When F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote "This Side of Paradise", there was a great hue and cry; when "Flappers and Philosophers" appeared, there was still a hue, and somewhat less of a cry; "The Beautiful and Damned" evoked merely a cry;--the best comment on "Tales of the Jazz Age" is dead silence. However, this space must be filled, and a reviewer cannot write, like Hilaire Belloc, on "Nothing". But we will be brief. Perpend.

"Tales of the Jazz Age" is a compilation of short stories--some better, some worse, but all indifferent--previously published as magazine fiction. It is a volume tendered primarily into the "hands of those who read as they run and run as they read". And this statement by the author sums up the whole proposition very neatly, in that the book is imbued with the "running" fever; the author runs--jazzily, rejoicing in his own self-confessed naughtiness; and the reader runs likewise--mainly in aimless, frantic circles! Until finally both author and reader are hopelessly weary of themselves, the book, and each other. There is not even the jauntiness that at least justified Fitzgerald's earlier works; he has fed his muse on modern highballs--and now she has the headache. We can see in the "Tales" nothing but a hodge--bodge of spillways to a very trite hell.

There are those who will object, of course. Fitzgerald, if he has done no more, has at all events painted a very lively and life-like picture of the present youthful generation in full bloom--has shown the flapper and her partner what they really are (or think they are)--has interested and amused a large percent of the careworn American Public; and for such things, should be thanked. Even if he does falter noticeably in his latest writings and his most strenuous admirers cannot but admit that he does the censure should fall "more in sorrow than in anger."

Perhaps. We are inclined to think otherwise. Granted, the faithful painting of folly; granted, the momentary amusement. We still fail to find in his heetic, meteoric career anything permanent, anything constructive, or even anything literary. Keats, in one of his letters, speaks of Lord Byron's latest "flash poem", much as Barrie, for example, might speak of Fitzgerald; yet the flash poems of Byron are deep philosophic treatises compared with Fitzgerald's outbursts. Not that every story should be expected to bear its moral or illumine its great Truth...Heaven for-fend!; but certainly something more than the surface flush of artificial fever is to be looked for, in one who pretends to such a reputation as does the author of the "Tales". In one way, it is true, Fitzgerald is not entirely to blame: he is essentially the product of his age--the "jazz age" if you will--and was as inevitable, in some form or other, as the mediaeval Black Death or the modern poison gas. A spirit that is professedly superficial and light-headed must perforce give birth to its literary parallel; and F. S. F., with his creed of excitement for excitement's sake, is the outcome.

All the apologies in the world, however, could not restrain us, while we were reading the "Tales", from entertaining an almost irresistible impulse to give the author a sound paddling and send him off to bed. If he were not so blatantly precocious, so proudly puerile and so egotistically devilish, he might be bearable for the space of an hour. But he is--and consequently is not.

Of his technique, his style, his manner, there is nothing to be said, save that it is like the technique, style, and manner of every scribbler for "woodpulp publications", garnished previously with a touch of sauciness and rather new spice. We say "previously" advisedly; for as has been hinted, his "Tales" fall below even the standard set by "Flappers" et al.; the sauciness has run dry and the spice become flat and tasteless. The "Tales" show a marked weakening. Fitzgerald went up like a rocket; but now that he has reached his apex and is in danger of descending like the stick, he should spare himself and his public any further humiliation.