The Rich Boy E-Book

F.Scott Fitzgerald

• Herausgeber: Hesperus Press Ltd.
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Seitenzahl: 153

Beschreibung

Containing all the ambience of The Great Gatsby, The Rich Boy is a perfect collection of Fitzgerald stories evoking the trappings and illusions of 1920s high society. Undisputed king of Jazz Age writing, F. Scott Fitzgerald perfectly encapsulated all the glamour and despair of 1920s society. These three short stories are supreme examples of his craft. With wealth and privileges beyond measure, 'rich boy' Anson Hunter had every reason to expect life to be a breeze. Yet one by one his dreams fade away, leaving him with nothing. Slowly, painfully, he realises that beneath the sparkle and fizz of his glittering life lies only failure and disillusionment - the self-same emptiness that pervades the beautiful people of 'The Last of the Belles' and 'The Bridal Party'.

Leseprobe

The Rich Boy

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Contents

Title PageForeword by John UpdikeThe Rich BoyThe Bridal PartyThe Last of the BellesBiographical noteABOUT US SELECTED TITLES FROM HESPERUS PRESSCopyright

Foreword

‘The Rich Boy’, one of Fitzgerald’s more ambitious and deeply felt short stories, contains a sentence that occasioned a tiff between the author and his formidable friend and rival, Ernest Hemingway. In August of 1936, after Fitzgerald had confessed in print the low ebb of his fortunes and mental condition, Esquire published a Hemingway story, ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’, containing this passage from the autobiographical hero’s thought-stream:

‘The rich were dull and they drank too much or they played too much backgammon. They were dull and they were repetitious. He remembered poor Scott Fitzgerald and his romantic awe of them and how he had started a story once that began, “The rich are different from you and me.” And how someone had said to Scott, Yes, they have more money. But that was not humorous to Scott. He thought they were a special glamorous race and when he found they weren’t it wrecked him just as much as any other thing that wrecked him.’

Fitzgerald, living at the time in Ashville, North Carolina, was quick to respond, in a letter as gracious as it was blunt:

Dear Ernest,

Please lay off me in print. If I choose to write de profundis sometimes it doesn’t mean I want friends praying aloud over my corpse. No doubt you meant it kindly but it cost me a night’s sleep. And when you incorporate it (the story) in a book would you mind cutting my name?

When the story appeared in a Hemingway collection, the name had been changed to Julian. This was at the insistence of Maxwell Perkins, the editor at Scribner’s of both men, according to the scholar Matthew Bruccoli, in a long footnote in his F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Life in Letters. Bruccoli claims that the object of the put-down had been not Fitzgerald but Hemingway himself, bragging ‘I am getting to know the rich’ at a luncheon with Perkins and the critic Mary Colum, who had then said, ‘The only difference between the rich and other people is that the rich have more money.’

In any case, it is not much of a put-down, and Hemingway’s self-serving account ignores the next sentence in ‘The Rich Boy’, which begins to explain the difference:

‘They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand.’

It was important to Fitzgerald to try to understand. Literary pilgrims to St Paul can still see the modest houses his struggling, shabby-genteel parents rented in the vicinity of (but rarely on) Summit Avenue, the street of the local rich. His father, a delicate man whom he physically resembled, was descended from Maryland aristocracy, including Francis Scott Key, the writer of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’, but Edward Fitzgerald lacked the drive and vitality to be a successful businessman. Scott’s mother, born Molly McQuillan, brought a fierce Irish Catholicism and some money – inherited from her immigrant father, a grocer – to the marriage, but only enough to cling to the edges of respectability, and to send her son to private school and Princeton. At Princeton, Fitzgerald associated with the sons of the rich, and his short stories for The Saturday Evening Post made him, for a time, wealthy, but he and his reckless wife, Zelda, had no gift for accumulating money; in 1924 he wrote for the Post a comic essay, ‘How to Live on $36,000 a Year’, when this was a fortune. Financial security eluded him just as his glamorous heroines elude his heroes. Jay Gatsby does not know, but the reader can see, that Daisy will always choose, over her old suitor’s quixotic devotion and flashy, shady semblance of wealth, the secure protection of her brutish husband, who is truly rich.

The other famous aphorism on the first page of ‘The Rich Boy’ is:

‘Begin with an individual, and before you know it you find that you have created a type; begin with a type, and you find that you have created – nothing.’

Yet, though Fitzgerald closely based Anson Hunter on his hard-drinking Princeton friend Ludlow Fowler – ‘It is in a large measure the story of your life,’ he ingenuously wrote to Fowler in 1925, ‘toned down here and there and simplified’ – the rich boy retains something of the rotundity and vagueness of a type. Increasingly plump because of his drinking, he becomes, out of the wreck of his two main romances, a womaniser compulsively seeking the flattery his sense of inherent superiority demands. That sense, presumably, made him incapable of popping the question to Paula Legendre, preferring to keep her as a legend of lost love, or of consummating his romance with the sporty, less idealised Dolly Karger. Anson has, in his privileged vanity, a sterilising touch, killing the harmless affair between his Aunt Edna and a young man much like himself but without the clout of his money.

Fitzgerald was a considerable student of how money functioned. Anson, at first a dynamic and bluff and shrewd performer in the brokerage house he joins, acquires, touchingly, the ‘fussy pessimism of a man of forty’, and is urged by his firm to take a vacation, since ‘on every transaction in which he was involved he acted as a drag and a strain’. ‘The Bridal Party’ portrays, in the person of Hamilton Rutherford, a more buoyant and successful type, who no sooner goes broke in a stock-market downturn than he is offered a fifty-thousand-dollar-a-year job: ‘He happens to have it – that young man… In another year he’ll be back with the millionaires.’ Also, he carries off the girl. To Fitzgerald, money signals animal vitality; sexual success is part of its romance. But, by his own inner lights, sexual success wasn’t worth celebrating; it had something coarse about it.

His typical heroes mourn the loss of their true loves, usually met in the heady Southern atmosphere of magnolias and moonlight evoked in ‘The Last of the Belles’. In his own life he did get the girl – spectacular, beautiful Zelda from Montgomery, Alabama – and for a spell they were the ultimate Jazz-Age couple. But she became a mentally troubled liability, and the difficulties and disappointments of possessing the love object defied even Fitzgerald’s staunch and graceful descriptive powers. Tender is the Night tries to encompass his predicament, and cannot, for all its labour of polish, be called a successful novel; it does not master its own matter, as The Great Gatsby, through the agency of its bystander narrator, so satisfactorily does. ‘The Rich Boy’ was one of the few works to come out of the hectic year and a half, from April 1925 to December 1926, that Scott and Zelda spent in Paris after Gatsby’s completion. We can feel in it, for all its earnest, ruminative care, how difficult it was becoming for Fitzgerald, once so fabulously fluent, to write – to bring his susceptibility to romantic inertia and illusion into harmony with his clear-eyed, large-minded realism.

– John Updike, 2003

The Rich Boy

1

Begin with an individual, and before you know it you find that you have created a type; begin with a type, and you find that you have created – nothing. That is because we are all queer fish, queerer behind our faces and voices than we want anyone to know or than we know ourselves. When I hear a man proclaiming himself an ‘average, honest, open fellow’, I feel pretty sure that he has some definite and perhaps terrible abnormality which he has agreed to conceal – and his protestation of being average and honest and open is his way of reminding himself of his misprision.

There are no types, no plurals. There is a rich boy, and this is his and not his brothers’ story. All my life I have lived among his brothers but this one has been my friend. Besides, if I wrote about his brothers I should have to begin by attacking all the lies that the poor have told about the rich and the rich have told about themselves – such a wild structure they have erected that when we pick up a book about the rich, some instinct prepares us for unreality. Even the intelligent and impassioned reporters of life have made the country of the rich as unreal as fairy-land.

Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different. The only way I can describe young Anson Hunter is to approach him as if he were a foreigner and cling stubbornly to my point of view. If I accept his for a moment I am lost – I have nothing to show but a preposterous movie.

2

Anson was the eldest of six children who would some day divide a fortune of fifteen million dollars, and he reached the age of reason – is it seven? – at the beginning of the century when daring young women were already gliding along Fifth Avenue in electric ‘mobiles’. In those days he and his brother had an English governess who spoke the language very clearly and crisply and well, so that the two boys grew to speak as she did – their words and sentences were all crisp and clear and not run together as ours are. They didn’t talk exactly like English children but acquired an accent that is peculiar to fashionable people in the city of New York.

In the summer the six children were moved from the house on 71st Street to a big estate in northern Connecticut. It was not a fashionable locality – Anson’s father wanted to delay as long as possible his children’s knowledge of that side of life. He was a man somewhat superior to his class, which composed New York society, and to his period, which was the snobbish and formalised vulgarity of the Gilded Age, and he wanted his sons to learn habits of concentration and have sound constitutions and grow up into right-living and successful men. He and his wife kept an eye on them as well as they were able until the two older boys went away to school, but in huge establishments this is difficult – it was much simpler in the series of small and medium-sized houses in which my own youth was spent – I was never far out of the reach of my mother’s voice, of the sense of her presence, her approval or disapproval.

Anson’s first sense of his superiority came to him when he realised the half-grudging American deference that was paid to him in the Connecticut village. The parents of the boys he played with always enquired after his father and mother, and were vaguely excited when their own children were asked to the Hunters’ house. He accepted this as the natural state of things, and a sort of impatience with all groups of which he was not the centre – in money, in position, in authority – remained with him for the rest of his life. He disdained to struggle with other boys for precedence – he expected it to be given him freely, and when it wasn’t he withdrew into his family. His family was sufficient, for in the East money is still a somewhat feudal thing, a clan-forming thing. In the snobbish West, money separates families to form ‘sets’.

At eighteen, when he went to New Haven, Anson was tall and thick-set, with a clear complexion and a healthy colour from the ordered life he had led in school. His hair was yellow and grew in a funny way on his head, his nose was beaked – these two things kept him from being handsome – but he had a confident charm and a certain brusque style, and the upper-class men who passed him on the street knew without being told that he was a rich boy and had gone to one of the best schools. Nevertheless, his very superiority kept him from being a success in college – the independence was mistaken for egotism, and the refusal to accept Yale standards with the proper awe seemed to belittle all those who had. So, long before he graduated, he began to shift the centre of his life to New York.

He was at home in New York – there was his own house with ‘the kind of servants you can’t get any more’ – and his own family, of which, because of his good humour and a certain ability to make things go, he was rapidly becoming the centre, and the debutante parties, and the correct manly world of the men’s clubs, and the occasional wild spree with the gallant girls whom New Haven only knew from the fifth row. His aspirations were conventional enough – they included even the irreproachable shadow he would some day marry, but they differed from the aspirations of the majority of young men in that there was no mist over them, none of that quality which is variously known as ‘idealism’ or ‘illusion’. Anson accepted without reservation the world of high finance and high extravagance, of divorce and dissipation, of snobbery and of privilege. Most of our lives end as a compromise – it was as a compromise that his life began.

He and I first met in the late summer of 1917 when he was just out of Yale, and, like the rest of us, was swept up into the systematised hysteria of the war. In the blue-green uniform of the naval aviation he came down to Pensacola, where the hotel orchestras played ‘I’m Sorry, Dear’, and we young officers danced with the girls. Everyone liked him, and though he ran with the drinkers and wasn’t an especially good pilot, even the instructors treated him with a certain respect. He was always having long talks with them in his confident, logical voice – talks which ended by his getting himself, or, more frequently, another officer, out of some impending trouble. He was convivial, bawdy, robustly avid for pleasure, and we were all surprised when he fell in love with a conservative and rather proper girl.

Her name was Paula Legendre, a dark, serious beauty from somewhere in California. Her family kept a winter residence just outside of town, and in spite of her primness she was enormously popular; there is a large class of men whose egotism can’t endure humour in a woman. But Anson wasn’t that sort, and I couldn’t understand the attraction of her ‘sincerity’ – that was the thing to say about her – for his keen and somewhat sardonic mind.

Nevertheless, they fell in love – and on her terms. He no longer joined the twilight gathering at the De Soto Bar, and whenever they were seen together they were engaged in a long, serious dialogue, which must have gone on several weeks. Long afterwards he told me that it was not about anything in particular but was composed on both sides of immature and even meaningless statements – the emotional content that gradually came to fill it grew up not out of the words but out of its enormous seriousness. It was a sort of hypnosis. Often it was interrupted, giving way to that emasculated humour we call fun; when they were alone it was resumed again, solemn, low-keyed, and pitched so as to give each other a sense of unity in feeling and thought. They came to resent any interruptions of it, to be unresponsive to facetiousness about life, even to the mild cynicism of their contemporaries. They were only happy when the dialogue was going on, and its seriousness bathed them like the amber glow of an open fire. Towards the end there came an interruption they did not resent – it began to be interrupted by passion.

Oddly enough, Anson was as engrossed in the dialogue as she and as profoundly affected by it, yet at the same time aware that on his side much was insincere, and on hers much was merely simple. At first, too, he despised her emotional simplicity as well, but with his love her nature deepened and blossomed, and he could despise it no longer. He felt that if he could enter into Paula’s warm safe life he would be happy. The long preparation of the dialogue removed any constraint – he taught her some of what he had learnt from more adventurous women, and she responded with a rapt holy intensity. One evening after a dance they agreed to marry, and he wrote a long letter about her to his mother. The next day Paula told him that she was rich, that she had a personal fortune of nearly a million dollars.

3

It was exactly as if they could say ‘Neither of us has anything: we shall be poor together’ – just as delightful that they should be rich instead. It gave them the same communion of adventure. Yet when Anson got leave in April, and Paula and her mother accompanied him North, she was impressed with the scale on which they lived. Alone with Anson for the first time in the room where he had played as a boy, she was filled with comfortable emotion, as though she were pre-eminently safe and taken care of. The pictures of Anson in a skullcap at his first school, of Anson on horseback with the sweetheart of a mysterious forgotten summer, of Anson in a gay group of ushers and bridesmaids at a wedding, made her jealous of his life apart from her in the past, and so completely did his authoritative person seem to sum up and typify these possessions of his that she was inspired with the idea of being married immediately and returning to Pensacola as his wife.