This Side of Paradise (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (4 page)

Fitzgerald writes that he is not only “an observer and conscious factor” in
This Side of Paradise,
but that he is writing “a somewhat edited history of me and my imagination.” He confesses in the “author’s apology” to the original edition that even though he didn’t want to talk about himself, “I’ll admit I did that somewhat in this book.” The thinly disguised account of his youth in St. Paul, Minnesota, his time (1911-1913) at the Newman School, a Catholic prep school in Hackensack, New Jersey, and his years at Princeton (1913-1917) constitute the main time span of the plot. The novel goes beyond these years to suggest that Amory Blaine, closely modeled on Fitzgerald himself, fights in France in World War I, although Fitzgerald never entered the war. Many of the characters in the novel are based on Fitzgerald’s friends at Princeton, and Bruccoli notes the similarities in his biography of Fitzgerald:

Fitzgerald informs his readers of his autobiographical intent when he says that Amory and his friends had “struck on certain books, a definite type of biographical novel that Amory christened ‘quest’ books” (p. 111). In the “quest” book the hero sets off in life to discover the best use for his talents, with the idea that using them wisely according to a certain code will ensure social and economic success. During Amory’s quest, he does what most young people do today; predictably, he conforms to “fit in.” As part of his struggle to succeed, he tries to devise a strategy to live up to the prescribed Victorian ideals of propriety, sobriety, and hard work. One way he does this is to read dozens of young-adult books that were popular at the time, such as Booth Tarkington’s
The Gentleman from Indiana
(1899), Owen Johnson’s
Stover at Yale
(1911), and Compton MacKenzie’s
Sinister Street
(1913).

But none of Amory’s strategies work. Try as he might, Amory discovers more loss and frustration than gain and satisfaction. His classmates and teachers frequently see him as a misfit, or as someone who tries too hard to gain popularity and prestige, or as a person too obsessed with being important. The title of book one, “The Romantic Egotist,” is the reader’s clue to Amory’s failure. At this early stage of his quest, he is too narcissistic and egotistical to succeed. In fact, he has already admitted that his code to live by is a sort of aristocratic egotism (p. 19), and he believes himself to be physically, socially, and mentally superior to his fellow students.

Not only is Amory unable to live up to his idealized vision of himself; neither will the world conform to his illusions. Amory’s experience at Princeton leaves him so disillusioned that he claims he manages to educate himself in spite of it; the social elite leaves him embittered and “ ‘sick of a system where the richest man gets the most beautiful girl’ ”; women leave him heartbroken and convinced that evil and sex are nearly synonymous; and his job in advertising makes him tired of a society where “ ‘the artist without an income has to sell his talents to a button manufacturer’ ” (p. 256). Paradoxically, what begins as a “quest” becomes more of an inquest on the values of the culture upon which it is based. By the end of the novel Amory is spouting his own brand of socialism as a way to change a culture in which he no longer believes, in “a gesture of indefinite revolt.”

Thus Amory’s romantic quest ends in a rude awakening. It is Horatio Alger in reverse, a story of riches to rags. In the end Amory has left Princeton without a degree, has fought in World War I, has grieved the death of his parents, his mentor Monsignor Darcy, and several of his friends, has lost the love of his life to a richer man, and is poverty-stricken. When we first meet Amory, he is being advised by his mother to have breakfast in bed. When we leave him he has recently calculated that his remaining $24 will buy 480 doughnuts, which he can live on for quite a while, provided he sleeps in the park. What happens between these two points in Amory’s life does not happen in a straight line. He spends most of his time befuddled, trying on different poses like so many suits, attempting to find a fit. He has taken to heart the advice of Monsignor Darcy that personalities fade but personages do not, and he determines to become a personage. Personalities are static characters, Monsignor Darcy claims, living according to the opinions of others, while personages are active, always creating, constructing, and becoming. But Amory can become a personage only after he has thrown off his facades, shed his narcissism and conceit, and returned once again to the “fundamental Amory,” with no poses and no prejudices. For Amory to achieve this status, however, he must completely transform his values.
This Side of Paradise,
then, is not so much a novel about youth as it is a novel about its transience, and a blueprint with which Fitzgerald explores the themes that preoccupy him for the rest of his life: the power of money and the fear of poverty, the evils of sex and relationships with women, and the tragedy of loss—loss of love, loss of youth, and loss of certainty.

Probably no other theme possesses Fitzgerald so completely as that of the power of money. His maternal grandfather was Philip F. McQuillan, a successful businessman in St. Paul, Minnesota, who in 1877 left a considerable fortune to his five surviving children, the oldest of whom was Mollie McQuillan, Fitzgerald’s mother. After her marriage Mollie used her money to supplement the family income, which gave Scott the advantages of an upper-middle-class child; he took frequent trips with his mother and had a very comfortable early childhood. However, his father, Edward, was financially inept. Stephen Blaine, Amory’s father in
This Side of Paradise,
is strikingly similar to Fitzgerald’s. Strong on breeding but weak in business, Edward Fitzgerald lost his wicker furniture business, moved his family from St. Paul to Buffalo to Syracuse and back again, was fired from his sales position with Proctor and Gamble, and finally resorted to depending on his wife’s rich St. Paul relatives. In fact, as Bruccoli notes, his father’s firing from Proctor and Gamble in March 1908 was the most traumatic family crisis of Scott’s young life. Eleven years old, he overheard his mother talking about it on the phone. Afraid the family would go to the poorhouse, Scott gave back to his mother the quarter she had given him to go swimming (Bruccoli, p. 20). Many years later Fitzgerald remembered his father coming home that day as a “completely broken man” who was a “failure the rest of his days.” From then on as the Fitzgerald fortune declined, so did Scott’s prospects, and his childhood memories of that decline color his fiction with the pathos of the outsider denied a place at life’s table.

Amory Blaine’s fortunes parallel those of Fitzgerald, and Amory is the first of Fitzgerald’s heroes to find himself on the outside looking in. “Loss of money is not only the worst pain in itself, but it is the parent of all others,” declared English author Samuel Butler in his autobiographical novel
The Way of All Flesh
(1903); thus Amory Blaine’s eventual poverty brings about his later losses in social status and in love. Even though Amory is characterized as far wealthier than Fitzgerald was at birth, until Stephen Blaine’s death Amory has only the vaguest idea where his money comes from. After his father’s funeral, however, he takes his father’s ledger and goes through it carefully, noting that his father had made some very poor investments: “His father had devoted the previous year to several unfortunate gambles in oil. Very little of the oil had been burned, but Stephen Blaine had been rather badly singed” (p. 93). His family’s expenditures for 1906 had been $110,000, a massive sum for that age, and their holdings had decreased significantly. “Amory was shocked to discover the decrease in the number of bond holdings and the great drop in the income” in 1912 (p. 93). Later, when Amory’s mother begins putting money into railroad and streetcar bonds, the reader knows this spells doom for his financial future.

Fitzgerald, like Amory, became more fully aware of his financial and social inadequacies at Princeton, where he was an outsider at first and, as a Catholic and a graduate of a not-so-prestigious preparatory school, could not gain admittance to the inner circle. Likewise, Amory watches the wealthy “drawing unconsciously about them a barrier of the slightly less important but socially ambitious to protect them from the friendly, rather puzzled high-school element. From the moment he realized this, Amory resented social barriers as artificial distinctions made by the strong to bolster up their weak retainers and keep out the almost strong” (p. 41). Amory’s resentment of the rich is compounded by his desire for their luxurious and aesthetic lifestyle. His simultaneous longing and bitterness shows through most obviously in his affair with the wealthy Rosalind Connage. As Stephen Hahn remarks, “In Fitzgerald’s work there is a tragic contradiction between the beauty that wealth creates and the beauty that it simultaneously entraps and abstracts from life.... His constant theme is the tragedy of romantic love and, more generally, romantic aspirations of all kinds”
(“And She Be Fair,”
pp. 94-97). Rosalind, like a fly in amber, is trapped in that tragic contradiction: the “woman-as-beautiful-object.” She challenges Amory immediately when she opens their first conversation, by naming her price: “Oh, it’s not a corporation—it’s just ‘Rosalind, Unlimited.’ Fifty-one shares, name, good-will, and everything goes at $25,000 a year” (p. 162). At that time Amory is making a paltry thirty-five dollars a week, and although Rosalind does eventually come to care for him, her sense of financial preservation wins out, and she drops him for fear that she will be his “squaw, in some horrible place.” Rosalind’s only source of power is that of “woman-as-beautiful-object.” With no purchasing power of her own, she can afford only to be purchased and thus cannot risk playing her only hand, her beauty, on a low bid. Dawson Ryder might be boring, she claims, but is “floating in money” and would be a wiser choice. Unlike the romantic and unrealistic Amory, the young Rosalind has already learned the basic laws of supply and demand, and is a capitalist to the core.

Rosalind Connage is a fictionalized Ginevra King, the golden girl belonging to the moneyed aristocracy of the Chicago suburb of Lake Forest who threw Fitzgerald over for his lack of money while he was still at Princeton. Bruccoli notes that during Fitzgerald’s last visit to Ginevra, in August 1916 “it was pointedly remarked in Fitzgerald’s hearing that poor boys shouldn’t think of marrying rich girls” (p. 64). Fitzgerald’s affair with the girl had a traumatic impact on him, one he remembered for the rest of his life. He observed in 1938 that “in
This Side of Paradise
I wrote about a love affair that was still bleeding as fresh as the skin wound of a haemophile.” That wound is once again exposed in the portrait of Rosalind, the symbol of the glittering and magnificent life of the rich that conceals a dark underside of mendacity and deceit. As such, she is the literary predecessor of Fitzgerald’s later heroines, Gloria Gilbert in
The Beautiful and Damned
(1922) and Daisy Buchanan in
The Great Gatsby.

Amory’s fear of poverty is gradually realized and is matched by his repulsion for the ugly conditions to which the poor are condemned. Later in the book, after Amory’s gradual descent into indigence, he stands on a street corner in Manhattan and ponders what he’s seen in the city:

At this point he has an argument with himself during which he asks and answers several of his own questions. One of them is “Do you want a lot of money?” His answer is “No. I am merely afraid of being poor” (p. 239). In his fear and anger, he decides that he “detests poor people” and that “it’s essentially cleaner to be corrupt and rich than it is to be innocent and poor” (p. 238). Thomas Stavola remarks that “the deepest motivation ... for Amory’s hatred of the poor is that he is one of them ... for in America there is no identity without money, the commodity that guarantees social recognition and love”
(Scott Fitzgerald,
p. 102). Just as Rosalind prefigures Gloria Gilbert and Daisy Buchanan, the fearful and embittered Amory who prefers corruption to poverty can be seen as the genesis of the wealthy Jay Gatsby, who turns to illegal bonds and bootlegging rather than miss his chance for love. And we get an inkling of Anthony Patch in
The Beautiful and Damned,
who lives in a haze of alcohol and wild parties while waiting to inherit his grandfather’s millions, and perhaps a glimmer of the brilliant psychiatrist Dick Diver in
Tender Is the Night,
who sells his talent and finally his soul to marry for money. In the end, Fitzgerald’s penetrating observations of the rich reveal not how much, but how little, their money can buy for them.

Amory’s Princeton friends call him “Original Sin,” and he lives up to his name by seeing the devil in several guises, twice as a living person, and once as an aura. Since this devil appears only to Amory, the implication is that he is undergoing a moral struggle, and as Stephen Tanner notes, “the conflict between good and evil is explicit” (“The Devil and F. Scott Fitzgerald,” p. 67). This devil is associated with Dick Humbird, a charming, popular, and powerful Princeton undergraduate, who has died an ugly death in a drunk-driving car accident. The reader might be led to believe that the devil tempts those who, like Faust, lose their souls to gain wealth, status, and position. And since wealth and status are the only way to “get the girl,” there is a subtle association between the devil, women, and sexuality. Amory frequently equates his sexual feelings and experiences with evil, or with sightings of “the devil,” and he is sometimes repulsed, even terrified, by them; he eventually concludes that “the problem of evil had solidified ... into the problem of sex” (p. 259). The intricate connection between Amory’s sense of evil, sexuality, and his own identity is summed up by Sy Kahn, who writes that
“This Side of Paradise
is something of an allegory in which American Youth is caught between the forces of Good and Evil.... Evil is identified with sex: there the devil wields his greatest powers”
(“This Side of Paradise:
The Pageantry of Disillusion,” p. 53). Each of Amory’s three encounters with this imagined devil signifies that he is at a crisis point. The devil first appears to him when he is in a New York café with his friend Fred Sloane and two girls, and a middle-aged man dressed in a brown suit smiles at him. Later, when he and Sloane go to an apartment with the two girls and Amory decides to give in to his sexual impulses with the girl named Axia, the man he had seen in the café appears again: “There the man half sat, half leaned against a pile of pillows on the corner divan” (p. 104). Amory identifies him as the devil by his terrible, incongruous feet: “The feet were all wrong.” Terrified, Amory perceives that “the whole divan that held the man was alive ... like wriggling worms” (pp. 104-105). In his horror, Amory runs out of the hotel and into an alley.