M@ reviewed This side of paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Review of 'This side of paradise' on 'Goodreads'
2 stars
This is the sort of thing that leads to authorship debates.
After Zelda refused his first proposal, Scotty drank all summer, then went to Minnesota to work on this novel. (History does not report if he stopped drinking at this point.) He then combined an unpublished novel written in the dining halls at Princeton with a bunch of juvenalia and some newly-written passages into a -- would there be a literary allusion to a young man's poorly thought out creation, stitched together from various parts, that goes terribly awry? Nothing's springing to mind...
Anyway, the end result is a novel about a prep school dofus which combines snippets like this:
The unwelcome November rain had perversely stolen the day's last hour and pawned it with that ancient fence, the night.
And this:
The evening sea was a new sensation, for all its color and mellow age was …
This is the sort of thing that leads to authorship debates.
After Zelda refused his first proposal, Scotty drank all summer, then went to Minnesota to work on this novel. (History does not report if he stopped drinking at this point.) He then combined an unpublished novel written in the dining halls at Princeton with a bunch of juvenalia and some newly-written passages into a -- would there be a literary allusion to a young man's poorly thought out creation, stitched together from various parts, that goes terribly awry? Nothing's springing to mind...
Anyway, the end result is a novel about a prep school dofus which combines snippets like this:
The unwelcome November rain had perversely stolen the day's last hour and pawned it with that ancient fence, the night.
And this:
The evening sea was a new sensation, for all its color and mellow age was gone, and it seemed the bleak waste that made the Norse sagas sad;
with stuff like this:
"I want to go to Princeton," said Amory. "I don't know why, but I think of all Harvard men as sissies, like I used to be, and all Yale men as wearing big blue sweaters and smoking pipes."
and a series of Princeton dining-club anecdotes about what the protagonist (originally from a work called "The Romantic Egoist", if you need a brief character précis) and his boring buddies did instead of studying.
To get back to my initial thought, it's very easy to see that 400 years hence, some literary critic will take this work and [b:The Great Gatsby|4671|The Great Gatsby|F. Scott Fitzgerald|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1490528560s/4671.jpg|245494], argue that they cannot possibly be the product of the same writer, and then create a series of cockamamie theories suggesting that [a:Ernest Hemingway|1455|Ernest Hemingway|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1406040005p2/1455.jpg] or [a:Ring Lardner|273838|Ring Lardner|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1344848845p2/273838.jpg] or [a:Sir Francis Bacon|14947626|Sir Francis Bacon|https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/user/u_50x66-632230dc9882b4352d753eedf9396530.png] actually wrote Gatsby. I would look forward to it, except of course I'll be dead.
