This Side of Paradise

A novel built from pieces

The book comes in two halves, with a short Interlude for the war between them: Book One is called 'The Romantic Egotist,' Book Two 'The Education of a Personage.' Inside each half the chapters break into short titled episodes rather than running straight through, and the writing keeps stopping to try another form. One whole chapter, 'The Débutante,' is written as a stage play, stage directions and all, so Rosalind Connage first appears in a script rather than a scene. Elsewhere there are poems, letters, and reading lists. Two evenings of boarding-school argument go into defining a social type Amory and a friend name the 'slicker': clever about social values, well dressed, and pretending that dress does not matter. And in one episode a pale man wearing pointed medieval shoes, whose feet strike Amory as unbearably wrong, follows him out of a New York party. The narration reports this as something that happens.

There is a practical reason for the patchwork. The novel absorbed nearly everything F. Scott Fitzgerald had written by the age of twenty-three, including passages salvaged from The Romantic Egotist, the earlier version Charles Scribner's Sons turned down in 1918. It also suits the subject. A young man who keeps trying out new versions of himself is being described by a book that keeps trying out new forms.

A coming-of-age novel in which Amory mostly loses things

This is a coming-of-age novel, a bildungsroman to use the standard term, and it describes its own kind from the inside. In the senior-year chapters Amory invents a name for the biographical novels his Princeton friends are passing around: 'quest' books, in which a well-armed young hero sets out to push himself ahead and then discovers 'that there might be a more magnificent use' for his advantages. This Side of Paradise is one of them, with a difference. Amory's education does not give him anything. It takes things away, one at a time: the family money, his standing in the eating clubs, Rosalind Connage, and each pose in turn. The last line claims the only thing he has left. 'I know myself,' he cried, 'but that is all.'

The story is told in the third person, and the narrator is not neutral about Amory. He stays close to Amory and grades him as the book goes on. 'It was always the becoming he dreamed of, never the being' is the narrator's judgment, not anything Amory would say about himself. That combination, romantic material described by a voice that already sees through it, is what Fitzgerald carried into his later books. It lasted longer than the borrowed poems or the chapter written as a play.

Money, clubs, and the fear of poverty

Class is the novel's constant subject, and Princeton runs on it: the eating clubs along Prospect Avenue that decide who eats with whom, the campaigns for class office, the daily sorting of who counts. Amory arrives already knowing how the system works and meaning to win at it. He chose the university, the narrator reports, for 'its alluring reputation as the pleasantest country club in America.'

In the second half, money starts taking things back. His mother's fortune shrinks under bad management. Rosalind Connage breaks off the engagement because Amory is poor, and becomes engaged to a rich man instead. In the final chapter a large car picks Amory up as he walks along the road, and he spends the ride arguing socialism at its owner, by his own admission for the first time in his life.

Poverty may have been beautiful once, but it’s rotten now. It’s the ugliest thing in the world. It’s essentially cleaner to be corrupt and rich than it is to be innocent and poor.

His complaint comes down to one thing: 'I’m sick of a system where the richest man gets the most beautiful girl if he wants her, where the artist without an income has to sell his talents to a button manufacturer.'

The book's two key words: personality and personage

Both words come from Monsignor Darcy, the Catholic priest who advises Amory from boyhood onward. Visiting him at the lowest point of his Princeton years, Darcy separates the two. A personality, he says, 'is what you thought you were'; a personage 'gathers. He is never thought of apart from what he’s done.' Book Two is named after the distinction, and the plot works through it, taking away one borrowed identity after another: the prep-school social operator, the campus literary man, the army officer, the advertising man, the fiancé.

What he is left with at the end is small and exact. At Monsignor Darcy's funeral, watching the people who had relied on the priest, Amory works out what he has wanted all along: 'not to be admired, as he had feared; not to be loved, as he had made himself believe; but to be necessary to people, to be indispensable.' It is as close as the book lets him come to knowing who he is.

Kisses and the new generation

The romance chapters shocked readers in 1920 because they were accurate. 'None of the Victorian mothers—and most of the mothers were Victorian—had any idea how casually their daughters were accustomed to be kissed,' the narrator announces, and then sets down the new rules in detail: the petting party, where the kissing is the entertainment, and the debutante who keeps count of the men she has kissed.

Four women matter, in this order: Isabelle Borgé, the debutante of Book One; Clara Page, his widowed third cousin, who turns down his proposal; Rosalind Connage, who ends the engagement over money; and Eleanor Savage, the last and the wildest, in the Maryland chapters.

On the last page the loss stops being Amory's alone and becomes his whole generation's, in the sentence the book is remembered for: a new generation 'grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken....' Quoted by itself, it reads as a verdict on the 1920s. In the novel it is simply the sum of what one young man has lost.

Where the novel takes place

Princeton holds the center of the book: the tables at the Nassau Inn, the eating clubs on Prospect Avenue, and the 'spires and towers' the prose keeps coming back to. The story ends on the road that leads there. Around it, the novel moves through:

• Minneapolis — two years of Midwestern boyhood, and a first kiss at a children's party given by a girl named Myra St. Claire
• St. Regis' — the Connecticut boarding school where he is disliked for a year, then accepted once he makes the football team
• Princeton — the courtyards, the touring musical put on by the student Triangle Club, the reading he does with Tom D'Invilliers, and the class the war empties out
• New York — his advertising job, the Connage family's house on Sixty-eighth Street, and the chapter written as a stage play
• Maryland — the weeks with Eleanor Savage, set in Ramilly County, which Fitzgerald invented
• Atlantic City — the boardwalk at his lowest point, and a hotel-room scandal Amory takes the blame for to protect a friend
• The road back — broke and on foot toward Princeton, where the argument in the car and the last line of the novel happen

How it was published, and what the reviewers said

Charles Scribner's Sons published the novel on March 26, 1920, in a first printing of 3,000 copies that sold out in three days. Twelve printings across 1920 and 1921 put 49,075 copies in print. Those figures come from Matthew J. Bruccoli, the scholar who compiled Fitzgerald's bibliography. The first edition is a dark blue cloth volume of 305 pages, and its copyright page reads 'Published April, 1920,' although the book had gone on sale in March.

The critic H. L. Mencken, writing in The Smart Set that August, called it 'the best American novel that I have seen of late.' The New York Times of May 9, 1920 judged it, as a picture of college men, 'as nearly perfect as such a work could be.' The sharpest criticism came from a friend. Edmund Wilson, who knew Fitzgerald at Princeton and became one of the leading American critics of the century, wrote in a later essay that it was 'one of the most illiterate books of any merit ever published,' while allowing in the same essay that 'it does not fail to live.'

Fitzgerald's life inside the novel

The novel is dedicated 'To SIGOURNEY FAY.' Monsignor Sigourney Webster Fay was a priest who had converted to Catholicism, and he is the model for Monsignor Darcy. Fitzgerald's biographers record that Fay's real letters, and a poem he had written, went into the novel almost word for word. Fay died in January 1919, the year Fitzgerald rewrote the book, and Darcy's death was written into the final chapter within months of the real one.

• Amory Blaine — Fitzgerald himself, with his own Princeton years rearranged
• Isabelle Borgé — Ginevra King, the debutante from Lake Forest, Illinois, whom Fitzgerald courted before he met Zelda Sayre; James L. W. West III's book The Perfect Hour, built from her diary and letters, traces the portrait
• Rosalind Connage — Zelda Sayre, in part. She broke their engagement in the summer of 1919 because he had no prospects, and Fitzgerald reworked the character to resemble her, then told her he had
• Thomas Parke D'Invilliers — John Peale Bishop, Princeton class of 1917 and editor of the college magazine, the Nassau Literary Magazine
• Burne Holiday — Henry Strater, a Princeton classmate and pacifist who campaigned against the war

These are starting points rather than portraits. The novel changes names, timing and outcomes freely.