THE BASIL AND JOSEPHINE STORIES

Even if the Jazz Age is long gone, Zelda and Scott are insistently recurrent memories of it, and the best and the brightest live on in that never-never Fitzgerald land of midwestern boys in the great pre-War I era for whom Yale or Princeton (but never Harvard) was the center of a universe populated with breathless women who held the infinite promise of April evenings in their lovely but oh-so-frivolous hands. Saturday matinees, town houses, college weekends, tea dances at the Plaza -- a lovely dream that Fitzgerald recreated for $3500 a shot for The Saturday Evening Post as he wrote the novel (Tender is The Night) which chronicled the change to nightmare; meanwhile still in love with his younger selves he wrote about? Basil -- who had trouble kissing Minnie Bibble on the veranda of the country club because what actuality could equal the possibility? -- and Josephine, all through at eighteen from discovering that men are only men, not the stuff dreams are made of. Yes, F. Scott was snobbish, childish, and hopelessly naive, and in the minor stories, like these, this comes through dearer than ever; but his hopes and failures were those of an America whose myth had not yet soured -- may he, and it, and us, requiescant in pace.