The Beautiful and Damned was published in 1922 and is the second novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald. When reviewed by The New York Times, the critic found Fitzgerald to be "pessimistic".
WES:
The Beautiful and Damned, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, is our novel for this month and
it appears quite representative of the genre of the 1920s. It seems to reflect
the persona of the time, a time when the universities began kicking out God,
society was becoming ever more soulless, Progressives (ala Woodrow Wilson and
Teddy/Franklin Roosevelt) were busy reshaping policy and society, with people
bouncing from one fad to another looking for something but never seeming to
find it. This novel appears to me to be almost the epitome of the
meaninglessness and fecklessness of lives where there are no moral guideposts,
no strictures, and no basis for one’s life except the pursuit of pleasure. The
book seems to have several themes that intersect in the lives of Anthony Patch
and Gloria Gilbert whose travails are depicted in this tale. Those themes
appear in the quotes below. I shall highlight in the ensuing paragraphs what I
think the author’s purpose was in these quotes as well as a few of my own
perspectives on these themes:
·
“It
seemed a tragedy to want nothing – and yet he wanted something, something. He
knew in flashes what it was – some path of hope to lead him toward what he
thought was an imminent and ominous old age.”
·
“Gloria’s
penchant for premonitions and her bursts of vague supernaturalism were a
surprise to Anthony. Either some complex, properly and scientifically inhibited
in the early years with her Bilphistic mother, or some inherited
hypersensitiveness, made her susceptible to any suggestion of the psychic…”
·
“But
the book lived always, so beautifully written, and so astounding the quality of
imagination with which these men of mind and genius had endowed it. They
neglected to give it a name, but after they were dead it became known as the
Bible.”
·
“He
had been futile in longing to drift and dream; no one drifted except to
maelstroms, no one dreamed, without his dreams becoming fantastic nightmares of
indecision and regret.”
·
“’I
always have an instinct to kick a cat,’ he said idly.”
·
“Very
few of the people who accentuate the futility of life remark the futility of
themselves. Perhaps they think that in proclaiming the evil of living they
somehow salvage their own worth from the ruin.”
·
“There
was nothing it seemed, that grew stale so soon as pleasure.”
·
“Only
a few months before people had been urging him to give in, to submit to
mediocrity, to go to work. But he had known that he was justified in his way of
life – and he stuck it out stanchly….’I showed them,’ he was saying. ‘It was a
hard fight, but I didn’t give up and came through!’”
Anthony’s life
surely was drastically affected by the loss of both of his parents before he
was 11. His father died while they were in Switzerland so he must have been
tremendously traumatized by that event and the strenuous journey home with his
father’s body nearby. His early life was impacted by his grandfather’s great
wealth and long, intimidating shadow. He felt a need to do something after
Harvard but could never actually get around to doing anything. Instead he lived
on his mother’s limited legacy and his grandfather’s yearly Christmas bond.
That money was quite enough for a fellow right out of college but soon melted
away after he married Gloria and their joint lives became more and more
expensive. They began to depend on the grandfather’s inheritance but that
became only a tenuous hope when the grandfather was disgusted over a drunken
incident and completely wrote Anthony out of his will.
Fitzgerald
apparently coined the word “Bilphism” himself in this book as it does not
appear in dictionaries. It supposedly means the science of all religions where
the soul lives on in reincarnation. Gloria appeared to be afflicted with this
curse and demonstrated it at the deaths of her parents but it seems apparent
that Fitzgerald did not believe in it. He cynically appears to have invented the
term as a derogatory reference to anyone foolish or stupid enough to believe in
or have a psychological “complex” involving a supernatural religion.
As above
noted, Fitzgerald consistently denigrates religion, especially the biblical
account. One particular scene where this occurred was where Gloria left a
drunken party after Joe Hull made a pass at her and she decided on the spur of
the moment to return from the summer cottage upstate back to New York. Everyone
in the party goes searching for her and they all end up at the train station in
the wee hours of the morning waiting for the train with each drunken sot
revealing their psychological motivations and religious underpinnings or lack
of same. The quote cited was the end of a long cynical monologue by Gloria’s
cousin who spends his time temporizing quality literature by writing claptrap
to make a buck.
Anthony
reveals himself to be a thoroughly unlikeable guy. He cannot make a decision
and puts off ever making a move to succeed in life. He is in it only to engage
in pleasure and constantly asks forgiveness from Gloria as he falls deeper into
alcoholism, debt, and ennui. This is revealed in the quote about nightmares and
the simple one liner about kicking the cat. Any man who kicks a cat is worthless
in my book. He reinforces his roguishness by shacking up with Dot while in the
Army, then dumping her and later throwing a chair at her when she shows up in
New York hoping to resume the relationship he simply had abandoned.
The theme of
this book has got to be the utter futility of life. Life constantly stinks for
Gloria and Anthony as everyone around them moves along while they sink deeper
and deeper. They apparently fail to move because of the promise of millions
from the contested inheritance that they believe will solve all their problems.
They can’t see what is happening even when Anthony is thrown out of the club
after drunkenly accosting Joseph Bloeckmann, the film producer, who had
genuinely tried to help Gloria.
Pleasure
consistently is the principle purpose of their lives and that mostly comes
right out of the bottle. They had to do something, meet someone, or party every
night and it nearly ruined them. As every addict is well aware of, it took more
booze each time to get the desired effect and that meant more and more money
and fewer and ultimately fewer friends.
After all the
time spent showing a downward spiral, finally, in the last couple of pages,
their legal appeal is a success and suddenly Anthony comes into a $30 million
inheritance. The last quote is actually the last couple lines in the book. It
shows or I think it shows Fitzgerald’s ultimate belief in the sheer uncertainty
of life. Anthony and Gloria in a moral universe should have been wrecked but
instead they are rewarded. Anthony actually thinks he has won out due to his
own abilities given in the quote when it is actually a pure twist of fate that
has put him safely on the ship to a holiday in Europe.
Overall, this
book had a few plusses and held some interest but I found much I disliked. I
did not like the characters. There was nothing redeeming in their actions and
reactions. The title might really be an insightful one. These characters wanted
to be beautiful and lived for pleasure but as the Bible says, pleasure is only
for a season. Without morality and redemption, they are damned – except in this
one everyone apparently will live happily ever after. Is that life – I don’t
think so. I also did not like the high degree of fluff with many characters and
scenes irrelevant to the main story line. This is probably due to the author’s
inexperience. I will have to explore his career more fully – maybe this was an
early effort for him. I rate this book as a 7 on my scale of 1-10 (1 as best).
ALLISON:
Dad wrote an
email to remind me that the title of this book is The Beautiful and Damned and not “The Beautiful and the Damned” as I have always called it,
even after reading the damn thing, and carrying it around with me, staring at
its beautiful cover for over a week.
The Beautiful and Damned.
Well, that changes everything.
Why did I subconsciously and so thoroughly add that the? My version is maybe easier on the
ear? “The Beautiful and The Damned”—a dichotomy, one and the other, situated across a gulf. Truly, I don’t know why or
how I misread, but it’s not an opposition, not at all, and I suddenly feel I’ve
misinterpreted the whole book! What a difference a the can make! Our two protagonists jointly assume these
descriptions rather than the assignments I had carelessly given them: Gloria,
beauty, Anthony, damnation. Well, shoot.
There are a lot of titles in this book that I didn’t
pay attention to. I am a lazy reader, which is partly why I enjoy reading with
Dad, who is inquisitive and follows all plot points meticulously. Fitzgerald
structured the story into three Books, each with three main chapters, and
countless mini chapters, all carefully labeled and I don’t know that I ingested
a single title. I don’t care for fiction that comes in neat categories, so I reject
chapter headings, almost unconsciously, but in doing so I am surely missing
out. Titles require thought. They are not unintentional. Let this be a lesson
to me.
I will come out immediately and say I struggled to
identify with these characters that want for nothing, yet are entitled
everything. This is a New York novel, and I love to read about New York because
New York novels tell about the city
as if it’s the only city—the
universal, and there’s something so bold and obnoxious about that. As a New Yorker
(and I call myself a New Yorker because I’ve lived in the city longer than I’ve lived anywhere else) it makes me feel
included in the joke. I want to recognize myself in New York, but our heroes
Anthony and Gloria may as well live on the moon, their privileged birthright so
elevates them from squall of the streets. I can’t live in this version of New
York, but I certainly recognize the cast of characters. I just don’t like them
very much.
As I neared the end of this book, I heard echoes of
Fitzgerald in another deeply devastating American novel: Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates. Despite similar fates, Yates’
book is about ambition which is arguably a theme more familiar to our American
indoctrinations than that of the elite. Of course this country is supposed to
offer wealth and security and love and warmth to those who only seize their
opportunity. The heartbreak of Revolutionary Road comes from the dissolution of the myth of the American Dream, which is also why my heart steels toward Anthony and Gloria. They refuse to struggle. But, as Buddha says, “life is suffering.” Their agony
instead manifests from the lack of
fight and in the end Anthony refers to himself as a cautionary tale. If you
fail to strive, fail to be motivated by a fragile ego, or shrewd greed, or even
the extraordinary effort of pulling up one’s bootstraps, then you are
undeserving.
Anthony thinks he is damned by a woman—by achieving
the one woman he wants. But he’s not damned. He’s spared a war of over 38
million (!!!) causalities, he never starves, and he teeters on the edge of
disaster the entire book, even perhaps, getting away with murder. His damnation
is psychic, and his own concoction. Conversely, we want to feel compassion for the
marriage of Richard Yates’ couple in Revolutionary
Road which is shattered by ambition and ponderings about
feminine “choices” between family and independence, or how a woman might
measure a successful life against the manly American algorithm of work = reward.
Gloria, finding Anthony’s role as provider lacking, asks these questions,
but her only “work” (becoming an actress) relies on her beauty, employed too
little, too late.
Maurice Sendak wrote a trilogy of children’s books
which he describes as “how children
master various feelings - danger, boredom, fear, frustration, jealousy - and
manage to come to grips with the realities of their lives.” If you ask me, In the Night Kitchen, is his book
on boredom. The hero, Mickey, (clearly a child lying in bed, waiting for sleep)
conquers insufferable boredom with ingenuity and creation. He takes control of his
dreamworld and removes himself from peril by forcefully protesting. He then
builds a plane out of dough, and delivers milk to the batter so we all can have
cake for breakfast. He is rewarded with pride, a job well done. I was reminded
of Mickey and Sendak’s In the Night
Kitchen, particularly when Anthony delivers an oft-quoted speech to his unrequited
mistress, Dot. Anthony tries to temper her heartache by explaining that it’s
better to desire than achieve when he says: “I’ve often thought that if I
hadn’t got what I wanted things might have been different with me. I might have
found something in my mind and enjoyed putting it in circulation. I might have
been content with the work of it, and had some sweet vanity of the success.”
He’s not exactly saying “be careful what you wish for” because there’s no real
longing for anything, as all that’s to be desired has been fated already
through fortunate birth—wealth, status, and beauty. Yet all of these surface
advantages fall short of fruition. Anthony is only wealthy enough to not have
to do anything. Gloria is only beautiful enough to find Anthony, wasting the
vague prize of her youth and beauty on a sad marriage of disrepair. No one
works at fixing anything, and the shiny veneer dulls and flakes with boredom
turned madness. This is a novel of neglected narcissists, stuck gazing in the
mirror. Anthony missed Sendak’s lesson of childhood, never learnt how to
protect his own ego, so that when things spiral out of control he relents to
the chaos rather than designing a world in which he is redeemed. A world in
which he is the hero.
I loved the language of this book, it was so very
beautiful and accessible, even as written nearly 100 years ago. But the book was
so very depressing and any morals gleaned,
like Mickey, I thankfully mastered
in childhood. I found it hard to like this book at all. I give it a 4 out of
10.
