On Vanity
Perhaps the best approach to gloss over the context of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s first novel is by introducing this snippet from “Fitzgerald’s Radiant World,” a critical piece written by Thomas Flanagan of The New York Reviews of Books:
This Side of Paradise had had a success, which was almost freakish, capturing the aspirations of a generation and especially of those within that generation who, like its author, aspired to be great writers. Reading it today, one blanches at its emotional and rhetorical excesses, and yet, as Matthew Bruccoli says, it was received as “an iconoclastic social document—even as a testament of revolt. Surprisingly, it was regarded as an experimental or innovative narrative because of the mixture of styles and the inclusion of plays and verse.” It was the autobiographical first novel of a very young writer who took himself very seriously, and who had not provided for his hero those escape hatches of irony . . . But it was not, by any stretch, the work of a man who planned a career as a writer of commercial fiction.
Even after more than ninety years of its publication, This Side of Paradise doesn’t quite exude a nostalgic archaism of narrative prose as one might generally expect, nor it purposefully exercises an ambition in creative writing or a contract to a lucrative career. While the novel might have laid the groundwork for Fitzgerald’s repute as a lyrical and clever innovator, the very stylistic elements he strings -episodic narrative, wavering point of view, stream-of-consciousness, the almost mystified mixture of prose, verse, and dramatic writings – are defiantly and consistently original for anyone who just started reading his oeuvres. His ostensibly experimental narrative, paired with a keen study of American contemporary in adolescence and young manhood, certainly cements This Side of Paradise as a perpetual classic of whenever and wherever.
This timelessness is usually carried out by the turbulent young generation that emerges from the novel, whom are simply the remnants of war that come to frankly reject the outmoded social tenets, as well as the shifting mood of disillusionment and hope instigated by their society. However, along with this youthful opposition is a supercilious sense of identity and selfishness, which appears to be relentless and unwavering to any form of concession at first but, nevertheless, succumbs to the laws of the populace. Amory Blain, the young hero that we want to hate but ultimately come to respect, reinforces this mellow resilience and humble defeat with a proclamation: “I simply state that I’m a product of a versatile mind in a restless generation—with every reason to throw my mind and pen in with the radicals.”
Even so, the odyssey that has propelled Amory to apprehend such realization is hardly methodical. From the inception of Book One, which is usually referred as “the Princeton years” or the “pre-war years”, we instantly realize that Amory is hardly a conventional young man, and his unconventional philosophies that he set for himself and for others are rather fanatical but rather necessary for his spiritual growth. For example, Amory describes himself as a “slicker”, “a definite element of success”, in which he has a “clever sense of social values, dresses well, pretends that dress is superficial—but knows that it isn’t, goes into such activities as he can shine in, gets to college and is, in a worldly way, successful,” and obviously the condition to sport a slicked hair.
Such desire for self-adaptation to established social systems, not to mention the obsessive analysis of them, carries on with Amory, even when he gets accepted at Princeton University. While Amory underscores (and even flaunts) his egotism around campus, he, nevertheless, remains susceptible to the egocentricities of other Princetonian pupils. Among the very first is Thomas D’Invilliers, wherein the literary friendship that they share unfolds his mind to the social scene within Princeton, which, at the same time, conventionalizes Tom too. Unexpectedly, the metamorphosis of Tom into a social swan inculcates Amory with regret at what he might have done had he not given in to social pressure, even though he seems to emerge unscathed and as elite as ever. This particular flair of him to absorb what is best from people and come out better for it offers further insight into his egotism and adaptability.
Still, regardless of Amory’s sustainability to remain an ideal egotist, his fascination with social grace is prompted when he meets Dick Humbird, who “seemed to Amory a perfect type of aristocrat,” but “could have lunched at Sherry’s with a colored man, yet people would have somehow known that it was all right.” Indeed, it is the fact that Dick does not come from the upper crust of society that puzzles Amory’s valuation to some extent, but only serves to better focus the utmost importance he places on sociability; he simply loves the way that Dick acts and is less concerned about his social credentials. While the escapades of the esteemed Humbird seemingly prove to be the most inspiring, it is actually his death that brings about an imperative realization to Amory’s understanding of reality. The “unaristocratic” demise of his perfect idealist is Amory’s first exposure to the random brevity of life, and the fact that all of Dick’s graces could not shield him from his accidental death tolls a dissuading taste from social idealism.
Another incident that galvanizes Amory’s dejection from the social scene and lost of his vanity at Princeton is his disbarment from the university’s newspaper, not to mention his superficial impression on campus that barely pars the success stories of his colleagues. Of course, his longtime confidant and father figure, Monsignor Darcy, is always available to judiciously rectify the fundaments of “the fundamental Amory”, in which the young egotist strictly set for himself. During their querulous discussion, Darcy highlights that both him and Amory are “personalities, but personages,” vis-à-vis the following definitions:
“Personality is a physical matter almost entirely; it lowers the people it acts on—I’ve seen it vanish in a long sickness. But while a personality is active, it overrides ‘the next thing.’ Now a personage, on the other hand, gathers. He is never thought of apart from what he’s done. He’s a bar on which a thousand things have been hung—glittering things sometimes, as ours are; but he uses those things with a cold mentality back of them.”
This elaborate conception allows for Amory to achieve a sense of success or confidence even in the absence of socially recognized successes. Indeed, he becomes more of a whole person and less of a reputation and, as a result, he ejects himself from the social scene at Princeton. With that in mind, Amory no longer requires “success” to maintain a healthy self-image; he has stripped himself of superfluity for good and that, unfortunately, comes with a great price: a dark conscience guised as a lurking phantasm that seems to hunt and glare at his social misconducts.
However, one can always be dependable (and even grateful) for the mental inquietudes of war in displacing any sense of misery or hopefulness from one’s reality. “The fundamental Amory” is once again reawakened thanks to the pacifist and colleague, Burne Holiday, who, unlike Amory, confronts the social conventions by initially staging a protest against the elite social clubs at Princeton and, inevitably, refusing to fight in the first modern war. With a profound admiration, Amory comes to grasp Burne’s thoughts and opinions and learn a great deal from his ability to empathize with other people while disallowing self-involved apathy. Regrettably, Amory’s adaptability to Burne’s idealism is merely skin-deep; he embraces much of Burne’s persona as a pose, not as a true change, which is later pointed out by his friend, Alec Connage.
Yet, despite his respectful veneration to Burne’s pacifism, Amory apathetically enlists himself in the army, which, in many ways, reveals how much he is still swept into the conventional currents around him. This, nonetheless, receives a great approbation in a written letter from Darcy in that Amory’s enlistment without emotion and out of a sense of duty undermines his search for a passionate outlet; it hints that he has achieved some of the qualities of the ideal gentleman that he had perceived in Dick Humbird.
Unfortunately, Amory’s own letter reveals quite the opposite, particularly when he lethargically cites that the single outcome that will materialize from his mother’s death is the financial problems that will come to follow. This leads him to pensively criticize the predominant American consumerists to earn money and, at the same time, to consider politics as a career by becoming a writer, even though he recognizes that he is not prone to write anything significant.
Furthermore, Book Two of This Side of Paradise, despite being concisely shorter and up to the point, doesn’t quite mitigate the austerities of war, of romance, and of Amory’s economic dispossession; hence Fitzgerald’s congruent theatrical monologues and stage settings, which also warrant the melodrama that spurs between the ex-soldier, Amory Blain, and the titular debutante, Rosalind Connage. With extraordinary psychological perspicacity, no doubt gleaned from the young author’s own experiences, Fitzgerald explores the influence that the dearth of money would have on the relationship, concluding that Rosalind would cease to be the woman that Amory loved if subjected to life without resources. Rosalind’s decision to detach their engagement functions as the most devastating incident for Amory, the one that fuels his clairvoyant understanding of the material world.
It is worth mentioning, however, that the rendering of Rosalind is fairly singular to Amory’s past love interests, and also refreshingly feminist to the era of the novel’s publication. The portrait that Fitzgerald sketched for Rosalind, especially her confession about how many men she both has kissed and plans to kiss, seems wittily incongruous to its time but it is absolutely true. Her mother’s platitudes convey the ways in which a young debutante was supposed to operate, but Rosalind confidently oversteps her bounds in every way in search of fun and some semblance of sexual liberation. This scene, with its blunt depiction of the manners of the young elite, was crucial to establishing This Side of Paradise as the popular success it became.
Now fairly dejected and contemptuous, Amory once again thrusts himself to a new but unsuccessful romance, which is later joined with chronic alcoholism and a boring career, until irony seeks him out and saves him through the hands of Alec Connage, the big brother of the girl that instigated his infliction. But Amory’s salivation ends abruptly when he decides to save Alec’s reputation from a scandalous affair. His clear realization that he lacks familial prestige that is as equal as Alec’s facilitates his decision to relinquish his own, which reveals that the more he loses, the more he is inclined to help another person. Yet, despite his “supercilious sacrifice”, Amory imitates a sense of his own nobility that is out of an impersonal desire to do something for someone else.
Yet, in the midst of the turmoil of the final chapter, we do witness a final culmination of Amory’s understanding of “the fundamental Amory.” He, for the first time, perceives a whole new class of people, the poor, and that he must count himself among them. Amory concludes that he has no more goodness to lose; he has hit rock bottom. Still, he does not want to re-experience his goodness or his youth simply to have the pleasure of losing it again. He does not regret the choices he made; he simply regrets that people he met and the decisions he presumed did not become what he wished them to become. He finally sees his judgment in a true and unsentimental light for the first time, as the faces of the people who influenced him most passes through his mind; his mother, the unconventional Darcy, the conventional Dick Humbird, and his lost lovers.
As Amory continues his pilgrimage to Princeton after he encounters another significant character, in which their meeting ends with a poignant revelation, he surmises that he must embrace his egotism and no longer try to banish it. He knows that he can act unselfishly, but only because these acts are mere expressions of himself and his own selfishness. His final declaration, “I know myself . . . but that is all-,” intimates many realizations are yet to come, but the fact that he finally got to understands himself despite his misfortunate is sufficient enough.
It is here, at the end of the book, we can lastly emerge with clarity that the lens Fitzgerald shone at its brightest zenith – brightness even then slightly clouded – is ultimately chaotic; he courageously depicts the sanguinity and failure that critically mingle in the American dream. While the youthful novel still has the innocence to look ahead, to hope, to dream, it lingers a golden, sparkling moment before the fall, for Amory Blaine, for Fitzgerald, and for America. This implies the limited self-knowledge we ratify with ourselves and that, regardless of our relentless, surreptitious desire for vanity, we still know nothing, or at least anything that is ostensibly assenting.
