The Connoisseur of Desire

Reviewing The Notebooks of F. Scott Fitzgerald in these pages forty-five years ago, Gore Vidal called him a “bold chronicler of girls who kissed.”1 Apart from the unwarranted condescension, the point was fair enough. Fitzgerald wrote frequently and fervently about boys dreaming of kissing a girl or recollecting the thrill of it, or relinquishing the hope of it, or, upon achieving it, asking themselves, “Had she been moved?… What measure of enjoyment had she taken in his kisses? And had she at any time lost herself ever so little?” Here, from his first novel, This Side of Paradise (1920), is the first kiss between Amory Blaine, a “young egotist” fresh out of Princeton, and Rosalind Connage, a girl with an “eternal kissable mouth” who’s been expelled from Spence for an infraction that she can’t, or won’t, remember: HE : But will you—kiss me? Or are you afraid? SHE : I’m never afraid—but your reasons are so poor. HE : Rosalind, I really want to kiss you. SHE : So do I. (They kiss—defin ... Read full article.