Tea at Trianon: Tales of the Jazz Age

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Monday, July 8, 2024

Tales of the Jazz Age

From Reid's Reader:

Tales of the Jazz Age is a very mixed bag. On the table of contents, Fitzgerald writes a facetious account of how each story came to be written. Its eleven stories contain three stories that are now often regarded as masterpieces, a fourth one that I would add to that list, and a fifth that comes near to greatness. The other six are mainly "fillers" - frivolous, silly and often reading like sophomoric college humour.
I'll deal with the rubbish first. "The Camel's Back" is a strained comedy about a man wearing a camel suit while gate-crashing a party. Fitzgerald himself said "I like it least of all the stories in this volume". "The Jelly Bean" is a little better - a sad anecdote of a bumpkiin bested by a canny flapper. "Porcelain and Pink", written as a play script, has a young man peeping in on a young woman in the bath, filled with banter and topical jokes that now mean nothing to us. Fitzgerald admits that "Tarquin of Cheapside", "Mr Icky" and "Jemima, the Mountain Girl" were all written when he was an undergraduate at Princeton - and they look it, even if he polished them up a little for later publication - wisecracks, puns, pratfalls etc, with (again as Fitzgerald admits) "Jemima, the Mountain Girl" leaning on the type of high-speed absurdities that the Canadian wit Stephen Leacock pioneered.
So much for the forgettable. Now for the genuinely worth reading stories.
May Day, a long short-story, was first published in a magazine in 1920 before Fitzgerald’s first novel was published. It is interesting in many ways. It is one of the very few stories Fitzgerald wrote that included proletarian characters and made a brief glance at a radical situation, quite different from the wealthier classes or parvenus that were his usual stamping ground – although much of the story does deal with the wealthier. It takes place in 1919 when the May Day riots broke out, pitting de-mobbed soldiers against Communists… or radicals who were deemed to be Communists. But this is going on in the background. Two proletarian de-mobbed soldiers are desperate for booze, having come back from the war in Europe to find that America is on the brink of adopting Prohibition. They go to an expensive restaurant where one of them knows a waiter who might slip them some drink. Expensive restaurants are still serving alcohol. Hiding in back-rooms of the restaurant, the two boozers get their wish and proceed to get smashed… But this is only part of the tale, for more of the story is about the higher class. A man called Gordon desperately needs money, having lost most of his wealth in speculation. He asks a friend to help him out… but no help comes. A haughty belle called Edith was once Gordon’s old flame. Edith is dining and dancing in the restaurant’s ballroom. A man called Peter is infatuated with Edith, but when he asks her for a dance she spurns him. Dejected, Peter finds his way into the backroom where the two bibulous soldiers are boozing. He joins them. The well-off gourmet and the proletarians meet in alcohol. Meanwhile chaos and the smashing of glass can be heard distantly going on in the riot some streets away. Gordon meets Edith in the restaurant. She used to think he was wonderful, but now he is a neurotic mess. She is no longer impressed by him and turns him away. Without money, Gordon goes back to his meagre lodgings and commits suicide. Presumably the dance goes on. Money, class, prestige and the unattainable woman – these are all ideas that Fitzgerald played with in most of his novels; and in some ways this long-short-story is their precursor.
Even more read than "Mayday" is The Diamond as Big as the Ritz . As I understand it, it is basically a fantastic adventure story but with a sort of moral. Way out in a desolate part of Wyoming, a prospector has discovered in a hidden valley a diamond of unbelievably huge proportions – maybe as big as the Ritz hotel. It must be worth wealth beyond belief, but the prospector leaves it in the ground. It is for him to delight in and nobody else but his immediate family. Over the years, he keeps his great discovery from prying eyes. He uses black slaves for heavy labour. He has persuaded them that the Confederates won the American Civil War and therefore slavery is still legal. [This is one element of the story which would now probably have the story banned from schools.] He has a crew with weapons such as machine guns and barbed wire to keep strangers out. Yet he raises a family there and he allows his son to go off to college… from which his son brings back a college friend to the forbidden zone. How does this story wind up? The college guy falls in love with the prospector’s daughter… but the college guy gradually understands that, to keep the huge diamond unknown, passing visitors such as he are put to death. So, with the girl, he tries to escape from the hidden valley… at which point aircraft, bombers and armed forces descend on the valley and the millionaire’s hidden valley is reduced to rubble. What, apart from entertaining us, is the point of the story? As I see it, The Diamond as Big as the Ritz is a kind of satire on miserliness. What is the point of huge wealth that is hidden from the world and is put to no particular use? Does wealth alone become a sort of fetish? The miser thinks that money is an end in itself. The “moral” could be expanded to be a satire on American capitalism, where money is pointlessly king… but I still see it as basically a fantastic adventure story.
The third most admired story has come to prominence only in recent years. This is The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, a fantasy about a man growing backwards. He is born a grumpy old man, grows to be a middle-aged man, becomes a young man, fights in the Spanish-American war, marries and has children of his own, is a teenager, then a toddler and finally we see him as a baby in a cradle. [Fitzgerald goes no further than that... it would be difficult to see Bejamin Button returning to the womb.] The story is set in the late 19th century and finishes in the 1920s. Its humour is built on the shocking effect that Benjamin's progress has on polite society. Why has the story come to prominence only in recent years? Because a film version was made in 2008, which up-dated the story to the present day and basically took only the general idea of somebody growing backwards. (Read more.)