The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Other Jazz Age Stories Read Online Free Page A

his time and talent. John Gunther in the Chicago Daily News wrote that “some of the stories in the book are good stories, true enough, but a collection containing only a few mere good stories is hardly enough from a man with the promise of Fitzgerald. And some of the stuff in the volume is absolute rot.”
    Yet critics as astute as Edmund Wilson who, if he was Fitzgerald’s friend from Princeton days was also unfailingly honest in his assessment of Fitzgerald’s work, wrote in Vanity Fair that “Scott Fitzgerald’s new book of short stories . . . is very much better than his first.” Wilson described himself as being full of “admiration at Fitzgerald’s mastery of the nuances of the ridiculous” in “The Lees of Happiness,” and deemed “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz” a “sustained and full-rounded fantasy”; he concluded the review by proposing Fitzgerald as “the most incalculable of our novelists; you never can tell what he is going to do next. He always has some surprise: just when you think the joke is going to be on you, it may turn out to be on him.—Nonetheless, in Tales of the Jazz Age , he has staged the most charming of ballets—something like the Greenwich Village Follies with overtones of unearthly music.”
    The reviewer for The Cleveland Plain Dealer was equally attentive to what he perceived to be the aesthetic qualities of Fitzgerald’s topical stories: claiming that he is “workmanlike, but he has a constant and irresistible gayety and insouciance that makes his workmanship effective,” this critic wrote that the tales of Fitzgerald’s second collection “are as new as the latest dance step; they are original, styleful, expert. And without moralizing, without bitterness, without even satirizing, they expose the jazz quality of the age—the post-war laxness, the cynicism of the young, the bewilderment of the old.” Finally, John Farrar, writing for the New York Herald , viewed Tales of the Jazz Age as “by far the most interesting” of Fitzgerald’s books to date and asserted, “In this collection he displays his amazing and still youthful verve and his virtuosity. He does many things, and does most of them well.”
    The reviews of Tales of the Jazz Age —positive and negative—together reveal that the critical reception of Fitzgerald’s work through two novels and two story collections was beginning to focus on the question of whether he was going to become an important American writer who was still coming to terms with the depth of his subject and honing his artistic skills, or whether he was, indeed, like the age he portrays—perceived as passing away with the rapidity of fashion, his bright talent already expended and, now, both burnt out and out of control. Such questions are always answered in time, and in Fitzgerald’s case they would be answered by The Great Gatsby . But at the point on the curve of his career when Tales of the Jazz Age was published, there was considerable uncertainty, both in Fitzgerald’s own mind and in the minds of his critics, about his future as a writer of great significance.
    In “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz,” after an apocalyptic explosion that destroys the fabulous diamond mountain which is both a paradise and a prison, John Unger, the story’s protagonist, proposes that everything he has experienced in the Montana empire of Braddock Washington “ was a dream. . . . Everybody’s youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness.” He concludes that “there are only diamonds in the whole world, diamonds and perhaps the shabby gift of disillusion.” The notion that youth, or even the long career of life, is a dream polarized by the pursuit of the luxurious transcendence signified by diamonds (“diamonds are forever”) and the disenchantment that inevitably follows in the wake of the