Dear terestrees,
I've found a number of Fitzgerald quotes that describe people in terms
of their geographic origins. My personal favorites are the ones from
Tales of the Jazz Age, a collection of short stories dealing in large
part with the migration of young people between different parts of
America. I would say that Fitzgerald is a chronicler of mobility, both
physical and social, rather than of the kind of local color that
arises from stasis and provincialism. Truman Capote specializes in the
latter. Unlike Capote, who uses local color to give his characters
life and fill them in completely, Fitzgerald employs it as a highlight
or as a background from which a character flees.
"His expression combined that of a Middle Western farmer appraising his wheat
crop and that of an actor wondering whether he is observed--the public
manner of all good Americans."
-- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and the Damned
"Anthony, loitering along through the warm dusk, felt for the first time
in years the slow, erotic breath of the South, imminent in the hot
softness of the air, in the pervasive lull, of thought and time."
-- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and the Damned
"It was an advantage that her accent was different. He could not have
determined the social status of a Southerner from her talk--in New York
a girl of a lower class would have been raucous, unendurable--except
through the rosy spectacles of intoxication."
-- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and the Damned
"At seven he would be in a jitney bound for the city, where hundreds of
little Southern girls were waiting on moonlit porches for their lovers."
-- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and the Damned
"In town the streets were in a sleepy dream again, and together Anthony
and Dot idled in their own tracks of the previous autumn until he began
to feel a drowsy attachment for this South--a South, it seemed, more of
Algiers than of Italy, with faded aspirations pointing back over
innumerable generations to some warm, primitive Nirvana, without hope or
care. Here there was an inflection of cordiality, of comprehension, in
every voice. 'Life plays the same lovely and agonizing joke on all of
us,' they seemed to say in their plaintive pleasant cadence, in the
rising inflection terminating on an unresolved minor."
-- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and the Damned
"On their way East they stopped two days in Washington, strolling about
with some hostility in its atmosphere of harsh repellent light, of
distance without freedom, of pomp without splendor--it seemed a
pasty-pale and self-conscious city."
-- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and the Damned
"The Bronx--the houses gathering and gleaming in the sun, which was
falling now through wide refulgent skies and tumbling caravans of light
down into the streets. New York, he supposed, was home--the city of
luxury and mystery, of preposterous hopes and exotic dreams. Here on the
outskirts absurd stucco palaces reared themselves in the cool sunset,
poised for an instant in cool unreality, glided off far away, succeeded
by the mazed confusion of the Harlem River. The train moved in through
the deepening twilight, above and past half a hundred cheerful sweating
streets of the upper East Side, each one passing the car window like the
space between the spokes of a gigantic wheel, each one with its vigorous
colorful revelation of poor children swarming in feverish activity like
vivid ants in alleys of red sand. From the tenement windows leaned
rotund, moon-shaped mothers, as constellations of this sordid heaven;
women like dark imperfect jewels, women like vegetables, women like
great bags of abominably dirty laundry."
-- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and the Damned
"'... We're frequently bored and yet we won't make any effort to know any one
except the same crowd who drift around California all summer wearing sport
clothes and waiting for their families to die.'"
-- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and the Damned
"In the South an engaged girl, even a young married woman,
expected the same amount of half-affectionate badinage and
flattery that would be accorded a debutante, but here all that
seemed banned."
-- F. Scott Fitzgerald, Flappers and Philosophers
"'I'm feline. So are you. So are most Southern men an' most of
these girls here.'"
-- F. Scott Fitzgerald, Flappers and Philosophers
"'But writers all speak about the South being tragic. You
know--Spanish senoritas, black hair and daggers an' haunting
music.'
He shook his head.
'No, the Northern races are the tragic races--they don't indulge
in the cheering luxury of tears.'"
-- F. Scott Fitzgerald, Flappers and Philosophers
"'A Southerner wouldn't talk the way you're talking now,' she said
evenly.
'They haven't the energy!'
'Or the somethin' else.'"
-- F. Scott Fitzgerald, Flappers and Philosophers
"Samuel became the sort of college student who in the early
nineties drove tandems and coaches and tallyhos between
Princeton and Yale and New York City to show that they
appreciated the social importance of football games."
-- F. Scott Fitzgerald, Flappers and Philosophers
"I want you to meet Mr. Perry Parkhurst, twenty-eight, lawyer, native
of Toledo. Perry has nice teeth, a Harvard diploma, parts his hair in
the middle. You have met him before--in Cleveland, Portland, St. Paul,
Indianapolis, Kansas City, and so forth. Baker Brothers, New York,
pause on their semi-annual trip through the West to clothe him;
Montmorency & Co. dispatch a young man post-haste every three months
to see that he has the correct number of little punctures on his
shoes. He has a domestic roadster now, will have a French roadster if
he lives long enough, and doubtless a Chinese tank if it comes into
fashion. He looks like the advertisement of the young man rubbing his
sunset-colored chest with liniment and goes East every other year to
his class reunion."
-- F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tales of the Jazz Age
"Never had there been such splendor in the great city, for the
victorious war had brought plenty in its train, and the merchants had
flocked thither from the South and West with their households to taste
of all the luscious feasts and witness the lavish entertainments
prepared--and to buy for their women furs against the next winter and
bags of golden mesh and varicolored slippers of silk and silver and
rose satin and cloth of gold."
-- F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tales of the Jazz Age
"He was loosely fat with little twinkling eyes, and, having removed his
collar and tie, he gave the impression of a Middle-Western farmer on a
Sunday afternoon."
-- F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tales of the Jazz Age
"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."
-- F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tales of the Jazz Age
"But Jim was long and thin and bent at the waist from stooping
over pool-tables, and he was what might have been known in the
indiscriminating North as a corner loafer."
-- F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tales of the Jazz Age
"You chose to come to an Eastern college. Either your eyes were opened
to the mean scrambling quality of people, or you'd have gone through
blind, and you'd hate to have done that-- been like Marty Kaye."
-- F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tales of the Jazz Age
"But Beatrice was critical about American women, especially the
floating population of ex-Westerners.
'They have accents, my dear,' she told Amory, 'not Southern accents or
Boston accents, not an accent attached to any locality, just an accent'--
she became dreamy. 'They pick up old, moth-eaten London accents that
are down on their luck and have to be used by some one. They talk as
an English butler might after several years in a Chicago grand-opera
company.' She became almost incoherent-- 'Suppose--time in every
Western woman's life--she feels her husband is prosperous enough for her
to have--accent--they try to impress _me_, my dear--'"
-- F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tales of the Jazz Age
"After the operation Beatrice had a nervous breakdown that bore a
suspicious resemblance to delirium tremens, and Amory was left in
Minneapolis, destined to spend the ensuing two years with his aunt
and uncle. There the crude, vulgar air of Western civilization first
catches him--in his underwear, so to speak."
-- F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tales of the Jazz Age
"So early in September Amory, provided with 'six suits summer underwear,
six suits winter underwear, one sweater or T shirt, one jersey, one
overcoat, winter, etc.,' set out for New England, the land of schools.
There were Andover and Exeter with their memories of New England dead--
large, college-like democracies; St. Mark's, Groton, St. Regis'--
recruited from Boston and the Knickerbocker families of New York;
St. Paul's, with its great rinks; Pomfret and St. George's, prosperous
and well-dressed; Taft and Hotchkiss, which prepared the wealth of the
Middle West for social success at Yale; Pawling, Westminster, Choate,
Kent, and a hundred others; all milling out their well-set-up,
conventional, impressive type, year after year; their mental stimulus
the college entrance exams; their vague purpose set forth in a hundred
circulars as 'To impart a Thorough Mental, Moral, and Physical Training
as a Christian Gentleman, to fit the boy for meeting the problems of
his day and generation, and to give a solid foundation in the Arts and
Sciences.'"
-- F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tales of the Jazz Age
"Princeton of the daytime filtered slowly into his consciousness--West
and Reunion, redolent of the sixties, Seventy-nine Hall, brick-red and
arrogant, Upper and Lower Pyne, aristocratic Elizabethan ladies not quite
content to live among shopkeepers, and, topping all, climbing with clear
blue aspiration, the great dreaming spires of Holder and Cleveland towers."
-- F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tales of the Jazz Age
"It was ever so much colder here than in Baltimore; she had not
remembered; the glass of the side door was iced, the windows were shirred
with snow in the corners. Her mind played still with one subject.
Did _he_ dress like that boy there, who walked calmly down a bustling
business street, in moccasins and winter-carnival costume? How very
_Western!_ Of course he wasn't that way: he went to Princeton, was a
sophomore or something."
-- F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tales of the Jazz Age
The copyright has expired on all the works from which these quotations
are drawn. They are available on Project Gutenberg under the letter F.
Project Gutenberg: Browse by Author: F
http://gutenberg.org/browse/authors/f
Regards,
leapinglizard |
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