This Side Of Paradise is a very famous novel and justly so. Its author, F. Scott Fitzgerald, has been something of a blind spot for me. I read The Great Gatsby as a teenager and, frankly, was disappointed. The reaction says more about me and my age than about the book. But that was many years ago and perhaps I should revisit it.

But This Side Of Paradise was the author’s first novel and first success. It did take him many years and much revision to complete and, frankly, it shows. The style, point of view and indeed characterisation is, for me, inconsistent throughout. And what is more the mixture of forms – narrative, description and poetry, also for me, seems to flow from the writer’s need to impress and explore rather than any desire to communicate. At the same time, it feels like the writer also does not want to experiment.

Amory Blaine, the principal character, is a Midwesterner who finds himself in a private school and then Princeton. At the outset, he appears to be born with a silver spoon in his mouth as he sets about building career, love, family, and future. But life does not work out that way for him. He is repeatedly unlucky in love, finding that the women he falls for have better, far more lucrative options. His fortune, apparently considerable at the start, dwindles, until at the end of the book he is a poor man, but returning to Princeton, no doubt to pursue the academe that he had earlier apparently turned his back on.

Amory Blaine does spend time in the trenches in World War I, but he is decidedly reticent about the experience. We have no clues as to whether this is born of trauma or indifference. Perhaps the author, himself, had no direct resource to rely on since his own time in the military was spent within the USA. At the end of the novel, amid disagreements about politics, he does mention one acquaintance who was killed in the fighting, but the loss of life in the trenches, and also from the influenza epidemic that followed apparently past him by or perhaps left no lasting impression. One feels that the events that cause Amory Blaine to rethink his life and pursue different directions were precisely those that beset the writer himself.

In the first half of the book, I felt a little frustrated about the characters, who seemed to have no depth. In effect, they all seem to live in an eternal present, hardly ever referring to their collective past or harbouring ambitions or fears about the future. What emerges is a desire to conform to the ideals of the social class that they imagine they adhere to, more specifically the social class to which they aspire. If they are successful in forming facilitating liaisons, that class identity is reinforced, if not, it is questioned. Amory increasingly finds himself in the latter position, leading him inexorably towards socialism. One feels that he would not have espoused these views if he had married money, as he originally set out to do.

Amory Blaine and several of his acquaintances are heavily into literature and regularly quote and write poetry, but the efforts are late nineteenth century in style. There is no obvious modernism here. They, and the writer, are drawn towards epithets which, though in context impress, seems overdone, overwritten. Here are just two examples. Wandering through a storm one day, Amory asks himself: ‘“Who the devil is there in Ramilly County,” muttered Amory aloud, “who would deliver Verlaine in an extemporaneous tune to a soaking haystack?”’ Soon after a character muses: ‘Summer is only the unfulfilled promise of spring, a charlatan in place of the warm balmy nights I dream of in April.’

By the end of the book, Amory declares himself a socialist, but his radicalism is couched in democratic terms, not in revolutionary and his position seems to be born of rejection by the social class he once aspired to, rather than a plea for justice in human relations. But This Side Of Paradise remains a masterpiece of its kind, a towering achievement of a young writer and is well worth reading.

The Crack-Up with Other Pieces and Stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald

I doubt that F. Scott Fitzgerald intended that The Crack-Up with Other Pieces and Stories should ever be published, let alone read as a single volume. This is a mix of autobiographical pieces and short stories. The distinction between the two, if not marked by physical division, would not be immediately obvious. The short stories deal with individuals trying to be somebody, unconsciously aspiring to some form of American Dream that usually only exists while these characters are awake and often dissolves into an alcoholic haze of non-achievement. The author, in the autobiographical pieces, lives a similar life, except that in his case the achievement is tangible.

Fitzgerald always seems to adopt the position of outsider looking in. He never really seems to be part of anything. Even his standpoint as a third person narrator seems more removed than is usual, as if he is reluctant to allow his characters to adopt their own voices. Not that, as an author, he imposes his own values or positions. It is more a case of his being somewhat difficult to pin down.

Perhaps this is because he was from out of town, if that town be this book’s version of New York, where much of the action takes place. The author reminds us several times that he is a mid-Westerner from St Paul, an identity and origin he seems to regard as both safe and homely when compared to the candle flame attraction of the metropolis he dared not approach too close.

There is, however, a general feeling of the persistent little guy prevailing, of the propertied, apparently privileged receiving eventual, and a highly moral, comeuppance. It’s a perspective he would use in The Great Gatsby, where the observation of a highlife from distance renders it desirable, whereas greater proximity reveals its flaws.

But this is not a coherent set of stories. They stand alone and were designed to do so. They are clearly best experienced individually and then similarities of theme and style will not confuse. Modern readers need to be aware of the fact that these stories were written about a century ago and contain some attitudes and language that today would be difficult to express in public, let alone publish.