There was no sky—only a dark, ominous tent that draped in the tops of the streets and was in reality a vast approaching army of snowflakes—while over it all, chilling away the comfort from the brown-and-green glow of lighted windows and muffling the steady trot of the horse pulling their sleigh, interminably washed the north wind. . . . She thought again of those isolated country houses that her train had passed, and of the life there the long winter through—the ceaseless glare through the windows, the crust forming on the soft drifts of snow, finally the slow, cheerless melting, and the harsh spring . . .
Visiting the Ice Palace, Sally Carrol becomes separated from Harry, and wanders alone through the black and chilling halls. In the deep silence she stumbles finally to a halt, overtaken by ecstatic terror. This is her introduction to the true nature of the North, which, she now understands, is beyond her—endless, ancient, and implacable. After her rescue, Sally Carrol flees to the easy life of the South, where the moment of fear and transcendence will never be repeated, and where such demands are not made upon the soul. The South is a pleasant place, but the North, Fitzgerald tells us, is one of dark magnificence. It is this sense of brooding nobility—as well as Fitzgerald’s passionate, incantatory voice—that overshadows the human characters and dominates this story.
For all her unconventional ways, Zelda refused Fitzgerald, at first, on very conventional grounds: financial ones. The beautiful young women in Fitzgerald’s work are often wealthy, or aspirants to wealth. Money held a deep and ambivalent fascination for the author, who had grown up poorer than his neighbors. In St. Paul, his family lived modestly among the very rich, and Fitzgerald went to school and college with their sons. He had seen the rich from very close, but always from below. Money played a powerful part in his world and in his writing, and its influence was something he explored, in ways increasingly subtle and complex.
In the light and frothy entertainment “The Offshore Pirate” wealth is seen as benign. The very rich are very benevolent here, and the consequences of wealth are happiness. The saucy Flapper, who stamps her foot and will not do as she’s told, meets her match in a dashing young Lochinvar, and by the happy ending everyone is rich and in love. The counterpart to this romantic diversion is the dazzling satiric fantasy “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz.” In this moral fable Fitzgerald both revels in the notion of great wealth and excoriates those who possess it. Here the rich are outrageously corrupt, stupefyingly wealthy, and utterly lacking in humanity. Everyone, including the narrator, is consumed by avarice: it is an extravaganza of dreadfulness. The height of depravity occurs when the host, in a moment of apocalyptic hubris, offers God a bribe. The ending is happy in that the monstrously swollen, overblown fantasy has exploded. Everything has been destroyed, everyone reduced to human proportions, flawed and struggling. This is a playful but savage attack on the influence of affluence, something which would continue to be the subject of Fitzgerald’s scrutiny. He would use it as a kind of awful magnifier to focus on mankind’s basest instincts.
Religion is at the core of the stories that bracket this collection, “Benediction” and “Absolution.” Fitzgerald was raised a Catholic, and the Church was initially important in his work—a worldly Jesuit plays a significant part in This Side of Paradise—but the religious presence would fade. A powerful sense of its diminishment prevails in the masterly “Absolution.”
Rudolph, a young boy from the working class, begins to neglect his religious obligations. His father discovers this and punishes him. The details of the beating, of the house, the narrow hallway, the timid mother, are all rendered with heart-stopping precision, but this is more than an intimate familial struggle. It is set against the larger backdrop of the mysteries of religious experience, with its combination of stricture and sensuality, ecstasy and abstraction. When Rudolph visits the priest at home to discuss his sins, little help is offered by this servant of the Church. The priest’s mind is giving way. He can no longer withstand the insistence of the beautiful, irresistible world—of the body, of the senses, of another kind of ecstasy.
Outside the window the blue sirocco trembled over the wheat, and girls with yellow hair walked sensuously along roads that bounded the fields, calling innocent, exciting things to the young men who