F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Beautiful and Damned
Was ever a writer so besotted by failure as F. Scott Fitzgerald? As a young man he craved literary success and achieved it, instantly, with This Side of Paradise (1920). In 1918 he had met and fallen for Zelda Sayre, who, a year later, broke off their informal engagement. Fitzgerald won her back and, within two weeks of the book’s publication, had married the woman of his dreams. He was twenty-four and had everything he wanted. Even then—or so he later claimed—the pleasure was tainted and enhanced by elegiac projection: “I remember riding in a taxi one afternoon between very tall buildings under a mauve and rose sky; I began to bawl because I had everything I wanted and knew I would never be so happy again.” That’s one way of looking at it; another would be that he was already looking forward to the real business of regret, loss, decline, and ruin. Fitzgerald understood that he had to climb to a dizzy height if the fall was going to be spectacular enough to satisfy him. He needed to achieve success in order to be convinced of the colossal scale of his subsequent failure.
By August he was at work on a new novel, which, he informed his publisher, Charles Scribner, “concerns the life of one Anthony Patch between his 25th and 33rd years (1913–21). 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 novel was duly completed in the summer of 1921 and published the following March.
For more than a hundred pages, The Beautiful and Damned does not reveal any kind of advance on This Side of Paradise. Isolated moments of insight cannot disguise its stylistic and structural flimsiness. The reader’s heart sinks when, after less than twenty pages, Fitzgerald abandons novelistic prose and inserts one of the little playlets that should have been edited out of his first novel. In the midst of “an F. Scott Fitzgerald phase,” the writer Richard Yates admired the way that “every line of dialogue in The Great Gatsby serves to reveal more about the speaker than the speaker might care to have revealed.” The characters in The Beautiful and Damned say some smart things—“unloved women have no biographies—they have histories”—but much of the dialogue wilts even as it is spoken. Unleashed as soon as Gloria sets foot in the book, Fitzgerald’s tendency to effulgence is, at first, ironically refracted through Anthony’s consciousness: “Surely the freshness of her cheeks was a gossamer projection from a land of delicate and undiscovered shades; her hand gleaming on the stained table-cloth was a shell from some far and wildly virginal sea.” Shortly afterward it takes on the signature tone of Fitzgerald’s own lyrical yearning. A cab “moved off like a boat on a labyrinthine ocean”; Gloria “turned up her face to him, pale under the wisps and patches of light that trailed in like moonshine through a foliage.” Fitzgerald never entirely grew out of this kind of thing—he would have been a lesser writer if he had—but he did learn to control it, to ground the lushest imagery in the actual and immediate. That is the problem with the first part of The Beautiful and Damned: its themes are declared without being adequately actualized in the specific drama of Gloria and Anthony’s relationship.
Significantly, the narrative clicks abruptly into focus on the brink of the first serious breach in their marriage, in circumstances that are like a premonition of the opening of Tender Is the Night: “With Eric Mottram, Anthony had been sitting over a decanter of Scotch all the hot summer afternoon, while Gloria and Constance Merriam swam and sunned themselves at the Beach Club, the latter under a striped parasol-awning, Gloria stretched sensuously upon the soft hot sand, tanning her inevitable legs.”
By the time the Patches leave—at Gloria’s insistence—Anthony is befuddled with drink. At the railroad station he becomes determined both to pay a pointless visit on some other friends and to assert his power over Gloria and her perceived selfishness. When she continues to insist on going home, he grips her arms. The scene that follows is ugly and devastating, all the more so because it is transcribed in such ruthless detail. Its aftermath leaves them changed forever. To her husband Gloria seems “a pathetic little thing… broken and dispirited,” while Anthony has “killed any love” and “any respect” his wife ever had for him. Fitzgerald does not leave it there, however. He had a sufficiently subtle understanding of such moments to know that the characteristic of a turning point is that, as often as not, one fails to turn: “she was aware even then that she would forget in time and that it is the manner of life seldom to strike but always to wear away.”
It is page 168 and we are, quite suddenly and in several senses, on the far side of paradise. Everything Fitzgerald has written up to this point is showy, shallow, and—as Jack Kerouac wrote to Neal Cassady—“sweetly unnecessary.” This is the first glimpse of the mature style and skill that will lead, ultimately, to his crowning masterpiece, Tender Is the Night. More immediately, his themes are now properly embodied in his characters. From here Fitzgerald’s command of his material is, for the most part, considered, assured. (Right at the end he blows it completely, but that is 190 pages away.)
It is difficult to disassociate Fitzgerald’s life—especially his relationship with Zelda—from his reputation as a writer. Fact and fiction are constantly informing, illuminating, intruding on, and obscuring one another. The temptation to read the novels as a form of vicarious autobiography was, on occasion, sanctioned by Fitzgerald himself. In 1930 he wrote to Zelda—then “sick as hell” at a clinic in Switzerland—that he wished “ 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.” Ten years later he told his daughter that “Gloria was a much more trivial and vulgar person than your mother. I can’t really say there was much resemblance except in the beauty and certain terms of expression she used, and also I naturally used many circumstantial events of our early married life. However the emphases were entirely different. We had a much better time than Anthony and Gloria had.” Despite the discrepancy, there is not really any contradiction between these two accounts. It is precisely the intermingling of literal truth and fabrication that gives the novel its imaginative truth.
The “circumstantial” details include the renting of a house in the country, the terrifyingly erratic driving that led the couple to it, and the binges that became the norm once they had moved in. It is generally assumed that Fitzgerald fell apart due to alcoholism, and while this is, in a sense, obviously true, it is also simplistic—for the simple reason that alcoholism became one of his great subjects. Write about what you know—that is the advice always given to aspiring writers. And what Fitzgerald came to know about was alcoholism. Fitzgerald didn’t actually drink that much and took the fact that he got drunk so quickly as proof that he was not nearly as far gone as some of his friends. Hemingway may have known a lot more about drink and drinking, but no one has written better about its effects than Fitzgerald. Guy Debord’s celebration of his own relationship with booze in Panegyric climaxes with an evocation of the state that was close to Fitzgerald’s artistic heart: “First, like everyone, I appreciated the effect of slight drunkenness; then very soon I grew to like what lies beyond violent drunkenness, when one has passed that stage: a magnificent and terrible peace, the true taste of the passage of time.” The passage of time; lost youth: Fitzgerald reiterated his loyalty to these themes so often that Gore Vidal satirically summed up the contents of his Notebooks in two lines: “Once upon a time, he was a success and now he’s a failure; he was young and now he’s middle-aged.”
In The Thirsty Muse, his study of “alcohol and the American writer,” Thomas Dardis traces the way that booze took its toll on Fitzgerald. This is demonstrably the case—but the irony is that, even before he had succumbed completely to alcoholism, Fitzgerald understood its ruinous consequences so precisely. To paraphrase Blake on Milton, Fitzgerald was of the temperance party without knowing it. In The Beautiful and Damned the process by which Gloria and Anthony “pour into themselves a gay and delicate poison” is painstakingly navigated. An ominous note is struck when, for a wedding present, their friend Maury gives them “an elaborate ‘drinking set,’ which included silver goblets, cocktail shaker, and bottle-openers.” With the accoutrements of booze thereby serving as a symbolic expression of their nuptials, the couple go from getting “tight” to unconscious dependency and squalor: “There was the odor of tobacco always—both of them smoked incessantly; it was in their clothes, their blankets, the curtains, and the ash-littered carpets. Added to this was the wretched aura of stale wine, with its inevitable suggestion of beauty gone foul and revelry remembered in disgust.”
Needless to say, Fitzgerald did not discover this subject—indeed, he was consciously under the influence of Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie while he was writing The Beautiful and Damned—but for no one else was booze so intimately entangled with the romance that it insidiously corrupts. “There’s no beauty without poignancy,” Gloria tells Anthony, and, in Fitzgerald, the poignancy is invariably viewed through the bottom of a glass. The mythic status of Fitzgerald in American letters was such that a writer like Richard Yates (born in 1926) was so intoxicated by his example that he spent much of his career—both imaginatively and literally—aspiring to an ideal of ruination exemplified by Fitzgerald.*
Drink is not the only measure of the Patches’ decline. Fitzgerald is careful to keep tabs on exactly how much money Anthony has and the rate at which his fortune is dissipated. (The two kinds of dissipation—spending money and drinking—come bathetically together at a scene near the end of the book when Gloria reproaches Anthony for paying “seventy-five dollars for a case of whiskey” even though they are on the brink of destitution.) As elsewhere in Fitzgerald’s writing, this scrupulous accounting has a deep-rooted metaphoric importance; financial ruin is always twinned with what he called, in the title of a story, “Emotional Bankruptcy.” As his biographer Matthew Bruccoli puts it, the “concept of emotional bankruptcy became a key idea for Fitzgerald. He believed that people have a fixed amount of emotional capital; reckless expenditure results in early bankruptcy.” Gloria is willing to live her life on these terms, “to use every minute of these years to have the best time [she] possibly can.” After that she won’t care and, even if she does, Gloria insists, “I won’t be able to do anything about it. And I’ll have had my good time.” Anthony sees through this hedonistic faux-Nietzscheanism: they have had their good time and are already “in the state of paying for it.”
Even this is open to doubt; Fitzgerald was astute about his material when he pointed out that Anthony and Gloria did not have as good a time as he and Zelda had. In The Beautiful and Damned there is nothing comparable to the enchanted Riviera evenings of Tender Is the Night or the ecstatic nights in Gatsby’s “blue gardens,” where “men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.”* The “parties” (Fitzgerald himself puts the word in quotes at one point!) in The Beautiful and Damned are just binges that leave Anthony, in the words of poet Peter Reading, a “grievously wounded veteran of the / Battle of Bottle.”
That it is not clear what else he might have amounted to was part of the novel’s purpose. As Fitzgerald explained to Edmund Wilson: “Gloria and Anthony are representative. They are two of the great army of the rootless who float around New York. There must be thousands.” Anthony has vague plans to write, but Gloria mocks his inability to settle down to the task. The problem, he retorts, is that she makes “leisure so subtly attractive.” Anthony is here scratching the surface of what will become one of Fitzgerald’s major artistic preoccupations and insights: that if leisure—to which everyone aspires—is akin to ruin, then perhaps ruin itself is subtly attractive.
Anthony’s attempts at paid employment prove no more successful than his literary and intellectual endeavors. For him to succeed in the world of finance, he realizes, “the idea of success must grasp and limit his mind.” By comparison, the idea of failure seems all-embracing, something that will consume and test his entire being. Perhaps failure will even contain its own kind of majesty. This is the wager at the center of Fitzgerald’s fascination, for failure also necessarily imposes its own limits. From being a person “of mental adventure, of curiosity,” Anthony becomes “an individual of bias and prejudice.” It is to the credit of Fitzgerald the artist—who, as a man, was prone to shoddy prejudices of his own—that the absolute nadir of Anthony’s life, the pitch of degradation, comes when, having been refused a loan, he calls the movie producer Joseph Bloeckman a “Goddam Jew.”
Even an incident like this demonstrates the capacity of failure to generate some kind of hideous enlightenment. Had everything gone smoothly for Anthony he might never have so nakedly confronted the potential baseness of his own character. In less extreme circumstances failure generates an aura of romance and mystery. Despite his drinking, “Anthony had rather gained than lost in appearance; his face had taken on a certain tangible air of tragedy, romantically contrasted with his trim and immaculate person.” Fitzgerald was never shy of using the word tragedy, but it seems to me that his writing—with the gleaming exception of The Great Gatsby—is constantly groping toward an intuition that has historic rather than simply personal resonance: namely, that, despite the vaulting claim announced by Dreiser’s An American Tragedy (1926), in twentieth-century America failure had superseded tragedy. Whether this in itself is a failure or a tragedy constitutes the crux of his creative efforts.
The First World War played a major part in Fitzgerald’s thinking along these lines. What space was left for individual tragedy in the wake of such a cataclysm? D. H. Lawrence, an English writer living in mainland Europe, began his last novel with the assertion that “ours is essentially a tragic age.” For Fitzgerald the fact that he—like Anthony in The Beautiful and Damned—missed out on the war only deepened the conviction that Americans were in a post-tragic age. What could be done in such a situation? Could failure and waste be imbued with a tragic grandeur of their own? Zelda came to believe that Fitzgerald succeeded in doing exactly this: “I do not know that a personality can be divorced from the times which evoke it.… I feel that Scott’s greatest contribution was the dramatization of a heart-broken + despairing era, giving it a new raison-d’être in the sense of tragic courage with which he endowed it.”
As early as This Side of Paradise there are moments when Fitzgerald flirts precociously with the prospect of failure. “I’ve begun to feel that I was meant to lose this chance,” reflects the youthful hero Amory Blaine at one point. Later, he feels “an overwhelming desire to let himself go to the devil,” but it is not until The Beautiful and Damned that Fitzgerald pursues this possibility in earnest. Midway through the novel, Fitzgerald sums up Anthony as someone who “has inherited only the vast tradition of human failure.” While a measure of satisfaction and consolation might be derived from this inheritance, Fitzgerald later came to feel dissatisfied with the passivity it implied. The book he was working on in 1932 would therefore “be a novel of our time showing the break-up of a fine personality. Unlike The Beautiful and Damned the break-up will be caused not by flabbiness but really tragic forces such as the inner conflicts of the idealist and the compromises forced upon him by circumstances.” The achieved reality of Tender Is the Night—as this novel became—would both fall short of this plan and, by failing, exceed it.
By then Fitzgerald was so immersed in his own sense of failure that his capacity to stand by his own judgments was severely compromised. Thus, when the novel was not greeted as warmly as he hoped, he revised and rearranged it and, in so doing, made it worse. In 1936 he wrote to his editor, Max Perkins: “This general eclipse of ambition and determination and fortitude, all of the very qualities on which I have prided myself, is ridiculous, and, I must admit, somewhat obscene.” Self-pity of this kind was a justifiable indulgence; having somehow summoned the tenacity and fortitude to write his masterpiece, Fitzgerald was no longer relevant to his own achievement. The philosopher E. M. Cioran believed that the autobiographical essays from this period (collected in The Crack-Up) in which Fitzgerald “describes his failure” constitute “his only great success.”* This, however, is radically to underestimate the extent to which Fitzgerald had internalized and preempted such a verdict.
Fitzgerald claims that the “quality which was the best” in Anthony worked “swiftly and ceaseless toward his ruin.” His fate is altogether less complex than Dick Diver’s, and The Beautiful and Damned is a less complex, less profound novel than Tender Is the Night. It is both a major step beyond the radiant ease of This Side of Paradise and an indication of the depths Fitzgerald still had to plumb in order to live up to—by breaking—its youthful promise.
2004
