This Side of Paradise (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (42 page)

“Ever read any Oscar Wilde?” inquires d’Invilliers, the young poet, of Amory Blaine, our hero, who has been presented as a youngster of a somewhat literary turn. “No. Who wrote it?” answers Amory, and we refuse to believe that young Mr. Fitzgerald is not pulling our leg. Then, too, in spite of the bleak and jaded way in which the author sums up the content of college life, it is evident that he is by no means unimpressed with the sprightliness of conduct and conversation which he assigns to his undergraduate characters, though it is silly conversation and sillier conduct.

It is probably true that in some respects Fitzgerald has painted a faithful portrayal of the type of young man who may be described as the male flapper, but our objection lies in the fact that to our mind the type is not interesting. After all, the reviewer who has been through several seasons of tales about sub-debs cannot view with anything but horror the prospect of being treated to exhaustive studies of her brother and first cousins.

In making himself responsible for the descriptions of college pranks and larks the author has undertaken a task of enormous difficulty. Things done in a spirit of alcoholic exuberation must of necessity sound flat and unprofitable to the mature and cold, sober reader. When Fitzgerald writes, “The donor of the party having remained sober, Kerry and Amory accidentally dropped him down two flights of stairs, and called, shamefaced and penitent, at the infirmary all the following week,” he does scant justice to Kerry and Amory. After all, in the mood and at the moment it can hardly have seemed such a silly trick as it must appear to the reader in Fitzgerald’s laconic statement.

The thing that puzzled us most was the author’s description of the violent effect of the sex urge upon some of his young folk. On page 122, for instance, a chorus girl named Axia laid her blond head on Amory’s shoulder and the youth immediately rushed away in a frenzy of terror and suffered from hallucinations for forty-eight hours. The explanation was hidden from us. It did not sound altogether characteristic of Princeton.

There are occasional thrusts of shrewd observation and a few well turned sentences and phrases in This Side of Paradise. It is only fair to add that the book has received enthusiastic praise from most American reviewers. Fitzgerald has been hailed as among the most promising of our own authors. And it may be so, but we dissent. We think he will go no great distance until he has grown much simpler in expression. It seems to us that his is a style larded with fine writing. When we read, “It was like weakness in a good woman, or blood on satin; one of those terrible incongruities that shake little things in the back of the brain,” we cannot but feel that we are not yet grown out of the self-conscious stage which makes writing nothing more than a stunt.

—from the
New York Tribune
(April 11, 1920)

As an account of the career of a boy through preparatory school, Princeton, love and life, “This Side of Paradise” may not be a great book. Frankly, I don’t know a great book when I see one. I have to wait and find out what other people think about it. But in spite of its immaturity, its ingenuousness and its many false notes, it is something
new,
and for this alone Mr. Fitzgerald deserves to a crown of something very expensive. He tells a story in a new way, without regard to rules or convention, and it is an interesting story. In these days when any one can (and does) turn out a book which has been done hundreds of times before and bids fair to be done hundreds of times again, simply by following Stevenson’s advice and playing “the sedulous ape” to successful predecessors, I should be inclined to hail as a genius any twenty-three-year-old author who can think up something new and say it in a new way so that it will be interesting to a great many people.

—from the
New York Morning World
(April 21, 1920)

Small wonder
[This Side of Paradise]
has taken the bookstalls by storm, that it has been hailed as a truly American novel, bewildering, brilliant. The story is a little slice carved out of real life, running over with youth and jazz and sentiment and romance and virile American humor—everything in short that is dear to a Princeton man (Mr. Fitzgerald himself), or a Yale man, or a Harvard man, or just any kind of man. The author calls it a book about flappers for philosophers, which amounts to the same thing.... To read
This Side of Paradise
once is to read it twice and quote it endlessly.

—from the
Harvard Crimson
(May 1, 1920)

The best American novel that I have seen of late is also the product of a neophyte, to wit, F. Scott Fitzgerald.... In “This Side of Paradise” he offers a truly amazing first novel—original in structure, extremely sophisticated in manner, and adorned with a brilliancy that is as rare in American writing as honesty is in American state-craft.... The first half of the story is far better than the second half. It is not that Fitzgerald’s manner runs thin, but that his hero begins to elude him. What, after such a youth, is to be done with the fellow ? The author’s solution is anything but felicitous. He simply drops his Amory Blaine as Mark Twain dropped Huckleberry Finn, but for a less cogent reason. But down to and including the episode of the love affair with Rosalind the thing is capital, especially the first chapters. Not since Frank Norris’s day has there been a more adept slapping in of preliminaries.

—from
Smart Set
(August 1920)

It has been said by a celebrated person that to meet F. Scott Fitzgerald is to think of a stupid old woman with whom someone has left a diamond; she is extremely proud of the diamond and shows it to everyone who comes by, and everybody is surprised that such an ignorant old woman should possess so valuable a jewel; for in nothing does she appear so stupid as in the remarks she makes about the diamond.

The person who invented this simile did not know Scott Fitzgerald very well and can have seen him only, I think, in particularly uninteresting moods. The reader must not suppose that there is any literal truth in the image. Scott is no old woman, but a very good-looking young man, and not in the least stupid, but exceedingly entertaining. But there is, nonetheless, a symbolic truth in the description quoted above: it is true that Fitzgerald has been left with a jewel which he doesn’t quite know what to do with. For he has been given imagination without intellectual control of it; he has been given a desire for beauty without an aesthetic ideal; and he has been given a gift for expression without many ideas to express.

—from the
Literary Spotlight
(1924)

1. Is Fitzgerald’s depiction of women in
This Side of Paradise
sexist? If so, in what way?

2. Why are relations between the sexes so difficult and unsatisfying in this novel?

3. Are the attitudes, values, mind-sets, and ambitions depicted in this novel still current? Does the ethos of the “Jazz Age” seem familiar to you?

4. Suppose you were Amory’s slightly older and much wiser cousin. What advice would you give him?

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