THE BEAUTIFUL
AND DAMNED by F. Scott Fitzgerald
By LOUISE MAUNSELL FIELD - March 5, 1922
It would
not be easy to find a more thoroughly depressing book than this new novel by F.
Scott Fitzgerald, "The Beautiful and Damned." Not because there is
something of tragedy in it-tragedy may be and often is fine and inspiring-but
because its slow-moving narrative is the record of lives utterly worthless
utterly futile. Not one of the book's many characters, important of
unimportant, ever rises to the level of ordinary decent humanity. Not one of
them shows a spark of loyalty, of honor, of devotion, of generosity, of real
friendship or of real affection. Anthony Patch, most important of them all,
lacks even physical courage. His one admirable quality is that of
"understanding too well to blame," and the reader more than suspects
that this refraining from blame is due more to his general laziness, his
general inertia, than to anything else. The book traces, at very great length,
with much repetition of a not particularly profound subtle psychological
analysis and numerous dissertations, the course of his mental, moral and
physical disintegration. In the beginning he is merely an idle, extravagant
young man, a mental prig and snob, vain of what he regards as his
"sophistication," seeing himself as one who "was aware that
there could be no honor and yet had honor, who knew the sophistry of courage
and yet was brave," realizing clearly and completely "that there was
nothing to waste, because all efforts and attainments were equally
valueless." His grandfather was a multimillionaire, and he was waiting for
his grandfather to die. Such was Anthony Patch at 25, his age when the book begins,
when it ends, some six years later, he has become a whining, whisky-soaked
semi-imbecile.
Gloria, the
heroine, is beauty-physical beauty-incarnate. Her creed is enjoyment.
Completely selfish, she declares: "If I wanted anything, I'd take it... I
can't be bothered resisting things I want." Toward the close of the book
she wants innumerable cocktails. And she does not resist her desire. She
believes implicitly in her beauty and its power; she could endure her husband's
degradation; but when she realized that her loveliness had begun to wane, she
really suffered. From the time she was 16 she had been admired and embraced by
men. Retaining her "technical purity," she offered her lips, not to
one or two, but to scores. This she regarded as being brave and independent.
Yet she had grace to recognize something at least of her cheapness, the appeal
to her of "bright colors and gaudy vulgarity." Without fineness,
fastidiousness or good taste, she yet possessed some small amount of endurance,
and of courage. She did not, like Anthony, whine as soon as things began to go
against them.
About these
two-and naturally enough, since people, like water, seek their own level-move a
number of other small-souled individuals. The women most closely associated
with Gloria are even cheaper than she is, and though the men who are Anthony's
"friends" never quite fall into the abyss of physical degradation
which engulfs him, it would be difficult to find anything to say in their
favor. The book covers the war years, and Anthony is sent to Camp Hooker, where
he occupies himself by getting drunk and picking up a mistress. Patriotism
being in Mr. Fitzgerald's view, mere foolishness and hysteria, it is not
surprising that he should depict the men Anthony meets in camp as another worthless
lot. He is not ill-treated; officers and men are not cruel, but merely stupid
and contemptible.
Most of the
scenes are laid either in New York or in the gray house, not far from the Post
Road. Anthony and Gloria rented a few months after their marriage. There they
entertained acquaintances at week-end parties, with the help of their Japanese
servant, Tana; "then the room seemed full of men and smoke. There was Tana
in his white coat reeling about supported by Maury... It appeared that everything
in the room was staggering in grotesque fourth-dimensional gyrations through
intersecting planes of hazy blue." Gloria did have one brief but violent
reaction of disgust, but it was quickly over and "parties" of this
kind were numerous, both in the country and in the New York apartment, where
"there was the odor of tobacco always-both of them smoked incessantly...
Added to this was the wretched aura of stale wine, with its inevitable
suggestion of beauty gone foul and revelry remembered in disgust... There had
been many parties-people broke things; people became sick in Gloria's bathroom;
people spilled wine; people made unbelievable messes of the kitchenette."
There is a great deal of this sort of thing, though neither Anthony nor Gloria
confined their drinking bouts to their own apartment, or to those of their
friends.
So far as
its style is concerned, much of the novel is well written, and Anthony's
gradual loss of his mental curiosity, his gradual degeneration into "a
bleak and sordid wreck" is convincingly depicted, though to the reader he
never seems one-third as intelligent as the author apparently thinks him. The
long conversations between Anthony and his two friends, Maury Noble and Dick
Caramel, are often merely tedious and pretentious, in spite of the fact that
now and then one of them does make a remark which is fairly clever. The general
atmosphere of the book is an atmosphere of futility, waste and the avoidance of
effort, into which the fumes of whisky penetrate more and more, until at last
it fairly reeks with them. The novel is full of that kind of pseudo-realism
which results from shutting one's eyes to all that is good in human nature, and
looking only upon that which is small and mean-a view quite as false as its
extreme opposite, which, reversing the process, results in what we have learned
to classify as "glad" books. It is to be hoped that Mr. Fitzgerald,
who possesses a genuine, undeniable talent, will some day acquire a less
one-sided understanding.
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