The Beautiful and Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald

To be clear, it’s about one set of people, not two: people who are both beautiful and damned.

The Beautiful and Damned is Fitzgerald’s second novel, published in 1922, following This Side of Paradise from 1920. Like This Side of Paradise, the novel is based on Fitzgerald’s own life.

This time, Fitzgerald spilts himself between two characters. The minor character, Dick Caramel, is the writer Fitzgerald, working on his first novel. The major character, Anthony Patch, gets Fitzgerald’s hedonism, alcoholism, and his love of the pretty, wild, girl: the real life Zelda for Fitzgerald, the fictional Gloria Gilbert, for Anthony Patch. In The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald splits himself between Jay Gatsby, the man from the mid-west in love with the pretty girl, and Nick Carraway, the Ivy League graduate writer. In Tender is the Night, Dick Diver and Nicole start out as Gerald and Sara Murphy, but then turn into Fitzgerald and Zelda.

We’re introduced to Anthony Patch first. The novel opens in 1913. Patch is a recent Harvard grad, back from a post-graduate trip to Rome, and living in Manhattan. This makes Patch a little older than Fitzgerald himself who was born in 1896, and a little older than Amory Blaine, Fitzgerald’s alter ego in This Side of Paradise. Anthony’s apartment is located very specifically on Fifty-second Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues (p. 10. I read the Penguin Classic paperback edition with an introduction by Kermit Vanderbilt). He’s 25 and single. He has no occupation or ambition, although he nurtures a vague thought that he might make a profit off his recent trip to Rome and write something about the Renaissance. His parents are dead and he has no siblings, but he’s the grandson of the very wealthy, and still living, Adam Patch who made millions on Wall Street and then turned, in later life, to moral causes. Anthony has enough income to support himself and employ a butler named Bounds, who also works for two other gentlemen. He drinks and dines and goes to shows with his friends, and dailies with girls. Mostly, though, he spends his time waiting for his grandfather to die so he can inherit the old man’s money.

In outline, the novel is very similar to James’ The Wings of the Dove, believe it or not. There’s a wealthy character slowly dying, and an amoral couple hoping to inherit. The drama of both novels hinges on how, and whether, and when, they will get the money that will sustain their livelihood.

Through his friendship with Dick Caramel, Patch is introduced to Gloria Gilbert, Caramel’s cousin from Kansas City, who is spending several months in New York at the Plaza with her parents. She makes her appearance on page 49.

Gloria is beautiful. Indeed, there’s even a short section prior to her physical appearance where Fitzgerald imagines a goddess of beauty waiting on some divine plane for her assignment to be incarnated in our world. Throughout the novel she is always described as beautiful. She knows it. And so, too, do her many male admirers. She’s also shallow and self-interested. She commits to nothing but fun and the moment. On page 188 she says:

“No one cares about us but ourselves, Anthony,” she said one day. “It’d be ridiculous for me to go about pretending I felt any obligations toward the world, and as for worrying what people think about me, I simply don’t, that’s all. Since I was a little girl in dancing-school I’ve been criticized by the mothers of all the little girls who weren’t as popular as I was, and I’ve always looked on criticism as a sort of envious tribute.”

The novel consists of three “Books” with each Book divided into three numbered and titled chapters. Each chapter is further divided into several short sections, titled but not numbered. Fitzgerald did the same in This Side of Paradise. Also, as in that book, Fitzgerald sometimes breaks off the straight prose and writes dialogue as though it were the script for a play.

Anthony and Gloria begin dating. They have a tiff and part for several weeks. At the end of “Book One” they’ve made up. In Book Two they marry, at Adam Patch’s estate. They honeymoon in California. The romance shows cracks nearly immediately. They spend more money than they have. To make up the difference, they sell the bonds that make up their capital one by one. When they return to New York that Autumn they look for a house and find one to rent in the fictional town of Marietta, north of Manhattan up around Rye and Port Chester. They entertain friends with drunken parties. Dick Caramel publishes his novel and it’s a surprising success. Though the house depresses them, in a bit of drunken unconsciousness Anthony signs a lease for a second year. In Chapter Three of this Book Two, there’s one of those chapter’s written like a play script describing a drunken party at the house in Marietta where Adam Patch suddenly arrives, unannounced. He’s shocked by the scene and leaves without saying a word.

When the lease on the house is finally up they return to New York, but they had given up Anthony’s apartment, and now they find a new, smaller, apartment on Fifty-Seventh street. Adam Patch finally dies, but disaster! after the drunken party scene he has cut Anthony from his will. Anthony puts an attorney on retainer to contest the will. At the end of Book Two, America enters the war. Anthony is turned down for a position as an officer, but is drafted as a private.

Book Three tells the story of Anthony at the training camp where he is assigned: the fictional Camp Hooker, somewhere in the deep south. Gloria keeps the apartment in New York. They write each other but the distance grows between them. Soon enough, Anthony meets a girl in town named “Dot” and they begin an affair. She’s nineteen, with a bad reputation and few prospects. She clings to Anthony. Anthony’s company is reassigned to a Camp Boone, in Mississippi. He tries to break it off with Dot but she despairs, so he moves her with him and sets her up in a boarding house in town. But he’s lost interest and she can tell. Gloria’s letters become less frequent and he begins to wonder if she’s found someone. Dot manipulates Anthony by threatening suicide. He rushes to see her, disobeying orders to stay in camp. He breaks it off with her. When he returns to camp he’s sentenced to the brig for a few days, then comes down with the ‘flu (the “Spanish” flu epidemic coming on the heels of the war). When he recovers, his company is reassigned once more, this time to a Camp Mills on Long Island. The Armistice follows shortly after and Anthony rushes into town to find Gloria, which he does, at an Armistice Ball at the Astor hotel.

Chapter Two of this Book Three, gives us a flashback of Gloria’s life in New York while Anthony was at his training camps. She declined the advances of a Captain Collins, staying true to Anthony. When she and Anthony set up household again, money is running low and the appeals process for the contesting of the will is going slow. Anthony tries getting a job selling shares of stock in a motivational book company but gives it up, just as he gave up earlier attempts to work in finance or write short stories like his friend Dick. Gloria tries a career as an actress but is told after her screen test that she’ll only be cast in mature parts. Insulted, Gloria gives up.

They move to an even cheaper apartment on 127th street. The money runs out. The bank closes their overdrawn account. Anthony drinks constantly. He fights with Gloria. He fights with his friends. And then Dot shows up at the apartment while Gloria is out meeting with their attorney about the will. Anthony throws a chair at Dot and then collapses in a drunken blackout. Then, Gloria returns home with the news that the final appeal on Adam Patch’s will has been ruled in their favor. They’re millionaires. The final short chapter puts the two of them on a boat to Italy. They’re wealthy, but ruined in every other way.

The writing is better than This Side of Paradise. Fitzgerald is improving. Gatsby is next, published in 1925. And the story of a long arc of descent while the possible salvation of the inheritance is dangled in front of them is engaging. That the inheritance finally arrives, but too late to save them, is pleasing. Anthony and Gloria aren’t attractive people, and the “fun” they have isn’t particularly fun. But still, I found myself rooting for them. Their stories are good, and well-told, and Fitzgerald has interesting ideas. I loved this exchange between Anthony and Dot as he tries to comfort her while breaking up with her and thinking to himself of Gloria, realizes the same emptiness of human desire discovered by the Buddha:

“Dot,” he whispered uncomfortably, “you’ll forget. things are sweeter when they’re lost. I know–because once I wanted something and got it. It was the only thing I ever wanted badly, Dot. And when I got it it turned to dust in my hands.”

“All right.”

Absorbed in himself, he continued:

“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 out of the success. I suppose that at one time I could have had anything I wanted, within reason, but that was the only thing I ever wanted with any fervor. God! And that taught me you can’t have anything, you can’t have anything at all. Because desire just cheats you. It’s like a sunbeam skipping here and there about a room. It stops and gilds some inconsequential object, and we poor fools try to trap it–but when we do the sunbeam moves on to something else, and you’ve got the inconsequential part, but the glitter that made you want it is gone–” (p. 282)

The novel feels overly long. The progress is from bad to worse, sad to sadder. But it’s also a long time with a great writer, so I didn’t mind the extra pages.