we go tearing into the air as if we meant business.” 1
Fitzgerald, however, was not so keen. He did as badly as an army officer as he had as a college student. Just as classes seemed to interfere with his theatrical career at Princeton, so drills and marches became an irritating interruption of the novel he wanted to write. Though he intended to lead an infantry platoon into battle, he never took his responsibility seriously, never realized that it was vitally important to acquire basic military skills. Like T. E. Lawrence, who would translate Homer’s Odyssey , with a pad on his knees, in the RAF barracks in India in 1930, Fitzgerald, concealing his pad behind Small Problems for Infantry , continued to compose while in the army and “wrote paragraph after paragraph on a somewhat edited history of me and my imagination. The outline of twenty-two chapters, four of them in verse, was made, two chapters were completed; and then I was detected and the game was up. I could write no more during [evening] study period.” Undeterred by this interruption, he continued to compose his book amidst noise and distractions: “Every Saturday at one o’clock when the week’s work was over, I hurried to the Officers’ Club, and there, in a corner of a room full of smoke, conversation and rattling newspapers, I wrote a one hundred and twenty thousand word novel on the consecutive weekends of three months.” 2
Fitzgerald had known Charles Scribner at Princeton; and Christian Gauss suggested that Scott send “The Romantic Egoist” to the venerable firm that published his own works as well as those of such eminent authors as Meredith, James, Stevenson, Barrie, Wharton and Galsworthy. Shane Leslie, another Scribner’s author, wrote an encouraging letter to accompany the manuscript. He noted its weaknesses but felt it was worth publishing, and compared Fitzgerald to the handsome and romantic Rupert Brooke, who had died of a fever on a Greek island while on active service in 1915. Fitzgerald used Brooke’s poem “Tiare Tahiti” for the title, epigraph and theme (age has nothing to tell the young in this world) of “The Romantic Egoist,” which was published as This Side of Paradise.
“In spite of its disguises,” Leslie wrote, “it has given me a vivid picture of the American generation that is hastening to war. I marvel at its crudity and its cleverness. . . . About a third of the book could be omitted without losing the impression that it is written by an American Rupert Brooke.” Since the mortality rate of infantry lieutenants was extremely high, Leslie thought that Fitzgerald, like Brooke, would die in the war. He urged Scribner’s to accept the book in order to make Fitzgerald happy during the last few months of his life.
On August 19, 1918—about five months after submitting the novel—Fitzgerald received a constructive response from a young editor at Scribner’s, Maxwell Perkins. Perkins saw considerable merit in the book, but felt its innovations were outweighed by its glaring defects: “We have been reading ‘The Romantic Egoist’ with a very unusual degree of interest;—in fact no ms. novel has come to us for a long time that seemed to display so much originality, and it is therefore hard for us to conclude that we cannot offer to publish it as it stands at present. . . . It seems to us in short that the story does not culminate in anything as it must to justify the reader’s interest as he follows it; and that it might be made to do so quite consistently with the characters and with its earlier stages.” 3 Perkins asked Fitzgerald to revise the book, changing the narrator from the first to the third person, and then submit it for reconsideration.
Fitzgerald, meanwhile, had become distracted by his military duties and by his frequent shifts around the country prior to embarkation for Europe. In March 1918 he joined the 45th Infantry Regiment in Camp Zachary Taylor, near Louisville, Kentucky—where
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