By F. Scott Fitzgerald (whose full name was Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald, and who lived just 44 years: 1896-1940), The Beautiful and Damned was first published in 1922.

In Fitzgerald chronology, that puts it two years after This Side of Paradise (1920), his first novel, which was an overnight success, and two years before money worries sent the author (together with his wife, Zelda, and their daughter, Scottie), to "live on practically nothing a year" in France. Their places of residence included Nice, which we visited 66 years later, as chronicled in the photo above.

Until recently, Scott Fitzgerald had belonged to my dim and distant past. I'd read the aforementioned Paradise. Plus I'd read The Diamond as Big as the Ritz (1922), which is a novella; The Great Gatsby (1926) -- of course -- because everyone did; and Tender Is the Night (1934). I remember reading at least one of these in my early days in Muenster, when I was lonely and homesick (and supposed to be only reading German...). After that, nothing. Until I came across Fitzgerald in both A Moveable Feast and The Paris Wife. The two give rather different accounts. Hemingway is quite dismissive, and seems to delight in making his friend look dumb; McLain, reporting through the eyes of the first Mrs Hemingway, is rather more intriguing.

Such a juxtaposition of texts is informative, but sometimes disconcerting. I was reading The Beautiful and Damned, for example, over the same few days in which I was listening to The Paris Wife, and at one point McLain has Hadley Hemingway reading Fitzgerald's novel, and finding it a bit depressing. I was momentarily quite confused... There's a bit of self-referencing in the Fitzgerald work as well, when second-rate writer Richard Caramel tells his friend Anthony Patch: "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... I'm sick of all this shoddy realism. I think there's a place for the romanticist in literature."


Another "real" book

Anyway, Anthony Patch is our key character. His father died young, but his grandfather lives stubbornly on, a rich man from whom Anthony hopes to inherit. In the meantime, he parties assiduously, and eventually finds someone to marry: The beautiful Gloria Gilbert.

There's no reason we should care about either of these two. They're spoilt, spendthrift, rich kids, who racket round completely irresponsibly, live utterly selfishly, and are staunchly convinced the world owes them a living. They live empty, lonely lives before they marry, and those lives stay empty and lonely once they're joined together. They make resolutions to spend less, or drink less, only to break them almost immediately; Anthony at one point succeeds in getting himself a job, but hardly survives a few weeks; and while their funds dwindle, they entertain wildly and unsustainably.

There's no reason we should care, but somehow we do, if only to tut-tut, and feel superior...

And then Adam J. Patch, a staunch prohibitionist, dies, having first cut his grandson off without a penny, in protest at his dissolute (and highly alcoholic) lifestyle. Anthony spends long years contesting the will.

When the US joins World War I, Anthony is called up, and has an affair (with the clingy Dorothy Raycroft). He's demobbed before he sees any action, and he and Gloria (who has stayed faithful) reunite, pleased to see each other again.

But that moment doesn't last. Soon Anthony is drinking constantly. Short of money again, he gets involved in a scam sales routine, and ends up absolutely at the bottom of the barrel. Meanwhile, without Anthony's knowledge, Gloria has made an attempt to get into the movies, only to be told she's now more suitable for character parts... She is distraught to feel her beautiful face -- pretty much her only asset -- is no longer serving her as it did.

At several points, as they wallow in self-pity, you long to give them both a good shaking. And yet we can't take our eyes off them them, as they spiral downwards, and we wait with bated breath for the end, convinced it's going to be pretty unpleasant.



I won't talk about the ending, because part of the pleasure of the book does lie in wondering where these two are going to wash up.

But the finale is unexpected, I will say that. It makes you ask what really happened on the fateful day when the verdict on the will was handed down, and reflect that the concept of just deserts can take on a very ironic twist indeed...

The relationship between Anthony and Gloria is the central plank of the novel. This is what holds the whole, somewhat sprawling, work together -- and it's what holds the reader, too. Both Hemingway and McLain, along with other commentary, are at one in indicating that a lot of autobiography has seeped in here. Scott and Zelda's relationship was notoriously fiery. And the tortured ties between Anthony and Gloria are surely too vivid to have been just "thought up". At one point near the beginning, we are told: "They were stars on this stage, each playing to an audience of two." And we are made privy to an extract from Gloria's diary (which finishes when she marries): "Marriage was created not to be a background but to need one. Mine is going to be outstanding. It can't, shan't be the setting -- it's going to be the performance, the live, lovely, glamourous performance, and the world shall be the scenery."

It's that star-of-your-own-show self-indulgence, that constant quest for the bright lights and unreality of the theatre, that bears down on the whole story.

Gloria is querulous and demanding. Anthony is self-pitying, occasionally violent, and often misogynistic: "All the distress that he had ever known, the sorrow and the pain, had been because of women. It was something that in different ways they did to him, unconsciously, almost casually -- perhaps finding him tender-minded and afraid, they killed the things in him that menaced their absolute sway."

Misogynism is a recurring feature. Richard Caramel, then an aspiring writer, and Gloria's cousin, pronounces approvingly: "Gloria's darn nice -- not a brain in her head." Anthony, meanwhile, is inclined to include Gloria "with her entire sex as curiously and definitely limited".

Anthony's gaze is routinely critical where women are concerned: "From the tenement windows leaned rotund, moon-shaped mothers, as constellations of this sordid heaven; women like dark imperfect jewels, women like vegetables, women like great bags of abominably dirty laundry."


Central Park. Zelda Fitzgerald has received way too little recognition for her art

In fact, Anthony displays a number of unpleasant traits, which perhaps would have shocked his age rather less than they do us. Anti-Semitism, for example: "Down in a tall busy street he read a dozen Jewish names on a line of stores; in the door of each stood a dark little man watching the passers from intent eyes -- eyes gleaming with suspicion, with pride, with clarity, with cupidity, with comprehension..." And there are a number of mocking references to the Patch household's Japanese servant.

Such attitudes are, of course, part of the era that Fitzgerald paints. And he paints it very vividly, warts and all. Here is his description of a certain kind of nightlife, for example:

"There on Sunday nights gather the credulous, sentimental, underpaid, overworked people with hyphenated occupations: book-keepers, ticket-sellers, office-managers, salesmen, and, most of all, clerks -- clerks of the express, of the mail, of the grocery, of the brokerage, of the bank. With them are their giggling, over-gestured, pathetically pretentious women, who grow fat with them, bear them too many babies, and float helpless and uncontent in a colorless sea of drudgery and broken hopes."

And here is his rather cruel portrait of Muriel, one of Gloria's friends:

"She was in her element: her ebony hair was slicked straight back on her head; her eyes were artificially darkened; she reeked of insistent perfume. She was got up to the best of her ability as a siren, more popularly a 'vamp' -- a picker up and thrower away of men, an unscrupulous and fundamentally unmoved toyer with affections... She would turn her head away, lowering her eyelashes and biting her nether lip in an amazing exhibition of coyness. She would rest her hands on her hips and sway from side to side in tune to the music, saying: 'Did you ever hear such perfect ragtime? I just can't make my shoulders behave when I hear that.'"

While the writing is often beautiful, I found aspects of the structure disconcerting. That strange, mythical "flashback", for example, that reveals Gloria as the personification of Beauty, "born anew every hundred years"; or the long monologue by Anthony's friend Maury Noble, sitting up on the roof of the railway shed in the middle of the night.

And the narrative, after a certain point, doesn't so much arc as bounce along the bottom. I agree with this reviewer that the novel is "overstuffed".

That review also has some interesting quotes. One is from Fitzgerald scholar Arthur Mizener. Referring to Anthony and Gloria, he comments: "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." That would account for some of the unevenness of tone.

The other quote is from Zelda Fitzgerald's review of the book, in the New York Tribune of April 1922: "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."

Subsequent biographers and critics have disagreed as to the significance of Zelda's remarks. But this was not the last time the Fitzgeralds would fight "over who could fictionalize their own lives", and the relationship eventually heads quite dramatically south:

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


Some of Zelda Fitzgerald's life and legacy is explored here