Inspiring Older Readers
This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Published in 1920, Scott Fitzgerald’s first novel was successful enough to enable him to marry Zelda in the same year. Despite shifting almost 50,000 copies in just a year, he didn’t actually make his fortune from this book given the very small margins on each copy sold. But what it did do was to build his reputation and allow him to earn a very good living selling short stories to magazines and periodicals while he worked on the next novel.
This Side of Paradise was a popular success because it captured both the spirit of the so-called Jazz Age and passed a withering judgement on a generation of middle class American youth. Although this wasn’t yet stylistically the Fitzgerald of The Great Gatsby, it is still clearly the work of a real and precocious talent and at just 23 he is already writing prose that has a maturity well beyond his years.
The story of Amory Blaine is in fact thinly veiled semi-autobiography and maybe what Fitzgerald's own life might have looked life if he didn't have the talent he had. Blaine is a handsome, privileged young man who is deeply egocentric and self-absorbed; he’s fully convinced of his brilliance and significance, he just hasn’t yet found exactly what it is he’s going to excel at. He fancies himself as something of a writer or literary figure of note – the only problem being that his writing’s not up to much and he’s constantly lured away from his studies by thoughts of romance.
He is very conscious that his roots lie in the middle classes rather than the upper echelons and his financial position is always precarious – a situation that will revisit him in the third and final part of the novel. Blaine finds his way to Princeton University and spends his time being a less than dedicated student. On the strength of his blonde good looks he drifts from party to party, making and breaking friendships, flirting with ideas without committing to them and never losing the powerful and incorruptible self-centredness of his life.
He’s in love with falling in love but in these early years there really is no-one he loves more than himself. A brief flirtation and declaration of love for a childhood friend, Isabella, soon ends when the two realise they don’t really like each other and they have been infatuated by the idea of love rather than the reality of it. Blaine’s friendships with his contemporaries are all unsatisfactory and lack any sense of close companionship and what closeness he does experience comes from his mother Beatrice and his religious mentor, Monseigneur Darcy.
Fitzgerald cleverly underscores Blaine’s deep sense of self-absorption by even making the onset of the First World War a rather irritating and insignificant interruption in the central characters life. He calls this second section of the book An Interlude and although he packs Blaine off to war, Fitzgerald gives us no real indication that the conflict has any impact on the young man.
In the final section of the book, Blaine finally falls in love with a New York debutant called Rosalind, who seems to return his affection. But in a bit of splendid brutality, Fitzgerald breaks Blaine’s heart by making Rosalind throw him over for his lack of money.
With the bitterness of the failed relationship, news of the death of Monseigneur Darcy and the imminence of his own financial destitution, Blaine is forced at last to consider something other than himself and to acknowledge that there is an outside world about which he knows very little. The book ends with one of Fitzgerald’s iconic encapsulations when Blaine declaims:
“I know myself”, he cried, “but that is all.”
Fitzgerald lays out the vapidness of the lives he chronicles with a sly and effective wit. The prose cuts and caresses at one and the same time and the author isn’t afraid to experiment; a good example of this quite daring approach is when he inserts dramatic dialogue and stage directions in the final section of the book where the characters are ‘playing out’ a relationship that is in fact being scripted by others.
The themes in this book are, I think, timeless – the way that power, privilege and entitlement in any generation breeds a blinkered self-centredness that is ultimately spiritually corrupt. Only by stripping Blaine of his self-deluding dreams, his material well-being and emphasising his essential loneliness in a potentially hostile world can anything like a shred of self-aware humanity begin to emerge.
This was a formidable debut novel and it’s even more intimidating to know that Fitzgerald would go on to do even better.
Terry Potter
June 2018