The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald Read Online Free Page A

19 It was, in the end, “the foul dust that floated in the wake of his dreams,” 20 the corrosive materialism of the American Dream gone bad and embodied in the immorality of the very rich of East Egg, most obviously in Daisy and Tom Buchanan, that finally betrayed him, not his enormous capacity to imagine and to dream. “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz” is Fitzgerald’s first major step toward
The Great Gatsby
’s indictment of wealth and of its effect on the romantic imagination, and the
Post
predictably declined the story because of its anticapitalistic message. Ultimately it was sold for $300 to
The Smart Set,
whose readers would immediately have gotten its message and appreciated it, though Fitzgerald maintained that he had not written the story as an indictment of materialism. Later he would look back on the months of his early poverty as he walked the streets of New York, and then his sudden reversal of fortune with the acceptance of his first novel, as having heightened his mistrust of the wealthy: “The man with the jingle of money in his pocket who married the girl a year later would always cherish an abiding distrust, an animosity toward the leisure class—not the conviction of a revolutionist but the smouldering hatred of a peasant.” 21 One could argue that in “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz” this smouldering hatred came close to the surface in the form of a fantasy which damns those like Percy Washington and his sisters, Kismine and Jasmine, who would bring friends home knowing full well that the price of their momentary pleasure would be the death of their friends.
    It is likely because of Fitzgerald’s determination to avoid open blasphemy against the money god and his desire to remain in the good graces of the popular magazine audience that we have “Winter Dreams.” This story was written immediately after “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz,” while the Fitzgeralds were living at the White Bear Yacht Club in St. Paul, the thinly disguised setting for Dexter Green’s meeting of Judy Jones, and it is unquestionably the most important forerunner of
The
Great Gatsby.
Like Jay Gatsby, Dexter Green in “Winter Dreams” invented a kind of self that he thought would make him acceptable to the “nice girl,” Judy Jones, who like Daisy Fay in the novel is “nice” primarily in the sense that she is rich and respectable. And Dexter, whose father owns “the second best grocery store” in town, sets out to make a fortune with the primary goal of being able to enter the world of Judy Jones, much as Gatsby sets out to make the money that he believes will win him access to the world of Daisy. The parallels between story and novel are as striking as one would expect in a story that Fitzgerald later described as “[a] sort of 1st draft of the Gatsby idea.” 22 In the end, “Winter Dreams” is, of course, a hauntingly sad love story that is, beneath its surface, a study of the power of a spoiled rich girl to determine the course of a poor, young romantic’s winter dreams of a better life than his father’s. With Ober’s difficulty in selling “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz” Fitzgerald had come to understand that in order to use the popular magazines as a workshop for what he professed to consider his “serious” work—his novels—he could not openly attack values that were sacred to middle-American magazine audiences.
    In September 1922, after sending “Winter Dreams” to Ober, the Fitzgeralds moved to New York, settling in Great Neck, Long Island, and remaining there until they sailed for Europe in April 1924. Their time in Great Neck is important not only because Long Island would ultimately provide the models for East Egg and West Egg in
The Great
Gatsby,
but also because it was here that Fitzgerald began an early draft of the novel, a draft from which only “Absolution” survives. In letters, Fitzgerald alluded to “Absolution” as being closely related to
The Great
Gatsby, in