More on another excerpt from This Side of Paradise and some related thoughts
In one scene of the novel, the main character, Amory, meets with a Monsignor at his college to discuss his plans to quit school (which F. Scott Fitzgerald really did from Princeton University). The Monsignor makes a fine distinction between “personality” being what you thought you were and “personage” being something more durable and less damaged potentially by society. A priest in Fitzgerald’s high school has been credited with encouraging him into fiction.
Fitzgerald must have been a fast reader (I did a lot of reading for my PhD but am normally a rather slow one). In this scene, he mentions Huysmans, Pater, Gautier, Rabelais, Boccaccio, Petronius, and Suetonious, and several other renowned authors.
We read Huysmans’ Against Nature for a grad school class. Known as À Rebours in its original French; it is a late 19th-century novel of the Decadent literary genre about a young man who can afford to basically drop out of work and conventional society and just behave oddly at home, making it an almost entirely artistic world largely of his own creation.
It reminds me of a neighbor a few weeks ago who said, jokingly I think, “just lock your door and watch TV.”