The Beautiful and Damned

Fitzgerald at his best. Fitzgerald's first major publication, This Side of Paradise, was defined by the author's hasty and slap-dash amalgamation of numerous short stories into a somewhat cohesive novel. The Great Gatsby illuminates the immorality of the hedonistic rich in the "Roaring 20s" but does not have a lot of character development and depth. The Beautiful and Damned, however, is Fitzgerald's most poignant and comprehensive exploration of hedonism among the nouveau riche in Manhattan during the 1910s-1920s, and the deleterious effects the "pursuit of pleasure" has on people in the modern world.

In the Beautiful and Damned, Fitzgerald introduces us to two principal characters—Anthony Patch and Gloria Gilbert. Patch is the grandson of Adam Patch, a progressive philanthropist and former industrialist worth some 40 million dollars. Enter Gloria Gilbert, the cousin of Anthony's Harvard pal and a consummate dilettante whose self-worth is entirely wrapped up in the charms that she exerts over men. Patch and Gilbert eventually wed and, assured that Patch will become a millionaire when his septuagenarian grandfather passes away, engage in a deliberately hedonistic lifestyle.

Fitzgerald renders the motivations, desires, and foibles of these two characters in such vivid dimensions that the reader cannot easily cast blame on either party for the predicament they find themselves in during their mid-20s. The dying Adam Patch deigns to visit his grandson at a rental property in New England, only to find that his grandson has become a lazy, sodden bum whose days are primarily concerned with drink and party. Anthony is disinherited in favor of his grandfather's personal servant and a retinue of political, business, and reform acquaintances. Anthony and Gloria sober up enough to realize that their dreams of "leisure" in Europe are now jeopardized and their attention becomes fixed in the present where their income from investments has dwindled and their employment prospects are even slimmer. Patch continues to contest his grandfather's will in prolonged litigation while he serves a brief stint in the U.S. Army and he and Gloria literally hit skid row financially. I won't ruin the actual ending here, so I will leave the synopsis at this.

So, what should we grasp about the relationship between Anthony and Gloria? George Eliot, the nineteenth century British novelist whose most famous work was the novel Middlemarch wrote in a novella, "The Lifted Veil," that in life there is "no tyranny more complete than that which a self-centered negative nature exercises over a morbidly sensitive nature perpetually craving sympathy and support." In other words, there is no greater recipe for a toxic relationship than that between a self-centered, narcissistic personality and a self-loathing, fragile personality. Anthony Patch, despite his assumed future wealth, his educational bona fides, and his surprising wit and charm was, beneath the surface, an insecure person in search of external confirmation of his self-worth. Throughout the novel, Anthony is unable to distinguish between authentic love (represented perhaps by Dot) and the sort of artificial affection that presumably many would-be suitors and friends express while they are in proximity to wealth and power.

Anthony's infatuation with Gloria Gilbert becomes the operative motivation of his entire existence in his most formative years and proves to be his undoing. He conceives that if he could only have Gloria then his life would be complete and his self-worth, identity, and confidence assured. Meanwhile, Gloria (insofar as Fitzgerald develops her) appears to be an overt narcissist whose self-worth was entirely wrapped up in her beauty and mastery of men. "In the end, then," Fitzgerald writes, "her beauty was all that never failed her." This is sad commentary, but unfortunately true of many young people even today. If all else fails, at least they retain their good looks. The question that Fitzgerald poses, though, is what happens when that beauty fades with the years, and like Anthony, a person finds that they "had dreamed the world away, basing [their] decisions upon emotions unstable as water."

Anthony and Gloria, approaching their late-twenties and early-thirties, have nothing to show for their passionate pursuits and self-destructive behavior. They reside in a mediocre apartment outside Manhattan. Both are effectively unemployed and/or unemployable. They are cut off from friends. Anthony is disinherited, an alcoholic, and self-absorbed in his reminiscences of the "could have beens." Gloria, meanwhile, feels that her beauty wanes with each day that passes and remains desperate to hold on to those small remembrances of a by-gone age when men stopped and paid her attention. Anthony sums up the effects of this atavistic and hedonistic lifestyle in a short monologue that may be an effective close to this review...

"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 variety out of the success....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..."

With Fitzgerald providing an apt closing to this review, I'll merely say that if I had a choice between his works that I've read thus far (Gatsby, This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and Damned) I would chose this work by a wide margin. Hopefully in the near future, I'll have a chance to read Tender if the Night.

In letters to John Peale Bishop and his uncle Phil McQuillan, Fitzgerald said that in The Beautiful and the Damned he’d paid much more attention to detail and that, as a result, this book was “much more carefully written than the first one” (the first one being This Side of Paradise). But in a letter to Carl Hovey, the editor of Metropolitan Magazine, where an edited and much cut version of The Beautiful and the Damned was serialized, Fitzgerald worried that it was “a bitter and insolent book that I fear will never be popular and that will undoubtedly offend a lot of people.”

Fitzgerald once described his novels as being “pessimistic,” and The Beautiful and the Damned is certainly that, and then some. However, despite Fitzgerald’s fears, it is a triumph on many levels, particularly in the textures he applies to the characters and their relationships. This is a book which falls squarely under the rubric of “realistic” fiction, for its logic is unerringly simple and is followed without deviation to the bitter (and tragic) end.

No, it’s not The Great Gatsby, but it’s a fine novel in its own right, even though it is “pessimistic”—and profoundly bleak in its outlook on life during the Jazz Age.

[Personal notes recorded in 1999.]