The Beautiful and Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald

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.