The Diamond As Big As the Ritz, by F. Scott Fitzgerald

I’ve read “The Great Gatsby” three times now and, frankly, I just don’t get it. (I admit that too often on this blog—it’s a good thing it’s only cyberspace that hears me. And if a tree falls in cyberspace, does anyone hear it?) It’s not that I don’t understand the book itself—one of those three times was high school English class so yes, thank you, I’ve analyzed all the themes until I and the themes were utterly sick of each other—it’s just that I don’t get why it’s considered such a great book, and Fitzgerald’s masterpiece. Nothing in that book really captured my imaginations or emotions, and so it was really, if anything, an exercise in analysis.

I thought, for years after reading it, that I just didn’t like Fitzgerald; then, however, I stumbled across “The Beautiful and The Damned,” and realized that Fitzgerald is amazing: he has a touch of genius, a lyrical poetry utterly suited to the Jazz Age he so ably represented, and when he really puts his pen to it, his prose shines and sparkles like, well, a diamond. Maybe even one as big as the Ritz. (“The Beautiful and the Damned,” by the way, is far from being Fitzgerald’s best book—I noticed his amazing writing in that one because so much of it was utterly ordinary. It’s one of the best examples I can think of of an early work which practically cries out with the potential it does not live up to.)

I’m still on the lookout, though, for what Fitzgerald’s best book really is: where, in the end, did he ever really use his potential? I don’t think it’s this collection of short stories, beautiful though they were, just because they’re so, well, short—I think he has the skills to create and continue a character, to let his readers live with him and laugh with him and love him until the end, rather than terminating their stories after twenty or even thirty or forty pages.

Not that these stories were inappropriately terminated; in fact, I felt Fitzgerald struck the right balance of plot and character, brevity and length. The stories all came to their natural end, and I never once found myself bored before the end, or hungering for more. (My two greatest problems with short stories: the ultra-short ones are uninteresting, not providing enough room for real character development, and the longer ones develop characters and situations that are too interesting, and I feel angry when they are ripped away from me after a mere ten pages.) Some of the stories here were, for the most part, unmemorable—the last one about the football player, for instance, titled “The Bowl,” failed to really capture my interest—but most were exquisitely constructed and even better written. I loved the title story, “The Diamond As Big As the Ritz,” for its exposure of the unthinking cruelties of the wealthy and the harmful influence of affluence, as well as its amusing veneer of fantasy. The story “Bernice Bobs Her Hair” was also a remarkably perceptive insight in male/female relations, and, what’s more female/female relations, as well as being in itself a rather charming and entertaining story. “The Ice Palace” was, I thought, a rather stirring account of South/North relations; since my only friend here is a Southerner, I appreciated the insights.

And, as I’ve said, Fitzgerald’s writing sparkles like the diamond itself. He throws away lines—lines that you know must have taken agonizing hours, days, weeks at the typewriter—as if they just occurred to him, as if they’re nothing, in the same way his main characters trifle with their wealth and privilege. For example, in describing the south and its men, he wrote that “mostly they just stayed round in this languid paradise of dreamy skies and firefly evenings and noisy niggery street fairs—and especially of gracious, soft-voiced girls, who were brought up on memories instead of money.” Or when he says that “everybody’s youth is a dream. A form of chemical madness.” How beautiful! And the best part is that, unlike in “The Beautiful and the Damned,” these sentences don’t stand out as pearls of potential awash in the sty of untrained writership; instead, they blend in and pass as normal. It is only when the reader takes a step back, a moment away from the stories, that he can see Fitzgerald’s talent come to life. I’ll be pleased, now, to know that I do like Fitzgerald, it’s only “The Great Gatsby” which fails for me. It’s a pity these stories are treated like trifles, while “The Great Gatsby” is inflicted on high schoolers; reverse the situation, and I’d guess you’d find a lot more adults willing to read Fitzgerald for fun.