What I Think and Feel at 25
‘The Beautiful and the Damned' first edition illustration by W. E. Hill
In 1922, when this article was first published, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s life was in a moment of enormous change. He was newly married to Zelda, and his second novel ‘This Beautiful and the Damned’ had been published just months before before to enormous acclaim, rocketing the young writer to fame and praise as the certified voice of the Jazz Age. Of course, Fitzgerald would go on to live up to this early reputation but at the tender age of 25, as he details in this short essay for ‘The American Magazine”, that future seemed far from inevitable. In classic wit, remarkable insight, and searing exploration of society and relationship Fitzgerald makes a case for youth in an world run by the old, and paints a vivid portrait of a genius grappling with his place and purpose.
F. Scott Fitzgerald July 1, 2025
The man stopped me on the street. He was ancient, but not a mariner. He had a long beard and a glittering eye. I think he was a friend of the family's, or something.
"Say, Fitzgerald," he said, "say! Will you tell me this: What in the blinkety blank-blank has a-has a man of your age got to go saying these pessimistic things for? What's the idea?" I tried to laugh him off. He told me that he and my grandfather had been boys together. After that, I had no wish to corrupt him. So I tried to laugh him off.
"Ha-ha-ha!" I said determinedly. "Ha-ha-ha!" And then I added, "Ha-ha! Well, I'll see you later." With this I attempted to pass him by, but he seized my arm firmly and showed symptoms of spending the afternoon in my company.
"When I was a boy he began, and then he drew the picture that people always draw of what excellent, happy, care-free souls they were at twenty-five. That is, he told me all the things he liked to think he thought in the misty past.
I allowed him to continue. I even made polite grunts at intervals to express my astonishment. For I will be doing it myself some day. I will concoct for my juniors a Scott Fitzgerald that, it's safe to say, none of my contemporaries would at present recognize. But they will be old themselves then; and they will respect my concoction as I shall respect theirs... “
And now," the happy ancient was concluding; "you are young, you have good health, you have made money, you are exceptionally happily married, you have achieved considerable success while you are still young enough to enjoy it - will you tell an innocent old man just why you write those"
I succumbed. I would tell him. I began: "Well, you see, sir, it seems to me that as a man gets older he grows more vulner-"
But I got no further. As soon as I began to talk he hurriedly shook my hand an departed. He did not want to listen. He did not care why I thought what I thought. He had simply felt the need of giving a little speech, and I had been the victim. His receding form disappeared with a slight wobble around the next corner. "All right, you old bore," I muttered; “don’t listen, then. You wouldn’t understand, anyhow.” I took an awful kick at a curbstone, as a sort of proxy, and continued my walk.
Now, that's' the first incident. The second was when a man came to me not long ago from a big newspaper syndicate, and said: "Mr. Fitzgerald, there's a rumor around New York that you and-ah-you and Mrs. Fitzgerald are going to commit suicide at thirty because you hate and dread middle-age. I want to give you some publicity in this matter by getting it up as a story for the feature sections of five hundred and fourteen Sunday newspapers. In one corner of the page will be—“
"Don't!" I cried, "I know: In one corner will stand the doomed couple, she with an arsenic sundae, he with an Oriental dagger. Both of them will have their eyes fixed on a large clock, on the face of which will be a skull and crossbones. In the other corner will be a big calendar with the date marked in red."
"That's it!" cried the syndicate man enthusiastically. "You've grasped the idea. Now, what we" "Listen here!" I said severely. "There is nothing in that rumor. Nothing whatever. When I'm thirty I won't be this me - I'll be somebody else. I'll have a different body, because it said so in a book I read once, and I'll have a different attitude on everything. I'll even be married to a different person-"
“Ah!" he interrupted, with an eager light in his eye, and produced a notebook."That's very interesting."
"No, no, no!" I cried hastily. "I mean my wife will be different."
"I see. You plan a divorce."
"No! I mean—"
"Well, it's all the same. Now, what we want, in order to fill out this story, is a lot of remarks about petting-parties. Do you think the-ah-petting-party is a serious menace to the Constitution? And, just to link it up, can we say that your suicide will be largely on account of past petting-parties?"
"See here!" I interrupted in despair."Try to understand. I don't know what petting-parties have to do with the question. I have always dreaded age, because it invariably increases the vulner—“
But, as in the case of the family friend, I got no further. The syndicate man grasped my hand firmly. He shook it. Then he muttered something about interviewing a chorus girl who was reported to have an anklet of solid platinum, and hurried off.
That's the second incident. You see, I had managed to tell two different men that "age increased the vulner-" But they had not been interested. The old man had talked about himself and the syndicate man had talked about petting-parties. When I began to talk about the "vulner-" they both had sudden engagements.
So, with one hand on the Eighteenth Amendment and the other hand on the serious part of the Constitution, I have taken an oath that I will tell somebody my story.
*
As a man grows older it stands to reason that his vulnerability increases. Three years ago, for instance, I could be hurt in only one way-through myself. If my best friend's wife had her hair torn off by an electric washing-machine, I was grieved, of course. I would make my friend a long speech full of "old mans," and finish up with a paragraph from Washington's Farewell Address; but when I'd finished I could go to a good restaurant and enjoy my dinner as usual. If my second cousin's husband had an artery severed while having his nails manicured, I will not deny that it was a matter of considerable regret to me. But when 1 heard the news I did not faint and have to be taken home in a passing laundry wagon.
In fact I was pretty much invulnerable. I put up a conventional wail whenever a ship was sunk or a train got wrecked; but I don't suppose, if the whole city of Chicago had been wiped out, I'd have lost a night's sleep over it-unless something led me to believe that St. Paul was the next city on the list. Even then I could have moved my luggage over to Minneapolis and rested pretty comfortably all night.
But that was three years ago when I was still a young man. I was only twenty two. When I said anything the book reviewers didn't like, they could say, "Gosh! That certainly is callow!" And that finished me. Label it "callow,"and that was enough.
Well, now I'm twenty-five I'm not callow any longer-at least not so that I can notice it when I look in an ordinary mirror. Instead, I'm vulnerable. I'm vulnerable in every way.
For the benefit of revenue agents and moving-picture directors who may be reading this magazine I will explain that vulnerable means easily wounded. Well, that's it. I'm more easily wounded. I can not only be wounded in the chest, the feelings, the teeth, the bank account; but I can be wounded in the dog. Do I make myself clear? In the dog.
No, that isn't a new part of the body just discovered by the Rockefeller Institute. I mean a real dog. I mean if anyone gives my family dog to the dog-catcher he's hurting me almost as much as he's hurting the dog. He's hurting me in the dog. And if our doctor says to me tomorrow, "That child of yours isn't going to be a blonde after all," well, he's wounded me in a way I couldn't have been wounded in before, because I never before had a child to be wounded in. And if my daughter grows up and when she's sixteen elopes with some fellow from Zion City who believes the world is flat-I wouldn't write this except that she's only six months old and can't quite read yet, so it won't put any ideas in her head why, then I'll be wounded again.
About being wounded through your wife I will not enter into, as it is a delicate subject. I will not say anything about my case. But I have private reasons for knowing that if anybody said to your wife one day that it was a shame she would wear yellow when it made her look so peaked, you would suffer violently, within six hours afterward, for what that person said.
"Attack him through his wife!" "Kidnap his child!" "Tie a tin can to his dog's tail!" How often do we hear those slogans in life, not to mention in the movies. And how they make me wince! Three years ago, you could have yelled them outside my window all through a summer night, and I wouldn't have batted an eye. The only thing that would have aroused me would have been: "Wait a minute. I think I can pot him from here."
I used to have about ten square feet of skin vulnerable to chills and fevers. Now I have about twenty. I have not personally enlarged-the twenty feet includes the skin of my family-but I might as well have, because if a chill or fever strikes any bit of that twenty feet of skin I begin to shiver.
And so I ooze gently into middle age; for the true middle-age is not the acquirement of years, but the acquirement of a family. The incomes of the childless have wonderful elasticity. Two people require a room and a bath; couple with child require the millionaire's suite on the sunny side of the hotel.
*
So let me start the religious part of this article by saying that if the Editor thought he was going to get something young and happy-yes, and callow-I have got to refer him to my daughter, if she will ive dictation. If anybody thinks that I am callow they ought to see her-she's so callow it makes me laugh. It even makes her laugh, too, to think how callow she is. If any literary critics saw her they'd have a nervous breakdown right on the spot. But, on the other hand, anybody writing to me, an editor or anybody else, is writing to a middle-aged man.
Well, I'm twenty-five, and I have to admit that I'm pretty well satisfied with some of that time. That is to say, the first five years seemed to go all right-but the last twenty! They have been a matter of violently contrasted extremes. In fact, this has struck me so forcibly that from time to time I have kept charts, trying to figure out the years when I was closest to happy. Then I get mad and tear up the charts.
Skipping that long list of mistakes which passes for my boyhood I will say that I went away to preparatory school at fifteen, and that my two years there were wasted, were years of utter and profitless unhappiness. I was unhappy because I was cast into a situation where everybody thought I ought to behave just as they behaved-and I didn't have the courage to shut up and go my own way, anyhow.
For example, there was a rather dull boy at school named Percy, whose approval, I felt, for some unfathomable reason, I must have. So, for the sake of this negligible cipher, I started out to let as much of my mind as I had under mild cultivation sink back into a state of heavy underbrush. I spent hours in a damp gymnasium fooling around with a muggy basket-ball and working myself into a damp, muggy rage, when I wanted, instead, to go walking in the country.
And all this to please Percy. He thought it was the thing to do. If you didn't go through the damp business every day you were "morbid."That was his favorite word, and it had me frightened. I didn't want to be morbid. So I became muggy instead.
Besides, Percy was dull in classes; so I used to pretend to be dull also. When I wrote stories I wrote them secretly, and felt like a criminal. If I gave birth to any idea that did not appeal to Percy’s pleasant, vacant mind I discarded the idea once and felt like apologising.
“ If you don't know much - well, nobody else knows much more. And nobody knows half as much about your own interests as you know.”
Of course Percy never got into college. He went to work and I have scarcely seen him since, though I under- stand that he has since become an undertaker of considerable standing. The time I spent with him was wasted; but, worse than that, I did not enjoy the wasting of it. At least, he had nothing to give me, and I had not the faintest reasons for caring what he thought or said. But when I discovered this it was too late.
The worst of it is that this same business went on until I was twenty-two. That is, I'd be perfectly happy doing just what I wanted to do, when somebody would begin shaking his head and saying: "Now see here, Fitzgerald, you mustn't go on doing that. It's-it's morbid."
And I was always properly awed by the word "morbid," so I quit what I wanted to do and what it was good for me to do, and did what some other fellow wanted me to do. Every once in a while, though, I used to tell somebody to go to the devil; otherwise I never would have done anything at all.
In officers' training camp during 1917 I started to write a novel. I would begin work at it every Saturday afternoon at one and work like mad until midnight. Then I would work at it from six Sunday morning until six Sunday night, when I had to report back to barracks. I was thoroughly enjoying myself. After a month three friends came to me with scowling faces:
"See here, Fitzgerald, you ought to use the week-ends in getting some good rest and recreation. The way you use them is -is morbid!"
That word convinced me. It sent the usual shiver down my spine. The next week end I laid the novel aside, went into town with the others and danced all night at a party. But I began to worry about my novel. I worried so much that I returned to camp, not rested, but utterly miserable. I was morbid then. But I never went to town again. I finished the novel. It was rejected; but a year later 1 rewrote it and it was published under the title, "This Side of Paradise."
But before I rewrote it I had a list of "morbids," chalked up against people that, placed end to end, would have reached to the nearest lunatic asylum. It was morbid:
1st. To get engaged without enough money to marry
2nd. To leave the advertising business after three months
3rd. To want to write at all
4th. To think I could
5th. To write about "silly little boys and girls that nobody wants to read about"
And so on, until a year later, when I found to my surprise that everybody had been only kidding-they had believed all their lives that writing was the only thing for me, and had hardly been able to keep from telling me all the time.
But I am really not old enough to begin drawing morals out of my own life to elevate the young. I will save that pastime until I am sixty; and then, as I have said, I will concoct a Scott Fitzgerald who will make Benjamin Franklin look like a lucky devil who loafed into prominence. Even in the above account I have man aged to sketch the outline of a small-but neat halo. I take it all back. I am twenty five years old. I wish I had ten million dollars, and never had to do another lick of work as long as I live.
But as I do have to keep at it, I might as well declare that the chief thing I've learned so far is: If you don't know much - well, nobody else knows much more. And nobody knows half as much about your own interests as you know.
*
If you believe in anything very strongly-including yourself-and if you go after that thing alone, you end up in jail, in heaven, in the headlines, or in the largest house in the block, according to what you started after. If you don't believe in anything very strongly-including yourself you go along, and enough money is made out of you to buy an automobile for some other fellow's son, and you marry if you've got time, and if you do you have a lot of children, whether you have time or not, and finally you get tired and you die.
If you're in the second of those two classes you have the most fun before you're twenty-five. If you're in the first, you have it afterward. You see, if you're in the first class you'll frequent!y be called a darn fool-or worse. That was as true in Philadelphia about 1727 as it is to-day. Anybody knows that a kid that walked around town munching a loaf of bread and not caring what anvbody thought was a darn fool. It stands to reason! But there are a lot of darn fools who get their pictures in the schoolbooks -with their names under the pictures. And the sensible fellows, the ones that had time to laugh, well, their pictures are in there, too. But their names aren't-and the laughs look sort of frozen on their faces.
The particular sort of darn fool I mean ought to remember that he's least a darn fool when he's being called a darn fool. The main thing is to be your own kind of a darn fool. (The above advice is of course only for darn fools under twenty-five. It may be all wrong for darn fools over twenty-five.)
I don't know why it is that when I start to write about being twenty-five I suddenly begin to write about darn fools. I do not see any connection. Now, if I were asked to write about darn fools, I would write about people who have their front teeth filled with gold, because a friend of mine did that the other day, and after being mistaken for a jewelry store three times in one hour he came up and asked me if I thought it showed too much. As I am a kind man, I told him I would not have noticed it if the sun hadn't been so strong on it. I asked him why he had it done.
"Well," he said, "the dentist told me a porcelain filling never lasted more than ten years."
"Ten years! Why, you may be dead in ten years.”
"That's true."
"Of course it'll be nice that all the time you're in your coffin you'll never have to worry about your teeth."
And it occurred to me that about half the people in the world are always having their front teeth filled with gold. That is, they're figuring on twenty years from now. Well, when you're young it's all right figuring your success a long ways ahead if you don't make it too long. But as for your pleasure-your front teeth!-it's better to figure on to-day.
*
And that's the second thing I learned while getting vulnerable and middle aged. Let me recapitulate:
1st. I think that compared to what you know about your own business nobody else knows anything. And if anybody knows more about it than you do, then it's his business and you're his man, not your own. And as soon as your business becomes your business you'll know more about it than anybody else.
2nd. Never have your front teeth filled with gold.
And now I will stop pretending to be a pleasant young fellow and disclose my real nature. I will prove to you, if you have not found it out already, that I have a mean streak and nobody would like to have me for a son.
I do not like old people. They are always talking about their "experience"- and very few of them have any. In fact, most of them go on making the same mistakes at fifty and believing in the same white list of approved twenty-carat lies that they did at seventeen. And it all starts with my old friend vulnerability.
Take a woman of thirty. She is considered lucky if she has allied herself to a multitude of things; her husband, her children, her home, her servant. If she has three homes, eight children, and fourteen servants, she is considered luckier still. (This, of course, does not generally apply to more husbands).
Now, when she was young she worried only about herself; but now she must be worried by any trouble occurring to any of these people or things. She is ten times as vulnerable. Moreover, she can never break one of these ties or relieve herself of one of these burdens except at the cost of great pain and sorrow to herself. They are the things that break her, and yet they are the most precious things in life.
In consequence, everything which doesn't go to make her secure, or at least to give her a sense of security, startles and annoys her. She acquires only the useless knowledge found in cheap movies, cheap novels, and the cheap memoirs of titled foreigners.
By this time her husband also has become suspicious of anything gay or new. He seldom addresses her, except in a series of profound grunts, or to ask whether she has sent his shirts out to the laundry. At the family dinner on Sunday he occasionally gives her some fascinating statistics on party politics, some opinions from that morning's newspaper editorial.
But after thirty, both husband and wife know in their hearts that the game is up. Without a few cocktails, social intercourse becomes a torment. It is no longer spontaneous; it is a convention by which they agree to shut their eyes to the fact that the other men and women they know are tired and dull and fat, and yet must be put up with as politely as they themselves are put up with in their turn.
I have seen many happy young couples -but I have seldom seen a happy home after husband and wife are thirty. Most homes can be divided into four classes:
1st. Where the husband is a pretty conceited guy who thinks that a dinky insurance business is a lot harder than raising babies, and that everybody ought to kow-tow to him at home. He is the kind whose sons usually get away from home as soon as they can walk.
2nd. When the wife has got a sharp tongue and the martyr complex, and thinks she's the only woman in the world that ever had a child.
3rd. Where the children are always being reminded how nice it was of the parents to bring them into the world, and how they ought to respect their parents for being born in 1870 instead of 1902.
4th. Where everything is for the children. Where the parents pay much more for the children's education than they can afford, and spoil them unreasonably. This usually ends by the children being ashamed of the parents.
*
And yet I think that marriage is the most satisfactory institution we have. I'm simply stating my belief that when Life has used us for its purposes it takes away all our attractive qualities and gives us, instead, ponderous but shallow convictions of our own wisdom and "experience."
Needless to say, as old people run the world, an enormous camouflage has been built up to hide the fact that only young people are attractive or important.
Having got in wrong with many of the readers of this article, I will now proceed to close. If you don't agree with me on any minor points you have a right to say: "Gosh! He certainly is callow!" and turn to something else. Personally I do not consider that I am callow, because I do not see how anybody of my age could be callow. For instance, I was reading an article in this magazine a few months ago by a fellow named Ring Lardner that says he is thirty-five, and it seemed to me how young and happy and care free he was in comparison with me.
Maybe he is vulnerable, too. He did not say so. Maybe when you get to be thirty five you do not know any more how vulnerable you are. All I can say is that if he ever gets to be twenty-five again, which is very unlikely, maybe he will agree with me. The older I grow the more I get so I don't know anything. If I had been asked to do this article about five years ago it might have been worth reading.
F. Scott Fitzgerald ( 1896 – 1940) was an American novelist, essayist, and short story writer. He is best known for his novels depicting the flamboyance and excess of the Jazz Age, a term that he himself popularized. Revered and respected in his lifetime, since his death Fitzgerald place has been cemented as one of the great American writers of the 20th century.
