The Short Stories
of F. Scott Fitzgerald
by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edited and with a preface by Matthew J.
Bruccoli
Completed February 2000
I've never been a particularly big fan of F. Scott Fitzgerald -- his works have always struck me as well-written and interesting, but never deeply insightful and mostly concerned with the superficial. In reading these stories, I think I have a better appreciation for his work: it offers insight into human nature and it is concerned with more than the superficial, but it doesn't step beyond Fitzgerald's worlds: society, alcoholism, tormented relationships with women and (some of the best) his perceptions of Southern society.
Nonetheless, I very much enjoyed these stories. Fitzgerald's observational and descriptive powers are impressive: I found his descriptions of courtship (too anachronistic a word for Fitzgerald, I suppose) in "Emotional Bankruptcy" to be wonderfully crisp: he stripped away the emotions of love to paint the "game" in stark relief. "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz," is a fantastic premise for a satire on wealth and society. I really liked Fitzgerald's characterization of Southern society in "The Ice Palace."
One of the best characteristics of Fitzgerald and his stories (which is also, of course, limiting) is that they all seem to draw from his personal experiences. In the preface, Matthew Bruccoli quotes Fitzgerald as having said, "I have asked a lot of my emotions -- one hundred and twenty stories. The price was high, right up with Kipling, because there was one little drop of something -- not blood, not a tear, not my seed, but me more intimately than these, in every story, it was the extra I had." You can feel that drop of something in the stories that deal with alcoholism: "Babylon Revisited" and "The Lost Decade." In "Babylon Revisited" one feels the main character's struggle -- though never articulated -- between his daughter and his desire for a drink. He has such revulsion toward his former life, but at the same time he seems to be on the brink -- so fragile -- of going back to it. In the end, I think what makes it so real is that the main character has this complete naivete -- forcing himself to limit himself to a drink a day -- toward his disease. And that, in the final analysis, is so quintessentially Fitzgerald: his character's naivete is so real and so compelling because it is really Fitzgerald's own.