Book-ish | This Side of Paradise - F. Scott Fitzgerald

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s first book, This Side of Paradise, may be the definitive account of that spirit. The story of Amory Blaine’s jaunt through Princeton is set in 1917, but the school and its people haven’t changed all that much since then –– at least, as far as I’ve seen. Reading it now, at the end of my first year here, was like staring into a mirror for too long: uncomfortable, revealing, and beautiful. Every Princeton student should read it. Why? Listen in.

This podcast was written and recorded by Gabe Robare, and was produced under the 145th Managing Board of The Daily Princetonian. It was edited by Cammie Lee and produced by Francesca Block with copy-editing and production help from Isabel Rodrigues.

Have a book you want us to review, or want to talk about a previous episode? Send us an email at podcast@dailyprincetonian.com.

Show Notes

It’s the end of a long semester. I’ve now spent just about one full academic year as a Princeton student, the last three months of it here on campus, in the best old place of all, just south of Nassau Street. Princeton’s a strange, strange place, at least the one I’ve experienced for the last year or so. It’s full of distinctly odd and incredibly talented people. And they’re all made more odd and more strange in their proximity to everyone else. There’s a particular spirit of the place, a blend of prestige, history, and emotion that hovers over campus like a wet fog.

This podcast was written and recorded by Gabe Robare, and was produced under the 145th Managing Board of The Daily Princetonian. It was edited by Cammie Lee and produced by Francesca Block with copy-editing and production help from Isabel Rodrigues.

Have a book you want us to review, or want to talk about a previous episode? Send us an email at podcast@dailyprincetonian.com.

What is Book-ish?

From The Daily Princetonian, Book-ish is more than a book review podcast: every other Saturday, listen for a candid discussion of a great book –– ranging to thoughts inside and outside the text at large. Book-ish is written and hosted by Gabriel Robare and produced by Francesca Block under the 145th Managing Board of The Daily Princetonian. The theme was composed and performed by Robare, and the cover art is by Sydney Peng.

Have a book you want us to review, or want to talk about a previous episode? Send us an email at podcast@dailyprincetonian.com.

[intro music]

For The Daily Princetonian, I’m Gabe Robare. You’re listening to Book-ish, a Prospect podcast. In this episode, we’ll be talking about This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was one of the greatest writers in the history of American letters, with wide fame as one of the leading artists of the Jazz Age. He was born in 1896 in Minnesota, grew up in Buffalo, New York (which actually is where I grew up, too), and enrolled at Princeton in 1913. While a student here, Fitzgerald wrote for The Triangle Club, the Nassau Literary Review, and The Princeton Tiger. (John McPhee, whose book I reviewed in the last episode of this podcast, also wrote for Tiger Mag.) He was a member of Cottage Club and Whig-Clio. He had an unremarkable academic career because his writing always distracted him from his classes. He dropped out of Princeton in 1917 to join the army; he never served in combat but he never returned to finish his studies.

This Side of Paradise is largely a character study of one rather irksome Princetonian: Amory Blaine. One sentence from late in the book probably best summarizes it: Amory “drives a car, but can’t change a tire.” It’s been widely cited that the character of Amory is based off of Fitzgerald himself. And if that’s the case, the last thing I would want as a Princeton freshman is to show up in August and find out that Fitzgerald –– or Amory, for that matter –– was my roommate.

Amory goes through a lot of twists and turns in this book, and by the end he’s destitute, with no money, no friends, and nowhere to go––but even still, for the whole time, he remains stubbornly stuck-up. The book is in the third-person, but clearly is from Amory’s perspective, as large stretches of the book take place in Amory’s own mind. The description of his physique focuses excessively on his beauty and charm: “Amory was now eighteen years old, just under six feet tall and exceptionally, if not conventionally, handsome … his personality seemed rather a mental thing, and it was not in his power to turn it on and off like a water faucet. But people never forgot his face.” He maintains this pretension from early in the book, and in his life; in high school, he “formulated his first philosophy, a code to live by, which, as near as it can be named, was a sort of aristocratic egotism.” Amory “wondered how people could fail to notice that he was a boy marked for glory,” and “was proud of the fact that he could never become a mechanical or scientific genius. From no other heights was he debarred.” At one point, Amory earns a position as an editor at this very newspaper, leading him to this… modest quip: “Amory, by way of the Princetonian, had arrived.” When he’s really in trouble by the end of the book, there’s nothing to worry about, because at least he will enter the canon as a writer: “He was where Goethe was when he began ‘Faust’; he was where Conrad was when he wrote ‘Almayer’s Folly.’” No one’s ever loved anybody as much as Amory Blaine loves Amory Blaine.

All this pretentious attitude comes from a fragile ego. One of his friends tells him, “You have tremendous vanity, but it’ll amuse the people who notice its preponderance … You’re really humble at heart. You sink to the third hell of depression when you think you’ve been slighted. In fact, you haven’t much self-respect.” For example, when another student once calls Amory “only a sweaty bourgeois” (which, by the way, is one of the more cutting insults I’ve ever heard), “Amory lay for a moment without speaking.” He’s always self-conscious of everyone else’s opinion of him. When he arrives on campus early in the book, he doubts everything about his physical appearance and affect, trying to blend in: “he had gone scarcely a block when he became horribly conscious that he must be the only man in town who was wearing a hat.” But his confidence returns later that day when he starts to get his bearings, and he “tried conscientiously to look both pleasantly blasé and casually critical, which was as near as he could analyze the prevalent facial expression.” Amory always imagines himself as a perfect image of a Princetonian, and we hear all about that imagination throughout the book, in all those stuck-up rejoinders. But when the world challenges that idea of himself, Amory and his ego are totally defeated. The same friend describes Amory’s condition well: “You’re a slave, a bound helpless slave to one thing in the world, your imagination.”

In addition to being tiresomely, stupidly vain, Amory is also tiresomely, stupidly romantic. He’s hilariously over the top in all his interactions. Here’s a short letter he wrote to a girlfriend early in the book: “My dear Miss St. Claire, Your truly charming envitation (spelled beginning with an ‘e’) for the evening of next Thursday evening was truly delightful to receive this morning. I will be charm and inchanted (spelled beginning with an ‘i’) indeed to present my compliments on next Thursday evening. Faithfully, Amory Blaine.”

For another example, take this description of Amory’s sporting career: “The game with Groton was played from three of a snappy, exhilarating afternoon far into the crisp autumnal twilight, and Amory at quarterback, exhorting in wild despair, making impossible tackles, calling signals in a voice that had diminished into a hoarse, furious whisper, yet found time to revel in the blood-stained bandage around his head, and the straining, glorious heroism of plunging, crashing bodies and aching limbs.” It takes an extreme romantic like Amory to make something like football into a brooding, gothic experience. But an extreme romantic he is, so football is glorious heroism, I guess?

[music break]

Despite his truncated time at the school, Fitzgerald still nails the Princeton experience exactly on the head, at least as far as I understand it. Amory Blaine, the book’s pretentious main character, thought about going to Yale, which “had a romance and glamour from the tales of Minneapolis,” his hometown. But he chooses Princeton, which “drew him most, with its atmosphere of bright colors and its alluring reputation as the pleasant country club in America.” Through Amory’s story, Fitzgerald crystallizes Princeton.

First off, the book makes constant, specific physical references to the school, making it odd to read while living here. Fitzgerald writes as if he’s looking at a map: “He regretted the rule that would forbid freshmen to be outdoors after curfew, for he wanted to ramble through the shadowy scented lanes, where Witherspoon brooded like a dark mother over Whig and Clio, her Attic children, where the black Gothic snake of Little curled down to Cuyler and Patton, these in turn flinging the mystery out over the placid slope rolling to the lake.” I’m certain I’ve taken the same walk that Amory describes, between the same old halls.

Fitzgerald depicts the social architecture of the school just as well as he depicts the physical architecture. The way people act in This Side of Paradise would feel eerily familiar to any Princeton student. Consider this very first-year-esque conversation between Amory and a friend in the book:

“Ever read any Oscar Wilde?”
“No, who wrote it?”
“It’s a man –– don’t you know?”
“Oh, surely.”

We’re all just trying to seem smart, amid a whole bunch of people who always seem just a bit smarter than we are. At one point, in my humanities-student way, I annotated “historical materialism” next to a fairly innocuous passage; at that moment I was indeed the tiresome academic that Fitzgerald mocks through this whole book. This excessive academia is everywhere in the book. At one point, Fitzgerald writes that “A quotation sailed into [Amory’s] head and he couldn’t resist repeating aloud”; and how real that is. We Princeton students –– and I am fully referring to myself here –– never miss an opportunity for a good quote.

Similarly, if you spend enough time on this campus, someone will try to convince you to convert to Marxism, and clearly that was the case too in 1917: a pair of upperclassmen tell Amory that they’re “Marxian Socialists” who “don’t believe in property.” In another stereotype, we all have a friend who might feel like they are “not like other girls” –– and so too does the character of Rosalind in this book, who says “I’m not really feminine, you know –– in my mind.” And who hasn’t spent a long night with a friend trying to get work done? There’s a scene where Amory studies for hours in the dorm of his friend Tom, which ends like this: “all lights burning, two sleepy, shivering boys read to each other from ’The New Machiavelli,’ until dawn came up out of Witherspoon Hall, and the Princetonian fell against the door, and the May birds hailed the sun on last night’s rain.” Reading this book, at least one thing is clear: here at Princeton, some things never change.

I should note that the plot of this book isn’t all that good, in a traditional sense. It’s at best a hazy framework, and at worst nonexistent. I only read the book last week and already I don’t really remember exactly what happens in it in terms of plot. Amory does have a story, but Fitzgerald as a young writer doesn’t craft it very well: it goes on too long and isn’t especially interesting. And Fitzgerald has a tendency to tell and not show, breaking one of the basest rules of literary style. (I should say that he never really got over this, even into his much more refined books later in his career, though The Great Gatsby may be so beautiful because of all its telling. But that’s a story for another time.) Even so the book’s still worth reading, especially for Princeton students, because it’s such a poetic depiction of the school. This Side of Paradise is a tone poem, for better or for worse. The value of reading it comes from knowing it.

When reading this book I kept remembering Nietzsche’s famous quote from his book Beyond Good and Evil: “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into the abyss, the abyss will gaze back at you.” I kept gazing at the abyss of This Side of Paradise and it began to gaze at me. This book is so relatable, feels so connected to my experience of Princeton –– so does that make me Amory Blaine? Am I, necessarily, then, this stuck-up, lousy, sweaty bourgeois? I sure hope not, but I don’t know. The end of the book is very dramatic –– classic Amory –– but relates to this feeling: “He stretched out his arms to the crystalline, radiant sky. ‘I know myself,’ [Amory] cried, ‘but that is all.’” Perhaps, when I’ve completed my time here, I’ll know myself too –– but I know Amory, and I don’t particularly want to be like him.

I think we all have a bit of Amory within us, unfortunately; we’re all appetitive beings, and we all want to be loved and appreciated. But I think there’s a way around that part of ourselves. Amory’s crucial error is that he’s always looking inward. That’s where all his undesirable qualities sprout from. But I think in reality there’s no one individual Princeton student; none of us is on their own. We are together. Consider this part of a letter Amory writes to one of his love interests in the book: “Oh, Isabelle dear––it’s a wonderful night. Somebody is playing ‘Love Moon’ on a mandolin far across the campus, and the music seems to bring you to the window. Now he’s playing ‘Good-by, Boys, I’m Through,’ and how well it suits me.” There’s something real, something special to that feeling Amory describes, of music somewhere far across campus. It’s a reminder that there are others here, that they are there just as I am here, and that we are both calling out into the world. We are all here, together. This is why I sleep with my window open, even in the coldest nights of Jersey winter––there’s a saxophonist in Walker Hall whose music floats to my window in Feinberg, and how well it suits me.

This podcast was written and recorded by me, Gabe Robare, and was produced under the 145th Managing Board of The Daily Princetonian. It was edited by Cammie Lee and produced by Frannie Block with production help from Isabel Rodrigues.

Special thanks to everyone who has had a hand in this project over the last semester, including but not limited to: Emma Treadway, Auhjanae McGee, Anna McGee, Asher Green, David Chmielewski, Kym Robare, Jon Robare, Anthony Grafton, John McPhee, and you, for listening. Thank you.

Have a book you want us to review, or want to talk about a previous episode? Send us an email at podcast@dailyprincetonian.com.

For The Daily Princetonian, this has been Book-ish. Have a great day and keep reading.