The Beautiful and Damned

With the upcoming release of Baz Luhrmann's take on The Great Gatsby, I figured now was an appropriate time to revisit F. Scott Fitzgerald's work. The Beautiful and Damned is his second novel, published in 1922. It concerns itself primarily with the courtship and early marriage of Anthony Patch and Gloria Gilbert, two twenty-somethings in New York's upper class.

In my experience, nearly everyone who has read The Great Gatsby ends up loving it. Those who don't tend to blame their dislike on the shallow, vapid characters. This makes sense. Gatsby, Daisy, Tom, and Jordan are complex characters, but not necessarily likable ones. They are, to various extents, vain, proud, and snobbish. They drink all day, engage in extramarital affairs, and feel sorry for themselves and the things they've lost since their youths. Most readers see the characters for what they are, I think, but are still able to enjoy the novel itself because of the brilliance of Fitzgerald's almost lyrical writing.

Take that sentiment, triple it, and you have The Beautiful and Damned. Anthony and Gloria are just flat out insufferable people. They are caricatures of the idle rich, doing little with their lives aside from attending parties and traveling. Anthony's ailing grandfather is worth thirty million dollars, and Anthony is content to spend the prime of his life just waiting for the old man to die already so he can collect his fortune. He doesn't work, and sees no reason to spend his time contributing to any sort of greater cause. Gloria is the type of person whose beauty has enabled her to spend her pre-marital years being endlessly pursued by suitors, flattered by the extent to which she has broken hearts through the years, but saving herself for her eventual husband. Once married to Anthony - the presumptive heir to thirty million dollars, of course - she sinks into a deep state of boredom. Essentially, the two of them spend the second half of the book going from being entitled but somewhat endearing rich kids to truly miserable, vapid thirty-year-olds. Ultimately, Anthony becomes a full-fledged alcoholic, violent toward his wife and those around him; Gloria realizes her beauty is waning, and this loss hits her harder than any other in her life. And that's more or less your story. Other less depressing characters exist on the periphery of the novel, but for the most part this is just a bitter tale about what happens to boring people as time goes by. In that sense, it's a timeless novel. I'm in my mid-twenties now, and although I have to work for a living, I've at times imagined what it'd be like not to have to do so - winning the lottery, or whatever. Never in those quick little daydreams do I end up being a miserable and violent alcoholic, but now? Suddenly I can't see the fantasy playing out any other way. Thanks, F. Scott Fitzgerald!

Like Gatsby, this book also explores the idea that love, feelings, memories, are all transitory. What's incredible when you're young is mundane when you're thirty; what you took for granted in your youth, you may spend the rest of your life hoping to reacquire. Allegedly, this whole story was loosely based on Fitzgerald's relationship with his equally famous wife, Zelda. Makes sense; though Fitzgerald was never the heir to a fortune, he did become a raging alcoholic, and although I know little about Zelda, I don't find it hard to believe that she was beautiful and vain and shallow, the poster girl for the flapper era of the 1920s. I've always gotten the feel from Fitzgerald, through his writing, that he was both critical of the world around him and also entirely at home and at peace with it. It's tough not to pick up on the criticism, given the way his stories seem to unfold, but there's an undeniable sense - probably from that lyrical way of writing - that he also admires his characters and their actions. Are these stories then self-critical in nature? Is Fitzgerald recognizing the follies of the Jazz Age while also giving into his vices and embracing it? Or am I misinterpreting something somewhere in there?

This post is running long now, and I still haven't hit on a few things I wanted to get to. But since I've done very little to sell the idea that I enjoyed reading this book - and truly, I did - I should end this by posting a few of my favorite excerpts. You be the judge.

Everywhere we go and move on and change, something's lost - something's left behind. You can't ever quite repeat anything. 

She was incomprehensible, for, in her, soul and spirit were one - the beauty of her body was the essence of her soul. 

It is in the twenties that the actual momentum of life begins to slacken, and it is a simple soul indeed to whom as many things are as significant and meaningful at thirty as at ten years before. 

Experience is not worth the getting. It's not a thing that happens pleasantly to a passive you - it's a wall that an active you runs up against. 

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 grasp 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. 

First one gives off his best picture, the bright and finished product mended with bluff and falsehood and humor. Then more details are required and one paints a second portrait, and third - before long the best lines cancel out - and the secret is exposed at last; the planes of the picture have intermingled and given us away, and though we paint and paint we can no longer sell a picture. We must be satisfied with hoping such fatuous accounts of ourselves as we make to our wives and children and business associates are accepted as true. 

He wanted to appear suddenly to her in novel and heroic colors. He wanted to stir her from that casualness she showed toward everything except herself. 

She had conceded vaguely to herself that all men who had ever been in love with her were her friends. 

[The lifespan of every woman's beauty is] the interval between two significant glances in a mundane mirror. 

I want to just be lazy and I want some of the people around me to be doing things, because that makes me feel comfortable and safe - and I want some of them to be doing nothing at all, because they can be graceful and companionable for me.

Anyway, that was The Beautiful and Damned, the F. Scott Fitzgerald book with a name that sounds like a shitty pop-punk emo album title.