The Beautiful and Damned Summary: Fitzgerald's Portrait of a Marriage Going Under
What it is about
The Beautiful and Damned is F. Scott Fitzgerald's second novel, published by Scribner's in March 1922 after serialisation in Metropolitan late the previous year. It opens in 1913 and follows Anthony Comstock Patch, a 25-year-old Harvard graduate living in New York on an allowance from his dying grandfather. Anthony imagines himself a writer. He writes almost nothing. He is waiting, more or less openly, for an inheritance.
Through his old classmate Dick Caramel he meets Gloria Gilbert, Dick's cousin, a beautiful flapper and jazz baby. The courtship is quick, the marriage quicker, and the quarrels start almost at once. What follows is a long, patient account of two people spending money they do not yet have, drinking more than they should, and moving between a New York apartment and a country house in Marietta while the years pass and nothing gets built.
Fitzgerald set out to do something different here. Mindful of the criticism aimed at This Side of Paradise, he wanted to improve his form and structure and to work in literary realism. He described the descent of "lovely young creatures" and "millionaires" into ruin as Hogarthian, and he took the view that New York's cafe society was no less doomed than the peasants in Thomas Hardy's bleakest novels. The book covers the mid-1910s heyday of that society, the dawn of the Jazz Age, and the end of an older America.
The main characters
Anthony Patch is the centre, and he is not an easy man to spend a novel with. He has taste, a small income and no application. His insecurities feed a growing dependence on alcohol. His attempts at employment fail. When his grandfather visits the Marietta house during one of the couple's drunken revelries and leaves in disgust, Anthony's response is not to reform but to hire a lawyer.
Gloria Gilbert is the more vivid creation. She is beautiful and she knows the value of it. She demands constant acknowledgement of that beauty, and when the money starts to run out she chases a film career, hoping to become the next Mary Pickford. She is rejected as too old. Her resignation to the marriage's decline is one of the coldest things in the book.
Around them sit Dick Caramel, the novelist who actually works, and Maury Noble, the aesthete. There is also Dot Raycroft, a lower-class Southern woman with whom Anthony begins an affair while serving in the American Expeditionary Force after the United States enters the war. Fitzgerald modelled Anthony loosely on himself and Gloria on his wife Zelda, drawing on the disappointing early years of their marriage in New York. At the time of their 1920 wedding he claimed neither of them loved the other, and those first years resembled a friendship more than a romance.
The themes
Money is the engine, but idleness is the subject. Anthony and Gloria are not destroyed by poverty. They are destroyed by the expectation of wealth, which gives them permission to do nothing for years at a stretch. The inheritance hangs over every chapter like a weather front that never breaks.
Beauty is treated as a wasting asset. Gloria's looks are her capital, and the novel tracks their depreciation with something close to cruelty. Love is shown as a short-lived condition that marriage exposes rather than protects. Underneath all of it runs a steady moral argument about character: whether these people were ruined by circumstance, or whether circumstance simply revealed what they already were.
How it landed
The book sold well without becoming a top-ten bestseller. An initial printing of 20,000 copies was followed by a second of 50,000. Reviews were mixed. Readers who wanted the gaiety of This Side of Paradise were startled by the pessimism, and some critics complained that Fitzgerald had swapped giddiness for "the bitter dregs of reality". Others, including H. L. Mencken and John V. A. Weaver, praised the improved craftsmanship. Weaver predicted that Fitzgerald would eventually be counted among the greatest American writers. His editor Max Perkins, who along with Edmund Wilson shaped the revisions, noted how far the writing had come. Later scholars rank it among Fitzgerald's lesser novels.
One footnote worth knowing: a month after publication, the humorist Burton Rascoe talked Zelda into writing a mock review as a publicity stunt, in which she pretended to be reading the book for the first time and joked about plagiarism. She had in fact proofread drafts and agreed to the quotation of her letters. Decades later this fed speculation that she co-authored the novel. Fitzgerald scholars find no evidence for it.
The ending, spoilers below
After the armistice Anthony returns to New York and to Gloria, and sinks into hopeless alcoholism while the inheritance case drags on. By 1921 he, Gloria, Dick and Maury have traded their youthful idealism for material comfort. Anthony finally wins the case. The fortune is worth $30 million. His health is wrecked and his spirit is gone, and the victory means nothing. Sailing to Europe with a wife he is estranged from, he repeats the prejudices of the grandfather he despised and tells himself his wealth is proof of his character rather than an accident of birth.
Why it still matters
It is the novel where Fitzgerald learned to look at his own life without flattering it. The glamour of the Jazz Age is on the page, and so is the bill. Read it for the portrait of a marriage that cannot survive the people inside it, and for an early, unsparing version of the material he would refine in The Great Gatsby. It suits readers who want Fitzgerald at his least charming and most honest.
