On Mothers, Marriage, Divorce and Children: 5 autobiographical stories and essays E-Book

Francis Scott Fitzgerald

• Herausgeber: e-artnow
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

This carefully crafted ebook: "On Mothers, Marriage, Divorce and Children" contains 5 autobiographical stories and essays in one volume and is formatted for your eReader with a functional and detailed table of contents. It is a collection of autobiographical stories and essays by American author F. Scott Fitzgerald. "Imagination" is about 2 different kinds of mothers. A Mrs. Judkins and a Mrs. Paxton. Mrs. Judkins is a mother who lives her life for her children and Mrs. Paxton is a mother who lives for herself. Table of Contents: Imagination—And a few Mothers "Why Blame It on the Poor Kiss if the Girl Veteran of Many Petting Parties Is Prone to Affairs After Marriage?" Does a Moment of Revolt Come Some Time to Every Married Man? What Kind of Husbands Do "Jimmies" Make? "Wait Till You Have Children of Your Own!" Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (1896 – 1940) was an American author of novels and short stories, whose works are the paradigmatic writings of the Jazz Age, a term he coined. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century.

Leseprobe

F. Scott Fitzgerald

On Mothers, Marriage, Divorce and Children:5 autobiographical stories and essays

e-artnow, 2013

ISBN 978-80-268-0274-7

Table of Contents

Imagination—And a few Mothers.

“Why Blame It on the Poor Kiss if the Girl Veteran of Many Petting Parties Is Prone to Affairs After Marriage?”.

Does a Moment of Revolt Come Some Time to Every Married Man?

What Kind of Husbands Do “Jimmies” Make?

“Wait Till You Have Children of Your Own!”.

Imagination—And a few Mothers.

The Ladies’ Home Journal (June 1923)

Table of Contents

Back in the days of tenement uplift, the homes of tired stevedores and banana peddlers were frequently invaded by pompous dowagers who kept their limousines purring at the curb. “Giuseppi,” say the pompous dowagers, “what you need to brighten up your home is a game of of charades every evening.”

“Charade?” inquires the bewildered Giuseppi.

“Family charades,” beam the dowagers. “For instance, suppose some night your wife and the girls take the name ‘Viscountess Salisbury,’ or the words ‘initiative and referendum,’ and act them out—and you and the boys can guess what words they’re acting. So much more real fun than the saloon.”

Having sown the good seed, the dowagers reenter their limousines and drive to the next Giuseppi on their list, a list made out by the Society for Encouraging Parlor Games in Poor Families.

Thus went the attempt from on high to bring imagination into the home, an attempt about as successful as the current effort to clothe the native Hawaiians in dollar-eighty-five cheesecloth Mother Hubbards manufactured in Paterson, New Jersey.

The average home is a horribly dull place. This is a platitude; it’s so far taken for granted that it’s the basis of much of our national humor. The desire of the man for the club and the wife for the movie—as Shelley did not put it—has recently been supplemented by the cry of the child for the moonlight ride.

The statistics compiled last year by the state of Arkansas show that of every one hundred wives thirty-seven admit that they married chiefly to get away from home. The figures are appalling. That nineteen of the thirty-seven wished themselves home again as soon as they were married does not mitigate the frightful situation.

It is easy to say that the home fails chiefly in imagination. Rut an imagination under good control is about as rare a commodity as radium, and does not consist of playing charades or giving an imitation of Charlie Chaplin or putting papier-mache shades on the 1891 gas jets; imagination is an attitude toward living. It is a putting into the terrific, lifelong, age-old fight against domestic dullness all the energy that goes into worry and self-justification and nagging, which are the pet devices of all of us for whiling away the heavy hours.

The word energy at once brings up the picture of a big, bustling woman, breathing hard through closed lips, rushing from child to child and trying to organize a dear little Christmas play in the parlor. But that isn’t at all the kind of imagination I mean.

There are several kinds. For example, I once knew the mother of a family, a Mrs. Judkins, who had a marvelous imagination. If things had been a little different, Mrs. Judkins might have sold her imagination to the movies or the magazines, or invented a new kind of hook-and-eye. Or she might have put it into that intricate and delicate business of running a successful home. Did Mrs. Judkins use her imagination for these things? She did not! She had none left to use.

Her imagination had a leak in it, and its stuff was dissipated hourly into thin air—in this fashion: At six a.m. Mrs. Judkins awakes. She lies in bed. She begins her daily worry. Did, or did not, her daughter Anita look tired last night when she came in from that dance? Yes; she did. She had dark circles. Dark circles—a bogy of her childhood. Mrs. Judkins remembers how her own mother always worried about dark circles. Without doubt Anita is going into a nervous decline. How ghastly! Think of that Mrs.—what was her name?—who had the nervous decline at—at—what was that place? Think of it! Appalling! Well, I’ll—I’ll ask her to go to a doctor; but what if she won’t go? Maybe I can get her to stay home from dances for—for a month.

Out of her bed springs Mrs. Judkins in a state of nervous worry. She is impelled by a notion of doing some vague, nervous thing to avoid some vague, nervous catastrophe.She is already fatigued, because she shouldhave gone back to sleep for an hour; but sleep is now out of the question. Her wonderful imagination has conjured up Anita’s lapse into a bed of pain, her last words—something about “going back to the angels”—and her pitiful extinction.

Anita, who is seventeen and a healthy, hardy flapper, has merely plunged healthily ami hardily into having a good lime. For two nights in succession she has been out late at dances. The second night she was tired and developed dark circles. Today she will sleep until twelve o’clock, if Mrs. Judkins doesn’t wake her to ask her how she feels, and will get up looking like a magazine cover.

But it is only eight o’clock now, and we must return to Mrs. Judkins. She has tiptoed in to look at the doomed Anita, and on her way has glanced into the room where sleeps Clifford Judkins, third, age twelve. Her imagination is now running at fever heat. It is started for the day and will pulsate at the rate of sixty vivid images a minute until she falls into a weary coma at one o’clock tonight.

So she endows Clifford with dark circles also.

Poor Clifford! She decides not to wake him for school. He’s not strong enough. She’ll write a note to his teacher and explain. He looked tired yesterday when he came in from playing baseball. Baseball! Another ghastly thought! Why, suppose—

But I will not depress you by taking you through all the early hours of Mrs. Judkins’ morning; because she is depressing. A human being in a nervous, worried state is one of the most depressing things in the world. Mrs. Judkins is exhausted already so far as having the faintest cheerful effect on anyone else is concerned. In fact, after breakfast Mr. Judkins leaves the house with the impression that things are going pretty badly at home and that life’s a pretty dismal proposition.

But before he left he did a very unfortunate thing. Something in the newspaper made him exclaim that if they passed that Gunch-Bobly tariff law his business was going to the dogs. It was merely a conventional grumble. Complaining about the Gunch-Bobly tariff law is his pet hobby, but—

He has put a whole bag of grist—does grist come in bags?—into the mill of Mrs. Judkins’ imagination. By the time he reaches the street car Mrs. Judkins has got him into bankruptcy. By the time he is downtown he has—though he doesn’t know it—been spending a year in prison, with a woman and two starving children calling for him outside the gates. When he enters his office he is unconsciously entering the poorhouse, there to weep out a miserable old age.

Not According to Model

But enough; a few more hours of Mrs. Judkins’ day would exhaust me and you, as it exhausts everybody with whom she comes into contact.