Chari and I decided for that this month at least, Chari would introduce the short story, and I would comment on it. In future months we hope to discuss the stories together.
This is for the
January edition of our:
If you read the story either recently or in the past, and want to comment, please do so!
Benjamin Button is a short story in
Tales of the Jazz Age.
I got the book
for free on Kindle.
You can also read it online on the link in the first sentence.
I
didn't know anything about the story at all before I started reading
it. That was fun.
I decided to basically
tweet my way through it making notes as I read. So no profound
analysis here, just what I was thinking as I was reading.
This probably
contains spoilers so you may not want to look until you read the story.
I
"..It
was the proper thing to be born at home" Interesting -- when did it
change?* Maybe when doctors stopped making house calls?
"charming old custom of having babies" -- sounds like Chesterton. I wonder who came first, FSF or GKC?**
"the day consecrated to the enormous event". Just that.
Doctor: What's up with the outrage? Scary! Wonder if Mr Button's son is a
beetle or something? He seems personally insulted.
Mr. Button: I don't blame you for trembling. Something is obviously wrong and the doctor seems to know it's your fault.
Desk Girl: "utter terror"? Yikes, I am trembling with the father.
Why do people get so hostile in this story when they don't understand something?
It's written like a comedy but scary too! I feel sorry for Button!
In the "crying room". Now we see what's wrong with Button's baby.
Poor old guy! The son, not the dad!
Button
is mad now, too. The hospital blames him and he blames the hospital!
But what about the baby? Why is this all about them?
The baby asks if Button is its father. The baby sounds mad, too. Button is angry at the baby!
All this anger!
Button
has to take the elderly grown baby home. Everyone seems to agree about
that. He doesn't really want to, but there is nothing else to be
done.
"And a cane, father. I have to have a cane." Funny!
II
Scene
at the clothing store. Mr Button can't seem to decide on the
appropriate garb for his son. Finally decides on huge baby costume.
Apparently wants to pass his own humiliation onto the next
generation.
Poor elderly baby. He has to trust this resentful, humiliated father to take care of him.
This seems like we are getting close to real life and mismatched parental expectations. Possibly?
III
Benjamin
Button (who almost got called Methusaleh) obediently plays with rattles
and tops and toy duckies even though he would rather smoke a pipe with
his grandpa and read in the study. Good son! He is underappreciated.
Being a father is
hard! You have to make sure the boy gets playdates and toys which won't flake off their paint in the child's mouth, and the right food -- warm milk and oatmeal!
Being
a son is hard! You have to move your creaky joints in childish play with your agemates, and line up lead soldiers, and deliberately
break windows and vases so your father will think you are doing typical boyish escapades!
"it was all part of Roger Button's silent agreement
with himself to believe in his son's normality"
yes, I think it's not just the Button family here.
IV.
Mr Button wants his son to go to Yale like he did. But the undergrads laugh at the "infant prodigy" who looks 50. No go.
"Hahaha" laugh the Yale undergrads. Yale will be sorry someday!
V.
It's
nice that now Mr Button and Benjamin look like brothers. They are
getting along much better. Benjamin joins the family business and does
well. Good times!
Oh Dad, your 20 year old son is in
love with a young lady who likes older men of 50, and you are talking
about lugs when he is talking about love! Humph, the older generation!
"Benjamin regarded him with dazed eyes just as the eastern sky was
suddenly cracked with light, and an oriole yawned piercingly in the
quickening trees..."
Nice line, F Scott -- I like that one. Ironic comedy turns slightly poignant ....
VI
Hildegarde
chooses to marry Benjamin because she appreciates mellowness and the seasoning of age. Her father, the general, hates this May/December alliance. Hmm, I
don't have many hopes for this marriage.
VII
The hardware business prospers and so does Benjamin.
Benjamin is 35 and looks 35! Even more good times. This is your golden age -- but you know where it is going!
"And
if old Roger Button, now sixty-five years old, had failed at first to
give a proper welcome to his son he atoned at last by bestowing on him
what amounted to adulation."
Cat's in the Cradle time here. But better late than never.
Benjamin is bored with the middle aged Hildegarde. He wants to be part of the Jazz Age.
VIII
Benjamin's
wife could now be his mother. He feels embarrassed to go out with her.
Does this sound familiar? You should know better, Benjamin.
Benjamin goes to war and comes back a conquering hero.
He takes up golf...
His son looks like his brother and is a Harvard grad (you missed out, Yale).
Benjamin can now hand over the family business to the next generation.
And at the same time, he looks about 25. Great!
Odd how no one really seems to realize a pattern here!
IX
Benjamin enters Harvard and in his underclassmen years totally owns Yale in football. Who is saying "Hahaha" now? In your face, Yalies!
But
the glory will not last. Now he looks like a spindly freshman, when he is a senior in college. He is dropped from the
football team, and his 30 year old son tells his own father to call him
Uncle.
More intergenerational tension about mismatched expectations. Will the Buttons never learn?
X
No
one believes Benjamin is a general, even if he insists it with his
adolescent cracking voice -- they think he stole his Dad's papers. He
can't go to war again.
His son brings him home, angry and embarrassed. Both.
XI
Poor Benjamin, destined to be despised and misunderstood in the most vulnerable years of his life, both sides.
But soon that is no longer a matter of concern -- his world is warm milk and his crib, and patterns of light and darkness.
"When the sun went his eyes were sleepy--there were no dreams, no dreams to haunt him."
I
feel sorry for Benjamin. Even though he was a Button just like his
father and son.
Notes and further research (after I read the story):
*
GKC and
FSF were
basically contemporaries, but GKC came first, born 22 years earlier, in
1874. They died only 4 years apart though, in 1936 and 1940
respectively. Wow, FSF died young. Only 44. They say it was a
combination of tuberculosis and alcoholism.
**
Timeline:
After 1900 the possibility of twilight-sleep childbirth lured women to
hospital births (would have been a good thing for Mrs Button, poor
woman!). By 1920, 30 - 50% of women gave birth in hospitals. By
1950 it was 88% and by the 1960's it was 97%. Curious that Fitzgerald knew something about this when he wasn't born until almost the turn of the century.
Fitzgerald wrote
Tales of the Jazz Age in 1922. So he was only about the age of my oldest son at the time.
The
movie looks quite different from the story.
I don't think I could go through the comic- tragedy of life played backwards twice.
But I hear it's a pretty good movie.
Echoes of Metamorphosis?
The
Curious Case of Benjamin Button belongs to that category of short story
- Kafka's The Metamorphosis is the most celebrated example - in which
an absurd conceit is established at the outset, and is then played out
in a realist vein. Here the conceit is that a man is born with the body
and mind of a 70-year-old, and proceeds to live his life in reverse. The
joke is that no one else seems to notice; or at any rate, they regard
Benjamin Button's inverted progress not as a flagrant violation of the
laws of science, but as an embarrassing social problem.
Yes, that struck me too.
Echos of Flowers for Algernon? Maybe.
That story made me sad, too. But don't we all go through this in a way? I guess so:
Both stories use a fantastic or science fictional premise to explore the
structure of all long lives, in which we are cognizant of being on a
long, slow decline back into the oblivion from which we came.
Inspired by a Mark Twain epigram? Interesting!
"It is a pity that the best part of life comes at the beginning, and the worst part at the end."-- Mark Twain
In Benjamin's case, he got the best part at the
end, perhaps? Nana took care of him, and he got to say "fight fight"
and use a cane as a sword instead of as prop for his doddering steps, and jump on the bed,
"which was fun, because if you sat down exactly right it would
bounce you up on your feet again, and if you said "Ah" for a long time
while you jumped you got a very pleasing broken vocal effect."
(A little bit of Chesterton there too)
And then your last memories of comfortable darkness, warmth and nourishment.
Maybe the story isn't so sad after all.
