This Side of Paradise (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Read Free Page B

and is amused and slightly shocked when he sees “girls doing things that even in his memory would have been impossible: eating three-o‘clock, after-dance suppers in impossible cafés” while their Victorian mothers had no “idea how casually their daughters were accustomed to be kissed” (p. 55). Many factors, both social and technological, had contributed to this “kissing” phenomenon, not the least of which was the rise of the automobile. By 1917, approximately 2 million autos were in use in the United States, some of them electric, like the one owned by Amory’s mother, Beatrice O’Hara Blaine. New words like parking (during which petting and necking took place) and jaywalking reflected the automobile’s influence on the language, and petting became a buzzword for the era. Indeed, Fitzgerald’s generous use of the term in This Side of Paradise further escalated the novel into iconic status as a handbook of modern morals. Fitzgerald remarked that the automobile was the start of the “petting revolution” that swept the youth of the era: “As far back as 1915 the un-chaperoned young people of the smaller cities had discovered the mobile privacy of that automobile given to young Bill at sixteen to make him ‘self-reliant’ ” (“Echoes of the Jazz Age,” p. 14). While the “petting scene” in This Side of Paradise is very tame by today’s standards, it depicts a reckless new kind of courting behavior for young couples of the 1920s and implies that “petting” was what everybody else their age was doing, in part to rebel against the buttoned-up propriety of their elders. It also assures the young that they are in a class by themselves, entitled to their ideas, opinions, and identities. Fitzgerald places them in Manhattan bars and restaurants, at the seaside and in the country, riding in cars and drinking excessively, quarreling, joking, and agonizing over sex and society, economics and war, literature, philosophy, and politics. For the first time in American literature, there was an identifiable “youth culture,” a term that described the habits of a distinct group claiming its place in the landscape of American fiction. While Fitzgerald had not created this new group, he had defined it. And its overwhelming energy, as captured by Fitzgerald, is the key to the power and charm of This Side of Paradise. In its pages, readers relive the pains, pleasures, and uncertainties of being young in the 1920s. Much as television, film, and radio do for the youth of today, This Side of Paradise gave the youth of the 1920s a mirror with which to view themselves and to externalize the confusion they were feeling while growing up in chaotic times. This is perhaps why the work was so astonishingly successful with the young, and why it sold more than 50,000 copies the first year alone. It spoke to them, embraced them, and said, “This is us. This is who we are, and we are in this together. This roller coaster culture has us all in its grip.” Even if the rest of the country was suffering from an identity crisis, the young could find comfort in knowing they were understood and acknowledged in the pages of the book.

An Autobiography with an Unstructured Plot That Goes Nowhere
    “The Romantic Egotist,” the title of book one, was the original title for the first version of This Side of Paradise, which Fitzgerald began writing in 1917 when he was twenty-one years old. He had worn out his welcome at Princeton by then, having spent little time on academics and almost all of it writing scripts and lyrics for the Triangle Club, performing in light musicals, and trying to “fit in” with the snobbish Princeton social elite. Frustrated with the effort, he gave up on a degree, enlisted in the army in October 1917, and was sent to the military training camp at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. There, convinced that he would be killed in the war, and wanting to leave some evidence of his talent behind, he began writing his novel