 were not built because the weather did not cooperate. In 1896, the year of Fitzgerald’s birth, ice structures on a smaller scale, called ice forts, were constructed, as they were in 1916 and 1917. The next ice palace to be built after the magnificent one of 1888 was in 1937, and it consisted of enormous screens, forts, and backdrops. Fitzgerald reports that he drew on a sketch of an ice palace of the 1880s, found in a newspaper of the period, for his conception of the ice palace in the story.
“Kubla Khan” . . . “caves of ice!”: the famous poem fragment by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) and its first two lines.
Wacouta Club: One of a number of winter sports clubs in St. Paul, the Wacouta Club was established in 1885.
BERNICE BOBS HER HAIR
The idea for “Bernice Bobs Her Hair” originated in a ten-page letter (circa 1916) that Fitzgerald wrote to his sister Annabel when he was nineteen and she fourteen. He instructed her in great detail in the areas of “Conversation,” “Poise,” and “Dress and Personality” as to how she could become a social success. The story that grew out of this letter was written in January 1920, and it was originally a ten-thousand-word story called “Barbara Bobs Her Hair.” After four magazines rejected it, Fitzgerald shortened it to seven thousand words, altered its climax (making it in his words “snappy”), and Ober sold it for $500 to The Saturday Evening Post with its new title, “Bernice Bobs Her Hair.” Written in the same month as “The Camel’s Back,” the story was published in the May 1, 1920, issue and was Fitzgerald’s fourth contribution to the magazine. Bernice fits in to the category of what Fitzgerald called the “wonderful kid,” a young woman of about sixteen who is on her way toward freespiritedness and liberation, the variety of flapper that Bernice has become by the time of the story’s unexpected turn. With her last gesture in the story Bernice signals her independence from the social hypocrisy of her cousin’s world, though ironically it is the precise world into which Fitzgerald had earlier given his sister the rules of entry. Fitzgerald included “Bernice Bobs Her Hair” in Flappers and Philosophers.
Hill School: boys’ prep school in Pottstown, Pennsylvania.
Hiram Johnson: A founder of the Progressive Party, Hiram Johnson served as governor of California (1911–17), then as a U.S. senator until his death in 1945. He opposed America’s entry into World War I, as well as its joining the League of Nations and the World Court.
Ty Cobb: outstanding baseball player who played for the Detroit Tigers (1905–26) and then the Philadelphia Athletics, retiring in 1928. He led the league in batting from 1907 to 1915 and 1917 to 1919. His lifetime batting average was .367.
red penny: Pennies from 1787 were made from copper or, beginning in 1856, an alloy of copper with nickel or zinc. Fresh from the mint, the coins were red, though they would later turn reddish brown or brown. From 1859 to 1909 pennies featured the head of an American Indian.
Annie Fellows Johnston: Johnston (1863–1931) was a children’s author, best known for the Little Colonel books, a series of thirteen novels dating from 1896. The sentimental, nostalgic novels dealt with the aristocracy of Old Kentucky.
“Little Women”: Louisa May Alcott’s successful novel (1868–69) depicting family life in nineteenth-century New England.
League of Nations: The League of Nations was formed after World War I to promote world peace and diplomacy.
amuse people or feed ’em or shock ’em: from the third act of Irish dramatist Oscar Wilde’s 1893 play A Woman of No Importance. Lord Illingworth: “To get into the best society, nowadays, one has to either feed people, amuse people, or shock people—that is all.”
Marie Antoinette: Marie Antoinette (1755–93), Queen of France, wife of Louis XVI.
THE OFFSHORE PIRATE
Fitzgerald began writing “The Offshore Pirate,” originally entitled “The Proud Piracy,” in late January 1920, during which time he lived in a New Orleans boardinghouse and made frequent trips to Montgomery, Alabama, finally convincing Zelda to resume their engagement. When he returned to New York he continued work on the story while awaiting publication of his first novel, This Side of Paradise. He mailed a version of the piece to Ober in late January, describing it as “a very odd story” and suggesting that Ober cut the ending if he thought it lacked “pep.” Ober, likely in consultation with Post editor George Horace Lorimer, asked Fitzgerald to change the ending, which he did, sending the revised story back to Ober with the comment that “the required Jazz ending” contained “one of the best lines I’ve ever written.” The Post bought the new story for $500 and published it in the May 29, 1920, issue, less than two months after Scott and Zelda were married in the rectory of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York and began their honeymoon at the Biltmore Hotel. In an odd twist, the Post had cut Fitzgerald’s “Jazz ending” in the magazine version, perhaps because they thought that it might be confusing to their readers, and substituted what was, in effect, a third one. But whatever its ending, “The Offshore Pirate” is one of Fitzgerald’s most beautifully dreamy and delightful stories; and Ardita Farnam is perhaps his most exemplary flapper. In her exchanges with the pirate, she spells out the details of the flapper creed based on faith in herself, freedom from family and social expectations, and courage: “courage as a rule of life,” she says, and “[a] sort of insistence on the value of life and the worth of transient things”—a creed that could have been spelled out in words and actions close to Ardita’s (as it likely was in those months of the story’s composition) by his fiancée Zelda, the living embodiment of the Fitzgerald flapper. Fitzgerald included “The Offshore Pirate” as the first story in Flappers and Philosophers with its “Jazz ending” restored, and this is the version reprinted here.
The Revolt of the Angels, by Anatole France: Jacques-Anatole-Fran?ois Thibault (1844–1924), winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1921 and better known under the pseudonym Anatole France, was a witty French critic, historian, novelist, and poet. The Revolt of the Angels (1914) is a satire on Christianity. A skeptic like Voltaire, France mocked both church and state, attacking ignorance and superstition.
statue of France Aroused: monument to French heroism in World War I erected on Marne battlefield by American sculptor Frederick MacMonnies.
“Narcissus ahoy!”: In Greek mythology Narcissus, son of the river god Cephissus, rejected the advances of the nymph Echo, who then pined away until nothing was left but her voice. As punishment Narcissus was compelled to fall in love with his own image, and he too pined away until he was transformed into the flower narcissus.
Stonewall Jackson: Thomas Jonathan Jackson (1826–63) was a Confederate general and Civil War hero regarded as a great tactical genius. Richard Taylor in Destruction and Reconstruction: Personal Experiences of the Late War (1879) noted that Jackson liked to suck on lemons. Historian James I. Robertson says that this is a myth and that Jackson just ate whatever fruit was available.
Sing Sing: New York state penitentiary at Ossining, New York.
Winter Garden and the Midnight Frolic: The Winter Garden at Broadway and 50th Street was one of the Great White Broadway Theaters. The Midnight Frolic shows were performed on the roof garden of the New Amsterdam Theater, 214 West 42nd Street. Florenz Ziegfeld staged the Ziegfeld Follies at New Amsterdam (1913–27), and showgirls from the Follies performed in the Midnight Frolic shows, which started at midnight and featured dance music between acts. The Frolic shows depended on drink sales after the performances. After Prohibition the Frolic shows became the Nine O’Clock Revue, shows that were sustained instead by admission charges.
Orpheum circuit: a chain of theaters making up a major vaudeville circuit in the Midwest and on the West Coast. Vaudeville was family entertainment in contrast to burlesque, which was characterized by bawdy style. Entertainers sought jobs on the Orpheum circuit, where they were assured of a long run going from theater to theater.
Plattsburg: World War I training center in Plattsburg, New York.
Booker T. Washington: Booker T. Washington (1856–1915), the founder of Tuskegee Institute in 1881, was a black leader and educator. His autobiography is entitled Up from Slavery (1901).
Callao: port in Peru near Lima.
rajah: prince from India.
Catharine of Russia: Catherine the Great (1729–96) was born Sophie Augusta Fredericka. Empress of Russia (1762–96), she was regarded as an enlightened despot.
Biddeford Pool to St. Augustine: popular East Coast resorts. Biddeford Pool was in Maine, St. Augustine in Florida.
Pollyanna: from the novel Pollyanna (1913) by Eleanor H. Porter. The main character, Pollyanna, is a child who always looks for something to be glad about despite troubles. The name has come to refer to foolish cheerfulness.
“Oh, blessed are the simple rich, for they inherit the earth!”: A reference to the Beatitudes, Matthew 5:1–2; Luke 6:20–26. From Matthew: “Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” From Luke: “Blessed be ye poor: for yours is the kingdom of heaven.”
MAY DAY
“May Day” was composed in March 1920 on the threshold of “The happiest year since I was 18,” as Fitzgerald put it in his Ledger. His first novel, This Side of Paradise, was to be published on March 26, and Zelda Sayre would become his bride on April 3. But this long, intricately woven story that Fitzgerald thought of as a novelette originated in the dark spring of 1919, when everything he wrote was rejected, his job writing copy for an advertising agency was disheartening, and his only escape was to throw himself into drunken parties with former college friends and just-met acquaintances who were, like him, living and wandering aimlessly in New York, their prewar idealism quickly fading to disenchantment. As the now-famous May Day riots of 1919, described vividly in the story, were taking place in New York and all over the country, Fitzgerald scarcely seemed to have taken notice of things beyond his own personal tribulations. Less than a year later, however, he brought his recollections of the spring and early summer of 1919—of the May Day riots, of his drunken escapades, and of his personal despair—together in the story of his partially autobiographical persona, Gordon Sterrett, in “May Day.” In the table of contents of Tales of the Jazz Age, he describes the three central episodes of the story, which appeared in the July 1920 issue of The Smart Set, as having taken place “in the spring of the previous year.” The events were “unrelated, except by the general hysteria of that spring which inaugurated the Age of Jazz,” but he wove them together into “a pattern which would give the effect of those months in New York as they appeared to at least one member of what was then the younger generation.” When Fitzgerald collected “May Day” in Tales of the Jazz Age he included it, for no obvious reason other than its general sense of finality, in the section entitled “My Last Flappers,” and he changed the ending of the Smart Set version to the much less ambiguous one that we have in the Tales of the Jazz Age version reprinted here.
Biltmore Hotel: large, elegant hotel at Madison and 43rd Street in New York City. It was gutted and rebuilt as the Bank of America Building.
Delmonico’s: elegant restaurant at Fifth Avenue and 44th Street. It opened at that location in 1898 and closed in 1923.
Welsh Margotson collars . . . the “Covington”: Welch Margetson was a London haberdashery. The “Covington” was a detachable shirt collar.
J. P. Morgan: J. P. Morgan (1837–1913) was an American banker, influential in the financing and management of most of the U.S. railroads in the late nineteenth century. With Andrew Carnegie he organized and financed the United States Steel Corporation.
John D. Rockerfeller: John D. Rockefeller (1839–1937) was an American oil financier. He and his brother William formed the Standard Oil Company. He was one of the richest men in the world, with a fortune estimated at a billion dollars.
Bolsheviki: the most radical of the Russian Marxist groups led by Nikolai Lenin. The Bolsheviks advocated war against the bourgeoisie and dictatorship of the proletariat. After the Revolution in 1917, the party was referred to as the Communist Party.
Shell hole: slang for coward.
Key: In Tales of the Jazz Age Rose is the speaker. Since this response is to Rose’s earlier remark, Fitzgerald likely intended the speaker here to be Key.
inconnu: unknown person, stranger.
Boche-lovers: Boche is a slang term for German.
Childs’: Childs’ Quick Lunch restaurants introduced the self-service cafeteria concept in 1889 with a chain of restaurants catering to downtown businesses.
Columbus Circle: Intersection of Broadway, Eighth Avenue, and 59th Street at the southwest corner of Central Park. A statue of Christopher Columbus was erected in the center of the circle in 1892.
Maxfield Parrish moonlight: Parrish (1870–1966) was a popular American painter and illustrator. He illustrated books and magazines, and his prints and calendars gave him wide exposure to the public. He used pure, transparent, thin oil glazes in combination with thin layers of varnish, giving his colors a great luminosity. His brilliant, cobalt-blue skies were known as “Maxfield Parrish blue.”
Commodore: The Commodore Hotel was on the northwest corner of 42nd Street and Lexington. It was gutted and rebuilt as the New York Grand Hyatt.
It . . . Hudson: This sentence in Tales of the Jazz Age reads, “It must have been thirty seconds after he perceived the sunbeam with the dust on it and the rip on the large leather chair that he had the sense of life close beside him, and it was another thirty seconds after that before that he realized that he was irrevocably married to Jewel Hudson.”
THE JELLY-BEAN
Though Fitzgerald records in his Ledger the composition date of “The Jelly-Bean” as May 1920, he likely began writing it in late January or February while he was awaiting the publication of This Side of Paradise. He wrote Ober that he was sending along a story that was the second in a series of “Jellybean stories (small southern town stuff ) of which The Ice Palace was the first.” The Post rejected the story, as did several other magazines, but after the publication of This Side of Paradise in March, Fitzgerald revised and returned the story to Ober in June with the setting changed from Tarleton, Georgia, to “a little city . . . in southern Mississippi,” so that it would not be considered “a series with The Ice Palace.” Metropolitan bought “The Jelly-Bean” for $900 in June 1920 and published it in the October issue. Fitzgerald included it as the lead story in his second story collection, Tales of the Jazz Age, changing its setting back to Tarleton and including it in the category of “My Last Flappers.” Nancy Lamar, the Southern belle–flapper in “The Jelly-Bean,” is undeniably in the line of descent of Sally Carrol Happer in “The Ice Palace” (years later Fitzgerald would describe “The Jelly-Bean” as “the first story to really recreate the modern southern belle”); but Nancy’s extraordinary impulsiveness points to a self-destructive streak just below the surface of the free-spirited, fun-loving Fitzgerald heroine, a quality that had not been evident before in his earlier flappers or belles. Metropolitan commented in a headnote to the story that Fitzgerald was known for writing about “the young American flapper”; but as it also pointed out, “Here is a new story which shows another side of Fitzgerald’s realistic gift.”
gob: slang for sailor in the U.S. Navy.
“Back Home in Tennessee”: “Just Try to Picture Me (Back Down Home in Tennessee),” 1915 song with lyrics by William Jerome and music by Walter Donaldson.
Sally Carrol Hopper: In “The Ice Palace” her name was “Happer.”
Liberty bonds: bonds issued by the United States to pay for World War I.
Dresden figures: The ceramic industry of Dresden, Germany, was known for elegant, hand-painted porcelain. Real lace was dipped in liquid porcelain and then applied to ceramic figurines. Dresden figures were thus delicate and fragile.
dope: Coca-Cola.
Lady Diana Manners: Diana Cooper (1892–1986), British actress and socialite known for unconventional behavior.
“Slow Train thru Arkansas”: Thomas William Jackson’s 1903 book On a Slow Train Through Arkansas convinced many readers that people in Arkansas didn’t wear shoes. The book cover depicts a train being held up by cattle on the tracks.
“Lucille”: Lucille, or, A Story of the Heart: A Pathetic Domestic Drama in Three Acts, 1836 play by William B. Bernard (1807–75).
“The Eyes of the World,” by Harold Bell Wright: Harold Bell Wright (1872–1944). During the first quarter of the twentieth century his novels outsold every other American writer. The Eyes of the World, published in 1914, is critical of the realism and naturalism in literature and art during this time. Dale B. J. Randall in “The ‘Seer’ and ‘Seen’ Themes in Gatsby and Some of Their Parallels in Eliot and Wright,” published in Twentieth Century Literature, 10 (1964), 61, notes similarities between The Eyes of the World and The Great Gatsby. Both books deal with “the relationship between falseness and fame.” Randall also notes that the dust cover of The Eyes of the World may have inspired the billboard of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg looking over the wasteland of ashes.
THE DIAMOND AS BIG AS THE RITZ
In the summer of 1915 Fitzgerald paid a visit to the Montana ranch of his Princeton classmate and lifelong friend Charles W. (Sap) Donahoe, and this visit inspired the setting for what would become his most extravagant fantasy, “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz.” The story provides a powerful foreshadowing of themes that Fitzgerald would develop more fully in The Great Gatsby, themes related to the emptiness of the American Dream and the carelessness and immorality of the very rich, who, like the Washingtons, care only about preserving the personal wealth that their diamond mountain represents. Fitzgerald began “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz” (originally entitled “The Diamond in the Sky”) in the fall of 1921 at White Bear Lake, Minnesota, and mailed the twenty-thousand-word manuscript to Ober on October 16, ten days before the birth of the Fitzgeralds’ daughter, Scottie, calling it “a wild sort of extravaganza partly on the order of The Off-shore Pirate + partly like The Russet Witch.” Though Fitzgerald had hopes that the conservative Saturday Evening Post would buy the story, he was not surprised when they declined to publish his scathing indictment of the American middle-class obsession with wealth. When McCall’s and Harper’s Bazaar also declined the story, Fitzgerald trimmed it to fifteen thousand words; and Ober eventually sold it for $300 to The Smart Set, which published it in their June 1922 issue. Fitzgerald selected “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz” for inclusion in the “Fantasy” section of Tales of the Jazz Age, maintaining in the table of contents that he had written it “utterly for my own amusement.” Earlier he had lamented to Ober the fact that “a genuinely imaginative thing like The Diamond in the Sky brings not a thing,” while “a cheap story like The Popular Girl written in one week while the baby was being born brings $1500.”
St. Midas’ School: fictional school, the naming of which references the legend of King Midas, who turned everything he touched to gold.
Ritz-Carlton Hotel: luxurious hotel at Madison and 46th Street in New York City.
duvetyn: good-quality wool with a smooth, plush appearance like velvet.
Tartar Khan: The Mongolian Tatar tribe (often misspelled as Tartar) under Genghis Khan overran Asia and Russia during the thirteenth century.
Cr?sus: Greek king of Lydia (560–546 B.C.) known for his wealth.
acciaccare: an embellishing musical note.
Titania: queen of the fairies in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Gargantua: fictional giant in stories by the French writer Fran?ois Rabelais (1494 –1553). Gargantua was voracious and vulgar but intelligent and educated in humanist ideas of the Renaissance.
George Washington: George Washington (1732–99), first president of the United States. Washington had no children.
Lord Baltimore: Lord George Calvert Baltimore (circa 1580–1632), English statesman. He was refused permission to settle in Virginia. His son Cecil founded the colony of Maryland on land granted to him after his father’s death.
El Dorado: mythical kingdom in South America rich with gold.
General Forrest: Nathan Bedford Forrest (1821–77), Confederate cavalry leader. He is believed to be one of the founders of the Ku Klux Klan.
first Babylonian Empire: circa 1850–1600 B.C.
to peach on you: to betray.
Pro deo et patria et St. Mida: Latin for “For God and country and St. Midas.”
canteen expert: The Red Cross, YMCA, and other charities set up hospitality centers for soldiers. Young women hosted the coffee and hot chocolate bars and entertained the soldiers.
Empress Eugénie: Eugénie Marie de Montigo (1826–1920), empress of France as wife of Napoleon III. Noted for extravagance, she lived in exile after 1870.
Nemesis: Greek goddess that dealt out divine justice and avenged wrongdoing.
Prometheus Enriched: reference to Aeschylus’ drama Prometheus Bound and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem “Prometheus Unbound.” (See note 30 to “Head and Shoulders.” )
God was made in man’s image: Genesis 1:27: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.”
cut me off with a hot coal: Rather than waiting for blisters to heal, a hot coal might be applied to them, popping the blister and cauterizing the wound. Scar tissue formed.
WINTER DREAMS
In his scrapbook beneath a quarter-page photograph of his first serious love, Ginevra King, and an announcement of her coming wedding in September 1919, Fitzgerald penned this handwritten line: “THE END OF A ONCE POIGNANT STORY.” The love story of Fitzgerald’s relationship with Ginevra King, which began during the Christmas holidays of 1914 and ended when she threw him over “with the most supreme boredom and indifference,” is at the heart of “Winter Dreams,” the most important of the stories that anticipate the subjects and themes of The Great Gatsby. The writing of “Winter Dreams” was begun while the Fitzgeralds lived with their ten-month-old daughter, Scottie, at the White Bear Yacht Club outside St. Paul, Minnesota, during late August 1922; he finished it in mid-September in St. Paul’s Commodore Hotel, shortly before the Fitzgeralds returned to New York for the publication of Tales of the Jazz Age. In the version of “Winter Dreams” bought by Metropolitan for $900 and then published in the December 1922 issue (the version reprinted in this volume), Fitzgerald’s full-paragraph description of Judy Jones’s house at the beginning of section three is used with only slight alteration to describe Daisy Fay’s house in chapter eight of The Great Gatsby. In the version of “Winter Dreams” that Fitzgerald revised for inclusion in his third story collection, All the Sad Young Men (1926), he removed virtually the entire paragraph of description of the house. This is but one of many substantive changes Fitzgerald would make when he revised the story; but this one is particularly interesting since it suggests that Fitzgerald did not wish to draw attention to the fact that he had taken descriptions from his “popular” fiction and put them in The Great Gatsby, which had appeared less than a year before All the Sad Young Men. The most important connections between “Winter Dreams” and The Great Gatsby, of course, lie in the parallels between Dexter Green and Jay Gatsby, between Judy Jones and Daisy Fay, and between the relationships in two of Fitzgerald’s most beautiful love stories.
bloomers: full, loose trousers gathered at the knee.
knickerbockers: pants that rolled up just below the knee. The style came from Dutch settlers in New York in the 1600s.
“The Pink Lady” and “The Chocolate Soldier” and “Mlle. Modiste”: Broadway musicals.
coupé: two-door automobile.
the war came to America: Congress voted to enter World War I on April 6, 1917. The war ended with the armistice on November 11, 1918. The battles were all fought in Europe.
ABSOLUTION
In his Ledger, Fitzgerald recounted an episode in his life when, at the age of eleven, he lied in confession by saying to a priest, “Oh, no, I never tell a lie.” This event is the origin of his brilliant story “Absolution,” which, like “The Ordeal” and then “Benediction,” centers on a moral dilemma associated with a sacred rite in the Roman Catholic Church. In April 1924, just before leaving Great Neck, New York, to live on the French Riviera, where Fitzgerald would complete The Great Gatsby, he wrote about “Absolution” and his novel-in-progress to Maxwell Perkins: “Much of what I wrote last summer was good but it was so interrupted that it was ragged & in approaching it from a new angle, I’ve discarded a lot of it—in one case 18,000 words (part of which will appear in the Mercury as a short story).” Then in late June, after writing the draft of the novel that would be published in April 1925, he wrote Perkins that “Absolution” was to have been “the prologue of the novel.” Years later Fitzgerald would write in a letter that the story “was intended to be a picture of [Gatsby’s] early life.” Understandably Fitzgerald’s comments have prompted speculation about the circumstance of the story’s composition and its relationship to The Great Gatsby. “Absolution” may indeed have been a prologue to a very early draft of the novel that Fitzgerald began while he and Zelda lived in Great Neck between mid-October 1922 and April 1924. This draft of the novel, however, does not survive. The manuscript that Fitzgerald wrote on the Riviera during the summer and fall of 1924, in essence the version of The Great Gatsby that was finally published, does not, of course, contain “Absolution ” as a prologue. After its publication in the June issue of American Mercury, Fitzgerald selected “Absolution” for inclusion in his beautifully haunting 1926 collection All the Sad Young Men, which also contained his Gatsby-related “The Rich Boy,” “Winter Dreams,” and “ ‘The Sensible Thing,’ ” as well as what was perhaps truly his last flapper story, “Rags Martin-Jones and the Pr-nce of W-les.”
the valley of the Red River: the Red River Valley in northwestern Minnesota has broad, flat prairies.
“Blatchford Sarnemington, Blatchford Sarnemington!”: perhaps a reference to Samuel Blatchford (1820–93), who was a justice of the U.S. Supreme Court (1882–93).
second wave of German and Irish stock: German immigration to Minnesota peaked in the 1860s and ’70s. Germans left because of overcrowded cities, lack of jobs, and inheritance laws leaving land only to the eldest son. The Minnesota Territory and Northern Pacific Railway advertised in Germany for immigrants. In 1878 there was a second wave of Irish immigrants escaping famine. Swedes left Sweden because of religious persecution, the lack of land, and mandatory military service, and were attracted to Minnesota because of the farmland and jobs available in the timber industry and iron mining. Railroad transportation sped settlement of the territory. The immigrants took advantage of the Homestead Act to become land-owners.
James J. Hill: James J. Hill (1838–1916), wealthy railroad magnate of the Gilded Age. After acquiring railroad properties, he formed the Great Northern Railway Company in 1889. He and J. P. Morgan won a fight with Edward Harriman and Jacob Schiff for control of the Northern Pacific. Known as “the Empire Builder,” he started with nothing but a vision of the future.
Alger books: Horatio Alger, Jr. (1832–99), popular American writer of boys’ adventures. He wrote 118 novels in book form, another 280 in magazines, and more than 500 short stories. Most of his stories had a “rags to riches” theme, with young protagonists who found success through pluck and luck.
collection of cigar-bands: Collecting cigar bands and labels was a popular hobby in the first decades of the twentieth century. The chromolithographed labels produced from 1860 to 1920 were beautiful works of art.
reform school: perhaps the Minnesota State Training School in Red Wing.
“Domini, non sum dignus . . . anima mea”: part of the Latin Mass. Translation: “Lord, I am not worthy that Thou shouldst enter under my roof, but only say the word, and my soul shall be healed.”
“Corpus Domini . . . ?ternam”: “May the Body of our Lord Jesus Christ keep my soul unto life everlasting.”
“Sagitta Volante in Dei”: Psalm 91:5, “Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night; nor for the arrow that flieth by day.”
things go glimmering: Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, canto 2, stanza 2, by Lord Byron: “Ancient of days! august Athena! where, / Where are thy men of might? thy grand in soul? / Gone—glimmering through the dream of things that were.”
pennon: flag, ensign of a knight.
German cuirassiers at Sedan: The Battle of Sedan on September 1, 1870, was the decisive battle of the Franco-Prussian War. Napeoleon surrendered. Cuirassiers are mounted soldiers wearing body armor.