718
PARTISAN REVIEW
Fitzgerald managed to think of it. In his Notebooks, what there is of
them in
The Crack Up,
Summit Avenue, "our show street," becomes
"Crest Avenue" and "A Museum of American Architectural Failures,"
which it certainly is, and James
J.
Hill, "our great man," goes as
"R. R. Comerford," and Henry Hastings Sibley, "our first governor,"
as "Chelsea Arbuthnot." Fitzgerald notes somewhat despondently:
"Arbuthnot was the first governor-and almost the last of Anglo–
Saxon blood."
"The Ice Palace" is a story that still says something about St.
Paul and more about Minnesota. Every year the local businessmen
get together and put on a winter carnival with the usual floats and
ceremonies. It happens in February, lasts ten days during which time
we live merrily under a monarchy- this year under King Boreas XII
who opened his reign with these words: "Let us unloose untapped
laughter and make merry with good, clean fun. Yea, verily, let joy be
unconfined." In private life the king works in a bank and the queen
is a stenographer. A palace is erected from blocks of ice, and thereby
hangs Fitzgerald's tale. In his time the palace was large enough for
the principal character in the story to lose herself in, but this year
(things are tough all over for royalty) it was more like a two-car
garage. (I hate to think what might have happened to Summit Avenue
itself if the Church hadn't discovered that the big houses make very
good convents-more than ever the district deserves the name "Vati–
can City.")
In this story Harry Bellamy, the local boy, is a Yale man
("scratch a Yale man with both hands and you'll be lucky to find
a coast-guard"), and like another Yale man, Tom Buchanan in
The
Great Gatsby,
he fears for the future of the white race. Tom says:
"Have you read
The Rise of the Colored Empires
by this man God–
dard? ... Well, it's a fine book, and everybody ought to read it. The
idea is if we don't look out the white race will be-will be utterly
submerged. It's all scientific stuff; it's been proved." And Harry says
(of the half-submerged "damn Southerners"): "They're sort of–
sort of degenerates-not at
all
like the old Southerners. They've lived
so long down there with
all
the colored people that they've gotten lazy
and shiftless."
"Can you feel the pep in the air?" Harry asks, but Sally Carrol
Happer, who comes from the South, hates to think of there being
