THE BEAUTIFUL AND DAMNED
By F. Scott
Fitzgerald
Latest Works of Fiction
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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