Book Review: The Beautiful and Damned, by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1922)

Original dust jacket of The Beautiful and Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1922.

F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, early 1920's.

After the overnight success of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s first novel, 1920’s This Side of Paradise, which I reviewed here, he published his second novel, The Beautiful and Damned, just two years later in March of 1922. The novel covers several years in the lives of Anthony Patch and his wife Gloria. Anthony has a sizable living allowance, intellectual pretensions, and not much talent or drive. Both of his parents are deceased, and he’s biding his time until he gets the huge financial windfall that will surely occur once his wealthy grandfather Adam Patch dies. The novel follows Anthony’s courtship of Gloria, and their travels as they drink, spend too much money, and wait for Anthony’s grandfather to shuffle off his mortal coil. 

At the end of the first chapter of the book, in an odd section entitled, “A Flash-Back in Paradise,” it is revealed that Gloria is the personification of Beauty, “who was born anew every hundred years.” (p.26) This is an odd choice for a novel that is otherwise committed to social realism, and highlights the fact that Fitzgerald actually wasn’t that committed to social realism as a style, which is one of the faults of the book. 

The Beautiful and Damned is filled with beautiful writing, but unfortunately it’s in the service of two main characters who soon become tiresome. Anthony has little with which to fill his days, which leads to this marvelous passage:

“His day, usually a jelly-like creature, a shapeless, spineless thing, had attained Mesozoic structure. It was marching along surely, even jauntily, toward a climax, as a play should, as a day should. He dreaded the moment when the backbone of the day should be broken, when he should have met the girl at last, talked to her, and then bowed her laughter out the door, returning only to the melancholy dregs in the teacups and the gathering staleness of the uneaten sandwiches.” (p.50) 

Gloria is defined largely by her beauty, which makes some sense; given that she’s apparently the personification of Beauty, but it makes her uninteresting and shallow as a character. 

Another main character in the book is Richard Caramel, a successful novelist who is Gloria’s cousin. I don’t think Caramel is meant to be a self-portrait of Fitzgerald, but there are some similarities between the two. Fitzgerald writes of Caramel: “His book was nearly ready, and as it grew in completeness it seemed to grow also in its demands, sapping him, overpowering him, until he walked haggard and conquered in its shadow.” (p.71) This would be an apt description of Fitzgerald a decade later, as he struggled to finish Tender is the Night. 

Anthony and Caramel have a conversation where they discuss an interview Caramel gave. Anthony says that he thought it was good: “Oh, yes; that part about the wise writer writing for the youth of his generation, the critic of the next, and the schoolmaster of ever afterwards.” (p.178) Fitzgerald actually said the same thing in a self-interview that was published just after This Side of Paradise was released in 1920. It’s a brilliant quote from a young writer, and of course it contains the prophecy of what happened to The Great Gatsby. Although Gatsby didn’t initially sell as well as This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and Damned, after Fitzgerald’s death it was rediscovered by critics and the public at large, and of course now almost every high school student in the United States reads Gatsby. 

At the very end of the book, there’s a rather funny in-joke when Caramel says: “You know these new novels make me tired. My God! Everywhere I go some silly girl asks me if I’ve read This Side of Paradise.” (p.396)

In another similarity between Caramel and Fitzgerald, Caramel’s successful novel is titled The Demon Lover. Just after This Side of Paradise was accepted for publication in September of 1919, Fitzgerald started work on a new novel, provisionally titled The Demon Lover. (The Far Side of Paradise, by Arthur Mizener, p.98) However, it doesn’t seem as though any part of Fitzgerald’s The Demon Lover survived. Fitzgerald biographer Matthew J. Bruccoli wrote: “Nothing is known about its plot.” (Some Sort of Epic Grandeur, p.106)

Alcohol is one of the main themes of the book, which makes sense given Fitzgerald’s alcoholism. Anthony’s slide into alcoholic dissipation is a prelude to Dick Diver’s similar descent in Tender is the Night. Geraldine, Anthony’s proletariat girlfriend, says to him, “You drink all the time, don’t you?” Anthony replies, “Why, I suppose so. Don’t you?” Geraldine says: “Nope. I go on parties sometimes—you know, about once a week, but I only take two or three drinks. You and your friends keep on drinking all the time. I should think you’d ruin your health.” (p.81) 

In the second half of the novel, the Patches come to “the realization that liquor had become a practical necessity to their amusement.” (p.261) Not a good sign.

It’s hard to not just read The Beautiful and Damned as a chronicle of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald’s marriage. I try not to read too much autobiography into Fitzgerald’s writings without hard evidence to back it up, but the novel feels very close to home, given what we know about Scott and Zelda’s lives.

Anthony and Gloria’s marriage, much like Scott and Zelda’s, is tempestuous from the very start. Anthony “felt often like a scarcely tolerated guest at a party she was giving.” (p.124) That’s maybe a sign that things aren’t going so well. 

Like Scott and Zelda, the Patches quarrel a lot: “Yet Anthony knew that there were days when they hurt each other purposely—taking almost a delight in the thrust.” (p.125) 

We can get some sense of what the early days of Scott and Zelda’s marriage was like from Andrew Turnbull’s biography of Fitzgerald. One of Turnbull’s sources is the diary of Alexander McKaig, a classmate of Scott’s at Princeton who saw them frequently during this time. 

April 12, 1920: “I do not think marriage can succeed. Both drinking heavily. Think they will be divorced in 3 years.” (Scott Fitzgerald, by Andrew Turnbull, p.119) This was less than two weeks after their marriage. 

October 12, 1920: “If she’s there Fitz can’t work—she bothers him—if she’s not there he can’t work—worried of what she might do…I told her she would have to make up her mind whether she wanted to go in movies or get in with young married set. To do that would require a little effort & Zelda will never make an effort.” (p.120)

December 11, 1920: “I told them they were headed for catastrophe if they kept up at present rate.” (p.121) 

Of course, Scott and Zelda were headed towards catastrophe, but the party would roll on for many more years. McKaig’s observation that Zelda could go into the movies mirrors Gloria’s friendship with Bloeckman, a movie producer who is always pestering her to make a screen test. At the end of the novel, Gloria finally does make a screen test, and, shock and horror; she’s told she’s too old to be a leading lady! She would have to settle for character parts! Rather than face the indignity of having to play something less than a leading role, Gloria doesn’t pursue acting. 

Like Scott and Zelda, Anthony and Gloria are terrible with money. Grandfather Adam says to Anthony about his income: “It ought to be plenty. If you have any sense it ought to be plenty. But the question is whether you have any or not.” (p.130) Like Scott and Zelda, Anthony and Gloria continually overspend and throughout the book Anthony is selling off bonds to tide them over. Scott did not have the family wealth that Anthony did—although his mother’s side of the family did have money, there was no trust fund for young Scott to live off of. He would have to make his own way in the world, and he did. From the time he was 22 years old, Scott Fitzgerald supported himself entirely as a free-lance fiction writer. During the decade of the 1920’s, Scott made just under $250,000 from his writings. That would be roughly $3.4 million or so in 2018 dollars. That should have been more than enough for the Fitzgeralds. But it wasn’t, and Scott was always taking out advances from Scribner’s, his very generous publishers. In 1924, Scott wrote a very funny article entitled, “How to Live on $36,000 a Year.” The joke of the piece was that Scott and Zelda couldn’t live on $36,000 a year, despite their occasional attempts at financial management. In 1924, two-thirds of Americans earned less than $1,500 a year, and I wonder how funny those two-thirds of Americans found Scott’s article. 

Anthony quickly learns after his marriage to Gloria what his duties will be: “The management of Gloria’s temper, whether it was aroused by a lack of hot water for her bath or by a skirmish with her husband, became almost the primary duty of Anthony’s day.” (p.151) 

There are other connections to Fitzgerald’s other writings and to his own life throughout the novel. Alert Fitzgerald fans will notice a precursor to Gatsby’s famous line about repeating the past when Gloria says “You can’t ever quite repeat anything.” (p.159)

A line that a character has about non-fiction being “a sort of literature that’s half fiction and half fact” actually came from Fitzgerald’s 1920 story “The I.O.U.,” which was rejected by magazines and eventually published in I’d Die For You, a 2017 collection of previously unpublished short stories. (Quote from p.250) 

When Anthony joins the military after the United States enters World War I, he puts down “author” as his occupation, and then changes it to “student.” (p.309) This is the opposite of Fitzgerald’s own response to a 1919 survey of World War I soldiers: he wrote “was student—am now writer.” 

The Beautiful and Damned is overstuffed, and, clocking in at 420 plus pages in the most recent paperback edition, could have used some editing. It’s pretty amazing that Fitzgerald was able to go from the put it all in style of this book to the graceful economy of The Great Gatsby. 

Like This Side of Paradise, there’s not much narrative drive in The Beautiful and Damned. There’s no real tension—you’re just seeing scene after scene of these people. As Fitzgerald writes, “There was nothing, it seemed, that grew stale so soon as pleasure.” (p.393) 

Fitzgerald conceived of The Beautiful and Damned and wrote it fairly quickly. In August of 1920, he wrote to Charles Scribner, outlining the plot: 

“My new novel, called ‘The Flight of the Rocket’ concerns the life of Anthony Patch between his 25^th and 33^rd years (1913-1921). He is one of those many with the tastes and weaknesses of an artist but with no actual creative inspiration. How he and his beautiful young wife are wrecked on the shoals of dissipation is told in the story.” (The Far Side of Paradise, p.135) 

Fitzgerald finished The Beautiful and Damned just before he and Zelda sailed for Europe in May, 1921. It was their first trip to Europe, and, ironically enough for two of the most famous American expatriates of the 1920’s, they didn’t like it. 

The Beautiful and Damned was serialized in Metropolitan magazine from September 1921 to March 1922. Scott and Zelda were back in Scott’s hometown of Saint Paul during that time, as Scott worked on the final proofs for the book. Unfortunately, the serialization may have harmed the book’s chances for success, as Carl Hovey, the editor of Metropolitan, “clipped and cut it up abominably,” according to a letter Fitzgerald wrote to his editor Maxwell Perkins. (The Far Side of Paradise, p.158) As James L.W. West III writes in his introduction to the 2008 edition of The Beautiful and Damned, “Much of Anthony’s dissolute behavior was excised; most of Gloria’s sexual allure was removed. Satire was blunted, criticisms of organized religion were deleted, and characterization was simplified.” (p.xi) 

Arthur Mizener’s comments on The Beautiful and Damned are insightful as to the faults of the book: “It is, compared to This Side of Paradise, a painstakingly thought-out book, and for that reason a much less effective one.” (The Far Side of Paradise, p.151) Both novels took a rather scattershot approach to their material, as Fitzgerald stuffed in as much as he could into both books, but for me This Side of Paradise had a youthful, off-handed charm that The Beautiful and Damned lacks. Perhaps that’s due to how Fitzgerald matured and changed in the intervening years. The Beautiful and Damned is also a darker book than This Side of Paradise, and bleaker in its worldview. 

Mizener also felt that Fitzgerald made a fundamental error in his handling of Anthony and Gloria: “Fitzgerald never made up his mind whether he wanted to stand apart from them and treat them satirically or enter into their experience with sympathy and understanding.” (The Far Side of Paradise, p.153-4) I agree with Mizener; it was never clear to me how the reader is supposed to feel about Anthony and Gloria. Matthew J. Bruccoli makes the same point in his Fitzgerald biography, writing bluntly: “The novel does not maintain a consistent attitude towards its characters.” (Some Sort of Epic Grandeur, p.151)

Zelda herself wrote a review of The Beautiful and Damned, which appeared in the New York Tribune in April of 1922, a month after the novel’s publication. Zelda’s review is quite funny, and she astutely noticed what Scott seemed to have missed: the fact that Gloria has birthdays in three different months—February, May, and September. The mystery of Gloria’s birthdays is addressed in the 2008 edition of the book, and while other errors in the book have been cleaned up, there was no way to change Gloria’s birthdays without seriously altering the chronology of the novel, so her three birthdays remain unchanged.

The most famous part of Zelda’s review is as follows:

“It seems to me that on one page I recognized a portion of an old diary of mine which mysteriously disappeared shortly after my marriage, and also scraps of letters which, though considerably edited, sound to me vaguely familiar. In fact, Mr. Fitzgerald—I believe that is how he spells his name—seems to believe that plagiarism begins at home.” (Appendix 2, p.429)

Biographers of both Scott and Zelda have quarreled over the importance of this paragraph for years. To feminist critics and biographers, this has offered proof that Scott was using Zelda’s life as material for his own fiction, and it paints him as a domineering husband.  Matthew J. Bruccoli, probably Scott’s most sympathetic biographer, defends Fitzgerald from Zelda’s charges, writing: “None of Fitzgerald’s surviving manuscripts shows her hand, though Zelda’s manuscripts bear his revisions. She did play an important role in his work—apart from providing him with a model—because he trusted her literary judgement and acted on her criticisms. But Zelda was never his collaborator.” (Some Sort of Epic Grandeur, p.162)

Of course, the truth could be somewhere in between. We can’t know Zelda’s intention behind the allegations—the entire review is written in a very satiric, ironic voice, so is her plagiarism allegation a mocking joke that isn’t meant to be taken seriously, or is it a more pointed criticism? We also don’t know what Scott’s reaction to Zelda’s review was. Did Scott laugh it off as a private joke between the two of them, or was he angered when he read Zelda’s review? 

The fight between Scott and Zelda over who could fictionalize their own lives would explode again a decade later as Zelda was writing her novel Save Me the Waltz and Scott was at work on Tender is the Night. Scott felt that Zelda’s book would cover some of the same ground that his own novel would, and he tried to dissuade her from publishing it. Scott eventually edited Save Me the Waltz, but because no manuscript of the novel exists before his involvement, we don’t know how much of the material he changed. Scott’s behavior during this time was abhorrent, culminating in a May 1933 meeting between Scott, Zelda, her psychiatrist, and a stenographer, who typed out a 114-page record of the proceedings. It’s quoted in Bruccoli’s biography, and it’s not pretty. As Bruccoli writes, “The angry discussion ranged over many of the fissures in the Fitzgeralds’ marriage, but the crux was Fitzgerald’s insistence on the authority to veto Zelda’s writing plans.” (Some Sort of Epic Grandeur, p.345) Both Scott and Zelda talked of divorce during the meeting. That probably would have been the best thing for both of them. 

What may have been lighthearted teasing in 1922 had turned into hatred and resentment on both sides a decade later. 

In 1930, shortly after Zelda entered Malmaison Clinic for treatment after her first mental breakdown, Scott wrote her a painfully heartfelt letter. We don’t know if Scott ever sent the letter to Zelda or not. “I wish the Beautiful and Damned had been a maturely written book because it was all true. We ruined ourselves—I have never honestly thought that we ruined each other” (Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda: The Love Letters of F. Scott & Zelda Fitzgerald, Edited by Jackson R. Bryer and Cathy W. Barks, p.65) 

That seems like a fitting final word on The Beautiful and Damned.