Fitzgerald's Craft of Short Fiction: The Collected Short Stories, 1920-1935 by Alice Hall Perty (review)

244Reviews Petry, Alice Hall. Fitzgerald's Craft of Short Fiction: The Collected Short Stories, 1920-1935. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1989. 235 pp. Cloth: $39.95. F. Scott Fitzgerald himself considered his short stories "trash," potboilers to meet urgent financial needs; sales were often his first concern. He used them as preparatory studies for his novels, in which their best parts were often incorporated. In spite of this, he managed to write at least a dozen short stories that are acknowledged masterpieces and quite a number that are artistically accomplished. Alice Hall Petry has chosen to study the four collections that were published during Fitzgerald's life (usually in the wake of his novels) as individual works. A split in quality is widely recognized between the first two collections—Flappers and Philosophers (1920), Tales of the Jazz Age (1922)—and the last two—All the Sad Young Men (1926), Taps at Reveille (1935). Her way of dealing with them is meant to bridge the gap and allow for a unified assessment of Fitzgerald's career as a short story writer. The four collections are approached through two clusters of topics: "In the first cluster are (1) love, sex, and marriage, (2) self versus society, and (3) free will versus fate. In the second cluster are (1) dreams and disillusionment, (2) the historical sense, and (3) the idea of home" (p. 7). The former cluster is the basis of the analyses of the first and third collections, the latter cluster for the second and fourth. The choice is admittedly empirical, but it works. In Flappers and Philosophers irony, and often plain silliness, intrude to disqualify a serious treatment, but the theme of self versus society, for instance, is successfully realized in early stories such as "Benediction" and "The Ice Palace." In Tales of the Jazz Age Fitzgerald often indulged in "fantasies," but the dreams of love and money reach disillusionment in a convincing way in stories such as "May Day" and "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz." In both, the longing for home is baffled by a sense of loneliness and isolation; motifs overlap, of course, and Fitzgerald shows a sure mastery over his craft when he succeeds in balancing them. It is when he "graduates from the Jazz Age," rather precociously, in the late 1920s and early 1930s that he can rethink and rearrange to great literary profit his early formulations under the topics chosen by Petry as guidelines. In the best stories of All the Sad Young Men, one is no longer bewitched by the idea of the glamorous woman: the self is often explored in relation to marriage, with men being usually expanded and enriched by the experience, and women more often trivialized by it (p. 123). A turning point can be detected in "Winter Dreams" and "The Sensible Thing," in that flexibility of attitude and acceptance of life as it is become signs of maturity. The way in which the protagonist of "Absolution" (a story about which Petry has interesting things to say) faces the problems of life reveals a complexity of approach that shows Fitzgerald's links with such contemporary writers as Sherwood Anderson and Willa Cather. Many of his triumphs, however, were in Taps at Reveille, the thickest of his collections. It began with the "Basil and Josephine" stories and ended with "Babylon Revisited," a perfect choice to indicate the transition from a flippant to a mature way of dealing with the writer's chosen topics. The "last of the belles" are satirized in the story of that title, disillusionment becomes inevitable even with worthy dreams ("Babylon Revisited" and "Crazy Sunday"), the theme of home betrays a dark as well as a light side; the complexity of the parent-child relationship colors some of the best stories. If, in a Jamesian way, evil itself becomes at times attractive ("A Short Trip Home"), atonement and saying farewell to the past ("Babylon Revisited" and "Two Wrongs") acquire significance and allow for deep reverberations. Petry's study is, on the whole, and given her premises, convincing. Her method Studies in American Fiction245 leads to some rigidity and repetitions, but she makes good and extended use of...