One of the most notable things about the novel and indeed all of Fitzgerald’s work is the luminous, sparkling prose. People have said about Fitzgerald again and again, my how he could write. He was not yet at the peak of his abilities; he still struggled to fuse style and meaning, but he was already an astonishing wordsmith with a dazzling ability to not only tell a story, but also evoke a whole world. This description of Times Square, written in 1921, is brilliant and eerily current today:
The soft rush of taxis by him, and laughter, laughter hoarse as a crow’s, incessant and loud, with the rumble of subways underneath—and over all, the revolutions of light, the growings and recedings of light—light dividing like pearls—forming and reforming in glittering bars and circles and monstrous grotesque figures cut amazingly on the sky (p. 25).
Over the years, many people have asserted that Fitzgerald’s talent with language was a gift, the implication being that he was a natural who could effortlessly toss off his writing. This was hardly true. While Fitzgerald may have had inborn talent, he labored over his writing. He had tirelessly studied the Romantic poets—in particular Keats—for their command of language and incomparable imagery, and he aspired to achieve a style as sumptuous, seamless, and lyrical as theirs. He wrote and rewrote all of his work with uncommon zeal. But what makes his style so effective is the sensitivity and feeling that underscore it. As Lionel Trilling noted, “Even in Fitzgerald’s early, cruder books ... there is a tone and pitch to the sentences which suggests his warmth and tenderness, and ... his gentleness without softness” (Kazin, p. 195). When Fitzgerald describes the hero’s first kiss with the heroine in
The Beautiful and Damned,
the tender yet powerful feelings fairly leap off the page:
There were pauses that seemed about to shatter and were only to be snatched back to oblivion by the tightening of his arms about her and the sense that she was resting there as a caught, gossamer feather, drifted in out of the dark. Anthony laughed, noiselessly and exultantly, turning his face up and away from her, half in an overpowering rush of triumph (p. 85).
At the center of this magnificent prose is the hero, one Anthony Patch. Anthony’s parents died when he was young, and his grandfather raised him, but his family seemed to have little effect on his upbringing or his values. He attended Yale, traveled in Europe, and as a young man had a vague sense that “he would one day accomplish some quiet subtle thing that the elect would deem worthy” (p. 7). Despite his notions of grandeur, Anthony is for the most part an opaque character with no real passion or ambition; as Fitzgerald himself said, he is a man “with the tastes and weaknesses of an artist but with no actual creative inspiration” (quoted in
A Life in Letters,
p. 41). The only thing that sets Anthony apart is his relationship to desire. Early on in the narrative he sees a woman across the way through his apartment window:
He felt persistently that the girl was beautiful—then of a sudden he understood: it was her distance, not a rare and precious distance of soul but still distance, if only in terrestrial yards.... Yet for a not altogether explained second, posing perversely in time, his emotion had been nearer to adoration than in the deepest kiss he had ever known (p. 19).
What has attracted Anthony is not the woman herself but the act of desiring her, the dream of her. This motif of desire that is more fulfilling than the object itself plays off the romantic themes of Fitzgerald’s idol, Keats. In the Romantic tradition one could never obtain beauty, which is an ideal, yet one must continually strive for it. Fitzgerald developed this theme of desire and the unobtainable dream that sustains us throughout all of his fiction, first articulating it with his hero Amory Blaine in
This Side of Paradise:
Always, after he was in bed, there were voices—indefinite, fading, enchanting—just outside his window, and before he fell asleep he would dream one of his favorite waking dreams, the one about becoming a great half back.... It was always the becoming he dreamed of, never the being (p. 19).
Of course, the unobtainable dream would reach its most mature expression in Jay Gatsby’s ill-fated, irrevocable, and inextinguishable desire to capture Daisy. Comically for Anthony, his initial dream falls apart as he looks again out the window and realizes that this female apparition is in actuality a fat middle-aged woman, not his ideal at all. Once again, life is empty and meaningless—that is, until Anthony finally does meet his ideal, Gloria Gilbert.
Gloria is introduced in the narrative not as a person, but as a beauty, sent down to Earth by a voice. This trope is in keeping with Fitzgerald’s Keatsian concept of beauty as an ideal and his rather sexless view of women. For Fitzgerald, beauty is never carnal, base, or attended by sexual desire. Instead it is a supernatural quality, connected to something much greater than an arrangement of features or body parts. Once Gloria has been sent down to Earth she becomes a real woman, yet to Anthony she is no mere mortal: “Out of the deep sophistication of Anthony an understanding formed ... that as she talked and caught his eyes and turned her lovely head, she moved him as he had never been moved before. The sheath that held her soul had assumed significance—that was all” (p. 62).
Anthony is besotted with Gloria, overwhelmed by the force of her person and her power. In describing Gloria’s effect on Anthony, Fitzgerald’s prose takes off: “Such a kiss—it was a flower held against the face, never to be described, scarcely to be remembered; as though her beauty were giving off emanations of itself which settled transiently and already dissolving upon his heart” (p. 86). Gloria is the totality of womanhood for Anthony; indeed “he was convinced that no woman he had ever met compared in any way with Gloria” (p. 87). Anthony’s worship of Gloria strongly resembles Fitzgerald’s initial response to Zelda. In a letter to a friend written while he was engaged, Scott stated, “Zelda is the only God I have left now” (quoted in
Some Sort of Epic Grandeur,
p. 111).
And so Gloria and Anthony marry. Both dilettantes without any real desire to do or accomplish anything, they settle into a pattern of partying and spending while waiting for Anthony’s grandfather to die and leave them his money. Anthony quickly learns that while Gloria may be his ideal, she is not easy to live with. Indeed she is spoiled, willful, egotistical, and a terrible housekeeper, one who neglects both laundry and dishes. But despite some disagreements and Anthony’s struggle to manage a personality stronger than his own, they love each other: “Of the things they possessed in common, greatest of all was their almost uncanny pull at each other’s hearts” (p. 138).
Although entertaining and well written, the story of Anthony and Gloria’s courtship and early marriage is the weakest section of the novel, in part because initially Anthony and Gloria lack substance as characters. Unlike Fitzgerald, who was driven by a deep and abiding passion both to live life and create art, Anthony wants nothing, while nominally pretending to be an aesthete and a gentleman. As Arthur Mizener stated, “Anthony is not real as the sensitive and intelligent man; what is real is the Anthony who is weak, drifting, and full of self-pity” (Kazin, p. 32).
The novel doesn’t really take off until the characters start to fall apart. Anthony’s grandfather comes by during one of their alcoholic binges and proceeds to disinherit Anthony. Then panic sets in as both Anthony and Gloria realize that, because they may never get the inheritance, they need to change their way of life. Unfortunately, as they ultimately discover, they lack the strength to do so. They try to rein in their improvident habits but continually fail. They cannot quit drinking. They criticize each other and start to grow resentful and distant: “Things had been slipping perceptibly. There was the money question, increasingly annoying, increasingly ominous; there was the realization that liquor had become a practical necessity to their amusement.... Moreover, both of them seemed vaguely weaker in fibre” (p. 225). They may be weaker in fiber, but through their dissipation Anthony and Gloria emerge as more believable characters—flawed human beings who are stuck in a downward spiral from which they cannot extricate themselves.
In fact, the more Anthony bottoms out the more interesting he becomes. When he goes off to war hoping to reform and become a new person but then quickly slips into a meaningless affair with Dot, a lower-class woman living in the South, he is pathetic but also overwhelmingly real. He continually struggles to cut things off with Dot, but because of his neediness, he is unable to do so. He becomes more and more pitiful but also more and more recognizably a person. When he returns to New York and attempts to sell motivational pamphlets to bartenders to make money but instead ends up dead drunk, he is a ridiculous failure. However, he is also a wonderfully three-dimensional human being. As many critics have noted, Fitzgerald never wrote about success as well as he captured failure. Throughout his fiction he wrote movingly of the broken man who can no longer maintain his dream, whose spirit has been undone. Fitzgerald’s unique ability to convey broken spirits was perhaps fueled in part by his memory of watching his own father’s sudden transformation from a dignified gentleman into an unmitigated failure.
In sharp contrast to Anthony’s downward spiral is the successful career of his friend and Gloria’s cousin, Dick Caramel. Dick is a writer who has a nominal success with his first novel,
The Demon Lover,
then gives in to the drum of commercialism and begins to write trashy stories for the magazines and the movies. Unlike Fitzgerald, who also wrote for popular magazines but felt that the work was beneath him, Dick doesn’t realize that he is compromising his talent. He has deluded himself into thinking that all of his work is as good as his first book. He doesn’t even know how much his literary reputation has slipped: Ironically, just as Anthony’s alcoholic dissipation foretells Fitzgerald’s emotional descent, Dick’s declining literary reputation foreshadows Fitzgerald’s literary reversal. When he wrote
The Beautiful and Damned,
Fitzgerald was one of the most highly esteemed young writers. Yet by the time of his death Fitzgerald, like Dick, was seen as passé and out of touch, a writer who had blossomed early and then bottomed out. Ultimately the timeless quality of Fitzgerald’s work would win out, but it is interesting that he chose to envision such a decline—even if only in a fictional writer—while still at his peak.
It had become the custom among young and clever reviewers to mention Richard Caramel with a smile of scorn. “Mr.” Richard Caramel, they called him. His corpse was dragged obscenely through every literary supplement. He was accused of making a great fortune by writing trash for the movies. As the fashion in books shifted he was becoming almost a byword of contempt (p. 340).
Like many desperate and weak people who are unable to change their behavior, Gloria and Anthony grasp onto the hope that a divine intervention of sorts will somehow transform their sorry state of affairs. Their version of the deus ex machina is the lawsuit they have launched contesting the terms of Anthony’s grandfather’s will. The lawsuit drags on for four years, and while it is being argued Anthony and Gloria develop separate coping devices to nurse their illusions and block the pain. Anthony retreats further and further into the bottle: “There was a kindliness about intoxication—there was that indescribable gloss and glamour it gave, like the memories of ephemeral and faded evenings” (p. 336). Meanwhile Gloria consoles herself with the notion that she still has her beauty and could, if need be, go into the movies. Finally, one day when she is tired of lacking money, Gloria does audition for the pictures, only to discover that her beauty has faded. No longer a glimmering youth, she is now a woman of a certain age. Fitzgerald attempts to imply that Gloria’s loss of beauty shatters her sense of self, but he cannot fully pull it off. Gloria has always tended to exist more as an idea and a counterpart to Anthony than as a character, and once she loses her beauty she also loses her only defining characteristic. Fitzgerald would successfully articulate this type of female character much more adeptly in
The Great Gatsby
with Daisy Buchanan, a woman who instead of ruining herself ruins others.
Much more effective than Gloria’s final descent is Anthony’s last bender. Out of booze and nearly out of money, he leaves the house with what appears to be a clear plan: He will use the two dollars he has to buy a few drinks, then hock his watch, which will give him and Gloria enough money for the weekend. Of course, he is a drunk, so nothing goes according to plan. He stays too late at the bar, so he can’t hock the watch. Out on the street he is snubbed by his old college friend, then—in an effort to resurrect his manhood—he tries to confront Mr. Bloeckman, an old beau of Gloria’s. Instead Mr. Bloeckman decks Anthony. Finally, a Good Samaritan dumps Anthony into a cab and takes him home, but when he discovers that Anthony doesn’t have any money, the would-be savior punches him. At each step we can feel Anthony’s intention to do the right thing slowly become muddled as he sinks deeper into confusion and alcoholic despair. Fitzgerald manages to present Anthony’s alcoholism in an empathetic light, as a sickness that he is powerless against, not a moral weakness, which is the way many people viewed it at the time.
At the end of the novel Fitzgerald lets his characters off the hook and gives them the money they had so desperately been waiting for. Yet there is no sense that either Anthony or Gloria will ever be content again. Their years of suffering appear to have divested them of any ability to feel happiness. This ending is somewhat unfulfilling and a sign that although Fitzgerald had adopted a more naturalistic approach for this novel, he didn’t really know how to make naturalism his own.
When
The Beautiful and Damned
came out, George Nathan, one of the editors of
The Smart Set,
proclaimed it “a very substantial performance” (quoted in Turnbull, p. 130) and a vast improvement over Fitzgerald’s first novel. The critic H. L. Mencken said, “There is fine observation in it, and much penetrating detail, and the writing is solid and sound.... Fitzgerald ceases to be a
Wunderkind,
and begins to come into his maturity” (quoted in
Some Sort of Epic Grandeur,
p.160). Many critics noted that while the central characters were not entirely redeemable, they were nonetheless compelling. Fitzgerald’s friend Edmund Wilson asserted that