commentary by Michael L. Bromley
copyright 2005

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This Side of Paradise
by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1924)
Project Guttenberg e-text here
Entered: Feb 25/05

It's the only book of Fitzgerald's I hadn't read, much less read at least twice. I always considered this one juvenile, but it was time to give it a try. I was right. Through it all, the genius, the silliness, the pretentiousness (that, the overall definition), I had stuck in the head that frightful image of the true story of Fitzgerald in a closet with Hemingway, whipping it out for Hemingway's judgment as to the normalcy of F. Scott's thang. The entire book was an exercise in words and pretensions in showing off the size of  Fitzgerald's dick.

Now, it's a great book. I loved every bit of it. It carries the story, it's interesting and so full those flashes of wonder that make Fitzgerald so enticing. It's just that the larger effect is post-adolescent show. You can see how Zelda and the contemporaries loved it. Thank God they outgrew it, and F. Scott, especially. Too often I found myself laughing at Fitzgerald and not often enough along with him. Nevertheless, each time I got frustrated with it, he'd lay out, like a wizard guitarist, another of those magnificent lines or metaphors, and I'd be laughing with him and shaking my head in awe.

As history, or sociology, I suppose, it's fascinating. Fitzgerald had from this beginning in Paradise, that super-sensitivity, as he'd call it, to the cultural strain. The post-moderns would likely be insulted by his definitions, as they're entirely elitist. But that's what the book is about, and it was the elites who defined the age. We get from this book all of the early 1920s fascination with the automobile, cigarettes, books, and booze. We get that cynicism of the absurd War's aftermath, and that meaninglessness that struck just in time to save the world, or America, anyway, from the stupid revolutions that would come to nearly kill the rest of the world over the next generation. America wasn't necessarily immune. Paradise explains why we didn't give in to the social and labor agitations of 1919 and 1920. What triumphed, Fitzgerald demonstrates, was an almost spiteful, if lamented rejection of idealism and its half-practical side in progressivism. While we can see how a Robert LaFollette ran so heartily in 1924 on the old ideas of 1912, as Fitzgerald slides in and out of the idealist impulse it is normalcy that wins out in Paradise, which, whether Fitzgerald meant it or not, is Warren Harding's conquering word.
 

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