The Complete Books of F. Scott Fitzgerald (all his 5 novels + all 4 short story collections published during his lifetime) E-Book
F.Scott Fitzgerald
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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
The Complete Books of F. Scott Fitzgerald brings together the quintessence of Fitzgerald's literary genius, compiling all five of his novels alongside four short story collections published during his lifetime. Renowned for his lyrical prose and keen social commentary, Fitzgerald's works explore the complexities of the American Dream, the disillusionment of the Jazz Age, and intricate human relationships. From the opulence of 'The Great Gatsby' to the introspective narratives of 'Tender Is the Night,' this compendium provides an invaluable glimpse into the thematic richness and stylistic evolution of Fitzgerald's work, offering insight into the post-war American struggle for identity and belonging. F. Scott Fitzgerald, often heralded as the voice of his generation, was born in 1896 in Minnesota. His acute observations of high society, personal experiences with wealth and poverty, and tumultuous relationship with Zelda Sayre greatly influenced the narratives he crafted. His tumultuous life and the societal transformations of the 1920s shape the ambivalence evident in his writing, making his perspectives both poignant and prescient. Readers are highly encouraged to delve into this comprehensive collection, as it not only encapsulates Fitzgerald's literary mastery but also invites contemplation on timeless socio-cultural issues. This anthology serves as both an introduction to newcomers and a treasure trove for long-time admirers, offering authentic access to the complexities of human experience in a rapidly changing world. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - The Author Biography highlights personal milestones and literary influences that shape the entire body of writing. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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The Complete Books of F. Scott Fitzgerald (all his 5 novels + all 4 short story collections published during his lifetime)
Table of Contents
Introduction
The collection titled 'The Complete Books of F. Scott Fitzgerald' aims to provide a comprehensive overview of the literary contributions of one of America's most celebrated authors. Through this single-author compilation, readers will experience the full trajectory of Fitzgerald's artistic endeavor, encapsulating the essence of his novels and short stories. The purpose of this collection is not only to present his works side by side but to illuminate how they collectively reflect the complexities of the human experience, particularly during the vibrant yet tumultuous decades of the early 20th century.
Encompassing Fitzgerald's five novels and four short story collections published during his lifetime, this collection offers readers a rich tapestry of genres. It includes novels characterized by their depth and complexity as well as short stories that showcase Fitzgerald's masterful storytelling. The selected works provide a holistic view of his literary output, revealing the evolution of his style and themes across different forms. This diverse representation invites readers to explore Fitzgerald's brilliance in capturing life's nuances, whether in expansive narrative arcs or succinct vignettes.
At the heart of Fitzgerald's oeuvre lies a tapestry of unifying themes, significant not only in their recurrence throughout his work but in their resonance with readers across time. Themes of love, disillusionment, ambition, and the quest for identity permeate each piece, reflecting the zeitgeist of the Jazz Age and beyond. Moreover, Fitzgerald's exploration of wealth and societal status often critiques the American Dream, revealing the inherent contradictions of success and disappointment. These thematic threads not only define his literary landscape but ensure his significance in American literature persists.
Stylistically, Fitzgerald is celebrated for his lyrical prose, sharp social commentary, and profound psychological insight. His works exhibit a seamless blend of elegance and poignancy, employing vivid imagery and nuanced characterizations that create an immersive reading experience. The recurring motifs of light and darkness, dreams and reality, serve to elevate his narratives to that of timeless allegories. These stylistic hallmarks contribute to a cohesive body of work that is simultaneously reflective of the era in which he wrote and deeply personal, inviting readers into Fitzgerald's own contemplative world.
Fitzgerald's novels, including 'This Side of Paradise' and 'Tender Is the Night,' showcase his profound understanding of character development, allowing readers to embark on emotional journeys fraught with tension and revelation. Each protagonist grapples with inner turmoil and societal expectations, providing a mirror to their own struggles. His short stories, such as those found in 'Flappers and Philosophers' and 'Tales of the Jazz Age,' capture the spirit of youth and rebellion, offering quick insights into the lives of characters at pivotal moments. The interplay between these two forms enriches the collection.
The exploration of love and relationships, particularly in works like 'The Great Gatsby' and 'The Beautiful and Damned,' highlights Fitzgerald's keen observations of romantic ideals and their often tragic unravelling. Through the lives of Jay Gatsby and the ill-fated couple of Anthony and Gloria Patch, readers witness the folly and beauty of pursuit in a world tethered to materialism. Fitzgerald's ability to convey the intense emotions surrounding love and loss leaves an indelible mark, making these works essential for understanding the emotional landscape of the human condition.
Fitzgerald's fascination with the American Dream serves as a critical lens through which to view his work. In 'The Great Gatsby,' the aspirational yet tragic pursuit of wealth offers a poignant critique of the era's excesses and the hollowness of material success. His characters are often caught in cycles of aspiration and disappointment, symbolizing the elusive nature of the promises that society holds. This thematic inquiry resonates today as contemporary readers grapple with similar questions about ambition, success, and the essence of happiness.
The Jazz Age's vibrant backdrop provides a dynamic context for Fitzgerald's storytelling, with its lively characters and cultural shifts influencing his narratives. His short stories, such as 'Taps at Reveille' and 'All the Sad Young Men,' reflect the flapper culture and the restlessness of the post-World War I generation. Beyond surface-level glamour, Fitzgerald delves into disillusionment experienced in a rapidly changing world, exploring how young people navigate between tradition and modernity, making his observations timeless and relevant as ever.
Fitzgerald's keen sense of place further enriches his narratives, as settings are intricately woven into the fabric of his stories. The opulence of East Egg and the desolation of the Midwest serve as more than mere backdrops; they become integral to character motivation and thematic exploration. The settings he creates allow readers to experience the contradictions of American life, from extravagance to despair. By inviting readers into these vividly portrayed environments, Fitzgerald heightens their understanding of the characters’ struggles and triumphs.
Another dimension of Fitzgerald's work that merits attention is his exploration of identity. Characters often wrestle with their self-perceptions and the expectations imposed upon them by society. In 'Tender Is the Night,' for instance, his protagonist faces the challenge of reconciling personal dreams with social reality. This ongoing negotiation of identity reflects broader questions of selfhood and voice, particularly in a rapidly evolving cultural landscape. Readers are invited to consider their own conceptions of identity as they traverse the narratives Fitzgerald expertly crafts.
Furthermore, Fitzgerald's use of symbolism adds depth and layers to his narratives, inviting rigorous interpretation. His recurrent use of motifs such as the green light in 'The Great Gatsby' embodies unattainable dreams and human longing. Such symbols resonate powerfully, allowing readers to grapple with their nuances and implications. In this collection, the wealth of symbols invites exploration and discussion, revealing the intricacies of Fitzgerald's insights into the soul's yearnings and societal barriers.
Fitzgerald’s prose is often characterized by its rhythmic quality and craftsmanship, which elevates even the most mundane moments into lyrical experiences. His ability to convey emotion through elegant language distinguishes him as one of the most admired stylists in American literature. The lush descriptions and careful attention to detail in works like 'The Beautiful and Damned' create vivid portraits of his characters’ experiences, allowing readers to feel deeply connected to their stories. This linguistic artistry ensures that Fitzgerald's work remains engaging across generations.
The collection also sheds light on Fitzgerald's evolution as a writer, from the youthful exuberance of 'This Side of Paradise' to the somber reflections present in 'The Love of the Last Tycoon.' This journey not only showcases his growth but also mirrors the shifting cultural dynamics of America during his lifetime. Readers will note how themes of youth, disillusionment, or idealism evolve within his work, providing a fascinating exploration of an artist's development in tandem with the society he sought to critique.
Fitzgerald's short stories present a unique opportunity for readers to engage with his work in more digestible increments, often packed with poignant revelations. Collections like 'All the Sad Young Men' deliver quick yet impactful narratives, showcasing his insight into the human psyche and social dilemmas. These shorter works often encapsulate the same depth as his novels, demonstrating Fitzgerald's adaptability as a storyteller and offering readers a well-rounded understanding of his thematic concerns and stylistic choices.
Moreover, this collection serves as an essential resource for literary scholars and casual readers alike, providing a single-volume reference to Fitzgerald’s complete body of work. It allows for comparative study across genres and forms, enriching discussions around narrative technique, theme, and character development. As scholars dissect the interplay between his novels and short stories, the collection stands as a testament to Fitzgerald’s enduring impact on literature and culture.
In a world where the rhythms of life can often feel disjointed, Fitzgerald’s narratives resonate with a timeless clarity that speaks to our collective human experience. The nuances within his works capture moments of joy, sorrow, love, and loss, reminding readers of the delicate balance we navigate in our quest for meaning. The emotional depth that permeates this collection offers integrated reflections that remain relevant to contemporary society, sparking curiosity and empathy.
Finally, I invite readers to delve deeply into this comprehensive collection, explore each work, and appreciate the intricacies of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s literary genius. Whether you are revisiting familiar narratives or encountering them for the first time, this anthology promises to enrich your understanding of a writer whose voice continues to captivate and engage. In doing so, you will discover the lasting legacy of Fitzgerald and his unparalleled contribution to the canon of American literature.
Author Biography
Introduction
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (1896–1940) was an American novelist and short‑story writer whose work captured and critiqued the exuberance and disillusionment of the Jazz Age. Best known for the novel The Great Gatsby, he also wrote This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and Damned, and Tender Is the Night, along with numerous stories such as Babylon Revisited and The Diamond as Big as the Ritz. His lyrical style, sharp social observation, and focus on aspiration and moral failure made him a central figure in twentieth‑century American literature. Although his reputation waned in the 1930s, posthumous reassessment established him as a canonical writer.
Education and Literary Influences
Born in Saint Paul, Minnesota, Fitzgerald attended local schools before enrolling at the Newman School in New Jersey, where teachers encouraged his literary ambitions. He entered Princeton University in the mid‑1910s, writing for the Triangle Club and campus magazines, but he struggled academically and left without a degree. During World War I he joined the U.S. Army as an officer candidate and served stateside, an experience that sharpened his sense of youthful urgency and thwarted expectations. While stationed in the South he continued to draft fiction, learning to balance romantic idealism with social observation—an equilibrium that would define his early published work.
Fitzgerald’s style drew on admired models he studied closely. He revered the poetry of John Keats for its cadence and imagery, and he examined the crafted prose of Gustave Flaubert and Joseph Conrad to refine structure and point of view. Engagement with the American tradition of Henry James and Edith Wharton informed his interest in manners, class, and desire. Early editorial support from H. L. Mencken and The Smart Set helped him find a national audience, while mass‑market magazines shaped his sense of pacing and dialogue. These influences combined in a voice at once lyrical, satiric, and attentive to social performance.
Literary Career
Fitzgerald’s first novel, This Side of Paradise (1920), distilled collegiate aspiration and postwar restlessness. Its surprise success made him famous in his early twenties and swiftly changed his circumstances. He became a visible chronicler of the era’s new mores, writing about flappers, jazz, and the allure of modern city life. His public image—amplified by magazine fiction and essays—contributed to his reputation as the spokesman of a generation. Marriage and sudden prosperity heightened the glamour surrounding him, even as they intensified financial pressures. The demand for his stories confirmed a rare popularity for a literary writer newly emerged from wartime uncertainty.
The Beautiful and Damned (1922) broadened Fitzgerald’s critique of wealth’s corrosive promises through the story of an aspiring aristocrat and his wife, rendered with alternating satire and sympathy. Throughout the 1920s he produced a stream of notable short stories for leading magazines, including The Ice Palace, May Day, Winter Dreams, and The Rich Boy. These works examined the textures of class, romance, and disillusionment with glittering surfaces that often mask loss. Magazine payments sustained him, but he aimed for formally integrated novels that could outlast fashion. He revised relentlessly, honing musical sentences and emblematic scenes that would culminate in his most enduring book.
The Great Gatsby (1925) fused his lyrical style with a tightly controlled structure and a detached narrator to explore ambition, reinvention, and betrayal. Set against Long Island wealth and the city’s energy, the novel deployed symbols—green light, ash heaps, automobiles—to illuminate an American dream vulnerable to distortion. Initial sales were modest, and some reviewers praised the artistry while questioning its moral center. Yet even early commentary noted its precision and shimmering prose. Over time, readers recognized its economy, narrative framing, and social critique as exemplary. The book gradually assumed its present stature as one of the most studied American novels.
In the latter 1920s Fitzgerald spent extended periods in Europe, notably Paris and the French Riviera, within a community of American expatriate writers and artists. The distance sharpened his perspective on American moneyed life, while exposure to avant‑garde experimentation encouraged structural risk in his fiction. He refined short stories of striking elegance and pathos and gathered observations that informed Tender Is the Night. The contrast between leisure culture and private strain, evident in these years, deepened his recurring themes: the costs of desire, the fragility of promise, and the gap between public spectacle and private reckoning.
Tender Is the Night (1934) emerged from long gestation, offering a complex portrait of glamour entwined with decline. Although many readers admired its beauty, the book met a mixed reception and sold poorly in the Depression era. Meanwhile, Fitzgerald’s finest late stories—such as Babylon Revisited and Crazy Sunday—traced remorse, work, and the aftermath of excess. In the mid‑1930s he published essays later known as The Crack‑Up, an unguarded account of depletion and the effort to rebuild craft. Critics and editors remained attentive to his talent, but commercial stability proved elusive, and his health and finances grew increasingly precarious.
Beliefs and Advocacy
Fitzgerald’s core commitments centered on artistic discipline, precise language, and an unflinching appraisal of aspiration’s costs. He neither celebrated nor simply condemned luxury; instead he dissected the seductions and limits of status, examining how performance shapes identity. His essays and fiction repeatedly probed the American promise—the belief in self‑making—and the moral evasions that can accompany it. He accepted the label chronicler of the Jazz Age while insisting on the period’s underlying melancholy. The tension between romance and skepticism structures his work, yielding narratives in which lyrical possibility collides with social stratification and the stubborn persistence of class boundaries.
Not a political activist in a formal sense, Fitzgerald advocated primarily for literary seriousness within popular culture, defending the short story as an art form and urging writers to revise rigorously. His public statements and later essays emphasized personal responsibility and professional standards during hardship. The Crack‑Up’s candor about exhaustion and addiction contributed to a tradition of self‑scrutiny in American letters, offering readers a vocabulary for private struggle without sensationalism. Across novels and stories, he argued—by example more than manifesto—that style could interrogate privilege, that sentiment required discipline, and that beauty in prose should coexist with ethical intelligence.
Final Years & Legacy
In the late 1930s Fitzgerald sought steadier income in Hollywood, working intermittently as a screenwriter within the studio system. He learned its collaborative constraints and occasional opportunities, securing limited credits while continuing to draft fiction. He began an ambitious final novel, The Last Tycoon, portraying the authority and illusion of a powerful producer alongside the machinery of American entertainment. He died in Los Angeles in 1940 following a heart attack, leaving the book unfinished. Posthumously edited and published by Edmund Wilson, it revealed a sharpened late style and confirmed that his imagination remained vigorous despite years of difficulty.
Critical reappraisal from the mid‑twentieth century onward elevated Fitzgerald to a central place in the American canon. The Great Gatsby, widely taught in schools and universities, became a touchstone for discussions of narrative voice, symbol, and the American dream. Scholars and novelists have drawn on his fusion of lyricism and social scrutiny, while adaptations for stage and screen have kept his characters in public view. His sentences—at once musical and diagnostic—remain models for stylists, and his subjects continue to resonate in debates about wealth, mobility, and reinvention. Today, he stands as the foremost literary historian of his turbulent age.
Historical Context
F. Scott Fitzgerald was born on September 24, 1896, in St. Paul, Minnesota, during a period of rapid urban migration, industrial growth, and the rise of consumer culture. His upbringing in a middle-class family exposed him early to the complexities of wealth and social ambition, experiences that would shape his narrative voice and inform his early novel published shortly after his graduation from Princeton.
By the early 1920s, the explosion of jazz music, flapper style, and Prohibition defined a new era of liberation and excess. His second and third books, together with a celebrated collection of short stories, capture the tension between youthful idealism and the harsher realities of a society in flux. The energetic nightlife of New York and Chicago provided both setting and symbol for characters pursuing dreams that often slipped beyond reach.
After enlisting in 1917 and completing officer training in Alabama, Fitzgerald returned to civilian life in 1919 amid widespread disillusionment. He and many contemporaries struggled to find purpose in a world transformed by global conflict. This sense of aimlessness and thwarted longing permeates his most famous work, in which the pursuit of an unattainable ideal reveals deeper moral and emotional bankruptcy. At the same time, changing gender roles—women’s suffrage achieved in 1920 and the flapper’s new independence—appear vividly in his female characters, who embody both empowerment and vulnerability.
The stock-market collapse of 1929 and the ensuing economic crisis marked another turning point. In his later novel, set partly on the French Riviera, themes of decline, loss, and the fragility of dreams come to the fore as characters confront dwindling fortunes and existential doubt. The deterioration of the American Dream under financial strain becomes central to his portrayal of authenticity, identity, and human resilience.
Fitzgerald’s work unfolded against the broader currents of modernism, a movement that questioned traditional forms and embraced experimental narratives. His use of symbolic imagery and occasional shifts in perspective—especially in the Riviera novel—demonstrate this influence. Characters often wrestle with inner conflicts that mirror the unsettled spirit of an age reshaping itself.
Although his fiction centers on white protagonists, the cultural vibrancy of the Harlem Renaissance and the wider Jazz Age atmosphere left an imprint on his depiction of music, nightlife, and social encounters. He neither foregrounds racial struggle nor ignores it entirely; rather, the diverse artistic ferment of the 1920s appears in the background of dialogues, settings, and sensibilities.
Meanwhile, the rise of the modern short story in American magazines offered Fitzgerald a platform to experiment and reach a broad readership. Collections published in popular periodicals demonstrate his skill at blending social observation with emotional insight, distilling the hopes and disappointments of a generation in just a few pages.
Often associated with the “Lost Generation” of writers—among them Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein—he shared their sense of disillusionment and desire for personal authenticity. His unfinished Hollywood novel explores the tensions between artistic integrity and commercial pressures, reflecting his own experiences in the film industry.
Prohibition reshaped social life, giving rise to clandestine bars, organized crime, and a pervasive flouting of legal strictures. In his major works, the lavish parties, secret gatherings, and moral ambiguities of his characters illustrate the contradictions of an age that celebrated both freedom and excess.
Wealth and privilege frequently provide the backdrop for his stories. Whether on Long Island or the Riviera, he probes the hollowness beneath opulent lifestyles, revealing how material success can coexist with emotional emptiness. Economic disparities become a lens through which he critiques cultural obsessions with status and consumption.
Personal experience also informed his fiction. His marriage to Zelda Sayre and her struggles with mental health inspired complex relationships in his novels, where love and ambition collide under the weight of societal expectations. The portrayal of psychological distress—most notably in the character of a psychiatrist whose wife battles illness—anticipates later conversations about mental well-being.
The expansion of magazines and mass media in the early 20th century transformed publishing, and Fitzgerald’s short fiction appeared in leading outlets, granting him both financial reward and widespread influence. His dual role as popular storyteller and social critic underscores the paradoxes of an era defined by rapid change.
Decades later, his exploration of aspiration, disillusionment, and identity still resonates. As contemporary readers confront questions of inequality, consumerism, and the search for meaning, his work endures as a mirror to shifting cultural landscapes and the timeless struggles of the human heart.
Synopsis (Selection)
This Side of Paradise
F. Scott Fitzgerald's debut novel follows the life of Amory Blaine, a young man navigating love and identity amid the complexities of early 20th-century American society, exploring themes of ambition, disillusionment, and the quest for self-discovery.
Flappers and Philosophers
This collection of short stories captures the spirit of the Jazz Age, portraying the lives of flappers, ambitious young men, and the social dynamics of the era, highlighting the joy and turmoil of modern American life.
The Beautiful and Damned
This novel tells the story of Anthony Patch and his wife, Gloria, as they spiral into decadence and excess, revealing the darker side of the American Dream and the ephemeral nature of wealth and beauty.
Tales of the Jazz Age
A diverse assortment of stories that encapsulate the vibrant culture of the 1920s, addressing themes of love, ambition, and the struggle between tradition and modernity, offering insightful glimpses into the lives of its characters.
The Great Gatsby
Set in the Roaring Twenties, this iconic novel chronicles the tragic love story of Jay Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan, exploring themes of obsession, social stratification, and the elusive nature of the American Dream.
All the Sad Young Men
In this collection of stories, Fitzgerald explores the experiences of disillusioned youth and the complexities of modern relationships, portraying characters grappling with the consequences of their aspirations and failures.
Tender is the Night
This novel centers on Dick Diver, a psychiatrist, and his tumultuous marriage to the wealthy and troubled Zelda Sayre, exploring themes of love, mental illness, and the decay of dreams against the backdrop of 1920s Europe.
Taps at Reveille
This collection features stories reflecting the fragmented lives and disillusionment of post-war American youth, delving into themes of love, loss, and the search for purpose in a changing world.
The Love of the Last Tycoon
Fitzgerald's unfinished novel examines the life of Monroe Stahr, a Hollywood producer, as he navigates the complexities of ambition, power, and personal relationships in the golden age of cinema.
This Side of Paradise.
New York: Scribners, 1920.
… Well this side of Paradise! …
There’s little comfort in the wise.[1q]
—Rupert Brooke.
Experience is the name so many people
give to their mistakes.
—Oscar Wilde.
THIS SIDE OF PARADISE
Table of Contents
Book One. The Romantic Egotist
Chapter 1. Amory, Son of Beatrice
Chapter 2. Spires and Gargoyles
Chapter 3. The Egotist Considers
Chapter 4. Narcissus Off Duty
Interlude. May, 1917-February, 1919
Book Two. The Education of a Personage
Chapter 1. The Débutante
Chapter 2. Experiments in Convalescence
Chapter 3. Young Irony
Chapter 4. The Supercilious Sacrifice
Chapter 5. The Egotist Becomes a Personage
To Sigourney Fay
Book One.
The Romantic Egotist
Chapter 1.
Amory, Son of Beatrice
Amory Blaine inherited from his mother every trait, except the stray inexpressible few, that made him worth while. His father, an ineffectual, inarticulate man with a taste for Byron and a habit of drowsing over the Encyclopædia Britannica, grew wealthy at thirty through the death of two elder brothers, successful Chicago brokers, and in the first flush of feeling that the world was his, went to Bar Harbor and met Beatrice O’Hara. In consequence, Stephen Blaine handed down to posterity his height of just under six feet and his tendency to waver at crucial moments, these two abstractions appearing in his son Amory. For many years he hovered in the background of his family’s life, an unassertive figure with a face half-obliterated by lifeless, silky hair, continually occupied in “taking care” of his wife, continually harassed by the idea that he didn’t and couldn’t understand her.
But Beatrice Blaine! There was a woman! Early pictures taken on her father’s estate at Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, or in Rome at the Sacred Heart Convent—an educational extravagance that in her youth was only for the daughters of the exceptionally wealthy—showed the exquisite delicacy of her features, the consummate art and simplicity of her clothes. A brilliant education she had—her youth passed in renaissance glory, she was versed in the latest gossip of the Older Roman Families; known by name as a fabulously wealthy American girl to Cardinal Vitori and Queen Margherita and more subtle celebrities that one must have had some culture even to have heard of. She learned in England to prefer whiskey and soda to wine, and her small talk was broadened in two senses during a winter in Vienna. All in all Beatrice O’Hara absorbed the sort of education that will be quite impossible ever again; a tutelage measured by the number of things and people one could be contemptuous of and charming about; a culture rich in all arts and traditions, barren of all ideas, in the last of those days when the great gardener clipped the inferior roses to produce one perfect bud.
In her less important moments she returned to America, met Stephen Blaine and married him—this almost entirely because she was a little bit weary, a little bit sad. Her only child was carried through a tiresome season and brought into the world on a spring day in ninety-six.
When Amory was five he was already a delightful companion for her. He was an auburn-haired boy, with great, handsome eyes which he would grow up to in time, a facile imaginative mind and a taste for fancy dress. From his fourth to his tenth year he did the country with his mother in her father’s private car, from Coronado, where his mother became so bored that she had a nervous breakdown in a fashionable hotel, down to Mexico City, where she took a mild, almost epidemic consumption. This trouble pleased her, and later she made use of it as an intrinsic part of her atmosphere—especially after several astounding bracers.
So, while more or less fortunate little rich boys were defying governesses on the beach at Newport, or being spanked or tutored or read to from “Do and Dare,” or “Frank on the Mississippi,” Amory was biting acquiescent bell-boys in the Waldorf, outgrowing a natural repugnance to chamber music and symphonies, and deriving a highly specialized education from his mother.
“Amory.”
“Yes, Beatrice.” (Such a quaint name for his mother; she encouraged it.)
“Dear, don’t think of getting out of bed yet. I’ve always suspected that early rising in early life makes one nervous. Clothilde is having your breakfast brought up.”
“All right.”
“I am feeling very old to-day, Amory,” she would sigh, her face a rare cameo of pathos, her voice exquisitely modulated, her hands as facile as Bernhardt’s. “My nerves are on edge—on edge. We must leave this terrifying place to-morrow and go searching for sunshine.”
Amory’s penetrating green eyes would look out through tangled hair at his mother. Even at this age he had no illusions about her.
“Amory.”
“Oh, yes.”
“I want you to take a red-hot bath—as hot as you can bear it, and just relax your nerves. You can read in the tub if you wish.”
She fed him sections of the “Fêtes Galantes” before he was ten; at eleven he could talk glibly, if rather reminiscently, of Brahms and Mozart and Beethoven. One afternoon, when left alone in the hotel at Hot Springs, he sampled his mother’s apricot cordial, and as the taste pleased him, he became quite tipsy. This was fun for a while, but he essayed a cigarette in his exaltation, and succumbed to a vulgar, plebeian reaction. Though this incident horrified Beatrice, it also secretly amused her and became part of what in a later generation would have been termed her “line.”
“This son of mine,” he heard her tell a room full of awestruck, admiring women one day, “is entirely sophisticated and quite charming—but delicate—we’re all delicate; here, you know.” Her hand was radiantly outlined against her beautiful bosom; then sinking her voice to a whisper, she told them of the apricot cordial. They rejoiced, for she was a brave raconteuse, but many were the keys turned in sideboard locks that night against the possible defection of little Bobby or Barbara….
These domestic pilgrimages were invariably in state; two maids, the private car, or Mr. Blaine when available, and very often a physician. When Amory had the whooping-cough four disgusted specialists glared at each other hunched around his bed; when he took scarlet fever the number of attendants, including physicians and nurses, totalled fourteen. However, blood being thicker than broth, he was pulled through.
The Blaines were attached to no city. They were the Blaines of Lake Geneva; they had quite enough relatives to serve in place of friends, and an enviable standing from Pasadena to Cape Cod. But Beatrice grew more and more prone to like only new acquaintances, as there were certain stories, such as the history of her constitution and its many amendments, memories of her years abroad, that it was necessary for her to repeat at regular intervals. Like Freudian dreams, they must be thrown off, else they would sweep in and lay siege to her nerves. But Beatrice was critical about American women, especially the floating population of ex-Westerners.
“They have accents, my dear,” she told Amory, “not Southern accents or Boston accents, not an accent attached to any locality, just an accent”—she became dreamy. “They pick up old, moth-eaten London accents that are down on their luck and have to be used by some one. They talk as an English butler might after several years in a Chicago grand-opera company.” She became almost incoherent—“Suppose—time in every Western woman’s life—she feels her husband is prosperous enough for her to have—accent—they try to impress me, my dear——”
Though she thought of her body as a mass of frailties, she considered her soul quite as ill, and therefore important in her life. She had once been a Catholic, but discovering that priests were infinitely more attentive when she was in process of losing or regaining faith in Mother Church, she maintained an enchantingly wavering attitude. Often she deplored the bourgeois quality of the American Catholic clergy, and was quite sure that had she lived in the shadow of the great Continental cathedrals her soul would still be a thin flame on the mighty altar of Rome. Still, next to doctors, priests were her favorite sport.
“Ah, Bishop Wiston,” she would declare, “I do not want to talk of myself. I can imagine the stream of hysterical women fluttering at your doors, beseeching you to be simpatico”—then after an interlude filled by the clergyman—“but my mood—is—oddly dissimilar.”
Only to bishops and above did she divulge her clerical romance. When she had first returned to her country there had been a pagan, Swinburnian young man in Asheville, for whose passionate kisses and unsentimental conversations she had taken a decided penchant—they had discussed the matter pro and con with an intellectual romancing quite devoid of soppiness. Eventually she had decided to marry for background, and the young pagan from Asheville had gone through a spiritual crisis, joined the Catholic Church, and was now—Monsignor Darcy.
“Indeed, Mrs. Blaine, he is still delightful company—quite the cardinal’s right-hand man.”
“Amory will go to him one day, I know,” breathed the beautiful lady, “and Monsignor Darcy will understand him as he understood me.”
Amory became thirteen, rather tall and slender, and more than ever on to his Celtic mother. He had tutored occasionally—the idea being that he was to “keep up,” at each place “taking up the work where he left off,” yet as no tutor ever found the place he left off, his mind was still in very good shape. What a few more years of this life would have made of him is problematical. However, four hours out from land, Italy bound, with Beatrice, his appendix burst, probably from too many meals in bed, and after a series of frantic telegrams to Europe and America, to the amazement of the passengers the great ship slowly wheeled around and returned to New York to deposit Amory at the pier. You will admit that if it was not life it was magnificent.
After the operation Beatrice had a nervous breakdown that bore a suspicious resemblance to delirium tremens, and Amory was left in Minneapolis, destined to spend the ensuing two years with his aunt and uncle. There the crude, vulgar air of Western civilization first catches him—in his underwear, so to speak.
A Kiss for Amory.
His lip curled when he read it.
“I am going to have a bobbing party,” it said, “on Thursday, December the seventeenth, at five o’clock, and I would like it very much if you could come. Yours truly,
R.S.V.P.
Myra St. Claire.
He had been two months in Minneapolis, and his chief struggle had been the concealing from “the other guys at school” how particularly superior he felt himself to be, yet this conviction was built upon shifting sands. He had shown off one day in French class (he was in senior French class) to the utter confusion of Mr. Reardon, whose accent Amory damned contemptuously, and to the delight of the class. Mr. Reardon, who had spent several weeks in Paris ten years before, took his revenge on the verbs, whenever he had his book open. But another time Amory showed off in history class, with quite disastrous results, for the boys there were his own age, and they shrilled innuendoes at each other all the following week:
“Aw—I b’lieve, doncherknow, the Umuricun revolution was lawgely an affair of the middul clawses,” or
“Washington came of very good blood—aw, quite good—I b’lieve.”
Amory ingeniously tried to retrieve himself by blundering on purpose. Two years before he had commenced a history of the United States which, though it only got as far as the Colonial Wars, had been pronounced by his mother completely enchanting.
His chief disadvantage lay in athletics, but as soon as he discovered that it was the touchstone of power and popularity at school, he began to make furious, persistent efforts to excel in the winter sports, and with his ankles aching and bending in spite of his efforts, he skated valiantly around the Lorelie rink every afternoon, wondering how soon he would be able to carry a hockey-stick without getting it inexplicably tangled in his skates.
The invitation to Miss Myra St. Claire’s bobbing party spent the morning in his coat pocket, where it had an intense physical affair with a dusty piece of peanut brittle. During the afternoon he brought it to light with a sigh, and after some consideration and a preliminary draft in the back of Collar and Daniel’s “First-Year Latin,” composed an answer:
My dear Miss St. Claire:
Your truly charming envitation for the evening of next Thursday evening was truly delightful to recieve this morning. I will be charm and inchanted indeed to present my compliments on next Thursday evening.
Faithfully, Amory Blaine.
On Thursday, therefore, he walked pensively along the slippery, shovel-scraped sidewalks, and came in sight of Myra’s house, on the half-hour after five, a lateness which he fancied his mother would have favored. He waited on the door-step with his eyes nonchalantly half-closed, and planned his entrance with precision. He would cross the floor, not too hastily, to Mrs. St. Claire, and say with exactly the correct modulation:
“My dear Mrs. St. Claire, I’m frightfully sorry to be late, but my maid”—he paused there and realized he would be quoting—“but my uncle and I had to see a fella—Yes, I’ve met your enchanting daughter at dancing-school.”
Then he would shake hands, using that slight, half-foreign bow, with all the starchy little females, and nod to the fellas who would be standing ‘round, paralyzed into rigid groups for mutual protection.
A butler (one of the three in Minneapolis) swung open the door. Amory stepped inside and divested himself of cap and coat. He was mildly surprised not to hear the shrill squawk of conversation from the next room, and he decided it must be quite formal. He approved of that—as he approved of the butler.
“Miss Myra,” he said.
To his surprise the butler grinned horribly.
“Oh, yeah,” he declared, “she’s here.” He was unaware that his failure to be cockney was ruining his standing. Amory considered him coldly.
“But,” continued the butler, his voice rising unnecessarily, “she’s the only one what is here. The party’s gone.”
Amory gasped in sudden horror.
“What?”
“She’s been waitin’ for Amory Blaine. That’s you, ain’t it? Her mother says that if you showed up by five-thirty you two was to go after ’em in the Packard.”
Amory’s despair was crystallized by the appearance of Myra herself, bundled to the ears in a polo coat, her face plainly sulky, her voice pleasant only with difficulty.
“‘Lo, Amory.”
“‘Lo, Myra.” He had described the state of his vitality.
“Well—you got here, anyways.”
“Well—I’ll tell you. I guess you don’t know about the auto accident,” he romanced.
Myra’s eyes opened wide.
“Who was it to?”
“Well,” he continued desperately, “uncle ‘n aunt ‘n I.”
“Was any one killed?”
Amory paused and then nodded.
“Your uncle?”—alarm.
“Oh, no—just a horse—a sorta gray horse.”
At this point the Erse butler snickered.
“Probably killed the engine,” he suggested. Amory would have put him on the rack without a scruple.
“We’ll go now,” said Myra coolly. “You see, Amory, the bobs were ordered for five and everybody was here, so we couldn’t wait——”
“Well, I couldn’t help it, could I?”
“So mama said for me to wait till ha’past five. We’ll catch the bob before it gets to the Minnehaha Club, Amory.”
Amory’s shredded poise dropped from him. He pictured the happy party jingling along snowy streets, the appearance of the limousine, the horrible public descent of him and Myra before sixty reproachful eyes, his apology—a real one this time. He sighed aloud.
“What?” inquired Myra.
“Nothing. I was just yawning. Are we going to surely catch up with ’em before they get there?” He was encouraging a faint hope that they might slip into the Minnehaha Club and meet the others there, be found in blasé seclusion before the fire and quite regain his lost attitude.
“Oh, sure Mike, we’ll catch ’em all right—let’s hurry.”
He became conscious of his stomach. As they stepped into the machine he hurriedly slapped the paint of diplomacy over a rather box-like plan he had conceived. It was based upon some “trade-lasts” gleaned at dancing-school, to the effect that he was “awful good-looking and English, sort of.”
“Myra,” he said, lowering his voice and choosing his words carefully, “I beg a thousand pardons. Can you ever forgive me?”
She regarded him gravely, his intent green eyes, his mouth, that to her thirteen-year-old, arrow-collar taste was the quintessence of romance. Yes, Myra could forgive him very easily.
“Why—yes—sure.”
He looked at her again, and then dropped his eyes. He had lashes.
“I’m awful,” he said sadly. “I’m diff’runt. I don’t know why I make faux pas. ‘Cause I don’t care, I s’pose.” Then, recklessly: “I been smoking too much. I’ve got t’bacca heart.”
Myra pictured an all-night tobacco debauch, with Amory pale and reeling from the effect of nicotined lungs. She gave a little gasp.
“Oh, Amory, don’t smoke. You’ll stunt your growth!”
“I don’t care,” he persisted gloomily. “I gotta. I got the habit. I’ve done a lot of things that if my fambly knew”—he hesitated, giving her imagination time to picture dark horrors—“I went to the burlesque show last week.”
Myra was quite overcome. He turned the green eyes on her again.
“You’re the only girl in town I like much,” he exclaimed in a rush of sentiment. “You’re simpatico.”
Myra was not sure that she was, but it sounded stylish though vaguely improper.
Thick dusk had descended outside, and as the limousine made a sudden turn she was jolted against him; their hands touched.
“You shouldn’t smoke, Amory,” she whispered. “Don’t you know that?”
He shook his head.
“Nobody cares.”
Myra hesitated.
“I care.”
Something stirred within Amory.
“Oh, yes, you do! You got a crush on Froggy Parker. I guess everybody knows that.”
“No, I haven’t,” very slowly.
A silence, while Amory thrilled. There was something fascinating about Myra, shut away here cosily from the dim, chill air. Myra, a little bundle of clothes, with strands of yellow hair curling out from under her skating cap.
“Because I’ve got a crush, too—” He paused, for he heard in the distance the sound of young laughter, and, peering through the frosted glass along the lamp-lit street, he made out the dark outline of the bobbing party. He must act quickly. He reached over with a violent, jerky effort, and clutched Myra’s hand—her thumb, to be exact.
“Tell him to go to the Minnehaha straight,” he whispered. “I wanta talk to you—I got to talk to you.”
Myra made out the party ahead, had an instant vision of her mother, and then—alas for convention—glanced into the eyes beside.
“Turn down this side street, Richard, and drive straight to the Minnehaha Club!” she cried through the speaking tube. Amory sank back against the cushions with a sigh of relief.
“I can kiss her,” he thought. “I’ll bet I can. I’ll bet I can!”
Overhead the sky was half crystalline, half misty, and the night around was chill and vibrant with rich tension. From the Country Club steps the roads stretched away, dark creases on the white blanket; huge heaps of snow lining the sides like the tracks of giant moles. They lingered for a moment on the steps, and watched the white holiday moon.
“Pale moons like that one”—Amory made a vague gesture—“make people mysterieuse. You look like a young witch with her cap off and her hair sorta mussed”—her hands clutched at her hair—“Oh, leave it, it looks good.”
They drifted up the stairs and Myra led the way into the little den of his dreams, where a cosy fire was burning before a big sink-down couch. A few years later this was to be a great stage for Amory, a cradle for many an emotional crisis. Now they talked for a moment about bobbing parties.
“There’s always a bunch of shy fellas,” he commented, “sitting at the tail of the bob, sorta lurkin’ an’ whisperin’ an’ pushin’ each other off. Then there’s always some crazy cross-eyed girl”—he gave a terrifying imitation—“she’s always talkin’ hard, sorta, to the chaperon.”
“You’re such a funny boy,” puzzled Myra.
“How d’y’ mean?” Amory gave immediate attention, on his own ground at last.
“Oh—always talking about crazy things. Why don’t you come ski-ing with Marylyn and I to-morrow?”
“I don’t like girls in the daytime,” he said shortly, and then, thinking this a bit abrupt, he added: “But I like you.” He cleared his throat. “I like you first and second and third.”
Myra’s eyes became dreamy. What a story this would make to tell Marylyn! Here on the couch with this wonderful-looking boy—the little fire—the sense that they were alone in the great building——
Myra capitulated. The atmosphere was too appropriate.
“I like you the first twenty-five,” she confessed, her voice trembling, “and Froggy Parker twenty-sixth.”
Froggy had fallen twenty-five places in one hour. As yet he had not even noticed it.
But Amory, being on the spot, leaned over quickly and kissed Myra’s cheek. He had never kissed a girl before, and he tasted his lips curiously, as if he had munched some new fruit. Then their lips brushed like young wild flowers in the wind.
“We’re awful,” rejoiced Myra gently. She slipped her hand into his, her head drooped against his shoulder. Sudden revulsion seized Amory, disgust, loathing for the whole incident. He desired frantically to be away, never to see Myra again, never to kiss any one; he became conscious of his face and hers, of their clinging hands, and he wanted to creep out of his body and hide somewhere safe out of sight, up in the corner of his mind.
“Kiss me again.” Her voice came out of a great void.
“I don’t want to,” he heard himself saying. There was another pause.
“I don’t want to!” he repeated passionately.
Myra sprang up, her cheeks pink with bruised vanity, the great bow on the back of her head trembling sympathetically.
“I hate you!” she cried. “Don’t you ever dare to speak to me again!”
“What?” stammered Amory.
“I’ll tell mama you kissed me! I will too! I will too! I’ll tell mama, and she won’t let me play with you!”
Amory rose and stared at her helplessly, as though she were a new animal of whose presence on the earth he had not heretofore been aware.
The door opened suddenly, and Myra’s mother appeared on the threshold, fumbling with her lorgnette.
“Well,” she began, adjusting it benignantly, “the man at the desk told me you two children were up here—How do you do, Amory.”
Amory watched Myra and waited for the crash—but none came. The pout faded, the high pink subsided, and Myra’s voice was placid as a summer lake when she answered her mother.
“Oh, we started so late, mama, that I thought we might as well——”
He heard from below the shrieks of laughter, and smelled the vapid odor of hot chocolate and tea-cakes as he silently followed mother and daughter down-stairs. The sound of the graphophone mingled with the voices of many girls humming the air, and a faint glow was born and spread over him:
“Casey-Jones—mounted to the cab-un
Casey-Jones—‘th his orders in his hand.
Casey-Jones—mounted to the cab-un
Took his farewell journey to the prom-ised land.”
Snapshots of the Young Egotist.
Amory spent nearly two years in Minneapolis. The first winter he wore moccasins that were born yellow, but after many applications of oil and dirt assumed their mature color, a dirty, greenish brown; he wore a gray plaid mackinaw coat, and a red toboggan cap. His dog, Count Del Monte, ate the red cap, so his uncle gave him a gray one that pulled down over his face. The trouble with this one was that you breathed into it and your breath froze; one day the darn thing froze his cheek. He rubbed snow on his cheek, but it turned bluish-black just the same.
The Count Del Monte ate a box of bluing once, but it didn’t hurt him. Later, however, he lost his mind and ran madly up the street, bumping into fences, rolling in gutters, and pursuing his eccentric course out of Amory’s life. Amory cried on his bed.
“Poor little Count,” he cried. “Oh, poor little Count!”
After several months he suspected Count of a fine piece of emotional acting.
Amory and Frog Parker considered that the greatest line in literature occurred in Act III of “Arsene Lupin.”
They sat in the first row at the Wednesday and Saturday matinées. The line was:
“If one can’t be a great artist or a great soldier, the next best thing is to be a great criminal.”
Amory fell in love again, and wrote a poem. This was it:
“Marylyn and Sallee,
Those are the girls for me.
Marylyn stands above
Sallee in that sweet, deep love.”
He was interested in whether McGovern of Minnesota would make the first or second All-American, how to do the card-pass, how to do the coin-pass, chameleon ties, how babies were born, and whether Three-fingered Brown was really a better pitcher than Christie Mathewson.
Among other things he read: “For the Honor of the School,” “Little Women” (twice), “The Common Law,” “Sapho,” “Dangerous Dan McGrew,” “The Broad Highway” (three times), “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “Three Weeks,” “Mary Ware, the Little Colonel’s Chum,” “Gunga Din,” The Police Gazette, and Jim-Jam Jems.
He had all the Henty biasses in history, and was particularly fond of the cheerful murder stories of Mary Roberts Rinehart.
School ruined his French and gave him a distaste for standard authors. His masters considered him idle, unreliable and superficially clever.
He collected locks of hair from many girls. He wore the rings of several. Finally he could borrow no more rings, owing to his nervous habit of chewing them out of shape. This, it seemed, usually aroused the jealous suspicions of the next borrower.
All through the summer months Amory and Frog Parker went each week to the Stock Company. Afterward they would stroll home in the balmy air of August night, dreaming along Hennepin and Nicollet Avenues, through the gay crowd. Amory wondered how people could fail to notice that he was a boy marked for glory, and when faces of the throng turned toward him and ambiguous eyes stared into his, he assumed the most romantic of expressions and walked on the air cushions that lie on the asphalts of fourteen.
Always, after he was in bed, there were voices—indefinite, fading, enchanting—just outside his window, and before he fell asleep he would dream one of his favorite waking dreams, the one about becoming a great half-back, or the one about the Japanese invasion, when he was rewarded by being made the youngest general in the world. It was always the becoming he dreamed of, never the being. This, too, was quite characteristic of Amory.
Code of the Young Egotist.
Before he was summoned back to Lake Geneva, he had appeared, shy but inwardly glowing, in his first long trousers, set off by a purple accordion tie and a “Belmont” collar with the edges unassailably meeting, purple socks, and handkerchief with a purple border peeping from his breast pocket. But more than that, he had formulated his first philosophy, a code to live by, which, as near as it can be named, was a sort of aristocratic egotism.
He had realized that his best interests were bound up with those of a certain variant, changing person, whose label, in order that his past might always be identified with him, was Amory Blaine. Amory marked himself a fortunate youth, capable of infinite expansion for good or evil. He did not consider himself a “strong char’c’ter,” but relied on his facility (learn things sorta quick) and his superior mentality (read a lotta deep books). He was proud of the fact that he could never become a mechanical or scientific genius. From no other heights was he debarred.
Physically.—Amory thought that he was exceedingly handsome. He was. He fancied himself an athlete of possibilities and a supple dancer.
Socially.—Here his condition was, perhaps, most dangerous. He granted himself personality, charm, magnetism, poise, the power of dominating all contemporary males, the gift of fascinating all women.
Mentally.—Complete, unquestioned superiority.
Now a confession will have to be made. Amory had rather a Puritan conscience. Not that he yielded to it—later in life he almost completely slew it—but at fifteen it made him consider himself a great deal worse than other boys … unscrupulousness … the desire to influence people in almost every way, even for evil … a certain coldness and lack of affection, amounting sometimes to cruelty … a shifting sense of honor … an unholy selfishness … a puzzled, furtive interest in everything concerning sex.
There was, also, a curious strain of weakness running crosswise through his make-up … a harsh phrase from the lips of an older boy (older boys usually detested him) was liable to sweep him off his poise into surly sensitiveness, or timid stupidity … he was a slave to his own moods and he felt that though he was capable of recklessness and audacity, he possessed neither courage, perseverance, nor self-respect.
Vanity, tempered with self-suspicion if not self-knowledge, a sense of people as automatons to his will, a desire to “pass” as many boys as possible and get to a vague top of the world … with this background did Amory drift into adolescence.
Preparatory to the Great Adventure.
The train slowed up with midsummer languor at Lake Geneva, and Amory caught sight of his mother waiting in her electric on the gravelled station drive. It was an ancient electric, one of the early types, and painted gray. The sight of her sitting there, slenderly erect, and of her face, where beauty and dignity combined, melting to a dreamy recollected smile, filled him with a sudden great pride of her. As they kissed coolly and he stepped into the electric, he felt a quick fear lest he had lost the requisite charm to measure up to her.
“Dear boy—you’re so tall … look behind and see if there’s anything coming…”
She looked left and right, she slipped cautiously into a speed of two miles an hour, beseeching Amory to act as sentinel; and at one busy crossing she made him get out and run ahead to signal her forward like a traffic policeman. Beatrice was what might be termed a careful driver.
“You are tall—but you’re still very handsome—you’ve skipped the awkward age, or is that sixteen; perhaps it’s fourteen or fifteen; I can never remember; but you’ve skipped it.”
“Don’t embarrass me,” murmured Amory.
“But, my dear boy, what odd clothes! They look as if they were a set—don’t they? Is your underwear purple, too?”
Amory grunted impolitely.
“You must go to Brooks’ and get some really nice suits. Oh, we’ll have a talk to-night or perhaps to-morrow night. I want to tell you about your heart—you’ve probably been neglecting your heart—and you don’t know.”
Amory thought how superficial was the recent overlay of his own generation. Aside from a minute shyness, he felt that the old cynical kinship with his mother had not been one bit broken. Yet for the first few days he wandered about the gardens and along the shore in a state of superloneliness, finding a lethargic content in smoking “Bull” at the garage with one of the chauffeurs.
The sixty acres of the estate were dotted with old and new summer houses and many fountains and white benches that came suddenly into sight from foliage-hung hiding-places; there was a great and constantly increasing family of white cats that prowled the many flower-beds and were silhouetted suddenly at night against the darkening trees. It was on one of the shadowy paths that Beatrice at last captured Amory, after Mr. Blaine had, as usual, retired for the evening to his private library. After reproving him for avoiding her, she took him for a long tˆte-à-tête in the moonlight. He could not reconcile himself to her beauty, that was mother to his own, the exquisite neck and shoulders, the grace of a fortunate woman of thirty.
“Amory, dear,” she crooned softly, “I had such a strange, weird time after I left you.”
“Did you, Beatrice?”
“When I had my last breakdown”—she spoke of it as a sturdy, gallant feat.
“The doctors told me”—her voice sang on a confidential note—“that if any man alive had done the consistent drinking that I have, he would have been physically shattered, my dear, and in his grave—long in his grave.”
Amory winced, and wondered how this would have sounded to Froggy Parker.
“Yes,” continued Beatrice tragically, “I had dreams—wonderful visions.” She pressed the palms of her hands into her eyes. “I saw bronze rivers lapping marble shores, and great birds that soared through the air, parti-colored birds with iridescent plumage. I heard strange music and the flare of barbaric trumpets—what?”
Amory had snickered.
“What, Amory?”
“I said go on, Beatrice.”
“That was all—it merely recurred and recurred—gardens that flaunted coloring against which this would be quite dull, moons that whirled and swayed, paler than winter moons, more golden than harvest moons——”
“Are you quite well now, Beatrice?”
“Quite well—as well as I will ever be. I am not understood, Amory. I know that can’t express it to you, Amory, but—I am not understood.”
Amory was quite moved. He put his arm around his mother, rubbing his head gently against her shoulder.
“Poor Beatrice—poor Beatrice.”
“Tell me about you, Amory. Did you have two horrible years?”
Amory considered lying, and then decided against it.
“No, Beatrice. I enjoyed them. I adapted myself to the bourgeoisie. I became conventional.” He surprised himself by saying that, and he pictured how Froggy would have gaped.
“Beatrice,” he said suddenly, “I want to go away to school. Everybody in Minneapolis is going to go away to school.”
Beatrice showed some alarm.
“But you’re only fifteen.”
“Yes, but everybody goes away to school at fifteen, and I want to, Beatrice.”
On Beatrice’s suggestion the subject was dropped for the rest of the walk, but a week later she delighted him by saying:
“Amory, I have decided to let you have your way. If you still want to, you can go to school.”
“Yes?”
“To St. Regis’s in Connecticut.”
Amory felt a quick excitement.
“It’s being arranged,” continued Beatrice. “It’s better that you should go away. I’d have preferred you to have gone to Eton, and then to Christ Church, Oxford, but it seems impracticable now—and for the present we’ll let the university question take care of itself.”
“What are you going to do, Beatrice?”
“Heaven knows. It seems my fate to fret away my years in this country. Not for a second do I regret being American—indeed, I think that a regret typical of very vulgar people, and I feel sure we are the great coming nation—yet”—and she sighed—“I feel my life should have drowsed away close to an older, mellower civilization, a land of greens and autumnal browns——”
Amory did not answer, so his mother continued:
“My regret is that you haven’t been abroad, but still, as you are a man, it’s better that you should grow up here under the snarling eagle—is that the right term?”
Amory agreed that it was. She would not have appreciated the Japanese invasion.
“When do I go to school?”
“Next month. You’ll have to start East a little early to take your examinations. After that you’ll have a free week, so I want you to go up the Hudson and pay a visit.”
“To who?”
“To Monsignor Darcy, Amory. He wants to see you. He went to Harrow and then to Yale—became a Catholic. I want him to talk to you—I feel he can be such a help—” She stroked his auburn hair gently. “Dear Amory, dear Amory——”
“Dear Beatrice——”
So early in September Amory, provided with “six suits summer underwear, six suits winter underwear, one sweater or T shirt, one jersey, one overcoat, winter, etc.,” set out for New England, the land of schools.
There were Andover and Exeter with their memories of New England dead—large, college-like democracies; St. Mark’s, Groton, St. Regis’—recruited from Boston and the Knickerbocker families of New York; St. Paul’s, with its great rinks; Pomfret and St. George’s, prosperous and well-dressed; Taft and Hotchkiss, which prepared the wealth of the Middle West for social success at Yale; Pawling, Westminster, Choate, Kent, and a hundred others; all milling out their well-set-up, conventional, impressive type, year after year; their mental stimulus the college entrance exams; their vague purpose set forth in a hundred circulars as “To impart a Thorough Mental, Moral, and Physical Training as a Christian Gentleman, to fit the boy for meeting the problems of his day and generation, and to give a solid foundation in the Arts and Sciences.”
