Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography (15 page)

The Beautiful and Damned
was gratefully dedicated to three early mentors—Shane Leslie, George Jean Nathan and Maxwell Perkins—“in appreciation of much literary help and encouragement.” The book covers the same prewar to postwar period (approximately 1910 to 1920) as
This Side of Paradise,
and also describes the personal history and genteel Romanticism of a wealthy and attractive young man. But while the earlier novel is witty, flippant and lighthearted, the later is ponderous and tragic, twice as long, less “literary” and more static. Its title suggests the protagonists’ movement from the pampered life of the beautiful to the suffering of the damned.

The damnation (such as it is) is mainly caused by alcohol. Toward the end of the book the broken, debt-ridden hero, Anthony Patch, “awoke in the morning so nervous that Gloria [his wife] could feel him trembling in the bed before he could muster enough vitality to stumble into the pantry for a drink. He was intolerable now except under the influence of liquor, and as he seemed to decay and coarsen under her eyes, Gloria’s soul and body shrank away from him.” Anthony’s drunken decline and unhappy marriage reflect Fitzgerald’s personal problems and anticipate those of Dick Diver in
Tender Is the Night.

Money plays as dominant a role in this novel as it does in the Naturalistic works of Dreiser and Norris, whom Fitzgerald greatly admired. Anthony’s relentless pursuit of money is very different from Amory Blaine’s long denunciation of capitalism in
This Side of Paradise.
The middle name of the cynical, decadent and potentially wealthy hero, Anthony Comstock Patch, ironically alludes both to Anthony Comstock, a fierce contemporary crusader against vice, and to the Comstock Lode, the most valuable silver deposit in America, found near Virginia City, Nevada, in 1859. Anthony is born into a wealthy family, graduates from Harvard and lives on the expectation of a multi-million-dollar fortune. He is ruined, however, by having sufficient income so that he does not have to work, but not quite enough to maintain his luxurious way of life. The word “clean” recurs throughout the novel to describe beautiful or elegant women and mornings of hard work. But at the very end of the book, when the Patches are corrupted by inheriting thirty million dollars, Anthony overhears a fellow passenger describing the luxuriously dressed Gloria as “
unclean
.”

Wealth—or the promise of wealth—turns Anthony into a facile mediocrity. He believes nothing is worth doing and refuses to work, dabbles with a medieval essay and rejects his grandfather’s offer to make him a war correspondent. As friends succeed in their own careers, Anthony dissipates himself in wild and finally repulsive parties during which “people broke things; people became sick in Gloria’s bathroom; people spilled wine; people made unbelievable messes of the kitchenette.” When his rich, priggish grandfather sees Anthony at one of these parties, he is horrified at his deterioration and disinherits him. After failing as a salesman, Anthony becomes seedy and unhealthy, and—like Gordon Sterrett in “May Day”—is cruelly rejected when he tries to borrow money from his old friend Maury Noble.

Before his precipitous decline, Anthony courts and marries the beautiful, vain, selfish and stupid Gloria Gilbert, who “took all the things of life to choose from and apportion, as though she were continually picking out presents for herself from an inexhaustible counter.”
¹
She hates staying home in the evening, always eclipses other women at parties and wants to marry a lover rather than a husband. Her marriage to Anthony is predictably wrecked by boredom and wastefulness, futile fighting and joyless parties.

Gloria’s unhappy marriage makes her responsive to Joseph Bloeckman, the vice president of a film company, who does business with her father and who rises in the course of the novel as the more genteel characters decline. Like Samuel Goldwyn, Louis Mayer and most other movie executives of Fitzgerald’s time, Bloeckman was a Jewish immigrant who started life in the humblest circumstances. After managing a side-show and owning a vaudeville house, he entered the film industry, in which his ambition, money and knowledge of show business propelled him to the top. When first introduced in the novel, he is insensitive, ingratiating and self-assured—and hopelessly in love with the wealthy and stylish Gloria.

Later in the novel, as Anthony becomes bored and Gloria disillusioned, Bloeckman reappears—now “infinitesimally improved, of subtler intonation, of more convincing ease”—and tempts her with a screen test. At the end of the long novel, the impoverished and humiliated Anthony has been rejected by all his friends. In a desperate attempt at blackmail, he impulsively phones Bloeckman (now called Joseph Black), who has usurped Anthony’s rightful place in society and tried to steal his wife. He finds Bloeckman in a nightclub and falsely accuses him of keeping Gloria out of the movies. When Anthony calls him a “Goddamn Jew,” Bloeckman beats him up and has him thrown into the gutter.

The Beautiful and Damned,
like most of Fitzgerald’s fiction, is extremely autobiographical. The Fitzgeralds’ house in Westport, their servant Tana (who also appears in
Save Me the Waltz
) provided by the “Japanese Reliable Employment Agency,” their extravagance, quarrels and drinking all appear in the novel. The long-awaited fortune is based on the sudden wealth acquired after the publication of
This Side of Paradise,
Gloria’s movie test on an offer made to Scott and Zelda to star in the film version of that novel, Bloeckman’s courtship of Gloria on Nathan’s of Zelda, the laconic discussion about whether or not the pregnant Gloria should have a child (“If you have it I’ll probably be glad. If you don’t—well, that’s all right too”) on Zelda’s decision to have her first abortion. Anthony has the same name as Zelda’s father; and Gloria seems to have all Zelda’s worst features without any of her redeeming qualities. As Scott later told their daughter: “Gloria was a much more trivial and vulgar person than your mother. I can’t really say there was any 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. . . . We had a much better time than Anthony and Gloria had.”
²

The novel powerfully expresses Fitzgerald’s fear of failure, sense of lost happiness and feeling of imminent collapse. Anthony’s friend Richard Caramel, who publishes a decent novel and then becomes a contemptible example of a commercial and Hollywood hack, prefigures Fitzgerald’s career as a compromised writer. Fitzgerald clearly saw Zelda’s threat to his future as a writer, but could neither change his domestic life nor stop writing about it. Confused at times between his imaginative and his real existence, he behaved like his own fictional characters and would eventually be overcome by the very doom he had foreshadowed in
The Beautiful and Damned.

The reviewers were kind to the novel and felt it represented a considerable improvement on
This Side of Paradise.
The liveliest notice, “Friend Husband’s Latest” in the
New York Tribune
of April 2, 1922, was written by Zelda. In her first published work, she wittily urged readers to buy the book because Scott needed a winter overcoat and she craved an expensive cloth-of-gold dress and platinum ring with a complete circlet. She revealed, for the first time, that Scott—with her permission—had absorbed bits of her writing into his novel: “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.” Two years later, after Zelda had published two articles, an interviewer in the
Smart Set
emphasized her idiosyncratic style and exaggerated his use of her material: “Mrs. Fitzgerald writes also. She has a queer, decadent style, luminous in its imagination, and very often Scott incorporates whole chapters of his wife’s writing into his own books. He steals all her ideas for short stories and writes them as his own.” Critics realized, early in Fitzgerald’s career, that his novels ruthlessly exposed their emotional conflicts and made Zelda a participant in his fiction as well as a partner in his marriage.

Writing more seriously about
The Beautiful and Damned
in the
Nation,
Carl Van Doren concluded that “its excellence lies in the rendering not of the ordinary moral universe but of that detached, largely invented region where glittering youth plays at wit and love.” In the
Smart Set,
the normally acerbic H. L. Mencken provided loyal praise: “Fitzgerald discharges his unaccustomed and difficult business with ingenuity and dignity. . . . If the result is not a complete success, it is nevertheless near enough to success to be worthy of respect. There is fine observation in it, and much penetrating detail, and the writing is solid and sound. . . . [With this novel] Fitzgerald ceases to be a
Wunderkind
and begins to come into his maturity.”

Eager as always for honest criticism that would help him as a writer, Scott was particularly interested in the responses of Bishop and Wilson. In the New York
Herald,
Bishop emphasized the art and the vitality of the novel: “the book represents both in plan and execution an advance on
This Side of Paradise.
If, stylistically speaking, it is not so well written, neither is it so carelessly written. . . . Fitzgerald is at the moment of announcing the meaninglessness of life [one of the themes of the novel] magnificently alive.”
³

In 1921 Fitzgerald had solicited Wilson’s comments on the typescript of the novel, just as he had done with the typescript of
This Side of Paradise
in 1919. Wilson, who would eventually supplant Mencken as the most influential critic in America, must have been pleased by his brief but flattering appearance in
The Beautiful and Damned
as Eugene Bronson, “whose articles in The New Democracy [
The New Republic
] were stamping him as a man with ideas transcending both vulgar timeliness and popular hysteria.” In February 1921 Wilson had told a friend that he was impressed by Fitzgerald’s ability to describe the seeds of destruction in his own marriage: “I am editing [not merely reading] the ms of Fitz’s new novel, and, though I thought it was rather silly at first, I find it developing a genuine emotional power which he has scarcely displayed before. . . . It is all about him and Zelda.” Wilson also reported that alcohol had aged Fitzgerald’s handsome profile at the same time that experience had tempered his mind: “He looks like John Barrymore on the brink of the grave . . . but also, somehow, more intelligent than he used to.”
⁴

Wilson served as both private editor and public critic. He showed Fitzgerald his rather cruel composite review of the first two novels (to be published in the
Bookman
of March 1922) when it was still in typescript. Appreciating the serious analysis, Fitzgerald modestly accepted his comments on the unconvincing characters, the “lack of discipline and poverty of aesthetic ideas,” and even told George Jean Nathan that he had enjoyed reading Wilson’s criticism. Though he asked Wilson to delete references to his drinking and his criticism of the war, which would have offended Zelda’s parents and hurt his reputation, he told him: “It is, of course, the only intelligible and intelligent thing of any length which has been written about me and my stuff—and like everything you write it seems to me pretty generally true. I am guilty of its every stricture and I take an extraordinary delight in its considered approbation. I don’t see how I could possibly be offended at anything in it”—though Wilson clearly felt he well might be. Less confident and resilient authors might have been discouraged by the review, but Fitzgerald, mining the scrap of praise, was particularly pleased by Wilson’s conclusion that “
The Beautiful and Damned,
imperfect though it is, makes an advance over
This Side of Paradise:
the style is more nearly mature and the subject more solidly unified, and there are scenes that are more convincing than any in his previous fiction.”

The financial success matched the critical approval of the novel. It sold fifty thousand copies in the first few months and Fitzgerald earned another $2,500 by selling the film rights to Warner Brothers. But he was extremely unhappy when he saw the film in 1922 and told Oscar Kalman: “it’s by
far
the worst movie I’ve ever seen in my life—cheap, vulgar, ill-constructed and shoddy. We were utterly ashamed of it.”
⁵

II

After a few months in St. Paul, the Fitzgeralds moved out to the lake for the summer season of 1922 and stayed at the White Bear Yacht Club, which relieved Zelda of her tedious household duties. Following the pattern established in 1920 by the publication of a novel and then a volume of stories, Fitzgerald capitalized on the success of
The Beautiful and Damned
by publishing his second collection of stories,
Tales of the Jazz Age,
in September 1922. In a letter to Max Perkins, written two months before publication, Fitzgerald used a culinary metaphor to comment on the disparate elements in the book: “I don’t suppose such an assorted bill-of-fare as these eleven stories, novelettes, plays & 1 burlesque has ever been served up in one book before in the history of publishing.”

In fact, he had had a difficult time finding sufficient material to round out his menu. He threw into the stew every story he had written since
Flappers and Philosophers,
except two extremely trivial pieces, and included three early works—“The Camel’s Back,” “Porcelain and Pink” and “Mr. Icky”—which he had excluded from his previous collection. The most innovative aspect of the book was the introduction to each story in the table of contents. Fitzgerald revealed that “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” (which echoes the title of several Sherlock Holmes stories) “was inspired by a remark of Mark Twain’s to the effect that it was a pity that the best part of life came at the beginning and the worst part at the end.” In this fantasy, the hero is born an old man of seventy, gets progressively younger instead of older and finally becomes an infant. Fitzgerald also boasted that in January 1920 he had rapidly dashed off “The Camel’s Back”: “it was written during one day in the city of New Orleans, with the express purpose of buying a platinum and diamond wristwatch which cost six hundred dollars. I began it at seven in the morning and finished it at two o’clock the same night.”
⁶