The Beautiful and Damned

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

  They found Anthony sitting in a patch of sunshine on the floor of his bedroom. Before him, open, were spread his three big stamp-books, and when they entered he was running his hands through a great pile of stamps that he had dumped from the back of one of them. Looking up and seeing Dick and Gloria he put his head critically on one side and motioned them back.

  "Anthony!" cried Gloria tensely, "we've won! They reversed the decision!"

  "Don't come in," he murmured wanly, "you'll muss them. I'm sorting, and I know you'll step in them. Everything always gets mussed."

  "What are you doing?" demanded Dick in astonishment. "Going back to childhood? Don't you realize you've won the suit? They've reversed the decision of the lower courts. You're worth thirty millions!"

  Anthony only looked at him reproachfully.

  "Shut the door when you go out." He spoke like a pert child.

  With a faint horror dawning in her eyes, Gloria gazed at him--

  "Anthony!" she cried, "what is it? What's the matter? Why didn't you come--why, what is it?"

  "See here," said Anthony softly, "you two get out--now, both of you. Or else I'll tell my grandfather."

  He held up a handful of stamps and let them come drifting down about him like leaves, varicolored and bright, turning and fluttering gaudily upon the sunny air: stamps of England and Ecuador, Venezuela and Spain--Italy....

  Together with the Sparrows

  That exquisite heavenly irony which has tabulated the demise of so many generations of sparrows doubtless records the subtlest verbal inflections of the passengers of such ships as The Berengaria. And doubtless it was listening when the young man in the plaid cap crossed the deck quickly and spoke to the pretty girl in yellow.

  "That's him," he said, pointing to a bundled figure seated in a wheel-chair near the rail. "That's Anthony Patch. First time he's been on deck."

  "Oh--that's him?"

  "Yes. He's been a little crazy, they say, ever since he got his money, four or five months ago. You see, the other fellow, Shuttleworth, the religious fellow, the one that didn't get the money, he locked himself up in a room in a hotel and shot himself--"

  "Oh, he did--"

  "But I guess Anthony Patch don't care much. He got his thirty million. And he's got his private physician along in case he doesn't feel just right about it. Has she been on deck?" he asked.

  The pretty girl in yellow looked around cautiously.

  "She was here a minute ago. She had on a Russian-sable coat that must have cost a small fortune." She frowned and then added decisively: "I can't stand her, you know. She seems sort of--sort of dyed and unclean, if you know what I mean. Some people just have that look about them whether they are or not."

  "Sure, I know," agreed the man with the plaid cap. "She's not bad-looking, though." He paused. "Wonder what he's thinking about--his money, I guess, or maybe he's got remorse about that fellow Shuttleworth."

  "Probably...."

  But the man in the plaid cap was quite wrong. Anthony Patch, sitting near the rail and looking out at the sea, was not thinking of his money, for he had seldom in his life been really preoccupied with material vainglory, nor of Edward Shuttleworth, for it is best to look on the sunny side of these things. No--he was concerned with a series of reminiscences, much as a general might look back upon a successful campaign and analyze his victories. He was thinking of the hardships, the insufferable tribulations he had gone through. They had tried to penalize him for the mistakes of his youth. He had been exposed to ruthless misery, his very craving for romance had been punished, his friends had deserted him--even Gloria had turned against him. He had been alone, alone--facing it all.

  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 had stuck it out stanchly. Why, the very friends who had been most unkind had come to respect him, to know he had been right all along. Had not the Lacys and the Merediths and the Cartwright-Smiths called on Gloria and him at the Ritz-Carlton just a week before they sailed?

  Great tears stood in his eyes, and his voice was tremulous as he whispered to himself.

  "I showed them," he was saying. "It was a hard fight, but I didn't give up and I came through!"4

  ENDNOTES

  Book One

  CHAPTER I

  1 (p. 8) Now Adam J. Patch ... left his father's farm in Tarrytown early in sixty-one to join a New York cavalry regiment: Fitzgerald's father, Edward, was a Maryland native and thus witnessed the Civil War from the Southern side; he helped row Confederate spies across a river when he was just nine years old. Scott loved to listen to his father's tales of the war and the "Old South."

  2 (p. 10) Harvard was the thing; it would "open doors," it would be a tremendous tonic.... So he went to Harvard: Fitzgerald attended another Ivy League school, Princeton University, and chronicled his experience there in his first semi-autobiographical book, This Side of Paradise.

  3 (p. 13) Julia Sanderson as "The Sunshine Girl," Ina Claire as "The Quaker Girl," Billie Burke as "The Mind-the-Paint Girl, and Hazel Dawn as "The Pink Lady": All four women were theater actresses in the 1910s and 1920s who also starred in films. Billie Burke (1885-1970), who wed theater impresario Florenz Ziegfeld (1869-1932) and played Glinda the Good Witch of the North in the film The Wizard of Oz, is the most notable of the group.

  4 (p. 14) Every Christmas he sent him a five-hundred-dollar bond: Early in his career Fitzgerald purchased a thousand-dollar bond as an investment. As it turned out it was the first, the last, and the worst financial investment Fitzgerald made. The bond dropped astronomically in value and grew to be a running joke between him and Zelda. Once he left it on the subway by accident and someone returned it to him. Scott repeatedly tried to cash it without success, and finally tore it up.

  5 (p. 20) "The Demon Lover": After publishing his first novel, Fitzgerald wrote his editor, Maxwell Perkins, that he was working on a new book tentatively titled "The Demon Lover." Fitzgerald scrapped that novel but decided to give the title to the novel being written by his fictional character, Dick Caramel.

  6 (p. 23) I'll do a musical comedy: As a college student Fitzgerald wrote several musical comedies for the Princeton theatrical group called the Triangle Club.

  CHAPTER II

  1 (p. 38) Behind Maury Noble's attractive indolence... lay a surprising and relentless maturity of purpose: Fitzgerald loosely based Maury Noble on his friend George Nathan (1882-1958). The book was also dedicated in part to Nathan, who was one of the editors of The Smart Set, a highbrow literary review that published some of Fitzgerald's shorter fiction.

  CHAPTER III

  1 (p. 67) At sixteen she began going to dances at preparatory schools, and then came the colleges; and everywhere she went, boys, boys, boys: This is a fitting description as well of Fitzgerald's wife, Zelda, who was surrounded by boys and beaus from a young age and quickly became one of the most popular and famous belles in her hometown of Montgomery, Alabama.

  Book Two

  CHAPTER I

  1 (p. 109) "We're twins. "Ecstatic thought! "Mother says"--she hesitated uncertainly--"mother says that two souls are sometimes created together and--and in love before they're born": People often noted that Scott and Zelda had an almost mystical connection.

  2 (p. 112) Delmonico's: One of Fitzgerald's first and best short stories, "May Day," contrasts the anti-socialist riots that took place around May Day with the Yale University dance held at Delmonico's, a famed New York restaurant.

  3 (p. 122) After a moment she found a pencil and holding it unsteadily drew three parallel lines beneath the last entry. Then she printed FINIS is large capitals, put the book back in the drawer, and crept into bed: Apparently these diary passages bear a remarkable resemblance to Zelda Fitzgerald's diary, a fact she noted in a review she wrote on The Beautiful and Damned for the New York Tribune.

  4 (p. 146) They signed a lease that night: While Fitzgerald was writing The
Beautiful and Damned, he and Zelda rented a house in Westport, Connecticut.

  5 (p. 154) "Just before the novel appeared I'd been trying, without success, to sell some short stories": Fitzgerald had attempted to sell short stories to all of the popular magazines when he first moved to New York but sold only one piece for thirty-five dollars. After his first book, This Side of Paradise, was published Fitzgerald was able to sell short stories to the top magazines for anywhere from $300 to $1,000 each.

  CHAPTER II

  1 (p. 158) The icy-hearted Scandinavian... gave way to an exceedingly efficient Japanese whose name was Tanalahaka, but who confessed that he heeded any summons which included the dissyllable "Tana": Fitzgerald and Zelda also employed a Japanese servant named Tana. Their friends George Nathan (1882-1958) and H. L. Mencken (1880-1956), co-editors of The Smart Set, played many of the same jokes on him that Dick and Maury play on Tana in the novel, such as sending him letters with phony calligraphy, referring to him as Tannenbaum, and pretending that he was a German secret agent.

  2 (p. 209) "We'll choose the keenest satirist alive to compile a deity from all the deities worshipped by mankind... so that people will read our book and ponder it'": Fitzgerald's editor, Maxwell Perkins, originally objected to this section, believing that the treatment of the Bible was too sacrilegious for most readers. Fitzgerald insisted that he should have the artistic freedom to express his ideas, however contentious, and the passage remained.

  3 (p. 245) During their circulation they collected, all told, thirty one rejection slips: When Fitzgerald was first trying to start his writing career in New York he received 122 rejection slips that he posted around his apartment.

  Book Three

  CHAPTER I

  1 (p. 259) He looked dumbly at the man who addressed him, a stout, black-haired captain, who fixed him menacingly with brown pop-eyes. "Come to attention!": When Fitzgerald was stationed in Kansas, he was punished for failing to salute a general while taking his regiment out for a march.

  2 (p. 266) Ah, la belle dame sans merci who lived in his heart: The French phrase is the title of a poem by Romantic poet John Keats (1795-1821), Fitzgerald's idol. Fitzgerald said that, compared to Keats's work, "all other poetry seems to be only whistling and humming" (The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald, p. 89; see "For Further Reading"). One of Fitzgerald's provisional titles for The Beautiful and Damned was The Woman Without Mercy, a loose translation of the title of Keats's poem.

  3 (p. 286) Anthony slipped between two freight-cars.... he knew that the military police were often sent through the cars to ask for passes: At the very end of World War II, when his regiment was sent to Washington from New York, Fitzgerald missed the train because he was AWOL. He mysteriously met the train in Washington, D.C., with some booze and two girls, bragging that he had requisitioned another train at New York's Pennsylvania Station by pretending that he had a message for the President.

  CHAPTER III

  1 (p. 327) Their new apartment, for which they paid eighty-five dollars a month, was situated on Claremont Avenue: When he first moved to New York and was trying to get started as a writer, Fitzgerald lived in an apartment on Claremont Avenue, in northern Manhattan near Columbia University.

  2 (p. 334) he had preferred the Harvard Club, largely because of Dick and Maury: During his first months in New York Fitzgerald ate most of his meals at the Princeton Club, preferring the company of others to his dreary apartment.

  3 (p. 357) Italy--if the verdict was in their favor it meant Italy: After Fitzgerald finished The Beautiful and Damned in 1921, he and Zelda--two months pregnant--went to Europe for several months. Fitzgerald enjoyed London but hated Italy, and they quickly left, returning to St. Paul for the birth of their daughter, Scottie.

  4 (p. 361) "It was a hard fight, but I didn't give up and I came through!": Originally the novel continued after the boat's departure with an additional scene in which Beauty--an allegorical spirit who earlier had descended to Earth to impart good looks on Gloria--is sent back to heaven now that Gloria has lost her attractiveness. However, both Zelda and editor Maxwell Perkins found it contrived, and they prevailed on Fitzgerald to cut it.

  INSPIRED BY F. SCOTT FITZGERALD AND THE BEAUTIFUL AND DAMNED

  F. Scott Fitzgerald's second novel, The Beautiful and Damned, was inspired by events in his own life. That life, particularly his marriage to the talented but unstable Zelda, has in turn inspired numerous other creative works.

  In 1922, just months after the publication of the novel, Warner Brothers snapped up the film rights to The Beautiful and Damned. The movie, a silent version, was not a success. In the late 1970s, author Christopher Isherwood and his partner, Don Bachardy, undertook the only other attempt to adapt The Beautiful and Damned for the movies. Although Isherwood had successfully adapted his own Berlin Stories as an award-winning film (Cabaret, 1972), their screenplay was never produced.

  Anthony and Gloria Patch, the doomed, mutually destructive main characters of The Beautiful and Damned, have always been the most compelling feature of the novel. Fitzgerald mined his tumultuous relationship with Zelda to create them, and not surprisingly, over the years Fitzgerald's private life has fascinated observers as much as his literature: The evidence is in the number of artists who have created fictional works based on this American golden couple.

  For instance, Budd Schulberg in 1950 published Disenchanted, a touching novel that follows the decline of the alcoholic, formerly illustrious novelist Manley Halliday. The novel was based on Schulberg's experience with Fitzgerald. Ever in debt, in 1939 Fitzgerald was attempting to write screenplays for Hollywood studios. Schulberg, a recent Dartmouth graduate, collaborated with Fitzgerald on the script of Winter Carnival (1939), a romantic comedy set at Schulberg's alma mater. Told through the eyes of Shep Stearns, an aspiring writer who must collaborate with Halliday on a movie script, the novel describes the slow collapse of the life of a genius. Schulberg, who greatly admired Fitzgerald, later worked with Harvey Breit to adapt the book as a Broadway play; it includes a scene in which Stearn revisits his college to do research for the movie and discovers the difficulty of working with Halliday. He tells the novelist, "Funny, ever since they sprung me out of here five years ago, I've had dreams how I'd come back in style. Showing up with someone like you or Hemingway. And now it's just something to go through, to get over with as painlessly as possible." Halliday responds, "That isn't funny. That's the big practical joke of life. After a while you don't count the years, you count the number of your disenchantments." The stage version of Disenchanted was nominated for three Tony awards in 1959, including Best Play; its star, Jason Robards, won for Best Actor.

  Numerous plays and teleplays have also been produced based on the lives of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. Two made-for-television movies appeared in the mid-1970s: F. Scott Fitzgerald and "The Last of the Belles" (1974) and F. Scott Fitzgerald in Hollywood (1976). The former is an account of Scott and Zelda's first meeting in Alabama during World War I and Scott's writing of the short story "The Last of the Belles." It stars Richard Chamberlain as Scott, Blythe Danner as Zelda, and Susan Sarandon as Ailie Calhoun. F. Scott Fitzgerald in Hollywood, which recounts Scott's years as a screenwriter, is notable for Tuesday Weld's haunting performance as the disintegrating Zelda. Jason Miller takes the role of Scott, and Dolores Miller portrays the acerbic writer Dorothy Parker.

  In 1980 Tennessee Williams wrote a play, Clothes for a Summer Hotel, about Fitzgerald's decline. Williams shared several characteristics with his predecessor--both were considered preeminent artists (Williams was acclaimed for, among other plays, 1945's The Glass Menagerie and 1947's A Streetcar Named Desire, and both struggled with substance abuse--but the play closed after two weeks. Critic Walter Kerr speculated in the New York Times on the reason: "It is as though the playwright's decision to deal with actual people ... had momentarily robbed him of his own imaginative powers."

  Just as the voice of Fitzgerald drowned out Tennessee Williams's, the novelist also
overshadowed his wife. In the mid-1980s, two plays chronicled the biography of Scott's troubled and gifted partner: Marty Martin's I Don't Want to Be Zelda Anymore (1984) and William Luce's Zelda: A One-Woman Play (1984). Martin's work shows a selfish Scott taking advantage of his young bride as he denies Zelda permission to use their lives in her fiction while he plagiarizes her diary. In the play, Zelda submits but reveals her pain with a sarcastic comment: "You be the creative one and I'll be the decoration on the veranda." Skillfully portraying the range of Zelda's emotions, Martin's original off-Broadway production won high critical praise. In Zelda: A One-Woman Play, William Luce shows the tormented existence of the woman who wrote that she was "physically and mentally ravaged by resentment." Borrowing lines from Zelda's accomplished but overlooked diaries and fiction, the story begins in the mental hospital where she was confined at the end of her life, but it jumps in time to other locales, such as Paris in the 1920s, where the Fitzgeralds socialized with Ernest Hemingway and other writers. Zelda sums up her worldview with the tragic line "Death is the only real elegance." Rounding out the eighties, Michael McGuire published The Scott Fitzgerald Play (1988), an adept report on the storied couple's relationship.

  COMMENTS & QUESTIONS

  In this section, we aim to provide the reader with an array of perspectives on the text, as well as questions that challenge those perspectives. The commentary has been culled from sources as diverse as comments contemporaneous with the work, literary criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout the work's history. Following the commentary, a series of questions seeks to filter F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Beautiful and Damned through a variety of points of view and bring about a richer understanding of this enduring work.