Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.
ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THE NOVELS AND STORIES OF F. SCOTT FITZGERALD – PART ONE, F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise
There is a canonical author who worried me for a long time. I had read a few of his works but had never read my way systematically through all his works, and I was therefore worried that I had perhaps misjudged him and had a superficial understanding of him. Complicating matters was the fact that his life story is as well-known as his literary work. Indeed many people think they know all there is to know about this writer because they have been told that he was at his peak in the so-called “roaring twenties”, that he invented the term “the Jazz Age”, that he had a spectacularly unstable marriage, eventually succumbed to alcoholism, declined as a writer, turned out much hack-work in his later years, and died when he was only in his early forties. The “legend” of the man has almost overshadowed his work.
I am of course referring to Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (1896-1940), who signed himself F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Confession of my reading history: I had read his best-known novel The Great Gatsby when I was a teenager. Who hasn’t? It often appears as a set text in high schools. Oddly enough I had also read his unfinished novel The Last Tycoon, but for a very pragmatic reason. I was a film reviewer in 1976 when the film version of The Last Tycoon came out, and I wanted to compare film with novel when I wrote my newspaper review. I’d also read some of Fitzgerald’s short-stories and essays (“The Diamond as Big as the Ritz” etc.). But that was my full acquaintance with F. Scott Fitzgerald.
So, in the last few months, I sat down and read my way through all five of Fitzgerald’s novels in sequence and followed this up by reading some of his shorter works. My findings are what I will torture you with in the next six or seven postings.
*. *. *. *. *. *. *. *. *. *. *. *. *. *. *. *. *. *. *. *
I have rarely read a novel by an esteemed novelist that is as badly organised, disorderly, messy, repetitive, sophomoric and uncertain of style as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s first novel This Side of Paradise. I am also still bemused that such a novel at once became a major bestseller and immediately made Fitzgerald a celebrity. I will get onto these matters later in this review. But before I do, I will tell an anecdote which will at first seem totally irrelevant to you.
When I was a teenager, I had to spend four terms (a year and a third) in a boarding school, because my parents had gone overseas and my siblings (all of them older than me) had already left home. I was not used to the boarding school ethos and didn’t particularly enjoy it. Up to that time I had been a proud “day boy”, cycling to and from school every day. In this alien environment, I sought out books that I could bury my head in, as a form of escapism. One “free” day, when we were allowed to go into Auckland Central, I discovered in a bookshop a big, fat paperback – about 700 pages in length - in which I became immersed. It was Compton Mackenzie’s Sinister Street, originally published in two parts in 1913 and 1914. It was a Bildungsroman, that is, the story of a young man growing through adolescence to adult maturity. In its day Sinister Street was regarded as scandalous because its protagonist, Michael Fane, and his sister were the illegitimate offspring of an aristocrat. Michael Fane studies at Oxford and revels in its “dreaming spires”. He falls in love with a young woman whom he tries to rescue from prostitution, but he fails. He goes through an intense religious experience and by the end of the novel he seems destined to become a Catholic priest. The language was often lush and romantic, idealistic, crammed with descriptions of place and mood, and just the sort of thing I could happily get lost in. I’m pretty sure that if I were to read it now I would find it melodramatic, overwrought, over-the-top, filled with purple prose and improbable dialogue, and altogether badly dated… but it served my purpose when I was a teenager.
So what has all this to do with F. Scott Fitzgerald’s first novel? Simple. Fitzgerald read and loved Sinister Street and in many ways his debut novel was inspired by it. Compton Mackenzie was one of his literary idols, and Fitzgerald followed his path by writing a Bildungsroman. The title This Side of Paradise came from a poem by Rupert Brooke, another of Fitzgerald’s literary idols. I know these things because I read This Side of Paradise in the very-annotated Cambridge Edition, which also gave me a detailed account of the gestation of the novel.
To put it briefly, it goes like this: Fitzgerald had been an indifferent student at Princeton, more involved in writing comedy shows for the university’s amateur performances than sticking to his study. He left the university without a degree. In 1917, when he was 21, he began writing the first version of what would later become This Side of Paradise, which he originally called The Romantic Egotist. It was written in the first-person. The publisher he chose, Scribner, turn it down but encouraged him to re-write it. In 1918 – during the First World War - he enlisted in the army, but never saw action overseas as the war ended before he could be involved. However at the military camp down South where he was trained, he met and fell in love with Zelda Sayre, usually designated by critics as “a Southern belle”. They got engaged, but she broke the engagement fearing that he wasn’t wealthy enough to support her. He went back to his parents’ home (in St. Paul in the Middle-West) and diligently re-wrote his novel hoping that he would win literary fame and become more acceptable to Zelda. The novel was now told in the third-person. A second time Scribner turned it down, but Scribner’s best-known reader Maxwell Perkins was more encouraging and said the novel would be publishable if only Fitzgerald could come up with a satisfactory ending. As it stood, the novel seemed to go nowhere. Fitzgerald changed the novel’s ending a little and – third time lucky – Scribner published it and immediately it was the best-seller of 1920. Fitzgerald was 23. Buoyed by his success, Fitzgerald again proposed to Zelda. This time she accepted him and they married. He was now able to demand great sums from magazines for his short stories. His future seemed stable. He was feted as the spokesman for what would now be called youth culture.
This Side of Paradise is divided into two “Books”, Book One having what was the original name of the novel “The Romantic Egotist”. The chapter headings throughout tend to be pretentious (“Spires and Gargoyles”, “Narcissus Off Duty”, “Experiment in Convalescence”, “The Supercilious Sacrifice’ etc.).
Amory Blaine is the son of a wealthy family. His pretentious mother Beatrice coddles and protects him when he is a young child, and he quickly becomes arrogant with grandiose ideas about himself. : “He was resentful against all those in authority over him, and this, combined with a lazy indifference toward his work, exasperated every master in his school.” (Part One, Chapter 1) The family is Catholic and he is sent to a Catholic prep school, a boarding school, St. Regis, when he is fifteen. He is greatly influenced by an erudite senior priest, Monsignor Thayer Darcy, who becomes a life-long friend. When he gets to Princeton, with its mock-medieval architecture, he has exactly the same sort of romantic reaction that Michael Fane had when he first saw the “dreaming spires” of Oxford. Amory sees, in somewhat purply prose: “The night mist fell. From the moon it rolled, clustered about the spires and towers and then settled below them, so that the dreaming peaks were still in lofty aspiration toward the sky. Figures that dotted the day like ants now brushed along as shadowy ghosts, in and out of the foreground. The Gothic halls and cloisters were infinitely more mysterious as they loomed suddenly out of darkness, outlined each by myriad faint squares of yellow light. Indefinitely from somewhere a bell boomed the quarter hour and Amory, pausing by the sundial, stretched himself full length on the damp grass…..” etc. etc. etc. (Part One, Chapter 2)
Amory’s experience at Princeton is in large part made of making sure he is part of clubs, admiring football matches, trying – after his fresher year – to ingratiate himself with more well-off sophomores, partying, flirting with girls from outside the university, and of course being involved in the light comedy performances that the students wrote. [All of which was true of Fitzgerald. The novel is very autobiographical in many places.] He also feels true love for the first time with a severely intellectual girl called Isabelle… but she ceases to be impressed with him when his conversation is so much taken up with himself… and his academic grades are too poor. He is no longer one of the writers for the college’s newspaper the “Princetonian”.
Amory does, however, have a sort of intellectual life. Among other things he is always concerned about the difference between personality [the way one superficially presents oneself] and personage [having grown into a person with a guiding sense of morality]. This matter is occasionally raised in correspondence Amory has with Monsignor Darcy. Be it noted, too, that twice in the novel, Amory believes he is in the presence of the devil. Along with his relgious upbringing, he has a strong sense of evil as a real force. Discussing poetry with his friend Tom D’Invilliers, he declaims what his favourite type of poetry is after he has just recited Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” “ ‘ I’ll never be a poet,’ said Amory as he finished. ‘I’m not enough of a sensualist really – there are only a few obvious things that I notice as primarily beautiful: women, spring evenings, music at night, the sea; I don’t catch the subtle things like ‘silver snarling trumpets’. I may turn out an intellectual, but I’ll never write anything but mediocre poetry.’ ” (Part One, Chapter 2) In short, he is a romantic whose beliefs are taking the place of the religion he is slowly disconnecting himself from. In the course of the novel he produces many poems – sometimes satirical but usually lushly romantic.
As some students do, Amory also has many intense discussions about the meaning of modern literature, philosophy and politics. In fact so many novels are quoted in This Side of Paradise that some critics have suggested Fitzgerald hadn’t read many of the texts his protagonist Amory ostensibly reads. As the First World War rumbles on, there are also student debates about the righteousness of waging war. A pacifist and radical student Burne Holiday becomes a major topic of discussion – but when Amory discusses the matter with his friend Tom D’Invilliers, Amory reveals his essential enduring narcissism when he declares “I tell you… he’s the first contemporary I’ve ever met who I’ll admit is my superior in mental capacity. ” (Part One, Chapter 4) Amory’s father dies but Amory has little reaction apart from examining his family’s wealth and noticing that much of it has gone. He goes partying in New York with other college boys, gets hopelessly drunk and disoriented, but still persuades himself that he is in control and his imaginative mind is still working. He almost falls in love with a charming young Catholic widow called Clara Page, who has two young children. Bored with lessons and lectures, Amory decides to enlist in the army.
At which point Fitzgerald suddenly skips over two years and we are into Book Two called “The Education of a Personage”, the Bildungsroman idea being that Amory is on the brink of becoming a fully-formed adult. Except that it isn’t true. Amory now falls madly, truly, deeply in love with Rosalind, a debutante from a very wealthy family. Fitzgerald characterises her thus: “She is one of those girls who need never make the slightest effort to have men fall in love with them . Two types seldom do: dull men are usually afraid of her cleverness – intellectual men are usually afraid of her beauty. All other men are hers by natural prerogative.” … But also “She is by no means a model character. There are long periods where she cordially loathes her whole family. She is quite unprincipled; her philosophy is carpe diem for herself and laissez faire for others.” (Part Two, Chapter 1) “She’s life and hope and happiness, my whole world now.” says Amory of Rosalind. (Part Two, Chapter 1). Fortunately for Amory, Rosalind has fallen in love with him too. This will be his greatest love. Except that the matter of money intervenes. Rosalind’s family want her to marry wealth, and so she dutifully prepares to do so because Amory, now out of college, earns only a small wage writing copy for an advertising firm [as Fitzgerald did at the time when Zelda Sayre had rejected him.]
Despair. Amory goes on a great bender. In his mental haze he resigns from the advertising company. He reads. He seems to lose all the religious feeling he used to have. He has a long discussion with his friend Tom D’Invilliers about the status of literature in the United States, damning most authors as frustrated young men so often do. He receives a letter from Monsignor Darcy offering him some consolation, but he finds it harder to connect with the priest. And he goes walking in the rural wilderness where, by chance, he meets a wild child, younger that he but very shrewd, Eleanor Ramilly. Could this be his true love? Nope, because she has some strange ideas that he can’t endorse. She is an atheist, an admirer of Nietzsche, a hedonist, immersed in the “decadent” authors. But after they have parted, she stays in his mind. He frames her in romantic terms: “For years afterwards when Amory thought of Eleanor he seemed still to hear the wind sobbing around him and sending little chills into the places beside his heart. The night when they rode up the slope and watched the cold moon float through the clouds, he lost a further part of him that nothing could restore; and when he lost it he lost also the power of regretting it. Eleanor was, say, the last time that evil crept close to Amory under the mask of beauty, the last weird mystery that held him with wild fascination and pounded his soul to flakes.” (Part Two, Chapter 3) Beware beautiful women with odd ideas... and note Amory's persistent religious concepts, even if they are fading in hin. Amory reads that Rosalind is about to marry, and that Monsignor Darcy has died. The woman he loved most and the man who most compassionately guided him are gone. He goes to Monsignor Darcy’s elaborate funeral, admiring the clerical pageantry of it but now more alienated from the religion. He becomes reckless, partying with rowdies who, to his surprise, have booked a room “for immoral purposes” with a woman. (Not that he himself loses his virginity.) In a weird sort of repentance for his past actions, he is even prepared to take the responsibility for this unsavoury event, but luckily he isn’t charged for any felony.
He is now penniless in New York, both his parents now dead and their money gone, sceptical, loathing the smell of the proletariat when he rides in public transport. He gives up his earlier beliefs and now scorns many of the books he once admired. He understands that he will have to live by money – which he doesn’t have. Is this the maturity and a blossoming into adulthood that a standard Bildungsroman narrative requires? Obviously not. For this reader at any rate, in his last chapter Amory seems still like a peevish child whose romantic ideas have been punctured… or perhaps he could be likened to the type of students who suddenly realise that their university years don’t necessarily equip them for material success or prestigious positions. But there is another way of reading it. Perhaps Fitzgerald is deliberately defying the standard Bildungsroman ending, wherein the mature young man reaches fruitful maturity. After all, that is not the outcome for all young people in their early twenties, and some people don’t reach maturity until many years later… or not at all.
The closing words of the novel (Part Two, Chapter 5) are “There was no God in his heart, he knew; his ideas were still in riot; there was ever the pain of memory, the regret for his lost youth – yet the waters of disillusion had left a deposit on his soul, responsibility and a love of life, the faint stirring of old ambitions and unrealized dreams. But – oh, Rosalind! – Rosalind…. ‘I’m a poor substitute at best,’ he said sadly. And he could not tell why the struggle was worthwhile, 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.’ ”
As I have synopsised This Side of Paradise, I might have left the impression that it is a smoothly sequential narrative. In fact it is more like the novel that is as “badly organised, disorderly, messy, repetitive, sophomoric and uncertain of style” that I mentioned near the beginning of this review. There are sudden, glaring changes in style and many inconsistences in the way the narrative is presented. Perhaps as a modernist experiment, Fitzgerald presents the whole story of Amory falling in love with Rosalind (Book Two, Chapter 1, “The Debutante”) in the form of a play script, complete with stage directions. In Book One, Chapter 2 Amory is traumatised by the death of a fellow student in a car crash… yet avery short time later, we find Amory happily pursuing his first love Isabelle. Fitzgerald has an “Interlude” between the novel’s two “Books” which, in five pages, jumps from 1917 to 1919 and therefore very briefly rushes over Amory’s military service… and surely military service would have had a major impact on how he developed mentally. The chapter concerning the pagan Eleanor (Book Two, Chapter 3, “Young Irony”), coming after Amory’s urban angst when losing Rosalind, is frankly a dive into pure romantic fantasy, with Eleanor discovered in a haystack, beautiful, often seen in moonlight, half characterised as witch or siren etc. etc. As for the last chapter in the book (Book Two, Chapter 5, “The Egotist Becomes a Personage”), it contains an incredibly improbable sequence wherein Amory, making his way back to Princeton, is given a ride in a millionaire’s car and he passes the time lecturing the millionaire on the benefits of [some sort of] Socialism… though again, Fitzgerald could be suggesting that the still-callow young man is now embracing a new sort of religion after having discarded an old one. Now that I’ve given you this rant, it’s only fair that I should note many of the novel’s first readers found Fitzgerald’s style daring, refreshing, revealing a new and interesting way to tell a story… but I stay with my view that stylistically the novel is a bit of a mess.
All of this brings me to the major puzzle. Why did This Side of Paradise become so quickly a massive bestseller in 1920? Apparently, in 1920, it was seen as daring for a novel to have university students getting drunk, partying, having many girlfriends, driving around in cars with girls, messing with “immoral purposes”, being involved in three or four love affairs, not taking study all that seriously and on the whole not behaving as an earlier generation had done. This Side of Paradise was published only a couple of years after the [First World] War had finished and there was a sense of relief, an easing of mores… and the fact that Prohibition had been voted in 1919 only encouraged younger Americans to drink more alcohol than their parents did. The behaviour of Amory and his student friends chimed with all this. In no time Fitzgerald’s novel was identified with flappers, vamps, “the Jazz Age”, the “speakeasy” etc. even if these things was only a very limited part of what he wrote about. Seen from a century later, the novel is far from being sensational. Of course there are no explicit sex scenes (they couldn’t be published in 1920 anyway), the nearest thing being the thwarted events that take place in a hotel in Part Two, Chapter 4. The behaviour of students in the novel now seems comparatively mild. Kissing isn’t an outrageous event. In short, as seen now, the novel reflects mores from long ago. They belong to the past. And even in 1920, most of the novel is not concerned with things that would then have seemed sinful.
Footnote: I have found one very annoying thing about Fitzgerald’s novels. Many episodes are built on the author’s autobiography and some characters are based on real people. This means that there is now an industry among scholars working out which character is based on whom. It has been determined that a much admired Princeton football star had the name Amory, so that was the name Fitzgerald gave to his protagonist. Likewise the scornful Isabelle was Fitzgerald’s first real love Ginevra King. And his major heart’s desire Rosalind was, not surprisingly, his wife Zelda. Most interesting, however, is Amory’s advisor Monsignor Darcy, who was based on Fitzgerald’s advisor Monsignor Sigourney Fay. Not only does the monsignor appear in the novel, but he actually contributed to it. Part of the letters the fictitious Monsignor Darcy sends to Amory were letters that the real Monsignor Sigourney Fay sent to Fitzgerald. Likewise, in the novel’s “Interlude” the poem Mons. Darcy sends to Amory when he is about to go to war was written to Fitzgerald by Mons. Fay. I could say more about Fitzgerald’s connection with Catholicism. Apparently when he was a student at Princeton he regularly went to Mass. But whereas the hero of Compton Makenzie’s Sinister Street Michael Fane was gradually drawn closer to the Catholic Church, Fitzgerald’s Amory and Fitzgerald himself were gradually drawn away from it. Even so, there are many tropes and beliefs in This Side of Paradise that suggest a Catholic sensibility… even if they are not apparent to the uninitiated.
No comments:
Post a Comment