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$Unique_ID{bob01250}
$Pretitle{}
$Title{Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald
Critical Comment, This Side Of Paradise}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Fitzgerald, F. Scott}
$Affiliation{Associate Professor Of English, Simon Fraser University}
$Subject{amory
fitzgerald
rather
own
reality
itself
blaine
love
paradise
side
hear
audio
hear
sound
see
pictures
see
figures
}
$Date{}
$Log{Hear Amory: His Glory*68390006.aud
See Amory*0125001.scf
}
Title: Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald
Book: This Side of Paradise
Author: Fitzgerald, F. Scott
Critic: Cooperman, Stanley
Affiliation: Associate Professor Of English, Simon Fraser University
Critical Comment, This Side Of Paradise
Book I
Many critics have complained, with justice, that a great flaw in This
Side of Paradise (aside from its loose, rambling structure) is the fact that
the author seems uncertain as to his own attitude. He mocks the romantic
delusions or emotional melodrama of his "little rich boy," Amory Blaine, while
too often he shares, or seems to share, in the delusions themselves.
There is, in short, a kind of "smart" pseudo-sophistication imbedded
within the narrative itself-a series of "clever comments" inserted for the
sake of the cleverness rather than for any aesthetic purpose. And one result
of this aesthetic self-indulgence is that the reader may find it difficult
to take either Amory or his adventures with any degree of seriousness at all.
Indeed, one feels as though the author himself were doing what Amory does
during the course of the narrative: he merely holds the posture of writing
about what actually is a very slight matter.
Gesture Without Substance.
The need for some sort of imposing or melodramatic gesture is, of course,
one of the chief qualities of Amory Blaine as an adolescent. That neither
Amory nor his creator-F. Scott Fitzgerald-ever grew out of this need, is a
fact that readers of Fitzgerald's works have recognized as central to the
direction of his life and career. For Amory, at any rate, and for his mother
Beatrice Blaine as well, the posture of reality all too often replaces reality
itself, while gesture stands as a substitute for emotional commitment.
A woman of inherited wealth, Beatrice Blaine is a lovely, charming,
superficial, childlike woman who maintains the posture of romance, a mere
surface superimposed upon an essentially frigid or infantile refusal to commit
herself to anything at all. She is, of course, the prototype for what has come
to be known as the "Fitzgerald Woman" - an "enchanting" but essentially
parasitic femme fatale whom Fitzgerald the author used so often for his books,
and whom (in the person of Zelda) Fitzgerald the man finally married.
The 'Momma's Boy.'
Beatrice's attitude toward the Church, for example, is typical of her
attitude toward all emotional commitments. "She had once been a Catholic," we
are told, "but discovering that the Priests were infinitely more attentive
when she was in the process of either losing or regaining faith in the Mother
Church, she maintained an enchantingly wavering attitude. . . . Next to
doctors, priests were her favorite sport." The effect, of course, is that of
a woman for whom all action is a matter of calculated performance.
Her very marriage to the weak and "ineffectual" (though rather literary
and "romantic") Stephen Blaine, Amory's father, was a similar "sport": having
married the all but invisible Mr. Blaine, Beatrice is subsequently rather
astonished at actually becoming pregnant, and makes of Amory himself a
perpetual toy of whatever fashionable manner she currently approves. That
Amory, indeed, falls into a posture of play-acting whenever he is with
Beatrice, is itself an indication of her "charm" - and her lack of substance.
The first chapter of This Side of Paradise is a very important one
because it includes many themes which Fitzgerald repeats and amplifies
throughout the rest of the novel. Amory, for example, from the very beginning
of the book-especially during his early adolescence in Minneapolis and his
four years at St. Regis' Academy in Connecticut-is precocious, "romantic," and
literally stuffed with gestures that come both from his own rather exotic
reading, and from the rootless globe-trotting of his mother. The very title of
the chapter ("Amory, Son of Beatrice") is both a parody of Epic genealogy, and
clear indication that Amory is a "momma's boy" in a very profound sense of the
term.
Amory himself, with his long-lashed and unusual green eyes, with his
calculated "charm," and his immense, though vague conviction of his own
"superiority," from the very beginning relates to all aspects of reality
through a veil of deliberate posturing. Anything too "real," indeed, alarms
rather than interests him: while playing a romantic scene with Myra St. Clair,
for example, he is enchanted with the young girl until he actually kisses her.
And then occurs an abrupt change from "romantic" mood ("their lips brushed
like wild flowers in the wind," writes Fitzgerald) to one of actual
repugnance: Amory, having touched the actual flesh of the girl, feels merely
a "sudden revulsion . . . disgust, loathing of the entire incident."
The Ideal Of Romance.
It is not the actual "kiss" which Amory desires (just as, later in his
life, it is not sex itself which he wants), but rather it is the idea of being
able to kiss the girl that intrigues him. He is, in short, perpetually
fascinated with some imagined and usually baroque shadow of Grand Romance. And
this Romance-whether of love, or "success," or "social justice," or "art" or
"intellectual pursuits," or "religion" - simply collapses at any touch of
sordid reality.
Amory Blaine, kissing Myra in the first chapter of This Side of Paradise,
or desperately regurgitating slogans of political radicalism in the last
chapter of the book, conveys the same sense of lack of substance: if, as the
critic Edmund Wilson suggests, Amory's "revolt" at the end of the novel is a
rebellion directed at nothing and one that goes nowhere, it is also true that
his emotions are generally in the same condition.
For Amory Blaine, in short, any sort of actual consummation is
necessarily sordid, somehow unsatisfying, always incomplete, and for this
reason his career becomes a series of gestures which are aimed at appearance
rather than at achievement. The achievement, indeed, is itself the deadliest
"failure" of all: so long as Amory can suffer the pangs of "Great Love"
without actually getting the girl, so long as he is prevented from actually
achieving reality (prevented, preferably, by some sort of conditions which are
themselves melodramatic-lack of money, perhaps, or Noble Sacrifice of some
sort, or a "fine" reservation of conscience, or the invasion of previously
Sacred Traditions by barbarian hordes with alien names), he can take a certain
amount of pleasure from failure itself.
Failure As A Theme.
Failure emerges as a basic theme of This Side of Paradise - and of
Fitzgerald's work as a whole. Inevitably, such failure marks the career of a
"superior" person who, unable to cope with the demands of that reality which
his own actions have created, falls back upon some Thwarted Dream of Beauty
(either of moral value or Grand Passion) and so redeems the failure itself.
The advantage, of course, is that failure permits the protagonist to maintain
his "superiority" unchallenged by the demands of achievement. The burdens of
reality, after all, are multiplied rather than lightened by the consummation
of one's desire.
It is always more difficult to maintain a happy marriage than to marry
one's Golden Girl; it is more difficult to offer creative leadership than to
acquired a status of political importance; it is more difficult to become a
poet than to have a Poetic Soul; it is more difficult to live with the
healthy woman one has created from a beautiful neurotic, than to make the
"cure" itself.
There is, in short, a certain fascination wi