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| The Making of This Side of Paradise, by James L.W. West III, 1983. |
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| The original dust jacket for This Side of Paradise, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, published on March 26, 1920. |
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| Professor James L.W. West III |
When F. Scott Fitzgerald’s first novel, This Side of
Paradise, was published on March 26, 1920, it launched the literary career
of one of the greatest American authors of the 20th century.
Fitzgerald’s fame and influence continue to grow, 100 years after his first
novel appeared. The latest manifestation of Fitzgerald’s lasting fame is Nick
Farriella’s parody “This Side of Paradise: A Letter from F. Scott Fitzgerald, Quarantined in the South of France.” Published by McSweeney’s on March 13,
2020, Farriella’s parody has become a big hit, with many people thinking it was
an actual letter from Fitzgerald.
If you’re a Fitzgerald buff who wants to learn more about
how This Side of Paradise was written, then the book for you is James
L.W. West III’s The Making of This Side of Paradise, published in 1983.
West has gone on to become the editor of the Cambridge Edition of the Works of
F. Scott Fitzgerald, a scholarly series that was finally completed in 2019.
West’s study of the manuscripts of This Side of Paradise,
including an earlier version that Fitzgerald titled The Romantic
Egotist, shed important light on Fitzgerald’s writing and editing
techniques. Fitzgerald wrote his first draft of The Romantic Egotist quickly
while he was in Army training camp from November 1917 to February 1918.
Stationed at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, the commanding officer of Fitzgerald’s
platoon was a young West Point graduate named Dwight Eisenhower.
The Romantic Egotist was written in the first person,
narrated by Stephen Palms. West writes, “Stephen’s narrative is so painfully
open and naïve that it is difficult to read without a curious discomfort, at
once effective and annoying.” (p.25) Stephen also addresses the reader
directly, writing about the narrative that he is constructing; no doubt this
was a sign of Fitzgerald’s haste to complete the manuscript.
As rushed as Fitzgerald might have been, West notes that
incidents in The Romantic Egotist manuscript will continue to reappear,
in highly reworked form, in Fitzgerald’s later fiction. There’s even an account
of Stephen’s train ride home from prep school to Minnesota that was the germ
for a beautiful passage in The Great Gatsby, in which Nick Carraway
waxes rhapsodic about a similar train ride. Fitzgerald was ruthless in mining
his own life for all the material he could.
Fortunately, some passages cut from The Romantic Egotist didn’t
find their way into Fitzgerald’s fiction. Namely, the passage in which Stephen
and Eleanor Savage see her fur coat mysteriously move across the room. What
made the fur coat move is never explained. As West writes, “This strange
episode reinforces the connection in This Side of Paradise between sex
and the supernatural.” (p.36) In the finished novel, the main character Amory
Blaine sees the devil in a chorus girl’s apartment. Did I mention that
Fitzgerald was raised Catholic? Fitzgerald actually revised the moving fur coat
episode before ultimately deciding to delete it from This Side of Paradise.
The Romantic Egotist was sent to the publisher
Charles Scribner’s Sons in May 1918. It was rejected, and the only editor at
Scribner’s who liked the book was Maxwell Perkins. Perkins wrote Fitzgerald an
encouraging rejection letter, and expressly told him to make revisions and
resubmit the novel. Fitzgerald did, but the novel was rejected again in October
1918. Perkins went on to become Fitzgerald’s lifelong friend and editor, as
well as the editor for two other famous writers of the 1920’s and 1930’s:
Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe. You know, no big deal.
West’s study of the manuscript of This Side of Paradise helps
us to understand the inconsistencies in Amory Blaine’s character a bit more. As
West notes, the material that presents us with a more cynical Amory is mainly
from Fitzgerald’s revision of the novel during July and August of 1919, and the
material where Amory seems more innocent and naïve is left over from the manuscript
of The Romantic Egotist.
The chapter titled “Young Irony,” which occurs late in the
second book of This Side of Paradise, in which Amory encounters the
beautiful atheist Eleanor Savage in the Maryland countryside, was originally from
The Romantic Egotist, and took place before Stephen Palms’ senior year
at Princeton. As West writes of the chapter: “Amory’s immature, adolescent
posturings in the novel therefore seem odd. He is supposedly a twenty-three-year-old
graduate of a sophisticated eastern university and a combat veteran of World
War I, but he moons over Eleanor, spouts clichés and bad epigrams, and composes
mediocre poetry at the dinner table.” (p.70)
Fitzgerald sent Perkins the manuscript of This Side of
Paradise on September 4, 1919. Perkins fought hard for Scribner’s to accept
the book in an editorial meeting, saying: “My feeling is that a publisher’s
first allegiance is to talent. And if we aren’t going to publish a talent like
this, it is a very serious thing.” If Scribner’s was not interested in young
authors, “Then we might as well go out of business. If we’re going to turn down
the likes of Fitzgerald, I will lose all interest in publishing books.” The
vote was a tie, with old Charles Scribner II himself eventually coming down on
the side of publishing. (Max Perkins: Editor of Genius, by A. Scott
Berg, p.15-6)
Perkins sent Fitzgerald an acceptance letter dated September
16, 1919, just a week before Fitzgerald’s 23rd birthday. Unfortunately,
in the ensuing six months before the novel was published, it’s clear that a
professional proofreader didn’t go near the manuscript. This Side of
Paradise was riddled with misspellings, and mistakes like Amory’s hair
changing from blond to auburn within a page went unnoticed. In a letter from
July 8, 1920, Perkins tells Fitzgerald that the editorial department has been
forced to do the proofreading. Perkins writes, “It is purely the mechanical and
therefore irksome.” (p.106) So that might explain why a careful proofreading
job simply wasn’t done. But still, wasn’t there some freelance proofreader out
there who could have helped Maxwell Perkins?
West counted the number of lists that were made of the
errors in This Side of Paradise, and he comes up with 11 different lists
covering some 40 or 50 different mistakes! Some of these mistakes were
corrected in the 4th and 7th printings of This Side of
Paradise, but many were not. The unfortunate upshot was that Fitzgerald
acquired a reputation as a dim-witted fool who didn’t know how to spell the
name of the great pitcher Christy Mathewson—misspelled as “Christie” in the
first edition. Fitzgerald was a poor speller, and proper names gave him lots of
trouble—Hemingway for example, he often spelled “Hemminway.” But Fitzgerald
obviously assumed Scribner’s would make those corrections, as indeed they should
have.
After all this talk of errors, there’s a doozy on page 118
that escaped the proofreaders of West’s manuscript at the University of
Pennsylvania Press: “If one really wants Fitzgerald’s errrors, then one needs a
facsimile edition of the manuscript.” Yes, “errrors” with four r’s. Quite
humorous, all things considered.
In his conclusion, West makes a passionate plea for a fully
corrected version of This Side of Paradise, as he notes that the 1960 edition
of the novel that was still in print in 1983 had many errors. West himself
would be the editor for the version of This Side of Paradise that finally
corrected all the errors of past editions: the 1996 edition, produced for the
Cambridge Edition of the Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald. This version is the
basis for the 2003 Scribner trade paperback, which is the version of This
Side of Paradise I recommend.
This Side of Paradise sold about 50,000 copies during
its first year and a half in print. It wasn’t one of the top ten best-selling
novels of 1920, but it was a book that made a considerable impact. Nearly all
the reviews of the novel make it clear that, almost overnight, Fitzgerald had
become one of the leading literary voices of a new generation.
One of the finest tributes to This Side of Paradise was
written by John O’Hara, a novelist whose subject matter was similar to
Fitzgerald’s own: “A little matter of twenty-five years ago I, along with half
a million other men and women between 15 and 30 fell in love with a book. It
was the real thing, that love…after the appearance of that book I was excitedly
interested in almost anything that was written by F. Scott Fitzgerald; his
novels, short stories, and his nonfiction articles…the novel was This Side
of Paradise. All he was was our best novelist, one of our best
novella-ists, and one of our finest writers of short stories.” (From the
Introduction to The Portable F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1945)
Fitzgerald would be amazed to know that 100 years later, his
first novel is still being read and enjoyed, now in an edition that comes
closer to what he was trying to convey all those years ago when he wrote about
Amory Blaine’s voyage of self-discovery.
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