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

one case referring to it as “a picture of [Gatsby’s] early life,” 23 and his comments have provoked speculation and debate about the relationship of the story to the novel. The most reasonable explanation regarding the connection between the two is this: At least as early as April 1924 Fitzgerald had been at work on a novel that had a strong Catholic element and included a protagonist who would evolve from a character like Rudolph Miller in “Absolution”; he eventually put this novel aside, apparently scrapping it altogether after salvaging what was probably its prologue, which he sent to
The American Mercury.
Then when he returned to the novel during the summer and fall of 1924 he began anew on what would become
The Great Gatsby,
perhaps bringing his earlier conception of Rudolph Miller to bear on his ideas about Jay Gatsby’s past.
    What we know for certain is that Rudolph Miller and Jay Gatsby share much in common. Like the young Jimmy Gatz, Rudolph Miller has a need to create an alter ego in order to thrive in a higher class of society than the one into which he was born. Both Miller and Gatsby have fathers who worship at the altar of American materialism, as is clear from Mr. Miller’s adulation of the empire builder James J. Hill and from Mr. Henry Gatz’s reverence for his son’s success, which, if Gatsby had lived, would have made him, according to his father, “[a] man like James J. Hill.” 24 In the case of Rudolph’s father, the tension in his life passed down to his son comes from being pulled between his faith in the Roman Catholic Church and his “mystical worship” of Hill. Rudolph’s stunning revelation after his exchange with the deranged priest—the realization that “There was something ineffably gorgeous somewhere that had nothing to do with God”—is a denunciation of at least one of his father’s sacred beliefs. As Fitzgerald put it in a letter, “the priest gives the boy a form of Absolution (not of course sacramental), by showing him that he (the priest) is in an even worse state of horror + despair.” 25 Rudolph’s absolution lands him squarely at the doorstep of the modern world where old beliefs no longer prevail—in short, at the doorstep of the Roaring Twenties.
    Fitzgerald’s best early short stories, from “Benediction” to “Absolution,” arc elegantly over the Jazz Age, and there is such thrill in their telling that it is perhaps easy to overlook the truth that they are, in the end, cautionary tales. In “Early Success” Fitzgerald said this, in retrospect, about his stories and novels of the early twenties: “All the stories that came into my head had a touch of disaster in them—the lovely young creatures in my novels went to ruin, the diamond mountains of my short stories blew up, my millionaires were as beautiful and damned as Thomas Hardy’s peasants.” 26 Indeed, the stories in this collection paint pictures filled with despair as well as euphoria. In them the American flapper is born, she comes of age in a burst of momentary liberation, and she heads toward matrimony. The Southern belle merges with the flapper and explores the world only to move back South to live out her days under a blanket of the chivalric code—in a worst case, marrying a razor manufacturer after a drunken evening and presumably living unhappily ever after. The intellectuals and artists of the stories are driven at best to frustration and irony and at worst to cynicism and suicide from lack of appreciation of their work, while the social climbers find themselves lured into the traps of the very rich, who would toy with them before condemning them to death or prison deep within a diamond as big as the Ritz. And then there are the romantic dreamers, particularly the men: their plight, especially if they happen to be caught in the spell of an enchantress, is youthful disillusionment and finally middle age, during which they can ponder “the gray beauty of steel that withstands