Conclusion “Dearly Beloved” and the Black Face of Fitzgerald’s Ambition

Abstract

There is a striking if probably unintentional symmetry to Matthew J. Bruccoli’s now standard 1989 arrangement of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s representative short stories. The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald begins with “Head and Shoulders,” the story of Horace Tarbox’s descent from the hallowed sphere of academic philosophy into the arms and the theatrical world of chorus girl Marcia Meadows. White though they seem, they settle in Harlem where she enjoys a comic reversal of fortune by writing a dialect novel, and he contributes what he can to the household by working as a Hippodrome trapeze artist. The collection ends with the previously uncollected “Dearly Beloved,”¹ a touching though slightly maudlin story about the tragic reversal of fortune of a former “colored golf champion” named Beauty Boy and his wife Lilymary. Bruccoli recommends the story as “the only Fitzgerald magazine piece in which a black character is treated seriously,” and rightly draws the connection between this character and the black fisherman/reader of The Love of the Last Tycoon (SSFSF 773). But whatever sympathy the story elicits for its abject African American stems from the extent to which Beauty Boy’s blackness is also and inevitably figurative, still related to (if at some remove) the blackface mask of minstrelsy.