Beautiful and Damned (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (3 page)

The Beautiful and Damned
is Fitzgerald’s least-known novel, yet it provides fascinating insight into his development as a writer and his evolution as a person. Stylistically, it functions as the intermediate step between the unfocused but exuberant vitality of his debut novel,
This Side of Paradise,
and the superb craftsmanship of his third and in many ways greatest book,
The Great Gatsby.
While
This Side of Paradise
is a discursive story with digressions aplenty and
The
Great
Gatsby
is a seamless, nearly flawless narrative,
The Beautiful and Damned
is somewhere in between: a fully fashioned and controlled story that nevertheless often belabors its points and exhausts its themes. Despite its defects, the book is a compelling story that allowed Fitzgerald to explore fundamental questions and themes he developed throughout his fiction: What is the purpose and the cost of maintaining dreams? What motivates failure? What causes people to fall in and out of love? And what makes a character tragic? Tragedy, of course, was a running theme in Fitzgerald’s psyche and his life.

When Fitzgerald began to write
The Beautiful and Damned,
his life was anything but tragic. His first novel had just been published to wide critical and popular acclaim, selling more than 75,000 copies. He was universally hailed as a literary wunderkind and had become one of the highest-paid short story writers in the business. He had finally won the hand of his sweetheart, Zelda, and together they were living the high life in New York, feted everywhere as the glamour couple. At the age of twenty-four, Fitzgerald had achieved all his dreams, and the future looked infinitely bright and promising. Yet within fourteen years he would hit rock bottom and become an alcoholic living in a cheap motel, eating twenty-five-cent meals and washing his own clothes in the sink while his wife was treated for schizophrenia in a nearby sanatorium. By then, unable to write and owing tens of thousands of dollars, overwhelmed by his dire situation, Fitzgerald would crack, suffer a nervous breakdown, and, like his character Anthony Patch, become a broken man.

While there is no simple explanation of how Fitzgerald’s downfall came about, there is no question that by writing
The Beautiful and Damned
he was expressing his fears of dissipation and, to a certain extent, prophetically anticipating and foreshadowing his own decline. Although he created several memorable heroes, in many ways Fitzgerald was his own greatest tragic figure. In keeping with the credo of his Romantic idols, like John Keats, he lived life at full speed, flinging himself into every experience with frightening energy to enlarge his powers as an artist. He married a woman who zealously asserted her own will and her thirst for life without fear, inhibition, or, at times, regard for him. Fitzgerald always had the capacity to recognize the risks inherent in his own behavior, to acknowledge that he was self-destructive, but he lacked the desire, strength, or ability to change. His resistance to change was perhaps a result of his artistic commitment. Fitzgerald’s first and foremost priority was to experience life, then to write about it. Everything else, even self-preservation, came second. While his lack of caution may in retrospect appear irresponsible, even indeed tragic, he did produce magnificent writing.

From the beginning, Fitzgerald felt that he was destined to be a writer. He was born in 1896 in St. Paul, Minnesota, to Edward Fitzgerald and his wife, Mollie, a middle-class Irish-American Catholic couple. Just three months before he was born, Scott’s parents had lost their two young daughters; although Mollie never talked about the dead children, the loss endowed her son with a heightened sensitivity to the past and to the fragile nature of life.

In an effort to quell her grief, Mollie spoiled and indulged her young son, and Scott quickly developed into a precocious and perceptive child. While his mother was an outspoken and ambitious woman, his father was a shy, retiring man. A southern gentleman and a distant relative of Francis Scott Key—the author of “The Star Spangled Banner” and Scott’s namesake—Edward told tales of the old South and the Civil War that fascinated Scott and invested him with romantic ideals at a young age.

When Scott was still a boy, Edward moved the family to Buffalo, New York, where he started a new business. The business failed, and then Edward was fired from a position as a salesman at Procter and Gamble. Fitzgerald later remembered that his father was never the same. While he had left in the morning a confident, capable person, “He came home that evening, an old man, a completely broken man. He had lost his essential drive.... He was a failure the rest of his days” (quoted in
Some Sort of Epic Grandeur,
p. 20). The family returned to St. Paul, moved in with Mollie’s wealthy mother, and lived off a substantial inheritance from Mollie’s father, who had been a well-to-do grocer and businessman.

Although her husband had failed, Mollie was determined that her son would succeed. She dressed Scott in the finest clothes, enrolled him in dance school and the St. Paul Academy, and made sure that he was introduced to the best families in town. Scott was an articulate, attractive, and sophisticated young man who knew very well how to sweet-talk the girls and please the parents. He fit right into St. Paul, where he joined in the rounds of sleigh rides, picnics, and dances. But like Basil Lee—his fictional alter ego in the “Basil and Josephine” short stories—Scott often had a hard time reining in his intelligence and his “fresh” know-it-all manner. He once corrected his teacher, admonishing her that Mexico City wasn’t the capital of Central America, and often endeavored to tell other children how they could improve themselves to become more popular. When he was twelve, the school magazine asked if someone would find a way to shut up Scott or poison him please! (Turnbull,
Scott Fitzgerald,
p. 21). A naturally dramatic child and somewhat of an exhibitionist, Scott was interested in the theater and would often, along with his friends, act out plays he had seen. He also displayed an early gift for writing, and had his literary debut at thirteen when his first piece was published in the school’s magazine,
St. Paul Academy Now and Then.
Scott could hardly contain himself and hung around after classes, excitedly asking students if they had read it.

When he was fifteen, Scott’s mother sent him to the Newman School, a Catholic boarding school in Hackensack, New Jersey, in order to improve his chances to attend a top university. Scott showed off his vast knowledge in class, bossed people around on the football field, boasted a few too many times, and quickly became persona non grata at the school. He encapsulated his position there wonderfully in the short story “The Freshest Boy”: “He had, indeed, become the scapegoat, the immediate villain, the sponge which absorbed all malice and irritability abroad”
(The Basil and Josephine
Stories, p. 61). While it may have been painful at the time, his pariah status helped foster Scott’s development as an artist, in that it allowed him to channel most of his energy into writing short stories and plays. By his second year he had achieved a belated kind of popularity, helped along by his status as a “writer,” his humbled manner, and his improvements on the football field.

At seventeen, Fitzgerald entered Princeton University, a long-held dream. At the time, he believed that “life was something you dominated if you were any good”
(The Crack-Up,
p. 70), and he planned to be not just good but great. He set highly ambitious goals for his tenure at Princeton: He wanted to be a football hero, and president of the Triangle Club, a theater group that put on a musical every year. The first goal was quickly squashed, since he didn’t even make the freshman team, but the second he pursued with dogged determination. Always a lackluster student, he quickly decided that classes were a waste and spent most of his time in his room writing musicals to submit to the Triangle or pieces for the
Princeton Tiger,
a humor magazine. He would often stay up all night, then wait outside of class for the editor of the
Tiger,
to waylay him with more submissions. His classmates would later remember Fitzgerald as an exuberant, gregarious young man who, as John Peale Bishop said, “looked like a jonquil” (quoted in Kazin,
F.
Scott
Fitzgerald: The Man and His Work,
p. 46), and was bursting with enthusiasm and emanating a magical, incandescent aura around him.

Although he didn’t pay much attention to his English professors, Fitzgerald did form a literary brotherhood of sorts with his classmate John Peale Bishop. According to Fitzgerald, Bishop taught him what was and wasn’t poetry and awakened him to the magic of the Romantic poets. Fitzgerald also met Edmund Wilson, an upperclassman who, despite his highbrow tastes, wrote for the Triangle and would become a lifelong friend. By his junior year Fitzgerald had written two Triangle musicals and was well placed to become president. Unfortunately, he had also severely neglected his studies. After he failed his make-up exams he was placed out of the running to be president of the Triangle Club. The dream was dead, and both college and life appeared meaningless: “It seemed on one March afternoon that I had lost every single thing I wanted” (Turnbull, p. 70).

Fitzgerald quickly replaced the Princeton dream with another—that of being a war hero. He received his commission as a second lieutenant in the fall of 1917, his senior year, and left school. As it turned out, he was a lousy soldier who fell off horses, improperly saluted his superiors, and poorly managed his regiment. He didn’t really believe in the war, and felt that all of the drills and practice skirmishes were nuisances that interrupted him from his real work: finishing his novel.

Convinced he might die in battle, Fitzgerald had hastily begun to write a coming-of-age story and every week spent half of Saturday and all of Sunday maniacally working on it in the officer’s club. Fitzgerald quickly finished the novel and in 1918 sent it to his friend and mentor Shane Leslie, who forwarded it to the publisher Charles Scribner’s Sons. Free to socialize, Scott finally allowed himself to have a little fun. He was now posted in Montgomery, Alabama, and while attending a dance he met one of its most celebrated belles, Zelda Sayre. Zelda was the youngest of the five children of Judge Anthony Sayre and already at nineteen an infamous beauty. Uninhibited, fearless, and effervescent, her exploits were legendary: She rode on motorcycles, smoked at a time when it was taboo for women, turned cartwheels at dances when things got boring, and entertained beaus round the clock. In Fitzgerald’s eyes, Zelda was an original, both the embodiment of his ideal woman and a fierce, bold individual whose flame burned bright, and he pursued her relentlessly.

The end of World War I interrupted Fitzgerald’s courtship of Zelda. He and his troop were sent back East and then dismissed. Eager to earn some money, Fitzgerald quickly moved to New York and got a job in advertising, then wrote Zelda asking her to marry him. He continued to toil as a writer, composing short stories at night, but had little success. His stories, like his novel, were almost all turned down, and he papered the walls of his apartment with more than 120 rejection slips. Then Zelda, fearing he would never make enough money, threw him over. Suddenly life in New York seemed pointless. Fitzgerald moved back to St. Paul to rewrite his novel.

One of Fitzgerald’s abiding characteristics was his ability to bounce back. Time and again he would suffer a terrible blow, then recoup, and achieve an astounding success. He moved back into his parents’ house determined to write a novel that would sell. He holed himself away in his bedroom, taped a careful outline to his curtains, and subsisted only on the sandwiches and milk his mother supplied. After two months he had rewritten a book he had originally called “The Romantic Egotist”—a semi-autobiographical novel about his youth and time at Princeton—and transformed it into what he felt was a more accomplished piece of writing, now titled
This Side of Paradise.
He sent it off to Scribner’s, certain that it would be accepted. He confidently wrote his friend Edmund Wilson, “I really believe that no one else could have written so searchingly the story of the youth of our generation” (quoted in
A Life
in Letters, p. 17).

Fitzgerald had always believed he was destined for greatness. Two weeks after he had mailed off his manuscript to Scribner’s, Fitzgerald received a letter from Maxwell Perkins, one of the editors, accepting the novel. Fitzgerald was jubilant. He ran down the streets of St. Paul stopping cars to tell them that he was now an author. As it turned out, his estimation of his book was correct. Although flawed and at times clumsy, it was a unique piece of writing that spoke to and for this new generation of flappers and former soldiers. It was published in March 1920, became a runaway best-seller, and transformed Fitzgerald’s life. The
Saturday Evening
Post, which had repeatedly rejected his work before, began paying him $1,000 a story. Zelda had accepted his offer of marriage and by April was settled with him in New York. And instead of being an impoverished unknown, Fitzgerald was now a renowned, wealthy author.

Fame, money, beauty, and early success: This was the American dream. Zelda and Scott embarked on a series of madcap escapades to celebrate: They rode to parties on the roofs and hoods of taxies; they went to a play and laughed during the serious parts, then remained silent during the funny parts; they jumped into the fountain at the Plaza Hotel. Everything they did was chronicled in the papers, and the couple began to symbolize the freewheeling era of flappers and flaming youth. But achieving all of your dreams at such a young age can be a mixed blessing. Later, Fitzgerald remembered “riding in a taxi one afternoon between very tall buildings under a mauve and rosy sky; I began to bawl because I had everything I wanted and knew I would never be so happy again” (quoted in Turnbull, p. 115).

After several months of the high life, Fitzgerald realized it was time to begin work on a second novel. However, the high life was expensive, and he was out of money. He composed several short stories to drum up some cash, then began to concentrate on his new work. His first priority was to take a leap forward as a writer. He was well aware of the weaknesses of his first novel: It was undisciplined, pretentious, and uneven—a pastiche of different styles and tones. Edmund Wilson had even warned Fitzgerald that if he weren’t careful he could easily become a trashy popular novelist. Although Fitzgerald wrote and would continue to write for mass-market magazines in order to sustain himself financially, he had decided he wanted to be a serious artist. Toward that end he resolved with his second novel to compose a more united, structured narrative. At the time he was reading Joseph Conrad, Frank Norris, and Theodore Dreiser; under the influence of their work, he gravitated toward social realism and began to shape a story of one couple’s deterioration. Fitzgerald wrote quickly, finishing the book in less than nine months. He was extremely happy with his work, telling his publisher Charles Scribner that “it’s really a most sensational book”
(The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald,
p. 41).