The Beautiful and Damned

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Comments

  HENRY SEIDEL CANBY

  Thanks to these excesses, Mr. Fitzgerald will miss his due meed of praise for some very outstanding accomplishments, and [The Beautiful and Damned] will be talked about for what is least valuable in it. Readers who spend their time counting the number of cocktails drunk in each chapter are not in the proper mood to appreciate subtler claims upon their attention. They will miss in their pursuit of sensationalism the evidences of great and growing artistic power which this book undoubtedly displays. No finer study of the relations between boy husband and girl wife has been given us in American fiction. If Anthony Patch, the hero, is a nullity, scarcely worth following after the graceful first sketch of his original steps in connoisseurship, Gloria is an original creation, frightening in her truth. And when he is not showing off in pseudo-wit, or trying to shock the bourgeoisie, or discovering profound truths of philosophy which get muddled before he can grasp them, how this novelist can write!

  --from Literary Review of the New York Evening Post

  (March 4, 1922)

  FANNY BUTCHER

  Where "This Side of Paradise" was an easy thing, almost a casual one, certainly an inevitable one, his new book is strained, self-conscious, everything about it is intentional. "This Side of Paradise" had a mental honesty about it that is--and always will be--extremely rare. It was sincerely callow. For that reason it was charming and important. "The Beautiful and Damned" has a semblance of sophistication and cynicism which is just as callow but which, somehow, doesn't seem so charming and so important.

  --from the Chicago Sunday Tribune (March 5, 1922)

  CARL VAN DOREN

  If it was haste and insolence which hurt "This Side of Paradise," what hurts "The Beautiful and Damned" is deliberate seriousness--or rather, a seriousness not deliberated quite enough. Bound to bring some sort of instruction in, Mr. Fitzgerald pushes his characters downhill as if gravitation needed help. He must have lost some of his interest in them as they went down; at least he imparts interest less and less as they advance; his imagination flames only while they are at the summit. Few current writers can represent young love in its incandescence as he can, but his knowledge--so far as this novel goes to show--does not extend with the same accuracy to the seedy side of life which he has felt he must explore. He has trusted, one suspects, his doctrine rather more than his gusto. For this read, too, he has, without adding much to the body of his style, sacrificed--or lost--some of the poetry which illuminated the earlier narrative and which illuminates the higher places of this one with a light never present unless there is genius not far off. Why did he have to mix good poetry with indifferent moralism? Moralists are plenty but poets few. It is encouraging, however, to see signs of increasing power in his work.

  --from The Nation (March 15, 1922)

  H. W. BOYNTON

  "The Beautiful and Damned" is a real story, but a story greatly damaged by wit. The narrative is infested with brilliant passages, "striking" descriptions, and scraps of ebullient commentary. The persons are not permitted to emerge from the type; whenever they seem about to emerge, the author shoves them back to anonymity by making them his own obvious mouthpieces....

  No, one cannot make much of this as pure novel, certainly not as either pure realism or romanticism. A novelist cannot be made out of an air of amused omniscience, or even by the most animated pursuit of irrelevancies; these things are the bane, not the making, of a true story-teller. I think Mr. Fitzgerald has the gift, if he has the patience to sort it out from the minor gifts and to give it a chance.

  --from the Independent and Weekly Review (April 22, 1922)

  MARY M. COLUM

  The story of this book deals with the married life of two young people, of that class which in Europe is called the middle class, but which in America is nearly always called the upper. These two have grown up without any of the discipline which is the training for life invented by the aristocracy, or the prudent worldly-wisdom which is the substitute invented by the petite bourgeoisie: they are peculiarly the product of a commercial civilization. The book deals with a life in America which has had few serious interpreters, and Mr. Fitzgerald has done it with impressive ability. The story of these two young people and their life in various places, including their amazing existence in that uncivilized form of shelter peculiar to New York, the two-room-and-bath apartment, is told with real conviction. They have no occupation and responsibilities, and tragedy overtakes them--in so far as tragedy can overtake the tender-minded and the undisciplined; for tragedy, like happiness, is the privilege of the strong. Mr. Fitzgerald's character-drawing is, in the main, somewhat amateurish, and he uses his people indifferently to express opinions quite unrelated to their characters. A certain easy grasp of conventional technique is his, especially in showing the interplay of the characters in each others' lives. His best and most consistent piece of character-drawing is that of Bloeckman, whose evolution is indicated with great subtlety. A novelist, and particularly a novelist who is a satirist, has to be on the outside as well as on the inside of his characters, and Mr. Fitzgerald has not the faculty of standing away from his principal characters: with Bloeckman he has done this, and also with the gentleman who appears for a moment to teach salesmanship. Everything in this salesmanship episode is done excellently and the satirist's touch is revealed in all of it. The Beautiful and Damned is indeed an achievement for so young a writer. It is one which, however, would seem less striking in England where they have had the highly intelligent commonplace for so long, or in France where they are the greatest masters of the highly intelligent commonplace in the world.

  --from The Freeman (April 26, 1922)

  H. L. MENCKEN

  The waters into which this essentially serious and even tragic story bring Fitzgerald seemed quite beyond the ken of the author of "This Side of Paradise." It is thus not surprising to find him navigating, at times, rather cautiously and ineptly. The vast plausibility that Dreiser got into the similar chronicle of Hurstwood is not there; one often encounters shakiness, both in the imagination and the telling. Worse, the thing is botched at the end by the introduction of a god from the machine: Anthony is saved from the inexorable logic of his life by a court decision which gives him, most unexpectedly and improbably, his grandfather's millions. But allowing for all that, it must be said for Fitzgerald that he discharges his unaccustomed and difficult business with ingenuity and dignity. Opportunity beckoned him toward very facile jobs; he might have gone on rewriting the charming romance of "This Side of Paradise" for ten or fifteen years, and made a lot of money out of it, and got a great deal of uncritical praise for it. Instead, he tried something much more difficult, and if the result is not a complete success, it is nevertheless near enough to success to be worthy of respect. There is fine observation in it, and much penetrating detail, and the writing is solid and sound. After "This Side of Paradise" the future of Fitzgerald seemed extremely uncertain. There was an air about that book which suggested a fortunate accident. The shabby stuff collected in "Flappers and Philosophers" converted uncertainty into something worse. But "The Beautiful and Damned" delivers the author from all those doubts. There are a hundred signs in it of serious purpose and unquestionable skill. Even in its defects there is proof of hard striving. Fitzgerald ceases to be a Wunderkind, and begins to come into his maturity.

  --from The Smart Set (April 1922)

  ROBERT LITTELL

  In emphasizing this smartness [in The Beautiful and Damned] it would not be fair to lose sight of Mr. Fitzgerald's cleverness, and of something far more than that, of a real sincerity and vigor of mind. The mind of one who reacts to life rather than explores it, who observes life by a sort of revulsion, a restless mind in which what you at first take to be poison turns out to be irritation and what you take to be madness, insomnia. A mind knowing both bitterness and triumph, and keenly enjoying both. Decidedly a mind with edge--perhaps the edge of a saw. A curious combination of energy and weariness, eagerness
and cruelty, suggesting fire without warmth.

  --from New Republic (May 17, 1922)

  LITERARY DIGEST

  A book like this book is worth writing and worth reading for its vivid picture of a phase of life that always exists, that is no more modern than the pyramids and a great deal less important, but that goes into the huge cosmos to add its modicum of color and motion to the sum of life. It is not important as a picture of to-day for that very reason, tho it takes on the hue of the moment and speaks in the slang of the hour. Our young people are not like Anthony and Gloria, tho there are a great many Anthonys and Glorias in our cities. As a strain in the national make-up nothing could be more negligible; they perpetuate themselves rarely, for they have not even force for that. They exist in each generation as the dregs and mistakes, the cripples and the morons, exist. They are worth noting, but a little of them goes a long way....

  No one can read very far into "The Beautiful and Damned," without realizing that here is a born writer. His style is natural, easy and free, and he has the creative power; that is, his characters are living people, he gets inside them and gives you all there is of them. He knows where to begin and where to stop and when he does a bit of description he does it well, with sufficient vividness and without making it obtrusive. He has humor, too, and a gift of wit. If one quarrels with him it must be on his choice of subjects. So far he has written only of the worthless and the immaterial. A man is, in the end, no bigger than his point of view, and if Mr. Fitzgerald sees no more in life than the spinning dance of midges he portrays with so much skill and intelligence, then he is but a midge himself, with the single added quality of being aware of his midgeness and able to describe it. There is no reason at all why an author should not be interested in studying the ineffectual type to which the characters in the novel belong; but there is no particular reason why there should not be included some perception that there is a good deal beyond this phase, and that the world is full of persons of infinitely greater force, feeling and imagination.

  --July 15, 1922

  Questions

  1. Is there a moral implied by the course of events in The Beautiful and Damned, a moral such as, "For every action, there is a consequence" ?

  2. What brings Anthony and Gloria to ruin? Is it the society in which they live, or the times? Divine retribution? Poor values? Irresistible fleshly desires? Money?

  3. A critic for the Literary Digest complained that Fitzgerald writes only about "the worthless and the immaterial," and that his characters "exist in each generation as the dregs and mistakes, the cripples and the morons, exist." Do you agree? Can you sympathize with Anthony and Gloria?

  4. Is it a uniquely American act to come into a fortune by means of litigation, as Anthony and Gloria do? Does Fitzgerald comment on this in the novel?

  5. Do we have now in America an equivalent to Fitzgerald's beautiful and damned?

  FOR FURTHER READING

  Selected Other Works by F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Afternoon of an Author: A Selection of Uncollected Stories and Essays. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1957.

  The Basil and Josephine Stories. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons,1973.

  The Crack-Up, with Other Pieces and Stories. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1965.

  The Great Gatsby. 1925. With notes and a preface by Matthew J. Bruccoli. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995.

  The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Edited by Andrew Turnbull. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1963.

  A Life in Letters. Edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli, with the assistance of Judith S. Baughman. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995.

  Tender Is the Night. 1934. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995.

  This Side of Paradise. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1920.

  Biography

  Bruccoli, Matthew. Fitzgerald and Hemingway: A Dangerous Friendship. New York: Carroll and Graf, 1994.

  --. Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald. With a genealogical afterword by Scottie Fitzgerald Smith. Second revised edition. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2002.

  Bruccoli, Matthew, ed. The Notebooks of F. Scott Fitzgerald. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1978.

  Douglas, Ann. Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1995.

  Latham, Aaron. Crazy Sundays: F. Scott Fitzgerald in Hollywood. New York: Viking Press, 1970.

  Mizener, Arthur. The Far Side of Paradise: A Biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965.

  --. Scott Fitzgerald and His World. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1972.

  Turnbull, Andrew. Scott Fitzgerald. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1962.

  Literary Criticism/Biography

  Hook, Andrew. F. Scott Fitzgerald.- A Literary Life. New York: Pal-grave Macmillan, 2002.

  Kazin, Alfred, ed. F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Man and His Work. New York: World, 1951.

  Le Vot, Andre. F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography. Translated from the French by William Byron. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1983.

  Mizener, Arthur. F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1963.

  Prigozy, Ruth, ed. The Cambridge Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

  a Follower of Bilphism, a fictitious religion.

  b French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778).

  c Samuel Butler (1835-1902), an English writer best known for his satire Erewhon and his novel The Way of All Flesh; his notebooks were published posthumously.

  d Charles de Talleyrand (1754-1838), a French diplomat skilled at political survival.

  e More commonly known as Francis Bacon (1561-1626), he was an adept philosopher and statesman.

  f Character in the Bible who lived to be 969 years old; see Genesis 5:27.

  g Literally, reduction to absurdity (Latin); refutation of a theory by showing that it leads to absurd conclusions.

  h Star of the silent movie era and the first screen vamp (c.1885-1955).

  i Muriel is muddling the lyrics from a popular tune by Irving Berlin (1888-1989).

  j Fictional or historical sirens.

  k In Greek mythology, a beautiful youth kidnapped by the gods to serve as a cup-bearer and, according to some versions, as a lover.

  l Gustave Flaubert's classic novel, published in 1869, about a young man's unrequited love for a married woman.

  m Reference to a theory that German zoologist Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919) promulgated ; it hypothesized that the embryonic development (ontogeny) of an animal repeats the evolutionary development of its ancestors (phylogeny).

  n Stylized drawings of young women that illustrator Charles Dana Gibson (1867-1944) created for many popular magazines at the turn of the century.

  o Secret clubs at Harvard and Yale, respectively.

  p Silent film star Mary Pickford (1893-1979) was dubbed America's first sweetheart ; she also produced many of her own films and helped found the motion picture production corporation United Artists.

  q Mathematical theorem.

  r From "A Forsaken Garden," by British poet Algernon Swinburne (1837-1909).

  s Although he wrote "Celt" and "Irishman," Fitzgerald most likely meant instead to refer to the "Sicilian" who appears on pages 255 and 267.

  t Poem by Algernon Swinburne (1837-1909).

  u Fictitious social club.

  v Heavyweight champion prizefighters during the 1910s and 1920s.

  w From Odes 3.1, by first century B.C. Roman poet Horace. The full Latin phrase odi profanum vulgus et arceo, meaning "I hate the vulgar rabble and keep them at a distance."

  x Fictitious movie stars.

  y Fitzgerald's first novel, a best-seller.

  z Romantic poet John Keats (1795-1821) was Fitzgerald's favorite writer.

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