“I don’t know how to run a newspaper, Mr. Thatcher, I just try everything I can think of.”
I kept flashing on this classic line from Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane reading this debut of another young man eager to make his mark. This Side Of Paradise is someone trying everything he can think of.
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel runs the gamut from the meaning of life to capitalism. Snappy phrases and clever barbs are in ready supply, as are finely-drawn settings so sumptuous you feel enveloped by them. Yet very much unlike Citizen Kane, there is an overall unpleasant, chaotic feeling about this debut, a preening eagerness to impress by trying to do too much too soon, rather than settle on telling a story.
Something of a fictional autobiography, This Side Of Paradise stars Fitzgerald’s alter-ego Amory Blaine, a rich and pampered boy of uncommon beauty who finds football success at boarding school and soon enjoys the admiration of his most beguiling classmates.
It all understandably goes to his head:
Amory wondered how people could fail to notice that he was a boy marked for glory, and when faces of the throng turned toward him and ambiguous eyes stared into his, he assumed the most romantic of expressions and walked on the air cushions that lie on the asphalts of fourteen.
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| Amory's boyhood is one of exceptional privilege. "When Amory had the whooping-cough four disgusted specialists glared at each other hunched around his bed; when he took scarlet fever the number of attendants, including physicians and nurses, totaled fourteen." Image from https://childrens-clothing.lovetoknow.com/1910-1919-kids-fashion |
As an undergraduate at Princeton University, Amory is seized by the twin desires of being a great writer and of maintaining his elite status. “I like having a bunch of hot cats on top, but gosh, Kerry, I’ve got to be one of them,” he says. Women become a way of marking his climb.
Fitzgerald himself didn’t grow up rich, but he kept wealthy company, and like Amory found his way to Princeton to pursue glory as a writer (and like Amory took a brief detour in the advertising business). Like Amory, he hit the rocks early and often when it came to women and alcohol.
This Side Of Paradise captures the heady, out-of-control feeling of the Jazz Age at dawn, as experienced in a slightly satirical college setting (“Princeton drew him most, with its atmosphere of bright colors and its alluring reputation as the pleasantest country club in America”), but as the novel continues, a despondency in tone and content creeps in and eventually takes over. Rich boy Amory finds himself repeatedly ruined by a parade of beautiful but emotionally absent women.
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| The architecture at Princeton impresses Amory: "...through the shell of his undergraduate consciousness had broken a deep
and reverent devotion to the gray walls and Gothic peaks and all they
symbolized as warehouses of dead ages." Above, a view on campus, circa 1910. Image from http://librarypostcards.blogspot.com/2009/03/1910-library-princeton-university.html |
Interesting female characters were normally no problem for Fitzgerald. The same year of this novel’s publication, Fitzgerald incorporated them into his classic short stories “Bernice Bobs Her Hair” and “The Ice Palace.” It’s hard to square such fine-tuned characters with the neurotics, gold-diggers, and dopey dolls Amory puts up with here.
There is Isabelle Borgé, Amory’s first great love, with whom he imagines tasting the exaltation of true romance. “Everything was hollowed by the haze of his own youth,” Fitzgerald explains. Then it falls to pieces as he comes to see her as nothing special after all.
There is Clara Page, the pious young Catholic mother who takes Amory to her church but not to her bed; and Eleanor Savage, an atheist poet who frustrates Amory by shutting down his romantic aspirations in a sudden fit (and killing her own horse to punctuate her rejection.)
Most drastically one-note is Rosalind Connage, the idle, pampered heartbreaker who longs for a rich mate and trifles with Amory’s affections. “She abuses them and cuts them and breaks dates with them and yawns in their faces – and they come back for more,” we are told.
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| "Flirt smiled from her large black-brown eyes and shone through her
intense physical magnetism." In preparatory school and especially at Princeton, Amory finds himself swept up early and often by the eager availability of the opposite sex. Image from https://www.ft.com/content/f81c7574-a794-4be9-8953-6da6ca32216d |
Today This Side Of Paradise would get rapped for misogyny. In its own day, there was a different scandal attached to the idea of Rosalind and other young women casually embarking on such things as kissing and cuddling with men. It is tame material now:
None of the Victorian mothers – and most of the mothers were Victorian – had any idea how casually their daughters were accustomed to be kissed.
At one point, Amory dares to tell Isabelle: “We’ve reached the stage where we either ought to kiss – or – or – nothing. It isn’t as if you were refusing on moral grounds.”
Whatever sex takes place is kept on the other side of Paradise, hinted at only in the vaguest of terms.
Instead, the plot consists of bantering interludes, either between Amory and his various women or more often Amory and his chums, usually Princeton classmates, discoursing on love and art. I enjoyed the latter encounters more, as there is some variety in them.
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| F. Scott Fitzgerald in his days of early fame. He began writing This Side Of Paradise under the title of "The Romantic Egotist," which became the first half of the final novel. "You're a slave, a bound helpless slave to one thing in this world, your imagination," Amory is told. Image from https://www.openculture.com/2013/02/seven_tips_from_f_scott_fitzgerald_on_how_to_write_fiction.html |
Fitzgerald pondering the ephemerality of youth is always good for an epigram or two:
As he put on his studs he realized that he was enjoying life as he would probably never enjoy it again. Everything was hollowed by the haze of his own youth…
Youth is like having a big plate of candy. Sentimentalists think they want to be in the pure, simple state they were in before they ate the candy. They don’t. They just want the fun of eating it all over again…
But other than losing his youth and his family fortune, little actually happens to Amory. He struggles at Princeton, mostly because his high expectations for life prove either unachievable or not really worth having after all. He loses one college friend to a freak accident, imagines himself stalked by a ghost, wonders with growing depression about the validity of truth and beauty, and wallows in his many failures.
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| Between sections of This Side Of Paradise, Amory enlists in the Army to serve in World War I. Little is told of this experience, but it serves to further darken the novel's glum mood. Image from https://www.history.com/news/why-were-americans-who-served-in-world-war-i-called-doughboys |
The novel incorporates several poetic interludes, verses written by Amory as well as other characters, all delivered in the same, heavy disillusioned voice. Book Two, titled “The Education of a Personage,” begins in the form of a long play, set at Rosalind’s Manhattan apartment as her and Amory first meet.
I think the book might have worked better as a play. With the play sections, Paradise’s lack of story doesn’t detract, and I got to enjoy lively, extended character interaction with zippy clubby banter, light social satire, and some glimpses of personality:
MRS. CONNAGE: I haven’t met Mr. Blaine – but I don’t think you’ll care for him. He doesn’t sound like a money-maker.
Personality is a theme of the book, how Amory values it and how it morphs into something a Jesuit mentor of Amory’s dubs “personage:”
“Personality is a physical matter almost entirely; it lowers the people it acts on – I’ve seen it vanish in a long sickness. But while a personality is active, it overrides ‘the next thing.’ Now a personage, on the other hand, gathers. He is never thought of apart from what he’s done.”
What does this mean? I don’t think Fitzgerald knew. Perhaps it suggests that a person is nothing without the trappings of a social construct, which does tie in with Amory’s alternating need to fit in or reject his surroundings but if so, there is no payoff. His journey is a dead-end, culminating in a long walk back to his old school and a final dialogue where Amory windily declaims on the meaning of life one last time.
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| After returning from war, Amory settles into Manhattan and its vibrant nightlife. He later notes: "...the sentimental person thinks things will last - the romantic person has a desperate confidence they won't." Image from https://twitter.com/beschlossdc/status/543928142587789313 |
There is a strange emphasis on failure over success. Fitzgerald was on the verge of arriving as a figure of importance in American culture; the failures of his life were mostly still to come. Why so dark?
A little research reveals at the core of the novel’s fruition was Fitzgerald’s relationship with Zelda Sayre, who apparently inspired the misery-inducing Rosalind and whose rejection of Fitzgerald for his lack of earning potential is believed to have contributed to its despondent cast. Ironically enough, by the time This Side Of Paradise was published on March 26, 1920, the two were a pair again, and got married just a few days later in Manhattan, on April 3.
Be careful what you wish for… This in fact seems one of the themes of the novel. Amory’s desire for a life of consequence sets him up for heartbreak and depression time and again.
“Life is too huge and complex,” he complains. “The world is so overgrown that it can’t lift its own fingers, and I was planning to be such an important finger – ”
Despite this, This Side Of Paradise is useless for providing insight into Fitzgerald’s life with Zelda; Rosalind the city girl who rejects Amory seems entirely too insignificant to hold up to Zelda the southern belle whose life offered its own fascinating counterpoint to that of her man.
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| Zelda Sayre, 1919. She and her Paradise counterpart Rosalind are far apart in some ways, but both enjoyed great beauty and male attention. "Rosalind still has to meet the man she can't outdistance," her sister Cecelia notes, ruefully. Image from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Zelda_Sayre_Flowerbed_1919.jpg |
It works better as a novel about a literary person’s coming of age, absorbing influences and finding his way. It reminded me a lot that way of James Joyce’s A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man, published four years before this [Amory, we are told, read Portrait and was left “puzzled and depressed.” This suggests some distance between author and protagonist, as Fitzgerald himself enjoyed Joyce a great deal.]
“Every author ought to write every book as if he were going to be beheaded the day he finished it,” Amory declares. He argues about what is good and bad in American fiction, and while there are whiffs of pretention, he amusingly captures a heady euphoria regarding where culturally-conscious Americans saw themselves in the early 20th century.
But Fitzgerald isn’t read for history lessons; he is read for the stories he tells and the way he tells them. In This Side Of Paradise the latter strength is only somewhat in evidence, but the lack of story itself holds it back. Combine this with a surprising lack of polish in the construction, and a hero that is hard to like either when he’s winning or when he’s not, and I was left fairly disappointed given the name on the spine.
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