"Still a Naughty Boy"
He looked at me sideways—and I knew why Jordan Baker had believed he was lying. He hurried the phrase ‘educated at Oxford,’ or swallowed it, or choked on it, as though it had bothered him before. And with this doubt, his whole statement fell to pieces, and I wondered if there wasn’t something a little sinister about him, after all.
The Great Gatsby was a moderate literary success, but not much of a financial one. Critics reduced The Great Gatsby by continuing the extant Fitzgerald narrative. While The Great Gatsby is a very different novel from This Side of Paradise, the earlier perception of Fitzgerald as a bright young man with a promising future as a chronicler of flapper culture persisted. The ever-present factoid that he was only 23 at the time of his first novel’s publication appears in reviews of his third, and many start with a reference to the author’s earlier image. This criticism was, as a friend of Fitzgerald’s stated in a letter soon after the book’s release, “not very interesting, but decidedly laudatory.” Selling fewer than 20,000 copies, it would go out of print before Fitzgerald's death 15 years later.
H. L. Mencken and other notable critics reviewed The Great Gatsby, remarking on its connection to Fitzgerald's earlier work, with Mencken even reaching out to Fitzgerald directly. McAlister Coleman connected the experience of reading the book itself to flapper-like jazz shows and drinking, and the concept of "flappers and philosophers" reappeared again from This Side of Paradise's reception.
A profile of Fitzgerald published under “Who’s Who In Paris," for example, reminds its reader that Fitzgerald “is popularly credited with the discovery of the flapper,” and that “no recent writer has exploited better than he… the milieu of modern New York.” To understand The Great Gatsby, this article states one must understand its author’s relationship with the culture that was around him ten years earlier. “It is astonishing,” it reads, “to know that he is less than thirty years of age…” The narrative of the young author is still present, overpowering any mention of his new book’s actual content until the final paragraph of the profile. Even then, focus is placed on how The Great Gatsby contains “the milieu… of modern Long Island,” the same framing as his earlier work. It’s shown as a continuity with the version of Fitzgerald that gained fame in 1920.
A new popular picture of Fitzgerald accompanies reviews connecting events in The Great Gatsby to Fitzgerald's previous work, seeing it as proof that the success of This Side of Paradise was replicable. The book is shown as a return to form for its author, who becomes a public figure as his personal travels and family life are described to readers.
In this letter, Fitzgerald’s friend refers to the work of famous literary critic H. L. Mencken as “a sausage machine, grinding out the same old highly spiced weenies and hot dogs we’ve been consuming for years.” The press around Gatsby reflects this. The same quote, describing Daisy Buchanan’s laughter from one of the first scenes of the book, is used repeatedly. The reader is reminded continuously of Fitzgerald’s youth, and the legend of Fitzgerald’s connection to flappers refuses to go away. One reviewer describes The Great Gatsby as “the soul of the flapper all grown up,” as if even when Fitzgerald’s female characters act very differently from the college-age Popular Daughters of This Side of Paradise, they are still cut from the same cloth. The “flappers and philosophers” kid trope prevents reviewers from seeing the heart of The Great Gatsby as it stands apart from Fitzgerald’s earlier work; “F. Scott Fitzgerald has grown up,” says a critic, “to find himself still a naughty boy.”
While Fitzgerald's friends said they understood his novel, the press fell back on the old tropes of the Fitzgerald narrative. Here, This Side of Paradise is used as shorthand for the "spirit of the Jazz Age," an era first chronicled by the younger Fitzgerald. This caricature of the author is recorded in a "Who's Who In Paris," which recites the story again in familiar fashion. Another article works his daughter Scottie into the story, with Zelda Fitzgerald cast as the "first flapper" and inviting little Scottie into that category.