THIS SIDE OF PARADISE
By F. Scott Fitzgerald
... Well this side of Paradise!... There’s
little comfort in the wise. —Rupert Brooke.
Experience is the name so many people give
to their mistakes. —Oscar Wilde.
To SIGOURNEY FAY
CONTENTS
BOOK ONE—The Romantic Egotist
CHAPTER 1. Amory, Son of Beatrice
CHAPTER 2. Spires and Gargoyles
CHAPTER 3. The Egotist Considers
CHAPTER 4. Narcissus Off Duty
INTERLUDE
BOOK TWO—The Education of a Personage
CHAPTER 1. The Debutante
CHAPTER 2. Experiments in Convalescence
CHAPTER 3. Young Irony
CHAPTER 4. The Supercilious Sacrifice
CHAPTER 5. The Egotist Becomes a Personage
BOOK ONE—The Romantic Egotist
CHAPTER 1. Amory, Son of Beatrice
Amory Blaine inherited from his mother every trait, except the
stray inexpressible few, that made him worth while. His father,
an ineffectual, inarticulate man with a taste for Byron and a
habit of drowsing over the Encyclopedia Britannica, grew wealthy
at thirty through the death of two elder brothers, successful
Chicago brokers, and in the first flush of feeling that the world
was his, went to Bar Harbor and met Beatrice O’Hara. In
consequence, Stephen Blaine handed down to posterity his height
of just under six feet and his tendency to waver at crucial
moments, these two abstractions appearing in his son Amory. For
many years he hovered in the background of his family’s life, an
unassertive figure with a face half-obliterated by lifeless,
silky hair, continually occupied in “taking care” of his wife,
continually harassed by the idea that he didn’t and couldn’t
understand her.
But Beatrice Blaine! There was a woman! Early pictures taken on
her father’s estate at Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, or in Rome at the
Sacred Heart Convent—an educational extravagance that in her
youth was only for the daughters of the exceptionally
wealthy—showed the exquisite delicacy of her features, the
consummate art and simplicity of her clothes. A brilliant
education she had—her youth passed in renaissance glory, she was
versed in the latest gossip of the Older Roman Families; known by
name as a fabulously wealthy American girl to Cardinal Vitori and
Queen Margherita and more subtle celebrities that one must have
had some culture even to have heard of. She learned in England to
prefer whiskey and soda to wine, and her small talk was broadened
in two senses during a winter in Vienna. All in all Beatrice
O’Hara absorbed the sort of education that will be quite
impossible ever again; a tutelage measured by the number of
things and people one could be contemptuous of and charming
about; a culture rich in all arts and traditions, barren of all
ideas, in the last of those days when the great gardener clipped
the inferior roses to produce one perfect bud.
In her less important moments she returned to America, met
Stephen Blaine and married him—this almost entirely because she
was a little bit weary, a little bit sad. Her only child was
carried through a tiresome season and brought into the world on a
spring day in ninety-six.
When Amory was five he was already a delightful companion for
her. He was an auburn-haired boy, with great, handsome eyes which
he would grow up to in time, a facile imaginative mind and a
taste for fancy dress. From his fourth to his tenth year he did
the country with his mother in her father’s private car, from
Coronado, where his mother became so bored that she had a nervous
breakdown in a fashionable hotel, down to Mexico City, where she
took a mild, almost epidemic consumption. This trouble pleased
her, and later she made use of it as an intrinsic part of her
atmosphere—especially after several astounding bracers.
So, while more or less fortunate little rich boys were defying
governesses on the beach at Newport, or being spanked or tutored
or read to from “Do and Dare,” or “Frank on the Mississippi,”
Amory was biting acquiescent bell-boys in the Waldorf, outgrowing
a natural repugnance to chamber music and symphonies, and
deriving a highly specialized education from his mother.
“Amory.”
“Yes, Beatrice.” (Such a quaint name for his mother; she
encouraged it.)
“Dear, don’t _think_ of getting out of bed yet. I’ve always
suspected that early rising in early life makes one nervous.
Clothilde is having your breakfast brought up.”
“All right.”
“I am feeling very old to-day, Amory,” she would sigh, her face a
rare cameo of pathos, her voice exquisitely modulated, her hands
as facile as Bernhardt’s. “My nerves are on edge—on edge. We must
leave this terrifying place to-morrow and go searching for
sunshine.”
Amory’s penetrating green eyes would look out through tangled
hair at his mother. Even at this age he had no illusions about
her.
“Amory.”
“Oh, _yes_.”
“I want you to take a red-hot bath as hot as you can bear it, and
just relax your nerves. You can read in the tub if you wish.”
She fed him sections of the “Fetes Galantes” before he was ten;
at eleven he could talk glibly, if rather reminiscently, of
Brahms and Mozart and Beethoven. One afternoon, when left alone
in the hotel at Hot Springs, he sampled his mother’s apricot
cordial, and as the taste pleased him, he became quite tipsy.
This was fun for a while, but he essayed a cigarette in his
exaltation, and succumbed to a vulgar, plebeian reaction. Though
this incident horrified Beatrice, it also secretly amused her and
became part of what in a later generation would have been termed
her “line.”
“This son of mine,” he heard her tell a room full of awestruck,
admiring women one day, “is entirely sophisticated and quite
charming—but delicate—we’re all delicate; _here_, you know.” Her
hand was radiantly outlined against her beautiful bosom; then
sinking her voice to a whisper, she told them of the apricot
cordial. They rejoiced, for she was a brave raconteuse, but many
were the keys turned in sideboard locks that night against the
possible defection of little Bobby or Barbara....
These domestic pilgrimages were invariably in state; two maids,
the private car, or Mr. Blaine when available, and very often a
physician. When Amory had the whooping-cough four disgusted
specialists glared at each other hunched around his bed; when he
took scarlet fever the number of attendants, including physicians
and nurses, totalled fourteen. However, blood being thicker than
broth, he was pulled through.
The Blaines were attached to no city. They were the Blaines of
Lake Geneva; they had quite enough relatives to serve in place of
friends, and an enviable standing from Pasadena to Cape Cod. But
Beatrice grew more and more prone to like only new acquaintances,
as there were certain stories, such as the history of her
constitution and its many amendments, memories of her years
abroad, that it was necessary for her to repeat at regular
intervals. Like Freudian dreams, they must be thrown off, else
they would sweep in and lay siege to her nerves. But Beatrice was
critical about American women, especially the floating population
of ex-Westerners.
“They have accents, my dear,” she told Amory, “not Southern
accents or Boston accents, not an accent attached to any
locality, just an accent”—she became dreamy. “They pick up old,
moth-eaten London accents that are down on their luck and have to
be used by some one. They talk as an English butler might after
several years in a Chicago grand-opera company.” She became
almost incoherent—“Suppose—time in every Western woman’s life—she
feels her husband is prosperous enough for her to
have—accent—they try to impress _me_, my dear—”
Though she thought of her body as a mass of frailties, she
considered her soul quite as ill, and therefore important in her
life. She had once been a Catholic, but discovering that priests
were infinitely more attentive when she was in process of losing
or regaining faith in Mother Church, she maintained an
enchantingly wavering attitude. Often she deplored the bourgeois
quality of the American Catholic clergy, and was quite sure that
had she lived in the shadow of the great Continental cathedrals
her soul would still be a thin flame on the mighty altar of Rome.
Still, next to doctors, priests were her favorite sport.
“Ah, Bishop Wiston,” she would declare, “I do not want to talk of
myself. I can imagine the stream of hysterical women fluttering
at your doors, beseeching you to be simpatico”—then after an
interlude filled by the clergyman—“but my mood—is—oddly
dissimilar.”
Only to bishops and above did she divulge her clerical romance.
When she had first returned to her country there had been a
pagan, Swinburnian young man in Asheville, for whose passionate
kisses and unsentimental conversations she had taken a decided
penchant—they had discussed the matter pro and con with an
intellectual romancing quite devoid of sappiness. Eventually she
had decided to marry for background, and the young pagan from
Asheville had gone through a spiritual crisis, joined the
Catholic Church, and was now—Monsignor Darcy.
“Indeed, Mrs. Blaine, he is still delightful company—quite the
cardinal’s right-hand man.”
“Amory will go to him one day, I know,” breathed the beautiful
lady, “and Monsignor Darcy will understand him as he understood
me.”
Amory became thirteen, rather tall and slender, and more than
ever on to his Celtic mother. He had tutored occasionally—the
idea being that he was to “keep up,” at each place “taking up the
work where he left off,” yet as no tutor ever found the place he
left off, his mind was still in very good shape. What a few more
years of this life would have made of him is problematical.
However, four hours out from land, Italy bound, with Beatrice,
his appendix burst, probably from too many meals in bed, and
after a series of frantic telegrams to Europe and America, to the
amazement of the passengers the great ship slowly wheeled around
and returned to New York to deposit Amory at the pier. You will
admit that if it was not life it was magnificent.
After the operation Beatrice had a nervous breakdown that bore a
suspicious resemblance to delirium tremens, and Amory was left in
Minneapolis, destined to spend the ensuing two years with his
aunt and uncle. There the crude, vulgar air of Western
civilization first catches him—in his underwear, so to speak.
A KISS FOR AMORY
His lip curled when he read it.
“I am going to have a bobbing party,” it said, “on Thursday, December
the seventeenth, at five o’clock, and I would like it very much if