Beautiful and Damned (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (58 page)

In 1922, just months after the publication of the novel, Warner Brothers snapped up the film rights to
The Beautiful and Damned.
The movie, a silent version, was not a success. In the late 1970s, author Christopher Isherwood and his partner, Don Bachardy, undertook the only other attempt to adapt
The Beautiful and Damned
for the movies. Although Isherwood had successfully adapted his own
Berlin Stories
as an award-winning film
(Cabaret,
1972), their screenplay was never produced.

Anthony and Gloria Patch, the doomed, mutually destructive main characters of
The Beautiful and Damned,
have always been the most compelling feature of the novel. Fitzgerald mined his tumultuous relationship with Zelda to create them, and not surprisingly, over the years Fitzgerald’s private life has fascinated observers as much as his literature: The evidence is in the number of artists who have created fictional works based on this American golden couple.

For instance, Budd Schulberg in 1950 published
Disenchanted,
a touching novel that follows the decline of the alcoholic, formerly illustrious novelist Manley Halliday. The novel was based on Schulberg’s experience with Fitzgerald. Ever in debt, in 1939 Fitzgerald was attempting to write screenplays for Hollywood studios. Schulberg, a recent Dartmouth graduate, collaborated with Fitzgerald on the script of
Winter Carnival
(1939), a romantic comedy set at Schulberg’s alma mater. Told through the eyes of Shep Stearns, an aspiring writer who must collaborate with Halliday on a movie script, the novel describes the slow collapse of the life of a genius. Schulberg, who greatly admired Fitzgerald, later worked with Harvey Breit to adapt the book as a Broadway play; it includes a scene in which Stearn revisits his college to do research for the movie and discovers the difficulty of working with Halliday. He tells the novelist, “Funny, ever since they sprung me out of here five years ago, I’ve had dreams how I’d come back in style. Showing up with someone like you or Hemingway. And now it’s just something to go through, to get over with as painlessly as possible.” Halliday responds, “That isn’t funny. That’s the big practical joke of life. After a while you don’t count the years, you count the number of your disenchantments.” The stage version of
Disenchanted
was nominated for three Tony awards in 1959, including Best Play; its star, Jason Robards, won for Best Actor.

Numerous plays and teleplays have also been produced based on the lives of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. Two made-for-television movies appeared in the mid-1970s:
F
.
Scott Fitzgerald and “The Last of the Belles”
(1974) and
F. Scott Fitzgerald in Hollywood
(1976). The former is an account of Scott and Zelda’s first meeting in Alabama during World War I and Scott’s writing of the short story “The Last of the Belles.” It stars Richard Chamberlain as Scott, Blythe Danner as Zelda, and Susan Sarandon as Ailie Calhoun.
F. Scott Fitzgerald in Hollywood,
which recounts Scott’s years as a screenwriter, is notable for Tuesday Weld’s haunting performance as the disintegrating Zelda. Jason Miller takes the role of Scott, and Dolores Miller portrays the acerbic writer Dorothy Parker.

In 1980 Tennessee Williams wrote a play,
Clothes for a Summer Hotel,
about Fitzgerald’s decline. Williams shared several characteristics with his predecessor—both were considered preeminent artists (Williams was acclaimed for, among other plays, 1945’s
The Glass Menagerie
and 1947’s
A Streetcar Named Desire,
and both struggled with substance abuse—but the play closed after two weeks. Critic Walter Kerr speculated in the
New York Times
on the reason: “It is as though the playwright’s decision to deal with actual people ... had momentarily robbed him of his own imaginative powers.”

Just as the voice of Fitzgerald drowned out Tennessee Williams’s, the novelist also overshadowed his wife. In the mid-1980s, two plays chronicled the biography of Scott’s troubled and gifted partner: Marty Martin’s I
Don’t Want to Be Zelda Anymore
(1984) and William Luce’s
Zelda: A One-Woman Play
(1984). Martin’s work shows a selfish Scott taking advantage of his young bride as he denies Zelda permission to use their lives in her fiction while he plagiarizes her diary. In the play, Zelda submits but reveals her pain with a sarcastic comment: “You be the creative one and I’ll be the decoration on the veranda.” Skillfully portraying the range of Zelda’s emotions, Martin’s original off-Broadway production won high critical praise. In
Zelda: A One- Woman Play,
William Luce shows the tormented existence of the woman who wrote that she was “physically and mentally ravaged by resentment.” Borrowing lines from Zelda’s accomplished but overlooked diaries and fiction, the story begins in the mental hospital where she was confined at the end of her life, but it jumps in time to other locales, such as Paris in the 1920s, where the Fitzgeralds socialized with Ernest Hemingway and other writers. Zelda sums up her worldview with the tragic line “Death is the only real elegance.” Rounding out the eighties, Michael McGuire published
The Scott Fitzgerald Play
(1988), an adept report on the storied couple’s relationship.

In this section, we aim to provide the reader with an array of perspectives on the text, as well as questions that challenge those perspectives. The commentary has been culled from sources as diverse as comments contemporaneous with the work, literary criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout the work’s history. Following the commentary, a series of questions seeks to filter F. Scott Fitzgerald’s
The Beautiful and Damned
through a variety of points of view and bring about a richer understanding of this enduring work.

Thanks to these excesses, Mr. Fitzgerald will miss his due meed of praise for some very outstanding accomplishments, and
[The Beautiful and Damned]
will be talked about for what is least valuable in it. Readers who spend their time counting the number of cocktails drunk in each chapter are not in the proper mood to appreciate subtler claims upon their attention. They will miss in their pursuit of sensationalism the evidences of great and growing artistic power which this book undoubtedly displays. No finer study of the relations between boy husband and girl wife has been given us in American fiction. If Anthony Patch, the hero, is a nullity, scarcely worth following after the graceful first sketch of his original steps in connoisseurship, Gloria is an original creation, frightening in her truth. And when he is not showing off in pseudo-wit, or trying to shock the bourgeoisie, or discovering profound truths of philosophy which get muddled before he can grasp them, how this novelist can write!

—from
Literary Review of the New York Evening Post
(March 4, 1922)

Where “This Side of Paradise” was an easy thing, almost a casual one, certainly an inevitable one, his new book is strained, self-conscious, everything about it is intentional. “This Side of Paradise” had a mental honesty about it that is—and always will be—extremely rare. It was sincerely callow. For that reason it was charming and important. “The Beautiful and Damned” has a semblance of sophistication and cynicism which is just as callow but which, somehow, doesn’t seem so charming and so important.

—from the
Chicago Sunday Tribune
(March 5, 1922)

 

If it was haste and insolence which hurt “This Side of Paradise,” what hurts “The Beautiful and Damned” is deliberate seriousness—or rather, a seriousness not deliberated quite enough. Bound to bring some sort of instruction in, Mr. Fitzgerald pushes his characters downhill as if gravitation needed help. He must have lost some of his interest in them as they went down; at least he imparts interest less and less as they advance; his imagination flames only while they are at the summit. Few current writers can represent young love in its incandescence as he can, but his knowledge—so far as this novel goes to show—does not extend with the same accuracy to the seedy side of life which he has felt he must explore. He has trusted, one suspects, his doctrine rather more than his gusto. For this read, too, he has, without adding much to the body of his style, sacrificed—or lost—some of the poetry which illuminated the earlier narrative and which illuminates the higher places of this one with a light never present unless there is genius not far off. Why did he have to mix good poetry with indifferent moralism? Moralists are plenty but poets few. It is encouraging, however, to see signs of increasing power in his work.

—from
The Nation
(March 15, 1922)

 

“The Beautiful and Damned” is a real story, but a story greatly damaged by wit. The narrative is infested with brilliant passages, “striking” descriptions, and scraps of ebullient commentary. The persons are not permitted to emerge from the type; whenever they seem about to emerge, the author shoves them back to anonymity by making them his own obvious mouthpieces....

No, one cannot make much of this as pure novel, certainly not as either pure realism or romanticism. A novelist cannot be made out of an air of amused omniscience, or even by the most animated pursuit of irrelevancies; these things are the bane, not the making, of a true story-teller. I think Mr. Fitzgerald has the gift, if he has the patience to sort it out from the minor gifts and to give it a chance.

—from the
Independent and Weekly Review
(April 22, 1922)

 

The story of this book deals with the married life of two young people, of that class which in Europe is called the middle class, but which in America is nearly always called the upper. These two have grown up without any of the discipline which is the training for life invented by the aristocracy, or the prudent worldly-wisdom which is the substitute invented by the
petite bourgeoisie:
they are peculiarly the product of a commercial civilization. The book deals with a life in America which has had few serious interpreters, and Mr. Fitzgerald has done it with impressive ability. The story of these two young people and their life in various places, including their amazing existence in that uncivilized form of shelter peculiar to New York, the two-room-and-bath apartment, is told with real conviction. They have no occupation and responsibilities, and tragedy overtakes them—in so far as tragedy can overtake the tender-minded and the undisciplined; for tragedy, like happiness, is the privilege of the strong. Mr. Fitzgerald’s character-drawing is, in the main, somewhat amateurish, and he uses his people indifferently to express opinions quite unrelated to their characters. A certain easy grasp of conventional technique is his, especially in showing the interplay of the characters in each others’ lives. His best and most consistent piece of character-drawing is that of Bloeckman, whose evolution is indicated with great subtlety. A novelist, and particularly a novelist who is a satirist, has to be on the outside as well as on the inside of his characters, and Mr. Fitzgerald has not the faculty of standing away from his principal characters: with Bloeckman he has done this, and also with the gentleman who appears for a moment to teach salesmanship. Everything in this salesmanship episode is done excellently and the satirist’s touch is revealed in all of it.
The Beautiful and Damned
is indeed an achievement for so young a writer. It is one which, however, would seem less striking in England where they have had the highly intelligent commonplace for so long, or in France where they are the greatest masters of the highly intelligent commonplace in the world.

—from
The Freeman
(April 26, 1922)

 

The waters into which this essentially serious and even tragic story bring Fitzgerald seemed quite beyond the ken of the author of “This Side of Paradise.” It is thus not surprising to find him navigating, at times, rather cautiously and ineptly. The vast plausibility that Dreiser got into the similar chronicle of Hurstwood is not there; one often encounters shakiness, both in the imagination and the telling. Worse, the thing is botched at the end by the introduction of a god from the machine: Anthony is saved from the inexorable logic of his life by a court decision which gives him, most unexpectedly and improbably, his grandfather’s millions. But allowing for all that, it must be said for Fitzgerald that he discharges his unaccustomed and difficult business with ingenuity and dignity. Opportunity beckoned him toward very facile jobs; he might have gone on rewriting the charming romance of “This Side of Paradise” for ten or fifteen years, and made a lot of money out of it, and got a great deal of uncritical praise for it. Instead, he tried something much more difficult, and 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. After “This Side of Paradise” the future of Fitzgerald seemed extremely uncertain. There was an air about that book which suggested a fortunate accident. The shabby stuff collected in “Flappers and Philosophers” converted uncertainty into something worse. But “The Beautiful and Damned” delivers the author from all those doubts. There are a hundred signs in it of serious purpose and unquestionable skill. Even in its defects there is proof of hard striving. Fitzgerald ceases to be a
Wunderkind,
and begins to come into his maturity.

—from
The Smart Set
(April 1922)

In emphasizing this smartness [in
The Beautiful and Damned]
it would not be fair to lose sight of Mr. Fitzgerald’s cleverness, and of something far more than that, of a real sincerity and vigor of mind. The mind of one who reacts to life rather than explores it, who observes life by a sort of revulsion, a restless mind in which what you at first take to be poison turns out to be irritation and what you take to be madness, insomnia. A mind knowing both bitterness and triumph, and keenly enjoying both. Decidedly a mind with edge—perhaps the edge of a saw. A curious combination of energy and weariness, eagerness and cruelty, suggesting fire without warmth.