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F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 novel is a surprisingly apt primer on the president of the United States.

There's an eerie symmetry between Donald Trump and The Great Gatsby's Tom Buchanan, as if the villain of F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 novel had been brought to life in a louder, gaudier guise for the 21st century. It's not just their infamous carelessness, the smashing-up of things and creatures that propels Tom's denouement and has seemed to many a Twitter user to be the animating force behind Trump's policy and personnel decisions. The two men, real and fictional, mirror each other in superficial but telling ways. Tom moves like Trump, aggressive and restless, and talks like him, with ponderous pride. He picks personal fights in public, "as though ... it would be a privilege to partake vicariously of [his] emotions." Tom surprises his dinner guests with disjointed political speeches, warning insistently that " civilization's going to pieces." His patrician mannerisms are shot through with flashes of anxiety, "as if his complacency, more acute than of old, was not enough to him any more."

Tom-the Yale man, the football star, the spender of old money, the scion of what he calls the Nordic race-embodies the peak of social status in his century. Trump-the former Playboy-cover subject, the billionaire celebrity, the most powerful man in America-does the same for his. And their shared personality traits are the product of their shared relationship to power-the casual unreflective certainty that comes from inheritance, and enables its holders to wield its blunt force as both a weapon and a shield. Such power has its own logic; it responds not to social or moral rules, but to what it perceives as danger. It's for these reasons that in 2018, The Great Gatsby reads like a warning. For as much as it is a story about the American dream, it is also a story about power under threat, and of how that power, lashing out, can render truth irrelevant.

Here's the cast of The Great Gatsby, for those distant from their high-school English classes. Nick Carraway, the narrator, is a naive midwesterner who considers himself "one of the few honest people that I have ever known." He takes a Wall Street job to escape hometown ennui and romantic commitment, renting a house in the less glamorous of twin Long Island suburbs and flirting idly with Jordan Baker, an athlete and cynical socialite. Next door to Nick is Jay Gatsby, a self-made man in terms of both fortune and identity, and across the bay is wealthy, beautiful Daisy Buchanan, Nick's cousin and the love of Gatsby's life. Daisy is married to Tom, who has a lover, Myrtle Wilson. And Myrtle, in turn, is married to a struggling mechanic, whose emasculation is just thorough enough to leave him the strength for revenge.

Fitzgerald draws a connection between class and character from the first pages of the novel, encompassing honor and honesty in Nick's comfortable middle-class notion of "advantages." Yet it soon becomes clear that the advantage afforded by wealth is less a natural inclination to honesty than it is the privilege of bending the world to one's own convenience. Nick sums up this dynamic:

They were careless people, Tom and Daisy-they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.

Money is a shield between the careless wealthy and the consequences of their actions, cutting them off from the reality of what they have done and what it means. Thus, although Tom (like Trump) has a reputation for having cheated on his wife, he decries the loss of family values, transforming easily " from libertine to prig." His actions, however confused, are in his own mind "entirely justified"-so that talking to him feels, in the end, like "talking to a child." Tom throws the weight of his denials around in tandem with his money, dismissively contradicting a man who sells him a dog on the street. When George Wilson, the mechanic, implies that Tom has been slow to produce the car he's promised to sell him, all it takes is Tom's cold "No" to make clear that he's overstepped his place.

Yet Tom is far from the only character to use his wealth and status as a means for deceit. Jordan, similarly privileged, is "incurably dishonest," relying on the assumed codes of polite society to protect her reputation just as she relies on drivers more careful than herself to stay out of her way. Gatsby acquires a new identity when he acquires his fortune, the excess of his belongings-shirts and books and oranges and flowers-matched only by the proliferation of stories about his roots. Nick, more subtly, aspires to do the same: He buys a set of financial books with "that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer," seeking amid their "shining secrets" a way out of his old life and out of "that tangle back home" with a woman he's rumored to be courting.

Even Daisy, idealized as she is, demonstrates the relationship between money and its power to override reality. As Tom's wife, she personifies the kind of wealth that he possesses and other men can only pursue: In Gatsby's words, "Her voice is full of money," which is to say it's seductive, hard to catch, and compels her listeners to belief, though she rarely says anything she means. At one point, Nick doesn't notice her insincerity until the moment she stops speaking. When she does, he interprets her smirk "as if she had asserted her membership in a rather distinguished secret society to which she and Tom belonged"-signaling the couple's elite status by flaunting how little they need to care for the truth.

Trump displays a similar carelessness. Amid the cloud of easily disprovable statements that surrounds his administration, he has also, strikingly, used falsehoods to define himself and his office-spinning claims of the largest-ever inauguration crowd and a landslide electoral victory and a record number of Time covers into the mythical biography of a superlatively powerful self. Trump doesn't appear to care for realism, and maybe that's the point: Whereas a social climber like Gatsby is meticulous with the details of his self-invention, stocking his library with real books though his guests would not be surprised by cardboard, Trump knows that the secret of power is effortlessness; in his world, as in Tom and Daisy Buchanan's, wealth means less if you have to work for it. The president inspires loyalty through sheer swagger, telling it like it is even when it isn't, speaking reality into existence: It is so, because I say so.

What can rouse such complacency into action? Only, perhaps, the notion that what Nick terms the "rather distinguished secret society" of the powerful is under siege. Tom expresses this anxiety early on in The Great Gatsby, when he warns from the head of his own opulent dinner table that "the white race," having "produced all the things that go to make civilization," must "watch out or these other races will have control of things." He wants, above all, to preserve the ease with which he sets the terms of his world-"to ensure," as Ta-Nehisi Coates has written, "that that which all others achieve with maximal effort, white people (particularly white men) achieve with minimal qualification." Tom is motivated by the same reactionism that Coates has documented as one of the forces that crowned Trump the successor to America's first black president.
Read more: Ta-Nehisi Coates on the "awful inheritance" underlying Trump's presidency
Tom's fears aren't brought to life, however, until he comes face-to-face with Gatsby-the man who "sprang from his Platonic conception of himself," whose smile, which "believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself," reflects back to all who behold it the reification of their dreams. There's convincing scholarship to suggest that Fitzgerald may have created Gatsby-with his "tanned skin," close-cropped hair, and studied diction-as a light-skinned black man passing for white, and this, to the white-supremacist Tom, would have been the ultimate insult. It's enough, though, that Gatsby acts, and leads Daisy to act, on terms that Tom has not defined-so that Tom finds his wife, and all of the wealth and power she represents, "slipping precipitately from his control."

The tragedy unfolds from there, and strangely, it parallels Trump's rise. Tom attacks Gatsby's origins the way Trump demanded Barack Obama's birth certificate, denouncing Gatsby as "Mr. Nobody from Nowhere." There is a scene; Daisy, unable at last to embody Gatsby's romantic ideal, drives in tears toward home, running Myrtle down with Gatsby's car. And Tom (after conspiring, the novel suggests, with Daisy) turns Wilson's need for vengeance to his advantage-just as Trump, with his anti-immigrant rhetoric, played to the previously unspeakable fears of those who felt their country had been taken from them. Tom names Gatsby as the source of Wilson's grief-his wife's lover and her killer-and Wilson kills both Gatsby and himself, while Myrtle's real lover (Tom) and killer (Daisy) retreat unharmed. Nick's famous condemnation comes here-"They were careless people, Tom and Daisy." This censure is all the more scathing for the moral emptiness of the Buchanans' petty sin, and all the more futile: The careless, by definition, pay no attention to whom they hurt.

Like Trump, who ran on promises to ban Muslims and deport Mexicans, Tom scapegoats an outsider as a threat to what his community values. Tom assigns an identity to hazy, formless discontents and fears, just as Trump has declared a national crisis that he alone can fix. The president lives in a widening circle of disgraced former aides and advisers; likewise, Tom leaves behind him the bodies of those who have done, or been blamed for, his dirty work. And like Trump, who's made numerous unfounded claims to cast himself as a victim, Tom cherishes his own implacable sense of what's right and wrong and real.

And this, today, may be the most potent warning of Fitzgerald's novel. Because when Tom and Daisy smash up the things and creatures around them, they don't just demonstrate their own carelessness about truth and consequences. They also expose the misconceptions of their witnesses, revealing that Gatsby is blinded by his own dreams; that Jordan is naive to trust in other people's honesty; that Nick has, as he confesses to Jordan, been lying to himself and calling it honor. So too has Trump exposed the gaps in America's ideal of itself- the ugly currents of its power, the limits of its possibilities. He's forced a reckoning, brought the country's vision closer to its reality.

Yet it's difficult, now, to know what a sense of reality is good for, when the disconnect between truth and the truths of power is so stark. In the penultimate scene of The Great Gatsby, Nick confronts Tom about what he told Wilson-and Tom is so certain of the justice of his actions that the only thing Nick can do is shake his hand. "There was nothing I could say," Nick muses, "except the one unutterable fact that it wasn't true."

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F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 novel is a surprisingly apt primer on the president of the United States.

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Alaska school board pulls ‘Great Gatsby’ from curriculum

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Bookstores are fielding requests for works removed from Mat-Su Borough School District classrooms.

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F Scott Fitzgerald's Great Gatsby was able to invent himself because he lived in an age of illusion. Does the novel say something about the way we live now, asks John Gray.

Not long before he died, a celebrated conjuror, whose beautifully simple yet seemingly impossible tricks had earned him the baffled admiration of his fellow magicians, was asked if there was anything he still wanted. He replied, "I wish somebody could fool me one more time."

The magician's confession came back into my mind when, a few months ago, I re-read The Great Gatsby. Scott Fitzgerald's novel - now in cinemas again - about a magnetically attractive millionaire, can be read as a story of the Jazz Age and a comment on the corruption of the American dream.

It's also a tangled, and finally tragic, love story. Using the traumas of the "Lost Generation" that emerged disillusioned from World War I, Fitzgerald distils a picture of how American hopes of making a new start in history were derailed by a culture whose energy was spun off from crime and fraud.

Yet I believe the unique quality of the book lies in its exploration of a more universal theme. A form of make-believe is the basis of society, and periods of extreme unreality like the Roaring Twenties have recurred throughout history.

When reality breaks in, it's an interlude between different versions of make-believe. If Gatsby's story resonates so strongly with us as the new film of the book suggests, it's because we find ourselves in just such an interlude at the present time.

The most obvious fact about Gatsby is that everyone knew he was a fake. While his friend Nick Carraway, who tells the story, wanted always to give Gatsby the benefit of the doubt, an aura of dissimulation surrounded the young tycoon from the start.

According to Carraway, Jay Gatsby - the more glamorous name adopted by James Gatz at the age of 17 - "sprang from his Platonic conception of himself". Gatz's parents were poor farming people and he'd never really accepted them as his family.

Like many before him and since, Gatsby was a self-invented personality. Where he differed from other self-invented figures was that the identity he invented for himself was a perfect embodiment of the fantastic world around him.

"A universe of ineffable gaudiness spun itself out in his brain," Carraway notes - a universe that encompassed not just the lavish parties that Gatsby laid on, but a multitude of glittering possibilities far removed from the bootlegging and gangsterism that were the true source of his wealth.

Gatsby yearned to make these squalid realities unreal, and so establish as an accepted fact the image he had created of himself. His wealthy friends knew he was a fraud and were drawn to him for that very reason. Entranced by what Carraway described as Gatsby's "extraordinary gift for hope", they too wanted to make reality unreal.

If everyone knew he was a fake and still believed in him, Gatsby must have been a rather special kind of fake.

When you study the history of forgery in the arts, you'll find that what distinguishes the forged work from the genuine article isn't the skill with which the original has been copied. Some fake paintings are so good that they contain the artist's distinctive defects.

Displaying these imperfections, these are the perfect fakes. There's nothing in a fake of this kind that distinguishes it from a painting by the artist himself. Yet the fake is still a fake, since the story of how it was made is false. What makes fake art is not any features of the art itself but the history of its production.

The wealthy people that flocked around Gatsby colluded with him in his fakery because, like him, they wanted to forget how their wealth had been made.

Fitzgerald's Jazz Age was a time when the borderlines between the fortunes of the elite and the spoils of organised crime were blurred and shifting. Prohibition helped create some of the great figures of the time and later.

It's been claimed that the businessman and American ambassador to Britain Joseph P Kennedy used wealth he amassed from bootlegging to fund the political careers of his sons John and Robert Kennedy. The legitimate part of his fortune came from investing in Hollywood films - one of the mass media that together with radio shaped America in the 1920s.

Easy money flowed from artificially low interest rates engineered by the Federal Reserve Bank in order to lift the US out of recession at the start of the decade. Powered by reckless borrowing and shady practices, the soaring stock market seemed to defy gravity until it crashed to earth in 1929.

Published in 1925, Fitzgerald's novel is astonishingly prescient in its insight into the shaky prosperity that ended with the crash. Some of the wealth that was created during the period was real enough.

The 20s were the time when cars spread to the wider population, new roads allowed cities to expand into suburbs and electrification transformed everyday life. But much of the prosperity of the period was insubstantial, and when the crash came everybody was affected.

This wasn't only because the boom rested on debt that couldn't be repaid. Much of the wealth of the time couldn't survive any clear vision of how it was produced. In these circumstances, Gatsby was the perfect fake.

There was no way the boom could go on indefinitely. Perhaps, at some level, the wealthy elites that Fitzgerald describes knew the boom had to end. If so, it was a fact they couldn't face. Hence the magnetic appeal of a figure like Gatsby, whose power of self-invention seemed able to prevail over any underlying reality.

Fitzgerald didn't write to teach any moral lesson, and there's none to be gleaned from The Great Gatsby.

Instead the story points to an unalterable fact. Human beings live by suggestion, not calculation. Societies and economies don't change like machines that function according to known laws. They're more like dreams, which come and go for reasons the dreamer can't perceive. Over the course of time, as in the era that Fitzgerald portrays, the world that has been created by the dream turns out to be an illusion.

So, too, are the figures that inhabit that world. Gatsby himself has become a phantom by wilfully pursuing an impossible vision - trying to renew his relationship with the woman he loved, and the short-lived intensity that existed in an unrepeatable past.

Thinking of Gatsby near the end of the book, Carraway expresses his view of the man and his world: "A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about..."

Carraway admired Gatsby, even loved him, for his unyielding loyalty to a vision of the unlimited possibilities of the future. At the same time, Carraway realised that Gatsby was a flawed and fated character who was bound unbreakably to the past.

It may be Gatsby's invincible attachment to illusion that explains our current fascination with him and his world. Just as in the Roaring Twenties, we've lived through a boom that was mostly based on make-believe - easy money, inflated assets and financial skulduggery.

The boom has ended, and no-one knows what will follow the current hiatus. Yet it's clear we've not given up make-believe. We want nothing more than to revive the fake prosperity that preceded the crash. Just like Gatsby, we want to return to a world that was conjured into being from dreams.

As Fitzgerald's narrator puts in the famous last lines of the book:

"Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter - tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms further... And one fine morning -

"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

We're possessed by Gatsby's vision of an unbounded future, even though we know it to be a fantasy. Sooner or later, one way or another, we'll find again the world of illusion we're looking for. Like the old magician, we can't help wanting to be fooled one more time.

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A Point Of View: Gatsby and the way we live now

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F Scott Fitzgerald's Great Gatsby was able to invent himself because he lived in an age of illusion. Does the novel say something about the way we live now, asks John Gray. Not long before he died, a celebrated conjuror, whose beautifully simple yet seemingly impossible tricks had earned him the baffled admiration of his fellow magicians, was asked if there was anything he still wanted.

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Sure, I knew that F. Scott Fitzgerald had an up-and-down career and a bad drinking habit and wound up dying at a young age while working as a script doctor in Hollywood. But until I read Maureen Corrigan's terrific book, " So We Read On: How The Great Gatsby Came to Be and Why it Endures," I had no idea that Fitzgerald's books were out of print by the time of his death. He had fallen so low. At one point in the 1940s, his widow, Zelda, had to make ends meet by busing tables in a restaurant in between her stays at a sanitarium, Corrigan reports.

Fitzgerald had soared to stardom at a precocious age, with his 1920 novel " This Side of Paradise." It was the kind of book that made him a cultural celebrity more than a literary titan: Scott and his dazzling wife did all the things that young, smart, fabulous people were supposed to do in the Roaring Twenties, like go to parties in Manhattan and on Long Island and then jump on a ship to Europe to hang out in Parisian cafes with other young ex-pat Americans, like that chap named Ernest Hemingway. They vacationed on the French Riviera. They spent boatloads of money, but Fitzgerald kept things together by cranking out short stories and commanding a fine price for them.

At some point in all this, he vowed to write a really great, modern novel, and he did just that circa 1924-25. It's a short novel, just nine chapters, each built around a party scene - though the final "party" is, of course, a funeral.

" The Great Gatsby," however, didn't sell well. Few literary critics registered that there was something special about the book. Fitzgerald was dismayed by the reception, and then "Gatsby" and its cultural milieu were overtaken by events as the Jazz Age gave way to the Depression. All those glitzy characters gulping martinis and staying up too late didn't resonate in a nation that suddenly hungered for grittier, dustier literary fare. Fitzgerald eventually produced another novel, " Tender is the Night," but it was a relatively weak effort, and Fitzgerald wound up in Hollywood with a profound sense that he'd lost his magic touch as a writer. Meanwhile, Zelda had suffered a series of breakdowns; Scott was in charge of raising their daughter, Scottie.

The last royalty check he received from Scribner's was for $13.13, and apparently that was solely for books that the author himself had purchased. In May 1940, he wrote to his brilliant editor, Max Perkins:

"I wish I was in print. It will be odd a year or so from now when Scottie assures her friends I was an author and finds that no book is procurable. . . . Would the 25 cent press keep Gatsby in the public eye - or is the book unpopular. Has it had its chance?"

Corrigan documents how, after Fitzgerald's death just before Christmas in 1940, "Gatsby" came back, establishing itself as part of the modern American canon. The novel received a boost from the war: With millions of Americans in uniform overseas, the U.S. government developed a program to ship them compact paperbacks to read in their down time. "Gatsby" was one of the books selected for the Armed Services Editions. That resulted, Corrigan reports, in 155,000 paperback copies of "Gatsby" being shipped overseas in 1945. Meanwhile Fitzgerald's friends and admirers worked diligently on the reputation-reclamation project. The sudden popularity of paperbacks coincided with the return of "Gatsby" to the mainstream of American letters. In 1949, Hollywood produced a version of "Gatsby" with Alan Ladd in the title role.

Rather quickly, in part because it's a short novel and easy to read, "Gatsby" because a fixture in high school English classes. Corrigan pinpoints 1951 as the critical year of the Fitzgerald revival. That happened to be the year that J.D. Salinger published " The Catcher in the Rye," in which Holden Caulfield notes that his older brother made him read "Gatsby."

"I was crazy about The Great Gatsby," Holden tells us. "Old Gatsby. Old sport. That killed me."

I can't emphasize enough how much fun Corrigan's book is. This is what I read in recent weeks as relief from my research on hypothetical dystopian futures. Her book reminds me a lot of my friend Paul Hendrickson's masterpiece "Hemingway's Boat," a similar effort at literary archaeology. (Paul was my colleague in the Style section back in the day.) Both books have the remarkable effect of making you understand why you like to read, and why literature can somehow grab you across great expanses of time and cultural differences, and how this human innovation known as writing - the rendering of life into symbols that can erupt in another person's brain as a story - is the ultimate killer app. Yes, Plato was right to fear this technology.

What makes "Gatsby" the Great American Novel, Corrigan argues, is the combination of its extraordinary rendering of the American vernacular - it's a "voice-driven novel" - and its success at capturing the aspirational (if borderline delusional) nature of the American psyche:

"Gatsby's magic emanates not only from its powerhouse poetic style - in which ordinary American language becomes unearthly - but from the authority with which it nails who we want to be as Americans. Not who we are; who we want to be. It's that wanting that runs through every page of Gatsby, making it our Greatest American Novel. But it's also our easiest Great American Novel to underrate: too short; too tempting to misread as just a love story gone wrong; too mired in the Roaring Twenties and all that jazz."

Her book explores the water themes everywhere in the novel (which I'm not sure I ever noticed) as well as way the book is almost absurdly over-structured, right down to the way Gatsby has his big reunion with Daisy Buchanan precisely in the center of the story.

In my own occasional stints as a writing teacher I have asked students to excise words from various difficult-to-cut literary passages (a McPhee* assignment, you know), and one of my selections is from "Gatsby." Imagine trying to shorten this passage by two lines of type:

Already it was deep summer on roadhouse roofs and in front of wayside garages, where new red gas-pumps sat out in pools of light, and when I reached my estate at West Egg I ran the car under its shed and sat for a while on an abandoned grass roller in the yard. The wind had blown off, leaving a loud, bright night, with wings beating in the trees and a persistent organ sound as the full bellows of the earth blew the frogs full of life. The silhouette of a moving cat wavered across the moonlight, and turning my head to watch it, I saw that I was not alone - fifty feet away a figure had emerged from the shadow of my neighbor's mansion and was standing with his hands in his pockets regarding the silver pepper of the stars. Something in his leisurely movements and the secure position of his feet upon the lawn suggested that it was Mr. Gatsby himself, come out to determine what share was his of our local heavens.

That, friends, is how it is done.

And, of course, there's that incomparable run of amazing writing at the end of the book, in which Gatsby is gone and the narrator, Nick Carraway, is pondering his friend's tragic life and imagining what the Dutch sailors saw when they first came upon that part of the world. The very end is among the most famous passages in literature:

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter - tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning --

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

-

Now let's hear from Corrigan. She teaches literature at Georgetown and is the book critic of NPR's Fresh Air. I sent her a few questions by e-mail and she graciously replied.

Q: Why did Fitzgerald's star fade so badly in his own lifetime? How much of that was cultural in nature - the coming of the Depression and a loss of interest in the Jazz Age? Were the critics just unable to see what was great about Fitzgerald's writing?

Corrigan: I think Fitzgerald was seriously rattled by the fact that "The Great Gatsby" didn't sell well. He expected it to outdo his two previous novels, and it turned out to sell fewer copies than "This Side of Paradise" and " The Beautiful and Damned" (about 21,000 copies). It took Fitzgerald a long time to write his fourth novel, "Tender is the Night," and he had several false starts (including a murder story and a medieval tale). Of course, "Tender is the Night" didn't sell very well either: Rich folks on the Riviera weren't a popular topic during the Great Depression, even though the novel doesn't glorify wealth. So, I think Fitzgerald's quick decline was a combination of a loss of confidence and a perception by the American reading public that he was out of step with the proletarian times. That said, Fitzgerald wrote " The Crack-Up " essays during the '30s, many brilliant letters and some wonderful short stories. Fitzgerald never stopped working as a writer; after all, he had to support Zelda (in private sanitariums) and their daughter Scottie (in private school and college). And, he never stopped trying to get "The Great Gatsby" republished and recognized as the masterpiece he knew it to be.

Q: Why was "Gatsby" so much better than his other work? He just found his zone and blocked out everything else?

Corrigan: Fitzgerald writes to his editor Maxwell Perkins in 1922 that he's begun working on a third novel that's going to be different: "simple and beautiful and intricately patterned." "Gatsby" is more modern than the novels that came before: It's tighter and much more consciously architectural in its design. (For instance, every chapter is centered on a "party" of sorts - including the failed "party" of Gatsby's funeral at the end. With the exception of Daisy (the femme fatale), every major character in the novel is stretching out their arms for someone or something that's out of their reach - Nick for Gatsby, Gatsby for Daisy, Tom for Daisy, Myrtle for Tom, George Wilson for Myrtle and so on. If you read Fitzgerald's first two novels, they're looser and, in the case of "Beautiful and Damned," really verbose. Less was more for Fitzgerald - he was a poet, and he did better with tighter forms like the short story, the letter, the autobiographical essay and the short novel.

Q: What's been the reaction to your book from the professional lit-crit folks and English professors?

Corrigan: Positive! I've gotten loads of approving letters from high school English teachers, and they're the ones I value most because those teachers live with "Gatsby" year after year, as I do. Also, "Gatsby" scholars like Jackson R. Bryer and Morris Dickstein have been very complimentary. I've also had wonderful reception from Fitzgerald's granddaughter, Eleanor Lanahan. The only person who out and out panned my book was Adam Gopnik in the New Yorker. Gopnik faulted me for not discussing John Galsworthy, Compton Mackenzie - writers whom Fitzgerald admired as a Princeton undergrad but outgrew by the time he was writing "Gatsby." Go figure. I guess it's good that there's someone out there arguing for the importance of Galsworthy and Mackenzie.

Q: If you had to do a similar book about a different novel, which one would it be? Let's just imagine you're not the world's biggest "Gatsby" fan. What other book deserves this kind of treatment?

Corrigan: Oh, that's a tough question. I think "Moby Dick" deserves the kind of intense - some might say obsessive - attention I've given to "Gatsby"; also "Jane Eyre" and "Wuthering Heights" (although Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar in their classic critical work, " The Madwoman in the Attic" did a pretty fantastic job of close reading for those novels). Willa Cather's " My Antonia " is a gorgeous American classic that deserves more attention.

Q. Are there any books written in the last 20 years that might plausibly be in the conversation about the Great American Novel?

Corrigan: Hmmm. I was one of the three Pulitzer Prize jurors who served on that ill-fated 2012 Pulitzer Prize committee - the one where the Pulitzer Board ended up not awarding the prize. We three jurors nominated " Train Dreams" by Denis Johnson, " The Pale King" by David Foster Wallace and " Swamplandia" by Karen Russell. I'd say out of those three excellent choices, "Train Dreams" is the one that might be eligible for Great American Novel status. I'm not sure that anything written in the last 20 years, however, beats out " Beloved " for Great American novel contender.

Read more:

Here is my 1995 essay "When Genius Bombs" that concludes with a discussion of the mediocrity of "Tender is the Night" and Fitzgerald's analysis of his own failings.

The Top 10 most-favorite and wunnerful books of all time according to some list that got published.

Here is my blog discussing Tracy Chevalier's advice on writing well (in which I put in a good word for the virtues of hard work).

Rando link maybe but here's a column I did on Aging Stud-Muffin movie stars coping with the indignities of middle age (think Fitzgerald at 44).

* My story on John McPhee's writing class, from the Princeton Alumni Weekly.

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Why 'The Great Gatsby' is the Great American Novel

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Sure, I knew that F. Scott Fitzgerald had an up-and-down career and a bad drinking habit and wound up dying at a young age while working as a script doctor in Hollywood.

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8 Ways Gatsby Captured the Roaring Twenties and Its Dark Side

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8 Ways Gatsby Captured the Roaring Twenties and Its Dark Side

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8 Ways ‘The Great Gatsby’ Captured the Roaring Twenties—and Its Dark Side | HISTORY

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F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel reflects the heyday of the Roaring 20s—and foreshadows the dark period that would fo…

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The American Experience Roaring Twenties Photos-PBS

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The American Experience Roaring Twenties Photos-PBS

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The Crash of 1929 | Image Gallery

The Roaring 20s

Many Americans spent the 1920s in a great mood. Investors flocked to a rising stock market. Companies launched brand-new, cutting-edge products, like radios and washing machines. Exuberant Americans kicked up their heels to jazz music, tried crazy stunts, and supported a black market in liquor after Prohibition. A popular expression of the time asked, "What will they think of next?"

Browse some photographs from "the age of permanent prosperity."

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The Roaring 20s | American Experience | PBS

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The Crash of 1929 | Image Gallery Many Americans spent the 1920s in a great mood. Investors flocked to a rising stock market. Companies launched brand-new, cutting-edge products, like radios and washing machines. Exuberant Americans kicked up their heels to jazz music, tried crazy stunts, and supported a black market in liquor after Prohibition.

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A Gallery of Articles and Photo-Many Topics 

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A Gallery of Articles and Photo-Many Topics 

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Roaring Twenties: The decade encapsulates a fascinating story, beginning with the return of young soldiers from the fronts of the First World War and emergence of a new and confident face of the modern womanhood, and ending with the sad note of the Black Tuesday, harbinger of the Great Depression.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roaring_Twenties

1920's Greatest Hits: We have listed some of the most popular artists below

GALLERY THREE: The Roaring Twenties: The Twenties were the cradle

of modern America, beginning with the  1920 census, the first ever to report a

majority of Americans living in urban areas. Daylight Savings Time was a spin-off

of the war. So were jazz, Wall Street speculation, and women's suffrage.

http://hoover.archives.gov/exhibits/Hooverstory/gallery03/index.html

The Roaring Twenties 1920-1929: The 1920s era went by such names as the Jazz

Age, the Age of Intolerance, and the   Age of Wonderful Nonsense

http://www.kidskonnect.com/subject-index/16-history/279-roaring-twenties.html

http://webtech.kennesaw.edu/jcheek3/roaring_twenties.htm

http://www.u-s-history.com/pages/h1564.html

http://www.chicagohs.org/history/index.html

http://www.baseballlibrary.com/ballplayers/player.php?name=Black_Sox_Scandal

Feminism is a diverse collection of social theories, political movements, and moral

philosophies, largely motivated by  or concerning the experiences of women, especially

Prohibition was any of several periods during which the manufacture, transportation,

import, export, and sale of  alcoholic beverages were restricted or illegal.

George Herman Ruth (February 6, 1895 - August 16, 1948), better known

as Babe Ruth, also commonly known   by the nicknames The Bambino and The

Sultan of Swat, was an American baseball player and United States national

icon.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babe_Ruth

http://www.baberuth.com/

Charlie Chaplin, who brought laughter to millions worldwide as the silent

"Little Tramp" clown, had the type of deprived  childhood that one would expect

to find in a Dickens novel. Born in East Street, Walworth, London on 16 April, 1889,

Charles Spencer Chaplin was the son of a music hall singer and his wife.
http://www.charliechaplin.com/article.php3?id_article=3

http://www.clown-ministry.com/History/Charlie-Chaplin.html

as the underground production and sale of   alcohol became big business.

http://doe.sd.gov/octa/ddn4learning/themeunits/1920s/crime.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organized_crime_in_Chicago

http://www.peppermusic.com/catalog/welcome.jsp

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Middle/High School Library / The Roaring Twenties

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Roaring Twenties: The decade encapsulates a fascinating story, beginning with the return of young soldiers from the fronts of the First World War and emergence of a new and confident face of the modern womanhood, and ending with the sad note of the Black Tuesday, harbinger of the Great Depression.

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So Granny What Did You Do as a Girl-Video

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So Granny What Did You Do as a Girl-Video

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SchoolTube - Safe video sharing and management for K12

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The Roaring '20s: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly - Museum Center at 5ive Points

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As we enter into the 20s again, there's been a renewed interest in the 1920s as a decade - from Gatsby-themed parties to electro-swing. But, like with any historical period, we pick and choose what we want from history: keeping the good and leaving the bad.

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Baz Luhrmann's "The Great Gatsby" is lurid, shallow, glamorous, trashy, tasteless, seductive, sentimental, aloof, and artificial. It's an excellent adaptation, in other words, of F. Scott Fitzgerald's melodramatic American classic. Luhrmann, as expected, has turned "Gatsby" into a theme-park ride. But he's done it in exactly the right way. He hasn't tried to make the novel more respectable, intellectual, or realistic. Instead, he's taken "The Great Gatsby" very seriously just as it is.

"Gatsby" is hard to pin down. On the one hand, it's broadly understood as a classic American novel, which suggests that it must have important things to say about the twenties, money, love, and the American dream. On the other, it seems self-evidently to be about style over substance. It's short (only a hundred and fifty pages); its plot is absurd; and it examines only the thinnest wedge of American life. It was poorly received when it was published (H. L. Mencken thought it was "no more than a glorified anecdote"), and it continues to be an object of skepticism (Kathryn Schulz, in last week's New York, writes that "Gatsby" is "aesthetically overrated, psychologically vacant, and morally complacent"). In 1950, in "The Liberal Imagination," Lionel Trilling predicted that Gatsby's story would lose its magnetism: Gatsby, Trilling wrote, represented the fantasy of "personal ambition and heroism, of life committed to, or thrown away for, some ideal of self," while modern society urges young people to find "distinction through cooperation, subordination, and an expressed piety of social usefulness." ("The Great Zuckerberg" doesn't have quite the same ring to it.) And yet, all the while, "Gatsby" has grown more beloved and resonant. Today the novel, like Gatsby himself, seems suspicious.

A lot of the confusion stems from the fact that "Gatsby" isn't like other great American books. It's not a social novel, like "Sister Carrie," or a novel of manners, like "The House of Mirth," or a novel about our national destiny, like "American Pastoral." "Gatsby" is weirder than all those books; it's more like Sherwood Anderson's "Winesburg, Ohio." It's about a spiritual atmosphere, and about the inner life that gives rise to that atmosphere. It's popular because we still live in that atmosphere today. Fitzgerald's novel is cool, sexy, stylized, and abstract; there's a dreamlike falseness, a hollowness, an unreality to it, and that apparent superficiality is part of what makes it fascinating. It's modernist and European without being arty. The best moments in the novel have the devious, carnal sophistication of high fashion; the characters seem unreal, but are also unforgettable. And, for all its strangeness, it also possesses a glamorous, crowd-pleasing commercialism.

What's most appealing about "Gatsby" might be its mood of witty hopelessness, of vivacious self-destructiveness. When Daisy says, of her daughter, "I hope she'll be a fool-that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool," you can't help but be drawn in. Perhaps she's right: look around, and you can easily see the advantages of being rich, attractive, and ignorant. Even if she isn't right, Daisy's attitude strikes a chord. This atmosphere of casual, defiant, disillusioned cool is the novel's unique contribution to literature. It's the reason the novel's endured. And it's to this side of the novel that Luhrmann is attracted: the seductive side.

Fitzgerald understood the pleasures of giving in, and he saw people as desperate to give in to nearly anything-a drink, a person, a story, a feeling, a song, a crowd, an idea. We were especially willing, he thought, to give in to ideas-to fantasies. "Gatsby" captures, with great vividness, the push and pull of illusion and self-delusion; the danger and thrill of forgetting, lying, and fantasizing; the hazards and the indispensability of dreaming and idealization. We often declare our independence, Fitzgerald thought, by declaring our allegiance to a cause that makes what Trilling called a "large, strict, personal demand upon life." Everyone is always getting carried away in "Gatsby" (not least its narrator, Nick Carraway). They get swept up in big parties. They don't want to drink, but once the whiskey bottle is produced, they drink too much. They're led into back rooms where they meet gangsters. They become involved in love triangles. They accept the generosity of bad people; they borrow cars and drive too fast; they adopt mannerisms, and believe in principles which, last week, they didn't know existed. Everybody is getting carried away-but always in their own way. Daisy, when she sings along, sings "in a husky, rhythmic whisper, bringing out a meaning in each word that it had never had before and would never have again." Reading "Gatsby," you think: What could be more pleasurable? You meet someone at a party, and you find that their attitudes exert a force on yours. You become a little more like them, and, also, a little more yourself. It's a little like the way you fall in love with a pop song. You give in to the same song as everyone else, but in the most private, personal way.

In "The Great Gatsby," there are a few large ideas, a few common dreams, to which everybody is attracted. Gatsby's romantic fantasy, his love story, exerts the most force in the novel. Gatsby's organized his life around one big idea: that love, at its best, is permanent and impersonal. This is his dream, his song. A love affair seems like something that happens between two people at a particular time and place, but, Gatsby hopes, if their love is strong enough, it becomes a law of nature, a rule of fate that can't be changed by circumstance or even by choice. It's a familiar wish-we all want to be loved perfectly and forever-and it makes for a great story; there's something admirable in it, and, along with Nick, you wonder whether a Great Romance might complete your life. ("Unlike Gatsby and Tom Buchanan," Nick says, "I had no girl whose disembodied face floated along the dark cornices and blinding signs, and so I drew up the girl beside me, tightening her in my arms.")

But "Gatsby" isn't really a novel about love. It's more interested in the act of fantasizing than in any particular fantasy. Much of "The Great Gatsby" is spent watching as many dreams and fantasies as possible, including Gatsby's, rise and fall like the tides. There's the compelling dream of youth, with its parties, songs, and dances, with its sexuality, beauty, and athleticism. There's Nick's dream of the old America: the place to which you go home for the holidays, "my Middle West . . . where dwellings are still called through decades by a family's name." There's the vague dream of art (represented, dismally, by the photographer Mr. McKee, and by Gatsby's shirts, and by jazz). And on the margins are the dreams of intellectual life, business success, and family happiness. Gatsby is magnetic in part because he accepts everyone, no matter what it is they idealize: with a smile, Nick says, Gatsby "understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that he had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey." Only later do we realize that Gatsby is so open-minded because he is the ultimate dreamer and pretender.

"Gatsby" isn't an argument in favor of fantasy, though. It's about the costs of fantasy-inevitable costs, since our dreams and fantasies are part of who we are. It's through fantasy that we edit out the parts of our lives that make us uncomfortable, as Gatsby edits from his own story the criminality of the business he runs with Meyer Wolfsheim. And every fantasy has an apex from which it recedes. Every dream is both seductive and insufficient. Like a trader in the markets, you have to know when to get out of one and buy into another. (Gatsby, Nick concludes, made the mistake of "living too long with a single dream"; this makes him admirable, but also unwise, even delusional.) A kind of fatigue sets in. Eventually, nothing seems permanent or precious; everything becomes temporary and disposable. "It was all very careless and confused," Nick says, later. "They were careless people, Tom and Daisy-they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they made." Carelessness, the novel suggests, is one of the costs of fantasy. Often, to dream up a new life, you have to destroy the old one.

The real achievement of "Gatsby," in other words, is that it shows us a state of mind. It's a state of spiritual hunger and dissatisfaction, of restlessness and curiosity, of excitement and anticipation, in which one is, as Nick puts it, "within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life." All this unfolds beneath that disillusioned surface. This is how you feel when you understand that there is no obviously right way to live, but find that you must choose anyway. It's pessimistic and ironic, in the sense that you are always only half-committed to your way of life. But it's also exciting, because you are always on the edge of discovery. There's always something at stake. The main thing is that you are never settled. You are always hungry, always searching, always throwing feelings away in order to make room for new ones.

It's possible to believe, as many critics do, that this is a uniquely American state of mind, and there's a sense in which "Gatsby" is describing what it's like to be young in America. Youth is when we do the most weighing and choosing, when we try out new personalities until they become exhausted or destructive. And in a consumer society, youth is extended. We're increasingly free to pursue our fantasies, to buy the costumes and accouterments of the lives we'd like to have. The result is a kind of national carelessness that realizes itself economically, ecologically, and politically. Luhrmann's "Gatsby" gestures toward the link between our period and Fitzgerald's. Our pop hits take place "in the club," and, Luhrmann shows, so did theirs. We love cocktails and speakeasy bars, and so did they. As in the twenties, we tend to admire wealth, no matter how it's made.

But the real strength of Luhrmann's movie is that it turns inward-not toward psychological realism, exactly, but toward fantasy. "Gatsby" is, to the end, defiantly unrealistic. (The same is true of Fitzgerald's novel: it ends in the most lurid way possible, with a hit-and-run and a murder-suicide.) The best sequence in his movie is a montage of Daisy and Gatsby after they've gotten back together. They laugh and swim; Daisy dives into Gatsby's spectacular pool. She tries to drive a golf ball off Gatsby's dock, and, laughing, breaks the club. It's filmed like a photo shoot, and set to an arresting song by Lana Del Rey called "Young and Beautiful." The lyrics of the song exactly sum up Gatsby's wish. ("Will you still love me when I'm no longer young and beautiful? Will you still love me when I've got nothing but my aching soul? I know you will.") Del Rey, with her self-consciously retro sound, look, and pseudonym (her real name is Lizzy Grant), is the perfect singer to put at the center of "Gatsby." And the scene, which shows Daisy and Gatsby living out their fantasy lives, also shows them to us as fantasies. When Daisy, at Gatsby's party, asks, "Was all this made entirely from your own imagination?," her question is directed not just at him but at us. It captures one of the strange facts that "Gatsby" reveals: that even when we imagine our fantasy selves, we imagine them with unfulfilled fantasies of their own. We are watching the fantasies of fantasy people. We think: if only we could dream their dreams.

And there's another sense in which I think Lurhmann gets "Gatsby" exactly right. His movie, which is presented in 3-D, seems streamlined and pre-packaged-it's presented, self-consciously, as mass entertainment-and his characters feel flat, smoothed-out, uncomplicated. Many critics have charged the movie with flatness, too. In his excellent essay on the film, my colleague Richard Brody writes that "there's no roughness whatsoever to [DiCaprio's] character, none of life's burrs or scrapes, no tinge of real power"; Carey Mulligan, similarly, "doesn't invest the character with style or with substance." The director, he concludes, is "unable to take society seriously, to recognize the extraordinary character that extraordinary manners both hide and (for those attuned to them) display." These are legitimate, discerning objections, and yet I can't help but feel that the film's flatness is a deliberate choice; that what seems like a failure of Luhrmann's imagination is actually a faithfulness to Fitzgerald's. The characters are like that in the novel, too; that's why Lionel Trilling, in "The Liberal Imagination," compared them to "ideographs." Flatness, after all, is the state to which all of Fitzgerald's characters aspire. Even Gatsby, whose life thrums with secret ambition and desire, manages to be the cool man in the pink suit. "You always look so cool," Daisy tells him. In a moment of admiration, she says that he resembles "an advertisement" of a man.

The flatness of the characters in "Gatsby" is, I think, part of what makes it so insightful. It might seem as though, if we were to live out our fantasy lives, we would become more creative and expansive; we would be unfettered, alive, and truly ourselves. But "The Great Gatsby" doesn't think that fantasies work that way. In "Gatsby," everyone wants to be simpler than they really are. Everyone wants to give himself up to something that will define, constrain, and explain him-to be swept up into a fantasy that's narrower than the life he really lives. Everyone is a fantasist, and, therefore, an actor, a "beautiful little fool."

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The Serious Superficiality of The Great Gatsby

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Baz Luhrmann's "The Great Gatsby" is lurid, shallow, glamorous, trashy, tasteless, seductive, sentimental, aloof, and artificial. It's an excellent adaptation, in other words, of F. Scott Fitzgerald's melodramatic American classic. Luhrmann, as expected, has turned "Gatsby" into a theme-park ride. But he's done it in exactly the right way.

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CommonLit | (love song, with two goldfish)

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Grace Chua is an award-winning journalist whose work usually deals with science and the environment. In this poem, Chua explores the love between two goldfish living in a fish bowl.

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To a Grey Dress by Arthur Symons | Poetry Magazine

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There's a flutter of grey through the trees:

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"Four winds blowing thro' the sky,
You have seen poor maidens die,
Tell me then what I shall do
That my lover may be true."
Said the wind from out the south,
"Lay no kiss upon his mouth,"
And the wind from out the west,
"Wound the heart within his breast,"
And the wind from out the east,
"Send him empty from the feast,"
And the wind from out the north,
"In the tempest thrust him forth,
When thou art more cruel than he,
Then will Love be kind to thee."

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"Four winds blowing thro' the sky, You have seen poor maidens die, Tell me then what I shall do That my lover may be true."

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I measure every Grief I meet
With narrow, probing, eyes -
I wonder if It weighs like Mine -
Or has an Easier size.

I wonder if They bore it long -
Or did it just begin -
I could not tell the Date of Mine -
It feels so old a pain -

I wonder if it hurts to live -
And if They have to try -
And whether - could They choose between -
It would not be - to die -

I note that Some - gone patient long -
At length, renew their smile -
An imitation of a Light
That has so little Oil -

I wonder if when Years have piled -
Some Thousands - on the Harm -
That hurt them early - such a lapse
Could give them any Balm -

Or would they go on aching still
Through Centuries of Nerve -
Enlightened to a larger Pain -
In Contrast with the Love -

The Grieved - are many - I am told -
There is the various Cause -
Death - is but one - and comes but once -
And only nails the eyes -

There's Grief of Want - and grief of Cold -
A sort they call "Despair" -
There's Banishment from native Eyes -
In sight of Native Air -

And though I may not guess the kind -
Correctly - yet to me
A piercing Comfort it affords
In passing Calvary -

To note the fashions - of the Cross -
And how they're mostly worn -
Still fascinated to presume
That Some - are like my own -

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I measure every Grief I meet With narrow, probing, eyes - I wonder if It weighs like Mine - Or has an Easier size.

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If and When Dreams Come True

You'll find yourself in still water,

Trolling for Gatsby-related poems today brought me to this stand-out sonnet.

Go out there and enjoy the present moment and what you actually have in your life, and don't spend too long staring at that green light, OK?

Full moon silhouetting the sky.
The long train of desire, having gone,
Pulled out from this quiet pool of shadow,
Will have left you at peace with your hands,
A few flowers moving in the breeze.
There will be music in the wind,
A future found in some alcove of blossoming trees;
Each highway will have driven itself away,
And so you will be left, finally, alone:
Abandoned, even, by any word you've ever cared
to read.
The moon will shine as it always has;
A cool seep will rise from the lake.

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If and When Dreams Come True : Gatsby Poem in Your Post

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If and When Dreams Come True You'll find yourself in still water, Trolling for Gatsby -related poems today brought me to this stand-out sonnet. Go out there and enjoy the present moment and what you actually have in your life, and don't spend too long staring at that green light, OK?

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The Curious Case of Benjamin Button by F. Scott Fitzgerald

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The Curious Case of Benjamin Button by F. Scott Fitzgerald

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The embedded audio player requires a modern internet browser. You should visit Browse Happy and update your internet browser today!

I

As long ago as 1860 it was the proper thing to be born at home. At present, so I am told, the high gods of medicine have decreed that the first cries of the young shall be uttered upon the anaesthetic air of a hospital, preferably a fashionable one. So young Mr. and Mrs. Roger Button were fifty years ahead of style when they decided, one day in the summer of 1860, that their first baby should be born in a hospital. Whether this anachronism had any bearing upon the astonishing history I am about to set down will never be known.

I shall tell you what occurred, and let you judge for yourself.

The Roger Buttons held an enviable position, both social and financial, in ante-bellum Baltimore. They were related to the This Family and the That Family, which, as every Southerner knew, entitled them to membership in that enormous peerage which largely populated the Confederacy. This was their first experience with the charming old custom of having babies-Mr. Button was naturally nervous. He hoped it would be a boy so that he could be sent to Yale College in Connecticut, at which institution Mr. Button himself had been known for four years by the somewhat obvious nickname of "Cuff."

On the September morning consecrated to the enormous event he arose nervously at six o'clock dressed himself, adjusted an impeccable stock, and hurried forth through the streets of Baltimore to the hospital, to determine whether the darkness of the night had borne in new life upon its bosom.

When he was approximately a hundred yards from the Maryland Private Hospital for Ladies and Gentlemen he saw Doctor Keene, the family physician, descending the front steps, rubbing his hands together with a washing movement-as all doctors are required to do by the unwritten ethics of their profession.

Mr. Roger Button, the president of Roger Button & Co., Wholesale Hardware, began to run toward Doctor Keene with much less dignity than was expected from a Southern gentleman of that picturesque period. "Doctor Keene!" he called. "Oh, Doctor Keene!"

The doctor heard him, faced around, and stood waiting, a curious expression settling on his harsh, medicinal face as Mr. Button drew near.

"What happened?" demanded Mr. Button, as he came up in a gasping rush. "What was it? How is she" A boy? Who is it? What--"

"Talk sense!" said Doctor Keene sharply, He appeared somewhat irritated.

"Is the child born?" begged Mr. Button.

Doctor Keene frowned. "Why, yes, I suppose so-after a fashion." Again he threw a curious glance at Mr. Button.

"Is my wife all right?"

"Yes."

"Is it a boy or a girl?"

"Here now!" cried Doctor Keene in a perfect passion of irritation," I'll ask you to go and see for yourself. Outrageous!" He snapped the last word out in almost one syllable, then he turned away muttering: "Do you imagine a case like this will help my professional reputation? One more would ruin me-ruin anybody."

"What's the matter?" demanded Mr. Button appalled. "Triplets?"

"No, not triplets!" answered the doctor cuttingly. "What's more, you can go and see for yourself. And get another doctor. I brought you into the world, young man, and I've been physician to your family for forty years, but I'm through with you! I don't want to see you or any of your relatives ever again! Good-bye!"

Then he turned sharply, and without another word climbed into his phaeton, which was waiting at the curbstone, and drove severely away.

Mr. Button stood there upon the sidewalk, stupefied and trembling from head to foot. What horrible mishap had occurred? He had suddenly lost all desire to go into the Maryland Private Hospital for Ladies and Gentlemen-it was with the greatest difficulty that, a moment later, he forced himself to mount the steps and enter the front door.

A nurse was sitting behind a desk in the opaque gloom of the hall. Swallowing his shame, Mr. Button approached her.

"Good-morning," she remarked, looking up at him pleasantly.

"Good-morning. I-I am Mr. Button."

At this a look of utter terror spread itself over girl's face. She rose to her feet and seemed about to fly from the hall, restraining herself only with the most apparent difficulty.

"I want to see my child," said Mr. Button.

The nurse gave a little scream. "Oh-of course!" she cried hysterically. "Upstairs. Right upstairs. Go-up!"

She pointed the direction, and Mr. Button, bathed in cool perspiration, turned falteringly, and began to mount to the second floor. In the upper hall he addressed another nurse who approached him, basin in hand. "I'm Mr. Button," he managed to articulate. "I want to see my--"

Clank! The basin clattered to the floor and rolled in the direction of the stairs. Clank! Clank! It began a methodical decent as if sharing in the general terror which this gentleman provoked.

"I want to see my child!" Mr. Button almost shrieked. He was on the verge of collapse.

Clank! The basin reached the first floor. The nurse regained control of herself, and threw Mr. Button a look of hearty contempt.

"All right, Mr. Button," she agreed in a hushed voice. "Very well! But if you knew what a state it's put us all in this morning! It's perfectly outrageous! The hospital will never have a ghost of a reputation after--"

"Hurry!" he cried hoarsely. "I can't stand this!"

"Come this way, then, Mr. Button."

He dragged himself after her. At the end of a long hall they reached a room from which proceeded a variety of howls-indeed, a room which, in later parlance, would have been known as the "crying-room." They entered.

"Well," gasped Mr. Button, "which is mine?"

"There!" said the nurse.

Mr. Button's eyes followed her pointing finger, and this is what he saw. Wrapped in a voluminous white blanket, and partly crammed into one of the cribs, there sat an old man apparently about seventy years of age. His sparse hair was almost white, and from his chin dripped a long smoke-coloured beard, which waved absurdly back and forth, fanned by the breeze coming in at the window. He looked up at Mr. Button with dim, faded eyes in which lurked a puzzled question.

"Am I mad?" thundered Mr. Button, his terror resolving into rage. "Is this some ghastly hospital joke?

"It doesn't seem like a joke to us," replied the nurse severely. "And I don't know whether you're mad or not-but that is most certainly your child."

The cool perspiration redoubled on Mr. Button's forehead. He closed his eyes, and then, opening them, looked again. There was no mistake-he was gazing at a man of threescore and ten-a baby of threescore and ten, a baby whose feet hung over the sides of the crib in which it was reposing.

The old man looked placidly from one to the other for a moment, and then suddenly spoke in a cracked and ancient voice. "Are you my father?" he demanded.

Mr. Button and the nurse started violently.

"Because if you are," went on the old man querulously, "I wish you'd get me out of this place-or, at least, get them to put a comfortable rocker in here,"

"Where in God's name did you come from? Who are you?" burst out Mr. Button frantically.

"I can't tell you exactly who I am," replied the querulous whine, "because I've only been born a few hours-but my last name is certainly Button."

"You lie! You're an impostor!"

The old man turned wearily to the nurse. "Nice way to welcome a new-born child," he complained in a weak voice. "Tell him he's wrong, why don't you?"

"You're wrong. Mr. Button," said the nurse severely. "This is your child, and you'll have to make the best of it. We're going to ask you to take him home with you as soon as possible-some time to-day."

"Home?" repeated Mr. Button incredulously.

"Yes, we can't have him here. We really can't, you know?"

"I'm right glad of it," whined the old man. "This is a fine place to keep a youngster of quiet tastes. With all this yelling and howling, I haven't been able to get a wink of sleep. I asked for something to eat"-here his voice rose to a shrill note of protest-"and they brought me a bottle of milk!"

Mr. Button, sank down upon a chair near his son and concealed his face in his hands. "My heavens!" he murmured, in an ecstasy of horror. "What will people say? What must I do?"

"You'll have to take him home," insisted the nurse-"immediately!"

A grotesque picture formed itself with dreadful clarity before the eyes of the tortured man-a picture of himself walking through the crowded streets of the city with this appalling apparition stalking by his side.

"I can't. I can't," he moaned.

People would stop to speak to him, and what was he going to say? He would have to introduce this-this septuagenarian: "This is my son, born early this morning." And then the old man would gather his blanket around him and they would plod on, past the bustling stores, the slave market-for a dark instant Mr. Button wished passionately that his son was black-past the luxurious houses of the residential district, past the home for the aged....

"Come! Pull yourself together," commanded the nurse.

"See here," the old man announced suddenly, "if you think I'm going to walk home in this blanket, you're entirely mistaken."

"Babies always have blankets."

With a malicious crackle the old man held up a small white swaddling garment. "Look!" he quavered. "This is what they had ready for me."

"Babies always wear those," said the nurse primly.

"Well," said the old man, "this baby's not going to wear anything in about two minutes. This blanket itches. They might at least have given me a sheet."

"Keep it on! Keep it on!" said Mr. Button hurriedly. He turned to the nurse. "What'll I do?"

"Go down town and buy your son some clothes."

Mr. Button's son's voice followed him down into the: hall: "And a cane, father. I want to have a cane."

Mr. Button banged the outer door savagely....

2

"Good-morning," Mr. Button said nervously, to the clerk in the Chesapeake Dry Goods Company. "I want to buy some clothes for my child."

"How old is your child, sir?"

"About six hours," answered Mr. Button, without due consideration.

"Babies' supply department in the rear."

"Why, I don't think-I'm not sure that's what I want. It's-he's an unusually large-size child. Exceptionally-ah large."

"They have the largest child's sizes."

"Where is the boys' department?" inquired Mr. Button, shifting his ground desperately. He felt that the clerk must surely scent his shameful secret.

"Right here."

"Well--" He hesitated. The notion of dressing his son in men's clothes was repugnant to him. If, say, he could only find a very large boy's suit, he might cut off that long and awful beard, dye the white hair brown, and thus manage to conceal the worst, and to retain something of his own self-respect-not to mention his position in Baltimore society.

But a frantic inspection of the boys' department revealed no suits to fit the new-born Button. He blamed the store, of course--in such cases it is the thing to blame the store.

"How old did you say that boy of yours was?" demanded the clerk curiously.

"He's-sixteen."

"Oh, I beg your pardon. I thought you said six hours. You'll find the youths' department in the next aisle."

Mr. Button turned miserably away. Then he stopped, brightened, and pointed his finger toward a dressed dummy in the window display. "There!" he exclaimed. "I'll take that suit, out there on the dummy."

The clerk stared. "Why," he protested, "that's not a child's suit. At least it is, but it's for fancy dress. You could wear it yourself!"

"Wrap it up," insisted his customer nervously. "That's what I want."

The astonished clerk obeyed.

Back at the hospital Mr. Button entered the nursery and almost threw the package at his son. "Here's your clothes," he snapped out.

The old man untied the package and viewed the contents with a quizzical eye.

"They look sort of funny to me," he complained, "I don't want to be made a monkey of-"

"You've made a monkey of me!" retorted Mr. Button fiercely. "Never you mind how funny you look. Put them on-or I'll-or I'll spank you." He swallowed uneasily at the penultimate word, feeling nevertheless that it was the proper thing to say.

"All right, father"-this with a grotesque simulation of filial respect-"you've lived longer; you know best. Just as you say."

As before, the sound of the word "father" caused Mr. Button to start violently.

"And hurry."

"I'm hurrying, father."

When his son was dressed Mr. Button regarded him with depression. The costume consisted of dotted socks, pink pants, and a belted blouse with a wide white collar. Over the latter waved the long whitish beard, drooping almost to the waist. The effect was not good.

"Wait!"

Mr. Button seized a hospital shears and with three quick snaps amputated a large section of the beard. But even with this improvement the ensemble fell far short of perfection. The remaining brush of scraggly hair, the watery eyes, the ancient teeth, seemed oddly out of tone with the gaiety of the costume. Mr. Button, however, was obdurate-he held out his hand. "Come along!" he said sternly.

His son took the hand trustingly. "What are you going to call me, dad?" he quavered as they walked from the nursery-"just 'baby' for a while? till you think of a better name?"

Mr. Button grunted. "I don't know," he answered harshly. "I think we'll call you Methuselah."

3

Even after the new addition to the Button family had had his hair cut short and then dyed to a sparse unnatural black, had had his face shaved so dose that it glistened, and had been attired in small-boy clothes made to order by a flabbergasted tailor, it was impossible for Button to ignore the fact that his son was a excuse for a first family baby. Despite his aged stoop, Benjamin Button-for it was by this name they called him instead of by the appropriate but invidious Methuselah-was five feet eight inches tall. His clothes did not conceal this, nor did the clipping and dyeing of his eyebrows disguise the fact that the eyes under-were faded and watery and tired. In fact, the baby-nurse who had been engaged in advance left the house after one look, in a state of considerable indignation.

But Mr. Button persisted in his unwavering purpose. Benjamin was a baby, and a baby he should remain. At first he declared that if Benjamin didn't like warm milk he could go without food altogether, but he was finally prevailed upon to allow his son bread and butter, and even oatmeal by way of a compromise. One day he brought home a rattle and, giving it to Benjamin, insisted in no uncertain terms that he should "play with it," whereupon the old man took it with-a weary expression and could be heard jingling it obediently at intervals throughout the day.

There can be no doubt, though, that the rattle bored him, and that he found other and more soothing amusements when he was left alone. For instance, Mr. Button discovered one day that during the preceding week be had smoked more cigars than ever before-a phenomenon, which was explained a few days later when, entering the nursery unexpectedly, he found the room full of faint blue haze and Benjamin, with a guilty expression on his face, trying to conceal the butt of a dark Havana. This, of course, called for a severe spanking, but Mr. Button found that he could not bring himself to administer it. He merely warned his son that he would "stunt his growth."

Nevertheless he persisted in his attitude. He brought home lead soldiers, he brought toy trains, he brought large pleasant animals made of cotton, and, to perfect the illusion which he was creating-for himself at least-he passionately demanded of the clerk in the toy-store whether "the paint would come oft the pink duck if the baby put it in his mouth." But, despite all his father's efforts, Benjamin refused to be interested. He would steal down the back stairs and return to the nursery with a volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica, over which he would pore through an afternoon, while his cotton cows and his Noah's ark were left neglected on the floor. Against such a stubbornness Mr. Button's efforts were of little avail.

The sensation created in Baltimore was, at first, prodigious. What the mishap would have cost the Buttons and their kinsfolk socially cannot be determined, for the outbreak of the Civil War drew the city's attention to other things. A few people who were unfailingly polite racked their brains for compliments to give to the parents-and finally hit upon the ingenious device of declaring that the baby resembled his grandfather, a fact which, due to the standard state of decay common to all men of seventy, could not be denied. Mr. and Mrs. Roger Button were not pleased, and Benjamin's grandfather was furiously insulted.

Benjamin, once he left the hospital, took life as he found it. Several small boys were brought to see him, and he spent a stiff-jointed afternoon trying to work up an interest in tops and marbles-he even managed, quite accidentally, to break a kitchen window with a stone from a sling shot, a feat which secretly delighted his father.

Thereafter Benjamin contrived to break something every day, but he did these things only because they were expected of him, and because he was by nature obliging.

When his grandfather's initial antagonism wore off, Benjamin and that gentleman took enormous pleasure in one another's company. They would sit for hours, these two, so far apart in age and experience, and, like old cronies, discuss with tireless monotony the slow events of the day. Benjamin felt more at ease in his grandfather's presence than in his parents'-they seemed always somewhat in awe of him and, despite the dictatorial authority they exercised over him, frequently addressed him as "Mr."

He was as puzzled as any one else at the apparently advanced age of his mind and body at birth. He read up on it in the medical journal, but found that no such case had been previously recorded. At his father's urging he made an honest attempt to play with other boys, and frequently he joined in the milder games-football shook him up too much, and he feared that in case of a fracture his ancient bones would refuse to knit.

When he was five he was sent to kindergarten, where he initiated into the art of pasting green paper on orange paper, of weaving coloured maps and manufacturing eternal cardboard necklaces. He was inclined to drowse off to sleep in the middle of these tasks, a habit which both irritated and frightened his young teacher. To his relief she complained to his parents, and he was removed from the school. The Roger Buttons told their friends that they felt he was too young.

By the time he was twelve years old his parents had grown used to him. Indeed, so strong is the force of custom that they no longer felt that he was different from any other child-except when some curious anomaly reminded them of the fact. But one day a few weeks after his twelfth birthday, while looking in the mirror, Benjamin made, or thought he made, an astonishing discovery. Did his eyes deceive him, or had his hair turned in the dozen years of his life from white to iron-gray under its concealing dye? Was the network of wrinkles on his face becoming less pronounced? Was his skin healthier and firmer, with even a touch of ruddy winter colour? He could not tell. He knew that he no longer stooped, and that his physical condition had improved since the early days of his life.

"Can it be--?" he thought to himself, or, rather, scarcely dared to think.

He went to his father. "I am grown," he announced determinedly. "I want to put on long trousers."

His father hesitated. "Well," he said finally, "I don't know. Fourteen is the age for putting on long trousers-and you are only twelve."

"But you'll have to admit," protested Benjamin, "that I'm big for my age."

His father looked at him with illusory speculation. "Oh, I'm not so sure of that," he said. "I was as big as you when I was twelve."

This was not true-it was all part of Roger Button's silent agreement with himself to believe in his son's normality.

Finally a compromise was reached. Benjamin was to continue to dye his hair. He was to make a better attempt to play with boys of his own age. He was not to wear his spectacles or carry a cane in the street. In return for these concessions he was allowed his first suit of long trousers....

4

Of the life of Benjamin Button between his twelfth and twenty-first year I intend to say little. Suffice to record that they were years of normal ungrowth. When Benjamin was eighteen he was erect as a man of fifty; he had more hair and it was of a dark gray; his step was firm, his voice had lost its cracked quaver and descended to a healthy baritone. So his father sent him up to Connecticut to take examinations for entrance to Yale College. Benjamin passed his examination and became a member of the freshman class.

On the third day following his matriculation he received a notification from Mr. Hart, the college registrar, to call at his office and arrange his schedule. Benjamin, glancing in the mirror, decided that his hair needed a new application of its brown dye, but an anxious inspection of his bureau drawer disclosed that the dye bottle was not there. Then he remembered-he had emptied it the day before and thrown it away.

He was in a dilemma. He was due at the registrar's in five minutes. There seemed to be no help for it-he must go as he was. He did.

"Good-morning," said the registrar politely. "You've come to inquire about your son."

"Why, as a matter of fact, my name's Button--" began Benjamin, but Mr. Hart cut him off.

"I'm very glad to meet you, Mr. Button. I'm expecting your son here any minute."

"That's me!" burst out Benjamin. "I'm a freshman."

"What!"

"I'm a freshman."

"Surely you're joking."

"Not at all."

The registrar frowned and glanced at a card before him. "Why, I have Mr. Benjamin Button's age down here as eighteen."

"That's my age," asserted Benjamin, flushing slightly.

The registrar eyed him wearily. "Now surely, Mr. Button, you don't expect me to believe that."

Benjamin smiled wearily. "I am eighteen," he repeated.

The registrar pointed sternly to the door. "Get out," he said. "Get out of college and get out of town. You are a dangerous lunatic."

"I am eighteen."

Mr. Hart opened the door. "The idea!" he shouted. "A man of your age trying to enter here as a freshman. Eighteen years old, are you? Well, I'll give you eighteen minutes to get out of town."

Benjamin Button walked with dignity from the room, and half a dozen undergraduates, who were waiting in the hall, followed him curiously with their eyes. When he had gone a little way he turned around, faced the infuriated registrar, who was still standing in the door-way, and repeated in a firm voice: "I am eighteen years old."

To a chorus of titters which went up from the group of undergraduates, Benjamin walked away.

But he was not fated to escape so easily. On his melancholy walk to the railroad station he found that he was being followed by a group, then by a swarm, and finally by a dense mass of undergraduates. The word had gone around that a lunatic had passed the entrance examinations for Yale and attempted to palm himself off as a youth of eighteen. A fever of excitement permeated the college. Men ran hatless out of classes, the football team abandoned its practice and joined the mob, professors' wives with bonnets awry and bustles out of position, ran shouting after the procession, from which proceeded a continual succession of remarks aimed at the tender sensibilities of Benjamin Button.

"He must be the wandering Jew!"

"He ought to go to prep school at his age!"

"Look at the infant prodigy!" "He thought this was the old men's home."

"Go up to Harvard!"

Benjamin increased his gait, and soon he was running. He would show them! He would go to Harvard, and then they would regret these ill-considered taunts!

Safely on board the train for Baltimore, he put his head from the window. "You'll regret this!" he shouted.

"Ha-ha!" the undergraduates laughed. "Ha-ha-ha!" It was the biggest mistake that Yale College had ever made....

5

In 1880 Benjamin Button was twenty years old, and he signalised his birthday by going to work for his father in Roger Button & Co., Wholesale Hardware. It was in that same year that he began "going out socially"-that is, his father insisted on taking him to several fashionable dances. Roger Button was now fifty, and he and his son were more and more companionable-in fact, since Benjamin had ceased to dye his hair (which was still grayish) they appeared about the same age, and could have passed for brothers.

One night in August they got into the phaeton attired in their full-dress suits and drove out to a dance at the Shevlins' country house, situated just outside of Baltimore. It was a gorgeous evening. A full moon drenched the road to the lustreless colour of platinum, and late-blooming harvest flowers breathed into the motionless air aromas that were like low, half-heard laughter. The open country, carpeted for rods around with bright wheat, was translucent as in the day. It was almost impossible not to be affected by the sheer beauty of the sky-almost.

"There's a great future in the dry-goods business," Roger Button was saying. He was not a spiritual man-his aesthetic sense was rudimentary.

"Old fellows like me can't learn new tricks," he observed profoundly. "It's you youngsters with energy and vitality that have the great future before you."

Far up the road the lights of the Shevlins' country house drifted into view, and presently there was a sighing sound that crept persistently toward them-it might have been the fine plaint of violins or the rustle of the silver wheat under the moon.

They pulled up behind a handsome brougham whose passengers were disembarking at the door. A lady got out, then an elderly gentleman, then another young lady, beautiful as sin. Benjamin started; an almost chemical change seemed to dissolve and recompose the very elements of his body. A rigour passed over him, blood rose into his cheeks, his forehead, and there was a steady thumping in his ears. It was first love.

The girl was slender and frail, with hair that was ashen under the moon and honey-coloured under the sputtering gas-lamps of the porch. Over her shoulders was thrown a Spanish mantilla of softest yellow, butterflied in black; her feet were glittering buttons at the hem of her bustled dress.

Roger Button leaned over to his son. "That," he said, "is young Hildegarde Moncrief, the daughter of General Moncrief."

Benjamin nodded coldly. "Pretty little thing," he said indifferently. But when the negro boy had led the buggy away, he added: "Dad, you might introduce me to her."

They approached a group, of which Miss Moncrief was the centre. Reared in the old tradition, she curtsied low before Benjamin. Yes, he might have a dance. He thanked her and walked away-staggered away.

The interval until the time for his turn should arrive dragged itself out interminably. He stood close to the wall, silent, inscrutable, watching with murderous eyes the young bloods of Baltimore as they eddied around Hildegarde Moncrief, passionate admiration in their faces. How obnoxious they seemed to Benjamin; how intolerably rosy! Their curling brown whiskers aroused in him a feeling equivalent to indigestion.

But when his own time came, and he drifted with her out upon the changing floor to the music of the latest waltz from Paris, his jealousies and anxieties melted from him like a mantle of snow. Blind with enchantment, he felt that life was just beginning.

"You and your brother got here just as we did, didn't you?" asked Hildegarde, looking up at him with eyes that were like bright blue enamel.

Benjamin hesitated. If she took him for his father's brother, would it be best to enlighten her? He remembered his experience at Yale, so he decided against it. It would be rude to contradict a lady; it would be criminal to mar this exquisite occasion with the grotesque story of his origin. Later, perhaps. So he nodded, smiled, listened, was happy.

"I like men of your age," Hildegarde told him. "Young boys are so idiotic. They tell me how much champagne they drink at college, and how much money they lose playing cards. Men of your age know how to appreciate women."

Benjamin felt himself on the verge of a proposal-with an effort he choked back the impulse. "You're just the romantic age," she continued-"fifty. Twenty-five is too wordly-wise; thirty is apt to be pale from overwork; forty is the age of long stories that take a whole cigar to tell; sixty is-oh, sixty is too near seventy; but fifty is the mellow age. I love fifty."

Fifty seemed to Benjamin a glorious age. He longed passionately to be fifty.

"I've always said," went on Hildegarde, "that I'd rather marry a man of fifty and be taken care of than marry a man of thirty and take care of him."

For Benjamin the rest of the evening was bathed in a honey-coloured mist. Hildegarde gave him two more dances, and they discovered that they were marvellously in accord on all the questions of the day. She was to go driving with him on the following Sunday, and then they would discuss all these questions further.

Going home in the phaeton just before the crack of dawn, when the first bees were humming and the fading moon glimmered in the cool dew, Benjamin knew vaguely that his father was discussing wholesale hardware.

".... And what do you think should merit our biggest attention after hammers and nails?" the elder Button was saying.

"Love," replied Benjamin absent-mindedly.

"Lugs?" exclaimed Roger Button, "Why, I've just covered the question of lugs."

Benjamin regarded him with dazed eyes just as the eastern sky was suddenly cracked with light, and an oriole yawned piercingly in the quickening trees...

6

When, six months later, the engagement of Miss Hildegarde Moncrief to Mr. Benjamin Button was made known (I say "made known," for General Moncrief declared he would rather fall upon his sword than announce it), the excitement in Baltimore society reached a feverish pitch. The almost forgotten story of Benjamin's birth was remembered and sent out upon the winds of scandal in picaresque and incredible forms. It was said that Benjamin was really the father of Roger Button, that he was his brother who had been in prison for forty years, that he was John Wilkes Booth in disguise-and, finally, that he had two small conical horns sprouting from his head.

The Sunday supplements of the New York papers played up the case with fascinating sketches which showed the head of Benjamin Button attached to a fish, to a snake, and, finally, to a body of solid brass. He became known, journalistically, as the Mystery Man of Maryland. But the true story, as is usually the case, had a very small circulation.

However, every one agreed with General Moncrief that it was "criminal" for a lovely girl who could have married any beau in Baltimore to throw herself into the arms of a man who was assuredly fifty. In vain Mr. Roger Button published Us son's birth certificate in large type in the Baltimore Blaze. No one believed it. You had only to look at Benjamin and see.

On the part of the two people most concerned there was no wavering. So many of the stories about her fiancé were false that Hildegarde refused stubbornly to believe even the true one. In vain General Moncrief pointed out to her the high mortality among men of fifty-or, at least, among men who looked fifty; in vain he told her of the instability of the wholesale hardware business. Hildegarde had chosen to marry for mellowness, and marry she did....

7

In one particular, at least, the friends of Hildegarde Moncrief were mistaken. The wholesale hardware business prospered amazingly. In the fifteen years between Benjamin Button's marriage in 1880 and his father's retirement in 1895, the family fortune was doubled-and this was due largely to the younger member of the firm.

Needless to say, Baltimore eventually received the couple to its bosom. Even old General Moncrief became reconciled to his son-in-law when Benjamin gave him the money to bring out his History of the Civil War in twenty volumes, which had been refused by nine prominent publishers.

In Benjamin himself fifteen years had wrought many changes. It seemed to him that the blood flowed with new vigour through his veins. It began to be a pleasure to rise in the morning, to walk with an active step along the busy, sunny street, to work untiringly with his shipments of hammers and his cargoes of nails. It was in 1890 that he executed his famous business coup: he brought up the suggestion that all nails used in nailing up the boxes in which nails are shipped are the property of the shippee, a proposal which became a statute, was approved by Chief Justice Fossile, and saved Roger Button and Company, Wholesale Hardware, more than six hundred nails every year.

In addition, Benjamin discovered that he was becoming more and more attracted by the gay side of life. It was typical of his growing enthusiasm for pleasure that he was the first man in the city of Baltimore to own and run an automobile. Meeting him on the street, his contemporaries would stare enviously at the picture he made of health and vitality.

"He seems to grow younger every year," they would remark. And if old Roger Button, now sixty-five years old, had failed at first to give a proper welcome to his son he atoned at last by bestowing on him what amounted to adulation.

And here we come to an unpleasant subject which it will be well to pass over as quickly as possible. There was only one thing that worried Benjamin Button; his wife had ceased to attract him.

At that time Hildegarde was a woman of thirty-five, with a son, Roscoe, fourteen years old. In the early days of their marriage Benjamin had worshipped her. But, as the years passed, her honey-coloured hair became an unexciting brown, the blue enamel of her eyes assumed the aspect of cheap crockery-moreover, and, most of all, she had become too settled in her ways, too placid, too content, too anaemic in her excitements, and too sober in her taste. As a bride it been she who had "dragged" Benjamin to dances and dinners-now conditions were reversed. She went out socially with him, but without enthusiasm, devoured already by that eternal inertia which comes to live with each of us one day and stays with us to the end.

Benjamin's discontent waxed stronger. At the outbreak of the Spanish-American War in 1898 his home had for him so little charm that he decided to join the army. With his business influence he obtained a commission as captain, and proved so adaptable to the work that he was made a major, and finally a lieutenant-colonel just in time to participate in the celebrated charge up San Juan Hill. He was slightly wounded, and received a medal.

Benjamin had become so attached to the activity and excitement of army life that he regretted to give it up, but his business required attention, so he resigned his commission and came home. He was met at the station by a brass band and escorted to his house.

8

Hildegarde, waving a large silk flag, greeted him on the porch, and even as he kissed her he felt with a sinking of the heart that these three years had taken their toll. She was a woman of forty now, with a faint skirmish line of gray hairs in her head. The sight depressed him.

Up in his room he saw his reflection in the familiar mirror-he went closer and examined his own face with anxiety, comparing it after a moment with a photograph of himself in uniform taken just before the war.

"Good Lord!" he said aloud. The process was continuing. There was no doubt of it-he looked now like a man of thirty. Instead of being delighted, he was uneasy-he was growing younger. He had hitherto hoped that once he reached a bodily age equivalent to his age in years, the grotesque phenomenon which had marked his birth would cease to function. He shuddered. His destiny seemed to him awful, incredible.

When he came downstairs Hildegarde was waiting for him. She appeared annoyed, and he wondered if she had at last discovered that there was something amiss. It was with an effort to relieve the tension between them that he broached the matter at dinner in what he considered a delicate way.

"Well," he remarked lightly, "everybody says I look younger than ever."

Hildegarde regarded him with scorn. She sniffed. "Do you think it's anything to boast about?"

"I'm not boasting," he asserted uncomfortably. She sniffed again. "The idea," she said, and after a moment: "I should think you'd have enough pride to stop it."

"How can I?" he demanded.

"I'm not going to argue with you," she retorted. "But there's a right way of doing things and a wrong way. If you've made up your mind to be different from everybody else, I don't suppose I can stop you, but I really don't think it's very considerate."

"But, Hildegarde, I can't help it."

"You can too. You're simply stubborn. You think you don't want to be like any one else. You always have been that way, and you always will be. But just think how it would be if every one else looked at things as you do-what would the world be like?"

As this was an inane and unanswerable argument Benjamin made no reply, and from that time on a chasm began to widen between them. He wondered what possible fascination she had ever exercised over him.

To add to the breach, he found, as the new century gathered headway, that his thirst for gaiety grew stronger. Never a party of any kind in the city of Baltimore but he was there, dancing with the prettiest of the young married women, chatting with the most popular of the debutantes, and finding their company charming, while his wife, a dowager of evil omen, sat among the chaperons, now in haughty disapproval, and now following him with solemn, puzzled, and reproachful eyes.

"Look!" people would remark. "What a pity! A young fellow that age tied to a woman of forty-five. He must be twenty years younger than his wife." They had forgotten-as people inevitably forget-that back in 1880 their mammas and papas had also remarked about this same ill-matched pair.

Benjamin's growing unhappiness at home was compensated for by his many new interests. He took up golf and made a great success of it. He went in for dancing: in 1906 he was an expert at "The Boston," and in 1908 he was considered proficient at the "Maxine," while in 1909 his "Castle Walk" was the envy of every young man in town.

His social activities, of course, interfered to some extent with his business, but then he had worked hard at wholesale hardware for twenty-five years and felt that he could soon hand it on to his son, Roscoe, who had recently graduated from Harvard.

He and his son were, in fact, often mistaken for each other. This pleased Benjamin-he soon forgot the insidious fear which had come over him on his return from the Spanish-American War, and grew to take a naive pleasure in his appearance. There was only one fly in the delicious ointment-he hated to appear in public with his wife. Hildegarde was almost fifty, and the sight of her made him feel absurd....

9

One September day in 1910-a few years after Roger Button & Co., Wholesale Hardware, had been handed over to young Roscoe Button-a man, apparently about twenty years old, entered himself as a freshman at Harvard University in Cambridge. He did not make the mistake of announcing that he would never see fifty again, nor did he mention the fact that his son had been graduated from the same institution ten years before.

He was admitted, and almost immediately attained a prominent position in the class, partly because he seemed a little older than the other freshmen, whose average age was about eighteen.

But his success was largely due to the fact that in the football game with Yale he played so brilliantly, with so much dash and with such a cold, remorseless anger that he scored seven touchdowns and fourteen field goals for Harvard, and caused one entire eleven of Yale men to be carried singly from the field, unconscious. He was the most celebrated man in college.

Strange to say, in his third or junior year he was scarcely able to "make" the team. The coaches said that he had lost weight, and it seemed to the more observant among them that he was not quite as tall as before. He made no touchdowns-indeed, he was retained on the team chiefly in hope that his enormous reputation would bring terror and disorganisation to the Yale team.

In his senior year he did not make the team at all. He had grown so slight and frail that one day he was taken by some sophomores for a freshman, an incident which humiliated him terribly. He became known as something of a prodigy-a senior who was surely no more than sixteen-and he was often shocked at the worldliness of some of his classmates. His studies seemed harder to him-he felt that they were too advanced. He had heard his classmates speak of St. Midas's, the famous preparatory school, at which so many of them had prepared for college, and he determined after his graduation to enter himself at St. Midas's, where the sheltered life among boys his own size would be more congenial to him.

Upon his graduation in 1914 he went home to Baltimore with his Harvard diploma in his pocket. Hildegarde was now residing in Italy, so Benjamin went to live with his son, Roscoe. But though he was welcomed in a general way there was obviously no heartiness in Roscoe's feeling toward him-there was even perceptible a tendency on his son's part to think that Benjamin, as he moped about the house in adolescent mooniness, was somewhat in the way. Roscoe was married now and prominent in Baltimore life, and he wanted no scandal to creep out in connection with his family.

Benjamin, no longer persona grata with the débutantes and younger college set, found himself left much done, except for the companionship of three or four fifteen-year-old boys in the neighbourhood. His idea of going to St. Midas's school recurred to him.

"Say," he said to Roscoe one day, "I've told you over and over that I want to go to prep, school."

"Well, go, then," replied Roscoe shortly. The matter was distasteful to him, and he wished to avoid a discussion.

"I can't go alone," said Benjamin helplessly. "You'll have to enter me and take me up there."

"I haven't got time," declared Roscoe abruptly. His eyes narrowed and he looked uneasily at his father. "As a matter of fact," he added, "you'd better not go on with this business much longer. You better pull up short. You better-you better"-he paused and his face crimsoned as he sought for words-"you better turn right around and start back the other way. This has gone too far to be a joke. It isn't funny any longer. You-you behave yourself!"

Benjamin looked at him, on the verge of tears.

"And another thing," continued Roscoe, "when visitors are in the house I want you to call me 'Uncle'-not 'Roscoe,' but 'Uncle,' do you understand? It looks absurd for a boy of fifteen to call me by my first name. Perhaps you'd better call me 'Uncle' all the time, so you'll get used to it."

With a harsh look at his father, Roscoe turned away....

10

At the termination of this interview, Benjamin wandered dismally upstairs and stared at himself in the mirror. He had not shaved for three months, but he could find nothing on his face but a faint white down with which it seemed unnecessary to meddle. When he had first come home from Harvard, Roscoe had approached him with the proposition that he should wear eye-glasses and imitation whiskers glued to his cheeks, and it had seemed for a moment that the farce of his early years was to be repeated. But whiskers had itched and made him ashamed. He wept and Roscoe had reluctantly relented.

Benjamin opened a book of boys' stories, The Boy Scouts in Bimini Bay, and began to read. But he found himself thinking persistently about the war. America had joined the Allied cause during the preceding month, and Benjamin wanted to enlist, but, alas, sixteen was the minimum age, and he did not look that old. His true age, which was fifty-seven, would have disqualified him, anyway.

There was a knock at his door, and the butler appeared with a letter bearing a large official legend in the corner and addressed to Mr. Benjamin Button. Benjamin tore it open eagerly, and read the enclosure with delight. It informed him that many reserve officers who had served in the Spanish-American War were being called back into service with a higher rank, and it enclosed his commission as brigadier-general in the United States army with orders to report immediately.

Benjamin jumped to his feet fairly quivering with enthusiasm. This was what he had wanted. He seized his cap, and ten minutes later he had entered a large tailoring establishment on Charles Street, and asked in his uncertain treble to be measured for a uniform.

"Want to play soldier, sonny?" demanded a clerk casually.

Benjamin flushed. "Say! Never mind what I want!" he retorted angrily. "My name's Button and I live on Mt. Vernon Place, so you know I'm good for it."

"Well," admitted the clerk hesitantly, "if you're not, I guess your daddy is, all right."

Benjamin was measured, and a week later his uniform was completed. He had difficulty in obtaining the proper general's insignia because the dealer kept insisting to Benjamin that a nice V.W.C.A. badge would look just as well and be much more fun to play with.

Saying nothing to Roscoe, he left the house one night and proceeded by train to Camp Mosby, in South Carolina, where he was to command an infantry brigade. On a sultry April day he approached the entrance to the camp, paid off the taxicab which had brought him from the station, and turned to the sentry on guard.

"Get some one to handle my luggage!" he said briskly.

The sentry eyed him reproachfully. "Say," he remarked, "where you goin' with the general's duds, sonny?"

Benjamin, veteran of the Spanish-American War, whirled upon him with fire in his eye, but with, alas, a changing treble voice.

"Come to attention!" he tried to thunder; he paused for breath-then suddenly he saw the sentry snap his heels together and bring his rifle to the present. Benjamin concealed a smile of gratification, but when he glanced around his smile faded. It was not he who had inspired obedience, but an imposing artillery colonel who was approaching on horseback.

"Colonel!" called Benjamin shrilly.

The colonel came up, drew rein, and looked coolly down at him with a twinkle in his eyes. "Whose little boy are you?" he demanded kindly.

"I'll soon darn well show you whose little boy I am!" retorted Benjamin in a ferocious voice. "Get down off that horse!"

The colonel roared with laughter.

"You want him, eh, general?"

"Here!" cried Benjamin desperately. "Read this." And he thrust his commission toward the colonel. The colonel read it, his eyes popping from their sockets. "Where'd you get this?" he demanded, slipping the document into his own pocket. "I got it from the Government, as you'll soon find out!" "You come along with me," said the colonel with a peculiar look. "We'll go up to headquarters and talk this over. Come along." The colonel turned and began walking his horse in the direction of headquarters. There was nothing for Benjamin to do but follow with as much dignity as possible-meanwhile promising himself a stern revenge. But this revenge did not materialise. Two days later, however, his son Roscoe materialised from Baltimore, hot and cross from a hasty trip, and escorted the weeping general, sans uniform, back to his home.

11

In 1920 Roscoe Button's first child was born. During the attendant festivities, however, no one thought it "the thing" to mention, that the little grubby boy, apparently about ten years of age who played around the house with lead soldiers and a miniature circus, was the new baby's own grandfather.

No one disliked the little boy whose fresh, cheerful face was crossed with just a hint of sadness, but to Roscoe Button his presence was a source of torment. In the idiom of his generation Roscoe did not consider the matter "efficient." It seemed to him that his father, in refusing to look sixty, had not behaved like a "red-blooded he-man"-this was Roscoe's favourite expression-but in a curious and perverse manner. Indeed, to think about the matter for as much as a half an hour drove him to the edge of insanity. Roscoe believed that "live wires" should keep young, but carrying it out on such a scale was-was-was inefficient. And there Roscoe rested.

Five years later Roscoe's little boy had grown old enough to play childish games with little Benjamin under the supervision of the same nurse. Roscoe took them both to kindergarten on the same day, and Benjamin found that playing with little strips of coloured paper, making mats and chains and curious and beautiful designs, was the most fascinating game in the world. Once he was bad and had to stand in the corner-then he cried-but for the most part there were gay hours in the cheerful room, with the sunlight coming in the windows and Miss Bailey's kind hand resting for a moment now and then in his tousled hair.

Roscoe's son moved up into the first grade after a year, but Benjamin stayed on in the kindergarten. He was very happy. Sometimes when other tots talked about what they would do when they grew up a shadow would cross his little face as if in a dim, childish way he realised that those were things in which he was never to share.

The days flowed on in monotonous content. He went back a third year to the kindergarten, but he was too little now to understand what the bright shining strips of paper were for. He cried because the other boys were bigger than he, and he was afraid of them. The teacher talked to him, but though he tried to understand he could not understand at all.

He was taken from the kindergarten. His nurse, Nana, in her starched gingham dress, became the centre of his tiny world. On bright days they walked in the park; Nana would point at a great gray monster and say "elephant," and Benjamin would say it after her, and when he was being undressed for bed that night he would say it over and over aloud to her: "Elyphant, elyphant, elyphant." Sometimes Nana let him jump on the bed, which was fun, because if you sat down exactly right it would bounce you up on your feet again, and if you said "Ah" for a long time while you jumped you got a very pleasing broken vocal effect.

He loved to take a big cane from the hat-rack and go around hitting chairs and tables with it and saying: "Fight, fight, fight." When there were people there the old ladies would cluck at him, which interested him, and the young ladies would try to kiss him, which he submitted to with mild boredom. And when the long day was done at five o'clock he would go upstairs with Nana and be fed on oatmeal and nice soft mushy foods with a spoon.

There were no troublesome memories in his childish sleep; no token came to him of his brave days at college, of the glittering years when he flustered the hearts of many girls. There were only the white, safe walls of his crib and Nana and a man who came to see him sometimes, and a great big orange ball that Nana pointed at just before his twilight bed hour and called "sun." When the sun went his eyes were sleepy-there were no dreams, no dreams to haunt him.

The past-the wild charge at the head of his men up San Juan Hill; the first years of his marriage when he worked late into the summer dusk down in the busy city for young Hildegarde whom he loved; the days before that when he sat smoking far into the night in the gloomy old Button house on Monroe Street with his grandfather-all these had faded like unsubstantial dreams from his mind as though they had never been. He did not remember.

He did not remember clearly whether the milk was warm or cool at his last feeding or how the days passed-there was only his crib and Nana's familiar presence. And then he remembered nothing. When he was hungry he cried-that was all. Through the noons and nights he breathed and over him there were soft mumblings and murmurings that he scarcely heard, and faintly differentiated smells, and light and darkness.

Then it was all dark, and his white crib and the dim faces that moved above him, and the warm sweet aroma of the milk, faded out altogether from his mind.

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The embedded audio player requires a modern internet browser. You should visit Browse Happy and update your internet browser today! I As long ago as 1860 it was the proper thing to be born at home.

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F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940)

The American Mercury, June 1924

There was once a priest with cold, watery eyes, who, in the still of the night, wept cold tears. He wept because the afternoons were warm and long, and he was unable to attain a complete mystical union with our Lord. Sometimes, near four o'clock, there was a rustle of Swede girls along the path by his window, and in their shrill laughter he found a terrible dissonance that made him pray aloud for the twilight to come. At twilight the laughter and the voices were quieter, but several times he had walked past Romberg's Drug Store when it was dusk and the yellow lights shone inside and the nickel taps of the soda-fountain were gleaming, and he had found the scent of cheap toilet soap desperately sweet upon the air. He passed that way when he returned from hearing confessions on Saturday nights, and he grew careful to walk on the other side of the street so that the smell of the soap would float upward before it reached his nostrils as it drifted, rather like incense, toward the summer moon.

But there was no escape from the hot madness of four o'clock. From his window, as far as he could see, the Dakota wheat thronged the valley of the Red River. The wheat was terrible to look upon and the carpet pattern to which in agony he bent his eyes sent his thought brooding through grotesque labyrinths, open always to the unavoidable sun.

One afternoon when he had reached the point where the mind runs down like an old clock, his housekeeper brought into his study a beautiful, intense little boy of eleven named Rudolph Miller. The little boy sat down in a patch of sunshine, and the priest, at his walnut desk, pretended to be very busy. This was to conceal his relief that some one had come into his haunted room.

Presently he turned around and found himself staring into two enormous, staccato eyes, lit with gleaming points of cobalt light. For a moment their expression startled him--then he saw that his visitor was in a state of abject fear.

"Your mouth is trembling," said Father Schwartz, in a haggard voice.

The little boy covered his quivering mouth with his hand.

"Are you in trouble?" asked Father Schwartz, sharply. "Take your hand away from your mouth and tell me what's the matter."

The boy--Father Schwartz recognized him now as the son of a parishioner, Mr. Miller, the freight-agent--moved his hand reluctantly off his mouth and became articulate in a despairing whisper.

"Father Schwartz--I've committed a terrible sin."

"A sin against purity?"

"No, Father . . . worse."

Father Schwartz's body jerked sharply.

"Have you killed somebody?"

"No--but I'm afraid--" the voice rose to a shrill whimper.

"Do you want to go to confession?"

The little boy shook his head miserably. Father Schwartz cleared his throat so that he could make his voice soft and say some quiet, kind thing. In this moment he should forget his own agony, and try to act like God. He repeated to himself a devotional phrase, hoping that in return God would help him to act correctly.

"Tell me what you've done," said his new soft voice.

The little boy looked at him through his tears, and was reassured by the impression of moral resiliency which the distraught priest had created. Abandoning as much of himself as he was able to this man, Rudolph Miller began to tell his story.

"On Saturday, three days ago, my father he said I had to go to confession, because I hadn't been for a month, and the family they go every week, and I hadn't been. So I just as leave go, I didn't care. So I put it off till after supper because I was playing with a bunch of kids and father asked me if I went, and I said 'no,' and he took me by the neck and he said 'You go now,' so I said 'All right,' so I went over to church. And he yelled after me: 'Don't come back till you go.' . . ."
"On Saturday, Three Days Ago."

The plush curtain of the confessional rearranged its dismal creases, leaving exposed only the bottom of an old man's old shoe. Behind the curtain an immortal soul was alone with God and the Reverend Adolphus Schwartz, priest of the parish. Sound began, a labored whispering, sibilant and discreet, broken at intervals by the voice of the priest in audible question.

Rudolph Miller knelt in the pew beside the confessional and waited, straining nervously to hear, and yet not to hear what was being said within. The fact that the priest was audible alarmed him. His own turn came next, and the three or four others who waited might listen unscrupulously while he admitted his violations of the Sixth and Ninth Commandments.

Rudolph had never committed adultery, nor even coveted his neighbor's wife--but it was the confession of the associate sins that was particularly hard to contemplate. In comparison he relished the less shameful fallings away--they formed a grayish background which relieved the ebony mark of sexual offenses upon his soul.

He had been covering his ears with his hands, hoping that his refusal to hear would be noticed, and a like courtesy rendered to him in turn, when a sharp movement of the penitent in the confessional made him sink his face precipitately into the crook of his elbow. Fear assumed solid form, and pressed out a lodging between his heart and his lungs. He must try now with all his might to be sorry for his sins--not because he was afraid, but because he had offended God. He must convince God that he was sorry and to do so he must first convince himself. After a tense emotional struggle he achieved a tremulous self-pity, and decided that he was now ready. If, by allowing no other thought to enter his head, he could preserve this state of emotion unimpaired until he went into that large coffin set on end, he would have survived another crisis in his religious life.

For some time, however, a demoniac notion had partially possessed him. He could go home now, before his turn came, and tell his mother that he had arrived too late, and found the priest gone. This, unfortunately, involved the risk of being caught in a lie. As an alternative he could say that he had gone to confession, but this meant that he must avoid communion next day, for communion taken upon an uncleansed soul would turn to poison in his mouth, and he would crumple limp and damned from the altar-rail.

Again Father Schwartz's voice became audible.

"And for your--"

The words blurred to a husky mumble, and Rudolph got excitedly to his feet. He felt that it was impossible for him to go to confession this afternoon. He hesitated tensely. Then from the confessional came a tap, a creak, and a sustained rustle. The slide had fallen and the plush curtain trembled. Temptation had come to him too late. . . .

"Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. . . . I confess to Almighty God and to you, Father, that I have sinned. . . . Since my last confession it has been one month and three days. . . . I accuse myself of--taking the Name of the Lord in vain. . . ."

This was an easy sin. His curses had been but bravado--telling of them was little less than a brag.

". . . of being mean to an old lady."

The wan shadow moved a little on the latticed slat.

"How, my child?"

"Old lady Swenson," Rudolph's murmur soared jubilantly. "She got our baseball that we knocked in her window, and she wouldn't give it back, so we yelled 'Twenty-three, Skidoo,' at her all afternoon. Then about five o'clock she had a fit, and they had to have the doctor."

"Go on, my child."

"Of--of not believing I was the son of my parents."

"What?" The interrogation was distinctly startled.

"Of not believing that I was the son of my parents."

"Why not?"

"Oh, just pride," answered the penitent airily.

"You mean you thought you were too good to be the son of your parents?"

"Yes, Father." On a less jubilant note.

"Go on."

"Of being disobedient and calling my mother names. Of slandering people behind my back. Of smoking--"

Rudolph had now exhausted the minor offenses, and was approaching the sins it was agony to tell. He held his fingers against his face like bars as if to press out between them the shame in his heart.

"Of dirty words and immodest thoughts and desires," he whispered very low.

"How often?"

"I don't know."

"Once a week? Twice a week?"

"Twice a week."

"Did you yield to these desires?"

"No, Father."

"Were you alone when you had them?"

"No, Father. I was with two boys and a girl."

"Don't you know, my child, that you should avoid the occasions of sin as well as the sin itself? Evil companionship leads to evil desires and evil desires to evil actions. Where were you when this happened?"

"In a barn in back of--"

"I don't want to hear any names," interrupted the priest sharply.

"Well, it was up in the loft of this barn and this girl and--a fella, they were saying things--saying immodest things, and I stayed."

"You should have gone--you should have told the girl to go."

He should have gone! He could not tell Father Schwartz how his pulse had bumped in his wrist, how a strange, romantic excitement had possessed him when those curious things had been said. Perhaps in the houses of delinquency among the dull and hard-eyed incorrigible girls can be found those for whom has burned the whitest fire.

"Have you anything else to tell me?"

"I don't think so, Father."

Rudolph felt a great relief. Perspiration had broken out under his tight-pressed fingers.

"Have you told any lies?"

The question startled him. Like all those who habitually and instinctively lie, he had an enormous respect and awe for the truth. Something almost exterior to himself dictated a quick, hurt answer.

"Oh, no, Father, I never tell lies."

For a moment, like the commoner in the king's chair, he tasted the pride of the situation. Then as the priest began to murmur conventional admonitions he realized that in heroically denying he had told lies, he had committed a terrible sin--he had told a lie in confession.

In automatic response to Father Schwartz's "Make an act of contrition," he began to repeat aloud meaninglessly:

"Oh, my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended Thee. . . ."

He must fix this now--it was a bad mistake--but as his teeth shut on the last words of his prayer there was a sharp sound, and the slat was closed.

A minute later when he emerged into the twilight the relief in coming from the muggy church into an open world of wheat and sky postponed the full realization of what he had done. Instead of worrying he took a deep breath of the crisp air and began to say over and over to himself the words "Blatchford Sarnemington, Blatchford Sarnemington!"

Blatchford Sarnemington was himself, and these words were in effect a lyric. When he became Blatchford Sarnemington a suave nobility flowed from him. Blatchford Sarnemington lived in great sweeping triumphs. When Rudolph half closed his eyes it meant that Blatchford had established dominance over him and, as he went by, there were envious mutters in the air: "Blatchford Sarnemington! There goes Blatchford Sarnemington."

He was Blatchford now for a while as he strutted homeward along the staggering road, but when the road braced itself in macadam in order to become the main street of Ludwig, Rudolph's exhilaration faded out and his mind cooled, and he felt the horror of his lie. God, of course, already knew of it--but Rudolph reserved a corner of his mind where he was safe from God, where he prepared the subterfuges with which he often tricked God. Hiding now in this corner he considered how he could best avoid the consequences of his misstatement.

At all costs he must avoid communion next day. The risk of angering God to such an extent was too great. He would have to drink water "by accident" in the morning, and thus, in accordance with a church law, render himself unfit to receive communion that day. In spite of its flimsiness this subterfuge was the most feasible that occurred to him. He accepted its risks and was concentrating on how best to put it into effect, as he turned the corner by Romberg's Drug Store and came in sight of his father's house.

Rudolph's father, the local freight-agent, had floated with the second wave of German and Irish stock to the Minnesota-Dakota country. Theoretically, great opportunities lay ahead of a young man of energy in that day and place, but Carl Miller had been incapable of establishing either with his superiors or his subordinates the reputation for approximate immutability which is essential to success in a hierarchic industry. Somewhat gross, he was, nevertheless, insufficiently hard-headed and unable to take fundamental relationships for granted, and this inability made him suspicious, unrestful, and continually dismayed.

His two bonds with the colorful life were his faith in the Roman Catholic Church and his mystical worship of the Empire Builder, James J. Hill. Hill was the apotheosis of that quality in which Miller himself was deficient--the sense of things, the feel of things, the hint of rain in the wind on the cheek. Miller's mind worked late on the old decisions of other men, and he had never in his life felt the balance of any single thing in his hands. His weary, sprightly, undersized body was growing old in Hill's gigantic shadow. For twenty years he had lived alone with Hill's name and God.

On Sunday morning Carl Miller awoke in the dustless quiet of six o'clock. Kneeling by the side of the bed he bent his yellow-gray hair and the full dapple bangs of his mustache into the pillow, and prayed for several minutes. Then he drew off his night-shirt--like the rest of his generation he had never been able to endure pajamas--and clothed his thin, white, hairless body in woollen underwear.

He shaved. Silence in the other bedroom where his wife lay nervously asleep. Silence from the screened-off corner of the hall where his son's cot stood, and his son slept among his Alger books, his collection of cigar-bands, his mothy pennants--"Cornell," "Hamlin," and "Greetings from Pueblo, New Mexico"--and the other possessions of his private life. From outside Miller could hear the shrill birds and the whirring movement of the poultry, and, as an undertone, the low, swelling click-a-tick of the six-fifteen through-train for Montana and the green coast beyond. Then as the cold water dripped from the wash-rag in his hand he raised his head suddenly--he had heard a furtive sound from the kitchen below.

He dried his razor hastily, slipped his dangling suspenders to his shoulder, and listened. Some one was walking in the kitchen, and he knew by the light footfall that it was not his wife. With his mouth faintly ajar he ran quickly down the stairs and opened the kitchen door.

Standing by the sink, with one hand on the still dripping faucet and the other clutching a full glass of water, stood his son. The boy's eyes, still heavy with sleep, met his father's with a frightened, reproachful beauty. He was barefooted, and his pajamas were rolled up at the knees and sleeves.

For a moment they both remained motionless--Carl Miller's brow went down and his son's went up, as though they were striking a balance between the extremes of emotion which filled them. Then the bangs of the parent's moustache descended portentously until they obscured his mouth, and he gave a short glance around to see if anything had been disturbed.

The kitchen was garnished with sunlight which beat on the pans and made the smooth boards of the floor and table yellow and clean as wheat. It was the center of the house where the fire burned and the tins fitted into tins like toys, and the steam whistled all day on a thin pastel note. Nothing was moved, nothing touched--except the faucet where beads of water still formed and dripped with a white flash into the sink below.

"What are you doing?"

"I got awful thirsty, so I thought I'd just come down and get--"

"I thought you were going to communion."

A look of vehement astonishment spread over his son's face.

"I forgot all about it."

"Have you drunk any water?"

"No--"

As the word left his mouth Rudolph knew it was the wrong answer, but the faded indignant eyes facing him had signalled up the truth before the boy's will could act. He realized, too, that he should never have come downstairs; some vague necessity for verisimilitude had made him want to leave a wet glass as evidence by the sink; the honesty of his imagination had betrayed him.

"Pour it out," commanded his father, "that water!"

Rudolph despairingly inverted the tumbler.

"What's the matter with you, anyways?" demanded Miller angrily.

"Nothing."

"Did you go to confession yesterday?"

"Yes."

"Then why were you going to drink water?"

"I don't know--I forgot."

"Maybe you care more about being a little bit thirsty than you do about your religion."

"I forgot." Rudolph could feel the tears straining in his eyes.

"That's no answer."

"Well, I did."

"You better look out!" His father held to a high, persistent, inquisitory note: "If you're so forgetful that you can't remember your religion something better be done about it."

Rudolph filled a sharp pause with:

"I can remember it all right."

"First you begin to neglect your religion," cried his father, fanning his own fierceness, "the next thing you'll begin to lie and steal, and the next thing is the reform school!"

Not even this familiar threat could deepen the abyss that Rudolph saw before him. He must either tell all now, offering his body for what he knew would be a ferocious beating, or else tempt the thunderbolts by receiving the Body and Blood of Christ with sacrilege upon his soul. And of the two the former seemed more terrible--it was not so much the beating he dreaded as the savage ferocity, outlet of the ineffectual man, which would lie behind it.

"Put down that glass and go up-stairs and dress!" his father ordered, "and when we get to church, before you go to communion, you better kneel down and ask God to forgive you for your carelessness."

Some accidental emphasis in the phrasing of this command acted like a catalytic agent on the confusion and terror of Rudolph's mind. A wild, proud anger rose in him, and he dashed the tumbler passionately into the sink.

His father uttered a strained, husky sound, and sprang for him. Rudolph dodged to the side, tipped over a chair, and tried to get beyond the kitchen table. He cried out sharply when a hand grasped his pajama shoulder, then he felt the dull impact of a fist against the side of his head, and glancing blows on the upper part of his body. As he slipped here and there in his father's grasp, dragged or lifted when he clung instinctively to an arm, aware of sharp smarts and strains, he made no sound except that he laughed hysterically several times. Then in less than a minute the blows abruptly ceased. After a lull during which Rudolph was tightly held, and during which they both trembled violently and uttered strange, truncated words, Carl Miller half dragged, half threatened his son up-stairs.

"Put on your clothes!"

Rudolph was now both hysterical and cold. His head hurt him, and there was a long, shallow scratch on his neck from his father's finger-nail, and he sobbed and trembled as he dressed. He was aware of his mother standing at the doorway in a wrapper, her wrinkled face compressing and squeezing and opening out into new series of wrinkles which floated and eddied from neck to brow. Despising her nervous ineffectuality and avoiding her rudely when she tried to touch his neck with witch-hazel, he made a hasty, choking toilet. Then he followed his father out of the house and along the road toward the Catholic church.

They walked without speaking except when Carl Miller acknowledged automatically the existence of passers-by. Rudolph's uneven breathing alone ruffled the hot Sunday silence.

His father stopped decisively at the door of the church.

"I've decided you'd better go to confession again. Go in and tell Father Schwartz what you did and ask God's pardon."

"You lost your temper, too!" said Rudolph quickly.

Carl Miller took a step toward his son, who moved cautiously backward.

"All right, I'll go."

"Are you going to do what I say?" cried his father in a hoarse whisper.

"All right."

Rudolph walked into the church, and for the second time in two days entered the confessional and knelt down. The slat went up almost at once.

"I accuse myself of missing my morning prayers."

"Is that all?"

"That's all."

A maudlin exultation filled him. Not easily ever again would he be able to put an abstraction before the necessities of his ease and pride. An invisible line had been crossed, and he had become aware of his isolation--aware that it applied not only to those moments when he was Blatchford Sarnemington but that it applied to all his inner life. Hitherto such phenomena as "crazy" ambitions and petty shames and fears had been but private reservations, unacknowledged before the throne of his official soul. Now he realized unconsciously that his private reservations were himself--and all the rest a garnished front and a conventional flag. The pressure of his environment had driven him into the lonely secret road of adolescence.

He knelt in the pew beside his father. Mass began. Rudolph knelt up--when he was alone he slumped his posterior back against the seat--and tasted the consciousness of a sharp, subtle revenge. Beside him his father prayed that God would forgive Rudolph, and asked also that his own outbreak of temper would be pardoned. He glanced sidewise at his son, and was relieved to see that the strained, wild look had gone from his face and that he had ceased sobbing. The Grace of God, inherent in the Sacrament, would do the rest, and perhaps after Mass everything would be better. He was proud of Rudolph in his heart, and beginning to be truly as well as formally sorry for what he had done.

Usually, the passing of the collection box was a significant point for Rudolph in the services. If, as was often the case, he had no money to drop in he would be furiously ashamed and bow his head and pretend not to see the box, lest Jeanne Brady in the pew behind should take notice and suspect an acute family poverty. But to-day he glanced coldly into it as it skimmed under his eyes, noting with casual interest the large number of pennies it contained.

When the bell rang for communion, however, he quivered. There was no reason why God should not stop his heart. During the past twelve hours he had committed a series of mortal sins increasing in gravity, and he was now to crown them all with a blasphemous sacrilege.

"Domini, non sum dignus; ut interes sub tectum meum; sed tantum dic verbo, et sanabitur anima mea. . . ."

There was a rustle in the pews, and the communicants worked their ways into the aisle with downcast eyes and joined hands. Those of larger piety pressed together their finger-tips to form steeples. Among these latter was Carl Miller. Rudolph followed him toward the altar-rail and knelt down, automatically taking up the napkin under his chin. The bell rang sharply, and the priest turned from the altar with the white Host held above the chalice:
"Corpus Domini nostri Jesu Christi custodiat animam meam in vitam aeternam."
A cold sweat broke out on Rudolph's forehead as the communion began. Along the line Father Schwartz moved, and with gathering nausea Rudolph felt his heart-valves weakening at the will of God. It seemed to him that the church was darker and that a great quiet had fallen, broken only by the inarticulate mumble which announced the approach of the Creator of Heaven and Earth. He dropped his head down between his shoulders and waited for the blow.

Then he felt a sharp nudge in his side. His father was poking him to sit up, not to slump against the rail; the priest was only two places away.
"Corpus Domini nostri Jesu Christi custodiat animam meam in vitam aeternam."
Rudolph opened his mouth. He felt the sticky wax taste of the wafer on his tongue. He remained motionless for what seemed an interminable period of time, his head still raised, the wafer undissolved in his mouth. Then again he started at the pressure of his father's elbow, and saw that the people were falling away from the altar like leaves and turning with blind downcast eyes to their pews, alone with God.

Rudolph was alone with himself, drenched with perspiration and deep in mortal sin. As he walked back to his pew the sharp taps of his cloven hoofs were loud upon the floor, and he knew that it was a dark poison he carried in his heart.
"Sagitta Volante in Dei"

The beautiful little boy with eyes like blue stones, and lashes that sprayed open from them like flower-petals had finished telling his sin to Father Schwartz--and the square of sunshine in which he sat had moved forward half an hour into the room. Rudolph had become less frightened now; once eased of the story a reaction had set in. He knew that as long as he was in the room with this priest God would not stop his heart, so he sighed and sat quietly, waiting for the priest to speak.

Father Schwartz's cold watery eyes were fixed upon the carpet pattern on which the sun had brought out the swastikas and the flat bloomless vines and the pale echoes of flowers. The hall-clock ticked insistently toward sunset, and from the ugly room and from the afternoon outside the window arose a stiff monotony, shattered now and then by the reverberate clapping of a far-away hammer on the dry air. The priest's nerves were strung thin and the beads of his rosary were crawling and squirming like snakes upon the green felt of his table top. He could not remember now what it was he should say.

Of all the things in this lost Swede town he was most aware of this little boy's eyes--the beautiful eyes, with lashes that left them reluctantly and curved back as though to meet them once more.

For a moment longer the silence persisted while Rudolph waited, and the priest struggled to remember something that was slipping farther and farther away from him, and the clock ticked in the broken house. Then Father Schwartz stared hard at the little boy and remarked in a peculiar voice:

"When a lot of people get together in the best places things go glimmering."

Rudolph started and looked quickly at Father Schwartz's face.

"I said--" began the priest, and paused, listening. "Do you hear the hammer and the clock ticking and the bees? Well, that's no good. The thing is to have a lot of people in the center of the world, wherever that happens to be. Then"--his watery eyes widened knowingly--"things go glimmering."

"Yes, Father," agreed Rudolph, feeling a little frightened.

"What are you going to be when you grow up?"

"Well, I was going to be a baseball-player for a while," answered Rudolph nervously, "but I don't think that's a very good ambition, so I think I'll be an actor or a Navy officer."

Again the priest stared at him.

"I see exactly what you mean," he said, with a fierce air.

Rudolph had not meant anything in particular, and at the implication that he had, he became more uneasy.

"This man is crazy," he thought, "and I'm scared of him. He wants me to help him out some way, and I don't want to."

"You look as if things went glimmering," cried Father Schwartz wildly. "Did you ever go to a party?"

"Yes, Father."

"And did you notice that everybody was properly dressed? That's what I mean. Just as you went into the party there was a moment when everybody was properly dressed. Maybe two little girls were standing by the door and some boys were leaning over the banisters, and there were bowls around full of flowers."

"I've been to a lot of parties," said Rudolph, rather relieved that the conversation had taken this turn.

"Of course," continued Father Schwartz triumphantly, "I knew you'd agree with me. But my theory is that when a whole lot of people get together in the best places things go glimmering all the time."

Rudolph found himself thinking of Blatchford Sarnemington.

"Please listen to me!" commanded the priest impatiently. "Stop worrying about last Saturday. Apostasy implies an absolute damnation only on the supposition of a previous perfect faith. Does that fix it?"

Rudolph had not the faintest idea what Father Schwartz was talking about, but he nodded and the priest nodded back at him and returned to his mysterious preoccupation.

"Why," he cried, "they have lights now as big as stars--do you realize that? I heard of one light they had in Paris or somewhere that was as big as a star. A lot of people had it--a lot of gay people. They have all sorts of things now that you never dreamed of."

"Look here--" He came nearer to Rudolph, but the boy drew away, so Father Schwartz went back and sat down in his chair, his eyes dried out and hot. "Did you ever see an amusement park?"

"No, Father."

"Well, go and see an amusement park." The priest waved his hand vaguely. "It's a thing like a fair, only much more glittering. Go to one at night and stand a little way off from it in a dark place--under dark trees. You'll see a big wheel made of lights turning in the air, and a long slide shooting boats down into the water. A band playing somewhere, and a smell of peanuts--and everything will twinkle. But it won't remind you of anything, you see. It will all just hang out there in the night like a colored balloon--like a big yellow lantern on a pole."

Father Schwartz frowned as he suddenly thought of something.

"But don't get up close," he warned Rudolph, "because if you do you'll only feel the heat and the sweat and the life."

All this talking seemed particularly strange and awful to Rudolph, because this man was a priest. He sat there, half terrified, his beautiful eyes open wide and staring at Father Schwartz. But underneath his terror he felt that his own inner convictions were confirmed. There was something ineffably gorgeous somewhere that had nothing to do with God. He no longer thought that God was angry at him about the original lie, because He must have understood that Rudolph had done it to make things finer in the confessional, brightening up the dinginess of his admissions by saying a thing radiant and proud. At the moment when he had affirmed immaculate honor a silver pennon had flapped out into the breeze somewhere and there had been the crunch of leather and the shine of silver spurs and a troop of horsemen waiting for dawn on a low green hill. The sun had made stars of light on their breastplates like the picture at home of the German cuirassiers at Sedan.

But now the priest was muttering inarticulate and heart-broken words, and the boy became wildly afraid. Horror entered suddenly in at the open window, and the atmosphere of the room changed. Father Schwartz collapsed precipitously down on his knees, and let his body settle back against a chair.

"Oh, my God!" he cried out, in a strange voice, and wilted to the floor.

Then a human oppression rose from the priest's worn clothes, and mingled with the faint smell of old food in the corners. Rudolph gave a sharp cry and ran in a panic from the house--while the collapsed man lay there quite still, filling his room, filling it with voices and faces until it was crowded with echolalia, and rang loud with a steady, shrill note of laughter.

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 were working in the lines between the grain. Legs were shaped under starchless gingham, and rims of the necks of dresses were warm and damp. For five hours now hot fertile life had burned in the afternoon. It would be night in three hours, and all along the land there would be these blonde Northern girls and the tall young men from the farms lying out beside the wheat, under the moon.

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There was once a priest with cold, watery eyes, who, in the still of the night, wept cold tears. He wept because the afternoons were warm and long, and he was unable to attain a complete mystical union with our Lord.

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"The Diviners must stand, or all shall fall."

The Diviners is a historical, paranormal fantasy set in 1920s New York City! And in this alternative history, there are people called Diviners who have magical abilities that are hidden from the world. And these powers will come in handy as a demon like being who was summoned from a Ouija board starts ritualistically killing people, while also bringing upon the apocalypse.

➽ Evie O'Neill - Sent to NY to stay with her uncle after causing too...more

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Khanh, first of her name, mother of bunnies

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"The Diviners must stand, or all shall fall." The Diviners is a historical, paranormal fantasy set in 1920s New York City! And in this alternative history, there are people called Diviners who have magical abilities that are hidden from the world.

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Reread due to this beautiful penguin edition designed by Peter Bentley.
Admired Brideshead much more this time round. Even the Julia half.
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"I had been there before; I knew all about it." 22

" I am very contrite. Aloysius won't speak to me until he sees I am forgiven, so please come to luncheon today. Sebastian Flyte." 32

"The languor of youth - how unique and quintessential it is! How quickly, how irrevocably lost." 77

"Anyway, however you look at it, happiness doesn't seem to have much to do with...more

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Reread due to this beautiful penguin edition designed by Peter Bentley. Admired Brideshead much more this time round. Even the Julia half. .. "I had been there before; I knew all about it." 22 " I am very contrite. Aloysius won't speak to me until he sees I am forgiven, so please come to luncheon today.

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Just as Jay Gatsby was haunted by Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fizgerald was haunted by his own great first love - a Chic...

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The story begins when journalist Thomas Cleary is sent to get some quotes or interesting information for an obituary on a very famous / notorious film producer. Thomas talks to this film producers daughter Lily who invites him to a dinner where he can meet those who knew him best where he will be able to get the low down on this wealthy well known man.
He is welcomed into this rich indulgent world where the rich hang out with the rich and price tags are practically irrelevant . The information t...more

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The story begins when journalist Thomas Cleary is sent to get some quotes or interesting information for an obituary on a very famous / notorious film producer. Thomas talks to this film producers daughter Lily who invites him to a dinner where he can meet those who knew him best where he will be able to get the low down on this wealthy well known man.