This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald

This is Fitzgerald’s first novel, and it shows. Hugely popular when it came out, in 1920, it made his career. It also made his marriage, as Zelda had refused him when he had less money but now, with the sales of this book plus the higher prices he could now demand for his subsequent work, he had enough to support her as she required. The public loved the peek into the hedonistic Jazz age lifestyle. The critics found the construction a mess, which it is, and the prose is a long way from the beauty of his later books, but it’s a competent start to a career that would get massively better, and he was only twenty-three when he wrote it.

Like many first novels, this one’s a bildungsroman drawn from the author’s life. The central character, named Amory Blaine, is born in Minnesota in 1896 to a wealthy family. The opening chapter is an absolutely marvelous piece of writing with the child Amory raised in high style by his eccentric mother, Beatrice – straight out of Auntie Mame. Amory goes to a prep school in New York called St. Regis, and college at Princeton. The bulk of the book covers his Princeton years. After he graduates, he spends a year as a military officer in the First World War, which occurs offstage and is barely mentioned. After the war he settles in New York, lives with a couple of friends from school, half-heartedly starts a job at an advertising agency, which he quits, ostensibly to pursue a career as a writer. The arc of his self-development is from a spoiled rich kid, sure he’s a genius (as his mother believes), discovering through successive lessons that he’s not so special, not so certain to be a success at every challenge he faces (football, poetry, social standing), though handsome, not the only choice of every girl he fancies, who finds himself a young man, the family money gone due to bad investments, wiser, due to the war and tragedy during his college years, facing the reality of who he is. And then from there, as Amory looks forward beyond the end of the novel, ready to create his authentic life.

The other way to give an outline of the book would be to list the women he’s involved with: five of them. First, there’s his mother Beatrice, who owns the first chapter and is a distant presence through much of the rest of the novel. The next four are girls he woos. Isabel, a childhood friend whom Amory reconnects with when he comes home from Princeton during his sophomore year. When he returns to college he embarks on an extravagant romance through correspondence with her, which carries them through the rest of the year only to break up suddenly when she comes out to New Jersey for the end of the year prom and they realize it was the letter-writing they loved, not each other. Clara, a beautiful young widow with two children who confesses that her heart is entirely devoted to her children and is sure she won’t ever marry again. Rosalind, a rich debutante in New York, who breaks Amory’s romantic heart when she turns him down because her practical heart demands a wealthy husband (which Amory no longer is). And lastly Eleanor, whom Amory meets while visiting an uncle in Maryland, who attracts Amory with her high-spirits, but then terrifies him when she comes close to killing herself in a sudden act of exuberance by running a horse over an embankment. The horse dies. Eleanor jumps off at the last moment.

Other characters are several boys he meets at Princeton: Tom d’Invilliers is the most important, a poet. There’s also a Catholic Priest, Thayer Darcy, a friend of Amory’s mother who he connects with while at St. Regis and then becomes a mentor for several years until he dies late in the novel. Monsignor Darcy is somewhat of a father figure, as Amory’s actual father dies early, but Darcy also sees himself in the younger man and lives through him, even calling Amory his “reincarnation”.

The construction of the book is chaotic. Firstly it’s divided into two “books” with the war coming in between as an “Interlude.” The first book has four numbered and titled chapters, the second has five. But all of the chapters are further divided into very short sections, each also given a separate title, almost like interstitial titles in a silent movie: “A Kiss for Amory”, “Snapshots of the Young Egoist”, “Code of the Young Egoist”, “Preparatory to the Great Adventure”, and etc. Most of the writing is straightforward prose and dialogue, and it’s all in chronological order, but Fitzgerald also includes numerous poems written by Amory or other characters, letters from Amory or received by him, and at the beginning of Book Two, when he meets Rosalind three sections written as a play.

The long section at Princeton contains almost nothing about his studies. Instead he reads. He exchanges opinions about various authors with his friends. He tries to get in with the popular crowd. There’s a lovely scene where he plays hookey with a group of friends for a long-weekend in Atlantic City, running out on the bill at restaurants and sleeping at the train station because they have no cash. A little later there’s a car accident on the return from a trip up to New York City and one of Amory’s friends in the lead car is killed. The friend returns later as a spectral image. The war, like Amory’s academic studies at Princeton, warrants barely a mention. The “Interlude” consists in its entirety of two letters, one from Monsignor Darcy to Amory, the other Amory writing back. After Rosalind breaks up with him, Amory goes on a three-week bender all around New York, which ends only with the inauguration of Prohibition. Later, there’s a nice scene at a hotel where Amory decides to take the heat from hotel security who want to arrest a friend of Amory’s for a violation of the Mann Act.

The book reminded me of Catcher in the Rye: all the prep school stuff and the drinking and shows in New York, and it reminded me of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, another bildungsroman, also a lot of Catholic atmosphere and talk about God and atheism. Portrait is one of the many novels Amory reads and name drops in the book. It left him “puzzled and depressed” he says (p. 191). Like Portrait, This Side of Paradise ends just as the narrator’s adult life is about to begin. Portrait ends with the famous line: “I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.” This Side of Paradise ends with Amory having made a pilgrimage back to Princeton from New York standing on the campus in the dead of night looking up at the towers of the campus saying this line, “I know myself,” he cried, “but that is all.”

Fitzgerald only competed four novels in his short life. He died at age 44. This is the first, followed two years later by The Beautiful and the Damned, and a long short story, The Diamond Big as the Ritz, (both 1922). The Great Gatsby (1925) is a gem, of course. I’ve read it several times. Tender is the Night came out in 1934. I read that a few years ago. Fitzgerald left The Last Tycoon unfinished at his death in 1940, which would have been his fifth novel. I read that, also, a few years ago and believe it might have been his masterpiece had he lived to finish it.