The Beautiful and Damned

This novel is said to be a "fierce parable about...the ruin wrought by time." I like the phrase. One could say that phrase encapsulates the singularness of Fitzgerald's novels.

"Anthony Patch with no record of achievement, without courage, without strength to be satisfied with truth when it was given him. Oh, he was a pretentious fool, making careers out of cocktails and meanwhile regretting, weakly and secretly, the collapse of an insufficient and wretched idealism. He had garnished his soul in the subtlest taste and now he longed for the old rubbish. He was empty, it seemed, empty as an old bottle-"

At age twenty-four, Fitzgerald was an acclaimed writer. Fourteen years later, he was an alcoholic living in a cheap motel and his wife was being treated for schizophrenia. Unable to write, he had a nervous breakdown. "The Crack-Up," which he wrote during his brokenness, is one of the most profoundly illuminating essays I've read. This is his second novel.

Anthony, the main character in this novel, tries to make sense of life, love, money, and relationships. There is heedfulness to surroundings, a main character who is curious, lonely, and perceptive. But those moments stray. Often, the dialogue is laborious. Anthony is difficult to stick with because he appears flat, his female counterpart unconvincing, and the plot inflexible.

این رمان پانصد صفحه ای که دومین اثر نویسنده می باشد در سن بیست و شش سالگی جرالد نوشته شده است و به حوادث زندگی مرد جوانی به نام آنتونی می پردازد. اثرات جنگ جهانی دوم در آمریکا در زمینه ی اثر دیده می شود و نوعی بلاتکلیفی و انتظار در نسل جوان رمان وجود دارد. شخصیت های اصلی رمان مملو از ملال و پوچی زندگی را به سر میبرند و هر شب را به مهمانی هایی می گذرانند که فردا صبح از برگزاری آن پشیمان می شوند اما با رسیدن شب باز همان ماجرا تکرار می شود.
قسمتی از رمان:
آدم نمی تونه هرچی رو خواست بدست بیاره، اصلا نمی تونه چیزی رو بدست بیاره، چون آرزو ها آدمو فریب میدن. مثل شعاع خورشید که روی یک جسم بی اهمیت می افته و طلایی رتگش می کنه. اما همین که دستمون بهش می رسه نور حرکت می کنه و اون چیز بی اهمیت می مونه رو دست آدم اما درخشش اون دیگه محو شده.

I know I said I wouldn't bother writing a review for this piece of trash but I couldn't resist to compile some of Scottie's 'greatest hits' just to give context for my dislike of this novel.

Some of the lovely descriptions (from men) about our main protagonist Gloria:

'Gloria's darn nice – not a brain in her head.'

'A sense of responsibility would spoil her. She's too pretty.'

'She's so utterly stupid.'

'Remarkable that a person [Gloria] can comprehend so little and yet live in such a complex civilization. A woman like that …'

Gloria about herself (brace yourself since the internalized misogyny is real with that one):

'I value my body because you [her husband Anthony] think it's beautiful. And this body of mine – of yours – to have it grow ugly and shapeless? It's simply intolerable.' (BITCH WHAT?)

'Women soil easily,' she said, 'far more easily than men.'

Some of the lovely descriptions about other women in the novel:

She had no sense of humour, but, to take its place, a happy disposition that made her laugh at the proper times when she was with men.

Her bosom is still a pavement that she offers to the hoofs of many passing stallions, hoping that their iron shoes may strike even a spark of romance in the darkness. (This is honestly one of my favorites like what kind of crack was Fitzgerald smoking?)

Scottie also had a wilde sense of 'healthy' relationships:

Then Anthony knew what he wanted – to assert his will against this cool and impervious girl, to obtain with one magnificent effort a mastery that seemed infinitely desirable.

'Hit me!' she implored him – wildly, stupidly. 'Oh, hit me, and I'll kiss the hand you hit me with.' (the fuck outta here)

Don't get me wrong, I'm aware that Fitzgerald knew that he was writing about fucked up relationships. However, he constantly propagates the notion that Gloria (and later Dot) want Anthony to seize the power and control their bodies and actions.

The emotional manipulation is also quite real with these two. After Anthony hits his wife at a train station (classy, I know), this happens:

Yet in the morning, coming early into her room, he knelt down by her bed and cried like a little boy, as though it was his heart that had been broken.

Anthony is also the one cheating in the relationship. However, when he suspects that Gloria cheated on him as well (which she didn't) he gets super aggressive and accusatory and makes her feel like a whore for pleasing men etc. It was truly sickening to read. In general, Fitzgerald portrayed the women in his story as the properties of men, rather feeding than questioning that fucked up trope.

Oh, and at one point suicide is used as a form of blackmail and Anthony says some pretty anti-semitic things. I won't even begin to fully cover the blatant racism in this novel. It made my skin crawl. The skin colour of a character was only mentioned to showcase that POC were subservient to whites. We encounter 'a coloured doorman', 'a glib Martinique Negro, with an incongruous British accent and a tendency to be surly, whom Anthony detested' and sidewalks peopled 'by an intermittent procession of ragged, shuffling, subservient Negroes'. None of these characters are given a voice (speech part) in the book.

Dot considered working for the Red Cross,

Trouble was she had heard that she might have to bathe Negroes in alcohol, and after that she hadn't felt so patriotic. (I hope you burn in hell)

And when she and Anthony went out to dance, they saw

n  a tragic Negro made yearning, aching music on a saxophone until the garish hall became an enchanted jungle of barbaric rhythms.n

Barbaric rhythms? Dude was playing the saxophone, so can ya'll chill.

In conclusion, the book is way too fucking long and needed some serious editing. Its exploration of themes is hella messy and the story isn't coherent at all. The ending was such a clusterfuck and made me want to throw the book across the room. I have nothing against narratives featuring unlikeable characters (heck, I usually find them fascinating) but you somehow have to make me care. The Beautiful and Damned is painfully unnecessary. Nothing happens except rich kids whining about the hardships of life. Sorry, can't relate.

There's nothing left to say except BITCH, THE DOOR. Also, where is my award for finishing this piece of trash?

FINALLY! Good GOD I am exhausted. This book is just another brilliant expose on an idea or ghost of who dear old Scott might have been. The delusions of the drink and all. But good lord how much did I despise Anthony and Gloria! What horrific humans. Not a soft spot for either one. What propelled me forward is the writing.

The elixir of Fitzgerald’s poetry and prose. His deep emotional state and mental demise. He as himself inserting different versions of who he imagined into his books. He may have believed in the multiverse because he certainly existed as all of these men in many realms simultaneously.

This story in particular is despicable and yet you can’t stop staring at it’s characters: Spoiled. Arrogant. Self indulgent. Self centered. Self destructive. And by the end I wanted to slap Anthony and Gloria so hard. On BOTH cheeks. I wanted to shake them and tell them they don’t know from suffering and hardship. I wanted them to shut UP. And even when they got what they wanted they might as well have been dead and buried for they had murdered their insolent souls.

However….. do not let this rant fool you: Fitzgerald may be in my humble opinion the greatest writer of the 20th century. But that’s just me….

Fitzgerald projected himself into his novels as protagonist, probably more than any other author I have read. And he usually dragged his wife and a few friends onto the pages with him. In The Beautiful and Dammed, his second novel, we meet Anthony and Gloria, two of the most miserable and unhappy characters you've ever met. Actually, they are very much like the characters in all of Fitzgerald's novels. They are young, beautiful, rich on some level, and they have absolutely nothing to do except drink and party. Sounds good to me, but in a Fitzgerald novel it always leads to destruction. Of Fitzgerald's four major novels, this is my least favorite. That's not to say I didn't like it, I did. It just speaks to the quality of his other work. This story is a train wreck of young hope and expectation gone awry, but you just can't look away.

As you may know, Reader, I struggled to get through George Eliot's masterpiece (cue massive eyeroll) Middlemarch. Refer to my review for a detailed explanation, or just read the next sentence of this one. It was boring, basically. There isn't really a plot, it's just a description of some people going about their daily lives with nothing very dramatic ever happening. The same can be said of the plot (term is used loosely here) of The Beautiful and Damned: rich people are miserable, make poor marriage and life choices, continue to be miserable, the end. (I can't say with authority that that's how Middlemarch ends because I didn't finish it, but that's what happened in the first 500 pages) So, logically, I should have hated this book as much as I hated Eliot's. But I didn't, and I think I know why: Fitzgerald's characters are interesting, and their self-destruction is a lot more fascinating than the people at Middlemarch. In that one, Dodo and company were more like unsuspecting tourists wandering too close to the edge of a cliff, about to tumble over without ever knowing what hit them. Anthony and Gloria, the main characters in this book, take a different approach: they run, roaring drunk and screaming, right for the cliff's edge and never look back. It's much more compelling and amazing and sad, and I'm still going to be mean and give the book just three stars because I am adamant that good books should have plots, dammit.

Also, I'm just going to say this and then hide from the Eliot fans' scorn and fury: Fitzgerald is a better writer. And he's funnier. Before you start flaming me in the comments about how I don't know what I'm talking about (well, DUH), I will present the following quotes from The Beautiful and Damned to support my claim:

"A stout woman upholstered in velvet, her flabby cheeks too much massaged, swirled by with her poodle straining at its leash - the effect being given of a tug bringing in an ocean liner. Just behind them a man in a striped blue suit, walking slue-footed in white-spattered feet, grinned at the sight and catching Anthony's eye, winked through the glass. Anthony laughed, thrown immediately into that humor in which men and women were graceless and absurd phantasms, grotesquely curved and rounded in a rectangular world of their own building. They inspired the same sensations in him as did those strange and monstrous fish who inhabit the esoteric world of green in the aquarium."

"In 1913, when Anthony Patch was twenty-five, two years were already gone since irony, the Holy Ghost of this later day, had, theoretically at least, descended upon him. Irony was the final polish of the shoe, the ultimate dab of the clothes-brush, a sort of intellectual "There!" - yet at the brink of this story he has as yet gone no further than the conscious stage. As you first see him he wonders frequently whether he is not without honor and slightly mad, a shameful and obscene thinness glistening on the surface of the world like oil on a clean pond, these occupations being varied, of course, with those in which he thinks himself rather an exceptional young man, thoroughly sophisticated, well adjusted to his environment, and somewhat more significant than any one else he knows. ...In this state he considered that he would one day accomplish some quiet subtle thing that the elect would deem worthy and, passing on, would join the dimmer stars in a nebulous, indeterminate heaven half-way between death and immortality. Until the time came for this effort he would be Anthony Patch - not a portrait of a man but a distinct and dynamic personality, opinionated, contemptuous, functioning from within outward - a man who was aware that there could be no honor and yet had honor, who knew the sophistry of courage and yet was brave."

Maybe 2.5. I didn't love this one. It felt messy and poorly structured in comparison with The Great Gatsby, and the characters really didn't grab me.

I really enjoyed The Great Gatsby so I was looking forward to this, being especially lured in by the fabulous title. Sadly, this turned out to be the only good thing about the book as it turns out that reading about bored, boring people tooling about being bored is incredibly boring. So boring, in fact, that I've even bored myself writing this, so I won't bother with any more.