Amory’s second relationship and first important romance is with Isabelle Borgé, a sixteen-year-old who has already “developed a past” (p. 55) as a “speed,” having gone off to school and become “sophisticated” beyond the code of St. Paul society. The two meet at a Christmas dance, and when Amory tries to kiss her, they are interrupted and the kiss never materializes. Later, when Isabelle and Amory have a tiff, she withdraws from his advances, and he becomes all the more aggressive: “He became aware that he had not an ounce of real affection for Isabelle, but her coldness piqued him. He wanted to kiss her... if he didn’t kiss her ... it would interfere vaguely with his idea of himself as a conqueror” (p. 85). Sarah Beebe Fryer comments on the dilemma of the two: “While Isabelle worries about being hurt by gossip about her tentative sexual experimentation (kissing), Amory soon begins to worry about his own social standing if he is unable to score with (kiss) a “Speed” (Fitzgerald’s New Women, p. 21). Later, he finds it impossible to carry through his overtures toward Isabelle, after he realizes that he is motivated more by satisfying his ego than his sexual desires, and he begins to wonder if he is, after all, “temperamentally unfitted for romance” (p. 87).
In glaring contrast to his other relationships with women is Amory’s love for his third cousin, Clara Page, which has nothing to do with the devil and everything to do with sexual self-discipline and religious devotion. Clara is based on Fitzgerald’s real-life Maryland cousin, Cecilia Delihant Taylor (“Ceci”), his favorite relative. Although she was sixteen years older than Fitzgerald, he seems to have been in love with her. In 1912 Cecilia Taylor was an impoverished widow with four young daughters. Clara Page is pictured as a widow with small children and as the quintessence of the virtuous woman. She is “very devout, always had been, and God knows what heights she attained and what strength she drew down to herself when she knelt and bent her golden hair into the stained-glass light” (p. 132). It is Clara’s virtue that probably causes Amory to fall so hard for her, because it allows little chance of physical contact: “She was the first fine woman he ever knew and one of the few good people who ever interested him” (p. 129). He writes a poem to her entitled “St. Cecilia,” pushes her to marry him, and tells her that he loves and adores and worships her. Amory “longed only to touch her dress with almost the realization that Joseph must have had of Mary’s eternal significance” (p. 133). Clara, who claims she has never been in love, sees through his adolescent worship and posing, but it is abundantly clear to the reader that the only woman Amory thinks is fit for him is the one who is sexually inaccessible.
Amory’s final romance occurs long after he tries to recover from the affair with Rosalind and after he and Clara have parted. It is with the hedonistic Eleanor, who is everything that Clara Page is not. She is “the last time that evil crept close ... under the mask of beauty” (p. 207). Eleanor claims that she goes through the world “giving other people thrills, but getting few myself” and that she has “never met a man I’d marry” (p. 213). Her history reveals that she is “hipped on Freud,” and has associated with “a rather fast crowd ... who drank cocktails in limousines and were promiscuously condescending and patronizing toward older people” (p. 216). It is ironic that Amory has spent the better part of the book drinking cocktails in limousines and condescending to just about everybody, but he can’t bear a female version of himself. As his alter ego, Eleanor forces Amory to see himself in her: They could “see the devil in each other.” To prove to Amory that she is not controlled by religion and will not “yell for a priest at her moment of death,” Eleanor tries to kill herself by riding her horse to the edge of a cliff, but she jumps off just as the horse bolts over to its death. Amory suddenly sees in her a reflection of his own increasingly blasphemous attitudes. James Tuttleton suggests that “in some sense Eleanor may be taken, if not as Blaine’s psyche, at least as a mirror image of one aspect of Blaine’s mind during his progressive disillusionment” (“The Presence of Poe in This Side of Paradise,” p. 67). ‘Stavola notes that Eleanor is a “satanic female figure who initiated [Amory] into physical sexuality” (p. 104). Amory later analyzes his relationship with her: “Inseparably linked with evil was beauty—beauty, still a constant rising tumult; soft in Eleanor’s voice ... every time he had reached toward it longingly it had leered out at him with the grotesque face of evil” (p. 259). In portraying Eleanor as a double for Amory’s own evil impulses, Fitzgerald is plotting out the problem of evil as part of his artistic vision. Tanner notes that “Fitzgerald intended Amory Blaine’s struggle with a diminishing instinct for recognizing evil to represent an important phenomenon of modern America on the eve of the 1920s” (p. 66).
Just as Amory has lost wealth, position, and even traditional religion, he has also lost faith in sexuality, convinced at last that it may be a diabolical force rising at will from the depths of his being, a personification of his own darkness. This near-total loss of faith, consistent with Fitzgerald’s tragic sense of the world, is almost medieval in its implications. Yet it is also consistent with the popular preoccupations of the times: Freud, sex, and the ego. Stavola notes that Amory’s hidden struggles with sex do not arise from the fear of sex and beautiful women, but from the fear of the destructive forces within himself that they release (p. 93). And it is a theme Fitzgerald reiterates in his later work, in which his male heroes are caught by the wiles of beautiful women who bring out the latent destructive impulses of their men: Anthony Patch, who self-destructs when the gorgeous Gloria Gilbert squanders his emotions; Jay Gatsby, who becomes a human sacrifice to the beauty and carelessness of Daisy Buchanan; and Dick Diver, who degenerates into a pawn for the neurotic and overbearing dependency of the lovely Nicole. Many of Fitzgerald’s heroes are at the mercy of the femme fatale Keats describes in one of Fitzgerald’s favorite poems, “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” (1819) in which the Fall is reenacted over and over again and a string of helpless Adams are in thrall to the apple and to Eve.
Love, Youth, and Certainty: The Tragedy of Loss
“Well this side of Paradise! ...
There’s little comfort in the wise.”
Fitzgerald took the title of his novel This Side of Paradise from one of the final lines of Rupert Brooke’s poem “Tiare Tahiti,” written in 1914 for a Tahitian girl named Taatamata with whom Brooke fell in love while in the Pacific Islands in 1913. Tahiti was then considered a paradise, and the sensual love imagery of the poem suggests that such a love can be found only there. The romantic notion that an ideal love exists beyond experience is a subliminal theme in This Side of Paradise, just as it is in all of Fitzgerald’s works. “The American Dream,” personified in the “perfect girl,” is supposed to fulfill those romantic yearnings. But in the end, it is only the girl who can’t be had who is worth the getting. Love gained is love flawed: Gatsby is undone by the mercenary Daisy Buchanan, Dick Diver by the mentally unbalanced Nicole, and Fitzgerald himself by the neurotic and emotionally dependent Zelda Sayre. It is little wonder that Fitzgerald’s favorite poem was Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (1819): “For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair.” Amory, “amor,” the love that can’t be attained, sets Amory up for perhaps his greatest loss, his attempt to find a love outside himself that is unrealizable. Stavola notes that “Throughout Fitzgerald’s writings there is a poignant sense of this transience and loss, at times an almost overwhelming awareness of dissolution and death. This experience is all the more bitter for his heroes because in their respective ways they are obsessed by intense romantic yearning, a sense of infinite possibilities, which they believe the limitless material promises of American life will ultimately satisfy” (p. 107).
Amory’s greatest loss is the love of Rosalind Connage, and their precarious relationship is significant for its fragility: “They were together constantly, for lunch, for dinner, and nearly every evening—always in a sort of breathless hush, as if they feared that any minute the spell would break and drop them out of this paradise of rose and flame” (p. 17
5). Reared to have faith in his romantic illusions, Amory is thrust into a post-war world informed by Freud and a shifting moral landscape where the only thing certain is change. Edward Gillin notes that because Amory believes in a love that exists yesterday, today, and tomorrow, he is forever “unadjustable,” and “he initiates a line of fictional brothers—Anthony Patch, Jay Gatsby, Dick Diver, and Monroe Stahr [The Last Tycoon (1941)]—who share their creator’s ultimate resistance to that now-ness Eliot styled ‘unredeemable’ ” (“Princeton, Pragmatism, and Fitzgerald’s Sentimental Journey,” p. 53).
With Amory’s disillusionments about love come his realizations about youth. Amory’s traumatic affair with Rosalind leaves him with “tireless passion, fierce jealousy” that he feels are the only “payment for the loss of his youth—bitter calomel under the thin sugar of love’s exaltation” (p. 228). Kirk Curnutt observes that as Amory’s youth erodes into a “succession of quick, unrelated scenes,” he struggles to acclimate himself to the lingering sense that maturation is a matter of loss rather than growth. (“Youth Culture and the Spectacle of Waste,” p. 89). And his losses are many: his parents, his mentor, Monsignor Darcy, his friends, his Princeton degree and the academic prestige such a degree would provide, his wealth, his love life, his youth, his reputation, and finally, his sense of certainty about the world in which he lives. He feels resentment and confusion about what to make of it:
He felt that it would take all time, more than he could ever spare, to glue these strange cumbersome pictures into the scrap-book of his life. It was all like a banquet where he sat for this half-hour of his youth and tried to enjoy brilliant epicurean courses (p. 217).
His alienation and disillusionment over these losses are the text of the last chapter of the novel, “The Egotist Becomes a Personage.” In this chapter Amory has realized that social posing provides no authentic self and that even though it may be difficult to find happiness within himself, it will be impossible to find it elsewhere. He refers to himself as an “intellectual personage,” someone who will struggle to control his life rather than be controlled by it. He “continually seeks for new systems that will control and counteract human nature.... It is not life that’s complicated, it’s the struggle to guide and control life” (p. 252).
Amory’s gradual rejection of his illusions extends to those who believed in their certainty: “There were no more wise men; there were no more heroes ... Amory had grown up to a thousand books, a thousand lies; he had listened eagerly to people who pretended to know, who knew nothing. The mystical reveries of saints that had once filled him with awe in the still hours of the night, now vaguely repelled him. The Byrons and Brookes who had defied life from mountain tops were in the end but flaneurs and poseurs, at best mistaking the shadow of courage for the substance of wisdom” (pp. 243-244). At this point, Amory has distanced himself so far from tradition that he thinks even the books of the previous generation are false. The depth of Amory’s disillusionment at this point is aptly described by Kahn: “Women had not proved inadequate to his imagination; philosophers and political leaders canceled out each other’s thoughts; few were the men who were not emotional or intellectual, or spiritual cripples” (p. 61).
In this ambiguous landscape, devoid of the old landmarks and stripped of the genteel codes of the past, Amory can no longer understand nor control his environment. The world has become a slippery slope under his feet, changing too fast and in too many directions. He is part of “a new generation dedicated more than the last to the fear of poverty and the worship of success; grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken” (pp. 260-261). Amory “knows himself” but that is all. He has dropped his ridiculous poses and put away his youthful illusions, to arrive back where he began, as “the fundamental Amory,” and he has found himself not by imitating his predecessors, but by disavowing them. His break with his past and its traditions suggests the autonomy and alienation of a modernist stance. As Craig Monk remarks, “The necessity of self-knowledge, coupled with the suggested impossibility of being certain about anything else, ultimately makes up the central idea of This Side of Paradise” (“The Political F. Scott Fitzgerald,” p. 64). In the end, that Amory “knows himself” means he knows a great deal—for only one who has a powerful vision of who he is can claim his self. Lionel Trilling observed that Fitzgerald “was perhaps the last notable writer to affirm the romantic fantasy, descended from the Renaissance, of personal ambition or heroism, of life committed to, or thrown away for, some ideal of self” (The Liberal Imagination, p. 249). Thus Fitzgerald’s early hero, who knows only himself, prefigures his later hero, Gatsby, who “springs from a Platonic conception of himself,” an existential being incarnate. And in that very conception, the reader perceives the compelling force of Fitzgerald’s romanticism and the enduring power of his imagination: What the world will not provide for him or for his heroes, he will create. It is a courageous claim for a young man of twenty-three, and a poignant reminder of the passion, despair, and illusions of our youth.
Sharon G. Carson is Professor Emerita in the English Department at Kent State University, where she has taught for thirty-five years, specializing in modern fiction and women’s studies. She has also created and taught courses in images of women in film as well as teaching frequently in the Honors College. She is the author of numerous articles and essays on modern and contemporary fiction.
THIS SIDE OF PARADISE
... Well this side of Paradise! ... There’s little comfort in the wise.
—Rupert Brooke.
Experience is the name so many people give to their mistakes.
—Oscar Wilde.
TO SIGOURNEY FAY
BOOK ONE
THE ROMANTIC EGOTIST
CHAPTER ONE
Amory, Son of Beatrice
Amorya Blaine inherited from his mother every trait, except the stray inexpressible few, that made him worth while. His father, an ineffectual, inarticulate man with a taste for Byron and a habit of drowsing over the Encyclopædia Britannica, grew wealthy at thirty through the death of two elder brothers, successful Chicago brokers, and in the first flush of feeling that the world was his, went to Bar Harbor and met Beatrice O’Hara. In consequence, Stephen Blaine handed down to posterity his height of just under six feet and his tendency to waver at crucial moments, these two abstractions appearing in his son Amory. For many years he hovered in the background of his family’s life, an unassertive figure with a face half-obliterated by lifeless, silky hair, continually occupied in “taking care” of his wife, continually harassed by the idea that he didn’t and couldn’t understand her.
But Beatrice Blaine! There was a woman! Early pictures taken on her father’s estate at Lake Geneva, Wisconsin,b or in Rome at the Sacred Heart Convent—an educational extravagance that in her youth was only for the daughters of the exceptionally wealthy—showed the exquisite delicacy of her features, the consummate art and simplicity of her clothes. A brilliant education she had—her youth passed in renaissance glory, she was versed in the latest gossip of the Older Roman Families; known by name as a fabulously wealthy American girl to Cardinal Vitori and Queen Margherita and more subtle celebrities that one must have had some culture even to have heard of She learned in England to prefer whiskey and soda to wine, and her small talk was broadened in two senses during a winter in Vienna. All in all Beatrice O’Hara absorbed the sort of education that will be quite impossible ever again; a tutelage measured by the number of things and people one could be contemptuous of and charming about; a culture rich in all arts and traditions, barren of all ideas, in the last of those days when the great gardener clipped the inferior roses to produce one perfect bud.
In her less important moments she returned to America, met Stephen Blaine and married him—this almost entirely because she was a little bit weary, a little bit sad. Her only child was carried through a tiresome season and brought into the world on a spring day in ninety-six.c
When Amory was fiv
e he was already a delightful companion for her. He was an auburn-haired boy, with great, handsome eyes which he would grow up to in time, a facile imaginative mind and a taste for fancy dress. From his fourth to his tenth year he did the country with his mother in her father’s private car, from Coronado, where his mother became so bored that she had a nervous breakdown in a fashionable hotel, down to Mexico City, where she took a mild, almost epidemic consumption. This trouble pleased her, and later she made use of it as an intrinsic part of her atmosphere—especially after several astounding bracers.
So, while more or less fortunate little rich boys were defying governesses on the beach at Newport, or being spanked or tutored or read to from “Do and Dare,” or “Frank on the Mississippi,” Amory was biting acquiescent bell-boys in the Waldorf, outgrowing a natural repugnance to chamber music and symphonies, and deriving a highly specialized education from his mother.
“Amory.”
“Yes, Beatrice.” (Such a quaint name for his mother; she encouraged it.)
“Dear, don’t think of getting out of bed yet. I’ve always suspected that early rising in early life makes one nervous. Clothilde is having your breakfast brought up.”
“All right.”
“I am feeling very old to-day, Amory,” she would sigh, her face a rare cameo of pathos, her voice exquisitely modulated, her hands as facile as Bernhardt’s. “My nerves are on edge—on edge. We must leave this terrifying place to-morrow and go searching for sunshine.”
Amory’s penetrating green eyes would look out through tangled hair at his mother. Even at this age he had no illusions about her.
This Side of Paradise (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Page 4