Rereading Fitzgerald

I haven't read Fitzgerald in a while. I used to teach Gatsby and read it at least once a year for that reason and sometimes read his short stories, too--a few of the best ones. He wrote a lot of them to keep Zelda in style. They were a reckless couple, and she was probably mad long before he realized it. What looked like fun, all of the jumping into fountains and riding on taxis instead of in them, probably manifested burgeoning insanity.

But I digress. My point is, their lifestyle was expensive, which is why F. Scott wrote a lot of short stories.

I reread one of them last week and remembered what I loved about Fitzgerald and what made him great. Well, one of the things that made him great. I was struck with how he moved the story along so smoothly and told me everything I needed to know about this upper middle-class couple and the sterile world they lived in, how  emasculated and bored the husband felt after a while--too much time on trains to pay for a house in the burbs. (http://www.daily-pulp.com/literature/the-baby-party/)

The fight at the end of The Baby Party reminds me of a story in James Kilgo's book Deep Enough for Ivorybills, in which Dr. Kilgo tells about the first time he shot a dear. H was already an adult, married with children, an unusual age for a man to start hunting. He said that hunting satisfied some need in him to literally bring home the bacon, to perform those ancient rites often denied modern man. He liked the hunt and providing food (despite his wife's "Poor thing" when she saw the doe in the back of the station wagon), but he liked more than that: he liked the rituals of hunting, time honored ways that men did things in a world they inhabited outside of the world of women and children.

I've read several explanations of Fitzgerald's story, none of which completely satisfy me. I think he and Dr. Kilgo would have agreed on some things.Yet I can see by the comments in forums that his purpose and meaning are not so clear that readers get it and agree on what "it" is.

Fitzgerald's writing has an elusive quality that I particularly like. I always feel as if I've missed something big and important in his best work and am driven back into the work itself in an effort to grasp that ephemeral moment or meaning.

In the end, I'm always left with one thought: I wish I could write like that.