The Connoisseur of Desire | Andrew Delbanco

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—definitely and thoroughly.)

HE: (After a breathless second) Well, is your curiosity satisfied?

SHE: Is yours?

HE: No, it’s only aroused.

Then a coy stage direction (“He looks it”) invites the reader to decide whether Amory’s arousal reveals itself as a facial flush or an evident erection.

Fitzgerald’s second novel, The Beautiful and Damned (1922), includes a chapter called “The Connoisseur of Kisses” that categorizes kisses by motive and effect. Some burn fiercely before “the flame retreats to some remote and platonic fire.” Others are cool from the start, as when a college boy presses himself upon a trusting shopgirl who, “after half a dozen kisses,” expects a proposal but gets at most a trinket before he moves on to his next adventure. Then there are young women who, with the nonchalance born of money, “kiss a man beautifully and romantically without any desire to be either his wife or his mistress.” In this gallery of portraits, Fitzgerald brought special conviction to those of earnest young men—no doubt partly self-portraits—fumbling to express “the most inept intimacy” with young women who kiss them casually as a form of recreation. This kind of mismatch furnished the plot for several early stories published in Redbook, McCall’s, and other mass-circulation magazines and later collected under the summary title All the Sad Young Men (1926).