Page 181 - 401_

180

Text 14
THE RICH BOY

F. Scott Fitzgerald

I
Begin with an individual, and before you know it you find that
you have created a type; begin with a type, and you find that you have
created nothing. That is because we are all queer fish, queerer behind
our faces and voices than we want any one to know or than we know
ourselves. When I hear a man proclaiming himself an "average,
honest, open fellow," I feel pretty sure that he has some definite and
perhaps terrible abnormality which he has agreed to conceal – and his
protestation of being average and honest and open is his way of
reminding himself of his misprision.
There are no types, no plurals. There is a rich boy, and this is
his and not his brothers' story. All my life I have lived among his
brothers but this one has been my friend. Besides, if I wrote about his
brothers I should have to begin by attacking all the lies that the poor
have told about the rich and the rich have told about themselves –
such a wild structure they have erected that when we pick up a book
about the rich, some instinct prepares us for unreality. Even the
intelligent and impassioned reporters of life have made the country of
the rich as unreal as fairy-land.
Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you
and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them,
makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are
trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to
understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than
we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of
life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink
below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are
different. The only way I can describe young Anson Hunter is to
approach him as if he were a foreigner and cling stubbornly to my
point of view. If I accept his for a moment I am lost - I have nothing
to show but a preposterous movie.