This Side of Paradise (1920) is the debut novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald, whom I lovingly rebaptized 'Hottie Mc Scottie'. (#sorrynotsorry) The book examines the lives and morality of post-World War I youth. Its protagonist, Amory Blaine, is an attractive Princeton University student who tries to define his own identity within and apart from his generation, the lost generation.

As most debut novels, This Side of Paradise is highly autobiographical. It was written in the context of Scottie and Zelda's on-and-off-relationship in the summer of 1919. After less than a year of courtship, Zelda Sayre broke up with the 22-year-old Scottie. After a summer of heavydrinking he returned to St. Paul, Minnesota, where his family lived, to complete the novel, hoping that if he became a successful novelist he could win Zelda back. I think this tells us a lot about Scottie's personality - it shows us his vulnerability but also his core belief that money and success would/could change everything. It is also important to note that Scottie had in mind that Zelda would probably read this novel, and whilst I haven't found an academic text on this, I would personally argue that his portrayal of the character Rosalind, whom he, in my opinion, based off Zelda, was altered by this fact. Her portrayal is bittersweet, very manic-pixie-dream-girl-esque (...what a word) and quite favorable, meaning that she is the one girl who leaves the biggest impact on our main protagonist, his epitome of beauty.

In the fall of 1919, Scottie gave the manuscript to an editor at Charles Scribner's Sons in New York. The book was nearly rejected, but upon further editing got accepted. Scottie begged for an early publication - *coughs* because his dick was hard for Zelda - but was told that he would have to wait until the spring. Nevertheless, upon the acceptance of his novel for publicaton he went and visited Zelda, and they resumed their courtship. His success imminent, she agreed to marry him (which speaks volumes about her morality as well). I honestly can't say I am a big fan of their relationship, it seems so destructive to me, but it's definitely something that I would have to do more research on before forming a valid opinion.

Hottie Mc Scottie is known as the embodiment of the modern American writer. The age of American high modernism was one of intense self-invention, and Scottie was prominent among these in having forged a self-created image of 'the author' conveyed to life and work. Even now, decades later, we are all somewhat familiar with Gatsby, the knowledge that Scottie was a cracked-up alcoholic and dead at the age of 45.

His first novel bears many traits of the Bildungsroman, the novel of moral and pscyhological growth. This Side of Paradise is both significant in its own right as a portrait of a young man's initiation into life, the chronicle of a generation, and a as the site where Scottie founds his identity as an author. As an authorial initiation, the novel foreshadows the concerns of his major works: the quest for identity, the investigation of modern sexuality, the estimate of 'consciousness'.

Intended to typify the youth of a generation that would become 'lost' in the aftermath of World War I, Amory is in the process of revolting from the old order as he tests out philosophies that his elders would regard as radical and behaviours they would see as dissolute. The emergence of sexuality is at issue, as Amory succesively experiences and rejects various romances, among others his disastrous relationship with the debutante, Rosalind. And of course, in the age of Prohibition, he drinks. ;)

Amory's problem is one of narcissism, and his 'education' in the novel involves both the formation of a 'personage' (unity of identity) and an encounter with that which lies outsite the self. The novel is much more about the formation rather than the full composition of Amory's identity. Perhaps most important, Scottie wrote a conclusion to the novel that, in its final line, offers the possibility that the 'personage' of Amory Blaine, while still in the process of formation, has yet achieved some form of self-definiton, precisely as a process. I appreciated that notion very much, because growing up can be fucking frustrating, and I often feel the pressure that I should have reached certain milestones in my life yet, that I should have a grip on who I am and who I want to become, but that's just not the case. Life is a process, things are constantly changing.

Amory Blaine is a nomadic figure, wandering from affair to affair, book to book, in search of both a relationship and a doctrine that will give him some access to 'reality' in a time when the ground seems to be constantly shifting under him. After World War I and the collapse of the old world, a new age of uncertainty began, characterized by frantic speculation and activity. Scottie portrays adulthood as a labyrinthine world, into which Amory is on the verge of entering. In giving a voice to both Amory and the world and people around him, Scottie portrays not only Amory's coming to identity within that generation, but the generation itself.

He attempts to capture the geist of his time, to define this group of individuals at this specific period in time. In This Side of Paradise he provides a fictional representation of a war generation identified, paradoxically, by its lack of identiy, by the loss of direction and the sense that history and Western culture as they were then known were rapidly coming to an end. What the lost generation has lost - cultural identity - is linked in complex ways to the formation of a new national identity after 1918 and his own search for a form of writing that would underwrite his identity as an author.

Amory defines himself within the historical and social contexts of his generation: a middle-class Midwesterner transplanted to the aristocratic halls of Princeton (you don't know how excited I got everytime Aaron Burr was mentioned...); a boy growing to maturity during the upheaval of a world war, shuttling erratically between idealism and disillusion; a young man exploring sexuality. Yet the completion of his education and his achievement of the status of 'personage' is marked by his seperation from both his childhood and 'generational' origins as he erases the past and attempts to begin anew at the point zero of disjunct self-knowledge: 'I know myself ... but that is all.'

Similar disparities set off Fitzgerald's writing in a novel that repeatedly lists the authors and texts that persons of Amory's sensibility and generation read, as if Scottie wanted to constitute for his readers the generational canon from which he proceeds. In its portrayal of Amory Blaine seeking identity within and apart from his generation, This Side of Paradise preserves the sense conveyed in this fragment of Scottie's own awareness as an author who is both reproducing the textual past and attempting to break away from it in generating a writing that is 'modernistic'.

The novel is an uneven assemblage of anecdotes, aborted novelistic sequences, poems, one-act plays, passages from author's letters and diaries, and vairously integrated short stories and set scenes. It feels almost experimental at times, which I adored because it showed that Scottie was still trying out new things, and first and foremost trying to break with old (literary) conventions to become a true modern writer.

On the one hand, This Side of Paradise can dazzle with its brilliant writing style and the beauty of the its language, but on the other hand, it is exactly that language that makes the novel feel superficial and its dialogue artifical at times. It is incredibly hard to connect to any of the characters, or to truly feel for any of them, because everything seems incredibly fake.

I would say, I read this at the perfect time in my life, being a student myself and still struggling to find my own identity and place in this world, and therefore I highly appreciate Scottie's debut novel.

This was going to be a two-star until today, when the last sixty or so pages took me by surprise, improving the experience somewhat. 'The Great Gatsby' is one of my favourite novels so at first I was greatly disappointed to find I wasn't enjoying this one, Fitzgerald's debut, at all, in spite of the odd snatches of beautiful writing. It felt aimless, cloggy, and I just wasn't interested in anything or anyone involved. The introduction in my copy even refers to it as a "deeply flawed apprentice work", so I was relieved to find it wasn't just me feeling confused by his early work. But the greats have got to start somewhere, and I'm glad I've read it.

3,5.

This novel is a lot of things at once:
It is a virtuoso’s exercise, it is philosophical, contains interesting political observations, it is a Bildungsroman, it is naïf and sometimes it is boring.
It is difficult not to compare it with The Great Gatsby, but it is unfair to do so, very few novels would pass that comparison.
It is amazing that he wrote it at 23. But it is also obvious in some of his observations.
In my opinion Amery’s love for Rosalind is quite conventional and immature. I loved Eleanor though, such a clear thinking feminist with a touch of “Thelma and Louise”!!
The description of the social structure at Princeton was interesting because, sadly, I don’t think things have changed that much in the Ivies despite the 100 years lapse.
All and all a thought provoking, sometimes lyrical read defining of an era and a tragic generation. This book has not aged and it is still very relevant.

Lots of cool quotes! :

“very few things matter and nothing matters very much."

“The idea, you know, is that the sentimental person thinks things will last—the romantic person has a desperate confidence that they won’t.”

“Is it worth a tear, is it worth an hour, To think of things that are well outworn; Of fruitless husk and fugitive flower, The dream foregone and the deed foreborne?”
Swinburne’s “Triumph of Time”

“Rotten, rotten old world,” broke out Eleanor suddenly, “and the wretchedest thing of all is me—oh, why am I a girl? Why am I not a stupid—? Look at you; you’re stupider than I am, not much, but some, and you can lope about and get bored and then lope somewhere else, and you can play around with girls without being involved in meshes of sentiment, and you can do anything and be justified—and here am I with the brains to do everything, yet tied to the sinking ship of future matrimony. If I were born a hundred years from now, well and good, but now what’s in store for me—I have to marry, that goes without saying. Who? I’m too bright for most men, and yet I have to descend to their level and let them patronize my intellect in order to get their attention. Every year that I don’t marry I’ve got less chance for a first-class man. At the best I can have my choice from one or two cities an”“ and, of course, I have to marry into a dinner-coat.”

“Oh, just one person in fifty has any glimmer of what sex is. I’m hipped on Freud and all that,but it’s rotten that every bit of real love in the world is ninety-nine per cent passion and one little soupçon of jealousy.”

“That’s your panacea, isn’t it?” she cried. “Oh, you’re just an old hypocrite, too. Thousands of scowling priests keeping the degenerate Italians and illiterate Irish repentant with gabble-gabble about the sixth and ninth commandments. It’s just all cloaks, sentiment and spiritual rouge and panaceas. I’ll tell you there is no God, not even a definite abstract goodness; so it’s all got to be worked out for the individual by the individual here in high white foreheads like mine, and you’re too much the prig to admit it.” She let go her reins and shook her little fists at the stars.”

“Their poses were strewn about the pale dawn like broken glass. The stars were long gone and there were left only the little sighing gusts of wind and the silences between ... but naked souls are poor things ever, and soon he turned homeward and let new lights come in with the sun.”

““A POEM THAT ELEANOR SENT AMORY SEVERAL YEARS LATER
“Here, Earth-born, over the lilt of the water, Lisping its music and bearing a burden of light, Bosoming day as a laughing and radiant daughter ... Here we may whisper unheard, unafraid of the night. Walking alone ... was it splendor, or what, we were bound with, ”

“Deep in the time when summer lets down her hair? Shadows we loved and the patterns they covered the ground with Tapestries, mystical, faint in the breathless air.
 That was the day ... and the night for another story, Pale as a dream and shadowed with pencilled trees—Ghosts of the stars came by who had sought for glory, Whispered to us of peace in the plaintive breeze, Whispered of old dead faiths that the day had shattered, Youth the penny that bought delight of the moon; That was the urge that we knew and the language that mattered That was the debt that we paid to the usurer June.
 Here, deepest of dreams, by the waters that bring not Anything back of the past that we need not know, What if the light is but sun and the little streams sing not, We are together, it seems ... I have loved”

“you so ... What did the last night hold, with the summer over, Drawing us back to the home in the changing glade? What leered out of the dark in the ghostly clover? God! ... till you stirred in your sleep ... and were wild afraid ... Well ... we have passed ... we are chronicle now to the eerie. Curious metal from meteors that failed in the sky; Earth-born the tireless is stretched by the water, quite weary, Close to this ununderstandable changeling that’s I ... Fear is an echo we traced to Security’s daughter; Now we are faces and voices ... and less, too soon, Whispering half-love over the lilt of the water ... Youth the penny that bought delight of the moon.”

Bleh, I tried. I tried SO HARD to like this book! I ended up skimming the last 1/3 or so of it. I love Fitzgerald’s other work, but this first book he wrote was so blasé, with no real plot or emotional connections. It was quite vapid and selfish. It reminded me of A Separate Peace or Catcher in the Rye, neither of which I enjoyed. Life is too short for boring books! On to better reading.

Part 1 - The Portrait of a Writer Struggling in his 20s.

More than anything, this book demonstrates a writer struggling to create something in his 20s. Filled with ideas, vignettes, poems, bursts of frantic energy, it never emerges into anything other than anecdotes of adolescence and young adulthood. In this respect, this book reminds me of a novel I started to write at 19 and 20 that I ultimately had to abandon (“Strange and Distant Land”). That novel, like this one seems to exist more as potential, ideas, and fragments than as a coherent something.

In some ways, the book reminds me of Natsume Soseki’s “Sorekara” (And Then), perhaps a little bit of “Catcher in the Rye.” Those books were also about troubled youths. The difference is that those novels were finished projects, complete somethings.

We’re never quite as clever as we’d like to be in our early 20s...and certainly, we lack that magical something called “depth.” The book often reaches for the clever without hitting on the deep...certainly not in the way a book like “Tender is the Night” is. And yet, you can see the elements that would become the more mature F. Scott Fitzgerald. For that reason, this book might be good for aspiring writers hoping to learn something about how writers evolve from book to book.

It also might serve as a cautionary tale for young aspiring writers: Be patient, young man. Be patient.


Interlude - A Peak into a World I Might Never Understand.


The book seems very much one of its time. What was it like to be part of the east coast upper class boarding school class of 1920? To understand the meaningful differences between being a Yale, Princeton, or Harvard man? I might never know...and the book is not a great introduction to this culture.

There are a lot of writers and philosophers discussed in this book. The novel is also, almost, a literary thesis in itself. If it is one, it’s one that presupposes your knowledge of the authors and philosophers being discussed. I have a feeling that time has not been kind to most (but not all) of the authors mentioned by Amory.

A novel is a poor place for philosophy unless one has planned it out well -- see “Sophie’s World” and “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.” It is wise to steer away from novelizing a philosophy, especially if you are in your early 20s.

A very young man deals with socialism. A very young man deals with honor and heroism. A very young man has trouble connecting to his family and friends and thus invests mystical faith in something called “the race” -- a concept that is foreign to my ears 100 years later. (A specific race? The human race?) Every young man feels that his generation has a more legitimate gripe than the one before, that true heroism has died or that some great moral wrong has been committed. The world is impure, they discover -- not realizing that this is not some novel discovery. Every young person struggles with ways to earn distinction and to win a mating partner. But one hundred years later, these gripes seem trivial, frivolous, and hopelessly dated. If anything, they serve to remind us that when we look back at our own youths, we will find many of our day-to-day problems trivial.

This “novel” then is an artifact of the reckless yearnings of youth...angst and despair of the 1910s and then 1920s...to finish a novel! To finish! To be done! But the book is not really finished. It is, like Amory Blaine, a work in progress.


Part 3 - The Novel that Never Was.


Typically, a young novelist is held back by a lack of experience. One writing teacher told me that no good stories ever came out of a university. What I think he meant was that really interesting elements of life lay outside of comfortable institutions. He could have equally said that no good stories came out of a human resources department, insurance back offices, or the mailroom of a company.

And yet, there are interesting things in this book -- a young man goes off to war (if only briefly). A young man tries to make his way in the advertising business. I couldn’t help but think that the scene before Amory goes off to war was a truly wonderful one, but one that could be even better. Two young people, about to go off to war, thinking about how their lives are about to change.

War, poverty, the prospect of death -- these are the kinds of experiences that get people outside of their abstract views of the world. Abstractions about “race”, “justice”, and “honor” always seem more meaningful to me when there are palpable stakes. The only route to the universal is through the particular.

The only way to get me to care about Amory’s ideas is to get me to care about Amory, his upper class east coast friends, and to really immerse me in the world he lives in.

The great tragedy of the novel is that Amory Blaine has yet to really live. Perhaps I should say -- the novel has a personality, but no personage.

“I know myself,” he cried, “but that is all!”

And that’s how the novel ends. The book made Fitzgerald rich at 24. Sometimes I have to wonder what people in The Roaring Twenties saw in it.

It is a manuscript that progresses from narrative to pages of poetry to tell the story; then to setting out the lines and actions of a stage play to carry the novel forward; then to love stories that never end well; then to naive and blustering arguments for socialism (it was after all 1920, and he’d written the novel in the years prior, with the Russian Revolution only two years young); then ending with a severely nihilistic attitude towards practically everything.

But we write and say a lot of iconoclastic things at 24 if we are in the habit of hashing things out in our mind over and over again. The male protagonist, Amory, who appears to a certain degree to be a sketch of Fitzgerald, doesn’t seem to know himself at the end, in any case. Except for his love affairs with four women, especially Rosalind, the novel did not enthrall or hold my interest.

Yes, there is some beautiful writing, some wonderful metaphors and similes, some lovely poetic flow to a rather chopped up narrative. But six years of his life later, when he publishes The Great Gatsby at 30, we see a much more cohesive and nuanced approach to writing that produces one of the great novels of American literature.

The Beautiful and the Damned was his second novel (1922), Gatsby his third (1926), Tender is the Night his final complete work (1934), and what a tragedy that was, but then, so was Gatsby. The writing in Gatsby is superior to This Side of Paradise in so many ways, yet it was not the bestseller Paradise was. Is that because the partying public didn’t like Fitzgerald’s criticism of their world in Gatsby?

There were several parts I enjoyed very much even if the overall effect on me was pretty gray.

I sometimes wonder what happens to reviews that disappear. I wrote this one before I began keeping copies and will not try to replace it. Just a note to say, as I remember it, this was not Fitzgerald at his best.

Of all the writing by writers in their early 20s I've read (and written), this book is down the street and around the corner from most. I wish I'd read about the Romantic Egotist before I wrote a book called Incidents of Egotourism in the Temporary World that also takes place in the Princeton area. (I loved when Amory Blaine biked at night with a friend from P'ton to my hometown.) Fitzgerald writes sharp, swervy, gorgeous, clever sentences, pretty much always with his eyes on the socio-existential prize. Also, really funny: 30 LOLs, at least. Self-consciously episodic in structure, with a conventional, linear, there-and-back again, rising arc (NOT lacking structure, as so many muffinheads on here say; the plot is propelled by Amory's thoughts about his emotional/intellectual progression more than old-fashioned conflict/resolution). Also, I think he's conscious of most of the things people on here level at him re: class -- he seems to me more often critical than complicit (eg, the end of his relationship with Rosalind, not to mention the final rant in the car). It's a lot like Tolstoy's Confession, but here the Egotist steps into the labyrinth of the rest of his life and realizes he knows himself and nothing else. Looking forward to the other F. Scott novels and then re-re-re-reading Gatsby.

I Do Hate to Be A Spoiler, but...

I must confess skim-reading “This Side Of Paradise” a couple of years back, dismissing the work as a rag bag and putting it down somewhere on Goodreads as “the first Coffee Table novel”. Before Christmas, I began delivering on a guilty self-pledge to plough through the tome word for word, and not a few weeks did pass before that mealy task was done. The verdict? It is more pastiche than rag bag, a distinction I endeavour to explain below.

Of course, the novel has to be read by all serious students of Fitzgerald's work not simply because it was the first he published; launching his career, it became the fiction sensation of 1920-1. It first took off on the back of positive reviews from a brace of friendly critics (Rascoe & Mencken) who were keen to promote Fitzgerald's distinctly Young American voice. Thereafter, it soared on chutzpah & hype; and benefiting from the coast-to-coast coverage of publishing giant Scribners almost 50,000 copies were sold in little over a year. It may be the first novel to depict the return of the US Expeditionary Force from Flanders, and by pre-dating Faulkner's “Soldier's Pay” and Hemingway's “The Sun Also Rises” by half a decade, it delineates the start of a literary movement of which the latter was to coin the term, “Lost Generation”.

That books sell through clever marketing is clear, but a certain amount of consumer satisfaction is also required. What appealed to 1920s readers is slightly more complex. No doubt, fascination with the lives of the rich would have kept many eyes on the page. Sex plays a major part, too. Of course, Fitzgerald was no purveyor of smut and the novel presented little that would have been worthy of any second glances by Jazz Age censors. It may therefore have benefited from the vogue for risqué without incurring any of the risks. Through a mixture of obtuseness and subtlety, Fitzgerald takes his reader from scandal-class kisses at posh house parties to the cheap hotel rooms of debauchery proscribed by the Mann - 'White Slavery' - Act of 1910. Also of topical note was the start of Prohibition in the very year of publication, which may have increased sales to the clientèle – or would-be clientèle - of the speak-easy. Most of all, though, “This Side of Paradise” is a book about young adults, written by a young adult, for young adults. It was the start of the era when law-making would begin to dog the lives of young Americans and lead, ultimately, to the revolutionary Beat Generation that came after the Second World War. Having laid that claim for it, however, it must be said that the text as a whole is not an easy read. Doubtless many copies would have fallen open at well-marked, well-read passages.

A handbag? Pastiche? Influenced by the likes of Compton MacKenzie’s “Sinister Street” and Joyce's “Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man”, its many passages of brittle prose are cut, for heaven's sake, with much damp poetry and windy dialogue. It's as though the contents of Zelda's diaries (the style of which Fitzgerald carefully deployed in drafts of his early novel, “The Romantic Egoist”) had been tipped out onto a large refectory table, cherry picked and then repackaged between leaves of his own stuff. Expensively produced stuff, that is. All the same, stuff. At one point our anti-hero Amory Blaine walks out of his job at a New York advertising agency complaining,

“...it took about ten thousand dollars to educate me where I could write your darned stuff for you”.

We never get to read his copy, but we are tied to the mast while Fitzgerald does impressions of Endymion The Vogon,

ttt“The shadow of a dove
Falls on the cote, the trees are filled with wings;
And down the valley through the crying trees
The body of the darker storm flies; brings
With its new air the breath of sunken seas
And slender tenuous thunder...”

Is this the writer who gave us “The Great Gatsby”? You better believe it! How did the old Iggy Pop number go? “Success/Here comes my Chinese rug”.

The main characters are clearly life-meets-literature drawn, from Blaine (an amalgam of Fitz himself with various Princeton bonhomies), his fairy godmother Ma, an actual Monsignor, a succession of débutantes (amongst which Fitz's real-life loves Zelda Sayres and Ginevra King are measured out in coffee spoons) plus lesser souls for whom the East Coast of the nineteen-teens would have been an anthem stomp for disaffected youth. It's an artificial book in as much as it's populated by artificial people. There is no plot, no ending to give away. So here's my spoiler: some die, others go on to other things.

85th book of 2021.

2.5. This is Fitzgerald's messy and juvenile debut from 1920. It's told through vignettes mostly with no real semblance of "plot". It reads of its time and reminds me of numerous other novels from the same sort of period (Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, Woolf's Jacob's Room, Nabokov's Glory). The most prominent flaw in the first half of the book is its seemingly complete lack of self-awareness: where later Fitzgerald works value vapidness as a theme, This Side of Paradise feels only vapid, without the dissection of it. This is rectified by the end somewhat but it's a lot of detached prose to read with a self-centred and fairly unlikeable protagonist Amory Blaine doing nothing. He goes to Princeton (as Fitzgerald did) and talks incessantly about his world view, what books he likes. . . These are things I usually like to read but Fitzgerald's delivery is poor. Frankly, it reads as if Fitzgerald had done and said everything that is in the book and simply recorded it all. At one point a character accuses Amory of writing things down and saving them for later, and maybe that's what Fitzgerald actually did. Other than being lifeless, the structure is mostly a smorgasbord is stuff: random numbered lists, several chapters that drop into the structure of a script with no apparent benefit, even a Question and Answer page (the latter two both appearing as chapter styles in Ulysses which I find interesting as this was published two years before). The Introduction does suggest that Joyce's Portrait must have been a great influence for Fitzgerald and he naturally tried to downplay that. Despite all its faults this novel was an instant success in 1920 and "overnight" sent Fitzgerald into money and literary fame. Just two books later he would write The Great Gatsby so somehow he learnt the craft fast. Very fast. There are tiny, tiny flashes of his later genius in here with some beautifully structured sentences in an otherwise hurricane of bland characters, bland happenings and dizzying structure.

Young Fitzgerald. This is literally the most narcissistic, self involved, preening novel I have ever read. It takes the cake. And that is saying a long among the egos of the authors I've made my way through. However. It is Fitzgerald doing the preening, and he has some reason for it. The writing experiments are very interesting, and they do make you look at the story a different way each time they shift. The prose is beautiful, though out of control and all over the place. I think that's part of the charm of the chaos of this novel and Fitz's personality, but it drove me crazy sometimes, so I can only imagine what it would do to others. As a result of that, the storytelling is also very loose and wandering. Nowhere near as tight as Gatsby, and not even approaching Tender is the Night. I have a personal bias towards reading the early works of geniuses, before they created their masterpieces. And even among that set, I find this one of the nearest and dearest to my heart.