The Diamond as Big as the Ritz and Other Stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Fitzgerald wrote these six stories at the same time he was writing his first two novels: This Side of Paradise (1920) and The Beautiful and Damned (1922). The title story, along with “The Jelly-bean” and “May Day” were published in Fitzgerald’s short story collection Tales of the Jazz Age in 1922. That collection also included “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”. The other three stories collected here appeared in book form in Fitzgerald’s Flappers and Philosophers in 1920.

“The Diamond as Big as the Ritz” is a very odd story and not at all what I expected. I imagined a pretty girl with a huge ring on her finger, drinking cocktails at a Manhattan hotel bar. But no, this is something else entirely.

Like so many Fitzgerald tales this one starts with a rich young man from the midwest going east to attend a prep school. This time it’s John T. Unger. The midwest town is named Hades, so you can tell we’re in fable territory. Unger is only one letter off from “under”, so John comes from the world of the “Unders” or the underworld. When he leaves home his father says, “We’ll keep the home fires burning.” He leaves town through “gates” on which is written an “old-fashioned Victorian motto” which his father always wanted to get changed but never did. We aren’t told what the motto is, but very likely it’s, “Abandon hope all ye who enter here.”

John Unger goes to school at St. Midas (another significant name), “the most expensive and the most exclusive boy’s preparatory school in the world.” In the middle of his second year he’s assigned a roommate named Percy Washington, an uncommunicative, aloof boy. Percy invites John to spend the summer with him at his family home in the West. John says yes, and then Percy announces that his father is the richest man in the world, whispering, “my father has a diamond bigger than the Ritz-Carlton Hotel.”

They travel to Montana, which made me think of Williams Andrews Clark, the fabulous wealthy “Copper King” who I read about in Twilight Man. The Washingtons (slang for dollar bills, and Percy, like “purse”.) live on a private estate in a hidden valley like the evil villain in a James Bond movie. The enormous diamond literally as big as a hotel, forms an entire mountain. Percy’s grandfather stumbled across it, realized what it was, and chipped off pieces of it to make his fortune. But if the general public knew about a diamond that size it would crash the economy because diamonds are only valuable because they’re believed to be rare. So after mining just enough to create a personal wealth that will last for generations, Percy’s grandfather closed up the mine and the family keeps it secret. The Washington family now lives in fabulous wealth but entirely cut off from society.

Slowly, the strange situation is revealed to John, and the story moves from humorous to horrible. The Washingtons go to great length to remain hidden. Maps are redrawn. Aeroplanes are their biggest concern. In order to have workers for the estate, Percy’s grandfather lied to the slaves who worked on his younger brother’s plantation at the end of the Civil War, telling them that the South won and then moved them all to Montana where their descendants continue to serve in bondage and ignorance.

Soon after John arrives at the “chateau” (as the family calls it), Percy mostly disappears from the story and we’re introduced to his two sisters: the elder Jasmine, and younger Kismine; “Jazz men” who betrays her friends and “Kiss men” who flirts with John but the horror mounts. While walking with the elder Washington, John discovers a prison where two-dozen men are kept. These are aviators who stumbled on to the estate and now can’t be allowed to leave. Earlier, though, Washington had released one of them to teach his daughters Italian, and that man has run off. Washington set a price on his head and has news that he’s been killed. Then Kismine lets slip the terrible truth. Her sister Jasmine had invited girl friends home before. At the close of the summer holiday the family had them killed to prevent them sharing the family secret. John realizes he shares that fate and he and Kismine decide to elope.

Before they can, though, all hell breaks loose. The Italian tutor had not been caught and killed. He made it out and informed the government. That evening, the U.S. military shows up with fighter planes. John and the two sisters steal away. The entire estate is blown to blazes behind them. The jewels John asked Kismine to bring with her turn out to be simple rhinestones she had taken off the dress of one of Jasmine’s murdered friends because she was attracted to costume jewelry she had never seenbefore. The three make plans to return to Hades where they will live in poverty.

It’s an incredibly bizarre and disturbing story. Very cleverly plotted in order for it to be at all plausible. But the horror eventually overtakes the delight of the fantasy. That John Unger is from Hades makes you think he’s the devil, but the true evil is the Washington family and what preserving their wealth forces them to do. Hades seems like a charming place after the Hell in Montana. After the devastation in Montana, when John and Kismine decide to go to Hades together, there’s this bit of dialogue: “Will father be there?” she asked. John turned to her in astonishment. “Your father is dead,” he replied somberly. “Why should he go to Hades? You have it confused with another place that was abolished long ago.” Hell is no more, but human greed, exploitation and cruelty persevere.

“The Offshore Pirate”. A charming story. A spoiled and sullen young girl named Ardita is on a yacht belonging to her uncle. She wants to be dropped off in Palm Beach where she plans to elope with a man her family doesn’t approve of. The uncle insists she accompany him to meet a more respectable man named Toby. She refuses to meet any man so boring, so the uncle goes off by himself leaving Ardita on the yacht. Soon after, the yacht is boarded by pirates, actually a group of jazz musicians, “Curtis Carlyle and his Six Black Buddies.” They’re carrying several bags of loot they stole and have now commandeered the yacht with the intention of sailing away to freedom. Ardita goes with them. They arrive at an island with a hidden port planning to lay low for a few days. Ardita and Carlyle start a romance. He invites her to stay with him and his gang as they sail around South America and then on to India. Then the Coast Guard finds them and the jig is up. But it was all a ruse. Curtis Carlyle is actually Toby. The loot bags are filled with mud. Although Ardita realizes she’s been tricked, she loves that a man has that much imagination, and he loves her sense of adventure, so the match is made.

“The Ice Palace”. Sally Carrol Happer from “the city of Tarleton in southernmost Georgia,” met a man from the north one summer in Asheville and is considering marrying him. He comes down to get her and takes her home with plans to wed. The rest of the story is in his northern town. Sally Carrol feels constantly cold and out of place. The final scene is at a winter festival where the town has constructed a huge palace from ice. Sally gets lost and abandoned in a labyrinth constructed in the basement. She’s rescued, but cries, “Oh, I want to get out of here! I’m going back home. Take me home”! And in the final scene she is back where she was, unmarried, in Tarleton.

“Bernice Bobs Her Hair”. A great little story. Bernice is Marjorie’s cousin, visiting from the midwest for the summer. Marjorie is popular. Bernice is awkward, with no sense of style, and no conversation. After a dance, Bernice overhears Marjorie telling her mother, “She’s absolutely hopeless!” and, tellingly, “I think it’s that crazy Indian blood in Bernice… Maybe she’s a reversion to type. Indian women all just sat round and never said anything.” At first Bernice is insulted but then she decides to ask Marjorie to give her lessons in popularity. Armed with good clothes, proper make-up, and memorized talking points, she’s a hit. One conversational gambit it to claim that she’s thinking of getting her haired “bobbed”. Eventually Bernice even attracts the attention of the boy, Warren, that Marjorie had been toying with and Marjorie gets jealous. She puts Bernice up to actually having her hair bobbed, which ruins her looks and Bernice realizes she’s been betrayed. That night she packs to go home, but before she does she sneaks into Marjorie’s room and while she’s sleeping snips off both of Marjorie’s braids, right and left. On the way to the train she flings the braids on to Warren’s porch and giggles wildly to herself, “Scalp the selfish thing!”

“The Jelly-bean”. Jim Powell is the last in line of a southern family that had once been wealthy but gradually lost everything. He lives above an auto mechanic garage where he does occasional, but not much, work, and makes more of his livelihood from gambling. Fitzgerald explains, “‘Jelly-Bean’ is the name throughout the undissolved Confederacy for one who spends his life conjugating the verb to idle in the first person singular–I am idling, I have idled, I will idle.” But Jim has a friend named Clark who invites him to a dance, and Jim says yes out of friendship even though he know he’ll spend the whole night in a corner not dancing or talking to anyone. We’re in the same town as the story, “The Ice Palace.” The same Sally Carrol Happer has a friend named Nancy Lamar that Jim admires. She’s at the dance with a guy named Merrit, the wealthy heir to the safety razor fortune of his Savannah family. Coming out of the dressing room, Nancy comes across Jim and asks him to help her get gum off her shoe. She’s tried everything. They go out to the parking lot and Jim empties the gas from one of the cars for Nancy to step in as a solvent. They like each other. At the end of the evening, Nancy and Clark and Jim are left drinking at a table when the man that had the gasoline drained from his car comes in. They get to playing craps, which Nancy likes, and Jim is good at. She gets into debt until Jim plays for her and wins back all her losings. Back at home Jim stays up all night thinking maybe there really is something for him in this world and resolves to turn his life around. But in the morning, Clark arrives with the news that after Nancy sobered up she suddenly eloped with Merrit that very morning. Jim retires his dream and goes back to his “jelly-bean” life.

“May Day” This is the best story in the book, much better than “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz”. It’s a complicated story of several different characters in New York on May Day, 1919. First there’s a man named Gordon Sterrett who calls up at the Biltmore Hotel for his friend from Yale, Phillip Dean. Gordon has gotten mixed up with a girl named Jewel Hudson and needs money. Phillip doesn’t give it to him but invites him to breakfast while they think it over. At the Yale club having breakfast they meet up with some friends in town for a big reunion dance that night at Delmonico’s. Gordon learns that an old flame of his, Edith Bradin is going to be there. Next we meet two soldiers, Carrol Key and Gus Rose. They’re looking for something to drink and then get caught up in a rowdy demonstration by a crowd of patriotic soldiers against socialism. They march with the anti-socialist soldiers for a few blocks then decide to continue their hunt for alcohol. (This is pre-prohibition but apparently there’s a law against selling liquor to soldiers). Eventually they track down Key’s brother, George, who’s a waiter at Delmonico’s. George is helping set up for the evening’s Yale reunion party, but he stashes Key and Rose in a storage room while he works to score them something to drink. Next, we’re on to Edith Bradin, who is angry at the young man, Peter Himmel, who’s accompanying her to that night’s dance, because he ungracefully tried to kiss her earlier, and she’s remembering fondly, Gordon Sterrett whom she used to like. The dance is on. Edith is popular. She spies Gordon, but soon realizes he isn’t the man he used to be. Peter, snubbed by Edith, leaves the dance and walks into the empty dinning room and encounters Key and Rose, hiding out in the storage room. He offers them a drink and they all proceed to get drunk. At one o’clock that evening (now the next morning) drunk Peter cuts in on Edith dancing, and Edith decides she’s had enough. But before going home she remembers that her brother, Henry, works in a newspaper office just a few blocks away and that he usually wraps up work about one-thirty. She decides to visit him. Jewel Hudson shows up at Delmonico’s looking for Gordon. She’s angry at him for standing her up earlier, because he couldn’t get the money she wanted, but she forgives him. He’s wary of her but decides to go with her. Edith visits her brother. The newspaper turns out to be a socialist organ and there have been May Day protests outside their office all day. Soon there’s yet another demonstration developing in the street below. The situation gets tense. The protestors rush upstairs to the office and there’s a melee. In the confusion, someone falls from the window. Henry’s leg is broken. Next, at a diner, called, “Child’s” the party-goers from Delmonico’s who haven’t gone to bed are gathered. Gus Rose is there. It was his friend Carrol Key who had fallen from the window and cracked his head open. Gordon is there with Jewel. Dean comes up to them and sneers at Gordon telling him, “What’d I tell you Gordy?” Then Peter Himmel shows up drunk and ready for a scene. Gordon and Jewel leave. Then, as night turns to dawn, Peter and Dean go off together, back to Delmonico’s then on to the Commodore for breakfast, and champagne, then on to the Biltmore, for more champagne. In the final scene, Gordon wakes up alone in a hotel room. He realizes that he and Jewel have gotten married. He leaves the hotel room, buys a revolver at a sporting goods store, takes the gun back to the rooms where he had been living and shoots himself.

“May Day” would make a great movie, I think, like Scorcese’s “After Hours”. It makes me surprised that Fitzgerald didn’t succeed as a Hollywood script writer.

I’ve now read all of Fitzgerald’s major fiction. Because of The Great Gatsby, one thinks of Fitzgerald as a beautiful prose writer. And he certainly is, but only remarkably so in that book. But his prose isn’t nearly so refined in This Side of Paradise, or The Beautiful and Damned. He’s also thought of as a chronicler of the Jazz Age, but there’s not much jazz in This Side of Paradise, which is mostly a story about Fitzgerald’s college years, and the life depicted in The Beautiful and Damned is dissipated and depressing filled with sad parties and marital bickering. Though he mostly sticks to a thin caste of New York Ivy league wealthy types, his range is actually quite large. “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz” is a fantasy/horror story. “Benjamin Button” is another fantasy story. “The Offshore Pirate” is a cute little romance story. “Bernice Bobs Her Hair” is a sweet revenge story. The inter-related “Ice Palace” and “Jelly-Bean” are southern romances. His short stories are thick with plot. Compare “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz”, and “May Day”, with the single scene, tiny psychological human moments of Hemingway’s Short Stories.

If there’s a Fitzgerald through line, true of all four of his completed novels and several of his stories, too, it starts with a young man with money from the midwest who attends prep school in the East and an Ivy League college, who ends up in New York city, maybe a writer, mooning after a pretty girl who he may or may not marry, realizing that neither education nor money, nor both education and money together, not even getting the girl, guarantee happiness. The pretty girls loses her looks, and maybe her mind. The young man loses himself in alcohol and maybe loses the girl, too. Then, or later, he goes to Hollywood, where he’s not a success and dies young. But boy can he write a novel, or a story.