Paying Homage to F. Scott Fitzgerald

“I don’t want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald defined a generation in American popular culture. His writing resonated in particular with affluent New Yorkers during a decade characterised by prosperity and hedonism. Although Fitzgerald’s third novel, The Great Gatsby, most acerbically captured the splendour of the Jazz Age of the 1920s, it is his debut, This Side of Paradise, which was his most earnest.

Through the character of Amory Blaine, Fitzgerald’s first foray into novel-writing took on a distinctive semi-autobiographical approach. Amory is born into a well-off Midwestern family and during his most formative years at Princeton, immerses himself among other like-minded young intellectuals who discuss, among other topics, the beauty of Wilde, Chesterton and Joyce. Amory falls in love with many young women, and it is the frankness with which he confronts these transformative scenarios which offers us the most sincere portrait of what the young Fitzgerald himself was like.

It is the novel’s style as a Bildungsroman (coming-of-age) story which appealed to me most. Flashes of Fitzgerald’s genius shine through as he depicts Amory as a floundering young intellectual, a boy saddled by the reality of youth as merely fleeting. That Fitzgerald astutely captured such existential dread as if a wise old man when in reality he wrote the novel during his early twenties, offers an insight into how brilliant he was intellectually. Patrick O’Donnell wonderfully noted in his introduction to the novel that Amory ‘is a nomadic figure, wandering from affair to affair, book to book, in search of both a relationship and a doctrine that will give him some access to “reality” in a time when the ground seems to be constantly shifting under him.’

This frenetic race-against-time culminates in the second part of the novel when Amory returns from Europe after serving in the Great War, to find ‘all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken’. It is this disillusionment that defines the concluding scenes of the novel. O’Donnell continues, ‘the novel is both significant in its own right as a portrait of a young man’s initiation into life, the chronicle of a generation, and as the site where Fitzgerald found his identity as an author.’

It is precisely the process Amory goes through from his intellectual awakening at Princeton to his spiritual awakening at war which embodies the essence of This Side of Paradise and makes it such a fabulous book for younger readers. Indeed, young people can read the novel and identify with Fitzgerald’s exploration of what it is to be a college student, but the author took this further, extrapolating the notion that by going to war, you can never come back; you are changed by the experience, you cannot be the same, you cannot re-enter the world that you left and it be the same. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that people recognised Fitzgerald as ‘the voice of a generation’ upon the publication of his debut in 1920.

After all, Fitzgerald’s own intellectual awakening contributed to the publication of his three other novels; The Beautiful and Damned (1922), The Great Gatsby (1925) and Tender Is the Night (1934). Although Fitzgerald put a lot of his own life into the three other finished novels, the level of frankness he achieved in conveying Amory’s hopeless usefulness was truly unique. The criticisms levelled at This Side of Paradise are of course not without merit, seeing as Fitzgerald distilled more of his genius in his three later novels. However, the debut novel reveals more than we could wish to have learnt about the young author, and much more than we learn about other era-defining novelists.

Today, although many readers would not emphatically recommend Fitzgerald’s debut, we must consider how widely well received the novel was and how quickly it propelled the young novelist into fame and affluence. It was its experimentation which garnered such widespread praise for Fitzgerald, as he demonstrated a striking balance between writing Amory from a third-person narrative, epistolary sections and even scenes written in the format of a play. Not only did Fitzgerald throw so much of himself into the story, he also brought the semi-autobiographical tale to life with such sections which I believe illustrated the complexities and even overwhelming elements of youth.

These different techniques worked superbly in demonstrating the drama of Amory’s life in a novel which actually lacked much incident. However, this was deliberate from that start for Fitzgerald. Edmund Wilson, Fitzgerald’s friend and literary mentor, a year above him at Princeton, said of the novel, ‘It is not really about anything; intellectually, it amounts to little more than a gesture - a gesture of infinite revolt.’ The balance achieved here by Fitzgerald must be savoured particularly when we consider that he never produced a work like this during the remainder of his career, cut short by his untimely death in 1940 at the age of forty-four.

My attitude to reading new authors has changed since my experience with Fitzgerald. I used to think that it was best to start off chronologically and work through a novelist’s career. However, having started Fitzgerald with The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night, I allowed myself to grow a fondness for the author and understand his style of writing before approaching his lesser known novels. I believe that I was therefore better prepared for This Side of Paradise than I would have been if it was my first Fitzgerald novel. I certainly believe that I enjoyed his debut much more having read his two iconic works than if I had read his debut first. Thus I can understand the criticisms of This Side of Paradise, but we must not take anything away from its beauty in our wider assessment of the truly remarkable Fitzgerald canon.

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