This Side of Paradise (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (3 page)

With the soul of a poet, the ear of a musician, and a psyche inextricably intertwined with that of his culture, F. Scott Fitzgerald was perhaps the last true voice of the romantic American spirit. And in all instances, he sought beyond the constraints of cultural mores and literary conventions to create a body of work that bespeaks its ethos.
This Side of Paradise
(1920) was Fitzgerald’s first novel, the work that made him the voice of post-World War I America, “the Jazz Age.” The Jazz Age was not just a drastic change in the culture; it was a new dimension in consciousness. During the 1910s and 1920s America underwent a massive paradigm shift, a transition from an era of smug Victorian conformity and certainty to one of confusion and ambiguity called “modernism.” World War I had accelerated the velocity of this change, and Fitzgerald expresses this transition in attitudes early in his 1917 play
The Debutante
when flapper Helen Halcyon with her cigarettes and silver flask is asked by her father if she is ready to fit into the wide, wide world, and she replies, “No daddy, just taking a more licensed view of it.” The typical 1920s flapper, Helen doesn’t want to “fit in” to the rigid roles prescribed for her by the Victorian world, but to live a more independent lifestyle based on her own desires, and to experience greater social and sexual freedom. Her disdain for convention is a symptom of the shifting cultural mores of the Jazz Age.

It is ironic that Fitzgerald’s first novel is the one for which he achieved the most acclaim, praise from which he never recovered. Perhaps its reception was the result of the novel’s sense of anticipation for the age to come. Written between 1917 and 1919 and published on March 26, 1920,
This Side of Paradise
actually preceded the Jazz Age, an era that Fitzgerald claimed lasted from May Day 1919 to October 1929, when the stock market crashed. Yet the novel is a sensitive barometer of the shifting social climate. Brian Way remarks that “all Fitzgerald’s best writing as a historian of manners is retrospective,” and even though
The Great Gatsby
(1925) and
Tender Is the Night
(1934) both look back on previous summers and previous years, “for a short time at the beginning of his career, Fitzgerald anticipated social change ... he achieved the kind of popularity which depends upon a writer’s being fractionally ahead of his time” (Way,
F. Scott Fitzgerald and the Art of Social Fiction,
p. 62; see “For Further Reading”).

This Side of Paradise
might have been ahead of its time partly because it examines and rejects the romantic idealism of the Victorian past and reluctantly embraces the troubling uncertainties of the future. It reveals an American culture that is economically on the ascendant but that is psychically ambivalent. World War I had finally ended in November 1918, and the “war to end all wars” had given the nation a euphoric sense of its own power. The stock market was booming, and thousands were getting rich overnight. Many felt the United States had emerged from the war relatively unscathed, having suffered fewer deaths than France, Germany, or Great Britain, and that it was now the greatest nation on earth. But at the same time Americans were troubled by a sense of unease: The trenches in France had demonstrated the brutality of war, and death was on a scale so massive it was incomprehensible. How had the culture, indeed the whole world order, failed so cataclysmically? The war had created a tectonic shift in human consciousness. Paul Fussell comments in
The Great War and Modern Memory
on the change that occurred between the start of the war in 1914 and its end in 1918: “Out of the world of summer 1914, marched a unique generation. It believed in Progress and Art and in no way doubted the benignity even of technology. The word
machine
was not yet coupled with the word
gun”
(Fussell, p. 24). The savage and absurd deaths of 10 million were a result of this new technology of killing, which introduced the “civilized” nations to artillery, air power, poison gas, and unprecedented civilian casualties. Ezra Pound decried the chaos of the war in his poem “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley” (1920): “There died a myriad, ... For an old bitch gone in the teeth, For a botched civilization,” and T. S. Eliot wrote that the stable world view of the nineteenth century could not accord with “the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history.”

Much like the rebellious youth of the 1960s during the Vietnam War, the young people of the 1920s questioned the absurdity of this “Great War,” the value system of a civilization that had created it, and the beliefs of their elders who had supported it. Many of them rejected what they regarded as a pretentious, hypocritical, and outmoded lifestyle and began to live for the moment. The “new women” of the post-war period began smoking and drinking in public, applying rouge, wearing shorter skirts, and speaking their minds. They were becoming more numerous in the post-war workforce, were gaining economic independence, and by 1920 would get the right to vote with the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. No longer the proper Victorian maid with her beau and her chaperone in the tearoom, the new woman was now “the flapper” and “the slicker” in the “speakeasy,”
sans
chaperone. Meanwhile, a sense of hedonistic revelry infected the ballrooms and nightclubs, where dances like the Charleston and the Black Bottom replaced the more sedate and conventional waltzes. Jazz music was popular and was becoming even more so by way of the Graphophone (an early phonograph) and the radio, early accompaniments to what Fitzgerald would call “the gaudiest spree in history.” Appalled by the uninhibited carousing, reactionaries mandated prohibition in early 1920 with the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment but were met with a populace drinking all the more, even if it was bootlegged liquor or grain alcohol. As Matthew J. Bruccoli notes, “Drinking increased among people for whom defying the bluenose Prohibitionists was a gesture of intellectual respectability”
(Some Sort of Epic Grandeur,
p. 131).

Amory Blaine, the young protagonist in
This Side of Paradise,
tries to make sense of this social transmutation, and is amused and slightly shocked when he sees “girls doing things that even in his memory would have been impossible: eating three-o‘clock, after-dance suppers in impossible cafés” while their Victorian mothers had no “idea how casually their daughters were accustomed to be kissed” (p. 55). Many factors, both social and technological, had contributed to this “kissing” phenomenon, not the least of which was the rise of the automobile. By 1917, approximately 2 million autos were in use in the United States, some of them electric, like the one owned by Amory’s mother, Beatrice O’Hara Blaine. New words like
parking
(during which
petting
and
necking
took place) and
jaywalking
reflected the automobile’s influence on the language, and petting
became
a buzzword for the era. Indeed, Fitzgerald’s generous use of the term in
This Side of Paradise
further escalated the novel into iconic status as a handbook of modern morals. Fitzgerald remarked that the automobile was the start of the “petting revolution” that swept the youth of the era: “As far back as 1915 the un-chaperoned young people of the smaller cities had discovered the mobile privacy of that automobile given to young Bill at sixteen to make him ‘self-reliant’ ” (“Echoes of the Jazz Age,” p. 14). While the “petting scene” in
This Side of Paradise
is very tame by today’s standards, it depicts a reckless new kind of courting behavior for young couples of the 1920s and implies that “petting” was what everybody else their age was doing, in part to rebel against the buttoned-up propriety of their elders. It also assures the young that they are in a class by themselves, entitled to their ideas, opinions, and identities. Fitzgerald places them in Manhattan bars and restaurants, at the seaside and in the country, riding in cars and drinking excessively, quarreling, joking, and agonizing over sex and society, economics and war, literature, philosophy, and politics. For the first time in American literature, there was an identifiable “youth culture,” a term that described the habits of a distinct group claiming its place in the landscape of American fiction. While Fitzgerald had not created this new group, he had defined it. And its overwhelming energy, as captured by Fitzgerald, is the key to the power and charm of
This Side of Paradise.
In its pages, readers relive the pains, pleasures, and uncertainties of being young in the 1920s. Much as television, film, and radio do for the youth of today,
This Side of Paradise
gave the youth of the 1920s a mirror with which to view themselves and to externalize the confusion they were feeling while growing up in chaotic times. This is perhaps why the work was so astonishingly successful with the young, and why it sold more than 50,000 copies the first year alone. It spoke to them, embraced them, and said, “This is us. This is who we are, and we are in this together. This roller coaster culture has us all in its grip.” Even if the rest of the country was suffering from an identity crisis, the young could find comfort in knowing they were understood and acknowledged in the pages of the book.

“The Romantic Egotist,” the title of book one, was the original title for the first version of
This Side of Paradise,
which Fitzgerald began writing in 1917 when he was twenty-one years old. He had worn out his welcome at Princeton by then, having spent little time on academics and almost all of it writing scripts and lyrics for the Triangle Club, performing in light musicals, and trying to “fit in” with the snobbish Princeton social elite. Frustrated with the effort, he gave up on a degree, enlisted in the army in October 1917, and was sent to the military training camp at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. There, convinced that he would be killed in the war, and wanting to leave some evidence of his talent behind, he began writing his novel during study periods and over long weekends in the officer’s club. Bruccoli notes that Fitzgerald was a poor soldier and considered the army an impediment to his writing. He got leave in February 1918 and returned to Princeton to the Cottage Club (the social “eating club” to which he belonged, much like one of today’s fraternities), where he completed his novel and sent it to Anglo-Irish author and mentor Shane Leslie, who in turn sent it to Charles Scribner’s Sons.

In June 1918 Fitzgerald was sent to Camp Sheridan near Montgomery, Alabama, where he met eighteen-year-old Zelda Sayre and fell in love. In August of that year Scribner’s rejected “The Romantic Egotist” claiming, “The story does not seem to us to work up to a conclusion,” and “Neither the hero’s career nor his character are shown to be brought to any stage which justifies an ending” (West,
The Making of This
Side of Paradise, p. 73). Fitzgerald revised it and sent it back, only to have the revision rejected again in October 1918. By then he was desperate for Zelda to marry him, but she was reluctant because of his instability and his questionable finances. After the war ended, he was finally discharged from the army, never having seen active service. Eager for economic and literary success, he returned to his birthplace, St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1919. There he holed up on the top floor of his parents’ house, lived on Coke and cigarettes, and wrote steadily during what he later termed “a long summer of despair” in the hope that a published novel would win him the hand of Zelda Sayre. And it paid off. The work was published in 1920 with enormous success. Fitzgerald had spent two years writing and revising
This Side of Paradise
before it was accepted for publication.

The final version of the novel leaves much to be desired for the reader who is looking for a straightforward plot and a focused narration. As James L. W. West remarks in the introduction to the Cambridge Edition of
This Side of Paradise,
“Its structure is haphazard, its writing uneven, and its characters inconsistent” because Fitzgerald took a great body of his own writing—short stories, poems, sketches, a one-act play, and parts of a previous attempt at a novel—to fashion his narrative (p. xiii). Furthermore, some of the episodes are made up of stories written over a considerable period of time, which accounts for the differences in tone and the lack of unity in the narrative.

Fitzgerald is the omniscient, non-participant, third-person narrator, narrating the actions, thoughts, and feelings of the central character, Amory Blaine. Although the narration is consistent through book one, the interlude section inserted between books one and two consists only of two letters, much of them poetry, and the reader is left to infer from their addresses and content that Amory has gone off to war in France. Fitzgerald writes chapter one of book two, entitled “The Débutante,” as a short play, narrating it from an objective or dramatic point of view. This crucial episode involves Amory’s experience with Rosalind, which is the crux of his later heartbreak, but it is only in the following chapter, “Experiments in Convalescence,” that readers understand the depths of Amory’s despair. Fitzgerald switches back to third-person omniscient narration, and we realize that Amory’s alcoholic binges are the result of his break-up with Rosalind. Nevertheless, Fitzgerald overcomes the momentary confusion of his narrative with his lively style and vivid observation, and engages his readers with his story. Ironically, this very lack of unity and combination of styles was considered avant-garde for its time. As Bruccoli notes,
This Side of Paradise
“was received in 1920 as an iconoclastic social document—even a testament of revolt. Surprisingly, it was regarded as an experimental or innovative narrative because of the mixture of styles and the inclusion of plays and verse” (p. 117).

Fitzgerald’s intent in writing the book, in spite of its haphazard structure, was clear to him from the beginning. He wrote in his manuscript: “I’m trying to set down the story part of my generation in America and put myself in the middle as a sort of observer and conscious factor” (Bruccoli, p. 80). Fitzgerald’s romantic idea is that the thoughts and feelings of the central character as a “sort of observer and conscious factor” are of paramount importance, and that the truth of a thing is measured by one’s depth of feeling about it. The concept of the primary importance of individual consciousness, emerging as a key tenet in modernist texts of the time, was influenced by Ezra Pound’s work in the magazine
The Egoist
and by popular Freudian psychology. The technique of narrating a period of confusion and maturation through a single consciousness is evident in the work of several of Fitzgerald’s contemporaries: James Joyce’s
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
(1916), Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time (1924), and Virginia Woolf’s
To the Lighthouse
(1927). It appears later in such other works as J. D. Salinger’s
The Catcher in the Rye
(1951) and
Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen
(1972), by Alix Kates Shulman.