This Side of Paradise (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Read Online Free PDF Page A

Paul relatives. In fact, as Bruccoli notes, his father’s firing from Proctor and Gamble in March 1908 was the most traumatic family crisis of Scott’s young life. Eleven years old, he overheard his mother talking about it on the phone. Afraid the family would go to the poorhouse, Scott gave back to his mother the quarter she had given him to go swimming (Bruccoli, p. 20). Many years later Fitzgerald remembered his father coming home that day as a “completely broken man” who was a “failure the rest of his days.” From then on as the Fitzgerald fortune declined, so did Scott’s prospects, and his childhood memories of that decline color his fiction with the pathos of the outsider denied a place at life’s table.
    Amory Blaine’s fortunes parallel those of Fitzgerald, and Amory is the first of Fitzgerald’s heroes to find himself on the outside looking in. “Loss of money is not only the worst pain in itself, but it is the parent of all others,” declared English author Samuel Butler in his autobiographical novel The Way of All Flesh (1903); thus Amory Blaine’s eventual poverty brings about his later losses in social status and in love. Even though Amory is characterized as far wealthier than Fitzgerald was at birth, until Stephen Blaine’s death Amory has only the vaguest idea where his money comes from. After his father’s funeral, however, he takes his father’s ledger and goes through it carefully, noting that his father had made some very poor investments: “His father had devoted the previous year to several unfortunate gambles in oil. Very little of the oil had been burned, but Stephen Blaine had been rather badly singed” (p. 93). His family’s expenditures for 1906 had been $110,000, a massive sum for that age, and their holdings had decreased significantly. “Amory was shocked to discover the decrease in the number of bond holdings and the great drop in the income” in 1912 (p. 93). Later, when Amory’s mother begins putting money into railroad and streetcar bonds, the reader knows this spells doom for his financial future.
    Fitzgerald, like Amory, became more fully aware of his financial and social inadequacies at Princeton, where he was an outsider at first and, as a Catholic and a graduate of a not-so-prestigious preparatory school, could not gain admittance to the inner circle. Likewise, Amory watches the wealthy “drawing unconsciously about them a barrier of the slightly less important but socially ambitious to protect them from the friendly, rather puzzled high-school element. From the moment he realized this, Amory resented social barriers as artificial distinctions made by the strong to bolster up their weak retainers and keep out the almost strong” (p. 41). Amory’s resentment of the rich is compounded by his desire for their luxurious and aesthetic lifestyle. His simultaneous longing and bitterness shows through most obviously in his affair with the wealthy Rosalind Connage. As Stephen Hahn remarks, “In Fitzgerald’s work there is a tragic contradiction between the beauty that wealth creates and the beauty that it simultaneously entraps and abstracts from life.... His constant theme is the tragedy of romantic love and, more generally, romantic aspirations of all kinds” (“And She Be Fair,” pp. 94-97). Rosalind, like a fly in amber, is trapped in that tragic contradiction: the “woman-as-beautiful-object.” She challenges Amory immediately when she opens their first conversation, by naming her price: “Oh, it’s not a corporation—it’s just ‘Rosalind, Unlimited.’ Fifty-one shares, name, good-will, and everything goes at $25,000 a year” (p. 162). At that time Amory is making a paltry thirty-five dollars a week, and although Rosalind does eventually come to care for him, her sense of financial preservation wins out, and she drops him for fear that she will be his “squaw, in some horrible place.” Rosalind’s only source of power is that of