The Beautiful and Damned

The Beautiful and Damned

File:Beyifuldamed.gif The first edition cover with the characters of Anthony and Gloria drawn to resemble Fitzgerald and Zelda
Author	F. Scott Fitzgerald
Country	United States
Language	English
Genre	Novel
Publisher	Charles Scribner's Sons
Publication date	1922
Media type	Print (Hardback & Paperback)
Preceded by	This Side of Paradise (1920)
Followed by	The Great Gatsby (1925)

The Beautiful and Damned, first published by Scribner's in 1922, is F. Scott Fitzgerald's second novel. It explores and portrays New York café society and the American Eastern elite during the Jazz Age before and after "the Great War" and in the early 1920s. As in his other novels, Fitzgerald's characters in this novel are complex, especially with respect to marriage and intimacy. The work is generally considered to have drawn upon and be based on Fitzgerald's relationship and marriage with his wife Zelda Fitzgerald.

Plot summary

The Beautiful and Damned tells the story of Anthony Patch, a 1910s socialite and presumptive heir to a tycoon's fortune, and his courtship and relationship with his wife Gloria Gilbert. It describes his brief service in the Army during World War I, and the couple's post-war partying life in New York, and his later alcoholism.

Toward the end of the novel, Fitzgerald sums up the plot and his intentions in writing it somewhat, even referencing his own first novel, when a financially successful writer friend tells Anthony:

"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'. Are our girls really like that? If it's true to life, which I don't believe, the next generation is going to the dogs. I'm sick of all this shoddy realism. I think there's a place for the romanticist in literature."

Themes

The Fitzgerald's grave in Rockville, Maryland, inscribed with the final sentence of
The Great Gatsby

The Beautiful and Damned is, at once, a morality tale, a meditation on love, money and decadence, and a social documentary. It concerns the characters' disproportionate appreciation of and focus on their past, which tends to consume them in the present. The theme of absorption in the past also continues through much of Fitzgerald's later works, perhaps best summed up in the final line of his 1925 novel, The Great Gatsby: "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past", which is now also inscribed on the Fitzgerald's tombstone shared with Zelda in Maryland.

According to Fitzgerald critic James West, The Beautiful and Damned is concerned with the question of 'vocation'—what does one do with oneself when one has nothing to do? Fitzgerald presents Gloria as a woman whose vocation is nothing more than to catch a husband. After her marriage to Anthony, Gloria's sole vocation is to slide into indolence; her husband's sole vocation is to wait for his inheritance, during which time he slides into alcoholism.

Publication history

Fitzgerald wrote The Beautiful and Damned quickly in the winter and spring of 1921-22, while Zelda was pregnant with their daughter, following editorial suggestions from his friend Edmund Wilson and his editor Max Perkins. Chapters of the book were first serialized in Metropolitan Magazine in late 1921, and in March 1922 the book was published. Based on the credible sales of his first book, This Side of Paradise, Scribner's prepared an initial print run of 20,000 copies, and mounted an advertising campaign. It sold well enough to warrant additional print runs reaching 50,000 copies.

Fitzgerald dedicated the novel to the Irish writer Shane Leslie, Jean Nathan, and Maxwell Perkins "in appreciation of much literary help and encouragement".

Originally called by Fitzgerald The Flight of the Rocket as a working-title, he had also divided it pre-publication into three major parts: "The Pleasant Absurdity of Things", "The Romantic Bitterness of Things", and "The Ironic Tragedy of Things". As published in book form, however, it consists of three, untitled "Books" of three chapters each:

• Book One

1. - Anthony Patch

2. - Portrait of a Siren

3. - The Connoisseur of Kisses

• Book Two

1. - The Radiant Hour

2. - Symposium

3. - The Broken Lute

• Book Three

1. - A Matter of Civilization

2. - A Matter of Aesthetics

3. - No Matter!

The first book tells the story of the first meeting and courtship of a beautiful and spoiled couple, Anthony and Gloria, madly in love, with Gloria estatically exclaiming: "mother says that two souls are sometimes created together--and in love before they're born."

Book two covers the first three years of their married life together, with Anthony and Gloria vowing to adhere to,

"The magnificent attitude of not giving a damn...for what they chose to do and what consequences it brought. Not to be sorry, not to lose one cry of regret, to live according to a clear code of honor toward each other, and to seek the moment's happiness as fervently and persistently as possible."

The final book recounts Anthony's disinheritance, just as the U.S. enters the "Great War"; his year in the Army while Gloria remains home alone until his return; and the couple's rapid, final decline after the War into alcoholism, dissolution and ruin -- "to the syncopated beat of the Jazz Age".

To the very end, Anthony Patch remains nonplussed, Fitzgerald writing in the closing lines of the novel:

"Only a few months before people had been urging him to give in, to submit to mediocrity.... But he had known that he was justified
in his way of life---and he had stuck it out staunchly.... 'I showed them ... It was a hard fight, but I didn't give up and I came through!"

Reception

Louise Field, writing in The New York Times, found the novel showed Fitzgerald to be talented, but labeled him too pessimistic. She said she hoped he "will some day acquire a less one-sided understanding".

Adaptations

A film adaptation in 1922, directed by William A. Seiter, starred Kenneth Harlan as Anthony Patch, and Marie Prevost as Gloria.

There is a German translation.

External links

• The Beautiful and Damned at Project Gutenberg E-text.
• The Beautiful and Damned, available at Internet Archive, scanned book. (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1922).