This Side of Paradise F. Scott Fitzgerald

CONTENTS

BOOK ONE: The Romantic Egotist

1. AMORY, SON OF BEATRICE

2. SPIRES AND GARGOYLES

3. THE EGOTIST CONSIDERS

4. NARCISSUS OFF DUTY

[INTERLUDE: MAY, 1917-FEBRUARY, 1919. ]

BOOK TWO: The Education of a Personage

1. THE DEBUTANTE

2. EXPERIMENTS IN CONVALESCENCE

3. YOUNG IRONY

4. THE SUPERCILIOUS SACRIFICE

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 Dark 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.

*****

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