Beautiful and Damned (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (59 page)

—from
New Republic
(May 17, 1922)

 

A book like this book is worth writing and worth reading for its vivid picture of a phase of life that always exists, that is no more modern than the pyramids and a great deal less important, but that goes into the huge cosmos to add its modicum of color and motion to the sum of life. It is not important as a picture of to-day for that very reason, tho it takes on the hue of the moment and speaks in the slang of the hour. Our young people are not like Anthony and Gloria, tho there are a great many Anthonys and Glorias in our cities. As a strain in the national make-up nothing could be more negligible; they perpetuate themselves rarely, for they have not even force for that. They exist in each generation as the dregs and mistakes, the cripples and the morons, exist. They are worth noting, but a little of them goes a long way....

No one can read very far into “The Beautiful and Damned,” without realizing that here is a born writer. His style is natural, easy and free, and he has the creative power; that is, his characters are living people, he gets inside them and gives you all there is of them. He knows where to begin and where to stop and when he does a bit of description he does it well, with sufficient vividness and without making it obtrusive. He has humor, too, and a gift of wit. If one quarrels with him it must be on his choice of subjects. So far he has written only of the worthless and the immaterial. A man is, in the end, no bigger than his point of view, and if Mr. Fitzgerald sees no more in life than the spinning dance of midges he portrays with so much skill and intelligence, then he is but a midge himself, with the single added quality of being aware of his midgeness and able to describe it. There is no reason at all why an author should not be interested in studying the ineffectual type to which the characters in the novel belong; but there is no particular reason why there should not be included some perception that there is a good deal beyond this phase, and that the world is full of persons of infinitely greater force, feeling and imagination.

—July 15, 1922

1. Is there a moral implied by the course of events in
The Beautiful and Damned,
a moral such as, “For every action, there is a consequence” ?

2. What brings Anthony and Gloria to ruin? Is it the society in which they live, or the times? Divine retribution? Poor values? Irresistible fleshly desires? Money?

3. A critic for the
Literary Digest
complained that Fitzgerald writes only about “the worthless and the immaterial,” and that his characters “exist in each generation as the dregs and mistakes, the cripples and the morons, exist.” Do you agree? Can you sympathize with Anthony and Gloria?

4. Is it a uniquely American act to come into a fortune by means of litigation, as Anthony and Gloria do? Does Fitzgerald comment on this in the novel?

5. Do we have now in America an equivalent to Fitzgerald’s beautiful and damned?

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