ALL THE SAD YOUNG MEN
By
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
1926
TO
RING AND ELLIS LARDNER
CONTENTS
THE RICH BOY
WINTER DREAMS
THE BABY PARTY
ABSOLUTION
RAGS MARTIN-JONES AND THE PR-NCE OF W-LES
THE ADJUSTER
HOT AND COLD BLOOD
"THE SENSIBLE THING"
GRETCHEN'S FORTY WINKS
THE RICH BOY
Begin with an individual, and before you know it you find that you havecreated a type; begin with a type, and you find that you havecreated—nothing. That is because we are all queer fish, queererbehind our faces and voices than we want any one to know or than we knowourselves. When I hear a man proclaiming himself an "average, honest,open fellow," I feel pretty sure that he has some definite and perhapsterrible abnormality which he has agreed to conceal—and hisprotestation of being average and honest and open is his way ofreminding himself of his misprision.
There are no types, no plurals. There is a rich boy, and this is his andnot his brothers' story. All my life I have lived among his brothers butthis one has been my friend. Besides, if I wrote about his brothers Ishould have to begin by attacking all the lies that the poor have toldabout the rich and the rich have told about themselves—such a wildstructure they have erected that when we pick up a book about the rich,some instinct prepares us for unreality. Even the intelligent andimpassioned reporters of life have made the country of the rich asunreal as fairy-land.
Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes themsoft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a waythat, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand.They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we arebecause we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life forourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us,they still think that they are better than we are. They are different.The only way I can describe young Anson Hunter is to approach him as ifhe were a foreigner and cling stubbornly to my point of view. If Iaccept his for a moment I am lost—I have nothing to show but apreposterous movie.
II
Anson was the eldest of six children who would some day divide a fortuneof fifteen million dollars, and he reached the age of reason—is itseven?—at the beginning of the century when daring young women werealready gliding along Fifth Avenue in electric "mobiles." In those dayshe and his brother had an English governess who spoke the language veryclearly and crisply and well, so that the two boys grew to speak as shedid—their words and sentences were all crisp and clear and not runtogether as ours are. They didn't talk exactly like English children butacquired an accent that is peculiar to fashionable people in the city ofNew York.
In the summer the six children were moved from the house on 71st Streetto a big esta