The story then shifts to a realist mode, introducing the familiar Fitzgerald themes of extravagant wealth and privilege-and their precarious nature. This excerpt from the opening section of “May Day” reads like Hans Christian Andersen, but with the sly satirical undertone of one of Oscar Wilde’s children’s stories.
“Alas! I have no more slippers! and alas! I have no more trinkets! May heaven help me for I know not what I shall do!” Some even of them flung up their hands helplessly, shouting: 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, and faster and faster did the merchants dispose of their trinkets and slippers until they sent up a mighty cry for more trinkets and more slippers in order that they might give in barter what was demanded of them. The most substantial of those early stories “ May Day,” almost a novella, opens in a post-World War One New York City described as a fairy kingdom in the throes of market-madness: He was a very well-read, if not particularly deep, thinker who approached literature through fairy tales-Orientalist fables, adventure stories, Edmund Spencer’s allegories-and his early stories mix a boyish imagination with the feigned worldliness of a Princeton undergraduate. The fantasies (which include the now-famous “ The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”) reveal quite a bit about Fitzgerald’s preoccupation with artifice. Fitzgerald’s desperately prolific output in the form means that there are a few hastily-composed pieces, some lightweight, whimsical fantasies, but all of the work is beautifully written and a joy to read. While Fitzgerald may have been an alcoholic spendthrift who preferred the finer things and those who wore them, he was also a very disciplined and serious writer, especially of short stories, which were his sole source of income throughout much of the ‘20s. Scott Fitzgerald becomes so associated with the jazz age frivolity he keenly observed, and the social climbing of his best-known character, that much of his pre- and post- Gatsby writing gets occluded.
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