This Side of Paradise (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (41 page)

“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.”

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 blessing 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.

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.

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:

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:

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.

[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 verisimilitude. 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)

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.