The second F. Scott Fitzgerald novel sounds many of the themes as the first, only with greater emphasis on the negative. Youth and beauty fade, wealth is lost, status slips and the mind becomes muddled by wasted opportunity. What is left is something of a fizzle, if a brilliant one.
The weirdest thing about this book is its copyright date. It seems to take in the whole of the Jazz Age. But unlike the later Fitzgerald short story “Babylon Revisited.” which also depicts the ruin of a similarly tragic couple, The Beautiful And Damned was published near the dawn of the Roaring Twenties, not after its end.
Fitzgerald had a prescient view of where the country was going, as well as his own famous marriage to Zelda Sayre. If only he had a plot!
The book introduces us to Anthony Patch, idle dreamer and grandson of a pious tycoon. Anthony wants only what is beautiful in life. To that end, he is smitten by Gloria Gilbert, a proud young beauty who dallies with many boys but can’t be bothered with any of them. Seeing at once her narcissistic core, he still yearns to be to her what she is to him:
Her beautiful eyes and lips were very grave as she made her choice, and Anthony thought again how naïve was her every gesture; she took all the things of life for hers to choose from and apportion, as though she were continually picking out presents for herself from an inexhaustible counter.
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| A book jacket sketch for The Beautiful And Damned provided by Zelda Fitzgerald shows her involvement and understanding of her husband's project. I particularly like the exclamation point she added to the title; she must not have been under any illusions about their future. Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beautiful_and_Damned |
Yet winning Gloria proves not that great a challenge; Anthony is described often as a handsome, personable man related to big money. Being true to her is more difficult; particularly as his aspirations to succeed are eclipsed by his enjoyment of too many parties and alcohol.
Gloria sees things more clearly, even when the going is good. She writes in her diary: “Blowing bubbles – that’s what we’re doing, Anthony and me. And we blew such beautiful ones to-day, and they’ll explode and then we’ll blow more and more, I guess – bubbles just as big and just as beautiful, until all the soap and water is used up.”
Eventually they are used up – by the last chapter Anthony and Gloria are physically declining, strung out, abandoned, and broke. What dreams they once had exist only as mocking memories. The reader can only feel sorry for them – more sorry for her, as Anthony’s self-pity never fails to annoy. Gloria always retains a redeeming spark of moxie about her.
Fitzgerald’s ability to write dashing, scintillating prose is on continuous display. One comment made by friendly critics at the time was that The Beautiful And Damned shows off Fitzgerald’s ability to light up a page with his signature descriptive talents. This is very true.
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| The Fitzgeralds in front of the Westport, Connecticut home they rented after marriage and the same house as it appears today. In the novel, the Patches make their home in the fictitious Connecticut suburb of Marietta at a similar beachfront Colonial, built "when our ancestors were gloriously deserting Washington in droves." Images from (above) https://www.wshu.org/news/2024-04-10/great-gatsby-great-neck-westport-ct-long-island and (below) https://s.hdnux.com/photos/21/76/27/4711876/4/1200x0.jpg |
Take this description of a Manhattan evening early in the book:
The soft rush of taxis by him, and laughter, laughter hoarse as a crow’s, incessant and loud, with the rumble of the subways underneath – and over all, the revolutions of light, the growings and receding of light – light dividing like pearls – forming and reforming in glittering bars and circles and monstrous grotesque figures cut amazingly on the sky.
Yet this faculty for engaging prose can be a negative. Characters often speak in pithy epigrams rather than real human voices. Fitzgerald has them opine on life’s meaning for pages at a time. There are also odd poetical turns meant to be provoking but often perplexing:
Her bosom is still a pavement that she offers to the hoofs of many passing stallions, hoping that their iron shoes may strike even a spark of romance in the darkness…
As with his first novel, This Side Of Paradise, Fitzgerald was swinging for the fences, and his capacity for detail in giving us the blow-by-blow on Anthony and Gloria’s financial decline will exceed the interests of most readers. Like many great writers, he didn’t always know when to stop.
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| Manhattan as depicted in a 1918 postcard. The exterior splendors of New York are often contrasted with skepticism about it all. "I think the city's a montebank," Anthony says. "Always struggling to approach the tremendous and impressive urbanity ascribed to it." Image from https://clickamericana.com/topics/places/see-old-new-york-at-night |
How do you explain a writer capable of a tight, genius sentence like “It was a reproachless twilight on the summer side of spring” who later the same paragraph references curbside trees forming a “umbrageous brummagem”? Fitzgerald’s ability to intoxicate with words too often included himself.
Ernest Hemingway must have had a field day with this book. It serves up his famous rival in two delicious ways Papa liked to promote: Fitzgerald the overwriter and Fitzgerald the whipped husband. Even if it isn’t a thinly veiled autobiography like This Side Of Paradise, the Zelda parallels here are stronger, suggesting futility and some sense of authorial shame less than two years into their marriage. Gloria is the strong one in the relationship, yet often remote and always impenetrable.
This is really Fitzgerald’s Zelda novel. This Side Of Paradise had been written to woo Zelda, but concerns several female characters, just one of which was based on Zelda. Its focus is on Fitzgerald stand-in Amory Blaine. In The Beautiful And Damned, Gloria is Zelda, to the point of Fitzgerald reportedly inserting passages from Zelda’s journal.
Zelda was an active participant in The Beautiful And Damned’s creation. She helped her husband with its construction, warned him off a fantasy ending that would likely have made the novel too pretentious, provided an unused cover design, and played the role of Gloria to the press to help sell the book. They aren’t an exact match, but the parallels are there.
[Sidenote on the ending: It’s often criticized, but I think it suits the novel very well. It’s bleakly satisfying and yet memorably unexpected, too.]
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| The Palm Court at the Plaza Hotel, one surviving example of the Gotham glamor the Patches bask in during the heady early chapters of The Beautiful And Damned, before finances force a retreat to Connecticut. By the last chapters, the Patches are reduced to selling off bonds to survive. Image from https://naftaligroup.com/the-plaza/ |
You see a lot more difference between author and creation with Anthony. He’s lazy, which Fitzgerald never was, and his drinking is something he only fleetingly acknowledges and never tried to control. Also, Anthony’s aristocratic upbringing debilitates him. Fitzgerald by contrast grew up in the struggling middle class; he learned early on that capitalism has winners and losers and the struggle is not always fair.
Fitzgerald offers some choice thoughts on this which shape the novel to the extent it is shaped at all:
It did not occur to Anthony that the type of man who attains commercial success seldom knows how or why, and, as in his grandfather’s case, when he ascribes reasons, the reasons are generally inaccurate and absurd.
Anthony is never more than a feather, his weakness a weight the novel emphasizes at the expense of a good plot:
He could say “No!” neither to man nor woman; borrower and temptress alike found him tender-minded and pliable. Indeed he seldom made decisions at all, and when he did they were but half-hysterical resolves formed in the panic of some aghast and irreparable awakening.
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| Late in the novel, Anthony is drafted to fight in World War I. The war ends before he is shipped overseas, but his marriage is jeopardized by his affair with a young Southern woman. F. Scott and Zelda actually met while he was a soldier stationed near her home in Montgomery, Alabama. Image from https://worldview.stratfor.com/article/americas-first-world-war |
The Beautiful And Damned is a book meant to shock. Fitzgerald takes some biting shots at religion and the non-capacity of human transcendence, but it is on the American way of life he unloads both barrels. The main heavy in the novel, glimpsed sparingly, is Anthony’s grandfather, “a rabid monomaniac, an unqualified nuisance, and an intolerable bore” who ascribes his lucky breaks to hard work and piety.
Fitzgerald’s word portraits of the man are scarcely that of a human:
Anthony surveyed his grandfather with that tacit amazement which always attended the sight. That this feeble, unintelligent old man was possessed of such power that, yellow journals to the contrary, the men in the republic whose souls he could not have bought directly or indirectly would scarcely have populated White Plains, seemed as impossible to believe as that he had once been a pink-and-white baby.
As he did in This Side Of Paradise, and in his 1920 short story “May Day,” Fitzgerald uses his platform to say some socialistic things about wealth inequity and the fate of the downtrodden. Yet the book works better as an unintended Prohibition tract. As a political writer, Fitzgerald was encumbered both by his infatuation for the rich as well as his elitist disinterest in everyone else. The immigrant underclass populating New York City register more as smells than as faces or voices.
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| The first edition jacket for The Beautiful And Damned emphasizes the wealth and distance of its main characters. While not matching the breakout success of This Side Of Paradise, the novel sold well enough to keep Fitzgerald's career on the upswing. Image from https://www.rarebookcellar.com |
While there is more of a throughline than you got with This Side Of Paradise, the novel goes off on many tangents too often left unresolved. I kept expecting more to happen with Gloria’s many old flames, especially one in the movie business. There is time spent on her parents that never pays off, and a subplot about a Japanese manservant which showcases clumsy racial humor. You expect that in a novel written 100 years ago; what isn’t expected is how weak the humor is.
Futility is the biggest takeaway. As a successful writer, Fitzgerald seems rather down on his trade. One of Anthony’s friends, Richard Caramel, enjoys tremendous commercial and critical success with his first novel, then goes on to write a lot of what he admits is “trash.” Caramel is sent up as a kind of mediocrity who can’t be bothered to be better:
“You know these new novels make me tired. My God! Everywhere I go some silly girl asks me if I read This Side Of Paradise. Are our girls really like that? If it’s true to life, which I don’t believe, the next generation is going to the dogs.”
The
Beautiful And Damned
is rather hard to get through with its dire tone and monotonous focus. I don’t
know how I could have, without those Scott and Zelda parallels to pick up on.
That may not be enough for everyone, though, who may enjoy it more in pieces
than as a whole.
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