Book Review: F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Beautiful and Damned: New Critical Essays, edited by William Blazek, David W. Ullrich, and Kirk Curnutt (2022)

The lovely cover of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Beautiful and Damned: New Critical Essays, 2022.

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s second novel The Beautiful and Damned celebrated its’ centennial in 2022. You’d be forgiven for not marking the occasion, since The Beautiful and Damned is slightly less famous than the novel that followed it: a little book called The Great Gatsby. Ironically, The Beautiful and Damned was Fitzgerald’s best-selling novel during his lifetime: it sold over 50,000 copies, more than twice as many as The Great Gatsby, and more than three times as many as Tender Is the Night. But while Gatsby and Tender were rediscovered and became best-sellers after Fitzgerald’s death in 1940, there has never been a similar revival of The Beautiful and Damned.  

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful and Damned: New Critical Essays shines needed light on the novel’s themes. Edited by William Blazek, David W. Ullrich, and Kirk Curnutt, the book presents 11 new essays from leading Fitzgerald scholars. New Critical Essays came out at the perfect time for me, as I had just re-read The Beautiful and Damned in preparation for a program I would be co-hosting in December. (My co-hosts were the talented authors Nicole Kronzer and Katharine Woodman-Maynard.) New Critical Essays aided my understanding of the many themes that Fitzgerald offers up in his second novel. The Beautiful and Damned is still my least favorite of the four novels Fitzgerald published during his lifetime, though. (I can’t fairly evaluate The Last Tycoon, since it was unfinished.) But I’d argue that some of the themes of The Beautiful and Damned have been overlooked. I think some of the novel is meant to be satirical, for example the scene where Gloria has a meltdown over not being able to order a tomato stuffed with celery. I’m pretty sure that Fitzgerald is mocking Gloria, although it’s hard to know for sure. Because the entire novel isn’t satirical, that scene may just go unnoticed by the reader.  

I won’t recap every essay in the book, but all of them made me think more about the points the authors were making, and they all enhanced my understanding of the novel.  

Jackson R. Bryer’s essay “The Critical Reception of The Beautiful and Damned, 1922-2022" was a fascinating look at how the novel has been overlooked and criticized by virtually every critic and biographer of Fitzgerald, in a pattern that now goes back decades.  

“The Periodical World of The Beautiful and Damned” by Kirk Curnutt examines how the novel appeared in its serialization in Metropolitan magazine in 1921-22. Curnutt shows how sharp Fitzgerald’s satire was, an element in Fitzgerald’s writing that often gets overlooked. Fitzgerald’s dissatisfaction with the serialization of The Beautiful and Damned was one reason why The Great Gatsby was not serialized. The only offer to serialize Gatsby was from the magazine College Humor. Fitzgerald wrote to Harold Ober, his literary agent, that he was turning down the offer: "most people who saw it advertised in College Humor would be sure that Gatsby was a great halfback and that would kill it in book form." (As Ever, Scott Fitz, p.74)   

Walter Raubicheck’s essay “Fitzgerald Among the Smart Set,” examines the influence of naturalism and H.L. Mencken on The Beautiful and Damned. Raubicheck shows how naturalism was fundamentally opposed to Fitzgerald’s own romanticism. This is one of the reasons why the novel never quite works. Fitzgerald also seems to offer almost a parody of Mencken’s cynicism: if everything is meaningless and nothing we do really matters, then Anthony Patch seems determined to literally do nothing for the course of the entire novel. Anthony is taking Mencken’s ideas to the extreme. 

And while Fitzgerald is cynical about all kinds of subjects in The Beautiful and Damned, there is always a spark of optimism or romanticism in all of his finest writing. Fitzgerald was cynical and distrustful of most institutions of American life: organized religion, business, government, the military. All of these institutions come under fire in The Beautiful and Damned. What gave Fitzgerald hope? Perhaps the beauty of the written word, the way a shaft of sunlight falls upon a pretty girl’s face at noon as she hurries towards lunch, the way the green light from Daisy’s dock reflects upon the water as the waves gently swell in the moonlight.  

“’That Damned Beautiful Summer:’ The Fitzgeralds in Westport,” by Richard Webb, Jr., makes the case for the importance of Westport, Connecticut in The Beautiful and Damned, and as a partial inspiration for The Great Gatsby. Westport is called “Marietta” in The Beautiful and Damned, and it’s fairly easy to find the cottage Scott and Zelda rented, as its’ location is faithfully described in the novel. Webb also reminds us of the occasional Gothic touches in Fitzgerald’s work, as Gloria seems to be visited by spirits while they rent the cottage. These episodes stop once Anthony and Gloria stop going to Marietta.  

Fitzgerald was by no means a writer of the supernatural, but there are sometimes Gothic flourishes, as when Amory Blaine sees the Devil appear in a chorus girl’s apartment in This Side of Paradise. Amory seems on the path to having a sexual encounter with a chorus girl, but the sudden appearance of the spirit sends Amory headed for the exit before anything can be consummated. (This is perhaps the time to remind you that Fitzgerald was raised Catholic.) Fitzgerald’s 1927 short story “A Short Trip Home” also features a similarly malevolent spirit or apparition.  

David W. Ullrich’s essay “Fatherly Designs and Childish Behaviors: Anthony Comstock vs. Tanalahaka in The Beautiful and Damned” has excellent background material on Anthony Comstock, the model for Anthony’s grandfather Adam Patch. Ullrich also takes the Japanese servant Tana seriously, something the novel fails to do.  

Ullrich also writes about Joseph Bloeckman, the movie producer who is a supporting character. Towards the end of the novel, Gloria finally agrees to take Bloeckman up on his offer of a screen test. But then, horror of horrors, Bloeckman sends Gloria a letter saying the director wanted a younger woman for the main part. However, Gloria might be suitable for the role of “a very haughty rich widow.” (p.379) Gloria doesn’t even finish reading the letter; her dreams of movie stardom are crushed.  

Gloria’s father is a business associate of Bloeckman’s, and Ullrich finds it unlikely that “the tactful and ever-circumspect Bloeckman would risk alienating his supplier of ‘film material’ and their long-standing business relationship by writing such a rude letter to Mr. Gilbert’s daughter.” (p.158) However, by this point in the novel, Gloria’s father has been dead for nearly 100 pages, so Bloeckman doesn’t have to worry about possibly offending him.  

Meredith Goldsmith’s chapter “Trouble on the Home Front: Militarism, Masculinity, and Marriage in The Beautiful and Damned,” examines how Fitzgerald uses military language throughout the novel. It’s one of those details that you can easily overlook until someone tips you off to it. Goldsmith also looks at the connections Fitzgerald makes between the Civil War and World War I.  

Preeminent Fitzgerald scholar James L.W. West III has a superb essay, “The Beautiful and Damned and the Jewish People.” West makes a comparison I also recently thought of, as he likens Joseph Bloeckman, who is a German Jewish immigrant, to Simon Rosedale, the Jewish real estate dealer in Edith Wharton’s novel The House of Mirth. Both Bloeckman and Rosedale are supporting characters who pop up every so often in the novels, and they progressively rise higher and higher in the course of the novels as the main characters fall lower and lower. West also reminds us that a good number of the supporting characters in The Beautiful and Damned are Jewish.  

“A Matter of Overcivilization: Fitzgerald’s Critique of Modernity in the Beautiful and Damned” by Joseph K. Stitt, focuses on one of Fitzgerald’s main intellectual ideas in his fiction: we’ve finished with the stale morality of the Victorian Age, but what comes next? What do we replace that morality with? Fitzgerald offers us no easy answers to those questions, but I think he spent a lot of time pondering the answers.  

New Critical Essays will give you a lot to think about, even if you’re a devoted fan of The Beautiful and Damned. Fitzgerald covers a lot of different topics and themes in the novel, which might be a shortcoming of the book, but it means there’s ample room for the many different essays in this volume.  

Book Review: Let's Go Play at the Adams' by Mendal W. Johnson (1974)

The 2020 reissue paperback of Let's Go Play at the Adams', by Mendal W. Johnson. (First published in 1974)

Let’s Go Play at the Adams’ is a 1974 horror novel by Mendal W. Johnson that has become a notorious cult book due to its’ shocking subject matter. After languishing out of print for decades, and commanding exorbitant prices on the used book market, the novel was finally reprinted in paperback in 2020 as part of Grady Hendrix’s “Paperbacks from Hell” series. The premise of the book is this: Barbara, a 20-year-old who is nannying for two children, ages 13 and 10, while their parents vacation in Europe, awakens one morning to find that she is tied to the bed and gagged. It quickly becomes clear that the children have made Barbara their prisoner in order to be free from adult supervision. The children have three older teenage neighbor friends that they typically spend their days with. Calling themselves “Freedom Five,” they have devised an elaborate plan to keep Barbara prisoner. 

 From the beginning, the children face a dilemma. They have caught a tiger by the tail. If they let Barbara go, they face certain punishment. (Although it seems clear Barbara is not a vengeful tiger.) If they keep Barbara prisoner, they avoid punishment for the moment, but their punishment may grow worse the longer Barbara is held prisoner.  

In the hands of a lesser talent, Let’s Go Play at the Adams’ could easily be just schlocky torture porn. But I think Johnson had higher aspirations in mind. Johnson convincingly enters into the minds of all of his characters-the five children and Barbara-no small feat for a novelist.  

I wonder if Johnson was familiar with books about the Holocaust? I bring this up because he seems interested in the psychology of why seemingly normal people would do bad things. I would suspect that Johnson knew of the Milgram experiments and the Stanford prison experiment—two notorious psychology experiments that demonstrated how “normal” people were capable of inflicting pain on others if they were instructed to do so by an authority figure. This is an underlying theme of the novel—because Barbara has become the children’s prisoner, they begin to treat her as a prisoner, not as a human being.  

Similar to the comic strip Dick Tracy, the novel shows how wrong compounds wrong. You do one wrong thing, and then suddenly you’re doing 5 more wrong things in order to cover up the first wrong thing you did. You sense the claustrophobic choices the characters face. (Or imagine they face, as they try to justify their actions and prevent anyone from learning about the first wrong thing.)  

Let’s Go Play at the Adams’ was Mendal W. Johnson’s only published novel, and he died just two years after the book’s publication. The introduction tells us that Johnson wrote several other unpublished novels. I’m curious as to what Johnson’s other novels are like—are they also thrillers/horror books?  

Let’s Go Play at the Adams’ was a difficult book to read, and it’s meant to be. If you read it calmly with a tranquil mind, I’d be worried.