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- Herausgeber: Musaicum Books
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017
In 'The Non-Fiction Writings of F. Scott Fitzgerald', readers are treated to a collection of various essays, letters, and other non-fiction works by the acclaimed author. Fitzgerald's distinct literary style, characterized by vivid imagery and introspective themes, is evident in these non-fiction pieces as well. This book provides a deeper insight into Fitzgerald's thoughts on society, culture, and the human condition, showcasing his keen observational skills and wit. The collection offers readers a fascinating glimpse into the mind of one of the most celebrated American writers of the 20th century. Fitzgerald's non-fiction writings are a testament to his versatility as an author, further cementing his legacy in the literary world. This book is a must-read for fans of Fitzgerald's fiction looking to explore the author's insights on a wide range of topics in a more personal and direct manner.
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The Non-Fiction Writings of F. Scott Fitzgerald
Published by
Books
Table of Contents
Essays and Articles.
Who’s Who—and Why.
The Saturday Evening Post (18 September 1920)
Table of Contents
The history of my life is the history of the struggle between an overwhelming urge to write and a combination of circumstances bent on keeping me from it.
When I lived in St. Paul and was about twelve I wrote all through every class in school in the back of my geography book and first year Latin and on the margins of themes and declensions and mathematics problems. Two years later a family congress decided that the only way to force me to study was to send me to boarding school. This was a mistake. It took my mind off my writing. I decided to play football, to smoke, to go to college, to do all sorts of irrelevant things that had nothing to do with the real business of life, which, of course, was the proper mixture of description and dialogue in the short story.
But in school I went off on a new tack. I saw a musical comedy called The Quaker Girl, and from that day forth my desk bulged with Gilbert & Sullivan librettos and dozens of notebooks containing the germs of dozens of musical comedies.
Near the end of my last year at school I came across a new musical-comedy score lying on top of the piano. It was a show called His Honor the Sultan, and the title furnished the information that it had been presented by the Triangle Club of Princeton University.
That was enough for me. From then on the university question was settled. I was bound for Princeton.
I spent my entire Freshman year writing an operetta for the Triangle Club. To do this I failed in algebra, trigonometry, coordinate geometry and hygiene. But the Triangle Club accepted my show, and by tutoring all through a stuffy August I managed to come back a Sophomore and act in it as a chorus girl. A little after this came a hiatus. My health broke down and I left college one December to spend the rest of the year recuperating in the West. Almost my final memory before I left was of writing a last lyric on that year’s Triangle production while in bed in the infirmary with a high fever.
The next year, 1916–17, found me back in college, but by this time I had decided that poetry was the only thing worth while, so with my head ringing with the meters of Swinburne and the matters of Rupert Brooke I spent the spring doing sonnets, ballads and rondels into the small hours. I had read somewhere that every great poet had written great poetry before he was twenty-one. I had only a year and, besides, war was impending. I must publish a book of startling verse before I was engulfed.
By autumn I was in an infantry officers’ training camp at Fort Leavenworth, with poetry in the discard and a brand-new ambition—I was writing an immortal novel. Every evening, concealing my pad behind Small Problems for Infantry, I wrote paragraph after paragraph on a somewhat edited history of me and my imagination. The outline of twenty-two chapters, four of them in verse, was made, two chapters were completed; and then I was detected and the game was up. I could write no more during study period.
This was a distinct complication. I had only three months to live—in those days all infantry officers thought they had only three months to live—and I had left no mark on the world. But such consuming ambition was not to be thwarted by a mere war. Every Saturday at one o’clock when the week’s work was over I hurried to the Officers’ Club, and there, in a corner of a roomful of smoke, conversation and rattling newspapers, I wrote a one-hundred-and-twenty-thousand-word novel on the consecutive weekends of three months. There was no revising; there was no time for it. As I finished each chapter I sent it to a typist in Princeton.
Meanwhile I lived in its smeary pencil pages. The drills, marches and Small Problems for Infantry were a shadowy dream. My whole heart was concentrated upon my book.
I went to my regiment happy. I had written a novel. The war could now go on. I forgot paragraphs and pentameters, similes and syllogisms. I got to be a first lieutenant, got my orders overseas—and then the publishers wrote me that though The Romantic Egotist was the most original manuscript they had received for years they couldn’t publish it. It was crude and reached no conclusion.
It was six months after this that I arrived in New York and presented my card to the office boys of seven city editors asking to be taken on as a. reporter. I had just turned twenty-two, the war was over, and I was going to trail murderers by day and do short stories by night. But the newspapers didn’t need me. They sent their office boys out to tell me they didn’t need me. They decided definitely and irrevocably by the sound of my name on a calling card that I was absolutely unfitted to be a reporter.
Instead I became an advertising man at ninety dollars a month, writing the slogans that while away the weary hours in rural trolley cars. After hours I wrote stories—from March to June. There were nineteen altogether; the quickest written in an hour and a half, the slowest in three days. No one bought them, no one sent personal letters. I had one hundred and twenty-two rejection slips pinned in a frieze about my room. I wrote movies. I wrote song lyrics. I wrote complicated advertising schemes. I wrote poems. I wrote sketches. I wrote jokes. Near the end of June I sold one story for thirty dollars.
On the Fourth of July, utterly disgusted with myself and all the editors, I went home to St. Paul and informed family and friends that I had given up my position and had come home to write a novel. They nodded politely, changed the subject and spoke of me very gently. But this time I knew what I was doing. I had a novel to write at last, and all through two hot months I wrote and revised and compiled and boiled down. On September fifteen This Side of Paradise was accepted by special delivery.
In the next two months I wrote eight stories and sold nine. The ninth was accepted by the same magazine that had rejected it four months before. Then, in November, I sold my first story to the editors of The Saturday Evening Post. By February I had sold them half a dozen. Then my novel came out. Then I got married. Now I spend my time wondering how it all happened.
In the words of the immortal Julius Caesar: “That’s all there is; there isn’t any more.”
Three Cities.
Brentano’s Book Chat (September-October 1921)
Table of Contents
It began in Paris, that impression—fleeting, chiefly literary, unprofound—that the world was growing darker. We carefully reconstructed an old theory and, blonde both of us, cast supercilious Nordic glances at the play of the dark children around us. We had left America less than one half of one per cent. American but the pernicious and sentimental sap was destined to rise again within us. We boiled with ancient indignations toward the French. We sat in front of Anatole France’s house for an hour in hope of seeing the old gentleman come out—but we thought simultaneously that when he dies, the France of flame and glory dies with him. We drove in the Bois de Boulogne—thinking of France as a spoiled and revengeful child which, having kept Europe in a turmoil for two hundred years has spent the last forty demanding assistance in its battles, that the continent may be kept as much like a bloody sewer as possible.
In Brentano’s near the Café de la Paix, I picked up Dreiser’s suppressed “Genius” for three dollars. With the exception of “The Titan” I liked it best among his five novels, in spite of the preposterous Christian Science episode near the end. We stayed in Paris long enough to finish it.
Italy, which is to the English what France is to the Americans, was in a pleasant humor. As a French comedy writer remarked we inevitably detest our benefactors, so I was glad to see that Italy was casting off four years of unhealthy suppressed desires. In Florence you could hardly blame a squad of Italian soldiers for knocking down an Omaha lady who was unwilling to give up her compartment to a Colonel. Why, the impudent woman could not speak Italian! So the Carabinieri can hardly be blamed for being incensed. And as for knocking her around a little—well, boys will be boys. The American ambassadorial tradition in Rome having for some time been in the direct line of sentimental American literature, I do not doubt that even they found some compensating sweetness in the natures of the naughty Bersaglieri.
We were in Rome two weeks. You can see the fascination of the place. We stayed two weeks even though we could have left in two days—that is we could have left if we had not run out of money. I met John Carter, the author of “These Wild Young People,” in the street one day and he cashed me a check for a thousand lira. We spent this on ointment.
The ointment trust thrives in Rome. All the guests at the two best hotels are afflicted with what the proprietors call “mosquitos too small for screens.” We do not call them that in America.
John Carter lent us “Alice Adams” and we read it aloud to each other under the shadow of Caesar’s house. If it had not been for Alice we should have collapsed and died in Rome as so many less fortunate literary people have done. “Alice Adams” more than atones for the childish heroics of “Ramsey Milholland” and for the farcical spiritualism in “The Magnificent Ambersons.” After having made three brave attempts to struggle through “Moon Calf” it was paradise to read someone who knows how to write.
By bribing the ticket agent with one thousand lira to cheat some old general out of his compartment—the offer was the agent’s, not ours—we managed to leave Italy.
“Vous avez quelque chose pour déclarer?” asked the border customs officials early next morning (only they asked it in better French).
I awoke with a horrible effort from a dream of Italian beggars.
“Oui!” I shrieked, “Je veux déclare que je suis trés, trés heureux a partir d’Italie!” I could understand at last why the French loved France. They have seen Italy.
We had been to Oxford before—after Italy we went back there arriving gorgeously at twilight when the place was fully peopled for us by the ghosts of ghosts—the characters, romantic, absurd or melancholy, of “Sinister Street,” “Zuleicka Dobson” and “Jude the Obscure.” But something was wrong now—something that would never be right again. Here was Rome—here on the High were the shadows of the Via Appia. In how many years would our descendents approach this ruin with supercilious eyes to buy postcards from men of a short, inferior race—a race that once were Englishmen. How soon—for money follows the rich lands and the healthy stock, and art follows begging after money. Your time will come, New York, fifty years, sixty. Apollo’s head is peering crazily, in new colors that our generation will never live to know, over the tip of the next century.
What I Think and Feel at 25.
American Magazine (September 1922)
Table of Contents
The man stopped me on the street. He was ancient, but not a mariner. He had a long beard and a glittering eye. I think he was a friend of the family’s, or something.
“Say, Fitzgerald,” he said, “say! Will you tell me this: What in the blinkety-blank-blank has a—has a man of your age got to go saying these pessimistic things for? What’s the idea?” I tried to laugh him off. He told me that he and my grandfather had been boys together. After that, I had no wish to corrupt him. So I tried to laugh him off.
“Ha-ha-ha!” I said determinedly. “Ha-ha-ha!” And then I added, “Ha-ha! Well, I’ll see you later.”
With this I attempted to pass him by, but he seized my arm firmly and showed symptoms of spending the afternoon in my company.
“When I was a boy—” he began, and then he drew the picture that people always draw of what excellent, happy, care-free souls they were at twenty-five. That is, he told me all the things he liked to think he thought in the misty past.
I allowed him to continue. I even made polite grunts at intervals to express my astonishment. For I will be doing it myself some day. I will concoct for my juniors a Scott Fitzgerald that, it’s safe to say, none of my contemporaries would at present recognize. But they will be old themselves then; and they will respect my concoction as I shall respect theirs….
“And now,” the happy ancient was concluding; “you are young, you have good health, you have made money, you are exceptionally happily married, you have achieved considerable success while you are still young enough to enjoy it—will you tell an innocent old man just why you write those—”
I succumbed. I would tell him. I began:
“Well, you see, sir, it seems to me that as a man gets older he grows more vulner—”
But I got no further. As soon as I began to talk he hurriedly shook my hand and departed. He did not want to listen. He did not care why I thought what I thought. He had simply felt the need of giving a little speech, and I had been the victim. His receding form disappeared with a slight wobble around the next corner.
“All right, you old bore,” I muttered; “don’t listen, then. You wouldn’t understand, anyhow.” I took an awful kick at a curbstone, as a sort of proxy, and continued my walk.
Now, that’s the first incident. The second was when a man came to me not long ago from a big newspaper syndicate, and said:
“Mr. Fitzgerald, there’s a rumor around New York that you and—ah—you and Mrs. Fitzgerald are going to commit suicide at thirty because you hate and dread middle-age. I want to give you some publicity in this matter by getting it up as a story for the feature sections of five hundred and fourteen Sunday newspapers. In one corner of the page will be—”
“Don’t!” I cried, “I know: In one corner will stand the doomed couple, she with an arsenic sundae, he with an Oriental dagger. Both of them will have their eyes fixed on a large clock, on the face of which will be a skull and crossbones. In the other corner will be a big calendar with the date marked in red.”
“That’s it!” cried the syndicate man enthusiastically. “You’ve grasped the idea. Now, what we—”
“Listen here!” I said severely. “There is nothing in that rumor. Nothing whatever. When I’m thirty I won’t be this me—I’ll be somebody else. I’ll have a different body, because it said so in a book I read once, and I’ll have a different attitude on everything. I’ll even be married to a different person—”
“Ah!” he interrupted, with an eager light in his eye, and produced a notebook. “That’s very interesting.”
“No, no, no!” I cried hastily. “I mean my wife will be different.”
“I see. You plan a divorce.”
“No! I mean—”
“Well, it’s all the same. Now, what we want, in order to fill out this story, is a lot of remarks about petting-parties. Do you think the—ah—petting-party is a serious menace to the Constitution? And, just to link it up, can we say that your suicide will be largely on account of past petting-parties?”
“See here!” I interrupted in despair. “Try to understand. I don’t know what petting-parties have to do with the question. I have always dreaded age, because it invariably increases the vulner—”
But, as in the case of the family friend, I got no further. The syndicate man grasped my hand firmly. He shook it. Then he muttered something about interviewing a chorus girl who was reported to have an anklet of solid platinum, and hurried off.
That’s the second incident. You see, I had managed to tell two different men that “age increased the vulner—” But they had not been interested. The old man had talked about himself and the syndicate man had talked about petting-parties. When I began to talk about the “vulner—” they both had sudden engagements.
So, with one hand on the Eighteenth Amendment and the other hand on the serious part of the Constitution, I have taken an oath that I will tell somebody my story.
As a man grows older it stands to reason that his vulnerability increases. Three years ago, for instance, I could be hurt in only one way—through myself. If my best friend’s wife had her hair torn off by an electric washing-machine, I was grieved, of course. I would make my friend a long speech full of “old mans,” and finish up with a paragraph from Washington’s Farewell Address; but when I’d finished I could go to a good restaurant and enjoy my dinner as usual. If my second cousin’s husband had an artery severed while having his nails manicured, I will not deny that it was a matter of considerable regret to me. But when I heard the news I did not faint and have to be taken home in a passing laundry wagon.
In fact I was pretty much invulnerable. I put up a conventional wail whenever a ship was sunk or a train got wrecked; but I don’t suppose, if the whole city of Chicago had been wiped out, I’d have lost a night’s sleep over it—unless something led me to believe that St. Paul was the next city on the list. Even then I could have moved my luggage over to Minneapolis and rested pretty comfortably all night.
But that was three years ago when I was still a young man. I was only twenty-two. When I said anything the book reviewers didn’t like, they could say, “Gosh! That certainly is callow!” And that finished me. Label it “callow,” and that was enough.
Well, now I’m twenty-five I’m not callow any longer—at least not so that I can notice it when I look in an ordinary mirror. Instead, I’m vulnerable. I’m vulnerable in every way.
For the benefit of revenue agents and moving-picture directors who may be reading this magazine I will explain that vulnerable means easily wounded. Well, that’s it. I’m more easily wounded. I can not only be wounded in the chest, the feelings, the teeth, the bank account; but I can be wounded in the dog. Do I make myself clear? In the dog.
No, that isn’t a new part of the body just discovered by the Rockefeller Institute. I mean a real dog. I mean if anyone gives my family dog to the dog-catcher he’s hurting me almost as much as he’s hurting the dog. He’s hurting me in the dog. And if our doctor says to me tomorrow, “That child of yours isn’t going to be a blonde after all,” well, he’s wounded me in a way I couldn’t have been wounded in before, because I never before had a child to be wounded in. And if my daughter grows up and when she’s sixteen elopes with some fellow from Zion City who believes the world is flat—I wouldn’t write this except that she’s only six months old and can’t quite read yet, so it won’t put any ideas in her head—why, then I’ll be wounded again.
About being wounded through your wife I will not enter into, as it is a delicate subject. I will not say anything about my case. But I have private reasons for knowing that if anybody said to your wife one day that it was a shame she would wear yellow when it made her look so peaked, you would suffer violently, within six hours afterward, for what that person said.
“Attack him through his wife!” “Kidnap his child!” “Tie a tin can to his dog’s tail!” How often do we hear those slogans in life, not to mention in the movies. And how they make me wince! Three years ago, you could have yelled them outside my window all through a summer night, and I wouldn’t have batted an eye. The only thing that would have aroused me would have been: “Wait a minute. I think I can pot him from here.”
I used to have about ten square feet of skin vulnerable to chills and fevers. Now I have about twenty. I have not personally enlarged—the twenty feet includes the skin of my family—but I might as well have, because if a chill or fever strikes any bit of that twenty feet of skin I begin to shiver.
And so I ooze gently into middle age; for the true middle-age is not the acquirement of years, but the acquirement of a family. The incomes of the childless have wonderful elasticity. Two people require a room and a bath; couple with child require the millionaire’s suite on the sunny side of the hotel.
So let me start the religious part of this article by saying that if the Editor thought he was going to get something young and happy—yes, and callow—I have got to refer him to my daughter, if she will give dictation. If anybody thinks that I am callow they ought to see her—she’s so callow it makes me laugh. It even makes her laugh, too, to think how callow she is. If any literary critics saw her they’d have a nervous breakdown right on the spot. But, on the other hand, anybody writing to me, an editor or anybody else, is writing to a middle-aged man.
Well, I’m twenty-five, and I have to admit that I’m pretty well satisfied with some of that time. That is to say, the first five years seemed to go all right—but the last twenty! They have been a matter of violently contrasted extremes. In fact, this has struck me so forcibly that from time to time I have kept charts, trying to figure out the years when I was closest to happy. Then I get mad and tear up the charts.
Skipping that long list of mistakes which passes for my boyhood I will say that I went away to preparatory school at fifteen, and that my two years there were wasted, were years of utter and profitless unhappiness. I was unhappy because I was cast into a situation where everybody thought I ought to behave just as they behaved—and I didn’t have the courage to shut up and go my own way, anyhow.
For example, there was a rather dull boy at school named Percy, whose approval, I felt, for some unfathomable reason, I must have. So, for the sake of this negligible cipher, I started out to let as much of my mind as I had under mild cultivation sink back into a state of heavy underbrush. I spent hours in a damp gymnasium fooling around with a muggy basket-ball and working myself into a damp, muggy rage, when I wanted, instead, to go walking in the country.
And all this to please Percy. He thought it was the thing to do. If you didn’t go through the damp business every day you were “morbid.” That was his favorite word, and it had me frightened. I didn’t want to be morbid. So I became muggy instead.
Besides, Percy was dull in classes; so I used to pretend to be dull also. When I wrote stories I wrote them secretly, and felt like a criminal. If I gave birth to any idea that did not appeal to Percy’s pleasant, vacant mind I discarded the idea at once and felt like apologizing.
Of course Percy never got into college. He went to work and I have scarcely seen him since, though I understand that he has since become an undertaker of considerable standing. The time I spent with him was wasted; but, worse than that, I did not enjoy the wasting of it. At least, he had nothing to give me, and I had not the faintest reasons for caring what he thought or said. But when I discovered this it was too late.
The worst of it is that this same business went on until I was twenty-two. That is, I’d be perfectly happy doing just what I wanted to do, when somebody would begin shaking his head and saying:
“Now see here, Fitzgerald, you mustn’t go on doing that. It’s—it’s morbid.”
And I was always properly awed by the word “morbid,” so I quit what I wanted to do and what it was good for me to do, and did what some other fellow wanted me to do. Every once in a while, though, I used to tell somebody to go to the devil; otherwise I never would have done anything at all.
In officers’ training camp during 1917 I started to write a novel. I would begin work at it every Saturday afternoon at one and work like mad until midnight. Then I would work at it from six Sunday morning until six Sunday night, when I had to report back to barracks. I was thoroughly enjoying myself.
After a month three friends came to me with scowling faces:
“See here, Fitzgerald, you ought to use the weekends in getting some good rest and recreation. The way you use them is—is morbid!”
That word convinced me. It sent the usual shiver down my spine. The next week end I laid the novel aside, went into town with the others and danced all night at a party. But I began to worry about my novel. I worried so much that I returned to camp, not rested, but utterly miserable. I was morbid then. But I never went to town again. I finished the novel. It was rejected; but a year later I rewrote it and it was published under the title, “This Side of Paradise.”
But before I rewrote it I had a list of “morbids,” chalked up against people that, placed end to end, would have reached to the nearest lunatic asylum. It was morbid:
1st. To get engaged without enough money to marry
2d. To leave the advertising business after three months
3d. To want to write at all
4th. To think I could
5th. To write about “silly little boys and girls that nobody wants to read about”
And so on, until a year later, when I found to my surprise that everybody had been only kidding—they had believed all their lives that writing was the only thing for me, and had hardly been able to keep from telling me all the time.
But I am really not old enough to begin drawing morals out of my own life to elevate the young. I will save that pastime until I am sixty; and then, as I have said, I will concoct a Scott Fitzgerald who will make Benjamin Franklin look like a lucky devil who loafed into prominence. Even in the above account I have managed to sketch the outline of a small but neat halo. I take it all back. I am twenty-five years old. I wish I had ten million dollars, and never had to do another lick of work as long as I live.
But as I do have to keep at it, I might as well declare that the chief thing I’ve learned so far is: If you don’t know much—well, nobody else knows much more. And nobody knows half as much about your own interests as you know.
If you believe in anything very strongly—including yourself—and if you go after that thing alone, you end up in jail, in heaven, in the headlines, or in the largest house in the block, according to what you started after. If you don’t believe in anything very strongly—including yourself—you go along, and enough money is made out of you to buy an automobile for some other fellow’s son, and you marry if you’ve got time, and if you do you have a lot of children, whether you have time or not, and finally you get tired and you die.
If you’re in the second of those two classes you have the most fun before you’re twenty-five. If you’re in the first, you have it afterward.
You see, if you’re in the first class you’ll frequently be called a darn fool—or worse. That was as true in Philadelphia about 1727 as it is to-day. Anybody knows that a kid that walked around town munching a loaf of bread and not caring what anybody thought was a darn fool. It stands to reason! But there are a lot of darn fools who get their pictures in the schoolbooks—with their names under the pictures. And the sensible fellows, the ones that had time to laugh, well, their pictures are in there, too. But their names aren’t—and the laughs look sort of frozen on their faces.
The particular sort of darn fool I mean ought to remember that he’s least a darn fool when he’s being called a darn fool. The main thing is to be your own kind of a darn fool.
(The above advice is of course only for darn fools under twenty-five. It may be all wrong for darn fools over twenty-five.)
I don’t know why it is that when I start to write about being twenty-five I suddenly begin to write about darn fools. I do not see any connection. Now, if I were asked to write about darn fools, I would write about people who have their front teeth filled with gold, because a friend of mine did that the other day, and after being mistaken for a jewelry store three times in one hour he came up and asked me if I thought it showed too much. As I am a kind man, I told him I would not have noticed it if the sun hadn’t been so strong on it. I asked him why he had it done.
“Well,” he said, “the dentist told me a porcelain filling never lasted more than ten years.”
“Ten years! Why, you may be dead in ten years.”
“That’s true.”
“Of course it’ll be nice that all the time you’re in your coffin you’ll never have to worry about your teeth.”
And it occurred to me that about half the people in the world are always having their front teeth filled with gold. That is, they’re figuring on twenty years from now. Well, when you’re young it’s all right figuring your success a long ways ahead—if you don’t make it too long. But as for your pleasure—your front teeth!—it’s better to figure on to-day.
And that’s the second thing I learned while getting vulnerable and middle-aged. Let me recapitulate:
1st. I think that compared to what you know about your own business nobody else knows anything. And if anybody knows more about it than you do, then it’s his business and you’re his man, not your own. And as soon as your business becomes your business you’ll know more about it than anybody else.
2d. Never have your front teeth filled with gold.
And now I will stop pretending to be a pleasant young fellow and disclose my real nature. I will prove to you, if you have not found it out already, that I have a mean streak and nobody would like to have me for a son.
I do not like old people. They are always talking about their “experience”—and very few of them have any. In fact, most of them go on making the same mistakes at fifty and believing in the same white list of approved twenty-carat lies that they did at seventeen. And it all starts with my old friend vulnerability.
Take a woman of thirty. She is considered lucky if she has allied herself to a multitude of things; her husband, her children, her home, her servant. If she has three homes, eight children, and fourteen servants, she is considered luckier still. (This, of course, does not generally apply to more husbands).
Now, when she was young she worried only about herself; but now she must be worried by any trouble occurring to any of these people or things. She is ten times as vulnerable. Moreover, she can never break one of these ties or relieve herself of one of these burdens except at the cost of great pain and sorrow to herself. They are the things that break her, and yet they are the most precious things in life.
In consequence, everything which doesn’t go to make her secure, or at least to give her a sense of security, startles and annoys her. She acquires only the useless knowledge found in cheap movies, cheap novels, and the cheap memoirs of titled foreigners.
By this time her husband also has become suspicious of anything gay or new. He seldom addresses her, except in a series of profound grunts, or to ask whether she has sent his shirts out to the laundry. At the family dinner on Sunday he occasionally gives her some fascinating statistics on party politics, some opinions from that morning’s newspaper editorial.
But after thirty, both husband and wife know in their hearts that the game is up. Without a few cocktails social intercourse becomes a torment. It is no longer spontaneous; it is a convention by which they agree to shut their eyes to the fact that the other men and women they know are tired and dull and fat, and yet must be put up with as politely as they themselves are put up with in their turn.
I have seen many happy young couples—but I have seldom seen a happy home after husband and wife are thirty. Most homes can be divided into four classes:
1st. Where the husband is a pretty conceited guy who thinks that a dinky insurance business is a lot harder than raising babies, and that everybody ought to kow-tow to him at home. He is the kind whose sons usually get away from home as soon as they can walk.
2d. When the wife has got a sharp tongue and the martyr complex, and thinks she’s the only woman in the world that ever had a child. This is probably the unhappiest home of all.
3d. Where the children are always being reminded how nice it was of the parents to bring them into the world, and how they ought to respect their parents for being born in 1870 instead of 1902.
4th. Where everything is for the children. Where the parents pay much more for the children’s education than they can afford, and spoil them unreasonably. This usually ends by the children being ashamed of the parents.
And yet I think that marriage is the most satisfactory institution we have. I’m simply stating my belief that when Life has used us for its purposes it takes away all our attractive qualities and gives us, instead, ponderous but shallow convictions of our own wisdom and “experience.”
Needless to say, as old people run the world, an enormous camouflage has been built up to hide the fact that only young people are attractive or important.
Having got in wrong with many of the readers of this article, I will now proceed to close. If you don’t agree with me on any minor points you have a right to say: “Gosh! He certainly is callow!” and turn to something else. Personally I do not consider that I am callow, because I do not see how anybody of my age could be callow. For instance, I was reading an article in this magazine a few months ago by a fellow named Ring Lardner that says he is thirty-five, and it seemed to me how young and happy and care free he was in comparison with me.
Maybe he is vulnerable, too. He did not say so. Maybe when you get to be thirty-five you do not know any more how vulnerable you are. All I can say is that if he ever gets to be twenty-five again, which is very unlikely, maybe he will agree with me. The older I grow the more I get so I don’t know anything. If I had been asked to do this article about five years ago it might have been worth reading.
How I Would Sell my Book if I Were a Bookseller.
Bookseller and Stationer (January 15, 1923)
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I believe that a book by a well-known author should be given a full window display—I don’t believe a mixed window display of four books for four days is nearly as effective as that of one book for one day. To attract attention it might be a coy idea to set all the books upside down and to have a man with large spectacles sitting in the midst of them, frantically engrossed in the perusal of a copy. He should have his eyes wide with rapt attention and his left hand on his heart.
Seriously, the above title puzzles me. If I were a bookseller I should probably push the most popular book of the season, whether it was trash or not.
The vogue of books like mine depends almost entirely on the stupendous critical power at present wielded by H. L. Mencken. And it is his influence at second hand that is particularly important. Such men as Weaver, in The Brooklyn Eagle; Bishop, in Vanity Fair; Boyd, in the St. Paul News, and dozens of others, show the liberal tendencies which Mencken has popularized.
The growing demand for likely American books is almost directly created by these men, who give no room to trash in their columns and, city by city, are making the work of living writers acceptable to the wavering and uncertain “better public.”
I did not know “This Side of Paradise” was a flapper book until George Jean Nathan, who had read parts of it before publication, told me it was. However, I do not consider any of my heroines typical of the average bob-skirted “Dulcy” who trips through the Biltmore lobby at tea time. My heroine is what the flapper would like to think she is—the actual flapper is a much duller and grayer proposition. I tried to set down different aspects of an individual—I was accused of creating a type.
I think that if I were a bookseller with a real interest in better books I would announce the new good books as the publisher announced them to me and take orders from customers in advance.
“See here,” I would say; “this is a novel by Fitzgerald; you know, the fella who started all that business about flappers. I understand that his new one is terribly sensational (the word ‘damn’ is in the title). Let me put you down for one.”
And this would be approximately true. I am not in love with sensationalism, but I must plead guilty to it in this instance. And I feel quite sure that, though my books may annoy many, they will bore no one.
10 Best Books I Have Read.
Jersey City Evening Journal (24 April 192)
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Samuel Butler’s Note Books. The mind and heart of my favorite Victorian.
The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche (H. L. Mencken). A keen, hard intelligence interpreting the Great Modern Philosopher.
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (James Joyce). Because James Joyce is to be the most profound literary influence in the next fifty years.
Zuleika Dobson (Max Beerbohm). For the sheer delight of its exquisite snobbery.
The Mysterious Stranger (Mark Twain). Mark Twain in his most sincere mood. A book and a startling revelation.
Nostromo (Joseph Conrad). The great novel of the past fifty years, as Ulysses is the great novel of the future.
Vanity Fair (Thackeray). No explanation required.
The Oxford Book of English Verse. This seems to me a better collection than Palgrave’s.
Thais (Anatole France). The great book of the man who is Wells and Shaw together.
Seventeen (Booth Tarkington). The funniest book I’ve ever read.—
Imagination—And a few Mothers.
The Ladies’ Home Journal (June 1923)
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Back in the days of tenement uplift, the homes of tired stevedores and banana peddlers were frequently invaded by pompous dowagers who kept their limousines purring at the curb. “Giuseppi,” say the pompous dowagers, “what you need to brighten up your home is a game of of charades every evening.”
“Charade?” inquires the bewildered Giuseppi.
“Family charades,” beam the dowagers. “For instance, suppose some night your wife and the girls take the name ‘Viscountess Salisbury,’ or the words ‘initiative and referendum,’ and act them out—and you and the boys can guess what words they’re acting. So much more real fun than the saloon.”
Having sown the good seed, the dowagers reenter their limousines and drive to the next Giuseppi on their list, a list made out by the Society for Encouraging Parlor Games in Poor Families.
Thus went the attempt from on high to bring imagination into the home, an attempt about as successful as the current effort to clothe the native Hawaiians in dollar-eighty-five cheesecloth Mother Hubbards manufactured in Paterson, New Jersey.
The average home is a horribly dull place. This is a platitude; it’s so far taken for granted that it’s the basis of much of our national humor. The desire of the man for the club and the wife for the movie—as Shelley did not put it—has recently been supplemented by the cry of the child for the moonlight ride.
The statistics compiled last year by the state of Arkansas show that of every one hundred wives thirty-seven admit that they married chiefly to get away from home. The figures are appalling. That nineteen of the thirty-seven wished themselves home again as soon as they were married does not mitigate the frightful situation.
It is easy to say that the home fails chiefly in imagination. Rut an imagination under good control is about as rare a commodity as radium, and does not consist of playing charades or giving an imitation of Charlie Chaplin or putting papier-mache shades on the 1891 gas jets; imagination is an attitude toward living. It is a putting into the terrific, lifelong, age-old fight against domestic dullness all the energy that goes into worry and self-justification and nagging, which are the pet devices of all of us for whiling away the heavy hours.
The word energy at once brings up the picture of a big, bustling woman, breathing hard through closed lips, rushing from child to child and trying to organize a dear little Christmas play in the parlor. But that isn’t at all the kind of imagination I mean.
There are several kinds. For example, I once knew the mother of a family, a Mrs. Judkins, who had a marvelous imagination. If things had been a little different, Mrs. Judkins might have sold her imagination to the movies or the magazines, or invented a new kind of hook-and-eye. Or she might have put it into that intricate and delicate business of running a successful home. Did Mrs. Judkins use her imagination for these things? She did not! She had none left to use.
Her imagination had a leak in it, and its stuff was dissipated hourly into thin air—in this fashion: At six a.m. Mrs. Judkins awakes. She lies in bed. She begins her daily worry. Did, or did not, her daughter Anita look tired last night when she came in from that dance? Yes; she did. She had dark circles. Dark circles—a bogy of her childhood. Mrs. Judkins remembers how her own mother always worried about dark circles. Without doubt Anita is going into a nervous decline. How ghastly! Think of that Mrs.—what was her name?—who had the nervous decline at—at—what was that place? Think of it! Appalling! Well, I’ll—I’ll ask her to go to a doctor; but what if she won’t go? Maybe I can get her to stay home from dances for—for a month.
Out of her bed springs Mrs. Judkins in a state of nervous worry. She is impelled by a notion of doing some vague, nervous thing to avoid some vague, nervous catastrophe.She is already fatigued, because she shouldhave gone back to sleep for an hour; but sleep is now out of the question. Her wonderful imagination has conjured up Anita’s lapse into a bed of pain, her last words—something about “going back to the angels”—and her pitiful extinction.
Anita, who is seventeen and a healthy, hardy flapper, has merely plunged healthily ami hardily into having a good lime. For two nights in succession she has been out late at dances. The second night she was tired and developed dark circles. Today she will sleep until twelve o’clock, if Mrs. Judkins doesn’t wake her to ask her how she feels, and will get up looking like a magazine cover.
But it is only eight o’clock now, and we must return to Mrs. Judkins. She has tiptoed in to look at the doomed Anita, and on her way has glanced into the room where sleeps Clifford Judkins, third, age twelve. Her imagination is now running at fever heat. It is started for the day and will pulsate at the rate of sixty vivid images a minute until she falls into a weary coma at one o’clock tonight.
So she endows Clifford with dark circles also.
Poor Clifford! She decides not to wake him for school. He’s not strong enough. She’ll write a note to his teacher and explain. He looked tired yesterday when he came in from playing baseball. Baseball! Another ghastly thought! Why, suppose—
But I will not depress you by taking you through all the early hours of Mrs. Judkins’ morning; because she is depressing. A human being in a nervous, worried state is one of the most depressing things in the world. Mrs. Judkins is exhausted already so far as having the faintest cheerful effect on anyone else is concerned. In fact, after breakfast Mr. Judkins leaves the house with the impression that things are going pretty badly at home and that life’s a pretty dismal proposition.
But before he left he did a very unfortunate thing. Something in the newspaper made him exclaim that if they passed that Gunch-Bobly tariff law his business was going to the dogs. It was merely a conventional grumble. Complaining about the Gunch-Bobly tariff law is his pet hobby, but—
He has put a whole bag of grist—does grist come in bags?—into the mill of Mrs. Judkins’ imagination. By the time he reaches the street car Mrs. Judkins has got him into bankruptcy. By the time he is downtown he has—though he doesn’t know it—been spending a year in prison, with a woman and two starving children calling for him outside the gates. When he enters his office he is unconsciously entering the poorhouse, there to weep out a miserable old age.
Not According to Model
But enough; a few more hours of Mrs. Judkins’ day would exhaust me and you, as it exhausts everybody with whom she comes into contact.
There are many Mrs. Judkinses, and I could go on forever. But I will spare you, for I want to talk about one woman who together with several others I know fought the good fight against the dullness and boredom of the home and, by an unusual device, won a triumphant and deserved victory
I’m going to tell you about a charming woman who, as I have said, used her imagination in an unusual way. Hers was the happiest home I ever knew.
Did she work for a while in her husband’s office and learn how his business was run, so that she could talk to him about it in the evenings? Reader, she did not. Did she buy a football guide and master the rules—so that she could discuss the game understandingly with her sons? No; she didn’t. Nor did she organize a family orchestra in which Clarence played the drum, Maisee the harp and Vivian the oboe. She knew nothing about football, nor did she ever intend to. Her remarks on her husband’s business were delightfully vague. He was a manufacturer of stationery, and I think that in some confused way she imagined that he ran the Post Office Department.
No; she was not one of those appalling women who know more about the business of everybody in the house than anyone knows about his own. She never bored her boys by instructing them in football, though she occasionally delighted them by her ludicrous misapprehensions of how it was played. And she never dragged the paper industry onto the domestic hearth. She couldn’t even solve her own daughter’s algebra problems; she admitted it and didn’t try. In fact, she was not at all the model mother, as mapped out by Miss Emily Hope Demster, of the Wayondotte Valley Normal School, in her paper on Keeping Ahead of Your Children.
She used her imagination in a finer and more far-seeing way. She knew that a home violently dominated by a strong-minded woman has a way of turning the girls into dependent shadows and the boys into downright ninnies. She realized that the inevitable growth of a healthy child is a drifting away from the home.
She Kept Young for Herself
So Mrs. Paxton protected herself by enjoying life quite selfishly in her own way. She did not keep young with her children or for her children—two hollow and disastrous phrases—she kept young for herself. When her children were tiresome she did not scold them; she told them that they bored her.
One of her sons was remarkably handsome and scholastically an utter dunce. I believe she liked him a little the best of the three; but when he was dull she laughed at him and told him so. She called him” the dumb one” without blame or malice, but always with humor. She could do this, because she thought of her children as persons, not as miraculous pieces of personal property.
A man doesn’t have to be very smart to do well in this world. In fact, Harry Paxton, though he never could get into college, has done very well since. And the fact that he is “dumb” is to this day a standing joke between him and his mother.
Mrs. Paxton’s children were always treated as though they were grown. As they grew older, their private lives were more and more respected and let alone. They chose their schools; they chose their activities; and so long as their friends did not bore Mrs. Pax-ton or at least were not personally inflicted on her, they chose their own friends. She herself had always been a musician; but as the children showed no predilections in that direction, no music lessons were ever suggested to them. As children, they scarcely existed to her—except in time of sickness; but as persons she got from them a sort of amazed enjoyment. One of her boys was brilliant; she was enormously impressed, exactly as though he had been someone she had read about in the paper. Once she remarked to a shocked and horrified group of mammas that her own daughter. Prudence, would be pretty if she didn’t dress so abominably.
Meanwhile she was protecting herself by having a good time, independently of her children. She did as she had always done. Until her children were old enough to share in her amusements, she let them alone in theirs. So far as their amusements were intrinsically interesting they interested her,but she seldom spoiled their frame of “pom-pom-pull-away” by playing it with them. She knew that children are happier by themselves, and if she played with them it was only because the wanted the exercise.
It was a sincerely happy home. The children were not compelled or even urged to love one another; and in consequence they grew up with a strong and rather sentimental mutual liking.
Mrs. Paxton’s home was a success, because she had a good time in it herself. The children never considered that it was run entirely for their benefit. It was a place where they could do what they liked; but it was distinctly not a place where they could do what they liked to somebody else. It neither restricted them nor did it prostrate itself abjectly before them. It was a place where their lather and mother seemed unforgetably happy over mysteries of their own. Even now they pause and wonder what were those amazing and incomprehensible jokes they could not understand. They were welcome to participate in the conversation, if they could, but it was never tempered into one-syllable platitudes for their minds.
Later, when Prudence came to her mother for worldly advice, Mrs. Paxton gave it—gave it as she would have given it to a friend.
So with her son at college. He never felt that there was someone standing behind him with all-forgiving arms. He was on his own. If he failed he would not be blamed, lectured or wept over; but he was not going to be bolstered through with the help of private tutors. Why not? Simply because tutoring would have meant that his mother would have to give up a new dress which she wanted and didn’t intend to give up—a straightforward, just and nsentimental reason.
Making Eminent Men
The home was never dull, because it was never compulsory; one could take it or leave it. It was a place where father and mother were happy. It was never insufficient; it had never promised to be a sort of dowdy, downy bed where everyone could indulge his bad habits, be careless in dress and appearance, nag and snarl in short, a breeding place for petty vices, weaknesses and insufficiencies. In return for giving up the conventional privileges of the mother, of dominating the children and endowing them with convenient, it erroneous, ideas, Mrs. Paxton claimed the right that she should not be dominated, discomforted or “used” by the children.
It is very easy to call her an “unnatural” mother; but being a “natural, old-fashioned mother” is just about the easiest groove for a woman to slide into. It takes much more imagination to be Mrs. Paxton’s kind. Motherhood, as a blind, unreasoning habit, is something we have inherited from our ancestors of the cave. This abandonment to the maternal instinct was universal, so we made it sacred—“Hands Off!” But just as we develop, century by century, we tight against the natural, whether it’s the natural (and “sacred”?) instinct to kill what we hate or the temptation to abandon oneself to one’s children.
It is a commonplace to say that eminent men come, as a rule, from large families; but this is not due to any inherent virtue of the large family in itself; it is because in a large family the children’s minds are much more liable to be left alone; each child is not ineradically stamped with the particular beliefs, errors, convictions, aversions and bogies that haunted the mother in the year 1889 or 1901 or 1922 as the case might be. In large families no one child can be in so much direct contact with its parents.
Returning to Mrs. Paxton, I want to set down here what happened to her. The three children grew up and left her as children have a way of doing. She missed them, but it did not end her active life, as her active life had always gone along quite independently of them. She never became the miserable mother of the movies, broken by the separation, thankful for one homecoming a year, existing for and ravenously devouring the four letters a month she receives from her scattered daughters and sons. It is some day proved to all women that they do not own their children. They were never meant to.
And Mrs. Paxton had been wise enough never to pretend she owned her children. She had had enough imagination to see that they were primarily persons; and, except in the aforementioned times of sickness, it was as persons that she first thought of them.
“The Home is Oversufficient”
So her life went on as it had gone on be-fore. As she grew older her amusements changed, but she grew old slowly. The strange part of it is that the children think of her as a person, not as a” mother” who has to be written to once a fortnight and who will excuse their most intolerable shortcomings.
“What? You’ve never met my mother?” they say. “Oh, she’s a most amazing, most interesting person. She’s perfectly charming. You ought to meet her.”
They remember their home as the place where their own interests were unhindered, and where, if they were bores, they were snubbed as bores should be snubbed.
“No,” cries the sentimentalist; “give me my old wrinkled mother who never thought of anything but me, who gave me the clothes off her back and grew old doing things for my pleasure. Why, I’m the only thing she was ever interested in.”
And that’s the fate of the mother we exalt at present—on screen and in sob story. Flatter her, “respect” her—and leave her alone. She never had the imagination to consider her children as persons when they were young, so they are unable to think of her as a person when she is old.
They send her a shawl for Christmas. When she visits them twice a year they take her to the Hippodrome; “Mother wouldn’t like these new-fashioned shows.” She is not a person; she is “poor” mother. Old at fifty, she eats in her room when there’s young company at dinner. She has given her children so much in selfish, unreasoning love that when they go from her she has nothing left except the honorary title “mother “on which to feed her ill-nourished soul.
We have learned at last on the advice of our doctors to leave babies alone. No longer do we tease and talk to and “draw out” the baby all day, and wonder why it is fretful and cross and nervous at the day’s end. A mother’s love for a child is no longer measured by the number of times it cries for her every night. Perhaps some day we’ll leave our children alone, too, and spend our time on ourselves. The home is not so much insufficient as it is oversufficient. It is cloying; it tries too hard. A woman happy with her husband is worth a dozen child worshipers, in her influence on the child. And all the energy spent in “molding” the child is not as effective as the imagination to see the child as a “person,” because sooner or later a person is what that child is going to be.
“Why Blame It on the Poor Kiss if the Girl Veteran of Many Petting Parties Is Prone to Affairs After Marriage?”.
New York American (February 24, 1924)
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Once past the age of thirty all civilized persons realize that many of our institutions are no more than conspiracies of silence.
When the clergyman assumes for the sake of his sermon that there is a great body of men and women who “live a moral life” he does not mean, if he is a man of any intelligence, that every week and every year this body is composed of the same people. He means rather that on any given date more people are engaged in keeping the rules than are engaged in breaking them. And he also means that these people who are at the moment engaged in being virtuous will combine against the people who are outraging the morals of the time.
The libertine sits in the jury box and votes against the divorce case defendant as heartily as does the pillar of the church. Three days later the pillar of the church may elope with the sexton’s wife and five hundred unfaithful husbands read the news aloud at breakfast in shocked and horrified tones.
So in discussing the question as to whether we human beings are really capable of a happy monogamy, I don’t want to start from the angle that four-fifths of us are approximately lily white and the other fifth a rather dingy shade of gray. I assume that at present there are a large majority of couples on this continent who are true to each other and a minority who are at present tangled up in some fascinating but entirely illegal affair.
Monogamy a Theory
We believe, from our racial experience, that monogamy is the simplest solution of the mating instinct. It tends to keep people out of messes and less time is required to keep up a legal home than to support a chorus girl. There are disadvantages—marriage is often dull for at least one of the parties concerned and the very security of the bond tends, not infrequently, to make an unconscious bully of the man or a shrew of the woman. But on the whole the advantages outweigh the disadvantages, and the only trouble is—that it isn’t really monogamy because one party is so frequently not true to the other.
