The car slowed up at the entrance to a great estate, ringed around by a huge hedge and a tall iron fence.
“Won’t you come in for lunch?”
Amory shook his head.
“Thank you, Mr. Ferrenby, but I’ve got to get on.”
The big man held out his hand. Amory saw that the fact that he had known Jesse more than outweighed any disfavor he had created by his opinions. What ghosts were people with which to work! Even the little man insisted on shaking hands.
“Good-by!” shouted Mr. Ferrenby, as the car turned the corner and started up the drive. “Good luck to you and bad luck to your theories.”
“Same to you, sir,” cried Amory, smiling and waving his hand.
“Out of the Fire, Out of the Little Room”
Eight hours from Princeton Amory sat down by the Jersey roadside and looked at the frost-bitten country. Nature as a rather coarse phenomenon composed largely of flowers that, when closely inspected, appeared moth-eaten, and of ants that endlessly traversed blades of grass, was always disillusioning; nature represented by skies and waters and far horizons was more likable. Frost and the promise of winter thrilled him now, made him think of a wild battle between St. Regis and Groton, ages ago, seven years ago—and of an autumn day in France twelve months before when he had lain in tall grass, his platoon flattened down close around him, waiting to tap the shoulders of a Lewis gunner.ar He saw the two pictures together with somewhat the same primitive exaltation—two games he had played, differing in quality of acerbity, linked in a way that differed them from Rosalind or the subject of labyrinths which were, after all, the business of life.
“I am selfish,” he thought.
“This is not a quality that will change when I ‘see human suffering’ or ‘lose my parents’ or ‘help others.’
“This selfishness is not only part of me. It is the most living part.
“It is by somehow transcending rather than by avoiding that selfishness that I can bring poise and balance into my life.
“There is no virtue of unselfishness that I cannot use. I can make sacrifices, be charitable, give to a friend, endure for a friend, lay down my life for a friend—all because these things may be the best possible expression of myself; yet I have not one drop of the milk of human kindness.”
The problem of evil had solidified for Amory into the problem of sex. He was beginning to identify evil with the strong phallic worship in Brooke and the early Wells. Inseparably linked with evil was beauty—beauty, still a constant rising tumult; soft in Eleanor’s voice, in an old song at night, rioting deliriously through life like superimposed waterfalls, half rhythm, half darkness. Amory knew that every time he had reached toward it longingly it had leered out at him with the grotesque face of evil. Beauty of great art, beauty of all joy, most of all the beauty of women.
After all, it had too many associations with license and indulgence. Weak things were often beautiful, weak things were never good. And in this new loneness of his that had been selected for what greatness he might achieve, beauty must be relative or, itself a harmony, it would make only a discord.
In a sense this gradual renunciation of beauty was the second step after his disillusion had been made complete. He felt that he was leaving behind him his chance of being a certain type of artist. It seemed so much more important to be a certain sort of man.
His mind turned a corner suddenly and he found himself thinking of the Catholic Church. The idea was strong in him that there was a certain intrinsic lack in those to whom orthodox religion was necessary, and religion to Amory meant the Church of Rome. Quite conceivably it was an empty ritual but it was seemingly the only assimilative, traditionary bulwark against the decay of morals. Until the great mobs could be educated into a moral sense some one must cry: “Thou shalt not!” Yet any acceptance was, for the present, impossible. He wanted time and the absence of ulterior pressure. He wanted to keep the tree without ornaments, realize fully the direction and momentum of this new start.
The afternoon waned from the purging good of three o’clock to the golden beauty of four. Afterward he walked through the dull ache of a setting sun when even the clouds seemed bleeding and at twilight he came to a graveyard. There was a dusky, dreamy smell of flowers and the ghost of a new moon in the sky and shadows everywhere. On an impulse he considered trying to open the door of a rusty iron vault built into the side of a hill; a vault washed clean and covered with late-blooming, weepy watery-blue flowers that might have grown from dead eyes, sticky to the touch with a sickening odor.
Amory wanted to feel “William Dayfield, 1864.”
He wondered that graves ever made people consider life in vain. Somehow he could find nothing hopeless in having lived. All the broken columns and clasped hands and doves and angels meant romances. He fancied that in a hundred years he would like having young people speculate as to whether his eyes were brown or blue, and he hoped quite passionately that his grave would have about it an air of many, many years ago. It seemed strange that out of a row of Union soldiers two or three made him think of dead loves and dead lovers, when they were exactly like the rest, even to the yellowish moss.
Long after midnight the towers and spires of Princeton were visible, with here and there a late-burning light—and suddenly out of the clear darkness the sound of bells. As an endless dream it went on; the spirit of the past brooding over a new generation, the chosen youth from the muddled, unchastened world, still fed romantically on the mistakes and half-forgotten dreams of dead statesmen and poets. Here was a new generation, shouting the old cries, learning the old creeds, through a revery of long days and nights; destined finally to go out into that dirty gray turmoil to follow love and pride; 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....
Amory, sorry for them, was still not sorry for himself—art, politics, religion, whatever his medium should be, he knew he was safe now, free from all hysteria—he could accept what was acceptable, roam, grow, rebel, sleep deep through many nights....
There was no God in his heart, he knew; his ideas were still in riot; there was ever the pain of memory; the regret for his lost youth—yet the waters of disillusion had left a deposit on his soul, responsibility and a love of life, the faint stirring of old ambitions and unrealized dreams. But—oh, Rosalind! Rosalind! ...
“It’s all a poor substitute at best,” he said sadly.
And he could not tell why the struggle was worth while, why he had determined to use to the utmost himself and his heritage from the personalities he had passed....
He stretched out his arms to the crystalline, radiant sky.
“I know myself,” he cried, “but that is all.”
ENDNOTES
1 (p. 9) Monsignor Darcy: The priest who becomes Amory’s mentor, father figure, and spiritual adviser, Darcy is a thinly disguised Father Sigourney Fay, Fitzgerald’s mentor, to whom the book is dedicated.
2 (p. 18) purple accordion tie and a “Belmont” collar: Amory’s clothes lack taste. His tie is purple with vertical accordion pleats; his collar has rounded points.
3 (p. 23) Andover ... St. Paul’s ... Kent: The prep schools mentioned were the best in the country at the time. St. Regis‘, the one Amory attends, is fictitious. Fitzgerald went to the Newman School in Hackensack, New Jersey.
4 (pp. 42-43) Ivy ... Cottage ... Quadrangle: The social organizations or clubs mentioned here had their own buildings, hosted their own meals, and were centers of social activity for Princeton undergraduates. Greek-letter fraternities were banned at Princeton in 1855. Princeton did not admit undergraduate women until 1969.
5 (p. 126) Clara: Clara is modeled on Fitzgerald’s third cousin, Cecilia Taylor, on whom he had a crush.
6 (p. 147) A Lament for a Foster Son ... King of Foreign: The real-life Father Fay, the model for Monsignor Darcy (see note 1, above), wrote this poem of lamentation and bless
ing to Fitzgerald when he was ready to go off to war. To emphasize their mutual Irish ancestry, Monsignor Fay begins each stanza of the poem with an expression in Gaelic.
7 (p. 158) “she’s a sort of vampire”: Cecelia here describes her sister Rosalind as the quintessential flapper who smokes, drinks, and is frequently kissed, and who treats cruelly all men who adore her. Fast girls in the 1920s were known as “vampires” or “vamps.”
8 (p. 221) “I’ m hipped on Freud and all that”: The psychoanalytic and sexual theories of Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) had gained wide popularity in the United States by the 1910s and 1920s.
9 (p. 243) Here he might live ... delivered from right and wrong and from the hound of heaven: This is an allusion to the poem ”The Hound of Heaven” (1893), by Francis Thompson (1859-1907), in which the poet is pursued by and yet flees from God and from all his (the poet’s) failures, and ends up living a life of drug addiction and poverty. Amory may be comparing himself to Thompson here.
10 (p. 247) a magnificent Locomobile: First introduced in 1902 the Locomobile was built for thirty years in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and had a reputation as the finest and most carefully built automobile ever made in the United States. Even in 1920 it would have cost upward of $13,000.
INSPIRED BY THIS SIDE OF PARADISE
I’m restless. My whole generation is restless.
—Amory Blaine, in This Side of Paradise
Gertrude Stein had been very much impressed by This Side of Paradise. She read it when it came out and before she knew any of the young American writers. She said of it that it was this book that really created for the public the new generation.
—Gertrude Stein, from The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933)
Fitzgerald and the Jazz Age
F. Scott Fitzgerald was the literary hero of the Jazz Age. His first novel, This Side of Paradise (1920), successfully harnessed the frenetic energy of that era. Fitzgerald said the Jazz Age began on May Day, 1919, and ended in October 1929, after the infamous crash of the stock market that heralded the economic depression of the 1930s. During that time American culture began its obsession with youth, fashion, money, music, liquor, and sex. This Side of Paradise, unlike many literary remembrances of the era, captured the spirit of the decade as it came into being. The novel’s timeliness was signaled by its extreme popularity, particularly among young people.
Fitzgerald chronicled the Jazz Age for most of his career. The short story collection Flappers and Philosophers (1920) introduced the personality—the flapper—that, like Fitzgerald, came to emblematize the era. Flappers were pert women who wore makeup, bobbed their hair, hiked up their skirts, and rebelled against the constraints the older generation tried to impose upon them. Fitzgerald captured the decadence of the Jazz Age in his second novel, The Beautiful and Damned (1922), which describes the dissolute life of the drunken Anthony Patch, heir to millions. Tales of the Jazz Age (1922), another short-story collection, contains the lushly told “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz,” a tale about a man who comes to live a life of grandeur that is on a mythical scale.
Fitzgerald’s masterpiece, The Great Gatsby (1925), has been called the finest novel ever written by an American. The story follows the strangely dispassionate Nick Carraway as he observes the vicious feuding of Tom and Daisy Buchanan and cautiously befriends his neighbor Jay Gatsby, a gracious but disconcerting new millionaire who throws lavish backyard parties but destroys himself pursuing a lost love. Fitzgerald’s last finished novel, Tender Is the Night (1934), is set on the French Riviera, where it traces an ill-fated triangle formed between the young actress Rosemary Hoyt and the unstable couple Dick and Nicole Diver. Of all the writers of that era, Fitzgerald best captured the hope, excitement, glamour, and degeneration of America’s first modern decade.
Other Jazz Age Writers
New York City, which boasted glittering nightlife, a lively bohemian scene, and large numbers of extremely wealthy people, was the center of the Jazz Age. Most of the writers connected with the era worked either in New York or in Europe. Fitzgerald, for example, penned many of the works discussed above while living in Paris among a circle of expatriates that included Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein. Among the New York set was Dorothy Parker, a bitterly funny writer and poet closely associated with the New Yorker magazine. She immortalized the new woman of the 1920s in a poem, “The Flapper” (1922), which pays tribute to the author of This Side of Paradise:
The playful flapper here we see,
The fairest of the fair.
She’s not what Grandma used to be,—
You might say, au contraire.
Her girlish ways may make a stir,
Her manners cause a scene,
But there is no more harm in her
Than in a submarine.
She nightly knocks for many a goal
The usual dancing men.
Her speed is great, but her control
Is something else again.
All spotlights focus on her pranks.
All tongues her prowess herald.
For which she well may render thanks
To God and Scott Fitzgerald.
Her golden rule is plain enough—
Just get them young and treat them rough.
One of Parker’s lighter pieces, “The Flapper” contains touches of the cynicism that later became her trademark.
Writing at the same time as Parker and Fitzgerald was Edna St. Vincent Millay, a New York bohemian who was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. The short poem “First Fig” (1920), one of her best-known verses, captures the excesses of the Jazz Age with vivid symbolic imagery:
My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—
It gives a lovely light.
The poem anticipates the brilliant debuts and abrupt deaths of luminaries such as Fitzgerald, who died at forty-four after a long battle with drinking; it also calls to mind the emotional breakdowns of his wife, Zelda.
Where This Side of Paradise portrays the restlessness of Amory Blaine during college and immediately thereafter, Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926) describes the travails of a slightly older group. The novel—which opens with Gertrude Stein’s famous line “You are all a lost generation”—revolves around a crew of emotionally downtrodden expatriates living in Paris. In tough, understated prose, narrator Jake Barnes describes the trip the motley group takes to Pamplona, Spain, to see the running of the bulls. In a larger sense, the aimlessness of the principal characters represents the widespread hopelessness and disillusionment people felt following World War I.
COMMENTS & QUESTIONS
In this section, we aim to provide the reader with an array of perspectives on the text, as well as questions that challenge those perspectives. The commentary has been culled from sources as diverse as reviews contemporaneous with the work, letters written by the author, literary criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout the work’s history. Following the commentary, a series of questions seeks to filter F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise through a variety of points of view and bring about a richer understanding of this enduring work.
Comments
HARRY HANSEN
[This Side of Paradise] is one of the few American novels extant. We have any number of American writers who ape the Russians and produce cheap milk and water imitations of the Russians. We have authors by the score who imitate the British and produce cheap aye-aye-sir imitations of the British. We have a few who fall under the spell of the French and try to write like the French, but can’t, the French being inimitable. But we get almost no real American novels. And when we do the writers go down into our steel mill towns and write about Europeans living under American conditions, or down into a coal mine, or into the murky half-world. Fitzgerald has taken a real American type—the male flapper of our best colleges—and written him down with startling veris
imilitude. He has taken a slice of American life, part of the piecrust. Only a man on the inside could have done it.
—from the Chicago Daily News (March 31, 1920)
HEYWOOD BROUN
We have just read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise and it makes us feel very old. According to the announcement of his publishers Mr. Fitzgerald is only twenty-three, but there were times during our progress through the book when we suspected that this was an overstatement. Daisy Ashford is hardly more naive. There is a certain confusion arising from the fact that in spite of the generally callow quality of the author’s point of view he is intent on putting himself over as a cynical and searching philosopher. The resulting strain is sometimes terrific.
Of course, Mr. Fitzgerald is nearer to college memories than we are and, moreover, we have no intimate knowledge of Princeton, and yet we remain unconvinced as to the authenticity of the atmosphere which he creates. It seems to us inconceivable that the attitude toward life of a Princeton undergraduate, even as a freshman, should be so curiously similar to that of a sophomore at Miss Spence’s.
“Ever read any Oscar Wilde?” inquires d’Invilliers, the young poet, of Amory Blaine, our hero, who has been presented as a youngster of a somewhat literary turn. “No. Who wrote it?” answers Amory, and we refuse to believe that young Mr. Fitzgerald is not pulling our leg. Then, too, in spite of the bleak and jaded way in which the author sums up the content of college life, it is evident that he is by no means unimpressed with the sprightliness of conduct and conversation which he assigns to his undergraduate characters, though it is silly conversation and sillier conduct.
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