Note: My review of Lauren Groff’s new novel The Vaster Wilds for Chicago Review of Books is online and available to read here.
Fitzgerald’s first novel is a lively mess from which fine bittersweet things can be picked out. (Imagine candied walnuts in a too multifarious salad.) He would call it “a somewhat edited history of me and my imagination”; it’s a Künstlerroman which made its artist famous, getting him out of debt and on his way to wealthy. The hero, announced in Book One as “The Romantic Egotist”, is Amory Blaine, born in 1896 to Stephen and Beatrice. After years of tutoring and road trips with his glamorous mother, he stays with an aunt and uncle in Minneapolis, then attends St. Regis’ in Connecticut, and goes on to Princeton. After footballing glory at St. Regis’ Amory hopes for similar distinction at university, but a failed math exam costs him eligibility, and he turns to literature. There is a relationship with an Isabella Borgé, whom he meets on Christmas break, and an infatuation with Clara Page, a widowed older cousin. The Interlude (May, 1917—February, 1919) takes Amory quickly through his time in the 171st Infantry. Book Two begins with the courting of Rosalind Connage in New York, during which Amory also begins working for an advertising agency. The relationship is not to last as Rosalind seeks a wealthier man, and Amory is distraught. After a post-breakup bender that ends just as Prohibition begins, he has a lesser love in Maryland, Eleanor Savage, and when he makes a sacrifice for Rosalind’s brother Alec, getting him out of trouble in Atlantic City, Amory ruins his name. He hitchhikes from New York, has a long talk about socialism with the owner of the car, and ends with a nighttime walk back at Princeton.
Fitzgerald’s first chapter, “Amory, Son of Beatrice”, is his best. The fascinating Mrs. Blaine, raised partly on her father’s estate by Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, also in Rome, and London, has an “exquisitely modulated” voice and “hands as facile as Bernhardt’s”. She drinks, rises late, and teaches Amory to think himself better than his Midwestern peers. She is a Celtic Catholic, but “discovering that priests were infinitely more attentive when she was in the process of losing or regaining faith in Mother Church, she maintained an enchantingly wavering attitude.” Blaine is to be guided by a former lover of hers who has since taken orders and is now a Monsignor Darcy in upstate New York. She soon has a nervous breakdown, leaving Amory in Minneapolis, and she will certainly be missed. So, mental trouble shows itself and quickly recedes from the story (leaving however a vague foreboding that Amory will inherit his share), and the arch comedy comes forward. There are strong hints of Mark Twain in Fitzgerald’s affectionate satire of aspiring youth: thirteen year old Amory is invited by Myra St. Clair to her bobbing party, and his considered RSVP reports him “charm and inchanted indeed to present my compliments on next Thursday evening.” Amory is disappointed that the St. Claires’ butler is not a cockney, but pleased by Myra and the ambience of the well-chosen Minnehaha Club, which will be the setting of a future conquest. He and Myra have a moment alone outside the club, by the brilliant snow, with great anticipation in the chill air. “‘Pale moons like that one’—Amory made a vague gesture—‘make people mysterieuse’” Fitzgerald somehow brings back the exhilarating passages of boyhood with all their intensity and seeming significance, while showing the aspect of the ridiculous. One wishes his Amory didn’t get to Princeton so quickly, and that we might have had more than a few lines given to such episodes as his challenge to the French teacher Mr. Reardon, or the St. Regis’ vs. Groton football game.
At Princeton Amory finds what he calls a “glittering caste system”, which despite its name can actually be climbed, in Amory’s case using theatre, and football, and a place on the board at the Daily Princetonian. His literary interests are encouraged by his friendship with young poet Tom D’Invilliers, and suddenly feeling he has read nothing for years, he gets to work on “Shaw, Chesterton, Barrie, Pinero, Yeats, Synge, Ernest Dowson, Arthur Symons, Keats, Sudermann, Robert Hugh Benson, The Savoy Operas”. (Fitzgerald would quip that This Side of Paradise was “a romance and a reading list”; perhaps the most insightful of autobiographical novels would be just that list, nested in some minimal narrative. The generous dispensation of literary references throughout the novel, including nine lines of Swinburne inspired by a drive to Deal Beach, could be thought of in analogy to a young mathematician showing his work when writing a very elaborate problem.) The consequence of the literal lists like the one above is that as Synges and Sudermanns slide into obscurity, the novel becomes distinctly useful as documentation of literary fashions, first presumably dated, and then antique. The muse may already be calling Amory to the desk in his first two years at Princeton, but his priorities are elsewhere. He’s set up for an introduction at the Minnehaha Club to one Isabella Borgé, a beauty from Baltimore given to “very strong, if very transient emotions. . . .” Fitzgerald’s forecasting (rain guaranteed), including that ludicrous ellipsis, is a little irritating, but once he gets them alone together in the den upstairs, he returns to the amusing courting satire, finding something new now that Amory is grown up. A “P.D.” (popular daughter) like Isabelle has a different kind of list to recite, that of the boys she “went with” in Baltimore, whose names evoke red Stutz automobiles and athletic achievement. “Isabelle strung the names into a fabrication of gayety that would have dazzled a Viennese nobleman. Such is the power of young contralto voices on sink-down sofas.” After some dancing at Princeton, luncheon in New York, and a visit to the Borgés’ summer place on Long Island, chapter two ends with their first kiss which is also the “crest of his young egotism”.
On the other side of that hill is disillusionment, the death of the father, and even a sight of the devil, all within Chapter 3, “The Egotist Considers”. Amory’s exquisite early vanity is the best thing on offer in This Side of Paradise; he cannot recover it, and the novel cannot quite recover with its more mature moods and preoccupations. Beyond the malapropisms somehow uncorrected and then catalogued by Fitzgerald’s wonderfully honest friend Edmund Wilson (“flare” for flair, “Juvenalia” for juvenilia), there are problems with metaphors, more egregious than they had been in the first two chapters, like sophomore McDowell’s “flaccid camaraderie in the droop of the cigarette from his pale lips”, or the personality of the student agitator Burne, that “root” from which “had blossomed the energy that he was now trying to orient with progress”. Things get further confused because Fitzgerald has a lot of formal ideas he wants to get into his first novel. The wartime Interlude is almost entirely epistolary, and Book Two starts as a play, but one with very long stage directions which are really novelistic narration, as Rosalind and her family are being introduced. There are many more poems and pieces of poems in Book Two, Amory’s musings are sometimes split into “Question” and “Answer”, and there is even a paragraph verging on stream of consciousness: “What a dirty river—want to go down there and see if it’s dirty—French rivers all brown or black, so were Southern rivers.” Fitzgerald wrote a first draft while waiting for an army commission, thinking it might well be his first and last novel, and he included poems, stories, and even parts of plays he had written in college. The novel was apparently cobbled together before substantial revisions gave it a little more shape and changed some of the characters’ names, and this is strangely fortunate in that the formal variety mitigates a couple problems, distracting us from the repetitiousness of the failed romances (four, or maybe three plus a hypothetical one), and from how little Amory has to do after graduating Princeton. What he must do, for Fitzgerald’s purposes, is learn, and to use Monsignor Darcy’s typology, change from a mere “personality”, with his special tastes and his antics, to a “personage”, one who can “give people a sense of security” as did that second father. Amory’s basic weakness is what his name suggests, and he ends the novel panged with memories of Rosalind, but it’s clear he will not be wrecked by romance again. The vanity remains, but its visions are more dignified now than the restaurant after the theater or the charmed girl close by on the loveseat: he fancies that “in a hundred years he would like having young people speculate as to whether his eyes were brown or blue, and he hoped quite passionately that his grave would have about it an air of many, many years ago.”