Two Who Never Met
BLUMBERG, LESLIE
Two Who Never Met The Basil and Josephine Stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald edited with an introduction by Jackson R. Bryer and John Kuehl Scribners. 287 pp. $8.95. Reviewed by Leslie...
...In this respect, the book's most interesting feature is the contrast it offers between the two protagonists' histories...
...There are two noteworthy stories in this collection...
...Reviewed by Leslie Blumberg Between 1928-34 between, that is, The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night-f...
...Ironically, however, this book is greater than the sum of its parts...
...Whether he soars or crashes, Basil participates in experience reflectively enough to learn from it-and to grow...
...Although Fitzgerald originally conceived these stories as a unified series, he never published them as such, fearing they would be unfavorably received as a novel...
...looked at as a whole, the volume has genuine value, for it provides an insight into Fitzgerald's often complicated and perhaps circular notions about money and the psychology of class...
...Sometimes he behaves in extremes...
...His nascent manhood fumbles for a posture with girls...
...Accepting the world into which she was born and the place in Chicago society that her money and beauty allow her, she feels no desire for any kind of achievement or glory...
...Fitzgerald planned but never wrote a final tale bringing the two together, and this omission is significant: It suggests the author's vision of the black threads that lace the fabric of his romanticism...
...The Freshest Boy" recounts the horrors of Basil's ostracism in an Eastern prep school with a vividness that throws one back to the painful age of 15, when it seemed as if the judgments of peers could make or break a lifetime in a single moment...
...He wants to be everything?a great athlete, popular, brilliant, and always happy"-and to transcend everything, especially the limitations of his background...
...Though she is "faster" than Basil, she doesn't go anywhere...
...Nonetheless, amid a cold flurry of snow, stars still shine for him: "As always -Symbols of ambition, struggle and glory...
...Basil, as he develops, views life with increasing expansiveness...
...Never reaching into the realm of unknown feeling, never extending herself beyond the outworn past, Josephine merely collects experience -and spends herself...
...The scene was of unparalleled brightness and magnificence and only the practiced eye of the commander saw that one star was no longer there...
...And so, in the final story, when she is in the arms of her ideal man, she finds that she has no desire for him: "I've got nothing to give you," she says, "I don't feel anything at all...
...It is this longing of Basil's that prefigures the tragic fates of Jay Gatsby, Dick Diver and Monroe Starr, each of whom grasps part of a star only to see it turn to ash in his hands...
...Scott Fitzgerald paused to cast a backward glance at the emotional fluctuations of adolescence...
...Now Jackson R. Bryer and John Kuehl have arranged the pieces according to Fitzgerald's original plan: Divided into two sections, The Basil and Josephine Stories first follow the maturation of Basil Lee, whose identification with the author is thinly veiled, and then the development of the golden girl, here known as Josephine Perry...
...Taken individually, the pieces by and large are shoddily executed and far inferior to Fitzgerald's best work...
...Basil similarly fails in the last of the stories devoted to him, yet he has resources left to draw on, and his defeat reveals the potential for future victory...
...At another, he acts the perfect saint, saving his friends from the temptations of liquor and sex with flourishes of self-righteous gallantry...
...He has lost Minnie, a golden girl not unlike Josephine ?a kind of immortal woman . . . you know, like Madame Du Barry and all that sort of thing...
...Constantly testing the world and his relation to it, he is trying to find out who he is and what he will become...
...What would have happened if Basil had actually met Josephine...
...Rejecting others' guidance, he is frequently alienating and self-destructive, but his independence also gives him the freedom to play a part in his own creation...
...At what should be the pinnacle of her success, Josephine fails utterly...
...Not so with Josephine...
...For despite the stars that remain in Basil's firmament at the end of his series, despite the optimism that rides on the heels of his failure with Minnie, Basil's continued yearning results from a passion not simply for realistic goals but for the unattainable as well?all that is personified by women like Josephine who, seeming to have everything within their reach, stay forever out of reach...
...She is wild, even extravagantly bold in her femme-fatale ways, but her innumerable romances and narcissistic excesses reveal a grim consistency...
...his insecure will jockeys for a position of power...
...Fitzgerald's capacity to evoke an empathetic response is likewise the virtue of "Emotional Bankruptcy," which dramatizes Josephine's long-awaited encounter with "the perfect man...
...Most appeared eventually either in anthologies or in The Saturday Evening Post...
...Possibly Fitzgerald refrained from describing an encounter between Basil and Josephine because he had already told this story in The Great Gatsby, and would tell it again in Tender Is the Night and The Last Tycoon...
...More important, by portraying a middle-class, smalltown boy and a rich, city girl as they evolve from amorphous postwar adolescents to young adults on the brink of the Jazz Age, it gives us an idea of how Fitzgerald understood the formation of those character types that obsessed him throughout his career...
...But apart from these two tales, The Basil and Josephine Stories are not particularly good...
...At one point, he is a guileful demon, lying indiscriminately and manipulating events in order to arrange an unchaperoned teenage party...
...Lacking a central self, she becomes, like Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby, the external trappings that surround her, the perfumed aura, the white dresses, the piquant melodies of her milieu...
...The wind blew through them, trumpeting that high white note for which he always listened, and the thin-blown clouds, stripped for battle, passed in review...
...Fourteen short stories resulted from his own awakened memories and those of Ginerva King, a golden girl he knew and, the editors tell us, desired in Buffalo, New York...
Vol. 57 • February 1974 • No. 3
