May Day by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Melville House continues its mission to reissue little known short works by classic authors in The Art of the Novella series. May Day by F. Scott Fitzgerald is a model of the genre, piquant and bristling with the kind of sarcastic brilliance for which the author is best known.
It’s the first of May 1919 and New York City is sparkling with triumphant arches, jubilant soldiers back on American soil, and saucy flappers promenading in the “wealthy sun.” The jazz age meets the aftermath of the Armistice and the encounter is rocky. The giddy freedom for which Fitzgerald’s college men and flappers seem so eager comes with a dark side: bickering, class warfare, dissipation, poverty, and fatal despair. In May Day, Fitzgerald even branches out into other societal trends of the age like bolshevism, hooliganism, and subversive journalism.
Fitzgerald sold May Day directly to the Smart Set editors H.L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan for $200. When the novella appeared in the 1922 collection Tales of the Jazz Age, Fitzgerald said:
“This somewhat unpleasant tale, published as a novelette in the ‘Smart Set’ in July, 1920, relates a series of events which took place in the spring of the previous year. Each of the three events made a great impression upon me. In life they were unrelated, except by the general hysteria of that spring which inaugurated the Age of Jazz, but in my story I have tried, unsuccessfully I fear, to weave them into a pattern—a pattern which would give the effect of those months in New York as they appeared to at least one member of what was then the younger generation.”
The pattern that May Day weaves is formed of the interconnected stories of the failed illustrator Gordon Sterrett and his grasping girlfriend Jewel Hudson, the debonaire flapper Edith Bradin and her anarchist brother Henry, two merry Yale men, Peter Himmel and Philip Dean, and a pair of dim soldiers, Carroll Key and Gus Rose. Over about 24 hours, these characters collide in a story that turns what should have been a time of celebration—“this paradise of violet blue,” as Peter calls it—into a series of miscalculations and humiliations that ends in tragedy.
Fitzgerald opens May Day in an arch tone:
“There had been a war fought and won and the great city of the conquering people was crossed with triumphal arches and vivid with thrown flowers of white, red, and rose….So gaily and noisily were the peace and prosperity impending hymned by the scribes and poets of the conquering people that more and more spenders had gathered from the provinces to drink the wine of excitement….”
The twin temptations of materialism and venery color the meeting of Gordon Sterrett and Philip Dean who haven’t met for several years. Dean teases Sterrett about his love affair with Edith Bradin and tells him that she will be at the Gamma Psi dance later that evening at Delmonico’s. Fortune has been kind to Dean who can afford a grand hotel and thick silk shirts. Sterrett, on the other hand, nervously hides his frayed cuffs as he works himself up to his errand— borrowing $300 so Jewel won’t make trouble. The fastidious Dean fobs him off with a five-dollar bill and stands him to breakfast. They part as cordial enemies.
The adventures of Privates Carroll Key and Gus Rose would be comic if they weren’t tinged with self-loathing and anti-Semitism. Key, whose “name [hints] that in his veins, however thinly diluted by generations of degeneration, ran blood of some potentiality” represents one of Fitzgerald’s alter egos as the author himself was remotely related to Francis Scott Key. Rose, “swart and bandy-legged, with rat-eyes and a much-broken hooked nose,” is defiant, brutish, and easily led. Key develops a plan to find his brother who is a waiter at a “hash joint” and get their hands on some liquor.
On the way, they encounter a crowd milling around “a gesticulating little Jew with long black whiskers” who harangues the group with socialist propaganda. An angry soldier-blacksmith sends the “God damn Bolsheviki” sprawling, and the crowd sets off to beat up more anarchists. Key and Rose are caught up until they remember their mission. Finally, they find brother George who has moved up in the world and now waits tables at Delmonico’s. Key and Rose hide in a closet and pilfer liquor from the refreshments set up for the Yale Gamma Psi dance. Peter Himmel discovers the soldiers and teases them as "Harvard men" before joining them for a few closet cocktails.
Himmel is trying to rescue some self-esteem after being rebuffed by Edith at the dance. His crime was attempting to put his arm around her shoulders and, more calamitous, mussing her coiffure. Fitzgerald’s picture of Edith as she descends the staircase at Delmonico’s is a marvel of sensuality, sentimentality, and shallowness. She is the quintessential flapper, perfumed and sleek, slangy, and bewitched by her own potential for love and adventure. “I smell sweet…I’m made for love,” she thinks and channels her thoughts into rosy dreams of curing Gordon Sterrett of his helplessness.
Drunk and desperate, Sterrett has found Edith at the dance and bares his soul, tearfully saying that he is going crazy, that he is a failure, and that he’s desperately poor. This is a little more reality than Edith is prepared to handle. She passes the evening dancing with other men and avoiding Sterrett’s gaze. Finally at half-past one, she escapes and goes to visit her anarchist brother Henry at his newspaper office nearby.
"Where do you keep the bombs?" she asks flippantly of her brother and his bedazzled colleague. Within minutes, a mob crashes in, the same crowd that beat up the Jewish socialist. The police break up the scene—but not before Henry’s leg is broken and Key is pushed out of a window and falls to his death. Unnamed and unmourned, he dies in his uniform, though hardly a hero. It is the kind of irony that Fitzgerald interjects surely as a reference not only to the senseless casualties of war, but also to the social deadbeats he chronicled throughout his career. (Key’s body is identified by name a few pages later when his buddy Rose forlornly watches it loaded into an ambulance.)
The story winds down with Rose following the gleefully drunk Dean and Himmel as they strut down the street sporting large IN and OUT signs torn from the kitchen doors at Delmonico’s. Rose hopes to be recognized and perhaps given a little something by the society gentlemen. Instead, it is Edith who recognizes the soldier as one of the mob from her brother’s office. Like the Jewish street orator, Rose is set upon and beat up.
May Day ends in bleak despair with Gordon Sterrett “irrevocably” wed to the gold-digger Jewel. (The situation is not unlike Maugham’s Of Human Bondage in which the impoverished Philip Carey is blackmailed into marrying the slatternly waitress Mildred. It is also worth noting that both Fitzgerald’s novella and Maugham’s 1915 book were strongly autobiographical.) Hungover and dull-witted by his predicament, Gordon shoots himself in the head.
The satire in the novella’s opening paragraphs—“Never had there been such splendor in the great city”—preempts the high ideas and heroism of war with drunkenness and crass commercialism. From these lofty heights, we quickly descend to the sordid facts of human actions. These facts, culminating in the dispassionately recounted death of a failed artist, sound disturbingly prescient in view of Fitzgerald’s own premature death from a heart attack in 1940.
© Leann Davis Alspaugh. All rights reserved. Photo: John Held's cover from the 1922 edition of Tales of the Jazz Age
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