This Side of Paradise

The Project Gutenberg EBook of This Side of Paradise, by F. Scott Fitzgerald This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org Title: This Side of Paradise Author: F. Scott Fitzgerald Posting Date: August 6, 2008 [EBook #805] Release Date: February, 1997 Last Updated: November 6, 2016 Language: English Character set encoding: UTF-8 *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THIS SIDE OF PARADISE *** Produced by David Reed, and Ken Reeder 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 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.”