THE BEAUTIFUL AND DAMNED

Wow, what a second novel! Coming off his first novel, This side of Paradise, no one expected F. Scott Fitzgerald to top the bestseller list again so quickly. F. Scott once again uses The 1920’s Jazz age and WWI as a backdrop for his second novel. The effects of future wealth and power are fully examined on the two main characters of the novel: Anthony Patch and his eventual wife, Gloria Gilbert. I’m also happy to report that there were only six main characters, which allows the reader time to get to know each character’s modus operandi. Anthony, a recent Harvard graduate, was brought up by his multimillionaire grandfather, Adam Patch. Grandpa wanted Anthony to write a book, or anything else constructive other than wasting his life away in the NYC nightlife. But Anthony could not get motivated in any career when he knew he was going to inherit millions from his sickly grandfather soon. Anthony got along nicely, selling off a bond or two (inherited from his mother) when he needed cash to continue his NYC daily cabareting. “At eleven he had a horror of death. Within six impressionable years his parents had died and his grandmother has faded off almost imperceptibly.” So you see, it was a matter of time before his grandfather dies...where else would the money go? Oh, life is going to be so good! Whereas Anthony occasionally traveled back and forth from NYC to Europe, he decided to get an apartment in NYC (closer to grandfather’s Tarrytown estate) and wait for the old man to die before living permanently in Europe. It’s not that he hated his grandfather (he didn’t); he just wanted his money. And his parties. And his booze.

I forgot to mention that F. Scott Fitzgerald is known to be the last descriptive writer. Let’s see how F. Scott describes Anthony’s seventy-five-year-old grandfather Adam Patch on page 16, “The span of his seventy-five years had acted as a magic bellows, the first quarter-century had blown him full with life, and the last had sucked it all back. It had sucked in the cheeks and the chest and the girth of arm and leg. It had tyrannously demanded his teeth, one by one, suspended his small eyes in dark-bluish sacks, tweaked out his hairs, changed him from gray to white in some places, from pink to yellow in others - callously transposing his colors like a child trying over a paint-box. Then through his body and his soul it had attacked his brain. It had sent him night-sweats and tears and unfounded dreads. It had split his intense normality into credulity and suspicion. Out of the coarse material of enthusiasm it had cut dozens of meek but petulant obsessions; his energy was shrunk to the bad temper of a spoiled child, and for his will to power was substituted a fatuous puerile desire for a hand of harps and canticles on earth.” What did he say? Anyway, back to the story. Anthony continues to drink and party at the many NYC private clubs he has joined. He is usually with his two best friends from Harvard. Maury Noble and Dick Caramel, who is writing a book. One day Anthony runs into Dick coming out of a barbershop. He tells Anthony that his cousin from Kansas is staying at her parent's apartment at The Plaza. Dick tells Anthony, “Got a cousin up at The Plaza. Famous girl. We can go up and meet her. She lives there in the winter - has lately anyway - with her mother and father.” Later, Anthony runs into Maury and is informed that he also met Gloria...and she has the best legs he ever saw. Lets meet Gloria.

Before Anthony meets Gloria, I would like to talk about the chapter F. Scott titled, A Flash-Back in Paradise. The reader meets “Beauty, who was born anew every hundred years, sat in a sort of outdoor waiting-room through which blew gusts of white wind and occasionally a breathless hurried star (is this heaven?). It became known to her, at length, that she was to be born again (is the VOICE God)? She learns that she will journey to a country that she has never been to. Beauty asks, “How long a stay this time?” The VOICE answers, “fifteen years”. All Beauty knows is that she will be a “society gurl”, as a “ragtime kid, a flapper, a jazz-baby, and a baby vamp.” This is what I don’t understand...the few woman in the novel all lived way over fifteen years. None of them died in this novel, none of them left after fifteen years... Is this a continuation of something that was started in F. Scott’s first novel? If so, I’m lost because I didn’t read This Side of Paradise. Okay, enough already. Gloria was gorgeous and every man or woman agreed. She was a lifetime partygoer and a big tease. And a big drinker. To Gloria, “Beauty always came first. That’s why she didn’t have children, the menace (a pregnancy) to her beauty appalled her.” Then she met Anthony. Her cousin and Anthony’s friend Dick brings her over to Anthony’s NYC apartment. It’s page 48...let the romance game start! “On Thursday afternoon Gloria and Anthony had tea together in the grill-room at the Plaza (try to get in there now, haha) They play the society game saying hello and blowing kisses to all the rival debutantes and bachelors. But they know that they are the stars dancing on the Plaza floor. Life is good...unless.

Some of the language used by F. Scott is archaic by today’s standards, but no writer could put a sentence together better than Fitzgerald. Some say this novel truly emulates the romance F. Scott Fitzgerald had with his wife, Zelda Sayre. In reviewing the many quotes from the real life Zelda, I find a Gloria Gilbert in most of them, such as, “Without you, dearest dearest I couldn’t see or hear or feel or think - live - I love you so and I’m never in all our lives going to let us apart another night.”

RATING: 5 out of 5 stars

Comment: While Hemingway and The Left Bank Gang of Paris expatriate writers of the 1920s ultimately ended the descriptive writing era, I still prefer it, even though a novel like The Beautiful and Damned takes awhile to finish because it’s really a kind of textbook on writing. You really aren’t reading the novel...you are studying it. Fitzgerald never changed his writing style. That’s why I like reading the classics.

Did you know that Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (F. Scott's full name) was named after his father’s distant cousin, the author of the “Star-Spangled Banner”.

Many of Fitzgerald’s novels and short stories have been adapted to film. The Great Gatsby has been a movie five times, while The Beautiful and Damned has been done twice. Even his short stories have become movies, such as, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (you didn’t know he wrote that...did ya?)

In 1940 with The Last Tycoon only half finished, F. Scott Fitzgerald died of a heart attack on December 21, in Sheilah Graham’s (a gossip columnist) Hollywood apartment. He is buried in Rockville Union Cemetery in Maryland. He was 44 years of age.

In 1948 Zelda Fitzgerald died in a fire at a hospital in North Carolina. She was 47.